Abstract

I know that my view offends those who would prefer a noncentrist, or antifederalist, notion of Canadian literature. Davey has repeatedly expressed such a preference in his own criticism. It similarly offends those who believe that new critical voices are beginning to change our perceptions of the canon. I recognize these voices and grant that they may eventually alter our values. So far, very little has changed. It is this assertion that troubles Davey and prompts his central objection: my concept of the canon is unitary, centralist, conservative, monolithic, distorted, and misleading. It is all of these, insofar as it represents my attempt to describe the concept as it has been transmitted in works of Canadian criticism that promote the idea of coherence by arguing the validity of tradition, influence, pattern, or literary solidarity among authors in different eras. Such criticism imagines a unified view of Canadian literature as the reflection of a unified country. It projects a dream of what Northrop Frye called “the peaceable kingdom.”1 In my essay, I emphasize the fictiveness of this dream. Yet this is the fiction that seems to have inspired most Canadian criticism. Although Davey might object to the expression of this dream, the objection doesn’t come to terms with my assertion that the dream of national unity remains the driving force behind the literary and critical values we seek out and support. This force is not rational or empirical, as Davey would have us believe. It is a matter of faith. We create the canon in order to embody a vision of something larger we want to sustain. Robert Lecker is professor of English at McGill University. He is the author of several critical studies, including On the Line , Robert Kroetsch , and An Other I , and coeditor of Essays on Canadian Writing, the multi-volume Canadian Writers and Their Works , and the eight-volume Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors . Lecker is currently preparing a collection of essays on the Canadian canon