Destination nation : writing the railway in Canada

Since the completion of the CPR, the railway has held an important place in the Canadian imagination as a symbol of national unity, industry, and cooperation. It would seem to follow, given the widely held belief that national literatures help to engender national self-recognition in their readers, that Canadian literature would make incessant use of the railway to address themes of national community and identity. This assumption is false. With a few notable exceptions, Canadian literature has in fact made very little deliberate effort to propagate the idea that the railway is a vital symbol of Canadian unity and identity. Literary depictions of the railway do, however, exhibit a tension between communitarian and individualist values that may itself lie at the heart of the Canadian character. Some of the earliest representations of the railway, in travel narratives of the late nineteenth century, make explicit reference to the notion that the railway was a sign and a product of a common national imagination. But poets of this period virtually ignored the railway for fear that its presence would disturb the peaceful contemplation, and thus the identity, of the individuals who populated the pastoral spaces of their verse. Modern poets did eventually manage to include the train in their work, but used it most often as a vehicle to continue the private musings of their individual lyric speakers rather than to explore the terrain of the national consciousness. One prominent exception to this tendency is E. J. Pratt's Towards the Last Spike, in which imposing individuals such as Sir John A. Macdonald and William Van Horne and thousands of unnamed rail workers combine their efforts in order to construct the railway, which stands as a symbol of how individuals and communities can work together in the national interest. Canadian fiction demonstrates the same impulses as Canadian poetry by using the railway as a means of depicting the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of individuals, but it also challenges the myth of the railway's creation of a unitary national culture by showing how diverse communities---of race, class, and region---imagine their relationship to the railway in very different ways. The varied character of Canada's literary treatment of one of the country's central national symbols suggests that a tension between individualism and communitarianism also informs Canadian literature itself, whose writers have used the railway to fulfill their goals in individual texts but have rarely employed it as a symbol of national community.

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