(1977)
I first became interested in Canadian monsters, not, as you might suspect, through politics, but through my own attempts to write ghost stories and through some research I happened to be doing on Sasquatches, for a CBC “Poem for Voices.1 My collection of other people’s monsters has not been systematically acquired, and there are probably glaring omissions in it. No sooner will this article appear in print than some indignant student of the occult will, no doubt, chastise me for not having known that the central character in I Was A Teenage Werewolf was, like Walt Disney, a Canadian, or for some error of similar magnitude. I hasten to cover my tracks by declaring that, unlike my compatriots here assembled, I am not a professional academic, and my collecting and categorizing of monsters must be ascribed to an amateur, perverse and private eccentricity, like that of, say, a Victorian collector of ferns. (Like many writers of my generation I started to read Canadian literature in self-defence; we got tired of people telling us there wasn’t any and that we should therefore not exist, or go to New York.)
But criticism, even the proliferating Canlitcrit of the last decade, hasn’t had much to say about the subject, probably because magic and monsters don’t usually get associated with Canadian literature. In fact, the very term “Canadian literature” would seem to exclude them, in the popular mind at least, and the popular mind is not always wrong. Supernaturalism is not typical of Canadian prose fiction; the mainstream (with those useful qualifications, by and large and so far) has been solidly social-realistic. When people in Canadian fiction die, which they do fairly often, they usually stay buried; mention of supernatural beings is as a rule confined to prayers and curses; God and the Devil appear in the third person but rarely in the first, and are not often seen onstage. The divine and demonic levels of human existence may appear through analogy or symbol, but there aren’t very many apotheoses or descents to the underworld, or even white whales, scarlet letters in the sky, or Blithedale Romance mesmerists. Canadian fiction on the whole confines itself to ordinary life on middle-earth.2 Recently, experimentalist Larry Garber began a story, “Susceptible to illusion as I am, I was not at all surprised when Jack (whom we had buried a few weeks previously) announced his presence at my threshold.3 This opening ploy is meant to come as a shock to the reader, and the fact that it does indicates the extent to which it is an exception to the usual Canadian realistic conventions.
The supposed lack of otherworldly dimensions, or even worldly ones, used to be almost routinely lamented by poets and others critics. Thus Earle Birney, in his much-quoted poem, “Can.Lit.:”
we French & English never lost
our civil war
endure it still
a bloody civil bore
the wounded sirened off
no Whitman wanted
it’s only by our lack of ghosts
we’re haunted
And, more severely, Irving Layton, in “From Colony to Nation:”
A dull people, without charm
or ideas,
settling into the clean empty look
of a Mountie or a dairy farmer
as into a legacy
One can ignore them
(the silences, the vast distances help)
and suppose them at the bottom
of one of the meaner lakes,
their bones not even picked for souvenirs.
Fifteen years ago, this was Canada, or rather this was the image of it which everyone seemed to believe in: a dull place, devoid of romantic interest and rhetorical excesses, with not enough blood spilled on the soil to make it fertile, and above all, ghostless. Unmagical Canada, as prosaic as Mounties and dairy farmers appear to be before you actually meet some up close…
But is this a true picture of Canada or its literature, and was it ever? Over the past fifteen years a certain amount of exhumation, literary or otherwise, has been taking place, which could be viewed as archaeology, necrophilia or resurrection, depending on your viewpoint. The digging up of ancestors, calling up of ghosts, exposure of skeletons in the closet, which are so evident in many cultural areas —the novel, of course, but also history and even economics —have numerous motivations, but one of them surely is a search for reassurance. We want to be sure that the ancestors, ghosts and skeletons really are there; that as a culture we are not as flat and lacking in resonance as we were once led to believe. The Prime Minister of Canada for more than twenty years, Mackenzie King, formerly a symbol of Canada because of his supposed dullness and greyness (“He blunted us,” goes the F. R. Scott poem W.L.M.K, “We had no shape / Because he never took sides, / And no sides / Because he never allowed them to shape….”), is enjoying new symbolic popularity as a secret madman who communed every night with the picture of his dead mother and believed that his dog was inhabited by her soul. “Mackenzie King rules Canada because he is himself the embodiment of Canada—cold and cautious on the outside… but inside a mass of intuition and dark intimations,” says one of Robertson Davies’ characters in The Manticore, speaking for many.
It is this talking-picture side of Canadian literature, this area of dark intimations, which I would like to consider briefly here. Briefly, because my own knowledge is far from encyclopaedic; but also because Canadian fictions in which the supernatural and the magical appear are still only exceptions which prove what may soon no longer be the rule.
The North, the Wilderness, has traditionally been used in Canadian literature as a symbol for the world of the unexplored, the unconscious, the romantic, the mysterious and the magical. There are strange things done ’neath the midnight sun, as Robert Service puts it. (There are probably stranger things done in Toronto, but they don’t have quite the same aura.) So it’s not surprising that a large number of Canadian monsters have their origin in native Indian and Eskimo myths. One of the earliest uses of this kind of monster in literary prose (I hesitate to call it “fiction,” although it probably is) is in a book called Brown Waters and Other Sketches (1915), by William Blake. The narrator is fishing in “the great barrens that lie far-stretching and desolate among the Laurentian Mountains.” He describes the landscape in exceptionally negative terms:
So were we too alone in one of the loneliest places this wide earth knows. Mile upon mile of grey moss; weathered granite clad in ash-coloured lichen; old brule — the trees here fallen in windrows, there standing bleached and lifeless, making the hilltops look barer, like the sparse white hairs of age. Only in the gullies a little greenness… dwarfed larches, gnarled birches, tiny firs a hundred years old —and always moss… great boulders covered with it, the very quagmires mossed over so that a careless step plunges one into the sucking black ooze below.
One evening the narrator’s companion tells a story concerning the disappearance of a man named Paul Duchene, a good guide, familiar with the wilderness, who wandered off and has never been found. He then mentions the belief of the Montagnais Indians:
….strange medley of Paganism and Christianity —that those who die insane without the blessing of a priest become wendigos—werewolves, with nothing human but their form, soulless beings of diabolic strength and cunning that wander for all time seeking only to harm whatever comes in their way.
He goes on to speak of his journey the summer before to a place called the Riviere a 1’Enfer, where he camps beside a lake with black water. His guides go back for supplies, and he is left alone, whereupon he experiences an “oppression of the spirit:” “In what subtle way,” he asks, “does the universe convey the knowledge that it has ceased to be friendly?” That night a tremendous storm blows up. Sitting in his tent, he hears an unearthly cry, which is “not the voice of beast or bird.” He bursts from the tent and is confronted by a creature —“something in the form of a man” —which springs at him. “And what in God’s name was it?” asks the narrator. The story-teller replies, “Pray Him it was not poor Duchene in the flesh.”
The juxtaposition of the oppressive landscape, the story-teller’s reaction to it as hostile, and the appearance of the wendigo indicate that this is a tale about the Monster as Other, which represents forces outside and, in this case, opposed to the human protagonist. Duchene, child of the wilderness, has become the wilderness as seen by the narrator—the incarnation of an unfriendly natural universe. The storm is one aspect of this landscape; the wendigo, soulless and destructive, is the same landscape in human form.
The wendigo story in Brown Waters is as short and simple as the folk-tale material from which it obviously derives. A more extended and much more sophisticated Monster-as-Other was created by Sheila Watson in her novel The Double Hook (1959). The novel begins, “In the folds of the hills, under Coyote’s eye…” Coyote turns out to be a deity of sorts, part animal, part god, both below human nature and beyond it. At first, like the landscape he represents, he appears harsh and malevolent. He is Fate, he is retribution, he is Death, he is the nature of things; he is also called a “mischief-maker.” But in fact he is double, like the hook of the title: “the glory and the fear,” both together. His nature changes according to the vision of the perceiver, and the reader comes to know the various characters partly through their views of Coyote. “There’s no big Coyote, like you think,” says materialist Theophil. “There’s not just one of him. He’s everywhere. The government’s got his number too. They’ve set a bounty on him at fifty cents a brush… This is a thin mean place, men and cattle alike.” By the end of the book both he and his landscape have become, if not exactly nurturing, at least more benevolent. He presides over the birth of a child, and sings, in his rather Biblical manner:
I have set his feet on soft ground;
I have set his feet on the sloping shoulders
of the world.
The wendigo and Coyote are both landscape-and-nature creatures, nature in both cases being understood to include super-nature. Neither are human; both can act on human beings, but cannot be acted upon. They are both simply there, as supernatural forces in the environment and as embodiments of that environment which must be reckoned with. They are objects rather than subjects, the “Other” against which the human characters measure themselves. The environment and its monster in Brown Waters are so overwhelmingly negative that the best thing the protagonist can do is run away from them, which he does. The environment and its deity in The Double Hook also provide an ordeal for the human actors, but both environment and deity are double-natured, and the proper response to them is not simple escape but further exploration resulting in increased self-knowledge. The one character who attempts escape ends by returning, and Coyote blesses him accordingly.
It is very difficult to make a completely non-human supernatural being the protagonist in a fiction: but there are at least two Canadian novels in which the protagonist is a semi-human being. Such beings might be called “magic people” rather than “monsters.” They have magical powers and otherworldly attributes, but they are nonetheless partly human and can be acted upon by ordinary human beings. A case in point is the central character in Tay John (1939), Howard O’Hagan’s potent and disturbing novel. Tay John is a strange creature, half white man and half Indian, half mythical and half “realistic.” In the first third of the book, which is written in the form of a folk tale or legend, we learn of his birth underground from the body of his dead and buried mother. He emerges and is seen wandering near the gravesite, an odd child with yellow hair, brown skin and no shadow. After he has been lured into the land of the living by the elders of the tribe and given a shadow by a wisewoman, he is marked out to be the tribe’s leader and potential saviour. But first he must enter manhood by going apart to a place of his own choosing, to fast, to have a vision and to acquire a guiding spirit.
Unfortunately he picks the wrong place. It is “a valley where no man went,” and like the lake of Blake’s Riviére à I’Enfer it has black water, with similar associations:
The water that came down from that valley was turgid, dark, and flowed silently, with no rapids. It was said that if a man drank of that water he would lose his voice and go from the sight of his fellows, roaming the hills at night to bark at the moon like a coyote. The coyote men saw by day was not the same they heard by night, for the coyote they heard by night was the voice of a man whose hands had become claws and whose teeth had grown long and tusk-like, who sat on his haunches, lifted his head to the sky and lamented the human speech gone from him.
The spirit of that valley was cruel. Men feared that one night, taking the form of a great white bear, it would come down upon them in their sleep and leave them with a coyote’s howl for voice and only a coyote’s claws for hands, and each man would be for ever a stranger to his neighbour.
What the Indians fear most about the spirit of the valley is the power it has to divide the society, to make each man a stranger to his neighbour: “The boy says I’ the man says ’We’ —and this word that the man speaks is the word of his greatest magic.” But Tay John chooses to say “I.” The valley of the wendigo-like were-coyote does present him with a sign, but it is an ominous one: he is visited by “an old bear, with snow-dust on his coat;” in other words, the great white bear of the myth. He is not changed into a coyote outwardly, but he brings back something that will have the same effect, a bag of sand from the river. The sand contains gold, which is not known to the Indians; but when a party of white prospectors arrives, it is Tay John they select to guide them to the valley, because he is the only man who has ever been there. From this time forward he has a new name (Tete jaune, corrupted to Tay John) and is contaminated by the egocentric, individualistic spirit of the whites.
This trait emerges when Tay John wishes to marry. The tribe feels that, as magic leader, he should not marry. “The woman of Tay John is the people,” they say. “He is a leader of the people and is married to their sorrows.” But he will not accept this condition, and leaves the tribe to seek out the world of the white men who have given him his name.
As might be expected, the encounter is disastrous. The remaining two sections of the book consist mainly of hearsay and eyewitness reports of the doings of Tay John —his hand-to-hand combat with a grizzly, his sacrifice of his own hand to gain possession of a horse. But he doesn’t fit into the white world any more easily than he did into the Indian; in both, he’s an exception. His tribe wished him to be a hero and leader, but about all the whites can think of to offer him is a position as guide, or, worse, a tourist Indian, dressed up to meet the trains. He resists this tame fate and elopes into the mountains with a strange white woman, a “woman of the world” who leaves her rich protector to go off with him. Like Tay John’s own mother she dies in childbirth, and Tay John is last seen pulling her corpse on a toboggan. The description reminds us of his magic origins:
Tay John came on, more distinct now, through the curtain of swirling snow, entangled in it, wrapped in its folds, his figure appearing close, then falling back into the mists, a shoulder, a leg, a snowshoe moving on as it were of its own accord —like something spawned by the mists striving to take form before mortal eyes.
“He seemed very big off there, shadowy like,” Blackie said, “then again no bigger than a little boy.”
When his tracks are followed, they lead nowhere:
Blackie stared at the tracks in front of him, very faint now, a slight trough in the snow, no more. Always deeper and deeper into the snow. He turned back then. There was nothing more he could do. He had the feeling, he said, looking down at the tracks, that Tay John hadn’t gone over the pass at all. He had just walked down, the toboggan behind him, under the snow and into the ground.
The semi-human hero has returned to the earth in much the same way as he emerged from it. His life, like the confused trails he makes in the snow, has been circular. Although he performs several acts beyond the range of most men and is generally regarded as singular, he has not used his gifts to benefit his people, and ultimately they do not benefit him either.
It is interesting to compare Tay John with the “magic” protagonist of a very different book, The Sun and the Moon4 (1944) by P. K. Page. Kristin, born during an eclipse of the moon, is a visionary who can see things that aren’t there. She can also “become” inanimate objects, seeing and feeling as they do: “She had only to sit still long enough to know the static reality of inanimate things —the still, sweet ecstasy of change in kind.” As a child she likes doing this, and finds people noisy and superfluous. But when she is seventeen she meets a painter named Carl; they fall in love and become engaged, and she finds herself “stealing” his essence by “becoming” him, much as she was once able to “become” a rock or a chair. Apparently, she discovers, she can “become” things in this way only by partially absorbing them. Kristin finds that she is draining away Carl’s talent and even his personality by the sheer force of her empathy with him. He himself has no idea what is going on, but finds himself losing consciousness during what her father calls her “comatose periods.” He awakens feeling drained and old and shaken; and when he tries to paint her portrait, he finds that it is in fact his own he has painted. (But badly; Kristin, who has temporarily taken him over, isn’t much of a painter.)
Kristin wants Carl to play sun to her moon, to “predominate,” as she puts it; she feels he will be strong enough to resist her inadvertent power. But it is doubtful whether or not Carl in fact possesses enough strength to justify her faith. “ ’It is as if I have surrendered my being to an alien force and it has made me less,’” he thinks, just before one of these moments of “invasion.” Kristin herself says of her love and her powers of metamorphosis:
If only… I turned into trees or stones or earth when I’m with him, it couldn’t hurt him. But this way… I am like a leech, a vampire, sucking his strength from him —the moon eclipsing the sun… I cannot be with him without stealing into him and erasing his own identity.
On the eve of her wedding, she finds herself faced with an agonizing problem. She loves Carl and wants to marry him, but she feels she must find “a solution that would protect Carl” from her:
As we are, if I marry him, it will mean the complete merging of two personalities. But the truth rushed to her out of the night: it will mean the obliteration of two personalities. That is, she thought slowly, the words like heavy sacks that had to be carried together to form a sentence, that is, if I have a personality of my own. For I am a chameleon, she thought, absorbing the colours about me and our marriage will submerge us, wipe us out as the sun obliterates the markings of water on a stone.
The solution that she finds is worse than the problem. During the night, she allows herself to “become” the stormtossed trees outside her window, projecting her soul into their substance, except that this time she does not return to her body. The woman Carl marries the next day is a soulless automaton, emotionless and almost idiotic, who goes through the motions of their life together with no joy and no pain. The “real” Kristin has been completely absorbed by the trees; to all intents and purposes she is a tree, and Carl —his talent destroyed by this harrowing experience, and still not knowing what has caused her to change —leaves her in despair. The book ends, not with a description of Kristin’s reaction (for presumably she will have none), but with a cinematic cut to the external landscape, which we must by now presume to be the same as the inside of her head:
The sun and a small wind broke the surface of the lake to glinting sword blades. On the far side, where the trees marched, unchecked, right down to the water’s edge, there the lake was a shifting pattern of scarlet, vermilion and burnt orange.
Kristin, like Tay John, has been absorbed back into the nature that produced her.
But then, love affairs between men and the moon, or men and trees, or mortals and faery queens, never did work out very well, if mythology and folklore are to be believed. It is odd to find a dryad in Canadian literature, even though she is disguised as a rather frothy socialite, but that is obviously what Kristin is. (All the objects she chooses to “become” are natural ones; she does not, for instance, ever “become” a motor car.5) Kristin and Tay John are both figures of this sort, demi-gods, with unusual births and strange attributes; like satyrs and their ilk, they are bridges joining the human world, the natural world and the supranatural world.
I have now mentioned four creatures, in four separate books: two, the wendigo and Coyote, who are completely non-human, gods or devils, incarnations of their respective natural environments, and two, Tay John and Kristin, who are semi-human but still strongly linked to nature. It would now seem proper to examine the next rung down on the hierarchical scale, which ought to be a priest figure if we are using an epic analogy, or a poet or artist if we are using a pastoral one.6 Such a figure would be human but magical, and in twentieth-century Canada he is likely to be a magician, for what is stage magic but ritual from which the religion has been removed?
Two well-known Canadian authors have created magicians; they are, of course, Robertson Davies, in his Magnus Eisengrim trilogy, and Gwendolyn MacEwen, who creates a whole series of magicians which bear a strong generic likeness to one another. It would be hard to find two writers whose approaches to prose fiction are more different; yet their magicians have a few things in common. Both are artist figures, and both are in fact Canadian, although both disguise this plebeian origin under an assumed name. (The implication is that you can’t be both Canadian and magic; or you can, but no one will believe in you if you reveal your dull grey origins.)
MacEwen specializes in magician as artist as Christ.7 (In her first novel, Julian the Magician, the magician actually insists on being crucified, just to see if he can be resurrected.) Her characters are not only called magicians, they actually are; that is, they seem able actually to perform superhuman feats. Davies’ Magnus Eisengrim, on the other hand, is a professional magician, the creator of a very good magic show based on the principles of illusion. But the reader is always left wondering whether MacEwen’s magicians are really what they claim to be, or just clever frauds, or perhaps a little insane; whereas Davies weights the evidence in favour of the belief that Eisengrim may in fact have sold his soul to the devil.
Two of the stories in MacEwen’s collection, Noman (1972), 8 are attempts to reconcile the Otherworld of the magical with the resolutely non-magical world of Canada, which MacEwen spells with a “K.” In her earlier works these two places were always kept separate and opposed; the magic world was ancient Egypt, or the Arabian Middle East, or Greece; it contained miracles. Kanada was the place of bacon and eggs, of non-revelations, and it had to be escaped from, either mentally or physically, if you wanted any vision other than the mundane. But in “Kingsmere,” which is not really a story but a description, MacEwen explores the possibilities of what she calls “Noman’s land:” Mackenzie King’s artificial ruins. What strikes her is the relationship between the remnants of the past (mostly European) and the landscape that frames them, or rather, that they frame:
He reassembled these broken bits of history to frame or emphasize certain aspects of the landscape. He made naked windows and doors for the forest and the hills.
You stand on a terrace flanked by a row of unreal Grecian columns. You look through a classic arch and see, not Athens, not Rome nor even Palmyra, but the green Gatineau hills of Kanada. You wonder if the landscape protests these borrowed histories, these imported ruins.
For MacEwen, Kingsmere is a time-travel place, a doorway between the past and the future:
You walk farther down, toward the interior of the garden. Something isn’t right. Into whose future are you moving?… You have spotted one very large arch at the far end of the field, and for a second you have an intense, blinding perception of the real nature of the place. This stone on stone, this reconstruction of a past that was never yours, this synthetic history. Only the furtive trees are real. Here there is a tension between past and future, a tension so real it’s almost tangible; it lives in the stone, it crackles like electricity among the leaves.
He tried to transplant Europe, to bring it here among the stark trees and silent trails, but
There, beyond the arch, is the forest.
The narrator in “Kingsmere” is afraid to pass through this magic arch. Not so Noman, the central character in the story of that name. Noman is the magician as Kanadian; his name, in addition to being Ulysses’ pseudonym, is probably intended to symbolize the famous Kanadian identity crisis. At first he pretends he cannot understand English, and his friends construct all kinds of exotic nationalities and identities for him, “imagining a thousand possible tongues for him, for somehow it was incongruous that he could have worn so beautiful a coat, or danced so well in Kanada.” He finally reveals the awful truth, and his friend Kali, who has been cooking exotic foods for him, calls him a monster and feeds him a can of pork and beans in disgust. He shares with Kristin the ability to become “whatever he encountered,” and he seems to have worked in a carnival as a clown, an escape artist, and finally a dancer. With his thousand possible identities and his refusal to choose just one, he sets himself up (or is set up by his author) as Kanada incarnate. “Kanada,” he sighs. “Papermaker. Like a great blank sheet in the world’s diary. Who’ll make the first entry?”
As Kanada, he sets himself the task of solving his own identity crisis, and this is where he links up with “Kingsmere.” He speaks to Kali:
“Let’s possess the future as surely as we possess the past!”
“But you don’t have a past,” I winked at him in the mirror.
“Yes I do, damn it! I’ll tell you about it later. Let’s become the masters of time, let’s move into time!”
“To pave the way for our descendants?” I laughed.
“No,” he said, and looked at me strangely. “For our ancestors. They’re the ones who are trapped.”
I didn’t feel like questioning him, so I let him go on.
“We’ve inherited this great Emptiness,” he said. “An empty door that leads into the forest and the snow. No man can get through… ”
“Can you?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure what he was talking about.
“Yes,” he said, “I think I can.”
He goes about this process, which will apparently make it possible to move into the future by rediscovering and releasing the past, in three stages. First he and Kali make love, and then sit applying metaphors to their bodies;
We sat cross-legged like children proudly comparing the maps of our bodies —the birthmarks, scars, incisions, beauty-spots, all the landmarks of our lives, those we were born with and those we’d incurred. New trails broken in the forest, old signposts no longer used, footprints of forest animals who come in the night, places of fire, places of water, portages, hill.
The metaphors, which at the beginning of the story were resolutely polyglot European, are now just as resolutely Kanadian, though they are natural rather than the canned pork-and-beans Kanadian ones we have had earlier. Next, he stages his own death, which is Kali’s idea:
“Noman, I have the answer to all your problems.”
“And what is it, Kali?”
“You must die.”
“That’s the answer to everybody’s problem.” he said.
“No,” I told him, “I mean you must stage a mock death, a brilliant scene in which we’ll all participate. Then you can be born again, maybe even assume a real name.9
Finally, after this fraudulent imitation of Christ, he and Kali go to Kingsmere, “Noman’s land,” and Noman peels off his clothes and makes it through the magic arch:
He spotted an arch at one end of the terrace, like an ancient door that led into the forest, the final mystery…
“Coming Kali?” he asked again, and when I didn’t answer he went on farther into the spooky greyness….
“Noman, what are we doing here?” I cried. “Whose past have we stolen? Into whose future are we moving?”
And he (swiftly removing his clothes) called back to me —“Why, our own, of course!”
And blithely stepped, stark naked, through the arch.
We are not told what “real name” he will assume, what the future is like on the other side of the arch, or what becomes of Noman, but by the nature of the story, and of MacEwen’s Kanada itself, we can’t know. It’s interesting, though, that Noman’s possession of himself involves an entry into the forest; in fact the end of the story is reminiscent of both O’Hagan and Page.
What we might call “the sacrificial fade-out” seems to be typical of these Canadian demi-gods and magician priests: their death or disappearance is chosen, and seems to have some element of sacrifice in it, but unlike traditional sacrifices, such as Christ’s, it doesn’t save or even benefit anyone else, and is more in the nature of an abdication or departure. The sacrificial fade-out is a MacEwen specialty. It’s present in almost all of her magician stories, including her two novels, Julian the Magician and King of Egypt, King of Dreams’, but it is most explicit, perhaps, in her short story, “The Second Coming of Julian the Magician,” a seriocomic treatment of the dilemma of a real magic man in a non-magical age and country. Julian materializes on Christmas Day, 1970, at noon, at the top of a ferris wheel in “a second-rate carnival.” The magic signs of his birth are “three white balloons” in his left hand and “an inverted crucifix made out of red and green tinsel paper” in the middle of his forehead. The left-handedness and the inversion are significant, as is the tinsel paper: Julian is a tacky upside-down Christ, fated to be tacky and upside-down by the lack of faith of his potential believers. He realizes that in this incarnation he has a choice of performing in carnivals or in “cheap burlesque halls,” and that his iconography is contained only in comic books and people’s dreams:
In the comic books my cloak is red, green or yellow; there are little wings on my boots, little wings on my head, lightning bolts or sacred hammers in my fists. Only the children worship me now.
He is “Atman, his identity hidden only by a ’B’ at the beginning of his name.”
But even when he walks on walls or makes it rain or creates black fire, his audiences are bored or uneasy, since they believe “it’s all done with mirrors,” his magic mere trickery. And a lot of it is. He’s a student of Houdini and Blackstone, although he insists that even tricks and illusions are real magic as long as they are believed: “the Master of Illusions doesn’t make you believe what he wishes, but what you wish.” His failure is the failure of the audience:
During my acts no-one swooned; no-one approached me afterwards with nervous diseases for me to cure. (How very different from my last life when the peasants regarded me as holy man, a healer. But then this is North America. Could Christ have taught in Rome?)
He quickly realizes that his “enemy” is the Twentieth Century itself, the Dr. Zero of the comics, the Power House of the city, the Machine. He had a terrible nightmare, in which a Fat Woman named Reality (“But you can call me Reali for short”) grabs his magic wand and chases him with it. Reality and the city and the machine are one, and he refuses to be “tricked into reality.” He decides to destroy the electrical city by blowing up the Power House where he has a job as night watchman, and he accomplishes this, in fact or fantasy. Then, observed only by the children who are his sole congregation, he performs an apotheosis, disappearing from the top of the ferris wheel in the same way he appeared. His encounter with reality has not been a pleasant one.
“Yet still I wave this wand like a sarcastic tongue at the universe… know myself to be both icon and iconoclast,” says Julian, a speech that could have been made as well by Robertson Davies’ Magnus Eisengrim. He would have phrased it differently, however. For MacEwen, the magician is a poet, concerned with the transforming power of the Word; for Davies he is clearly a novelist, concerned with illusions produced by hard work and a meticulous attention to detail. MacEwen’s magicians want to control the universe, but Davies’ contents himself with controlling the minds of the audience. Julian creates real birds out of mud, and nobody cares because nobody can believe he’s really done it. Eisengrim gives them fake snow on a stage, but does it so well that it looks real. This is his magic: he’s applauded, not for what he does—nobody really thinks he’s magic—but for his consummate skill in doing it. Perhaps this is why he’s a professional success and Julian is a failure.
Like “Noman,” “Eisengrim” is a pseudonym.10 Davies’ magician started life in a “Kanadian” small town of the pork and beans variety, narrow, puritanical, judgmental; his real name is plain Paul Dempster. His hatred of Canada stems from his persecution at the hands of this town, and its efforts to stifle his childish interest in magic. He is kidnapped by a figure paralleling MacEwen’s Fat Lady Reality, a cheap conjuror who abuses him sexually while subjecting him to a bitter apprenticeship in a carnival that is not just second-rate but third-rate. Here he learns a view of magic that is equivalent to the underbelly of God: cynicism, fraud and trickery, cunning as well as conjuring, exploitation, the audience as dupe. From these humble beginnings he works his way up in the world of international magic as, among other things, an escape artist and mechanical genius, with a stopover in the legitimate theatre as a “double,” and is finally able to create a distinguished magic show that brings him worldwide fame.
Although he is a consummate artist, he is also, curiously, a kind of non-person, a Noman figure who is no-one because he has the capacity to be everyone, as well as to be invisible. His first job in “Wanless’ World of Wonders” is to crouch inside a mechanical monster named Abdullah, who is supposed to be a card-playing automaton but is really a trick worked from inside to defraud the customers. Of this period in his life he says:
… when I was in Abdullah, I was Nobody. I was an extension and magnification of Willard; I was an opponent and a baffling mystery to the Rube; I was something to be gawped at, but quickly forgotten, by the spectators. But as Paul Dempster I did not exist. I had found my place in life, and it was as Nobody.
He lives under several pseudonyms from this time on; as the “double” of a famous actor, he takes the curious name of “Mungo Fetch,” “fetch” being a Scottish word for an unlucky vision of yourself you see before you die. When he finally creates his own show, its piece de resistance is a much more sophisticated version of Abdullah, a Golem-like oracular brazen head, which utters disturbing truths about members of the audience. Like Abdullah it’s a fraud, though like Abdullah its effects on the audience are real and sometimes disastrous; Eisengrim’s relationship to it is that of the invisible power. With both Abdullah and the brazen head, however, is some question as to whether Eisengrim is their master or their slave, controlled by the monsters he thinks he is directing and creating.
Eisengrim is “wolvish,” a quality which has suggested his last assumed name. It’s made clear that this ruthless quality is a result of his hideous early experiences and is responsible for his having survived them. It’s also responsible for his success as a magician. Both he and the other characters in the book insist that he’s both an artist and a genius, as well as a glorified trickster and fraud, a Master of Illusions. His “wolvishness” is linked to “an intensity of imagination and vision,” and to what another character, quoting Spengler, calls “the Magian World View:”
It was a sense of the unfathomable wonder of the invisible world that existed side by side with a hard recognition of the roughness and cruelty and day-to-day demands of the tangible world. It was a readiness to see demons where nowadays we see neuroses, and to see the hand of a guardian angel in what we are apt to shrug off ungratefully as a stroke of luck. It was religion, but a religion with a thousand gods, none of them all-powerful and most of them ambiguous in their attitude toward man. It was poetry and wonder which might reveal themselves in the dunghill, and it was an understanding of the dunghill that lurks in poetry and wonder…. Wonder is marvellous but it is also cruel, cruel, cruel.
And Eisengrim partakes of the cruelty as well as the magic. On one level Davies’ trilogy is about spiritual vampirism, the exercise of sinister, devouring power over others. Eisengrim has been the victim in such a relationship, but he later becomes the devourer. On another level the novels are about retaliation, the justice rather than the mercy of the universe; and such justice is unpleasant, if not sinister. One of Eisengrim’s friends says:
… the Devil is the setter of prices, and a usurer, as well. You buy from him at an agreed price, but the payments are all on time, and the interest is charged on the whole of the principal, right up to the last payment.
To which Eisengrim replies, “Do you think you can study evil without living it?” He implies that he has lived it, and this is certainly true. Eisengrim’s public personality is a deliberate creation; he is, in a way, his own monster, with his own ego incarnate in the brazen head. The last word in the trilogy is “egoist,” and it’s an open question whether the religion for which Eisengrim acts as magician-priest is really a religion of wonder, as he sometimes claims, or merely a religion of himself, a form of devil-worship.
And this brings us to the last category of magician or monster I’ll discuss here. I began with Blake’s wendigo, a monster representing a destructive external environment, so it’s fitting to end with the wabeno, a monster representing a destructive internal one. The wabeno appears in Way land Drew’s The Wabeno Feast (1973), a novel which cuts between two time-streams: a not-so-distant future in which Canada is dissolving into chaos, and the eighteenth-century past, at the peak of the Hudson Bay Company’s power. The episodes from the past are told through the journal of a would-be factor, one MacKay, who journeys into the wilderness with his sinister double, Elborn. Early in the voyage, Elborn encourages the voyageurs to tell “tales of death and terror:”
They tell of the wendigo, a mythical creature of Indian lore, and each elaborates on the other’s imagining until in his fantasy Elborn beholds a creature thirty feet in height, a naked, hissing demon whose frog-like eyes search out unwary travellers and roll in blood with craving to consume them! Another whispers that the creature lacks lips to cover its shattered teeth, and a third describes its feet like scabrous canoes on which it rocks howling through the swamps at evening.
MacKay refuses to pay heed to these stories. He is an eighteenth-century man, determined to be practical and rational and to make money; we learn that he has already renounced love and religion.
MacKay does not meet the wendigo, the monster from without. Instead he encounters the wabeno, and in company with Elborn is privileged to witness the singular ceremony staged by the wabeno and his followers on a nearby island. The wabeno is “the most powerful” of the Indian shamans, the translator tells them:
… whether his influence be curative or pernicious he knew not, although he thought the latter. The wabeno, he said, would use any means to cure disease or to quench an unrequited love, and those who placed themselves in his influence and used his potions on themselves or on others must submit entirely their will to his, for the remedies might grow extreme… It was good, he added, that the power of the wabeno had declined, and that such sorceries as he practised so as to conjure an overturn of nature grew less common as the Company’s influence spread.
The wabeno and his followers differ from other Indians in their height, the “military precision” of their tents, and their white garments. Their skins also are a peculiar shade of white.
The wabeno feast itself is an orgy which begins with murder and cannibalism, continues as a frenzied dance in which the performers leap through fire so that their sexual organs are burned away, and ends with the wabeno setting fire to the entire island. The wabeno and his band vanish, although no-one knows whether or not they have died in the fire:
Elborn maintained that they had fled, and that they would spread their dementia like a plague until the last had been run to earth; but for my own part I believe that we had heard the dawn crying of the loons, and that the shaman and his band had found that morning the death which they had sought so eagerly.
Although the wabeno makes only one appearance in the novel, he is its organizing symbol. The translator opposes the wabeno to the Company, but in fact they stand for the same things: the desire for power through the destruction of others, which in the end is the same as self-destruction. MacKay, who dedicates himself to the Company’s goals of accumulating beaver skins by debauching the Indians so they will want trade goods, is insane by the end of the book. In fact he was probably insane at its beginning; his mocker and shadow, Elborn, appears to exist in his own mind only, and when he kills Elborn he is, like Poe’s William Wilson, killing himself. MacKay’s story counterpoints the twentieth-century half of the book; here we see the spirit of the wabeno infecting the whole of society. It is of course significant that the wabeno and his band are white; the only Indians in the book who are able to live in dignity and self-sufficiency, without drunkenness, murder and disease, are those who have made a vow not to mingle with the white traders or use any of their goods,11 just as the only twentieth-century characters who escape the destruction of society, both physical and spiritual, are those who choose to make a canoe journey alone into the wilderness.
It is usual for a critic to present some general conclusions at the end of an effusion such as this. I’m not sure that I have any to offer; as I noted, I’m a mere collector of Canadian monsters, and I present them so that their rarity and exotic beauty may be admired, not necessarily in order to interpret them. There are many more phenomena of a similar kind; ghosts, witches, talismans, time travellers, premonitory dreams, poltergeists and affairs with bears (this latter seems to be a peculiary Canadian interest, as I’ve collected three). But I’ve surely dredged up enough specimens to indicate that there is indeed “a mass of dark intimations” in the Canadian literary soul.
I have also arranged my specimens in a rough paradigm, which, curiously, corresponds to the order in which their respective books were written. The wendigo and Coyote, which we may call “environmental forces” or Monsters as Other, come from quite early books,12 as do the two demi-gods or “magic people” I’ve mentioned. The magicians, on the other hand, are creatures of the sixties and seventies, and seem rather more concerned, symbolically, with man’s relationship to his society and to himself, as opposed to his relationship with the natural environment. The final example, the wabeno, combines both concerns in a rather allegorical and very contemporary fashion. In the tradition of the horror movie, I’ve begun with a terrifying thunderstorm and ended with a man-made conflagration; that is, I’ve begun with a story which plays upon man’s fear of natural power and ended with one illustrating the dangers inherent in his own lust for power. The connection between this pattern and the changes in Canadian society and outlook over the last sixty years is perhaps too obvious to be mentioned. In any case, such a critical pattern exists in the mind of the critic rather than in the external world. Perhaps the critic is himself a kind of magician, for, as Julian the Magician says, in his incantation for making an egg disappear:
… like everything else in the universe its existence depends on your seeing it—that alone —and its existence is the gift of your inner eye.
And, in the face of this, who will say there are no wendigos, or that the picture of Mackenzie King’s mother does not actually talk? There is more to Kanada than meets the eye…
1 “Oratorio for Sasquatch, Man and Two Androids” in Poem for Voices, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1970. The first eleven lines are not mine.
2 I could suggest two reasons for this, neither of which have anything to do with innate lack of panache on the part of Canadian fiction writers. The first is that the Canadian fiction tradition developed largely in the twentieth century, not the romantic nineteenth. The second is that in a cultural colony a lot of effort must go into simply naming and describing observed realities, into making the visible real even for those who actually live there. Not much energy is left over for exploring other, invisible realms.
3 “Visions Before Midnight,” Circuit, 1970.
4 The Sun and the Moon was first published under the pseudonym Judith Cape.
5 She does “become” a chair, but only on the level of its molecules.
6 Epic: gods, semi-divine heroes, priests and oracles. Pastoral: Nature, satyrs etc., singing shepherds.
7 See her early poem, “The Magician as Christ.”
8 See also “The Return of Julian the Magician” in the same collection.
10 See Robertson Davies, Fifth Business (1970), and The Manticore (1972), but with special reference to World of Wonders (1975).
11 Compare also the story of Kakumee and the Tornak in Farley Mowat’s People of the Deer. Here also the spirit of the “whites” is seen as a demon and its influence on the native people is entirely destructive.
12 Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook, although published in 1959, was actually written a decade earlier.