also Robert Bringhurst, A Story as Sharp as a

Knife (Vancouver: Douglas & Mclntyre, 1999)

349-360.
3 Haida Texts: Masset Dialect i7i.
4 Solitary Raven i95.
5 Maria Tippett, Bill Reid: The Making of an Indian
(Toronto: Random House, 2003). I find many
errors in Tippett's book. Here are a few representative examples. One of the first things anthropology students must learn is how the moiety
system works on the Northwest Coasl. There are
two Haida moieties. Eagle and Raven. Members
of one must marry members of the other. Each
moiety consists of several lineages or clans.
Slasttaas (or Sdast'aas), for example, is the name
of one of the lineages within the Eagle moiety.
Tippett confuses Reid's moiety and his lineage,
then misconstrues the lineage name as the personal name of one of its members, Reid's maternal grandfather, Charles Gladstone. Next, by
misreading a catalogue label, she shifts the hneage
name from Gladstone to an article he carved. She
also trips on two of the cardinal rules. First, children belong to the moiety and lineage of the
mother, not the father. Second, moieties themselves do not have leaders, anymore than genders
do, though every lineage within the moiety does.
The late Miles Richardson II was headman of the
Qqaadasghu Qiighawaay, the Raven lineage to
which Bill Reid belonged. His son. Miles
Richardson ill, former president of the Council
of the Haida Nation, is therefore necessarily an
Eagle. By asserting that Miles III is "the hereditary chief of the Raven moiety," Tippett turns the
social order upside down. European social structure takes a beating too. Tippett conflates
Dominique de M^nil, a devoted collector of
painting and sculpture, with her daughter, photographer Adelaide de M^nil, then marries
Adelaide twice: to her husband, anthropologist
Edmund Carpenter, and to her father, Jean de
Menil. Even where things are easy, Tippett sometimes makes them hard. For example, she transposes and confuses Reid's three Haida names,
persistently writing Kihiguulins as "Kihlguullne"
and al times writing this garbled name (which,
when correctly pronounced, means "the one who
speaks well") with another, Yaahl Sgwaansing,
(which means "Solitary Raven").
6 Solitary Raven 217.
7 Robert Bringhurst, "And Sheila is an honourable
woman," Globe and Mail, 14 October 2002: A-13.
8 See Tippett 276.

191

Has SurwVa/Survived?
Janice Fiatnengo

McClelland and Stewart's reissue of Survival

provides an occasion to reconsider Atwood's
well-known book. Since its publication in
1972, Survivalhas achieved international
recognition and has come to symbolize a
pivotal moment in Canadian history. To
many readers, tbe book announced the
coming of age of Canadian literature and
the flourishing of a vibrant and defiant
nationalism. It contributed to defining the
Canadian canon, placing emphasis on E.J.
Pratt, Sinclair Ross, Irving Layton, Jay
Macpherson, Margaret Laurence, Al Purdy,
lames Reaney, Dennis Lee, andwith
noticeable emphasisGraeme Gibson. It
encouraged a method of reading that diagnosed the ills and aspirations of the
Canadian psyche through its dominant literary images; in the process, it established
the now famous victim mentality and its
corresponding motifs of menacing wilderness, hunted animals, and paralyzed artists.
It articulated a formula for recognizing literary patterns that some readers found useful, others perverse. To some, it became
associated with thematic criticism and the
dominance of the paraphrase. To others, it
embodied the quest to define a national
essence tbat was characteristic of the decade.
Most of all, it encouraged a response,
whether of emulationa number of critics
published works of thematic criticism that
implicitly or explicitly endorsed Atwood's
critical principlesor outrage.
Atwood had made it clear that she did not
consider herself an academic (a disavowal
that itself rankled some scholars), tbat she
did not want readers to take her "oversimplifications as articles of dogma," and that
her book was not a comprehensive survey
or even an original interpretation. She was
a writer producing a practical guide for nonspecialists, providing a rudimentary "map

Canadian Lileraluie 18} I Winter 2004

O p i n i o n s

a n d

N o t e s

of the territory" to help Canadians learn

about their culture. In the course of writing, Atwood confessed, the book had developed into an argument about the colonial
condition, "a cross between a personal
statement ... and a political manifesto."
With its sociological approach, emphasizing plot rather than form, it was readable
and engaging, garnering a positive response
from the audience Atwood had in mind
high school teachers and non-specialist
readers. But literary scholars, despite
Atwood's disclaimers, did read the book as
a definitive statement about Canadian literature, not without some justification, and
were irritated by her style, approach, biases,
and omissions.

Jeannette Duncan, Stephen Leacock,

Robertson Davies, and Robert Kroetsch. It
was disingenuous to delete their contributions and then to declare that "Canadian
literature is undeniably sombre and negative." Furthermore, the justice of some of
Atwood's observations was weakened by
what Keith termed "sloppy critical habits"
of over-simplification. From a different
perspective, Frank Davey (Margaret Atwood,
1984) objected to the book's falsely unifying,
Eastern-Canadian national vision, which
was oblivious to regional or aesthetic distinctions among writers. Atwood's refusal
to discuss matters of style or technique, he
commented, made literature seem a matter
of statement rather than aesthetic structure.

Survival was easy to criticize. After

warning against taking her generalizations
as dogma, Atwood continually overclaimed, emphasizing the presence of "so
many writers in such a small country, and
all with the same neurosis." The primary
pattern Atwood identified seemed at once
too generalwere struggle, loss, and failure exclusive to the Canadian tradition?
and also too narrow to account for "the
impossible sum of our traditions," to borrow from Malcolm Ross. Not surprisingly,
scholars from across the critical spectrum
took Atwood to task for falsely homogenizing a diverse literature. For Robin Mathews
(Canadian Literature, 1978), the book's
single-minded focus on narratives of failure
promoted the very colonial mentality it
claimed to describe by ignoring the literature of class struggle and anti-colonial
resistance Canadians had produced. By
selecting "a literature of surrender," Atwood
"prepare[d] the consciousness" for colonial
defeat. In a more moderate assessment,
W.J. Keith (An Independent Stance, 1991)
made a similar point about the narrowness
of the tradition Atwood designated. The
comic strain was almost completely excised
by her decision to ignore canonical texts
by Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Sara

Re-reading the book now, one notices

some of these weaknessesthe tendency to
exaggeration, the flippant tone. I was particularly struck by the relentless progressivism of Atwood's approach, in which
Canadian literature is seen as steadily
accomplishing its ov/n liberation, freeing
itself from its condition of colonial servitude by naming the source of its oppression
and imagining avenues of resistance. Near
the end of the study, she cites recent work
by bill bissett and Dennis Lee to make her
point that "English Canadian writers are
beginning to voice their own predicament
consciously," a voicing that "would have
been unimaginable twenty years ago." The
implication, that earlier writers were too
colonized to recognize their situation, is
inaccurate. Has Atwood forgotten the
impassioned yet hard-headed depiction of
precisely the Canadian predicament in
Sara Jeannette Duncan's The Imperialist
(1904)? Or even further back, the satirical
assessment of Americanism in Haliburton's
The Clockmaker (1836)? And surely direct
engagement with social and political realities
is powerfully accomplished in the writing
of Margaret Laurence and Mordecai Richler,
to name only two. Yet despite these objections to some of Atwood's statements.

192

Canadian Literature iSj / Winter2004

equally striking is how well the book's

argument has survived its more than three
decades in print: the observations remain
acute, the generahzations relevant, and
many of the judgements bold and critically
mature. I am still delighted by Atwood's
marvellous aphorisms, as in the assertion
that "Canadians are forever taking the
national pulse like doctors at a sickbed: the
aim is not to see whether the patient will
live well but whether he will live at all."
Exactly so. And who can forget or dispute
her observation that Canadians may "have a
will to lose which is as strong and pervasive
as the Americans' will to win." A preoccupation, in Atwood's memorable phrase, with
"frozen corpses, dead gophers, snow, dead
children, and the ever-present feeling of
menace" is not the whole story of Canadian
literature (what is ever the whole story?),
but it remains an engaging, witty chapter.
Individual sections of the study also
remain incisive. The chapter on animal victims, in which Atwood was one of the first
to identify the animal story as a genre of
Canadian literature, remains compelling
and unsurpassed, particularly in tracing
how the pathos of animal death in the stories of Charles G.D. Roberts and Ernest
Thompson Seton develops into the more
sobering catastrophe of species extinction
in the work of Fred Bodsworth and Farley
Mowat almost a century later. Noting that
animal stories are always an expression of
human concerns and perceptions, Atwood
concludes that animals "are always symbols"
for human experience and thus links literary depictions of animal death to Canadian
fears of cultural annihilation. It is a punchy
and memorable argument, but 1 find the
focus on animals exclusively as symbols a
limitation in what is otherwise an astute
analysis, for it does not begin to account
even for Atwood's own sensitive and haunting animal portrayals in fiction and poetry.
Long before Terry Goldie's Fear and
Temptation, and before the majority of

193

white intellectuals concerned themselves

with First Nations' issues and representations, Atwood's attention to the figure of
the Indian in Canadian literature confirmed her critical acuteness. Addressing
the role of Native peoples in white literature, her observations anticipate many
insights of post-colonial theory: "The
Indians and Eskimos have rarely been considered in and for themselves," she notes:
"they are usually made into projections of
something in the white Canadian psyche, a
fear or a wish." She is clear-eyed about the
ethical implications of white writing that
elegizes Native peoples, noting its dependence on a conquered, passive or dead population. Speaking of Purdy's poems of
lament, she observes that "Eskimos in the
flesh Purdy finds alien and difficult to communicate or identify with ... It is natives
who are dead or extinct that really say
something to him, give him a meaningful
refiection of himself." Commenting on
Laurence's portrayals of the M^tis in A Bird
in the House and The Fire Dwellers, Atwood
perceptively notes whites' sense of the emotional barrier created by Native suffering:
"The Indians are, finally, a yardstick of suffering against which the whites can measure their own and find it lacking." Her
analysis of the complex patterns of identification and displacement in white representations of Natives remains cogent, and
Atwood's matter of fact prose highlights
her conviction and lack of squeamishness.
Much present post-colonial theorizing will,
one suspects, age less well.
The discussion seems to bog down in
some of the middle chapters, as for example in "Family Portrait," in which Atwood
explores families in Canadian literature as
sites of stifling entrapment and guilty
repression. Atwood's enumeration of the
typical configuration of the three-generation family is functional but flat, and she
fails to demonstrate the complex connections between the family motif and the

Canadian Ulera!ure iSj / Winter 2004

O p i n i o n s

a n d

national psyche that make her other chapters provocative. Nonetheless, valuable critical insights pepper the pages, from
Atwood's summation of the meaning of
Canada in immigrant literature in which
the country "seems to offer newcomers a
chance to exploit her; but this promise is
seldom kept,"to her analysis of Canadian
ambivalence toward state authority.
Speaking of representations of rebellious
heroes, she notes that such narratives "suffer from a confusion about the nature and
moral position of authority which is in fact
a confusion in the Canadian psyche
itself.... Canadiansand not only
Canadian Prime Ministers^are terrified of
having authority undermined, monolithic
federalism shaken." One may agree or disagree with specifics in Atwood's argument,
but her ability to identify core elements of
our popular myths is, in my opinion, inarguable. The text is fascinating too, as Davey
has noted, for the way it illuminates
Atwood's own hterary preoccupations; her
insistence on self-imposed victimization
on how "the obsession with surviving can
become the will not to survive"reminds
us of her rigorous fictional examinations of
complicity, political passivity, and active
self-destruction.

N o t e s

nonetheless, Canadians' combined sense of

vulnerability and moral superiority to the
United States is at least as potent a force in
our collective identity as it was at the time
of Survival^ and the victor-victim dynamic
remains, arguably, f/ie defining feature of
Canadian cultural politics. Though few
scholars would speak now of literature as a
"mirror" of society, most of us still conceive
of an intimate connection between social
organization and the stories we tell.
Atwood ended Survivalhy asking "Have we
survived? If so, what happens after
Survival?" Considering that we don't seem
to have reached that "after" yet, Atwood
might wish us to ask what purposes are
served by our long-standing investment in
victimhood.

Though much recent scholarship has

rejected a theme-based, nationalist
approach, there are certain continuities
between Survival and more recent criticism. Post-structuralism has influenced our
critical vocabularies, yet the sociological
and ideological focus of Survival is not so
different from that of much feminist and
post-colonial criticism; moreover, the ubiquity of current concerns with marginality,
power relations, and anti-colonial resistance suggests that Atwood's focus on colonial victimization remains central to
Canadian cuitural concerns. Recent studies
of colonialism focus much more fully on
the experience of Aboriginal peoples and
people of colour than Atwood did;

194

Canailian Literature li} I MQinxtr joo^