making a list, checking it twice

Is Canada boring? I think it was during one of our first classes that Susan mentioned that one of our candidates for “Greatest Canadian” was the guy who invented the zipper. I think she may actually have been confusing CBC’s Greatest Canadian contest with its list of Greatest Canadian Inventions, but no matter. In addition to the zipper, the latter list boasts our country’s claims to the automatic lubricating cup, the caulking gun, the fog horn, instant mashed potatoes, the green garbage bag, the paint roller, the Wonderbra, and standard time, among others. Canada has a reputation for obsessing over its own cultural identity, or lack thereof, and one of the results of this anxiety seems be a prevalence of excessive cataloguing. From the top 10 Canadians, to the top 50 Canadian songs, we are a country of list-makers.

Love him or hate him, Douglas Coupland seems to have put his finger on this tendency with his bafflingly popular Souvenir of Canada books (and now, film!). In them, Coupland takes a stab at defining the Canadian identity by assembling a seemingly random collection of what he calls “intuitively Canadian” objects in photographic form. These objects include everything from Kraft dinner and stubby beer bottles to plastic geese and medicare. Notwithstanding the broad and highly subjective statements Coupland is making about our collective psyche, I find the list-making tactic a seductive approach to the problem of identity, and it reminds me of some of the topics we’ve been discussing in relation to boredom.

In his introductory section on Boredom and Modernity, Lars Svendsen writes about the increase in boredom as a factor of society’s failure as a conveyor of meaning. He says that we become socialized within an “overall meaning” (aka, culture), and that this overall meaning “gives meaning to the individual elements in our lives” (22). But, he asks, when the overall meaning has disappeared, what happens to the status of the cultural products that supposedly bear a relation to this larger concept? Do they maintain any sort of unified influence on a culture? (Do things still thing??? [23]).

As Canadians, we seem to think they do. By making lists of all the things that supposedly make us Canadian, we are engaging in a desperate attempt to construct meaning out of the mundane bits and pieces that make up our everyday lives. If plastic geese and maple syrup say something important about our relation to the world, then perhaps they, and by extension we, aren't as boring as one might think. But to what extent does this really work? Or perhaps a better question is, to what extent do the items on these lists actually constitute meaning, rather than simply information? (Svendsen makes this distinction on page 29). I might be intrigued to know that a Canadian invented the caulking gun (or not), but I’m not sure what possessing this piece of information does for my sense of national identity. If nothing else, for the five minutes I spent reading the Greatest Canadian Invention list, I wasn’t bored.

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This is a student blog for ENGL 465 at Simon Fraser University.