[In the following essay, Brown delineates Clarke's transformation of New World myths, and claims that Clarke's work is part of the New World literary tradition.]

As satire, Clarke's fiction is a sustained attack on moral and social failures in both Canada and the Caribbean. But his satiric contempt for individual and collective corruption does not wholly define his work. It coexists with an affirmative idealism which is reflected in the typical ebullience of his style and characterization, and which counters the social malaise of the everyday world with an insistence on the creative possibilities of life itself. Life is energy, the kind of energy that he so often discovers and affirms in language and personality. It is an irrepressible vitality that always seems to endure in individuals and cultures in spite of themselves: on an individual level, it can be discovered in the Caribbean peasant's sheer power of endurance, or in the ambitious drives of an immigrant; and in an ambience like Toronto, it is manifest in the city itself as a bustling growth and lively, cultural diversity that manages to defy prevailing conformities.

Moreover, if materialism is a moral problem in Canada's immigrant communities, ambition per se is attractive because it is a symptom of the special energy which defines human individuality. By a similar token, the perversion of power in political institutions and in personal relationships is morally reprehensible, but the very idea of power is inseparable from this special human energy. We are therefore encouraged to raise ethical questions about the ambitions of a May Thorne, for example, without really denying a certain admiration for her strength of will and purpose.

All of this adds up to a fundamental ambivalence which shapes Clarke's moral and social vision. His moral indignation—his saeva indignatio—and his affirmative idealism constantly interact in his fictive judgement: social and individual failures are tragic and contemptible, precisely because they betray the creative potential of the human spirit. Conversely, this insistent emphasis on life as creative energy alerts us to the destructive realities, the decrepitude and second-handedness of the everyday world. Moral idealism shapes satiric realism, and vice versa. Indeed, art itself is a metaphor of that creative idealism which gives meaning and purpose to life—poetry (John Milton, John Moore, Henry White), music (calypso, jazz, blues, European classics), religious folk songs (“A Funeral”), and, by implication, the novelist's own art. Without this kind of creativity, the individuals in Clarke's fictive world lose a sense of purpose, even the will to live. They become spiritual zombies, like William Jefferson (“The Man”), Joshua Miller-Corbaine (“A Man”), or Nick Evans (“The Collector”), and Trotman (“A Slow Death”).

Given Clarke's underlying idealism, his interest in the popular idealization of cultures takes on additional significance. He debunks facile idealization (Canada as El Dorado, the Caribbean as Paradise) while developing a more complex, and ethically defined, ideal of each society. In the case of the Caribbean, the tourist cliches of Paradise are discarded in favor of a Miltonic ideal: Paradise becomes a sustaining, purposive myth, once we discard the escapist view of Paradise as social reality, and once we embrace idealistic images as aspiration and visionary purpose rather than as some facile, ready-made construct. More specifically, we replace the false idyll with a redemptive aspiration, an idealistic commitment to redeem the society from its legacy of colonialism.

This is all quite similar to the way in which Clarke redefines the idealization of Canadian society. As we have seen, the popular equation of material success with fulfilment is the essence of the immigrant's classic El Dorado myth. As a society of immigrants, then, Canada represents what Alejo Carpentier calls el espejismo del Dorado (“the mirage of El Dorado”). But if, as Carpentier reminds us, the original myth annihilated both its historical pursuers and the victims of their greed, nonetheless it has always held a certain fascination for many as an awesome monument to human imagination and courage. Hence, those who burned their wings “in the flame of the myth” (al fuego del mito) not only exemplified the destructiveness inherent in the myth, but also embodied an inspiring capacity to aspire, to reach beyond familiar boundaries.¹ In a similar vein, Clarke's Canada is an extended metaphor of materialism as the El Dorado mirage. However, the material ambitions of its immigrant heritage are also part of a broader, and deeper, purposiveness. This is the purposiveness implied by the humanist goals of social progress and multicultural harmony. It represents an ideal potential to aspire beyond the society's palpable limitations. Consequently, although the visions of progress and harmony tend to be mere “mirage” in the fiction, the pursuit, or even the envisioning, of such ideals is the ultimate saving grace: it is the flame of an idealistic energy that counterbalances decrepitude.

Clarke's affirmative idealism is not only derived from his Biblical and Miltonic heritage, or from the traditions of fortitude in his Caribbean folk culture. It also belongs to a certain tradition of New World idealism. His fictive emphasis on the Canadian El Dorado as spiritual potential, rather than mere materialism, implies a simultaneous emphasis regarding the American Dream—for the latter is the hemispheric prototype of the Canadian El Dorado. As a symbol of spiritual and humanist ideals, then, Clarke's ideal Canada falls within that myth of American innocence which R. W. B. Lewis has summarized in his classic study, The American Adam (1955): the “conviction of the new historical beginning … and the enlivening sense of possibility … of new creations and fresh initiatives.”²

Lewis's contention that this faith has disappeared from the literature of the United States itself actually heightens the usefulness of his thesis in the study of a writer like Clarke. The latter's idealism is quite consonant with that mythic, New World idealism which Lewis defines as the essence of American innocence—the vision of life and history enjoying a new beginning “under fresh initiative” (The American Adam, p.5). Conversely, the moral and spiritual impoverishment which Lewis discovers in a society that has lost his vision is comparable with the limitations which move Clarke to satirize the thwarting, or aborting, of idealistic vision in Canada and the Caribbean. And, it must be added, in the United States itself.

The United States, as an allegory of failed idealism or corrupted innocence, does not dominate Clarke's fiction in a direct way. But it does loom in the background. It is the envied standard of material affluence in his impoverished Caribbean villages; and in the person of someone like John Moore-Adams (Proud Empires), it suggests liberating energies that seem an attractive alternative to colonial self-loathing. Appropriately enough, the image of American innocence—as a symbol of American idealism—is least ambiguous in Clarke's young, school-age children. However, it is ambiguously child-like: it is fresh and beguiling, but fragile and fraught with illusion. Among adult characters, like Henry White and Moore-Adams, we are brought face to face with the destructive violence of American society. At the same time, the crassest features of mass-consumer culture, in both Canada and the Caribbean, are symptoms of American materialism. However, all of this is inextricably bound up with those explosive energies which are equally characteristic of the society—with creative as well as destructive effects.

These are the energies that attract Boysie Cumberbatch to American slang and music, and eventually to the United States itself (The Bigger Light). They also explain Clarke's continuing interest in the United States, because its creative possibilities are so similar to his artistic vision of life itself as affirmative energy. The short story, “Hammie and the Black Dean,” is therefore a revealing example of Clarke's response to American energy as destructive force, and as innocent vitality.³ It is the violence that dominates here. There is the psychic violence implied by the defensiveness and loudness of the black students on an integrated university campus. The black dean, insecure about his status in a white university, and suspicious of the young blacks as potential trouble-makers, is another example of the psychic self-destruction inherent in racial inferiority complex. When he goes berserk and murders the students with a rifle belonging to the white university president, the dean is both the victim and agent of a corrupting and violent system.

However, when Hammie, one of the students, curses his killer with his dying breath, he incarnates that spirited, and defiant self-assertion which attracts Clarke to American idealism. By describing the student's obscenity as “Hammie's curse,” the narrator pointedly reverses the old Biblical myth that has been an old stand-by for centuries of white racism: as the alleged descendants of Ham, blacks pay his penalty for having peeped at the nakedness of his father Noah. Here, with the reversal of the myth, the original perpetrator has become its target—the white racist, together with the latter's most pathetic and dangerous victim, i.e., the self-hating black surrogate of the white power-structure. In reversing the myth, Hammie's curse is an act of self-discovery and self-affirmation, albeit a belated one. While his death reveals much about the ugly side of America and its most traditional victims, his curse is the essence of an energetic and affirmative American idealism.

This is not Clarke's final word on the United States. An unpublished novel, American Dutchman, continues and enlarges upon the ambiguities of the American experience, a theme that is central to Clarke's most fundamental instincts as artist and moral idealist. For if he discovers an abundance of metaphors in the (ugly) American reality, then his moral idealism accords perfectly with the American reality, then his moral idealism accords perfectly with the American myth of innocence as a New World ethos embracing the hemisphere as a whole. This New World imagination counters the destructive realities of hemispheric history with the vision of ideal possibilities. It celebrates the human capacity to be creative, even as its historical memory reflects the long human saga of violence and greed. This complex synthesis of historical realism and affirmative idealism also typifies the artistic imagination itself. If the history and legends of the New World open up a world of wonder (maravilloso), as Carpentier suggests, so does the artist⁴ In transforming two of the most typical of New World myths—El Dorado and Caribbean Paradise—Clarke's work is therefore not only a major contribution to Canadian and Caribbean literatures, but also belongs to a distinguished New World tradition.

Notes

1. Carpentier, Los pasos perdidos (pp.148–49); The Lost Step (pp.142–43).

2. The American Adam: Innocence Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Phoenix Books Edition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1959), p.9.

3. North American Review, 14 (April, 1972), 219–47.

4. Los pasos perdidos (p.149); The Lost Steps (p.144).