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Imagining Toronto
In Imagining Toronto, Amy Lavender Harris ventures deep into the imagined city — the Toronto of fiction, poetry, and essays — where she dowses for meaning in the literature of the city on the lake as its inhabitants understand, remember, and dream it. By tracing Toronto’s literary genealogies from their origins in First Nations stories to today’s graphic novels, Harris delineates a great city’s portrayal in its literature, where the place of dwelling is coloured by the joy and the suffering, the love and the sorrows, of the people who have played out their lives on the written page. Through tales of the city’s neighbourhoods and towers, its ravines and wild places, its role as a multicultural city, as a place of work and leisure, Harris reminds us that the reality of Toronto has been captured by its writers with a depth and complexity that go far beyond the reductive clichés of Toronto as either a provincial “Hogtown” or a pretentious “world class” city. Michael Ondaatje once noted that “before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined.” Imagining Toronto shows just how richly and completely it has been, if only we would look.
Shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize
Shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize
- GenresCanadaNonfictionAcademic
300 pages, Paperback
First published October 16, 2010
3 people are currently reading
71 people want to read
About the author
Amy Lavender Harris
3 books14 followersAmy Lavender Harris is the author of Imagining Toronto (Mansfield Press, 2010), which was shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in Canadian literary criticism and won the Award of Merit, the highest honour given to a book at the Heritage Toronto Awards. Her next book, The Space Between Us, explores lived multiculturalisms in Canadian cities.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 1, 2011
Amy Lavender Harris’ Imagining Toronto is one of the best books I’ve read this year, blowing my mind with its gorgeous prose, fascinating facts, stunning narrative, and sheer readability– I was absolutely lost inside it. Which is fitting for a book whose author/narrator implores her reader to: “descend until we lose our bearings, until the landscape merges with the base of the bridge, and the sounds of trains, traffic and the river grow almost indistinguishable from one another. We have reached the city at the centre of the map: let us begin.”
Though its bibliography is 24 pages long, Imagining Toronto is no catalogue, or dry academic treatise, but instead it is a story, and the story is a city (and the city is a story, but we could go on like this forever). Harris has not merely written a book about Toronto, but she has written the city itself, from the depths of its ravines to the tip of the CN Tower, 1815 feet up in the sky. Her raw materials are the city’s fictions, and the city is rendered by these poems and stories in glorious concreteness.
Though it was fascinating to realize the volume of literature that has been written about Toronto, to encounter books I’m familiar with (The Robber Bride, Moody Food), books I need to reread urgently (Headhunter), and books I simply must read now (What We All Long For, The Torontonians etc.), the greatest delight of Imagining Toronto was what these fictions had to tell me about the city itself. About its geography– the true location of Cabbagetown, for example. About the infamous Ward slum (finally razed with New City Hall) which Harris intriguingly refers to not as the city’s “other”, but as its shadow. And about the migration of its residents westward toward Kensington Market, and then eventually out to the suburbs. About multiculturalism, which Harris shows through various works is our “creation myth”, suggesting more productive ways to understand our neighbours and negotiate this space we all share. She writes about situations in which fact and fictions fail to gel, in particular with the portrayal of Toronto’s homeless populations in works such as Carol Shields’ Unless and Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig, and the virtual silence in our stories from characters who’d reflect the reality of homeless people’s lives.
Harris is utterly in command of her material, her footnotes populated with engaging asides. She leads her readers on a tour across Toronto’s varied topography, through its neighbours, and along its “desire lines” (“despite their lyrical nomenclature, we owe these cartographies of desire not to poets, but to transportation engineers [...who] used the term to refer to the informal footpaths worn by pedestrians deviating from paved pathways…”). She writes about “Desire’s Dark Side”, and highlights that missing children are prominent in the city’s history and in its stories– Shoeshine Boy and Barbara Gowdy’s Helpless among others. We are taken to the Toronto Islands (the number of which, I was surprised to learn, is anybody’s guess), and not only learn of the stories the islands have told, but the story of the islands themselves, and of the artists and writers who’ve lived there. In “City Limits”, Harris highlights another disparity between fact and fiction– “The Myth of the Monocultural Suburb.” And what it means that so many places once at the limits of the city have now been absorbed into the city proper.
Just as you have to walk a city to gets its sense, so too do you have to actually read this book to understand its comprehensiveness. References are current to August 2010, and include recent books such as Alissa York’s Fauna. (And though the works within Imagining Toronto seem an exhaustive list, Harris includes an ever more complete Toronto Library on her website.) One gets the impression that this is the kind of book an author could have gone on writing forever (Volume II, anyone??), but reading it is a similar experience. With every page, we discover a new dimension of the city to explore, another book to add to our list to-be-read, and when we reach the conclusion, we realize we’ve been transported somewhere new.
Or perhaps we’ve been here all along, but we’ve only just starting noticing, and imagining. And then we realize that noticing and imagining are so often the very same thing.
Though its bibliography is 24 pages long, Imagining Toronto is no catalogue, or dry academic treatise, but instead it is a story, and the story is a city (and the city is a story, but we could go on like this forever). Harris has not merely written a book about Toronto, but she has written the city itself, from the depths of its ravines to the tip of the CN Tower, 1815 feet up in the sky. Her raw materials are the city’s fictions, and the city is rendered by these poems and stories in glorious concreteness.
Though it was fascinating to realize the volume of literature that has been written about Toronto, to encounter books I’m familiar with (The Robber Bride, Moody Food), books I need to reread urgently (Headhunter), and books I simply must read now (What We All Long For, The Torontonians etc.), the greatest delight of Imagining Toronto was what these fictions had to tell me about the city itself. About its geography– the true location of Cabbagetown, for example. About the infamous Ward slum (finally razed with New City Hall) which Harris intriguingly refers to not as the city’s “other”, but as its shadow. And about the migration of its residents westward toward Kensington Market, and then eventually out to the suburbs. About multiculturalism, which Harris shows through various works is our “creation myth”, suggesting more productive ways to understand our neighbours and negotiate this space we all share. She writes about situations in which fact and fictions fail to gel, in particular with the portrayal of Toronto’s homeless populations in works such as Carol Shields’ Unless and Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig, and the virtual silence in our stories from characters who’d reflect the reality of homeless people’s lives.
Harris is utterly in command of her material, her footnotes populated with engaging asides. She leads her readers on a tour across Toronto’s varied topography, through its neighbours, and along its “desire lines” (“despite their lyrical nomenclature, we owe these cartographies of desire not to poets, but to transportation engineers [...who] used the term to refer to the informal footpaths worn by pedestrians deviating from paved pathways…”). She writes about “Desire’s Dark Side”, and highlights that missing children are prominent in the city’s history and in its stories– Shoeshine Boy and Barbara Gowdy’s Helpless among others. We are taken to the Toronto Islands (the number of which, I was surprised to learn, is anybody’s guess), and not only learn of the stories the islands have told, but the story of the islands themselves, and of the artists and writers who’ve lived there. In “City Limits”, Harris highlights another disparity between fact and fiction– “The Myth of the Monocultural Suburb.” And what it means that so many places once at the limits of the city have now been absorbed into the city proper.
Just as you have to walk a city to gets its sense, so too do you have to actually read this book to understand its comprehensiveness. References are current to August 2010, and include recent books such as Alissa York’s Fauna. (And though the works within Imagining Toronto seem an exhaustive list, Harris includes an ever more complete Toronto Library on her website.) One gets the impression that this is the kind of book an author could have gone on writing forever (Volume II, anyone??), but reading it is a similar experience. With every page, we discover a new dimension of the city to explore, another book to add to our list to-be-read, and when we reach the conclusion, we realize we’ve been transported somewhere new.
Or perhaps we’ve been here all along, but we’ve only just starting noticing, and imagining. And then we realize that noticing and imagining are so often the very same thing.
December 28, 2012
Fascinating read. I had no idea the extent of books, poems, and essays written based in Toronto. Sure, I've read a lot of the usual suspects...Margaret Atwood, Hugh Garner, Michael Ondaatje, Warren Dunford, but the 24 pages of Sources at the back of the novel gives you an idea of how much is out there. Imagine the Can Lit course you took in high school - and make that a Tor Lit. Amy Lavender Harris covers many recurring themes found in literary Toronto: city of ravines, city of neighbourhoods, city of multi-cultures, city verses suburbia, topics that anyone who lives in Toronto has no choice but to engage in. There are so many books I now want to read, and first I am going to start with M.G. Vassanji's No New Land.
December 1, 2011
Lyrical, intelligent, a complete joy to read. Makes you fall in love with Toronto, and revel in our rich literary history. Still, Harris does not spare skewering some common misconceptions about homelessness, work, sex, class, and much more. Steer your eyes away from the cover, and dive in.
October 8, 2024
A journey through Toronto through the written word. A book to read if you want to add to your to read list. It had many Toronto books I have read and many I am curious to read.
May 21, 2015
Picked it up from the new bookshelf in our local library. An impressive book that looks at how the city of Toronto has been imagined by Canadian authors in both fiction and poetry. Drawing from a diverse collection of writers Lavender-Harris weaves together narratives about the city and how it has been understood over time. An important book for anyone interested in the history of the city.
"Warkentin writes, "a key difficulty in constructing the city's metaphors is the handling of meaning from one generation to the next, or across barriers of birth, class and circumstance. For a large part of its history, Toronto has been in a state of near-amnesia seeking desperately for its own memory." 20
"The secret, then, to Toronto's identity isn't to be found in the relentless building and rebuilding of its structures, in civic self-aggrandizement nor in its inhabitants' disquieting and unceasing quest for visceral entertainments, but in our connection to (and displacement from) the city's subterranean terrain, our own half-buried past and half-articulated dreams." 32
"Still, in the inaugural issue of Taddle Creek (December 1997), Alfred Holden observes optimistically, "It's such a Toronto thing to do. You take something beautiful, make it wretched, and bury it. Then, a hundred years later, recognizing both error and opportunity, you dig it up and make it bloom." 36
"At the same time, the ravines define more than Toronto's topography: they are the repository of the city's memory and the symbolic seat of its conscience, a tangled warren of nightmares and desires played out in subterranean shadow. Descending into the ravines it like touring the urban subconscious, a labyrinth of the city's secrets exposed to sudden view." 39
"In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau refers to "the long poem of walking" as a series of rhetorical strategies expressed in physical space: at street level the body turns, detours and returns in the same way a phrase manifests, inverts and completes itself on the printed page. In this sense walking is at once lyrical and vividly metaphorical: we leap ahead, retrace our steps, omit passages, take shortcuts, lose ourselves, experience surprise and become open to discovery. In short, we walk the same way we read-and for that matter-write." 120
"But if the Ward was the white, middle-class city's Other, it should be understood not as the "respectable" city's opposite, but rather as its visible shadow. In many ways the Ward was a projection of characteristics deemed incongruent with the public image of Toronto the Good, even if in truth it was a much a part of the city's character as Orange parades, church picnics and prohibition." 152
"In The Robber Bride...Old money whispers, new money shouts: one of the lessons Roz though she had to learn, once. Keep your voice down, Roz, went her inner censor. Low tones, low profile, beige clothing: anything to keep from being spotted, located among the pushing hordes of new money, narrow-eyed, nervous money, bad-taste money, chip-on-the-shoulder money." 170
"The front's been ripped out and glassed over, the lawn is paving-stone. There's an antique child's rocking horse in the window, a threadbare quilt, a wooden-headed doll with a battered face. One-time throwout, recycled as memory." 186
"They make the story up as they go along, and as a result the city they create through narrative is continually shifting and often at odds with itself." 190
"Despite the obliterating effects of three centuries of subsequent urban development, evidence ranging from spear fragments to entire villages dug up periodically out of backyards and construction sites offers silent testimony to the long-standing presence of Toronto's original inhabitants. The only artifacts missing from the popular narrative are Aboriginals themselves-and their stories." 209
"Warkentin writes, "a key difficulty in constructing the city's metaphors is the handling of meaning from one generation to the next, or across barriers of birth, class and circumstance. For a large part of its history, Toronto has been in a state of near-amnesia seeking desperately for its own memory." 20
"The secret, then, to Toronto's identity isn't to be found in the relentless building and rebuilding of its structures, in civic self-aggrandizement nor in its inhabitants' disquieting and unceasing quest for visceral entertainments, but in our connection to (and displacement from) the city's subterranean terrain, our own half-buried past and half-articulated dreams." 32
"Still, in the inaugural issue of Taddle Creek (December 1997), Alfred Holden observes optimistically, "It's such a Toronto thing to do. You take something beautiful, make it wretched, and bury it. Then, a hundred years later, recognizing both error and opportunity, you dig it up and make it bloom." 36
"At the same time, the ravines define more than Toronto's topography: they are the repository of the city's memory and the symbolic seat of its conscience, a tangled warren of nightmares and desires played out in subterranean shadow. Descending into the ravines it like touring the urban subconscious, a labyrinth of the city's secrets exposed to sudden view." 39
"In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau refers to "the long poem of walking" as a series of rhetorical strategies expressed in physical space: at street level the body turns, detours and returns in the same way a phrase manifests, inverts and completes itself on the printed page. In this sense walking is at once lyrical and vividly metaphorical: we leap ahead, retrace our steps, omit passages, take shortcuts, lose ourselves, experience surprise and become open to discovery. In short, we walk the same way we read-and for that matter-write." 120
"But if the Ward was the white, middle-class city's Other, it should be understood not as the "respectable" city's opposite, but rather as its visible shadow. In many ways the Ward was a projection of characteristics deemed incongruent with the public image of Toronto the Good, even if in truth it was a much a part of the city's character as Orange parades, church picnics and prohibition." 152
"In The Robber Bride...Old money whispers, new money shouts: one of the lessons Roz though she had to learn, once. Keep your voice down, Roz, went her inner censor. Low tones, low profile, beige clothing: anything to keep from being spotted, located among the pushing hordes of new money, narrow-eyed, nervous money, bad-taste money, chip-on-the-shoulder money." 170
"The front's been ripped out and glassed over, the lawn is paving-stone. There's an antique child's rocking horse in the window, a threadbare quilt, a wooden-headed doll with a battered face. One-time throwout, recycled as memory." 186
"They make the story up as they go along, and as a result the city they create through narrative is continually shifting and often at odds with itself." 190
"Despite the obliterating effects of three centuries of subsequent urban development, evidence ranging from spear fragments to entire villages dug up periodically out of backyards and construction sites offers silent testimony to the long-standing presence of Toronto's original inhabitants. The only artifacts missing from the popular narrative are Aboriginals themselves-and their stories." 209
August 15, 2020
A good starting point for readers eager to discover that contrary to popular opinion, scribes have always been writing about Toronto.
And a vast improvement on Atwood's wildly narrow scope in Survival, with dozens of books explored, and more name-dropped, that will open new avenues of exploration.
And a vast improvement on Atwood's wildly narrow scope in Survival, with dozens of books explored, and more name-dropped, that will open new avenues of exploration.
April 6, 2011
A bit heavy going but a thorough look at books that have featured Toronto in their plots. Will borrow again when I need more reading ideas.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews