Second Words by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT000000
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc.
Published: 1995-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

The North, the Wilderness, has traditionally been used in Canadian literature as a symbol for the world of the unexplored, the unconscious, the romantic, the mysterious and the magical. There are strange things done ’neath the midnight sun, as Robert Service puts it. (There are probably stranger things done in Toronto, but they don’t have quite the same aura.) So it’s not surprising that a large number of Canadian monsters have their origin in native Indian and Eskimo myths. One of the earliest uses of this kind of monster in literary prose (I hesitate to call it “fiction,” although it probably is) is in a book called Brown Waters and Other Sketches (1915), by William Blake. The narrator is fishing in “the great barrens that lie far-stretching and desolate among the Laurentian Mountains.” He describes the landscape in exceptionally negative terms:

So were we too alone in one of the loneliest places this wide earth knows. Mile upon mile of grey moss; weathered granite clad in ash-coloured lichen; old brule — the trees here fallen in windrows, there standing bleached and lifeless, making the hilltops look barer, like the sparse white hairs of age. Only in the gullies a little greenness… dwarfed larches, gnarled birches, tiny firs a hundred years old —and always moss… great boulders covered with it, the very quagmires mossed over so that a careless step plunges one into the sucking black ooze below.

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