In an exchange of correspondence with John Mills published in The Fiddlehead, Hugh Hood has defined his aim as a writer of fiction:

I am trying to assimilate the mode of the novel to the mode of fully-developed Christian allegory, in ways that I don't fully understand. I want to be more “real” than the realists, yet more transcendent than the most vaporous allegorist. … Now let me put it to you that since I am both a realist and a transcendentalist allegorist that I cannot be bound by the forms of ordinary realism.¹

These remarks imply that no critical approach based on the expectation of a purely mimetic realism can come adequately to terms with his work. In another letter, published in Essays on Canadian Writing, Hood (responding to a review of Dark Glasses) provides a specific suggestion for his interpreters. After insisting that his fiction stands outside the tradition of “Flaubertian psychological analysis,” he goes on to say:

There is also a Christian aspect here which is fundamental in any right understanding of my work. I note for example that neither character nor incident (though perhaps metaphor) seems to function in the same way in expressly Christian work as in purely secular work. The discussion of the secular and sacral in various parts of A New Athens is relevant here.²

In this essay I want to explore the “Christian aspect” of Hood's recent fiction by examining three of the stories in Dark Glasses and then A New Athens itself in accordance with the principles which Hood has endorsed in his published correspondence.

The most relevant “discussion of the secular and sacral” in A New Athens is the conversation between Matthew Goderich and May-Beth Codrington on the nature of “‘sacred art,’” “‘the art of revelation’” (NA, p. 170). When Matthew asks, “‘You don't admit that art and music and poetry have been absorbed into the purely natural world?’” Mrs. Codrington replies, “‘Certainly not.’” She explains at some length:

“You see, Matthew, the trouble with all this so-called Canadian art, that you meddle about with, is that it's cut off from the world of vision. Group of Seven, group of eight or ten, there's nothing inside them. Emily Carr. Trees and Indians. Nothing for the soul, no footing in the other world for our art. That's a bad thing. The people who paint in this country think that they must go to the majesty of the great outdoors, the world of trees and rocks, of material things, for their subjects. Of course the true subject for the painter is the soul's voyage in the companionship of Jesus and the angels. Rembrandt, Raphael, Michelangelo. A painting should re-enact the Redemption and Atonement.”

(NA, p. 171)

Certain titles of Mrs. Codrington's paintings suggest the way in which “‘the world of vision’” is to be related to “‘the purely natural world’”: His Worship, John Baker Lawson, sometime Mayor of Stoverville, robed as Herod; The Honourable Philip Horsbaugh, Member of Parliament for Stoverville-Smiths Falls, represented as Judas, with spilled salt and traditional moneybag; and her masterpiece, The Population of Stoverville, Ontario, Entering into the New Jerusalem.

There is justification (quite apart from Hood's public utterances) for approaching the stories in Dark Glasses as works of art in this tradition. The New Testament epigraph—“For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face”—suggests the opposition of and relation between “‘the purely natural world’” and “‘the world of vision’” of Mrs. Codrington's conversation with Matthew. Each story in Dark Glasses presents us with an action in which the characters struggle with moral questions in a context which seems to be purely secular; yet each story also subtly evokes the context of “‘the Redemption and Atonement’” The three stories which I want to consider—“Going Out as a Ghost,” “Dark Glasses,” and “Thanksgiving: Between Junetown and Caintown”—have in common a narrative texture which makes it particularly easy to misread them as “Flaubertian” or “secular.” David Latham's summary of two of the stories exemplifies the reductively psychological readings with which most reviewers have been content:

Most of Hood's characters quickly retreat from the impact of the brief moment of self-revelation. “Dark Glasses” presents an intolerant writer who clips dark lenses over his glasses because he cannot bear to recognize his own savage self in the eyes of two older fanatics. In “Thanksgiving: Between Junetown and Caintown,” a breast-shaped mountain and a boar with hemisphere-like testicles represent the domestic world of sexual politics in which a domineering wife feels threatened by the evidence that her strengths must be complemented by her husband's.³

The problem is not that Latham's interpretation is wrong, but rather that it is limited. “The Christian writer,” Hood observes, “will not understand character as a series of shrewd psychological revelations—recognition jokes like those you hear on the Carson show.”⁴ The meaning and value of moments of self-revelation in these stories are to be found in the way that secular experience is related to “‘the world of vision.’” Hood's method parallels May-Beth Codrington's: “The artist has refused to assign the Trinity to a place in heavenly dimensions. … The painter defies the viewer to locate God. But God is there” (NA, p. 215).

“Going Out as a Ghost” is explicitly a meditation on man's fallenness and implicitly a meditation on divine mercy. The first sentence sentence speaks of our tendency to choose evil rather than good: “The children were preparing for Halloween, a festival they preferred to Christmas” (DG, p. 7). The children's father, the story's unnamed protagonist, is amused but also disturbed by the delight which they take in such items as a gorilla mask—“He was troubled by the human cast of the bestial shape”—and by their tendency to imitate “certain simian characteristics in their movements” (DG, p. 8). Their final choices for Halloween costumes suggest strife and exploitation. The two boys are soldiers from opposing sides in the Civil War; the two girls dress up as horse and ringmaster.

The father's contribution to the family discussion about costume—“‘I'll throw a sheet over my head and cut holes in it … I'm going out as a ghost’”—strikes everyone as “the lowest deep of impoverished fantasy” (DG, p. 7). The notion of deliberately assuming a false identity is central to the action involving the protagonist—“a confused man” (DG, p. 7)—and Philly White, a ghost from his past who “hadn't been heard from in forty years,” but who telephones to explain that he is being detained at the Centre de Prevention, “a quasi-jail where persons are held to await trial or, in certain cases, sentencing after conviction” (DG, p. 11). White wants help. At first the protagonist attempts to provide it; but he gradually discovers that White has been deceiving him, and that he himself must adopt a disguise of sorts in order to deal with White's importunity.

But the concept of ghostliness is also associated with the protagonist in a different way, as Barry Cameron has argued in a perceptive review of Dark Glasses. The story, he suggests, “… pivots around the notion of Veni Creator Spiritus—‘Send forth thy spirit and they shall be created, and thou shalt renew the face of the earth.’”⁵ The Veni Creator Spiritus is from the liturgy for Pentecost Sunday; the protagonist's effort to help White can be interpreted as an attempt to go out as the Holy Ghost, to affect White's life in a way analogous to the way in which the Holy Spirit changes the lives of the Christians in Acts 2. The protagonist can, to some extent, be associated with the Holy Ghost as the continuous presence of God in this world; but he also fails to personify the Holy Ghost successfully, fails to embody the unlimited outpouring of love signified by the feast of Pentecost, and withholds part of his humanity from White. The story concludes with the protagonist staying inside instead of “going out,” while White waits forlornly in his Upper Room at the Centre de Prevention.

White is an alcoholic, small-time con artist, and congenital liar. A police sergeant reports that “‘nobody knows anything about Philly White for sure’” (DG, p. 14), and later we are told that “What oppressed the listener to Philly White's phone calls was that he never, even by accident, said the plain truth” (DG, p. 19). The father, on the other hand, wins our sympathy by his desire to be helpful. He tries (unsuccessfully) to visit White, agrees reluctantly to handle his mail, and balks only when (on Halloween, of course, a day on which “It was full dark by six p.m.”) White makes “his first concrete demand for money.” The protagonist responds by assuming the uncharacteristic pose of (verbal) tough-guy: “‘A hundred and eighty from the poor sucker for openers, eh? It's finished, White, you get me? That's it. Don't call again and don't have any more mail sent here’” (DG, p. 20). But the story closes with an expression of his moral uncertainty: “I did right, he told himself, I did right (wrong), I did right, right (wrong), I did right …” (DG, p. 21).

Hood has presented the action in such a way that the reader knows that he himself would have come to the same decision as the Everyman-like central character. White's untruthfulness alienates him from our sympathy; such a man does not deserve to be helped. When the father, in a moment of exasperation, tells White that “‘I don't have any responsibility for you,’” we are essentially unmoved by the retort of the chronically irresponsible prisoner: “‘We are all responsible for one another’” (DG, p. 18). In dealing with such people, we discover that we must wear masks to prevent them from exploiting us. But the fact remains that in rejecting White at the end of the story, the protagonist is also rejecting the vision of mutual responsibility to which White has appealed. The protagonist ultimately fails to uphold the moral standard of God's love for man (and therefore of man for man) which is signified by the Holy Ghost. Is the father's disguise that different from the ape-mask, or from White's own?

This sense that the protagonist is somehow right in pragmatic terms but wrong in absolute terms provides the link between the story's “secular” dimensions and “‘the world of vision.’” White, imprisoned, helpless, blindly reaching out for mercy, presents us with a powerful image of fallenness. Hood's descriptions of the Centre de Prevention suggest that its inmates cannot be other than what White is:

It is a deceptive building. It is the embodiment of a lie. It doesn't look like what it is; suicide is routine inside.

(DG, p. 11)

It reminded him of a shiny polished dark monolith seen in some science-fiction film. Some sort of object of perverse worship.

(DG, p. 13)

Many died on Parthenais Street without receiving either condemnation or justification. … There were many like White whose guilt had been legally established.

(DG, p. 19)

The theological ring of “condemnation or justification” can hardly be ignored, nor can the references to deception, idolatory, and guilt. It is not difficult to see the “‘Prevention Centre’” (as White miscalls it) as an image of a fallen world whose denizens have not experienced the mercy of salvation.⁶

In White's attempt to communicate with the story's protagonist there is a faint but discernible suggestion of man's attempt to reach the Divine Being. There is a sense of De profundis clamavi about White's phone calls (although literally he is calling from the heights, his cell being on the tenth floor): the telephone is even described as “clamorous” when it rings for the first time (DG, p. 10). From the first call—“‘I want to get straightened out and start again’” (DG, p. 11)—to the last—“‘I'm only trying to make contact’” (DG, p. 21)—White's pleadings have an undeniable element of authenticity.

But the protagonist has no “Get out of Jail free” cards, though he thinks whimsically of them (DG, p. 18). Getting Philly White out of jail is clearly impossible. Maintaining even the most tenuous sort of relationship would cost more in the way of time, effort, and money than he is willing to donate. From this perspective, his attempt to go out as the Holy Ghost becomes increasingly ironic. If Philly is to the protagonist as fallen man is to the Third Person of the Trinity, then Hood has, in his portrayal of the protagonist, given us a subtler and more acute rendering of fallenness, a fallenness with which we can identify. For the Christian, the world has been redeemed precisely because the Divine Being is not like the protagonist, that is, not like us.

The story measures human inadequacy against divine mercy. The result of the measurement, however unflattering to the human ego, should give no cause for despair, as long as there is evidence that divine mercy is real. Hood has made it as difficult to “locate” the Divine being in his story as May-Beth Codrington has in her paintings. Irrefutable proof of His presence and Grace is provided, however, by the facts that the Centre de Prevention does not constitute the total reality of the story's world, and that no other character acts as Philly White does. The father clearly loves his children; his desire to help White is genuine if limited; his friend David agrees to do a favour for him without knowing what it is; he leaves his car with a mechanic who is “a highly trustworthy man” (DG, p. 9). Details like these combine to create the sense of a world characterized by harmonious relationships grounded in various sorts of commitment, a world redeemed from the “ruin” (DG, p. 19) associated with White.

“Dark Glasses” makes a similar point much more overtly. Here too the central image pattern has to do with disguise, and again the central character (in this case, the narrator) makes a gesture of rejection which the reader must endorse. But again there is a visionary perspective which calls the protagonist's (and therefore the reader's) judgment into question.

The narrator is a writer who attends a party wearing clip-on dark glasses; he spends the first page describing them, explaining that he uses them to conceal his eyes from people whom he dislikes, and so on. At the party he encounters Herman and Yetta Leventhal, “famous activists in the vanguard of the civil-liberties movement” (DG, pp. 124–25). This is the first time that he has seen them since the sudden death of Chaim, their only son. Before he can speak any words of consolation, they overwhelm him with socialist rhetoric. The narrator, who is fifteen years younger than Herman and therefore the representative to him of another generation, concludes that the lawyer “had me mixed up with somebody else” (DG, p. 127), perhaps even Chaim: “I now had the impression that Chaim's ghost was standing in front of me. I seemed to be turning into him” (DG, p. 129).

Throughout the story, the narrator associates the Leventhals with a literal darkness which gradually acquires metaphorical resonance. He has much to say about Herman's aura of “dark light”: “Blue and silver and fine chalk pinstripe, neat moustache, penetrating eyes and this absurd halo around him of—I can see I won't get this across—of dark light” (DG, p. 126). The narrator comments that “My smoked lenses may have had something to do with it” (DG, p. 126), but even after he removes the clip-ons, he finds that “the dark light … was now if anything intensified” (DG, p. 127). It is an “alien shadow” (DG, p. 127), forming around the Leventhals, and originating in a mysterious source.

Metaphorically, the dark light can be related both to the narrator's own artistic vision—at one point he tells a man at the party that “‘Maybe I can only recognize sad stories’” (DG, p. 121)—and to the dark psychological state experienced by the Leventhals. That Hood wishes to associate this state with fallenness is made clear by the fact that the phrase “dark light” echoes Milton's phrase “darkness visible” in the description of Hell in Book I of Paradise Lost.⁷ The nature of fallenness in this context is revealed most fully when the narrator finally attempts to speak directly about Chaim, and Herman, who is unable to face the reality of his son's death, hides his feelings (even from himself) behind his disguise of socialist rhetoric:

“Chaim, Chaim, what is that?” Herman said, making a brushing motion with his left hand. “The error of the activist is to invoke the strike weapon too readily. The strike is like the peace officer's weapon; it must exist but should never be used, and the union leader who pulls men off the job has taken from them something that can never be replaced, a day's productivity. … The union leader may think that an increase in wages or a betterment in working conditions will compensate for time lost, but it never can, it never can. You cannot call back time lost.”

(DG, pp. 128–29)

Both narrator and reader are aware that the deeper meaning of Herman's last sentence is that you cannot call back a lost son; it is at this point that the narrator feels that he is turning into Chaim's ghost, as he provides the occasion for the release of Herman's pent-up emotion.

“If things are to be built of glass, let it be dark glass that confers an illusory solidity” (DG, p. 125), the narrator has mused earlier. The Leventhals' desperate grasping on to the “illusory solidity” of socialism has an effect similar to Philly White's deceitfulness: it appalls us, and it distances us from them. The reader sympathizes with the narrator's final gesture: “I clipped the dark lenses onto my glasses again and put them over my eyes, wishing they would do the same. I wanted their faces covered up. I could not bear the sight of them” (DG, p. 129).

Again the double image of fallenness is present. For obvious reasons, we refuse to identify with the Leventhals. But another issue is raised by the narrator's inability to be merciful. Herman's last speech echoes Philly White's: “‘… no, you won't listen, you don't let me tell you. I can't reach you’” (DG, p. 129). In approving the narrator's decision to end his attempts to communicate with the misguided couple, we are adopting the perspective of some sort of disgusted and unforgiving deity whose creatures “seemed shrunken, huddled together and feeble” (DG, p. 129).

Ironically embedded in Herman's rhetoric is the information which we need to relate the story's action to “‘the Redemption and Atonement’”:

Herman said, “Marx was devoted to the suffering and the dying. He wouldn't recognize in the prosperous, bourgeois German Jew a potential saviour. But your Russian proletarian, Jew or Gentile, ah, there was the insulted and injured man, the sufferer who would redeem the world.”

(DG, p. 128)

The Leventhals are aware of the concept of “‘the sufferer who would redeem the world,’” but only as poetic fiction. They can interpret human experience only through the dark glass of politics. The narrator admits that the injustices against which they struggle are real, and that “They can't be praised enough for courage, for persistence in the face of adversity” (DG, p. 125). But their unwillingness to accept the personal meaning of their son's life and death indicates a fundamental limitation of vision and reveals that their political activity is quixotic. It is the narrator, whose own vision is not so limited, who is even more culpable in this situation. He deliberately looks at the Leventhals through the dark glass of his own self-righteousness. He will not risk being “‘insulted and injured’” by them. He will not attempt to re-enact the role of “‘the sufferer who would redeem the world.’” As in “Going Out as a Ghost,” the inadequacy of the human response to the perception of fallenness has been contrasted with the Christian Deity's plan of salvation.

In “Thanksgiving: Between Junetown and Caintown,” the narrator undergoes an experience clearly presented as a secular analogue of salvation. The narrator is a woman who is the dominant partner in her marriage. On the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, she and her husband climb Blue Mountain, which is “shaped like a tit … the breast of a goddess” (DG, p. 63), an emblem of female supremacy. They reach the top, despite the husband's fear of heights (at a crucial stage in the ascent she must lead the way), only to get lost on the way down. She is terrified, but they are saved by the husband's ability to remain calm and rational. At one point, towards the conclusion of the descent, she is astonished to find herself “Taking directions from him!” (DG, p. 74). His plan works, and at the end of the story they find themselves walking past a pig farm, a sign that they have returned to civilization. The major image here proclaims the triumph of male sexuality: “Through the gloom I saw an enormous boar glaring at me balefully. He had the biggest testicles I've ever seen, swollen sore-looking grey hemispheres, and made threatening noises, moving toward us” (DG, p. 74). Possibly this is an ironic allusion to the Phrygian myth of Attis and Cybele, in which Attis is killed by a boar or by self-mutilation, or to its Greek version, in which Adonis is castrated by Ares in the form of a boar.⁸ In Hood's story, the great mother goddess-figure is defeated, and for her own good. When they arrive back at their car, the husband seems ready to return to a submissive role: “‘I'll drive’ he said, ‘shall I? Will I drive then?’” But the narrator's response indicates that her attitude towards him has changed: “I had nothing to say. I said nothing” (DG, p. 75).

Plot summary is enough to suggest the story's potential as “‘art of revelation.’” The narrator's husband is her saviour in a narrowly literal sense. Hood's use of the names “Junetown” and “Caintown” is certainly significant—Junetown having unmistakable overtones of Eden after the Fall, especially when set beside a town named after the first murderer. However, it is the narrator's meditation on “personal incapacity” (DG, p. 69) which provides the most important link between “secular” and “sacral” in this story. In a bleak reverie at the top of the mountain before she and her husband begin the descent, she ruminates sympathetically about her husband's fear of heights, and then goes on to admit: “And we all do this. I do it. I am aware what I cannot, will not, do. Some things you can't; some you won't; some you neither can nor will, and those terminate, finish, kill, end, oh, oh” (DG, p. 69). So described, “personal incapacity” becomes a metaphor for fallenness, an identification which Hood reinforces by describing the narrator's subsequent experience in terms of being lost (itself a conventional image of alienation from God) and fearing death (which, traditionally, came into the world as a result of the Fall): “We were lost. Good and lost. I, who had never been afraid of anything in my life, thought about dying here” (DG, p. 71). But she survives. In recognizing her own incapacity and in acknowledging that she must depend on her husband, whose ability to cope with the situation is superior to hers, she is losing her life in order to save it. At the pig farm, the boar glares at her from within “a stinking square of fenced dirt” at “a crossroads.” “‘This,’” her husband announces, “‘is Junetown’” (DG, p. 74). Earth, their unprepossessing but rightful dwelling place, has been returned to; and, as the narrator states earlier, “Hard reality clothed in endearment … will have to do me till we finally get somewhere” (DG, p. 64).

At one point she comments that “Grace is impossible under pressure of physical laws” (DG, p. 68). She is thinking of physical grace, but the word's spiritual meaning is clearly crucial to an understanding of the story. Grace, Hood is saying, is certainly not bound by the laws of human psychology. Despite the natural negative tendencies of her personality, the narrator has received the Grace which she needs in order to cope with the demands of life in the fallen world. That her experience on the descent is to be interpreted as a secular analogue for redemption is suggested by the fact that she and her husband have returned to Junetown (instead of Caintown) at “a crossroads,” as well as by the way in which her husband has delivered her from her lostness, and from her concomitant fear of death. Early in the story, before ascending the mountain, she has characterized herself as “a dreadful mean woman,” indifferent to the potential for joy in the world around her—“You will not catch me prancing through meadows, nor does my heart lift at a soft breeze” (DG, p. 64); but when she realizes near the end of the story that she is at last safe from harm, she finds herself, on Thanksgiving weekend, spontaneously rejoicing: “In the next field were living creatures, cows, Oh happy happy cows. I thought” (DG, p. 74).⁹

Character and incident function in this story, as in the others in Dark Glasses, in such a way as to reveal how human actions imitate or parody the greater actions of God. The narrator's husband in “Thanksgiving: Between Junetown and Caintown” comes closest, despite his obvious flaws, to acting in a way which makes him truly analogous to the Divine Being. But Hood's presentation of the protagonist of “Going Out as a Ghost,” sympathetic as it is, contains an unmistakable element of parody, and the parodic dimension becomes dominant in his depiction of the narrator of “Dark Glasses.” The responses of others to these actions vary according to the fidelity of the imitation. Philly White and the Leventhals make themselves inaccessible to the “Grace” which the protagonist and the narrator (respectively) try to offer to them. But the “dreadful mean woman” of “Thanksgiving: Between Junetown and Caintown” allows herself to be transformed into a person who is capable of giving praise.

What is true of Hood's short fiction should also be true of his novels, if his own testimony is valid: “The stories are by-products to an extent nobody but me can appreciate. The whole thing is one huge novel anyway, the one bright book of the redemption and atonement.”¹⁰ A summary of the important events of A New Athens does not provide any obvious clues about its relation to “the redemption and atonement,” however. There are four chapters. In the first, Matt Goderich, the thirty-six year old narrator, hiking through the countryside near Stoverville, Ontario (Brockville), in July, 1966, experiences a vision of his wife as he had first seen her, fourteen years earlier. In 1952, Matt had been spending a summer in Stoverville doing research for his master's thesis in art history. He first saw Edie Codrington as she rode on the observation car on the ceremonial last train ever to run on the Stoverville, Westport and Lake Superior Railroad. (The vision is inspired by his accidental discovery of the abandoned roadbed.) In Chapter 2, Matt describes his courtship of Edie, which culminates with his unspoken proposal while they witness (through the ice of the St. Lawrence on a skating party on New Year's Eve, 1952) a vision of a rarely-seen “ghost ship” (NA, p. 114), the Duke of Clarence, sunk in 1837 or 1838. In the first half of Chapter 3, Edie converts to Catholicism; Matt and Edie are married; and Edie's father dies in March, 1954. The second half of the chapter is largely concerned with Mrs. Codrington's development (by 1960) into a mature artist. In Chapter 4, the Duke of Clarence is recovered by a team of archaeologists. In addition, Mrs. Codrington dies; the paintings which she has been hoarding in her attic workroom are revealed to be works of genius; her home is turned into a museum; and, in 1966, the Codrington Colony for the Encouragement of Visionary Art is established.

Hood's presentation of these events does not violate the conventions of realism, but the dimension of Christian allegory is present as well. A New Athens is ordered by means of a clear biblical structure. Chapter 1 corresponds to Genesis, Chapter 2 to the prophetic books, Chapter 3 to the Gospels, Chapter 4 to the Book of Revelation. This structure is not merely decorative; its presence allows the reader to perceive the true significance of the novel's action. This particular fragment of “the one bright book” demonstrates how Divine Grace enters the postlapsarian world through the sacramental union of Matt and Edie.

That the world of the novel is post-lapsarian is a point worth making, since John Mills, referring to The Swing in the Garden, has accused Hood of Pelagianism.¹¹ Very early in A New Athens, Hood gives us Matt's meditation on asphalt:

I began to feel as if I'd wandered off the map—and came to myself staring at broken old creases in the shoulder of the highway and certain strange upheavals in the tarred surface. They made me think of all that is compressed at infernal temperatures under the earth's crust, of tar and tar beds and the fossil remains that have been squeezed to black goo by the pressures of many ages. The heat. The weight! He was rightly named McAdam who bound up those old stones with the black viscous stuff; we are naturally poets. Something had crossed the old highway sometime in the past and left a scar, more accurately a series of parallel indentations, ruts, which many subsequent applications of temporary surfacing had not concealed. Thus a freshly-painted surface will imperceptibly yellow and blemish and crack as wet plaster rejects the clawed molecules of the paint, chemical sickness in the plaster making its structure refractory.

(NA, p. 6)

But, having begun with this vision of fallenness, Hood has Matt re-enter the novel's equivalent of Eden (or Edie-en), as he discovers the old SWLS right-of-way: “Twenty feet apart, banks of shrubbery stood on either side of this strange earthwork, for all the world like a doorway in a fairytale opening into the green garden, the magical lost world of childhood, almost of babyhood” (NA, p. 8). The destructive force of time, “the pressures of many ages” can obviously be overcome.

Matt's account of his vision of the train begins with the simple statement that “This place intersected with that time” (NA, p. 18); then his 1952 experience of Edie is restored to him. But this return to the green garden is not to be construed as Matt's desperate attempt to escape from 1966. He is interested rather in continuity, in the possibility that “nothing that has once existed can ever stop existing” (NA, p. 11), in “the persistence of structure through destructive ages” (NA, p. 51). Matt's original vision of Edie was at once a glimpse of paradise—“I see that from the first moment I saw her, from the beginning of things, she and only she was the one” (NA, p. 31)—and evidence that Matt was outside its walls, since she was, at that moment, “the one” only in potentia. The vision can be fulfilled only in marriage.

In Chapter 1, then, Hood uses the imagery of Eden and the Fall to say something about the meaning of time for a man who is conscious that “History traces the footpaths of the Divine Being” (NA, p. 11). Time can destroy the railroad; we learn that the rails have been sold to Gillette to be converted into razorblades. But time cannot destroy the human significance of Matt's vision: in fact time provides the only arena in which Matt and Edie's love can come to fruition. The analogue for redemption in the Matt-Edie story must then be the marriage itself, the sacrament through which the vision's potential is made manifest in the world of McAdam and his descendants.

In Chapter 2, Matt is linked to Ezekiel by Mrs. Codrington, who explains that Goderich, Ontario is a mandala: “‘Seen from above, the centre of town is a perfect wheel. Surely you remember the vision, prophetic and illuminated, of Ezekiel?’” (NA, p. 105). In this chapter there are two prophetic visions, both connected with the river, a motif of central importance in Ezekiel's book. The first is a “midnight epiphany” (NA, p. 81) witnessed by Matt and a girl named Valerie Sherbourne. An upper-laker called the Scott Misener moves upriver in the night, and Matt is deeply impressed by its powerful and mysterious presence. He is introduced to Edie the next day.

The more important vision occurs on New Year's Eve, 1952, the night on which Matt and Edie become engaged. Skating a hundred yards offshore, they see the “ghost ship” through the ice. The episode owes much to Wordsworth, especially to the description of the appearance of the moon over Mount Snowdon in The Prelude.¹² Matt's account reads in part:

Then suddenly the trailing edge of the huge mass, and the moon came out full, seeming larger than the sun at noonday, a swelling, rounded, perfect achieved circle seeming to bound across waves of air like some sort of chariot. Brilliant, almost white light flooded over us. Midnight noonday. There were rays, visible diagonal slanting rays of moonlight, striking the ice at an unusual angle and now the whole swept green hard sheet gleamed with unearthly radiance.

It happened. Just as she had prophesied. Looking slantwise across this sheeted green glow, we saw a myriad of glowing points of fire shooting from their responsive rays upward toward our blades from beneath the champagne-bottle ice. At first they were as tiny and as fleeting as the “seeing stars” effect obtained by pressing on one's closed eyelids, swimming, jumping pinpricks of gold. But these strange lights weren't gold, and they weren't illusory, though they certainly seemed illusory.

(NA, p. 113)

The mode is not purely naturalistic, however. The first chapter of Ezekiel is the source for much of the diction and imagery of this passage. Ezekiel, by the river of Chebar, sees visions of God; and the motifs of the chariot, the circle—“a wheel in the middle of a wheel” (Ezek. i.16)—the cloud, the holy fire, the shining metal, and the unearthly radiance—“the glory of the Lord” (Ezek. i.28)—are all present.

Finally Matt and Edie's vision reveals itself to be the ship:

The phantom. Really there. The ghost ship. Holding hands, we moved apart and stood looking from bow to stern and back, the design of the starry boat delivered to us from ancient metal in the moonlight, from solid emplacement in the muddy, sandy bottom of the river, these stars poured their light upward, copper-green. The image deepened out, solidified, held … the frame of the hull lay there fifteen feet below us as clear and as beautifully drawn as if on a naval architect's plan, perfect, magnificently geometrical like one of the Viking longships, exquisitely proportioned Pythagorean mystery.

(NA, p. 114)

At the end of the Book of Ezekiel, several chapters are devoted to a description of the prophet's vision of the Temple which will one day stand in Jerusalem, the source of the river flowing toward the East, signifying that the land has been healed. In A New Athens, the ship, cognate of Ezekiel's Temple, signifies the glory which will be exhibited in Matt and Edie's marriage.

In terms of the novel's para-biblical structure, the first sentence of Chapter 3 alerts us to the fact that the Christian era has arrived: “‘By what signs then, Matthew, are we to recognize the One True Church?’” (NA, p. 119). Matt persuades Edie to convert to Catholicism, and their marriage is celebrated. Their union can be interpreted as an analogue of redemption. It effects a permanent and positive change in their lives. After noting that marriage is the “traditional end of comedy” (NA, p. 139), Matt goes on to comment: “Whether or not the comic tone persists after the ceremony is over: that is what is widely open to question. For Edie and me, the comedy continued all the rest of the night and ever since” (NA, p. 140).

But redemption proves to be inseparable from atonement. The price of the marriage is, apparently, the death of Edie's father:

I've thought about Earl Codrington's death a good deal, off and on since then, and in certain ways I blame myself for it. I don't imply that I killed him deliberately, outright, in the terms of melodrama. I mean that I seem to have caused some sort of subtle damage to his emotions and affections; this was linked to the circumstance of Edie's becoming a Catholic. He felt he'd lost her. He felt that she'd gone right away from him by doing that.

(NA, p. 146)

Redemption and atonement is an explicit theme of the last part of the chapter, in which two of Mrs. Codrington's paintings are described, and in which she has her conversation with Matt on the nature of art. The subjects of the paintings are Stoverville's sometime mayor “‘robed as Herod’” (NA, p. 167) and the local member of parliament “‘represented as Judas’” (NA, p. 179). The existence of evil is acknowledged; what Herod and Judas stand for in the New Testament is alive in the Stoverville of 1960. But to identify such manifestations of evil in their proper context in the drama of salvation is to proclaim their ultimate defeat. The marriage of Matt and Edie, and the art of Mrs. Codrington, both function as wheels within the larger wheel of Christ's redemptive work.

Chapter 4 parallels the Book of Revelation. Matt compares the establishment of the museum in Mrs. Codrington's house to the establishment of the New Jerusalem. The “ghost ship” is discovered by the archaeologists Bill and Evelyn Starycz, who supervise its restoration. In 1966 it is put on public display at the Stoverville landing. The Duke of Clarence has been revealed to the world at large. This suggests a parallel between the ship and the marriage. The Temple of Ezekiel's prophecy has now been built in the lives of Matt and Edie. Time has not destroyed the original vision, but has rather demonstrated that vision's validity. The promise of the marriage has been fulfilled, proved on the pulses for thirteen years.

Chapter 4 is related to Revelation in another way. The apocalyptic theme of Mrs. Codrington's masterwork (The Population of Stoverville, Ontario, Entering into the New Jerusalem) gives Hood an opportunity to explain, through Matt's commentary, how actions in “‘the purely natural world’” are ultimately to be evaluated from the perspective of “‘the world of vision’” (NA, p. 171). In Matt's analysis of Mrs. Codrington's painting, Hood is also explaining how he wants his own work to be read. In The Population of Stoverville, Ontario, Entering into the New Jerusalem, “The things of this world were given their due, their line transmitted with utter fidelity” (NA, p. 212). But Matt comments at some length on such aspects of the painting as its “visionary impression of merged spatiality and spacelessness” (NA, p. 211), its depiction of recognizable citizens of Stoverville “according to Biblical norms” (NA, p. 214), and the fact that while “The painter defies the viewer to locate God,” nevertheless “God is there” (NA, p. 215). Certainly, as we have seen, Hood must have had such considerations in mind when he devised the structure of A New Athens.

An obvious conclusion is that Hood is in fact doing what he claims to be doing, assimilating “the mode of the novel to the mode of fully-developed Christian allegory.”¹³ The Dantean visionary dimension is demonstrably present. “I just want to get it clear,” Hood writes to Mills, “that my books are not the same kind of narratives as ‘The Stone Angel’ or ‘Duddy Kravitz’ and if they are read with their true genre in mind, then they will seem more worthy of critical approval.”¹⁴ Yet one wonders whether such approval will be forthcoming. Once the prejudice against his method has been overcome, Hood will still have to face a parallel problem with respect to his theme. He has chosen to write about a man of sophisticated intelligence who works out his salvation in a world in which “History traces the footpaths of the Divine Being” (NA, p. 11). Whatever else may be said about it, this choice is certainly unfashionable. Like Baudelaire, Hood may have to be “content to write only for the dead.”¹⁵ The comparison is perhaps instructive, for The New Age promises to be a kind of Flowers of Goodness, as uncongenial to our time as Les Fleurs du Mal was to most of Baudelaire's contemporaries. But those who study Hood's work with care will rediscover the truth of May-Beth Codrington's assertion that “‘Art is one of the divers tongues’”(NA, p. 168).

Notes

1. Hugh Hood, “Hugh Hood And John Mills In Epistolary Conversation,” The Fiddlehead, No. 116 (Winter 1978), p. 145.

2. Hugh Hood, “Letter,” Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 9 (Winter 1977–78), p. 140.

3. David Latham, “Optical Allusions,” rev. of Dark Glasses, by Hugh Hood, Essays on Canadian Writing, Nos. 7–8 (Fall 1977), pp. 106–07.

4. Hugh Hood, “Letter,” p. 141.

5. Barry Cameron, rev. of Dark Glasses, by Hugh Hood, The Fiddlehead, No. 115 (Fall 1977), p. 146.

6. One of the most important attributes of the Centre is its ambiguity. As has been pointed out to me, the Centre can be related to both the Inferno and the Purgatorio; but I don't think Hood wants it to be identified with either one. The protagonist never learns which it is for Philly White; though he clearly suspects it's the former, he can't be absolutely certain. The Centre would obviously not be out of place in either The Castle or The Trial (even though Philly, unlike Joseph K., has committed a definable crime).

7. John Milton, Paradise Lost, I. 63, in his Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1957), p. 213.

8. Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study In Magic And Religion, abridged ed. (London: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 347, 327.

9. A full analysis of the story's typological symbolism is beyond the scope of this essay. Such an analysis would have to come to terms with the meaning of such motifs as the ascent, the mountain top, the descent, the crossroads, Junetown and Caintown, and the festival of Thanksgiving. Here I want merely to demonstrate that the story belongs in the category of “art of revelation.”

10. Hugh Hood, “Hugh Hood And John Mills In Epistolary Conversation,” p. 137.

11. John Mills, “Hugh Hood And John Mills In Epistolary Conversation,” pp. 134–35.

12. William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), xiv, 1–62, in his Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchison, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 583–84.

13. Hugh Hood, “Hugh Hood And John Mills In Epistolary Conversation,” p. 145.

14. Hugh Hood, “Hugh Hood And John Mills In Epistolary Conversation,” pp. 140–41.

15. “… volontiers je n'écrirais que pour les morts.” Dedication to Les Paradis artificiels (1860). Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Y. G. Le Dantec, rev. Claude Pichois (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1961), p. 346.