Arts and Literature in Canada:Views from Abroad, Les arts et la ...

IJCS/RIÉCYou are not smitten with the shockOf that great thundering sky?Visual perspective in this poem emerges as the impoverishing instrument of afearful mind (“The fear has eaten back/Through sockets to the caverns of thebrain”); it is designed to control space, to impose rational orientation onoverwhelming and potentially maddening magnificence. To encounter thismagnificence with the imagination, “nonsensuously” and aperspectivally, is arisky enterprise, but only to the adventitious perceiver will the landscapereveal its unseeable greatness.Margaret Atwood's “This Is a Photograph of Me” (1966), too, is concernedwith an artificial way of seeing; in fact, the single lens of the camera fulfills thedemand of Renaissance perspective that the perspectival scheme beconstructed from a single eye-point. The poem begins with a familiar“picture”—a portrait with a landscape background: “In the background thereis a lake,/and beyond that, some low hills.” Landscape and self seem to beseparate, but the next lines reveal a collapse of the two entities: the self hasdrowned and thus become a part of the land: “I am in the lake, in the center/ofthe picture, just under the surface.” Seeing something in perspective requires aminimal distance between subject and object; when self and land are fused, thisdistance is nullified and the perspectival scheme accordingly destroyed. Thedivision between foreground and background suggested in the poem's first twolines has been capsized— person becomes land, foreground background, andthe alleged background is foregrounded, taking the place of where the personshould be. Subject and object unite in a single picture plane. Apart from thecollapse of its depth, the picture is also “flawed” with respect to scale: “It isdifficult to say .../how large or small I am:/the effect of water/on light is adistortion ....” The crooked perspective in these lines is a correlative to thebewilderment of the self, which, having merged with the land, must re-orientitself and develop new ways of relating to its environment.Man's relation to the environment, the merging of self and land, is at the corenot only of Atwood's art, but also of other Canadian poems of the late 60s and70s—a period when Canadian literature was absorbed in questions of identityand pursued them with special attention to the Canadian man-naturerelationship. 19 Nowhere is this relationship explored as obviously in Canadianterms as in The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970). As in Avison's“Perspective,” the collapse of vision in this cycle of poems is a precondition todeveloping more appropriate modes of perception; “[v]isual perception limitsand excludes. Inner vision alone leads to a full understanding” (Grace 1980:34). At the same time, this collapse symbolizes the breakdown of mentalperspectives. Mrs. Moodie, the British immigrant, is unable to understand hernew country because the concepts with which she tries to do so are incongruentwith the country's realities.20