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Groves's Unpublished MAN and its Relation to The Master of the Mill
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Grove's Unpublished MAN and it's Relation to The Master of the Mill. Birk Sproxton UNI VERSITY OF MA NITOBA I One of the most illuminatingdocuments for the student of Grove's novels is his unpublished Ant Book entitled MAN: His Habits, Social Organisation , and Outlook. A carbon typescript of 262 single-spaced pages, MAN is in part an early version of what became Consider Her Ways (1947), but it is also helpful for the light it sheds on his other published works. The extant copy was among the Grove papers found in 1964,1 and it was written in the mid-twenties, perhaps 1925,2 during the period when Grove was working on the trilogy out of which came Settlers of the Marsh (1925), and on The Yoke of Life (1930). MAN is related to many of Grove's works: it echoes themes from his 1914 paper "Rosseau as Educator,"3 and it includes the basic ideas Grove put forth in his 1943 University of Toronto Quarterly article, "Democracy and Education." In fact, MAN abounds in schemes, opinions, and ideas which show up again and again in the Grove canon, and may be thought of as an essential outline of Grove's world view. As we shall see, MAN includes a cosmogony, an epistemology, a theory of history, and it includes comments on subjects from sex to socialism. The Table of Contents illustrates the ambitiousness of Grove's conception , its organization, and even something of its tone: The Origin of the Present Book, by F. Philgrove Introduction The Scope of the Enquiry to be conducted The Manner in which the Enquiry was to be conducted The Perils and Hardships that were encountered The Reports on our Findings The Resultsof the Enquiry The Best Means of Exterminating Mankind Parti. Man as Part of Creation Man in Nature Chapter I. Nature Enslaved by Man II. The Needs of Man III. VI. V. IV. III. II. I. 36 Part II. Man's Organisation, Economic Cooperation and Insurance Chapter I. Man's Ideas of Wealth II. Credit III. Competition IV. Part III. Man's Organisation, Social and Political „, T , „ . , „ , & Chapter I. The Social Scale TT Government ,„' International Relations Part IV. Man's Higher Life, Spiritual and Intellectual Religion Chapter I. Leisure and the Employment of Leisure II. Science III. Education IV. Epilogue, by Prof. R. S. Contemnour4 The seeming tightness of organization is misleading, for MAN is very uneven. Perhaps Grove's basic "mistake" was in his choice of structure: the Subtitle announces that the book is "A Treatise by Wawa-quee...." By opting for a discursive format for his satire, Grove put himself in the position of having to establish immediately the identity and characteristics and his ant-persona. There can be little sustained narrative interest when such a form is chosen, and Grove's most clearly-realized satiric passages are to be found in the opening pages of his text. Grove evidently did not at first recognize his blunder, for the typescript has been carefully proofread and minor changes made. Evidently MAN was a labour of excitement if not of love. To put the matter more specifically, the problem with MAN is that Grove does not clearly establish his centre of interest. He wants his reader, at one and the same time, to follow the ant's survey on man and to keep an eye on the workings of her ant-mind. In the first paragraph of Philgrove's essay we find this invitation: In literary criticism it has often been asserted that the poet, the writer of fiction, and the thinker do not reveal things so much as they reveal themselves. In presenting the present book to my human readers as the work of an ant, I cannot avoid pointing out that the Formicarian author, writing as she does on Man, reveals, not so much us as herself (p. 1). Fortunately, when Grove rewrote his Ant Book, he wrote it as a narrative, and the coyness evident in this quotation disappears, and the ironic juxtaposition of human and ant affairs is effective because it is not insisted upon. Grove's excitement at his first conception of the Ant Book is evident in the first sixty odd pages, consisting of the human editor's prologue and [44.200.40.97] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:10 GMT) 37 Wawa-quee's "Introduction" to her report. Of these two parts, by far the more fully-realized is the chapter by...