Any discussion of a national literature misses the point. The subjects of great writing might be local, but the themes are universal.

In last weekend’s Globe and Mail Books section, Ken McGoogan called brazenly for what many cultural architects in this country have been tacitly suggesting for a generation: that we finally embrace the disturbing myopia of looking “at literature through the prism of nationality.”

His comments were sparked by the marginal debate over the Canadianness of Ed O’Loughlin, the Dublin-based writer whose novel Not Unkind and Not Untrue is being extolled by some as the only Canadian contender for the Man Booker Prize; it turns out that O’Loughlin was born in Toronto and lived in Edmonton until the age of six.

McGoogan suggests that a novel he enjoyed about the Franklin expedition, The Terror, written by an American, should be considered Canadian Literature because, set as it is in the Arctic, it “is far more deserving of specifically Canadian attention than the majority of the books that, come autumn, we will see short-listed for this country’s most prestigious literary prizes.”

It is not only the nationality of the author, therefore, that locates a book within the Canadian literary tradition; it is the nationality of the book. What can nationalize a book? According to McGoogan, it is whether or not it speaks directly to a people. So he has no problem declaring that the still-very-much-unpublished novel by American Richard Ford “will belong to Canadian Literature” because it is set in Saskatchewan.

Besides the obvious lunacy of hinging a literary tradition on prize culture, McGoogan – here more Mr. Magoo – would have us perniciously narrow the gaze of our appreciation and “take the nationalist path.” By his logic, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar has more relevance to Italians than his other plays because, since it is set in Rome, it can be “claimed” as Italian Literature.

Not only are his remarks wildly offensive to readers and writers in this country – that what should interest us is the local, the inert, and the solipsistic – they represent, to this writer’s mind, an utterly evil interpretive frame: one that sees a work of literature as having nationalist qualities.

A poet may belong to a nation, but a poem may not; for even though its subject may be local, its object is universal: the human spirit.

And though all writing will inevitably be inflected with the accents, cadences, and rhythms of a particular place – the idiosyncrasies that transubstantiate a bit of ink and paper into a living thing – what makes literature our species’ most precious institution is its ability to connect souls through space and time, a living bridge between two unlike lives.

McGoogan writes that he does not believe that Canada, as Pico Iyer suggested in his 2001 Hart House Lecture, has a postnational literature. Neither do I. Postnational literature requires that our pasts be unremembered, that we divorce ourselves from the literature and histories of our forebears and neighbours, so that we may go forth afresh together, bound as newborns in a shared amnesia.

But literature – great literature – solved this problem at its genesis. Literature needs neither to forget its nationality, nor be predetermined by it, because all literature is supernational; it rallies and transports us to a further country where the governments that ghettoize our kind have no dominion.

McGoogan’s confusions spring from a misunderstanding of how national traditions come about. In no way am I proposing that Canada doesn’t have a native literary tradition, or that discussing what may or may not be located within it is inappropriate. But where McGoogan sees literary tradition as a prescriptive process, I see it as descriptive. Literary traditions aren’t deliberately established by writers cleaving to a tribal ideal; they evolve by the contagious influence of singular, transportive voices, often from other countries. This is why Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses calls literature “the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man,” not “the eternal affirmation of the spirit of the nation-state.”

What we – indeed, what any citizen – should value and be drawn to in literature is the artistic accomplishments of its finest practitioners. One thinks of Alice Munro, who may very well be the finest prose writer working today in the English language. And though her work is deeply rooted in Southwestern Ontario, to read her is to come in contact with a profoundly universal vision of a shared humanity. As Ralph Ellison said of William Faulkner, “for all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man.” So too is every master.

McGoogan isn’t alone. Some of the finest writers of the last century have succumbed, at their peril, to the dulling influence of “looking at literature through the prism of nationality” rather than judging its worthiness of our attention by its aesthetic merit alone. Randall Jarrell, an otherwise superb reader of letters, wrote this in his essay “Is American Poetry American?”:

Contrast the English attitude toward American poetry with the English attitude toward Canadian poetry. You may say, ‘What attitude toward Canadian poetry? They never mention it.’ Exactly – it is taken for granted as a negligible provincial variant of English poetry, worthy neither of antagonism nor remark.

He wrote this at a time when Canada was producing poems by Avison, Layton, Page, Cohen, Nowlan, Purdy, Newlove, Atwood, and Ondaatje, to name just a few; poems that Jarrell would have been able to enjoy had he not shared McGoogan’s reading style.

The central pathology of the 20th century was the sort of nationalism McGoogan now encourages; I’d have thought those hundred years a sufficient dissuasion.