Reading Stones: Travels to and in Canada

• Published in: University of Toronto quarterly 1996-07, Vol.65 (3), p.523-533
• Main Author: Runte, Roseann
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Canadian literature; Frye, Northrop; History; History & criticism; Literary criticism; Nature; Travel
• ISSN: 0042-0247; 1712-5278
• DOI: 10.3138/utq.65.3.523

Whether perambulating authors set out to write travelogues, to describe their visits to Canada as part of secret spying missions (surveying the cod stocks as long ago as the seventeenth century), to write novels or romances set in the Canadian wilderness, to compose letters, not only for the edification of those left behind but to create an epistolary bridge linking the writer to the reader and the very surroundings the author has escaped or lost,or to write poetry, all share the desire for discovery. All share the realities of instability and seek to render permanent their impressions. This is as true today as it was several centuries ago. As Northrop Frye writes,'The feeling of nomadic movement over great distances persists even into the age of the aeroplane.' Furthermore, as Dennis Porter has noted, despite the fact that Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques declares the end of travel, travel writing continues today. Current critics like Jacques Derrida still wax eloquent over voyages, such as that of Bougainville in the eighteenth century. Others, including Roland Barthes, attempt, in their own travels and in their resulting writings, to 'go beyond essentialism in the European relation to otherness through a practice of "writing" which was intransitive.' However, while their writing is intentionally intransitive, it is inevitably subjective. Barthes's erotic reading of a Japanese meal, while going beyond the typical European discovery of and reaction to difference, still defines difference with regard to self and interprets these signs according to the only codes accessible to the writer, that is, his own cultural background. To varying degrees, this is the reaction of the travellers, early and late, who 'discovered' Canada.