Selected Minor Works: Oh. Canada.

Justin E. H. Smith

One often hears that Montreal is the New York of Canada. It seems to me one may just as well say that Iqaluit is the New York of Nunavut. Both analogies are true enough, insofar as each settlement in question is the undisputed cultural capital of its region. But analogies can often work simply in virtue of the similitude of the relation in each of the pairs, even when the two pairs are vastly different the one from the other. Montreal is the New York of Canada, to be sure. But Canada, well... Canada is the Canada of North America.

This will be the first of two articles in which I lay out a scurrilous and wholly unfounded diatribe against the place I now call home. The second part will consist in a screed against Canada as a whole; today I would like to direct my bile towards Montreal in particular.

Sometime in early 2002, there was an amusing article in the New York Times, chronicling the fates of a few New York families that had fled to re-settle with relatives in Canada for fear of further attacks. Within a few months, they were back. As I recall, one man was quoted as saying something like: I'd rather go up in fireball, I'd rather be vaporized, than live out the rest of my days up there.

New York pride is not only quantitative, yet it is interesting to note that there was more square footage in the World Trade Center than in all the highrises of Montreal combined. Still, in terms of square feet, if not of lives, September 11 scarcely made a dent in Manhattan.  It is of course not everywhere that the greatness of a city is measured by the number of skyscrapers it hosts. If this were the universal measure, Dallas would have London beat by a long-shot. But in Montreal the skyline is constantly pushed, on the ubiquitous postcards and tchotchkes sold along St. Catherine Street, as though this were some great accomplishment of human ingenuity, rather than a paltry imitation, a mere toy model, of the envied city to the south.

Les gratte-ciel are also celebrated shamelessly in Quebecois art and cinema. Take Denys Arcand, the tiresome and repetitive director of The Decline and Fall of the American Empire and its sequel The Barbarian Invasions, as well as of the slightly more compelling 1989 film, Jesus of Montreal. The way he cuts to new scenes with panoramic shots of the city’s skyscrapers at night, alto saxes blaring, you would think you were watching a promotional segment of the in-flight entertainment program on an incoming Air Canada plane. You would almost expect this schmaltzy segue to be followed by scenes of children getting their faces painted at a street fair, of horse carriages in the old town, or of a group of young adults, sweaters tied around their necks, laughing in a restaurant booth as a man in a chef’s hat serves them a flaming dessert. And yet this is not Air Canada filler, but the work of a supposedly serious director, himself only one example of a very common phenomenon in French Canadian movies. Every time I see the Montreal skyline glorified in Quebecois cinema, I think to myself: if Nebraska had a state-subsidized film industry, Omaha too would be portrayed as a metropolis.

But pay attention to the panorama, and you will see that there is simply not much there. Montreal is probably a notch closer to Iqaluit than it is to New York on the scale of the world’s great cities. I place it just behind Timisoara, and just ahead of Irkutsk, Windhoek, and Perth. It is admittedly not just an aluminum shed and a ski-doo or two. But still one gets the sense there that the entire settlement could be easily dismantled and quitted overnight, as one might pack up a polar research station. I’ve lived in Montreal for three years, and still, every time a Canadian commences another soporific paean to the place I think to myself: where is this city you keep mentioning? I must still be lost in the banlieue. I must not have discovered that dense and vital core of the place that would justify all this effusive praise. And so I consult the map repeatedly, and determine to my confusion that I have by now been just about everywhere in the city, indeed that I live in the centre-ville. In New York, in contrast, I always know, in the same way I know I exist, that I am most assuredly, metaphysically there. You cannot be in New York and doubt that you are in New York.

A student of mine recently returned from her first trip to New York and announced that it is ‘not all that different’ from Montreal. She noted that there is virtually the same concentration of hipsters in each place, and that many New York hipsters are listening to Montreal bands such as Les Georges Leningrad. Call it ‘the hipster index’. In Baltimore, Tucson, Cincinnati, and even Edmonton, there are plenty of ruddy youngsters who collect vinyl, make objets d’art with trash they find, do yoga, declare ‘I’m not religious per se, but I consider myself a very spiritual person,’ read Jung and Hesse and Leary and (‘just for fun’) their horoscopes, have spells of veganism, try to build theremins, decorate with Betty Page artifacts, and speak disdainfully of that empty abstraction, ‘Americans’. I’ve been to these places, and seen them with my own eyes. All these places rank very high on the hipster index. I’m afraid, though, that I am reaching a period of my life in which I measure the greatness of a place by other indices. Like beauty, for instance, and the intensity and importance of the things the grown-ups there are up to.

The other city often invoked in order that Montreal might borrow a bit of greatness is, of course, Paris. The city on the Seine, but without the jet-lag, is how the tourism industry packages it. I think this has something to do with the fact that a French of sorts is spoken in the province. But an English (of sorts) is spoken in Alabama, and nobody thinks to invoke London to try to get people to go there. It is odd, when you think about it, to make a claim to greater affinity with the Old World on the mere basis of la francophonie. After all, every major language of the New World –excluding those of the First Nations—is part of the European branch of the Indo-European family, but this doesn’t give Brazil, Panama, or the United States any special foothold in Europe.

I have been to Paris, and stood at intersections waiting to see pick-up trucks pass by with bumperstickers exclaiming the French equivalent of ‘This vehicle protected by Smith & Wesson,’ or ‘U toucha my truck, I breaka u face.’ They don’t have these there. They don’t have strip malls, or ‘new country’, or donuts, or (regrettably) coffee to go, and WWF wrestling has not made much of an impact.

The situation is quite different in Quebec. La belle province is 100% American, in the early-18th-century sense of the term, and Montreal is but an outlying provincial capital. The metropolitan capital to which Montreal is subordinated is New York. What counts as center and what as periphery does not, of course, stay the same forever. A few more decades of incompetent US government and global warming may change the balance between the two cities. For now, anyway, this is just how things are.

A very happy new year from 125th Street in Harlem. I will be returning to my usual, deracinated life up north a few days from now. If they’ll still let me in.

Comments

[lily]

Wow, man. Take a deep breath or something.

[M-J]

No, no, no: You got it all wrong. New York is the American version of Montreal.

[Simon]

Interesting. Being a son of the (even) Edmonton you referenced, I am looking forward with some sort of morbid fascination to read what sort of truculent commentary you will be directing towards this nation as a whole.

I am not one of those - though there are MANY here - that speaks with disdain of Americans. If America were more like the Americans that inhabit it, 'twould better fit the ideals it espouses. (From the impressions gained of the Americans I've had the pleasure of meeting.)

And for the record, though I was baptised Catholic as an infant, I am long lapsed and therefore not religious per se, but do consider myself to be a very spiritual person.

[Morley Chalmers]

There was a time when Montreal was the New York of Canada -- but that was 50 years ago. Don't get me wrong, Montreal is a great city (ignoring Simon's posing disdain throughout for anything that's not New York). If some city is the "New York" of some other country because of cultural and commercial impact on that country, then Montreal is the New York of French Canada, but hardly of the whole of Canada. Toronto long ago surpassed Montreal in size, commerce, English-speaking media.

Many Americans have moved here for various reasons and have settled in quite comfortably. We've been a safe harbour for disaffected Americans for a very long time.

At a superficial glance Canada is a pale copy of the US. But linger here for a while, get to know the people, the values, the thinking you'll see something quite un-American. Like the US, Canada is also a regional country. The west, Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes each has its own personality, in much the same way the regions of the US are distinct.

The whole article was a kind of "look at me" article saying, what? Applying American patriotism to a foreign city and saying it doesn't measure up by that yardstick and at the same time it's a pale copy of America.

Simon's article was childish, silly, pointless.

[Morley Chalmers]

My mistake. It's Justin E. H. Smith who wrote a silly, childish, pointless article, not Simon.

[Morley Chalmers]

And I'm the silly goof who took Justin's bait. He was clearly trolling for trolls and I jumped into his puddle.

[Simon]

I'll jump back in the puddle with something more from another deracinated American whose view of the country is slightly more on par with my own:

John Rogers:

Canada does not convert. Canada heals. Canada leads. First among the nations, creating the Peacekeepers. Pushing the Land Mine ban. Still not perfect, but doing their best at reconciling issues with the aboriginal peoples even as other nations such as Australia choke on their responsibility. Allowing Quebec its poetic, myopic thrashings. I'm always a little dismayed at native Canadians who whinny about Canada's missing identity. I, as an adopted son, know damn well what Canada is. "Come, have a pint, I don't mind your odd accent -- mine's a bit dodgy too. Your business is your business, we can all be friends as long as you buy the next round."

[Abbas Raza]

I guess it is just I who find Justin's uniquely misanthropic and curmudgeonly take on things not only hilarious, but a needed break from all the seriousness at 3QD! But then I suppose it's easier to do that sitting in NY than in Iqaluit. :)

Your description, Justin, of the hipsters in places like Baltimore (where I spent a decade) is spot-on, and too funny. I almost fell off my couch laughing.

[serial catowner]

As refreshing as it is to see a post that's longer than a paragraph, and doesn't link to a pay-firewall site, where's the news? New York is a big city, who said it wasn't?

Trust me, there are places to go in this world where New York itself looks pretty small. Places that will "put you closer to God than going to church 40 Sundays".

[verbatim]

I suppose this is part of a process of revelation. It's interesting to see. I'm curious to know what you have to say about "Canada."

[margy]

Where to next on your bizarre, self-referential quest to inhabit and grow disgruntled in every state, province, and country on the planet? How about Pomerania?

[dude]

Man you're such a bigot, it's so incredible I can't stop laughing my ass off!!!!

[Marie]

I know I'm responding late, but as a former New Yorker in Montreal, this article is a breath of fresh air.

Yeah, it's a bit of a rant, but people in Montreal are so obsessed with the idea of being the San Francisco/New York of Canada, they don't understand there's something missing with a city that regards itself that way.

How does Montreal get all this P.R? Between the potholes, grating nationalism/provincialism, the lousy bridges and lack of urban planning, so much is missing.

Maybe Montreal should just call herself an ugly Boston with better bars, and call it a day.

[olavi valo]

Quelle poubelle!

[Justin Smith]

I'm tired of answering for something I wrote in an explosion of spleen years ago, but perhaps it will be useful to say a few words here, which future commenters might consult before bothering to comment.

I have been in Montreal for almost a decade now, and in a few months will be moving permanently to Paris. I still do not think Montreal is nearly the sort of metropolis one would be led to believe it is from the way people talk about it within Canada. It is however a place that has grown on me, a bit, and I am happy to have given it a decade of my life.

Recently, watching a documentary about Leonard Cohen, and a movie based on a novel by Mordecai Richler, it struck me that it would indeed be a very interesting thing to be *from* Montreal, to leave the place and to dream about it, to have it inside of one in that way that only the place you're from can be. But arriving late, already in my 30s, I just have to admit that the city never took root in my soul, never became my muse. If this has not been the experience of other nouveaux arrivants, tant mieux pour eux.

I do think that the feeling of being not completely welcome here is connected to a certain provincialism that trickles down from the political orthodoxy of Quebec nationalism. I don't really know how this could be avoided, and I hasten to add that politically I am fairly convinced of the justice of the sovereigntist cause. But I prefer to spend my time in properly cosmopolitan spaces, of which there are really only a handful in the whole world, where the question of whether one is from there or not simply does not come up. I recognize at the same time that this question is experienced by different people depending on their social identity, and that my experience is in large part conditioned by the fact that I carry a grade-A passport, am a man, &c.

I don't see anything bigoted in what I wrote. I know very well that Québécois generally could not care less how their society and their cities compare to those in France, and my mention of what things are like in Paris was not meant as a blow against what Québécois believe of themselves, but rather against what I still see as the idiotic belief of casual American tourists that in going to Montreal they are going to North America'a Paris, or to a Europeanoid city right next door.

One of the disagreeable effects of Québec nationalism, in my view, has been that the society has largely subtracted itself from that abstract entity called 'global francophony', which at one point, one might have hoped, could have constituted a properly transnational community, and could have given people in Trois-Rivières and Brazzaville a sense of shared identity and fraternity. Unfortunately, what we have instead is an extremely rigid and rather uninviting conception of what it takes to belong to the community, here in Montreal, and this involves a mastery of many, many things that simply do not interest me, and that I don't think could interest anyone who conceives his or her life in a global context.

This is all just about me and where I feel comfortable, though. I regret having taken the mocking and haughty tone I did when I wrote this seven years ago. There are many interesting things to be said about the complicated history of this place and about the forces that have made it the way it is. But the tone I took then makes it difficult now for me to be the one to say them.