The Canadian Supernatural

“As to ghosts or spirits they appear totally banished from Canada. This is too matter-of- fact a country for such super-naturals to visit.” —Catharine Parr Traill

It always makes me chuckle when I read those lines. Go to any Chapters, Coles or regional tourist shop: you will find at least one collection, if not several, of local ghost stories or regional tales of the supernatural. John Robert Colombo has made a career of finding and packaging such encounters. Granted, it was 1833 when Catharine Parr Traill wrote those words and Ontario did not yet have the requisite number of haunted houses needed to meet the supernatural stereotype. In fairness, her idea of ghosts was imported from a country that offered its citizens romantic, class-based folklore in which spirits either hung out in gothic graveyards or suddenly appeared on the moor.

Of course, that is the problem, isn’t it? We are taught to read Canada’s literature as derivative creative expressions of countries that know nothing of how nature or the supernatural might be interpreted by those who actually come from here. I am sure the aboriginal peoples of Canada would object to Parr Traill’s ignorance of the supernatural; they have borne witness to the presence of forces in this land for thousands of years. But since aboriginal scholars and storytellers were nowhere near the critical table at the time English departments began to spring up in this country, we have taken Parr Traill’s words at face value and more or less carried on like proper colonial academics.

But what if we approached our creative close encounters through the lens of an animist or aboriginal understanding of the land? Perhaps the outcome might be different. Perhaps we might view our writers and stories in a more favourable light, and afford them more space in our high school and university curricula.

Take New Brunswick author Charles G.D Robert’s turn-of-the-century novel, The Heart of the Ancient Wood, published in 1900. It is about a young girl named Miranda who grows up in a remote cabin in northern New Brunswick with her mother. A prominent aspect of the story, though, is Roberts’s portrayal of Miranda as a supernatural figure, capable of communicating with the woodland creatures around her. Birds perch on her shoulder and squirrels eat out of her hands; she stops a charging moose and chases away a lynx, both without the use of weapons. At one point the narrator even describes her kinship with the animals as a “semi-occult experience.” Miranda’s closeness to the earth and respect for the spirits of the land thus enable her to communicate with nature on a different level than the rest of the human beings around her.

Equally important to the narrative is Miranda’s friendship with a she-bear, named Kroof, who follows her around year after year until a series of circumstances forces Miranda to choose between her love for Kroof and the life of a hunter named Young Dave Titus. The ending bears no resemblance to classic 19th-century class-based British or American romance; instead, Roberts offers us a distinctly Canadian tragedy—the traumatic wrenching of Miranda away from her deeply mystical connection to the landscape: “You’ve killed the old life I loved,” she cries as Young Dave reaches out to embrace her.

Several decades after Roberts published The Heart of the Ancient Wood, in 1976, Marian Engel wrote another version of the cabin encounter, complete with her own Miranda and Kroof. But Engel took Roberts’s attempt at articulating animism a step further in her Governor General’s Award–winning novel, Bear. Lou, a young librarian and archivist, is sent out to a remote island house to catalogue some old papers for the local historical institute. There she encounters a male bear on a chain in the yard, which the previous owner attempted to domesticate. She also learns that an old aboriginal woman from a nearby reserve comes and sits with the bear, sometimes for hours, to visit and talk with it.

Lou begins to feel pity for the imprisoned animal; however, not only does she eventually befriend the bear and periodically remove the chain, but she also attempts to have a sexual relationship with it. But as the narrator points out, it is not an act of bestiality on the part of Lou: “She loved the bear. She felt him to be wise and accepting. She felt sometimes that he was God.” And so, whereas Miranda Craig is blessed from her youth with an uncanny ability to connect with the wild, Lou has no such power and wishes to become initiated, body and soul, into the secret of nature’s mysteries.

Early American writer Henry David Thoreau would have difficulty understanding these kinds of cabin experiences. To him, the land was a spiritualizing force only as it relates to humankind: “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.” His literary and philosophical sensibilities come from elsewhere, from safe European ideas about a perfectible nature that cares nothing for the uncanny, edgy or animist perspective that one often finds in Canadian fiction. In fact, Thoreau’s instinct is to dominate, not communicate with nature: “I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw.” Neither of these ideas from Walden rings true to a Canadian sensibility, yet it is Thoreau’s transcendentalist cabin, not those of Roberts or Engel, that we regularly teach in our classrooms.

Then there are the Canadian protagonists who become transformed by nature. And I do not mean psychologically or emotionally. I mean literally: an original form of Canadian supernaturalism in which humans are transformed into animals. Consider Margaret Atwood’s 1972 female protagonist in Surfacing. Her journey begins as a quest to find her father, who disappeared near their family cabin in Northern Ontario. But as the novel progresses, her search brings her closer and closer to the wilderness; she is drawn to the water, the remoteness of the place, the ancient aboriginal paintings on the nearby rocks. The longer she stays at the cabin and engages
with the natural world around her, the more she is repulsed by the childish and petty behaviour of her dysfunctional companions—so much so that by the end of the novel she decides she no longer wishes to live among them. She discards her clothes, lets her hair grow out and gazes into a broken mirror where she spies “a creature neither animal nor human.” By the end of the novel the line between the human and natural world has been blurred, and the reader realizes it is nature that pulls all the strings. Atwood’s protagonist is no longer engaging with the land: she is being transformed by it.

Or how about David Canaan in The Mountain and the Valley by Nova Scotia novelist Ernest Buckler in 1952? As David approaches the top of the mountain at the end of the novel, the confused babel of voices in his head ceases and he achieves a final clarity of spirit: “And then the blackness swam in his head again. He waited for it to clear. And then the blackness turned to grey and then to white: an absolute white, made of all the other colours but of no colour itself at all. And then the snow began to fall.” He collapses and the snow continues to fall around him. He is no longer discernable against the mountainside; he has literally become part of the land. Perhaps more significant is the novel’s final image of a partridge attempting to fly, only to fall over the far side of the mountain. Most English literature scholars would explain this image in classic mythological terms—that the partridge represents David as a kind of Icarus figure, who falls short of achieving his dream. But an animist reading of the novel’s ending would interpret it as another animal-transformation myth; that is, the partridge is really David Canaan finally becoming one with the land—not returning from where he came, but disappearing forever into the land he loves.

Both Atwood’s and Buckler’s books have achieved canonical status among Canadian literature scholars. Their animist elements, though, are often viewed as peripheral points of discussion rather than key modern examples of an original Canadian mythos. In the case of Atwood, her protagonist’s transformation is generally read as a form of feminist escape while Buckler’s partridge serves as a colonial metaphor for the tragedy of the failed artist.

Connection and transformation are two kinds of animist narratives in Canadian fiction. The third close encounter, though, is the one most familiar to Canadian readers—identification with the North. And nowhere is the link between nature and the supernatural in the land more obvious than in northern tales that include shamans. These powerful figures abound in Canadian fiction, and the most striking portrayal may be found in James Houston’s 1980 Spirit Wrestler. Houston, a non-Inuit who spent 14 years in the Arctic and almost single-handedly introduced Inuit art to the South, offers readers a compelling tale about an Inuit shaman named Shoona who recounts to the administrator of Baffin Island the story of his life, of how he was taught as a young man forms of trickery that would make him believable as a man of great power. Yet there were also times when his visions were much more than sleight of hand, moments when he became one with the animist heart of the North: “I was part of the earth and sky and sea, that I myself was moving with the measured rhythm of the tides, the turning of the stars.” Shoona’s physical and spiritual connection to the North is equally measured by the novel’s mystical ending, in which he describes with his last dying breaths a vision he has of being eaten by Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the sea who is half-woman and half-fish and the most powerful being in Inuit mythology.

A variation on the shaman figure is the Northern artist in Gabrielle Roy’s La montagne secrète (The Hidden Mountain), whom the Eskimos in the story refer to as “Man-of-the-Magic-Pencil.” First published in 1961, the novel is set between Northern Canada and Paris and is about a young artist named Pierre who travels to the North to find inspiration in the landscape. Eventually his northern sketches garner the attention of a local missionary priest, who through the help of contacts mounts a small exhibition of his work. The priest, though, is of colonial kiln, and suggests that for Pierre to become a true artist he should go and study in Paris. But the young artist soon realizes that he is not inspired by European beauty. Instead, it is the awesome power of the northern landscape that moves him to create—to the point that he imbues Parisian skies with his northern colours. Even his living conditions remind him of his Canadian home: “He lit the first fire he had ever had in Paris. He wondered if its smoke could be seen in the sky as it would be seen from very far off on the low plains of his Canadian land … As though to give him pleasure, the wind that he was convinced must have come from afar rumbled over the roof close above him. By the strange happiness that took hold of his heart, he understood how much he had missed the wind of the North, the blowing snow, the tempestuousness of the storm and of nature.” The Hidden Mountain is thus a kind of anti-colonial text, for rather than becoming European in his gaze Pierre chooses instead to paint Paris through his experiences of the Canadian North. His identification with the North is not simply a matter of aesthetics: it is his spiritual and creative centre.

Just a few decades ago The Spirit Wrestler and The Hidden Mountain were included in the prestigious New Canadian Library series, an imprint used by teachers and professors as a benchmark for what should be taught in Canadian literature courses. Now they are out of print and exist only on library shelves, because neither book conforms to the prevailing colonial myth of our country’s literary heritage.Near the end of Elizabeth Hay’s Giller Award– winning Late Nights on Air (2007), a group of radio broadcast employees from a station in Yellowknife goes on a canoe trip to retrace the last journey of Arctic explorer John Hornby. Not surprisingly, the trip quickly becomes for them a spiritual as well as a physical journey. Along the Thelon River they witness a Caribou migration and find themselves surrounded by a place in which the natural and the supernatural intersect. Then one of the group declares, “I think we’re in a thin place … where seen and unseen meet.” This is not some sudden mystical declaration; it is the same reaction to the Canadian landscape that Roberts was attempting to articulate more than a hundred years earlier.

Look again at Yann Martel’s Life of Pi or Paul Quarrington’s Whale Music; reread the work of Farley Mowat and Graeme Gibson, and think of them in relation to the books I have been describing. A unique tradition persists in Canadian literature wherein our relationship to the natural world becomes awesome, brutal and deeply mysterious. What’s more, these stories are strikingly similar in animist sensibility to ideas expressed in the work of Joseph Boyden, Tomson Highway, Eden Robinson and a host of other Inuit and First Nations writers. Think of Will Bird’s kindness to the bear in Through Black Spruce or the figure of Coyote in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water. These are familiar mythical refrains and ring true for Canadian readers; the increasing popularity of aboriginal literature is likewise evidence of a rediscovered sense of our shared Canadian imagination. This is not to say that our non-aboriginal writers are attempting to depict points of intersection between the human, natural and supernatural worlds in exactly the same way as First Nations storytellers. But there is a real sense of communal influence in our creative response to nature.

A conversation has been going on between writers in this country for more than a century about our kinship with the land. What we need is for more educators to realize that these close encounters are deeply Canadian and worthy of celebration.