Decline and Progress: the Portrayal of Age in Fiction by Mordecai Richler and Robertson Davies

Decline and Progress: The portrayal of age in fiction by Mordecai Richler and Robertson Davies

A Thesis submitted to the Committee of Graduate Studies

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the

Degree of Master of Arts

in the Faculty of Arts and Science

Trent University

Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

MA Program in Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies

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Decline and Progress: The Portrayal of Age in Fiction by Mordecai Richler and Robertson Davies

Patricia Life

This interdisciplinary thesis combines the fields of literary criticism and Age

Studies in order to offer an analysis of the novels Barney's Version (1997) by Mordecai

Richler and The Cunning Man (1994) by Robertson Davies. I position the novels as illustrations of Margaret Morganroth Gullette's and Kathleen Woodward's theories in regard to progress-and-decline narratives and in regard to the multiplicity and fluidity of human identity. The novels counter the ideology of "positive aging" and their "little narratives" resist the cultural "grand narrative" which depicts age by means of an either/or progress/decline binary. The novels offer an alternative "version" which depicts aging as the negotiation, across the entire life course, of a maze of intersecting decline and progress. I argue that age-related expectations influence the interpretation of texts and that aging people's attitudes towards themselves and others may be inaccessible, masked beneath apparent narratives of progress and/or decline.

Key Words: Age Studies; literary criticism; gerontology; narrative; identity; progress; decline.

ii Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapters

1 Introduction

2 Theoretical Approach

3 Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version - "In my present state of decline"

4 Barney's Version - Fracturing the Binary of Progress and Decline

5 Robertson Davies' The Cunning Man - "Gain, every moment of it"

6 The Cunning Man - Behind the Curtain of Progress

7 Conclusion - Navigating the Web of Decline and Progress

Works Cited

iii Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere appreciation to my thesis committee - Dr.

Stephen Katz, Dr. Sally Olivers and Dr. Michael Peterman - for their kindness and patience and for the intellectual guidance they provided during the writing of this thesis. I would like to thank my husband Richard Life and my son Jonathan Life for their encouragement and moral support. As well, I extend my gratitude to OGS and SSHRC for funding my research and making the writing of this thesis possible.

IV 1

Chapter 1: Introduction

This thesis explores the portrayal of age in two Canadian novels, Barney's

Version by Mordecai Richler and The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies. I have selected this topic because it allows me to combine two compelling areas of study: the first is

Canadian literature; the second is the process of aging.

My interest in aging and ageism arose gradually over a period of eighteen years.

During this time I acted as my mother's caregiver and advocate as she experienced the onset and ensuing development of dementia. During the same time period, my academic interest in the study of age was stimulated by a number of situations in which I found myself resisting the expectations which my culture was imposing on me in regard to age- appropriate behaviours. First, I discovered that as a volunteer and family-council member at the long-term-care facilities at which my mother was a resident, I was a bit too

"young." Most volunteers were of "retirement age." Then, when I returned to university in my forties as a part-time student in order to complete an undergraduate degree in literature, I was a bit too "old" for that role. When I retired from a sports/coaching career after twenty-five years, I was too "young" to be a retiree. When I returned to university as a graduate student, I discovered that I was rather "old" to be a full-time student.

Although I am female, white, middle-class, English-speaking, Canadian and able- bodied, the category by which of late I am most frequently identified is age. During the last two decades, I repeatedly have been seen as being either too old or too young to fit society's age-appropriate ideals. Canadian culture perceives age first as chronology, but it complicates chronological age by associating it with types of behaviour used to characterize individuals marked by chronological ages. In this regard, my conduct has 2 been inconsistent with those of most other people of a similar age; and since I have acted against the prevailing age narratives of my society, I have encountered resistance not just from others but also from my own culturally induced and internalized sense of proper behaviour. What I find to be most curious is that I have been considered old in one context yet, simultaneously, young in another. As a result of these personal experiences, I have become intrigued by the relationship in my culture between chronological age categories and the imposition of age-related expectations.

In this thesis three meanings of age emerge. The first two are common understandings of the term. The first of these is that "age" is a constructed measurement of the fixed time set apart in periods of life through a developmental process. Hence periods such as "young," "middle-aged," and "old-aged" are determined according to an individual's anticipated progress across the expected human life course. A second meaning of age derives from the social conditions by which age gradations are administered and governed in a collective sense. For instance, four-year-olds are considered too old to need diapers and, in most of North America, fourteen-year-olds are considered too young to marry. There are legal and bureaucratic "ages" associated with drinking, voting, marrying, driving and within educational and military systems, themselves crosscut by relations of gender, race, class and region. Thirdly, as I have found by personal experience, age gains meaning through relativistic and interactive processes. Hence, age exists on a continuum of relationships. To a typical long-term-care resident, I am "youn§>" whereas to a typical graduate student I am "old." Further complicating the complexity created by the relativity of age, cultures assign a variety of expectations in regard to age which can create contradictory meanings. Different ages are 3 associated with different age-related behaviours. For instance, some people believe that age brings wisdom, whereas other people believe that old people experience mental decline; neither belief is completely accurate. What remains unambiguous is that, consciously and unconsciously, most people in Western culture categorize themselves and others according to chronological age and according to age-related expectations, yet seem not to acknowledge the fluidity and relational conditions that underlie their experiences of aging.

One of the most important areas wherein constructed and relational meanings of age intersect is retirement and transitions from "productive" to supposedly

"unproductive" periods of life. Pat Thane (2000) looks to "literary evidence from the 16th century" to support the claim that for "both men and women in preindustrial Europe old age was defined by appearance and capacities rather than by age-defined rules about pensions and retirement; hence people could be defined as 'old' at variable ages" (9).

Thane also notes that "research into English poor relief records in the 18th century first describe[s] some people as 'old' in their 50s, others not until their 70s" (9). Thane indicates that often menopause was seen as the beginning of old age for women and the inability to perform manual labour as the beginning of old age for men. Where frequently in contemporary times, government disciplines a society through mandatory retirement restrictions based simply on chronological age, less emphasis is placed on function as a delineation of age. In contemporary Ontario society, the recent discontinuation of mandatory retirement has decreased the significance of chronological age measurement.

As well, participation in sports and hobbies and choices in regard to art and clothing fashions which previously were considered too youthful for older people are now being 4 embraced by some but not all older people. Kathleen Woodward (1999) points out that

"In North America men above the ideal age grow steadily more vulnerable to the

[fashion] cycle because of the growing identification of masculinity and work-related savvy with youth" (37). People of all genders and ages are confused by multiple age- related expectations and are pulled in a variety of directions by opposing cultural forces.

A sixty-five-year-old man who by the Ontario government's previous standards would have been considered too old to be productive now can have the opportunity to work, but he may be pressured to dress in a youthful manner and embrace numerous other culturally decreed, age-related behaviours in order to remain employable; at the same time, he may feel pressure to present a more suitably dignified demeanour to his dependent family members. Age assessment has become increasingly complex, contradictory and multi-levelled.

While participation in the larger Western culture leads to general age-related beliefs and behaviours, interaction within smaller sub-communities creates variation in people's perception of the age identity of self and others. Cathrine Degnen's study (2007) of old people and their interactions in a South Yorkshire village in Britain suggests that each community assigns age identities specific to its own dynamics. Whereas in the context of the larger community, all individuals forming part of the group of old people which Degnen studies would be considered to be old, within the community of the old people's group studied, further age criteria separate the individuals. In "Minding the gap:

The construction of old age and oldness amongst peers" she writes, "Unlike definitions of old age which have emerged from other research that privileges ability and functionality as markers of oldness, being old in this context ha[s] much more to do with what is 5 deemed to be proper social comportment" (Degnen, 75). In discussing the ostracizing of one "old" group member, she writes that "the vagueness of her speech patterns in conjunction with the highly visible impairment of her motor skill functions are interpreted by other members as markers of oldness" (73). "Normal" oldness is considered to include some slowing and physical incapacity but "getting past it" is seen as "real" oldness. She concludes by saying that, "the older people I work[] with made far more distinctions about who is old and what oldness is than most younger people would ever make or have a vocabulary to distinguish amongst" (78). Degnen's study suggests that the nuances of the term "old" are even more complex for the aged than they are for the relatively young. Her work invites further research into the age-related beliefs and behaviours of the various pockets of culture within larger Western culture.

With these various and sometimes conflicting definitions of age as background, this thesis looks to current cultural narratives within literary sources to contribute to what age means to us today. As such, my research contributes to "literary gerontology," a subfield situated between the field of literary studies and the field of gerontology. While the role of gerontology is to explore the human aging experience, the role of literary gerontology is to explore the meaning of that human aging experience as it is expressed, created and represented in texts and works of fiction. Theoretical and practical texts form the core of scholarly debate regarding aging; however, the arts also help us to understand the complexities of human behaviour, and thus, the gerontological umbrella has come to encompass the study of literary texts dealing with the topic of aging. Science seeks to increase knowledge through the acquisition of hard empirical evidence and seeks to disseminate that knowledge through fact-focussed exposition, but the arts can augment 6 understanding and communication through their interpretive, creative and reflexive dimensions. Since aging involves more than the physical ailments to which an aging body is prone, the study of aging must include research into and expression of those aspects which are situated beyond the physical and the medical.

In Stories of Ageing (2000), Mike Hepworth writes,

Because fiction is a creative mental activity requiring author and reader to

extend her or himself imaginatively into the minds of other characters,

novels are in the advantageous position of admitting readers to a variety of

different perspectives on the situation of an aging individual.

(Hepworth, 5)

Reading literary narrative and its criticism allows us to compare our own experiences and the internal narratives which we have created out of those experiences to an alternative story - something someone else has organized - thus affording us the opportunity to reflect and to accept and/or resist the cultural representations and ideas portrayed.

In "Literary History as a Tool of Gerontology" (2000), Teresa Mangum supports the role of literature in gerontology by stating that "[d]rivers who choose the back roads" are "like humanities scholars, [who] value a different kind of excursion. They want to understand how people live and think, what desires motivate choices and action" (Mangum 2000,

62). She argues that the study of literature affords people "a complex understanding of place and its inhabitants and, therefore.. .a context for interpreting their experiences"

(62). According to Mangum, fiction has the potential to inspire imaginative contemplation of the issues of aging and has the capacity to appeal to readers' emotions and intellects. Consequently, literature may stimulate increased interest and curiosity in 7 the reader. Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye (2006) postulates that "if the direct union of grammar and logic is characteristic of non-literary verbal structures, literature may be described as the rhetorical organization of grammar and logic" (Frye, 227). Thus literature is preferable in situations where powers of persuasion are desirable. Facts and figures provided by other types of research into aging may become more compelling to readers when coupled with the appeal of art. By increasing the interdisciplinarity of its approach, gerontology acquires the capacity to explore and understand age and aging more completely.

The content of this thesis also intersects with a field of study known as "Age

Studies." Scholar Margaret Morganroth Gullette originated and named this area of research (Woodward, xvii). Like literary gerontology, Age Studies explores art and

aging; but, like Cultural Studies' scholars, Age Studies' scholars focus their efforts on

discovering the forces which underlie a society's beliefs. While literary gerontology

limits its scope to the study of literature and what it reveals about the meaning of age today and in the past, Age Studies explores age as embodied in all aspects of our culture.

Thus it addresses a great variety of cultural sources and vehicles of cultural expression,

including those emanating from the worlds of art, entertainment, performativity,

speculative fiction, fashion, film — in short, all encoded productions. Age Studies'

scholars analyze the dominant narratives and stereotypes which influence Western

society's attitudes and behaviours in regard to age, explore the way in which people of all

ages accept and resist culturally assigned definitions of age, and challenge people to

reconsider their assumptions in regard to age and aging. Some scholars of age use the

term "critical gerontology" rather than "Age Studies," thereby emphasizing the inclusion 8 of critical theory within the mandate of the discipline. Other scholars prefer to use the term "Age Studies" because it suggests that the study of age should not be limited to the study of the old. Perhaps in time the discipline will settle on the term "Critical Age

Studies" since that title would encompass both the foundational importance of critical theory and the intention to study all ages. Each of these varieties of scholarship on the meaning of age derives in part from a common source.

In 1903, the zoologist Elie Metchnikoff invented the term "gerontology" and thus marked the beginning of the West's scientific study of old age (Squier 1999,93). This early attempt to identify the importance of aging as a separate field of inquiry had its political counterpart later in the century. For example, as Woodward reminds us (1999), in 1968 Robert N. Butler invented the term "ageism" and was one of the first to address issues associated with aging which exist beyond the medical. Woodward explains that the term "ageism," "in analogy with sexism and racism.. .was first coined.. .to name widespread discrimination against the elderly based on prejudice rooted in the very fact of being older" (Woodward, x). In 1970, Simone de Beauvoir published La Vieillesse and it was republished in English in 1972 as Old Age in the United Kingdom and Canada, and as The Coming of Age in the United States. She can be credited with combining a review of historical and contemporary attitudes towards old age with a more critical and perhaps pessimistic perspective on old age, commenting that "the vast majority of mankind look upon the coming of old age with sorrow or rebellion" (de Beauvoir, 599). In a recent issue of the Journal of Aging Studies (2008) devoted to critical thought in aging studies,

Harry R. Moody identifies the birth of his own and others' interest in culture and aging as 9 occurring in the 1970's and early 1980's (Moody, 209). This accords with Cole's (1992) periodization of the critical field:

Over the past 20 years, many people have sensed that something important

is missing in a purely scientific and professional gerontology. Mainstream

gerontology - with its highly technical and instrumental, avowedly

objective, value-neutral and specialized discourses — lacks an appropriate

language for addressing basic moral and spiritual issues in our aging

society. (xi)

During the 1970s and 1980s, social science and humanities scholars like Thomas Cole augmented the work of medical gerontology, thereby creating a unique interdisciplinary academy focussed on the study of age. Moody remembers that it was a time of "waning cultural optimism" when therefore the "critical perspective became even more important." Since then, the two editions of The Handbook of the Humanities and Aging

(1992 and 2000) and journals such as the Journal of Aging Studies mentioned above and the Journal of Aging and Identity have provided intellectual spaces in which critical thinking about age could be shared. These have been accompanied by a number of conferences such as the 1992 conference Images of Aging at Trent University and the

1996 conference at University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee that resulted in the publication of Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (Woodward 1999). Moody also suggests that this specialized area of gerontology now has reached maturity as a field of study

(205). This spring, a new on-line journal, Journal of Aging, Humanities and the Arts, has been launched that supports Moody's claim that not only has the field "reached maturity" but that the academic pursuit of knowledge in regard to cultural aging will be ongoing. 10

In order to situate my project within this productive zone of critical humanities inquiry in aging research, I will introduce and borrow from the work of four important critical and innovative scholars. These are Mike Hepworth, Teresa Mangum, Sally

Chivers and Barbara Frey Waxman, whose key texts are respectively Stories of Ageing

(Hepworth 2000), 'Little Women: The Aging Female Character in Nineteenth-Century

British Children's Literature' (Mangum 1991), From Old Woman to Older Women:

Contemporary Culture and Women's Narratives (Chivers 2003) and To Live in the Center of the Moment: Literary Autobiographies of Aging (Frey Waxman 1997).

Mike Hepworth was an Aberdeen sociologist who believed that the task of explaining the work of social gerontology could be facilitated by using examples from literature. His text Stories of Ageing (2000) reviews about one hundred pieces of fiction, demonstrating the way in which the study of literature can complement the work of more traditional gerontology. Hepworth shows how a novel can serve as a fictional illustration of empirical research, and he argues that the study of literature can help to reveal the subtleties of a variety of different age-related topics. He claims that his goal in writing

Stories of Ageing is to encourage readers to "explore fiction as an imaginative resource for understanding variations in the meaning of the experience of ageing in society" (1).

He expresses the hope that people who have read his text will search out other age-related fiction in order to increase their understanding of age. He believes that "[fjiction is a particularly valuable resource precisely because it allows the writer, through the exercise of imagination, access to the personal variations and ambiguities underlying the common condition of growing older" (4). In Hepworth's opinion, literature reveals the uniqueness of each aging experience, but also facilitates sharing of the common experiences inherent 11 in the aging experience. Hepworth argues that "ageing is not a uniform process which completely eliminates the past self," but that rather, within the disguise of old age, the past, youthful self is maintained (4). I intend to argue in this thesis that both Mordecai

Richler's Barney's Version and Robertson Davies' The Cunning Man reveal this type of layering of self within self. Their narratives illustrate that the protagonists' younger identities are still contained within their current selves. Hepworth's work serves as a model of the way in which literature can be used to illustrate those concepts of gerontology which might be difficult to explain by other means. For example, fiction can look at aging fromth e inside perspective of an aging person rather than from an external perspective. In Hepworth's words, illustrations from fiction "mak[e] sense of the differences between the perspectives of insiders and outsiders on ageing (4).

As with Hepworth's work on fiction, American scholar Teresa Mangum provides an example of the type of work which has served to motivate my own project. In "Little

Women: The Aging Female Character in Nineteenth-Century British Children's

Literature" (1999), she contributes to gerontology's knowledge of Victorian attitudes towards aging by applying her skills as a literary historian to nineteenth-century children's literature. She demonstrates how an absence of recorded social history from earlier times can be augmented by an examination of literature. Mangum looks to a selection of Victorian children's literature for information about behaviours and cultural belief patterns of the past. Her revelations regarding the negative depiction of older women support and illustrate the theoretical arguments of Kathleen Woodward, the editor of the text Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, in which Mangum's article is printed. In the introduction preceding Mangum's article, Woodward argues that post- 12 menopausal women have been traditionally seen as unimportant, and in Woodward's words, "invisible" (ix). Mangum's research reports that during the Victorian period both children and older women were relegated to the private and powerless periphery of life; thus, her work provides an example of the way in which literary gerontology scholarship can support and corroborate other gerontology scholarship.

Mangum's article (1991) also demonstrates the way in which analysis of literature can explain the role of imagination in acculturating age-related ideologies. She argues that "[a]s adults interpreting the narratives we live, we consciously consider people and plots in light of those remembered childhood stories, 'reading' the world in part through the texts and images of childhood" (59). She asserts that the reading of literature in which post-menopausal women are depicted as peripheral and powerless has the potential to replicate cultural beliefs and perpetuate the powerlessness of women in future generations. Her work demonstrates that literary age scholarship has the potential to identify the forces which govern belief, and that it also has the potential to shake people loose from their acculturated beliefs.

The work of Canadian scholar Sally Chivers complements but also differs from that of Hepworth and Mangum in that she seeks age-related texts in other places than just

literary narratives. In From Old Woman to Older Women: Contemporary Culture and

Women's Narratives (2003), Chivers analyzes a radio broadcast which the CBC provided

during the 'famous ice storm of 1998" in Montreal and identifies its ageist content (xvii).

Chivers explains that in many ways her own situation was identical to that of older

people during the storm in that she too was isolated and alone (with her cat) in a home

without electricity. But, unlike the so-called "vulnerable" elderly, she was included in the 13 broadcasters' assumed audience because of her age. In the section entitled "The

Construction of Vulnerability'," Olivers speculates that in order to reduce the sense of vulnerability in its storm-bound listening audience, the CBC broadcasters chose to highlight the plight of a supposedly more vulnerable body of old people. She notices that although the broadcasters recognize that these others must be within the range of the storm, the old people are not included in the broadcasters' projected listening audience.

Instead they are figured as being more isolated and dependent than those to whom the broadcast is directed, and are excluded from the anticipated audience. By close reading and listening she deconstructs the power relations assumed by the broadcasters and identifies the incongruities of their assertions. For instance, she notes that "the CBC did not consult octogenarians for advice on how to function without electricity - a presumed area of expertise for someone who has necessarily lived through at least one world war and the advent of numerous electrical devices now presumed essential" (xviii). Like

Mangum, Chivers explores how cultural attitudes towards aging are both revealed and perpetuated through narrative. Also like Mangum, Chivers references Kathleen

Woodward's claim that our culture renders older women unimportant or "invisible"

(xxiv) and she corroborates Woodward's assertion that youth is unfairly privileged over age (xxv). Chivers's textual criticism of the CBC broadcast provides evidence which supports Woodward's earlier theoretical assertions. Mangum's and Chivers's work benefits from the reinforcement Woodward's theory provides to it, but by their attention to Woodward's work, they in turn are providing promotion of Woodward's theoretical ideas and increasing the academic community's awareness of her work. This mutually supportive inter-textuality within the field of Age Studies serves to reinforce the ideas 14 presented and provides each of the scholars with a stronger voice. Mangum's and

Olivers's work (incorporating Woodward's work) exemplifies the way in which explorations of theory and of narrative can combine in order to contribute to our understanding of the meaning of age. Their work also can be perceived as a demonstration of the way in which important theoretical ideas (such as those of

Woodward) can be given a wider audience by the attention of further scholarship. The models provided by Hepworth, Mangum and Olivers challenge me to consider how my own critical attention can serve to promote age theory scholarship. Their work motivates me to explore the relationship between theory and literature in other age-related texts.

Finally, the American scholar Barbara Frey Waxman is known for having introduced the term "Reifungsroman" to describe a novel of "aging as ripening," in her text From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Aging in Contemporary

Literature (1990). She differentiates these stories from the Bildungsroman, or novel of coming of age, by explaining that the Reifungsroman describes "ripening" or coming further of age. By her use of the metaphor "ripening," Frey Waxman asserts her belief that aging into old age should be figured as a gain rather than as a loss. In the text To Live in the Center of the Moment: Literary Autobiographies of Aging (1997), she studies autobiographies of aging and states that,

Contemporary American autobiographers of aging make elders strong

protagonists instead of relegating them to roles as antagonists, sidekicks,

or invisible demons. They depict elders' lives, their own lives and those of

their age cohort, in innovative ways, challenging the mainstream cultural 15

assumption that entry into old age means the end of vital engagement with

life. (2)

Frey Waxman asserts that there is an increasing demand for literature about "ripening" into old age and an increasing demand for work by authors who are "ripening" into old age (11). The reason for this demand, she states, is that people want answers to their questions about age. She writes, "How does one develop the courage to face the spectres of old age and stare them down? How does one reject the association of old age with deterioration and connect aging with productivity and philosophical ripening" (6)? She believes that the writers she critiques can show us how to "live in the instant" rather than in the past or future, to be "ripened" as opposed to rotted, and to avoid the trap set by our culture of accepting old age as a period of decline. She writes, "To live in the center of the moment is to reject our culture's view of time as a linear regression into old age and death. Instead, it is to intensify and spiritualize time in later life." She writes, "The elders

I mention here have done just that" and she believes that through the writing of these elders both young and old have an opportunity to reformulate their beliefs in regard to age (6). Unlike Hepworth, Mangum and Chivers, Frey Waxman, in the text To Live in the

Center of the Moment: Literary Autobiographies of Aging, elects to focus on the writing of relatively aged authors. She justifies this decision by explaining that the personal experience of older authors lends credibility to their work on aging and that the speculation offered by younger writers writing about age is not as trustworthy or reliable as the experiential knowledge of older writers.

In summary, Hepworth illustrates and explains his work by using examples from literature; Mangum and Chivers draw connections between narrative texts and age theory and promote the age theory which they consider important; and Frey Waxman advocates that we should pay particular attention to autobiographical work about middle-aged-to- aged people by middle-aged-to-aged authors. In the chapters ahead in this thesis, I borrow from both the work and the spirit of these four writers to create a model of analysis to apply to my own selection of texts and whose theoretical perspective is outlined in the next chapter. 17

Chapter 2: Theoretical Approach

In this thesis I develop close readings ofBarney's Version and The Cunning Man with particular attention to the effects of genre, narrative and point of view. I combine the close reading of these texts in order to demonstrate their utility in representing two key

Age Studies' ideas: first, that identity is fluid and multiple and is achieved over time and secondly, that decline and progress narratives vie for dominance within age identity.

Again, the influential ideas of Hepworth, Mangum, Chivers and Frey Waxman, along with those on age identity and decline narrative offered by Margaret Morganroth Gullette and Kathleen Woodward inform the conceptual background. In this thesis, I argue that

Mordecai Richler's and Robertson Davies's novels confirm Gullette's age identity theories in that the novels portray the fluidity and multiplicity of the identities of the protagonists and illustrate that those identities are compounded over time. As well, I argue that Richler's and Davies's small "versions" counter the dominant cultural "meta" narrative which depicts age by means of an either/or progress/decline binary. In its stead, these two authors offer a replacement model of age where oldness and youthfulness are not separated binaries. In Barney's Version and The Cunning Man, aging is depicted as the navigation of a progress-and-decline web which stretches throughout all chronological ages.

Close Reading of Texts

In this thesis, "text" is understood to mean any encoded production, that is, a human-made construction which carries cultural knowledge and which can be interpreted through "close reading." I use the term "close reading" to mean a careful and detailed 18 analysis of texts or, in this case, works of prose literature, by readers attuned to both denoted and connoted interpretations, that is, to communications which they may determine to be obviously blatant and/or suggestively subtle. Although post-modernism has broadened the range of the critic's scrutiny in performing a "close reading," the term derives from its roots in the New Criticism of the 1940s and 1950s. In his introduction to

Northrop Frye's 1957 text Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006), editor Robert D.

Denham explains: "New Criticism was more a movement than a school - a body of ideas about the nature of literature and a method of reading literary texts. Among its more immediate forbears was T.S. Eliot, with his[.. .jdictum that literature was autonomous"

(xxxvii). Thus the term "close reading" is used today to refer to an analytic technique, but it also draws on the specific approach of the New Critics who, according to Denham,

"saw the literary work as a unique object for rapt attention" (xxxvii). I adopt this method but without considering literary production to be autonomous. In fact, it is key to my argument that the age identity of literary authors matters for the interpretation of what literature says about aging. Through close reading, I intend to demonstrate this relationship.

Genre

My use of the term "genre" has associations that relate to the fourth essay of the

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays where Frye refers to genre as "the intention of producing a specific kind of verbal structure." He traces the origins of the term to the

Greeks who designated that the first three genres were "drama," "epic" and "lyric" (Frye

228). He notes, "The Greeks gave us the names of three of our four genres: they did not 19 give us a word for the genre that addresses a reader through a book." He writes that he will therefore "make an arbitrary choice of 'fiction' to describe the genre of the printed page;" he thereby indicates that he recognizes in total four genres (230). Today a tour of any bookstore would confirm that our contemporary popular literary culture recognizes many more genres than four; none of the shelves bear the title of "epic" or "lyric"

(although they are still important to the academy), and the presence of newcomers such as the "graphic novel" indicates that the term "genre" is defined much differently today than in the time of either the Greeks or of Frye. The latter half of the twentieth century has seen an increase in the number of genre divisions and considerable disagreement amongst genre theorists in regard to the criteria appropriate for classification and naming of genres and subgenres.

However, the word "genre" still suggests a set of prescriptive rules, which debates about post-modernism have raised, although contemporary post-modern literature can in itself be called a genre as well as a period. It is marked, to some extent, by its tendency to fragmentation, parody and self-reflexivity; however, in The Canadian Postmodern: A

Study of contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (1988), Linda Hutcheon stresses that the post-modern is characterized most significantly by an "urge to trouble, to question, to make both problematic and provisional any[.. .Jdesire for order or truth through the power of the human imagination" (2). The post-modern, which Hutcheon describes as

"something new [which] began to appear in the seventies and eighties," has been characterized by our culture's tendency to re-sort categories and indeed to question categorization itself. Hutcheon argues that modern literature reveals "a search for order in the face of moral and social chaos," that is, a search for the type of ordered confidence 20 manifest in realist literature. In relation to realism and modernism, post-modernism is characterized by its lost belief in the possibility of absolute order (2). Frye's point however is still valid when he states: "The purpose of criticism by genres is not so much to classify as to clarify[...]traditions and affinities, thereby bringing out a large number of literary relationships that would[. ..]not be noticed as long as there were no context established for them" (229). Contemporary writers and critics flaunt convention by mixing previously separate genre styles. However, they also confirm the worth of the original function of genre division by making use of relationships to earlier bodies of literature in order to create and/or undermine meaning. New conventions work in part because writers and readers are aware of the way in which earlier writing can be and is being twisted. Linda Hutcheon writes, "As Derrida has argued, any genre designation both pulls a body of texts together and simultaneously keeps it from closing.

Classifications of genres are paradoxically built upon the impossibility of firmly defining genre boundaries" (22). A single text can be categorized several different ways according to several different criteria. It can be identified simultaneously by its historical time period, its geographical source, its political or ethnic affinities, and so on; the tension within and between genre boundaries has become a rich source of cultural meaning.

Consequently, critics such as Ralph Cohen (1991) argue that "in the last half of the twentieth century generic theory has reemerged as a critical force." Cohen states that "a theory of genre can account for literary change more adequately than histories based on themes, ideas, periods, and movements" (85-6). Discussion of genre today must consider the foundational meanings derived from genre categories, the meanings derived from shifts in genre categorization, the meanings derived from texts' contestation of genre categories and also the role of the reader who inevitably approaches a text according to preconceived genre-related expectations. Linda Hutcheon's embrace of the post-modern perspective is evident when she concludes: "In the end, genres are defined by readers"

(22). In making this claim she is referencing "reader-response" theories which derive principally from the work of Fish, Iser, and Bakhtin. In Doing What Comes Naturally:

Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies, Stanley Fish argues that "what is left out of the traditional or classical account is the actualizing role played by the reader in the production — as opposed to the mere perception or uncovering

- of literary meaning" (Fish 68). Whereas formalism contends that meaning is contained within texts and relayed to the reader through the act of reading, reader-response theories argue that in response to the act of reading the reader constructs a meaning which is suggested and constrained by the parameters of the text but which accords with his/her own literary and cultural background. In "Perspectives on Stance in Response to

Literature: A Theoretical and Historical Framework" (1992) Susan Taylor Cox explains that

Fish identifies the reader's interpretive community as the source of literary

meaning. According to Fish, the members of an interpretive community

share not only an approach to literary meaning-making, but also the

learned perceptual habits, the humanly constructed models for making

sense of the world that Fish calls, in general, interpretative strategies.

(18)

The author first creates possible meanings by positioning the text within an inter-textual context and within an inter-genre context; but then, depending on how the reader — in responding to the text - decides to classify a text, he/she extracts his/her own specific meaning or meanings from the potential variety of meanings which the text facilitates.

Narrative

In addition to "genre," "close reading" and "texts," a key object of analysis in this thesis is "narrative." Generally, narrative is a structure which brings coherence to stories and to our lives and which helps us to make sense of things. The word, as I will use it, refers to three things: the ordered structure created when an author deliberately re-sorts the chronological building blocks of a story or tale in order to create effect; the underlying, grammar-like poetics of narrative fiction which some critics believe are common to all fiction; and the concept of culturally induced "grand" and "little" narratives identified and named by Jean-Francois Lyotard.

My first point involves the literary critic's interest in whether and where the plot arches and how and why the various chronological bits are put together. Authors strategize how they can temporally reorder their characters' experiences in order to achieve an artistically effective discourse. Manipulation of the order in which chronological events are revealed creates suspense and assigns emphasis. The story is re sorted according to the desired narrative approach. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (1983) writes, "The main types of discrepancy between story-order and text-order[.. .]are traditionally known as 'flashback' or 'retrospection' on the one hand and

'foreshadowing' or 'anticipation' on the other[....] I shall follow Genette in rebaptizing them 'analepsis' and 'prolepsis' respectively" (46). Narrators speak from an established reference point in time but interrupt their narratives with interjections from the past and future. Authors attempt to control the text's impression on the reader by allowing the

present period introduced at the beginning of the text to move forward a prescribed

amount within the duration of the text and by selecting the ordering and duration of the

narrator's visitations to chosen moments in the past or future. As Frey Waxman points

out, choosing to select a narrator's old age as the initial reference point within the present

time of the text elevates the status of old people. The same chronological events can be

relayed from reference points in either the character's old age or in his or her younger

years, but the ensuing emphases and insights will vary depending on the authorial

decision made. If an old narrator filters a story as he/she rerninisces, that is, uses

flashback or analepsis, the text assumes a different quality than if a younger narrator

relays the same story while moving forward through present time into old age.

The word "narrative" is used to reference the temporal arrangement within a

story; however, as my second point indicates, it is also used to reference the underlying thematic structure which connects that story to a specific literary community. Generally

speaking, "narratology" is the study of narrative, but it is specifically also the structuralist

study of narrative plots. Whereas Fish's post-modern perspective sees meaning created in the reading of texts, structuralists see meaning created in the writing of texts - both

grammatically and thematically. As in linguistics, where a system of signs is considered to signify meanings, in narratology, common themes and/or archetypes are considered to

underlie plots and create meanings. In his essay "Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols"

in the Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Northrop Frye reveals his confidence in the

stability of syntactic and narrative structure: Formal criticism, in other words, is commentary, and commentary is the

process of translating into explicit or discursive language what is implicit

in the poem. Good commentary naturally does not read ideas into the

poem; it reads and translates what is there, and the evidence that it is there

is offered by the study of the structure of imagery with which it begins.

Frye assumes the reliability of language structures and argues for the recognition of the underlying archetypal symbolism "which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience" (91). Contrasting his theory to the

New Critics who consider literary works as autonomous, Frye contends that "the archetypal critic can be concerned with [the poem's] relationship to the rest of literature"

(93). For Frye and other formalists, the specifics of tales may vary, but the underlying structures are thought to be recycled material. The reader and possibly even the writer are considered to be unaware of these deep structures, but the effect of the text is increased by the consequent resonance. Frye writes, "In suggesting the possibility of archetypal criticism, then, I am suggesting the possibility of extending the kind of comparative and morphological study now made of folk tales and ballads into the rest of literature" (96).

In the essay "Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths" in the Anatomy of Criticism: Four

Essays, Northrop Frye also explores these "grammatical rudiments of literary expression" and adds that "the structural principles of literature are[...]closely related to mythology and comparative religion" (123-4). Frye describes a theory of literature in which myths or archetypal patterns are thought to be foundational to all literature. Post-modernism prompts a move away from this theory by revealing that theorists such as Frye are bounded by a Euro-centric canon and thus are prone to making false assumptions about the supposed universality of interpretation and ideology.

The third point which I have listed about narrative moves away from temporal and thematic considerations and places the analysis of literature in relation to the larger cultural context which exists beyond our own "interpretive community." Jean-Francois

Lyotard has repositioned the term "narrative" so that it now imparts the connotation of ideology or bias. He argues that during modernity the universalizing meta-narratives of society (such as Christianity, capitalism and Marxism) which promised an idea of emancipation (from such problems as sin, poverty or oppression) collapsed - leaving society with a lack of legitimized knowledge (19). In The Postmodern Explained:

Correspondence 1982-1985 (1993) Lyotard discusses the impact of his seminal 1979 text and explains that

[T]he 'metanarratives' I was concerned with in The Postmodern

Condition are those that have marked modernity: the progressive

emancipation of reason and freedom, the progressive or catastrophic

emancipation of labour [...] the enrichment of all humanity through the

progress of capitalist technoscience[.. .]and even[.. .]the salvation of

creatures through the conversion of souls to the Christian narrative of

martyred love. (17)

Post-modern society has been left to grapple with the problem of meaninglessness, but it has also acquired the potentials associated with the demise of authority. Lyotard's thinking on "grand" or "meta" narratives points out that overarching belief systems embraced by culture infiltrate all aspects of life to the point where they become naturalized, inevitable and possibly invisible to those who live in their shadow. Lyotard argued that even writers and story-tellers are affected; thus, culturally prevalent beliefs and habitual behaviours are intentionally and/or unintentionally included in all artistic productions. As a result, thoughtful art criticism has the responsibility and the capacity to reveal which narratives have been internalized and to what effect. Each story-telling is dependent on the teller's perspective and is just one "version" of many possible versions of the same story. Linda Hutcheon explains that "Jean-Francois Lyotard has defined the

'postmodern condition' as one characterized by a distrust of 'meta-' or 'master' narratives, that is, of the received wisdom or the grand narrative systems that once made sense of things for us" (15). After Lyotard, when contemporary critics use the term

"narrative" in relation to the study of literature, they suggest that the speakers, protagonists, authors and readers of stories are influenced by the power of ubiquitous meta-narratives. In the post-modern world, we have been made aware of the biases inherent in our cultural production and have become more sceptical in our reading; nevertheless, we remain susceptible to future grand narratives.

Each of the three points discussed above about "narrative" - that is, its temporal, thematic and cultural aspects - contributes to our critical understanding of narrative texts by drawing our attention to the underlying workings which drive literature. And as in the case with genre, the presence of assumed conventions and underlying implications provides something to writers and readers with and against which they can create meaning in the writing and reading of texts. 27

Point of View

The concepts around "texts," "close reading," "genre" and "narrative" also connect to "point of view," the third area of analysis mentioned in my introduction to this chapter. The use of the term "point of view" in literary criticism refers to the perspectives from which the author writes, from which the narrator tells the story and from which the reader interprets a meaning or meanings from the story. Since our criticism in cultural studies now acknowledges that there should be no assumed central truth, meta-narrative or privileged point of view, the matter of perspective has become an important focus of analysis in our critical humanities. The contest between elitist traditions and the post modern recognition of the margins has meant that critics have attempted to displace power away from the centre by recognizing the literary voices of the margins. In so doing, the critics reveal that both the centre and its margins are social constructs.

Earlier writing in the canon of English literature was usually written from the perspective of an assumed centre. Omniscient third-person narration and an associated

sense of authority have been and are common features of traditional realist writing, whereas post-modern forms of writing more often reflect doubt regarding authoritative knowledge. Particularly in regard to first-person texts, the tension between a narrator's professed reliability and his/her admission of unreliability is a rich source of meaning for the literary critic. There are also interesting tensions between the first-person narrator

identified in present time within a text, the first-person narrator's past and/or future selves

as revealed in the text and the first-person narrator as he/she is shown to evolve throughout the time period of the text's present-time action. These multiple voices should

not be conflated. In Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (1983), Shlomith Rimmon- 28

Kenan explains that "localization and narration are separate in so-called first-person retrospective narratives, although this is usually ignored by studies of point of view" (73).

Rimmon-Kenan's point can be understood by considering the evolving focalizers which bridge the present-age narrator in Barney's Version as revealed at the outset of the text

(who has just begun to experience symptoms of Alzheimer's disease) with the present- age Barney at the end of the text (who must be admitted to a long-term-care facility). His point can be further understood by differentiating the multiple focalizations of the present-age Barneys from the multiple focalizations of the past-age Barneys on which the narrator also intermittently focuses his writing. This thesis will differentiate between the present-age narrator Barney who evolves throughout the present time of the text (who would be described by Rimmon-Kenan as "the centre of consciousness") and the Barneys of previous ages, all of whom in turn also become the "focalizer" through whom the narrator "sees" life; that is, there is a difference between the speaking, narrating Barneys and the seeing Barneys who become the temporary focus of the narrator's attention and through whose eyes we temporarily view the action of the story.

Similarly, we should differentiate between the identity of the real-life author and the "implied" author, that is, the author as revealed by the text. Rimmon-Kenan explains:

"Thus while the narrator can only be defined circularly as the narrative 'voice' or

'speaker' of a text, the implied author is - in opposition and by definition - voiceless and silent. In this sense the implied author must be seen as a construct inferred and assembled by the reader from all the components of the text" (87). Consequently, there is significant tension and energy between the implied author and the actual author. This becomes a distinctly interesting topic in the case of aging authors. 29

Another aspect of narration and point of view which may not be immediately obvious is that if there is a narrator, there must be also a "narratee" or imagined reader to whom the narrator addresses the storytelling (103). Both the author and the narrator create a unique construct of the assumed recipient of their narration. Post-modernism has fractured the binary of author and reader associated with the realist novel into a crowd consisting of many different additional entities. Conceptualizing an implied author, a narrator, a focalizer, and a narratee as well as the author and the reader increases the literary critic's ability to find meaning in the text.

Selection of Texts

The task of selecting suitable texts for this thesis, ones that make the contributions it sets out to make, requires choices in regard to generic identity, narrative structure, point of view and the individual merits of specific texts. Following Frey Waxman's example, I have selected mature authors who write from a position of experiential knowledge in regard to aging. In discussing Margaret Laurence's depiction of Hagar in The Stone

Angel, Sally Olivers questions the validity of assessing age through the eyes of the young. She points out, "I remain suspicious that the novel might reflect only a relatively young person's understanding of old age" (xi). Chivers's comment provides further support for Waxman's endorsement of the merit of aged authors' work on age. All people can offer speculative insight into aging; but only those with some personal experience of aging can provide first-hand knowledge of aging. For these reasons, I determined that the perspective of relatively old-aged authors was of more merit than the perspective of younger authors who as yet can only look at the latter stages of aging from the outside. While a "young person's understanding of old age" is of value too, I determined that this thesis will address the work of authors who speak from a position of experiential knowledge about aging.

I deviate from Frey Waxman's example in To Live in the Center of the Moment:

Literary Autobiographies of Aging (1997). She chooses to assess autobiographies of literary writers, while I have chosen to address fictional autobiographies featuring imaginary characters. Authors' "real" autobiographies may be restricted by their desire for privacy, by their subjectivity and by the need to condense vast amounts of information and focus the content. Consequently, the theoretically truthful autobiography can claim to be only a little less Active than the fictional autobiography, especially when that fiction is written by a writer who shares with his protagonist a similar age and many of the same life experiences. I have chosen to address fiction because of the creative freedom it affords its writers to express whatever they believe to be important by whichever means they believe the most effective. Richler's and Davies's fictions provide a biding place in which they can conceal their own lives; consequently, they have the opportunity to be playful, sad, ironic and metaphorical. They can pose their thoughts within what they consider to be the most artistically effective context. This freedom of expression is worth the abandonment of a questionable-at-best claim to authentic truth or reality. The search for facts can be left to other gerontology scholars. The role of literature, as Hepworth asserts, is to illuminate the meaning of age. Following

Hepworth's model, I will demonstrate that the content of Richler's and Davies's texts serves well as illustration augmenting Age Studies theory. 31

In this thesis, I assess first-person narratives (as opposed to third) because I believe they offer more opportunity for readers to experience imaginatively the situations and feelings of the aging protagonists. The personal point of view is more likely to incite interest and curiosity about the aging experience. The author's use of a first-person voice acknowledges the inevitable subjectivity of each person's experience. This recognition of personal bias is characteristic of our post-modern understanding and helps to provide an honest approach to this study of age. Texts using first-person narration recognize by their form that each aging experience is just one of the many possible "little narratives" or

"versions" through which aging can be explained.

I selected Barney's Version and The Cunning Man for the following reasons. The authors Richler and Davies both have contributed significantly to literature and culture in

Canada during the second half of the twentieth century. There have been few age studies on the contribution of Canadian literary writers and what they offer to age knowledge.

My personal aesthetic sense values the artistic merit of these particular texts and their amenability to exploring what I consider to be key ideas in the work of Age Studies' scholars.

Gullette's Theory of Age Identity

In this thesis I argue that Barney's Version and The Cunning Man serve to illustrate Gullette's theories in regard to identity and aging. She argues that identity is fluid and multiple rather than stable and that it is an achievement acquired with aging.

Gullette (2004) believes that defining identity as fixed, unchanging selfhood is too restrictive. She complains that "the idea that identity changes over time (a staple of researchers in development) remains stubbornly undeveloped in so-called high theory"

(121). She adamantly disagrees with Jens Brockmeier's idea that identity describes that part of the self "that remains unchanged'" and discounts arguments about identity, such as Stuart Hall's, which '"assume a stable subject"' (121). For Gullette, identity is flexible and fluid. It accommodates the changes which occur with aging. It is also multiple, allowing each person to be identified in a number of ways simultaneously. Gullette sees identity as being comprised of all that a person has been and has done up until the current point in time. She writes, "I think mat identity over time can be seen as a sense of an achieved portmanteau 'me' - made up, for each subject, of all its changeable and continuing selves together" (125).

Analytic philosopher Warren Bourgeois voices an opinion on identity similar to that of Gullette. In order to explain the definition of identity which Gullette resists, I will briefly insert some of Bourgeois' thinking here. Like Gullette, he believes that the definition of identity should be expanded to allow for the changes which happen to a person over time. In Persons: What Philosophers Say about You (2003), he offers an explanation of society's development of the concept of "identity" which facilitates my understanding of Gullette's argument. He points out that we view "outward resemblance and some kind of continuity of body" as the most important identifiers of the ongoing sameness of a person (23). He writes, "the strength of this outward resemblance criterion is probably dependent on our religious heritage - on the doctrine of the immortal soul entering the body at conception and, whatever the changes to the mind, leaving the body only at death" (23). He argues that this belief in the permanent presence of a soul in the living body has encouraged society to consider "identity" as a fixed essence or object. Bourgeois points out that "[p]ersons, however, change frommomen t to moment and, whether or not they appear stable to their friends and loved ones, over the years they change their bodies and many of the characteristics by which we know them." He ponders how identity of the body can be considered to be consistent and writes,

Persons sometimes seem to be much more like the things we call

'processes' than like the things we tend to call 'objects,' much more like a

sunrise than like the relatively stable moon, though they are importantly

unlike either sort of thing. On the other hand, when we think of persons as

souls or selves unchanging within the body and mind, persons seem more

like objects and less like processes. (Bourgeois 27)

I would conclude that even if a personal belief system leads us to believe that a person's soul forms the essence of identity or even if we perceive some material object (DNA for example) as being the essence of identity, a recognition of the processes of change which influence persons requires an expansion of the definition of identity. Bourgeois accommodates this need by recognizing both "object" (the usual fixed definition of identity) and "process" (a changeable identity) in his definition of identity. Gullette stresses that identity should be perceived as fluid and multiple and as an achievement which increases with aging. She uses the term "age identity" when she wants to stress time's changes. For the purposes of this thesis, I will do the same. I will use the term

"identity" as a catch-all term defined by the fluid, multiple age identity of Gullette's explanation but also defined by the fixed essence or "object" and "process" of Bourgeois' complementary explanation. Gullette argues that the acquisition of "age identity" begins with birth and continues indefinitely. She believes that people proceed towards a gradually more and more complex age identity throughout the entirety of their life course. For Gullette, aging begins as soon as a child is born, not at some point in middle-age. Therefore, she argues that Age Studies should not just encompass the study of older people, but should include the study of all ages. Gullette's overarching thesis is this: "Human beings are aged by culture" (12). She states that as soon as a child interacts with its environment, its perceptions in regard to aging begin to be acculturated. Age Studies' scholars construe age expectation to be one of the prevailing cultural grand narratives which exert pressure in society. In Aged by Culture (2004), Gullette writes that children accept and/or resist the view of the world imposed upon them from outside. That worldview includes attitudes towards aging:

The meanings of age and aging are conveyed in large part through the

moral and psychological implications of the narrative ideas we have been

inserting into our heads, starting when we were very young indeed... .Our

age narratives become our virtual realities. Certainly, whichever accounts

you and I find ourselves living with and seeing the world through make a

fundamental difference to the quality of our lives, starting with our

willingness or reluctance, at any age, to grow older. (11)

Feminist scholars challenge the "naturalness" of "female" behaviour and re-label it

"performance" or culturally induced beliefs and behaviour. Similarly, Gullette challenges the "naturalness" of age behaviour and re-labels it culturally induced beliefs and 35 intentionally assumed and performed behaviours (161). Adapting Judith Butler's initial work on the performance of gender to her purposes in Age Studies, Gullette writes,

"We know that gender is a performance because we can see it feigned so well. About age as a performance, we need to start the arguments" (159). She believes that age expectations or narratives, like gender narratives, are initially imposed on children:

The Body's expressions are partly derived from socialization....Acting

one's gender begins in early childhood. When you learn cultural attitudes

and habits that early, they become second nature....As Judith Butler points

out, you can't fall out of character even performing them day after day, all

day.... (160)

But Gullette offers encouragement by saying that performance of both age and gender can be selectively modified by the individual:

These consolidations of habit are not fixed and final.. ..During an

individual's life course, people can opt for new bodily attitudes, habits and

self-descriptions. (160)

Gullette states that people continue to be acculturated in the performance of both gender and age throughout their lifetimes. However, with consciousness, people can exert control over the narratives which exert pressure on them. They can perform age as a message directed from themselves towards others (as Butler maintains gender is performed) by deliberately projecting the behaviours associated with a specific version of oldness. 36

Theory of Progress-and-Decline Narratives

Gullette asserts that the most dangerous of the age narratives which we can

embrace and perform is the decline narrative, a grand narrative which perceives and

projects aging as a process of loss. Decline narratives and progress narratives vie for

dominance within age identity. This important point is central to Barney's Version and

The Cunning Man because, as the thesis will demonstrate, it serves to illustrate the

contest between the view of aging as progress and the view of aging as loss. According

to Gullette, culturally induced age ideology in Western culture leads people to believe,

that at some point, their age identity is beginning to become less than it once was, that is, that the state to which they had progressed during their youth is now eroding. Kathleen

Woodward believes that, during youth, aging is figured culturally as progress; but once the individual is decreed "aged" - by themselves and/or their culture - the progress model is replaced by one of decline. Woodward explains that the experience of aging

involves "the internalization of our culture's denial of and distaste for aging, which is understood in terms of decline, not in terms of growth and change (xiii). Gullette (1991)

states that "we are aged by culture through a process of accepting "Time" as insuring losses to our prior achieved identity (Gullette 1991,49). She argues for "defensive optimism" (Gullette 2004,20) and calls for a "visionary antidecline movement" (27).

She believes our "unconscious habits of thought" are detrimental to our well-being, and

she worries about the "furtive power of decline to instil a masochistic belief in human obsolescence" (Gullette 28-29). As well, Gullette is concerned that the point at which decline narratives overwhelm progress narratives is becoming chronologically younger than in the past. She is concerned that, in today's society, even those in early middle age 37 are seeing themselves as being in decline. She explains that "the structures that support progress and progress narratives are slowly being withdrawn early or late in middle life from all but the most privileged" (19).

Gullette's "antidecline movement" is different from the movement known as

"positive aging." While it is reasonable for aging individuals to attempt to maintain good health through such things as proper diet, exercise and youth-obsessed risk-aversive lifestyles, the contemporary frenzy to eradicate evidence of aging cosmetically or technologically or fashionably derides the state of being old. Sally Chivers explains:

As Woodward implies, the promotion of positive aging damages by

relentlessly clinging to an impossible, and undesirable, continued

youthfulness; this process is called 'positive ageism,' which, like ageism

more generally, results in negative perceptions of what age actually entails

by restricting it to false optimism and cosmetic, youthful activity, (xxv)

Western culture increasingly views those who age with few outward signs of age as

"successful." Although it can be inspiring and uplifting to believe that you have the power to counter the effects of time, by extrapolation, the discourses of positive aging beliefs label as "unsuccessful" and irresponsible those who become unhealthy in body, mind, spirit or finances. Chivers continues:

positive ageism tries to deny decline altogether[... .]To deny that

physicality is to deny most of what makes old age a rich process worthy of

academic scrutiny. To pretend that physical changes do not cause physical,

social, and emotional pain is to avoid the complexity that offers age

studies such potential. (xxv) 38

Denying the reality of decline denigrates and causes hardship for those who are unable to maintain the illusion of youth.

Gullette asserts that the narrative of positive aging is market driven. She writes:

"Lacking age studies Americans are led to desire anti-aging products rather than age- conscious ideas. Because decline has such sharp teeth, 'positive aging' increasingly sports a capped smile" (22). She considers that "positive aging" beliefs are promoting a

"cult of youth," encouraging even fairly young people to approach their life as if they were being gradually used up, as if their opportunities were diminishing. She argues that

"youthfulness" is being marketed as a commodity and that "the heady rush of 'anti-aging' is commercial" (22). The governments of late capitalism find it beneficial to encourage people to believe that only youthfulness is attractive and that weakness, inactivity and dependency are indications of failure. Financially expensive social support can be avoided when citizens believe that their worth is measured by their ability to appear youthful and independent. In Cultural Aging: Life Course, Lifestyle, and Senior Worlds

(2005), Stephen Katz describes the "the emergence of cultural aging and its problematical

'positive,' 'successful,' and 'active' mandates as a new form of ageism and an element of current bio-demographic politics and its enforced ethics of self-care and individual responsibility" (19). Positive aging masquerades as a way to empower aging people, but it actually supports neoliberal political agendas and reinforces a decline attitude towards aging. Katz states his intention to seek out "possibilities of resistance" and asserts that

"[c]ultural aging, despite its configuration in regimes of life course and technologies of expertise, is also an opportunity to go beyond the disciplining bounds of consumer practices and neoliberal, market practices and to defy both negative and positive ageism"

(19).

The "antidecline movement" Gullette advocates differs from the ageist "positive aging" movement in that it advocates acceptance of the inevitability of signs of aging and instead recommends that people focus on the aspects of aging which can be seen as progress - such as the ongoing achievement of identity and the broadening of inner life.

Gullette is concerned because she believes that "stability and progress are felt as interior needs, essential to the survival of the self (19). She believes that people need to feel that they are moving successfully forward towards future goals and that, as a result of the prevalence of the negativity associated with a culturally imposed decline narrative, people's internal self-descriptions become "more edgily poised within the binary of progress versus decline" (19). She argues that, since our age identity is forged through our experiences and through our inner growth, aging should be perceived as an achievement - as a progression towards an accomplished age identity. Who would want to be younger if in order to be younger they had to give up their age identity? More attention to inner growth and less to physical appearance would allow people to maintain better attitudes towards aging. In her work as an Age Studies' scholar, Gullette attempts to discover the strategies which people can exert as they age in order to counter the influence of decline attitudes in their lives.

Gullette's and Woodward's figuring of aging according to models of decline and progress facilitate my consideration of the meaning of aging. Their thoughtful questions and discussions of age-related issues allow readers to make distinctions amongst concepts such as positive aging, successful aging and loss/gain narratives. They explain the 40

difference between a genuine and constructive acceptance of the ongoing progression towards old age and a "positive aging" mask placed over an accepted interior decline

narrative or the mere performance of externally decreed, expected age behaviour.

Where Gullette, Woodward and other theorists are talking primarily about

attitudes towards aging rather than lived experience or actual states of being, they are also talking about the way that people experience the imposition of culturally determined narratives of progress or decline. Even though individuals might be experiencing progress

on physical or financial grounds, they might believe that they are in an aging decline as a

result of culturally induced and internalized emotional/psychological attitudes. They even

might experience an actual deterioration in state as a result of those attitudes. Gullette

recommends "defensive optimism." She encourages aging people to probe and reject the

cultural baggage which drags them into a decline narrative. That sounds like a

convincingly worthwhile plan. However, her exhortation to pursue a "visionary

antidecline movement" may result in a pressure similar to that created by the "positive

aging" movement - in this case a pressure on the old to conceal their doubts from society

and/or from their own inner self. It could create a pressure (just like the expectation of

active independence puts pressure on those who are unable to remain active) to conform

to an accepted approach to aging, one which denies those who are suffering the right to

acknowledge their suffering (mental, physical, financial, emotional) for fear of appearing

to be inadequate people.

As the next chapters develop my analysis of Barney's Version and The Cunning

Man, several questions come to mind. How and where do the texts' portrayals of aging

align with the ways in which Gullette and Woodward figure aging, identity and the 41 contest between progress and decline narratives? How do the protagonists' lives reproduce, contradict and/or resolve the tensions in these narratives? How and where do the texts express conditions under which age identity emerges? How do these texts develop metaphors that contribute to our understanding of aging across the life course? In this thesis, I will consider how the above theoretical ideas relating to age withstand scrutiny when they are considered in relation to the everyday lives depicted in larger- than-life form in the novels. Mordecai Richler and Robertson Davies depict two imaginary characters - Mr. Barney Panofsky and Dr. Jonathan Hullah — whose lives cannot be described as being merely a straight march uphill followed by a decline down the other side. Instead they live, over the lengthy course of their aging, through multiple hills and valleys comprised of both progress and decline. My close reading of Barney's

Version and The Cunning Man in this thesis examines the concept of age identity. It examines the idea that aging is the achievement of identity over time within the tension between narratives of progress and narratives of decline. 42

Chapter 3: Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version - "In my present state of decline"

In Chapter 3 and in Chapter 4,1 apply the theoretical ideas outlined in Chapter 2 to Mordecai Richler's text Barney's Version. I consider how the text demonstrates identity as multiple, fluid and achieved over time, and how the text portrays aging as a tension between narratives of progress and decline. I explain how Richler's small

"version" counters the dominant cultural "meta" narrative which depicts age by means of an either/or progress/decline binary and how Richler offers an alternative narrative which depicts aging as the navigation of a progress-and-decline web which stretches throughout all of our chronological ages. I begin this chapter by summarizing the literary criticism written in response to Richler and Barney's Version and will follow that by offering my own analysis of the text.

Mordecai Richler was born in 1931 and he published the novel in 1997 at the age of 66. He writes Barney's Version from the perspective of the 67-year old protagonist and narrator Barney Panofsky. The text can be figured as an illustration of Gullette's idea that a mature person's identity is achieved gradually - as a result of the experiences which he/she undergoes over time. The format of Barney's Version demonstrates the way in which, even in mature years (or maybe especially in mature years), people continue to sort through identity indicators in order to determine who they are and who they are in the process of becoming. In order to write his memoir, Barney's current self assesses all of the previous selves still contained within him. The variety and emotional charge of

Barney's experiences demonstrate the multiplicity and complexity of age identity. In order for him to understand who he is as he continues to live in the present, and in order for him to explain those identities to the rest of his world, Barney sorts through all of the 43 experiences which have combined over time to create the man he has become. Barney explains, "I try to retrieve some sense out of my life, unscrambling it" (26). Richler's repeated reference to Barney's inability to remember the name "colander" provides humour, while simultaneously revealing the preliminary symptoms of Barney's

Alzheimer's disease; but the colander also serves as a metaphor representing the attempt

Barney makes, through his writing, to sift and sort the memories of his life. The protagonist's final words reassert the metaphor of the colander: "Yes. I'm not totally wacko yet. I can even remember how to strain spaghetti" (403).

Barney's desire to write is premised on his need to respond to nasty accusations made in an autobiography being written by his long time rival, Terry Mclver. Barney's projected narratees are the people who have already been offended by his past behaviour and the people who will be offended once they read Mclver's book. Barney's "version" explains the circumstances surrounding his first wife Clara's suicide, explains why he has been accused of murdering his best friend Boogie after finding him in bed with The

Second Mrs. Panofsky, and explains why his third marriage also fails even though it is with his "heart's desire" Miriam (18). In Barney's own words:

To come clean, I'm starting on this shambles that is the true story of my

wasted life (violating a solemn pledge, scribbling a first book at my

advanced age), as a riposte to the scurrilous charges Terry Mclver has

made in his forthcoming autobiography: about me, my three wives, a.k.a.

Barney Panofsky's troika, the nature of my friendship with Boogie, and, of

course, the scandal I will carry to my grave like a humpback. (1) 44

Review of the Critical Literature:

Most of the current critical attention to Barney's Version discusses the text in relation to Richler's contribution to Canadian culture and in relation to the rest of his oeuvre.1 In Mordecai Richler (1971), George Woodcock discusses Richler's beginnings, stating that Richler was required to emerge from two ghettos - once as a Jew and again as a Canadian writer (58). Woodcock reports that as a young man in the 1950's, Richler went to England to escape from what was then an anti-Semitic ghetto in Montreal, and to escape from what most believed was an arid environment for writers in Canada. In

Michael Posner's oral biography entitled The Last Honest Man: Mordecai Richler: An

Oral Biography (2004), Robert Fulford is quoted as saying that Richler "turned out to be a predictor of so much that happened in Canada. He was the beginning of the whole understanding of Canada as a multiplicity of ethnicities. He, of course, would never have dreamt of saying that. He might even be angry with me" (qtd in Posner, 363). Although today, we expect to hear a variety of voices in Canadian literature, many would agree with Fulford that that movement towards multiplicity began with Mordecai.

Michael Posner reports that, as an adult writer, Richler responded to his childhood experience of anti-Semitism in Quebec by creating and defending Jewish underdog characters. Michael Posner quotes Richler as saying: "Orwell said that writing was revenge on your own childhood and whatever indignities you suffered. That's true, to some extent. It is a way of getting your own back" (qtd in Posner, 1). In Assimilation and

Assertion: The Response to the Holocaust in Mordecai Richler's Writing (1989), Rachel

Feldhay Brenner says that Richler can be described as a "vengeful Jewish moralist" who,

1 Richler's oeuvre includes short stories, essays, children's books, anthologies and non-fiction as well as 10 novels. 45 like other Jews living in a post-Holocaust world, can no longer believe in the possibility of intellectual affinity with non-Jews. However, Brenner argues that Richler also can be seen as a "liberal moralist" who believes that the quest for meaning is found in "self confrontation" (114,162). She argues that this contradictory energy - between his self- identification as a Jew and his belief in liberal humanism - is what creates artistic tension in his work; and she explains that his work defends not just Jews, but any and all underdogs. Richler himself states that "the novelist's primary moral responsibility is to be the loser's advocate" (qtd in Posner, 41). In an article entitled "Mordecai's Version"

(1997) in the Quill & Quire, Joel Yanofsky quotes Richler as saying, "I started off long ago with the premise that if God was dead we had to work out a system of values and that is what most of us try to do[.. .]Fm a satirical novelist and most satirical novelists are very moral creatures" (qtd in Yanofsky, 3).

As "loser's advocate," Richler satirized everything and everyone. James Shapiro of The New York Times (1997) lists the "familiar objects of Richler's scorn" as "Quebec separatists, rabid feminists, self-deceiving Jews and self-crowned laureates" (1).

Yanofsky explains that "Richler knows what Jonathan Swift knew: the first rule of satire is to offend everyone. That way no one is spared and no one is singled out" (3). Yanofsky believes that Richler, over the course often novels and in numerous other publications, alienated a lot of people; but Yanofsky points out that with the publication of Barney's

Version "Canadian literature's most famous curmudgeon is being outed as a nice guy - or at least nicer than everyone suspected" (1).

Shapiro states that like many of Richler's previous characters, Barney is a product of St. Urbain Street, "the latest incarnation of the unappealing protagonist," who turns out to be a "good guy deep down" (1). Shapiro explains that Barney's Version reprises "the themes that have continued to dominate his writing - both fiction and nonfiction - [.. .]the outsider's search for honor and integrity, the fate of being Jewish in a post-Holocaust world and what it means to be a Canadian writer" (1). But according to

Shapiro, Richler's usual themes recur with less "urgency" in Barney's Version and are now "relegated to the background" while Richler probes a new theme - the "unreliability of narrative and memory" (2). Shapiro explains his position by saying, "Even Barney confesses at times that he hasn't been entirely truthful with us, 'tinkering with memory, fme-tuning reality' (although this admission helps persuade us that he has been honest elsewhere)" (2).

Critic Abraham Levitan's article "Richler's Version" (1998) also reveals contradictions in Barney's nature, although in his case, the revelation is not necessarily intentional. He introduces his comments by writing that Barney "possesses a spirit dominated by two qualities: extraordinary eloquence and unfailing honesty" (1). Yet in the next paragraph he describes Barney as being "convinced that he can dupe the world."

Thus the article reveals that there is tension between Barney's "honesty" and his desire to

"dupe." Levitan also points out that it is often difficult to discern how to interpret

Barney's words. For instance when he calls his "doddering" and "randy" father a

"'disgusting old man'" for desiring to "'get as much as you can while the getting is good,'" the reader is "left unsure whether such a statement is meant as excoriation or affirmation" (2). The reader wonders to what extent Richler is deliberately obfuscating the portrayal of his protagonist in order to make a point about the impossibility of accurately seeing all of what Barney, or any person, actually is. As Shapiro points out, Barney admits to having Alzheimer's - which certainly provides grounds for readers to doubt his story. Richler inserts into Barney's narrative sections of writing in Mclver's voice, a device which serves to highlight the differences between the protagonist and his rival. The novel includes footnotes and an afterward written in the voice of Barney's son Michael. Shapiro records that the discrepancies between Barney's account and that of his son appear relatively immaterial until, near the end of the book, we discover that Michael "cannot reconcile Barney's version of his courtship with Miriam (confirmed by Miriam herself) with the available facts" (3). At this point, there appears to be not only confusion within Barney's version of events, but within Miriam's as well. The reader begins to consider that perhaps Alzheimer's is not to be perceived as the only cause for the text's confusions. For Shapiro,

This questioning of memory's reliability is an unexpected move on

Richler's part, in large measure because the satiric drift of his fiction

ultimately rests upon the conviction that it's possible to know what really

happened, who was right and who was wrong. The satirist may not like

reality, but he's at least sure that he knows what it is. Either Barney killed

Boogie or he didn't. (3)

Shapiro does not go on, however, to speculate on any possible reasons for what he considers to be Richler's newly tender face and curiously less-fixed opinions.

While Shapiro considers Barney's Version to be significant because of Richler's new attention to "the unreliability of memory," Ada Craniford (2005) suggests that

Barney can be interpreted as a rougher, funnier version of Shakespeare's proud and arrogant King Lear. She points out that like Lear, Barney falls from a position of power, bemoans the lost love of his family and loses his mental acuity. Craniford's critical interest in all of Richler's oeuvre focuses on an exploration of the "biographical threads,"

"complicated web of literary sources" and "pure invention" which make up his novels

(8). She explains that,

Barney's Version, the last novel Richler wrote, parodies characters and

events from a number of his previous novels as well as situations and

people taken from his life. At the same time it expropriates significant

chunks from Saul Bellow's novel Herzog, a book that focuses on Herzog's

attempts to deal with the betrayals of his latest wife. The Herzog

connection broadens the terms in which we view Barney's lament for his

mismanaged life, making it part of a larger literary tradition. (7)

Craniford traces the ways in which Barney's Version borrows not just from

Shakespeare's King Lear, but from Herzog as well. She looks at the elements in the three wives which relate to Richler's own two wives, Cathy and Florence. As well, she notes where Richler alludes to his earlier nine novels. For Craniford, part of the pleasure in reading Barney's Version is identifying the source from which various aspects of the story have developed. She concludes by saying that "while Richler's borrowings from

Saul Bellow's Herzog drive the plot, it is Barney's incarnation as a modem King Lear—

"a foolish, fond old man" who has lost[.. .Jeverything—that wrenches the heart" (137).

Louise Dennys, editor of Barney's Version, emphasises the book's heart- wrenching nature as well. She explains that the book became a success in part because,

"[i]t had a tenderness that reached out to a much broader readership than his previous books had, which came out of the love story and the depth and the feeling" (qtd in Posner, 302). As Abraham Levitan writes, "[Richler's] prose rings with so much raw comedy that one barely realizes its deep-seated sadness until the finalpages " (3). Joel

Yanofsky describes Barney's Version as "without question, his saddest novel" (2).

Biographer Charles Foran describes the book as a "joyful text about decay and dying" with language which "springs" with "raw energy" (23 Jan, 2008 lecture). While critics emphasise different aspects of the book in their reviews of it, as a group they appear to see Barney's Version as a sad book about the decline of an aging man which nonetheless manages to portray the bitter-sweet joy of living.

Genre. Narrative and Point of View in Barney's Version:

My analysis of the novel Barney's Version will add to the above body of criticism by assessing the book primarily as a Reifungsroman, or story of ripening, as defined in

Chapter 1 with reference to the work of Frey Waxman. I will offer a close reading of the text focussing on genre, narrative structure and point of view and will consider the text in relation to age, identity and progress/decline narratives.

Genre

As indicated in the above criticisms, Barney's Version combines multiple genres.

It is a Reifungsroman; but it is also simultaneously a pseudo-autobiography, a murder mystery, a comedy, a tragedy, a romance and a satire. This mixed-genre stance along with its self-reflexivity, its parody and its fragmented presentation suggest the influence of post-modernism. However, acknowledging that the protagonist Barney has not given up his hope in life and embracing Linda Hutcheon's claim (as discussed in Chapter 2) that post-modernism has abandoned the search for order and meaning, we would have to conclude that Barney's Version demonstrates aspects of modernism too. The conventions surrounding genre provide material with and against which the text creates new wholeness out of the fractured and reconnected pieces. Both in genre identification and in character identification, the text presents the concept of a collection of miscellaneous parts. The protagonist Barney is an aging man; but he is also simultaneously a memoir writer, a possible criminal, a comic figure, a tragic figure and a larger-than-life caricature.

This effectively underlines the text's premise that age identity is multiple and fluid.

Within the embrace of the Reifungsroman lie all of the book's genre identities; within

Barney's age identity lie all of Barney's present, previous, and often, contradictory age identities. The multifaceted genre identity of the book serves as a mirror emphasizing the complexity of the age identity of the protagonist. Just as it is impossible to essentialize the genre as merely Reifungsroman, it is impossible to essentialize Barney as merely an old person. He cannot be ensnared by any singular identity category. He is not just old any more than he is just male, just Jewish, just English speaking, just not French or just a resident of Montreal. The text's genre form reinforces the point made in its content; that is, that age identity is multifaceted, fluid and difficult to discern.

Richler's plot cannot be essentialized either. As discussed in the review of criticism, the text reworks within itself a number of other well-known works.

Shakespeare's King Lear and Saul Bellow's Herzog are two of the most important, but the allusions are numerous. Some are foundational to the novel and some subtly augmentative. The intertextual references range all the way from canonized literature to popular culture. The police officer Sean O'Hearne carries traces of the criminal 51

Raskolnikov's indefatigable examiner Porfiry from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

Barney writes, "Raskolnikov has nothing on me. Or, put another way, to each suspect his own Inspector of Police Porfiry. O'Hearne continues to keep tabs on me, hoping for a deathbed confession" (85). In the same section of the text, Richler alludes to popular culture as he refers to O.J. Simpson's questionable pardon for murder. O'Hearne tells

Barney, "O.J. is guilty as hell, you know. Just like you" (87). By including allusions to other texts, Richler's text demonstrates that it is simultaneously part of, but also distinct from, other identities. Richler's textual technique figures the novel as unable to identify itself readily -just as Barney is unable to identify himself readily.

Narrative Structure

By his choice of title, Richler immediately identifies Barney's Version as one small "version" or narrative set into dialogue with the larger narratives of his culture.

Lyotard's notion of pervasive cultural "grand narratives" and "little narratives," as discussed in Chapter 2, is immediately and obviously important to an understanding of the text. Richler figures Barney as the underdog striving to find his own voice and attempting to create a narrative through which he can make sense of the world.

However, Chapter 2's discussion of narrative structure as the authorial reordering of chronology is also a significant factor in analyzing Barney's Version. Richler's narrator begins his memoir by writing its opening three sentences in the present tense. He then briefly references the future — the future in which Terry Mclver will publish his autobiography. By paragraph two, Panofsky has begun to describe the past. Although he is still speaking in the first-person point of view as Richler's present-time narrator, the localizer, or the one who actually saw what is being described, is no longer the present- time Barney but Barney as he was in the past. For the next few pages, Barney skips back and forth amongst the past, the recent past and the present, seeing the world through a variety of focalizers; that is, a variety of versions of himself. Note that the very existence of a distance between these various focalizers confirms that the definition of identity as a fixed core should be expanded to include this multiplicity.

As a result of Richler' s use of multiple Barney focalizers, we begin to see the extent to which Barney's past and Barney's previous age identities are blended within his present self. By page fourteen, we are not surprised to see within one sentence the juxtaposition of the word "now," which suggests the present, with the word "held," which suggests the past. He says, "Now I held the spaghetti thingamajig" (14). The past begins to blur with the present for Barney, thus suggesting that the missing name for the colander is not the only disordered aspect in Barney's mind.

The text makes it clear, though, that the writing of Barney's Version begins in

Panofsky's present. The structure thus privileges the aged protagonist by placing him at the centre of the reader's attention (as per my discussion of Barbara Frey Waxman's work in Chapter 2). We watch the present-time Barney encounter the dilemmas associated with numerous intersecting aspects of his past experience and his current age identity, dilemmas which are associated with his current chronological age of 67 years.

The structure of the text establishes that this story is not about the character's youth, but about the way in which the character's past has contributed to his current identity and situation. It begins with his old age, only then telling the story of his past for the purpose of explaining how he has evolved towards the identity which he currently holds. Barney tells us, "In my mind's eye, I'm still twenty-five. Thirty-three max. Certainly not sixty- seven, reeking of decay and dashed hopes" (17). All of what he has been as a younger person is still contained within the Barney he has become. All of the past is contained within the present. The first information Richler reveals about Barney is that he is

"scribbling a first book" at an "advanced age" (1). Richler positions the mature Barney in our minds and then in order to explain the man Barney has become proceeds to unravel a multitude of other characters and situations as seen through a multitude of Barney focalizers. The text thus exemplifies the quantity of intersections which occur in individual's lives and the unique combinations which give rise to the achieved or age identity of each individual. Barney is shown as someone who is relatively old; and he is shown as someone whose relatively old identity is comprised of the now virtually inseparable factors which have combined over time to form an age identity web - a maze of interdependent characteristics - intricate, tight and still always mobile and evolving.

The text places the aging protagonist at its centre, a character living while aged; and then proceeds to reveal the surrounding web comprised of that character's relationships and past experiences.

As argued above, the text's multifaceted genre identities mirror the multiple fluid identities of its aged protagonist. The text also sets multiple mirrors within the structure of the novel. Scenes between Barney and the other characters are layered strategically within the text in order to highlight the variety of ways in which readers may perceive

Barney, the variety of ways in which Barney may be perceived by his peers and the variety of ways in which Barney perceives himself. For instance, Barney's grim visit to a long-term care facility to visit his unfortunate peer Hymie Mintzbaum is sandwiched between a scene in which the young Chantal aspires to sleep with him and a scene in which he is pursued in a bar by a "professional escort," also aspiring to sleep with him

(227-236). The effect of the Mintzbaum scene's message in regard to Barney's impending loss of agency is increased by its placement in proximity to the two scenes which depict Barney's potential and/or potentially lost sexual activity. The narrative structure strategically uses scene placement as a mirror in order to reveal aspects of

Barney to himself and to readers.

Echoing the scene placement tactics, the text also uses other characters to reveal

Barney's identity as an aging man to Barney and to his readers. Barney establishes his identity by accepting and/or resisting the rnirror provided by each of the other characters.

When Barney visits Hymie Mintzbaum in Hillcrest Nursing Home, Richler is foreshadowing Barney's own future at King David Nursing Home (411). When Barney sees Hymie confined to a wheelchair and struggling to speak, he rejects the image he sees of himself in his peer and he reacts by giving Hymie what he himself would want. He confronts Hymie's caregiver/waiter, '"Don't talk to him like that,' I said, 'and bring him a Springbank please'" (231). Barney does not want to anticipate a future without cigars or

Macallan for himself, and he acts towards Hymie as if he were acting towards himself.

The text uses Hymie as Barney's mirror to force both the protagonist and his readers to see Barney's future. Readers are invited to see Barney as Hymie and perhaps also to see ourselves as visitors confronted, like Barney, with our own impending aging.

While Richler clearly uses other characters as reflectors to reveal Barney to himself, he also demonstrates the protagonist's development by contrasting the views of one Barney focalizer with those of a second Barney localizer. For instance, he first uses the eyes of a youthful Barney to introduce into the text an old Frenchman in Paris. The older Barney recalls that he and his peers disdained the old Frenchman for his lecherous and undignified behaviour towards a young woman. After his affair with the "bimbo" which ruins his marriage with Miriam, Barney realizes that he "had become that odious

Frenchman of unblessed memory" who had "pranced onto the terrace to claim the woman young enough to be his daughter" (356). This is painful for him because he had earlier distanced himself from the Frenchman. He now sees a similarity between his own body and behaviour and that of the man whom he had previously ostracized. Just as the text's genre identity provides a context with and against which to figure this text, the text provides Barney with examples of other aging males and other variations of himself with and against which he can take his own present measure.

However, Richler's record of Barney's interactions with Hymie, the old

Frenchman and others does not necessarily allow readers to interpret the extent to which each mirror image resembles the protagonist. For example, as Levitan (1998) has pointed out, Barney's relationship with his father Izzy Panofsky lacks clear definition. We are unsure (and suspect that Barney is unsure too) to what extent Barney resembles Izzy. We are also unsure whether, in the incident with Hymie, he has done a service to his old friend or whether, as Fiona accuses, he is an "irresponsible drunk" who has selfishly refused to allow himself to see a future defined by decline (234). Barney is not presented in a manner which would lead to our clear opinion of him. Instead, like the text's genre identity, Barney is presented as an assembly of images and mirror images, some of them slightly out of focus. 56

One of the text's central devices is a murder-mystery plot which revolves around whether or not Barney indeed murdered his good friend Boogie after finding him in bed with the Second Mrs. Panofsky. This ongoing narrative thread adds suspense and entertainment to the novel, but also serves the serious function of bringing an important theme into focus, that is, the difficulty of accurately discerning identity. Was Barney a murderer or was he not? Near the end of the text we learn that even Barney was unsure of the answer to that question. When asked if he really murdered Boogie he replies, '"I think not, but some days I'm not so sure. No, I didn't. I couldn't have'" (388). Later he muses,

'"I fired that shot well over his head. But I only raised my gun hand at the last minute. So if I wasn't guilty of murder in fact, I was by intent'" (392).

To this point then, my analysis of Barney's Version suggests that Richler portrays identity as not only achieved over time, multitudinous and fluid, but also as so complex that it is difficult to discern accurately - Barney cannot see himself clearly and cannot see others clearly either. Likewise, the other characters and we, as readers, have difficulty discerning Barney's character. At the end of the text, Mike Panofsky summarizes,

"Before his brain began to shrink, Barney Panofsky clung to two cherished beliefs: Life was absurd, and nobody ever truly understood anybody else" (417). The text suggests that, just as Barney's perception of himself and others is problematic, our ability to ascertain identity is suspect.

Point of View

The narrative of Barney's Version is written in the first-person voice of the protagonist with a multitude of focalizers alternating amongst past and long-past 57 variations of Barney joining the present-time narrator. Barney's voice is occasionally interrupted by the first-person insertions from his rival Mclver, by the occasional news clipping or letter and by a final first-person chapter by his son Mike Panofsky. The interjections of other people's "versions" serve to emphasize the uniqueness of each first- person perspective in the text. In the writing of this novel, Richler opted for first-person narration for the first time in his career. All of his other novels are written in third-person.

The first-person narrative style at first encourages readers to identify with the protagonist's version of events; but as the story progresses, we become aware that Barney is not only suffering from dementia, but is also defending himself against suspicion of murder and, by bis own admission, is prone to embellishment. Describing the incident in which he visits with Hymie Mintzbaum, Barney admits, "But possibly I only wish that had happened. Dining out on a story, I tend to put a spin on it. To come clean, I'm a natural-born burnisher. But, then, what's a writer, even a first-timer like me?" (234).

Departure from the authority of third-person narrative and use of the word

"version" in the title suggests a desire on Richler's part to indicate that he is aware that what he tells is just his personal interpretation of the world - or his version — rather like the way his protagonist's narration is just Barney's version. The self-reflexivity of the above quotation indicates that Richler, also a writer, is acknowledging that he, like

Barney, is a "burnisher." The text tells us that, like Barney and the characters in the book, the author and his readers are unable to see each other accurately. We therefore increasingly acknowledge that Barney and Richler are unreliable narrators, whose version of the truth is suspect. As the book progresses Barney admits that even he is unsure of the veracity of his claims. He writes: ...in my present state of decline, I suffer long nights when I receive a

veritable jumble of pictures out of my past, but lack the means to

unscramble them. I have wakened more than once recently no longer

certain of what really happened that day on the lake. Wondering if I had

corrected the events of that day even as I have embellished other incidents

in my life, enabling me to appear in a more favourable light. To come to

the point, what if O'Hearne was right? What if, just as that bastard

suspects, I did shoot Boogie through the heart? I need to think I am

incapable of such brutality, but what if I were in fact a murderer? (315)

In one of the insertions of text written by Barney's troublesome biographer Terry Mclver,

Richler writes, "the groom seemed[...]melancholy, imbibing endlessly, and in constant pursuit of an attractive young woman, who was doing her best to avoid him. In later years, however, she would become his third wife, rather, I'm told, than abort his child"

(385). Since Barney has not suggested that Miriam only married him in order to avoid aborting his child, we are startled to read this assertion by Mclver, and begin to further question Barney's version of the truth. Remembering Craniford's assertions about the parallel details between Richler's fiction and Richler's life, we wonder to what extent the author is twisting the biographical details of his own life to tell this story. We wonder to what extent Barney is inventing a version of his own, to what extent Mclver is inventing his own version and to what extent Barney's progressive dementia is inhibiting his ability to recall the truth accurately.

By the end of the text, Barney's dementia has progressed to the point that he has had to turn over his power of attorney to his children. Barney is forced to relinquish his power as narrator to his son Mike, who then takes the text to its conclusion in his own voice, adding multiple corrections to his father's version by adding footnotes. The structural change in narrative voice reflects the content's description of change in the

Active world of the text, that is, that life is also carrying on, that Barney is no longer in a central position of power. Since in several places the son's version of events contradicts the story we have heard from our previous narrator, Barney's identity becomes even more multiple, confusing and difficult to discern. Our belief in his version of events further deteriorates. However, his son's punctilious and condescending approach does not engender our confidence either.

The book could have ended here, at the point where Mike's voice replaces

Barney's, but Richler arranges for Barney's identity to continue to evolve while he is physically and mentally declining. In the final pages, Mike reports mat the body of

Boogie is found and that the family must "cope with the revelation that Barney had lied and was a murderer after all" (406). Barney's daughter Kate (Cordelia to his Lear) defends him saying, "He never stinted on any of us, and we owe him the benefit of the doubt. So you believe what you want, but if I live to be a hundred, I'll still know he was innocent" (407). Even though Barney has been overcome by dementia, his identity in the eyes of others continues to change and develop.

The book could have ended at this point too, with Barney's identity potentially established as a murderer, but Richler arranges for his protagonist's identity to evolve once more. Richler writes that Mike watches while "a big fat water bomber[.. .]scooped up who knows how many tons of water, flew off, and dumped the water on the mountain." Mike determines that Barney was very likely not a murderer after all and that 60

Boogie probably had been "murdered" by an airplane (417). Thus, while Barney is living in a state of decline in King David Nursing Home, his identity progresses from being a possible murderer, to being a probable murderer to being almost definitely a non- murderer. Likewise, the genre swivels from tragedy to poignant biography and finally, with this entertaining hook, to murder mystery.

In this tale of an aging protagonist, Richler's manipulation of genre, narrative and point of view has the cumulative effect of inviting us to view Barney's age identity not just as multiple and fluid, but also as being in simultaneous and possibly indiscernible states of progression and decline. 61

Chapter 4: Barney's Version - Fracturing the Binary of Progress and Decline

This chapter takes from the previous chapters and then applies Woodward's and

Gullette's discussion of our culture's decline/progress age narrative to the novel Barney's

Version. As I have explained, Woodward and Gullette have identified the currently prevalent belief which portrays aging as a decline/progress binary to be a "grand narrative" reflecting and controlling cultural attitudes in our society. They argue that this narrative is too simplistic and that the public's embrace and perpetuation of it is inappropriate. I agree with them. In this section, I reveal the complexity which disputes this culturally imposed narrative, as anticipated in the theoretical introduction in Chapters

1 and 2. As I have indicated earlier, Gullette (2004) is concerned that people's attitudes towards age are becoming "more edgily poised within the binary of progress versus decline" (19). Woodward and Gullette believe that people are acculturated to perceive their lives in terms of either decline or progress. Gullette warns that people consider themselves to be in a state of progress in childhood and young adulthood, but are embracing a decline narrative at ever-younger ages. According to Gullette, the

chronological age at which people switch to seeing themselves as "over the hill" is

getting far too young (33). In my analysis of Barney's Version in this chapter, I consider

Richler's narrative in relation to Gullette's assertions discussed in Chapter 3 about the multiplicity and fluidity of identity and in relation to her assessment of our culture's

embrace and perpetuation of the narrative of progress and decline. Analysis shows that

Barney's Version lends itself well as an illustration of the concept of progress and decline

in aging. However, Barney's narrative contradicts the either/or, binary conceptualization

embodied in our larger cultural narrative and provides a much more complicated picture; of the issue of decline and progress in aging. Our culture's embrace of this binary is inappropriately rigid; aging should not be configured in terms of an either/or choice between progress and decline. As I have previously mentioned, Barney's Version is one small voice in conversation with the voice of our larger culture. While Richler's narrative confirms the prevalence of the concept of progress and decline in aging, it also contradicts the assumptions of the grand narrative's progress/decline binary. In Barney's

Version, progress and decline are not shown as an age-driven linear path heading uphill and then downhill. Progress and decline are shown as occurring alternately and even sometimes simultaneously throughout the characters' entire life course. The binary model in which decline replaces progress is countered by a model wherein navigation of a web of simultaneous and ongoing decline and progress occurs throughout the life course, wherein we are sceptical of the acuity with which we define the losses and gains of an aging person and wherein we are sceptical of the acuity with which we identify the person him/herself. In describing both identity and aging across the life course, Barney's

Version presents a narrative where multiplicity and fluidity counter the fixed and the oppositional. The text fractures identity and aging into unfixed post-modern fragments.

Although the text confirms the existence of a culturally imposed either/or decline/progress model, it indicates that when considered in relation to Barney's entire life course this culturally imposed model fractures into a multiplicity and fluidity which parallels that of the model of identity also evident in the text.

From the outset of Barney's Version, some might argue that the protagonist is, as described in his own words, in a "present state of decline" (315). Certainly by this self- description on Barney's part, the text acknowledges the influence of the prevailing 63 cultural narrative which figures aging in either/or terms, that is, as either a state of decline or of progress. Barney Panofsky introduces his "present state of decline" as one in which

"these increasingly frequent bouts of memory loss are driving me crazy," one in which he

"make[s] sure [his] digitalis pills, reading glasses, and dentures [are] within easy reach on the bedside table," and one in which he checks his boxer shorts for cleanliness before going to bed in case he dies in the night (10-11). Some might argue that when his memory and selfhood began to change as a result of Alzheimer's disease (at some point just prior to the commencement of the text), Barney Panofsky switched from being the centre of a narrative of progress to being the centre of a narrative of decline. Up until the time at which he began to show signs of the disease, he was still "progressing" towards an achieved identity. He was still accumulating experiences, and he was considering and editing them in order to revise bis personal definition of his own identity; he was still establishing it all in his memory. But at the outset of Barney's Version, that is, after the onset of memory loss, he has begun to lose aspects of himself. Now, the identity which he has compiled and stored in his memory is disintegrating. Other people in Barney's world might remember the man they had known him to be, but from the outset of the text,

Barney is increasingly incapable of keeping charge of his own identity. Barney's own individual control and sense of personal identity are disappearing. From this perspective, it could be argued that the protagonist is portrayed as being in a decline narrative.

However, Gullette champions the idea that we can consider the permanently ongoing achievement of age identity as grounds to figure aging as progress. Gullette might argue that Barney could be said to be developing a larger "portmanteau" of identity even after he begins to become mentally incognizant as a result of Alzheimer's disease, 64

but most would figure Barney to be declining once his health deteriorates. The "progress"

in Barney's achieved age identity conflicts with the obvious "decline" in the text's presentation of Barney and his health. At the beginning of the present-time section in the text, Barney is a man who is experiencing the onset of Alzheimer's. By the end of the text, his identity is that of a sufferer of advanced Alzheimer's disease. Barney's age

identity continues to increase and in a sense it "progresses" or becomes larger, but most would assert that he has passed "over the hill" and is in a decline. I agree with Gullette's

assertion that aging should be configured as progress towards an achieved identity.

However, because of his dementia, I also see Barney's achievement of further identity in this situation as indicating a decline. These contradictions suggest that the designation of

a rigid binary of either/or in regard to decline and progress in describing the aging process is inappropriately strict. Barney is experiencing declining health at the same time

as he is increasing his "portmanteau" of identity and therefore progressing.

As I have shown in Chapter 3, Richler's portrayal of Barney is deliberately

indistinct. It suggests the impossibility of understanding other people and of accurately

discerning identity across the life course. To emphasize this point, the text depicts

outrageous imaginary scenarios in its story of the larger-than-life Barney. It demonstrates that after Barney becomes severely mentally impaired, his reputation twice becomes reconfigured as a result of Mike's discoveries in regard to Boogie's murder-mystery plot.

First he is reconfigured as a murderer (instead of a murder suspect) and then he is reconfigured as a non-murderer. Consequently, Barney's reputation or his identity in the eyes of other people improves. If he were still cognizant, the vindication would undoubtedly make him believe that he was experiencing progress. Although the mentally 65 incognizant Barney may be unaware of these progressions in his identity, if we allow that the regard of others is part of Barney's identity, then we also would have to say that a rigid designation of either decline or progress fails to encompass all of what Barney is experiencing. At least fromth e point of view of other people, Barney's identity - even after he is in the long-term-care facility - undergoes progress and improvement as a result of Richler' s plot machinations.

These simultaneous occurrences of progress and decline resist the binary opposition inherent in the cultural narrative of progress and decline. When we consider progress and decline in relation to Barney's life we do not see a straight trip uphill followed by a decline. Even prior to the onset of Alzheimer's disease there can be no clear-cut proclamation of either a state of progress or a state of decline at any point in his life. Whether his life up until that point is for him a decline narrative or a progress narrative cannot be readily answered. Considering the concept of decline in relation to the entirety of Barney's experience of aging fromchildhoo d to the present time reveals that this culturally perpetuated narrative is just not an accurate or useful model in Barney's case. Barney may be an imaginary character and he may have over-sized and unrealistic adventures, but Richler's text still makes it obvious that the culturally decreed imperative just does not fit what life actually is and does. Richler's little narrative effectively speaks out against the larger narrative. As they age, people do not make one trip uphill followed by one trip downhill. Lives encompass an intermingling of decline and progress - a web of ups and downs. We can see these patterns in our own lives and we can see them through the story relayed by Barney. During both his early life and his later life, there are not one but rather multiple stages during which Barney could be said to be in decline: his wife's stillbirth of another man's child (117); Clara's consequent suicide and his ongoing sense of guilt (140); his trial for murder of his best friend (337); and Miriam's ultimate rejection of their marriage

(348) - to name just a few. During these times, his life is no longer moving uphill, no longer progressing towards a bright future. Yet, after each one of these traumas, he rallies. In each circumstance he is in decline for a period of time; after each circumstance, he resumes a progress narrative. Following these apparent temporary periods of decline narrative are multiple periods which could be called progress narrative: his promotion of a brilliant poetess (56); his remarriage to Miriam (299); his financial success and recognition in the field of television production (343) - again, to name just a few. After two divorces and a murder trial, he enjoys a lengthy period of happiness as husband to

Miriam and father of their children. If Barney's periods of decline may be associated with his increasing chronological age, then so too are the ensuing periods of progress which follow them.

Further complicating the analysis, during chronological periods when some aspects of Barney's life are in a state of decline, other aspects of his life are simultaneously in a state of progress. For instance, during the same time period in which he is accused of murder and could expect to suffer a lifetime of persecution as a result, he simultaneously is able to make progress in his plans to wed Miriam (296). To use the model introduced in the theoretical introduction to this thesis, not only do multiple paths decline downhill while multiple paths progress uphill, they also all cross multiple hills and valleys while so doing. Analysis of Barney's Version reveals the extent to which the narrative which our society uses to configure aging is inadequately simple.

For instance, if we assess Barney's status at the time at which the novel begins,

we see Barney falling down several hills - that is, falling down the hills comprised of his physical, emotional and sexual well-being, his social relationships and his work

satisfaction. However, simultaneously he is maintaining progress on those hills

comprised of financial success. After his admission to the long-term-care facility, he also

successfully climbs back up some of his social hills; Miriam, Solange and his children

unite in extending their social support towards him.

On the hill comprised of his physical health and well-being, the present-time

Barney (that is, of the novel's outset) is experiencing memory loss, urinary malfunction

and a variety of other issues revealed by Richler as the text unfolds. Barney's emotional

status is equally poor. He lacks confidence in a promising future and reports that "Lying

in the dark, fulminating, I recite[] aloud the number I [am] to call if I ha[ve] a heart

attack" (11). Sexually, Barney describes himself in negative terms too. Richler writes,

"alone in my hotel room, my dentures soaking in a glass on my bedside table, I reach[]

down to grab myself. At my decrepit age, the only answer is usually self-service" (239).

We can assess that Barney is in a state of decline in regard to his social

relationship with his extended community and in regard to his intimate social relationship

with Miriam, his "heart's desire;" and the larger society in which Barney lives views him

as a "suspected murderer" (3). We later learn that when the novel begins, he has been

cleared of legal charges and is thus is in a better state legally than previously, but we and

his family have to wait until the end of the book to hear proof which suggests that he was not Boogie's murderer. In his more intimate social world, from the outset of the novel,

Barney is mourning the loss of his wife Miriam. She has remarried "Blair Hopper ne

Hauptman, Herr Doktor Professor of Nostrums" (79). Richler writes that Blair "had entered [Barney's] life, like an unwanted polyp" (316).2 Barney is figuratively vanquished by this character, the embodiment of all of the elements in life which threaten him. Blair is youthful and fit; is gentile; is a successful academic; does not indulge in alcohol and tobacco; is self-confident; and accepts women as men's equals. Blair is a professor at a university; by comparison, Barney "had barely made it out of high school, just managing to matriculate with a third-class pass" (346). Richler writes that Barney

"envied classmates who went on to McGill with ease. In those days, there was still a

Jewish quota at McGill. Our bunch needed a seventy-five percent mark to gain admittance, while goyboys qualified with sixty-five" (346). Blair is also younger than

Barney and is good-looking in an Aryan way. Richler describes Blair as "[c]loser to

Miriam's age than mine, which is to say, some ten years my junior. He [i]s tall, straw- haired, blue-eyed, and broad-shouldered. He would have looked nifty in an SS uniform"

(317). The text uses Blair to represent the youthful, educated, gentile forces against which

Barney feels he must compete and by which he fears he will be replaced. Richler writes,

"Mr. Mary Poppins ingratiated himself with our kids, teaching them goyishe stunts"

(320). As Rachel Brenner (1989) explains, the Jewish protagonist in Joshua Then and

Now defeats a German man to win the woman; by comparison, in Barney's Version, the

German wins and Barney is the loser (133). Miriam leaves Barney in order to assert her independence; he admits, "fearful of losing her, I made her my prisoner" (348). He

2 He compares Blair metaphorically to the polyp which has put his own life into a period of declining health. Michael Posner writes mat, "Richler had a small tumour removed earlier, in 1993" (333). acknowledges that it was his own lack of self-confidence which ultimately led to his downfall. Barney is emasculated by Blair and reduced to accepting a pseudo-relationship with a Quebecois actress named Solange - a poor replacement for his wife. Solange summarizes Barney's mistakes: "I bet [Blair] doesn't correct or contradict [Miriam] at dinner parties. Possibly he is considerate rather than ill-tempered. Maybe he makes her feel cherished" (363).

Barney's social interactions with Miriam and Blair reveal his personal insecurities, but they also reveal that Barney is heading downhill culturally as well. He discovers that male/female relations now entail new expectations. The chauvinistic and competitive male world to which Barney was acculturated (by role models such as his father Izzy and businessman Duddy Kravitz) has not prepared him for a relationship with the type of woman Miriam feels she must become. When she leaves him, Miriam says,

"You've been making all the decisions for me ever since we married" (361). Barney protests her expressed need to do interesting work and become more independent of men by saying, "'Don't you think giving birth to and bringing up three wonderful children is an interesting thing?'" Miriam replies, '"It doesn't command much respect these days, does it?'" (343). Barney becomes aware that he is out of step with the cultural expectations of modern women. Simultaneously he becomes aware that he is losing other aspects of the familiar English-speaking culture of the Montreal of his youth. He explains, "In my declining years, I continue to linger in Montreal [.. .Jrooted in a city that, like me, is diminishing day by day[.. .]Soon the only English-speaking people left in

Montreal will be the old, the infirm, and the poor" (81). Cultural standards have shifted.

In the world of television production, Barney's references to Voltaire go unrecognized while "the industry's new Wunderkinder[... ]the young squirt who now runs the studio.. .would have nodded knowledgeably, allowing that we were both scholarly types" if he had "dropped the name of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, or the Submariner"

(230). When Barney "[i]s suddenly overcome by the itch to try [his] liver-spotted hand at screenplay-writing again," he is rejected. The "young squirt" says "I do appreciate this window of opportunity to strategize with somebody who used to be a player, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to pass on this one" (230). From the outset of the novel,

Barney's social, cultural and physical paths all seem to him to be declining.

Barney has also lost the satisfaction which he has been able to obtain vocationally. In the past, his career success has been an important bolster to his meagre self-confidence. When Barney offers to sacrifice his work satisfaction and retire in an attempt to get Miriam to stay with him, Miriam responds by telling Barney "you only pretend to hate your production company. The truth is you love the deal-making and the money and the power you enjoy over the people who work for you" (361). This interaction between Barney and Miriam reveals the extent of his attachment to both his wife and his work while simultaneously revealing the extent of the loss he is experiencing in both areas in his present life. He complains, "I no longer really have to go into my production office, where I am considered a spent force" (79). Barney is aware that

"people dread the days [he] turn[s] up" (169).

In summary, Barney can be seen at the outset of the novel to be in a state of decline in the areas of physical, social, sexual, cultural and vocational well-being. But even with all of those strikes against him, because he is in a decidedly good financial state, the decline cannot be said to be absolute. Barney was not wealthy in his youth. He 71 remembers, "Those days. Christ Almighty. One step ahead of creditors" (81). But throughout his life he has made financial progress. When Miriam wants to return to work, he tells her, "but we don't need the money. We're loaded" (343). And Mike's words near the end of the text provide further confirmation of Barney's financial well-being: "I am the beneficiary of Barney's gift for money-making" (413). Although in many aspects of his life, at the outset of the novel Barney can be considered to be in a decline narrative, from a financial perspective, his situation would be more aptly labelled as a narrative of progress. He has far more financial security to ensure his wellbeing than he did as a youth. Barney declines due to dementia, but at least he can afford to buy elite treatment in his long-term-care facility.

In Gullette's discussions of decline and progress, attitude change in the aging individual is what marks the transition from a progress narrative to a decline narrative.

She encourages a "visionary antidecline movement" (Gullette 2004,27) and prompts people to resist the enculturated "process of accepting "Time" as insuring losses to our prior achieved identity" (Gullette 1991,49). In Gullette's call to arms - her exhortation to refuse to accept a narrative of decline - she does not discuss indices of decline and progress but rather she discusses the psychological approach to aging assumed by the aging individual. By her use of the terms, transition from a progress narrative to a decline narrative occurs at the moment when a person believes that the gains which they are receiving as they age are no longer as great as the losses which they are receiving as they age.

My analysis of Barney's Version reveals the diverse and fluid web of identity which Barney achieves during 67 years of aging. Thus, it would be inaccurate to say that Barney's life progresses until he reaches a certain age at which decline replaces progress; and it would also be inaccurate to say that Barney perceives his aging that simplistically.

Like real-life (not imaginary) human beings, Barney experiences multiple periods of belief in a future filled with decline and multiple periods of belief in a future filled with progress; he even experiences attitudes of decline and progress about the future simultaneously. The primary reason why it is so difficult to label Barney's Version as strictly a progress narrative or strictly a decline narrative is because Barney himself remains ambivalent. He begins his memoirs by stating that he is "starting on this shambles that is the true story of my wasted life" which surely suggests a decline narrative (1); yet there is also evidence that Barney is attempting to maintain an attitude of progress, even at the expense of editing out certain truths. Richler writes, "still sleep wouldn't come. So I set the spool of my life on rewind, editing out embarrassments, reshooting them in my mind's eye" (172).

As I note in the review of critical literature in Chapter 3, Shapiro points out that

Richler's "questioning of memory's reliability is an unexpected move" because it undermines the satirist's firm sense that it is possible to know "what really happened" and "who was right and who was wrong" (3). I agree with Shapiro that, in Barney,

Richler creates a character who rewrites history. Moreover, the text draws attention to the bizarre nature of the universe by offering a plot in which a man can be plucked randomly from a lake without any requirement of sinister intention. The sense of meaninglessness is further emphasized by the rapidity of the final plot developments. In quick succession we learn that Boogie's body is found and Barney must be a murderer, and then learn that the airplane probably killed Boogie and therefore Barney must be innocent. The flurry 73 with which the text ends suggests that Barney could just as readily have been "proven" to be a murderer as he could have been "proven" to be innocent. The author who writes that kind of plot line also rejects the cut-and-dried absurdity of viewing life as either a progress narrative or a decline narrative depending on your state of aging. Mike Panofsky quotes Barney as saying "Life was absurd, and nobody ever truly understood anybody else" (417). That comment seems to sum up the message of the text. Shapiro asks the question: "does the ending restore our belief in an either or kind of truth?" I would answer by saying that if a reader wishes to read the ending as absolute there is room to do so, but I think that it seems more likely that Richler may now be satirizing the possibility of absolutes. Barney's Version allows room to see the plot in an "either/or kind" of way if a reader chooses to respond by interpreting the genre to be that of a mystery novel, but I would argue that Barney's Version contradicts the possibility of an "either/or kind of truth" in relation to identity and aging. How could we account for this? Richler may have been, to use Frey Waxman's term, "ripened." Although he was not as old as Davies was in writing The Cunning Man and could not at age 66 be considered "old" in the absolute sense, his proximity to death and his own awareness of his proximity to death may have imbued his writing with some of the wisdom of old age. Perhaps his illness brought him to a position where he felt less confidence, optimism and conviction about the absolutes of life. Perhaps his illness led him to see the ambivalences more clearly than the absolutes.

The majority of critics refer to Barney's Version as a story of decline. Ada

Craniford writes that in Richler's novels, the "Jewish main characters come out more or less intact - except for Barney Panofsy" (6). I would argue that the text descends into a narrative of decline only at the point at which we lose Barney's own voice, the point at which Mike assumes the role of narrator, the point at which Barney's hope-filled voice is lost. As Charles Foran points out, it feels as if Barney dies in this text - even though we know that he continues to live on in the long-term-care facility (2008). Until the protagonist's vigorous presence is silenced, the text breaths with Barney's life and with his attitude of hope. His indomitable spirit is revealed in such lines as: "'Because Miriam will come home one of these days. I'm willing to bet on it. Hey for a guy named after a character in a comic strip I haven't done too badly, wouldn't you say?'" (387). The sense of decline in the text is offset by the urgency of Barney's character - despite our recognition of his admittedly roguish and unreliable nature. When the vibrancy of his voice is stopped, so is the sense of any and all progress. When his energy dies, our belief in his potential progress dies too. The most significant gift Barney's Version offers us is the message that it is possible for each of us to cling to life throughout all of the ages of our life with the sort of tenacity and zeal demonstrated by Barney Panofsky.

My own reader response positions Barney's Version as a novel balanced between a sense of progress and a sense of decline. The rough and spirited humanity captured in

Richler's depiction of Barney somehow counters the more sobering aspects of the text.

The novel is taut with the tension between Barney's admissions of decline and his impassioned attempts to justify his lingering hopes. He hopes that he will once again remember missing words; he hopes that he will be cleared of murder charges; and he hopes that Miriam will once again return his love. In the final words written in Barney's voice, the protagonist's determination remains evident: "Yes. I'm not totally wacko yet. I can even remember how to strain spaghetti" (403). In the same paragraph, we see that Barney still believes that Miriam will return to him. He says, "But my wife wasn't dead, merely absent. Temporarily absent. And I had to talk to her." Throughout the entirety of his narration, Barney struggles, but he also believes and strives and hopes.

Results:

Although Barney's Version can be interpreted variably, for the purposes of this thesis, I would propose the following conclusions from my analysis of the novel. First, my discussion ofBarney's Version elucidates the theories of Age Studies' scholarship, particularly those of Kathleen Woodward and Margaret Morganroth Gullette on the topics of age identity and culturally imposed progress/decline age narratives. My analysis encourages the inclusion of conscious consideration of age-related issues as part of interpreting the novel. Secondly, Barney's Version can be interpreted to be an illustration of the complexity of human identity. The protagonist Barney Panofsky provides an example of the multiplicity and fluidity of identity; and by its disclosure of the development of Barney's life, the text exemplifies and confirms the theory that identity is achieved continuously and cumulatively during the process of aging. And lastly, my discussion demonstrates that although Barney's Version can be interpreted as an illustration of the prevalence of our culture's progress-and-decline narrative, the text disputes the either/or make-up of the progress/decline binary and provides an alternative narrative of aging. Extrapolating from the larger-than-life example offered in Panofsky, my analysis indicates that the designation of progress or decline becomes complicated when considered in relation to the complex intricacies of the complete life of an individual. Barney's life illustrates aspects of "decline narrative" and "progress narrative," but overall his life does not illustrate an either/or binary. Instead this novel's voice fractures the binary of progress and decline in our prevailing cultural grand narrative and offers a replacement narrative where aging is figured as a life-long process wherein we navigate a web comprised of both gain and loss.

The next two chapters follow from and build upon these concluding points about

Richler and Barney's Version, in application to Davies and The Cunning Man.

Specifically, Davies's text, like Barney's Version, illustrates the fluidityan d multiplicity of achieved age identity and reveals and counters the prevailing culturally imposed age narrative of decline and progress. 77

Chapter 5: Robertson Davies's The Cunning Man - "Gain, every moment of it"

Robertson Davies's novel The Cunning Man is similar to Richler's Barney's

Version in that it is written from the perspective of a mature male protagonist; but

Davies's Dr. Jonathan Hullah is considerably older than Barney's 67 years.3 The text reveals that Hullah had already completed university and had worked for a period of time before enlisting in the services to fighti n WWII; thus we can assume that he is meant to be roughly of the same age cohort as Davies himself, who, at the time the novel was completed, was 81 years of age (Davies 224). The format of The Cunning Man is much like that of Barney's Version, in that we again have a relatively old male writer writing the story of an aging male protagonist who is writing his own version of his life story.

Thus we can readily interpret the novel as a second illustration of Gullette's idea that identity is continuously accumulated over time and that it is fluid and multiple in nature.

Davies's text also parallels Richler's text in that it can be interpreted as an illustration of the culturally imposed age narrative of decline and progress. Like Barney Panofsky, Dr.

Hullah is a mature, first-person narrator, attempting to record the events of his lifetime from his own perspective. In the process, he accepts and/or rejects aspects of his identity assigned to him by others, creates his own "little narrative" and hopes to set it into dialogue with the larger narratives in his culture. Panofsky writes his memoirs in order to defend himself against the accusations written in the upcoming publication by his rival

Terry Mclver; Hullah begins writing in bis Case Book in order to determine what he is willing to reveal about his past to the reporter Esme Barron. He explains, "Everything I say to Esme is rooted in my childhood, and in the totality of who I am and what my

3 Davies' oeuvre includes 11 novels and several volumes of plays as well as collections of essays, speeches and letters. experience of life has been. Does she understand that?[... ]But those depths lie below anything I may tell her. And they must be explored in some degree in this narrative in my

Case Book" (14). In a manner very similar to that of Barney Panofsky, Jonathan Hullah sets out to tell his own "version" of the story of his life.

Review of the Critical Literature:

Although The Cunning Man tells the story of Dr. Hullah's past and present life,

Davies himself has stated that the primary protagonist in the novel is the city of Toronto.

In a letter to a friend in 1994, Davies describes the goals of his latest project:

I have tried in [The Cunning Man] to capture something of the

Chekhovian quality of a certain kind of Canadian life, which appears as

our population grows more and more un-British in origin and we are

nagged by newcomers who are restless under British law and what

continues to be British custom in government. Of course this is resisted,

but inevitably there are those who regret the past loudly and plangently,

and cannot see that it is a past that never was. These people interest me

deeply and the change in this country from a colonial to another sort of

colonialism - that dominated by the U.S.A. - is fascinating.

(qtd in Grant 1999,307-8)

According to his own description of The Cunning Man, Davies is attempting to chronicle the gradual evolution of the city of Toronto. A Saturday Night interview (1994) quotes

Davies as saying that "Toronto is the hero really" and explains that the "book traces three student friends through their separate vocations - priest, doctor, teacher - and tells how 79 they and the city change and develop" (Coren, 3). Dr. Jonathan Hullah is the doctor named in this quotation. His two student friends - Brocky Gilmartin and Charlie Iredale — are the teacher and priest mentioned.

In a letter to physician Horace Davenport published in Val Ross's oral biography

Robertson Davies: A Portrait in Mosaic (2008), Davies reveals another of his goals in writing The Cunning Man. He warns his friend that he may not like The Cunning Man, because "I do not pretend to know anything about medicine, but am somewhat critical of certain modern medical approaches, which I think would benefit from a strong injection of intelligent humanism. Ross interprets that Davies "set out to tweak the noses of the medical profession" (346).

While Robertson Davies when speaking of The Cunning Man may stress the theme of Toronto's cultural coming of age and the need for humanism in the medical profession, critical attention to this Davies's final text, and indeed to all of Davies's novels, focuses primarily on the author's intent examination of the self and on his inclination to found his stories on Jungian psychology. Like many of Davies's previous novels, The Cunning Man revolves around the story of one man and around that man's attempts to understand himself and his relationship to the world Which he inhabits.

In a critical study entitled Robertson Davies (1986), Michael Peterman introduces a discussion of Davies and his novels by explaining the terms "egotism" and "egoism."

Peterman says, that as Davies progresses in his career, he becomes, "increasingly preoccupied with the distinction between egotism and egoism, between selfishness and enlightened self-interest in men of special prominence, be they intellectuals, artists, or priests." That is, Davies's protagonists are fascinated by the process of self-discovery, but are not egotistical or caught up in their own needs. It would be more accurate to say that they are in the process of determining their own identity. Peterman explains, "Survival, self-knowledge, and self-assertion distinguish Davies's heroes" (Preface, np).

Discussion of Carl Jung's work in relation to Davies was first introduced by

Gordon Roper in a 1978 article entitled "Robertson Davies's Fifth Business and 'That

Old Fantastical Duke of Dark Corners, C.G. Jung.'" In the article, Roper argues that in order to understand Davies's texts it is necessary to consider Jung's work on the significance of myth and archetype (Cameron 3). As I have explained in Chapter 2 in my discussion of narratology, Northrop Frye (a colleague of Davies at the University of

Toronto) was also interested in the influence of myth and wrote extensively on the topic of literary archetypes. His teachings greatly influenced the course of Canadian literary criticism and his text Anatomy of Criticism dealing with the subject was internationally influential. I will discuss the significance of Frye in relation to Davies and The Cunning

Man at further length in Chapter 6.

One of the several critical analyses which build on Davies's Jungian approach is

Patricia Monk's The Smaller Infinity: The Jungian Self in the Novels of Robertson Davies

(1982). This text examines Davies's exploration of Jungian psychology, discussing his oeuvre up until World of Wonders. Monk explains that, according to Jung's teachings,

the individual must not only decide how much of what he or she perceives

is self and how much not-self, but also make sure that he or she identifies

it correctly, or accurately, including only the appropriate data and making

the right judgments. This identification is obtained by feedback or

reflection from the environment (as though it were a mirror). (Monk 17) 81

According to Monk's explanation, Davies's Jungian process of obtaining self-knowledge

requires individuals to embrace the opposing parts of themselves within themselves until

they achieve a state of wholeness. This state of wholeness requires individuals to

recognize and accept the archetypal aspects of the self- what Jungians call "the

collective unconscious" - and then to combine the unconscious aspects with the

conscious self or ego.

Monk explains that Jung and Davies believed that the visual and literary arts

reveal an assortment of the archetypal or mythic figures which inhabit our unconscious.

The Jungian journey of self-discovery requires individuals to endeavour to recognize

these archetypal figures in their own lived experience. For instance, Monk explains that

Jung identifies the "shadow" as the dark, other side of the ego, the "suppressed savage"

or "alter ego" (Monk 36). He names the "anima" as the projection of the self onto

someone of the opposite sex. Other examples of archetypal figures include: the magus or

old wise man; the sybil or old wise woman; the princess; and the prince or rich young

man. The individuated self, the final pinnacle of achievement desired by Jung, by Davies

and by Davies's heroes, is a complete self who has integrated all of the unconscious

archetypal aspects of his personality into the consciously known self. Monk writes, "The

individual's task, however, is always the same: to learn to see what is reflected in the

mirror of art or environment without distortion and so to learn his or her true identity"

(17). She argues that the goal of reading Davies's novels is to trace the hero's

development and to explore his attempts over time to achieve individuation. The role of the plot in the novels is to reveal the way in which the environment reflects the identity of the hero. 82

Although there is an abundance of criticism addressing Davies's earlier work and his Jungian themes in general, relatively little has been offered in regard to the final novel

The Cunning Man. One of the works which does address Davies's complete oeuvre is literary critic Lynn Diamond Nigh's text Robertson Davies: Life, Work, and Criticism

(1997). In it she writes that in The Cunning Man, Davies "once again t[akes] up the idea of Jungian wholeness, this time incarnate in the figure of an unorthodox physician who achieves success at cross purposes from traditional institutions and curative praxis" (44).

She considers Dr. Hullah to be a character who is depicted as having pursued Jungian individuation successfully and who thus represents a state of wholeness. Diamond-Nigh believes that Davies's text presents Hullah as a representative of the integration of wisdom and knowledge - the embodiment of the magic of aboriginal healer Mrs. Smoke in combination with the science of Dr. Ogg. It is as a result of his experiences with these two teachers that Hullah adopts the caduceus (a stick around which two serpents entwine) as his symbol. By the time Dr. Hullah begins his Case Book notations, he is acclaimed far and wide as "The Cunning Man" - a man unusually capable of treating the body, mind and spirit of human sufferers (patients). The term and the text's title are taken from the introductory epigram which acknowledges and quotes Jtobert Burton's The Anatomy of

Melancholy (1621):

Cunning men, wizards, and white witches, as they call them, in every

village, which, if they be sought unto, will help almost all infirmities of

body and mind....

The body's mischiefs, as Plato proves, proceed from the soul: and if the

mind be not first satisfied, the body can never be cured. 83

This quotation is important to the text in that it is the source of Hullah's assigned title; but Burton's text The Anatomy of Melancholy also becomes significant when Hullah uses it as a model for his retirement writing project, The Anatomy of Fiction.

Diamond-Nigh muses that "the final artistic theme - Jonathan's Anatomy of

Fiction - is admittedly puzzling and strikes the reader almost as a lapse" (44). She does not mention the likely allusion to Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, only saying that

The Cunning Man, although faulted for its rambling quality and failure to

integrate and explore many themes that Davies had lightly proffered, was

better received by critics and the general reading public [than Murther and

Walking Spirits]. Academic circles have been on the whole silent on these

two works. (51)

Diamond-Nigh reports on the meagre and/or unflattering attention which critics have generally afforded The Cunning Man. In her discussion of Davies's works, she chooses to focus primarily on his earlier texts, which she considers to be his more successful efforts.

In her article "The Anatomy of Influence: Robertson Davies's Psychosomatic

Medicine" (2000), Cynthia Sugars questions whether Dr. Hullah has achieved the touted state of Jungian wholeness which others like Diamond-Nigh have assigned to him. She introduces her argument by discussing Hullah's work on the major manuscript which he plans to entitle Anatomy of Fiction. She points out that he states:

I am going to apply modern medical theory to the notable characters of

literature[... .]the day will come when no writer will dare to offer a novel

or a play to the public until he has investigated the medical history of all his characters. Very likely the great writers of the future will all be

doctors. (414)

Diamond-Nigh passes over Hullah's retirement project by saying, "Precisely what to make of this [his plans for Anatomy of Fiction] is difficult to say. It seems impossible that

Davies means this seriously, but then why is it uttered by The Cunning Man?" (44).

While Diamond-Nigh seems to accept The Cunning Man's superiority at face value,

Sugars assumes a more critical stance.

Sugars counters Diamond-Nigh's musings by arguing that Dr. Hullah is not in fact a figure who has achieved the status of "wise man," but is instead a figure who has suppressed his own self-knowledge. She argues that Hullah hides a drive to better his childhood friend and rival Brocky. Therefore, in her view, he actually represents an absence of self-acceptance and self-knowledge. She writes,

What [Hullah] doesn't acknowledge, however, is how the idea for this

anatomy was originally planted many years earlier when he and Brocky

were boys in boarding school. The boys have a weekly literary discussion

group, the Curfew Club, during which Brocky presents his interpretation

of the physiopathology of Hamlet, a talk entitled 'A Knotty Point of

Shakespeare Criticism Untied: Where Did Hamlet Hide the Body of

Polonius?' (69)4 The diagnosis-reading centres around the issue of the

King's (and Shakespeare's) apparent constipation. (Sugars 8)

According to Sugars, Dr. Hullah's idea to astound the literary world by providing medico-analytic literary criticism clearly derives from the literary presentation given by

Brocky during their time together as young students at Colborne College.

4 Corresponds to page 70 in edition of text listed in Works Cited. Sugars further suggests that Davies may not have been in conscious control of ail of the details of his art in the writing of The Cunning Man. That is, she ponders whether

Davies's text may be harbouring "unthought knowns within it" (13). Sugars argues that,

"although Davies's doctor protagonist attests to the influence of a prior cross-disciplinary study, Robert Burton's 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy, the primary but unacknowledged intertext in The Cunning Man is Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism"

(1). She draws a comparison between Hullah's failure to recognize Brocky's influence and Davies's failure to recognize Frye's influence. Do these missing acknowledgements represent an oversight on Davies's part? Does The Cunning Man, as Diamond-Nigh suggests, suffer from "lapses" in judgement on the part of its author? Davies's unspoken allusion to Frye highlights and parallels Hullah's unspoken allusion to Brocky Gilmartin.

However, the point about which Sugars has not speculated is whether Davies, for some literary purpose, deliberately arranges Hullah's unacknowledged debt to Brocky. Could

Davies be deliberately tipping his hat to Frye by way of the borrowed title? Could he be leaving the allusion slyly unacknowledged in order to parallel Hullah's lack of acknowledgment of Brocky? These issues make me wonder about possible alternative readings of this text. The content of the text suggests an "implied author" (discussed under Point of View in Chapter 2) who is inattentive and capable of "lapses;" however, I wonder whether that construct is a facade designed to mask a sly and capable writer who layers his text with a multitude of interpretable meanings. Genre, Narrative and Point of View in The Cunning Man:

In the remainder of this chapter and in Chapter 6,1 will add to and assess the above body of criticism. I will begin by approaching Davies's text in a manner similar to that in which I approached Richler's text. That is, I will offer a close reading of the text

focussing on genre, narrative and point of view and I will consider the text in relation to

age identity and progress/decline narratives.

Genre

Like Barney's Version, The Cunning Man incorporates a multitude of genre identities. As in Richler's text, the combined genre identity serves to mirror the complexity of the age identity of the text's protagonist. Mordecai Richler and Robertson

Davies both begin their stories by inciting curiosity in their readers. In the first paragraph ofBarney's Version, Barney introduces his intention to counter "scurrilous charges" (1).

In the first paragraph of The Cunning Man, Hullah introduces the mystery surrounding the death of Father Ninian Hobbes. Hullah speculates, "Should I have taken the false teeth? In my years as a police surgeon I would certainly have done so" (3). However, we soon learn that, like Barney's Version, The Cunning Man is not just a murder mystery but also a Reifungsroman, a history, a comedy and a subtle satire. Davies's stance as Dr.

Hullah allows us to consider the text as pseudo-autobiography as well; and perhaps the debt the text owes to Jung qualifies it to be something else - something which I could name "psychography." Patricia Monk describes Davies's interest in the workings of human personality and his reliance on Jung's work as a foundation for his writing: 87

Jung resolves the mystery of the human personality in the concept of the

self- a human being developed to the fullest potential of that inner

infinity - as part of a complex theory of the nature of consciousness and

the unconscious in the individual and in the group which also includes the

concept of the archetypes of the unconscious. It is on this massively

structured, complex theory that Davies draws, but within the whole sweep

of Jung's ideas and theories Davies's own interest is quite specific. He

concentrates on the 'mystery of human personality,' and is fascinated by

what, ultimately, we mean by the term 'human.' (Monk 4)

As Monk suggests, Davies's entire oeuvre could be considered to be an exploration of personality. Since his texts explore the Jungian beliefs on which he bases his own life, perhaps his work should also be considered to be a type of autobiography. Diamond-Nigh writes that Davies "has always believed that a person's essence, however maturely grasped within, can never be authentically captured and conveyed to others by means of biography, but must await a fictional rendition to be justly perceived" (5).

Davies's voice is readily recognizable due to its formality and due to the tendency of his characters to speak in long sentences that more closely resemble written rather than spoken language. Diamond-Nigh reports that "Davies's novels have been characterized as more apropos the nineteenth century than the late twentieth^. .]It seems as if the aesthetic concerns of the recent decades have passed him by, and that is why he is often considered out of date" (18). However, she astutely points out that the archetypal and representative nature of the characters and the musings by its self-reflexive artist characters should be interpreted not as evidence of Davies's antiquation but as indicators 88

of his post-modernism. Diamond-Nigh argues that the combination of romance and

realism which arises out of the "strong underpinning of myth" in Davies's work makes

his writing "ahead of its time" - makes it something akin to the magical realism of the

new Latin American novel "characterized by the impossibility of separating what is real

from what is magic" (18-20).

Both Barney's Version and The Cunning Man challenge convention by resisting

static genre identification. Alternatively, we could say that they both embrace some of the

apparent traits of late twentieth-century post-modern literature, one of which is the

resistance of genre identification. As well, the obvious individuality of both protagonists

challenges convention by resisting fixed or stereotypical age depiction. The many ways

in which the texts mirror the concept of multiplicity reinforce the underlying premise in

each text that identity is multiple, fluid and continually evolving over time.

Narrative Structure

As in Richler's text, Davies's text and his protagonist's narration can be figured

as "little narratives" by which Davies and Hullah enter into dialogue with the larger or

"meta" narratives of their respective societies. Davies's use of a narrator in the process of

writing his own narrative lends a distinctly self-reflexive quality to the text. It invites us

to query in what ways Davies hopes to counter prevailing cultural narratives and, for the

specific purposes of this thesis, in what ways the text has succeeded in countering prevailing narratives relating to identity and aging.

As is the case in Barney's Version, The Cunning Man's text begins its narration in the character's present and in his old age, seeing the past through the eyes of numerous 89 younger focalizers. Thereby, Davies places our focus on the protagonist's achievement of his current identity rather than on the process by which it has developed. We are told that

Hullah has written his Case-Book jottings over a period of about four years, the final section being written after the narrator reaches 65 years of age. Consequently, even within the novel's present time we "see" through a number of focalizers. Thereby, the continuous living and growing of the older protagonist is emphasized. Davies relays the tale of the protagonist's youth for the purpose of explaining how Hullah has become his current self. Hullah's reminiscences and the memoir which they prompt serve as an opportunity for him to reassess, sift and edit his previous experiences. They provide an opportunity for him to come to an understanding of who he is today. The colander metaphor from Barney's Version could be applied equally aptly to The Cunning Man; both men are in the process of sifting and straining their memories. Hullah explains that although he originally had jotted down notes in order to ascertain what to tell Esme about the mysteries of St. Aidan's church, the writing has become increasingly compelling. He writes, "If I leave a few notes on the story in my poorly kept Case Book, somebody may find it when I am dead. What they will find is much more than 'a few notes' but when I wrote this I did not know how much my story would possess me" (4). The doctor attempts to convince his readers of the veracity of bis "narrative" or "version" of the facts as they occurred, and to convince them of his own preferred interpretation of the identity of Dr. Jonathan Hullah.

The term "narrative" refers to the overt voice in the text as well as to the foundations which support that voice. As discussed in Chapter 2, narratology considers the role of such narrative structures as underlying myths or archetypes. In the assessment of Davies's texts, as Chapter 4 indicates, these structures have received particular attention. He and Northrop Frye could be considered to be two key Canadian academics responsible for the promotion and prominence of this type of literary criticism in Canada following the middle of the twentieth century. Considering the amount of notice Jungian themes have received in Davies's oeuvre throughout his career - bom by Davies and by his critics - their consideration has to be seen as relevant in an analysis of his final novel

The Cunning Man. Along with identity and age narratives, the Jungian narrative is an established mode with and against which this novel creates meaning. This idea will be developed further in Chapter 6.

Point of View

When we consider the genre identities and narrative voices and structures of

Barney's Version and The Cunning Man, we see distinct similarities between the two. texts, but when we look at point of view, we see that the authors' techniques diverge. In

Barney's Version, there is a clear sense that Richler's authorial voice remains distinct from the narrative voice, because Richler indicates the unreliability of Barney's narration in various ways. By contrast, Davies presents a convincingly authoritative Dr. Hullah.

Except for a few brief insertions in the form of letters from Chips to Barbara Hepworth, wherein we get an external picture of Hullah, Davies and his protagonist keep a firm grip on first-person perspective (325). Near the end of the text, Hullah explains that, "I really did not begin to write ['a few things about my life'] down until rather less than four years ago when Miss Esme Barron of the Colonial Advocate came to pump me about the history of the district of Toronto in which I live" (469). Unlike Barney who is writing to 91 defend himself against his rival's soon-to-be published text, Hullah has been placed in a position of authority by Esme's request for information about the past. There is an emphasis throughout on Hullah's solitary individualism, and although Davies presents

Hullah in the context of his community, the character is prone to lengthy introspection.

This privileged white male may espouse belief in Anangke or destiny, but the narrative style and the authority with which the character interacts with others suggests that Hullah suspects that he has the ability to control the fate of himself and others. Unlike Barney,

Hullah handles the entirety of his narration with little interruption from other sources.

Davies's gradual exploration of the doctor's past coupled with his attention to the further evolution of the doctor's life in the present serves as an illustration of the gradual achievement of identity over time. The text reveals that Hullah's life experiences and relationships have woven together to form a multiple and fluid identity web - a present identity which is still capable of mobility as the character continues to age while already old. Section IV of Hullah's text showcases the aged protagonist's admirable ongoing adaptation to changes in the society in which he lives. The Cunning Man illustrates that

Hullah's identity continues to evolve as he lives past the age of 65 years, and it is decisively not a tale of the past told from the perspective of a static, unchanging old man.

The text makes clear that part of Hullah's ongoing living involves the adaptation of his earlier cultural attitudes and behaviours.

Like Barney, Hullah attempts a mid-to-late-life relationship with a younger woman. Hullah's aspiration to wed the reporter Esme (who is also the young widow of his godson), his attendance as a young man at the single-sex school Colborne College and numerous other details of the text could be seen as proof of a stereotypical patriarchal stance on the part of the protagonist (and his author); and I will acknowledge that Hullah tells the type of male-centric story which could irritate those of us with feminist

convictions. However, the story does not end by following this cliched patriarchal pattern to its conclusion. Hullah's intended relationship with Esme is interrupted by the woman's

own agency, although that agency apparently only leads her to become engaged to a younger protector.5 However, I would argue, that once Hullah recovers from his misbegotten romance, Davies through Hullah depicts an aged protagonist who appears to be in the process of evolving past his previous cultural expectations and habits. In fact, the text contests stereotypical presentations of the male by showing the aged protagonist adapting to new circumstances. As his body ages, Hullah takes the advice of his nurse and begins to exercise and accept Chris' maintenance ministrations. Davies writes,

"Twice a week now I lay on Christofferson's table as she searche[s] out stiff spots, aching spots, and tense spots on my body; she [is] a masterful masseuse" (441). Here we

see the doctor keeping pace with his culture as well as with the changing needs of his body. Hullah evolves past his earlier patriarchal stance by developing a care-sharing model wherein he and his nurse/colleague become more equal as he ages and wherein he

eventually finds social support from his male companion Hugh McWearie. In her text

From Old Woman to Older Women, age-studies scholar Sally Chivers describes this type

of seriatim support network as a potential coping strategy for aging single women, but

surprisingly Davies's text claims it for its male protagonist (81). This care-sharing model

and the central lesbian relationship in the novel are in keeping with new-configuration-

family models. Dr. Hullah accepts both readily. Yet, both counter the stereotypical

3 Davies' earlier novel Murther and Walking Spirits discloses considerably more agency on this young widow's part since it reveals that Dr. Hullah's godson (and her husband Gil) was murdered by Esme's lover. 93 nuclear-family model associated with pre-feminism attitudes wherein one man (provider),

one woman (homemaker) and their children were thought to constitute the only valid

family configuration. Arguably these inclusions in the novel reveal that the aging

protagonist is adapting to changes in his surrounding culture. Possibly the aging author is

adapting as well.

Hullah's identity is continuously being achieved and renewed. It does not remain

static. By comparison, Barney's identity also changes; but it changes in that since his cultural attitudes do not keep pace with the changes wrought by feminism in his society, he ends up a lonely divorced man yearning poignantly for his wife's return. Barney's

identity changes, but unlike Hullah, he is unable to update his cultural attitudes. Thus he

cannot accommodate his wife Miriam's evolving need to prove herself in the working world. Unlike Barney's Version, The Cunning Man appears to be a narrative wherein,

despite occasional challenges, the protagonist manages to adjust adequately to the altered

environment in which he must live. Thus the book and its protagonist appear to maintain

both a narrative of progress and an attitude of progress well into Hullah's old age and to

do so with relative ease. Like Barney, Hullah appears to maintain hope. Like Barney,

Hullah achieves financial success. Unlike Barney, Hullah appears to enjoy good health,

sustaining social relationships, professional acclaim and meaningful work - up to and

beyond the final page of the text. "The Cunning Man" enjoys all of this even though by

the end of the text he has lived well over a decade longer than Barney. In the final pages

of the text, Dr. Hullah describes bis life as, "Gain, every moment of it" (513). Can we

therefore claim that The Cunning Man contradicts the prevailing age narrative, as 94 identified by Gullette and Woodward, which would assume that by his age he would have embraced an attitude of decline?

As in my discussion of Barney, consideration of progress and decline in relation to Hullah's life reveals more complexity than is suggested by the straight-forward, either/or binary of our culture's prevailing narrative. In the next chapter, I will challenge

Hullah's declaration of "gain" by responding to Cynthia Sugar's questions in regard to

Hullah' s possible lack of self-knowledge. 95

Chapter 6: The Cunning Man - Behind the Curtain of Progress

As indicated in the "Review of Other Criticism" section in Chapter 5, critics have argued that Davies's oeuvre showcases his belief in the Jungian search for integration of self. I agree that on first impression Dr. Jonathan Hullah may appear to be "The Cunning

Man" and may appear to embody the Jungian ideal, but in this chapter I will argue that the text also facilitates interpretation of an opposing view - that is, that Dr. Hullah can be seen as a man merely masquerading competency and wholeness, both to others and to himself. Hullah's apparent "cunning man" status contributes to the maintenance of an apparent narrative of progress, but it masks an interior self which displays much less self- assurance. The protagonist who at first glance may appear to exemplify the Jungian ideal and who may appear to embrace an anti-decline age attitude is, by my alternative interpretation of the text, a man whose progressions and declines form as intermingled a web as Barney's do and a man whose ability to understand bis inner self is questionable.

If we "look behind the curtain," as the ending of The Cunning Man implies we should, we can see that the ambiguities of Davies's text invite an ironic interpretation; I believe that the sections which initially do not seem to make sense should not be construed to be, as Diamond-Nigh suggests, mere "ramblings," nor should they be seen to be indicative of

"the failure to integrate and explore many themes that Davies had lightly proffered"

(Diamond-Nigh 51). If we decipher the text's puzzles and unravel its layers, Davies allows us to see an insecure protagonist who actually lacks the self-awareness he is touted as having. As well, if affirmative age ideology prompts a sufficiently thorough scrutiny of the text, then we can see an old author who is creative and clever enough to write a text which presents increasingly sophisticated layers of meaning with each re-reading. 96

Admittedly, on first perusal, the text suggests that Dr. Jonathan Hullah is the epitome of success and self-knowledge. He could even be construed to be a potential

"poster-boy" of an anti-decline narrative. Lynn Diamond-Nigh states in the text

Robertson Davies: Life, Work, and Criticism that, The Cunning Man, like the rest of

Davies's novels, appears to be an illustration of the Jungian ideal. She argues that the text portrays in Dr. Jonathan Hullah a man who has achieved individuation, who he is "The

Cunning Man," one who has integrated the dualities of wisdom and knowledge. The novel reveals a man who asserts that he has found the balance between science and magic and who believes that he can administer to patients more effectively than other practitioners can. As well, Hullah graciously accepts the title "The Cunning Man" assigned to him by his community. He confidently commissions the artist Emily to create for him a caduceus representing "'the Warring Serpents of Hermes - Knowledge and

Wisdom, balanced in an eternal tension'" in order that he may proclaim his beliefs and abilities publicly on his clinic wall (334). The doctor does not appear to lack self-esteem.

The tenor of Davies's writing in Hullah's Case Book situates the events and people in the doctor's life as mere props or mirrors which help him to explore his selfhood; and the author and his narrator position those mirrors in a way which shows the doctor to advantage. Hullah's self-designed history showcases its principal character,

"The Cunning Man," by setting him against a backdrop composed of others' failures. The text tells us that Charlie Iredale, who along with Brocky Gilmartin has been Jon's

Colborne College friend, fulfils his childhood ambition and becomes a priest; but we later learn that Charlie fails because he does not find adequate means to balance his intense spirituality. After helping to build St. Aldan's Church into a prominent cultural and 97 religious centre, Charlie commits the murder of Father Ninian Hobbes. Consequently, his career and his health both plummet, resulting in his eventual death. The artist Emily similarly meets destruction when, according to our narrator's opinion, her inability to accept her lack of brilliance as an artist leads her to contract a fatal cancer. She compares herself unfavourably to the more capable artist Barbara Hepworth, and allows what Monk calls the "inner god" of art to destroy her (Monk 156). Monk's text The Smaller Infinity:

The Jungian Self in the Novels of Robertson Davies can provide us with background information on this aspect of The Cunning Man. In it, she explains that for Davies art

"subsumes the artist's ego so thoroughly that little or no distinction can be made by the artist between himself and his daimon" (Monk 156). Thus it could be said that Charlie and Emily are consumed by their respective excesses. Hullah's account leads us to conclude that neither character has achieved the sort of balance which purportedly sustains The Cunning Man.

The doctor's Case-Book jottings suggest that Brocky Gilmartin also represents a failure. Although this childhood friend achieves his ambition to become a professor of

English literature, he ultimately fails in that he is unable to produce the important book which he had intended to write. Hullah mentions that Brocky has "done very well as a scholar, but he hasn't written the great book he talked of (482)6. Our narrator pens a story which presents a positive picture of himself and a comparatively negative picture of the other individuals around him. His own successful self-possessed state is showcased by those others in his company who have been unable to achieve similar success in their

61 should point out that Hullah self-deprecatingly does add, "Look at me; the more I see of illness the less I know," but this is offered during a therapeutic talk designed to cheer up Charlie in the face of his failures (Davies 482). lives. Hullah's "version" informs us that he, "The Cunning Man," displays an unparalleled mastery of wisdom and knowledge.

Superficially, Davies's text appears to provide a helpful illustration of Gullette's exhortation that chronological aging need not be associated with a decline narrative. The story ends with the protagonist in good physical and financial health, supported by friends and engaged in a meaningful writing project. Dr. Hullah's adaptation to his new situation - that is, his acceptance of the generalized decline of patriarchal and Anglo- centric supremacy and the disintegration of his former way of life at St. Aldan's - seems to allow him to continue his attitude of progress well into old age. But as I read the text my suspicions are aroused; I think it is unlikely that Robertson Davies would suggest that self-knowledge and knowledge of others can be as absolute as the implied author of the text seems to suggest they are.

Richler's Barney's Version encourages readers with its suggestion that it is possible to reject a narrative of decline by grimly clinging to hope, but it simultaneously suggests that our ability to discern the identity of self and others is suspect. My analysis ofBarney's Version suggests the impossibility of conclusively determining a state of either progress or decline in an individual's life. Is it not likely that Robertson Davies, a man renowned for his intellectual capabilities, would also reveal complexity in the protagonist of this his final text?

The more we look into The Cunning Man, Hullah's potential as a model of absolute progress increasingly disappears. Close reading reveals that, like Barney, Hullah navigates an intricate maze of decline and progress over the entire course of his lifetime.

For example, as a child, he experiences a seemingly disastrous decline in which he 99 suffers a near-fatal childhood illness. Davies writes, "At last the thermometer rose to 106, and Dr. Ogg told my parents that I was not likely to live overnight" (24). But the illness turns out to be a fortuitous opportunity for the future doctor to learn from the mysterious aboriginal healer Mrs. Smoke (21-28). Hullah's temporary loss of health results in a gained opportunity when he is stimulated to learn about the mysteries of healing. As a consequence of his temporary decline, he is able to progress towards the establishment of his future career. As a young serviceman he suffers another serious period of decline when the explosion of a German bomb precipitates his entrapment in a bathtub for four days prior to rescue (235-8). Although he comes close to death by dehydration and exposure to cold, the experience leads to his placement in a hospital and the consequent commencement of his life-long role as holistic physician and "cunning man." Davies explains, "though physically I recovered in about ten days, I was in a bad mental state, and that recovery was slow[... ]But I had what I must call a revelation in that tub and very slowly I came to some conclusions that have been important in shaping my life ever since" (238). Since each of these life-threatening experiences included the promise of progress within them, we can see that Davies's text contradicts the cultural narrative figuring aging as a straight trip uphill followed by decline. Also significant is the point that during his childhood illness and during his bathtub entrapment Hullah is much closer to experiencing death than he is as an old man at the end of the text. As he ages, Hullah traverses a web of intermingled progress and decline - a web which is much more complex than our culture's prevailing age narratives suggest.

I have earlier quoted Hullah as saying that his life was "Gain, every moment of it"

(513). However, prior to that proclamation he is in the process of pointing out aspects of 100 his life which position him in a decline. He mentions his loss of the church community at

St. Aidan's and his loss of first Nuala and then Esme, yet he then writes, "But—no gains?

Has it all been loss and downhill journey? Certainly not. To have known these people was a rich experience for me" (513). (Note that he specifically references the idea of going "downhill" which suggests that he and his author have taken conscious notion of that particular narrative.) As he reviews the situation, he concludes that he is not in a position of decline, but I am suspicious that this may merely indicate that he is attempting to adhere to an expected position of optimism. We could interpret that he has successfully cheered himself by recounting the benefits in his life, but he could also just be assuming a mask of good cheer. This and other examples in the text indicate that the paths of progress and decline in The Cunning Man create the same sort of confused and networked web of interaction which we have seen in Barney's Version. As in Ricmer's text, the model of an either/or binary of progress or decline is not complex enouglRo encompass the complicated intersections of loss and gain experienced by Hullah. The

Cunning Man contests the culturally prevalent narrative which constructs age by means of a progress/decline binary and offers a similar alternative to that which Barney's

Version offers. In The Cunning Man, aging is shown to consist of a complex web mixing progress with decline throughout all chronological stages.

The Cunning Man speaks to the challenge of accurately interpreting exhibited attitudes in regard to aging and progress and decline. Each of us brings a set of established ideologies to our reading of a text and our reading is restricted by these parameters. In the case of The Cunning Man, our pre-existing age ideology predisposes our interpretation of the text. Our attitude towards aging affects the way we see the protagonist, the text and the author. As I have discussed in Chapter 1, Western culture perpetuates contradictory expectations in regard to age. For example, some construe that age brings wisdom, while others simultaneously maintain that eighty-year-olds are usually mentally incompetent. Some eighty-year-olds do have reduced abilities and other eighty-year-olds do have great wisdom; however both stereotypical ways of thinking essentialize aged persons. Both fail to anticipate the unique combination of traits that makes up each individual and both overlook the myriad of other characteristics which old people may individually exhibit. Preconceived assumptions regarding age-related traits will direct readers' interpretations of both the contents and the author of a text.

Thus we see that analysis of The Cunning Man has the capacity to challenge another of Western culture's questionable age narratives. That is, it facilitates our consideration of the expectations we each bring to our reading of relatively old artists. In the text From Old Woman to Older Women: Contemporary Culture and Women's

Narratives, Sally drivers points out that in La Vieillesse, a text widely considered to be foundational to Age Studies' scholarship, the author Simone de Beauvoir expresses the belief that old age and creativity do not and cannot coexist. Chivers writes,

Rather than being better able to write fiction because of increased life

experience, de Beauvoir argues that, because novels rely on imaginative

extensions of inner convictions, elderly novelists risk simply repeating

themselves. A novel must engage with readers' imaginations, and, in her

disappointing view, an elderly writer is past imagining new possibilities.

(9) 102

Chi vers disagrees with de Beauvoir's views on the decline of creativity in association

with aging. She argues that if we "challenge[.. .]destructive attitudes toward

age[...]rather than replicating troubling patterns, then old age itself could be an utterly

different stage of life" (9).

In the article "Creativity across the Life Course? Titian, Michelangelo, and Older

Artist Narratives," Stephen Katz and Erin Campbell discuss the "two opposing narratives" which Western culture has ascribed to the relationship between aging and

creativity. According to Katz and Campbell, one narrative suggests that "there are mid

life peaks after which creativity either declines into unimaginative aesthetic expressions

or hardens into static stylistic conventions" and the "second narrative asserts that

creativity continues, grows, and renews itself across the life span and throughout an

artist's life in immeasurable ways" (101). Katz and Campbell argue that the issue of late-

life artistic style needs to be considered further. In late life, artists may think thoughts

which deviate from those expressed in their earlier oeuvre and they may probe new

feelings in unexpected ways. Thus they may work with an altered style, all of which may

be underappreciated by a culture with its own set of preconceived expectations.

The majority of critics of The Cunning Man seem to have been operating under

the assumption that an old author is likely to be in an age-induced decline and thus should

not be expected to show imaginative and artistic creativity. Critics may have associated

Davies's advanced age with a reduction in ability and may have embraced the view that

old authors can produce only less successful repeats of their previous texts. Thinking

thusly, they would accept any apparent "lapses" as reasonable and would not be looking

for any new directions in Davies's work. None appear to have seen a need to probe 103 further in order to discover an explanation for the identified weaknesses and perceived ambiguities in Davies's text. For example, Lynn Diamond Nigh does not query why

Davies "rambles" about seemingly irrelevant topics and Cynthia Sugars does not query why Davies's protagonist overlooks the fact that Brocky is the source of the medico- analytic method. In fairness, perhaps they do not expect a text to facilitate a reader's understanding of its intrigues. Nonetheless, analysis of The Cunning Man can yield more than they have uncovered.

Critics have acknowledged that in his earlier novels Davies demonstrates evidence of creativity and skill. I have approached The Cunning Man by starting from the premise that Davies's creative mind may have remained the same or may have been improved by aging. I admit that I wondered in my first reading of The Cunning Man whether Davies should have allowed freer rein to his editor; but I have looked at the apparent "lapses" of the text and now think that they contribute something important to the meaning of the text. I now think that Davies and Richler are relatively old artists who are thinking new thoughts - thoughts which deviate from or grow beyond those expressed in their earlier works. I acknowledge that it is not possible to discern authorial intention definitively, but I would argue that reviews to date have not looked hard enough at Davies's possible artistic goals in creating The Cunning Man and thus have overlooked possibly significant interpretations. If we approach the text with the attitude that an octogenarian such as Davies may be writing with skill and subtlety rather than with decreased ability, a new meaning of The Cunning Man emerges. In the remainder of this chapter, I will explore an ironic reading of the text, wherein Davies presents Hullah as a man who lacks self-awareness and wherein Davies suggests that knowledge of self and 104

others is much more difficult to discern than an initial or superficial reading of the text

suggests it to be. Extrapolating from this, I will argue that perhaps Davies himself can be figured as the publicly proclaimed "Cunning Man" who in private simultaneously holds a more insecure opinion of himself and his abilities.

In order to discern the irony in The Cunning Man, the distance between the voice of the text's narrator and the underlying voice of the text must be noted. Richler makes the distinction obvious, but Davies does not. The pseudo-author, Jonathan Hullah, should not be confused with the text's implied author, and neither of those should be confused with the actual author, Robertson Davies. Hullah's tight-fisted first-person narrative style makes me suspicious of the protagonist's seemingly persistent attitude of progress.

Perhaps the apparent authority of the textual style could be interpreted to be an authorial

suggestion that Hullah experiences a compulsion to exert control over his external

environment and a suggestion that readers should consider why that is so.

One of the curious speeches, which Diamond-Nigh might have been referencing

when she talks about the text's "rambling quality and failure to integrate and explore

many themes[...] lightly proffered," is Hullah's long ode to the mastery of irony (51).

During a lengthy description of his past theatrical involvements and adventures, Hullah

describes his relationship with and his regard for Darcy Dwyer. While Hullah's insertion

of the speech is seemingly random, Davies's discussion of Dwyer's mastery of irony

serves as a reason to introduce an in-depth explanation of "'Ironia, which we call the drye

mock.'" Veering away from any further active development of the plot - which a reader

seeking entertainment might prefer at this point in the text - Davies, using the voice of

Hullah, explains that irony is: Not sarcasm, which is like vinegar, or cynicism, which is so often the

voice of disappointed idealism, but a delicate casting of a cool and

illuminating light on life, and thus an enlargement. The ironist is not bitter,

he does not seek to undercut everything that seems worthy or serious, he

scorns the cheap scoring-off of the wisecracker. He stands, so to speak,

somewhat at one side, observes and speaks with a moderation which is

occasionally embellished with a flash of controlled exaggeration. He

speaks from a certain depth, and thus he is not of the same nature as the

wit, who so often speaks from the tongue and no deeper. The wit's desire

is to be funny; the ironist is only funny as a secondary achievement. (159)

If we assume that Davies is a creative and capable aged artist who would not have included this section for no reason, we need to ask what possible motivation he might have for drawing attention to the technique of irony. If we consequently assume that

Davies's depiction of Hullah as "The Cunning Man" can be taken to be ironic, then an alternate interpretation of the text follows.

As I mention in Chapter Four, Cynthia Sugars points out that in designing the retirement writing project which Hullah entitles The Anatomy of Fiction the doctor has appropriated Brocky's Colborne College literary presentation. Hullah designs a medico- analytic approach to literature by borrowing from Brocky's childhood dissertation on the theatrical consequences of Shakespeare's constipation, and then calls it his own innovation. As Sugars rightly points out, Hullah does not seem to see his own unconsciously motivated actions. But while it is reasonable to suggest that Hullah might have been unaware that he got the idea for his project from Brocky, I do not think that it 106 is reasonable to suggest that Davies would have forgotten that this is the source of his protagonist's idea. If we make the assumption that old authors are not necessarily mentally reduced, then we must ponder why Davies chooses to have Hullah overlook the source of his inspiration.

The Anatomy of Fiction obviously derives from Brocky's idea, but Davies does not choose to show Hullah acknowledging its source. Thus, the relationship between

Hullah and Brocky draws my attention. At the beginning of the text, when the two meet at Colborne College, Davies presents Brocky as a boy who has the savvy to assume appropriate fashions and mannerisms, whereas he presents Hullah as a boy who feels awkwardly out of place. We first watch Brocky verbally tie Hullah into knots with literary references and then we hear him proclaim that, "the day after tomorrow, being

Saturday, you and I will go downtown and get you a few things that will bring you out of the nineteenth century. Till then, I suppose you must go on with that terrible horse-collar"

(59). The two boys become friends,bu t throughout its entirety, the text demonstrates that they are also rivals.Thi s point is foundational to my interpretation of the text.

When Hullah returns home after serving his country at war, he discovers that during the interim Brocky has stolen his girlfriend Nuala. In spite of the marriage between Nuala and Brocky, for many years afterwards, Hullah acts as Nuala's covert lover. Accordingly, there is room for readers to interpret that the rivalry, at least from

Hullah's perspective, continues. But Hullah eventually learns that Brocky has not been as ignorant of their relationship as he had hoped. Apparently, Brocky had uncovered the affair between Hullah and Nuala by hiring a private detective but had chosen to confront only Nuala about it. Hullah's Case Book jottings describe that he, Nuala and Brocky 107

eventually discuss the affair and its implications, and do so with little apparent distress on

anyone's part. Hullah stresses that there was "only a muted row in the dining-room of the

York Club." The doctor points out that there was acceptance and civility when it "should have been utterly unacceptable (425). Brocky asks, '"how could you do what^ou were doing? Making a cuckold of a man you think of as your best friend?'" but, according to

Hullah's narration, Brocky feels largely unchallenged by his wife's relationship with

Hullah (422). Awareness of the distance between the authorial voice and the narrative voice prompts us to question the extent to which Hullah is underreporting the anger and resentment he feels about his rival Brocky in this situation. Davies provides enough information to hint that Hullah may be harbouring more unresolved emotion than is obviously evident but not enough information to preclude the interpretation that Hullah is indeed "The Cunning Man." The text's surface hides complicated potential layers of meaning, just as the text's protagonist hides complex possibilities within his superficially apparent public persona.

Hullah confesses that as a result of his meeting with Brocky and Nuala he is forced to see himself "not as Lancelot of the Lake, the self-hating adulterer, and decidedly not as the figure in the centre ring of the circus, but as a side-show in the lives of the two people I loved best" (426). The fact that Brocky makes little fuss about

Hullah's role causes Hullah to feel reduced in stature. At the same meeting, Hullah discovers that Gil, whom he suspected might be his own offspring, is in fact the son of

Brocky. Both Nuala and Brocky aver that Gil is Brocky's rather than Hullah's son, thus ending Hullah's hopes of progeny and any associated benefits; and although it is the death of Gil which precipitates the said meeting (of Hullah, Brocky and Nuala at the 108

York Club following the funeral), Gil's widow Esme manages to produce a grandchild for Brocky and Nuala by the end of the text. Hullah mentions the baby in his jottings, describing "the birth of her daughter, posthumous child of Gil" (470).

Very little grief is expressed in regards to the death of Gil and very little anger is expressed in regards to Nuala's betrayal of her lover and husband. When considered closely, these events and the associated feelings or lack of them on the part of Hullah,

Nuala and Brocky seem suspect. Can we as readers consider the narrator to be reliable on these points? Can we believe that Hullah feels no great resentment towards the rival who not only has stolen his life-long lover, but also has fathered the child (that is, the representative future) that would have been his if that rival had not stolen Nuala? Near the end of the text, we are told that the doctor recovers from his love for Nuala, and that a short while later he abruptly "falls in love" with Esme, the widow of Brocky's son Gil.

As Davies writes them, Hullah's relationships with females resemble a male competition more than they resemble romantic love. It is no coincidence that while he acknowledges no further claim on Nuala the doctor actively pursues acquisition of the young woman and child whom Brocky undoubtedly construes to be bis own. Through Hullah, Davies introduces this new twist to the plot as follows: "Spring was coming, and one morning I awoke with horror and astonishment to find that I was in love with Esme" (496). This odd and abrupt inclusion is as obliquely linked into the preceding prose as is Davies's earlier inclusion dealing with irony. Consequently, readers could be expected to assume that there is an agenda behind Hullah's sudden desire to usurp the grandchild and daughter-in-law of Brocky. I would argue that Davies expects readers to recognize these departures from his previously proficient writing form and question whether he may be employing the "drye mocke" himself. The abruptness of this introduction of a love

interest could be interpreted as Davies's hint that readers should consider why Hullah precipitously believes that he should become Esme's "protector." Hullah's desire to

acquire guardianship of her and her child represents a compulsion on the doctor's part to take all of what is Brocky' s for himself.

In writing The Anatomy of Fiction, Hullah will be attempting to write the great

book which Brocky intended to write. Davies subtly suggests that Hullah wants to

assume not only Brocky's progeny but also Brocky's professional competency in the

field of literature. By these means, Dr. Hullah could incur revenge for his injuries, usurp

his rival's power and emerge as the winner of the male competition established in their

childhood. Significantly, Hullah does not acknowledge any of the ways in which he is

attempting to defeat Brocky. From this we can infer that Hullah has repressed his resentment and hidden his extreme feelings from both himself and his readers.

Pursuing Sugars' argument, but adhering to the premise that age has not reduced this artist's ability, I would argue that Davies - by intent - is planting his protagonist's

apparent lack of self-knowledge. The text interpreted in this way suggests that a respected

and apparently self-aware aged man can potentially be a man who in actuality is driven

by insecurities, lacking in self-knowledge and driven to actions outside of his conscious control. Monk writes that "Davies, as we have seen, considers the devil to be 'not the

commonplace symbol of evil but the symbol of unconsciousness, of unknowing, of acting without knowledge of what you're intending to do'" (132). If we assume that Davies,

despite his age, is still a competent author, then we could conclude that he is relaying the

deliberate message that this old wise man Dr. Hullah is unable to see his own no unconscious desires, his own devil. Davies may be saying that, although Hullah sets himself up as "The Cunning Man" and thinks that he has achieved self-knowledge, he is mistaken. If we accept that Davies's dissertation on the meaning of irony is a carefully placed set of reading instructions, then we must suspect mat he wishes for readers to see that even an acclaimed wise man such as "The Cunning Man" may in truth lack self- awareness and wholeness.

Dave Little stresses that for Davies, the devil within us is the unrecognized dark part of ourselves, the part which we have difficulty seeing. He explains,

We also find in Jung the probable origin of Davies's concept of the

internal devil, for in "The psychology of the Unconscious' Jung affirms

the devil as 'a variant of the "shadow" archetype, i.e., of the dangerous

aspect of the unrecognized dark half of the personality.' (48)

Patricia Monk quotes Jung in this regard:

'Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's

conscious life, the blacker and denser it is[.. .]If the repressed tendencies,

the shadow as I call them, were obviously evil, there would be no problem

whatever. But the shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive,

unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. (Jung in Monk 36)

By these descriptions, Hullah can be defined as a being, not of obvious evil, but of inferior acuity.

If indeed Davies is employing the "dry mocke" in regard to the supposed self- knowledge of Hullah (and by extrapolation on his own and our capacity for self- knowledge too), and if readers and critics have been unable to interpret the text in this Ill way due to the ageist assumption that Davies's creativity must be diminished, then the irony becomes delightfully unstable - rendering the book's art far greater than has been assumed. The previously interpreted "ramblings" and "lapses" give way to new meaning and to humour too. What we would have is a "Cunning Man" (Davies) writing a book about a "Cunning Man"(Hullah), who is not really a "Cunning Man," but only hopes and purports himself to be one, and the authorial "Cunning Man" (Davies) being perceived by readers as deficient due to age bias, when in fact he is a "Cunning Man" indeed, who has the wisdom to know, that he is perhaps not, in fact, that cunning a man. I would argue that in writing The Cunning Man, Davies may in part be mocking his own public identity as a "Cunning Man."

Davies was aware of his age and aware of the public's speculations in regard to competency in old age. In a letter in Judith Grant's collection entitled Robertson Davies,

For Your Eyes Alone: Letters 1976-1995 (1999), he reports that he was invited to speak at Johns Hopkins Medical Centre "where they were having a series of meetings about old age." Davies writes:

they asked me to speak about creativity in old age, and as I am now

eighty, and still working steadily, I was assumed to know something about

it. What I told them was simply that if you have never been creative in

your younger days you must not expect to write, or paint, or compose

music simply because you have grown old. But if you have done these

things when young, you will probably go on till you drop. Who ever heard

of a 'retired' painter. (Davies qtd in Grant, 288) 112

By pointing out how ridiculous it would be to assume that new talent arrives with old age, he makes the point that the loss of creativity is equally unlikely to occur, thereby politely but adamantly denying the likelihood of the loss of creativity in aging.

In The Cunning Man, Davies confronts the sceptical attitude some readers hold towards his public persona while subtly calling into question his own failure to achieve self-knowledge and integration. The public image of self-aggrandisement which has followed Davies does not reconcile with the image of Davies revealed in the letters published by Grant These letters indicate that Davies is not entirely the arrogant, larger- than-life persona he is assumed to be by many of the reading public; indeed, they reveal a surprising vulnerability on his part Grant quotes Davies in a letter to Mordecai Richler:

These critics -1 do not know what you make of them but I am foolishly

open to destructive criticism and my digestion, sleep and — for the worst —

my self-confidence is shattered by these assaults. I picture myself reeling,

in deepening senility, from botch to botch, as Beckmessers7 with their

score boards and their clicking pencils mark me down[.. ..]I salute you

from the slough to which they have banished us. (150)

In this 1985 letter, Davies perceives that his public expects him to "reel" in "deepening senility" and produce increasingly bad art as he ages. Is it possible that The Cunning Man is a response to the negative messages which he considers to have been aimed at him? In

Val Ross's recent oral biography (2008), author Shyam Selvadurai recounts his impressions of Robertson Davies after sharing a stage and a van with him when they toured to present readings from their respective novels. Ross records his comments:

7 "Beckmesser was the name under which Wagner caricatured the critic Edward Hanslick in Die Meistersinger von Number^ (Grant's notes on the letters). 113

I saw that the tremendous adulation he had received tonight [at a reading]

was something he held slightly apart from him; that his theatricality, the

cape, the fedora, the walking stick, the white handkerchief that he brought

out periodically to mop his brow, were all part of a theatre performance

that in a curious way kept the audience [...] at a distance; a distance I have

now come to understand as vital. (Selvadurai qtd in Ross. 351)

Davies, like Hullah, was known in the public realm for his competent and flamboyant persona, but in the private realm, he was a shy and less arrogant man. In The Cunning

Man, Davies may be deliberately encouraging readers to interpret both Dr. Hullah and the author as self-aggrandizing "Cunning Men" while simultaneously querying the viability of "Cunning Man" status for either.

I would argue that Davies evidences a chameleon tendency towards flexibility in

The Cunning Man. In Ross's oral biography, Brenda Davies is quoted as saying "Rob could have two different opinions about the same event. I never argued with him because if he was losing he could go round to the other side. You never knew" (Davies qtd in

Ross, 341). Interpreting this novel in conjunction with certain comments in his letters, I see a master ironist providing a superficially entertaining story which supports one image while all the time inserting a deeper message into the text in which he negates that image and admits his and his character's ultimate failure to achieve self-knowledge.

At different points in the text, Davies indicates that the protagonist Hullah is a master at disguising his own attitudes. This further supports the argument that Davies may be instilling a deliberate subtext into The Cunning Man. When describing his early education at Colborne College, Hullah explains that he and his friends "learned a high 114 degree of cunning in concealing what our true nature might be[....] It was this last important lesson, the acquirement and concealment of cunning, that I had already some aptitude for" (17). Put more simply, the doctor is cunning at concealing his cunning.8

Describing his interactions with his patients, Dr. Hullah writes, "To these wretches I was a marvel of well-being. It was inconceivable to them that I might have any cares, disappointments, aches or pains, for these things were their exclusive property" (431).

Davies explains that the narrator chooses to appear to be in good mental health in order to assist his patients in their troubles, not because he is gifted with "infectious mental health." He concludes, "My appearance of well-being was a professional manner" (431).

Davies gives us the sense that there may be many concealed layers below Hullah's surface-level identity. He writes, "My occasional hours with Esme, where she probes my memory and my sensibilities with the blunt end of her reporter's pencil, hint to me that though I have become a more complicated fool, the fool that I was as a youth still lingers somewhere inside me" (160). By this, Davies suggests that, just as his protagonist harbours depths within himself, multiple meanings may be layered within the text. I suspect that Robertson Davies is advising his readers by these various inclusions that

Davies draws readers' attention to the term "cunning" by using it in both the title and the epigram. The OED provides the following definitions: 1. Knowledge; learning, erudition. Obs. 2. The capacity or faculty of knowing; wit, wisdom, intelligence. Obs. 3. Knowledge how to do a thing; ability, skill, expertness, dexterity, cleverness. (Formerly the prevailing sense; now only a literary archaism.) In contrast to these definitions, the OED also ascribes more ominous meanings: 4. A branch of knowledge or of skilled work; a science or art, a craft. In early times often = occult art, magic. Obs. 5. Now usually in a bad sense: Skill employed in a secret or underhand manner, or for purposes of deceit; skilful deceit, craft, artifice[....] As a personal quality: Disposition to use one's skill in an underhand way; skilfulness in deceiving, craftiness, artfulness. This disparity of meaning for the word "cunning" serves to reinforce my assertion that Davies deliberately facilitates alternative interpretations in this novel - particularly if considered in conjunction with bis reference to Burton's "cunning men, wizards, and white witches." 115 both the text and its protagonist may not be what they appear to be; and he may be advising his readers that Robertson Davies may not be what he appears to be either.

Davies suggests that our conceptualizations and efforts to understand ourselves and the world are to some extent hindered by our own inability to perceive. This message, like Richler's, is a sobering one. But pessimism on the part of the author can be denied on the grounds that Davies offers his ideas on the challenges inherent in the pursuit of self-knowledge within material which stimulates introspection. And the sly and winking manner in which Davies approaches his material suggests that the author is attempting to amuse himself while simultaneously attempting to entertain readers and confound critics.

Davies's disdain for self-advancing literary critics is evident in his personal letters. In the above-mentioned letter to Mordecai Richler in 1985, Davies expresses his anger towards those who make a living by criticising artists. He tells Richler about an article in which "you an(i I b°m have our noses roughly wiped by a couple of critics" and wherein the critics argue that his and Richler's "popularity is inexplicable." He retaliates against the criticism by telling Richler that "The academic critic, I think, settles on his mat on the campus and cries 'Give me tenure, and I will knock a book'" (qtd in Grant,

149). In Chapter 5,1 mention that Diamond-Nigh muses that "the final artistic theme -

Jonathan's Anatomy of Fiction - is admittedly puzzling and strikes the reader almost as a lapse" (44). I would argue that this puzzle can be solved by interpreting Hullah's medico- analytic critical method as an amusing parody of the literary critics in Davies's life.

Davies made it clear that for him the author was the ultimate authority. He frequently spoke out against what he saw as the ridiculous self-aggrandisement of literary critics. 116

This opinion was in direct opposition to that of his University of Toronto colleague,

literary critic Northrop Frye who writes in Anatomy of Criticism,

The poet may of course have some critical ability of his own, and so be

able to talk about his own work. But the Dante who writes a commentary

on the first canto of the Paradiso is merely one more of Dante's critics.

What he says has a peculiar interest, but not a peculiar authority. It is

generally accepted that a critic is a better judge of the value of a poem

than its creator, but there is still a lingering notion that it is somehow

ridiculous to regard the critic as the final judge of its meaning, even

though in practice it is clear that he must be. (7)

As Cynthia Sugars has pointed out, the unacknowledged intertext in The Cunning Man is the debt Davies owes to Northrop Frye for having borrowed the title of his text Anatomy

of Criticism in order to name Hullah's text Anatomy of Fiction. The two men were

colleagues together at the University of Toronto. Obviously, Davies knew of his and

Frye's mutual interest in literature's underlying archetypes. Clearly, he was aware of

Frye's extensive contribution to Canadian literature's discussion of narratology. I would

argue that by using the title and by pretending to reference only Burton, Davies offers

both tribute and ridicule to the great Toronto literary critic of his time, Northrop Frye.

In the article "The Liar of Orpheus: Framing Devices and Narrative Structure in

Robertson Davies's Cornish Trilogy," Ian Munro comments on Davies's battle of wits

with critics. Munro believes that the majority of them underestimate Davies, and he

explains that "[t]his opinion of Davies is widespread; he is seen primarily as a popular

but old-fashioned writer, cranking out entertaining yet conventional novels which display 117 not only a Victorian morality but also a Victorian transparency of literary motive." But

Munro asserts that, "[w]hen one analyzes the techniques and devices through which

Davies constructs his work, a different writer emerges, one whose writing thrives on the ambivalence and incompleteness which characterize the postmodern text" (258). Munro's discussion does not address The Cunning Man directly, but he does confirm my argument that Davies's writing offers an underappreciated complexity. He points out that "the novels encourage[.. .]a misreading" (257-8). In his analysis of The Rebel Angels, Munro discusses the "hidden or implied text which contradicts" (265). Munro's comments support my argument that in The Cunning Man Davies deliberately facilitates multiple interpretations. I would argue that Davies's final text contains within it the seeds which enable its own contradiction.

More grounds for suspicion of Davies's disguise in The Cunning Man reveal themselves in the text's concluding scene. Davies's protagonist informs a telephone caller, who mistakenly thinks that he has reached a movie theatre, that "No, this is the

Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Good-night" (514). While this ending combines up-beat humour with grim acknowledgment of the mortality of the protagonist and his author, most significantly, it also suggests that people are performers and that Davies's revelation of the protagonist's identity and his account of past events may not be as transparent as it first appears. We know that Davies himself was avidly and actively involved in theatre throughout his lifetime.9 Thus we can interpret that Davies is advising readers to look beneath the superficially apparent - in this text, within its author and within themselves - in the same way in which good Jungian students would attempt

9 See Michael Peterman's study of Davies, 1986. 118 to look beneath the superficial in their own minds and lives. We could take these final words of Davies as a suggestion that the protagonist, his novelist and his readers are playing a role - and that there may be unknowable depths beneath those roles. By referencing the illusion inherent in theatre, Davies and his character neatly conclude the play by stepping back out of sight behind the stage's curtain, but he invites his audience to join him there.

Results:

My interpretation of The Cunning Man facilitates consideration of the theories of

Age Studies' scholarship, particularly those of Kathleen Woodward and Margaret

Morganroth Gullette on the topics of age identity and the prevalent progress-and-decline age narrative of our culture. My analysis demonstrates that The Cunning Man can be interpreted as an illustration of the complexity of human identity. The protagonist Dr.

Jonathan Hullah provides an example of the multiplicity and fluidity of identity; and, by its disclosure of the development of his life, the text exemplifies and confirms the theory that identity is achieved continuously during the process of aging. Furthermore, like

Barney's Version, The Cunning Man questions the acuity of our perception of that identity - both in ourselves and in others. My analysis demonstrates that The Cunning

Man illustrates a relationship between the culturally imposed, progress-and-decline age narrative and the life course of a complex individual. Like Barney's Version, The

Cunning Man contests the larger age narrative by voicing an alternative narrative which fractures the either/or binary of the progress-and-decline narrative and replaces it with a narrative wherein people of all ages continuously navigate a web of loss and gain. 119

My discussion of The Cunning Man suggests that age-related expectations may have biased earlier critics' analyses. In my approach to the text, I choose to anticipate creativity in an aging artist and consequently expect ongoing artistic capability on

Davies's part. Thus I discover that Davies's presentation of Dr. Hullah as "The Cunning

Man" can be interpreted ironically. My reading of The Cunning Man voices an alternative narrative which suggests that an outwardly expressed, culturally induced, progress narrative may mask an interior attitude of decline. I argue that the text suggests that knowledge of aging people's attitudes towards themselves and others may be inaccessible

- masked beneath apparent narratives of progress and/or decline. 120

Chapter 7: Conclusion -Navigating the Web of Decline and Progress

With my analysis of Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version and Robertson

Davies's The Cunning Man I present and apply some key theoretical ideas from Age

Studies' scholarship, in particular the work done by Margaret Morganroth Gullette and

Kathleen Woodward on the achievement of age identity and on the cultural imposition of decline-and-progress narratives. I have advanced two goals: to encourage consideration of age-related issues and to draw attention to the literary creative and theoretical works on the subject of age.

As Chapters 4 and 6 have concluded, the novels Barney's Version and The

Cunning Man illustrate Gullette's assertion that human identity is fluid and multiple rather than fixed. I have used the lives of Richler's Barney Panofsky and Davies's

Jonathan Hullah as sample cases in order to demonstrate the way in which events occurring over a life course add to the individual's initial identity and lead to the cumulative achievement of a composite identity. Analysis of the two texts reveals the way the protagonists' mature identities are comprised of all that they have been and done up until their current age. As Gullette says, "identity over time can be seen as a sense of an achieved portmanteau 'me' - made up, for each subject, of all its changeable and continuing selves together" (Gullette 2004,125). Richler's and Davies' narrative structures position the two aging protagonists as first-person narrators who are in the process of writing their own stories, thus emphasising that the stories of these two individuals are being told in order to showcase the ways in which they have become the men they are at the present time. The multiple genre identities of both texts serve to mirror the multiple identities of these two complex older characters while simultaneously facilitating the authors' attempts to provide both entertainment and meaningful art.

Where I consider Gullette's and Woodward's progress-and-decline theories in relation to the lives of Barney Panofsky and Jonathan Hullah, I have shown that a progress-and-decline age narrative is emplotted in stories of lives, however fictional in this case. More importantly, I have shown that Richler and Davies provide counter- narratives which dispute the current culturally prevalent age narrative. In Barney's

Version and The Cunning Man, progress and decline are not positioned as distinct and opposing poles. For Barney and Hullah, progress and decline repeat and overlap in a complex intersecting web which exists throughout the entirety of the life course. The models presented in Barney's Version and The Cunning Man contradict the prevailing age narrative in that they reject the opposition inherent in the binary of progress and decline. Richler and Davies do not figure persons as being in an age-dependent state of either progress or decline. Instead they figure aging as the navigation of a complex and intersecting web consisting ofboth progress and decline. Thus, Barney's Version and The

Cunning Man offer alternative narratives disputing the currently circulating "meta" narrative.

Our desire to perceive ourselves as being in a state of progress and our compulsion to perceive the world in terms of clear-cut binaries carries over from the enthusiasm of the Enlightenment and its associated tendency towards encyclopaedic categorizations. As Lyotard explains, an "idea develops at the end of the eighteenth century in the philosophy of the enlightenment and in the French Revolution[....]The progress of the sciences, technologies, the arts and political freedoms will liberate the 122 whole of humanity from ignorance, poverty, backwardness, despotism" (81). Post the era of modernism, we are slow to abandon its lingering cultural assumptions. Today, the compulsion to "progress" and the desire to sort things in terms of being "this" and not

"that" are gradually giving way to what could be called "continuum thinking." Post modernism has allowed us to reject the either/or thinking which restricts us with binaries such as centre/margin, female/male, black/white, young/old and progress/decline. We have begun to accept a style of conceptualization which embraces gradations, not just absolutes. In Chapter 2,1 discuss how Lyotard's ideas about narratives have helped to dismantle the ideology of centres and margins and thus have led to the increasing rejection of the idea of a privileged central literature or canon. Our denial of the opposition inherent in the binary of male/female has led to our increasing acceptance of a new gender-inclusive continuum. Canada's acceptance of same-sex marriage indicates our partial abandonment of the restrictive binary which positions the male in opposition to the female. Barack Obama's status as the Democrats' candidate in the upcoming

American presidential election is indicative of Western culture's decreasing racial prejudice and increasing embrace of hybridity (although the fact that it is worth remarking on his candidacy shows that bigotry is not yet eradicated). Post-modernism may also begin to figure aging as a continuum - instead of as a stark division which privileges youthfulness and denigrates oldness.

Age, however, needs to be perceived by an even more expansive model than that which a continuum can facilitate. A continuum only eliminates the absolutes inherent in a binary model. As in my earlier discussion of central and marginal literature in literary canons, we need to dismantle even the concept of a continuum in order that we can 123

eliminate hierarchical thinking. The application of any sort of linear model to aging still

suggests winning or losing, going up or going down. In Barney's Version and The

Cunning Man both binary and linear imagery are replaced by the image of aging as the navigation of a complex maze. This model figures aging throughout the entire life course as the negotiation of a multi-directional or even direction-free web which encompasses overlapping gains and losses. This is a model which has the potential to adequately reconfigure aging. The influence of fractured, post-modern, decentralized thinking leads us to question the hierarchical nature of a progress/decline binary or continuum. The concept of "progress" on a linear plane carries negative weight in that it connotes an unfortunate sense of pursuit of the American dream and/or fiscal success. A model emerges in these two novels which is less rooted in time and development - a model which acknowledges the random nature of life. The addition of such texts as Barney's

Version and The Cunning Man to the general literary conversation ongoing in our culture helps us to diminish our compulsion to categorize in either/or binaries. If we accept aging as the navigation of an intersecting, sometimes directionless and random web of gains and losses we can begin to live in time rather than against it. We can begin to see the potential to "live in the centre of the moment," as Frey Waxman advocates. We can begin to accept present-time as more important than future time.

Age scholarship has the potential to identify the forces which govern belief and the potential to shake people loose from acculturated habits. The model demonstrated in

Barney's Version and The Cunning Man - wherein persons of all ages are figured

navigating a web of gains and losses - has the potential to alter people's perceptions of

their own experience of aging. As well, consideration of the age-related expectations underlying critics' assessments of The Cunning Man may similarly provoke awareness of habitual age ideology. As Teresa Mangurn points out, each reading experience lays a foundation for every reading experience thereafter. She maintains that we interpret the world in terms of our previous interpretations of the world and argues that,

"Iff., ^literature has such a hold on the conscious mind, how powerful must be its place in the fabric of memory, feeling, and fears that we call the unconscious" (59). My work in this thesis follows Mangum in its attempt to broaden how we read the work of older authors.

Positive Ageism:

In my introduction to this thesis, I comment on Western culture's tendency to diminish oldness and privilege youthfulness. I discuss our current obsession with youth and the compulsion felt by many individuals to retain the appearance of youth. What is conspicuously absent in both novels addressed in this thesis, is any significant focus on this trend. In my analysis of Barney's Version and The Cunning Man I have emphasized what I consider to be the primary concerns of the texts, but I would argue that often what a text chooses not to stress is as significant as what it presents. Richler and Davies have chosen to present alternative images of aging which dispute the prevalent age narrative.

They have not directly addressed at length ideas such as "the cult of youth" or "ageless,"

"successful," or "positive" aging. By comparison, female authors writing about female protagonists might more likely choose to focus on the issue of positive aging since they and their characters would have felt more cultural pressure to maintain beauty by mamtaining a semblance of youth. However, both Richler and Davies succeed in drawing attention towards their own objectives and away from positive aging by putting their emphasis on alternative narratives rather than on the prevalent narrative.

While both Panofsky and Hullah appear to feel the loss of some of the benefits associated with their youth, neither protagonist desperately bemoans the loss of his appearance of youth nor aspires to "age agelessly." Yet, both texts do acknowledge that the cultural narratives which privilege youthfulness have influenced their protagonists in that both men involve themselves in sexual relationships with younger women. In

Barney's Version, an inebriated Barney succumbs to the ambition-motivated seduction of a young actress. Barney voices a familiar litany: "I was helplessly drunk and didn't ask that bitch to come on to me in the first place. Young women have no business tempting respectable old family men by dressing like hookers" (354-8). Hullah's situation is similar to Barney's in that he desires the widow Esme, but it is less tawdry and more paternalistic in that he aspires to marry her in order to protect her and her child. When

Hugh McWearie asks Hullah "what precisely do you want fromEsme, " the doctor replies, "I want to give something to her. Affection, protection, security, all that I have"

(504). However, in their separate ways, Barney and Hullah both participate in the stereotypical behaviour wherein an old male attempts to reassert his youth by coupling with youth. In both cases, the relationships are fleeting. In Hullah's case, the potential relationship ends before it can begin because Esme informs the doctor of her imminent marriage. Barney renounces his liaison as soon as he regains sobriety and proves his sincerity by later resisting the overtures of his young assistant Chantal. He says, "Chantal, my dear, this isn't right. I'm a grandfather and you're not even thirty yet" (228). 126

Although Richler's and Davies's opinions cannot be decisively interpreted by the content of their fiction, it could be argued that both authors are acknowledging and addressing the "cult of youth" issue by introducing these representative relationships with younger women. As well, Barney's Version occasionally shows Panofsky rejecting various images of "ageless aging." The text does not use terms such as "positive,"

"successful" or "ageless," but it does make derisive reference to characters who feel compelled to maintain the illusion of youth by means of dyed hair, youthful fashions and cosmetic surgery to face and breast. On the one hand, Barney praises Miriam saying

"[m]y wife never found it necessary to dye her hair, and she is still beautiful" (Richler

362). On the other, he describes bis neighbour in the following terms:

We also boast a gaggle of divorcees of a certain age in The Lord Byng

Manor. My favourite, an anorexic with a helmet of lacquered hair dyed

blonde, breasts once as flat as yesterday's flapjacks, and legs as thin as

pipe cleaners, hasn't spoken to me since we ran into each other after she

had returned from a second-chance clinic in Toronto, where she had gone

for a face-lift and a boob refill. I had greeted her in the lobby with a kiss

on the cheek.

'What are you staring at?' she demanded.

'I'm waiting to see if the dent remains in place.' (Richler 78)

Interestingly, Richler describes both men and women in Barney's image-conscious world

indulging in the pursuit of youthfulness. He writes, "Hymie had obviously endured a

face-lift since I had last seen him. He now dyed his hair black and wore a bomber jacket,

designer jeans, and Adidas" (25). Those men who work in fields where appearance is 127 crucial perhaps feel as much cultural pressure to age agelessly as women do. Richler also

introduces consideration of the relationship between financial status and health when he describes a wealthy character purchasing an organ: "He flew to Zurich yesterday. Kidney transplant. They buy them in Pakistan. Costs a fortune, but what the hell?" (162). Aptly,

since Richler's protagonist Barney works in the showy entertainment industry and

Davies's protagonist is a physician, there is more emphasis overall on the maintenance of

appearance in Richler's text and more emphasis on the maintenance of health in Davies's text. In his later years, Hullah accepts the ministrations which his nurse Chris deems helpful for his wellbeing, but the text does not make any statement to endorse or reject the appearance-enhancing techniques popular with "ageless agers," except perhaps by not mentioning any.

Also absent from these two novels is any blatant consciousness on the part of the

protagonists that the topic of age should be a central concern. They both mention various

changes which have occurred over time, but do not rant against aging itself as the cause

of their troubles. That is, the characters do not see their problems as being due to aging,

but rather as being due to whatever has occurred when they happen to be of a certain age.

Rather than figuring the associated chronological age as the problem, in Barney's Version

and The Cunning Man, the events and feelings are figured as the problems.

Gullette (2004) worries that, "Lacking age studies [people] are led to desire anti-

aging products rather than age-conscious ideas" (22). She expresses the fear that people

are becoming increasingly obsessed with a need to appear youthful. It could be argued

that to some extent Barney Panofsky and Jonathan Hullah provide a model which helps

dispute the model which Gullette fears is prevalent. In the examples set by Barney and 128

Hullah, there are no demonstrated obsessions with the oncoming loss of youthful appearance.

Richler's and Davies's Final Words:

Both Davies and Richler lived only a short time after the publication of their final novels. Although Davies was older than Richler, when they wrote The Cunning Man and

Barney's Version, both were aware that they were reaching the outer limits of their mortality. Richler wrote from the position of his late middle age, but he was also writing from what for him was his oldest age and he knew it. In the oral biography The Last

Honest Man: Mordecai Richler, Michael Posner reports that "Richler had a small tumour removed earlier in 1993," and afterwards believed that he would not live much longer

(333). Although Richler died relatively early in relation to the life course men reasonably can expect today, Posner reports that at his seventieth birthday, Richler remarked that any time past that point was "overtime" (341). Richler may have published Barney's Version at the age of sixty-six, but he did not expect to live much past seventy years of age.

Therefore, although Richler could more accurately be described as being in late middle age, as they wrote their respective final novels, he and Davies both felt themselves to be living in their oldest age.

Davies completed his final novel at eighty-one years of age and died a year later.

In Robertson Davies, For Your Eyes Alone: Letters 1976-1995, Judith Grant reports that it was not until well after he was "home from the English publicity tour for The Cunning

Man " that he began to feel unwell. She adds that "he was slow to recover from a session of influenza and asthma. And new tests revealed a leaky heart valve" (292). Grant reports 129

that he recovered and felt well throughout another summer but that "late that October,"

while busy writing another novel, "he contracted pneumonia. Before he recovered, he

suffered a stroke, lapsed into a coma, and died" (292). During the writing of The Cunning

Man he was evidently in good health. However, at eighty-one, he must have been aware

that he was reaching the end of his allotted life course since he was nearing the upper

limits of the human life span.

I selected Davies and Richler in part because I recognize that old artists may have

more credible knowledge to offer about the meaning of age than younger people. Thus, I think it is appropriate to discern whether my analysis has addressed the primary concerns

or emphases expressed by the authors themselves. I acknowledge the impossibility of

accurately discerning authorial intention; but I wonder what, from the perspective of their

advanced ages and proximity to death, these two authors may have thought to be the

ideas they wished to impart.

Neither author minimizes the grim concerns of old age. As Kathleen Woodward

writes, "in recognizing and repudiating our culture's negative and trivializing stereotypes

of old age, we must take equal care not to produce a similarly limiting repertoire of

'positive' stereotypes that ignore what may be the real physical liabilities of old age"

(xxii). Richler and Davies could not be accused of avoiding the tough issues of aging.

Richler's portrayal of Barney's dementia is not romanticized. And if my interpretation is

accurate and Davies deliberately presents The Cunning Man in an ironic light, then part

of his message is that people cannot expect to achieve self-knowledge and become wise -

even in old age. Richler admits to a similarly humble outlook. When questioned about

Barney's Version he says, "I share Barney's notion that life is fundamentally absurd and nobody understands anybody else, but you make the best of it" (qtd in Posner, 303). In

Barney's Version and The Cunning Man both authors are addressing the apparent randomness of life and are commenting mat it is not possible to ascertain and understand the depths which underlie our own and others' behaviours and beliefs.

Both books however also provide a hopeful outlook. Davies creates meaning for himself and all who will become old by replacing the cliched, dying-old-man plot, which

is Father Hobbes, with an alternate model, which is Dr. Hullah, who lives, thinks and writes while continuing to grow old. Davies's novel reinvents the conventional old man

of fiction as seen at the outset of the novel; he changes the cliched device into a main

character. Unlike Ninian Hobbes, Dr. Hullah may be old, but bis health is not failing.

Although Davies presents the limitations facing them both, he and his character strive to know more about what it means to be human. In order to find meaning in their aging, they both engage in a writing project; and if my interpretation is accurate, Davies has not

entered a creative decline at 81 years of age, but instead in The Cunning Man is

attempting a complex and energetically creative piece of writing.

Richler suggests that he writes to create meaning. He says, "You really write as a

recognition of death. It's an enormous conceit and you hope to leave something, one

thing, somewhere that will last. It's an attempt to impose meaning on just being here"

(qtd in Posner, 332). In writing Barney's Version, Richler may have been doing

something for himself, but he also leaves for us a book and a character which pulse with

life. Barney lives his "version" with vigour and with relentless will and hope.

Mordecai Richler and Robertson Davies portray identity as fluid and multiple and

as a continuing achievement compounded over time. Their small "versions" counter the 131 dominant cultural "meta" narrative which depicts age by means of an either/or progress/decline binary. These two authors offer a replacement model of age where oldness and youthfulness are not two disconnected poles. In Barney's Version and The

Cunning Man, aging is depicted as the navigation of a progress-and-decline web which stretches throughout all of our chronological ages. Richler and Davies portray the challenges inherent in aging, the difficulty of conceptualizing the aging experience and the questionable nature of our knowledge of self and others; however, they also celebrate the vital energy of life and the value of intellectual introspection. My critical attention to

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