Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.

Like Margaret Atwood, who once suggested that the national illness of
Canada was schizophrenia, Hutcheon cleverly tries to advance a theory of
irony as being the key to understanding ourselves as Canadians. She
explores this theory by examining literature and art (mainly
photography), without ignoring the possibilities in politics and popular
culture. “Obsessed, still, with articulating its identity, Canada
often speaks with a doubled voice, with the forked tongue of irony.
Although usually seen as a defensive or an offensive rhetorical weapon,
irony—even in the simple dress of saying one thing and meaning
another—is also a mode of “speech” (in any medium) that allows
speakers to address and at the same time slyly confront an
“official” discourse: that is, to work within a dominant tradition
but also to challenge it—without being utterly co-opted by it.”

This is a fascinating work, engagingly written and captivating in its
singlemindedness. But it is a wholly intellectual exercise, one that
only a few Canadians will read and one that espouses a theory that few
ordinary Canadians would recognize or acknowledge. That is partly
because most of the works examined are ephemeral (of doubtful literary
merit) and do not accurately reflect Canadian issues (being too
egocentric), and partly because the same theory, if applied with equal
cleverness to Guatemala or Spain or even France, might be as convincing.
Thus Hutcheon’s study is in itself ironic (which may or may not prove
her theory).