Because the border is unguarded and the distinctions between American and Canadian cultures were becoming increasingly blurred, some differentiation of their characters was necessary to distinguish them in order to maintain sovereignty. This sovereignty was a last bid to avoid falling prey to the full 'schizophrenia' of continentalist cosmopolitanism. In a text titled Americanadians, Boyle tried to dissect the distinction by rendering each nation in caricatured form: "[A]mericans are perhaps the most naive, bungling, obnoxious and disgusting people who ever blundered into a position of enormous wealth and power in the history of the earth. Canadians by contrast are a meek, mild and foolish lot who are too frightened even to blunder, captives of circumstance, ashamed of their lot, indecisive, greedy but lazy, and envious of their neighbours. Canadians believe they are
Americans."201 What makes it worse is that the Americans that Canadians believe they are, are not even real Americans. "I think it's quite appropriate that Walt Disney was a Canadian from Homesville, Ontario, because who better than a Canadian could conceive of Disneyland, the actualization of the American dream. Canadians live the American dream. Americans live in the American reality," Boyle would joke.202 Mesmerizing as this virtual reality may be, Canadians frequently snap out of this empathic contagion to realize that they are not actually Americans, not even the simulated kind. This tends to cause them deep embarrassment so they dream of overcoming their perceived mediocrity by becoming successful abroad. Such a strategy ends badly. "Canadians live the
201 John Boyle, "Americanadians," Typescript. (Boyle Fonds: AGO archives, 1973), 2. 202 John Boyle, "Canada as Colony," Typescript. (Boyle Fonds: AGO archives, undated), 7.
American dream, but, significantly, unsuccessfully."203 Both the phenomenal and the fantasy life of Canadians has been a failed utopian dream of a foreign land. Success requires a degree of brutality, discipline, industriousness and inventiveness that Canadians are typically devoid of. Such debilitating mediocrity pushes most of the country's citizens into a bland parody of life. "We are scavengers and parasites on the prey of Americans... [...] Americans are hunters and killers, and we for all our evil thoughts are not. We are losers. We are failed Americans. Canadians are the most mediocre people on earth, and it is in the distinctive Canadian character that the heavy sense of failure and mediocrity manifests itself."204
Boyle's thinking here is not esoteric. It was a common way of thinking about Canada among many of the country's artists.205 Written at approximately the same time, Margaret Atwood's Survival (1972) surveys Canadian literature and suggests that the road to Modernity is paved with losers. "The heroes survive, but just barely; they are born losers, and their failure to do anything but keep alive has nothing to do with the Maritime Provinces or 'regionalism'. It's pure Canadian, from sea to sea."206 Boyle could be
mocking or embracing this. Statements like: "I love losers, underdogs, cowards and Canadians. May the day never come when Canada is a nation blinded by its own propaganda. May the day never come when we can no longer look with shame at our
203 John Boyle, "Americanadians," Typescript. (Boyle Fonds: AGO archives, 1973), 3. 204 Ibid., 3.
205 For examples see the essays edited by Ian Lumsden in Close the 49th Parallel etc.; The
Americanization of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970). An obsession with Canadian mediocrity frequently appeared in 20 Cents as well. The Canadian hero as loser was also a common feature in films such as Goin' Down The Road (1970), The Rowdyman (1972), Paperback Hero (1973), and The Hard Part Begins (1974).
history and humility toward our future," are saturated by a sensibility too hyperbolic for the coolness of irony, yet too mocking to be entirely sympathetic.207
Failure, then, becomes a matter of diagnosis as well as a strategic tool or form of inoculation. To fail to fail would be to become American. To exceed in failure would be to become more Canadian. But what would come from this severe exaggeration of failure? For Boyle, the answer seemed to be found in a form of anarchic regionalist- nationalism that was born from the shock of realizing how severely alienated Canadians were from their own immanent existence. Rather than resulting in sober realism, what occurs is a delirious artificiality, but one that is severely materialist. Like the Group of Seven, the London Regionalists founded their own, even more inchoate, micro-society.208 And, like the Group, their nationalism was ultimately based primarily on an obsessive drive toward the in-itself and the surface.209 This surface is the outside of America. A text written in 1970 helps to clarify Boyle's aversion to American interiority, which he links to mind, suffocation, a foetus and guts all of which are in a state of movement and action:210
...Yankee go home, get out of my country. You're too fucking efficient. I don't need your money. I don't need your mind. I don't need your beauty. I don't need your philosophy. Draft dodger, fuck off. You want to bring your innate ugliness to my country. [...] Intellectual refugee stay home. Suffocate in your own horseshit. Go home and destroy us from your cybernetic foetus. Don't come here and make me destroy myself. You are a cancer. You yankee bastard.
207 John Boyle, "Americanadians," Typescript. (Boyle Fonds: AGO archives, 1973), 5.
208 This would include the members of the Nihilist Spasm Band along with Jack Chambers, Tony Urquhart etc.
209 See chapter one of this thesis.
210 In reading this text, it is also worth noting that Trudeau had described his reform of the country as a 'cybernetic revolution' starting at least in 1968 with the publication of Federalism and the French Canadians.
[...] Get the fuck out of my loser virgin country because I love your guts. You have nothing to offer me. You are the most blatant human beings on the face of the earth.211
The failure to be an American is the failure to embrace the stance of action. There are two possible options then: to embrace a passivity that simulates action, which is what the majority of Canadians do, simply continuing on as failed Americans (or British or French or...), or to embrace impenetrability and abstraction. Though never stated in these terms by the artist, it is the latter option that I believe his work formally operates within.