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

He [Grandfather] had grown up in a time when most people in our part of the world knew exactly where they stood at any period of their existence. ... All this was gone now and Grandfather knew it. His sadness was not for himself but for his loved ones who would have to live in the chaos left by the war. (VT. 150) Although MacLennan's attitude towards time is close to the treatment of time in modern fiction he was not able to abandon the traditional narrative techniques fully. He broke with the linear chronology of story-telling for the sake of findign a new perspective, a new focus, but not one which is overwhelmingly subjective. The mixture of the subjectivized narration and the authorial intention of objectivity lead to two consequences on the readers' side: we can treat Voices in Time as successful experiment of MacLennan, where he achieved to present his highbrow morals in an understandable but modern form; and we can also treat the novel as a not really powerful one since it stopped halfway between realism and modernist tendencies. As for the narrative method, it is more conventional than original for it seems to have common features with the style of Aldous Huxley, Robert Merle and George Orwell in many ways, especially in the descriptive parts of the future vision. While reading the other parts of the book which are set in Germany (Ch.8) we can also think of Jorge Semprun's Grand Voyage, or Anne Frank's Diary,

; too. However, MacLennan's intention was different from the pure description of a given period and its people. Moreover, he denied the connection with any futuristic science-fiction where the emphasis is on the detailed description of the New World, while here, in this novel the future is a predicted result of our present and past without any importance in itself. Future has simply a narrative role, an angle to look back from. The whole visionary image and the author's historic awareness come from his Maritime heritage, his deep concern for human survival, as Janice KulynKeefer pointed out (218); and his critical consciousness comes out of the age he lived in. History and moral philosophy are closely linked in MacLennan's mind, although he often oversimplifies and trivializes the basic notions in his philosophy. The question of the cyclical or spiral nature of 64