The Great Escape: Three Manitoba Novels

Queenston House, the publisher of these three novels, is to be praised for responding to and encouraging local writers. The Bad Life and Malke, Malke, set in Winnipeg, and A Small Informal Dance, set in rural Manitoba, reflect our rural and urban experiences and dramatize our contemporary attitudes, values, and morals. In its own way, each demonstrates the richness of Manitoba’s cultural and literary heritage. But each also illustrates the malaise that is spreading with alarming speed through the body of our current fiction—a culturally suicidal obsession with the personal, the trivial, and the nostalgic. For in these three novels it is painfully evident that our literature, with its images of order and discipline and its themes of solid comfort and comfortable security, has become insulation against social reality rather than illumination of it.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Malke, Malke, Bess Kaplan’s story of an aging north-end jewess. Despite her age, Malke Brenner, thrice married, thrice widowed, is sprightly, independent, and sexually alive. She explores life with passion and energy, seeking fulfillment from the full range of human experience. Not only does she relish the affections of family and friends, but also the satisfactions of mature sexuality. Her pursuit of the latter, though, offends her respectable middle-class family while at the same time plunging her into a series of titillating but embarrassing adventures with a pair of men who vye to become her fourth husband. These adventures, the dramatic interest of the novel, demonstrate to Malke’s family the intense sexuality of their “baba”. But they also testify to Malke’s vitality—one which transforms this old woman’s impoverished existence into a full and meaningful life.

Despite the novel’s affirmation of the value of life, Malke, Malke nevertheless fails to achieve a meaningful fictional victory. For its scope is too narrow, its concerns too limited. The responses of an urban jewish family to its “baba’s” sexuality are finally of slight interest in our complex technological world. Malke, Malke draws us into the minor details of Malke’s search for mature fulfillment. It invites us into her consciousness as she plans her strategy for re-marriage, as she anticipates the reactions of her family, and as she weighs the relative merits of her suitors. But all of its minor details finally are no more than minor details—as we follow them we become trapped in a circle of infinitely narrowing radius which, pleasant as it may be, isolates us from everything but the reactions of a handful of characters to the romantic fantasies of one old woman. I’m not suggesting that the interplay of family and romance is an inappropriate subject for fiction—Dickens, Faulkner and Laurence explore the values of cultures and expose their shortcomings by unfolding such relations. But for Kaplan in Malke, Malke this subject provides an escape from social reality, a way of defense against the actualities of modern existence. Despite her accurate and often touching documentation of a small life opening into fulness, Kaplan finally offers adults the same kind of escape from reality that masterpieces of fantasy offer children.

Equally insulating is Helen Levi’s account of rural prairie life in A Small Informal Dance. Set in Plum Bluff (Manitoba) it describes the life of a typical prairie town, demonstrating the complexity of rural relationships and the interdependence of lives lived in close proximity. Its central character, Mrs. Andrews, represents the more endearing values of small-town life—charity, openness, forgiveness. She willingly supports community projects and encourages the least promising of her acquaintances in the struggle for self-realization. And these qualities earn her the epithets “wholesome,” “thoughtful,” and “generous.” Balanced by her ironic sensitivity to the vagaries of human character, these qualities make Mrs. Andrews an interesting fictional creation whose relationships with her immediate family and the extended family of the community offer absorbing and entertaining reading. The essence of a modern rural community is captured in a prose style whose wit, energy and precision almost redeem its insulating social vision.

But technical accomplishment alone does not redeem A Small Informal Dance. In fact its technical strengths finally show the hollowness at its centre. For Helen Levi has created a novel containing all of the surface virtues of the pastoral world, but with none of its penetrating insight into human experience. The pastoral turns away from sophisticated urban life toward a bucolic retreat in order to advance a serious criticism of society. It develops the convention of simplicity in order to explore the complexity of the actual. But A Small Informal Dance falls back upon the rural setting, endorsing the current fancy that some special sort of wisdom is to be found, and found exclusively, among wholesome, simple rural folk. In brief, A Small Informal Dance is a testament to the continuing presence of the false pastoral, a potent nostalgia for the assumed benefits of country life. Despite its apparent irony it idealizes rural values and rural character types, nostalgically re-creating settings and personalities whose chief virtue is their appeal to our feeling that the problems of contemporary civilization are too overwhelming to be confronted. It offers what all versions of the false pastoral offer, a comforting escape from the actual.

More deeply ironic, more conscious of the interplay of art and society, David Williamson’s The Bad Life is accordingly more of a disappointment because it retreats from social criticism into self-effacing irony. This is the story of Ted Fenwick, a nice guy (retrospectively we would call him a “square”) who, dissatisfied with the tranquility of the fifties, throws over his dependable girlfriend and an attractive future in business for the promises of the bohemian life on the (figurative) Left Bank of the Red River. Pursuing his enthusiasm for painting, he establishes himself in a suitably depressing garret and attempts to acquire a mistress-model. Here he also encounters a group of social rebels whose seriousness about overthrowing City Hall is matched only by their ineptness. Ted’s adventures with them, led by the appropriately named Henri Tard, culminate in arrest, cautionary justice, and a return to the comforts of home and the securities of the middle class.

To be sure, Williamson has created a delightful comedy. Several scenes, including Ted’s nervous interviews with prospective mistresses, and his rejection of a comfortable career at Roderick and Randall Investments, are hilarious. It is clear from these episodes that Williamson is delightfully sensitive to the comic potential of rebellion against authority and sexual curiosity. Yet the comedy of The Bad Life is finally a self-effacing defense against the hopelessness that lies at its centre—a hopelessness generated by the conviction that serious efforts to transform mediocrity into meaningfulness are destined to failure. The thematic thrust of The Bad Life, that rebellion is pointless and silly, is not altered by the fact that the society itself is equally pointless and silly. Multiplied ironies lead in this instance to only escapist self-irony, a dehumanizing shrug of the shoulders in the face of the inevitable.

This ironic rejection of the bad life and return to the comforts of nice society is a disturbing assent to the stultifying confines of our repressive culture. More pointedly than Malke, Malke and A Small Informal Dance, The Bad Life demonstrates the failure of current Manitoba fiction to confront social reality, to make artistic experience a way of breaking down the emotional cliches and the confining intellectual alternatives of our society. Historically this has not been the way of Manitoba fiction—as Douglas Durkin’s The Magpie, Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese Laurence’s The Stone Angel confirm. In the hands of these authors fiction has been a way of defining the repressiveness of values and institutions and of describing the struggle to resist their oppressiveness. Infatuation with the trivial details of “slice-of-life” actuality, resignation to the mediocre, means acceptance of things as they are. And ultimately this means rejecting the essential function of art, which is to make us aware of ourselves and of our quarrels with society and culture.

Mr. Wayne Tefs is a teacher and critic. He is one of the editors of The Sphinx: A Magazine of Literature & Society, and has contributed reviews and articles to various Canadian periodicals. In our first issue he reviewed Bess Kaplan’s earlier novel, The Corner Store.