Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

It’s a good title. Jonathan Kertzer has found a name for a Canadian
subgenre that has existed for decades and has recently taken on the
proportions of a literary-critical epidemic: an earnest, politically
correct brooding on our national shortcomings. The perennial
“Where-is-here?” syndrome duly receives a new set of clothes.
Canadian identity, the treatment of minorities, the pros and cons of
nationalism, separatist rumblings, patriarchal assumptions: they are all
here.

Kertzer is a thoughtful, formidably well-read commentator; if one wants
a contemporary treatment of these topics, Worrying the Nation can be
recommended. Unlike his more nationalistic predecessors, he does not
confine himself to Canadian background studies but roams far afield—to
the extent that, at times, his arguments can become a series of
quotations, a feat of name-dropping. The literary texts he discusses in
detail are Oliver Goldsmith’s The Rising Village, E.J. Pratt’s
Towards the Last Spike, Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies, Joyce Kogawa’s
Obasan, and Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic. An interesting list, but
(let’s face it) a highly selective one.

The shades of deconstruction hang over this book, and as a result I
find myself wanting to argue against its grain. Yes, Pratt’s epic does
reveal the prejudices of its author and its age, but it may well be
important because it thereby reveals our own prejudices. Kertzer does
not lay sufficient emphasis on this point. On the other hand, he can be
engagingly frank as he feels his way through the minefield of modern
cultural theory.

There is much to ponder here. Personally, I find myself challenging a
sentence in Kertzer’s concluding chapter: “As well as post-colonial
and post-structuralist, we must now be post-national.” Must? An unkind
(deconstructive) critic might consider that word not only deterministic
but disturbingly aggressive. Still, that it provokes argument is one of
the book’s strengths. Kertzer not only offers food for thought (and
worry) but indicates a need for alternative approaches to our current
dilemmas.