CRITICAL APPROACHES TO THE FICTION OF MARGARET LAURENCE Also edited by Colin Nicholson TROPIC CRUCIBLE: Self and Theory in Language and Literature (co-editor) ALEXANDER POPE: Essays for the Tercentenary Margaret Laurence (1926-87) (Courtesy of Trent University, Ontario) Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Margaret Laurence Edited by COLIN NICHOLSON Senior Lecturer, Department of English Literature University of Edinburgh M MACMILLAN Editorial matter and selection, chapter 12 ©Colin Nicholson 1990; Chapter 1 ©Clara Thomas 1990; Chapter 2 ©David Richards 1990; Chapter 3 ©Shirley Chew 1990; Chapter 4 ©Simone Vauthier 1990; Chapter 5 ©Michael A. Peterman 1990; Chapter 6 ©Elizabeth Waterston 1990; Chapter 7 ©Coral Ann Howells 1990; Chapter 8 ©Nancy Bailey 1990; Chapter 9 ©Peter Easingwood 1990; Chapter 10 © Lynette Hunter 1990; Chapter 11 ©John Thieme 1990; Chapter 13 ©Gayle Greene 1990; Chapter 14 ©Barbara Godard 1990; Chapter 15 ©Greta M. K. Coger 1990. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990 978-0-333-46069-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended), or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WClE 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1990. Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Typeset by Wessex Typesetters (Division of The Eastern Press Ltd) Frome, Somerset British Ubrary Cataloguing in Publication Data Critical Approaches to the fiction of Margaret Laurence 1. Fiction in English. Canadian writers. Laurence, Margaret, 1926-1987 I. Nicholson, C. E. (Colin Edward), 1944- 813'.54 ISBN 978-1-349-10094-1 ISBN 978-1-349-10092-7 ( eBook) DOl 10.1007/978-1-349-10092-7 Contents Margaret Laurence frontispiece Preface vii Acknowledgements XV Notes on the Contributors xvi 1 'Planted firmly in some soil': Margaret Laurence and the Canadian Tradition in Fiction Clara Thomas 1 2 'Leave the Dead some room to dance!': Margaret Laurence and Africa David Richards 16 3 'Some truer image': A Reading of The Stone Angel Shirley Chew 35 4 Images in Stones, Images in Words: Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel Simone Vauth.ier 46 5 'All that happens, one must try to understand': The Kindredness of Tillie Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle and Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel Michael A. Peterman 71 6 Double is Trouble: Twins in A Jest of God Elizabeth Waterston 83 7 Weaving Fabrications: Women's Narratives in A Jest of God and The Fire-Dwellers Coral Ann Howells 93 v vi Contents 8 Identity in The Fire-Dwellers Nancy Bailey 107 9 The Realism of Laurence's Semi-Autobiographical Fiction Peter Easingwood 119 10 Consolation and Articulation in Margaret Laurence's The Diviners Lynette Hunter 133 11 Acknowledging Myths: The Image of Europe in Margaret Laurence's The Diviners and Jack Hodgins's The Invention of the World John Thieme 152 12 'There and not there': Aspects of Scotland in Laurence's Writing Colin Nicholson 162 13 Margaret Laurence's The Diviners: The Uses of the Past Gayle Greene 177 14 Caliban's Revolt: The Discourse of the (M)Other Barbara Godard 208 15 Margaret Laurence's Manawaka: A Canadian Yoknapatawpha Greta M. K. Coger 228 Index 247 Preface When I first began asking people whether they would like to contribute to a collection of essays exploring some of the issues raised in her fiction, Margaret Laurence was alive. On the one occasion that I was able to meet her, in 1983, it was through the good offices of Malcolm Ross, then Visiting Professor in Literature at Edinburgh University's Centre of Canadian Studies, and Adele Wiseman in Toronto. Canada Council footed the bill, while their counterparts in London, Canada House's Academic Relations department, came up with the label 'Faculty Enrichment Award Scheme'. At a large dinner-party in her house Adele Wiseman enabled me to put together an unusual three-week long seminar on current writing in Toronto talking to several of its producers. Adele also suggested that I should visit Laurence at Lakefield, and gave me telephone contact. I spent an afternoon and evening at Lakefield and for supper we were joined by the Scottish writers Andrew Greig and Kathleen Jamie. Andrew had brought his guitar, and I seem to remember that by the end of the evening we were all singing Scottish songs with more enthusiasm than ability. But earlier in the day Margaret Laurence had asked how could I most usefully spend my time with her. At that time I had read only one of her novels and told her so. Well then, after a moment's pause, would I like to see her collection of photographs. And so for more than an hour she talked me through a photographic record of moments in her life. It remains a vivid memory and something for which I have had considerable cause to be grateful when subsequently reading her work. A distinctive interweaving of her life and her life of writing is after all one of the attributes of Laurence's fiction. But it is impossible to read that fiction without being impressed by the scale of the achievement. By giving imaginative shape to contours and definitions of Canadian sensibility, Laurence has added to the ways in which we can understand ourselves and each other. So this collection was first conceived as a token in celebration of the many different kinds of recognition which her writing inspires. It would have been pleasant to give her a copy. Time was against us in that. But the impetus of compassionate human personality which informs her work makes it difficult for us not to think of vii viii Preface her as still being present, and of these essays as a continuation of relationships in other ways. At any rate, it is in that spirit of constructive engagement that this collection is offered. In order to set an appropriate context of Canadian practice and precedent, Clara Thomas, one of Laurence's most widely read critics, considers ways in which the novelist developed and exten­ ded elements recognisable as a Canadian tradition in fiction. The illustrative topoi which Thomas selects include the climatic geography of the Canadian West, Scots-Canadian themes, the small town, the recognition of home, the registration of domestic speech, and the clear voice of women writing. And in this last respect, Thomas suggests for it a cross-gender representativeness. The historical coincidence of a maturing Canadian sense of purpose and place with a more widely articulate feminist awareness lends strength and credibility to Laurence's representative aspect. Then, much of the novelist's own status as paradigm stems, in Thomas's words, 'from our myth of the golden west and its demolition'. In similar vein, Thomas brings into focus the ethnic lineage in fiction to which Laurence is an adherent, and which she inventively restructures. Scotch myths and small-town ambience are here contextualised and connected with the ways in which Laurence exploited them for narrative purposes. But what then seems to be immediately called for is fuller consideration of the impact of expatriation upon her work. Laurence was uniquely placed to respond in distinctive ways to her experiences in Africa, and those experiences have in tum been seen as formative in the emergence of her own novelistic skills. Her encounter with colonialism was, itself, contextualised by her developing sense of Canada's historical situation and record. She could bring into play a different perspec­ tive. These are the areas of her work which David Richards explores, placing some of Laurence's sentimental attachments in other analytical frameworks, opening up some of their ambiguities and looking, too, at the positive interaction between Laurence and Africa. Chinua Achebe publicly acknowledges a sense of indebtedness, and Richards offers a comparative scheme which sets Achebe' s and Laurence's work in ways which suggest that for their literary relationships the river flowed both ways. Shirley Chew's essay on the first novel in the Manawaka cycle, The Stone Angel (1964), concerns itself with the archaeology of Preface ix memory. Hagar Shipley's backward glance over main-travelled roads is often cantankerous or troubled in other ways. Chew discerns an opposition between a search and a yearning for stasis on Hagar's part and narrative strategies which undermine coherence and deny serenity. Within these tensions, Laurence's character-studies group around the angel in various ways. Then, in a French reading of this novel as the play of signifier around signified, Simone Vauthier analyses ways in which the figure of the stone angel reads, and is read by, its contexts. As motif, the recurrent image enshrines considerable meaning. Laurence was to call her next novel A Jest of God (1966) and the novel which followed that features Stacey Cameron/MacAindra who can archly remonstrate with god-spoken words of her own imagining. Little surprise, then, that The Stone Angel should subject celestial represen­ tation to various human resonances and to prairie wind and weather. To read The Stone Angel is to encounter an icon of movement from sightlessness to fall, to partial restoration. The stone figure plies within and across an intriguing field of signifiers; a movement in which both petrified and angelic attributes are displayed. Hagar and the stone angel become, in precise ways, intertexts of each other.