Canadian books under attack
Sometimes by their authors
By John Degen
Illustration by Graham Roumieu
When B.C. mom Jean Baird realized her son had managed to graduate high school without having a single Canadian book assigned to him in English class, she decided to do something about the situation. She lobbied the B.C. government, gathered support from writer friends and family — she's married to former Parliamentary Poet Laureate George Bowering — and managed to extract legislation from the B.C. Ministry of Education requiring at least one Canadian book per year on each class reading list. The decision was hailed by writer advocate groups across the country. And then, all too predictably, it was attacked on prominent writer/reader web discussion boards such as bookninja.com and the Quill & Quire blog.
Some suggested the new law is slightly embarrassing. Do we really have to legislate kids into reading our books? Others thought forcing teachers to assign a Canadian book trespassed on their autonomy as educators. Shouldn't individual teachers be trusted to know what books their class needs to read? Still others accused writer advocates of wanting this law because it would guarantee more Canadian books sold. Greedy authors, forcing citizens to part with money they might freely choose to spend elsewhere.
I read a lot of books in high school, way back when. Of the Canadian books assigned, I remember one in particular, Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel. Was that novel the best choice for introducing the wonders of literature to a teenage boy? Probably not. But I never looked at my grandmother the same way again, that's for sure. And when that sad, proud old Canadian woman went reluctantly into a full-care facility near the end of her life, we shared a gallows humour that would have been unavailable to me had some teacher in Aurora, Ontario not been forced by curriculum to teach me that damned depressing book.
Let me run through some quick responses to the online literary self-flagellation over this issue.
Apparently, we do need this legislation, because earlier attempts to encourage educational engagement with Canadian culture failed for Jean Baird's son. And yes, that is embarrassing. Since when do teachers have complete autonomy over the reading lists they distribute? There are all sorts of pressures on curriculum. A CanCon pressure strikes me as relatively benign considering some of the others I've seen from my seat on Parent Council.
As to the avarice of Canada's writers, it is as legendary as their parsimony. Just try getting one to pick up the tab in a bar. It can't be done. But maybe, maybe, if curriculum committees bought a few more of their books these tight-fisted greedheads would loosen up and spread the love a bit.
"There are very, very few Canadian novels that I would want to occupy my top two slots in a class," wrote one self-hating commenter, a fairly big-name B.C. writer and national book reviewer who is, one might conclude, a bit reactionary. This fellow is a poet, not a novelist, so it's entirely possible his ill feeling toward Canadian novels is little more than sales-envy. But I doubt it. The Canadian inferiority complex is well-established and insidiously popular within the very lit scene it disrespects. The creation, financial support, educational prioritizing, and celebration through awards of Canadian books based on their Canadianness is an abashment to some who believe that greatness, and greatness alone, should be the measure of a book's merit.
And I don't disagree. But I do wonder how this greatness is defined. I wonder how it's possible someone who has grown into creative talent and expression in this country cannot think of enough truly great Canadian novels to fill out that one-peryear requirement. That's not criticism, it's reverse-chauvinism, and it stinks of the same backhanded provincialism that convinces a government to reprioritize itself away from a robust funding of the arts. We can't keep giving all this money to our artists because they are (take your pick): a) too radical b) obscenely named c) not speaking to average families d) not good enough
Did I get less from The Stone Angel than I did from A Canticle for Leibowitz (that's right), All Quiet on the Western Front or Lord of the Flies? How do we quantify these things? Each of these novels certainly taught me something about life, and about the art of writing. But The Stone Angel also taught me about the breadth of my country, my national history, and about people who live around me but are not my people. Surely, there is a kind of greatness in all of that.
