Two Toronto Novels and Lessons of Belonging: The Global City in Modern Canadian Literature

Russell Smith's 1994 novel How Insensitive momentarily pulls its protagonist out of the city to reveal what is different about life in the hinterlands. On his way to a nightclub in the north end of Toronto, Ted Owen finds himself for the first time beyond the reach of the subway system. The walk north from the terminal station takes him into a sterile streetscape of closed specialty food shops streetlights extending in a perfectly straight line for miles, disappearing over the horizon. Alienated by this taste of near-wilderness, Ted suddenly notices his dress: he has brought a trench coat because Some voice from his childhood had told him he might be cold. The trench coat, he concludes, is absolutely inappropriate for the suit. But his sudden self-consciousness is expressed not only in terms of space, fashion, or the triggering of a childhood memory. In his rush to leave his apartment he has forgotten his watch. Frantically he searches the tops of buildings for a time There was none, continues the narrator, and he cursed the inadequacy of the street. In a real city, one would always be in sight of a pixelboard (94). (1) When he finally gets to the nightclub, Ted is stuck on the lack of a time The following dialogue ensues, it is worth quoting at length in order to understand that the lack of a is no mere inconvenience. Ted says to a friend: Do you know ... on my way here I was looking for a display, you know the ones on the tops of buildings in the subway, to check the time, when I couldn't see one I was actually irritated? I mean we've come to expect that every street has one somewhere. Fully, said Andreas, pouring wine inaccurately. I realized that a mere two years ago I would never have expected them on any street, much less desired them, even less been embarrassed by their absence. I mean it felt strangely provincial. I've come to feel that in a real city you'd always be in sight of a time display. Andreas laughed. the temperature. Exactly. And preferably with a constant stock ticker running, so one can keep track of New York prices. And when the New York exchange shuts down, at night, it would switch over to Tokyo prices. At least that way we'd all have some sense of being connected , I mean you wouldn't feel this awful dislocation that you feel up in deserted suburban areas like this. I feel so inhuman up here. (97) Ted Owen wants to feel as though he is in a real city in order to overcome the provinciality of the hinterlands. But what is more striking about Ted's attitude is the way in which he believes that Toronto qualifies as a real city: it does not have to be the source center of Canadianness, or even the nerve center of the Canadian economy; it qualifies by being connected to New York Tokyo. In other words, Ted is signaling how a global city (2) like Toronto becomes a site of identity-formation that codifies itself as a global urban consciousness, fluent in a transnational discourse of signs, values, knowledge. Through Ted's identification with foreign cities, themselves materialized in the abstract value of stock prices, How Insensitive serves as a case study of how fictional representations of the global city-hess of Toronto produce an ideological break in the history of English Canadian literature. By programmatically transforming Canadian literary nationalism's traditional anti-urbanism into a rearticulation of the relationship between the nation-state its global cities, Ted signals that the relationship between land national identity is historically past, that new, ahistorical urban structures of feeling are taking its place. Perhaps the best way to illustrate why the wholly urban cosmopolitanism represented in How Insensitive is significant is to contrast it with the anti-urbanism implicit in another novel that deals with Toronto's transformation into a global city. …

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