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
regain their intellectual power and want to find a new meaning and purpose of their lives. One can take the aspect of generations, as a basic drive for MacLennan throughout his works as a common feature, a motif he always applies and goes back to. This notion is central in most of his novels as well as in this particular book, where the title Voices in Time can refer not only to the documents found by André, but also the different generations' voices in human history. The characters within this network take their more or less set roles. Such as for instance in Barometer Rising or in Two Solitudes , John Wellfleet is a narrator, preserver of the past, and moral guide of the present, André's generation, where latter's role is to bring John back to life again and to find the way out of the present blindness. Timothy stands for the so called 'instant generation', commercial society men, who can realize the failure in their lives only after a tragic event. This line leads up to Conrad Dehmel, a figure always in a Catch-22 situation. This ambiguous character is full of love and hate, death and life motifs. Out of his self-hatred and shame he comes to self-revelation; even his death is a trap for he was mixed up with another person. Having a closer look at the strengths and the weaknesses of character-drawing in his book Hyman's opinion seems worth being concidered stating that there are many stereotypes and even some caricature-like figures (Hyman 322). Oversimplification can also be a problem in our age. To put his major characters into the place of the 'innocent victim trapped in history' is not very satisfying from an artistic point of view since today nearly anyone can claim to be one like that. Moreover, there is the question of the 'enem/ as such, if there is one, who is not a victim at the same time. As an example we can take Dehmel. Is it really true that he is driven by pure fate? In general if it was so, the strong pessimistic feeling of being in a trap of circumstances and history would overtake the whole atmosphere of the book. As a consequence of the oversimplifications of the philosophic background, the style of the book seems to be occasionally naive, overpurified or at least ironic. Here we can think of sentences like "What do you call a spaceship?" (VT 14); which seems ridiculous when future characters ask it of past characters. We can 70
