REID GILBERT
Working from a deeply felt response to Glenn Gould’s “Solitude Trilogy,” and basing her analyses in various meticulously summarized critical filters – especially an intriguing conjunction of Foucault and Bakhtin “grounded on the notion of [Bourdieu’s] habitus” (25) – Sherrill E. Grace theorizes the construction of “North” in Canadian consciousness. She argues persuasively that “no matter who, when, or where we are, we are shaped by, haunted by ideas of North, and we are constantly imagining and constructing Canada-as-North, as much so when we resist our nordicity as when we embrace it” (xii).
Grace is careful to allow a wide variety of opinion as she travels through the country north of 60 (and – importantly – through other geographical and mental placements of “North”) and through a wide variety of texts. In fact, one of the major strengths of this extensive analysis is its catholic choice of subjects. Grace moves from high to popular art, to performance, to political sites, proposing an overall discursive formation of “North” that embraces each, while allowing each to resist any totalizing (and southern) representation or any simple assignment within “a Eurocentric chimera” (66) of origin. Faced with the ever-present danger of reducing a complex and varied land- and mindscape, she succeeds in juggling the very idea of representation with notions of the constructive nature of language (in its broadest sense) and its relation to power and place.
Moving from the very notion of “North,” Grace considers some aspects of historiography and geography, pointing out the political and social strategies at work in cartography. She then considers painting, photography, literary text, and performance, including music, theatre, and film – reading each back into her interdiscursive and interdisciplinary thesis. Finally, in Part 4, she introduces work by northerners who have “written back in protest, anger, and pride to the dominant discourse, which has constructed the North as a homogeneous, empty space” (xv). It is this chapter that opens up the study, calling for future work. This section alone would make the book worthwhile; in the context of the earlier chapters, however, it brings one of Grace’s major premises to life by demonstrating that any conceptualization of “North” – including her own – is always in need of rethinking and (re)placement. There is a critical selflessness in the inclusion of Part 4 which flags Grace’s true commitment to her subject and which makes Canada and the Idea of North a metaphor for the very methodology it proposes.
If there is a fault in the book, it arises ironically from one of the chief strengths, and is absolved by this strength. At times, Grace is so careful to outline her methodology that the reader wishes she would simply proceed with her always astute examinations, rather than preparing the critical ground quite so carefully before, and while, she considers the example. Like Foucault, whom she cites in the opening chapter while laying out her macro-level approach, Grace “is at pains to explain (to legitimate)” (27) her method. While this academic precision sometimes retards an easy forward reading, it also assures that each subject is treated seriously and avoids the potential danger of any multidisciplinary approach: Canada and the Idea of North is not enthusiastic, popular criticism; it is a passionate, but highly rigorous, set of interconnected analyses built on a well thought out and highly valuable theoretical foundation. Moving to the micro-level, Grace seeks “to grasp a single discrete statement” (29) in each example and then to forge its links to the “network of relations within the discursive formation” (29) of the macro-level. It is the comprehensiveness of this underlying method, its amazing ability to link elements in a complicated pattern that nonetheless admits its own ruptures, that makes Canada and the Idea of North an extremely important contribution to Canadian scholarship.
Readers of this journal will be particularly interested in the analysis of plays in Chapter 4, “Performing North.” Grace first provides a brief history of southern plays that aim to represent North, moving from Denison and Voaden to Judith Thompson’s Sled. She also discusses the effect of filmic depictions of North on southern psychic construction and, therefore, on typical audience reception of plays about the north. The early plays are often “cast in the form of a conventional western tragedy with a deeply embedded Christian plot-line turning on sin, guilt, and punishment” (143). Those plays that move beyond such cultural assumptions, such as Beissel’s Inuk and the Sun, claims Grace, present a less problematic representation of the Inuit Other. Still, these plays present North “as an idealized space of beauty, freedom, and adventure or escape [. . .]” tied to “a documentary mode.” The playwrights “envision a symbolic, mythic North in a landscape of the imagination” (148). Often, as Grace points out throughout the study, this “space of beauty” is also cast as “objectifiable feminine Other,” reiterating a masculinist need to penetrate and control (48) and guaranteeing closure.
Grace then contrasts such plays with those which write the various “real norths, with real people living there with real problems” (150): plays such as Hardin’s Esker Mike & his wife, Agiluk and Wendy Lill’s The Occupation of Heather Rose. Such plays reveal the presumptions and greed of southern administrators and the southern audiences watching themselves on stage. (The chapter does not consider Marie Clements’s Burning Vision, published after this book appeared, but Clements’s 2000-2003 writing is a continuing example of Grace’s observation that the stories of the “real norths” are not “a pretty picture” [151]. )
Grace moves, finally, to Mansel Robinson’s Colonial Tongues, which she sees as “important ballast” to Thompson’s Sled, providing “all that Thompson left out”(152). Thompson sees North as “an aesthetic object,” which her characters seek “in death and in a promise of rebirth”(150). Robinson turns “inside out” the “romantic, idealized norths” of Sled and other plays (as does Tomson Highway in Kiss of the Fur Queen ([259]), “to show audiences [ . . .] how close the north is and how important it is to national life” (150).
It is, in the end, this link between nordicity and nationality that concerns Grace. While “the discursive formation of North takes its place easily on the stage” (154), it takes place as easily and very powerfully on the psychic stage. It is Grace’s belief “that the idea of Canada and the idea of North are one and the same” (155), and she is hugely successful in drawing out the links among elements of perception, sites of representation, and utterances of language that form the “dialogic hybridity” (268) of this nation. Sherrill E. Grace seeks not a geographic, but a shifting magnetic north – and Canada and the Idea of North exercises its own magnetic power, pulling the reader through its dense compendium toward a much fuller understanding of Canada in its being-as-North.