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Canadian author Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature.




Of course, Canadians were publishing fiction long before the world caught onto it. Much of it was quite good, too. Writers like Robertson Davies, Hugh MacLennan, and Mordecai Richler were popular in their home and native land despite going virtually unnoticed elsewhere. So overlooked were Canadian fictionists that as late as 1972, Atwood wrote a book lamenting that the work of her countrymen was ignored because a distinctly Canadian identity was unseen. In the aftermath of that book, Atwood later wrote, “the two questions I was asked most frequently by audience members were, ‘Is there any Canadian literature?’ and ‘Supposing there is, isn’t it just a second-rate copy of real literature, which comes from England and the United States?’”

Both in her fiction and her non-fiction, Atwood attempted to both define and formulate that Canadian identity. She argued that the dominant theme running through centuries of Canadian literature was survival – survival against an unforgiving climate, primarily — just as the British were defined by being an island and the United States had a frontier mentality.

Alice Munro’s work adopts Atwood’s theme but subtly adjusts it. Munro’s characters struggle to survive in the harsh environments of the small towns in Northern Ontario, yes, but they struggle predominantly with the provincial attitudes that accompany those small towns. Usually women, Munro-folk try to resist or at least subvert the gender confines within which they live. “I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was ‘call attention to yourself,’ or ‘think you were smart,’” Munro told the New Yorker in 2012. Munro herself is from Wingham, Ontario (population 2,875), exactly the type of place her characters inhabit, and was born around the same time in which her stories are set. “I tried to lead an acceptable life and a private life and got by most of the time O.K,” she has recalled. She was among the few girls she knew to attend college, but she got married, had three children, and, as women were supposed to do, sacrificed her own career for her husband’s for many years. “It wasn’t the housework or the children that dragged me down,” she has said. “It was the sort of open rule that women who tried to do anything so weird as writing were unseemly and possibly neglectful.”

Simply by striving to survive as individuals, Munro was tapping into a variation on Atwood’s great Canadian theme. That idea is present not just in literature, of course. Canadians have long seen themselves as embattled, and not just by the weather. First there was the struggle to retain ties with the British Empire that birthed it but existed continents away. And then there was, and is, the persistent fear of being overshadowed and even invaded by the United States (an invasion did occur, in 1812). “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant,” a Canadian Prime Minister once told an American audience. “No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”

Having Munro win the Nobel Prize affirms two things for Canadians. First, there is such a thing as Canadian literature, and much of it is very good. Second, there is such a thing as Canada, and much of it, too, is very good.

Jordan Michael Smith, a Canadian writer living in Washington, D.C., is a contributing writer at Salon and the Christian Science Monitor.

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