I’ve been told that Canadians are excellent writers. If there ever was an overstatement this certainly is one of them.
Yet Canada has produced some world renowned authors. Think Margaret Atwood, Nobel prize winning Alice Munroe, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Mordecai Richler, Yann Martel, Leonard Cohen, Northrop Frye and Malcolm Gladwell, to name a few. So, what is it about Canada that produces good writers?
Could it be something about Canada’s long winters? Yet, lots of Canadians spend cold winter days - and nights - doing anything but writing. They are outdoors enjoying the frigid weather or skating on an ice rink shooting hockey pucks into frozen nets. They aren’t curled up in an armchair or sitting at a desk writing the next great novel. So we can’t entirely blame the weather.
Canada’s educational system is world class outperforming most countries. That is a start but it takes years to become a great writer. Canada is well known to have a good balance between the arts and sciences. But I have seen lots of really crappy essays over the years, and some of them just happened to be mine. We can’t entirely blame the Canadian school system either.
So how is it that many Canadians are known as great writers?
Practice and repetition is important. Repeatedly drilling good grammar into our brains is important. This repetition is behind the famous 10,000 hour rule by the well-known Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers.
Saying something worthwhile
But excelling in writing goes beyond mechanically repeating grammar. We could cite many examples of writers who have a passion for words and the sounds of words. But words themselves are useless unless they say something meaningful. They need to convey ideas, concepts, images and emotion. And for that wordsmithing is not enough. The Beatles who spent over 10,000 hours playing to audiences would have been a mediocre band after returning from Hamburg if their music didn’t convey anything worthwhile. They would have just been great guitar players.
Here is another example. Lots of kids are passionate about sports. In Canada young people enjoy a mixture of ice hockey, basketball, baseball and soccer. But having a passion in sports takes more than a casual interest in the game. It is knowing the rules, the required skills, who are the best players and why they are so good at their sport. It also takes many hours of practice.
And this is true for writing. Excellent writing conveys more than just good understanding of grammar, although this is important. It also has to include astute observations about human behaviour and expressing those insights in the best possible way.
Canada as a vast territory from sea to sea to sea
A book that demonstrates this relationship between writing and observation is The Life of Pi written by the Canadian Yann Martel. This novel is a book about geography and place. It is full of exploding colours, interweaving textures, fearful dynamics and extraordinary wonder. It’s the kind of book that draws you into its world and releases you only on the last page.
Martel’s novel is a story with three characters. A young man named Pi is set adrift on the Pacific Ocean in a lifeboat which he shares with a frightened and trapped Bengal Tiger. The third character is the vast open ocean itself on which both are drifting endlessly to an unknown and uncertain destination. This book typifies all that there is to know about Canada. What is Canada but wide open geography. It is space writ large and has a profound effect on the people of Canada. Canadians are a small group of people sharing this vast nature that at times is frightening, dangerous and unpredictable. The Life of Pi can be seen as a metaphor about the geography of Canada and the peoples and dangers that are intrinsic to being a Canadian.
Northrop Frye, one of Canada’s literary giants, had this to say about the Canadian Literary Identity:
“Based on his observations of Canadian literature, Frye concluded that, by extension, Canadian identity was defined by a fear of nature, by the history of settlement and by unquestioned adherence to the community. However, Frye perceived the ability and advisability of Canadian (literary) identity to move beyond these characteristics. Frye proposed the possibility of movement beyond the literary constraints of the garrison mentality: growing urbanization, interpreted as greater control over the environment, would produce a society with sufficient confidence for its writers to compose more formally advanced detached literature.”
A healthy fear of nature and its power
Canadians have a profound fear of nature. It is a constant in the life of a Canadian. It is something that is entered into at one’s peril. Nature’s wrath and power was something that could not be easily conquered as the European settlers found out rather quickly when they arrived on these forbidding shores. It was also something to be respected. The early settlers learned how to survive in the harsh Canadian geography by adopting to this new land and learning the habits and skills of the First Nations people. Those who could not adopt either returned to Europe or left for the warmer climate of American colonies. Those who stayed gained much more than they could have imagined.
The endurance and fortitude of those who stayed and persevered brought enormous benefits. It created communities that shared a sense of belonging and care for one another. They helped one another. They struggled together. They innovated together. They faced nature’s power together. Neighbours were not just the people next door all fenced up and locked up in their little boxes they called home. They saw themselves as part of the fabric of community - they were surviving and thriving in this country together. And this mindset became the foundation of being Canadian. And this is seen in the writing of Canadians.
Frye suggested that Canadians were ready to move beyond the “garrison mentality” of the country’s early years. And indeed they have. Pi who at first had a justifiable fear of his environment in the form of the Tiger and the ocean achieved a greater control over his environment and ultimately conquered it - but just barely. Pi survived in spite of these challenges, and lived to tell the tale.
Fearlessness in understanding human behaviour
Canadians have a passion for learning about human behaviour. This is a generalization, to be sure, but the facts speak for themselves. Pi thrived on the open ocean with the Bengal Tiger by first observing and understanding the behaviour of the Tiger. He learned to master the open ocean by observing and understanding its unpredictability, its dangers and its wonders.
Like the open ocean, the geography of Canada leaves a permanent impression on the minds of Canadians, especially its writers. Like Canada, knowledge is vast, but with observation and understanding it becomes manageable and understandable. It is possible to create order and structure out of what appears to be disorder. Nature is never tamed, but it can be understood.
In fact, the challenge of writing is not the mechanics of writing. Good grammar and spelling is mere repetition (and today that is taken care of by software anyway). Excellent writing is like drifting across a vast open ocean with a Bengal Tiger, both of which are menacing. Canada’s gift to its writers is its vastness and its natural dangers which are only surmounted with a manageable fear.
A piece of paper, a pen and a topic represents a formidable challenge, vast in scope, but with skill and care and understanding produces astute observations on the human condition that both entertain and enlighten us. This is Canada’s gift to the world.