Margaret Laurence, a Manitoba native, is a notable and celebrated Canadian author who published a wide variety of works throughout her career. Yet, as described in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, “Laurence's greatest achievement lies in the [five] Canadian [texts] dominated by the town of Manawaka” (Coldwell): The Stone Angel (1964), A Jest of God (1966), The Fire-Dwellers (1969), A Bird in the House (1970), and The Diviners (1974). In fact, as John Lennox and Ruth Panofsky proclaim, it is with this collection of texts that “Laurence steadily became the best-known and most successful Canadian novelist of her generation” (Selected Letters 4). Nevertheless, Laurence did not begin her writing career with Canada in mind. Indeed, before publishing her first Manawaka novel, she had already published four other texts, all set in Africa (Stovel 6). Therefore, how did Laurence come to write about Canada, and what conditions allowed her to become the renowned Canadian author that she is celebrated as to this day? As Jack McClelland worked to create a new literary field in Canada, Laurence entered the scene right when Canadians needed her most. As the culmination of her Manawaka cycle, The Diviners presents an honest and earnest depiction of a search for national identity, allowing it to resonate deeply with Canadians and solidify Laurence’s status not just as an author, but as a canonical Canadian author.
While the shift from her African to Canadian writing may seem arbitrary, in truth, Laurence’s writing on Africa served as a necessary catalyst for her Canadian writing. In an essay from 1978, Laurence explains how, during her time abroad, she came to admire the new generation of African writers working to reclaim their history and culture following the years of British colonialism. Canada, she realized, was facing a similar dilemma, where Canadian authors were having “to find [their] own voices and write out of what [was] truly [theirs], in the face of an overwhelming cultural imperialism” (“Ivory Tower or Grassroots?” 52). In other words, Laurence made a pivotal connection between the Canadian and African literary scenes, realizing that Canada, like Africa, was also searching for its own national and cultural identity following the effects of British and American imperialism. In fact, it was this connection that made Laurence realize the importance of a national body of literature and prompted her literary return to Canada. As Laurence herself acknowledges, she could only write about Africa as an outsider (“Ivory Tower or Grassroots?” 57); after writing four texts about the continent, she finally “decided…that what [she] most wanted was to return to [her] own people, [her] own land” (Dance on the Earth 155-156). As Laurence herself affirms, it was via Africa that she was able to come back to Canada (“Ivory Tower or Grassroots?” 57). Just like Morag in The Diviners, Laurence had to go away to gain a broader experience of the world—both physically and in her writing—before she could return home.
However, while Laurence’s writing on Africa was a leading catalyst in her transition to Canadian-based writing, it was not the only thing that aided her transformation into a Canadian author. Her relationship with Canadian publisher Jack McClelland also greatly influenced her career, with McClelland propelling Laurence into the Canadian literary scene. In a letter from January of 1960, a few months after McClelland had eagerly concurred to publish This Side Jordan—her first novel, still set in Africa—, McClelland asks Laurence if she plans to write any fiction about Canada. He notifies her that Bob Weaver, a CBC broadcaster, will be requesting a story and that “[he] think[s] [Laurence] would have a better chance…if [the story] were Canadian” (Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland 9). This correspondence demonstrates how McClelland was interested in having Laurence transition to a Canadian context in her fiction. Whether or not his advice was the revelational spark or just an added push needed to encourage Laurence to write about her home country, it is clear that McClelland played a vital role in her transition to Canadian-based fiction since, as Laura Davis and Linda Morra note, it was not long after his letter that Laurence began to write her Manawaka cycle, with The Stone Angel published soon after in 1964 (Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland XXII).
Clearly, one of the main factors in Laurence’s establishment as a recognized Canadian author was her lasting and loyal connection with Jack McClelland, who expanded the possibilities for her within the Canadian literary field. As Roy MacSkimming explains, before the arrival of Jack McClelland on the Canadian publishing scene, Canadian trade publishing was struggling to survive, creating, as the Massey-Lévesque Commission asserted in their 1951 report, a distressing lack of national literature (24). Therefore, when Jack McClelland took over McClelland and Stewart from his father in 1952, he was entering a neglected and desolate field, a field that he set out to improve over the course of his career. In his pivotal essay on the field of cultural production, Pierre Bourdieu maintains that “change in the space of literary or artistic possibles, is the result of change in the power relation that constitutes the space of positions” (339). In other words, by establishing his place in the Canadian literary field, moving Canadian publishing away from the agency business and asserting Canadian authorship as a legitimate undertaking (MacSkimming 122), McClelland expanded what Bourdieu calls the space of possibles. As a result, McClelland opened up the space of position-takings, creating more opportunities for new authors, like Laurence, to establish their place in the field.
Furthermore, as their correspondences reveal, McClelland helped Laurence navigate the Canadian literary field throughout her career, advancing and supporting her status as a significant Canadian author. For instance, early on in her career, in October of 1960, McClelland wrote to Laurence to recommend she employ Willis Wing as her American agent, as he had already worked with a “very strong group of Canadian writers” (Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland 25). Similarly, in a letter from June of 1963, McClelland notes how he hoped Laurence, who was living in England at the time, had finally heard from Ted Allan or Mordecai Richler (Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland 68). His letter reveals how, even when she was away, McClelland was dedicated to connecting her with other members of the Canadian literary scene. By setting up Laurence with these connections, that of agents or other authors, McClelland worked to advance her status within the field.
In addition, McClelland also worked hard to advocate for Laurence when she was in the running to win accolades or awards. In a letter from May of 1965, he asserts that “[he is] mad as hell about the fact that [Laurence] didn’t receive the Governor-General’s Award” (Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland 121) for her first novel, The Stone Angel. As a publisher, it is evident that McClelland was aware of how beneficial literary awards were for a writer's career. Yet, McClelland did not have to fear for too long, as the following year, in 1966, Laurence eventually won the Governor General’s Award, this time for her second novel, A Jest of God (Stovel xvi). Indeed, as her career progressed, Laurence accumulated more awards and honors with each newly published work. For instance, after her third novel, The Fire Dwellers, was published, she served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Toronto for the 1969-1970 academic year (Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland 205-207). Furthermore, following the publication of A Bird in the House, Laurence was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1972, an honor given to individuals who greatly contributed to the nation (“Order of Canada”) and, in the same year, received three honorary degrees from various Canadian universities. In a letter from March of 1972, McClelland writes that, while the honorary degrees may be a chore for Laurence as they do not provide any income, he maintains the importance of the accolades as he asserts that “Canadian universities have been far too slow to recognize the importance and significance of our great writers” (Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland 249). As Bourdieu maintains, these honors, distinctions, and awards help to maintain a writer’s dominant position within a literary field (343), a place that Laurence slowly worked up to throughout her career, with every award helping to advance her to the status of an iconic Canadian author.
In addition, the publicity and marketing of her novels was another critical venture for which McClelland offered his support. In fact, if it were not for McClelland, Laurence most likely would not have done much publicity work at all. While she recognized the advantage of publicity work for her career—“I KNOW publicity is necessary. I KNOW it is to my advantage” (Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland 159) she wrote in a letter to McClelland from 1966—, she still attended parties and events begrudgingly. For instance, as she writes in her memoir, she was very much opposed to the idea of a big launch party for The Diviners until a woman in the publicity department came up with the idea of having a divining competition on the grounds of the Ontario Science Center, an idea that Laurence herself could not resist (Dance on the Earth 211). In short, McClelland always encouraged the publicity aspect of her novels, helping to disseminate her works to a broader audience and increasing her recognition as an author.
However, it was not just her relationship with McClelland or their strategic navigation of the field but also the support of the readers that consecrated Laurence as a famed Canadian author figure. As Foucault argues in his essay describing the function of authorship in society, the concept of the author “does not develop spontaneously” but is instead “the result of a complex operation which constructs a certain rational being that we call ‘author’” (286). The author, he concludes, is a projection based on how readers analyze a text (286). In other words, the figure of the author is not inherent in the writer themselves but is produced by the audience of the text. Consequently, for Laurence to become a canonized Canadian author, her writing needed to resonate with her Canadian readers. As many of the reviews and critical interpretations of The Diviners reveal, Laurence’s writing was an honest and accessible display of a national Canadian identity and heritage. In her article from The Globe and Mail, Marian Engel contends that Laurence has achieved her distinction in Canada because of the reality and truthfulness of her characters. She argues that the Manawaka novels “are meaningful to many Canadians because they belong to the fabric of the country,” showing the true “grit and fibre that went into all these settlements in Canada” (Engel 37). Thus, for Canadian readers, as Engel maintains, the honesty and authenticity of Canadian life that Laurence demonstrates through both her settings and characters were the qualities that allowed her work to, as Christian Riegel writes, strike a nerve in the Canadian psyche (xi). In fact, The Diviners’ enduring presence on the Toronto Star’s national bestseller list following its publication testifies to its significance for Canadian readers. In the July 26th, 1975 edition, the national bestsellers list positions The Diviners at its 60th consecutive week on the list (“National Bestsellers” G7). Evidently, this was a massive achievement for a Canadian novel at the time, as the other bestselling books barely came close to The Diviners’ lasting presence on the list, with the closest only reaching 21 consecutive weeks. In short, the realism of her work resonated with readers, who came to see Laurence as a pivotal figure of Canadian literature.
Furthermore, through The Diviners, Laurence explores many of the culturally relevant aspects of a changing national identity that many Canadian citizens were puzzling through in the early 1970s. Therefore, her novel arrived in the Canadian literary scene right at the moment when Canadians needed it most. In 1971, just three years before The Diviners was published, the Pierre Trudeau government adopted the Multiculturalism Policy. The key objectives of the policy were to assist different cultural groups in maintaining their own cultural identity and to foster beneficial exchanges between different cultural groups within Canada (Brosseau and Dewing 2-5). Thus, in the early 1970s, the notion of a national identity was facing profound changes within Canada, moving towards an acceptance of ethnic diversity. According to Wolfgang Klooss, throughout her Manawaka novels, “Laurence employs a specifically regional and thereby multi-ethnic perspective that does away with cultural hegemony in order to present an otherwise panoramic vision of prairie life which takes into account both the immigrant and native contribution to Canadian history” (67). In sum, at a time when Canadian citizens were pondering over the new multicultural perspective of their nationality, Laurence provided them with a novel that was highly multicultural in its outlook. Not only does her writing represent various ethnic groups within the country—like the Scottish heritage of Morag, the Métis heritage of Jules, or the Jewish identity of Ella—but it also displays every region within the Canadian landscape through its characters: Manitoba through Morag, British Columbia through Fan, Quebec through Jules, Alberta through Dan Scranton, and the Maritimes through Ella (MacLaren). In this way, The Diviners allowed all Canadians to resonate in some way with the text and its characters, even if they were not from the Manitoba region like Morag.
In fact, Klooss maintains that The Diviners fully achieves this new multi-ethnic literary approach because of its use of not just written but oral versions of Canadian historiography (67). In this way, Laurence brings not only her Manawaka cycle full circle but also her entire career. Her first published work—and first African text—, A Tree for Poverty: Somali Poetry and Prose, was a translation of Somali folk literature that included thirty poems and thirty-six stories of Arabic and Somali origin (Stovel 88). Not only did this translational work teach Laurence about the command of language and metaphor, as Stovel points out (92), but it also points to the emergence of many of the essential themes in The Diviners, which allowed her writing to connect so deeply with her Canadian audience. Oral history, preserved by being passed down generationally, often tells stories of one’s culture and history. Thus, A Tree for Poverty showed Laurence the importance of connecting with one’s ancestors and past. In fact, this theme is especially significant within The Diviners, as Christie’s stories of Piper Gunn and Jules’ tales about the original Jules Tonnerre play an essential role in the narrative, serving as crucial components of Morag’s, Jules’, and eventually Pique’s search for self. In short, The Diviners brings Laurence’s career full circle, ultimately ushering in a humble and fulfilling closure to her works, solidifying her position as a distinguished Canadian author.
In short, the establishment of Laurence as a canonical Canadian author cannot be reduced to one single reason. There were many factors that went into the shaping of her status as a famed Canadian author, including the themes she was exposed to in her Africa writing, her lasting and caring relationship with Jack McClelland and the radical shifts he made to the Canadian literary field, and the actual content of The Diviners and her other works—such as her authentic and truthful portrayals and her multicultural perspective. Overall, even years after her death in 1987, Laurence has continued to be publicly recognized as one of Canada’s most influential and pivotal authors. For example, in 2018, she was named a Person of National Historical Significance by the Government of Canada, commemorating her legacy as “one of Canada’s most esteemed and beloved writers” (“Government of Canada”). While this is just one example of how Laurence’s legacy as an iconic Canadian author has endured into the present era, overall, it is clear that Laurence was a crucial figure in the Canadian literary field and helped pave the way for the generation of Canadian authors that followed.
Works Cited
Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed.” The Broadview Reader in Book History, edited by Michelle Levy and Tom Mole, Broadview Press, 2015, pp. 335-352.
Brosseau, Laurence, and Michael Dewing. Canadian Multiculturalism (Background Paper). Legal and Social Affairs Division, Library of Parliament, 3 Jan. 2018, https://lop.parl.ca/staticfiles/PublicWebsite/Home/ResearchPublications/BackgroundPapers/PDF/2009-20-e.pdf.
Coldwell, Joan. “Laurence, Margaret.” The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, edited by Eugene Benson and William Toye, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1997. Oxford Reference, https://www-oxfordreference-com.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/view/10.1093/acref/9780195411676.001.0001/acref-9780195411676-e-852.
Engel, Marian. “It’s the grit. Laurence is unforgettable because she is us.” The Globe and Mail, 19 Apr. 1975, p. 37. ProQuest Historical Newspapers, https://proxy.library.mcgill.ca/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/grit-laurence-is-unforgettable-because-she-us/docview/1239513667/se-2?accountid=12339.
“Government of Canada Recognizes the National Historic Significance of Margaret Laurence (1926-1987).” Parks Canada, 8 Aug. 2018, https://www.canada.ca/en/parks-canada/news/2018/08/government-of-canada-recognizes-the-national-historic-significance-of-margaret-laurence-1926-1987.html.
Klooss, Wolfgang. “Canadian Multiculturalism and Some Recent Trends in Anglophone Writing.” Us/Them: Translation, Transcription and Identity in Post-Colonial Literary Cultures, edited by Gordon Collier, Brill, 1992, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004484351.
Laurence, Margaret. Dance on the Earth: A Memoir. McClelland & Stewart, 1989.
---. “Ivory Tower or Grassroots? The Novelist as Socio-political Being.” Recognition and Revelation: Short Nonfiction Writings, edited by Nora Foster Stovel, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020, pp. 50-60. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mcgill/detail.action?docID=6305232.
MacLaren, Eli. “The Diviners, chapter 10.” ENGL 346: Materiality and Sociology of the Text, 4 April 2022, McGill University. Lecture.
MacSkimming, Roy. The Perilous Trade: Book Publishing in Canada 1945–2006, McClelland and Stewart, 2007.
Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland, Letters, edited by Laura K. Davis and Linda M. Morra, University of Alberta Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mcgill/detail.action?docID=4891129.
“National Bestsellers.” Toronto Star, 26 July 1975, p. G7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers, https://proxy.library.mcgill.ca/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/page-g7/docview/1372351096/se-2?accountid=12339.
“Order of Canada.” The Governor General of Canada, https://www.gg.ca/en/honours/canadian-honours/order-canada. Accessed 10 Apr. 2022.
Riegel, Christian. Challenging Territory: The Writing of Margaret Laurence, University of Alberta Press, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mcgill/detail.action?docID=3411576.
Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman, edited by John Lennox and Ruth Panofsky, University of Toronto Press, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mcgill/detail.action?docID=4669947.
Stovel, Nora Foster. Divining Margaret Laurence: A Study of Her Complete Writings. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt80qxg.
Comments