How about “Canadians” — there’s already been Never Cry Wolf and Map of the Human Heart… hmm… I don’t exactly see a genre shaping up there. Robertson Davies had a uniquely Canadian approach to literature, though. He took the sharp incisiveness of Anglo and Celtic wit, and applied it to the vastness of the Canadian land. If only they could turn Robertson Davies novels into successful movies.
Salman Rushdie gently satirized Indian Westerns in Midnight’s Children: there was a Hindu cowboy movie hero back in the 1940s called Gai Walla (which is roughly “cowboy” translated into Hindi), galloping on his horse across the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Rushdie also satirized the tendency of Indian comic book publishers to turn Hindu mythology into comic books, by having a new Hindu religious sect appear that was based on Superman comic books.
The old west was an area where people were just to busy trying to stay alive and maintain some sense of law and order, due to the speed at which people were moving in and the low population density in these new areas. Certainly indians had been living there for a long time, so theoretically it might not seem like a bunch of people suddenly moving into unexplored and unknown land–but the Whites and the natives were not on the greatest of terms, so if anything they were moving into hostile, unexplored, and unknown land.
I think you will find that such a situation on such a scale is very rare. And it is because of this hardship and the amount of shades-of-gray decisions that everyone had to make just to stay alive that the Old West has been able to become a genre of its own. Outside of the Puritans and their witch hunting ways, the Old East is largely just an extension of European civilization without there really being much to distinguish it except of course for some American issues like slavery or the mafia. Slavery is too black and white an issue to become a genre, though certainly some good films have been made from the topic.
On a side note, it is interesting living in Japan where one of the standard TV genres is the “Samurai soap opera,” which is essentially a soap opera but set 200 years ago and where the guys can chop each other apart.* And I totally don’t get how Godzilla, Mothra, and all of those can become a genre. Big monster befriends kids, destroys Tokyo, the end. Big monster befriends kids, destroys Tokyo, the end. Big monster befriends kids, destroys Tokyo, the end. My god, I get tired of them just seeing the previews.
Kindly note that I haven’t ever watched and am largely guessing from the 0.5 second glimpses while flipping through channels.
I’ve got news for you. While the Puritans* were settling Massachusetts in the 17th century, Puritans were winning a civil war in England, and running Parliament.
I was not aware of that, however I was speaking of the Nathaniel Hawthorne-style “separatists who thought the Puritans were backsliding.” After some more people got all settled in, you had normal farmers and bankers and hunters, just going about their lives in a way that isn’t totally foreign to the modern mind.
And I might note that the European genre for this category would be “The Catholic/Protestant Wars”* which is quite a different genre from “Puritanical colonies in 17th Century New England.”
*Would be my guess as someone who isn’t aware of the specific item you reference.
But the European witch trials were organized (as such), backed by the “central government” of the church, and took place among what had been fully established societies and cities that had existed for possibly several hundreds of years. The Puritan witch trials were specifically tied in with the strict Puritanical way of life mixed with the isolation they found themselves in.
So it is that the US gives us “The Scarlet Letter” while as Europe creates “Queen Margot.” These both stem from tales concerning roughly the same period of time (Queen Margot looks to be set about a generation earlier) and the issues those areas were dealing with. And even though the causes of those issues might have stemmed from the same source (protestantism), the genres they create are very different.
While on the other hand, Melville talking about setting out on a whaling ship could have been written on either side of the Atlantic. Edgar Allan Poe could just as well have been writing about ravens in London as Bram Stoker could have had Dracula appearing in New York to hunt his beauties. These might all be good stories, and of course these authors will always be influenced by other local authors more than foreign ones–but still none of these requires a certain time and a certain history to have meaning. The early colonies of the first Puritans is one of those paticular patches in American history where if you plop down two characters in there, there will already be a whole lot of extra baggage that comes with it–and that baggage is unique to that particular time and place. The Old West, the catholic/protestant wars, the Spanish Inquisition, and all of these are specific points in history where your characters are not just normal people living in a normal world–rather there is a very real world that is quite possibly rather frightening and anything the characters do will be that much more important because messing up can have much more dramatic consequences.
I’ve been working on an “Eastern” novel called “Riverbeast” for a coupel of years, using Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi as source material. My story’s about a woman who gets kidnaped by a gang of wild riverboatmen who have a grudge against her wealthy merchant father. I thought my story might be farfetched, but as I read accounts of the riverboatmen, I realized I was in safe territory indeed.
BTW, Life on the Mississippi is available free online and is an excellent read – just google the tiltle, you’ll pull up a site with a free copy pretty quick. Also, there’s an old Kirk Douglas movie about flatboat merchants’ adventures on the Missouri River which while more of a Western than an Eastern, gives a nice account of the wildness of things back in them thar days. (Within the context of the censorious era when it was made).
Uh… there are metric shit-tons of Canadian literature about every conceivable aspect of the national psyche. (We call it CanLit). Hamish could give you a better rundown of it than I could, as he’s spent the better part of the last few years studying it. It dates back quite a ways, as well.
Hey matt, you’re talking to a big Margaret Atwood fan here. My favorite author in all of North America. How many Margaret Atwood cinematizations have there been? The Handmaid’s Tale was set south of the border, so I don’t count it as a “Canadian.”
Any Canadian movies you could recommend? Atom Egoyan? I saw one movie from Toronto titled Masala. (It should have been titled Toronto Masala to avoid confusion with the Mississippi one.) It was phuckin’ hilarious and subversive at the same time. It contained political satire, social satire, sexual satire, and religious satire. Guaranteed to offend everyone. It was brilliant and very, very Canadian.
