As many of you know, the print media and the blogosphere have been abuzz with the pithy headline that half of the 1,500 Canadians surveyed in a recent poll could not name a single author from this country, living or dead. I tend to side with those who find an optimistic note in the fact that half of the 1,500 Canadians surveyed in a recent poll could: I will never forget my shock when I first shopped for a home and entered dwelling after dwelling that had not a single book on display.
What is very interesting to me is what this media response tells us about our cultural assumptions. For example, while I am a supporter of arts subsidies because they allow worthy projects that might not attract commercial support to see the light of day, it seems strange to me that we might now turn around and expect a literature buoyed by grants to enjoy a wider, popular recognition. Moreover, I have been privy to the diversification of Canadian letters, but what was once welcomed as a new honesty seems now disparaged as an unfortunate fragmentation. When I left this country in the early 1990s, Canadian literature courses were filled with books by dead white men; when I returned four years later, those same courses had new evidence of voices that repositioned gender, race, and sexual orientation. When I lived in England and we had four television channels, we could be certain that half the dining hall had watched what we watched the night before. Should we be surprised, then, that in this new, diverse climate names like Charles Roberts and Morley Callaghan do not roll off the tongues of Canadian students of literature?
I chose to study modernism before I had even finished my undergraduate degree: I was attracted by the first period, the early twentieth century, that actively threw off the narrow definitions of national literatures. My literary heroes were, and still are, those men and women who wrote in English but read French, and German, and Italian, and who allowed themselves to be influenced by all. Amongst writers today, there are people whose books I will buy immediately upon release. One of these is Wayne Johnston, the Newfoundland writer whose prose invokes for me the place from which I came. What Mr. Johnston does for me is what many of the hand-wringers believe Canadian literature does, or should do, for you. But I also buy without hesitation new books from Michel Houllebecq, Hanif Kureishi, David Leavitt, and Cormac McCarthy, writers who speak to me of the world in which I live. And if any of the 750 respondents who could not name a single Canadian author have someone whose work motivates them like these writers motivate me, I can forgive them what the pundits seemingly cannot.
