Mnemographia Canadensis is largely the result of "Matters of Memory," a graduate course designed in 1994 by the collection’s principal contributor and offered by the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario in 1996-1997. Aimed at exploring the literary and material manifestations of what has variously been called "collective," "cultural," "social," and "public" memory in Canada, the course consisted of two components: (1) a series of presentations by the instructor that focused on commemorative practices in Canada between the late eighteenth century and the present day, with particular emphasis on the relationship between literary and material manifestations of memory; and (2) a series of presentations by the other members of the seminar that focused on a selection of national, regional, and local sites of memory such as the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa and the Montreal Massacre monument in London’s Victoria Park. Before the Fall term was much underway, everyone in the seminar became acutely aware of the difficulties surrounding even the term "memory" in a collective context and of the impossibility of dealing with any matter of purportedly collective memory in Canada without also considering issues of community (or society) and environment (or landscape). Just as the division of Mnemographia Canadensis into two parts entitled Muse and Recall and Remember and See reflects the two components of the Matters of Memory Seminar, so the subtitle of the collection—Essays on Memory, Community, and Environment in Canada, with Particular Reference to London, Ontario—reflects the breadth, complexity, and specificity of the topics addressed by members of the seminar.
Mnemographia Canadensis somewhat unusual in being both the product of a single author and a group of essays by other hands. If a literary model for this combination of singularity and miscellany were to be sought in Canada, it might be found in Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1852), a work whose formal characteristics and their ideological implications are discussed at some length in the present collection (Essay 7: Trees and Forest: Variety and Unity in Early Canadian Writing). To the extent that the collection is the product of a single author, its origins lie in the ideas that were initially articulated in "Remembering and Forgetting in Canadian Literature and Criticism" (1986) and then expanded in "Forgetful of Former Care: Notes on the Past and Present State of Canadian Memory," an essay first published in Western Today (London)1 in 1988 and reprinted here with minor revisions and additional notes because, in its anxious, angry, and admittedly somewhat naive way, it prelusively raises many of the broad cultural and social concerns that motivate much of the collection as a whole. To the extent that it is a miscellaneous compilation by various hands, the collection is a partial embodiment of a pluralistic approach to (collective) memory that seems not only necessary but also desirable when the subject is Canada, a "community of communities" in which, as Graeme Wynn suggests in "Forging a Canadian Nation" (1987), communal and individual interests are "mutually reinforcing" and people characteristically exhibit a "tangle" of "local, regional (or provincial), …national," and ethnic "allegiances" (407-08). Perhaps it is not too much to hope that in form as well as content Mnemographia Canadensis reflects a Canadian nationalism that is simultaneously aware of the achievements and shortcomings of Canada’s colonial and national history and able to face the challenges and possibilities of creating, in the words of Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory (1994), "a multi-ethnic vision of the future and a more pluralistic one of the past" (308).
While the essays gathered here frequently touch and draw upon recent and not-so-recent literary and psychoanalytical theories in their readings and soundings of commemorative, communal, and environmental matters, a concerted effort has been made in the interests of accessibility to avoid unnecessary theoretical terms and to provide definitions of necessary ones either contextually or in notes. Given the medley of voices and approaches in the collection (and, indeed, the diversity and polyphany2 that, as Benedict Anderson has observed, increasingly characterizes nation states or "imagined communities" in the twentieth century ), a Procrustean theory of the nature and function of (collective) memory should neither be expected nor missed in the following essays. With the preliminary help of James McConkey’s The Anatomy of Memory: an Anthology (1996) the Matters of Memory seminar canvassed most, if not all, of the relevant theory and analysis, however, and certain writers, texts, and concepts in memory studies and related areas can readily be identified as foundational or continual presences in the collection.
As already intimated, Anderson’s theorization of the nation in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983) lies centrally in the background of the collection. So, too, do T.J. Jackson Lears’s analysis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reactions to modern culture in No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (1981), Lawrence Buell’s exploration of Western perceptions and representations of nature in The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1995), and Raymond Williams’ recognition of the "selectivity" of what passes as "tradition" (9) in "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory" (1973), an essay whose impact on the present collection comes partly through the offspring that it helped to create, most notably The Invention of Tradition (1983), edited by E.J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, and Hobsbawm’s own Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (1990).3 No less of a presence in the background of the collection are the meditations of Joseph Priestley in his Lectures on History, and General Policy (1788) on the merits of "visible monuments" and "historical poems" in "perpetuating memory" (76) and the prognostications of George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) on the manipulation of history to serve the needs of the present and, as important, on the contribution to communal solidarity of actual or imagined conflicts with some fearsome and detested "Other." It is surely not fortuitous either that so many of Canada’s monuments and long poems commemorate military sacrifices and events or that anti-Americanism became a defining feature of Canada’s embryonic culture during and after the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Are the great monuments and commemorative cemeteries of the First World War, then, the evidence of Canada’s coming-of-age or attempts to manipulate popular consciousness?4 Could they be both?5 Such questions are never far from the centre of the essays here, whether the focus be on the National War Memorial in Ottawa, the Sesquicentennial Celebrations in Hamilton, or the Celebrate the Thames project in London.
In approaching the subject of (collective) memory itself, the Matters of Memory Seminar benefitted greatly from a vast and rapidly growing body of scientific and critical literature.6 With Maurice Halbwachs’ La Mémoire collective (1950; trans. 1980),7 Jacques Le Goff’s Storia e memoria (1977; trans. 1992),8 Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire (1984-1992),9 and Steven Rose‘s The Making of Memory: from Molecules to Mind (1992)10 as principal points of departure, the seminar ranged widely and eclectically in the field of memory studies, but with a growing recognition of the importance of the work of Sigmund Freud and his heirs on mourning and melancholy11 and of several major thinkers and scholars in specialized areas—of Frances A. Yates and Henri Lefebvre on the relationships between place and recall,12 of Endel Tulving on "episodic" and "semantic" memory,13 of Paul Connerton on the role of rituals in sustaining and conveying memories,14 of Ian Hacking on the development of the sciences of memory in the late nineteenth century,15 and of Gayle Greene on the need for feminists (and, by extension, other progressives) to remember the past in order to avoid repeating its errors.16
If there is one theory of the nature and function of individual and collective memory underlying all of the present essays, it is the constructionism of the British psychologist F.C. Bartlett. "[W]hen a subject is being asked to remember," Bartlett writes in Remembering: a Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (1932), very often the first thing that emerges is something of the nature of an attitude. The recall is then a construction, made largely on the basis of this attitude, and its general effect is that of a justification of the attitude" (207). As sceptical of the notion of collective memory as he is convinced of the constructive nature of individual remembering, Bartlett nevertheless concedes that "[s]ocial organization gives a persistent framework into which all detailed recall must fit, and it very powerfully influences both the matter and the manner of recall" (296).17 In other words, only individuals have the capacity to remember, but preliminary, and, indeed, prior, to the process of individual recall there exists a mental (pre-)disposition that has been at least partly shaped by a social or communal environment: to speak of the "memory of [a] group" is to reify and transcendentalize; to speak of "memory in [a] group" is to acknowledge both the singularity of individual recollection and its relation to a surrounding society or community—Canada, say, or London.
Of the numerous other assumptions and characteristics
that these essays have in common, one more is worth mentioning here. It
is simply the hope that, in its small way, Mnemographia Canadensis may
help to awaken an "attitude" of recall and create a
"framework" of remembrance that will enable Canadians to
retain conciousness of their unique and fragile communities
and environments and thus to resist the homogenizing and degrading
effects of multi-national capitalism and consumerism.
"Forgetfulness…is driven by an unshakable belief in
progress," wrote Russell Jacoby in 1975 of a "social and
economic dynamic" in which "oblivion and novelty feed off each
other and flourish" in the same shopping mall as "planned
obsolescence," "rampant subjectivism," "blind
materialism, and superficial humanism" (1, 4, 150). Memory, it
could be said in 1998, is crucial to the reclamation of men and women’s
full humanity—their sense of a continuity, even a comradeship, between
present, past, and future generations—without which the human race and
its sustaining environments are doomed to become the victims of the
pernicious cultural and personal values diagnosed by Jacoby.18
In part because it is a society of immigrants, a "tomorrow’s
country," adjacent to one of the most powerful manufacturers of the
goods and evils of progress, Canada has been especially prone to
"social amnesia," to the "refusal or inability to think
back" (Jacoby 3-4), that undermines people’s abilities to think
critically, to use language accurately, to understand and exercise their
democratic rights and responsibilities. But, as Sara Jeannette Duncan
long since observed in The Imperialist (1904), Canada is a
"new country already old in acquiescence" (64-65), a society
rich in history and values as well as hopes and resources, a vast and
privileged portion of the globe in which memory and understanding may
yet so nourish right thinking and right action that they become, in the
words of Margaret Avison’s "Snow" (1960), the
"rhizomes" that "quake" the "astonished
To identify the sources of quotations as precisely and concisely as possible, page references have been given in roman type and line references to long poems in italics. Thus, "Lampman, Poems 180-81" refers to pages in Archibald Lampman’s Poems and "Malcolm’s Katie 3: 9-13" refers to the given part and lines of Isabella Valancy Crawford’s long poem.
To assist the reader in establishing the temporal contexts of discussions, the date of a work’s first publication is supplied with initial citations. Unless otherwise indicated, such dates refer in the case of literary works to their first publication in book form under their author’s name. The Imperialist, for example, was first published as a book in 1904 and "Snow" was first collected in Avison’s Winter Sun volume of 1960.
An Index to the collection appears at the end of the second volume.