LAURENCE AND

THE USE OF MEMORY

Leona M. Gom
I .
IN MARGARET LAURENCE'S Canadian novels, The Stone Angel,
A Jest of God, A Bird in the House,
1
The Fire-Dwellers, and, most recently, The
Diviners, perhaps her most important technique involves the use of time, and in
particular her use of subjective time as memory. Hagar, Rachel, Vanessa, Stacey,
and Morag each are deeply denned by their Manawaka pasts, and they plunge
frequently into these pasts; their memories, particularly those of Hagar, Vanessa
and Morag, become as important as their presents. Significantly, The Diviners
opens with the sentence, "The river flowed both ways," the river obviously being
the river of time. There is not, then, for Laurence, simply a forward movement
of time, but a backward flow as well, into subjective time
2
and into memory. Like
Ford, she believes that to get a vivid impression of any fictional character, "you
could not begin at his beginning and work chronologically to the end. You must
first get him in with a strong impression, and then work backwards and forwards
over his past."
3
In the first of her Canadian novels, The Stone Angel, which is, interestingly
enough, paralleled most closely by her last, The Diviners, in its emphasis on
prolonged memory-segments, the reader participates as actively with Hagar in
her fictional past level as he does in her fictional present level. Since the memory
process is so crucial in the development of this novel, then, its misuse is the most
serious artistic flaw in the work. Consider what Mendilow says of following a
character's mental processes: "flashes of the past jerk in and out of his present
consciousness, telescoping, coalescing, disintegrating, breaking out of sequence,
starting off chains of unpredictable and sometimes untraceable associations."
4
Memory, then, does not follow a temporal "logical" sequence, as common sense
accustoms us to expect; rather memory must be seen as a form of disorder, as a
violation of objective, serial order.
5
The Stone Angel, obviously, does not use this
principle of disorder and distortion of events in memory, a principle basic to the
stream-of-consciousness writers. In fact, Hagar's recollections on the second
narrative level could be set apart from the present-tense sections of the novel and
become a most coherent and chronologically-developed story on its own. Although
Hagar speaks of "the junkyard of my memory," it is a junkyard in which all the
48
LAURENCE AND THE USE OF MEMORY
discarded memories are organized in a linear sequence, from Hagar remembering
herself at age six to her memory of her last trip to the Manawaka cemetery with
Marvin and Doris. Surely this is a highly artificial and contrived use of memory,
which follows no sequence of time, especially over interruptions and passages of
time in the present. That details or events in the present should almost always
cause Hagar's reminiscences seems to indicate that Hagar had no preconceived
plan to tell her story chronologically; Laurence herself admits that she is "not at
all sure that flashbacks ought to be in chronological order, as I placed them in
order to make it easier to follow Hagar's life."
8
It is unlikely, then, that Clara Thomas is correct when she says that "any
questions about a forced tidiness of form are hushed as Hagar takes shape and
authority; this is the way she would remember, forcing order on her own mind
as she had tried always to force her own order on all those around her."
7
What
Thomas does not account for here is the fact that Laurence also uses associative
memory. If Hagar could have forced "order on her own mind," her memories
could not have been triggered continually by some sight, sound or thought in the
present, for these "trigger mechanisms", to use Edel's phrase, do not evoke
memories in a neat chronological progression, but shuffle them out of sequence.
Like Proust's Marcel, Hagar is led into the past by a sensory guide in the present :
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after
the things are broken and scattered,... the smell and taste of things remain poised
a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment,
amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalp-
able drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
8
Thus, as the crumb of madeleine with tea and the phrase from Vinteuil's sonata
evoke memories for Marcel, so are the memories of past activities for Hagar
evoked by similar activities or objects in the present. As she drinks her tea (which,
unlike Marcel's, "tastes like hemlock"), the "sense of being alone in a strange
place, the nurse's unseeing stare, the receding heat of the day all bring to mind
the time I was first in a hospital, when Marvin was born." The waiting in the
doctor's office reminds her of the "many years I waited at the Shipley place";
her moving to the seashore reminds her of the other move she made, away from
Manawaka; the children playing house make her remember "some other children,
once, playing at house, but in a somewhat different manner". Although George
Robertson, who prefers "to have the jumps, when they come, to be abrupt,
disconnected," may be right when he accuses the transitions between the narra-
tive levels of lacking "deftness," and of making the reader "too much aware of
them when they do occur,"
9
these trigger mechanisms do operate according to
the principles of associative memory.
Laurence, however, does not rely exclusively on the long excursions into Hagar's
49
LAURENCE AND THE USE OF MEMORY
memory on the second narrative level to reveal Hagar's past, and it is when she
incorporates brief flashes of memory into the first narrative level that the process
seems most natural, most true to the principles of associative memory. Thus the
colour of her lilac dress reminds Hagar of "the lilacs that used to grow beside the
grey front porch of the Shipley place," and the brief paragraph-long description
is an especially arresting one, precisely because it does not fit into the order of
the second narrative level, which has left the reader with Hagar Currie, not
Hagar Shipley. Similarly effective is the mention a few pages later of Bram,
whom the reader has not yet met, but whose name consequently is implanted in
the mind at an early point in the book. The best use of such anticipatory hints,
however, concerns John. Hagar first mentions his name in the first chapter, and
Laurence feels no need to explain more than this: "John's eyes were grey, and
even near the last they looked the same to me as the boy's, still that hidden eager-
ness as though he half believed, against all reason and knowledge, that something
splendid would suddenly occur." His name slides easily into Hagar's conscious-
ness several times before his birth, eighty pages later, occurs in the second narra-
tive level, and the cause of his death remains tantalizingly mysterious until very
late in the novel. Hagar tells the woman in the nursing home that she had two
sons, one of whom "was killed in the last war"; but although she admits to
the reader that this is not true, she does not elaborate, and the reader must wait
until her scene with Lees before he understands, finally, what is true, and what
Hagar really means when she tells Lees, "I had a son, and lost him." The impact
of her revelation is greatly heightened by the anticipations.
Excellent as the purely associational jumps into the past are, however, in The
Stone Angel Laurence has committed herself to the use of a sustained second
narrative level, and it is unfortunate that she realized only in retrospect that the
flashbacks might have been more effective if not in chronological order.
Yet in The Diviners Laurence returns to this basic structure. Although she does
make use of some of the technical and typographical devices she developed in
The Fire Dwellers, it is the form of The Stone Angel, with its two parallel plot
lines and two Hagars, that The Diviners uses most as its model. There is an even
clearer separation of the two narrative levels, and the reader spends even more
time with the younger Morag than he does with the younger Hagar. And, perhaps
most significantly in terms of this study, both novels have their second narrative
levels move ahead chronologically. The obvious question is, does it work for The
Diviners where it failed in The Stone Angel?
What must be considered first in proposing an answer is whether or not
Laurence uses associative memory, the "trigger mechanisms," with Morag. The
answer seems clearly to be yes. Granted, the causal connections are much more
subtle than they are in The Stone Angel, and there are occasional instances where
there are apparently none at all; but in most cases, Morag's "memorybank
50
LAURENCE AND THE USE OF MEMORY
movies," as she calls them, unwind on a definite cue from their director. Seeing a
picture of Brooke in the paper begins the series of film-flashbacks about her life
where she met him. Thinking of lost languages leads her to and quickly past
-reflections on Dan McRaith, Christie, and Jules; it is only when she thinks
of Brooke and his forgotten language that she stops, and the second narrative
level resumes, conveniently where it had left off", with her life in the midst of her
marriage to Brooke. Later, her reflections on her "need to make pilgrimages"
and her "quest for islands" leads immediately into a memorybank movie called
"Sceptr'd Isle"; the title makes the thought-connection obvious, and the follow-
ing memory segments quite plainly are explanations of the older Morag's reflec-
tions. Finally, her last series of memories is preceded, on page 336, with her
observation that "the Canada geese were flying south"; the second of the subse-
quent memory segments ends with the same sentence-paragraph.
10
On this basis alone, then, it is possible to conclude that Laurence was not
particularly serious in her statement about reconsidering her chronological
arrangement of Hagar's memories, for in The Diviners she falls prey to the same
inconsistencies concerning the memory process; again she tries unsuccessfully to
reconcile associative and chronological memory. However, before accusing
Laurence of not having learned her lesson, there are two other points to consider :
first, the actual form of these flashbacks, and, second, Morag's profession a
writer.
Morag's earliest memories are contained in photographs, and she presents these
to the reader chronologically, which is only to be expected; "Order," after all,
"flowed in Morag's veins, despise it though she might," so it is reasonable for her
to arrange her photographs in sequence, causing them thus to become chrono-
logical, associative stimuli. The same is true of the four early photographs of
Pique, which Morag has arranged, chronologically of course, in an album, and
each of which introduces a memory bank movie; since this set of memories has
already been under way for five "reels", the use of photographs is gratuitous to
legitimize chronology, but makes an interesting parallel with the childhood snap-
shots of Morag. The use of photographs, however, is not a sustained technique,
and may at best represent frozen frames in Morag's longer mental movies.
11
It is
the convenient arrangement of these reels in Morag's consciousness that seems to
be contradicted by her own admission that they are "sneakily unfolding inside
her head" (my emphasis).
This rather dreadful mixed metaphor might, however, provide the reader with
a clue as to the real role of these memorybank movies. A film cannot be "un-
folded", but paper can, and Morag is, after all, a writer, a "wordsmith", whose
novel unfolds for her even as Laurence's unfolds for the reader. And Laurence
gives us strong hints throughout The Diviners that the novel on which Morag is
working is actually a verbal transcription of the movies she is playing. Thus, the
51
LAURENCE AND THE USE OF MEMORY
movies actually become chapters in Morag's novel. She even speaks of her writing
inspirations in cinematic terms: "Last night, sleepless until three A.M., long and
stupendously vivid scenes unfolded. Too tired to get up and write them down, she
still couldn't shut the projector off for the night". One of the mysterious "key
words" she has jotted down is "Jerusalem," which turns out to be part of Morag's
subsequent memorybank movie; elsewhere Morag tells Pique, "I don't know if
I'll want it [the novel in progress] published when it's finished." Indications are
strong, then, that Morag is actually writing an autobiographical novel. The final
words of the novel, after Morag's movies have caught up with her fictional
present, reinforce such a view: "Morag returned to the house, to write the
remaining private and fictional words, and to set down her title." That the close
of Laurence's novel should parallel so closely the conclusion of Morag's is hardly
coincidental.
If Morag's novel, then, is really her memorybank movie sequence, a stronger
case can be made for the chronological arrangement. Morag, is, in effect, writing
down the movie sequences simultaneous to the reader's reading of them, and that
she, as a competent novelist, should be organizing her material, chronologically
as it happens, is certainly not unusual. The associative stimulus becomes the point
at which Morag last left off her novel and to which she returns with intentions to
resume writing. Laurence never explicitly tells us that Morag is translating her
film images into words, but the clues are there. Frequently, immediately after a
prolonged movie sequence, the next reference that occurs is to a sustained period
of Morag's writing. After the memory series culminating in Christie's death, Morag
speaks of words "rushing out in a spate so that her hand could not keep up with
them". More often, the return to Morag's present is preceded by such phrases as
"work over for the d a y. . . . "

I m
LHUS, I F THE READER is aware that what he is actually read
ing, in Morag's memorybank movies, is her novel, the chronological arrangement
seems much less contrived, and indeed necessary. Laurence has preserved the
technique of The Stone Angel and legitimized it. For the most part, however, she
has dispensed with those brief and out of sequence flashes of memory that worked
so superbly with Hagar. There are occasional references to Dan McRaith before
the reader actually meets him, but they have none of the subtlety or effectiveness
of Hagar's brief references to Bram and John, perhaps because, when the reader
at last meets him, Dan is a disappointment as a character and is certainly less
significant in Morag's life than Bram and John were in Morag's.
A Jest of God, which is free from the rigorous demands of two distinct narra
tive levels, handles the memory process much more naturally, although there is a
5 2
LAURENCE AND THE USE OF MEMORY
sense of manipulation of Rachel's recollections, simply to give the necessary
exposition. On the whole, however, it is well-integrated with her present state of
mind and her thoughts, and although her memories are not entirely associational,
they at least avoid the restricting chronology with which Hagar is faced. The most
effective use of memory in A Jest of God, however, concerns those recurring
memories, usually very brief, that involve some painful experience. "Such
moments," Rachel says, remembering the young couple on the hill, "are the ones
that live forever. . . . I wish I could forget that day, and those kids, but I can't."
Frequently, the memories are ones of events in which the reader participated
earlier in the fictional present; it is a technique Laurence uses excellently in the
flashbacks in The Fire-Dwellers. For Rachel, perhaps the most painful of such
memories is the Tabernacle scene: "I remember everything, every detail, and
will never be able to forget however hard I try. It will come back again and
again, and I will have to endure it, over and over." She recalls it as she talks to
her mother, and to Calla, and she is "back there in that indefensible moment,
trapped in my own alien voice, and the eyes all around have swollen to giants'
eyes. How will I ever be able to forget?" The memory of her making love with
Nick is likewise characterized by a mocking painfulness, by a sense of the absurd :
"I can see myself now, the frenetic haste, like a person in some early film,
everything speeded-up comically." The memory is very similar to Stacey's mock-
ing flashback in The Fire-Dwellers of her hurried loving of Luke: "Stacey, touch-
ing him too urgently now, now, no time to waste, I haven't got all day."
Stacey, of course, is frequently struck by such unpleasant recollections of her
recent behaviour. As she watches Katie dance, she relives her own dance scene,
seeing herself as a grotesque; she torments herself with memories of her behaviour
with Thor; she cringes from Ian's shrill "Can't you just leave me alone?" because
it recalls Mac's words. Her memories of her more distant past, outside the fictional
time covered by the novel, have in common with Hagar's the trigger mechanisms
which integrate the flashbacks into the fictional present. Mac's bitter words,
"You do, eh? You really think you do?" suddenly provoke a flashback of her
father, locked in the mortuary, saying the same words to her mother. The almost-
automatic love-making with Mac recalls the magic of their early years together.
Luke's mention of horoscopes creates a flashback of her job with Janus Uranus.
The trip to the morgue inspires a memory of Cameron's Funeral Home. And the
name of Vernon Winkler, as "the recollection filters blurredly back," gives rise to
a flashback of Stacey in Manawaka watching a fight. Although the trigger
mechanisms in Stacey's fictional present might be accused of the same obvious-
ness that Robertson believed was a problem in The Stone Angel, they are
generally handled much more deftly, and Godfrey's criticism of The Stone
Angel's transitions, that "a good deal of space is wasted,"
13
would certainly not
apply to the sharp and sudden jumps in The Fire-Dwellers.
53
LAURENCE AND THE USE OF MEMORY
The use of memory in A Bird in the House is, although the basis of the book,
less interesting than that of the other novels. The entire novel is memory, recalled
by the forty-year-old Vanessa, whom the reader meets only at the end. As in The
Stone Angel and The Diviners, the memories are recounted chronologically,
14
and although the reader can accept this disciplining of memory into a linear order
because it is recounted deliberately and without interruption, in the past tense, by
the mature Vanessa, he cannot feel the same excitement he feels at one of Stacey's
sudden flashbacks. The memories become memoirs, recapturing not the visions of
childhood but the reflections of the writing adult. Even when sudden associative
memories strike the young Vanessa, such as the memory of driving in the car with
her grandfather, they are so elaborately prefaced that their effect is dulled.
If, however, memory is examined according to Mendilow's concept of it, where
"the event in the past at the time of its occurrence is not as it is recalled later,"
where "the reaction, not the action, is important," and where "something has
changed the perceiver,"
15
A Bird in the House becomes a more interesting
study of memory. That the recollected event differs from the actual is readily
apparent in both The Fire-Dwellers and A Jest of God, where the reader can see
for himself how Stacey and Rachel distort in memory significant events, usually
painful ones; however, it is only in A Bird in the House (and to a lesser extent,
The Diviners and The Stone Angel) that the entire novel is devoted to a revalua-
tion of the past, by a character attempting to understand herself in time present.
It may be this search for integration of self that leads Kent Thompson to such
praise for the technique of A Bird in the House, in which he says Laurence has
avoided the "usual dangers of this method" and "accomplished the virtues. . . .
In the same period of time different things occur in the life of Vanessa. She does
not recognize their significance. However, the narrator by looking at different
patterns in that same sequence of time does."
16
Although the novel really never
gives a precise sense of the adult narrator against whom the younger Vanessa is
played, there is a use of the double perspective, or the "double focus," which
interested such much earlier writers as Sterne, Richardson, and Defoe.
17
Richardson's comments on the "two characters" that the author has to support
are relevant here; the author, he says, "has to consider how his hero felt at the
time of the events to be related, and how it is natural he should feel them at the
time he is relating them."
18
Furthermore,
Much more lively and affecting... must be the style of those who write in the
height of a present distress ; the mind tortured by the pangs of uncertainty... ;
than the dry, narrative, unanimated style of a person relating difficulties and
danger surmounted, can be . . . the relater perfectly at ease; and if himself, un-
moved by his own story, not likely greatly to affect the reader.
19
It is easy to place the Vanessa who narrates A Bird in the House in the latter
54
LAURENCE AND THE USE OF MEMORY
category, relating events "when curiosity is extinguished" and "passion cooled."
20
Thomas, however, appreciates the novel for just this distance between the
character who experiences and the character who narrates "from a platform of
adult awareness... . Hagar and Rachel were characters embroiled in intensity
and requiring intense response; Vanessa, the narrator, provides a calmly consis-
tent viewpoint."
21
Even if one does not dispute the "calmly consistent viewpoint"
of the narrator, as Laurence herself does,
22
it is debatable whether the sacrifice of
the more immediate perceptions of the experiencing Vanessa is worth the
restrained style of the adult. The distance between the two characters is too great
for the reader to accept Vanessa's credibility as a child, or to participate in the
life which she herself looks back on with relative uninvolvement.
There is another problem involved in working with the two characters, a
problem Mendilow notes in Moll Flanders, where "two characters are super-
imposed one upon the other, and the impression of the one who acts is coloured
and distorted by the interpretation of the one who narrates."
23
In order to retain
Vanessa's childhood perceptions while at the same time presenting an adult
evaluation of a situation, Laurence is forced to overuse both the eavesdropping
device and the listening-but-not-understanding device, both of which allow the
child Vanessa to remain "only partially knowing" while the older Vanessa can
use her as a medium for presenting an incident. The young Vanessa, then,
frequently must say, "I could not really comprehend these things"; "her face
became startled, and something eke which I could not fathom"; "at the time I
felt only bewilderment." The strain between the two Vanessas becomes one of
the greatest problems in the novel, and it often requires an unwilling suspension
of disbelief on the part of the reader to accept both the understanding of the child
and also the detailed and more objective recall of the older Vanessa, whom the
reader never actually gets to meet and evaluate for himself. ;
The two Hagars in The Stone Angel present much more of a challenge to the
reader, for he is continually evaluating not only the younger Hagar, but also the
older Hagar who remembers her; thus the narrating Hagar is of greater interest
precisely because she is not, as is the older Vanessa, a fully self-aware and
objective character. And, having realized that the old Hagar is anything but
infallible, the reader become increasingly interested in seeing how she restructures
and revaluates her past life. Evidence of a change in Hagar's attitudes is easy to
find, and, like Vanessa, she frequently uses the "now-then" distinction to show an
increased understanding over the years, but her understanding is often, and
significantly, a movement from a definite assessment to one of doubt. Seeing her
father with Lottie Dreiser's mother, she "felt no pity for her nor for him. I scorned
them both. . . . Yet now, remembering their faces, I'd be hard put to say which
one of them had been the cruder." Elsewhere, she says of Dan that he "cultivated
illness as some people cultivate rare plants. Or so I thought then." And, "it
55
LAURENCE AND THE USE OF MEMORY
seemed to me then that Matt was almost apologetic, as though he felt he ought to
tell me he didn't blame me for her dying, when in his heart he really did. Maybe
he didn't feel that way at all how can a person tell?" Remembering her life
with Bram, she recalls, "It was so clear to me then who was in the wrong. Now
I'm no longer certain"; "I have to laugh now, although I was livid then." This
greater understanding of her earlier self, and her final acceptance of the necessity
of needing other people shown, for example, in the juxtaposing of her earlier
refusal to "cry in front of strangers, whatever it cost me" with her present
discovery that with the man at the beach she is "not sorry I've talked to him, not
sorry at all, and that's remarkable" is made possible by the two-character
technique.
The Diviners of course also uses this method, presenting the reader with two
Morags, but there is less reader interest in the older Morag than there is in the
older Hagar. The older Morag, unsure as she may be as to the best way to handle
situations, particularly with Pique, is nevertheless a self-aware character, and
probably more secure in her identity than are any of Laurence's heroines. The
reader thus is rarely able to see more than Morag herself does, and the woman
that is introduced at the first of the book is not significantly different from the
woman at the end which is not the case with Hagar. Morag grows and learns,
particularly in her relationship with Christie, throughout the second narrative
level, but does not move toward a significant character development on the first
level; she has, in a way, like the narrating Vanessa, already "arrived" when the
novel begins. She has new experiences, of course some with new friends
(Royland, the Smiths) and some with characters the reader encounters in her
memories (Pique, Jules) but she does not change significantly because of
them. Nor can the reader see her change because of what she learns from her
memories.
This latter condition is true because Morag not only understands herself, she
understands the memory process. She realizes her "invented memories," as she
calls them, are unreliable as documentaries of fact, that they are "maybe true
and maybe not". "A popular misconception," she says, "is that we can't change
the past everyone is constantly changing their own past, recalling it, revising
it. What really happened? A meaningless question." Reflecting on a childhood
memory, she seems even to be addressing herself to Vanessa's problem: "I can't
trust it [her first clear memory] completely, either, partly because I recognize
anomalies in it, ways of expressing the remembering, ways which aren't those of
a five-year-old, as though I were older in that memory (and the words bigger)
than in some subsequent ones. . . . " Morag's consciousness, then, of her editing,
and of her "refilming" her memorybank movies, makes her aware of her own
unreliability as a projectionist. The reader cannot be involved in this editing,
this revaluation of her past, as he is in Hagar's, for Morag is aware that there
56
LAURENCE AND THE USE OF MEMORY
can be no totally factual version of "what really happened." Hagar attempts to
give the facts, with retrospective footnotes; Morag assures the reader that the
footnotes would have changed the facts. They are equally valid ways of dealing
fictionally with the memory process.
I n terms of the two character technique, however, its use in The Stone Angel
is much more significant and successful than it is in either A Bird in the House or
The Diviners, for there is more dialogue between the two Hagars, and between
them and the reader, than is possible with the two Morags or the two Vanessas.
Compared to the dynamic Hagar who changes most, not on the second
narrative level, but on the first Vanessa in particular is a static narrator. As
for Morag, it is interesting that the reader takes leave of her, as well, where he
had first met her: watching the river that flows both ways and looking "ahead
into the past, and back into the future, until the silence".
I t is what Morag does best. It is also, of course, what Margaret Laurence does
best. She has launched her novels like boats on the river of time, her characters
in them swept backwards and forwards in their search for a mainland that will
give them, at last, an unclouded view of their little island of Manawaka.
NOTES
1
A Bird in the House has been considered as other than a novel, albeit as more than
a collection of short stories ; Thompson may be closest to an accurate classification
when he calls it a "whole book," in which "some stories re examine the same
chronological period as other stories, but examine them with a new focus and a
different pattern of events." For the purposes of this paper, however, it will be
considered a novel.
2
The distinction between objective, conceptual or linear time, and subjective, per
ceptual or psychological time has frequently been made, and can be applied readily
to Laurence's characters, who each are strongly influenced by their internal time
clocks. Memory is only one aspect, albeit the major one, of subjective time.
3
Ford Madox Ford, quoted by Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 191.
4
Mendilow, . ., Time and the Novel, 221.
5
Remembered events, however, do follow each other in a causal relationship ; there
is an orderly progression of follows , follows B, etc. The point is, as Meyer
hoff explains, "t hat this peculiar order of the inner life appears as, or must be
judged as, a form of disorder when it is compared with objective temporal
sequence" {Time in Literature, 23).
6
Laurence, "Ten Years' Sentences," Canadian Literature 41, 14.
7
Thomas, Clara, Margaret Laurence, 38.
8
Proust, Mancel, Swann's Way, part one, Vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past,
61.
9
Robertson, George, "An Artist's Progress," Canadian Literature 21, 54.
1 0
The second sentence, to be consistent, is in the present tense, and uses "are", not
"were"; this serves only, however, to emphasize the similar situations on the two
narrative levels, on two temporal levels.
57
LAURENCE AND THE USE OF MEMORY
11
It might be noted here that her memorybank movies are in the present tense, while
her real present is narrated in the past. The exact reverse is true with Hagar. The
reason for Morag's memories to be told in the present is implicit in their movie
format ; there is an unaging presentness in both movies and memories, and the film
medium lends itself, for this reason, readily to flashback. It is no contradiction,
incidentally (as will be discussed later), for Morag to say her movie-memories
have "been refilmed, a scene deleted here, another added there" (D, 23), for this
does not affect their quality of immediacy.
12
An interesting parallel might be drawn here with the artistic satisfaction of Woolf's
Lily Briscoe in To The Lighthouse, who ends the novel by finishing the painting
she had been working on throughout: "With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it
clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done ; it was finished.
Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my
vision" (p. 310).
13
Godfrey, Dave, "For Bonfires," Tamarack Review XXXIII, 92-4.
14
Individual stories, however, move ahead in time beyond the fictional present of
the next story, but the general movement of Vanessa's memory is chronological
rather than associative, both within the separate stories and in the novel as a
whole.
15
Mendilow, Time and the Novel, 219.
16
Thompson, "Margaret Laurence: A Bird in the House" The Fiddlehead
LXXXIV, 109.
17
Mendilow includes an interesting discussion of these authors and the double focus,
in a section called "The Time Locus of the Pseudo-Author," pp. 89-96.
18
Richardson, quoted by Mendilow, Time and the Novel, 90-1.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid.
21
Thomas, Margaret Laurence, 55-6.
22
Speaking of her grandfather, she says, "I think I honestly kept on disliking him
until I got all the way through those stories,... when I realized not only that I
didn't dislike him anymore, but that there were things about him that I greatly
admired." (quoted by Wigmore, "Margaret Laurence," 52).
23
Mendilow, Time and the Novel, 91.
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