John Ralston Saul threw one intellectual grenade after another. The prevailing mythology about Canada is false, he said. We’re not an English and French inspiration, but a ‘Metis nation’ rooted in centuries of First Nations’ political, cultural and social influence. He traced the Canadian preference for negotiation over armed conflict to Aboriginal traditions; our comfort with social complexity to the ever-expanding Aboriginal ‘circle’ and Canadian egalitarianism to the Aboriginal notion of a ‘common bowl.’ We do not understand the origins of those traits which distinguish us from the United States and Europe.
The Canadian philosopher told a small, older, predominantly-francophone audience that our elites look to England and France to interpret their own country, thereby reducing Canada to a colony. This is revolutionary stuff. Yet Saul generated only polite attention and seemingly uniform sympathy, with one audience member asking what could be done to help. In response to a question about how his book had been received, Saul commented that he had been expecting “une réaction épouvantable,” but had had a largely positive reception.
How can these ideas be so non-controversial? Is it that people don’t understand the implications, or don’t think the ideas matter?
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A couple of hours later, a laidback Israeli novelist by the name of Meir Shalev was expressing gratitude, before an audience of several hundred Canadians, to his interviewer, CBC’s Paul Kennedy, for keeping the political chatter to a minimum. “I do not want to write political novels,” he said, pointing out that a writer from Canada is never automatically asked by journalists about politics.
Shalev spoke charmingly about his children’s books (one of which is about a girl who desperately wants dimples), his love of Russian novels (he claims that Moby Dick is one), and the childhood memories which inform many of his works. He described the motivations behind his new novel The Pigeon and the Boy, a love story in which he uses a homing pigeon as a metaphor for longing.
The closest Shalev came to being spontaneously political was the crack he took about sharing the same birth year as the state of Israel : “We are both 61, but I look better.”
Most of the questions from the audience were about Israeli politics.
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Re John Ralston Saul: seems to me this is pretty evolutionary (rather than revolutionary) stuff, and if the audience was subdued and even sympathetic in its response, that only serves to illustrate his characterization of the Canadian people as comfortable with social complexity and addicted to negotiation and “wait and see”. I was at his English talk — it was obviously an electrifying redrawing of some standard Canadian assumptions about ourselves — it felt right in some ways, although I’m not so sure on others — so, good Canadian as I was, I went out to buy his book (& had him sign it), like so many others did, to understand more… and to be better equipped to explain the nature of Canada to my adult ESL students, who happen to be immigrants to this country.
On reflection, though, I wonder how well his thesis of this as a “fair country” that cooperated in its early days with the aboriginals jibe with the genocide of the Beothucks of Newfoundland? In a way, describing ours as a “fair country” is a kind of blandishment, and if at all controversial, perhaps because it is too comforting and non-controversial. But again, I’ll have to read his book to develop a firm opinion…
Interesting comment, thanks Brian. I read the book and wouldn’t say that Saul is glossing over this country’s history of atrocities and injustice. But as he is mainly treating the history of ideas , he addresses himself to a kind of ‘intellectual genocide’ – the whitewashing of Canadian history so that it nearly excludes Aboriginal influence. He would say, I think, that the genocide of the Beothucks, slavery, the epidemic of residential school abuse, head taxes, etc etc were the results of ‘Europeanism’ among the Canadian elite – a monolithic mentality replete with nationalism and intolerance, Alongside this mentality among the elites, however, was something else unexpressed, homegrown, and rooted in Aboriginal tradition: a tolerance for social complexity, a desire for social fairness etc. Given the near-absence of Aboriginal culture in my high school and university Canadian history classes, I find this revolutionary.