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
of the permissive matrist and the authorian patrist cycles) in/through the lives of the individual characters. Some examples are the colonial mentality versus the search for the Canadian identity in Barometer Rising-, the French and English conflict in Two Solitudes; or the American —Canadian relations in the Precipice. In Each Man's Son a more universal topic (i.e. human relations, here especially the one between the father and the son) is set in a Greek tragedy form; while The Watch that Ends the Night, his most powerful novel moves out to Europe. His last book: Voices in Time (1980) extends this line with its settings mostly in Germany. In a sense this novel tends to be a summary of his philosophical ideas touching universal themes and generalizing all his experience absorbed in his former novels. In an interview with Alan Twigg he says: "That book wasn't about Canadian politics. I had a very universal subject there" (Twigg, 86). The theme of the book is related to MacLennan's deepest concern: the misuse of human energy versus the purposeful direction of the same forces and its impact on the survival of mankind. His complex system of thoughts is embedded into a story which is interpreted from different aspects. The framework of the book is a twenty-first century (2039.) setting. The central character, John Wellfleet talks about the past, the world before the so called Second Bureaucracy, about the period of human history that he experienced in the second half of the twentieth century. The occasion for this story-telling is that a young man, André Gervais, had found a box full of documents, ^VOICES IN TIME', voices of people whose lives occured in our present time and our recent past. Wellfleet is confused about these papers, their value and effect, like MacLennan could have been about the critical acceptance and further impact of all his writings. A proof for this uncertainty could be his personal reaction to the criticism he received after each piece of work that appeared. Both the writer's and the narrator's role is to give a sense, a meaning to these voices. The narrator's perspective of time is subjective and it creates a sense of relativity of viewpoint. Through these lenses a chance is given to look over and understand our present from past and future distances. The topic, style and atmosphere of the book shows the writer's opinion at a final, mature stage of his carreer, where MacLennan owned a wider perspective 62
