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Hugh MacLennan 57 optimism of the Epilogue, seems the final subversion of the plot, a triumph of dogma over drama. 8. Voices in Time Thirteen years after Return of the Sphinx MacLennan published Voices in Time (1980) at the age of seventy­three, a final elegy for the present but with surprising hope for the future. The novel is set in a dystopian future, about 2039 (VT 170), but despite a brief science fiction beginning, it makes no pretence to be a futurist novel. The perspective is established so that the novelist (through his seventy­five­year­old narrator) can reflect back with apocalyptic omniscience on the tragedies of the twentieth century, including our present age: "I had no wish whatever to write futuristically. . . . fiction requires a perspective in time and now there is no perspective because the changes are coming so fast" (qtd. in E. Cameron, Life 355). This perspective allows the historian MacLennan to view the cycles of civilization: the repetition of the errors of the 1930s in the 1960s, and the eventual "self­ murder of a civilization" (VT 249) in the 1990s through the logical development of irresponsible technology and materialism, coupled with moral and spiritual decadence. The portrait of decay recalls his analysis of the fall of the Roman Empire in his doctoral dissertation, Oxyrhynchus. The hope that illuminates all these historical disasters (even his prophetic Armageddon) lies in the cyclical renewal of humanity after each self­destructive tragedy. At first glance, Voices in Time may not seem as thematically religious as his two previous novels, since there are fewer overt references to traditional theology in the novel. However, as MacLennan's essays and interviews make clear, and his biographer has fully documented, the philosophical framework of the book is based on his religious answer for humanity and the final development of his new theology, his modern vision of God. In 1969 MacLennan discovered Robert Ardry's theories of the New Biology, and Ardrey's "views of the evolution of man provided a convenient mythology to which [MacLennan] could link his already evolutionary view of the life process" (E. Cameron, Life347). In all his novels MacLennan has portrayed the human duality of creative and destructive forces: divine immanence and original sin are natural concepts for a Calvinist. In a 1970 essay he indicated how far he had come from the political and humanist solutions of his earliest novels: "Man's real troubles are not caused by political and economic systems and only incidentally by scoundrels, but by the cruel contradictions planted in his nature by no less an authority than the God of Evolution Himself" (CC viii). Nevertheless, in the face of the suicidal destruction of humanity by its own modern technology and political upheavals, he posits a hope in this God of Evolution who wills the cyclical renewal of the human race: "I happen to believe in the God that's implicit in 58 Faith and Fiction evolution, . . . this is part of the chain of life, as I see it. It's away above politics.... I think our ancestors would call it divine when they said that God is not mocked" (D. Cameron, "MacLennan" 132). After the 1970 October Crisis in Quebec, MacLennan applied his radical redefinition of traditional theism to the nuclear age: Underneath it all of course is the mid­20th century volcano, its causes so mysterious I am convinced they are lodged in the evolutionary process itself. What some New Biologists have called "The Keeper of the Kinds" permits no species to threaten the survival of all species, including itself, and this is what our military technocrats have been doing with gusto for more than 20 years, with promise of more to come. ("Quebec Crisis" 17) In Voices in Time MacLennan laments the sin that destroys humanity despite much grace and goodness, and celebrates the hope of the resurrection in the rebuilding of civilization. John Wellfleet, MacLennan's principal spokesman in the novel, reconstructs the twentieth century from the "voices in time" (VT 27) which come to him in a box from the past delivered by Andre Gervais, an architect of the future. Although we get bits of John's personal story, he functions primarily as historical expositor and channel for the stories of his stepfather, Conrad Dehmel, and older cousin, Timothy Wellfleet. These older relatives were tragically caught up as actors/victims in the socio­ political maelstroms of the thirties and the sixties, before the final Great Fear (nuclear blackmail) and...

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