Читать книгу The Myth Alive - Don Gutteridge - Страница 5

First, I have always wanted to write what Archibald MacLeish has called poetry of the public world, i.e., poetry whose symbols and referents would be part of the common wisdom of Canadian readers--not because I am a nationalist, but because I am hopelessly a Canadian, having been born, raised, educated, and professionally turned out in an area not more than sixty miles in diameter, whose centre happens to be London, Ontario. This desire to write public poetry is no doubt due to the example of E.J. Pratt. Paradoxically, though, I discovered quite early that I was not E.J. Pratt reborn and refurbished, because all of my poetry turned out to be intensely personal and stubbornly private. Nevertheless, I continued to find that writing my own kind of narrative poem about historical figures was increasingly rewarding. I was, it seemed, writing private poems about public figures.

Secondly, I have always felt that there was an advantage in using symbolic material that was part of the common heritage. I now feel that there are two justifications for this view: 1) My own personal and psychological make-up required me to use elaborate Yeatsian masks through which I could safely explore my own troubled inner world, and 2) I wanted my poetry to have reference to me as an individual and to the past from which I evolved and by which I was involuntarily shaped. I suppose that is what MacLeish really meant by public poetry.

Thirdly, I discovered about the same time that I could write about only certain historical figures. My adolescent fantasies about composing the great Canadian epic soon collapsed about me when I found that I could not write a poem about William Lyon MacKenzie or Sir Guy Carleton (a teen-age idol of mine in those halcyon days before the Beatles and Bob Dylan) or, most regretfully, the Right Honourable John George Diefenbaker. In fact, I was drawn only to certain kinds of historical figures, whose "stories" provided me with those symbols and structures which could meet the demands made by my private need for expression.

From this brief autobiographical background we come to the present, and Louis Riel. For me, Riel was a natural extension of my original interest in men like La Salle and Champlain. His personality and story contained symbolic potential both for the private dilemmas I had been systematically exploring for seven years and for my desire to re-discover the peculiarly Canadian myths of my historical past. I fondly hoped that my readers would find meaning in my personal vision--for themselves as indivisible humans, and as Canadians who unintentionally happen to share a common mythology.

Before I discuss this vision and how its historical elements have become transmuted into poetry, I would like to refer you to the poem and the voice of Louis Riel, as he waits alone in Fort Garry for the arrival of Wolseley's army, and the disintegration of his dream:

RIEL

And so, it had come to this: waiting for Wolseley

And his troops to assume form out of wilderness

Like black flies at the first heat, and not knowing.

He had had to kill Scott (would have done the same for

Boulton too, if the murdered boy's mother

Had not come like that, kneeling before him, her hands

Upon his, her lips shaping prayers that belonged

To another, to One great enough to forgive).

Scott had deserved death; for he was a symbol

Of all that stood in the way of their hopes, the vision:

Canadian, Orangeman, bigot, blasphemer,

A man without root, with no touch of the soil

In him or wind on him.

He'd voted death

With the others (four to three, his vote cancelling

Mercy), because the flowing inside was too strong,

Needed resistance of this rock to give it

Will and final direction (was not Scott's fists

There on the street, nor shame of eyes watching, seeing).

And yet, the soldiers were coming, and this earth

Would ripen with their bayonets. Could current

Be turned that easily? be blocked this close to sea?

Or could it carry some darkness of its own?

(Scott's blood a black coil on the innocent morning).

Outside, night gathered the rain unto itself

In a dark hoarding, and wind was an ancient plague

Settled around his house: black and wet, and awkward--

The cloak of a stranger.

The voice here is, I hope, poetry and not history, though the events referred to are historical facts. What makes this passage poetry (I trust) rather than history is its attempt to render the feelings of Louis Riel at this crucial moment in his life, and through this rendering to develop certain basic images which gather meaning as the poem progresses, and will become those kind of symbols that lift the poem from its historical moorings and raise it to the level of the universal. I want the reader to understand Louis Riel in this time and this place, to understand his attachment to the land and the revulsion he feels for those who do not share it with him, and to feel the images through which he habitually explores his own emotions and ideas: the flowing of currents, the wind as plague, man as a stranger in God's house--though the words and images are mine, I like to think that they might be historically probable or at least representative of what Riel would have thought. In this sense, then, the poem has historical validity of a certain kind. On the other hand, I am aware that there is as much of me in these lines as there is of the probable Louis Riel. (You will recall that Mr. Lacey referred to me as a Luddite, and I am, I guess.) To put this idea in other words, I found that I could render Riel's feelings because I conceived of them partly as my own. And it is precisely this symbiotic process which makes it possible to use history as symbol, to bring our vanished past not only into the perspective of the present (a task that many historians habitually perform), but also to draw that past into our own time through the consciousness of a single individual who uses not the intellectual rigours of the historian's trade, but his own deeply felt and fully realized identification with the people and events of our common past. And since I did not set out consciously to write poeticized history, the only validity that such a work might have--besides being a personal statement--is that I have found something in my own consciousness which is identical to that implied in Riel and his story. What this something is is not obviously a common environmental or temperamental experience--since I am not a Metis, do not speak French, am intractably presbyterian, and have no present plans to effect a revolution. Rather, it must be a commonality that runs more deeply in the human experience than event, or personality, or time and place. I have my own intuitions as to what this commonality is, having written the poem itself. Suffice it to say at this point that I am implying that a work of art which interprets historical events in the light of their symbolic or mythical meanings obtains any validity it might have by being "true" to its historical sources in the literary sense outlined above, and by being simultaneously "true" to the imaginative needs of its author at the time of writing. It is only when we really believe that these seemingly contradictory truths can be reconciled within the poem that literature can have any meaning for us.