The Wacousta Syndrome: Explorations in the Canadian Landscape

Bruce Whiteman is Head of Rare Books at the McGill University Libraries
and author of The Invisible World Is in Decline, Books II to IV.

“Things can’t be now / what they useter / Since that Wacouster / come in our yard.” So, according to Frank Davey, runs an Ottawa Valley folksong that he uses as the epigraph to his recent poem “Wacouster,” published in his book The Louis Riel Piano & Organ Co. (Turnstone Press, 1985). In the same poem he writes: “It’s the ancient battle for the Canadian psyche,” and if the poem had not appeared before the publication of Gaile McGregor’s The Wacousta Syndrome, one would swear that Davey was having a joke on her and her imposing book.

The Wacousta Syndrome is Survival gone mad. Atwood’s unpretentious thematic study of Canadian literature is here swelled to 450 pages of small-type academic prose with a similar raison d’être: what do the persistent themes of our books (and paintings) have to say about us as a people? Successive chapters of the book are devoted to proving that Canadians see nature as masculine and frightening, that the house is an important symbol (as a garrison), that we view God as a miserable task-master, that we are fascinated by magicians, that we have problems with the family unit, and so on. McGregor takes particular pains to distinguish all of these cultural characteristics from their American counterparts, until it seems that from first to last the Canadian psyche is engaged in an endless enantiodromion with its equivalent to the south of latitude 49°.

Clearly McGregor has read an enormous amount and spent a good deal of time looking at Canadian art. But, her methodology and conclusions aside, I have some reservations. To begin with, she depends too much on secondary texts to prop up her theses. Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Colin Wilson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Piaget, Sidney Hook, and Claude Levi-Strauss (among others) may all lend respectability to such a study as this, but too often one gets the feeling that the imaginative works themselves are merely fuel for a machine designed to discover evidence of a cultural or psychological theory to which McGregor is partial. A further reservation I have relates to McGregor’s use of second-rate books as the preponderant source for her generalizations — books such as Patricia Blondal’s A Candle to Light the Sun and David Williams’ The Burning Wood, for example. She herself admits that “[i]n this kind of study… flawed or second-rate... material may be even more useful than more successful productions, if only because conventional patterns tend to come through relatively untransformed” (p.223). On the basis of such logic one would be well advised to elaborate a cultural theory on the evidence of the adventure and romance novels of writers like Marian Keith, H.A. Cody, and Gilbert Parker.

McGregor has a disturbing habit of referring to what she calls “the corpus,” as though the 300 years of literature that include St. Ursula’s Convent, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder; Beautiful Joe, Show Me Death! and The Sound of Vinegar as well as Roughing It In the Bush, Settlers of the Marsh, and The Wars, were all of a piece. The generalizations of which McGregor is so inordinately fond are all ultimately based on a small selection of books (most of them novels — poetry and drama are second-class citizens here). There is no question that many of her conclusions contain some truth — if that is the sort of thing one wants from reading books and looking at pictures — and that, right or wrong, she forces us to think. But finally, for all its impressive dress and massive size, The Wacousta Syndrome seems something of a throwback to that time in the 1960s when reading Canadian books was inextricably linked with the problem of discovering “the Canadian Identity” with an uppercase I. Surely we no longer undergo the aesthetic experience only for so shopworn a reason, and certainly our most interesting writers have progressed to other concerns. McGregor’s stated aim of “devising a portable methodology of ‘mapping’ culture by means of selected ‘marker’ traits” gives her away: like second-rank critics everywhere, she is interested not in books, but in academic theories.