Hugh MacLennan World Literature Analysis
After a publisher had rejected one of MacLennan’s first novels, suggesting that it needed a stronger sense of locale, the publisher became an external force that directed the young writer’s focus to the Canadian scene. When, in 1960, the great American editor and critic Edmund Wilson found in MacLennan’s essays “a Canadian way of looking at things which had little in common with either the ’American’ or the British colonial one and which has achieved a self-confident detachment in regard to the rest of the world,” he set his seal on the reputation of MacLennan as a Canadian nationalist. Although it is true that his seven published novels are set in Canadian culture and that his heroes, like the author himself, come home again, it is also true that MacLennan’s world travels and his studies of classics and history in universities of three nations, as well as his Canadian heritage, have informed his thinking and his novels.
In his doctoral research in 1935, for instance, MacLennan found that the private enterprise responsible for Rome’s greatness “was also responsible for the reduction of democratic communities to quasi-feudal serfdom.” As early as Two Solitudes, MacLennan warned against the dangers of uncontrolled capitalism. In his next novel, The Precipice, the same message appears as a denial of the value of the American Dream. Later, in 1960, MacLennan identified another element of the cycle of history. From a book by Gordon Rattray Taylor, MacLennan adapted the Freudian notion that “the extreme father-identifier, the ’patrist’ is compelled by hidden psychological needs to crave authority,” whereas the mother-identifier, the matrist, “hates conflict . . . is bored by power . . . tends toward democracy” and “softens by corruption any authoritarian institutions he has inherited.” In history, matrist and patrist political systems alternate. Disturbed by the permissiveness of the 1960’s and 1970’s, MacLennan foresees in Voices in Time democratic freedom declining into chaos and ushering in a new authoritarianism as antidote.
All of MacLennan’s novels treat the conflicts of father and son, not only because MacLennan spent years coming to terms with his own stern father, but also because MacLennan knows his Freud and his Sophocles. Scholar Alec Lucas points out numerous Oedipus motifs in the novels: “heroes with physical defects,” “separation from the father; the search for a father during which . . . [the son] discovers himself,” “kindly foster-parents, and sexual attraction to a member of one’s own family or a maternal female.” In MacLennan’s first three novels, Barometer Rising, Two Solitudes, and The Precipice, the rebellious sons never come to terms with their fathers or their fathers’ sexuality. In Each Man’s Son, however, the middle-aged son gives up the ghost of his father, and in The Watch That Ends the Night, MacLennan turns Dr. Jerome Martell, a parallel to his own father, into a Christ figure. By 1980, MacLennan himself has turned into a father, critical of the permissive younger generation; but his author figure, childless John Wellfleet in Voices in Time, becomes the kindly teaching father to the children of the future.
MacLennan scholar T. D. MacLulich says that MacLennan’s historical study leaves him uncertain as to whether society’s course is determined by forces beyond human control. The play of human will against externally determined destiny is also the subject of Sophocles’ great Oedipus tragedies, which MacLennan loved. The thinker who grew up with a Calvinist father and who came to manhood during the Great Depression might well be inclined to see the external as determiner. Yet critics who fault MacLennan for the use of external...
(This entire section contains 2188 words.)
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determiners are unwise. Such events as the Halifax Harbor explosion inBarometer Rising, which frees Neil Macrae from a disgrace (also externally caused by a false accuser), are actual determiners in real life; and it is his reaction to the suffering caused by the explosion that frees Neil from the desire for revenge. Yet the lesson of tragedy and of life is that the noble individual must struggle against determinism or, unable to prevail, accept fate with dignity and self-control. MacLennan and his heroes do one or the other; they are never craven.
The great myth of the struggle of life—of will against determinism—is that of Odysseus. That myth recurs in all the novels. Like Odysseus, Neil Macrae in Barometer Rising comes home unknown to Halifax from World War I, wounded and disgraced, to reclaim his identity and his place in society, to take vengeance on his enemy, and to restore his house. Neil and his faithful Penny and their son are reunited in seasoned happiness like that of Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus. In Each Man’s Son, structured like the Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614) with counterpointed scenes at home and in the world, Archie MacNeil, a boxer, lacks Odysseus’s cunning to survive the exploitation of prizefighting, and his wife, Mollie, lacks the strength to resist her suitor. On his return, Archie kills Mollie and her lover and dies, but “Telemachus” (the son) survives to live with Dr. Ainslie, a Calvinist mentor at last grown wise. In The Watch That Ends the Night, Dr. Jerome Martell, like Odysseus an “oddly pure sensualist so many experimenting women had desired,” returns from war and wandering to bring Catherine, his dying former wife, and her husband, George, to terms with their past, to enable them to affirm her remaining life and accept her death. This affirmation of life and death is a major theme of the Odyssey. Scholar George Woodcock calls the Odyssey “the product of a people in the process of becoming aware of itself . . . [appropriate] to illuminate” the rise of a “Canadian national consciousness.” It is also a myth of communication with the world. MacLennan’s novels and his Canada are part of the world.
Two Solitudes
First published: 1945
Type of work: Novel
The lives of three generations of two Canadian families are bound up in the conflict between French Canadian and Anglais ideas and aims for Canada.
A Galsworthian family saga, which of course includes intergenerational conflicts, bildungsroman, and love stories, Two Solitudes presents the bipartite consciousness for “European” Canada and urges reconciliation through reciprocal understanding: “Love consists in this,” says the epigraph from the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, “that two solitudes protect, and touch, and greet each other.” In the account of the older generation from 1917 to 1921, Athanase Tallard, member of Parliament and seigneur of the agricultural community of St. Marc, represents the French tradition, Catholic, communal, “bound in sacred trust to the soil”—although he is critical of the Church, advocates scientific education, and has taken as his second wife a sensuous Irish Catholic girl. Typical Anglais are represented by the self-made capitalist Huntley McQueen, and by Janet Methuen, who has married into an old moneyed English family of Montreal, one with manners but very little noblesse oblige. Janet’s father, John Yardley, a retired sea captain who buys a farm in St. Marc, is the sort who should help bring about conciliation. Honorable, humane, exuberant, attuned to nature, Captain Yardley earns acceptance in the community. The parish priest, Father Beaubien, who opposes Yardley and Athanase, embodies the Church’s antiassimilationist policy. In the interest of controlled progress, Athanase collaborates with McQueen to set up industry in St. Marc. When he loses his place in his own community and can no longer be useful to McQueen, the tycoon bankrupts him. Yet it is Marius, the son of Athanase and his ascetic, sanctimonious first wife—Marius, “sexually puritanical, politically ambitious, a tool in the hands of the Church and the fledgling separatist movement,” ultimately a failure—who destroys his father in the French Catholic community.
Paul Tallard, the son of Athanase and his Irish second wife, Kathleen, is the focus of the episodic account of the next generation. Educated in French and English, humanely and scientifically, living as little lord of the country manor and then in urban poverty in Montreal, studying at university and then traveling the world for five years (1934 to 1939), Paul would seem ideal for developing the unified Canadian consciousness in the world, and so he is. In Athens, the cradle of his civilization, he thinks that “in spite of all the things he had done and the places he had seen, he [is] essentially unchanged: a Canadian, half French and half English, still trying to be himself and stand on his own feet.” In 1939, Paul goes home to write—for Paul is an incipient writer—about “naturally vital people” in Canadian society, and to marry Heather Methuen. The daughter of Janet Methuen and granddaughter of Captain Yardley, Heather has denied the mercenary values of her mother and has sought breadth and independence by studying art in the United States. Like Paul, she is faithful to Canada. Like her grandfather, she is full of joy. Though theirs is a romance of individuals, their marriage points the way toward national reconciliation.
The novel ends with declaration of war against Germany. Paul will volunteer, his first act as a unified Canadian being the defense of the civilization of which both the French and the English are a part. Among the French and English Canadians, MacLennan concludes, “there woke . . . the felt knowledge that together they had fought and survived. . . . The country took the first . . . steps toward becoming herself,” alone but in touch with a world of nations.
Voices in Time
First published: 1980
Type of work: Novel
In the twenty-first century, an aged survivor of political and physical cataclysm tries to recover and record historical knowledge as a help to the renewal of civilization.
Voices in Time is at once a futuristic and a historical novel. When André Gervais, one of a new generation stirring in the 2030’s, born after “the Great Fear,” “the Destructions,” and the establishment of the repressive, simplistic Third Bureaucracy, discovers buried records of a Wellfleet family in Metro (once Montreal), John Wellfleet, a seventy-five-year-old “inoperative” in the new society, organizes his family’s experiences into a model of what went wrong in the twentieth century. Since John tries to recount the stories of his family members in their own voices, his resulting book is structured as a montage written in a variety of styles.
Central to the novel is the elegant voice of Conrad Dehmel, John’s stepfather. The son of a German naval officer bound utterly to pride, discipline, and duty and a gentle, war-loathing mother, Conrad develops liberal values. Studying history in England in the 1930’s, he falls in love with Hannah Erlich, a German Jew. Both return to Germany right before World War II. As part of a plan to save Hannah and her psychologist father from extermination, Conrad joins the Gestapo, but the plan fails; Hannah and his own family die under the Nazis, their fates determined by Adolf Hitler’s horrible misuse of power. Tortured terribly, Conrad survives and emigrates.
The second major voice—one of late twentieth century vulgarity—is that of John’s older cousin, Timothy Wellfleet. Like Conrad, he is the son of a military man, a man who, however, never disciplined his son; Timothy becomes a representative member of late twentieth century society. First an advertising agent, he later becomes a radical-chic television interviewer, the kind of “media” newsman who belittles his guests from established society and makes himself the star of the show. When Timothy sympathetically features terrorist separatists whose kidnapping and murder trigger the government crackdowns of Canada’s October Crisis (1970), his producer, a Jew who is also his mistress, accuses him of encouraging terrorism. She leaves him and his program.
Timothy and Conrad’s stories come together when Conrad, a respected history professor who feels duty bound to warn North Americans that the young generation’s loss of confidence in civilization makes conditions right for an upsurge of fascism, appears on Timothy’s program. Using garbled information from a Marxist-terrorist source, Timothy accuses Conrad of his Gestapo connections and of responsibility for Hannah’s death. A Holocaust survivor, having mistakenly identified him from television as a Nazi torturer, kills Conrad, then, seeing his mistake, kills himself. Undisciplined Timothy’s banal misuse of banal power has wrought horrible results.
In the book that he edits, John Wellfleet and his voices suggest a pattern of history: After Germany’s defeat in World War I and its suffering in the Depression, Hitler appealed to the Germans’ need for an authority figure, a superego to approve their doing anything to recover their pride. In late twentieth century North America, undisciplined young people and their permissive elders also were demoralized; they felt the need for authority and discipline that they could not give themselves. According to MacLennan’s apocalyptic story, an authoritarian regime (the Second Bureaucracy) did follow a time of license and terrorism (the Great Fear), but its strength was not real: Its uncontrolled war computers caused the Destructions. In the Third Bureaucracy, there is hope in the cycle of history: André Gervais, his colleagues, and his children may restore civilization; John Wellfleet’s history book may guide them. MacLennan may have hoped that the warning of his novel might forestall the destruction that he prophesies.