A Study of the Salem Quartet Novels of Matt Cohen

FAMILIAL RELATIONSHIPS VIS-À-VIS PLACE AND TIME: A STUDY OF THE SALEM QUARTET NOVELS OF MATT COHEN

Thesis submitted to Bharathidasan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH By

UMA GOVINDARAJAN

Ref. No.018666/Ph.D2/English/Part-Time/October 2007

Under the Supervision of

Dr.V. AYOTHI

Currently Principal, Prof. & Head PG & Research Department of English Thanthai Hans Roever College, Perambalur.

Former Prof. & Head Director, Centre for Canadian Studies Department of English Bharathidasan University, Trichy.

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BHARATHIDASAN UNIVERSITY TRICHY, INDIA

SEPTEMBER 2013

Dr.V. AYOTHI Currently Principal, Prof. & Head PG & Research Department of English Thanthai Hans Roever College,Perambalur. Former Prof. & Head Director,Centre for Canadian Studies Department of English Bharathidasan University, Trichy.

CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that the thesis entitled FAMILIAL RELATIONSHIPS VIS-À-VIS PLACE AND TIME: A STUDY OF THE SALEM QUARTET NOVELS OF MATT COHEN submitted by UMA GOVINDARAJAN is a research work done under my guidance and supervision and I certify that the thesis is fit for submission to Bharathidasan University for a Ph.D. Degree. I certify that this thesis represents independent work on the part of the candidate.

Station: Trichy Date : September 2013 (V. AYOTHI)

UMA GOVINDARAJAN Ref. No.018666/Ph.D2/English/Part-Time/October 2007

DECLARATION

This is to state that the thesis entitled FAMILIAL RELATIONSHIPS VIS-A-

VIS PLACE AND TIME: A STUDY OF THE SALEM QUARTET NOVELS OF

MATT COHEN submitted by me, is a research work done under the guidance and

supervision of Dr.V.AYOTHI, Currently Principal, Prof. & Head, PG & Research

Department of English, Thanthai Hans Roever College, Perambalur and Former Prof. &

Head, Department of English, Bharathidasan University, Trichy, and that the thesis has

not previously formed the basis for the award of any degree, diploma, associate ship,

fellowship or any other similar title.

I also state that the thesis represents independent work on my part.

Station: Trichy Date : September 2013 (UMA GOVINDARAJAN)

CONTENTS

Chapter Title Page No.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I INTRODUCTION 1

II ISSUES BASED ON THE CONCEPT OF PLACE 33

III CONFLICTING CONCEPTS OF TIME 84

IV MAN-WOMAN RELATIONSHIP 125

V THE QUEST FOR IDENTITY 154

VI CONCLUSION 195

WORKS CITED 204

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

At the outset, I submit all my efforts to God, the almighty in earnest reverence and heartfelt gratitude for His boundless blessings which, besides making me physically strong, mentally agile, intellectually sharp and spiritually fortified to complete this

Herculean task on time, illumined what in me was dark.

Next I owe my debt of gratitude in abundant measure to Dr.V.AYOTHI,

Currently Principal, Prof. & Head, PG & Research Department of English, Thanthai Hans

Roever College, Perambalur, and former Prof. & Head, Department of English,

Bharathidasan University, Trichy, my research guide and supervisor for having allowed me to do research in the subject of my choice and interest. It is no exaggeration to put on record that his timely and scholarly guidance with critical insights, necessary and relevant comments and above all, friendly concern that eased off my tension and stress. His attention to every detail of the thesis was meticulous. The enriching experience I had as his research-scholar makes me at once, proud and happy.

I deem it a great blessing that timely help came from Dr. S. GANESAN,

Associate Professor of English, H.H. The Rajah’s College, Pudukkottai – 622 001,

Dr.ANTONYSAMY, Reader in English (Retd.), Government Arts College, Melur-

625106 and Prof. HUDHA KHAN, Head of the PG Department of English (Retd.),

Wakf Board College, Madurai-625020, in the form of reading my initial drafts of the thesis, writing an abstract in Tamil and proposing many useful and valuable suggestions. I am grateful to Mr. R. Kamarraj, Muscat and Mr. Roger Jaggie, U.K. for procuring the necessary primary sources from the United Kingdom.

I remain grateful to Bharathidasan University for its varied services, particularly the services rendered by the librarians-both general and departmental-who extended all support in the selection of secondary sources for my study. Yet another member who richly deserves my heartfelt thanks is Thiru.R.RAVIKUMAR of SUBATHRA

COMPUTER, Madurai, for the neat execution of the initial-draft of this thesis.

I would fail in my duty if I forget to make a mention of the unstinted support and selfless help extended by my husband and my daughter without which the dream of attainment of the highest degree in the academic career would not have been translated into reality. Finally I do thank one and all who, directly or indirectly had helped me in this hard task and whom I have not mentioned by individual names, not because of forgetfulness but because of timelessness and spacelessness.

UMA GOVINDARAJAN

TEXTUAL NOTE

The following abbreviations are used for indicating the name of the novels of Matt

Cohen immediately after some quotations.

DI - The Disinherited

CW - The Colours of War

SSSKM - The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone

FD - Flowers of Darkness

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

Canadian literature, perhaps, the latest to join and adding a glowing feather to the New English Literature is but an amalgamation of two distinct sentiments and cultures—the British and the French. The recent emergence of Canadian writing that appears on the firmament of literary horizon glows like a shining star of a noticeable magnitude which cannot escape even a naked eye. The writers of

Canada and their counterparts in America have begun to attract the attention throughout the world. Canada’s ethnic and cultural diversity is the focal point in its literature with many of its prominent writers focusing on ethnic life. The pointed observation of Parameswari in this regard is worth recording here:

Canadian literature is a literary output arising out of a confluence of the two main streams in the English language-British and American. It is the ‘fruit of the

British seed planted in American soil’; a New literature growing in the North

American continent. Any new literature very soon asserts its nationalism and develops an independent tradition. Canadian literature is no exception to this phenomenon. It gained, down the years, unique identity of its own, transcending cultural and racial barriers. Even as the country emerged as a single nation its literature achieved a new identity. (9)

As K.Balachandran rightly points out in his editor’s note that “though original writings in Canadian Literature have come out, critical materials have yet to come sufficiently” (i), it is felt that a brief analysis of the history of Canadian

Literature will not be out of place in this study. The subalternized voices of the

First Nations people are beginning to be proliferated around the world as an iconoclastic clarion call against the reinforcement of the hegemonic cultural imprints. These submerged, subjugated, and subordinated voices merge to question the established canons of the authority and to assert their presence, identity, and quest for recognition. The important First Nations people are

Indians, Metis, Inuits, and Beothuks in Canada, Aborigines in Australia, Maoris in

New Zealand, Blacks in South Africa, the Welsh in Commonwealth of

Independent States and New Guinea, the Ainu in Japan, Basques in Spain, Lapps or the Saami in Scandinavia and Norway and Torres Strait Islanders in

Queensland. Though the First Nations people are geographically separated, they are politically, socially, culturally and psychologically united. Their identities are localized, but their suffering and the sinning discrimination against them are globalized. They are, by and large, politically weak, territorially subalternized.

Mythopoeic energy, native orature, primitive beliefs, the idea of community, folk elements, cultural roots and an affinity with nature provide a rich resonance to the literary production of the Natives.

Classification of the native writings of all postcolonial countries in the world is a serious problem worth pondering. The term “post colonialism” has been used in many ways by critics and theorists of literature, history, political science, economics, feminism, women studies. It has also been used to describe the process of decolonization of the erstwhile colonies under European domination and control. So people have used the term to describe the internal colonization of the all Can-Americans and aboriginals of USA, Canada, and Australia. The term post colonialism has also been used metaphorically to describe the conditions of women and other marginalized groups like the dalits, lesbians, homosexuals.

The Native writers in Canada who have been submerged in the course of history and hitherto remained voiceless now begin to voice their not unsung but hitherto, unheard melodies. They have been neglected for various reasons and primarily five reasons are noted for this neglect: first European cultural arrogance and attitudes of cultural imperialism and paternalism that initiated and fostered patronizing stereotypes of the Indian; European antipathy and prejudice towards the oral literatures of so-called primitive peoples; the European belief that the

Indian was a vanishing race; the purist attitude of western literary critics towards literature that does not conform totally to their aesthetic criteria; and finally, the difficult problems of translating native literature. The works of the Natives have an aesthetic dimension and sensibility. Their sufferings, protests, aspirations and

visions become universalities that have been particularized within a native consciousness.

The recent emergence of Canadian Native writing poses a zoom point in the global literary arena. It has vitalized the creative literary urge of the Native writers in Canada with its amazing orality of whether the ‘Indian’ was truly a member of the human species has been rethought after the literary output of the

Canadian Native Indians. The Native writers of Canada and the United States receive serious attention throughout the world. Some of the Native poets of

Canada and the United States have had their works translated into more than a dozen of European languages. Native writing, quite different from much of

European literature, has its own roots. For example, the idea that literature is only the province of a select few is now directly antithetical to deeply held understanding in Native cultures. The unheard and the silenced, Canadian Native women writers increasingly correct the misdefinitions in their writings. They write their own stories and personal experiences in which pain is their way of life.

It is now very much evident that the struggle of the Native writers lies not only in their life but also in the literary form. They try to achieve a new form of writing by blending native orature with the current literary development. In this process they are not conventional in their form and language; instead the titles of their works become a larger identity in forms as seen in Slash I am Woman and

Half-breed. They find materials from their own Native history, autobiographical experiences and oral tradition. In narrativising these materials they find a new meta-fictional narrative mode to express their life experience. In articulating the social and cultural struggles, the form gets a vital energy to record their protest and anger. There is also a new merger in the binarism of oral/written, and women body. If the lives of Canadian Native women writers are characterized by double colonization and double dispossession, their writings show the process of decolonization and rewriting with an amazing energy from the subaltern position through the recovery of myth, oral tradition and language by decolonizing the master-narratives. In subverting the mainstream, concepts of genres, history, culture and race, the Native women writers create a new mode of hybridized counter discourse, a third literary and cultural level of opposition, comprising postmodern in their challenges to history, historiography and in their investigations of auto referentiality, intertextuality, rewriting, playful self- reflexivity, irony, allegory, parody and mimicry, postcolonial in the centre/margin debate, place and displacement, language, oral/written history and multiple challenges to Eurocentric world views and post-structural in their creation of counter discourse, language reality dichotomy and textual variations strategies.

In transforming their truth-based experiences into art form, their ‘selves’ become synecdochic and they evolve with “a new genre with realism” in their

‘life-writing’ and ‘self-writing’ modes of expression. In this context, the Native writers come closer to the Afro-American and the Native American writers.

‘Autography’, ‘autogynography’, ‘communo-biography’, ‘autoethnography’ ‘bio- oratory’, ‘bio-mythrography’ and ‘fictionalysis’ are the important terms which may be used to refer to their personal storytelling/storylayering methods in the closer vein of Afro-American and Native American theories/writings of autobiographies.

It is quite interesting to note that in the very beginning Canadian literature was more in French than English. The rise of Quebec patriotism, the Lower

Canada Rebellion of 1839 and the modern system of primary school education sowed the seeds of French Canadian fiction. As Pamela of Richardson is widely accepted as the first British English novel L’ influence d’un live of Philippe Ignace

Francois Aubertde Gospe is widely regarded as the first French Canadian novel.

Influence of French authors particularly that of Balzac, is traceable in the novels of that time which were mostly rural or historical. Father Henri-Raymond Casgrain, one of Quebec’s first literary theorists advocated in as early as 1866, the projection of proper Catholic morality as the one and only goal of literature. But his theory was rejected by authors like Louis Honere Frechette and Arthur Buies who broke the conventions to produce more interesting works.

There was a new dawn in the thirties of the last century with the appearance of a group of authors educated at the Universite Level and Universite de Montreal who built their works on strong psychological and sociological foundation. The writings of Gabrielle Roy and Anne Hebert which for the first time, earned international acclaim largely helped French Canadian literature enter into and find a permanent place in the world literary arena. The turmoil of the second world war, industrialization in the fifties and especially the Quiet Revolution in the sixties of the last century paved the way for the rapid growth of French-Canadian literature and the winning of the coveted Prix Goncourd by Acadian novelist

Antonine Maillet proved a turning point as it drew the global attention towards it though it was still ‘green’ and in its ‘salad days’. Simultaneously there arose an experimental branch of Quebecois literature. The poet Nicole Brossard pioneered this move with his writing in formalist style and Roch Carrier’s story The Hockey

Sweater bringing to limelight the social and cultural tensions between English and

French speakers in Canada.

The voluminous writings of poetry and novels in English which, though a few in quantities were remarkable in quality in the twenties and thirties of the last century and mark the virtual beginning of Canadian literature. F.R.Scott and

A.J.M.Smith as poets and Hugh Mac Lennan and Sinclair Ross as novelists are still considered the pioneers and trend-setters of Canadian Literature. Though

Smith and Mac Lennon preferred to write in different genres the wave-length of their thinking was identical, for, both of them in and through their writing bring to the fore the emerging national culture. Since then Canadian Literature began to expand quantitatively and qualitatively with the inflow of writers like Margaret

Lawrence, Sheila Watson, Mordecai Richler, Margaret Atwood, and Robert

Kroetsch. Dr.Parameswari is all praise for Margaret Lawrence for her “breadth of vision, historical sense in the ‘Eliotean sense’, largeness of texture and above all for breaking away from the narrower patterns of the past which make her unique and distinct”(9).

The dominant theme of Canadian writing is the theme of survival, as exemplified in Margaret Atwood’s most popular work Survival. The theme of survival is closely related to the theme of isolation which the immigrants try to overcome by seeking and establishing their identity. Expatriation is virtually a complex state of mind which includes a longing for the unforgettable and unreadable past, the never-ending struggle to compromise between the self and the new, unfriendly, if not alien, environment, and unshakeable assumption of moral, traditional and cultural superiority of the country of origin over the alien but chosen host-country and above all a strong will to totally reject the forced identities of the new surroundings. The expatriate builds a cocoon around himself as he experiences hostility, dissemination and unfriendliness at every step that he

takes in the adopted country. The irresistible urge in an expatriate to evoke ethnic origins is caused and fueled by above all things, nostalgia.

Canada exists in dialectic of regional and ethnic tension because its mosaic of social regions and ethnic cultures try to retain their own identity. The country itself is a fully transplanted culture--the French, the Jewish, the Polish, the

Ukrainian, the Indian and the English--which still tries for survival and their quest for survival naturally leads them to produce works to establish an identity of their own. Like its history, its literature too, has been growing slowly but steadily and cautiously. It certainly reflects, with photographic accuracy, the on-going struggle of a budding nation to assert itself against the pressures of a mother country and a neighboring giant at the south. Canadian Literature is more akin to Australian literature or other New Zealand literature than to African or Caribbean, Indo-

Anglian Literature. It is important to note that Canadian literature is not produced by a native population as the consequence of the colonial rule or introduction of

English education as in the case of India and Africa. It is the English speaking immigrants, who settled in Canada in search of an oasis to rescue them from the life of suffering and misery in their own homeland that shouldered the responsibility of shaping and enriching Canadian Literature. In fact the early

Canadian Literature in English was produced by the British immigrants whose mother tongue was English.

Richler’s article The Holocaust and After which appeared in the Spectator in 1966 reveals the gravity of the cruel incidents of the past. Margaret Atwood remarks in Survival that “there is a literature-unearthing the buried and forgotten past” (112) and relates this phenomenon to Canadian writers’ desire for roots and origins. Although this cannot be claimed as a uniquely Canadian motif, this digging into the past for roots, however, constitutes a vital necessity in a culture such as Canada, which as a result of being a New Nation suffers from a sense of rootlessness and minimal history that, in turn becomes problematic in its ability to assert a distinctive-rooted-identity. A British or a European writer can write within a culture-literacy tradition that he can trace back through centuries. An American writer can take his tradition for granted without feeling any obligation to define it because in the relatively, older and well-established American culture, the question of tradition is a settled issue. A Canadian writer is always in an unenviable defensive position in regard to his culture-literacy tradition; he is not even sure if it exists at all. As Robert Krotesch remarks: “In America they ask: who am I? Canadians do not ask who they are, they ask, rather ‘if they are’”

(World 91). This is the plight of the Canadians, especially the Jewish Canadians who feel alienated in a foreign land. As the result, the Jewish-Canadian Writers search for their identity, search for their roots, and they strive hard to keep

themselves on par with the gentiles. The painful memories of holocaust haunt the

Jews, especially the Jewish-Canadian writings.

The Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler planned, designed and executed the genocide of Jews. He planned to exterminate the entire Jewish race as part of his plan to conquer the world. By the end of the war in 1945, the Nazis had killed millions of

Jewish men, women and children-over two-thirds of the Jews in Europe. The Nazi persecution of the Jews began after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. The

Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and began a campaign of mass murder against all the Jews of Europe. Special Nazi units followed the rapid advance of

German Army and killed more than a million Jews. Millions of Jews were also imprisoned in concentration camps. Large numbers of Jews were sent to the gas chambers and were killed. The camps also had factories in which prisoners were worked to death. The captives lived under horrible conditions. Doctors performed cruel experiments on some prisoners. Those unable to work--the aged, the sick, many women and children--were put to death.

Adolf Hitler, the worst tyrant that the world has ever witnessed was behind the spine-chilling, cruel and inhuman incident, the Holocaust. The virus-like spread of death at the behest of Hitler was unprecedented in history. His hatred for the Jews motivated him to wipe out the entire community. The Holocaust, the most dreaded historical incident, made the Jews hate Hitler and Germany. Jews,

for Hitler, were nothing but parasites. The confiscation of property, the unjustifiable termination from service, the denial of citizenship which orphanated them in their own country and above all the widespread killing forced the Jews to flee to other countries like Canada. These are the historical happenings that instigated the Jewish Canadian writers to write about the bitterness of Holocaust and the ill-treatment of their community in their literary works.

The Fascist anti-Jewish sentiments expressed in all provinces, the racial discrimination practiced against the Jews in Quebec and the evils of anti-Semitism propagated in 1930s at Montreal, Canada are expressed in the novels of Klein and

Richler. Though Klein gives expression to the sense of insecurity and anxiety inflicted upon Canadian Jewish citizens in Quebec in his works, he is optimistic about the possibility of the sympathetic Jewish-French Canadian inters- relationship. His novel The Second Scroll brings out his unshakeable faith in humanism. In a letter to his nephew, Melech, the survivor, in the novel narrates his tragic experiences--the atrocities committed on Jews. Significantly, the arrival of the letter coincides with the celebration of Torah, the feast of rejoicing, observed at Montreal synagogue. On the other hand, Mordecai Richler deals with the erosion and loss of humanistic values in his novel St.Urbain’s Horseman.

Both the novels “have thematic parallels”. In both, the protagonists are the sons of

Eastern European immigrants who set out from Montreal to Europe in search of a

member of a family directly involved in the “Holocaust”. Unfortunately, both the protagonists die before meeting their elusive relative. In fact, the tension between the desire to adhere to the ideal of brotherhood of men and the brutal reality of racism have inspired these writers to take up the cause of the Jews in their novels.

In his study of Jewish Canadian Writing (1989) Michael Greenstein describes the early invisibility of Jewish writing on the Canadian Literary scene.

Ravin, similarly, but more specifically, points at Canadian literary criticism, which while excavating and acknowledging other literary ethnicities historically has tended to ignore Jewish specificity. The tension between the ceaseless efforts and assertion of the Jewish heritage and the total rejection of Jewish roots constitutes the spectrum of Richler’s exploration of Jewish survival in the post-war world.

Traditionally, the Jews have represented the exiled people; they were persecuted and they had to flee the country to different parts of the world, and face humiliation, inhuman treatment and butchery everywhere. Life, for them, was a filled cup of woe and their struggle for survival was unending. Their fear and a sense of alienation eclipsed their nourished desire to assimilate and assert their identity. Also the anti-Semitism openly propagated by the fascist movement in

Quebec corroborated a sense of insecurity and alienation on the part of the

Canadian Jews. In fact fear of survival is the major characteristic that marks

Canadian immigrant writings. A major problem that arises owing to these forces

is the conflict in the mind of the individual to discover, establish and sustain his own identity.

Canada is chiefly a land of immigrants. Almost every racial and/or religious group has come there only as explorers or immigrants and settled down. Hence,

Canada has turned out to be a multiracial country, which contributes to attract people from many parts of the world. Over the past five decades, Canada has experienced a fresh wave of immigrants who have exerted tremendous impact on its society and literature. The immigrant community cut off from their native culture and settled in Canada, an alien country in the midst of ethnic as well as religious groups has had to face the problem of adjustment to a new environment.

S.Ramamurthi observes:

It is noteworthy that the nature of the sufferings and conflicts of the

protagonists of many of these novels of the Jewish Canadian writers show

great variations depending on various hostile forces at work, such as

economic inequality, social alienation and a sense of insecurity against

which they have to battle facing psychic tension, ruthlessness and

restlessness. (70)

Writers such as A.M. Klein, Mordecai Richler, Irving Layton, Leonard

Cohen and Adele Wiseman are a few outstanding Jewish Canadian writers who have genuine concern for the plight and problems of the Jewish settlers in Canada.

They presume the danger to the Jewish community from the Fascist movement of

Quebec and anti-semitism. Deeply agitated by the rejection of the humanistic values in the post-war world, they express their growing skepticism against people’s attitude towards the inhuman victimization of fellow men.

During the Second World War, A.M. Klein published two books,

Poems and The Hitleriad, both in 1944. Poems developed ideas forecast in Hath

Not a Jew but also reflected Klein's anxieties over current events and the plight of

Jews in the wake of the Holocaust. Poems such as Polish Village, Meditation

Upon Survival, and Elegy were thoroughly contemporary accounts of persecution and suffering with which Klein, despite his relative safety in Canada, deeply sympathized. The Hitleriad was a very different work, a mock epic written in a satricial style reminiscent of Alexander Pope in such works as The Dunciad. In it,

Klein attempted to satirize Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cohorts, although later critics often noted that the inescapable bitterness of the subject caused Klein's humorous intentions to run awry.

Klein's greatest achievement as a poet came in 1948 with the publication of

The Rocking Chair and Other Poems. The book earned Klein a Governor

General's Award in poetry and sold in numbers far exceeding the norm for a book of Canadian poetry. The success of the book owed much to Klein's new-found focus on domestic Canadian subjects, particularly the culture of French Canada, which Klein, fluent in French and sympathetic to their minority status in North

America, understood better than most English-Canadian writers of his day. Klein's mission to Israel in 1949 on behalf of The Canadian Jewish Chronicle inspired his last major work and only complete novel, The Second Scroll which has been discussed briefly in the earlier pages.

Mordecai Richler was a Canadian author, screenwriter and essayist. A leading critic called him "the great shining star of his Canadian literary generation" and a pivotal figure in the country's history. His best known works are

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) and Barney's Version (1997); his

1989 novel Solomon Gursky Was Here was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 1990. He was also well known for the Jacob Two-Two children's stories.

In addition to his fiction, Richler wrote numerous essays about the Jewish community in Canada, and about nationalism as practiced by Canadian

Anglophones and the francophone Québécois. Arriving as immigrants in Canada when English was the country's sole official language (long before English-French

bilingualism became an official federal policy), the Jewish communities in

Montreal -- a city in the francophone province of Québec -- largely acquired

English, not French, as a second language after Yiddish. This later put them at odds with some in the Québec nationalist movement, which argued for French as the official language of Québec. His Oh, Canada! Oh, Quebec!: Requiem for a

Divided Nation (1992), a collection of essays about nationalism and anti-semitism, generated considerable controversy.

Richler published his novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in

1959. The book featured a frequent Richler theme: Jewish life in the 1930s and

40s in the neighborhoods of Montreal, east of Mount Royal Park on and about St.

Urbain Street and Saint Laurent Boulevard (known colloquially as "The Main").

Richler wrote of the neighborhood and its people, chronicling the hardships and disabilities they faced as a Jewish minority.

Among the Jewish writers, Mordecai Richler shows a lot of concern for the problems of the Jewish immigrant youth. The presence of his mythic concern for his ancestral past and his archetypal search for freedom and identity is strongly felt in his works. In his portrayal of agony and suffering of his protagonists and unrelented protest against the brutal ill-treatment by the fascist forces he seems to reflect Charles Dickens of British-English literature and Mulk Raj Anand of Indo-

Anglian literature. Whereas the elders in the Jewish community are bound by the

tradition and are desirous of preserving the Jewish religious rites and expect their children to faithfully follow them but the younger generation, in an adventurous spirit, tries to break family ties to free themselves from the Jewish ghetto. The resultant action, the clash between the old values and modern thinking forms the subject matter of Richler’s novels.

Irving Peter Layton, was a Romanian-born Canadian poet. He was known for his "tell it like it is" style which won him a wide following but also made enemies. Layton fought Puritanism throughout his life. Layton's work had provided the bolt of lightning that was needed to split open the thin skin of conservatism and complacency in the poetry scene of the preceding century, allowing modern poetry to expose previously unseen richness and depth.

Leonard Norman Cohen is a Canadian Juno Award-winning singer, songwriter, musician, poet, and novelist. His work often explores religion, isolation, sexuality, and interpersonal relationships. Cohen has been inducted into the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and both the Canadian Music Hall of

Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. He is also a Companion of the

Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honor. In 2011, Cohen received a

Prince of Asturias Award for literature.

In 1951, Cohen enrolled at McGill University, where he became president of the McGill Debating Union and won the Chester McNaughton Literary

Competition for the poems "Sparrows" and "Thoughts of a Landsman". His literary influences during this time included William Butler Yeats, Irving Layton,

Walt Whitman, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Henry Miller. His first published book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), was published by Dudek as the first book in the McGill Poetry Series the year after Cohen's graduation. Cohen’s poetry collection The Spice-Box of Earth came in 1961.

Cohen continued to write poetry and fiction throughout much of the 1960s and preferred to live in quasi-reclusive circumstances after he bought a house on

Hydra, a Greek island in the Saronic Gulf. While living and writing on Hydra,

Cohen published the poetry collection Flowers for Hitler (1964), and the novels

The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966). His novel The Favourite

Game was an autobiographical bildungsroman about a young man who discovers his identity through writing. Beautiful Losers received a good deal of attention from the Canadian press and stirred up controversy because of a number of sexually graphic passages. In 1966 Cohen also published Parasites of Heaven, a book of poems. Both Beautiful Losers and Parasites of Heaven received mixed reviews and sold few copies.

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Adele Wiseman received a B.A. from the

University of Manitoba in 1949. Her parents were Russian-Jews who emigrated from the Ukraine to Canada, in part, to escape the pogroms that accompanied the

Russian Civil War. In 1956, Wiseman published her first novel, The Sacrifice, which won the Governor General's Award, Canada's most prestigious literary prize. Her only other novel, Crackpot, was published in 1974. Both novels deal with Jewish immigrant heritage, the struggle to survive the Depression and World

War II, and the challenges the next generation faced in acculturating to Canadian society. Wiseman also published plays, children's stories, essays, and other non- fiction. Her book, Old Woman at Play, examines and meditates on the creative process while paying tribute to Wiseman's mother and the dolls she made.

Anglian literature. Whereas the elders in the Jewish community are bound by the tradition and are desirous of preserving the Jewish religious rites and expect their children to faithfully follow them but the younger generation, in an adventurous

spirit, tries to break family ties to free themselves from the Jewish ghetto. The resultant action, the clash between the old values and modern thinking forms the subject matter of Richler’s novels.

Matthew or Matt Cohen is a Jewish Canadian English writer who, under the pseudonym of Teddy Jam has written children’s books too. May be, it is true that he is not the glowing star of first magnitude in the firmament of Canadian English

Literature. Nor is he an author who is oft-sought after, oft-read or oft-quoted. Yet his contribution to the enrichment of Canadian English literature is undeniable, indisputable or unignorable. That he was nominated twice --in 1979 for The Sweet

Second Summer of Kitty Malone and in 1997 for Last Seen--for the coveted

Governor General’s Award for English fiction which, he, however, won in 1999 for Elizabeth and After shows how successful a novelist was he. His book for children The Fishing Summer (1997) was also nominated for the same award for children’s literature thus making him one of the few writers to have been nominated for the highest award in the same year in two different categories. As a socially conscious writer, he showed keen interest in the welfare of the society, especially the writing community and hence he joined hands with those who founded the Writers’ Union of Canada. As the President of the Union in 1986 he succeeded in persuading the Canadian government to form a commission and establish a Public Lending Right Program. He also served on the Toronto Arts

Council as chair person of the literary division and was able to obtain increased funding for writers. In recognition of this work he was honored with Toronto Arts

Award and the Handsour-front Prize. To celebrate his untiring writing till his death in 1999, the Writers’ Trust of Canada instituted a Canadian Literary Award named after him.

Cohen, in fact, was a complex figure--an urban Jewish intellectual--with deep roots in the land, a Canadian cultural nationalist; a prickly individualist who fought hard for the Public Lending Right which endowed a honorarium to the writers on each borrowing of their books from a public library; loved and respected by his friends like Gibson for his remarkable sense of humor. If, as a versatile genius and craft-conscious and technically daring writer he was popular among his readers not only in Canada but also in Holland and France. As a writers’ writer, he enjoyed the enviable reputation of his contemporary writers too.

At the age of just 26, he published his first novel Korsoniloff (1969) which motivated the beginning of his long and tenacious journey as a writer. Since then till death in 1999 there was no turning back. Within these three decades he published nearly thirty books which include novels, short-story collections, poetry, children’s books and translation of Canadian literature. Though his first novel saw the light of the day in 1969 it is only in 1974 he found himself famous with the publication of the novel The Disinherited, which launched what would ultimately

become known as ‘the Salem Quartet’--four novels, the other three being The

Colours of War, The Second Summer of Kitty Malone, Flowers of Darkness linked together, set in fictional Salem, a county situated somewhere north of Kingston.

Cohen was equally at home writing in English and translating from French.

His works are acclaimed to be multidimensional which portrayed disaffected youth as an Korsoniloff and Johnny Crackle Sings; focus on the irresistible urge to search for one’s roots and identity as in The Disinherited, The Colours of War and

The Spanish Doctor, Korsoniloff and Johnny Crackle Sings which were published in quick succession are the tales of inner alienation, of divisions within the consciousness that would eventually end in irrevocable loss and leave the characters on the verge of eccentricity, if not madness. In his very first novel--

Korsoniloff—itself, Cohen makes his intentions crystal clear by terming the narrative as a ‘morality monologue’ to establish which he makes his hero

Korsoniloff, a Toronto Philosophy Professor, undertake a mental pilgrimage for a true understanding of self. But the irony is that he finally recognizes in his own personality the split which is the inevitable and ultimate product of sociological pressures.

Johnny Crackle Sings --a freer fantasy that lacks the clinical verisimilitude of Korsoniloff--is the tale of a country boy ruined by an ambition to become a big- time folk singer. In its exploration of drug-created states of mind, it moves

constantly on the edge of surrealism, and has the kind of self-consciousness that shows a writer still searching for his appropriate form. While this novel was being written, Cohen was already working on the stories included in Columbus and the

Fat Lady (1972) which established the territory he would occupy in his later novels. Night Fights (1978) includes some stories from Columbus and offers the same mixture of rural fantasy in stories that prefigure the larger novels and somewhat symbolic tales that explore the verges of psychological breakdown in a similar way to Cohen’s earlier, smaller novels. The Expatriate (1982) and Café le dog (1983) are later collections of his stories.

The five novels published between 1974 and 1981-The Disinherited (1974),

Wooden Hunters (1975), The Colours of War (1977), The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone (1979) and Flowers of Darkness (1981) are at first glance more conventional than Cohen’s earlier books, but they can be linked with the more obviously experimental novels because they work less by linear chronology than by a constant interpenetration of past and present. There is a disturbing sense of the provisional in the lives of all their characters, and ominous transitions that do not always turn out to be disastrous. All these novels--except for Wooden

Hunters, which takes place among deprived Natives and washed-up whites on an island resembling one of the Queen Charlottes in British Columbia--are set, or end, in the fictional Salem, in a southern-Ontario countryside, where the once-

prosperous farming economy established by Loyalists and British immigrants is fast disintegrating.

The Disinherited is a chronicle novel that develops the theme of agrarian decline through the changes in the lives of a pioneering family. The Colours of

War seems at first to be a futurist novel as it describes a journey across Canada, but the hero’s journey through the future, and his destination in the heart of the

Ontario countryside, which Cohen has made his special terrain, represents a flight into the protective past. The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone centers on two drunken, ugly, life-worn people and their eventual happiness, and gains its effect by inverting the pattern of the customary romance. Flowers of Darkness, which shows the destruction by the consequences of his own hypocrisy of a demoniac preacher, reads in many ways like a genial parody of William Faulkner, to whose Yoknapatawpha County Cohen’s creation of his own county of the imagination, has been compared.

Cohen uses the novel form as a vehicle for a searching inquiry into the moral struggle facing the individual today in a rapidly expanding technological society. Essentially, the author is attempting to discover a solution to the personal dehumanization which results first from extensive role playing and secondly from an inability to accept the responsibility involved in being an individual; that is, in differing from the norm. The problem emerges as two-fold. On the one hand,

accepting the inevitability of role-playing, leads to the corruption of personal integrity and the paralysis of emotion. On the other hand, variance from the role or norm necessitates an honest evaluation of self, which is likely to be disheartening.

Other than his massive contribution to fiction, Matt Cohen has few short stories, poems and children’s literature, also, to his credit. Columbus and the Fat Lady (1972), Too Bad Galahad (1972),Night Flights (1978), The

Leaves of Louise (1978), The Expatriate (1982),Café le Dog (1983), Life on

This Planet (1985), Living on Water (1989),Racial Memories (1990), Lives of the Mind Slaves (1994) and Getting Lucky (2001) are some of his noteworthy short-stories. Cohen tried his hand in writing poetry with Peach

Melba (1974) and In Search of Leonardo (1985). His Non-fiction Typing: A

Life in 26 Keys (2000) and Children's Literature (as "Teddy Jam") with

Night Cars (1987), Doctor Kiss Says Yes (1991), The Year of Fire (1993),

The Charlotte Stories (1994), Jacob's Best Sisters (1996), The Fishing

Summer (1997), This New Baby (1998), The Stoneboat (1999), ttuM (1999) and The Kid Line (2001) got Matt Cohen a place among the other prolific writers in Canadian Literature.

This study on “Familial Relationships vis-à-vis Place and Time: A Study of the Salem Quartet Novels of Matt Cohen” is divided into Six Chapters. A brief history of Canadian English Literature in Chapter I–“Introduction” sheds much light on the Jewish Canadian writers, as the author selected for this study belongs to this group. The role of Adolf Hitler in the exodus of Jews is given due importance as it accounts for the large scale of immigrant Jews settling in Canada.

The literary journey of Cohen, his achievements as a writer, a public servant and a human being are dealt with in detail. A brief analysis of his major works, deemed necessary and relevant, also find a place in the first chapter.

Chapter II entitled “Issues Based on the Concept of Place” analyses the significance of repetition of Salem as the setting of Cohen’s novels in general and the Salem Quartet in particular. Focus is on the remarkable achievement of Cohen in making these four novels unique in form through significant modifications in the ‘place’ and atmosphere and through variations in temporal elements. Like a master craftsman, Cohen, with a deft stroke of brush, is able to paint the same setting in different forms. Thus, Salem, a small city of peace and serenity despite the fall in Agrarian sector because of unprecedented, rapid industrialization, becomes the city of restlessness and turmoil in The Colours of War on account of political upheaval; while the hails, storms and eerie atmosphere lend Gothic tradition and the same city on account of the love affairs, of course illicit, make it

a rural idyll, brought to limelight is the fact how each of these novels possesses a strong sense of place; the same land which provides roots for some characters and offer protection from sun and shower, denies both to some others who are, hence, forcibly alienated either temporarily or permanently. Cohen’s skill in making use of the landscape to reflect and amplify the themes yields the desired and required fruit of making the setting a correlative of human behaviour and emotions.

Under the title of “Conflicting Concepts of Time”, Chapter III discusses various vital issues related with the treatment of ‘time’ in these novels. It is but natural and inevitable that such a discussion is to be attempted at a number of levels; as tense, as definite periods, as significant moments and as structure within which events are recognized. According to Tokaruk, “Time is a linear manifestation of the destiny of events, but its continuum in the human mind is often interrupted by memories and flashbacks” (i). Cohen’s ability in arranging such flashbacks is so effective a manner as to determine the emphasis he wants, leads him to attain his goal. His choice and use of cyclical and rhythmical patterns of time to provide one way of coming to terms with the feministic implications of the directions of time towards death further adds vigor and vitality to the narrative.

Care is taken to point out that Cohen always tries to present Time as a natural force--a perennial source of both good and evil--birth and death. As Cohen considers the time of inner awareness a perfect measuring rod to assess the

intensity of human experience he does not lay emphasis on the order of succession of events and time.

As the title “Man-Woman Relationship” suggests, a detailed discussion on the issues associated with the man-women relationship is attempted in Chapter IV.

Though the domestic harmony and peace of mind of the man and wife depends largely on the fulfillment of sexual appetite, sex is not the be-all and end-all of life. Though sex plays a key role in the making or breaking of a home, Canadians particularly the characters of Cohen seem not to consider it a taboo or even immoral, leave alone sin. To drive home this point, this chapter is woven around the remark of Cohen himself in the Disinherited which underscores the fact that “it was not the local custom to boast of chastity” (38) and the pointed observation of

Ayothi, when he reiterates the fact that marriage and family have served as institution, which facilitated their co-living and nothing more than that “ as there was no binding of the souls. . . they lived together as husband and wife because the system wanted them to do so” (53). Taking the cue from the above arguments is shown how the Thomases in The Disinherited and Gordon Finch in Flowers of

Darkness, despite their indulgence in extra marital sex, live under the same roof with their wedded-wife and how they perform other domestic duties like

Thomases working on the farm and Finch in the cow-shed. It is also discussed how feminine psychology works on the mind of female protagonists of Cohen.

While the wife of elder Thomas pays back her husband in his own coin by developing illicit intimacy with her husband’s cousin, Maureen, wife of Finch goes one step further and shoots him to death as “it would be hard to be the wife of a crazy minister who screws the girls in his own Sunday school” (FD 96).

The favorite and oft-repeated theme of most of the diasporic writers-- namely “The Quest for Identity”--is taken up for a deep study in Chapter V. The pain and agony of the diasporic writers who are dislocated from their native soil either forcibly or in self-exile and get relocated in an alien but chosen atmosphere is, in fact, aggravated by being marginalized in the refugee land. The brutal denial of roots in the refuge soil on the basis of color, region, religion and even language adds fuel to the fire of assumed rootlessness in their ancestral soil. As Chitra

Banerjee Divakaruni points out in an interview the relocated women writers, in particular, are doubly marginalized on account of gender, the author discrimination too (Unknown ix). The suppressed sorrow or of anger over the futile search for identity finds a proper outlet in the creation of characters, particularly of the younger generation in a mirror-like reflection of their own self.

This is very true; particularly of the Jewish writers of Canadian literature on whose unhealed wounds of exodus because of the unprecedented and unbearable tyranny of Adolf Hitler, salt is rubbed in the wound where they hoped to get solace and healing touch. Growing discontent over the deteriorating conditions of living,

absence of communication between parent and child, the dead past, bleak present and the uncertain future push the youth to the verge of vexation as a result of which they find themselves standing between two worlds--one dead and the other yet to be born.

Erik Thomas, the Scion of the fourth generation of Thomases of The

Disinherited thus finds his ancestral land, which ensured a source of advancement to his forefathers, as a stumbling block to his development and hence he flees

Salem. The rapid growth of industrialization which naturally converts the cultivable lands into concrete jungles expedites his exile. Sailing the same boat with him is Theodore Beam of The Colours of War who also finds himself alienated in the land of his ancestors and seeks shelter elsewhere. But there is a difference too. Whereas the futile search of identity forces the latter to return to his parental house, the former disinherits his farm and goes away once and for all.

While these two flee Salem in search of a better refugee soil, Annabelle of The

Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone moves to Salem with her husband to rescue her husband from a chasing scandal. Similarly, while the absence of communication between the father and son forces the youngster take his own decision the timely advice of the father Bob Finch to his son Gordon Finch in

Flowers of Darkness (71) enables the son to choose Salem as his permanent resort to propagate religious principles. On the base of above-mentioned points the

problems arising out of man-woman relationship are examined in Chapter V and the final Chapter Conclusion, is a record of all the findings of the microscopic analysis of the foregoing chapters and further it also throws light on Cohen’s mastery over presenting a link between the metaphysical elements like Place and

Time with human personalities.

CHAPTER II ISSUES BASED ON THE CONCEPT OF PLACE

‘Place’ in the novels of Matt Cohen in general and in the Salem Quartet in particular denotes the physical, mental, spiritual, moral, social and emotional conditions through which the characters move. All the four novels are linked together with an invisible but unbreakable and irresistible strong sense of place.

While some of the characters find staunch support, deep roots and ever-reliable encouragement in the land of their birth and living, some find an unfriendly atmosphere which, in due course, develops into hostility and which once again in turn, forces them into exile. The physical setting which reflects inner landscapes is, more often than not, antagonistic and their sense carries a negative and allegorical sense and use. Land, thus becomes a symbol of life and reflects the theme with a photographic accuracy and usually correlates human behaviour and emotions. The form of the novel, then, depends largely if not wholly, on the correlation between the landscape in which the physical, mental, intellectual and emotional aspects of the characters act.

Just as William Faulkner has created Yoknapatawnapa country; just as

Margaret Laurence has made Manewaka a very real place to her readers; just as

R.K.Narayan has breathed beauty and glory into Malgudi to make it a real and living character in his novels, Matt Cohen has made the rocky farm land of

Eastern Ontario vivid in his readers’ imagination. The Kaleidoscopic view point of this rocky rural landscape--philosophical, geographical and temporal--gives a unique sense of place which in turn, becomes one of the most interesting and striking things about Cohen’s novels. The regional setting shapes not only the lives and minds of his characters but also the form of his novels. Each novel is developed in a singular way in terms of form, technique and narrative content so as to produce very different as well as emphatic effects.

The Salem countryside and its characters are first introduced to Cohen’s readers in The Disinherited as the strong base of succeeding novels. This novel focuses on a family farm and records lives on which stretch from the present owner back to the pioneers who first settled there. Effective and efficient use of the technique of mental journeys, flashbacks, memories and diaries produces the desired effect of recapitulating the buried past. The men of each generation are fully aware of the narrow pattern of behaviour that the land imposes on them. A strong sense of safety and security born out of the strong roots of this ancestral land makes them feel at home. The inevitable and irresistible impact of such a land on the bodies, minds and souls of the characters naturally gives birth to a dynastic and dynamic narrative which is presented in a non-traditional form.

The temporal setting of The Colours of War is in the near future. The conflicts suggested as present between generations in The Disinherited have

become a general condition in Theodore Beam’s world. He is physically alienated from his former home, Salem, the unnamed but implied locale of The

Disinherited. The plot revolves around his intention and attempt to return to his ancestral land, and the actual journey back to his birth place parallels his futile search for a meaningful and brighter future in a far off shelter. Totally different is the tone of the next novel The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone from that of the preceding two novels although the primary setting and some of the characters are the same. The deft handling of the temporal elements and Cohen’s skill in varying the setting decide and design the dramatic changes.

In The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone the setting time again stresses the elemental nature of life which counterpoints the character’s constant struggle to grasp a second chance of happiness. Anne Tokaruk’s observation rightly justifies Cohen’s form and style: “The form the novel assumes is dependent on the arrangement Cohen makes the conflicts of the past and present and their relationship to a future which the characters are trying to shape in a grey and decaying landscape” ( 3). Through an ominous atmosphere of brooding evil and pervasive but unknown fear, Cohen quite skillfully transforms the otherwise quiet

Salem setting into a gothic setting. The physical arrangement of the town provides a model for polarities developed in the novel. The sequence of events which happen within a prescribed span of time causes the creation and sustenance of its

strong sense of impending doom distinct which makes it unique and quite different from the other novels of Cohen.

The farm, situated somewhere north of Kingston, Ontario, that occupies the centre-stage in The Disinherited belongs to the Thomases for the last four generations none of whom ever stirred out of the city except Erik Thomas, the sole scion of the fourth generation who forced himself into a self-exile and spent nearly a decade in the far-away Toronto in search of greener pastures. For the men folk, however, whether they are in or out of the farm, the place always remains close to their heart and acts as touchstone for their attitudes and decisions. The actual time span of the fictional present in this novel is just two months Cohen cleverly employs the technique of flashbacks, memories and diaries to throw light on the hopes, loves, frustrations and complexities of the past and present generations.

This method of using place as a ‘constant’ and time as the ‘variable’ enables the author to arrive at a form which is eminently suitable to reflect the characters.

“Setting in itself does not fundamentally alter the theme of fiction. Man’s consideration to his own nature in the universe and his formulation of a personal philosophy to deal with the emptiness-emotional, cultural, intellectual-that is to much a part of his world is of course, a universal theme.” (Ricou xi) Ricou makes himself still more clear when he proceeds to explain that the authors of Prairie fiction put to perfect use the very familiar landscape to explore these questions.

Cohen’s fiction reflects Ricou’s keen observation with photographic accuracy as he deftly uses the rocky farmland of Eastern Ontario as an image of the fundamental issues of human experience. The land, a sure source of steady income which offers an unfailing assurance of decent and dignified living and acts as the passport to prosperity is subject to fall in standard and quality because of constant use and climatic changes which are beyond the control and even understanding of man. But the gradual decay of the quality of land has a telling effect on the human beings. That is what exactly happens in the life of Thomases in The Disinherited.

The slow and steady decline of the viability of a small farm, the inevitable eventuality of the gradual but certain decay of the quality of the land faithfully records the painful experiences of each generation of Thomases. The ‘present’ of the novel which centres on the fourth generation of Thomases focuses on the uncertainty of Erik Thomas and his generation wherein are reflected the uncertainty, bewilderment, frustration and discontentment of the young generation. Erik and the like are left with but two options--accept inheritance of the land with all its restrictions including insecurity or reject it totally and be on the move to find a ‘brave new world’. The external and internal landscapes which

Cohen presents complement each other. The farm is the microcosm which reflects truths about the relationships of all human beings to their landscape, to themselves and to other people.

The Disinherited opens with the hospitalization of Richard Thomas, father of Erik. In beginning the narrative, thus, near the end of the life of an industrious and faithful son of the soil, Cohen’s purpose of providing a view point to explore universal issues is well served. Richard lies in the hospital nearly for a couple of months and the novel centres around the memories, to relationships with other people in general and his son, in particular. It is, in fact, quite interesting to note that though he is on his death bed, his mind’s eye is fully opened through which he is able to visualize the past generations and the recollection of the past reveals that the decline of the land has paralleled the erosion of feelings of purpose and security in the people who lived on it. All details--both major and minor--are scattered throughout the novel so that when Richard breathes his last and the novel ends, completed is a presentation of a spectrum of four generations and of their attitudes towards the land, themselves, other people and life in general.

The homesteading ancestor was Richard S.Thomas who was a settler. In

Survival Margaret Atwood rightly calls such settler “a man who attempts to clear a place for himself out of the land” and his experience as “a primal encounter with the land” (113) and his activity as “trying to fit a straight line into a curved space”

(20). This pioneer took with indefatigable courage and vigour the Herculean task of changing nature’s order into the shape of human civilization. His ceaseless and tireless efforts, fuelled by his strong will reaped a rich harvest within a short span

of time and there arose a workable farm carved out of the wilderness. The rich reward of the physical industry serves as an unfailing source of mental satisfaction which also won the praise of other settlers as a rare and remarkable achievement which is to be passed on to posterity. Above all, the untiring effort and attitude offers the physical place which was carved out of wilderness is of great significance--both actual and symbolic.

A slow but steady change in the attitude towards the land is certainly traceable with the passing of every generation. The pre-meal grace of the second generation as articulated by Simon Thomas, “Accept the homage of us, your humble servants, for you’ve here given us this earth that we may feed and love you” (DI 50], is replaced by a stern warning by Richard of the third generation that, “the farm was different then than now, it was important to know that this physical universe was not a constant but artifact that could only be bought with time and blood” (53). It is simply because the members of the succeeding generations began to grow pessimistic and discontent because the idea of the possession of the land as the inviolable right given by God Himself was on the wane. The pessimism penetrates still deeper into the veins of the succeeding generations wherein breeds frustration, depression, dejection and discontent in the likes of Erik. The growing negative attitude as the inevitable and ultimate outcome of sinking self-confidence and loss of faith in the fertility of land is well-expressed

in Richard’s remark: “There’s always someone to say that this land isn’t meant for farming or that it should never have cleared, or that the only future for it is some sort of park, for city people” (158). Though his mind is not totally free from the lingering doubts, Richard Thomas cut short his stay in Toronto University to return to the farm because “it was the right thing for him to do” (41), because as the faithful descendent of his forefathers he still remains grateful to his ancestors for having bequeathed a worthy piece of land and also because his sense of duty and loyalty is so strong and deep that he begins to reflect them in his own thoughts about the practicality and reasonableness of devoting his life to the continuation of their efforts. Although Richard did conquer a piece of land he also paid a price for it and Henry Kreisel’s remarks in one of his articles show light on his state of mind:

Into the attempted conquest, whether ultimately successful or not, men pour an awesome, concentrated passion. The breaking of the land becomes a kind of rape, of passionate seduction. The earth is at once a willing and unwilling mistress, accepting and rejecting her seducer, the cause of his frustration and fulfillment and either way the shaper and controller of his mind exacting servitude. (261)

Cohen effectively and efficiently employs the technique of the flashbacks and diaries not only to recapitulate the important events of the past generations but also to faithfully record the relationship of key characters of past generation with other people. Richard Simon Thomas was, no doubt, a man of industry and strong

will power who spares no pains in the conquest of the land. But the irony is that he has to pay a heavy price for it. His excessive indulgence in the making and maintenance of the farm and his total dedication to the cause of the land caused irreparable loss in the domestic life and the eventuality was the development of illicit intimacy between his wife Elizabeth and his cousin William, the poet whose diary acts as a sort of running commentary of all minute but important events of his day.

Observation of John Moss on Cohen’s fictional writing particularly about the immigrants, exactly mirrors levels of dedication to the land and the attitudes of the settlers as well as the descendents, is worth quoting here: “They have come with their memories and have tried to reconstruct the past, an alien past, as it should have been rather than as it was, and often they have done so without regard to the Canadian place where they have relocated” (Patterns 80). No doubt this observation is a reflection of the mind-set of Thomases but Cohen makes it accurate with the attitude of some of the minor characters like Henry Beckwith who sits on his doorstep imagining the young people, former pupils become Prime

Ministers and explorers, school girls out for a ride between lessons, men of his own age already dressed for the day and tapping their way along with silver-tipped canes (114). The change in the attitude towards the land is hinted at when Simon

Thomas wanted his son Richard to be educated as a “gentleman” and when

Richard is ready to pass on the farm to his son, Erik is reluctant to accept it as he is well aware of his limitations. He knew fully well that the life styles of his forefathers are gone with the wind which cannot be revived. To step into the shoes of his father or grandfather either financially or philosophically, he is sure, is a near-impossibility. The men of past generation certainly found the land as passport to prosperity while the modern youth found the same land as an unbreakable wall obstructing the fulfillment of their ambition in life. These extremely opposite attitudes denote that the circle of attitude is complete and broken as well.

While analyzing the colonial effect in Canadian fiction, an alien or alternative experience is strongly felt with the duality in space and time, and exile from it ends with a loss due to separation. Of all the characters in The

Disinherited it is Williams the romantic poet, whose diaries faithfully make it crystal clear how the colonial and immigrant mentalities merge in him, to make him the living example of this definition. In the creation of William, Cohen tries most probably, to present “a foil to reflect diametrically opposite response to the land and to those of his cousins” (Tokaruk 13). It is not as settler but as a refugee, seeking shelter from strangulating poverty and chasing law that William set his foot in Canada. Though taken in by his cousin he found it difficult, though not impossible, to come to terms with the new landscape. Though he is called a poet, not even a single line of his poetry is cited whereas long prose passages of his

diary are presented which bring to limelight the utter loneliness and isolation of this mystical character. The very first passage cited in the novel is a clear indication of the emotional depression which keeps him mentally away from the landscape of his host-country: “The snow all went two weeks ago and now the land and forest demands all or would drown me. What a vast infertile wilderness

Panorama of attack and all flowers. God has betrayed man here and he will betray

Him also” (59). William had unshakeable and unquestioning faith in God which gave him the strong belief that to call the mortals the absolute owners of the land which is in the sole possession of God and God alone is absurd: “God has said that the land is His and can belong to no man and therefore how can one man give what is not his to another man who cannot possess it” (138).

Of the main characters of The Disinherited the man who sails the same boat with the poet in not responding appropriately to the same landscape with which both are inadvertently associated is undoubtedly Erik who ironically enjoys the right and liberty of reading the diary fully near the end of the novel. The diary unveils the mind of the poet and in no ambiguous words makes it crystal clear that his inner feelings and emotions towards immigration from the very beginning were bitter and negative and that in his opinion the voyage to Canada is forced due to the disinheritance of the old world which left him with no alternative than

“seeking a new world” (220). The rigidity in the poet’s mind does never allow him

to flexibly come to terms with the new land and the eventuality is that he slowly descends into madness. Similar, if not identical, is the mind-set of his great-grand nephew Erik who is also alienated and finds it difficult to integrate his life with that of the farm. Cohen’s success certainly lies in the remarkable way of presenting this experience of alienation from both the immigrant point of view and from that of contemporary youngster. The effective and efficient efforts to establish bonds of blood and inclination are not only unique but also quite impressive. The theme initiated by the title is enriched by the layers of significance Cohen gives it by revealing similar conflicts in the two men of different generations.

Even the mental imbalance of the poet has its own significance as it is what

Margaret Atwood describes as a mutilation depriving the victim of cultural tradition and this sort of mutilation is serious as it is the inevitable and ultimate result of total paralysis-rather removal of the brain, making the victim an idiot or an amnesiac which culminates in the emotional and artistic death at the hands of different or hostile audience (Survival 180). May be there had been signs of eccentricity, if and though not of lunacy, in the behavior of the poet before he set his foot on Canada. But certainly after his arrival in Canada, the instability shows an upward trend. They say he even forgot how to talk (DI 190). What a pity! It is the cruel blow of fate to deprive a man of speech who once “lisped in numbers”.

Burial of his mortal remains far away from the Thomas Family Plot which “rid of him, off in a corner of the cemetery that was mostly weeds and rocks” (191) completed his isolation from the community with which he was so closely associated. His idiotic son Frederick is described as having “collapsed into the landscape” (192) and is so alien that he is put in “a special place”--asylum.

Though none bothers about him while alive, his death denotes that ‘his exile was over’ (192). Thus Cohen weaves a theme of alienation and isolation which “blends into the overall tapestry of the novel” (Tokaruk 15).

Although The Disinherited is a novel of four generations and though the family farm and time are the controlling principles of all these generations and though the men-folk of these generations occupy the center-stage it is an irrefutable fact that the aura of Richard Thomas is strongly felt throughout the novel, particularly in the observations of both the past and present generations. It is his consciousness that provides the glasses to the men of not only his generation but also succeeding generations see everything through his spectacles. Richard strongly believes that family is continuous and he is well aware of the pressures of duty and responsibility not only to preserve and improve the gifts of the past but also to pass the legacy to future generations. His attachment to and association with the farm was so close that he put an abrupt end to his university education in

Toronto and returned to the farm. He himself recollects: “It came upon me

suddenly, I felt out of place in those clothes, sitting in a metal machine running, down a piece of pavement” (41). His knowledge of his ancestors’ devotion and dedication to the farm is so rich and deep that he felt the onus on him to develop it further and leave it to posterity in an improved stage so that they would keep the torch unextinguished. His father’s will was yet another source of inspiration which motivated him day-in and day-out: “He did his duty”, Herman White had said of Simon, “as if it were for him to say, and now unlikely as it was Richard

Thomas, would have his turn to do his, it being left unclear whether there was any larger possible purpose or simply the holy mission of colonizing the earth” (143).

In his domestic and societal activities Richard is, of course, not religious in its traditional sense. But when it comes to his devotion, dedication and unbreakable bond to land his is, in fact, more religious than that of the most self- styled religious persons. For, it is generally accepted that single minded service in general and the bond to the land in particular, tantamount to religiosity in its emotional and even spiritual sense. Cohen seems to use the phrase “holy mission” with the purpose of comparing Richard and Miranda with Prophet Abraham and

Sarah and by extension of the deed to the land is quite similar to Yahweh’s promise to the prophet to make him the father of a nation and Steward of the land of Israel. Richard perceives that the blessing of inheritance is a mixed one and it epitomizes the conflict which is the very central tension in the novel:

. . . like Abraham and Sarah in their new possession of this land they would be able to have children or else be condemned to a purposeless self-preservation, to milk the land every year enough to fill their bellies and their bank balance, nothing more, a straight trade, body for earth, three generations of bones to feed the land like so many fallen trees, animals. (143)

To put it in the words of Shakespeare “the most unkindest cut of all” inflicted upon Richard was the total disinterestedness, though not hatred or enmity, of his son Erik towards the ancestral land; what was considered a boon by the three generations has lost its grace in the fourth generation the sole representative of which began to consider it a bane. What was hitherto enjoyed as the God’s bounty and unadulterated blessing is strongly condemned as satanic curse and a strong wall obstructing the youngster’s ambition and aspiration to advance in life. The repeated but futile attempts of the father to convince his only son to work on the land and pass it on to his successors as was done by his forefathers implies without an iota of doubt that his earnest wish would face the danger of remaining a dream or mirage. Erik’s suggestion to leave the farm to

Miranda and “quit worrying about it” extracts the instantaneous retort from his father, Richard: “I’m not worried about it. I’m worried about you” (144). Richard senses a vacuum in Erik’s life which cannot be fitted with anything except the inheritance of the land and as such, for Richard, it is important that not Brian, better-suited and much deserving adopted son, but his own son Erik should

become the legal and rightful inheritor of the ancestral land. But the generation gap has its own impact on the conceptualization of the past and present generations. Hence comes the reply from Erik: “No one has destinies anymore.

They live in apartments and breed goldfish”(146).

Of all the occupations in the world farming is unique in the sense that though it is closely associated with man’s intent, attitude and tireless labour the result is not the product of any of these. The outcome of the labour of the land is a natural phenomenon which is decided and dictated by a particularly cyclical rhythm of nature which again is dependent of the changing seasons and life-cycle of nature. It is a closed world that necessitates a constant struggle and a round-the- clock vigil; and Richard is well aware that no relaxation is allowed in this hard task of farming, as lack of attention leaves the land to collapse (99). With his limited power, strength and knowledge man cannot certainly master the dragonish power of Nature but he has to learn at least the art of controlling them if he wishes to reap a rich harvest of his labor.

The phrase “rigid structuring” indicates the sexual tension and violence which lie beneath the farming like live coal “just waiting only for provocation to erupt” (Moss DI 187) strengthens the impact. This is quite true of Thomas’ farm which invariably has experienced violent physical reactions in each generation.

The inevitable and miraculous regularity of these reactions clearly show that they

are closely related to the natural cycle of life. It is interesting to note that man is also not free from such repetition of violence. Particularly the men, related with the farm but who intend to discontinue, though not sever, their association with this land and who nurture a negative attitude toward the land, become the victims of this violence. The poet’s diary records such violence while he was on his way to Canada: “My back was already with scars, search up and down the length of my back that were old and black and scars that were new criss-crossed with my ribs from my shoulders to waist” (223).

As if to prove the veracity of the statement “history repeats itself” this scene of violence is repeated, of course, under different circumstances four generation later. Now the victim is Erik, the sole survivor of the fourth generation that suffered violent attacks from none other than from his adopted brother Brian soon after Richard’s funeral. While trying to lift his arms “he could feel the cuts along his back and shoulders, see where the skin had been turning away from itself, like riverbanks, peeling away and thickening at the edges, leaving new unprotected snakes of blood” (231). Such violence clearly reflects the vigour and wildness of the land itself.

If in the past when the land was fertile with full of vigor and life and when brawling and physical-violence were considered a way of life, in the present, land is leached and the vigour of men in general and the likes of Erik in particular is

sapped to which none other than Richard himself is an eye-witness. While lying on his death bed in hospital, Richard sees this: “When Erik and Brian were there

Richard could see how they were defeated by each other, nothing between them except automatic and sterile violence” (88). If Brian’s outbursts are the natural outcome of his basic instinctive and passion reaction, Erik’s is no less despite his education and sophistication which prove beyond doubt that nurture cannot change nature. This naturally brings to the fore the irrefutable fact that there is an invisible but unbreakable parallel between the land, the farm and the human life which paves the way for a deep probe into archetypal patterns. In The Disinherited

Cohen seems to make keen observation and arrive at conclusion that land mirrors men’s condition in a perfect manner. Erik is out of synchronization with the cyclic rhythm of nature; as a typical modern youth, his energies and vigor get polluted by urban environment. The worse is that the same urban environment causes irreparable damage to human beings, eventually leading to the collapse of the cultivable lands and farm by transforming them into concrete jungles.

The pointed observation of D.G. Jones on the function of the land in

Butterfly Rock (35) is worth-quoting here as it has relevance to the subject and sheds light on the tight grip under which Erik is held by the land though he intends to reject or disinherit the land and is forced him into self-exile in search of self- identity: “The land is both condition and reflection, both mirror and fact.

Particularly in literature it comes to symbolize elements of our inner life, as these elements are ignored or repressed; the land becomes a symbol of the unconscious, the irrational in the lives of the characters”(37). This statement unearths the hidden inner life of Erik who leaves his ancestral land in a genuine attempt to sever all connections with it and goes to a far-off place like Toronto. But the irony is that his attempts “to swallow the city whole . . . miserably fail to bear fruit as the city still lay undigested in him” (13). Nor could he mentally or intuitively cut off his association with the ancestral land though he is physically thousands of miles away from it. The farm, however, occupies the centre-stage in his thinking.

Valerie kindles his imagination in which he visualizes her working in his mother’s gardens. Neither the host city of Toronto nor the ancestral home town could, make him feel at home, for at both the places he finds himself a fish out of water. “He was resentful of the feeling of familiarity or relief almost, of the way Richard and

Miranda and Brian still claimed him for their own as easily and thoughtlessly on the land” (13).

Throughout his life Erik felt the pressure of the farm though he didn’t have any inclination to inherit it; nor could the city, which he thought would be an alternative could offer him the required or desired satisfaction. The urban environment grows meaningless day by day and the routine and mechanized life there is no less monotonous than the rural life, particularly the farm life:

The sounds of traffic and people in the street, talking and arguing in foreign languages, endlessly climbing in and out of cars, sitting in the street playing radios and waiting for the heat to dissipate, waiting something to happen, trying to justify another day gone by, have something happen to make it worth going through again. (234)

In fact Erik’s quest is the basic quest of any discontented self or perturbed mind. It is the search for self-identify or the quest to find his ‘place’ so as to come to terms with his relationship to the universe. While analyzing Canadian poetry,

Jones remarks that “any thing may happen, but whatever so may be it will continue to reflect the past” (164). This is the reality that Erik has to hold fast at the end of the novel when he is forced to consider life after Richard. Cohen seems to have taken the cue from Ricou in his descriptions of the land which is “employ and nightmarish peopled by bewildered, frightened men” (112), where life is totally devoid of meaning or pattern.

The very introduction of the male protagonist of The Disinherited quoted below makes the intent of Cohen clear that he is determined to use the setting for the amplification and reflection of the theme of the novel.

As his [Richard’s] hand moved towards the ground, the morning jolted and stopped. He pressed his left elbow against his ribs and tried to get a breath. He knew in the very centre of it there would be place where he could gather himself and survive. It was as if some giant hand had wrapped around his ribs and was locking him into

that one particular moment and when he came back to consciousness he was lying in the sand. (5)

The sinking condition of Richard in the wee hours of his life at the very beginning of the novel that leads is his hospitalization and which culminates in his death symbolizes the growing decay, detriments and the qualitative fall in the standard of human life and environment as well. Cohen’s description of the barn that the

“roof needs fixing and the beans are starting to rot” underscores this fact. More than that, Cohen uses the decaying and disintegrating condition of the barn and the house as a symbolic way the external life-style of the farm reflecting the internal lives of the characters. Through the Kaleidoscopic view of death, dying and decay

Cohen, of course, upholds a natural and inevitable phenomenon of life. In a lively discussion on the geophysical imagination in Canadian Fiction, Moss concludes:

Such a natural process is not a moral state, no more than natural corruption-ageing, death, decay-is a moral state. Both are conditions of existence. In this process of nature, neither life nor even death is wasted except in the eyes of the beholder; neither life our even death is wasted except in the eyes of the beholder; (Patterns 122)

The ultimate disintegration opens the eyes of Richard to their refutable fact that his forefathers and he have been fighting a losing battle against the invisible and invincible fate which has driven the last nail into the family coffin while his son

Erik finds himself in a dilemma about the possibilities the changes may offer. But the success of Cohen as the novelist lies in skillfully drawing this correspondence

between the geographical and human conditions in such a manner as to embellish this theme.

“Place, as character, means that the setting affects the people in a story as much they affect one another” (Macaulay 133). Cohen’s treatment of the place almost exactly in this way adds to the dimensions of place something more than setting. In The Disinherited the place encompasses the story wherein the quality of the life-style of his characters is the result and reflective of the rural setting. The manner in which they speak or communicate to one another may not carry any artistic or literary value but it certainly sheds light on their philosophy of life, manners, labours and spirituality. Cohen’s use of place in his works is not just for decoration or ornamentation but it is copious and his botanical knowledge, beyond doubt is his forte as exemplified in his description that “ground fit only for juniper seeds and sumac trees, . . . elm trees which rose almost a full hundred feet into the air and maple trees which could give three gallons a day of sap during the first spring run. . .” (99).

Moss is all praise for this precise botanical knowledge of Cohen which is

“always fully integrated into the fiction and often presented as correlatives of human behavior and emotion” (DI xi). The remarkable ability of the author is found in his choice and use of the most familiar of farm details without, at the same time, making them a cliché but which relate all other parts of the narrative.

In fact the place as rectangle pieces of land is unalterable and remains constant in shape and size but it does vary in consistency and duality.

The quick response of Cohen in an interview in as back as 1981 to a question on the craving of people for generational continuum, as quoted by Alan

Twigg is worth recording here:

No, I think it’s more than the physical presence of the landscape. The crucial experience for a lot of my characters is that they try to get too much from other people. When they try to get less, it’s better. They have to relate to other people through the landscape, not at the cost of it. (182)

In The Colours of War Cohen uses the landscape as a metaphor for

Theodore Beam’s journey of self-discovery. Both Theodore and Erik the male protagonists of The Colours of War and The Disinherited respectively are “the birds of the same feather” in the sense that as the typical modern youth they force themselves into self-exile on finding--rather assuming--their native place a stumbling block to the advancement in their life. Again the futility of search for better and greener pastures forces them back to their ancestral landscape. Whereas the place remains unnamed in The Disinherited, it is specified as Ontario, Salem in

The Colours of War. Again, like Erik, Theodore is made to understand what it means to be alive and to come to terms with a natural landscape that is sometimes harsh and alien but at the same time proves to be a perennial source of sustenance.

Further more both of them typically represent the frustrated modern youth who look before and after pine for what is not. The ten-year stay in Vancouver miserably fails to offer the mental satisfaction that Theodore was in hectic search for and he laments “it was familiar to me but it wasn’t mine” (CW 16). No less dissatisfied is Erik who had tried to swallow the city (the host city) whole which lay undigested in him [DI 13]. Both the novels thus lay emphasis on the dispossessing process which continues to the point of no return and people flee seeking refuge in rural retreats where they hope to find a chance to be self-reliant.

If Theodore is worried over the destructive pollution of woods and harbours which resulted in the ground being “torn up for airports, sub-divisions and industrial parks” (CW 23), Erik expresses his anger at the rapid industrialization which slowly eliminates the small farms like theirs. “In a few years, this kind of farm won’t even exist. Less family live here than did ten years ago” (DI 41).

Cohen is very clear about where the moral responsibility of this disastrous condition lies: “While bombs and cannons exploded all over the world this continent rode out the century like a fat eunuch King on a velvet pillow” (CW 10).

Both Erik and Theodore were on the verge of vexation because of the pressing feelings of alienation and the unprepossessing landscape which developed in their heart of hearts an urge to return to their native place. The God gifted opportunity came to both of them in the form of a phone-call from their

respective home. If the return of Erik to his ancestral house is expedited by the phone call about his father’s hospitalization that of Theodore’s is hurried by his father’s phone call. Besides very many emotional reasons for seeking his fortune there is one practical reason in the mind of Theodore that his wood house is certainly a place where “with all the farms there would be enough food” (CW 37).

The farewell-kiss of Valerie to Erik and the blessing of the lady to Theodore that

“it is good to go home” (CW 21) rejuvenate both of them. Commenting on the actual and symbolic seeking of house and roots which is consistent in the writings of Cohen and which reflects the central theme George Woodcock states: “that all the promises of the future are illusory the comparison with the discovery of roots”

(World 146).

The train journey gives Theodore time and room for the recollection of the past. Whereas even after ten years of stay in Vancouver the mountains there still remained “foreign” to him and that “they’re too busy being themselves and don’t care about people” (CW 30), he finds his physical separation from his childhood city held no power or strength to totally sever his association with it. On the contrary he finds in his inner mind the city growing to spiritual significance for him. He toys with its name and is pleased to add a spiritual tag to it as it is the shortened form of their holy city Jerusalem. The picture of the town so indelibly printed in his heart since childhood that he could find in a synagogue “each faced

in his own mysterious direction towards his own Jerusalem” (CW 46) which strengthens this view and the spiritual significance has grown so strongly as to make him believe that his return to his native place would certainly and ultimately land him in the city of peace. Theodore’s classic response to a new experience of yet another type of alien landscape which the train passes through the prairies extracts Ricou’s remark: “Man on the prairie, as portrayed in Canadian fiction is defined especially by two things: exposure to and awareness of the surrounding emptiness” (CW ix). The comment of the rebel leader Perestrello on the alienation of the landscape is apt as it sheds light on their vision which effects consciousness of the hollowness of their lives and makes them consider the vivid beyond which is death: “Look”, said Perestrello, “space. Empty space, Last summer grain grew there. In twenty years it could be a desert, a coal mine, a city state, a prison camp”

(CW 61).

Perestrello proceeds further to emphatically express his views on the philosophy of survival which is consistent with events culminating in the shooting of both Theodore and Perestrello which kills the latter: “No one can see the future.

The prospect of death is meaningless. That’s the worst thing. If a man can no longer hold his own death in his mind, if a man cannot balance the meaning of his death against his life then he cares about nothing” (CW 62].

The pointed observation of Margaret Laurence sheds sufficient light on the relationship found between Theodore who is forced by chances to join the rebels and Lise who is already a member of rebel group by choice in The Colours of

War: “The outer situation always mirrors the interior. The emptiness of the landscape and the blackness of the land reflect the inability of these people to touch another with assurance and gentleness” (7). The main journey brings

Theodore and Lise together and in order to bring him into their rebel-fold and to hold him in her tight grip Lise almost seduces Theodore but still keeps him at an arm’s distance saying “She never slept with anyone until she had known him for a week” (CW 50). A deep and detailed study of the map enlightens her and the finds that “into the midst of central Ontario” is “that forgotten and useless region which surrounds the town of Salem” would prove a safer shelter for them both where by the time they got to the church “we’d have blended into the landscape” (CW 74).

The happiness born out of this discovery weakens her to resolve and she invites him for a sexual union saying “we’ll pretend it’s been a week” and Theodore “was inside her, her legs wrapped round my waist” [CW 91]. This physical union means more than what meets the eye. It is the vision of a promised land, the hope of Salem which subdues and softens the bleakness of the prairie land and ushers in new hopes and new joys for them and their love--making that too breaking the

resolve--is but a symbolic vision of their happy and peaceful life in a remote corner of the country.

The concept of “home” is explored on various levels in The Colours of War the first of which is traceable in Theodore’s observation soon after his meeting with Dr.Fine. If Theodore laments as an individual for “homelessness” Perestrello as the chief of rebels naturally expresses his grief for a community which was wiped out of their European homes and driven to Canada to seek a home where, they hoped, a ripe and fertile land was waiting for them. But soon they realized it was but a mirage. Perestrello puts it:

Of course, we were wrong. The future was only the past in an elaborate disguise. The continent was ruined as easily as a wife or a child. . . We began to realize that the new world has already become the old. There was no place to recall us. We could only go round and noticed repeating ourselves. (158)

This cry of the rebel leader exactly echoes the articulation of Theodore: “In

Vancouver my life had proceeded calmly enough from nowhere to nowhere. If I needed a home then I had it in my mind”(103). The sentiments of both of these bring to the fore the North American experience in general where for several generations after migration, ‘home’ is still somewhere in Europe. Theodore recognizes as the journey proceeds that part of his father’s legacy to him has been a geographical location to which he can relate: “But at least Jacob Beam had the

courage to fight for Spain-risking his blood long after Perestrello himself had deserted. It is in his small town he had tried to escape at least he had given me a home” (161).

Though Cohen does neither explicitly express nor elaborate in this aspect this concept of a home certainly has a special meaning and significance for the

Jewish immigrant, particularly in his search for identity. In an interview with Alan

Twigg, Cohen admitted that some people do the right thing in leaving their home while he found for some others its almost inevitable to go away and come back and he further expresses: “I think I understand those people who come back better than these who go away once and for all” (18). If viewed through this light the reactions of Cohen’s characters become more interesting and better understood as well. The entry of the train into Ontario bush land increases the heart-beat and enhances the excitement of Theodore who is himself thrilled at the reaction of his arrival at ‘home’ at last. He grows optimistic about the positive and vital role of

Salem in fusing the loose ends of time and place which he has been experiencing for the past decade:

With each passing minute my feeling of home, its closeness my desire to get there, was growing stronger: and I couldn’t help thinking that this was what I wanted for years, that by being thousands of miles away I had only been shutting myself of from myself like a sullen and sulking child. And with each passing minute

the sky grew brighter too. Now the air was beginning to glow white with the rising sun (163)

At this point Salem seems to Theodore what Woodcock calls “an eccentric sanity in a world of collective madness” (World 132).

The true meaning--both literal and metaphoric--of the concept of home lies in the questions raised by a local character which pose a great threat to Theodore as he must answer for himself:

‘Where have you been? What have you seen? And where are you now? Theodore Beam’ . . . . (184).

Theodore’s long journey is, perhaps, meant to enlighten him on this issue and he is made to understand that Salem is not just a piece of rectangular and lifeless landscape but a symbol with soul. It is the symbols of peace and identity for the rural people there who, though seem to be ridiculously imperfect rustics certainly have a sense of identity which is closely related to their roots and landscape. On his return to the native place Theodore finds his father who had grown “merely short and almost fat” with the replacement of shining red hair with grey hair”. His instantaneous and spontaneous comment is that “Time had been cruel to him” (181). Such a change is noticeable not only in human beings but also in the town: “For while the station in the town’s centre was the same as it had always been, like the inner ring of a tree, the rest of the town had run riot” (182).

By such apt comparisons Cohen succeeds in making the setting correlative with the characters. On finding his roots in his own native place Theodore does not want to leave Salem though Lise and Felipa decide to leave. He feels “after all these years and trials I was home at last, to be renewed, to begin my life again”

(226). This confessional statement of Theodore upholds and confirms the symbolic stature of Salem.

The setting in The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone is, at once, the same as and different from that of The Disinherited and The Colours of War.

Cohen’s strong belief that the scene “will be different when is repeated, because meanwhile other things have happened which have made it different” (81), directs him to return to a statement, theme or place and work out things in a slightly different way. The memories of forefathers they cherish, and the indomitable sense of survival they possess make Cohen’s characters living on their ancestral land lively, interesting and loveable. But The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty

Malone is quite different in the sense that time and place reflect the dualities of life much more here in the earlier two. The Salem of The Sweet Second Summer of

Kitty Malone is, no doubt, decrepit and shoddy, yet it grows in significance as it happens to be the great setting of unforgettable love and long-lasting relationships.

The trenchant moments in the lives of very ordinary people in an anti-romantic setting add to the patterns and raise the significance and quality of the novel.

Cohen structures the seemingly antithetical details and mutually antagonistic principles by time so that the succession of related episodes defines and designs the form of the work.

Proper and prompt use of dualities which refer to the contrasting descriptions of the same scene looked through different points of view certainly enhances the dramatic and forceful effect of the novel. The most typical of these dualities is beautifully pictured by Cohen when he draws a pen-picture of Mark

Frank sipping a cup of coffee. For a stranger, this coffee is the coldest as it is boiled from last night’s grounds while the truth is that “Mark Frank liked his coffee muddied”. And as for the land his father had lost he was; in fact, glad “to have escaped the back breaking and endless hours of lending and ploughing”.

Instead of being faceted by animals and manure looking out at the front door the stranger “was able to gaze on a commcopia of ancient and rusting cars and trucks”

(42) while Mark’s personal opinion and reaction is extremely opposite to this view:

Looking out he could feel he has forged his own project in this life, that although his brother might read books and pin charts upon his wall, he was the true scientist and explorer. Because he alone had kept up with the times; its dead metal history filled his yard and in its few acres he had re-invented his father’s farm without the labor. (SSSKM 43)

Such a positive attitude brings to limelight Mark’s remarkable ability to find contentment and satisfaction even in adverse situation which actually makes him proud too. He does not measure the value of life on the basis of material prosperity but on the unquestioning acceptance of the given situation and his place in it. The detailed description (13) of a typical Friday night at the Salem Garage and General Repair where Pat Frank is employed presents yet another duality worth-mentioning. The setting though most unattractive does in no way obstruct the fellowship between Pat and Charlie; on the contrary, it develops a long-lasting companionship between these two; and their experience is enriched. The imaging of spring, with all its green hopefulness is represented by a sleazy singer in a plastic green outfit. Yet this interplay of black, a sterile place with warm relationship works and Cohen cleverly and carefully makes use of these contrasts to heighten thematic effects.

Another setting, the formerly prosperous farm of Pat and Mark Franks, provides an analogy for the world and to the garage where much of the action of

The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone takes place. On the burning to ashes of the old and original house they are forced to take shelter into the old pig bars converted into a dwelling place. The detailed description of this new house makes it crystal clear that gone are the former structures of Agrarian order on which were strongly based lives of foregone generations. Yet this sort of squalid home, an

inevitable eventuality of gradual but certain disintegration does in no way affect the domestic harmony or peace of mind of the twin brothers. In fact, it is a kind of harmony rarely found between near half-centurions of men living under one roof.

This type of setting immediately recalls to one’s mind the modern irony which according to Alan Wilde is chiefly and deeply concerned with the awareness and acceptance of the irresistible and irrefutable fact of prevalence of disorder and chaos in this world. Wilde finds the author of such chaotic setting in a dilemma in which he has to “situate himself in the world and at the same time confer meaning on it” (13). Wilde refers to the world which has almost reached the point of no return where repair is difficult, if and though not impossible.

Ironically, Cohen’s description of Salem, particularly in The Sweet Second

Summer of Kitty Malone almost exactly fits into this definition of Wilde (136).

The delicate texture of the novel is very well-woven with the contrasting threads of deterioration, decay, ageing, and discontentment. In a world apparently perturbed with disorderliness and chaos, the characters are endowed with a remarkable ability to confer a meaning on it and consequently to their life; thanks to the undying hope and everlasting love which keep them alive.

When Cohen returns to Salem time and again he does not just focus on the physical aspects of the land. He lays emphasis on the use and reuse of the soul and spirit of the seemingly lifeless landscape. Where The Colours of War ends, there

begins The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone. For, the characters in the latter may be labeled as the extension of those of the former. After his futile attempt to find roots elsewhere Theodore Beam of the Colours of War returns to the city of his ancestors and now, looking through their spectacles he is able to visualize the contentment his forefathers found in the source, though meager, of their living there and as such that novel ends with a hint that Theodore would follow their footsteps and survive there. In the Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone the scene remains the same. Poverty and unemployment ravage the entire city. But none stirs out as all invariably, like true fatalists; accept the lot as their pre- destined fate. More than that the feeling of being ‘at home’ energizes them and acts as a perennial source of fulfillment.

The very beginning of The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone brings to the fore the fatalistic sentiments of the characters. With a cigarette in the hand and the brandy in the other (7-8), Pat Frank thinks out the question whether things could have been different for him. But the only answer he finds--whether drunk or sober-- is in the negative. His conclusion is emphatic: “Different? No. Everything had to be as it was” (7). But Cohen finds nothing wrong or negative in his attitude which is akin to the idea of the modern youth struggling against the odds of life without the ability or strength to strike rudimental changes in the nature of things.

In fact it is this sort of approach and attitude that offers the enviable peace of mind

to the middle-aged people and this unquestioning acceptance of happenings paves the smooth way for the fulfillment and heart’s contentment, which in turn, makes them feel at home. The spirit that pervades The Disinherited and The Colours of

War and which establishes the fact that one’s roots are to be found in the land of his forefathers which alone remains an unfailing source of ‘feeling at home’ is found to continue in The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone too. The ancestral landscape is endowed with the natural gift to console, comfort and complete the sons of the soil. On leaving her husband and her home in Toronto, Kitty meets Pat in her grand father’s farm. She says:

‘I didn’t want to leave him but I needed to be here’. ‘It grows on you’, Pat said. In his tone was the twist he used to have, the voice he put on consumers and tourists.

‘Don’t laugh at me’

‘No’. (36)

Though Pat emphatically denies laughing at Kitty for her decision to return to

Salem the doubt whether he is teasing her is neither unfounded nor answerable.

Yet, it cannot also be denied that Kitty’s resolve is based not on the materialistic items like “pretty” areas and idealized people but on the value of the familiar and naturals. This strong feeling that infects everyone reiterates the view that they are

‘at home’.

Cohen effects certain changes in the setting with the retention of the spirit and soul of Salem, which adds to the strength of the texture of The Sweet Second

Summer of Kitty Malone. The deliberate discrimination of a detailed graphic description of the layout of the town increases the interest and delight of the novel.

The institutions like church, hospital and school repeatedly found in The

Disinherited and The Flowers of Darkness are conspicuous by their absence in The

Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone. The descriptive details of the landscape would lead a stranger to jump to the conclusion that Salem is but a shrunken kingdom the citizens of which have naturally to be deeply depressed or bitter. But the truth lies in the opposite. Quite contrary to the hasty judgment of the outsiders, the externally dilapidated, run-down, back-woods setting of Salem inhabit not the

“worthless” citizens but those with internal and intrinsic worth. Cohen quite easily succeeds in his aim of making use of the setting as a foil wherein are reflected the dichotomies of life.

Once again the efficient and effective employment of the technique of contrast enhances the interest and tempo of the novel. It is the contrast between the natural and rural setting of Salem with the urban environment of down town

Toronto. Kitty’s description of her life in Toronto and Pat’s personal experience in that city on his visit to hunt down Randy Blair presents a clear picture of the urban environment. Though he escaped unhurt while his car was damaged in an accident

Pat himself could very well feel the difference between his vehicle and those in urban area. On a suburban parking lot his old black Ford “looked as bizarre and out-of-place as it had looked natural in the dirt driveway of his home town” (133).

It is but natural that Pat feels fish out of water in the new-rather alien- environment. To add fuel to the fire he gets beaten black and blue by Randy in search of whom he has come to the town to avenge his attack on Charlie Malone.

Kitty’s experience in that city was no less horrible. The inhuman treatment she receives there naturally makes her condemn it as totally uncivilized and inhospitable. When she once again became Kitty Malone from Kitty Malone Blair and tore herself away from her husband and returned to Salam, “She couldn’t feel anything except relief at being away-from her husband, from their crazy fights, from the city when she could find no live place in herself that knew how to respond” (25). It is not in Toronto but in Salem that Kitty finds the roots that offer her enormous relief and the soothing feeling of being at home. Similarly Pat also feels “grateful” rather than “revengeful” when he was beaten and thrown out on the roadside and once he is back in Salem he is whole again. The computing feeling of “oneness” with the area of the ancestors and the alienation of the city is meant to reflect another dualism in the novel-an urban versus a rural environment.

Place in The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone implies not just the physical landscape to visit. But besides this common use by public there is a private and

personal landscape for every character which is invisible to or impenetrable by others. These inner and exclusively private places at times mirror and at times contrast with the public and external landscape. About Mark’s perception of such an inner place it is stated:

It was always Mark who had the money: where it came from Pat had never exactly figured out, he only knew that Mark perceived a secret landscape hidden behind the everyday terrain of opportunities for turning metal into cash, so somewhere in the midst of what appeared to a random and chaotic stream of visitors, wrecked cars and trucks, junked transmissions and engines, was a logical and systematic outraging of twenty dollar bills. (114)

Anne Tokaruk in his analysis of Matt Cohen’s novels points out that it is, of course, closely related to a special skill but Kitty’s perception, according to him is less tangible: “The sun had now deposited a small window of light at the foot of the covers. This warmth she received, wishing it towards her center, towards that mythical confirmation of her own ridiculous existence, towards that place Randy and Pat fought so hard to get themselves into” (70).

Lynn, the youngest and the tenderest of the characters too, in her mind’s eye a secret place is related to the spatial and temporal as it lies in the future:

Lynn was dreaming of the place where no one went. She felt Kitty’s body spooned to hers, the wet flow of kitty’s tears. In her dream she let Kitty’s tears melt into the river. She was walking north. She

wasn’t looking for Randy, or Kitty, or even Mark. She was past the place where the wolves and black flies come from, past the place where anyone lived. (206)

The juxtaposition of such inner landscapes and the physical ones naturally leads to a sort of psychological dualism with which Cohen sincerely attempts to explore- the correlation between the landscapes in which the minds and bodies of men act and react.

Cohen generally focuses on the impact of challenging situations on his characters and their reaction and response to such challenges. He lays emphasis on how they face and overcome the issues--domestic as well as societal and internal and external--arising out of causes like place, time, generation gap, sex and the like. If in The Disinherited Erik Thomas finds a solution to the pressing problem by foregoing-rather sacrificing-his right to inherit, in The Colours of War raising to the occasion, quite unforeseen, by taking arms not only the young and energetic

Theodore Beam but also his aged and weak father show to the world that the magnanimity lies not in never falling but in raising every time one falls. Such a courageous way of swimming against the current and facing the challenges brings to the fore the individual’s values and sensibilities. For most of the characters of

Cohen selfless love, empathy, sacrifices are the positive values to be upheld in life.

As such they are either adverse to materialistic values of life or miserably fail to compete in a materialistic and opportunistic world where money is the only

measure of man. In a society which considers money as the be-all and end-all of life they stand head and shoulders above despite their failure and external defeat.

Though trampled under the heavy burden of failure in this materialistic world for about forty nine years in a rural background Pat Frank of The Secret Second

Summer of Kitty Malone, still holds his head high.

Pat also sails the same boat with the other protagonists of Cohen. He, however, wanted to overcome the feeling of being collapsed and “wanted to explode with love and tenderness as if these long waking nights were making soft in the head” (10). Though, towards the end of the novel, he is not able to overcome the vicissitudes and frustrations of his long and tiring life by his decision to marry Kitty; and, thus becoming a father of Lynn and hold a steady job. His victory cannot be labeled as a traditional reform or success story; nor is he presented as a role-model. Cohen lays emphasis on his gaining self-confidence which alone leads him to the altar of victory. Cohen seems to suggest that such self-confidence is the by product of the development of self. In the process of gaining awareness or fighting against the dehumanizing forces of mid-twentieth century existence a man like Pat has to discover his own convictions which alone could make him knowledgeable and courageous to alter the hitherto unalterable nature of things and Cohen seems to underscore the fact that love plays a pivotal role as a reconciliatory force in altering, in anyway, the nature of things. Despite

the separation by physical bodies and distance and despite the near-absence of communication between the two, Erik and his father are nearer to each other in

The Disinherited which alone forces the son to rush to visit his hospitalized father.

Similarly, in The Colours of War, though Theodore Beam suspects that

Lise is entrapping him into the rebel group through sexual bribery it is his love for her that compels him to take arms. Pat Frank of The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty

Malone is also similar. May be they are non-heroic, even anti-heroic, yet they find a structure for their lives through love which imposes a meaning on the entire community. The description of the June air in the very opening of The Sweet

Second Summer of Kitty Malone that brings into the room “the sweet heavy fragrance of lilacs, the promise of the summer ahead” (7) and Pat’s conviction at the very end of the novel that “Family life is the latest thing” and Kitty’s optimism that “there would be other seasons but now, one more time, she was standing straight ready to live out the warm endless summer ahead” (233) reiterate this view. “The combined funeral and wedding feast” observes Tokaruk, “at the end is most appropriate as a celebration of their joy in living. It celebrates life and death- a reconciliation of woo of the most dramatic of the dualities of life” (72).

With certain deft stroke of a master-craftsman, Cohen is able to present an altogether, altered setting of atmosphere of Salem in Flowers of Darkness. It is not the city which is severely affected by speedy growth of industrialization at the cost

of Agrarian development as portrayed in The Disinherited, nor is it the city of peace despite the political upheaval as shown in The Colours of War. The seasonal and environmental changes like turbulent winds, hails, and thunderstorms transform the city into, a gothic setting of Bram Stoker’s fictional territory of

Dracula, the Prince of Darkness. As Eli Mandel observes “such a metamorphosis helps the familial territory to assume strange shapes” (17). It is akin to the

Romantic poet Coleridge’s concept of making the familiar unfamiliar by introducing characters with violent passion and unused powers; suspected-rather feared-presence of supernatural powers and by creating and sustaining the impression of alienation and isolation.

Linda Bayer-Berenbaum’s description in The Gothic Imagination, that

Gothic Landscape plunges from extreme to extreme (22) is found true in the detailed physical description of Salem in Flowers of Darkness. This town is dominated physically by the spire of the church of the new age; paint color of the church is faded; denominations are changed; yet “what stayed constant was the church’s meaning, because it was placed at the edge of the stores as if to say corruption-this far and no farther” (59). At the other end of the tavern is the hotel and tower. “Between the poles of towers and church Salem’s inhabitants swayed or sometimes staggered” (59). The intermediate spot on the street--Mandowski’s

General Stores--is in proximity closer to the hotel but otherwise it was considered

natural by the town, food being neither salvation nor sin (78). It implies the

Salemites’ awareness of the sharp distinction.

The spirit of the small city of Salem which is proud of its antiquity and ability to change itself in accordance with the modernity is not only reflected in the characters of Flowers of Darkness but also helps in shaping their behavior and character. Instead of dismantling the age-old building and constructing a new one there, Allen establishes his office in the century-old stone building by making it modern with its modern-frosted glass door (174). Not only that; the influence of the town is so telling upon Allen that he “had instantly adapted to this town, its unspoken customs, and ways its webs of old loyalties and feuds; he had disappeared into the weave of the place without resistance or fear” (174). No less influenced is Annabelle. Her louder thinking on being advised to give up her lover sheds light on her inner self. Walking towards the church she broods:

If I can make this journey, she said to herself, if I can take every step here to the church and stand on its stone steps, then somehow I’ll have started to redeem myself. She laughed. Redeem myself, God, I’m being a child. She stopped, took a step backwards towards the hotel, then resumed her walk towards the church, Stopped. Back and forth, what a wonderful game, a marvelous six year old’s game, this whole town laid out like a board of Snakes and Ladders, a game of Heaven and Hell for her to march about, each movement towards the angels accompanied by a tug from the devil. (174-5)

Her conversation with Jacob Beam during this walk illuminates her on the concept of good and evil. She realized “he was not so old after all, just a disillusioned man in a small town who had coated himself with layers of fat, hair and alcohol” (177) and this sort of communication is a turning point with a symbolic significance in her life, for, from henceforth she resigns herself to a conventional life.

Allen and Annabelle are supposed to be a typical young couple. But, having fallen on evil days and evil tongues they are forced to move out of Ottawa. When the crises had come not in single but in battalions--first her miscarriage, then

Allen’s disaster--Annabelle resolved to move to a small town which would be a sensible place for Allen to hide from the rumors that needed time to exhaust themselves (86). Having spent the whole afternoon they chose a random road which “chance on Salem” and which drew the exclamatory remark from Allen:

“It’s like the village I grew up in, only it hasn’t been changed” and surprisingly

Annabelle found a house there with a signboard which was exactly “the house she had dreamed of as a child: a solid stone house, not too big, with its front door in the centre, the porch roof held up by two fake Greek stone columns, large windows on either side” (86). Allen’s craze for Nature (21) drives him to repose total faith in nature which as the panacea “would heal all their wounds” (21). But in Annabelle’s mind lingers doubts about the healing touch of such a mysterious balm. Annabelle’s feeling of alienation is strengthened by her assessment of

Donna, a neighbor, as “just a city woman out of her element an alien and a fool who wanted never be able to survive in Salem” (22).

The portrayal of Annabelle with such a strong feeling of alienation throws light on Cohen’s interest and intent in continuing the Gothic tradition but with a difference. Whereas the early Gothic novelists set their plots in isolated medieval castles and thick and impenetrable jungles, Cohen sets his plots in the contemporary setting of thickly populated concrete jungles with focus on the estrangement. Cohen’ setting and characterization in Flowers of Darkness mirror

Andrew’s observation that the characters of Gothic novelists are not natural inhabitants of the settings in which they are placed because the very purpose of the setting is to create an isolated environment” (ix). Though Annabelle’s house is not far from the centre or crowd of the town and though it gives a majestic look which ensures comfort and mirth to the occupants Annabelle flees it from time to time as if she were confined in a prison of unbreakable walls. The fear of visitation of nightmares and ghosts adds fuel to fire.

In order to sustain and intensify the impact of the setting on the mind and activities of his characters Cohen employs various techniques like ironic and dramatic contrasts and deepening the gothic tradition with the introduction of storms and hails. As rightly pointed out by Thrall, but quite contrary to the appearance of serenity the landscape is, in fact, the opposite (216) as a proof of

time proven dictum “Appearance is often deceptive” and “Do not believe the obvious”. From the very beginning Flowers of Darkness is permeated with an atmosphere of brooding and unknown terror [Tokaruk 87]. Again falsifying faith and hope of the outsider like Annabelle the local clergyman instead of offering them solace and peace of mind, exercises unusual and sinister powers. Unable to carry out the instruction of Finch to breathe deep (27) to overcome nervousness

Annabelle reacts slowly but she however “kept breathing” (28). But Finch’s hand

“the rough palm open, settled like a moth upon her stomach” she found her fingers bruised and her shoulder felt” as though she had pulled a muscle. “She looked out the window, for the comforting sight of her own familiar house. On her belly, burnt right through her modest suit was the imprint of Finch’s hand. Finch, the nerve: Donna hadn’t warned her about his nerve” (28).

The minute details of the natural phenomena like lightning, thunders, thunderstorms and whirlwinds certainly heighten the effect of terror. Moreover they are introduced as the harbingers of evil. On seeing a faint flash of lightning,

Annebelle rushed in and brings handful of newspapers to “shelter the flowers from the hail” (84). But the thunder “that followed the second and brighter flash of lightning seemed to explode upward from the ground, jolting the whole lawn as if it intended to search her out and knock her over” (84).

She even visualizes “Finch, as demonic as the lightening. Finch: standing in his pulpit, his arms spread wide, needing only a cape to be a giant Dracula ready to ravish the entire congregation” (85). While the first lightning sheds light on the phobia of Annabelle the second fore-shadows that evil will be associated with

Finch. Yet another storm frightens Annabelle so much that she seeks refuge and shelter in the embrace of Finch. When she was sitting on the cliff top with Finch

“lightning rose up from the centre of the lake” (137) followed by a thunder and

“Annabelle took to heels. When she had reached the shelter of the woods, she was absolutely soaked. . . . When Finch joined her under the tree, Annabelle was sitting with her arms folded across her stomach drunk with fear” (137-8). Her attempts to release herself from his forced kisses and embrace were in vain and his heavy hands held her easily trapped against the tree but then “there was another explosion of thunder” and she was so terrified that “in her terror she pressed her throat into Finch’s mouth, wanting to be simultaneously penetrated and torn open, nailed by lightning into the wet ground” (138). The lightning, the dark clouds, the unstoppable storms, Annabelle strongly feels, play a vital role in changing her life style by “dissolving inside her the last barrier” which enables her to lead “civilized and ironical life” (139). The intensity of storm finally forced her to voluntarily

“wrap her legs around Finch and gather him to her until her thighs cramped with

pain” (139). Later in a conversation with Donna she defends herself by saying that the “violent energy” of the storm forced them together (159).

Cohen sincerely follows the Gothic novelists in incorporating, besides hails and storms, abysses as an important and integral part of the setting. Mac Andrew defines abyss as a metaphor in the Gothic tradition which brings to the fore the cause and consequence of the evil in the mind of men. He elaborates that “while the heavens rent by terrible storms continue to express human torment and rage at the most intense moment of moral danger, there appears in the landscape the terrible abysses of damnation” (ix). The most favorite resting spot of Annabelle is the lakeside cliff where she usually found comfort and refuge as it is far from the madding crowd of the town. A popular story associated with the place which makes it a touchstone of true love increases her interest in it. According to the story a beautiful young woman sprinted through the sea, “screaming to her lover who was fluttering towards the sea, “Francois! I love you. If you truly love me, for my soul alone, you will survive”, but he drowned and this according to Annabelle,

“was a lesson to those who would swim out of season” (105). As such it becomes the favorite rendezvous of lovers--Annabelle and Finch not the teen-aged lovers but immoral, rather sinning lovers of extra-marital affair-to satisfy their sexual appetite. The oscillation between the guilt-conscience and the sinful act

figuratively indicates the headlong fall of Annabelle into that abyss. “Yet conscience, unfortunately, was hurting these days” (140):

The idea that the relationship with Fine was not actual drama that would need to be resolved but was only a sex encounter-a series of encounters that might already be over-would ease her guilt. By the time she started to ask herself just who she was trying to fool, her mind would slip back to planning the next meeting with Finch. (140- 41)

To denote the completion of metaphoric abyss fall with no redemption for Annabelle, Cohen describes her passion thus: “When Finch emerged from the woods Annabelle would start to race and she felt as if she herself, running towards him, was making the great lover’s leap” (141). Visiting the same place after the death of Finch and “looking regretfully at the mouth that had swallowed her paramour up Annabelle felt that the lover had leapt and proved his love” (248).

Cohen’s deft use of the physical setting combined with the age-old legends enables him in the creation and sustenance of an atmosphere wherein choices are certain and results far-reaching.

In this Chapter, landscape is seen as almost another dominant member in the families, and the members of the families in the Salem Quartet Novels carry a strong impact of ‘land’ within them; Omniscient, Omni-potent ‘time’, too, reigns the family and the characters have to “swim with the current’” for survival which

is discussed in detail in the next chapter titled “The Conflicting Concepts of

Time”.

CHAPTER III CONFLICTING CONCEPTS OF TIME

In Matt Cohen’s novels, in general and the Salem Quartet in particular,

‘time’ is discussed on a number of levels as tense, as definite periods, as moments of great significance and, above all, as structure within which events are organized. Basically, time is a linear manifestation of the destiny of events but its continuum in the human mind is ensured by the frequent visualization in the mind’s eye of the by-gone moments through memories and flashbacks.

Cohen so effectively and efficiently employs this technique of flashbacks that he easily succeeds in creating and sustaining the emphatic effect throughout the narrative. The pressure of time on his characters is so enormous that they are forced to act before the allotted period of time runs out. The careful use of the cyclical and rhythmical patterns of time with clinical precision enables Cohen to present Time as a natural and neutral force. For Cohen, Time is a never failing source of not only good but also evil; it is the measuring rod of the intensity of human experience. As such, Cohen lays emphasis not on the order of events but on the indelible impact they create in the inner awareness which, in turn, sharpens and intensifies human experience.

There is the ever-present and ever-lasting tension that “the farm was only a thin transparency laid on it like a decal that could be blown off easily by wind and

time” [DI 99]. Yet by cleverly fixing its position as the warp, “Cohen is able to weave the woof of time backwards and forwards and create patterns which make the form of these novels so compelling and appropriate” (Tokaruk 29-30). Neither calendar nor clock takes any upper hand in the treatment; on the contrary, through the technique of the telescopic fixation or what is better termed as the

“interpenetration of the past and the present”, Cohen discloses moments from the past which are intimately involved in and/or closely related to the present. “Cohen has a marvelous capacity to move amongst the years rather than through time” comes as a great support for a deeper understanding (Moss Patterns 80). The well- planned and neatly executed manipulation of time bears the desired and required fruit to the novelist in influencing the form and structure of the novel.

A conscious and deliberate attempt on the part of the novelist to return to the same by-gone period would, normally, mar the interest of the novel and obstruct the flow of the story and make punctures in the otherwise neatly woven structure of the novel. On the contrary, it further kindles the best interest of the reader who strongly believes and deeply feels that it is not only natural but also inevitable in terms of the present story with his spontaneous and unpremeditated description. Cohen’s remarkable skill in entering into the consciousness of the character, which is providing the point of view, takes him to the altar of victory in this regard. In fact, he does it in an easy and convincing way by simply going

away from the present and external scene to penetrate into the inner-consciousness of the speaker. The technique of flashbacks or recollections of the past in tranquility is employed in a so natural and convincing way that the reader’s attention is discreetly drawn from the present scene to something subjective, which, in turn, takes the reader into a journey from the abstract statement of the present to another period of time and scene where also it is applicable equally and similarly, though not identically. The following passage from The Disinherited proves the veracity of this statement:

He stopped to look in the sugar house. It hadn’t been used for over ten years, since Erik left. The arch had caved in but the building was still solid. Light came in through the cracks of the roof and stood in the air like thin white sheets. He lit his cigarette again and blew smoke towards the roof, watching it appear and disappear in the strips of light. He always did that, every time he came there. His father had shown it to him one spring, fifty years ago. “Here” Simon Thomas had said, handing Richard his cigar, “You try it”. That, Richard realized, was the time when the problem had begun, the first time he could remember the feeling of ripe discontent in his stomach. (4-5)

Besides providing the irrefutable and authentic proof of Cohen’s ability in the handling of the strategy of the time-shift, the above-quoted passage serves other purposes that the author aims at. First, the voyage of Richard’s mind from the present to the past--an event occurring five decades back--is so easy and quick that

the reader also joins hands with the speaker in this smooth transition. The association of thoughts connected with the sugar house, particularly “the ripe feeling of discontent” despite the friendly gesture of the father in “handling

Richard his cigar” illuminates what was dark in the mind of Richard. He seems to have understood the true and full meaning of the dictum “history repeats itself” for, now after fifty years of his first discontentment with his father, he realizes his son Erik expresses this discontent with him and Richard seems to believe that though time changes, the issues in the family don’t. They remain constant and unchanged despite the rapid movement of time.

George Woodcock finds the novelists like Rudy Wiebe, Matt Cohen and

Robert Krotesch “concerned less with making thinly disguised policy statements than with the more basic functions of returning over time, of examining the foundations of history, of exorcising ancient guilt and celebrating ancient heroisms of giving spirit to the land” because of which he asserts, their respective novels

The Temptations of Big Bear, The Disinherited and The Studhorse Man breathe, “a new sense of history merging into myth, of theme coming out of a perception of the land of geography as a source of art”. In the article “Possessing the Land”, he further elaborates that in doing so these novelists “break Time down into the non- linear patterns of authentic memory and at the same time as they break down

actuality and recreate it in terms of the kind of non-literal rationality that belongs to dreams” (World 94).

A microscopic analysis of not only the attitudes of the members of the four generations towards time but also their aptitudes for the possession of time in their tight grip bring to the fore the patterns observed by Woodcock. The consciousness and perception of time which differ from person to person--leave alone generation to generation--play a pivotal role in moulding the attitude towards the land and also in shaping the life of the character concerned. Above all, such a different consciousness and perception certainly influence his reasoning faculty and thus becomes a key factor in his decision-making regarding “to be or not to be” in a historical time sequence. Cohen’s success lies in his sincere attempt to not only entertain but also enlighten his readers by offering a variety of perceptions for the just and undisputable analysis and assessment of the personal values and perspectives of his characters. Cohen achieves this remarkable feat not by forcibly implanting his views on the minds of his readers but by gently and gradually bringing to limelight the unique perception of the representative of each generation.

A deep and thorough analysis of such different attitudes and perceptions naturally leads Robert Lecker to conclude that “in The Disinherited are traceable four distinct views of time, four conflicting points of view and four narrative

lines” (96). The first generation reposed its faith fully in God and had unquestioning belief in the justifiable ways of God to Man. Further they had a clear vision of and deep faith in the unique concept of “eternal time”. The diary of

Williams is an authentic record which proves, beyond doubt, these observations of

Lecker. William jots down in his diary:

May 30: A night of fire. It has been written that only death can bring us into the garden. My cousin believes in this life is wrong. He is a pagan yet lives in his body like a snail. I have lived outside my flesh and He has shown me His way . . . He will forgive us at last . . . June 8: We are His instruments only & today it was done. (60-61)

It is a record of a man who wanted all to unquestioningly adopt the vision of divinity or eternity of time which blows the distinctions between the past, present and even future to the winds as meaningless and useless as well. Richard

Simon who differs from his cousin William in all respects seems to agree with him, yet with a difference. Whereas William’s concept of ‘eternal time’ is associated with ‘garden’ which means ‘heaven’ and hence the life hereafter, that of Richards is linked with earth and in life here. Continuity of life on earth, not in heaven, according to Simon’s perspective is “eternal time”. His view of true meaning of continuity of actions in and through time is brought to the fore in the following passage in The Disinherited:

The farm had first been settled by Richard Thomas’s grandfather Richard S.Thomas, the middle initial standing for Simon. That is what he called his first son: Simon. The first Richard had built the house, married, built three barns, and cleared some fields. When he was too old’ to work’ he passed the farm to Simon, who in turn married and had children. The first child was male and named Richard, after the grandfather. (53)

In Lecker’s observation, though Simon Thomas, the patriarch of second generation of Thomases, shoulders the duty and responsibility of making the life-cycle continuous on the lines of Richard Thomas, his sense of time is restricted to the past and present only and hence he concludes that Simon lives just between these two senses. He does not live for the future, nor does he place his faith in eternal time. (Journal 103).

More important than the representative Thomases of the first two generations are Richard Thomas, the dying representative of the third generation and Erik Thomas, the young and energetic representative of the fourth generation who is on the verge of vexation because of a dead past, unsatisfactory and agonizing present and uncertain future as these two occupy the centre-stage of the novel from the very beginning till the end. It is the recollection of the past of the older generation and the dream of a bright future of the younger generation that spins the thread to weave the texture of the novel. Lying in the hospital bed with the sure symptoms of imminent death does not deter the old man who, with help of

the viewless wings of memory, flies into the buried past and re-lives in it so as to protect himself from the frightening present.

The unfulfilled wish of Richard “to build a summer cabin” on the island (5) for him to settle there after marriage because of Erik’s forced self-exile even without marriage makes him feel like Hamlet that “Time’s out of joint” (Hamlet I, v.189) and he doesn’t want to die before setting the time right. He gathers courage as if to swim against time because he felt “unfinished, unready to die” (6). His insatiable appetite for sex which gives way for expressions like “He wished he had woken Miranda up, made love” (5) even while he experiences acute heart-pain, makes it clear that he is either unprepared to face the eventuality or unwilling to accept the fact that the pain in the heart is but the beginning of the end.

Commenting on this, Tokaruk remarks that Richard resists admitting that his condition is terminal because he equates the preservation of ‘his life’ with the preservation of ‘his way of life’. But this becomes increasingly difficult as “pain had made everything false and instantly fitted him into a new history” (35). The comment of the nurse, while offering him the sedative that its but “the sleeping pills” (46) forces him to concentrate on the past. “The sentence dissolved his present, and left him standing on Toronto corner with Miranda” (47). Richard is, in fact, not mentally prepared to die without ensuring the continuity of Thomas lineage. Speaking about Richard’s last hours which may gradually melt into

“minute, to seconds to nothing at all” (139), Tokaruk states: “Richard is trying to sustain a temporal world view in which life unfolds in orderly progression from the past. It is Richard’s consciousness that connects all the disrupted memories, and they are presented as fragmented flashbacks or dreams” (35).

Both Erik and Brian are the typical representatives of the younger generation. The former as the direct descendent of Thomases and the latter as the adopted descendent of Thomases, but both of them represent Thomases. Ironically both the de-facto and the de-joure heirs of the farm sail the same boat as both of them are in hectic search of not only their bright future but also their own self- identity. Lack of communication with father, growing discontent in the living conditions of a small town like Salem and above all, the strong belief in the dictum

“the grass on the other side is always greener” pressurize Erik, the heir apparent of

Thomases, to quit his own farm and land to work for advancement in life while

Brian cleverly exploits Erik’s absence to his advantage by working hard on the farm and land to ensure his future.

If the growing uncertainty about desired future makes Erik skeptical, the uncertainty about Erik’s willingness or unwillingness to inherit the farm and land makes Brian skeptical. Such a vision of future is, of course, the consequence of the bleak present into which both of them are fitted. Though Brian was the adopted son he was “stockier and dark and looked more like Richard Thomas than Erik”

(46). In order not to break the family tradition and to ensure the continuum,

Richard never wanted to bequeath the farm to him as he often says to Erik:

“You’re my son. I made it for you” (28). But, Erik from the very beginning emphatically expresses his intent not to inherit the farm. Hence he immediately retorts: “It’s your farm” and “there’s Brian” (28). When Valerie also makes reference to the farm as his, quick comes the reply: “My father’s farm” (21). Also

Brian is quite conscious of his lesser state and in fact he is more sinned against than sinning. Abandoned by his parents in his childhood days he is adopted by

Thomases who also do not treat him like a son. Nancy’s observation of the treatment meted out to Brian by his adopted father is quite true and correct:

He treats you like a slave. You live on the farm and you work there every day for twenty years. When he passes you in the yard or sits beside you at the table or asks you to pass the salt he never recognizes you are anything more than a dog. And now that he’s dying he doesn’t even think of you, he only wants to make sure his precious son gets the farm, Erik, the fool who doesn’t even know his own mind. (77)

The most cruel blow of all inflicted on Brian is by his own mother Ann

Cameron in abandoning him and the step motherly treatment in the adopted family adds fuel to fire and drives him to the verge of vexation and his feeling connected with history and tradition is deepened and intensified. Left alone by his mother,

Brian even as a child toyed with the bones found in a deserted house and made

vain attempts to reconstruct skeletons as if he were reconstructing the buried past from the existing present. But as Lecker rightly points out the child’s “failure to reconstruct the actual elephant points to a broader inability to resurrect the past and life” (105), Brian never succeeds in reconstructing a past which implies that there is no time or inclination in him to develop a vision of his own. Hence, consciously or unconsciously he is ready to make a compromise and stoops to conquer by imitating Richard as much as possible which naturally and ultimately drives him to cling to Richard’s vision which makes his beliefs mirror with photographic accuracy in the past and the continuity of the farm.

The conversation between Richard and Brian in the hospital is largely about the routine of the farm. But both of them are cautious and careful enough not to explicitly reveal the suspicion of inner minds, as both of them wonder:

. . . if it was worth the bother to farm this land with modern machinery, the fields so small that there would be hardly room for a tractor and combine to get going before it had to get turned around, the whole technology of modern farming designed for big flat fields with at least a few inches of soil uninterrupted by stones and bedrock. (166)

Such an attitude brings to limelight the mind-set of both the father and the adopted son which is bent upon to extending the buried and forgotten past into the future.

Erik Thomas, the other typical representative of the younger generation totally differs from his ancestry in the “perspective of family and concept of time” as well. When he visits his ailing father in the hospital he finds that “his father looked better than he had expected, but the sight of Richard in bed jolted him, reminded him that his past would eventually be reduced to remembered deaths”

(33). Even when Erik is all alone with Valerie he is not able to cast off the influence of Richard whose “imprint is still on him” which makes Valerie shot the pertinent question:

‘Do you find the present so disgusting?’ Valerie had asked him, as if he must be fixed on some other time, some immense conglomerate complaint from his past that was supposed to be his excuse and some equally compelling fantasy of the future in which everything would finally come right. (172)

In his views of life, future and time Erik is alienated and isolated not only from his ancestors but also from his own contemporaries like Brian. By shedding light on the physical differences between the father and the son, Cohen seems to drive home the point the difference is ‘within’ and ‘without’ as well. Whereas

Erik’s hands and fingers are “slender and defined”, Richard’s are “like battered sausages covered with calluses and scars like an old bull” (2). Even in his return to visit his father in the hospital he is shown as “thin and unbroken” (139), but his helping Brian in the farm while his father is in the hospital, besides making him

physically stronger offers him an opportunity to “reflect on the past, accept the present and consider the future” (Tokaruk 37). The manual labor in the farm makes Erik’s hands “marked with blisters and cuts” (143) and he stops working on the field as a helper of Brian and takes charge of the lawn as a “guardian and builds a patio out back” (163).

Physical strength gained by physical labor naturally sharpens his intellect which, in turn, enables him to make decisions which will influence his future. The observation of Mr. Zellar, an in-patient in the hospital that “the father is dying and the young son pines away, afraid to take what is his” and that, “the father is afraid to die and the son is afraid to live”(181) throws light on the inner mind of Erik.

Erik, however, seems to have made up his mind. He is resolved to throw off the dead weight of the past and construct a new future too; while he stands in the graveyard after the funeral of his father the thoughts that quickly flash across his mind unfold his future plans crystal clear:

He walked over to his father’s grave and stood above the wooden marker. The lump in his throat was gone but he still hadn’t cried. The grass would grow where they had thrown the seed and the mound will settle with time and rain-one day he would take his own children to see this grave and they wonder how someone related to them had come to be buried here whether this meant it was true that their father had been born on a farm. (231)

As Simon Thomas is virtually the last son of the soil to have lived and died in the small town of Salem “time” seems to have come to a standstill with his death. This is what Lecker means when he remarks that “the novel ends on a vision of future” (102) and Erik’s confrontation with the future from thereon indicates that the past is exorcised. Cohen’s craftsmanship in the use of his key characters’ perceptions of time to connect all the flashbacks and memories in a smooth manner leads Moss to conclude that Cohen: “replicates the mental processes of rumination . . . and often confounds temporal barriers kaleidoscopically, having bits and pieces of experience into designs before the single lens of a character’s mind” (Sex 190).

If the visualization of time-period in The Disinherited is made through the spectacles of four subsequent generations, in The Colours of War it is a restricted visualization of the past of one single individual. The words of Theodore Beam, the male protagonist of the novel, in the very opening of the narrative: “I have to tell you this story. . . This is my voice; the sound of past and future singing through my bones” (9-10) make it crystal clear the extent to which Time will be an organizing factor in the narrative. The hero’s ability, besides his living in present,

“to bear the sound of past and future” brings The Colours of War under Adam A.

Mendilow’s classification of the “Utopian novel” (90) though by general opinion this novel is an anti-Utopian one. Speaking of the Utopian novel, Mendilow

observes in Time and Novel that it “presents special difficulties, for the implied writing of it is even further in the future than the action described, so that the events occur in the relative past of the pseudo-writer, though in the future of the reader” ( Tokaruk 41).

The setting of this novel in the near future accounts to an extent for the difficulty of the reader in shifting the past tense “into the chronological future and feeling it imaginatively as a fictive present” (Tokaurk 42). Mendilow also points out that the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of conveying the full illusion of the future, certainly the root-cause of the start of many of these novels “from the contemporary scene and return finally to it at the climax of the narrative” (90) and this is exactly the structure that Cohen opted for this novel.

Yet another critic Patricia Tobin in her book under the very same title of

Time and the Novel remarks that “time exerts a double pressure on the realistic novel: as form, it is largely silent and unobtrusive but as process it is noisy and ubiquitous” (4). Cohen’s technique of time setting in the near future offers him the necessary and sufficient freedom to at once set up the details of government and social structures to suit his purpose and allow them to appear realistic. Thus in

The Colours of War, Time functions as form and process as well. Tobin opines that time, as a linear unity, goes to make an invisible but unbreakable link between the novel and the common sense of life which, in turn lays emphasis not on the

actual happening but on the modus operandi of that happening: “What is essential to the illusion of reality”, stresses Tobin, “is not what happens but how it happens”

(6). Based on this argument of Tobin in the summing up Tokaruk observes that when the operations of memory and mind are translated into the past tense of novelistic narration, the historical actual, the geographically life like and the artistically plausible become indistinguishable (43).

Epic is the only genre to begin in medias res or in the middle which recapitulates the beginning or the past through retrospective narration and foretells the end or the future through prophesy. Similarly, strict adherence to the

Aristotelian rule of maintaining the three unities--unity of time, action and place-- forces the classical playwrights to restrict the action of the play to three to four hours, the time of actual performance on the stage. Of all the plays of William

Shakespeare The Tempest is perhaps the only play to follow this rule, wherein

Prospero narrates his past to his daughter Miranda. This technique of flashbacks and retrospective narrations enables the writer to begin the narrative at the near- end of the story and that is what Cohen exactly does in The Colours of War.

If with the help of memoirs, diaries, recollections which shed sufficient light on the life and actions of four generations Cohen is able to rewrite the dynastic history of Thomases, it is through the mind’s eye of one individual,

Theodore Beam, Cohen makes not only the protagonist but also his readers aware

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of not only Beam’s past, but also present and future. This kind of visualization paves the smooth way for a self-introspection which, in turn, pressurizes him to take active part in the ongoing historical events of the country. In a way, it indirectly indicates the irresistible influence of Time on his life and actions. The train journey which swallows most of the time of the narrative rightly serves as a proper backdrop for not only the recollection of the past but also direct and active involvement in the present and shaping of the future.

The ominous times in the life of Theodore Beam which forced him to quit his native place and later to return to his native place are not just a matter of coincidence but what Edward M. Forster calls “life in time” (66). Further, the super-imposition of a quality of duration upon continuous change is made easy and possible is rightly endorsed by Eleanor Hutchens:

In a novel things happen when it is Time for them to happen. For this reason, the genre accommodates coincidence and the unprepared event much more comfortably than does any other. Time brings them; they are Time at work. Time will bring many things before the end. Ripeness is all; and ripeness arrives when Time and the will of the characters have fought out the matter between them and Time is seen to have prevailed. (57)

As holding back history causes stomach ache and “choking in throat”,

Theodore Beam resolves to push this out. His open declaration to begin the story with the telling of the times “of my life that were special and stuck up like sharp

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mountains through the comfortable dream of lies, the dream of everyday” (CW 9) is put into action by Cohen in a single or series of flashbacks, at the same time, without disturbing the balance and sense of proportion of the novel. “Memory’s functions in the human experience on the one hand and its place within the objective succession and of order of the time on the other is the key to the disclosure of some sense of continuity, identity, and unity within the context of the personal past of the individual” (Meyerhoff 42). True to this statement the memories, triggered by some event in the narrative present, bring to the fore the past buried deep into the mind of Theodore.

The significant happenings which have, in the past, shaped Theodore’s life flash across his mind’s eye by seemingly random associations as the plot is not a simple chronicle of uninteresting succession as asserted by Tokaruk (43). Both

Frank Kermode and Mendilow see eye to eye in the classification of Time under two categories both of which are traceable in the experience of Theodore. What

Kermode terms as “chronos or passing time or waiting time” (47) is called “the chronological time which is the same for everybody” by Mendilow in Time and the Novel (31). The second and more important kind according to the former is

“Kairos which means a specific point in time filled with significance, charged with meaning derived from its relation to the end” (47) and according to the latter “the psychological time or one’s own private clock that measures time by values and

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intensity of happenings” (31). By cleverly making his male protagonist, Theodore

Beam, the narrator of his past Cohen is able to focus on the significant events in

Theodore’s psychological time or Kairos which have, beyond doubt, influenced his life and which form the shape of the narrative as well. The accumulation of

Kairotic or psychological timed -events throw sufficient light on the character of speaker and indicate a sense of direction.

Besides leading the reader to the natural and inevitable conclusion that The

Colours of War is permeated by violence, the violent incidents that Theodore encountered both in the past and present play a vital role in sharpening his personal awareness and shaping his moral integrity do recall to the reader’s mind

Moss’s remark in Sex and Violence in Canadian Literature that “violence permeates novels which attempt to comprehend or resolve opposing realities on a moral plane” (254). The fist of a policeman shooting out “like a thick piston” (CW

21) without any warning is the first violent incident that Theodore remembers.

Being aware of the present condition of Canada this sort of intrusion or violence didn’t make him “surprised or angry”; on the contrary he “seemed amazing that I had been protected for so long” (21). An attempted knife attack in Vancouver train station which ended in a scuffle between Perestrello and his assailant is the second incident of violence (38) recollected by Theodore, triggered the momentum and expedited his involvement in the revolutionary movement. But the real turning

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point occurs in Regina where a local farmer Harry “was tied to the post with ropes around his chest and thighs and his wrists bound behind” (130). He was cruelly executed by the firing squad for having raised his voice and finger against the revolutionary movement the previous evening.

The brutal killing of a common farmer whose “voice” reminded Beam of

“some of the farmers who lived around Salem” (128) not only shocks Theodore but also awakens him to the seriousness of the situation and ground reality of life.

From there on, this personal awareness begins to be intertwined with his moral integrity. Moreover, the killing of Harry is viewed in three different angles by three active members of the one and the same revolutionary group. For Theodore, it is, as if “some part of me had died and I had been hurled into the future--my past demolished--like one of Jacob Beam’s carefully grown tomatoes against brick wall” (131). Lise, as a born rebel takes it in a lighter vein and remarks casually that, “it always happens this way. History catches up to people”(132). She also doesn’t fail to express her belief that such deaths are the harbingers of change:

“How people live and die is what makes things change” (132). For Felipa, the wife of the rebel leader Perestrello, “It is a great moment. Nothing like this has ever happened” (137) Commenting on these three perceptions Tokaruk states:

These three reactions present the interpretations of ‘Kairos’ occurring in ‘Chronos’. In this way Cohen emphasizes the importance of significant times in individuals and on the way events

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will unfold chronologically. Time is a powerful influence not only on individuals but on their future and also on the form of this novel. (49)

The strong will power and the self-confidence embody Erik Thomas, the virtually last of the Thomases of The Disinherited to forego inheritance and set out to face the future all alone. In having buried the past and leaving his native soil again in search of identity Erik presents himself totally different from Theodore Beam, the protagonist of The Colours of War who by his sincere attempt to recover his forgotten past, reverses this process. His eagerness to get to know his father and understand what his grandfather may mean to his life is mirrored in his concluding words: “Old words flood through me . . . this hand records them--my hand, my father’s hand” (234).

The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone presents events thoroughly rooted in time as well as place. The main characters here are the middle-aged who have a habit of and find pleasure in the recollecting their by-gone days, dead unforgettable past. It is but natural that on such occasions the memory does not reproduce the past events and time with proper continuity or meaning. The powerful, emotional or sentimental feelings of the past flash across one’s mind as a succession of fragmented and isolated moments of experience which makes continuity or meaning a remote possibility. But the fertile imagination and creative genius of Cohen enables him to overcome such hurdles. His clever and careful

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choice and arrangement of much significant and relevant events and times from the lives of his characters prove beyond doubt that despite the chaotic stream of life and fragmentization of experience, their life and experience bubble with positive and valuable qualities of duration, continuity and unity in terms of which some concept of the self may be upheld. Thus Cohen seems to present this novel as a faithful record of lives in motion wherein not only the space they live in but also time of their action plays a key role in building their lives and experiences.

The pointed observation of William J. Handy adds strength to this view and hence worth-quoting:

Works of fiction express man’s capacity to formulate his world in concrete presentations which render the full unobstructed bodiness or texture of the experience. As well, fiction, unlike poetry expresses man’s capacity to experience his experience, not merely in moments but in time. The novelist, whose focus is on man in his experiencing of his world in time, whether inner or outer, possesses the same characteristic concrete vision as the poet. Both see the world’s concrete constitution and both wish to celebrate precisely that aspect of its nature. (8)

Cohen’s remarkable skill in making the flashbacks and memories a fitting platform for his characters to re-enact their past experiences and also to integrate those former events with new meanings for the present helps Cohen in the creation and sustenance of what Handy calls the poetic quality in The Sweet Second

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Summer of Kitty Malone. While on a drive to Toronto, Pat recollects the past events after thirty five years in which two of his pet dogs were attacked by wolves and he stood helpless and dumbfounded; the dogs were torn apart. In the narrative present, this bitter experience helps him avenge his friend Charlie Malone who was attacked by Randy Blair, Kitty’s Son. The detailed description of this recollection serves two purposes--first it proves Cohen’s ability in creating and sustaining the poetic quality, and the second and more important is that it shows that time of human conscience is not just the time of chronology of events. It is the time of inner awareness, a virtual aspect, of human experience.

As Tokaruk’s analysis of Cohen’s concept of Time throws sufficient light on the difference between the chronological or everyman’s time and the psychological or individual’s time is worth quoting:

For Cohen, the time of inner awareness measures the intensity of human experience, not its order of succession. The placing of Pat’s memory of the scene with the wolves, not only re-examines a vivid event, it reveals one of the distinctive features of this novel: the way in which Cohen literally collapses Time. (74).

The journey to Toronto was initiated by an event which made Time almost stop for Pat. He strongly feels and realizes a sudden change in him which implies that something very significant had happened. Pat had known that everything had changed, that he had stopped drinking and was now focused on the hunting down

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of Randy Blair: “. . . Pat had not lost sight of this new purpose” (SSSKM 113). On the highway the Ford he was driving “came loose and homed for the ditch. . .

There was a bump, one corner of the car bit into the ground and everything snapped free. Wind whipped through the open window like a long last death- tunnel whistle” (SSSKM 122).

Curiously Cohen takes an unexpected but suspense-bound digression here.

Instead of speaking about the possible result of so violent an accident Cohen cleverly employs the flashback technique to fell two birds with one stroke. While this strategy dips Pat into the pool of recollection to bring to surface of his memory the dead past of the wolf scene the reader is anxiously waiting--rather in spell bound suspense--to know of the fate of Pat after this accident. Thus Cohen is able to succeed in completing the circle of Time--integrating the present events with those of the past, and suggesting the indelible impact of both the past and present on the future. The inability of Pat to raise to the occasion in the past, his gaining momentum in the present which would certainly enlighten and empower him so as to shape his life in future by taking wise and timely action to solve the problems are all unfolded at once here. Cohen seems to lay emphasis on his belief that human mind is a store house of both external events and inner awareness.

Thus, inner awareness pertains to the intensity of psychological time of external events.

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By common consent, it is acknowledged that literature has a twin function to perform--to present the contemporary society with a clinical precision, and to shape the future society as well. In other words any good and time-tested work of art not only shows how the present society is but also suggests how it ought to be.

True to this observation, Cohen holds the mirror up to nature and brings to fore a common but concealed characteristic of all people to experience simultaneously the chronological and psychological times. In order to give sufficient time to awaken the sub-conscious mind so as to make it push the past happenings up to the consciousness of Pat, not just as a mechanical recapitulation of the past but as the emotionally charged re-interpretation of the past and it has paved the way for the present journey, Cohen deliberately extends the chronological time of Pat’s journey to Toronto, though it is not so long actually.

The recollection makes it crystal clear how Time has played a pivotal role in moulding the character of Pat through the indelible impact of the past events on him. The events which were of significance at the time of occurrence have not lost their vitality or importance even after so many years, for they prove to be guiding factors of Pat’s present and future as well. A thread-bare analysis of the inevitable influence of the past on the present and future enables Mendilow to remark:

“Finally the hero greets his beloved with the pressure of all his past on the moment

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of his present which is modified by a purposiveness that thrusts toward a future with big hope” (31).

Ironically in The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone Pat is rushing to

Toronto to meet not his ‘beloved’ but his adversary Randy Blair; yet Mendilow’s observation holds water. While the lengthy recollection of the vain encounters with the wolves reminds him of bitter and unforgettable failure in life it also enlightens him on the basic principle of life that failure is not an obstacle but a stepping stone to success. Similarly, Pat has a valuable experience of Kairos in

Toronto “a significant time which was to have far- reaching influence on his life”(Tokaruk 76). Cohen describes the event thus:

Picking himself up from the ash cans and green garbage bags that littered the alley behind Randy Blair Senior’s apartment building he had known something irretrievable had happened. Although it was not the first time in his life he had lost a fight, or even the worst beating he had taken, this one had crossed a new line. For this there would be no revenge. (SSSKM 208).

This event clearly shows the influence of Time on Pat in changing his attitude and approach towards life. Cohen’s sincere efforts and the deft use of the faculty of memory as the connecting force of past, present and future by unearthing the past experience with their influence on the present and the future reveal the way human consciousness deals with the dual experience of time.

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With a view to stressing the significance of Time or drawing readers’ attention to the fast moving Time, Cohen opens The Sweet Second Summer of

Kitty Malone with the words: “Friday . . . and it was late” (7). Again in the introduction of a near half-century hero, Pat, whose skin is bleached and hardened simply because of ‘forty nine years’ exposure to “water and snow” adds strength to this view. The description that Pat’s knuckles and bones had been “mashed and thickened” and his fingers were swollen as “old bird’s legs” due to ‘accidents long forgotten’ (14) is certainly applicable to the level of consciousness only. These accidents though believed to be forgotten are not actually forgotten but are just lying asleep in his sub-conscious level to get awakened later and haunt him:

Ghosts past and present moved through the dark air. After all these years of sober drinking something had finally given way and he was haunted; not only by ghost of those dead or of those still living but haunted by the boy he had been; haunted by memories he had long ago discarded, by sounds and smells brought to him by the wind (14).

In placing the above-quoted passage in the very first chapter of the novel

Cohen intends to drive home two points. While the haunting of memories is a sure indication of the perturbed mind of the protagonist on account of the futility of the passage of time in healing the wounds and scars inflicted on his mind and body as well, the haunting of the ghosts of the dead and the living speaks in an unusual but strong and emphatic voice on the irreversibility of the movement of Time towards

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death. The inevitability and invincibility of death forces Meyerhoff to refer to the transitoriness of life as “the most significant aspect of time in human experience because the prospect of death enters as an integral and ineradicable part into the life of man” (66). The detailed descriptions of Kitty’s illness and Pat’s shrinking brain endorse Meyerhoff’s view. Cohen’s use of paradoxical aspects of time with such remarks as: “What was ahead was already past”(65) aims at the creation and sustenance of tension in the narrative and the striking contrast between the certainty of death in future--far or near--and the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings over the recollection of the past memories tends to make existence in the present a struggle to balance both extremes of time.

Ellen Malone, the oldest character and the only one to actually die in this novel, whole-heartedly and unquestioningly accepts the irrefutable truth that life is but short and death is ultimate and unavoidable. Not only that; she makes herself mentally prepared to welcome and embrace death while Pat Frank lay in

Randy Blair’s alleyway with “his life sliding into itself and his ribs sliding into each other” and while Kitty Malone “spent the night in bed dozing under the influence of two shots of morphine” (144). Ellen didn’t feel anything of this simply because “for Ellen, fear and pain had never been further” that thinking about her father in a different way with a pure and perfect awareness that “her father came and then he had gone” (145) is beyond doubt, an authentic proof of

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her positive attitude towards the transitoriness of life. She is well aware that the only certainty in this uncertain life is death, for anyone even “with a whole life in front him has to be rolled off in the end”, as Shakespeare puts in The Tempest,

“Our little life is rounded with a sleep” [IV, i.157]. Her anticipation of and courageous readiness to embrace death reiterates the fact that she is fully aware of the fullness of time:

When all grievances are remembered and gone, all you eventually do in this life is roll right off the edge. Right off the edge like ice cream falling out of a cone, like her father rolling off the old barn roof and it came to Ellen Malone that the time had arrived for her too, that this long silvery night was the last. She would be spending in this kitchen where she had mewled, cooked, and then mewled again, her last night in this house. It was time, she thought, to be like that old ice cream scoop of a moon, time for her to be moving on. (145)

Ellen’s worldly wisdom, moral courage and spiritual fortitude in anticipating, rather welcoming death, which according to almost all religious scriptures, is but “rebirth” or awakening into the Hereafter. This immediately recalls to the reader’s mind the observation of Meyerhoff that “the movement of time towards death is also the condition of birth and rebirth” (68) and Cohen’s description of her knowledge of “leaving this house once and for all” as a powerful force to transform her into a baby getting ready to be born” (151) endorses Meyerhoff’s view, without fail.

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Cohen does not present Ellen as a lady with religious fervor; yet her positive attitude towards death--in welcoming it instead of being disheartened-- is an unshakeable proof of her knowledge and awareness of death, as scriptures claim, a blessing in disguise which holds the key to unlock the golden portals of eternal peace and serenity. The leaving of the house, once and for all, which “had kept her alive the whole time” and the rooms “where she had spent too much time does not seem to aggrieve her for old places . . . could no longer promise her anything” (153) and she is hopeful of going to an entirely new place which indeed is a far better place than she had ever known. Wisdom in fact, dawns upon her later--almost at the last stage of her life. For, all these years she could not see the meaning of “her father’s wonderful and cryptic last good-bye” that “Indians so surely know how to die”. But now sitting in the clean white shadows of a Kingston

General Hospital nursing stations, she felt that there would be a “different meaning to his words” (166). Her father certainly did not mean that “Indians were no good for living” but that they had equated death to “an inner fantastic flower that took a whole life time to seed and grow and they burst into violent exploding bloom” (166). This realization gives her the strong belief that she an “eighty-two years old, an old wrinkled-skin bag of shit” was heading “straight for heaven”

(167).

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Commenting on Ellen’s stoic-like attitude towards and acceptance of a natural phenomenon that completes the life-cycle, Tokaruk states: “Part of Ellen’s elation stems from the fact that she now understands that she had spent her whole life waiting to be freed from the bonds of time. Her timeless and imperishable soul will enter a sacred realm where human- time loses its meaning” (74).Through the death of a ripe old woman, Cohen seems to lay emphasis on the fact that death is not to be considered a hazard of existence but an integral and inseparable part of life itself which has to be accepted as such. Though it looks like an ordinary event occurring in the very last phase of human life, it certainly gives the true meaning and affirms the value of living.

By putting an inviolable and unbreakable seal on the future of Ellen in this mundane earth death has acted as an Arthurian knight rescuing a damsel in distress; as she has certainly escaped from the dimensions of Time with a clear cessation of future. The irony is that the survivors are not so blessed. They have to swim along or against the tides of future experiencing the agony or/and ecstasy in- store for them. The pervading spirit near the end of the narrative is a clear vision of the future and the sugar bush provides a paradigm for what Pat sees as the three time periods of his life: “The survival of the leaves in biting Winter and the resurrection of the trees in Spring from the mere skeletons of Autumn were once the matter of inexplicable wonder. But now the sound of the breaking and

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crackling of last year’s leaves as he steps over them no such questions any longer existed” (216). Beginning, growing, dying with such finality and re-creation without fail, season after season is no more mysterious. It is but a natural phenomenon to be found in the cycle of human life too, as viewed by Pat:

Once the maple forest was younger. . . .Trees straight, competing underbrush and poplars cleared away, twin maple sugar shacks battened against the weather and surrounded by neatly corded wood- was so strong that Pat Frank seldom saw the bush as it was now. . . . Tonight Pat’s perception was different. In the now-rising light he saw the bursts of spring leaves and the twisted remains of the maple forest anew, as if with each second of dawn it was growing again, painted into the clear morning air with no past at all, no previous image; painted into the clear morning air so new and clean he could suddenly smell the deep valley of oxygen between the trunks. (216- 17)

The first touch of sun which turns “the upper reaches of leaves” into “bright and tender green” sends a sudden wave of tremble into heart. The heart which is not excited with “love or hate even regret” but which is “dizzily neutral” further experiences “the sun-lighting up and beaming through his eyes a rushing torrent that pounded his chest and rose up his spine until it washed right through his skull” (217). The blinding white caused by the lighting up of the sun injects into him the optimistic air that “pure waves of life, life translucent waiting to be formed” (212). The time-bound repetition of events of Nature, better known as

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the cycle of Nature which Pat finds in the “yellow sun burning itself to oblivion just to push the green grass up every summer, shining its heart out for grass that six months later would cripple and freeze, drive itself back into the earth” (226) forces him to speculate over human life: “Jesus, whoever heard anything so crazy as the same seasons happening over and again forever?” (226). If in finding a

“friend, philosopher and guide” in nature he shares the platform with the Romantic

Poet William Wordsworth, in gaining knowledge on the role of time and seasons in driving the life into the earth and then resurrecting it, he recalls immediately to the reader’s mind the prophesy of Percy Bysshe Shelley: “If winter comes can spring be far behind?” (Ode to the Westwind). But this illumination does not, however, lessen his anger at himself. In fact, his self-introspection makes him more angry because his knowledge about his own life is very little and because the time is running out so quickly:

He [Pat] was only angry: angry at this woman for trying to lead him away from himself, angry at himself for being so desperate to escape that he didn’t know who he was any more, didn’t know anything about himself except that once he had been a boy who wanted to be a man, and that now he was a man, an aging man past his prime with one rib cracked, his hair lost, a new wife and no better dream than that of being a boy again. (227-28)

The divergent attitudes and views of Ellen and Pat towards Time, ageing and death make time appear cyclical which Tokaruk finds as “a way of envisaging

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a timeless dimension outside and beyond the historical march of time” (81). The positive and negative aspects of life, as presented by Cohen, though appear to be poles apart, are somewhat reconciled by the cyclical view and account for a natural response toward the temporal world. Meyerhoff’s observation that “time has always been a source of both good and evil” (68) is quite applicable to The

Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone in particular, as this novel emphatically establishes that time is more often a neutral force.

The portrayal of the characters of Pat and Mark with their strong feelings of anxiety and uneasiness and occasional visualization of the significant moments of their life as an accumulation of worn out pieces in a junk yard shows the influence of Meyerhof on Cohen, for Meyerhof views the trend in modern literature to measure the value of time on the self basis of consumption as a “social meaning of time” which implies that time is of purely “instrumental, technological value, just like any other commodity” (69). The reinterpretation of the significance of time they have already spent, opens the avenues of meaningful and valuable personal relationship which culminates in their decisions to marry Kitty and widow Kinead respectively. Their decision to enter into wedlock when they are virtually on the threshold of old age is certainly the inevitable and ultimate result of their strong feeling of irresistible pressure of time on them “to reconstruct”, as Tokaruk says:

“their individual lives according to a coherent, intelligible and significant pattern

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which will impose a sense of continuity, duration and identity through time” (82).

Cohen’s success lies in the clear and neat transformation of the fragments of the past and present into a meaningful form.

A cyclical view of Time, a common perspective in the novels of Cohen, is consistent throughout Flowers of Darkness with much stress on the time-tested proverb, “As you sow, so you reap”. The psychological insights and the structural unity of the novel require such a strong base as this concept and view that

Maureen Newell, a catholic “who is well aware of her original sin of having been

“born to sin” (46) is “unable to cry, unable to respond” when the priest warns her of going to hell if she sinned. The unquestioning faith in the Gospels strengthens the belief that sin, like ancestral property, is inherited. Gordon Finch’s awareness of the contrary moods of his father “make him conscious of the curse of his heredity” (42). Yet, his inability to “capture” the mind of his father into words (42) does not prevent him from praising Maureen for her “special knowledge” to which the secret under-side of life was utterly visible, as proved in her saying: “Your father wants to destroy you. . . That is why he acts the way he does. He wants to destroy you with half his being and with the other half he wants you to be more than his match so that when he dies, he can be sure you’re strong enough to survive” (42).

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A microscopic analysis of the temporal theme of the hereditary visitation of sin extracts the comment from Tokaruk that such a theme “is interesting structurally, thematically and certainly psychologically and morally too” (104).

The interpenetration of the past and present, a unique feature of Cohen’s novels, in general and of the Salem quartet in particular, is traceable in Flowers of

Darkness too, the narrative present of which is approximately the nineteen eighties but with certain degrees of definite past. The effective and efficient use of time shifts, flashbacks and memories throw necessary and sufficient light on the significant times or events in the life of the main characters like Annabelle, Finch and Maureen. Annabelle’s affair with Issac comes to the surface of her memory with no recollection of her childhood; Maureen’s strict catholic upbringing is clearly visualized in flashbacks. The memories and flashbacks, thus, become a passport to familiarity of not only the past but also the present behavior, morality and psychology of the characters.

The consciousness of the characters of the passage of both the time and days lends shape to this novel. Cohen’s deft use of the device, what D.L.Higdon calls “barrier time” (9), refers to the precise time-span consumed for certain significant events or dire consequences accounting for the interest and tempo of the narrative. It is certainly not a matter of coincidence that the time span of

Flowers of Darkness is almost nine months--the term of normal pregnancy. For,

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the excitement caused the pregnant of Nellie Tillson, the rape-victim of Gordon

Finch and the imminent birth of the illegitimate child is super-charged under the circumstances of the plot. The impending birth of a child, the direct consequence of the rape within the “barrier time” is largely responsible for the past, present and future action to attain a highly charged significance.

A crime is doubled in magnitude if and when law is broken by the very law makers. Similarly a sin becomes doubly punishable if and when the sinner happens to be a close associate of the church. This is what exactly happens in the case of Finch whose sexual assault of an innocent girl like Nellie leads but to natural and dire consequence. His sinning against the girl makes him totally ineligible for the mercy and forgiveness of the almighty particularly when he goes on piling sin upon sin. His blatant refusal to confess, first to Nellie’s uncle, then to his own wife Maureen and his readiness to swear on the Bible rejecting Maureen’s wise counseling not to “drag the church through the mud” (127) lead him to “the point of no return without his seeing it” (127). The start of the count-down for the inevitable and fixed end clearly shows that the time structure of the narrative is provided by the “barrier time”. In order to stress an all-important moment--a moment of finality--Cohen cleverly and cunningly uses the barrier-time to weave the story of Finch’s affair with Annabelle who got infuriated at the order of Finch forbidding her from the entry into Mandowski’s store, strikes him publicly. From

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this very moment the swift movement of time increases the momentum as not only the characters but also readers are anxiously waiting to find how and when Finch would solve the problem, if at all he could do so. But as her repeated requests to face the paternity suit fall on a deaf ear, Maureen resolves to punish him according to the gravity and magnitude of sins.

The pressure of time naturally and ultimately forces the dire consequences culminating in the shooting to death of Finch and Mandowski by Maureen who doesn’t spare herself also. Curiously with the death of Finch is forgotten the problem of Nellie who is not at all mentioned thereafter but a new problem erupts in the form of pregnancy of Annabelle which is also as implications and circumstances suggest, is the result of Finch’s sexual union with her. The time- period is over; Finch is dead; but Annabelle faces the rest of life. “It was almost a year now since they had moved to Salem: only a year but a whole second life had been lived” (250). The focus and stress on Cohen’s favorite and familiar concept of cyclical nature of life and time brings to the fore the neutralizing effect of time, for time brings forth not only good but also evil.

Cohen’s deft use of non-linear pattern of memory to breakdown the actual and then to recreate and integrate it with the present in The Disinherited makes it crystal clear that in the hands of a creative genius like Cohen, ‘time’, especially the past becomes a powerful and irresistible force. Cohen examines the

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implication of breaking the concept of Time of Richard Thomas that the continuum of Time and the farm is not only interrelated but inter-dependent by the portrayal of Erik who is in hectic search of a new dawn in a far-off place other than his ancestral land and though Cohen presents Time as a continuum in The

Disinherited he himself could not help the implied but strong sense of the end of an era or the fullness of time with the death of Richard Thomas, the last of the

Thomas clan to have lived and died in Salem.

Whereas the influence and pressure of time is traceable in the characters of

The Disinherited, it is found as an essential feature of the structure of The Colours of War. The technique of beginning the narrative at the near-end enables Cohen to assure his readers unity and a fitting closure though the novel is set in a politically unstable and physically threatening future. As in The Disinherited and in The

Colours of War also time is the “linear manifestation of destiny of events and the framework for the events; . . . is a journey which allows for a quality of flowing and imposes a sense of duration on continuous change” (Tokaruk 111). Seemingly disordered and discontinuous events, in fact, attain a meaningful continuity through the structure of Theodore’s journey from Vancouver to Salem. Cohen’s concept of Time looks certainly different in the novel as he lays emphasis on the difference between two kinds of times, namely, Kairos and Chronos.

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Cohen’s use of time and place in The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty

Malone is but to reflect the dualities of life. If Kairos and Chronos are the two kinds of time used in The Colours of War it is the chronological and inner time as found in The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone. If the chronological time, the indicator of which is exclusively the private or personal clock helps the characters in measuring time by value and intensity, the inner time otherwise known as psychological time the vehicle of which is the memory of the characters forms the strong base for the emotionally charged reconstruction and/or re-interpretation of the past events.

Cohen strongly believes that his characters mirror with photographic accuracy the human consciousness which experiences both the times simultaneously. In making the ‘present’ of the novel as the reconciliatory or balancing factor between the spontaneous recollection of the significant moments, incident and powerful feelings of the past, and the inevitable eventuality of the future namely death lies the success of the novel and the author. The use of Time in Flowers of Darkness makes it unique and distinct as Cohen aims at creation and sustenance of suspense and tempo in this novel with the help of this device. The mounting of pressure of time is responsible for the veiled presence of a strong sense of impending doom which in turn gives every action a highly charged significance throughout the novel; further, the explosiveness of the ‘present’

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accounts for the fewer flashbacks and recollections in his other novels. With a careful choice of such fewer flashbacks Cohen is able to throw necessary and sufficient light on the present conditions of the main characters. With the help of his favorite and familiar strategy of recollection of the past to re-build the present and visualize the future, Cohen makes two things clear in and through these novels that time is cyclical in nature and neutral in force. This chapter clearly illustrates how the characters are caught and trapped in the claws of Time, which no one could escape. Cohen is proved adept in depicting the past, present and future through flashbacks that require the reader to be alert throughout the reading.

Chapter IV discusses the pivotal importance of Man-Woman Relationship to keep the family in-tact by analyzing the chosen novels of Matt Cohen.

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CHAPTER IV MAN-WOMAN RELATIONSHIP

Marriage, no doubt, opens new avenues for the widening of the circle of relationship; it brings in new faces, hitherto unknown or even unseen; yet it also, opens up the Pandora’s Box. It ushers in problems, which, if left unheeded, lead to conflicting situations the first casualty of which is the domestic harmony. At times it results in broken homes and broken hearts.

One loves a friend in spite of his/her defects. If the same yardstick is applied in families too, if the precept that forgetfulness and forgiveness is better than confrontation and vengeance is put into practice and if the axiom “Where blood is thick fault is thin” is fully believed and followed, such conflicting situations can easily be overcome. But impracticability of these wise-sayings, emotions overpowering intellect and ego replacing love are the bitter realities of life and the ultimate result is the married life turns out to be the harbinger of not ecstasy but agony.

There is no discrimination, of course, between arranged marriages and love marriages; for both are tarred with the same brush. More often than not, the family is disintegrated, because, as Ayothi rightly points out that “there’s no binding of the souls” (53) in either. Through most of her stories in the anthology,

Arranged Marriage, Chitra Divakaruni Banerjee, a diasporic writer, dislocated

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from India and relocated in America, shows that the Asian arranged marriages are no more long-lasting and the conflicting situations push the couple to the point of no return, particularly in an alien country like America.

“The Canadian family”, according to Atwood, “is symbolized by its struggle to survive. As against the American family-hero’s rebellion against the family structure to define his own freedom, the Canadian family is a trap in which you’re caught” (Survival 131). Though the feeling of being trapped is common to

American and Canadian families, the difference lies in the remarkable ability and spirit of the Canadian protagonists to break away. The family in its past and present, in its generational structure is embedded indelibly such that the ancestral influence becomes a moral and psychological fixture in the mind of the protagonist, as found in the case of Erik. As the novel [DI] itself is radically unique in form and content, it’s but natural, that the characters too are quite unconventional. They are emotional grotesques who are at dissonance with their environment and also with themselves and are made to see themselves reflexively by the very same environment against which they fight. The novel is unique in that it is a ‘three-generation’ novel and all these generation have both the

Canadian and uncanadian elements in them. While the grandfather--Simon

Thomas--is a typical Canadian grandfather, the father--Richard Thomas-- is more

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tolerant, accommodating and anticipatorily less of the domineering grandfather to be; the fourth generation, Erik, is notably liberated.

Cohen in The Disinherited presents conflicting situations arising in the same family where the father’s is the arranged marriage and the son’s is love marriage. The Thomas of first generation, Simon Thomas, was forced into the life of Leah by none other than her own father. Though it is not so sweet a memory,

Leah Thomas is never tired of repeating umpteen times the story of her forced marriage to her sons. She was only seventeen and was teaching in a school when her father forced her and Simon “together against their will” (96). There was no courtship; no proposal but the marriage was over within a wink of an eye. She was very proud of the British culture which “existed in her own being” and which was the foremost civilization in the world after its victory over the French “by sheer manners and command of the English language” (97). The gulf which was originated and widened everyday because of their mutual misunderstanding is well-revealed in their assessment of each other. In Leah’s estimate, Simon was

“ignorant” who would prefer “a person of dignity and not the common slut”, while

Simon used to tell his children: “Your mother was never-meant to put up with this world” (47). To make matters worse there was always the irritating presence of her father-in-law because of whom she “had not, in fact, been able properly to take to her bed” (97). He was so obsessed with cleanliness and order of the house

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which, in fact, had been “given ever to his son and family” that he used to come into her room, when after one of her fights with Simon she had decided not to get up, and poked the covers off her with his cane--that and every time thereafter-- so that it was not until he was buried that she could spend even one sick day in bed

(97). For her husband, she is just a toy to play with particularly in the bedroom while for her father-in-law she is but a servant maid to maintain the cleanliness and order of the house for which, though, he is no more the master. Her life, even at the budding stage is, thus, squeezed between two selfish and self-centered male chauvinists. But her cup of woe is not yet full.

Simon’s advocacy of avoidance of tobacco and women for a long life was not followed by his own self, for he used to proudly recollect his experiences with every woman he had in the past. He never felt shy or reluctant to elaborately describe his sexual activities to his son, Richard. Many women including

Catherine Beckwith who came to look after his ailing wife Leah and the wife of

Herman White, his lawyer who made his will were easily lured by him to satisfy his sexual appetite. But he was such a pervert that, instead of keeping his activities a secret, he made them public with the intent of being appreciated and applauded for his manliness: “Although it was not the local custom to boast of chastity,

Simon Thomas was considered to be somewhat exceptionally descriptive in his talk, especially at community gatherings where many of the apparent subjects of

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his anecdotes were present, along with their husbands. But no one ever got angry”

(88).

The Canadian society presented by Cohen in the above quoted lines, at once, reflects the Indian society presented by Girish Karnad in Naga Mandala where Rani’s husband a regular customer of a sex-laborer, walks erect with his head high as the society does not consider his act as a betrayal of or disloyalty to his wedded wife, leave alone a sin. Simon Thomas has derived interest in extra- marital sex, perhaps from his mother who had an affair with the cousin of her husband: “They say my father caught them in the barn”, said Simon referring to his mother and the poet (58). The poet, for his part, has recorded in detail the development of the illicit intimacy between them:

May 25: My cousin’s wife knows what is in me and constantly finds excuse to talk to me, even stand against me when we are in the gardens in the house. Sometimes she is bolder. . . Her attentions to me are proof of His care.

June 1: My cousin’s wife grows closer and we spoke today about the need to be extends assimilated passed through the blood of another.

June 6: We went into the field. . . . Insects constantly swarmed about us we had to go back to the house before it was done.

June 8: We are His instruments only and today it was done. (59-61)

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Though Leah Thomas, Simon’s wife, remains a mute and passive spectator of her husband’s unfaithfulness to her, Richard Thomas, father of Simon was not so tolerant. Although it was not the local custom to boast about chastity, he could not digest his wife’s disloyalty as it implies his inability to sexually satisfy her.

No cross is heavier for a man except that of the title of “unmanliness”, a euphemism for impotency. The infuriated husband naturally tries to take revenge by killing the poet through rat-poison but even after consuming the food with rat poison the poet remained alive: “Nothing happened” (58).

Though Leah was a silent observer of her husband’s immoral conduct, which left an indelible impact on her mind, she could feel an acute pain in her heart which burst into fiery words in her conversation with her sons. As “brevity is the soul of wit”, she utters just a few words which are capable of speaking volumes of her agonized mind: “They say he is a gentle man. She would repeat that several times” (99). The repetition of the word “gentleman” is clearly reminiscent of Mark Antony’s famous oration after the assassination of Julius

Caesar where, at first, he literally means it but later the word attains a connotative status meaning, the very opposite. The same effect is traceable here too. Not the words but the intonation and accent bring out the true mind of the speaker. Two different characters in two different of plays of Shakespeare speak the very same words--“I am not what I am”–-but they mean entirely different things. While

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saying so, Viola in disguise of a man in The Twelfth Night (III, i, 138) refers to her gender and physique but Iago, a scheming villain in Othello (I, i, 66) refers to the meanness of his mind that indulges in “motive hunting of motiveless malignity”.

Leah Thomas, however, had her own doubts, not about her linguistic skills but about the comprehensiveness of her audience. So she has to elaborate: “They say Simon Thomas is a gentleman” she would say, “because he has never killed or beaten anyone. . . The little runt never went to war because he was a coward” (96).

The perfect character analysis made in so few words makes her claim that “No one understands a thing about your father except myself” (95). Besides, it clearly shows how broken hearted she is because of the misconduct of her husband. The society may applaud him for his adventures with other women and celebrate him as a “gentleman” but in the estimate of his wife he is nothing more than a “runt”.

If the arranged marriage of Simon Thomas and Leah Thomas miserably failed to bring in harmony and delight, no better is the love marriage of Richard

Thomas and Miranda Thomas. It is, in fact, the deep and unadulterated love for

Miranda that brings Richard back to the farm (41). While wooing, the meritorious features, however tiny, have a miraculous power of eclipsing the defects, however big. But after marriage, the things are reversed. The defects surface and the merits go beneath. This is what exactly happens in the life of Richard and

Miranda, too. They, unlike his parents, “fought over everything” (2). Some nights

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he would storm out of the house and gone down to drink. On his return at late night he would find her sleeping in the spare room with her nightgown on. But if pacified, “she would wait for him in their bed naked and patient” (3). Though she was of second generation still she has not gained the liberty to give vent to her thoughts openly.

Miranda herself tells her son Erik that her face had to “express everything she was not allowed to put into words” (31). Though Richard is not as rigid as his father in maintaining the house, he was not in the good books of Miranda, who confesses that she would have given a second thought to her marrying Richard if she had met Simon before their marriage (151). His hatred towards her and unappreciable nature for the sumptuous suppers she prepared for him were, perhaps, born of his assumption that she is his son’s house keeper and not a wife.

Thus Thomases’ attitude towards women and treatment of them not as human beings with flesh and blood but just objects without feelings and emotions is yet again brought to the fore when Erik imagines what would happen when he introduces his lady-love Valerie to his father Richard. “He would look her over point by point pretending to inspect her as if she were a cow he was considering at a sale” (27). Yet, the women adjusted with them and attended to their needs, including the sexual ones even in the hospital (152) and lived under one roof, though not happily, not because they loved them whole heartedly but because the

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society demanded so. What Ayothi in his microscopic analysis says of Theo and

Mariam is true of and applicable to these couples also: “. . . marriage and family have served as institutions which facilitated their co-living and nothing more than that. They lived together as husband and wife because the system wanted them to be so . . . there was no binding of the souls” (K. Balachandran Essays 53).

Thomases are quarrelsome by nature; they’re easily provoked and they quarrel over flimsy reasons and serious reasons as well. Erik and his adopted brother Brian come to blows while stealing crates of tomatoes from their father’s farm. Brian started the brawl on being accused of taking “too many” crates. “For his answer Brian jumped onto Erik from the rail gate and they both went sprawling in the dust . . . they were rolling over on the ground and wrestling” (47).

But the fight between Simon and Richard, the father and son, is of a serious nature. They were literally crossing swords with each other for the possession of

Katherine Malone who was the concubine of Simon, who sent Richard to her house, in fact, to keep vigil so that she would not entertain any other (111).

Though she, in fact, started as a baby sitter, the attraction of his youthfulness and athletic body was so irresistible that she soon taught him dancing and sexual act, too (112).

Once fallen, Richard could not free himself from the clutches of her enticement. Cleopatra-like “infinite variety” of Katherine eclipsed the age

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difference and Richard walked willingly and voluntarily into the trap laid by her.

Grown suspicious of this unacceptable relationship, Simon warns Katherine and shows the photographs of his relatives, particularly of the poet William C. Thomas who seduced his mother “as if to say to Richard that this was the absolute all-time greatest betrayal of history, a case of Brutus stabbing his own father in the lowest possible place, seducing his own father’s bride-to-be while his mother fatally weakened bearing this ungrateful son, died of neglect” (127). But as Katherine was holding the father over the son (112) by entertaining the former in the kitchen and the latter in the bed room at one and the same time (119)and as the infatuation was too deep for Richard, a modern Casanova (113) to resist neither of them paid no heed to Simon’s threats and warnings.

Katherine’s instantaneous rejection of Simon’s proposal to “live with him” on Leah’s death, confirms his suspicion and infuriates him (120) and his advice to

Richard “to leave her alone” (128) to enable her to move into their house under the pretext of nursing his ailing mother, provokes the son. As a result, there ensues a duel between the father and the son (129). Leah Thomas who witnessed the deadly battle and shouted at her husband to run for safety (129), collapsed.

Seeking a solution to the conflicting situation arising out of the issue of possession of a thirty-nine year old woman--much younger than the father but older than the

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son--through the flash of knives wounded both the men and expedited the death of

Leah Thomas (131) for no fault of hers, as fore-warned by Simon (127).

Not only the major characters but also the minor characters in The

Disinherited are confronted with issues which are sex-based. Rose, whom Erik frequents whenever he is in his native place, has a daughter and her husband-- a mechanical painter--is possessive not of his wife but of a machine he has designed.

He’s least bothered if his wife shows herself to anybody but he’d kill her if she shows his machine to anybody (16). He deserts her and the child as a result of which she enters into the sex industry entertaining Kingston’s most respected business men, stiff-white historians from the university, psychiatrists who have decided to expand their horizons, visiting dignitaries from Mexico who would like to twin with a small Canadian city, a cosmetic salesman with a rare brand of bath oil (162). The nurse attending on Richard in the hospital has a similar story. Her husband, a baker who used to leave at midnight for work began to leave earlier.

She consoled herself by assuming he was going to play poker while her worldly- wise mother rang the warning-bell that he was playing around up the hotel (99).

In order to avoid direct confrontation, she moved to her mother’s. It is interesting, rather shocking, to note that the husband could not detect or feel the absence of his wife in his house for a week (48).

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Sex, though not the be-all and end-all of life, is an important and integral part of life which can make or mar life. As the author himself admits that it was not the local custom to boast of chastity (88), he boldly paints his characters with the brush of immorality, if not sin, of indulging in premarital and extra marital sex.

Katherine, who before her marriage to Peter Malone, conceives a child through the old Simon (106), and on the day of his funeral conceives a child through his son whom she christens as Richard Malone for obvious reasons. Miranda, wife of

Richard remarks that it was strange how birth and death were always mixed together as Richard Malone being conceived at the very same time as his father was buried (149). Peter Malone, husband of Katherine is also aware of this fact as he knew “that any child of his would be healthier than this” (154). But every sinner has an explanation to justify his act. It is perhaps the forcible marriage with

Leah that drove Simon to seek new pastures to graze.

When Simon speaks to Erik of his mother’s infidelity to his father he says that though his father could outwork any man in the country was not in all-ways a strong man: “Especially as regards my mother. . .” (87). For her past, Katherine has two reasons. It is perhaps to avenge the old man, she seduced his own young son. Moreover like Simon’s father Peter Malone was also “sure of accuracy of his failed weapon” (124). In the case of Erik, the protagonist, as Margaret Atwood remarks, he “feels trapped inside his family . . . he feels the need for escape”

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(Survival 63). In his attempts to escape and break away from his family, he finds solace and shelter only on the feminine laps, be she a whore or lady-love.

Whatever is the reason, these extravagances never failed to play havoc in familial relationships as it is seen in the duel between the father and son which hurried

Leah to her grave. But in the case of Richard the domestic harmony is not at all at stake mainly because of the understanding, adjustability and accommodativeness of not only his wife but also Peter Malone the husband of his concubine. In fact after his death, too, both Miranda and Katherine Malone would live under one roof as “they had lots to talk about” (239).

Whereas man’s relationship to earth which largely, if and though not wholly, depends upon his decisions to perpetuate or sever ties with his ancestral land is the focal point in The Disinherited, man’s relationship to the fellow human beings through his active participation and whole-hearted co-operation in the struggle for a new dawn which will ensure the well-being of the individual morale of the society and orderliness in the state at large is the focal point in The Colours of War; it is man’s relationship to his own family, which is the basic unit of the society and the harmony of which relies mainly upon his clear understanding of his responsibility and meticulous execution of duty to his wife and children, occupies the centre-stage in Flowers of Darkness. John Ruskin’s meaningful and justifiable remark in Sesame and Lilies that “Shakespeare has no heroes; he has

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only heroines” (137) is very much applicable to Flowers of Darkness for, though this novel deals with the deeds--rather misdeeds--of the main male character,

Gordon Finch, a minister of the church, the character that steals the show at the end is his wife Maureen Newell Finch. Unlike other novels of Cohen, Flowers of

Darkness revolves around just three major characters, two of whom are women.

All the four male characters--main as well as minor--are portrayed as offenders to fellow human beings, society and even religion. The magnitude of their offence or sinful activities varies just in degree. If in Allen Jamieson’s attempt to find refuge and shelter in a small town like Salem can be traced as

“scandal chasing him” (55), in the attempt of Taggard and Mandowski to extort money from the sex-assailants like Finch is exposed their villainy. But the most cruel and cunning of the lot is beyond doubt, Gordon Finch whose fiendish face is hidden under the mask and garb of religiosity. Though Reverend Gordon Finch is the “Protestant Minister” (33) he is popular--rather notorious--particularly among women for what Donna Wilson calls his “lady-killing reputation” (22). Even his wife Maureen Finch admits the bitter fact that “everyone knew that Finch was a lady killer” (34). Her irritation and annoyance knows no bounds when she notices her husband “mounting in the pulpit” to stand “at the head of congregation” with his eyes “surveying his parishioners”, would more often than not, “settle on one of his mistresses” (47). When such a womanizer is projected as the chief male

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character of a novel, it is but natural and inevitable that man-woman relationship, particularly sexual relationship of all kinds like marital, pre-marital and extra- marital, takes the center-stage.

Parallelism between woman and land is yet another concept which is put to deft use by Cohen in The Disinherited. It has been universally and unanimously acknowledged, since times immemorial, that mother Earth that shelters the seed in her patiently waits to deliver a fully grown plant after a prescribed period of proper watering and manuring, symbolizes woman while the sky that waters the plant typically represents the man. Paul Shepard emphatically endorses this view with “that land is female is more than allegorical” (109). He goes on to explain the background in which originated and sustained this age-old convention: “In the genesis of the Gods, the earth has been predominantly female, the sky male. The

Great mother is the spirit of generation and nutrition. The Garden is the threshold of her mystery, of birth, death, the place of giving and taking life” (20).

True to this view, Thomases of the past generations, as typical fatalists, considered the land as their destiny and harbinger of good tidings while Erik, the present protagonist, though does not attach any such divine powers to the land, at least considers it a touchstone to weigh the activities and happenings in his life.

But the women hold a totally different view of the land. The excessive attachment of their husbands to the land who continue to work on farm makes the women

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more angry than sorrowful for they consider land, as Moss puts it, “in some ways the mistress of men” (Sex 192). The neglect of the husband leaves the woman infertile while the excessive care of the man makes the land fertile and productive.

As if to avenge her husband for her his preoccupation with the land which naturally results in the total neglect of the wife, Elizabeth, the first Thomas- woman developed an illicit intimacy with the cousin of her husband, and the inevitable and ultimate consequence was the birth of the illegitimate child, the poet William Thomas. The women of succeeding generations do not indulge in such extra-marital sex either because they are physically weak or morally strong or both. Leah of the second generation is thin and infertile who held a high opinion of herself and strongly believed she deserved a more refined role than that of a farmer’s wife. Her inability to overcome her laziness or weakness tied her to the bed as an invalid. Miranda of the third generation makes a much more satisfactory adjustment with life on the farm. Ironically it is her husband who seeks extra- marital fulfillment with Katherine Malone, the warm, earthy woman of the novel.

As a Mother-Earth figure, Katherine is closely associated with the fertility of earth. Her relationship with Simon is further complicated because of her intimacy with his son Richard, also at the same time. Besides the ecstasy that her body offers him, Simon finds in her company a perennial source of rejuvenating his youthful energy and she has the remarkable power of making him oblivious of

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his domestic duties as a result of which his duties and responsibilities as the landlord, husband and father are gone with the wind. It is not an unalloyed joy alone that he receives from her company but there is a grudge too. His discovery of the bitter fact that his concubine is the mistress of his own son, too, leads to a laterally violent fight between the father and son, in which the youth gains the upper hand and takes possession of not only the woman in question but also the farm of the fore fathers. With her “infinite variety”, Katherine is able to exercise her magical powers over Richard too, so as to not only energize him but also help him escape the burdens of being a Thomas. Though she does hold him in the tight grip, he does not show any serious intention to take her as his wedded wife.

In Erik’s relationship with Rose can be traced certain similarities with that of his father and grand father with Katherine. Both women are believed to have been in possession of certain miraculous or supernatural powers of witchcraft to enrich the productivity of the land. The elusiveness, instead of reducing or damaging the attraction, increases the attraction between the two: “Erik, even when he was with her, had known that what made it possible for them was the knowledge that he would leave” (27). It is but a perfectly mirrored reflection of

Erik’s relationship with the farm. Despite the fascination it has for him, there is no interest or inclination in him to possess it permanently. At the end of the novel

Erik meets an unnamed, pregnant girl who also temporarily takes him out of

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himself but with whom no binding arrangements need be feared. A microscopic analysis of Erik’s inherent nature to keep him away from or disown the things of right or choice, leads George Woodcock that “in all his actions he shows himself taken up in the essential loneliness, the underlying alienation of modern man”

(World 137). The strong underline of sexuality that runs through the novel in rhythm with the other patterns imposed by place, the passage that gives a long and detailed description of Katherine’s trudging through the spring mud to meet

Richard shows Cohen’s efforts to make the readers understand that their union is as inevitable and natural as the spring flowers and further it certainly is but an example of this kind: “. . . and took her feet out of her boots . . . let them sink in the tiny surface puddles hot from the sun. . . the other hand coming out of the mud, palm towards the sun, the liquid breaking apart into thousands of tiny fertile bubbles” (110).

Almost on similar lines runs the advice of Simon to his son Richard to

“have a woman in the morning in winter, before or after the milking it doesn’t matter” (142), which makes it crystal clear that sex is often dictated by the routine of the farm and that everything in their life including the sexual relationship with women is closely related to the extent to which they relate their environments.

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George Woodcock’s remark that the women play the potent roles of reconciling the irreconcilables does not only strengthen the concept of the earth being the female , and the garden the place of giving and taking life, but also shows how Cohen’s female characters particularly in The Disinherited live up to this observation. While Miranda is the only real link between Erik and his father, trying to bridge the otherwise ungulfable gap, Rose Garnett influences Miranda and Erik in curious ways. Katherine as the mistress of both the father and the son not only appeases the sexual appetites and bears sons to both of them, while

Elizabeth does the same thing to her husband and his cousin. When Simon presents the ring, acquired by the poet on his voyage to Canada, to Katherine as an engagement ring she gently but boldly declines the offer. But the same ring however falls into the hands of Erik who puts it on the finger of an anonymous girl and thus establishes a link between the generations. Erik’s bold move to establish a possible relationship with the “disoriented” girl may be taken as a possible signal of a future event in which he may eventually be found to come to terms with his landscape. The generations differ; the circumstances differ; the ways differ--yet all the women invariably express their willingness and readiness to don the role of reconciling forces.

Like any other character of Cohen, both Theodore and Lise do not consider sex as a taboo or something extra-ordinary. It is, for them, a natural urge which

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has to be addressed as and when it surfaces. Lise is not married; yet she has had a baby. Theodore has had his first sexual experience in Salem before he left his parents. Once Jacob Beam, Theodore’s father, took him to visit his friend Henry

McCaffrey where there were Henry’s sisters too. Jacob’s choice of Mirabel, the prettier of the two sisters deeply hurt the other sister, Rosalie. Her lament reveals that she suffers an inferiority complex. “Look at your father” she says to

Theodore, “right away he preferred my sister. It’s always been that way” (116).

Though she says “I always fall in love with married men”, she does not want to miss the opportunity to “seduce” a teen-ager, perhaps, as if to avenge the society that always ignores her because of her ugliness. Before he could realize how has it happened he “was inside her” and “her thighs tightened round my hips and drew me in deeper” (118). Thus in the past the sexual acts for both of them were just body attraction but now they see their union in the railway compartment in a new light. It is not the end but a means to unite them emotionally. It is no more infatuation or calf-love but true and genuine love which would keep them in a life- long bond, a love that would eventually eclipse everything including their revolutionary spirit and enable them to live in a remote corner of the big country.

Though “the affirmation that he is making in choosing Lise is an affirmation of romantic love” (Lawrence 104), and though Theodore risks his own life to prevent Lise from risking hers, he could not help the feeling that there is a

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“gap” which seems “to be growing wider” (162). Yet this sense is not powerful enough to obstruct the development of their love which is originated and continued, of course, through their physical union. When they make love for the first time Theodore feels both he and Lise are on “the edge of the world, waiting to fall off” and later both of them “seemed to enter an oasis of perfection: Sex” (137).

But love, when fully blossomed, ushers in a new kind of feeling. As the lovers plan their journey to Salem, he feels, “a strange sense of recognition, as if we had been sitting here always, planning how to survive, as if our previous lives had been unreal and could now be forgotten” (145). But the lovers cannot remain in this world forever because it excludes too much.

While Lise has to exclude her attachment to Perestrello’s cause, Theodore finds his feeling vertically “divided”--one part of himself is committed to the relationship while the other remains “skeptical”. Deep and inescapable complication engulfs his feelings as he himself observes: “they were growing in two opposite directions--lure and detachment” (125). As a result, the mutually experienced “oasis of perfection” is eclipsed and the lovers become two solitudes and their relationship but a compromise. Theodore observes: “And she moved away from me again, as if her words could only tell me that in her mind lived her private thoughts; now and again their direction would always remain unknown to me” (132).

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Acceptance of this development implies that, Theodore is, of course without recognizing it, all set to adopt the reductive pattern of life in his native Salem, and ready to step into the shoes of his father, Jacob Beam. Matthew Lawrence’s observation presents a vivid picture of this: “The place of innocence is to be neither the brave new world envisaged by Perestrello, nor the realm of sexual ecstasy briefly occupied by the lovers”, but rather (apparently) in what Woodcock called “the discovery of roots in the countryside near Salem” (105).

The women in The Disinherited are just mute spectators or passive participants in the day-to-day affairs and activities of social life, while Lise and

Mrs.Peresterello in The Colours of War rise to the occasion in contributing their might for a national cause. Their participation in the on-going rebellion may be direct or indirect but it is certainly no less active than man’s, for the wife of

Perestrello-- the rebel leader, stands by her husband through thick and thin while

Lise makes use of her own body to lure Jacob Beam into the rebel group. But the women in Flowers of Darkness goes a step further in the sense they are no less sinful than men, for they are not sinned against but voluntarily and willingly dive into the sea of sin as deeply as men. For, if there had been forcible sexual exploitation, once they could be pitied as hapless and helpless victims of rape; but when the act becomes a recurrent feature it loses the tag of molestation and this

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sort of consensual sex takes them beyond the barrier of victims to the realm of sinners.

If Gordon Finch exploits his power, position and status in the society to lay women in bed to satisfy his sexual appetite, Nellie Tillson cleverly and cunningly exploits the inevitable eventuality of her sexual union with him, namely pregnancy, to blackmail him through Mandowski. Annabelle, yet another mistress of Finch cannot be termed as a flower of chastity, for she was not a virgin even when she married the lawyer Jamieson. She first “learned to kiss the photographer” who praised her as “the perfect lady” (19). Not only that; she spent

“two disastrous months with Isaac, a crazy married drunk before she had found

Allen” (p.19). Nor was the chastity or virginity of Maureen Newell remained unpunctured , when she took the wedding ring from Gordon Finch. “She had spent several years at a private school in Toronto where it was rumored that “she had stayed an extra year to have a baby fathered by one of the priests there” (37).

These experiences of all the three female characters of Flowers of Darkness reiterate the fact already expressed in The Disinherited that it was not the local custom to boast of chastity.

Though sex plays a key role in sustaining or rupturing the domestic harmony, it is not the be-all or end-all of married life. Mutual trust, faith, confidence and selfless love between the man and woman play a larger role in

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keeping the matrimonial ties unbreakable and ensure peace of mind which, in turn, holds the key to the prosperity and continuity of the wedded life. Hence any study on the man-woman relationship ought to be made on these two planes and this chapter is devoted exclusively for such an analysis in these levels. That the reaction of a wife’s anger--expressed or suppressed--is clearly reflected in the bedroom at night is almost a global phenomenon. If her anger is subsided she eagerly awaits her husband in the bed room at night; if not, she avoids the bed room altogether and sleeps in a spare bed room.

Cohen gives expression to the well-known feminine psychology in both

The Disinherited and Flowers of Darkness. While speaking on the sexual relationship between Richard Thomas of the third generation and his wife Miranda in the former, he states:

His parents had never argued, but he and Miranda, the first few years, fought over everything, some nights he had stormed out of the house and gone down to drink . . . Then dazed . . . he would make his way home. If she was still angry, she would be wearing her nightgown and sleeping in the spare room. Otherwise, she would be in their bed, naked and patient. (3-4)

A similar situation involving Gordon Finch and his wife Maureen Finch in

Flowers of Darkness is described thus: “He took the glass that she held carefully

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so their fingers wouldn’t touch, and walked to the dresser. In the old days, a fight like this would have meant that he would sleep downstairs for a week” (128).

Yet another unique characteristic of women which is also almost universal is possessiveness. Eve, the Prime Mother of mankind herself is said to have made

Adam an equal partner in the First Fall lest he should enjoy the company of another Eve. This implies that possessiveness is instilled in the blood and veins of woman since the creation itself. Cohen’s women are no exception to this universal rule. If and when adultery or extra marital sex of the husband shakes the roots of possessiveness, she takes the powerful weapon of unforgetfulness and unforgiveness to punish the offender. She is, however, least bothered about her husband’s past life of pre-marital sex simply because he was not a part of her life then. But once he becomes her husband it is but natural that she expects and wants him wholly for herself. When he crosses the border, she avenges him. Simon

Thomas’s mother in The Disinherited, though passive, takes revenge on her adulterous husband by paying him back in his own coin. She develops illicit intimacy with the cousin of her husband and Simon refers, without mincing words, to his mother and the poet when he says that “my father caught them in the barn”

(58) and the poet’s diary gives date-wise details of the development of their love.

If physically strong but mentally passive Mrs.Thomas of the first generation in The Disinherited takes a comparatively non-violent means of

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revenge, physically crippled but mentally strong Maureen Finch of Flowers of

Darkness resorts to violence to avenge her incorrigibly erring husband. Self- introspection, after the confession of Finch--not a private confession to a singular pastor in a closed cabin but a public confession to the congregation on a Sunday prayer meeting--makes it crystal clear that Maureen is partly responsible for the immoral life of Gordon Finch. With the Reverend’s confession, imploring the compassion and forgiveness of the congregation, Maureen is convinced of the unwanted and adverse result of the delay in her decision-making to marry him.

Maureen raised her finger against her own self in a sort of self accusation

“for making him wait” and she thought whether “Finch would have been different had she married him right away” without giving him “the agony of waiting” (235).

As a true catholic who strongly believes in the Biblical Judgment that “the wages of sin is death”, she presses the trigger of the pistol and pierces the body of her husband with bullets; she also punishes the owner and proprietor of the Grocery

Shop, Mandowski, who dragged the church and the Reverend to the court of law on a paternity suit; realization of the near-impossibility of survival on crutches or a wheel chair, that too in an isolated cell in the prison, forces her to terminate her life too with the use of the same gun. Her way of killing herself sent such a rude shock that the police officer Sammy Warren himself remarks: “I’ve never seen a woman shoot herself” (246).

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But for the extra marital affairs, Gordon Finch proves himself a docile and dutiful husband performing his domestic duties without any murmur. In maintaining the barn, in looking after the cattle--from delivery of a calf to the milking daily--in nursing his ailing wife, in carrying her physically in and out of the house, in taking care of the children, in his undiminished love for his wife despite her becoming invalid after marriage he has shown that he is a loving husband and affectionate father and responsible head of the family. A very opposite of Maureen is to be found in Miranda, the wife of Richard of the third generation of Thomases of The Disinherited, for she not only forgets and forgives the sinning past of her husband but takes full care of him while he is hospitalized due to heart attack. As a loving and dutiful wife she feels it is her bounded duty to fulfill all the needs of her husband including the sexual appetite:

. . . The doctor’s afraid we’ll kill ourselves fucking’, Richard said, startled at how fast Miranda blushed snapping red like a light.

‘Go on’.

‘Well’. Her hand is on his legs; it would be possible to feel human again.

‘Well’ she said. She went to the door and locked it and then came back and lay on the edge of Richard’s bed, her head on his chest so he could put his arm around her. (152)

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The pointed observation of Margaret Lawrence is worth-quoting here as it is applicable to the relationship between Theodore who is forced by chances, to join the rebels and Lise who is already a member of rebel group by choice: “The outer situation always mirrors the interior. The empires of the landscape, the blackness of the land, reflect the inability of these people to touch another with assurance and gentleness” (47).

The main journey brings Theodore and Lise together and in order to bring him into their rebel-fold and to hold him, Lise almost seduces Theodore but still keeps him at an arm’s distance saying “She never slept with anyone until she had known him for a week” (CW 50). But a deep and detailed study of the map enlighten her and the finds that “into the midst of central Ontario” is “that forgotten and useless region which surrounds the town of Salem” would prove a safer shelter for them both “where by the time they got to the church we’d have blended into the landscape” (CW 74). The happiness born out of this discovery weakens her to resolve and she invites him for a sexual union saying “we’ll pretend it’s been a week” and Theodore “was inside her, her legs wrapped round my waist” (CW 91). This physical union means more than what meets the eye. It is the vision of a promised land, the hope of Salem which subdues and softens the bleakness of the prairie land that ushers in new hopes and new joys for them and

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their love-making, that too breaking the resolve, is but a symbolic vision of their happy and peaceful life in a remote corner of the country.

Thus Cohen has envisaged Man-Woman Relationship in numerous dimensions to give a clear picture of Canadian Society to the outside world with his strong message of “not to worry about the mud that is extracted while digging for gold”. While many questions of the source of man or woman’s deviation leave one bewildered, groping for answers, it is proven worthwhile to study the cause that drove the characters out of their path, to embark on “The Quest for Identity” in Chapter V.

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CHAPTER V THE QUEST FOR IDENTITY

Familial issues that cause ruptures into the family relationships leading to conflicts among the members of the same family which, in turn, result in domestic disharmony are a global phenomenon. The barriers of region, religion, caste, creed, language, wealth, status and the like do not exist for them. Nor are they new but as old as the world, for The Bible records the first ever conflict between two brothers originated and fuelled by jealousy. Cain and Abel are the two sons of the Prime Parents, Adam and Eve. As a token of gratitude for the God’s bounty, both of them, after a year of earnings, offer a part of the profit to the God. But because of the qualitative difference between the offerings, God accepts Abel’s offer of fatted cattle, and totally rejects Cain’s waste- grain. Non-acceptance of his offer by God, thinks Cain, tantamounts to disinheritance by God and this sows the seeds of deep-rooted jealousy in him which culminates in a duel between the two and the killing of one by the other. The ancient epics of India The Ramayana and The Mahabharata which are 1000-3000 years older than the Bible are also based on such conflicting situations as found in The Bible. The jealousy of

Gauravas over the supremacy of Pandavas in all walks of life eventually results in the Kurukshetra war. The ambition of Kaikeyi to crown her son Bharatha as the

King of Ayodhya motivates her to force her step-son Rama into exile. But

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ironically Rama heartily accepts this disinheritance, for as the reincarnation of

Lord Vishnu he has to perform a mission on earth for which his Vanavasam(exile) is absolutely necessary. If the mother-son conflict is in the human world, there are conflicts between brothers in the animal and demon worlds which are also detailed in the same epic. Deeply hurt and frustrated over the total rejection of his repeated advice and warnings, Vibikshana deserts his own brother Ravana to join the camp of their arch-enemy Rama. Vali forcibly usurps the throne of his brother Sugriva and marries his wife Tara. Vali’s, criminal acts find a perfect reflection of the acts of Claudius in Hamlet who also usurps the throne of his brother, and marries

Gertrude, the widow of the murdered king, the Great Hamlet. But there is a difference too. Whereas Vali does not kill his brother, Claudius performs this heinous crime too. It is quite interesting to note that the familial issues play a prominent role in the happenings of The Iliad, the first Greek epic. It is the disloyalty of Helen whose exceeding beauty “launched thousand ships” and caused “the burning of topless towers of Ilium” in the Trojan War.

Not only epics of this kind but actual history of the world also records the horrifying incidents of bloodshed caused by jealousy, greed, and wrongful desire of the bloodthirsty- brothers. Quite contrary to the axiom that “birds of the same feather flock together”, the human beings are not able to live under one roof though they belong to the one and the same family. It is said that Ilango, the

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younger Prince of Chera kingdom, in order to falsify the prediction of a soothsayer-- that he, though younger, would ascend the throne and his elder brother, Senguttuva, would be the disinherited--instantaneously took the decision to lead a life of renunciation. But he is a rare exception among the power-hungry and blood-thirsty princes. For, the pages of history, particularly those of the

Moghul period, are strewn with the blood of princes slain by their own brothers.

Aurangazeb goes a step further in imprisoning his own father, Shah Jahan, in his attempt to ascend the throne.

If greed for power fuels the jealousy of kith and kin, in politics it is avarice the venom of which instantly kills the filial love and drives the warring brothers to the modern battle field namely the court of law. If and when gold rusts then what about iron? The characters in a fictional writing do reflect and represent the contemporary society and so there is no wonder they suffer from psychological oppression born out of jealousy and conflicting situations.

Conflicting situations, arising out of issues--issues of varied kinds and nature, from personal to universal -- are deftly exploited by writers with unfailing imagination and creative faculty to produce fine works of art. George Eliot’s Silas

Marner, for example, is based on the personal problem of Silas Marner. If his failure in love drives him out of his native village Lantern Yard to lead a secluded life in Raveloe, his loss of gold there, his life-long savings completes his ruin.

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Thanks to his finding and adopting the orphaned girl, Eppie, he makes a re-entry into the society which regains his lost interest in life and gold as well. The novelist seems to emphasize that none can isolate himself from the society, for true happiness lies in living together, despite misunderstandings.

The underlying current in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, seemingly a politico-historical novel based on French Revolution linking the capitals of Britain and France, is the unreciprocated love of Sydney Carton for

Lucy which is so deep that he makes supreme sacrifice to save her lover who looks like his identical twin. Likewise, Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of

Wakefield, Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess in Jane

Austen’s Pride and Prejudice are the good examples of novels built upon familial issues fuelled by ego, lovelessness, generation-gap, communication-gap and the like. Charles Dickens in many of his novels particularly Oliver Twist and Bleak

House and his Indian counter part Mulk Raj Anand in Coolie, Untouchable and

Two Leaves and a Bud deal with the societal issues of exploitation and oppression of the poor and the marginalized. Sir Walter Scott is noted for highlighting the politico-historical issues in his novels. The familial issues between a husband and wife, the latter sinning first and forcing the former to follow her, gains universal proportion, simply because the couple happens to be the Prime Parents of

Mankind.

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Though John Milton’s great epic Paradise Lost begins with the words “of

Man’s first disobedience” (I, 7), it is Eve who sinned first by eating the “fruit of the forbidden tree/whose mortal Taste brought death into the world with all our

Woe” (I, 2-3) and forced Adam to taste it who also disobeyed God by obeying his wife lest there should emerge domestic disharmony. If analyzed deeper and further this Fall, a pre-destined one, was in fact, originated in the war between Satan and

God. It is the envy of Satan, a celestial being created out of fire over the supremacy of Man, created out of mud. Thus, the envy of Satan and disobedience of Adam and Eve attain the universal status for they are the first of their kind which still continue. Hence there is no wonder that the story writers cleverly exploit these defects in man--jealousy, ego, anger, and misunderstanding--to weave into a fine texture. In any piece of literary creation, irrespective of its theme and treatment, can be traced such issues which invariably lead to conflicting situations and, at times help furthering the plot.

Matt Cohen’s The Disinherited does not follow the generally accepted and/or followed practice of narrating the story in the chronological order. The inter-penetration of past and the present makes this novel different and unique.

Nor does it like an epic, begin in the middle and recapture the beginning in retrospective narration and move towards the end. Rather it begins at the end--or near the end--where a major character Richard S.Thomas is in hospital awaiting

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and fearing death, the inescapable eventuality of life. Through him the sense of warring past and present is splendidly created and it is acclaimed as a finely-told story of the decay of generations of people discovering each other too little and too late.

Cohen gives artistic form to the tension between past and present, life and death, good and evil all of which become metaphorical landscapes through which his characters journey. Their physical trials and spiritual sufferings are triggered by losses and fears where each inevitably exhibits and encounters the dark and destructive in him through the other he wrestles with. It is the first of the series of what later came to be known the Salem Quartet the other three being The Colours of War, The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone and Flowers of Darkness. No less a person than Margaret Atwood, a multi-faceted genius and contemporary of

Cohen is all praise for this novel when she remarks that this novel is witty and ironic, immense in the scope of its conception and brilliant in its execution.

The Canadian family, according to Atwood, is symbolized by its “struggle to survive” (Survival 131). As against the American family, hero’s rebellion against the family structure to define his own freedom, the Canadian family is “a trap in which you’re caught” (131). Though the feeling of being trapped is common to American and Canadian families, the difference lies in the remarkable ability and spirit of the Canadian protagonists to break away. The family in its past

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and present, in its generational structure is embedded indelibly such that the ancestral influence becomes a moral and psychological fixture in the mind of the protagonist, as found in the case of Erik Thomas. As the novel itself is unique in form and content, it is but natural, that the characters too are quite unconventional.

They are emotional grotesques who are at dissonance with their environment and also with themselves and are made to see themselves reflexively by the very same environment against which they fight. The novel is unique in that it is a ‘four- generation’ novel and all these generations have both the Canadian and uncanadian elements in them. While the grandfather--Simon Thomas--is a typical

Canadian grandfather, the father, Richard Thomas, is more tolerant, accommodating and anticipatorily less of the domineering grandfather to be; the last generation, Erik, is notably liberated.

The only certainty in this world of uncertainties is death which is the ultimate, the inevitable and the invisible. The Tamil bard Tiruvalluvar says that this world enjoys this unique pride of having buried him today who was alive yesterday. William Shakespeare poetically describes that “our little life is rounded with a sleep” (The Tempest V, i). Edmund Spenser, the Poets’ Poet, welcomes it as it is “the end of all woe” like “the porte after stormie seas” (Fairie Queene,

Canto I). It strikes the old and the young alike. John Keats, who witnesses his younger brother die of consumption in his early twenties, condemns this world as

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a place where “youth grows pale, spectre thin and dies” (Nightingale ode). No one--king or clown, prince or pauper, saint or sinner--can escape the jaws of death.

When Jesus Christ, believed to be the Son of God by Christians, Prophet

Mohammed [PBUH] believed to be the last Messenger of God by Muslims, the ten births of Lord Vishnu [Dasavatar] Himself, Lord Buddha, the deified founder of

Buddhism could not escape from the final clutches of Fate what about ordinary human beings? But the irony is that though man knows fully well that he has to meet his pre-destined end sooner or later, he does not want to die.

The reluctance to die is not due to the pangs of death but the fear, rather exaggerated fear, born of ignorance of unknown and uncertain happenings after death which Francis Bacon beautifully puts in “Of Death” as “Men fear death as children fear darkness”(11). This is what exactly happens to Richard Thomas in the novel, The Disinherited.

Expectation of death is more painful than the actual occurrence. Richard’s close relatives who visit him in the hospital fuel his fear by expressed words or implied actions. Erik wondered how long it would take his father to die, whether it “would happen easily and passively one night in sleep or whether he would have to be prolonged by esoteric mutilations” (35). While it is just a matter of time for the son, it is all certain for the wife who explicitly expresses, “It is all determined .

. . we can only be born to our fates. . . we cannot escape our destinies’”(40).

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Richard S.Thomas himself had the premonition of dying. He spent the whole of first night in the hospital without sleeping, for the place and atmosphere were not only new but also strange and his mind was plagued by the repeated question “whether this was all just a brief prelude to dying” (46). Being in the hospital at a ripe old age naturally unnerves him. He is afraid of closing his eyes for the darkness that follows such a closing of eyes reminds him of “darkness of death” (85) which, as a veil, would cover him; prevent him from seeing anything again. His, wife Miranda’s untimely conveyance of doctor’s suggestion to make his will enhances his agony and tension. It reminds him that he has already put a leg in the grave and his fear is echoed in his prattle:

‘Oh death’, Richard said. He was surprised at the resonance and tone of his voice. ‘Oh death’, he repeated, ‘How do I fear thy sting, Yes’ He stopped . . . ‘Oh death’, he began again, this time trying to make his voice vibrate, ‘how do I fear thy sting’, where future’s end doth ring and little birdies sing’. . . ‘I always told you’. . . ‘Now that I’m dying’. . . ‘What was I saying? Yes. May be I’ll just fall out of my bed and splat, die’. His voice doesn’t sound so good there. He tried to remember exactly what it had sounded like, repeating the words over in his head, but then forgot them and found and he was repeating nothing at all. (136-37)

In his delirium, he saw fantastic pictures of himself entering into a dreamless sleep

(45); the sudden stopping of the chattering of the nurse; himself being embalmed and carried to the grave, just as automatically the ground carries dead leaves (82)

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and finally being buried. He also visualized people crying over rather with

“hypocritical solemnity” (51) and himself being soon forgotten. If at all he was remembered afterwards it was just to “tell how many years” he had lived (82).

If Richard, the son of second generation makes use of muscle power to settle scores with his father, Erik, the Scion of fourth generation doesn’t resort to such wild means. As a pacifist and introvert he keeps quiet and literally keeps distance from his father who was in his farm at Kingston and Erik at the

University of Alberta. His problems are two--a minor issue related to his adopted brother Brian and the major issue associated with the farm. The farm is the ancestral property passed on from generation to generation. As the youth of the modern generation and a student of university he is well aware of the rapid industrialization which would, in due course, engulf their farm too. As all the food will be grown “on huge farms run by businessmen, or in factories”, he points out “in a few years this kind of farm won’t even exist”. To ascertain his view- point he adds, “Less families live here than did ten years ago” (41). His disinterestedness in farm from the very early years had kept him away from that work and now, as his mother says he does not even “remember how to milk a cow” (41). Time and again he refuses to claim it as his farm. To his father he says “It’s your farm” (28) and when Valerie refers to it as his farm, he immediately corrects it by retorting “My father’s farm” (21). His last real

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conversation with Richard had been eight years ago, the night he drove home from the school to his house when the altercation between himself and his father erupted on the issue of farm. Since then Erik had come home once a year at

Christmas. He and Richard confined their discussions to the weather and local politics (28). Even then, his unwillingness to remain at home would take him to

Rose, a woman older than he and with a child of her own, to spend his time joyfully in her company--yet another case of pre-marital sex. As is the father so is the son.

True to the philosophic and prophetic expression of Tiruvalluvar, a Tamil poet of-I Century that bane and boon of an individual are neither forced or nor gifted by any external element but self-earned, all suffering of Erik including his failure rather unwillingness to inherit his ancestral property is self-begotten. He is a Thomas by birth and blood but certainly not-by spirit. The irresistible instinct to quarrel and even the sexual appetite are legacies that he has inherited from his father and grandfather. But their spirit of untiring hard work to develop and upkeep the farm and barn till it is passed on to the next generation is conspicuous in him by its absence. The elders despite their petty faults cherish and try to sustain the positive values of life which they expect to be continued by the succeeding generations. But the youngsters either because of being cruelly hit by rootlessness in their own soil or because of their adventurous spirit to seek new

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horizons or because of both, do not stand up to their expectations and flee them.

Erik is one such modern youth who dislocated himself from his native soil as

“there’s nowhere to go” (28) but ironically, he finds in the place of relocation also that “there was no one he wanted to see, nowhere he wanted to go”(218). Thus he is stranded between two worlds one dead and the other yet to be born. As Shelley puts it he looks “before and after and pines for what’s not” (Ode to Skylark).

The pain and pressure, an off-shoot of his combat against rootlessness and hectic search for self-identity aggravated by his “inability to cry” (229) and

“ignorance to positively respond to the mourners of his farm” (238) push Erik to the brink of eccentricity, if and though not madness. His repeated denial of

Richard’s repeated offer of bequeathing the farm and barn to him and suggestions to build a house of his own there to settle after marriage; his sigh of relief on having been left out in the final will-- as it’s a blessing in disguise to release him from many a problem (239); his aversion to marriage on the ground is a “constant harassment” (20) though he doesn’t shun women and even falls in love with

Valerie; hallucinations of his father a “dead man looking up seeing all with eyes closed” and “Brian springing at him with a broken bottle”--show him not only as eccentric but also enigmatic. But there are two women who properly assess his character as unsteady and oscillating. Valerie, his lady love, chides him for his always being in the contemplative mood. “I wonder, you know, if you ever get

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through things by thinking” she emphasizes it by repeating the same sentence again and adds “I’ve never known anyone as lazy as you”. She even threatens him to sever her ties with him if he does not correct himself. Again Rose Garnett, a whore, whom he invited to live with him, totally ignored his suggestion for she strongly felt “that he was obviously incapable of letting anything pass in or out of his own boundaries” (218). His character, no doubt, is his own destiny; yet the role of rapid and unprecedented industrial growth at the cost of Agrarian development, converting most of the cultivable, fertile lands into concrete jungles cannot be ignored.

Of all the problems in the novel, Brian’s is unique in the sense that he’s not a Thomas by birth. Born of Ann Cameron he comes to Richard in adoption, who forced by a clause in the will of his father assigning the duty of finding someone else to give it to when they were finished (142-3), as he was childless then.

Sterility of the young couple forced them to adopt him from an agency knowing

“nothing about his background” (78). His problems began from early childhood, when he was forcibly taken away from Thomas by his own parents Joe and Ann, for he could not stay with them happily or peacefully. Nor could be forget the family that adopted him, “especially Erik whom he missed” (66). Forgetfulness and forgiveness were unknown to the child who was angered at having been disowned at birth, for no fault of his. It is, perhaps even without knowing that it’s

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a type of revenge, he sets ablaze every paper, book and curtain in that house and

“almost burned to death” (198) but escapes to reach the Thomases once again.

In his total rejection of his own parents who deserted him at birth and in his preference of the adopted parents he exactly reflects two other characters--one fictional and the other mythological. Eppie in George Eliot’s Silas Marner refuses to go with Godfrey Cass, her own father who deliberately disowned her at birth, for being an illegitimate child, though his. More in anger than sorrow she strongly expresses her unwillingness to go with him when he comes to claim after twenty years and happily stays with Silas Marner, her adopted father. Similarly, Karna in the Mahabharata gently but firmly turns down the invitation of Kunti, his mother, to go with her. He emphatically asserts that his love and attachment for the charioteer who bred him up and for Duryodana, a friend in need, who raised his status in society by adorning him with a coronet is unquestionably much deeper and wider than his love for a selfish and self-centered mother who threw the new- born infant in the running waters to preserve her pride and dignity in the family and society. It is then he gives expression to the famous saying that death is certain to him if he be among six or hundred, which later became to be misinterpreted as referring to age, while Karna actually referred to numbers of his brothers and friends.

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Brian’s problems fueled by the fact that he is a non-Thomas grew with age.

Not that he is unloved and unprotected but the very love and care paves the way for new problems like expectation in the mind of Brian and complex and fear in that of Erik. In fact there was reciprocal love between Brian and the adopted family. Brian used “to play with Erik and accept food from Miranda but it was

Richard he needed” (75) who rose up to his expectations by teaching him the art of playing in early days and the tricks of trade in farming later. He so closely followed the foot-prints of Richard that he grew “stockier and dark looking more like Richard Thomas than Erik did” (46). His wife Nancy also endorses this observation of the nurse when she comments: “You look more like Richard than

Erik does” (78). By inheriting the spirit of industry, integrity and unquestioning faith in the elders’ words--which is miserably lacking in the actual son--the adopted son, Brian becomes a replica of Oliver of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist where Oliver the illegitimate child grows into “the symbol of goodness and nobility” while his half-brother Monks, the legitimate child of his father turns out to be a “complete scoundrel”.

In the heart of hearts of both Brian and Nancy, there lingers a justifiable anxiety and fear caused and sustained by the skepticism about the attitude of

Richard Thomas towards them. Though Richard is magnanimous in loving the adopted son equally as his own son, when the matter of property crops up he

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behaves like a father in the true and worldly sense. In fact Brian is pained to have been given a trailer instead of a house for him and his wife to live in. In unequivocal words Nancy gives vent to her thoughts:

He treats you like a slave. . . You live on the farm and you work there everyday for twenty years. When he passes you in the yard . . . sits beside you at the table or asks you to pass the salt, he never recognizes you are anything more than a dog. And now that he’s dying he doesn’t even think of you, he only wants to make sure his precious son gets the farm, Erik, the fool who doesn’t even know his own mind. (77)

In fact, it is this fear that drives Nancy to take contraceptive pills (6).

Nancy’s act brings to fore a striking difference between the tradition-bound older generation and the ultra-modern younger generation. Whereas Miranda is deeply aggrieved at infertility or even delay in child birth, Nancy deliberately delays childbirth with medical help. But Erik’s stubbornness to forgo the right of inheritance proved beneficial to them. According to the final will, “Miranda owned the farm and Brian could live there and work as long as he wanted . . . The clause was too pleasing for Brian to control his smile and he heaved a sigh of relief. It was most satisfactory to his wife, Nancy, who announced that now it would be possible for them to have children” (229).

It is also said that it’s easier to be an angel than a man; for a man encounters a pitfall at every step he takes in life and more than that he is not yet

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fully out of animal-instincts from which he is said to have been evolved. The readiness of Thomases and even Brian to pounce upon one another at the least opportunity and the sharing of the same woman to satisfy their sexual appetite by father and son prove the veracity of this statement. Again, invariably all religions advocate peace and tolerance. All in this world embrace one or the other religion.

Yet there is no tolerance among men, groups, religions and even nations. That’s mainly because in the modern age, ritualism in religion has totally eclipsed--rather eliminated-- spiritualism. All are ritualistic but none is spiritualistic. Simon, for example, never touched his food, particularly after the death of his wife, without saying grace. He used to recite “Oh Lord, accept the homage of your humble servants for you have given this earth that we may feed and love you” (50). It is but a lip service because he was not as tolerant as he was taught and expected to be by his religion. Nor did he follow the religious percept ‘commit not adultery’ for he was in touch with Katherine when his wife was alive and with his housekeeper after his wife’s death. But he was not completely devoid of human qualities.

Simon-- may be, he was a disloyal husband but he was a good father as he was interested in shaping the future of his son Richard. He wanted his son to become a “gentleman”. After his high schooling, “they studied the university calendar” and “finally history and philosophy were selected as those subjects most

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conducive to gentility” (49). Not only that, even after the fight with his son he was not reluctant to bequeath the property to him: “Simon intended that the farm be passed to Richard because that particular barn was Richard’s responsibility”

(93). The same is true of Richard too. Despite his weaknesses he was a dutiful father. His unfulfilled desire to leave the ancestral property to his legal heir, Erik, the love and care he showered upon his adopted son, providing a right to protected-life in his farm after death clearly show that he is the chip of the old block.

In his eagerness to take care of a prostitute along with the yet-to-be-born child, though seemingly a sign of eccentricity, is yet a sign of humanism glowing in the mind of Erik. The sleepless nights of Richard Thomas and the restless wanderings of Erik Thomas are a proof of the dictum that uneasiness lies not only the head that wears the crown, but also on the head of the common man that confronts familial issues and conflicting situations in everyday life. The life of the three major characters of this novel is but a proof of the fact that man is but a combination of human and bestial qualities. He is both a child of God and a sinner. To conclude, the observation of George Woodcock about Mordecai

Richler’s novel St. Urbain’s Horseman is recorded here as it very much suits The

Disinherited too: “. . . a rich book tragic, funny and sad that strangely but

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successfully combines something of Dickens’s scope and gusto with Jewish tryst and humour (Canadian Imagination 76).

The unfulfilled quest for identity forces Theodore Beam and Erik, the male protagonists of The Colours of War and The Disinherited respectively, to get separated from their families while yet in their teens. Hurt by the parental preference of the adopted son, the hero of The Disinherited leaves his family while no such reason is traceable in the case of Theodore Beam. Again, whereas

Theodore Beam is finally united with his parents Erik, fulfils his filial duty by just paying annual visits to his parents during Christmas. Above all, the striking difference is to be found in the nature of their encounters. Erik’s are mainly social while Theodore Beam’s are political as he is caught in the mire of civil war.

Lawrence observes: “Theodore Beam witnesses the Canadian system in action at the moment when its enormous potential for oppression has finally begun to realize itself on a large scale. Beam is faced with a series of crucial choices all of which in some way involve his sense of self in relation to the political reality which most Canadians prefer to ignore” (94 ).

Discontentment with some or all aspects of society in which man, particularly the younger generation, lives is the major thrust behind the quest. In his search for self-illumination, there occur radical changes in the seeker’s relationship with and perception of society. Though he is free to discard the

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existing values, he cannot do so just for the sake of discarding. Unless his relationship with the world is realistic and clear-sighted, his rejection of the values becomes invalid and unjustifiable. In his attempt to reach his goal, the seeker has to pass through phases and the main phase is the initiation denoted by intense emotional experiences.

Theodore Beam undergoes much emotional turmoil-over his not-so- harmonious relationship with his parents, over the deaths of Perestrello and

Dr.Fine, over political ideologies and the ongoing rebellion, and even over his relationship with Lise. Such emotional experiences enlighten the seeker so that even if he misses the goal of quest he is appropriately shaped so as to face the problems of life. Wisdom dawns upon him and his concluding words clearly show how he grows optimistic: “The sky is clear and the sun is out . . . we will go on living” (234). It is the moment of illumination--the moment in which the protagonist attains knowledge both of the self and the world. The confessional, statement of Theodore Beam proves the veracity of this statement: “I didn’t know myself very well then: I hadn’t learned to see myself in other people, or how to betray, or to kill or even to love. I only felt vague stirrings beneath the surface, a half-knowledge that the policeman’s careless gesture had trapped me into life again” (28).

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In the beginning of the novel Theodore explicitly expresses his inability thus but the experiences and encounters so enlighten him that, by the end of the novel he is completely transformed. Whatever he laments he could not do in the beginning, he is able to accomplish at the end: he has learnt to see himself in his father; to betray the revolutionaries; to kill his father’s assailant and above all, he begins to love Lise. In short, Theodore, in and through his search for identity, has almost correlated the life-cycle and has come to know himself. Though he has learnt to see the things, hitherto unknown to him, there is no indication that he understands what has happened to him. Though he can quote Nietzsche, he has no consistent philosophical position to help him interpret and evaluate his experience.

Hence, remarks Lawrence: “. . . he largely relies upon instinctual guidance. His education and environment have done nothing to prepare him to ‘know himself’ as a political being; his instincts is to deny, in so far as circumstances permit, that his world has a political dimension” (102).

Even when Theodore leaves his parents, he has no definite plans, no goals.

“At this strange time in my life”, says he himself, “it seemed as if past and future hardly existed” (17). His life, then, is marked by absolute absence of commitment. He doesn’t seem to have been motivated by urge to stand on his own legs or to build a world of his own. It is perhaps the adventurous spirit akin to that of Don Quixote or discontentment with life in the rustic Salem that drives him out

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of his home towards a bigger city like Vancouver. Nor does he flourish in his new environment mainly because, like his father he is either “slow” or “lazy” (19) or both. He was supposed to be a freelance journalist but in fact, he, “was unemployed” (21). Frustration, caused by failure and inability to pay the rent for more than three months (21) forced him to decide “to retreat to Salem to start all over again” (54). His decision to return to his home-town has to be executed sooner than he expected because of ransacking of his apartment by a pair of

Kafkaesque police detectives looking for drugs and that is the turning point in his life.

During his train journey to Salem, Theodore, by a pre-planned net work of circumstances, gets himself involved in a nebulous revolutionary cadre using the train to distribute weapons to its confederates in various places across the country.

A mysterious Che Guevara-like Perestrello spearheads the revolution who works hard for the unification of people against the forces of the Government. Theodore also gets the acquaintance of Lise which naturally develops into love later. Lise

“was never married but had a baby once” (54). Her unquestioning faith in

Perestrello and executing his commands in life and spirit makes Theodore feel that they are “connected by long invisible strings” as “part of someone’s dream” (55).

Though she says that “she never slept with anyone until she had known him for a week” (50), she later relaxes her self-made rule in the case of Theodore saying

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“we’ll pretend it’s been a week” (91), and willingly takes him “inside her” (91).

Though he suspects that she traps him into the revolutionary group by offering herself physically to him, he does not mind. He says: “I didn’t care if she had been bribing me. I didn’t feel the need to leave her anymore.”(93). And, his conversion into revolutionary is complete.

When the train reaches North Bay, the revolutionaries are attacked by the

Government forces and the leader is killed. Theodore and Lise, however, escape to Salem where Theodore is reunited with his parents after a decade of estrangement. But the political crisis has extended its octopus-like hands and engulfed the remote corner of the county like Salem which, witnesses, perhaps for the fist time, the horrifying presence of the Government troops. In his attempt to rescue his father from an advancing soldier, Theodore has to kill the soldier. But, by the end of the novel both Theodore and Lise have abandoned the cause of revolution and resolve to “go on living here” (234). The Government has evidently stamped out all overt resistance but the large political issues have not been solved.

Woodcock interprets the action of the novel thus: “Theodore must be seen as a kind of latter-day Candide, set to wander as an innocent through the man-made jungles of the present, and to find that all the promises of the future are illusory in comparison with the rediscovery of roots and of Matt Cohen’s very equivalent of

Voltaire’s cultivation of one’s garden” (World 46).

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Neither Jacob Beam the father, nor Theodore Beam, the son, can be accused of lacking in courage and both are capable of rising to the occasion too.

In his youthful days Jacob “had gone to his war . . . In Spain and all over Europe he had traveled around like a mercenary in search of something” (16). But when he “retreated with his letters and diaries into a small town that closed its eyes to the present, let alone the future” (161), Jacob always stayed close to the ground and advised others to do the same. In his opinion “the world would be a safer place if everyone ignored each other” (175). Nor does he claim to have achieved ethical perfection as he finds pleasure in alcoholism and extra-marital relationship.

Yet, the fighting spirit in him is not extinct which surfaces again in his old age when he strongly defies the soldier who demands to see his identity card.

Theodore who faithfully followed the footsteps of his father in retreating to

Salem, which is “a town set apart from the rest of the world” (53) exhibits his courageous spirit when he risks his life to kill the soldier who is about to murder his father, Jacob. This sort of resistance, though bordering on courage, is certainly not enough to connect to a notion of political identity that will give the act significance at a level beyond that of self-realization or knowing oneself. The ongoing war--be it a civil war or revolution--according to Jacob is not a heroic war which he fought in his young days. This is the worst as it involves “fighting against yourself”. Theodore also expresses almost a similar opinion: “But this war

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was supposed to be different. There were no sides and no armies or so the papers said. Just illegal underground groups” (14). Theodore assumes famine and fear as the primary causes of this war: “Not only there were more people than food but also there were more bombs and bullets than people” (52). He sounds optimistic when he expects the outcome of the war would be the “emergence of a new world- like Noah after the flood” and destruction of “all the bad Governments” (53). But in reality the war leaves the survivors standing between two worlds--one dead and the other yet to be discovered. As such at only one point he does feel any sympathy for the revolutionary cause--when a farmer at a meeting in Regina throws in his lot with it. The farmer reminds Theodore one of those he has known in Salem, and the joining of the forces, he reports “moved something in me”. But this sense of solidarity is undercut almost immediately when he learns that the only dissident farmer at the meeting has been murdered. He laments: “I felt some part of me had died and I had been hurled into the future--my past demolished-- like one of Jacob Beam’s carefully grown tomatoes thrown against a brick wall”

(131). Apart from this one moment, Theodore usually withholds emotional commitment from the revolutionary cause.

Lise, however, nurtures a totally different view about this war. She is, perhaps made to believe that the new Government is born out of war or revolutions were no better than the ousted ones, though it is believed to be “a

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people’s Government” (53). All Governments invariably try to keep people “cold and hungry” so as to paralyze the faculty of thinking and reasoning (89). She is sure that this war “had sprung out of nowhere, nor was it brought into existence by a few people who are tired of peace and contentment to spoil which they started trouble”. She finally bursts out while educating Theodore on war:

And do you know how many thousands and millions have died in this century to serve one man or another, to put fancy food in the mouths of a few while half the world starves? This war is nothing new. The only thing new is that this continent, which has spent the last two hundred years dancing on top of the rest of the world like fat ballerina falling down the stairs, is now catching the same disease as everyone else: hunger. (173)

She is all praise for Perestrello who selflessly leads the war. She pays a glowing tribute to him when she says that “Perestrello never joined this war, he was born to it and he has lived it all his life” (173). Lise’s theory of the on going war is not formulated on assumption but on concrete evidence gathered from the reports in the print media and the Prime Minister’s address to the nation through the visual media. The shifting of the report about “minor shortage of food for the next weeks, until early in the spring” from the “back pages” (26) of the newspaper to “the front page” (36) shows the gravity of the situation. It is a well known secret that the

Government usually resorts to the tactics of suppression of fact in order to keep the panic of the public at low ebb. This is what exactly happens in this newspaper

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item too. But the cat is out of the bag in the last item of the same report:

“Emergency legislation will be introduced to make the illegal sale or purchase of food, a crime punishable by life imprisonment” (36).

The declaration of emergency falsifies the newspaper report and proves beyond doubt that the shortage a food is neither “minor” nor will it be over in “a few weeks”. Prime Minister’s address to the nation further strengthens this view.

His defense of declaration of “emergency to act quickly and ruthlessly to preserve our social order”; setting up of a joint commission of the Canadian and

American Governments” to restore economic prosperity and equality” and his assurance of job-security to the employees of “food and resource industries”, and finally his appeal to the people to help the Government in detecting the sabotent and trailor” (97) clearly bring to the fore the unpredicted out “famine and fear” prevalent in the country. The situation is so grave that “soon people would begin snatching at each other’s food” (37). There is no wonder, then, young girl of twenty four years, like Vise whose life “had already divided in its centre” (54) could read between the lines and understand the seriousness of the situation fully and correctly and she cannot err in judgment. Similarly her decision to accept the leadership of Perestrello in the war against the erring and incompetent

Government and to fight till the end for the welfare of the people is not taken in a hurry but after a careful and complete analysis of Perestrello’s life and character.

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The most striking feature of Perestrello that attracts Lise is his selfless care for people and unshakeable belief in them (77). Hence there is her unquestioning faith in him.

Any journey, however long begins with a short and small step. Any revolution is born in an individual’s mind. It is the resultant action of individual thinking and collective execution. The originator of the revolution naturally becomes the voice of the voiceless. Pushed to the brink of frustration because of oppression, exploitation and marginalization the victims are silently and patiently waiting for an opportunity to retaliate. The success of the revolution lies not only in giving shape to the growing discontent and uncontrollable anger over the erroneous policies and maladministration of the institution and uniting people who have so far been put to untold sufferings but also in consolidating the anger and putting it on the right path. This is what Perestrello, the revolutionary-turned-priest in The Colours of Wars exactly does. He has grown into an acknowledged legislator of suffering masses, not by chance but by choice.

Lise points out that he never “joined” this war, but was “born” to it and has lived it all his life. The spirit of revolution runs in his veins as his father himself died a martyr’s death as a political prisoner in Mexico. He was brought up in a mission which manufactured and hid illegal weapons. When Perestrello became a priest his sermons did not end with just justifying the ways of God to

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Man. He would continue to educate the masses in his parish on universal brotherhood and the need for a revolution. When he left priesthood, he was offered a job with the railway union and that suited his purpose (173). In a world where

“nobody ever thinks of the future” (62), he alone thinks of the future. As a true revolutionary he is least bothered about the dead past, angered over the dark present and optimistic about the bright future. The turning of cultivable lands into

“empty space which soon would become a desert, a coal mine, a city state or a prison camp” (61) naturally infuriates him. It is a kind of self-analysis when he says: “Yet to the man who knows how to think, everything is possible. One man who knows what he wants has more force than a thousand who don’t want anything” (62).

Perestrello is able to draw “pure force” because he knows exactly what he wants. Like Martin Luther king he, too, has a dream. He strongly believes that there is a place for them waiting to be discovered. He sums up his dream: “When we’ve suffered, when the violence is over and the false Governments have fallen, when we’re simple men and women again, standing on the face of the earth, there’ll be something we can reach for, something noble inside us” (158-9).

Though he does not brood over the split milk it is neither easy nor possible for him to wipe away the bitter memories of the past. Rendered rootless and homeless in their own native soil and “kicked out of Europe like so many ants from the hill”

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(158), Perestrello was brought to this continent by his father on a boat. The fresh air that he breathed here could not allay their old fears. They found the new land

“ripe and fertile”. The earth richly yielded to the plough. Yet they were proved wrong. The expected prosperous future once again eludes them and proved to be but a mirage. History repeated itself and their imaginary future crumbled like the bitter past and the continent was easily ruined. They began to realize “that the new world had already become the old” and there was no place to receive them.

Their journey continued from nowhere to nowhere yet undaunted they move on like Milton’s Satan who never gives up hope:

What though the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable will And study of revenge, immortal hate And courage never to submit or yield And what is else not to be overcome? (I, 105-10)

Yet as a true revolutionary, he never underestimates the power of the

Government against which he has risen in rebellion. But true heroism lies not in ever falling but in rising every time one falls. Also the revolutionaries may be defeated and even eliminated as in the case of Perestrello but revolution can never be curbed, for like Phoenix, it has its resurrection from its own ashes.

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If as “born to it” Perestrello represents the revolutionary and Lise, as an

American represents the class of the blind and unquestioning followers who repose complete faith in the leader of their choice, Theodore Beam, born and bred in Canada truly represents the common Canadians. At one point Lise says that,

“History catches up the people” and immediately retorts Theodore, “Bullshit”

(78). This made Lawrence to remark: “In saying this, he is affirming one of the most deeply cherished of Canadian myths; that we have somehow been exempt from the responsibility of making history and that we can continue to opt out without paying a price” (121). To drive home his point Lawrence quotes Al

Purdy’s poem about the October Crisis, “The Peaceable kingdom” in which the poet laments the loss of political innocence that the October crisis implies.

Cohen’s point is that political innocence dies a lot broader than Purdy suspects but the two would agree, observes Lawrence “that it is a luxury we can no longer afford” (101).

Peresterello is the embodiment of sentimental radicalism of the Nineteen

Sixties which was very popular among Beam’s generation. The vague rhetoric about “a people’s Government” is enough to lure the likes of Lise. Her allegiance to her chosen leader, no doubt, grows stronger and deeper because of her understanding of his selfless care and unshakeable belief in people and she meticulously follows his footprints and carries out his instructions to the letter.

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Yet, lack of conviction and commitment makes her, after the killing of Perestrello, abandon the war-path and settle for a peaceful domestic life with Theodore in

Salem. Theodore, who has been forced by chance into this group naturally, does not act whole heartedly as Perestello; nor does he faithfully follow the leader like

Lise. “Theodore’s rejection of Perestrello”, according to Lawrence, “is ironic because it, too, is based on intuition rather than rationalization” (143).

Theodore cannot explicitly express the reason for his rejection but “his unconscious can deliver the message clearly enough. There is a striking difference between his intuitions about Perestrello and those of Lise. Having been born in

Spain and brought up in Latin America, naturally Perestrello’s reading of history is un-Canadian. His optimistic vision of utopian idealism about the discovery of

“innocent” and yet-untouched place” is made crystal clear in his theoretical emphasis on “pure force”. Theodore’s skepticism about the restoration of innocence by force sounds justifiable; yet he cannot articulate the ideological congruence of Perestrello and the Government except through his unconscious.

If, on one hand, Theodore reflects the Canadian in his political concept, on the other he appears to be a mirror-like Canadian Jew in his plight and lament of rootlessness and homelessness. As the narrator, the protagonist, expresses himself in unequivocal teems about his pathetic plight of homelessness. Either in search of identity or in pursuit of greener pastures, he deserts his parents while he was just

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seventeen and travels three thousand miles to Vancouver, the new place of his relocation. When circumstances force him after ten years of stay there to return to his parents he gives a louder thinking to his troubled mind: “I had lived here ten years but I didn’t own much, not even a bed” (24). In his first meeting with Dr.

James Fine, Theodore is startled to find Glorie Fine, the doctor’s wife, an alcoholic and shocked at the poor maintenance of house, particularly furniture.

Still he could not control or conceal the jealousy fuelled by the fact that the doctors own a home:

Despite everything, he had a home, where was mine? Vancouver? Salem? The train? Or was it only this body I lived in this crazy and useless body. . .Home, yes we’re all of stupid that we’d give up anything to attain it to convince ourselves that this place, any place, is somehow where we belong. (102)

It is ironic that the realization of homelessness does not motivate Theodore in the right direction to find a solution to this biting problem. On the contrary, he grows idler and indulges in day-dreaming. Time and again he refers to his day- dreaming. His outlook is epitomized by a fantasy about the opposite of Black

Holes: “Soft Holes: places in the universe where stars have disappeared into ecstasy and everyone that comes into them has a billion year orgasm” (27).

Lawrence opines that it is not particularly remarkable that Theodore should indulge in such day-dreams, but there is nothing in his imagination to

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counterbalance it. It is as though the Soft Holes provides the archetype for the kind of life he seeks outside his fantasies as well (125). His day-dreaming grown so wild that an entire chapter (Chapter VI) is devoted to a description of a dream in which Theodore is being interrogated and tortured by Felipa, Perestrello’s sinister wife, and by the two Vancouver detectives who forced his running away from his refuge by raiding his apartment.

Theodore is certain that “the pure force” of both the warring sides in equivalent in its amorality but with a striking difference--the possession of power in one of them and the absolute absence of power in the other. He explicitly expresses his hatred for politics (53) and this hatred forces him to constantly try to reassure himself that the cataclysmic events unfolding around him are not real:

Despite Lise’s wound, the boxcars full of weapons, the radio in Perestrello’s compartment blasting out news of war and revolution, some part of me still believed that the old order would continue, that peace and comfort would reassert themselves like a small town shrugging off a scandal and that when we got off the train . . . the wound be cured, safe again: familiar and untouched. (62)

But wisdom dawns upon him later and the newly acquired illumination that what is happening around him is neither illusory nor imaginary but something real, forces Theodore to make a conscious decision. During the attack of the train by the soldiers he rises to the occasion and acts resolutely to prevent Lise from

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joining the battle, for he was fully aware of “What had to be saved, and what had to be betrayed” (76). Though Theodore realizes what he is going to do and he does what he wants to do, there is no attempt on his part to explain the causes for his putting Lise and his relationship with her above the interest of revolution.

Lawrence defends this strategy of Theodore as he finds that “Cohen’s irony cuts both ways” (125).

On the one hand, Theodore is right not to be taken in by Perestrello as Lise is; Perestrello’s strategy is to mystify his disciples, to remain a leader whose ideas and methods are not subject to rational scrutiny just as the Government is perceived only through its lies and acts of violence; on the other hand, Theodore does not lay bare his thoughts, specifically about why Perestrello is not worth supporting. He is afraid that the outcome of the revolution would certainly be against the revolutionaries as they are outnumbered and hence he considers the ongoing fight but to be a foolish-bravado. In placing the demands of personal reality above those of political dimension, points out Lawrence, Theodore reflects with photographic accuracy the mind-set of Canadians who “at the time of October crisis were content to allow the Government’s arbitrary powers in order to remove the threat that political reality might impinge upon their lives; they wanted to continue cultivating their gardens” (132). Theodore is not at all interested in social justice. His interest lies in the pursuit of “soft holes” and its more respectable

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equivalents: romantic love, family, peace in a rural community. If pure force must rule, he would prefer to forget this fact.

K.Chellappan , in his study Beyond God the Father: The Manawaka novels of Margaret Lawrence as a Feminist Rewriting of T.S.Eliot’s “Four Quarters writes:

Lawrence’s first novel The Stone Angel, like “East Coker” begins with the earth, more particularly the hill, the cemetery and The Stone Angel which releases Hager’s memory. But the stone in the novel also stands for the human body. . .” (K. Balachandran Essays 43).

This pointed observation of K.Chellappan is quite applicable to The Colours of

War too, as this novel also make the beginning in “an old stone church” (9), the stone symbolizing strength, steadfastness, unbreakability and immovability.

While living in Salem upon his seventeenth year, Theodore has been unploughed earth. Though Jacob Beam is not in the good books of his son Theodore Beam who remarks: “it was years before I noticed him--a stocky, bearded presence who slowly edged into my life--and by then he had already become ridiculous” (13), he has inherited the two qualities of being “slow” and “lazy” (19) from his father.

Moreover, in their own house they “had lived as eccentrics and strangers” (41).

Again when Jacob confesses that he “could have been a better father”, Theodore not only endorses his view but also goes a step further and states, “At times he was worse than useless” but at the same time he is not reluctant to admit “I could have

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been a better son” (162). He also fully realizes that his lack of success in life saddens his parents (47). All these facts make one thing clear that his home in

Salem was neither a happy one nor his life there worth living.

In his decision to leave his home and parents and to go three thousand miles away to Vancouver is revealed his desire to subject the unploughed earth to tilling which implies suffering but which will pay in the long run. But the distance of three thousand miles did not have the power to free him from the haunting of the spirit of his father, for in Vancouver he could not opt for any job except the one

“he had learned” from his father, namely “setting linotype in a weekly newspaper”

(122). Yet again the legacy of his father “slowness” and “laziness” obstructed his advancement in life and though he was supposed to be a “freelance journalist”, it was “three months since he paid the rent” (21). The detectives’ raid at his

Vancouver apartment drives the last nail into his coffin and, like the prodigal son, he decides to return to his parental fold. But the ten-year experiences in

Vancouver, though unhappy, are not in vain for they help largely in the shaping of the unploughed earth. His unforgettable experience with his employer Scarlet

Tiara, his landlady and the police make him worldly-wise. Theodore, who in

Salem hadn’t learned “how to betray or to kill or even to love” (28) now learns to encounter challenges in life and learns even to “hate” himself when women like

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Felipa make advances towards him (104). The earth gets hardened and enters into the process of getting shaped and strengthened further.

Theodore’s forced involvement in the revolution plays a pivotal role in making him a holistic human being. He knows pretty well that the absence of armies of rival countries makes this war totally different and it is a battle between the domestic army and some rebellious “illegal underground groups” (16). The sexual satisfaction offered by Lise, a sort of bribery or love drags Theodore into the group of Perestrello from which there is no escape. Yet he proves worthy of their choice by his meticulous service and heroic deeds which make no less a person than Perestrello express, “we have to thank you; we’re in your debt” (156).

Felipa, Perestrello’s wife goes a step further when she is all praise for him: “My husband says you’re indispensable. Lise says you’re wonderful. Even the doctor admires you. Such a good Samaritan” (164). The man who was not “a perfect son” (47) and who belonged to “a ridiculous family” (31) has now risen as a Good

Samaritan. Strength is now being breathed into the unploughed earth to make it a harder substance.

It is Theodore’s infatuation for Lise that undoubtedly trapped him into the revolution. Later, the infatuation slowly gave way to reciprocal love. The man who had not learned to love himself is now able to love others too. Sex was neither new nor strange to either of them. But the physical attraction culminating

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in unbreakable bond of love is something new and a welcome change for both of them. To Lise’s repeated questions like “Do you love me?”, Theodore replies in the positive and when she finally asks him “How do you love me!”, arching above her he replies: “In deep like this” (150). In fact their mutual love is so deep that they are able to place their love above revolution, particularly after the death of

Perestrello, and decide to live permanently in Salem (204). The seventeen year old boy who ran out of his home-town because he felt rootless, returns to the same old city after ten years to establish his roots there. He gratefully acknowledges the service of Lise in not only restoring himself confidence, but also his parents’ faith in him (47). His decision to stick to his roots in Salem and not to move out of it completes the metamorphosis. Cohen does deftly begin the novel in the stone church which, though old, is strong, unbreakable and immovable--a symbolic state attained by the male protagonist through the long journey and vicissitudes of life.

In having been caught between the ignorance of hope and ignorance of reality and in having been chained between what Margaret Atwood calls the two

“unknown lands” (The Journals 32), Theodore presents himself a typical

Canadian, born amidst the expansive hostilities of the land. He also finds that individual identity which is determined or undermined by eco-cultural milieu is so simple. Born and bred in a well-established and long-surviving culture, he

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chooses or is forced to go into self-exile to Vancouver, three thousand miles away from the place of birth but ironically the host-town also brutally denies him the desired and required happiness and peace of mind. Futility of old identity and every cultural constituent that constructed it and the near-absence of a new configuration of constituents that could shape new identity shock him rudely. The inescapable sense of alienation that forces him to cultivate a new identity, however, opens his eyes to the bitter and irrefutable truth of loss of meaning and assurance of the past memories and he feels alienated from his past and present.

To sum up, Theodore proves himself a typical Jew according to the definition of Ayothi who states: “. . . any man can be a Jew by being good and any

Jew can be a humanitarian propelled by his goodness. The Jewish trait of being good is universal and the humanity by demonstrating goodness can be Jewish” (K.

Balachandran Essays 57). Theodore’s humanitarianism surfaces in his relationship with the four year old granddaughter of his land-lady in Vancouver who, he assumed “had a fatal disease” (28). His untiring and unreluctant core and concern for her even “at strange hours of the night” (28) proves beyond doubt he is good at heart. Again, the excessive grief and uncontrollable anger at the brutal killing of the farmer Harry pierced with twelve bullets for having “spoken up at the meeting” (130) is an indisputable proof of his humanitarianism. His joining hands with the revolutionaries, though it is against the law of the state, bring to the

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fore not only his faith and perseverance but also his deep and genuine concern for the society at large. By being good, he is able to identify himself with the society around him and this identification, in turn, guides him to be accommodative and adjustable in the new environment. All these characteristics, as enumerated by

Ayothi to define a Jew, are found in Theodore to make him a typical Jew.

In this way with the touch of Jewish attitude in all his characters in the Salem quartet, Cohen has successfully imparted the element of ‘search’ not only in their success but also in their failures and it has been well captured in this chapter. Along with Cohen’s characters, the readers also are made to travel in search of the motives behind their actions and it is proved strongly that all the reading leads to a kind of Quest.

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CHAPTER VI CONCLUSION

“Canadian Literature”, according to Parameswari “is the fruit of the British seed planted in American soil”, the output of which arises, “out of a confluence of the two main streams in the English language” (Survival 36). British and

American, however, asserted its nationalization and developed an independent tradition earlier than other continental literatures mainly because of speedy recognition of Canada as a single nation which, in turn, helped its literature in the attainment of a unique identity breaking all cultural and racial barriers. With the appearance of impressive and outstanding figures like Margaret Lawrence,

Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, Sinclair Ross, Sheila Watson and Rudy

Wiebe on the literary avenue, the mid-twentieth century witnessed the quantitative and qualitative expansion of Canadian literature.

K.Balachandran in his Editor’s Note to Essays in Canadian Literature stresses the need to study Canadian literature without which one’s knowledge of world literature would be incomplete and imperfect as well (i). S.Ramaswamy’s pointed observation in A Note on Canadian Biculturalism wherein, with the help of a quotation from The World Book of Encyclopedia, Vol.III, he establishes the fact that Canadian Literature is made up of bilingualism and bi-culturalism--

French and British—(170) quite applicable to Matt Cohen who, as a novelist and

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short-story writer is equally at home in writing in English and translating from

French which enabled him to create multi-dimensional works that speak volumes of dissatisfied and frustrated youths.

In making the young men like Erik Thomas of The Disinherited and

Theodore Beam of The Colours of War run away from their forefathers and ancestral land to an alien but chosen soil and in making the women characters- both major and minor--from a Mrs.Thomas of older generation in The Disinherited to Lise in The Colours of War and Annabelle in Flowers of Darkness--freely indulge in both pre-marital and extra-marital sex--breaking the tie between women and reproduction--Cohen seems to unfold a new concept of freedom and identity. While such women consider sexual freedom as the key to unlock the golden portals of women’s emancipation, there are certain other women characters like Mrs.Thomas of the older generation and Maureen Finch of Flowers of

Darkness who to borrow the words of Parameswari “bear the stress of a great conflict between the traditional ideas hammered into her mind and the awakened new consciousness” (Survival 8). Mrs.Thomas’ illicit intimacy with the cousin of her husband, as if to avenge her husband’s unfaithfulness to her and Maureen’s killing of her husband as obvious punishment for his making misuse of his religious office to seduce women devotees clearly bear testimony to the observation of Parameswari. Not only his women characters but his men

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characters are also poles apart in certain aspects. While the younger generation flees their homeland chasing an exclusive freedom and identity, the elders find their homeland an unfailing source of prosperity.

The problems traceable in Cohen’s novels are of varied hues and magnitudes. They range from strained parent-son relationship as found in The

Disinherited and sexual exploitation in Flowers of Darkness to political upheaval in The Colours of War. As such, the consequences also, naturally, differ in degree, for the nature and cause of the problem determines the gravity of consequences.

Hence, the consequences of these problems, too, vary from just disinheritance of the ancestral land to the killing of immoral, if not sinful, husband and self as well.

These problems rise from communication-gap or total absence of communication which still more widens the already existing gulf between father-son, making it totally unbridgeable. Cohen’s deft handling of such an issue a finely-told story of the decay of a generation’s long way of life and of the fierce family infighting over who is to inherit or escape.

The irresistible urge to attain justice enables him to present people who discover each other too little and too late in The Disinherited, which, in turn makes it, both social and political, when both Canada and the United States are in a State of civil disorder with food and fuel shortages, corrupt Government and armed forces patrolling the street makes The Colours of War at once a science fiction,

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political fantasy and an unforgettable story of alienation, loyalty and love, whereas the representatives of the younger generation in The Disinherited and The Colours of War desert their homeland Salem, to escape the monotony of the present, the young couple in Flowers of Darkness in their attempt to escape a life of scandal in

Ottawa finds shelter and refuge in the small town of Salem. Though Annabelle succeeds in rescuing her husband from the haunting scandal, she herself falls a victim to a life of scandal as she falls into the trap laid by the minister of local church to seduce her. The under currents of passion, hatred and fury of one man and three women make the narrative a haunting and unforgettable story.

The remarkable ability of splendid writing of Cohen weaves a beautiful texture of violence in The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone wherein is presented the story of two lives inextricably intertwining though they, however, spent twenty years loving each other, hating each other and even ignoring each other’s existence. The centuries-old hatred towards women running through the

Jewish veins as pointed out by Ayothi that “Jewish religion is considered to be a male-dominated religion and the females are not even allowed to sit with the men in the synagogue” (54) is manifested in Cohen’s portrayal of the Canadian society.

Whether it is the society of agriculturalists as in The Disinherited or the rebels as in the Colours of War or of rural people as in The Sweet Second Summer of Ketty

Malone the men occupy the centre-stage pushing the women folk to the circle.

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Worse than that, women are presented just as sex-machines as of their only duty in life were to satisfy the sexual appetite of the men inside or outside their family.

Lise, a rebel woman, also exploits her own sex-appeal to entice Beam in Flowers of Darkness. Ayothi’s comment on religion that “religion is equated with goodness and goodness is symbolized by good heart” is revealed in the total absence of goodness in the heart of Gordon Finch, a religious head which makes him not a human being, leave alone the minister of the church. His wife Maureen

Finch who, superficially looks like a modern women fighting for the emancipation of women, is in the heart of hearts a tradition-bound woman. If her concept of elimination of the sinner is the sure and successful way of making the society sin- free, her killing of self after shooting her husband to death recalls to the reader’s mind, particularly the Indian reader, the brutal system ‘Sati’--the wife’s plunging into funeral pyre of her husband--as the then barbaric society believed there was no life for a widow in the society.

To sum up, in the Salem Quartet novels, Matt Cohen has elucidated the issue of Place and how it haunts the life of people in Canada, as most of the

Canadian population is just immigrants. They are always on the lookout for

‘shelter’ which at times becomes an advantage or a trap. Such a contradiction posed by land in The Disinherited is well explained in the portrayal of Erik and

Brian, where the former is not willing to “inherit”, the latter is waiting to “get” the

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same from his adopted father. The Colours of War exposes Perestrello as fighting to release the land from the bad government, doesn’t succeed in his mission even with the new government. Place remains a puzzle as Salem offers a final-resort to

Theodore and Lise in the same novel, as they decide to live together. For some, it is a “home-coming”, while for others it is “self-exile”; it is a “blessing” for some and it’s a “curse” for some.

Two kinds of ‘time’: Chronos and Kairos exploited as a potential tool by

Cohen to measure the characters clearly presents the male protagonists in the

Quartet as sufferers and losers. They fail to act ‘in time’ and the Kairos-- the supreme moment with much greater significance-- once missed is lost forever.

Time neither heals nor wounds anybody’s life completely, as the heroes return back to their home-towns after a decade or so, but achieving nothing. The younger generation types --Erik, Brian, Perestrello, and Theodore Beam and older generation types --Simon, Richard, John and Finch are all victims of ‘time’ as they simply travel through the chronological time, but fail to catch the significant time to reach their targets.

The ‘holy’ relationship between man and woman, which is supposed to convey a strong bond, in turn gets across the idea of adultery, pre-marital and extra-marital occupying the backdrop of all four Salem novels. A strong sense of disloyalty is painted underneath each character, irrespective of gender and they fail

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to realize the sin they are committing. Though Cohen introduces many new characters through adultery, not all of them gain significance with their support extended to their partners. Marriage, as an institution, teaches both adaptability and tolerance as the key for success and ensures the significance of being together in low and high tides. The sharp distinctions in the mind-set of different generations claim the focal point in Cohen’s style of writing familial stories.

“The Quest for Identity” outlines and enlightens the readers the benefits of quest as a constant theme prevalent in the minds of all the characters in the Salem Quartet novels. The point of “satisfaction” in life or career is not easy to fix, and female protagonists like Elizabeth, Leah, Miranda and Katherine in The

Disinherited get indulged in newer ventures trying to locate their identities in the male chauvinistic world; males, on the other hand, get lost in their quest by deviating the boundaries with or without the knowledge of their counterparts.

Colours of War shows Peresterello, Lise and Theodore taking up the revolutionary theme on their shoulders, and at the same time, exploiting the rebel-mask to protect them from losing their identity. Though Peresterello succumbs to his revolutionary fight, Theodore and Lise give up their commitment with revolution at the end, as they ended up falling in love with each other. Similarly, the long- tolerant wife of Finch gets stimulated at her husband’s public confession about his

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misdeeds, shoots her partner down thereby justifying the quest of finding her identity in punishing the sinner in the Flowers of Darkness.

The study of all the four elements -- Place, Time, Man-Woman

Relationship along with the Quest for Identity—clearly brought in a higher level understanding of families in Canada as portrayed by Matt Cohen, in the chapters of the thesis. This research work is a modest attempt to understand a less studied novelist like Matt Cohen in proper perspective. The microscopic analysis of the mental journey of the creator and his creations shows why the expected utopia is the alien but chosen-soil is always elusive. The study also focuses on the quest- motif and identity crisis a favourite and oft-repeated theme with almost all diasporic writers. Hence, the possibility of further researches on the individual authors or by way of comparative studies is not ruled out. Novels of Matt Cohen, other than those selected for this study, can give new insights and they could be probed and researched. Comparisons between literatures in Indian writing in

English and in Indian regional languages and the writings of diasporic writers in general and Indian diasporic writers in particular would prove a worthy choice of interest to probe. The sentiments of humanism and humanitarianism, trends and tendencies, parallel contents and cross-currents and revolutionary perspective, as found in the authors like Aritha Van Herk and Anita Desai, Aritha Van Herk and

Prema Arunachalam, Mordecai Richler and Mulk Raj Anand, Margaret Atwood

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and Kamala Das, Alice Munro and Ambai, Tony Morrison and Bama can be taken up for further researches which would certainly prove interesting and rewarding the researchers and illumine the future scholars as well. Moreover, the growing interest in the study of Canadian literature would open new avenues of criticism not only in fiction but in other genres like poetry and drama as well. Such studies could provide new grounds and areas to critics and comparatists.

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