Laura Ferri's contribution to John Moss Finding the Right Words. Toronto. Iguana Editions, 2025
TWO FROM OTHER PERSPECTIVES
SHIFTING IDENTITIES:
A CONVERSATION WITH LAURA FERRI
My Conversation with Laura Ferri called “Talking with John Moss” was recorded in Peterborough, 2002 and published in Englishes: Letterature Inglesi contemporane (Rome), the same year. Laura was cultural coordinator of the Siena-Toronto Centre at the University of Siena. She makes my words more coherent I’m sure than they actually were. She and her husband were gracious hosts when Bev and I visited Siena. Some of that experience finds its way into fiction.
Laura Ferri: In "Invisible among the Ruins" you write, “... we are a northern nation. The white of our flag is the winter; the Arctic, a condition of our imagination. As we become increasingly a part of the global community, as our history, written by geography, is rewritten by ethnic diversity, we cannot survive as a people without coming to terms with how we imagine ourselves. The white of our flag is the winter, but the Arctic has seasons. Those who live there know that. For the rest of us, who visit or who read, we must explore beyond winter, find what is there and what we think is there, find what we missed.” The illuminating perception of a postmodern critic and the daring experience of the man who has travelled the Arctic conflate here into a whole vision of Canada’s identity: its multi-ethnic growth, the possibility of its global future. Could you expand on this?
John Moss: This is a most difficult question. In effect, in your very astute reading of the passage I articulate my position and feelings in the clearest way I am able to. Canada is evolving as a multi-ethnic society in ways my grandparents, and even my parents, could not have foreseen, and perhaps would not have liked. They were comfortable with British privilege and welcoming to all, so long as outsiders conformed to the standards of the Empire. Curiously, this sure sense of their own presence in the world placed even First Nations people as outsiders, and therefore inevitably subject to assimilation, as the price of belonging. This is reminiscent of Rome, conferring citizenship to people in the provinces in exchange for fealty to the Imperial centre. All that has changed, as Yeats said, changed utterly. It is irrelevant whether the change is good or bad, or from which perspective it is measured. It is what happened. And Canada evolves into a multi-ethnic nation with unknowable prospects. In our time, it is important that we come to terms with the cost of transition, that we accommodate new ways of seeing and being ourselves. There is a tendency, however, to dismantle the past, our cultural and historical heritage, and to see ourselves in the present as simply a holding ground for future development. Ministers of the crown, leading thinkers, sometimes deny Canada’s real presence in the world, perceiving us risen from a past that is irrelevant to most and incapable of a coherent vision into what lies ahead. Perhaps this is why we are governed by political pragmatists. There is no room for ideals, for memories or for dreams. As the world’s nations converge under the cultural hegemony of global economics and as traditional family and communal relations inevitably collapse, individual human beings more than ever will need to sustain a sense of belonging through identity with the nation-state as a cultural home. Place of being will become more important, not less. If Canadians cannot relate to their landscape through history or culture or vision, then Canada will fade away. We will not be destroyed by barbarians at the gates or among us. It will be our own lack of focus that does us in, our inability and lack of desire to see ourselves not through ethnicity or power but as a gathering place, a good place to be.
L.F.: Would you consider this passage appropriate for use in an anthology for Italian students, to give them a sound sense of what Canada is? Which others would you suggest?
J.M.: Yes I would. I think often students connect more through metaphor and allusion. Just look at the lyrics of popular songs!
L.F.: What do you consider peculiar to Canadian literature? Could you offer a statement which may best describe the Canadian literature of the last few decades?
J.M.: I think there are many things particular to Canadian literature but, as with all literature, few things peculiar, that is, unique. Culture is infectious. It settles in, where conditions are similar, and assimilates. It seldom expires on its own, or spontaneously springs into being. Canadian literature in the 19th century was largely a delayed response to British literature, in part emulation and in part hybridization. In the 20th century, it came much more under the influence of the Americans, but by the 1960s it was developing a voice of its own, what might be described as the cosmopolitan parochial, exemplified by pride in being the same and yet different from the rest of the world. This quickly gave way to the post-colonial expression of our individual experience in a borderless world; the Canadian reader as ‘Everyman’, the writer as only him or her self.
L.F.: Which Canadian authors would you recommend for the teaching of literature in high schools?
J.M.: David Adams Richards, Margaret Atwood, Jack Hodgins, Jane Urquhart, Robert Kroetsch.
L.F.: You have recently moved from post-modern criticism, through critical fiction, into Borgesian short stories. Could you say something about this turn in your writing?
J.M.: At this point it is difficult to comment. When I was writing those stories, that was the only way I could write.
L.F.: Is there a risk that critical fiction, as exemplified by your Borgesian stories, for all the power it has to extract responses subversively from those who are widely read, may be too demanding for young students and put them off literature at all? Or do you think that students should be exposed to this kind of maieutical challenge rather than remain subject to prescriptive critical commentary?
J.M.: No, yes. I couldn’t have said better. Of course, it is demanding. But liberating, too. Read a story like “Peggy Be Good.” There is more critical thought in response to Atwood’s writing carried in that piece of fiction than in everything else I’ve written, and it is far more accessible. Teaching is sharing, providing access. In this story, the reader is invited to form a relationship with Atwood’s canon and the authorial personality that informs it and holds it together. Students will make the leap if given the opportunity; they will respond to her writing through direct experience in my text. I think prescriptive critical commentary can deaden the sensibility, whereas critical fiction can bring it to life.
L.F.: In Being Fiction, in the chapter on James Joyce, relating to the Irish question you sound disappointed by the fact that “The Irish who condemned specific acts of terrorist brutality would invariably wind up their exhortation against the most heinous crime with an explanation of why it was, just so.” Isn’t it ever possible that accounting for the historic origins of a terrible event, rather than a mode to offer violence sanction, may be a way to help the civilized world find the correct, I would say honest, response to it? I am obviously referring to the heinous attack on the Twin Towers and the Western World’s reaction to it: Enduring War.
J.M.: Ah, you ask penetrating questions. First of all, it would seem accounting for the historical origins of events has done little in the past to reduce the horrors of which we are capable. Sometimes it seems, those who know history are condemned to repeat it. But what I was getting at had less to do with history than about the confusion of moral and theological context. If the activity of righteous fanatics is perceived on a religious spectrum of good and evil, then response will also be placed on that spectrum, at the opposite extreme. This kind of reductionism immediately degenerates into such dangerous absurdities as "the axis of evil", and Satanic epithets, all of which perpetuate the conflict. It becomes a simplistic Bushite notion of “my God is better than your God.” and “my readings of Scripture are better than yours.” But on the scales of secular justice, all crimes are unconscionable. Then, in a search for right and wrong, the pathology of an act of terrorism may both be evaluated in absolute terms as unacceptable, and seen, in relative terms, continuous with the conditions that brought it about, conditions that may be addressed. Human beings can far more easily agree on what is right and wrong than on what is sacred and what is profane. The Twin Towers tragedy is wrong; that is why it was deemed a holy achievement, precisely because it was a theologically justifiable wrong. Both sides agree, although those of us outside the sphere of religious zealotry regard it as a profanity. I would rather humanity struggles to right wrongs than to justify action through deference to an infinitely malleable God.
