Nowhere as an idiom

The concept of “Nowhere” exists throughout Canadian literature. Nowhere is a relatively obscure geographic and demographic territory with little historical baggage, which presents a few challenges (and some opportunities). It’s a blank slate with space waiting to be filled. Noah Richler presents this pseudo-archetype in This is My Country, What’s Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada, in which he examines the CanLit scene by way of interviewing prominent (and not) Canadian authors and attempts to build a survey of common themes throughout Canadian writing.

Guy Vanderhague’s The Englishman’s Boy is a good example of taking Nowhere and making it universally readable by establishing parallel story lines in an abstract historical setting and in Hollywood, California. Margaret Atwood does the same thing in Oryx and Crake, a post-plague dystopian novel essentially set in Nowhere, North America.

I think Nowhere, in addition to being an archetype, embodies a personal, existential state of transition. One of Richler’s interviewees describes the tendency for those in Nowhere to latch on to foreign instantiations of domestically abstract objects, possibly in an attempt to create a sense of locality, neighbourhood, but generally a sense of Somewhere. A car is an abstraction in Canada because there are no Canadian car manufacturers. I can’t think of an equivalent personal example worth writing down, but such examples do exist. The immigrant novel is about taking Nowhere and filling it with familiar things to give the sense of Somewhere. This is impossible, of course, if you don’t have a sense of Somewhere. The sense of being Nowhere creates a yearning to be elsewhere, but being elsewhere isn’t logical unless it leads you Somewhere. It’s a frightening, infinitely iterative spiral. So, maybe it’s best to “… just generate enough silence to make time stand still” (Richler quotes Douglas Coupland’s Hey Nostradamus!).

In a way, then, I think Nowhere is also an idiom. Nowhere is distinct in Canadian literature and impossible to directly translate. I think one’s own existential state of Nowhere is also idiomatic: is it possible to directly express your own Nowhere or Somewhere? I’m terrible at it, but I think most people probably are. Somewhere, as a place one strives to be, is inherently abstract.