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RIVER of NOW and THEN Margaret Laurence's Narratives

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RIVER of NOW and THEN Margaret Laurence's Narratives RIVER OF NOW AND THEN Margaret Laurence's Narratives Barbara Hehner ΤLHE DIVINERS, Margaret Laurence's most recent novel, is overflowing with ideaДНs abouЕ t life, about life in Canada, and about life in Canada as experienced by a woman. Laurence has been quoted as saying, "Now the wheel seems to have come full circle — these five books [the Manawaka fiction] all interweave and fit together."1 The extent to which The Diviners is made to interweave with the earlier books is, in fact, almost irritating. The Tonnerre family, members of which have appeared in The Stone Angel, The Fire Dwellers, and A Bird in the House, play a major, and thematically defensible, role in the present book. But why include Julie Kaslik (sister of Nick, Rachel's lover in A Jest of God) and her husband Buckle Fennick (Mac's tormented friend in The Fire-Dwellers), when our interest in them is derived from the earlier books, and not from anything they do in The Diviners? And it is a jolt to read that Stacey Cameron and Vanessa MacLeod, Morag's contemporaries, play together, since they have not previously seemed to exist on the same imaginative plane: Stacey of The Fire-Dwellers is a fully realized fictional creation, while Vanessa, of the short story collection, A Bird in the House, is more an effective narrative device than a memorable character. Not only characters, but obsessive images familiar to Laurence's readers recur in The Diviners: the disemboweled gopher, which Stacey of The Fire-Dwellers, like Morag, saw as a child; the grotesquely fat woman imprisoned by her bulk (Hagar, of course, Buckle's mother in The Fire-Dwellers, and now Prin) ; the burning shack that trapped Piquette Tonnerre and her children, which Laurence has described twice before; and the greatest catastrophe Manawaka ever experi- enced, the departure of the Cameron Highlanders for Dieppe, mentioned in all Laurence's Canadian fiction. Laurence has been quoted as saying that she will probably never write another novel, and one can almost feel, while reading The Diviners, the pressure on its author to make a final important statement about Life and Art. It seems to have 40 LAURENCE S NARRATIVES been Laurence's ambition in this novel, dense with themes and symbols, complex in structure, but meandering in plot, not only to clarify the ideas expressed in her earlier books, but to express all those ideas for which she never previously found a suitable fictional embodiment. In the earlier Manawaka books, Laurence explored such themes as the diffi- culty of achieving genuine communication between individuals, and the limits placed on personal freedom by family and ethnic background, in ways that critics have come to identify as distinctively "Canadian". Her female protagonists merely survive rather than triumphing, and they grow up in a community which displays the "garrison mentality" in its need for rigid conformity and its fear of spontaneity and sensuality. But in The Diviners, Laurence has overturned the negativism of these Canadian literary themes. Morag is no Philip Bentley: she has published five novels. She is in touch with the needs of her body as well as her mind, and has striven to satisfy both. She has freely chosen a loving relation- ship with the Métis, Jules Tonnerre, and borne a child by him who seems to symbolize the healing of the division between culture and nature in the Canadian psyche. At times The Diviners seems almost too self-conscious in its reworking of Canadian literary clichés. As just one example, Margaret Atwood has defined the "Rapunzel Syndrome" in Canadian literature: imprisoned by the repressive attitudes of the society around her, the woman passively awaits rescue by the prince.2 Atwood points to Rachel in A Jest of God as a typical victim of this malaise. In The Diviners, Morag, caught in a stifling marriage, sees herself as Rapunzel: "Maybe tower would be a better word for the apartment. .The lonely tower. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair." To Morag, however, "letting down her hair" does not mean waiting helplessly for the prince to save her ; it means taking a first step towards freeing herself, by defying current stan- dards of chic and letting her straight black hair grow out. Cultural nationalism and women's liberation dovetail nicely here. Morag's marriage to the Englishman Brooke, whose taste and intellect she considers superior to her own, can be seen both as the outcome of the "colonial mentality," which considers indigenous culture inferior to that of the mother country, and as the result of growing up in a society that assigns housework to women and intellectual achievement to men. The Diviners comes to grips with currently- debated issues much more explicitly than Laurence's previous fiction: the search for a Canadian identity, the discrimination encountered by women, the unjust treatment of native people, and even ecology, find a place in the novel. The Diviners also uses the most sophisticated narrative technique Laurence has yet attempted, and an examination of this technique provides a suitable intro- duction to the novel, since both its virtuosity, and the unfortunate outcome of this virtuosity, its obtrusiveness, exemplify the strengths and failings of the novel 4·1 LAURENCE S NARRATIVES as a whole. In The Diviners, Laurence not only attempted to refine the narrative devices she had used before, but, as with other aspects of this novel, to stretch her story-telling abilities in new directions. ΤIHE RECURRING narrative device used in The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, and IThem Fire-Dwellers is the first-person, present-tense narrator who is also the central character of the book. This technique would seem to be a psychological necessity for Laurence : I... have the sense of a whole world going on inside each skull and I can hardly bear it that this should be so, because I think I want a greater sort of contact with other people than in fact may be possible. I'm sure this is one reason why I do identify so much with the main character in my books . one has this kind of perfect identification or communication. 3 Paradoxically, the first-person technique provides Laurence as a writer with the feeling that she is sharing another person's mind while, by strictly limiting the point of view of each novel, it conveys to the reader Laurence's conviction that human beings are hopelessly isolated from each other. The Stone Angel presents the reminiscences of ninety-year-old Hagar Shipley. The novel's present, revealed to us by Hagar speaking in the present tense, covers only a few days, as she "rages against the dying of the light." But Hagar's memories, in the past tense, range over her whole life. Laurence exercised great care in providing both the time and the motivation for these memories in the novel's present : Being alone in a strange place, the nurse's unseeing stare, the receding heat of the day — all bring to mind the time I was first in hospital, when Marvin was born.4 Laurence wrote in "Ten Years' Sentences," a 1969 article, of her pride in being able to recapture the idiom of her grandmother's day : Yet Doris never cared a snap about that pitcher, I'm bound to admit. Well there's no explaining tastes, and ugliness is pretty nowadays. Myself, I favour flowers. .. but she also allowed Hagar some unlikely flights of rhetoric, whose equivalent is not to be found in her next two novels : I now think she must have been carved in that distant sun by stone masons who were the cynical descendants of Bernini, gouging out her like by the score, gaug- ing with admirable accuracy the needs of fledgling pharaohs in an uncouth land. Hagar's memories are presented in the order they occurred, which Laurence afterward viewed as an artistic mistake: "The flashback method is, I think, a 42 LAURENCE S NARRATIVES little overworked in it, and I am not at all sure that flashbacks ought to be in chronological order, as I placed them to make it easier for the reader to follow Hagar's life."5 In A Jest of God and The Fire-Dwellers, which portray much younger women, memories play a much smaller part than in The Stone Angel. Thus Laurence was able to present these memories out of chronological order without fear of confusing her readers. And she continued to take great care that these reminis- cences seem to be called up naturally by events in the novels' present : The Flamingo Dancehall is shut tight and locked, blinds drawn, but tonight it will be all mauve and green shifting lights, and blare, and couples. In the summer there are dances every night here now. It used to be only once a week, Saturdays, when I was about seventeen. Sometimes I'd go with three or four other girls, scarcely wanting to ... (A Jest of God) Stacey smokes and waits. 1 couldn't have gone in. Yes I could have. No I couldn't. And yet I'm curious as well. How do they stash them away? In grey-metal drawers like outsize filing cabinets, chilled for preservation? I don't want to know .. Cameron's Funeral Home was never entered into by children. Stacey and her sister were forbidden .. (The Fire-Dwellers) A Jest of God marks Laurence's most sustained use of the first-person, present- tense narrative, and the technique produces a tour de force recreation of a troubled and often divided mind : And Mother nods and says yes it certainly is marvellous and Rachel is a born teacher.
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