‘There and not there’

Abstract

Where better — indeed where else — to begin an exploration of this subject than with that moment in The Diviners which Bob Kroetsch considers ‘has become a touchstone passage in Canadian writing’.¹ Morag Gunn, still looking for a centre of origination, goes to Scotland, wondering whether there she might find a sense of her true ‘home’:

McRaith points across the firth, to the north.

‘Away over there is Sutherland, Morag Dhu, where your people came from. When do you want to drive there?’ Morag considers.

‘I thought I would have to go. But I guess I don’t after all.’ Why would that be?’

‘The myths are my reality. Something like that. And also, I don’t need to go there because I know now what it was I had to learn here.’

‘What is that?’

‘It’s a deep land here all right,’ Morag says. ‘But it’s not mine, except a long way back. I always thought it was the land of my ancestors, but it is not.’

‘What is, then?’

‘Christie’s real country. Where I was born.’

Myth was the product of [wo]man’s emotion and imagination acted upon by [her] surroundings.

Oxford English Dictionary