Al menos tres FVC, con una diferencia no mayor del 5%

In a short story entitled “The Indonesian Client” in Canadian writer Doug-las Glover’s collection Bad News of the Heart, a character declares that

“he preferred Canadians because, like the Dutch, they are culturally blank, an asset in modern business.”¹ What a bleak dismissal, likely to arouse in Canadians and the Dutch not a little indignation. Cultural blankness pro-claims a terrible lack, reads a fi gurative absence that condemns the aesthetic practices of these two different peoples to a nadir of affect in the larger world. But this summation also incites questions about how such incog-nito cultures situate themselves in a global Zeitgeist wherein ethnicities are celebrated even as they are transformed through the process of migration.

Whereas the character reads this presumed blankness as an “asset,” his summary also implies a certain inscrutable vacancy, suggesting that both the Dutch and Canadians are tabula rasa in terms of their performance of culture. Yet Canadians and Netherlanders appear to share what might be considered the most desirable trait of people moving throughout and within a global culture: Citizens of these two nations and heritages prac-tice a transnational invisibility, ghosts within the architecture of particular nationalisms, but effective in terms of transmutation. Both, it would seem, demonstrate themselves capable of transition, self-effacement, and even convenient disappearance, articulated as a peculiar reticence about overtly performing or acknowledging their heritage. This concatenation of Cana-dian and Dutch idiosyncrasies enunciates a shared elusiveness, a virtual invisibility that appears to transcend or escape cultural markers. Glover’s fi ctional designation effectively invites an examination of the chameleonic capacity of these two nationalities and their similar embracing of alterna-tive rather than oppositional culture. Raymond Williams usefully defi nes this as the difference “between someone who simply fi nds a different way to live and wishes to be left alone with it, and someone who fi nds a different way to live and wants to change the society in its light.”² Certainly both the Dutch and the Canadians manifest little interest in changing global society.

But is this diffi dence really the case, or is it merely a convenience of cultural depiction? Does such compunction exist because both occupy a nation suf-fi ciently diverse that performing ethnicity is difsuf-fi cult, unnecessary, or itself

redundant? And if the ‘performative’ aspects of Dutch and Canadian iden-tity are equally contingent, then how do these two minor cultures imper-sonate themselves?

In light of this comparison, it becomes a challenge to examine how Dutch migration leaves traces and is traced in a relatively new culture like Canada’s. Does Dutch ethnicity in the North American settler nation speak to its country of origin, or does it suffer a peculiar disconnect and fi nd allegiance more with a generalized European culture? It is said of the Netherlands that the Dutch practice an embracing and embraceable cul-tural tolerance. At the same time, in Canada they are considered an ethnic group that quickly erases its visibility, audibility, and any other identifi able characteristics. Model citizens, Dutch immigrants are noted for assimilat-ing as quickly as possible, as if seekassimilat-ing protective coloration. In contrast to those who embrace a fi ercely nostalgic yearning for home, they are quick to adapt and quicker still to shift their allegiance from their country of origin to their country of opportunity. Although more than a million Canadians report some Dutch ancestry,³ it is as if they are determined to disappear, abjure their heritage, and melt into the mainstream. The effect is an invisi-ble ethnicity that speaks to a taciturn culture in world terms, even while the Dutch have spread across the globe. How, then, is that ancestry declared and at the same time evaded? It is useful to consider how this diaspora has quietly proceeded “without the stabilizing allusion to an original homeland or essential identity”⁴ through some examples of the Dutch presence in Canadian culture, particularly as read and written within recent advertis-ing and Canadian literature. It is also imperative to keep in mind the extent to which Canada’s cultural entity is a troubled and troubling proposition.

A benign Siberia, a gentler if not kinder America, a geographical extrava-ganza, an imaginary homeland, a culinary disaster, and an outright fash-ion victim, Canada could be construed as a dangerous place to be Dutch because the two collude in that already mentioned undemonstrative and diffi cult-to-identify cultural identity or heritage. The fl avor of ‘Dutch’ in a Canada that prefers more visible indicators is faint; the hyphen connecting

‘Dutch-Canadian’ is more a marker of mutually disappearing categories than a declaration. Why then trace or extend these connections? In terms of migration, homelands, and border crossings, the cross-pollination between Dutch and Canadian is a tenuous matter at best, not likely to raise eyebrows or to create a tsunami wave of change in any cosmopolitan discourse. The two cultures simply seem to match one another in their adaptability; in that respect theirs is an interesting marriage of convenience. In public and aesthetic terms, they recite a parallel practice, both of them performing a curious deviation from the usual displays of sociosymbolic identity.

In April 2000, a subsequently famous advertisement for Molson Cana-dian beer vividly depicted the conundrum shared by CanaCana-dians and the Dutch. In the ad, a young man who identifi es himself as ‘Joe’ stands in a theater with a screen behind him on which various clichés of Canadian

culture (fur traders, lumberjacks, and dogsleds) are visually depicted while he ‘rants’ about what a Canadian is and is not, with especial emphasis on how Canadians are different from Americans.⁵ Much viewed and dis-cussed, the “I Am Canadian” ad gave rise to multiple copycats and par-odies. There is nothing at all Dutch about the ad; one could tender the argument that the focus on beer might bear a remote cousinage to Dutch drinking tastes, but that would be a stretch. As has been pointed out by cultural critics, the ad’s popularity is doubtless due to its exploitation of the very clichés that the actor decries in the piece. To be Canadian is to speak a mélange of apology and foot-shuffl ing self-abnegation, leavened by an enthusiasm for hockey and a “we are the second biggest!” brag. For all Joe rants, he takes his cues from the American delineation of Canada and the extent to which the world continues to confuse the two nations. Moreover, the ‘Canada is NOT’ syndrome becomes the underlying structure for the lesson that occurs on the stage in front of those clichéd images, all to the soundtrack of Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” march, the staple of American graduation ceremonies and a covert witness for Joe donning the mantle of ‘Canadian,’ as if to declare his (and the nation’s) rather tenu-ous adulthood.

In a more recent television commercial, fi rst aired in February 2009, an elegant man in a three-piece suit paces back and forth behind the glass at the edge of a hockey arena, where a group of children practice Canada’s national sport on the ice. In a marked but elegantly deployed Dutch accent, he advises the viewer to “stick to the fundamentals,” and to “grow your sav-ings” with ING Direct. He promises that “every dollar you save, whatever the amount, will grow with high interest, and never shrink with fees and service charges. Your money will be safe but working hard, just like you.”⁶ Frugality incarnate, ING Direct’s Canadian ad campaign features not a Canadian, but Dutch actor Frederik de Groot. Born in 1946 in Bilthoven, Utrecht, De Groot is the epitome of the muted hyphen that would charac-terize a Dutch-Canadian, although he is very much a citizen of the Neth-erlands. The ad succeeds because De Groot possesses a perfectly attractive (but not too attractive), middle-aged but not old, bland but utterly trust-worthy—and for some reason compelling—face. His most famous phrase,

“Save your money,” is pronounced with a clear, precise intonation in Eng-lish, but carries beneath it an unmistakably Dutch cadence. De Groot has come to be known to Canadians as the ‘save-your-money guy.’ Although the orange colors associated with ING clearly gesture toward the Dutch national color and ING’s head offi ce in the Netherlands, few Canadians (except those of Dutch ancestry) would likely recognize these references.

These two Canadian television ads, one for beer and one for fi nancial services, seem hugely dissimilar from one another, any comparison spuri-ous. In fact, they serve as interesting refl ections of the invisible ethnicity shared by Netherlander and Canadian; they perform overt demonstrations of the very cultural absences that are key to Canada’s confi guration. Direct

and yet chameleonic, both ad campaigns use the strategy of a declarative, even lecturelike approach rather than the minidramas favored by the adver-tising world. And in their performativity, both tread a zone of remark-able cultural dilution—the promise of distinctiveness blurred by migratory transformation. They manage to suggest a porous cultural identity and a fractured social unity, even as they appear to endorse a fundamental national personality.

The dichotomy implied by the “I Am Canadian” commercial is the invis-ible but defi nite border etched between the powerful and self-confi dent United States and the large but small, rich but geeky, orphan-adopted-by-the-world Canada. As Jonathan Kay of the National Post opined, Joe is as irritatingly self-effacing a backpack fl ag snob as a Canadian can be. “He is not on stage for the vulgar (American) task of propagandizing, but for the proper (Canadian) task of ‘educating.’”⁷ Joe is polite, ‘nice,’ and only warms up and permits himself to boast when he gets to zed over zee (the alphabet makes him almost passionate!), hockey, and Canada’s geographi-cal size. But he retreats from his own enthusiasm and ends with character-istic Canadian politeness, saying “thank you” as if grateful that anyone has bothered to listen. Although it is tempting to read this miniature exposé at face value, irony plays a large part in its performance and in the Cana-dian response to its success, primarily manifested as embarrassed pride.

Here, Canada is ironic target and ironic destination: It is home to irony, the migratory center and locality of irony. And ironies proliferate. Directed by an American, Kevin Donovan, the advertisement did feature a Canadian actor, Jeff Douglas, but Douglas moved to Los Angeles to advance his bur-geoning career after the commercial’s success. So much for practicing what you preach.

Most interesting for hyphenation purposes, the images that the ad decries (the lumberjack, fur trader, and dogsled) are images of Canada made pop-ular by a nineteenth-century Dutch migrant, Cornelius David Krieghoff.

Born in Amsterdam in June of 1815, Krieghoff is arguably the painter most responsible for the endlessly proliferating perceptions of Canada as a land of lumberjacks and quaint Franco-Canadians costumed for snow. He was trained in genre painting in Germany, then in 1837 sailed to New York and enlisted as a volunteer in the American army in the war against the Florida Indians. His reasons for doing so are not known. We only know that he met a Quebecois woman named Louise Gauthier, married her in 1840, and then moved to what was nascent Canada, British North America, where he settled fi rst in Toronto and then Montreal. His genre art did not sell read-ily, and he was forced to work as a housepainter until he was persuaded to move to Quebec City and to take as his subject ‘typical scenes’ of the Cana-dian countryside, those scenes presenting so much of what has become cul-tural cliché: Indians, hunting, horses, snow scenes, sleigh rides, canoes, and the fur trade. Success followed, and his work began to enjoy commercial recompense. Still considered a major Canadian painter (he died in Chicago

in 1872), his work is now enthusiastically appraised and is well represented in exhibitions of traditional Canadian art, even if his idealized versions of First Nations people are somewhat skeptically regarded.

Indeed, in the early twentieth century, Franco-Canadian critics pro-nounced themselves less than pleased with Krieghoff’s hearty application of Dutch genre painting to French Canadian culture.

Jean Chauvin reproached him with liking “the common people, carous-ing, noisy merrymakcarous-ing, and knock-about farce,” and with putting his farmers “in huts that looked more like pigsties.” Two years later Mau-rice Hébert derided Krieghoff’s characters in violent language. “What Prussian faces they display, or should we say Bavarian or Dutch snouts!

One of the men lifts a glass of spirits, rubs his belly, licks his chops, and slobbers, all in a grossly stupid manner.” Gérard Morisset took up these judgements on his own account, and amplifi ed them. According to him, “this painter is a gay dog who does not disdain to souse with his monied clientele; he turns out pictures, as a manufacturer would, which are within everybody’s grasp because of the carousing that he depicts, the besotted faces of his fi gures, the rather crude comedy of his genre scenes, and his autumn landscapes with their violent and loud colours.”⁸

Transplanted Dutch traits are thus given a sound and prejudicial thumping;

critics did not approve of Krieghoff’s subjects and the infl uence of seven-teenth-century Dutch genre paintings on his depiction of Canada. And the snobbish dismissal of Krieghoff as a painter who fi rst drank with his clients and then succeeded only because he churned out pictures that appealed to their limited tastes fi rmly locates him beyond a refi ned cultural iden-tity. Whereas there is obvious evidence of Dutch tonality in his paintings, Krieghoff also manages to convey certain attitudes that have become strin-gently Canadian, identifi ably noted for brisk weather and roughly attired denizens. What is even more interesting is the extent to which Krieghoff infi ltrated art itself. The art historian Arlene Gehmacher is succinct: “He was much imitated in his own time, and the enduring value of Krieghoff’s works has encouraged forgery in ours. Seldom in the past thirty years has an auction of Canadian art not included at least one painting ‘by,’ ‘attrib-uted to,’ or ‘after’ Krieghoff.”⁹ The sincerest form of fl attery is forgery.

Robertson Davies, a twentieth-century fi ction writer who chronicled the doubtful cultural aspirations of early Canadians, quietly amplifi ed the Krieghoff effect. Davies included in his personal lineage some vague Dutch ancestors alongside his Welsh and English origins. Dutch characters appear in his novels in genre roles, as sidelined offi cials or merry great-grandmoth-ers, but his deployment of them as characters is telling, and useful for their illumination of Canada’s attitude to culture. In Davies’ novel What’s Bred in the Bone, the critic and art collector Francis Cornish is invited to work in

collusion with a German countess on an art fraud scheme during the time of the German Reich. When Cornish says that he is not entirely comfort-able marching under “the Devil’s banner,”he is reminded rather sharply that he can do so and learn a great deal, or he can return to Canada, “back to your frozen country, with its frozen art, and paint winter lakes and wind-blown pine trees, to which the Devil is understandably indifferent.”¹⁰ Cornish chooses instead to learn from the Devil and thus gains enormous knowledge about art, which is tested when he is asked to “‘go to the Neth-erlands and kill a man’” (metaphorically speaking) who is trying to sell to the Reich a fake painting, one that is claimed to be made by Hubertus van Eyck.¹¹ This passage in the novel brings together the same phlegmatic assumptions previously suggested about the Dutch and Canadians. Francis is chosen for his knowledge of art but also because he possesses “‘a very nice strain of common sense’” enhanced by his family background in bank-ing, for bankers “‘manage to look and sound so trustworthy, even when they are not.’”¹² Dutch bankers, if one is to believe the Canadian ING com-mercials, are especially trustworthy.

In dealing with the elegant and hospitable Dutch Ministry of Art, who are most interested in whether the disputed painting is real or fake because “‘a great masterpiece by Hubertus van Eyck was a national treasure and could not leave the country,’”¹³ Cornish must exert more than colonial dexterity.

The judge in charge of the inquiry, appointed by the Dutch government and named Huygens (to remind readers of the famous seventeenth-century Dutch mathematician), “looked precisely as a judge should” and mirrors Cornish, who behaves precisely as an expert should.¹⁴ Cornish proves that the painting is not the work of a Dutch Master but a fake by pointing out that it includes as an iconographical detail a New World monkey, “‘unknown in Europe until the sixteenth century.’”¹⁵ Because Hubertus van Eyck died in 1426, it is not possible that he was the painter; the “New World monkey”

introduces the appropriate measure of both doubt and proof. In this novel, Canadian Francis Cornish and the Dutch match one another in terms of their steely determination to sort true from false, but also in their business-like approach to the problem. As refl ectors, investigators, and observers, neither Cornish nor the Dutch are seduced by the Devil or his banner, as if to foreshadow the canny Canadian investors who will choose ING over other, less reliable banks. Objective if interested, both Dutch and Canadian are characterized as introverts that hold their own counsel. Not so the poor Flemish buffoon who faked the picture and was humiliated by Cornish and the Dutch jury. His end is both literal and metaphorical. “‘He lived in Amsterdam in one of those lovely old houses on a canal. You know how they have projecting mounts for cranes hanging over the canal bank, so that in the old days those merchant houses could have goods hauled up to the top fl oor for storage? Picturesque old things. It seems Letztpfennig hanged himself on his crane, right out over the canal.’”¹⁶ Not quite Dutch, Letztpfennig (last penny) has a German name and a ‘Flemish’ provenance;

he does not possess the impenetrable surface of the Dutch judge and the Canadian art master, who share the inscrutable assets of cultural dexterity and cultural “blankness.”

Robertson Davies’ most autobiographical novel, Murther and Walking Spirits, traces his own family background, including his mother’s descent from a Dutch immigrant who moved fi rst to Pennsylvania and then to Ontario, Canada. In that unveiling of protagonist Gil Gilmartin’s family history, the Dutch ancestors depicted are forced by their author to represent a national type. The Vermuelens are “cautious,” “strong on the dignity of cousins,”and determined survivors.¹⁷ When it seems that the American

Robertson Davies’ most autobiographical novel, Murther and Walking Spirits, traces his own family background, including his mother’s descent from a Dutch immigrant who moved fi rst to Pennsylvania and then to Ontario, Canada. In that unveiling of protagonist Gil Gilmartin’s family history, the Dutch ancestors depicted are forced by their author to represent a national type. The Vermuelens are “cautious,” “strong on the dignity of cousins,”and determined survivors.¹⁷ When it seems that the American