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

The weakness of the technique here, as in the earlier novels, is that MacLennan never fully integrates the action of the present and the action of the past... instead of one novel, we have seen large documents:... They are, literally, voices in time, but there are too many voices, too many times. (31) Unfortunately Hyman's opinion seems to be right. Either John Wellfleet's or André Gervais's narrative role should have been stronger to balance the authorial voice. However, the writer seems to be satisfied with the traditional literary idea of having an old experienced man, a representative of the old world asked by a young, agile but unexperienced man of the future in the course of a lesson on history. On the other hand, Wellfleet is the one who the whole story is organized around, who is a link between the generations, ages, and he is also a medium to transfer the experience accumulated in his mind and in the documents. He is not a 'playback machine' like the one which they could have seen in Timothy's TV show. He has human feelings, especially sadness and nostalgia coming up from his oppressed subconscious. The writer's technique is especially powerful when he desribes the old man's dreamy memories because he recalls everything he had lost, and this image is often associated with music. Music is the form of intellectual value that survives even if a power tries to deny its presence because it can express the sense of loss and gives pleasure. In Dehmel's family there were the ones who were able 'to see the music'; in Timothy's life he associated love and sexual feelings with a symphony, and in the others' lives music appears quite often to be equally important. Searching for the adequate form of his book MacLennan worked a lot on creating a chronology of the events and characters so as to be able to let these figures feel free with their associations and memories. There is an analogy which is presented in the story and in the narrative voice between the writer and the main character, John Wellfleet, too. Both want to arrange their life experience, to transfer it to the following generations, and to give a sense of the voices. Both take the role of the reserved old man, who had already given up the hope for a more mature, happier civilization, but after having the pleasure of meeting a young man who wished to learn, they 69