It's Just a List

[Denis Salter]

Dear Eric and others,

I think that you are (condescendingly, if only unwitting) under-
estimating the public. The public regularly makes choices about
which plays, operas, ballets, museums, galleries they will take
in.  I refuse to think these are uninformed choices. I refuse to
believe, since I see no evidence for it, that the public has so
naturalised its aesthetic values -- or had its aesthetic values
so naturalised -- that it isn't aware, at some level of self-
recognition, why they like something, why they like only part
of something, why they don't like something and so on and so on.

You suggest someone might stumble across a volume of Canuck plays or
a Canuck novel or a collection of Canuck stories. No doubt this
is how things happen. I am a book addict.  When I go to bookstores,
I look for specific books, I browse, I have a coffee and read
parts of several books, and, often, I find new books that I didn't
even known had been published which, as it turns out, I really want
to read. Nationalism, Ten Top Forties Lists--yes, probably,
maybe, though I am not entirely sure about this, they 'influence'
my 'naturalised' tastes; sometimes, on the contrary, I won't even
LOOK at books because they are on somebody's IMPORTANT list.
In brief, what I am saying, is that reading books, seeing plays,
and so on and so on, are a function of multifactorial issues,
all them from acquired/innate, recently learned, and non-essentialised
aesthetic values, to whether or not I can afford the time, afford
the ticket, and book a babysitter.

Final point: why should a play be deemed important because it's
a Canadian play?  That is not the way or why I read a play, see
a play, or direct a play. "Canadian," as Richard Plant suggests,
is a category, a box, a boundary.  If you want that particular
boundary or whatever, enjoy it.   If you don't want that articular
boundary to dictate your choices, become aware of the whys and
wherefores of autre ways to choose.

I think that Ten Best Lists are a good idea. If you are a curmudgeonly
type, as I am, you will probably do anything, short of building
a pipe bomb, not to see, read, glance at even one of the books
listed. You've made a choice and you know why: you are a curmudgeon.
And you go elsewhere. These lists, however,do much to expose the values
that a given community shares.  One of the, perhaps only, interesting
parts of the Gazette is its Saturday list of the favourite non-fiction
and non-fiction.  The choice and ranking are based on a survey of
various Mtl. bookstores and how many of each title has been sold.
The English list and the French list, side by side, are indeed two
solitudes (as McLennan really meant the term, taken from Rilke). That
is, there is the possibility of difference and of crossovers.
Maybe the crossovers have become 'natural' to those who read both
languages with facility. What, I wonder, are the *non-arbitrary*
values that form the English list and that form the French list?
Maybe a gifted, smart, articulate, and impassioned critic like
Mark Abley would be able to tell us.

A la prochaine,

Denis.


Denis Salter
Department of English
McGill University
853 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 2T6
(514) 487 7309
E-Mail  CYWS at MUSICA.MCGILL.CA