This might only be of interest to Canadians and a few Canuck-ophiles but here goes: Canadian nationalism ebbs and flows but the most recent high tide was from 1967, when Canada celebrated its centennial year as a confederation, to the late 1970s. This was a golden age of nationalist cultural fervor, the period where presses such as Coach House books and the House of Anansi made their mark, when writers such as Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro gained their fame. Not every writer was a nationalist during this period, certainly Munro wasn’t. But many others were: think of the Atwood of Survival and Surfacing, a novelist and critic very interesting in exploring the geography and mythology of her native land.

Since the early 1980s, the dominate spirit in Canadian literature has been post-nationalist: many young writers see Canadian nationalism as stodgy, stolid and backward looking. These writers don’t look to Canadian history for stories but are openly internationalist. A good example would be the well-regard Camilla Gibb, who lives in Toronto but has written novels about Ethiopia and Vietnam. Or the excellent Steven Heighton, who often writes about Asia.

There is a passage in Russell  Smith’s 1998 novel Noise which expresses this post-nationalist mood:

“It used to be that you could get a lot of recognition by writing about Canada, as long as it was about small towns and nature.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. You could have canoes and the prairies or, also, sad women, very sad women who were fat or whose husbands had left them or something. There was a lady who wrote about fucking a bear, which was like a union with the land. There was a lady who wrote about mystical experiences she had at a cottage in northern Ontario. I was never sure what that was about. They were very important at one time, very stern and important. I had to study them in school. Anyway, [Ludwig Boben] was one of them. He concentrated on the prairies. He wrote a lot of books about the prairies, with a lot of native names, and wise native people, like there’s  a young boy with an Ojibway grandmother who will teach him the ways of the forest, sort of thing, and there’s a lot of history, like a lot of the Riel rebellion for example.”

“The what?”

“History. And there’s a lot of disaster, on the prairies, like people having to rebuild their sod house after floods and so on.”

For our purposes, what is noteworthy is that comics don’t fall into the periodization seen in literature. The sort of nationalist themes that Smith’s characters were dismissing as dated in 1998 – small towns, historical figures such as Riel – are in fact a major concern to the best Canadian cartoonists: Seth’s whole body of work, indeed, revolves around such topics, as do the most popular works of Chester Brown and David Collier (who did a fine biographical portrayal of Grey Owl, another Canadian icon).

Many Canadian cartoonists seem to be late-born nationalists. Why is this? It might simply be an offshoot of the fact that Canadian comics were themselves late in developing, with Vortex, Drawn and Quarterly and other firms only gaining a foothold in the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps also in a hinterland country like Canada, an art form has to go through a nationalist phase, using up the available historical themes, before it can move into post-nationalism. The nostalgic imperative felt by Seth and others might also be a factor: Seth grew up during the nationalist heyday of 1967, so in doing nationalist art he is returning to his childhood in the same way he does when he looks to Jack Kirby or John Stanley for inspiration.

This is a complicated topic, one which I hope to return to. One nuance worth noting is that Chester Brown is not a pure nationalist, since his libertarian politics are, to some degree, at odds with any attempt to glorify the national past (which explains, in part, the distancing effect he aimed for in Louis Riel). Still, while Brown might distrust the nation-state, Louis Riel does give evidence of Brown’s deep engagement with Canadian history. And of course the nationalist theme in Seth’s work comes with a healthy measure of irony and puckish humour (as do all his engagements with a nostalgic themes).

It’ll be interesting to see how long the nationalist phase lasts in Canadian comics. When I look at some younger artists, I already see post-nationalist stirrings but I’m not sure if that is a good thing or not. While post-nationalism promises freedom, it also involves a kind of historical amnesia that I’m uncomfortable with.

Labels: Canadian identity, Chester Brown, David Collier, Heer notebook, Seth