"Our city awaits its great novelist," wrote literary critic Philip Marchand in "What's Toronto's Story", a multiple-page article appearing in Sunday's Toronto Star. Describing Toronto's literary terrain as "undeveloped propert[y]", Marchand invokes a variety of theories purporting to explain the nascent state of Toronto literature and advances a few pet hypotheses of his own.

Toronto, Marchand writes, was not the birthplace of sufficient numbers of novelists to have lodged in their imagination, and/or "is just too bloody big and amorphous", and/or elicits an apologetic reflex so great that, as penance, writers don't describe life here, and/or is the victim of a kind of national and/or publishing and/or readers' and/or critics' consipracy, and/or has not yet managed to produce a sufficiently "big immigrant novel about Toronto" that would appeal to local and international audiences, and/or remains too preoccupied with its own nineteenth century past, and/or has not achieved the kind of satirical brilliance needed for Toronto to produce its own Pope or Dryden. To construct these views, Marchand quotes novelists David Adams Richards, Barbara Gowdy, Antanas Sileika, Russell Smith, the late Matt Cohen, Andrew Pyper, Sheila Heti, and Shyam Selvadurai (these last three via comments made to Toronto Life magazine), as well as writer and critic John Metcalf, and me, via my work for the Imagining Toronto project.

My difficulty with these claims is not that they are wholly inaccurate but that they evade an inescapable reality: Toronto literature, even great Toronto literature, already exists. We might need more of it, and we certainly need to read and remember more of it, but speaking as if Toronto literature doesn't exist requires an increasingly ludicrous shuffling of the story. Writers, characters, plots, points of view, settings, tropes, even readers, are sucked deep into some kind of literary black hole from which there appears to be no escape. Having already told Marchand I was "inclined to blame literary arbiters", I'm going to state, more pointedly now, that this black hole appears to swirl most powerfully around the literary critics themselves who go to such great lengths to deny the existence of Toronto literature. If there is a conspiracy against Toronto literature, it might be traced to such critics.

It seems to me that Marchand's ability to harness the comments of eight authors who live in and/or write about Toronto is alone sufficient to refute the claim that Toronto literature remains undeveloped. I will add that it might have been worth Marchand's while to interview some of the many writers who have made Toronto a principal setting for much of their work -- novelists whose work Marchand mentions in his article -- such as Catherine Bush, Nalo Hopkinson, and Darren O'Donnell. Indeed, Darren O'Donnell's Your Secrets Sleep With Me and Nalo Hopkinson's award-winning Brown Girl in the Ring might be seen as examples of the very 'epic' Toronto fiction whose absence Marchand laments, novels dealing with the great themes of immigration, identity, clash of cultures, the city's character and significance that Marchand avers are essential ingredients in any "great" novel.

"Greatness", of course, is a controversial concept. Marchand holds that the best Toronto literature is satirical because "[s]atire captures the grotesque, the compulsive, the moralistic, the pretentious -- the very atmosphere, in short, of Toronto circa 2006". My first thought upon reading this statement was that writers who project their bitterness upon literary landscapes are unable ever to transcend them; something, I believe, that must be one prerequisite for literary greatness. Moreover, if literary greatness may be reduced (at least in the medium term) to sales, prizes, international readership, and remaining in print, then the very Toronto novels Marchand excludes -- Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, Timothy Findley's Headhunter (itself incidentally a high satire of Toronto) -- must be considered great. But if 'greatness' is a title that may be bestowed upon writers only by the self-elect, then it is no wonder that Toronto literature seems doomed.

I'd like to propose a radical solution to the seemingly intractable problem of determining whether Toronto literature exists. My solution: I suggest people in the business -- writers, literary critics, teachers, researchers -- actually read some of it. The advice given traditionally to aspiring writers, to read and read some more, seems especially instructive here. It seems to me that a person who has not immersed oneself thoroughly in Toronto literature, who has not practically bathed in it, cannot truly be said to be qualified to write about it, or perhaps even to write it in the first place.

How does one go about doing this, when commentators continually deny that any meaningful Toronto literature exists? Well, you could always do what I've done: in the past year or so I've read only Toronto literature, amassing a library of hundreds of Toronto titles, and taking those same titles on the subway, into my teaching at York, to dinner parties, and, yes, into the bathtub with me. I'm in the middle of writing a manuscript about Toronto literature (and also have a couple of my own Toronto stories on the go), and in the process of doing so, have discovered some crucial entry points into the city's literature.

Here are three of them.

1. Gwendolyn MacEwen (whose name is, rather unfortunately, misspelled in Marchand's article) was, perhaps, the first writer to mythologize Toronto successfully. Her story anthologies, Noman (1972) and Noman's Land (1985), narrate a Toronto whose very buildings are "alive, shivering, with bones and sinews and tendons", its voices "unreal in the high air" of rapid city-building. In her later work, MacEwen suggests that some of these efforts -- including the construction of the CN Tower -- reflect the city's profound loneliness. MacEwen's sense of the city's loneliness is echoed movingly in Darren O'Donnell's 2004 Toronto novel Your Secrets Sleep With Me: O'Donnell writes,

it's an ugly beautiful city; a shy city; a city that has a hard time saying hello to acquaintances. A sad city. A lonely city.

Echoes of MacEwen appear in other Toronto works, too. In "Sunlight at Sherbourne and Bloor", a famous poem published posthumously in Afterworlds (1987), MacEwen writes,

the present is the logical outcome
Of all points in the past, and that building going up across the street has been going up forever. Everything we do now contains the seeds of its own unfolding. The bridge eases across the deep ravine.

A similar sentiment may be traced in Anne Michaels' well-known Toronto novel Fugitive Pieces as well as in her poetry. Michaels writes,

There is no city that does not dream
from its foundations. The lost lake
crumbling in the hands of brickmakers,
the floor of the ravine where light lies broken
with the memory of rivers. All the winters
stored in that geologic
garden. Dinosaurs sleep in the subway
at Bloor and Shaw, a bed of bones under the rumbling track.

2. bpNichol. In an article appearing in Spacing magazine, I described the late Toronto poet bpNichol's Martyrology series as "a poetic pilgrimage ... serving as a kind of guidebook, a skeleton key to the city and its parables." Toronto Poet and academic Stephen Cain makes a similar point at greater length and depth in an essay shortly to be published in The State of the Arts: Culture in Toronto (Coach House Books, launching November 26th). Cain argues that Nichol's work may be read as a kind of psychogeography of Toronto, particularly the Annex neighbourhood where so much Toronto literature has been written and set. In my own reading, I have found traces of Nichol's influence in Katherine Govier's well-known story collection, Fables of Brunswick Avenue, in Catherine Bush's excellent, gripping, Minus Time, and even in the late, lost Daniel Jones' Toronto punk novel, 1978.

3. Maggie Helwig's fantastic "The Other Goldberg Variations" (a long poem published in Talking Prophet Blues in 1989) is written ostensibly as an homage to Toronto's genius pianist Glenn Gould, but simultaneously offers a literary score to Toronto, tracing the city's muse and music along its streets, alleys, valleys, and memories. Writing perhaps of the reclusive Gould but also of our collective desire for solitude, she comments,

Knowing
that I could walk seventeen miles through a ravine
in the heart of Toronto, and never
directly see the city
is of some comfort.

Helwig writes also of the city's "skeletal music", subtly referencing, perhaps, MacEwen's descriptions of Toronto's buildings as alive, like concrete totems. There is something epic about Helwig's poem, a tone that transcends the physical city and invokes, perhaps, the kind of "music from elsewhere" that Margaret Atwood describes in The Robber Bride.

It is not by accident that the three 'entry' points' indicated above are provided by Toronto writers who are known primarily as poets. Poetry does something prose often struggles with: it distills essential experiences and meanings into compact texts, texts that may subsequently be unfolded into rich and more lengthy extrapolations of their themes. And it is no surprise, either, that both MacEwen and Helwig have also enjoyed success in their prose works. And the lesson from this? Not that we should necessarily value poetric inscriptions of Toronto above other ways of writing the city, but that we owe these (and many other) writers, the city, and ourselves the small duty of reading and remembering their work. Certainly we should not dismiss the very possibility that great Toronto literature exists without even reading them.

As Maggie Helwig writes about Gould/Toronto,

Many things are perfect only in memory.
This is the result of intractable commitment.
...
I have a conception that lacks all possible
means of reproduction. But
I praise the human voice.

And so. If we are to appreciate Toronto literature, or even acknowledge its existence, we too might share in this "intractable commitment" to reading and remembering the city's literature. And in doing so we too might learn how to praise the human voice.

1. While not so storied as Chicago, LA and New York, Toronto does well enough for itself as a literary subject to be resented by the rest of Canada.

   And don’t forget less ponderous, future-facing works of Robert Sawyer and Cory Doctorow.

   Posted by Diane  on  11/07  at  12:21 PM

2. I agree, Diane. Cory Doctorow’s novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (Tor, 2005) is an essential Toronto read.

   I told Marchand that Toronto has a booming literary industry in detective/mystery novels (Rosemary Aubert, Maureen Jennings, Eric Wright, among numerous others) and that it has produced whole series of vampire, noir, science fiction, and children’s books, but suppose that genre fiction is excluded by its very character from being great in the literary sense. I’m somewhat ambivalent about such a characterization, having read excellent, thoughtful genre fiction as well as turgid, insufferable ‘literature’.

   I don’t agree, though, that Toronto is less storied than Chicago, LA, or New York. I think those cities have benefitted from better marketing. Perhaps Toronto needs its own King Kong.

   Posted by Amy Lavender Harris  on  11/07  at  12:36 PM
4. "I don’t agree, though, that Toronto is less storied than Chicago, LA, or New York. I think those cities have benefitted from better marketing." Fair enough. It must have been some PR agency which came up with "The Paris of the Midwest". And the best we can think of to call ourselves is "Hog Town" or "The Big Smoke".
   
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Posted by Diane  on  11/08  at  10:43 AM
6. "I don’t agree, though, that Toronto is less storied than Chicago, LA, or New York. I think those cities have benefitted from better marketing." Please. Take Chicago, the least "storied" of those. Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair.. Not to mention other cultural products of the city like, say, the electric blues and the skyscraper. Boosting Toronto literature is a worthy cause, but hyperbole is only going to encourage more negative reactions. (Like this post, for instance.. apologies)
   
   Posted by  on  {comment_date format=’%m/%d’}  at  {comment_date format=’%h:%i %A’}
Posted by  on  11/08  at  03:56 PM

7. It would be amusing, if it wasn’t so tedious, that one may count on being accused of hyperbole for merely mentioning that a city like Toronto has cultural assets, too.

   I don’t recall suggesting a pissing match between Toronto and Chicago, which, in addition to the Oprah Winfrey Show, has myriad cultural assets, doubtless including those you mention (although it might be noted that Saul Bellow was born in Canada, just as many exellent Toronto writers were born abroad).

   One of my aims with the Imagining Toronto project is to undo the depressing habit of evaluating Toronto culture only by reference to other cities and other literary traditions. We have one of our own, and it is far past time to acknowledge the quality of works produced in and about this city, on their own merits.

   Posted by Amy Lavender Harris  on  11/08  at  04:31 PM

8. The Canadian habit of being self-effacing prevents us from appreciating our own accomplishments.

   Posted by Editor  on  11/08  at  05:15 PM

9. Shiela Heti’s comment in the orginal article – that she finds it comical to write about Toronto- speaks to an important aspect of the problem. I keep calling Toronto a teenager and I think this is reflected in that comment. Because of our position in the hierarchy of global cities, there’s a tendency toward a reactionary and mortified attitude toward who we are – like the teenager who despises her parents for simply being. I think a “mature” response to the situation would be to acknowledge the bigger forces that determine legitimacy and, to whatever extent and by all means, look to other centres for inspiration and validation but then, ultimately, bring it on home to the people who you love deeply, warts and all.

   Posted by  on  11/20  at  04:15 AM
11. Darren's point is well taken (and very well made in his excellent Toronto novel, Your Secrets Sleep With Me, Coach House Books, 2004), but if it extends to a claim that Toronto is (and is only) a teenager, I'm wondering if what's being diagnosed is a state of arrested development -- not of the city itself but of our ways of reading and writing it. The late, lovely poet Gwendolyn MacEwen described Toronto as young, lonely and haunted in her story collections Noman (1972) and Noman's Land (1985). She writes, "They didn't know who they were, so they came and built these big cities in the wilderness. They still found it empty, so they stuck up this tower in the emptiness. They were so lonely they didn't even know it, maybe even lonelier than me." If we employ similar themes in our writing two decades later, does this mean the city is still metaphorically teenaged? That it has failed to grow up? That Toronto is somehow 'younger' than cities like Montreal (1639 as a city), New York (1660s) or Chicago (which was founded in 1833, making it about the same age -- or perhaps a little younger -- as/than Toronto)? Perhaps we return to the same argument gnawed over in the comments above. As apt as Darren's characterization is, and as Gwendolyn MacEwen's depiction was two decades ago, I don't think Toronto is teenaged. Rather, I think Toronto's capacity to support this rendering, among many others, demonstrates that Toronto is a fully mature source of literary inspiration. The novelist Robertson Davies offered Jungian readings of a Toronto beset with the kinds of existential angst a middle-aged man might experience. This reading is mirrored in Timothy Findley's <HeadhunterCivic Square (1968) Similarly, there have been gendered and/or feminist readings of Toronto dating back half a century. Many of these have flowed through the pen of Margaret Atwood, but neither begin nor end with her. A book I have been seeking for some time, Joyce Marshall's Lovers and Strangers (1957) depicts the city's gendered landscape in ways that anticipate Atwood's The Edible Woman and The Robber Bride by decade(s). Since then, we may read Lynn Crosbie, Nalo Hopkinson, Anne Denoon, Carole Corbeil, and many other writers who have inscribed women's voices into this city. And Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, Neil Bissoondath, M.G. Vassanji, Althea Prince, David Bezmozgis, and a long list of other writers have -- for decades -- powerfully inscribed a version of Toronto seen from the outside -- by immigrants, blacks, and women who labour to penetrate the city's barriers and build a Toronto that includes their narratives. The point is not that Toronto can or should be characterized in any one way, but that it can sustain numerous readings and characterizations. And if the debate swings among these varied readings, we underscore the reality that the Toronto that used to be narrated as a middle-aged man can now be written as a teenager, and tomorrow as a young girl, or a refugee, or a cheerful dog or indolent cat, or as any other part of the organic and mechanical universe that flows through the city.
    
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Posted by Amy Lavender Harris  on  11/20  at  08:49 AM

12. true.
    I’m specifically making reference to sociologist Saskia Sassen’s classification of global cities where she uses a number of factors to determine whether a city is alpha, beta or gamma. Toronto is on the high end of beta. more info on wikipedia if you search ‘global city’.

    Posted by  on  11/21  at  09:50 AM

13. Interesting perspective, if an irreducibly economic one. I agree with your suggestion (in a previous comment) that we “look to other [non-economic?] centres for inspiration and validation”, but do not agree that we will or must eventually ‘grow up’ and rejoin the competition for global status. Perhaps what you are pointing out is a tension between culture and commerce; if so, I agree wholly. I will add, in that case, that writers have a responsibility to mark and meddle in such points of rupture. (This is something I think you do very well.)

    Years ago I used to teach Sassen’s work to undergraduate students, but found its empirical materialism limiting and (forgive me Roger Keil) boring. I do not accept that cities are the passive sites of global restructuring. I think there are tremendous countervailing forces, some ideological and others creative. It seems to me that, at the very least, global shifts since September 11th 2001 call into question our very notions of globalization and render much of Sassen’s views (and arguably also John Friedmann’s work on citizenship and governance )moot. We are no longer asking the right questions.

    I suspect, also, that while we measure and categorize our cities and the changes wrought therein, the real meaning of those changes is conveyed only low to the ground, in subtle behavioral cues and in the stories we tell.

    Posted by Amy Lavender Harris  on  11/21  at  11:28 AM

14. Good discussion. One of the founding principles behind Reading Toronto is the belief that in a global data environment our interpretation of cities can be based on new information that is far more fine-grained than “materialistic” tools produce. Information “cities,” if such a phenomenon can ever exist, are the ephemeral extensions of physical cities and allow for rapid modelling of socio-political forces. While theoretical, the recent influence of blogging on U.S. elections illustrates the power of these “other” cities.

    Posted by  on  11/21  at  12:01 PM

15. it’s not only economic, it’s social, cultural, biopolitical etc. and it’s not a a matter of ‘growing up’ except to the extent that to grow up means not worrying about growing up.

    have you read sassen’s latest book – Territory, Authority, Rights? She portrays a very complex situation. and yeah, it’s a boring as shit. but good info to know. have you read hardt and negri’s multitude. that’s interesting and not dull.

    my big point is that i worry about attitudes lihe Heti’s that feel a niggling embarrasment at being a hick. to grow up means not to worry about that, to happily hook into whatever cosmopolitanism suits your fancy, always building networks of love and trust from site to site.

    Posted by  on  11/22  at  06:02 AM

16. I agree wholly with your views about growing up (or not growing up) and being comfortable in your [city’s] own skin and building networks of trust and reciprocity. I don’t agree, though, that Sassen’s work underscores the pressing need for that view by showing some of what we’ve lost, or that Hardt & Negri’s Multitude: War and Democracy in an Age of Empire provides a template for rediscovering it.

    Sassen pioneered much of the considerable body of work showing how states [and cities] are transformed by global flows tied to corporatization and, especially, free trade and production niches. Her current arguments tracing the rise and replacement of the ‘national’ (which inform Territory, Authority, Rights) are powerful and original.

    The problem, in my view, is that she’s right only descriptively or materially, and that even then her arguments stumble when confronted with the many and increasing numbers of exceptions. There are parallel movements going on, and one such movement gaining strength and influence is a new kind of imperialism driven by (not infrequently religious) ideology that harnesses economic and cultural processes. Sassen’s globalization fumbles here, as do many of the traditional’ ideas about statehood whose eulogy she writes.

    I’m less familiar with Hardt and Negri’s work. I would like to like their perspective on what amount to proletarian tribes ‘short-circuiting’ global capital. But I find this culture/economy jamming perspective either naive or dishonest about its own ideological underpinnings. For me, traveling through their world would be like finding Tolkein’s hobbits trapped in Lord of the Flies instead of their own novels.

    Where does this leave us? In a city like Toronto it seems we still have some option to determine how and whether we’d like to grow. It’s possible to explore many of the options through speculative fiction set in Toronto. Your version strikes me as informed by realistic optimism. Cory Doctorow’s version (conveyed in Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town and ,i>Eastern Standard Tribe) seems somewhat aligned with Nardt and Negri’s approach. Timothy Findley’s headhunter suggests that madness is easily collective. Nalo Hopkinson’s version (Brown Girl in the Ring) takes a hard look at race and class as differences we are not likely to so easily overcome. Recently I read an older small-press novel called Leslieville (set in Toronto’s Leslieville) written by Peter Lonergan. In it, Lonergan suggests that where collective action fails or turns abusive, the only recourse that remains is for individuals to stand against coercion, serving as examples to a passive and acquiescent population.

    Perhaps this doesn’t get us very far, but it does accomplish one important thing: it gets us talking about what matters inside and outside of the city we live in.

    Posted by Amy Lavender Harris  on  11/22  at  09:58 AM

17. i’m in pakistan and i’m sick. will respond when i feel better.
    my adventures:
    http://www.darren-in-pakistan.blogspot.com

    Posted by  on  11/23  at  01:19 AM

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