Weaving a Canadian Allegory: Anonymous Writing, Personal Reading

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s.

Czernis is a sociologist who applies sociological theory to the analysis
of a little-remembered Canadian constitutional document, the 1979 report
of the Task Force on Canadian Unity (the Pepin-Robarts Commission). But
instead of examining the proposals for their constitutional validity,
she focuses on what she brilliantly labels “the federal writing
machine” and how it produced an “anonymous writing style.” The
Report, she argues, “is an example of a social emblem, an iconographic
construction that emerges from within an abstract symbolic discourse
that seeks a narrative history.” The federal writing machine labors,
in other words, and brings forth a mouse: a re-writing of Canada’s
tradition in an allegorical mode that suspends precedent, that searches
for an imagined past.

This is an interesting approach, though one wishes that the
bibliography listed even a few works on Canada’s history. Admirers of
sociological method will find much to like; historians may be more
puzzled.