Margaret Laurence's Epic Imagination (review)

Margaret Laurence was adept at writing beautifully designed novels depicting the messy lives of characters who struggle to figure out where they went wrong. Things go wrong because, as Thomas Hardy once suggested, they always do. The greater her characters' confusion, the more intricate are Laurence's image patterns, time shifts, literary allusions, and biblical echoes – all knitting a verbal texture that argues through the force of its ingenuity, first, that life must be redeemed; second that life can be redeemed by art; and third, that an artistic vision is also a moral one. To make sense of life is to compose it, both artistically and ethically, although such a feat can be achieved only in retrospect. It is not surprising, therefore, that Laurence was drawn to artist-figures (Vanessa, Morag), or that she appeals to critics who enjoy unweaving her well-woven prose, as Paul Comeau demonstrates in Margaret Laurence's Epic Imagination. He is particularly well attuned to Laurence's sensibility; indeed, he often seems to breathe with her as he works scrupulously through her works, in effect doing for her what she does for her characters. Just as she orchestrates their disrupted lives into meaningful patterns, so he arranges her varied writing according to the controlling design of a Christian epic, which offers 'a coherent artistic vision, a Commedia dell'Anima of epic depth and proportion.' Guided by Dante, Milton, and Northrop Frye, he follows her down into Hell (The Stone Angel), through Purgatory (A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers), and up into Paradise (The Diviners).

Laurence's own comments on her writing invite this orderly approach, whose strength is its devotion (in several senses of the word) to a noble purpose. Given the epic structure, we know exactly what to look for in each story, so the pleasure of Comeau's patient analysis lies in having our expectations confirmed in ever-greater detail. This he accomplishes admirably, although he sometimes overwhelms us with biblical and heroic parallels that Laurence may not have intended but which are guaranteed by the epic mode. Apologetic phrases like 'without pushing the analogy too far' recur. Admirers of her work will find few surprises here, but they will be pleased to see their impressions amplified and clarified. In pursuing its design, this is an admirable book: well researched, clearly written, earnestly argued.

The limitation of Comeau's approach arises from its devotion to a single pattern. Although his model illuminates plot and character – and focuses attention on them – its very persistence raises doubts about how its religious idiom fits into a modern, humanistic, psychological setting. What are the secular equivalents of sin, deliverance, and salvation? To praise Laurence's 'profoundly felt spiritual and artistic sensibilities' and her 'broader acceptance of self and the mystery at the heart of things' sounds too vague. Why is there so little room for Christ in this Christian epic? One answer may be that Comeau investigates the 'loser epic' – a term adapted from David Quint to describe 'epics of the defeated,' whose episodic romances are more disjointed, inconclusive, evasive, and republican than the authoritarian, Virgilian sort. As Comeau's study proceeds, the loser epic sounds less like an epic, more like a novel, and finally, in a twist that I do not find quite convincing, like postmodern fiction. In the process, it is drained of those heroic qualities (salvation, sacrifice, expiation, grace, transcendence, redemption) on which it relies, but without offering modern equivalents. Obviously Laurence's novels offer moments of psychological satisfaction and artistic completion, for instance when Morag finally divines the title of her novel; but when Comeau concludes his analysis of The Fire-Dwellers by announcing, '[i]ronically, then, life can be apocalyptic without providing any significant revelation,' he seems to have argued himself into a corner. The result is a comedy, but not the kind that Dante had in mind.