Madness in English-Canadian Fiction - ub-dok - Universität Trier

all literature, directly or by implication, addresses the problem of survival. The quest for
meaning, the search for pleasure, the drive for power, the denial or acceptance of death, the
desire to tell people how they live or even how they should live - are all dimensions of the
question of survival. There is, therefore, hardly any singularity in this claim, or variations of
it, in terms of a symbolic centrality which unifies and informs the literary imagination of
Canadian writers. The identification of this as serving such a central role would seem
reflective [merely] of that identifier's desire for coherence in a polyglot, ill-defined and
changing social landscape.3
My own line of argumentation would be similar to Pache's who suggests
Thesen wie die in Survival vertretene sind interessant, man sollte sich jedoch davor hüten, aus
einigen Beispielen schon spezifisch kanadische Merkmale der Literatur abzuleiten.4
Finding recurrent characteristics in a given nation's literature and then declaring them
to be nationally distinctive just does not work, especially if one "chooses to work with
materials - literary themes - that are [...] international in nature."5
Another aspect which has to be emphasised is that even if it might hold true "that
certain peoples and regions have their own distinctive literary and cultural traditions
and attitudes, conditioned by shared language and habit and historical experience",6
that a certain region produces its own type of literature, as a certain climate produces
its own flora, in the case of Canada one would always be confronted with the size of
the country. Geographically, as well as historically the country is divided into so many
different regions that it will always be problematic to view them as a homogeneous
entity, a fact which has led various writers and critics to the conclusion that any form
of identity or sense of place can only be established locally or regionally, never
nationally. Thus the national definition can be no more than a 'collective
consciousness' based on various regionalisms.7
As far as madness is concerned, this study will therefore refrain from claiming it to be
yet another centralising and unifying symbol of the Canadian mind, even if Margaret
Atwood discovers in Moodie's approach to her country a schizophrenic ambiguity
which she identifies as a central feature of the Canadian character:
3 Itwaru, Arnold Harrichand: The Invention of Canada: Literary Text and the Immigrant Imagery.- Toronto: TSAR, 1990.p.
24
4 Pache, Walter: Einführung in die Kanadistik.- Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1981.- p. 100
5 Davey, Frank: Surviving the Paraphrase.- In Canadian Literature 70 (1976) .- p. 8
6 Woodcock, George: Odysseus Ever Returning.-Toronto: McClelland & Stewart (NCL), 1970.- p. 131
7 cf. Woodcock, George: Odysseus Ever Returning.-Toronto: McClelland & Stewart (NCL), 1970.-
2