Further Ambiguity

Wendy Cope, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986)

As with Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, one of the poems in Wendy Cope’s collection confronts us with an ambiguously Canadian reference.

The Poem

The Lavatory Attendant

I counted two and seventy stenches
All well defined and several stinks!
–Coleridge

Slumped on a chair, his body is an S
That wants to be a minus sign.

His face is overripe Wensleydale
Going blue at the edges.

In overalls of sacerdotal white
He guards a row of fonts

With lids like eye-patches. Snapped shut
They are castanets. All day he hears

Short-lived Niagaras, the clank
And gurgle of canescent cisterns.

When evening comes he sluices a thin tide
Across sand-coloured lino,

Turns Medusa on her head
And wipes the floor with her.   (49)

The Commentary

The flushing toilets make “short-lived Niagaras,” which to a Canadian will immediately raise thoughts of Niagara Falls (Canadian side). But of course there are also falls on the American side, and it is impossible to say whether Cope is thinking of Canada or the U.S. (a problem that has arisen before). Most likely she is just thinking of the humour inherent in comparing a toilet flush to one of the largest waterfalls in the world, and isn’t thinking about Canadian versus American sides at all — such things concern us, not her.

Since the Canadian falls are the larger and more impressive, however, the comparison is inherently funnier if the Canadian falls are meant, because the contrast is greater. And since Cope herself is a British poet, I feel we can draw on our history as a British colony and claim the reference as a Canadian one.

And while it’s an honour for Canada to be home to (the most impressive part of) a waterfall that is so famous poets from other countries draw on it for comparisons, we might note that Canada is, yet again, known for a natural feature that happens to be within our borders rather than for anything that could really be considered a Canadian accomplishment.

The Commentary on The Commentary

The thought process in the second paragraph above reveals a peculiarly Canadian form of insecurity: we’re convinced that the world in general takes no notice of us, and so when we come across a reference that might be about us, but might not, we’re very keen to convince ourselves that it is about us, because it makes us feel important to be referred to by non-Canadians. Being noticed forms a sort of bulwark against our own feelings of national insignificance.

As for the third paragraph, how typical: go to great lengths to claim a reference is Canadian, and then complain that it’s not complimentary enough.

That Little Development League to the North

David Waldstein, “As N.F.L. Prepares for Longer Extra Points, C.F.L. Offers a Preview” (NY Times, August 16, 2015)

The title above is the actual headline of the article, but if you look at the photo you’ll see the teaser that appeared at the top of the front page of the Sports section: “Long extra points make Canada’s league a laboratory for the N.F.L.”

Having read that, it’s not even necessary to read the article; everything you need to know about the American attitude to Canada is already expressed that one word, “laboratory.”  This is a classic instance of the way Americans see Canada, and anything that happens here, not as significant in its own right, but only insofar as it could have an impact on the U.S. Canada is visible only through an American lens: the CFL, in the view of the august New York Times, is not an independent national league with its own long football tradition (the league was founded in 1958, but the first Grey Cup was awarded in 1909); it’s nothing more than a development league, a “laboratory” where rules experiments can be tested in a consequence-free environment before they’re incorporated into the NFL, where the games, and therefore the rules by which they are played, really matter.

The attitude continues in the article:

The National Football League will also introduce longer extra points this season, and with its two-month head start, the C.F.L. has become a test laboratory for the new extra-point rule, which will add more uncertainty to games, and perhaps more excitement.   (S6)

The phraseology is a little more gentle there, making the CFL’s status as a laboratory sound more like an accident of chronology than an essential aspect of its nature, but the idea persists.

And later in the article we get this:

Higgins, Daniel and Bede all said that the kickers in the N.F.L. were generally superior to their C.F.L. colleagues….   (S6)

So even the key CFL figures who are quoted in the article (Alouettes coach Tom Higgins, CFL statistician Steve Daniel, and Alouettes kicker Boris Bede) admit that the CFL is inferior to the NFL. (I’m not saying this isn’t the case, of course, only that it’s another element of the paternalistic view of Canada expressed in the article.)

All this shows that football is yet another arena in which Americans tend to look down on Canadians and see us as their adorable, bumbling little cousins, not up to the high professional standards set by leagues and athletes in the U.S., but still trying our best to keep up, and occasionally useful when we allow Americans a glimpse of how rules changes might work out in their own league — though needless to say (except that, of course, they do say it), the much higher skill level of NFL players makes the comparison a bit tenuous.