Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)

STUDIES - Anna Jakabfi: Regionalism and the Surgeon Figure in Hugh MacLennan's Fiction

These thoughts reminiscent of existentialism reveal the learned man whose mind can wander into nothingness to find his active, helping, healing self again. Philosophizing is an important preoccupation which the maclennanian doctor is often engaged in. Here it also counterbalances the guilt feeling inflicted upon him by the pernicious influence of his puritanical upbringing on the one hand, and on the other it serves to illustrate the way the learned man solves his conflicts compared to the uneducated. For the miners in Broughton a punch-up is the solution to all their problems, for the doctor it is contemplation, watching nature, the procedure of combinig visual sensitivity to brainwork which serves not only as an eye-opener but as a physical outlet for tension in his organism. For Daniel Ainslie the real beauty comes from having saved someone's life: "Life was never so vivid as when it was in danger nor was a human being ever so vitally himself as when he had passed through pain and emerged on the other side of it."

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2 REGIONALISM Barometer Rising and Each Man's Son take place in the Maritimes, Barometer Rising in Halifax and Each Man's Son on the island of Cape Breton. Jerome Martell's early childhood in The Watch That Ends the Night was spent in a logging camp in the woods of New Burnswick, and the description is so vivid that the reader can feel the physical presence of the woods. The first ten years of Jerome never sank into oblivion in spite of the fact that the obscurity of his origins haunts him all his life. This is the way the grown-up man remembers the New Bruswick area: "... those little fishing ports and lumber towns along the Gulf shore and in my mind I can smell them. Such ripe combination of smells they give out: balsam, lobster pots, drying fish, oakum, new lumber, bilge, and the stench of fish-offal on beaches under umbrellas of screaming gulls. But inland, even four miles inland in that country, there is no sense of ocean at all, but only of this primeaval forest of spruce with the tangle of deadfalls and the sound1

5 Cf. op. cit pp. 2, 193—4 58