As Canadian as Possible Under the Circumstances

Patricia Morley is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University, an associate fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute, and author of Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

In an essay originally delivered as the 1989 John P. Robarts Lecture,
literary critic Hutcheon examines the place of irony in Canadian
culture.

The Canadian identity has been the object of wit and the subject of
passionate scholarship for some decades. Hutcheon finds it frequently
ironic: “Canada’s voice is often a doubled one, that of the forked
tongue of irony.”

Examples range from Al Purdy and bp Nichol through Northrop Frye (one
of the first to put forward this theme) and Marshall McLuhan, along with
Alice Munro, Leonard Cohen, and many others. Hutcheon acknowledges that
irony is the prevailing mode of our century, yet insists on something
distinctive in the Canadian brand.

This literate and often amusing argument gives equal time to women
writers and artists while allowing for diversity and contradiction. The
text reads well, with relatively little jargon. The claim is
sufficiently diffident to raise few objections: “Whatever the medium
and whatever the function, irony seems to be at least one of the ways
English Canadians have chosen to articulate their problematic
identities.”