Читать книгу The Myth Alive - Don Gutteridge - Страница 6

Let me now illustrate what I mean by returning to Riel. I am briefly going to reconstruct the events which led to the writing of the poem, comment on the source materials I used, and demonstrate from the poem itself how historical fact, with some artistic manipulation, can become a symbolic statement which does not really violate history, but at the same time leaves history behind for something which may be more meaningful in human terms.

My first encounter with Louis Riel was quite accidental. It occurred while I was still at university. One evening I turned on the television set, and there I saw Louis Riel for the first time (actually it was Bruno Gerussi, who rendered a somewhat latinate version of our famous Metis rebel). The vehicle was John Coulter's Louis Riel, and I remember being fascinated by the play, the story, and the man. Shortly thereafter, I read G.F. Stanley's standard biography of Riel, and then, gradually, the Riel story slipped to the back, or bottom, of my mind.

It was at least five years later, and after I had written three narrative poems, that I went to see an amateur production of the same Coulter play, performed at Althouse College of Education, with John Ferns in the title role. I felt that it was a superb performance of the play, but suddenly and certainly unexpectedly, I was unmoved by the play itself, by the very conception which it implied about Riel. And I remember feeling at the time that Coulter was not a native Canadian, and though he had researched his material thoroughly (much more thoroughly than I ever could, or would), he had missed what Riel really was in Canadian terms. He had got his history straight--for the play is faithful to the known and observable historical facts--but he had missed the meaning. And I do not mean here that he had failed to explain Louis Riel in a psychological sense (for there is little meaning to be found there), but simply that he had not seen or felt the essential conflict and the pervading tragedy of those important events from our past. The very fact that Coulter chose to use a chronicle form indicated to me that he was not prepared to see the story in poetic or mythical terms. And why should he? Indeed, how could he, not being a native Canadian (I mean here that he was not only not born here, but more seriously does not think or feel Canadian).

As I left the theatre that summer evening, I decided that the Riel story could best be rendered in some sort of poetic form, for somehow--I did not really know how, just then--the people and events seemed too large for the conventional stage, their meaning too complex for what I have called poeticized (or in this instance) dramatized history. Looking back on it now, I can see that it was my involvement with the problems of writing historical narrative poems which made me so unhappy with the same Coulter play which I had enjoyed a few years previously. At the same time I was becoming aware that Riel himself would be the culmination of my own work in this form. That evening I knew I would write a poem about Louis Riel.

Poets, however, are notoriously unorganized creatures. I suppose the normal procedure at this point was to dash to the nearest library and begin my research. In a sense, I did. But what emerged a few weeks later was a poem on Champlain. Yet another year passed, during which I was trying to exorcize the image of La Salle from my imagination (he's still there), and another narrative poem was written. Then in the fall of 1966, while browsing in a bookstore, I came upon Strange Empire: the Story of Louis Riel by John Kinsey Howard, the American historian. From this moment on, there was no doubt that my next poem would be about Riel.

What was in Howard's account that I had not found in Stanley's biography or Coulter's play? Quite simply, it was imaginative, interpretive history, and lying dormant just below the vibrant surface of the book, those undeveloped symbols which my imagination had been seeking, in its own time and its own way, for two years. From an historian's viewpoint Howard and Stanley represent two historiographical polarities. Howard's book is interpretive, emotive, critical, beautifully written--what I would call a humanistic document. Stanley's biography is factual, well-documented, comprehensive--a reasonable and just account of Riel's life viewed largely from the outside through the rational eye of the trained historian. In my preface to the poem, I advise the reader to look at both these biographies if he wishes to get an historical perspective on the man and the period. From a poet's point of view, however, it is Strange Empire which attracts and holds the mind and the feelings. It may well be "bad history", perhaps because Howard seems to write the way a poet writes: selecting and arranging details to elucidate a pattern; describing people, events, even landscapes, in order to engage the reader's emotions; and finally working these individual parts together so that in total they make a human statement about our past--and in a sense, about ourselves who are necessarily implicated in our own history. Bernard de Voto in his preface to the book, sums it up this way:

Finally, the book is very fine art. The hope of a small company of writers is to bring history out of the seminar and restore it to the living room where it was once acknowledged to belong. Sacrificing none of the methods or the results of scholarship, they accept the heavy additional obligation of transforming scholarship into literature. That is what happens here. Everything in Strange Empire conforms absolutely to the discipline of fact but an equally disciplined historical imagination is at work, giving life to facts that would be dead without it and the craftsmanship put in its service. This is a drama of reality, not fantasy, of real men, not imagined ones, but the reader is led to participate in it as he might in the fictitious drama of the theatre--to the end that he may understand the deeds and the motives of men at a decisive hour. Tense as narrative, very moving as tragedy, it illuminates a part of the strange path that the people of North America have travelled as they came to be what they are.²

What is implied here in De Voto's remarks is that this kind of interpretive history is very close to the spirit of literature in that it searches for meaning through pattern and image, through the modes of narrative, drama, and poetry, and it reminds us in every word and in every sentence that there is a human voice and a human consciousness in control of the meaning. In this kind of history, the events that compose the pattern, and the landscape which gives rise to the imagery are factual. In pure literature they may or may not be factual: it does not matter there. In one sense, then, imaginatively conceived history is as close to the true spirit of literature as the so-called historical novel or play, which may, at its worst moments, be merely formalized romance cluttered up with factual historical data of no genuine significance.

Needless to say, then, Howard's book inspired me to write Riel: a Poem for Voices. It is fair to ask at this point why I wanted to write a poem about Riel if Strange Empire itself was such a powerful and imaginative recreation of that period. It was a question which I asked myself repeatedly during the autumn of 1966. Strange Empire is imaginative, but it is--as I have indicated--also history. It recreates those times as vividly as any writer will ever be able to. Howard makes the white man feel ashamed, and fills the sensitive reader with a feeling of tragic loss. But because it is history, and because we come to it and accept it as history, it does not really try to make us see its patterns of meaning as universal. Certainly history does make us consider the past in the light of the present; some historians are prone to pointing a moral or two, even predicating a recurring pattern of historical events. But they mean these things, one assumes, in a literal sense. If America is Rome reincarnate, then she may re-enact, literally, the fall of Rome, as Senator Fullbright has intimated. But the truths of literature do not operate this way. When they are valid, their truth is archetypal, rooted in the scheme of things, in the unchanging psyche of man--they are in time, and yet out of it--they apply equally to social man and to man private and indivisible.