KEVIN BURNS
Lost in North America- The Imaginary Canadian in the American Dream should be required reading for the members of the Federal Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. It helped me understand something I had just witnessed on Parliament Hill, watching the committee at work: members reading and ranting, translators translating invective as members of the committee struggled with their task-finding ways in which Canada's cultural community can build national identity and unity.
According the Gray, Canadian culture and identity are essentially works of the imagination and their basic underpinning is driven by "that basic social device of the Canadian village- the ability to see and not to see at the same time." (Gray's emphasis.) What I saw and did not see at the same time was the Director of the National Gallery of Canada explaining the gallery's role in promoting national unity. The chair of the committee thanked Dr. Thomson for talking about Canadian and not provincial or regional art. The Bloc Québécois culture critic exploded that Québec was in a state of siege and that federal institutions were weapons of the conquerors. She then stormed out of the room. The remaining committee members quietly apologized for her intervention and her now empty chair, then proceeded to ask polite questions about the Gallery's finances. For Gray, seeing and not seeing and the ritual apology are fictional devices we use to build our imagined Canadian identity. However, he wams, if "we spend our lives in agreement, apologizing and talking about the weather, we may avoid conflict, but we will never get to know one another. The village lives in harmony, but it is an accord of strangers passing silently in the fog."
Lost in North America is about life in the fictional villages that John Gray says comprise Canada in our collective imagination. He presents a series of seemingly simple, autobiographical anecdotes that build on this premise. A story about a Gray family pet- a snapping turtle from his school days in Nova Scotia- provides him with insight into the Canadian approach to nature inherited from our forebears who "carried with them from Europe, along with their volumes of Wordsworth, A.A. Milne and the Bible; their need to bring the natural environment into line with what they wanted to believe, to minimize the lurking suspicion that there might be something out there, a living presence just out of sight, that is neither our servant nor our friend."
For the most part Gray presents his ideas about our imagined sense of national identity through a chronological sequence of autobiographical vignettes. During the Trudeaumania era, escaping from the "little village" of his Nova Scotian youth, Gray travelled to Montreal to discover a disturbing, yet formative link between language and identity. "When you hear people living day to day in another language, the words you are accustomed to putting to things no longer seem so ... absolute. By extension, everything that has ever been said to you in your own language is open to question. The world becomes a comparative, since nobody has the last word on how to describe it."
In the final third of the book Gray drops these evocative, personal stories and concentrates on "the flux" that he says constitutes the state of politics in Canada in the 1990s. His familiar targets include The Free Trade Agreement, Meech Lake, Lucien Bouchard and the rise of the Bloc Québécois, political correctness, and the management of the CBC. "Entropy comes in a variety of styles.... The Hollywood film industry provides an example of the decline in the American style; for the Canadian counterpart we look to the CBC."
This final section of the book, written and published long before the. 1995 Québec Referendum, marks a shift in Gray's tone and style. The writing is darker. Rhetoric tends to fill the space occupied earlier by personal stories. As his political pique heightens his remarkable story-telling skills recede and the book loses momentum. Nevertheless, one of the most imaginative and musical voices in the Canadian theatre has managed to produce an important piece of prose: a serious, yet playful look at the fragile nature of our national cultural identity.
Gray says the starting point for Lost in North America was his less-than-successful appearance before an earlier federal committee, also charged with the task of strengthening the cultural ties that bind. He wasn't pleased with his contribution then and this book evolved as a kind of retrospective second chance. In just a few years, Gray says our sense of cultural identity has become even more vulnerable and that we have even more to be anxious about. But for him, a sense of looming dread is a sign of Canadian optimism: "Where there is anxiety there is hope."
Rather than yelling accusations across the table at each other the present members of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage would benefit by reading this book. "[T]he current crisis of Canada's political and social institutions, the disappearing act now being performed by the Canadian nation-state, may be seen as a birth, not a death: not as the shattering of a doomed social enterprise, but as the cracking of an egg." Gray has produced a funny, poignant, sometimes angry, yet timely book about the fragility of our national sense of identity.