The Land of the Rock and of the Long Evening

An essay on that which should be less mysterious

I knew a Wise Woman

And she said to me
That the trickster, the coyote,
He would fool me
Unknown

Given a choice of the negative or positive aspects of any symbol - sea as life-giving Mother, sea
as what your ship goes down in; tree as symbol of growth, tree as what falls on your head Canadians show a marked preference for the negative.1 This is what Margaret Atwood states in
the introduction to Survival about the general atmosphere preferred by 20th century Canadian
writers in their works. The whole literature of the country, up to 1972, when Survival was
published, is considered by Atwood the epitome of pessimism and it does not seem that a shift in
this paradigm is to be expected in the near future. What characterises these works is a constant
intuition of danger lurking just about the corner (the world of danger was the same as the real
world), perilous situations from which one could but narrowly escape (only to meet another
even worse impasse), the cruel forces of nature and, eventually, death. What is essential in all
these writings is the one element that ties them in because of the stance taken against all these
vicissitudes. As such, Atwood speaks of survival as the central theme of Canadian literature,
even culture at large. Survival without hope, without expectations for any sort of brighter future,
living through a crisis just to find oneself in the middle of another one, crippled successes to
obtain victory, but to be left with a maimed self at the same time all in all, survival not
necessarily because of a greater goal, but for the sake of survival itself, maybe driven by an
extreme instinct of self-preservation. A far cry from the commonsensical definition of survival as

Atwood, Margaret. Survival. 1972.

resilience and determination despite the most trying circumstances that test the will of the subject.
This is an obstinate kind of survival that has no shine of prospective glory to it, but the despair to
stay alive.
Is this all there is to Canadian literature? Probably not, as one could talk endlessly about the
perceived omnipresence of the forces of nature that strive to crush human dignity whether
these forces are to be ascribed to the environment or the human nature itself which meddles
with any attempt at achieving anything. Indeed, while their Southern neighbours could construct
their whole culture around the idea of the frontier, the daring limit to be pushed further and
further in an act of almost extravagant and ever-youthful arrogance in the face of the elements
within and without, Canadian culture is that of a self-hatred that smiles as it knows that the worst
of times and the best of times can be both survived. There is also this sense of the sublime: you
see here not only the beautiful which it has in common with Europe, but the great sublime to an
amazing degree; every object here is magnificent: the very people seem almost another species,
if we compare them with the French from whom they are descended.2 It has to deal with the
kind of sublime described by Edmund Burke, for instance, in his A Philosophical Enquiry into
the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Contrasting with Schopenhauer, for
instance, who emphasizes pleasure at the sight of sublime3, Burke focuses to a great deal on the
subjects experience of pain (and pleasure resulted from removal of pain) especially from a
psychological perspective, but taking into account the physicality of it as well, as the subjects
physical limitations are revealed. But whilst we contemplate so vast an object [], of almighty
power, and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our
own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him.4
In this particular literary tradition, representations of the sublime generally belong to stormy
manifestations of nature and death, in which case even the miracle of life is corrupted. Take, for
instance, the example of Alistair MacLeods Winter Dog. The narrator, who is also the
protagonist, has a firsthand view of the transfiguring power of death: I saw the perfect seal. [...]
the seal was dead, yet facing us in a frozen perfection that was difficult to believe. [...] Even now

Brooke, Frances. The History of Emily Montague. 2005 edition. Letter II.2.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. 1966 edition. Volume 1.
4
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Part I, Chapter
5, Power
3

in memory it seems more real than reality as if it were transformed by frozen art into
something more arresting than life itself. The way the sudden seal in the museum exhibit freezes
your eyes with the touch of truth. There is an intrinsic ambiguity in this object: the dead seal is
both an exponent of perfection and an omen of inevitable disaster as perfection is perverted by
desire. Immediately I wanted to take it home.
The result of this is a near-death experience; the only things preventing the protagonist from
following the same destiny as the seal are his own knowledge about the harshness of nature and
his companion. Indeed, one can say that fear of death and darkness is nothing but fear of the
unknown knowledge dissolves the state of prostration that often strikes when facing a
seemingly inescapable fate. The man-dog creature confronts the challenge like a Juggernaut, just
as unstoppable as the nature it is running from and through. It assumes the role of non-victim, as
Margaret Atwood considers it knowledge and creativity of man and loyalty of dog form
together a mechanism that surpasses the pressure of the elements. However, in the end the result
is the same; the truth, as the protagonist realises it, is merely that they had been spared for a
future time. Eventually, he and the dog would go through all the other phases of victim: the
dog, even after being shot, refuses to accept death and tries to get to the only safe place he knows,
although his wound is obviously fatal. In the meantime, the protagonist first accepts the dogs
fate in a matter of fact, it cant be helped manner, considering that nothing could have been
done anyway to save him, and ends up projecting the entire responsibility upon the animal in
fact, trying to justify his own failure to protect the dog. Although he owes his life to the dog, this
gift of life is stained by the fact that he was incapable of doing anything in return.
Winter Dog is not the only one of MacLeods stories to feature the theme of death and survival.
The Closing Down of Summer is also mostly constructed on the same basic principle. On the
other hand, this story is a lot more about the gruesome face of death than about its power to bring
things to perfection; more about how death can be violent and destructive and escaping death can
be a mutilating experience, both physically and psychologically, than about the peace that
accompanies it.
From the very beginning, survivors are presented, as further away from their workplace as
possible. Instead of a deep mineshaft, a long-stretched beach; instead of the insulated electric
lamps, the heat of a summer Sun; instead of tight, constricting galleries, the open sky. However,

as far away as they run, their fate has already left them inerasable marks. Only the scars that all
of us bear fail to respond to the healing power of the suns heat. They seem to stand out even
more vividly now, long running pink welts that course down our inner forearms or jagged sawtooth ridges on the taut calves of our legs. It is a bitter polarity that this story presents, and
many more of such dualities are to appear along its evolution. As much as these characters wish
to be healed, they are forced to carry all the burden of surviving not only because they have
seen countless others dying, but also because they are forced to carry on living in spite of their
own wounds, in spite of all the pain accumulated. It is also quite curious, until considered deeply,
how such powerful men, strong in both body and will to live, fear such minor injuries as a
broken toe. But it is also explained, and one cannot but understand, that no matter how small the
wound inflicted, it may just as well prove lethal if it is in a vital point. What they fear is not the
loss of a major limb or anything of the sort, but the damage to something vital to their capacity of
work and, in a last instance, vital to their survival abilities.
The depictions of death and mutilation are as vivid here as they could ever be, and fall no short
of lurid details: my younger brother died, crushed and broken amidst the constant tinkle of the
dripping water and lying upon a bed of tumbled stone. We could not get him up from the bottom
in time, as his eyes bulged from his head and the fluids of his body seeped quietly onto the
glistening rock. This sort of introduction to a usual cessation of life by mineshaft accident is a
clue about exactly how much the narrator-protagonist is accustomed to the idea of it; to someone
like him, having to bury others, in expectation for ones own funeral, is in fact an essential part
of the identity but, nonetheless, that does not prevent him from being afraid or disgusted by the
aftermath of the mineshaft death, the repugnant wreckage of a human body, as he himself admits
later (when they are burying his brother next to his father and the land slides): We were wildly
and irrationally frightened by the slide and braced our backs against the splintered and
disintegrating box, fearful lest it should tip and fall upon us and spill and throw whatever rotting
relics remained of that past portion of our lives. Of little flesh but maybe green decaying bones
or strands of silver matted hair.
However daunting the life and death of a miner may be though, the protagonist goes on to
confess that it is nevertheless the only way he could live he knows that there is a blatant
contradiction between his inborn fear of confined spaces and work in the most confined place

that could ever be found. He nevertheless justifies his efforts: when we work we are never still.
Never merely entombed like the prisoner in the passive darkness of his solitary confinement. For
we are always expanding the perimeters of our seeming incarceration. A very particular
situation is depicted here: the miners take survival as a challenge against nature. We are big
men engaged in perhaps the most violent of occupations and we have chosen as our adversary
walls and faces of massive stone. [] Always hopeful of breaking through though we know we
never will break free. This is perhaps the archetypal characterisation of the miner-survivor: one
who actively fights nature, conquering bit by bit the very icon of its massiveness, crumbling
from within the barriers that he himself has set, discovering whatever riches hide behind the
dangers of rock and soil. And at the same time, through the cruellest of all ironies, he knows that
in the end, he will be the one to lose, he is well aware of his own limitations, he knows that the
light at the end of a tunnel is nothing more than a lamp casting its light upon the entrance to
another one.
Having attained such a wide variety of valences from the bitter, dry, guilty monotony of day to
day life to the exhilarating feeling of conquering a new, unknown part of the world I believe
one can definitely say that survival is a concept worthy of being deemed quintessential for the
life of a nation be it as heterogeneous and loosely-defined as the Canadian nation is. Moreover,
it is also unquestionably the very pillar of what can be called Canadian literature as in not an
imitation of European literature, nor a childish attempt at imitating a trend, as Margaret Atwood
tries to show. And the inevitability of a tragedy is not something that undermines this survival;
quite on the contrary, the powerful contrast between I want to live and I know I will not is
something that vastly increases its importance.

Bibliography

Atwood, Margaret. Survival. 1972. Introduction, at

http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/tbacig/cst1030/1030anth/survival.html

Brooke, Frances. The History of Emily Montague. 2005 edition.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful. Part I, at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15043/15043-h/15043-h.htm#CONTENTS

MacLeod, Alistair. As birds bring forth the sun. McClelland & Stewart Ltd., Toronto,
1992

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. 1966 edition. Volume 1, at
https://digitalseance.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/32288747-schopenhauer-the-world-as-willand-representation-v1.pdf