SOURCE: "Canadian Nationalism in Search of a Form: Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising," in Journal of Canadian Fiction, Vol. 1, No. 4, Fall, 1972, pp. 68-71.

[In the essay below, Arnason discusses MacLennan's formulation of a Canadian consciousness in Barometer Rising and Two Solitudes.]

Hugh MacLennan published his first novel, Barometer Rising, in 1941. Since that time, he has become the "grand old man" of Canadian novelists, an assessment that has little to do with his age or the quality of his achievement, but is rather an acknowledgement that the development of a Canadian consciousness is paralleled in the development of his work.

Success did not come easily or quickly to MacLennan. He wrote two novels, So All Their Praises (1933) and Man Should Rejoice (1937) which were never published. Both were concerned with broad international issues. It was only when MacLennan narrowed his scope and turned to a Canadian subject that he did succeed. That success was marked by the Publication in 1941 of Barometer Rising, the first novel written in Canada, by a Canadian, in which a peculiarly Canadian consciousness manifests itself.

Since that time, MacLennan has continued to expand his vision of Canada and Canadian consciousness. At the same time, his importance has been recognized, and a growing body of critical study of his work is available. Unfortunately, certain critical clichés have prevented a balanced assessment. The first of these is that MacLennan has, in some incomprehensible way, suffered "a failure of imagination", and the second is that he is a sociologist in disguise. Neither of these views will stand close scrutiny.

A reassessment of Barometer Rising must begin with MacLennan's second novel, Two Solitudes. In it, he has created his vision of the artist as a young man, in the person of Paul Tallard. Though Paul Tallard comes from a very different background from Hugh MacLennan, he is the young artist who discovers the difficulty of dealing with broad world themes, and turns back to his Canadian roots. The insights, values and ideas that Paul gains in Two Solitudes mirror MacLennan's aesthetic and ethical views.

For instance, in Two Solitudes, Paul gains an insight into the problem of writing a Canadian novel:

he realized that his reader's ignorance of the essential Canadian clashes and values presented him with a unique problem. The background would have to be created from scratch if his story was to become intelligible. He could afford to take nothing for granted. He would have to build the stage and props for his play, and then write the play itself.

It is an insight which MacLennan himself shares with his character, and it accounts, in part, for some of the successes and some of the failures of MacLennan's work.

The basis of Paul's insight is an assumption that the reader will be ignorant of things Canadian. Who, then, is this hypothetical reader? Obviously, he is not a thinking modern Canadian, or else he should know something of the "essential Canadian clashes and values" and the kind of stage-business that Paul envisions would be superfluous. Is he then some outsider, some American or English, or non-Canadian-Canadian literary creature to whom the author offers his work with built in apologies? This appears to be the case and many of the excesses in MacLennan's work spring from an assessment of his audience that is parallel to the assessment that Paul makes. Why else would a man suffering from shell-shock, obsessed by thoughts of revenge and desperately hungry for love be permitted by his artistic creator to think: "The Citadel itself flew the Union Jack in all weathers and was rightly considered a symbol and bastion of the British empire" [Barometer Rising].

Why else would a wounded alcoholic doctor, seconds before he is to deliver a proposal of marriage be permitted to pause and contemplate irrelevantly that

"… Halifax, more than most towns, seemed governed by a fate she neither made nor understood, for it was her birthright to serve the English in time of war and to sleep neglected when there was peace. It was a bondage Halifax had no thought of escaping because it was the only life she had ever known; but to Murray this seemed a pity, for the town figured more largely in the calamities of the British Empire than in its prosperities, never seemed able to become truly North American".

These examples are typical, and they are by no means isolated instances. Throughout both Barometer Rising and Two Solitudes action is continually interrupted by contemplations about Canadian society, Canada's place in the world and the forces that operate in Canada's Usually, these thoughts do not arise as any consequence of the action and seem to exist purely as apologia to the un-Canadian reader. Sometimes they seem to be meretricious interpolations on the part of the author, a difficulty in form that arises from MacLennan's inability to handle his narrative with skill.

In part, though, MacLennan's insight is a valid one. At the time of his writing Barometer Rising, there were not many people in Canada who thought of themselves as essentially Canadian, and so some of the stage business is not so superfluous as it might first appear. Now, thirty years later, when people can refer to themselves as Canadians without feeling that there is something embarassing or pretentious about the use of the word, MacLennan's self-consciousness seems particularly clumsy. In retrospect, any battle that has been won seems disproportionate to its causes. Today, we wonder whether Canada, as a nation, can survive. Thirty years ago the problem was not whether Canada survived, but whether it existed at all.

Since MacLennan is very much concerned with ideas, it is necessary to examine some of the ideas that he considers important. That is to say, since MacLennan is building "the stage and the props for his play" it might be worthwhile to examine them before we look at the play itself.

First, MacLennan's conception of Canada's possibilities seems to be based on an idea of corporate spiritual energy invested in the state. The wars in Barometer Rising and Two Solitudes are testimony to the expended energy of the Europeans. The first world war, MacLennan feels, will leave only madness, contempt, despair and an "intolerable burden of guilt" in Europe, because the war is the "logical result" of the Europeans "living out the sociological results of their own lives". Canada's role in the future will be to "pull Britain clear of decay and give her a new birth" [Barometer Rising]. MacLennan is a bit less overtly didactic and somewhat more dramatically convincing in his treatment of European decadence in Two Solitudes. First, the reader is given a picture of a cultured, wealthy, Parisian woman, the carefully wrought product of an European civilization caught, fascinated, waiting for a brutal German to debase her sexually. It soon becomes apparent, as MacLennan moves toward the lecturers tone in which he is most comfortable that she is an analogue for one part of Europe and the brutal porcine German is an analogue for the other. As Paul retraces in his mind the progress of his novel Young Man of 1933, we find that an effete, wasted civilization that has abandoned itself to machines and cities and has forsaken God is powerless to resist the resurgence of totemism, magic and brutal atavism, in fact, the whole danse macabre that "had burst out of the unconscious" and found its focus in Hitler.

Speaking for MacLennan, Paul says "the same brand of patriotism is never likely to exist all over Canada. Each race so violently disapproves of the tribal gods of the other I can't see how any single Canadian politician can ever imitate Hitler—at least, not over the whole country." MacLennan clearly feels that the future is Canada's. In Barometer Rising he confidently and optimistically foresaw Canada as "the central arch which united the new order." A trifle more subdued in Two Solitudes, he sees Canada acting "out of the instinct to do what was necessary" taking the first steps to self-knowledge, aware that she is "not unique but like all the others, alone with history, with science, with the future." This view of Canada is not, however, as chastened as it may first appear. The war is leading the rest of the world to self-destruction while it leads Canada to self-knowledge.

Against this backdrop of historical inevitability, MacLennan sets his props: his own ideas and attitudes, and his impressions of what are typically Canadian ideas and attitudes. MacLennan clearly distrusts certain aspects of progress. In Barometer Rising his characters deplore the mass production of ships, and regret deeply the passing of honest craftsmanship. In Two Solitudes Paul sees the machine behind Hitler, "the voice of God the Father no longer audible through the stroke of the connecting rod." Angus Murray in Barometer Rising has a theory that "… this war is the product of the cities." Paul Tallard in Two Solitudes sees "the new city-hatred (contempt for all things but cleverness)" as the foundation for anti-semitism, class warfare and economic jealousy. The conscienceless American engineer of Barometer Rising is the typical product of the city.

On the other hand, MacLennan clearly feels a deep emotional attachment to certain aspects of the old order. The simple, God-fearing farmer-fisherman of Cape Breton epitomize for him the enduring values. Tied both to the sea and the land, governed by the natural rhythms of the earth, they are honest and noble. Alec McKenzie of Barometer Rising and Captain John Yardley of Two Solitudes function as archetypal figures, symbols of human potentiality against whom the other characters may be measured.

This is not to say that MacLennan is opposed to change. Indeed, there are many things about the old order that he resents—the desperate and cold materialism of men like McQueen, the aristocratic conventions of people like Col. Wain and The Methuens which lead them to debase the country in which they live and which gives them their living, and the narrow religious bigotry of Alfred Wain and Father Beaubien. Change offers not only the hatred of the cities and the brutality of the machine, but also the possibility for growth and renewal, for the fulfilling of destiny and the achievement of self-knowledge. The drastic and accelerated change occasioned by the war are the flames from which Canada will arise, Phoenix-like, to take its rightful place in the world.

Canada, as MacLennan sees it, and presumably as Canadians themselves think of it, is the product of two cultures. On the one hand, it is tied to England and "a world without England would be intolerable" [Barometer Rising]. On the other hand it is tied to the United States by "a frontier that was more a link than a division." Uniquely, it partakes of the two cultures. MacLennan clearly sees a dialectic at work, and Neil McRae expresses it: "… if there were enough Canadians like himself, half-American and half-English, then the day was inevitable when the halves would join and his country would become the central arch which united the new order." The same kind of dialectic functions in Two Solitudes in which Paul Tallard becomes the synthesis of the French-Canadian and English-Canadian cultures. Here, though, the symbolic form of the dialectic functions against MacLennan's thesis that the cultures are in fact solitudes and must co-exist rather than merge. The title of the novel is from a poem by Rilke, and is part of a definition of love, another example of MacLennan's incurable optimism.

There is one more significant idea that must be mentioned, and that is the sense of geography that MacLennan feels is part of the Canadian vision and which becomes, in his novels, an important device. In Two Solitudes, Heather paints a picture and asks Paul to comment on it. When he sees it, he (or else the author—there is some confusion) notices "… she had missed the vastness of such a scene, the sense of the cold wind stretching so many hundreds of miles to the north of it, through ice and tundra and desolation." It is an error that MacLennan has no intention of making. The sun that sets on Halifax makes long shadows in Montreal, glints on the prairies and beams down from high noon on Vancouver. MacLennan seems determined to create a vision of Canada as at least a geographical reality if not a social one, and he loses no opportunity to tie a description of a particular place into a vision of the whole continent.

A set of ideas provides the stage and the props for MacLennan's play: the background is the historically inevitable achievement of destiny and self-knowledge by a young and vigorous country pulled from the outside by two cultures and from the inside by two cultures, caught between the old and the new. The props are certain attitudes and representative characters. Against this is to be set a play which will be an artistic whole, and which will utilize this stage and these properties. Obviously enough, since a nation is a composite of its individuals, the play will concern itself with the achievement of individual destiny and self-knowledge.

It is fashionable to claim that the failures in MacLennan's novels are the result of a failure of imagination. This is not an adequate assessment. The failures that occur are usually the result of a failure to handle with skill the technical form of the novel and sometimes the result of the misapplication of an unbalanced talent.

First, every novel must have a voice, a presumed narrator who tells the story. In the case of Barometer Rising the voice is that of an omniscient author who sees everything, who can move about at will and permit the reader to share the thoughts, feelings, and vision of various characters. At times he exists independently of any character and observes and comments for himself. Like the characters themselves, he is limited to a present and retrospective vision, and none of the unfortunate dramatic ironies of the "dear and gentle reader" school of omniscient author intrude themselves. When the voice speaks for itself, and when it operates at some distance from the characters, it is observant, acute, and incisive. When it moves closer, though, it runs into problems. Too often we begin with the description of a character's thoughts, and find that the anonymous voice has taken matters out of their hands and is commenting itself. For example, [in] Barometer Rising we discover Wain contemplating Alec MacKenzie. "Wain puffed a lungful of smoke against the windowpane", at this point the anonymous voice is watching from outside. "MacKenzie was the only man in the world capable of upsetting his apple cart, of cancelling out all the patient work he had done in Halifax since his return from France"—now we have moved into Wain's mind and are observing his thought. "But the big man had no notion of this"—so far, so good. "When he had accepted the job and brought his wife and family to Halifax he had never guessed that it had been Wain's motive to make him a dependent". By this point there is some considerable doubt as to whether Wain is thinking or the narrator has taken over.

The result of this unsureness in the handling of point-of-view is that the characters are blurred. At times the thoughts of the characters are authentic and individual; at other times they are not. Penny, for instance, is distinctly feminine much of the time, but when she contemplates the Nova Scotian scene, and the anonymous voice intrudes, she could be Neil, Murry or anybody else:

Her eye wandered back to the freighter sliding upstream a commonplace ship, certainly foreign and probably of the Mediterranean origin, manned by heaven knew what conglomeration of Levantines, with maybe a Scotsman in the engine room and a renegade Nova Scotian somewhere in the forecastle. The war had brought so many of these mongrel vessels to Halifax, they had become a part of the landscape.

Besides blurring the identity of the characters, the authorial voice also blurs the action and interferes with the dramatic power of the narrative. MacLennan's chief skill lies in his ability to write sustained passages of descriptive narrative. This is obvious in his powerful description of the events leading to the explosion and the chaotic action thereafter. He chooses to dissipate this power by his refusal, in the first half of the book, to sustain his focus on any action. As the action approaches a climax, the focus shifts and the dramatic tension created is lost. To be sure, this shifting focus is obviously intentional. The unfulfilled nature of the characters calls for unfulfilled action, and provides a striking contrast to the sharp decisive nature of the action in the latter part of the book, as the cathartic effect of the explosion impels the characters to self knowledge and the fulfillment of their destinies. In theory, it is a fine idea, and as an outline for a novel it has a compelling symmetry. Unfortunately, in practice it is unsatisfying, and even more unfortunately MacLennan is incapable of supplying any richness of imagery and metaphor to make up the deficiency.

It is frequently pointed out that the explosion in Barometer Rising operates as a kind of deus ex machina which dispenses an arbitrary, though poetic justice. It interferes with the action, and prevents the confrontations that the early development of the book would seem to demand. For instance, Neil does not encounter Geoffrey Wain until he is safely dead, and the triangular relationship between Neil, Penny, and Angus creates none of the difficulties inherent in the situation. This is quite simply explicable, though, in terms of MacLennan's aesthetics. Just as Canada itself must work out its destiny in terms of individual self knowledge, so must each of the characters in the novel. Confrontation leads to victory or defeat, but not to the kind of self knowledge that MacLennan wants to delineate. The explosion prevents Neil from confronting Colonel Wain and Angus from confronting Neil. Instead, it makes each confront himself and learn to understand himself. At the end of the novel each of the characters is oddly isolated and self contained. There has been no development of relationships; but then, that is not what the novel is about. Though Penny and Neil are reunited physically as they ride together on the train, each is completely separate and distinct; that is to say, no communication goes on between them. Neil does not even know that he is a father when the novel ends.

This argument does not absolve the novel of weakness in its close. The process of self-discovery is not particularly convincing, and MacLennan's refusal to permit relationships to grow and change limits the novel and is frustrating to the reader. The argument does absolve MacLennan of much of the charge that his imagination is limited. He does not fail to develop interpersonal relationships because he cannot envision them, but because he chooses to concentrate on the individual's relationship with himself.

Another defect in the novel occurs as a result of MacLennan's use of characters in his novel both as props in his stage setting and participants in the action. The characters are too obviously symbolic. Col. Wain and Alec MacKenzie represent two facets of the old order, Angus Murray represents the transition and Neil and Penny represent the new order. MacLennan makes the mistake of overestimating the obtuseness of his readers, and to make sure that nobody has missed the point allows Angus Murray to sum up the symbolic action in a neat little precis:

There was Geoffrey Wain, the decadent of military colonists who had remained essentially a colonist himself, never really believing that anything above the second rate could exist in Canada, a man who had thought it necessary to lick the boots of the English but had merely taken it for granted that they mattered and Canadians didn't. There was Alec MacKenzie, the primitive man who had lived just long enough to bridge the gap out of the pioneering era and save his children from becoming anachronisms. There were Penny and Neil MacRae, two people who could seem at home almost anywhere, who had inherited as a matter of course and in their own country the urbane and technical heritage of both Europe and eastern United States. And there was himself, caught somewhere between the two extremes, intellectually gripped by the new and emotionally held by the old, too restless to remain at peace on the land and too contemptuous of bourgeois values to feel at ease in any city.

We're the ones who make Canada what she is today, Murray thought, neither one thing nor the other, neither a colony nor an independent nation, neither English nor American. And yet, clearly, the future is obvious, for England and America can't continue to live without each other much longer. Canada must therefore remain as she is, noncommittal, until the day she becomes the keystone to hold the world together.

All in all though, struggling under the symbolic load they must carry and with their thoughts continually being wrenched away from them by the author, the characters do remarkably well for themselves. Angus Murray is not a very convincing alcoholic, and is perhaps a bit too clear sighted, but he does seem motivated by genuine concerns, and his responses are convincing. Penny Wain does not convince us of her brilliance, but does convince us of her femininity. Colonel Wain, though a megalomaniac is not much more a parody than many real-life colonels. Alec MacKenzie, though a bit too good to be true, is acceptable. The Neil of the first part of the novel and the Neil of the second part are each in his own way convincing. Neil number one is indecisive and paranoid, and his actions confirm this. Neil number two is smugly selfish and competent, as is shown by his handling of things after the explosion. The difficulty is that it takes an unusually powerful ability to suspend disbelief to be convinced that the two are one, and that is a chief flaw in the book. We have seen no flashes of the old Neil or the Neil to come in the shuffling character of the first part of the book, and so we are not convinced at his change. The peripheral characters—Aunt Maria, Roddy and the rest who have escaped the symbolic load and who don't do much thinking are all quite delightful.

Style is as much an aspect of form as it is of thought and it is in respect of style that the novel has its chief virtues and its chief faults. MacLennan's greatest strength is in pure narrative description. His point by point description of the Halifax explosion is as good as anything of its kind in Canadian literature, or any other literature, for that matter. His description of the details of the landscape are deft and sure and he can characterize people with swift, sure and precise detail. Where he is weakest is in his handling of metaphor, and his novel loses strength from his inability to make vivid and animate comparisons. His ear for dialogue is not particularly good. The speech of his characters is a bit bookish at best, and collapses at moments of deep emotional stress, as may be seen by the stilted conversation between Neil and Penny at their first confrontation. John Yardley's accent in Two Solitudes is chiefly the result of his inability to pronounce the "a" in "that", though he can pronounce the same sound well enough in other words. Finally, a tendency to prefer latinate forms, possibly as a result of his training in the classics, leads MacLennan at times to such infelicities of expression as "she welcomed the lassitude as an anodyne to thought" [Barometer Rising].

In the end, a novel is not judged by weighing of its good points and weaknesses and the drawing up of a balance sheet. It must stand on its own, apart from the author's intent and its significance as a philosophic document. On these terms, Barometer Rising is a limited success. MacLennan has taken the subject of national consciousness in Canada and given it a form that is convincing. Unfortunately, the novel is weighed down by a lot of stage business that reduces its immediacy and vitality. The clutter is in part a weakness in MacLennan's writing, but another part of it is sheer historical necessity. An evolving Canadian consciousness found its first firm voice in MacLennan, and if that voice is a bit self-conscious, surely that is understandable.

In a conversation between Margaret Laurence and Robert Kroetsch in a book called Creation, an interesting passage occurs:

L: You know, I read Kipling, and what the hell did Kipling have to do with where I was living? And that isn't to say that we shouldn't read widely, but it is a good thing to be able to read, as a child, something that belongs to you, belongs to your people. And you and I might have sort of subconsciously had a compulsion to set down our own background.

K: I've suspected that often. We want to hear our story.

Laurence and Kroetsch speak of "our people" and "our story", and unselfconsciously regard themselves as Canadians. I don't think it is too much of an overstatement to say that their easy acceptance of the Canadian fact owes something to the ground broken by Hugh MacLennan.