The Other Daemon

JOURNAL OF CANADIAN STUDIES Editor Associate Editors Editorial Assistants Editorial Board The Other Daemon RALPH HEINTZMAN DAYID CAMERON JOHN WADLAND ARLENE DAVIS MARGARET PEARCE WALLACE CLEMENT MARGARET LAURENCE HARVEY McCUE JACQUES MONET, S.J. W.L. MORTON W.F.W. NEVILLE JAMES E. PAGE MICHAEL PETERMAN GORDON ROPER DONALD V. SMILEY DENIS SMITH PHILIP STRATFORD T.H.B. SYMONS W.E. TAYLOR CLARA THOMAS MELVILLE H. WATKINS ALAN WILSON REVUE D'ETUDES CANADIENNES Directeur Directeurs adjoints Assistantes Comite de redaction To devote an issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies to Hugh MacLennan seems, on the face of it, altogether natural. Is he not the most "national" of modern Canadian novelists? Who has addressed the "national question" in fiction more openly, more consistently and with more obvious sincerity? Does he not deserve to be regarded , in this one sense at least, as the Canadian Tolstoy or Balzac? What then could be more appropriate than that a journal of "national" studies should give him the attention he merits? Yet as soon as all this is granted, questions begin to crowd in, questions both about MacLennan and about Canadian studies. To what degree is MacLennan's apparent preoccupation with the national question the element in his work most deserving of study? Are the novels in which it is most prominent - Two Solitudes, The Precipice , and Return ofthe Sphinx (though he would dispute its inclusion here) - as successful as those in which it is more muted, such as Each Man's Son and The Watch That Ends the Night? If not, does the enduring interest of MacLennan's fiction perhaps lie elsewhere than in a nationalism he now disclaims? Perhaps the Canadian setting is incidental to larger themes, or perhaps Canada serves as a paradigm for the whole western world. Even in Two Solitudes, after all, he stated that Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 14, No. 4 (Hiver 1979-80 Winter) Canada "was not unique but like all the others, alone with history, with science, with the future.'' And about Return of the Sphinx he is even more emphatic that the Canadian setting is of distinctly secondary importance. Be that as it may, if it be granted, as in the later MacLennan criticism it seems to be, that what he has to say of significance about the Canadian situation has to do with those universal problems and experiences he happens to locate here, then this same perspective may be extended to Canadian studies as well. For their chief interest and claim consist neither in their defense of Canadian nationhood nor in the quest for altogether unique features of Canadian society and consciousness, but rather (as I have already observed in the case of Harold Innis) in the opportunity they provide to contribute to the self-knowledge o( the world: the opportunity to discover in the originality of Canadian history and imagination, patterns of thought, feeling and experience which will enable men everywhere to understand themselves better. Certainly the closer one looks at even the novels which deal most explicitly with the national question, the more one must acknowledge that, while MacLennan takes the question itself seriously , he always goes through it and beyond it to deeper matters. In The Precipice, for example, the very obvious contrast drawn between Canada and the United States is also an exploration of contrasting tendencies within human mind and culture, one that points forward to the spiritual concerns of Each Man's Son and of The Watch That Ends the Night, as both T.D. MacLulich and Robert Chambers point out. Similarly the anxiety about the break-up of Canada which seems to dominate Return of the Sphinx is but the other side of concern about more universal phenomena: the reemergence of dark forces of power and personality long suppressed in western civilization; and the difficulty of relations between the generations. As George Woodcock suggests, the "fathers and sons" theme, so closely associated in western culture with the name of Turgenev, may be found throughout MacLennan's fiction and serves as a unifying element. Yet MacLennan employs this theme or is attracted to it not for itself alone but because (as he himself 2 makes clear through the voice...