![]() Such a politics of ‘shared opportunity, and shared hope’, rooted in liberalism, would, its architects hoped, ease the animus between Canada's English and French-speaking populations, a division memorably captured in the title of MacLennan's novel Two Solitudes (Ignatieff, 2000: 127).ĭrawing on the resources of his ‘philosophical anarchism’, Woodcock developed a critique of Trudeau's civic nationalism, inflected with its own version of nationalism, which posited a radically different image of Canada's possible future as the ‘anti-nation’. The civic nationalist project aimed to define the ‘nation in cultural terms while infusing it with a largely civic content and vision’, with the ambition that ‘the formal constitutional acts of citizens’ would be at the heart of a rights-based unity (Ignatieff, 2000: 128 Smith, 1998: 93). From his first election victory in 1968, Trudeau dominated Canadian politics for the next 16 years, continuing both to ‘fascinate’ and ‘provoke highly emotional reactions’ even after his retirement from political life (Couture, 1998: xii). In this conversation, Woodcock's principal antagonist would be Canada's Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his project of civic nationalism. A process of ‘Canadianization’, in which successive generations of ‘nation-builders tried to use culture to imprint a sense of nationhood’ on Canada's post-Confederation journey, revealed the existence of a plurality of ‘radically different nationhoods’ competing for supremacy (Edwardson, 2008: 5, 6). Woodcock was a witness to, and a participant in, a period of prolonged reassessment that was already underway as he returned to the country. ![]() From Canada's confederation in 1867, the ensuing debates have tended to revolve around a cluster of issues that, while not uniquely Canadian, possess particular resonances in view of that country's history: the feasibility of meaningful nationhood in the context of Canada's geographical and ethnic diversity the competing models of assimilation and accommodation to which this diversity points and, at the same time, the exclusion of Indigenous perspectives and histories from these settler-initiated accounts the relationship between federal and provincial power that rested, from the outset, on different visions of the nation's future held by francophone and anglophone Canadians and Canada's relation to its more powerful southern neighbour (Coulthard, 2014 Lévesque, 2009 Silver, 1997). Political theorists and ambitious political actors have long been drawn to the possibilities that Canada embodies. This anarchism, evolving from a self-described anarchist ‘absolutism’ to a philosophical anarchism, would lead Woodcock into a creative conversation with the forces of Canadian nationalism, in which he repurposed narratives of Canada's cultural growth to challenge the statist implications of these nationalisms (Woodcock, 1994: 51). Woodcock, a man of ‘two worlds’, would achieve prominence as a commentator on Canadian culture and politics-incautiously credited by one scholar with ‘virtually creat Canadian literature’-and through the prism of his anarchism attempt to explain Canada's cultural and political development during a period of significant change (Hughes, 1974: 49 New, 1978: vii Tippett, 2015). Returning to Canada in 1949, Woodcock began a new journey as he reinvented himself as a Canadian intellectual while also being recognised as anarchism's most influential historian (Ward, 2004). ![]() 1 Born in Manitoba in 1912, but reared almost entirely in Britain, Woodcock's Troy was austerity Britain of the late-1940s, whose bleakness cultivated a ‘feeling akin to claustrophobia’, and his Ithaca the arbutus-lined shores of Vancouver Island (Woodcock, 1982: 310). Woodcock's description of the Odyssean dimensions of MacLennan's literary exercise mirrors his own interweaved personal and political history (New, 1978). The returning wanderer, arriving in a ‘mysteriously changed homeland’, is an onlooker but also an interpreter of shifting political, social and cultural structures, working to comprehend and explain the state of the nation to the reader (Woodcock, 1970: 13, 14). His skill and characteristic technique, Woodcock continued, was to demonstrate the ‘underlying universality of the personal and national experiences’ in his creative renderings of the Odyssey's central plot device. ![]() Shaping both the Greek epic and MacLennan's oeuvre, particularly his novels Barometer Rising (1941) and Two Solitudes (1945), was, he argued, a sense of a people ‘becoming aware of itself’, with MacLennan working to ‘illumine the growth of a Canadian national consciousness’. In an essay composed as he was becoming ‘Canada's most prolific and celebrated man of letters’, George Woodcock reflected on the importance of the Odyssey to the Canadian novelist Hugh MacLennan (Colebourn, 1995: 4).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |