Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)
STUDIES - Judit Kádár: Hugh MacLennan's Complex Narrative Technique in His Last Novel
concerned. He concentrates on the emotional effects and transfers them into the lives and interactions of individual characters. The main concern in Voices in Time is the misuse of human energy, the tendency which culminates in the limitless rule of organizations and mass media —the owner of information which is another keyword in the entropic fiction. This can add a new feature to the traditional concepts about MacLennan's writing although the freshness and force of the subject is a bit restrained by the author's didactic style. In MacLennan's novel the upper layer of the social order, the bureaucracy, and the intellectuals are morally responsible for the creation of violence, while the masses are victims, blind believers or servants, whose last means is violence, too. On their side the lost religious belief and the loss of the cultural values unites with the fear, the 'distant fear' (VT 144) coming from the bureaucracy, which leads to the state of social paranoia described by Dehmel in the following way: In the relatively rare periods in the part that we call civilized people understood that a civilization is like a garden cultivated in a jungle. ...In nature, if there are no gardeners, the weeds that need no cultivation take over the garden and destroy it... During my lifetime too many of the men who thought of themselves as civilization gardeners is nearly everything they did from the promotion of superhuman science to superhuman salesmanship, devoted the ambiguous genius of their programmed brains to the cultivation of the weeds. (VT 121) Psychologically the frustration leads intellectuals to the feeling that they can improve their self-importance by creating chaos, and by crime committed in the name of freedom (eg. Timothy Wellfleet's work at the TV) , while the same is the result of the vulgarity and aggressivity of power owned by the Red Tape, such as the case of kidnappers hired directly by the Establishment in the 1970 crisis, or the permanent lying of the politicans in the media. MacLennan's handling of time in this novel is two dimensional, it drives both back and forth in the course of time. Naturally he applies the 67
