Читать книгу The Myth Alive - Don Gutteridge - Страница 4

I will attempt at this point to make some sweeping generalizations about the difference between poetic history and historical poetry--not because they will hold true under close scrutiny nor absolutely define an area whose edges in reality are almost always blurred, but because it is through a longer perspective that we might be able to discern what is really going on in the historical poem. Speaking cautiously, we can define two basic kinds of literary/historical materials. In the first kind, which might be labelled poeticized history, the purpose is to make history "come alive", as it were, by rendering it in the more accessible forms of literature. I am thinking here primarily of the so-called historical novel, like The Viking by Mika Waltari or Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff. The former tries to give the reader a sense of the Viking period, and while the story-line is mostly invented, there is accurate attention given to descriptive detail dealing with people, places, and events of that historical time. In the Sutcliff novel, the reader is plunged into the world of King Arthur (called Artos the Bear in the book). The story may be legendary, but we come face to face with such historical figures as the Saxons, Hengest and Horsa, and leave the book quite convinced that Miss Sutcliff has done her homework well, for not only the characters, but the landscape, the Romanized towns and the particular kind of warfare of that period are described with loving care.

Nevertheless, I feel that anyone who did a thorough study of this kind of book would soon discover that the lines between history and literature are not always clearly drawn. For example, Waltari's book is written in the romance mode, and one senses the shaping presence of the mode throughout, especially its insistence on a Hollywood-type love story. We may have accurate historical data in varying degrees in many historical novels, but the literary person is also aware of the exigencies of the literary mode working to shape the materials into a novel (or play or poem). The point I wish to make here is that even in the commonly accepted form of historical novel, or drama (like Elizabeth the Queen) or poem (like Brébeuf and his Brethren), there are problems presented which involve the subtle relationship between literary mode/genre and the historical materials which can be utilized in a variety of ways. This complex problem is perhaps best illustrated by Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, for here we have not only the typical use of historical setting and event, superimposed on the typical romantic plot with typically romanticized characters, but we must also face the fact that the book purports to elaborate and justify Carlyle's rather misguided historiographical view of the French Revolution.

However it is the second kind of historical/literary combination with which as a poet I am here concerned. In this type, the writer--most likely a poet or dramatist--uses the historical materials as symbol or structuring principle in order to make a personal statement of his own or, put another way and more pompously, to reveal the universal in the particular. This point is often misunderstood in dealing with historically based literature of this kind. Here the poet uses history in the same way that he might use nature imagery, psychological theories, philosophical ideas, sociological trends, etc.--all are part of a common and shared knowledge, and thus are raw material for the poet's neurotic obsession with symbol-making. Keats, for example, used the nightingale in its conventional setting, not because he was a bird-lover, but because he saw in the bird the possibility of rendering a certain mood and a complex set of emotions and thoughts. This is not to say that a poet selects such materials arbitrarily, for it is precisely because he can feel the potential meaning in his referents, as symbol and as object, that he can create valid poetry. In fact, one of the difficulties in discriminating between poets and pseudo-poets is often centred on this point: do the symbols operate on us in a merely academic or intellective way, or do they convince us of their validity both as symbols and as recognizable objects? To read "Ode to a Nightingale" is to relive the actual experiences of Keats. We are there with him in that garden, hearing that nightingale, following the poet's mind back into the magic landscape drawn for us in stanzas four and five, and on to Ruth "amid the alien corn", and back out to the cold reality of the tolling bell and the English hillside. Whatever the poem eventually comes to mean for us, its essential hold over the mind and feelings derives from the fact that its images and symbols are referents to a whole experience which we recognize or are brought to recognize. This is not to say that the best poets must use only the familiar landscape to convince us. Keats, for example, in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", creates a nightmare landscape of his own making, but the individual objects within that landscape are vividly rendered: the withered sedge, the songless woods, the cold hillside, the dismayed knight, and the lady with the wild, wild eyes--all these are referents to parts of a reality which we recognize, and they become, in the forge of the poem itself, part of a larger reality which emanated from Keat's own imaginative needs. Again, we are compelled to live through a strange and yet utterly convincing experience.

Much of the foregoing is common knowledge to those who deal with poetry in their daily lives, and we have come to accept the use of landscape, seasons, even myth, as respectable source material for literature. However, when writers use historical materials in the same way, they are often mis-read. For some writers (not all) historical events and personages hold the same kind of imaginative potential as nightingales or medieval romance did for Keats. They find in history a ready source of symbol or structure for their work, and quite often have a rather cavalier concern for history in any sense that would please an historian. The unsuspecting reader may go to such poems, plays, or novels expecting to find interpretive history and be justifiably disappointed.

Why, then, would a poet who wished to write a long poem on an heroic person select an historical figure of such prominence as Riel, one who has stirred so much controversy and partisan argument, if he does not intend to interpret these events in some way that might be construed as historical? Would it not be more judicious to invent a wholly fictitious character who might serve his purposes equally well, and at the same time avoid the controversial and historiographical entanglements generated by any attempt to deal with Louis Riel? One answer, of course, is that this approach is perfectly feasible, and is often used by poets and others. But this answer, quite simply, will not do for me (nor I suspect for Pratt in The Titanic, Shaw in St. Joan, or Bolt in A Man for All Seasons). It will not do for me because in the last nine years [1960-1969] I have written long poems on figures from Canadian history like Dollard, Brébeuf, Hudson, Champlain, La Salle, and Louis Riel. Although I've spent most of a decade writing poems about historical figures and events, I have only recently paused long enough to ask myself why. What follows is a tentative attempt to answer this question and the others which I raised earlier: what is historical poetry and wherein lies its validity?