Text and Subtext: Laurence’s “The Merchant of Heaven”

Text and Subtext: Laurence's HThe Merchant ofHeaven'' W.H.NEW Margaret Laurence's concern for the Old Testament appears throughout her writing: in her repeated image of Jacob wrestling with the angel, in her stories of Rachel weeping for her children and Hagar raging through her desert, in her critical and cultural observation about Jack Ludwig's novel Above Ground that "for most of us in Canada...the Old Testament legends have· more relevance than the classical ones." It is a fascination with the power and the poetry of the Old Testament, moreover, rather than a declaration of belief in any literal truth, which underlies these repeated images and observations. And the function of the Biblical analogues in Laurence 's fiction is often to assert this very distinction . Her characters have to learn, when walking through symbolic landscapes, how to recognize the symbols; they have to refuse to be defined by narrow interpretations of life's possibilities; they have to free themselves from an attitude of mind that equates the symbol itself, rather than the understanding evoked by the symbol, with reality. The implications are broadly cultural as well as narrowly theological, affecting political stances and sex roles and other areas of human endeavour where stereotyped patterns can interfere viciously with common freedom. Laurence's technical means of articulating such distinctions is frequently to build a story around a central allusion or a central ''text'' (the stories of Hagar and Rachel in The Stone Angel and A Jest of God offer ready examples) and then to counter this story with what amounts to a "subtext" - a tangential set of allusions that alters its implications and its potential rigidity. A clear instance of this process is provided by the third story in The Tomorrow-Tamer and other Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 13, No. 3(Automne1978 Fall) stories, ''The Merchant of Heaven.'' The allusions here are New Testament rather than Old Testament ones, but they carry the same distinction between the possibilities of ''poetry'' and the absolutes of literalism. The resulting technical tensions underscore the dilemmas in which the characters find - or perhaps lose - themselves, and reiterate the cultural perspective which Laurence elsewhere argues openly. The central narrative is simple. Brother Lemon, proselytizing evangelist for the Angel of Philadelphia Mission, comes to Africa full of a vision that he has learned in America, accepted as gospel, and taken as his duty to teach to pagans. Meeting him in Africa are an extraordinary range of actual African people (bureaucrats, townsmen, the poor, the diseased - none of whom quite fit Lemon's stereotyped expectations) and two individuals who go far to overturning them: Danso, the African artist who despises Lemon even before meeting him, and Will, the narrator, an English architect who hopes to use Brother Lemon's ambitions to further his own career and who ends up moved instead by the individual he comes in some small way to know. Lemon - so American he is almost a stereotype himself: by turns crass and well-meaning, oddly humourless and capable of pity, egocentrically rigid and profoundly naive and vulnerable - cannot, of course, adapt to Africa. Having come with what he accepts as the truth, he cannot accept the multiplicity of truths that Africa unfolds before him, nor can he adequately comprehend the persistence of other points of view. Hence, in one way at least, he is defeated, and he leaves. Laurence makes the story somewhat subtler by showing how Danso's and Will's perspectives are also imperfect - Will's because of his (never adequately explained) mixed motives, and Danso's because of the anger engendered by feelings of deracination and impotence. The deracination derives from the way, during Danso's own childhood , that colonial European churchmen usurped the African church and took a people's culture away in the name of civilization; the impotence comes from his inability to protect his own family .from other religious charlatans or to provide them with the answers and solutions they con19 tinue to need. Danso's rigid identification of Lemon as a "pedlar of magic" is equally as inadequate , therefore, as Lemon's own identification of himself as the apostle of the only truth. And...