Manawaka and Deptford: Place and Voice

Manawaka and Deptford: Place and Voice JOHN WATT LENNOX Margaret Laurence and Robertson Davies have created Canadian settings in and against which characterization and intrigue can be measured. Their Canadian worlds - Manawaka and Deptford - bring to mind Del Jordan's description in Lives of Girls and Women of the people she knows in her own town: "People's lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable - deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.''I This description is evoked in different ways throughout the Manawaka and Deptford works. Hagar Shipley remarks , "I know, I know. How long have I known? Or have I always known, in some far crevice of my heart, some cave too deeply buried, too concealed?"2 In A Jest of God, Rachel Cameron notices how the painted walls of the Tabernacle of the Risen and Reborn are "dense and murky, the way the sea must be fathoms under."3 The place is "like some crypt, dead air and staleness, deadness, silence" (p. 31). Stacey MacAindra asks herself when it was that her husband "started to go underground, living in his own caves?"4 Whenever Vanessa MacLeod's Grandfather Connor - "The Great Bear" - is angry, he retreats wordlessly to the basement where "from his cave, however, the angry crunching of the wooden rockers against the cement floor would reverberate throughout the house."5 To Morag Gunn, her memory is the cave where the shadows of her parents move, ''two sepia shadows on an old snapshot, two barely moving shadows in my head, shadows whose few remaining words and acts I have invented."6 Manawaka's caves are places of concealment , retreat, menace, revelation. Caves are also an important part of Deptford as the town's name suggests. Dunstan Ramsay Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 13, No. 3 (Automne 1978 Fall) tells about how Percy Boyd Staunton's stubborn refusal to accept any responsibility for Mary Dempster's misfortune "seemed to deepen my own guilt, which had now become the guilt of concealment as well as action."7 In The Manticore , David Staunton is taken back through the Jungian archetypes until he encounters in the primeval caves of Switzerland the sanctuaries of man's bear-worshipping ancestors and discovers that he has been "reborn, by the terror of the cave."8 Magnus Eisengrim (Paul Dempster) describes how, after being sodomized as a boy, he remembered his father's reading "about Lot and his daughters, though I had never followed what it was they did in that cave."9 Next he tells how Willard "pushed me into a place that was entirely dark, and confined....Then a door below me was closed, and snapped from the outside, and I was in utter darkness" (p. 36). Soon afterward , as Paul begins to work with the carnival mechanical effigy, he talks offeeling that ''inside Abdullah I had entered into my kingdom" (p. 57). Thus, caves in the Deptford cycle are also associated with agony, ordeal and revelation which are usually and intimately linked with the forces of Deptford from which the protagonist attempts to free himself. Against Del Jordan's description of lives in Jubilee, Laurence's and Davies' created worlds can be importantly differentiated from one another. Davies deals literally and figuratively with "deep caves" which become the mystery and experience and knowledge of the esoteric and the unusual - hagiography, Jungian psychology and countless worlds of wonders. In Laurence, one finds both deep caves and kitchen linoleum for she illuminates the mystery and experience and knowledge of the familiar and the commonplace. Through an examination of the Manawaka and Deptford fiction, and through more particular examination of The Stone Angel and Fifth Business, place and voice in the fiction take on an intriguing significance. Setting is one example of this differentiation. While the social mythology of the small town is recognizably North American, the social mythology of the small town Scots - mercantile, practical, aggressive and proud - is distinctively 23 Canadian. In a language true to his time and place, Jason Currie tells his children, "Nobody's going to hand you anything on a silver platter. It's up to you, nobody else. You've got to have stick-to-itiveness...