Читать книгу The Myth Alive - Don Gutteridge - Страница 3

For a long time now I have been interested in the problems of adapting historical materials for literary purposes, and felt that I might make use of my recent experience in writing Riel: A Poem for Voices to develop and clarify some ideas which have lain half-formed in my mind for the last nine years. Before beginning, I feel compelled to preface my remarks with two disclaimers. First of all, I am not a historian, either by training or inclination, and so I beg your indulgence if I presume to remark too boldly upon historiographical matters. Secondly, I am not a literary scholar, though I occasionally confess to have had some training along that line. I am, however, going to discuss--with the temerity of all foolish angels who rush blindly in --both history and literature. I do so with the only authority to which I can honestly lay any claim: that of a poet, who for the last nine years has been writing, and sometimes publishing, poems which are rooted in history--specifically the history of this country. But more of that later.

Let me begin with a recent, barbarous review that appeared in Edge magazine, and was penned by one Edward A. Lacey, pseudonym. As will be soon apparent, I made the grossest error in writing a short preface to the poem, in which I said, "In an attempt to come to grips with the current French-English problem in poetic terms, I turned to the history of Louis Riel." It seems to me, in retrospect, that it was a misreading of this statement which led Mr. Lacey, our pseudonymous reviewer, to make such remarks as the following:

Several of the books I shall be reviewing here are from the poisoned crop of 1967, and some of these poets are Luddites, and obviously do care about Canada and what happens to it, and one must examine their works in the light of their beliefs. The first such volume to come to hand is a curious antiquity by Don Gutteridge, Riel: A Poem for Voices (Fiddlehead Books, 1968, 52 pp), a long four-part dramatic poem, presumably meant for radio recitation, consisting of monologues delivered by the individual dramatic personae, relieved and mixed with "voices," basically choral interludes which range from letters, newspaper advertisements, accounts and editorials relevant to the events of Riel's life and death, to Indian chants.

I must quarrel with Mr. Gutteridge's basic premise (which of course doesn't affect the poem's artistic validity), that his poem is an attempt to come to grips with the French-English problem in poetic terms. The French-Canadians are not, and were not, the same thing as the Indians, by a long shot. Even though the WASP attitude toward the two groups may have been basically the same (and this is highly disputable), the groups' concept of, and attitude to, themselves, were very different.¹

At this point he goes on, quite rightly, to show that the historical situation now is radically different from that of one hundred years ago. However, he has missed the essential point here, for I was attempting to reveal in poetic, not historical, terms the relationship between Riel's story and our present racial problems. I knew perfectly well when I began writing Riel that Metis were not French Canadians, and that Manitoba and Saskatchewan were not Quebec. But Mr. Lacey has assumed that I was writing a poeticized form of history, when I was actually writing historically based poetry, or poetry in which historical data provides an essential source of metaphor and symbol. In short, Mr. Lacey has raised--unintentionally perhaps--the problem of the relationship between literature and history. What is poetry? and what is history? And what in the world are they when one encounters them together in unholy wedlock? Can Louis Riel be simultaneously historical man and literary symbol?

Our pseudonymous reviewer brings yet another charge against me in regard to my handling of history:

Recognising, then, that Riel is about the subculture we have destroyed, not the one we are at present destroying, I have one further complaint--the evident bias with which Mr. Gutteridge treats Riel's opponents and mingles fancy with history. The quotation from Alexander Henry shocks with its horror and authenticity, the lengthy excerpts from The Globe and Mail sadden one with their reminder of what Ontarians are, and were, and the discreditable part they played in the events under discussion, and the sensitive and poetic rearrangements of Riel's address to the court and of the recorded comments of bystanders at his execution bring the poem to a moving conclusion. But what of Dr. Schultz's monologue and self-portrait, and especially the pseudo-quotation from Thomas Scott? What is Mr. Gutteridge's authority for considering Scott a sadist to animals (except, of course, Canadian cultural traditions) or for causing him to speak an unauthentic, sub-literate garble. I'd similarly challenge the shrinking-violet letter which a soldier in the first Riel campaign reportedly writes home to his father--the tone doesn't ring true. If Mr. Gutteridge is going to invent material, let him do so credibly. Apart from these instances, though, our author seems to have done his research and his combining and selecting of material well.^2[i]

I stand accused here of mingling "fancy with history" and of bringing to the poem an "evident bias". Both accusations imply that Mr. Lacey has come to the poem as if it were poetic history, and his complaints would be perfectly valid if the poem were indeed such an animal. It is not. It is simply a poem with history as its organizing metaphor. Also, I would assume that most readers go to poetry precisely because it does have a kind of bias, a bias which in its own way might provide us with insight not only into history but into the human condition regardless of its historical setting. Mr. Lacey also charges that some of the invented material is not "credible". If he means that these sections are not true to the poem, then I accept this criticism with reluctant good grace. If, however, he means that they lack historical credibility, (and I suspect he does, considering the context of his remarks) then we are back to the basic problem once again: is this history or poetry? And if it is both, then how do we come to grips with the combination in critical and responsive terms?

It seems to me that there are two basic questions raised here by Mr. Lacey. 1) What is the difference between poetic history and historical poetry, and 2) regardless of these differences, what kind of bias is permissible in a poem with historical overtones, and how do we learn to "read" it so that it has some valid meaning for us? In short, what is the nature of its validity?

It is these two questions upon which I hope to shed some tenuous and tentative light. As a non-scholar and non-historian I can only hope to do so by explaining to you what my intentions were, and how I proceeded to handle my source materials. Perhaps these honest confessions of the man who made the poem may be of some use both to the historian who wishes, somehow, to include literary materials as part of his intellectual framework, and to the literary man who, day in and day out, brings his mind and emotions to the raw stuff of literature: the poem.