CHASING THE CHINOOK: ON THE TRAIL OF CANADIAN WORDS AND CULTURE
By Wayne Grady
The American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed that “Every word was once a poem.” “Bare lists of words,” he thought, could be “suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.”
For Wayne Grady, every word might be an essay. The starting point for Chasing the Chinook is Grady’s belief that Canadian culture is expressed in a distinct Canadian language.
For those who don’t believe Canada has a language (or languages), he suggests that every time we peer into a gopher hole or dump a hockey puck into a corner we are “participating in a linguistic event that is distinctly Canadian.” That is, we are participating in Canadian, not American culture.
Luckily, this is not a rigid thesis. Grady does not see his essays as arguments. Instead, he borrows a definition of the essay from Michael Hamburger: “An essay really ought not to be on anything, to deal with anything, to define anything. An essay is a walk, an excursion, not a business trip.”
The style fits the form. Grady is an effective but still casual writer. The brief chapters in Chasing the Chinook are like little walks, with may diversions. Along the way there are many stops for anecdotes and digressions drawn from his impressive range of reading.
In terms of content, each of the 41 essays focuses on a word that is either demonstrably Canadian “or at least arguably Canadianish.” In most cases the connection is clear (as with “garrison mentality” or “filles du roi”), but even sympathetic readers may find the link is sometimes strained.
There are, for example, several inventions or discoveries made by Canadians that seem to have no particular relevance to Canada at all (such as “kerosene,” “polygraph,” and “Peking Man”). These essays, while enjoyable, don’t have much to do with nationality, words, or culture.
The same thing could be said about “ice.” Ice truly is interesting stuff, and there’s no doubt Canada has a lot of it, but it does not, as Grady suggests, stand in the same relationship to Canadians as sand to Saharans or air to birds. Canadian culture is not quite so large as that.
Objections like these, however, are part of the fun. Any cultural commentator capable of making lucid generalizations of some originality (and there aren’t that many out there) is bound to provoke disagreement. In doing so, Grady forces us to arrive at our own definitions of what is and is not Canadian. The result is a fresh, invigorating approach to that most familiar of our national pastimes.
Notes:
Review first published November 14, 1998.
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