bout de papier, Vol. 15, No. 3 (1998) — Fall 1998 // Automne 1998, pp. 42–43
REFLECTIONS OF A SIAMESE TWIN by
John Ralston Saul; Viking, 1997, 546 pp.
$36.99
To be Canadian means to be a citizen of the most culturally plural country on earth. It also means to be in constant debate over who we are culturally as a people. A comedian at the Juste Pour Rire festival in Montréal this year defined Canadians as “unarmed Americans with a health plan” Richard Gwyn wrote about “the unbearable lightness of being Canadian,” and Chief of the Grand Cree, Matthew Coon Come, said that “we are not the ones threatening to leave, we are the ones threatening to stay” In the land of self-effacement and variety the articulate Merlin is king.
Into the ring jumps John Ralston Saul with Reflections of a Siamese Twin. Reading Saul is like flying through thick cloud into sudden clear air to see a huge landscape down below. As one of Canada’s most committed cultural intellectuals, Saul transposes the tedious syndrome of the “two solitudes” into the stark gothic image of the “Siamese twin”. The seedlings of Canada’s congenital confederal agony seem like the harbingers of obscure history, but the effect is contemporary. The Siamese twin is the freak spawn of the anachronistic clash between Ultramontanism and Orangeism.
Images of papal zouaves “from the other side of the Alps,” and top-hatted fascists on a Catholic-baiting march are hardly the current sense of the Canadian self, or of reality, in Canada’s peaceable kingdom. Yet Saul asks us to reflect. We are on the right trail towards the grail of civilization, but we don’t yet comprehend this as our national course.
Saul has concentrated in previous works on cultural insight. Voltaire’s Bastards and The Doubter’s Companion form his insightful investigation of western culture. His CBC Massey Lectures Series in 1995 saw him forceful in his criticisms of conformity and corporatism. He argued that our massive new reservoirs of information and knowledge, available at the end of a mouse, are in fact turning us into an unconscious civilization. Canada the unconscious? Love or hate him; Saul prods us to wake up to the reality of crumbling institutions that now lie victim to a lack of vision and leadership on the cusp of the millennium.
In 1994, Saul wrote a foreign policy paper for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade defending a clairvoyant initiative that the promotion of Canadian culture in the world, through engaged insight into that culture, would be a “third pillar of foreign policy”. Canadian self-confidence would see Canadian values offered to the world as a contribution to problem-solving and conflict-resolution counterpointing the Ozymandian ruins of the Berlin Wall and the roots of the Cold War. But international cultural enterprise was relegated to a stillborn global issues branch, which, coupled with a stunning lack of understanding and commitment by the Department’s senior managers from 1994 to 1996, rendered the third pillar a bright shining lie.
Reflections of a Siamese Twin is an admonition that our cultural ignorance is one of our national problems. Canada “is an idea of what a country could be, a place of imagination… it is very much its own invention. Our glory is the remarkable originality of the Canadian experiment.”
The author judges that the Canadian “problem” stems from the “ever-thickening walls of a mythological prison… over the past decades we have seen wave after wave of high-quality, talented politicians and public servants severely handicapped in their ability to propose interesting policies…
The problem is historic; so “ … why not begin with what could be called the two great tragedies of Canada’s first century? They began as political struggles and ended by infusing much of the mythological and real poison and bitterness into our society”. Poison and bitterness? The first “tragedy” was “the victory of the Ultramontane movement in Quebec and the second the victory of the Orange movement in Ontario”. These were ’the spearheads of intolerance and manipulation of fear”. The Ultramontanes caused French Canada the “loss of a century”. The Orange movement “provoked the Métis persecution… and caused Ontario also to lose close to a century of balanced evolution” Separatism, the inheritance, is as racist as any ethnic cleanser available on the shelf of political ideas.
Saul makes the crucial distinction between culture and heritage. “Culture may contain some heritage, but above all it is alive and heritage is tied to an uncontrollable continuity which is relevant to all aspects of society… The whole concept of heritage has grown over the last few years because it treats culture as something in the past – dead and boxable. Heritage is something which ideologies can use for appropriate purposes. It is controllable, nonthreatening, and malleable for those interested in isolating one culture from another.”
The ultimate absurdity, Saul notes, is when politicians and bureaucrats try to “protect” culture (from the Americans, of course). “Only a dead culture requires protection.” No legislation in the world can stop the flow of ideas and intellectual resources — as samizdat proved during the downfall of the Soviet Union. The Internet, in turn, adds momentum to the pronouncement of ideas and creative products making protection of culture as ridiculous as it is impossible.
Another myth shattered in Reflections is that Canada is more “European” than the United States. “Canada is profoundly un- European. Its attitudes and policies are largely the product of local circumstances, in part because we have constructed a country on the margins of western civilization… The United States, on the other hand, is the natural prolongation of the European idea. It is the European state personified. It has become what France, Germany, England, and spain dream they might become it only they had the space.”
Canadians, argues Saul, have never dreamed of “conquering a frontier”. Canada is the sum of many eclectic parts. “Canada either is an idea or does not exist. It is either an intellectual undertaking or it is little more than a resource-rich vacuum lying in the buffer zone just to the north of the great empire.” This puts a high premium on understanding Canadian culture, and articulating and pronouncing it to ourselves, our children, new immigrants, and our friends and enemies around the world. The “idea” is brilliantly simple in its awesome complexity. Saul quotes Harold Innes, who, at the end of his life, “shifted his attention from the trade-routes of the external world to the trade routes of the mind”
No people in history has been more adept at communications systems than Canadians, and the challenge now is for recognition that “the communication of ideas means the communication of how a society might construct itself”. The Canadian “idea,” based on very practical necessities such as surviving four distinct seasons, and trading competitively in the world, is a cultural gem worthy of international dissemination.
It is an idea, not an ideology or a hegemony — that is why it is so typically Canadian and exemplary. If we say so ourselves we can add that even the United Nations has given Canada top marks as an exemplary society. Canada’s first century and a half, says Saul, was a series of eight strategic steps. “These eight strategic leaps — the reformer’s alliance, the Maritime dash, the railroad, the National Policy, the immigration flood, the refusal of imperial engagement, the social revolution, the cultural engagement — actually fit one into the other like a preplanned campaign.”
The cultural cringe of Canadian elites in recent years helped lead us to the brink in the 1995 referendum. Politicians and bureaucrats failed where busloads of ordinary Canadians rushed to embrace the humanity of Quebec beyond her politics. Today we face a similar challenge, polished by a Supreme Court ruling on Canadian fusion or fission. The virus of fission has no cure except for the concerted cultural effort to reinforce the fusion of common, yet distinct, interests. Quebec is not distinct from other provinces, but Quebec is distinct in itself and therefore stands as the French cultural magnet of all the Americas. By looking outwards instead of inwards Quebec embraces “the Canadian idea” articulated by Saul for which it deserves so much credit as co-author.
It is sobering to read in this book of the relative decline of Canada’s influence in the world because, it seems, of national insecurities and uncertainties. But it is energizing to see a laser-thin light beam on Canada’s great challenge — the cultural imperative. “ … culture does precede, not so much as the ultimate reality but as the pure expression of reality.” Saul has added to the national unity debate by identifying the cultural issues and sensitivities that alienate where they could bond. The act of confronting separatist ideology as “poison and bitterness” cannot hide the fact that many francophone Canadians do feel alienated and surrounded. In fact, they are an essential dimension of the Canadian idea — from Quebec to all of Canada’s French-speaking communities.
The Canadian idea is subsumed, in the author’s mind, in the Inuit concept of Isuma — “intelligence that consists of the know!- edge of our responsibilities towards our society”. Like the equivalent African concept of Ubuntu, the cultural imperative demands that we know ourselves well and care greatly for ourselves. Only then can we learn to know others and take care of others.
This book is important for Canadian students, professors, politicians, ambassadors, and bureaucrats. It will challenge, annoy, confuse, and convince various readers. John Ralston Saul is almost certainly, at this moment, writing the next critique of his beloved country. The book should be read by everyone else who cares about the future of Canada and who understands that the power of words can motivate constructive actions. Rarely does coherent argument about Canada’s soul range from the intellectually deliberate (and often debatable) to the clear, provocative, confusing, and accessible. Readers will find much to argue with, and much to admire — that is what cultural insight is all about.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 15, No. 3 (1998) — Fall 1998 // Automne 1998, pp. 42–43. Read the rest of this issue →
