Читать книгу The Myth Alive - Don Gutteridge - Страница 7

In the final part of this paper I would like to demonstrate the way in which historical poetry and poetic history are transformed into symbolic poetry whose referents happen to have been of historical interest. Howard caught the essence of the Riel tragedy: the clash of cultures. He saw the nature of the conflict between Indian and American, between Metis and would-be Canadian, as a tragic encounter between two fundamentally different peoples. The conflict is centred on the conception which each group has of the land--its meaning for them and the uses which it serves. Seen in this light the events of the period are tragically predictable. Howard, of course, sides with the Indians and Metis, largely because their philosophy of land was mystical, humane, constructive, and socially harmonizing--indeed it was so powerful that it dissolved racial and language barriers in a way that, from our present vantage-point, seems marvellous.

What I wanted to add to Howard's own beautiful and moving account was the poetic meaning I felt in this story; namely that what might explain the problems in Quebec (or in Biafra, or Vietnam, or in my own personality, which I had been exploring for seven years in my poems) was the meaning which lay below the surface of the Riel story. If I could find the viable and valid symbols in this story, if I could make people feel them in all their complexity, then perhaps some human light would be thrown upon the dilemmas of 1967.

I had, of course, to find these symbols and put them in a vehicle that would allow them to work. I did this over a period of six months--not in any organized way, for poems never come like that. I did not know what the final pattern or meaning was going to be until I wrote the last section. Rather, my method was to read through Strange Empire, seizing on events, images, half-ideas, and starting to write, not at the beginning of things, but anywhere that seemed "right" for the moment. I also re-read Stanley's biography, so that I would be aware of the basic history, but I eventually used very little from his book. Early on, I noticed that Howard quoted extensively from original source materials--letters, notes, speeches, documents--and I found much of my imagery latent in these. This led me to the Reference Library in Toronto where I rummaged through the newspaper file in search of similar materials. Here I found Charles Mair's famous and condescending letter about Rupert's Land (he was beaten with brooms by the ladies of Red River for his disparaging remarks), as well as numerous letters to the editor which gave me an authentic "feel" for the Orange point of view (my own Presbyterianism was of some help also in this matter). I was halfway through the poem before I discovered the form it should take: that of a series of voices, whose contrasting views would, I felt, bring the essential conflict to life, and would also point the way to the deeper and more universally human dilemma which underlay the historical tragedy. Whereas Howard focussed widely on the whole American west, I zeroed in on Riel as a symbol of the Metis viewpoint, and Sir John A. MacDonald and his Orange lackies as symbol for the Canadian viewpoint. Through the verse, I was able to invoke the necessary imagery of landscape and Metis life in a way not open to the historian.

The only major problem which developed was--ironically--that I found so much material in the history and documents which fitted my own vision that I had to distort or invent very little to make the poem work. The only examples of such distortion are a hypothetical speech which I put into the mouth of Thomas Scott and a letter supposedly written by a soldier during the first rebellion. In my previous poems I had changed historical fact at will because I wanted the reader to see exactly what I was doing--making poetry out of history, and not writing poeticized history. The amazing fact about the Riel story is that the poetry is already there, built-in, and there are many more poems and plays to be written from this material. Indeed the tragedy of Riel is at once historical and universal, the property of history and the breeding-place of literature. It remained for me to give it my focus and my words, to make it my personal tragedy, one which I hoped Canadians could read alongside the actual story. Even three years after the event, I still marvel at the fact that history and poetry proved to be so intricately connected that it was almost impossible to write a symbolic poem without re-telling the history. Perhaps it is at this very meeting-point that history and poetry get closest to those myths which underlie both of them. And Mr. Lacey's review simply reminded me of what I had known all along.

In conclusion, then, Riel is primarily a poem, and as poem it seizes within its imaginative grasp the historical Louis Riel and transmutes him into metaphor; it selects those peripheral elements which were associated with that same historical man and his time--the prairie landscape with the buffalo moving timelessly over it like the cyclic drift of the seasons themselves, and the Indian and Metis people who saw with the simple naivete of the natural mind that man was merely an extension of land and season, of elemental soil and animal blood; and it selects those strange men like Macdonald and Scott who pitted themselves so foolishly and ignominiously against the flow and circularity of Nature herself; it takes these men and these circumstances and welds them into a single metaphor--until Riel is defined by Macdonald and Macdonald is defined by Riel, until they have no valid life except that provided by the movement and shape of the poem in which they now participate. No longer do they belong to history; they are the living metaphors of poetry.

And they speak as metaphor only because they have been transmuted through the imagination of one man living in one time and one place. And they have meaning only if that man has found in the vital elementation of his metaphor a truth which is compatible with his own sense of being, working beneath his own time and place to elucidate that sameness of feeling which adheres in the original historical events. Moreover, this wondrous fusion of the poet's spirit with the spirit of an historical figure like Riel in the symbolic forge of a poem can only convey its meaning to those readers who, coming at it from the outside, can recognize this spirit--calling on their understanding of the history which generated the metaphor, and responding to the poem as verbal construct, so that it stirs in them that elusive mythological dream which sleeps just below consciousness.

And so the elements which once belonged to history become transmogrified through the mind of the poet into a metaphor which becomes the common poetry of all those who can read and respond. Moreover, it is only because we, as humans, can and do respond to history in poetic terms that we can speak with assurance of a Canadian mythology--a mythology which is ours because we, as Canadians, unconsciously share it. And through the consciousness which poetry awakes in us, we are able to bring it to light, and know it.

These are the grand intentions of any poet who dares to call upon history as metaphor. Whether Riel achieves them, even partially, must be decided by those who confront it, honestly, as literature.