Two Solitudes
by
by
To Live Is To Change - But Not Entirely
In the 1950's my family would spend several holiday-weeks every year in Northern Vermont. Part of the annual ritual was a trip to Montreal and Quebec, only a few hours drive across the border. McGill University and the shrine of St. Anne de Beaupre were the unexceptional tourist standards. But what a shock to me - a country in which people could understand English but wouldn't speak it; a country of some vague but pervasive hostility; perhaps most remarkably a Catholic country which wore its religion as a weapon, whether defensive or offensive I could not tell. But it was certainly different; and yet the Appalachian Mountains of New York were visible from the skyscrapers of Montreal.
Two Solitudes is about the tension between French Canadians and their English-speaking compatriots at just about the time I became inarticulately aware of it. Little known to me at the time, matters had reached such a state as to threaten the national unity of Canada. Ten years later, secession of Quebec from the Confederation was a real political prospect until at least some of the issues MacLennan touches - official language, ethnic discrimination, the role of the Church in politics, for example - had been addressed.
I took an extended camping trip through Eastern Canada, mostly the Gaspe peninsula and the Acadian shore of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island in 2002. My expectation was, given the absence of international news about Québécois separatists, that the reforms of the 1960's had been more or less effective. I was therefore shocked to discover overt hostility to English-speaking visitors and the frequent presence of Acadian independence flags all around the coast.
This experience reminded me of one of the most remarkable traits of Canada that isn't shared with its neighbour to the South: cultural continuity. Like the United States, Canada of course is a country of immigrants, and therefore to some degree a 'melting pot'. But in Canada what's in the pot is much less homogeneous and maintains much more of the national flavours of its first white settlers.
MacLennan's characters are often frustrated by the Canadian penchant for resolving a problem, specifically the inequity experienced by French Canadians, by ignoring it. Canadians, the reader is led to believe, tend, in a very English way, to muddle through, to make small, incremental, half-hearted attempts at social change. But these same characters despise the absence of cultural continuity and its substitution by greed and ideology in the United States.
Given my experience on the Acadian Shore, it strikes me that Canada has indeed found a middle way between the ideological destructiveness of the United States and the political stagnation of pre-WWII ethnic relations in the country. The French-English problem isn't 'solved'. But it's not meant to be. It is too complex to even attempt to fix permanently. Since it evolves, in this case by catalysing isolated French-speaking settlements, it can only be addressed incrementally with enough national energy to keep the whole together without destroying the smaller wholes within it.
I don't know if this kind of national social strategy has a name but it appears to be in play in a number of policy areas - First Nation, international relations, immigration, to name only three. And it seems to be a rather effective way to keep the country away from the obvious distress of social trauma and disintegration of its larger neighbour.
Appropriately, therefore, while brilliantly describing the existential reality of a multinational country, MacLennan doesn't provide what has come to be called a 'global solution'. Canada, it would seem, has the rare and precious virtue of humility - in its writers as well as its social policy. Or put another way by one of MacLennan's characters, "Its an odd thing about this country - there are few outright villains."
In the 1950's my family would spend several holiday-weeks every year in Northern Vermont. Part of the annual ritual was a trip to Montreal and Quebec, only a few hours drive across the border. McGill University and the shrine of St. Anne de Beaupre were the unexceptional tourist standards. But what a shock to me - a country in which people could understand English but wouldn't speak it; a country of some vague but pervasive hostility; perhaps most remarkably a Catholic country which wore its religion as a weapon, whether defensive or offensive I could not tell. But it was certainly different; and yet the Appalachian Mountains of New York were visible from the skyscrapers of Montreal.
Two Solitudes is about the tension between French Canadians and their English-speaking compatriots at just about the time I became inarticulately aware of it. Little known to me at the time, matters had reached such a state as to threaten the national unity of Canada. Ten years later, secession of Quebec from the Confederation was a real political prospect until at least some of the issues MacLennan touches - official language, ethnic discrimination, the role of the Church in politics, for example - had been addressed.
I took an extended camping trip through Eastern Canada, mostly the Gaspe peninsula and the Acadian shore of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island in 2002. My expectation was, given the absence of international news about Québécois separatists, that the reforms of the 1960's had been more or less effective. I was therefore shocked to discover overt hostility to English-speaking visitors and the frequent presence of Acadian independence flags all around the coast.
This experience reminded me of one of the most remarkable traits of Canada that isn't shared with its neighbour to the South: cultural continuity. Like the United States, Canada of course is a country of immigrants, and therefore to some degree a 'melting pot'. But in Canada what's in the pot is much less homogeneous and maintains much more of the national flavours of its first white settlers.
MacLennan's characters are often frustrated by the Canadian penchant for resolving a problem, specifically the inequity experienced by French Canadians, by ignoring it. Canadians, the reader is led to believe, tend, in a very English way, to muddle through, to make small, incremental, half-hearted attempts at social change. But these same characters despise the absence of cultural continuity and its substitution by greed and ideology in the United States.
Given my experience on the Acadian Shore, it strikes me that Canada has indeed found a middle way between the ideological destructiveness of the United States and the political stagnation of pre-WWII ethnic relations in the country. The French-English problem isn't 'solved'. But it's not meant to be. It is too complex to even attempt to fix permanently. Since it evolves, in this case by catalysing isolated French-speaking settlements, it can only be addressed incrementally with enough national energy to keep the whole together without destroying the smaller wholes within it.
I don't know if this kind of national social strategy has a name but it appears to be in play in a number of policy areas - First Nation, international relations, immigration, to name only three. And it seems to be a rather effective way to keep the country away from the obvious distress of social trauma and disintegration of its larger neighbour.
Appropriately, therefore, while brilliantly describing the existential reality of a multinational country, MacLennan doesn't provide what has come to be called a 'global solution'. Canada, it would seem, has the rare and precious virtue of humility - in its writers as well as its social policy. Or put another way by one of MacLennan's characters, "Its an odd thing about this country - there are few outright villains."
posted by The Mind of BlackOxford @ July 29, 2017
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