Illustration by Minhee Bae
One day over the holiday break, I went out for Greek food and good conversation with a couple of friends. When the subject of Canadian literature came up, one of my pals unsurprisingly made a face. A wrinkling of the nose, a stressing of the eyebrows. “Canadian literature? Pee-yoo! I think I’ve had enough hayrides, maple tree sap, and sprawling landscapes for one day thankyouverymuch.”
This was not the first time I’ve had that conversation; I’ve felt this Canadian inferiority complex before. Part of the issue, it seems to me, is that for a good part of Canadian literary history, the stories told have been ones concerning the wild and the pastoral, rather than the urban centre. So of course Torontonian snobs like my friends and I are going to be somewhat unsatisfied.
MINHEE BAE/THE VARSITY
When it comes to film, Toronto’s biggest role for the last two decades or so has been that of a type-cast chameleon pretending to be Chicago or Manhattan. A scene from the underrated Bulletproof Monk comes to mind, in which Seann William Scott, standing in front of Nathan Phillips Square and Toronto City Hall says, “This is America.” Or Good Will Hunting, when Matt Damon goes to visit his girlfriend at Whitney Hall residence, University College and says, “This is Harvard [in America.]”
In his book Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said defined imperialism as “the practice, theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory.” Included in this “domination” is a form of cultural imperialism. Now, perhaps Said did not have Toronto, Canada’s largest metropolitan centre, in mind when he was working out the quirks of his theory, but nevertheless, it is difficult to deny how awash we Canadians (Torontonians included) are in American culture. The whole world is!
I, for one, think it’s ridiculous that American movie studios can dress up Toronto as if it were Boston and have our city lend itself to the American imagination, rather than a Canadian one. All of a sudden, Toronto is contributing to the immense amount of cultural capital a place like New York City already has. In short, there’s some cultural exploitation going on and Toronto is the one getting screwed.
Now, I know what you’re going to say: “Hold your horses Jakob, have you ever even read a Canadian book before?” Well, I have, and yes, I know Toronto has some truly kick-ass works, and I know that it has sometimes been represented with proper chops.
So what characterizes Toronto within the Canadian imagination?
The major question lurking behind Canadian creativity, according to Northrop Frye, is not a question of identity (i.e. what the heck is Canada?). He wrote, “It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question ‘Who am I?’ than by some such riddle as ‘Where is here?’”
Where is here? Where is Toronto? A quick (and by no means exhaustive) survey across the mediums of short stories, films, and graphic novels seems only to complicate the question.
In David Cronenberg’s 1983 cult classic film Videodrome, Toronto is refigured as a scuzzy sci-fi city where televisions and video dominate the collective consciousness of the society. There are crack-den warehouses devoted solely to television watching, for it is a world in which television makes one hallucinate. Not excluded from Cronenberg’s dystopian vision are passing ttc streetcars and glimpses of the cn Tower at the break of dawn, which seem to mesh with his vision perfectly.
That this off-kilter fantasy-Toronto can work successfully is also proven by another example: the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley. In O’Malley’s Toronto, landmarks like Honest Ed’s or Pizza Pizza become zones of half-reality, half-videogame chaos. At the back of Lee’s Palace is a save point; Casa Loma is the stage for a boss battle; magical doors appear at Hillcrest Park. Like Cronenberg, O’Malley uses Toronto as a space that can be mutated and filled with magic.
But is this the only way Toronto can be represented? Does our city really need sci-fi and video game magic to elevate it into a setting worthy of a novel or film?
The graphic novelist Seth creates a moody, minimalist Toronto in It’s A Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken. Seth creates motifs out of the Botanical Gardens and the glowing rod at the top of the Canada Life building. Sarah Polley, in her second directorial work Take This Waltz offers up a romanticized Toronto, which serves as a backdrop for the film’s complex plot. In Polley’s vision of Toronto, College Street glows and Trinity Bellwoods Park becomes a summer jungle.
David Bezmozgis uses Toronto as the setting for his connected tales in Natasha and Other Stories. The title story begins as follows: “When I was 16 I was high most of the time. That year my parents bought a new house at the edge of Toronto’s sprawl. A few miles north were cows; south the city. I spent most of my time in basements.”
Bezmozgis’ prose is up front and straightforward, and through his style, Toronto becomes a blank background to be filled with the character’s boyhood adventures. In other words, Toronto becomes a space of re-creation, of re-representation.
All of these works show that Toronto is a city in constant representational flux. A stereotype of itself has yet to solidify, and perhaps it never will. Common amongst all of Toronto’s disparate representations is their difference; artists re-create the city through their own eyes. It seems as if artists from multiple disciplines have rejected Frye’s ultimate Canadian riddle of “Where is here?” and instated a more pragmatic question: “What is here?” I think the answer is that here, Toronto, is what you make of it.
