Did you know that “toward” is an adjective as well as a preposition? Meaning, among other closely related ideas: in process, promising, auspicious? I think I would have known that if I had thought about it, but I didn’t. Until today. I am trying to probe, or grope, toward (or equally towards) a toward notion of Canadian Enlightenment, hoping that nothing untoward happens on the way. Onward, upward, forward, outward, grasping the wheel and turning windward, and all that good stuff. Excelsior-ward!
An early result from the first e-mailings of our Stephen Leacock Sesquicentennial — in fact a Sesquiettriaquatariacentennial (both 150th and 75th) — has been a firm pulse of interest in Canadian Enlightenment, be it “a” or “the” or without prior article.
This stimulated me to reply, along these lines: I think we have some plausible form of Canadian Enlightenment, although there are those who would sneer at the idea I am sure. There always are. My hypothesis is that it is organic, evolutionary, incremental, cumulative, with all manner of people contributing their fragmentary, incomplete and inconclusive bits which seep their way into the national consciousness or subconsciousness and gradually influence our behaviour for the better. Instead of the “dream of a perfect world or no world at all” deplored by W. H. Auden we have a dream of a world or a country that becomes better in stages. This process becomes first visible and memorable in what people wrote, not just the Big Writers, but all kinds of lesser ones. In what they spoke too, of course, but that is ephemeral. This view makes me particularly interested in what shows up in literary magazines down through the ages, and not only in published books. I am fascinated by The Canadian Magazine of Politics, Science, Art and Literature (1893-1944), also Andrew Macphail’s University Magazine, as an early witnesses to this whole project. I look down the list of names in the early volumes and I ask myself, who are these people? I intend to find out, but it’s going to take a while. I think many of them will turn out to be “folk writers” adding their little osmotic bits to the whole creature in almost complete anonymity.
Of course there is another osmotic creature out there too, that I call the Yottapede, a beast of quite a different hue. If we are looking for an epic struggle on which to build a national epic — and we should be looking for one — we could set Canilluminia against the Yottapede and let them slug it out. Canallumina has not yet triumphed, but she is still in the game, represented not by any of our favourite polarities, but by those who seek to reconcile them. That is Unsolved Riddle territory.
I am wondering if “osmotic” in this context is the opposite of “apocalyptic”, in the sense that B.W. Powe uses the latter in his recent book Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. Powe sees those two as apocalyptic writers (i.e. revelatory, prophetic) and no doubt they qualify. Who else? Expanding on Matthew Arnold I think we would find Canadian Enlightenment in the best that has been thought, written, and voiced in memorable ways by Canadian writers and about Canada. I think the question of who is a Canadian writer and who is from somewhere else and writing about Canada depends on how much he or she has imported or learned here, and needs to be handled delicately. We owe much to our immigrants, but possibly not the automatic right to define us. I think that comparable care must be taken with the word “Canada”. When does “Canada” emerge from “pre-Canada”? In the political context, which is extraordinarily important in any useful concept of enlightenment, I think it comes some time in the 1840’s, when local leaders began to assert themselves against the pipe dreams of the colonial authorities. I would be prepared to find that the process began even earlier in the Maritime Provinces, but I am not as familiar with the history. It was certainly mature in some practical sense by the time of Confederation.
I do not think we need to own the unenlightened policies of the colonial authorities or the practices condoned by them, nor should we try to claim credit for the enlightened ones, until after the time when we had grasped the political initiative to some effective extent. By 1837 that extent was not effective, as the rebellions showed. When Responsible Government arrived, it was. The date when “Canada” emerged for Enlightenment purposes probably came somewhere in between.
Whether Stephen Leacock is “apocalyptic” or “osmotic” in this whole process remains for me an unsolved riddle, at least for the time being, and perhaps forever. In any case, I think he is perhaps the most interesting figure in the early stages of the Canadian Enlightenment creature’s evolution, because he emerged from folk writing into a position of such literary prominence which has to some extent endured, and because he lays out — fragmentarily, incompletely, and inconclusively — his tetrad of Knowledge, Imagination, Compassion, and Humour, and because so many people read him and thus were subjected to his osmotic influence, and because he himself was so thoroughly also in the grip of the Yottapede impelling him to a life of comfort, security and academic mediocrity. His intense absorption in it and equally intense struggles against it make his life story a parable, compelling in its own way. He becomes an Unsolved Riddle of a man.
The people of Mariposa don’t struggle. They embrace the Yottapede, and when they become successful and assume they know the answers to the riddles (as in The City of Arcadian Adventures) they become childishly foolish and morally monstrous. That is why I believe both those books to be prophetic, and why he abandoned that stream, because the next prophetic work was going to be too painful to write, a black hole of nihilism fed by successive waves of war, speculative madness, economic depression, and political insanity. No wonder he drank.
That’s enough for today. Thanks for reading.
Fourfold Vision: Cultivating Complex Minds for Complex Times 