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Surrogate Fathers and Orphan Sons GEORGE WOODCOCK On first reading, Hugh MacLennan appears a simple writer. His fictional techniques are traditional ; not only has he never written anything that could in any way be termed experimental, but he has publicly expressed his distaste for avant garde writers like Samuel Beckett and even Marcel Proust. For himself he has even disclaimed any pretence of being an intellectual: I have never been particularly intelligent, and abstract ideas are usually incomprehensible to me. My brain is far slower than my intuitions, and in every novel I have written my brain has hung me up because it keeps refusing to accept what my intuitions shout at it. That is why I have taken so long to write my novels.... (The Other Side of Hugh MacLennan, 250.) MacLennan's views of the proper nature of fiction have wavered from verisimilitude to autonomous invention and back again. In 1951, refuting all those who had tried to find actual people in his novels, he remarked that "the surest way to write fiction that rings false is to make it accurate in its representation of the people you know'' (OS, 37). But in 1955, writing of Dickens with qualified approval, he remarked that "his characters , no matter how preposterous, have never seemed incredible to me. At times they are caricatures , but I am sure all of them except his heroines were drawn from life. If his pages squirm with grotesques, so did the world he lived in" (OS, 89). The fact, it seems to me, is that while MacLennan has paid lip service to the belief that novelists·must be "creative," in the sense of being wholly inventive, in practice - like Defoe and Dickens - he has recorded life as he knew it to be, and exercised his imagination, which is a different faculty from invention, mainly in ordering the known. 20 Invention finds its logical end in fantasy, and nothing that MacLennan has written can be described as fantastic. But imaginative recording almost always touches on the didactic, as it did in the dawn of the novel with Defoe, and as it has done ever since when emergent literatures coincide with the growth of national consciousnesses, as happened in Canada at the very period when MacLennan began to write. After producing a group of never-published novels set outside Canada, MacLennan turned to his own country as the setting for Barometer Rising. At that time, in the early 1940s, Canada - he remarks - was "virtually an uncharacterized country,'' and it is quite evident that he believed the attempt to portray it in "pure" literature , detached from the facts and problems of Canadian society, would be self-defeating. ...it seemed to me that for some years to come the Canadian novelist would have to pay a great deal of attention to the background in which he set his stories. He must describe, and if necessary define, the social values which dominate the Canadian scene, and do so in such a way as to make them appear interesting and important to foreigners, whether he liked it or not, he must for a time be something of a geographer, a historian and a sociologist, to weave a certain amount of geography, history and sociology into his novels. (OS, 46) Not merely did it seem to MacLennan essential that the Canadian writer, at least in his generation, should project Canadian "social values"; he also regarded it as essential that he should be "engaged," should take his side and play his part (and here he cited Aeschylus standing in the ranks at Marathon) in the political crises and moral issues of his time. A true child of my epoch, I believed that a writer should also be a citizen. I am disturbed by the kind of detachment that enables some writers to rub their hands over the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind because they furnish such exciting materials for literature . (OS, 248) Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 14, No. 4 (Hiver 1979-80 Winter) Celine, as an allusion in The Watch that Ends the Night makes clear, was no more one of MacLennan 's favourite writers than Proust or Beckett. Given such views...

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