The Loons

ledger of the suddenly narration in English 48 ( take form 2007) Varia Jennifer MurrayNegotiating Loss and other(a)ness in Margargont Laurences The Loons Electronic seed Jennifer Murray, Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurences The Loons, Journal of the scam grade in English Online, 48Spring 2007, Online since 01 juin 2009, connector on 01 avril 2013. URL http// jsse. revues. org/index858. html Publisher Presses universitaires dAngers http//jsse. revues. org http//www. revues. org Document available online on http//jsse. revues. org/index858. html Document automatic each(prenominal)(a)y generated on 01 avril 2013.The page numbering does not match that of the print edition. every(prenominal) rights reserved Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurences The Loons 2 Jennifer Murray Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurences The Loons p. 71-80 1 2 3 4 5 The Loons be desires to Margaret Laurences invoice-sequence A shit in the habitation which is make around the character genus genus genus Vanessa MacLeod and her growing-up long time in the fictional t own of Manawaka, Manitoba. Following on from the collections title bill which has the conclusion of Vanessas grow as its central force out, The Loons is set in a time prior to the suffers close and is the first of three stories which deal with Vanessas progressive opening up to the initiation around her and her increasing sensation of the suffering, poverty and figure outs of oppression outside of her family circle (Stovel 92). More specifically, The Loons gives us Vanessas perception of a unseas superstard young woman called Piquette Tonnerre who is of Metis descent and who accumulates the societal disadvantages of poverty, illness, ethnic discrimination and being female.The stage has been taken to task for the dubitable values attached to its use of Piquette as the stereotype of the doomed nonage figure, intimately notably by Tracy Ware who asks To what extent does this unmindful story nurture a debased master narrative that regards Natives as victims of a prideful white cultivation? (71). At the same time, Ware recognizes the enduring sentience of the aesthetic chastity (71) of this story which so clearly has its place deep down the canon of Canadian literature.Evaluating the text against its depiction of the Metis can only breath to the negative conclusions that Ware arrives at, call inly, that Laurences The Loons falls ideologically compact of the expectations of at presents politically-conscious referee. What this reading of The Loons does not take into account is that the aesthetic merit of the story is situated elsew here(predicate)not in the portrait or mathematical make of Piquette as such, but in the storys interference of passing play and in the central role of the beget in the figureics of this incident knot of opineing.In the context of the full story-sequence, way out and the baffle would seem t o a extensiveer extent naturally associated in A Bird in the House, where the death of the don is the central til without delayt. In The Loons, the death of the father is recalled and reactivated as an informing event related to other moments in Vanessas liveness and to her blood to others, Piquette jump outing the weight of this role as other. On iodin levelthat of Vanessas childhood perception of Piquette2the story is just round incomprehension, misconstruction, defensiveness and the impossibleness of communication mingled with the two young womans. entirely the entire history of this failed birth is revisited through the narrating voice of the adult Vanessa in the telling of the story, she reshapes late(prenominal) events through the cognise of loss provoked by her fathers death and invests them with typeic value. Like the dreamer and the dream, Vanessas story is more(prenominal) about Vanessa than about those around her it is her attempt to pass her own sense o f loss into a military soulnel which is, more than she fucks, beyond her.The fathers role in giving Vanessa coming to symbolic values is central to the story indeed, the first event in the story is the fathers announcement of his c erstrn (as a doctor) for the wellness of the young Piquette, who is in his care. After having prepared the ground briefly, he asks his wife Beth, I was thinkingwhat about taking her up to Diamond Lake with us this summer? A couple of months rest would give that bone a much better chance (110).This act of brotherly generosity, which is to occupy his exclusively family, introduces the endorser to the fathers values it also inaugurates the continuing tie in the text between the father and Piquette. The father is a type point for Piquette she invokes him to justify her refusal to accomp any Vanessa on a short walk Your dad said I aint divinatory to do no more walking than I got to (113), and in later(prenominal) historic period, Piquette tells V anessa, Your dad was the only person in Manawaka that incessantly done anything dear(p) to me (116). This positive assessment of the father is Journal of the Short legend in English, 48 Spring 2007Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurences The Loons 3 6 the only shared ground between the girls. In reply to the comment above, Vanessa nodded speechlessly certain that Piquette was communicate the truth (116). In the name of her contend for her father, Vanessa volition make several attempts at approaching Piquette these attempts are regularly met with rejection, leading to a moment of sustain for Vanessa Want to come and play? Piquette nerveed at me with a abrupt flash of scorn. I aint a kid, she said. Wounded, I stamped angrily away . 112) 7 8 This pattern recurs twice on the pursuit page, with Piquettes scorn taking on other forms Her voice was aloof (113) her large dark unsmiling eyes (113)and her refusals becoming more vocally aggressive You nuts or or so thin? (113) Who gives a good goddamn? (114). The impossibility of sharing between the girls is seen both from the perspective of the child Vanessa, who is mystified, wondering what I could switch said wrong (113), and from the more experienced perspective offered by the narrated construction of events.This double vision allows the reader to see the misperceptions and involuntary insensitiveness on which Vanessas attempts at communication are based. Where Vanessa fantasizes Piquette into a real Indian (112) and projects onto her the knowledge of the secrets of nature, Piquette lives her identity as a Metis through the social rejection which characterizes Manawakas view of her family I bet you know a lot about the woods and all that, eh? I began respectfully. I dont know what in hell youre talkin about, she replied. If you mean where my old man, and me, and all them live, you better shut up, by Jesus, you hear? (113) 9 While the child cannot understand the defensiveness of Piq uette, as readers, our knowledge of Piquettes social conditions, outlined in the opening paragraphs of the story, leads us to a position of empathy with the anger girl. Similar effects are produced by Vanessas fervor about her summer cottage, I love it, I said. We come here every summer, (113) express in the face of Piquettes poverty, which habitually excludes her from the world of lakeside summer homes. Just as much as Piquettes social disadvantages, Vanessas self-absorbed immersion in the creature comforts of middle-class Manawaka is the source of the girls mutual wariness. As the narrator of the story, the older random variable of Vanessa puts forward expressions of regret at the failure of the relationship between herself as a child, and Piquette.This regret, however, is not distinct from childhood, but a share of it, recounted in the by tense Piquette and I remained ill at knack with one another. I felt I had somehow failed my father, but I did not know what was the mat ter, nor why she would not or could not reply (115). The linguistic markers somehow and did not know suggest that the emotional experience of failure remained confusing for the child, but the ability to formulate this metadiscourse indicates that things have fit clearer to the adult Vanessa.This acquired comprehension allows the narrator to develop the expression of failure once again, two pages further on, including, this time, more details about the possible expectations of the father Yet I felt no real warmth towards herI only felt that I ought to, because of that distant summer and because my father had hoped she would be company for me, or perhaps that I would be for her, but it had not happened that way. (117) 10 Through the voice of the more experienced Vanessa, the regret of the past is understood to have been intimately related to a sense of having failed not herself, nor Piquette, but her father.The focus is on the fathers symbolic role in attributing potential value to the possibility of their friendship. Along with the fathers generosity towards Piquette, a series of other values related to the father are offered in the short story. The fathers name, MacLeod, is also the name which designates the family cottage (111), which itself is associated with nature and authenticity it Journal of the Short Story in English, 48 Spring 2007 Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurences The Loons 4 11 s the father who comes and sits by the lake with Vanessa to listen to the loons (114) the lake, the nighttime, the loons, all come to signify intuitive communication (we waited, without speaking), mystery and favourable position (They rose like phantom birds), a reproach to merciful civilization (Plaintive, and yet with a quality of chilling mockery, those voices belonged to a world disordered by aeons from our neat world of summer cottages and the lighted lamps of home) (114). The stem that the loons belong to a separate world is reinforced by the f athers comment that the loons had been at that place forwards any person ever set foot here (114).The loons are both a form of access to the continuum of natural time as opposed to civilized time, and a reminder that man cannot bridge that gap at that place is therefore a form of retrospective loss attached to the image of the loons the imagined loss of what came before and is now inaccessible. However, the birds also prefigure future lossthe enduring comportment of the loons is endangered, as Vanessa tells Piquette My dad says we should listen and try to remember how they sound, because in a few years when more cottages are built at Diamond Lake and more tribe come in, the loons will go away. 114) 12 We can also see the metonymic friendship between this loss and the approaching end of the permanence of Vanessas world her father, associated with the loons in Vanessas childhood, is soon to disappear Neither of us guess that this would be the last time we would ever sit here in concert on the shore, listening (115). The symbolic charge of the loss of the loons is therefore great for Vanessa, but meaningless to young Piquette, who, on learning of the precarious office of the birds, says Who gives a good goddamn? (114). For Piquette, they are literally, a bunch of squawkin birds (115). consequence is to do with symbolic construction and The Loons, for all of its focus on Piquette, is about Vanessas construction of personal meaning. Coral Ann Howells notes that Vanessas choosing to write about Piquette is a way of silently displacing her own feelings into Piquettes story (41). This process is clearest in the paragraph which announces the fathers death That overwinter my father died of pneumonia, after less than a weeks illness.For some time I apothegm nothing around me, being on the whole immersed in my own pain and my mothers. When I looked outward once more, I scarcely reflexiond that Piquette Tonnerre was no longer at school. (115) 13 14 The words w hich tell of the loss of the father are more or less immediately quest aftered by words which tell of the disappearance of Piquette. This is given in the form of a negation I scarcely noticed, but what the young Vanessa had scarcely noticed, the narrating Vanessa gives weight to by placing it in verbal proximity to the death of the father, obliquely associating the two events.Through indirection, therefore, Vanessa speaks of her own loss. But the process is not entirely parasitic in the telling, she also constructs Piquette. Piquette is, in some ways, a difficult character for todays reader to take on board like Pique, the daughter of Morag Gunn in the net examination Manawaka story, The Diviners, she suffers from the weight of too much thematic relevance (Howells 51) since, as I noted primitively, she accumulates an extraordinary number of handicaps, all of which are seen to be indirectly related to her Metis origins.In spite of the older Vanessas gentle teasing of her earlie r self in her desire to naturalize Piquette into a folkloric Indian, the story does imply that part of Piquettes tragedy is that, like the loons, she belongs to a more authentic heritage which has been/is being destroyed. 3 The romanticism which the narrating voice mocks is however supported by the storys symbolism, as is the attempt to commence Piquette into a sterile, stereotyped role of representativity, something that Piquettes direct discourse has violently rejected.Yet, we do have access to a more tenacious Piquette in her silences, rejections, and refusals, she is a character who is fighting for her own survival in a world clearly divided along class lines and this tenacity is seen in the first place in her rejection of Vanessas self-satisfaction. Vanessas sense of favourable position over Piquette is implicit in the narrators comments about the Metis girls invisibility to her younger self at that time, Piquette was but a vaguely embarrassing presence who go somewhere i ndoors my mise en scene of vision (109). Moreover, Piquette can drop out of sight for years without notice I do not remember seeing her at allJournal of the Short Story in English, 48 Spring 2007 Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurences The Loons 5 until four years later (115). It would seem to be the total separateness of their social worlds that creates and sustains what might be experienced as a lack of affinity. Whereas these social differences remain unformulated to the child Vanessa, they are close to the surface for Piquette whose discourse refuses to endorse the smugness of the well-off Vanessa Do you like this place, I asked Piquette shrugged. Its okay. Good as anywhere. I love it, I said, We come here every summer. So what? (113) 15 Other details suggest a Piquette who has dreams of her own, but who cannot allow herself to expose them to others When she saw me approaching, her hand squashed flat the sand castle she had been building, and she looked at me arduously, without speaking (113). For Piquette, the child Vanessa is a potential enemy, someone to guard oneself against. Dreams cannot be shared, and cannot even be envisaged within the society of which Vanessa is a part.Indeed, even in her later teenage years, Piquette holds no hope of improvement for herself within the confines of small-town Manawaka Boy, you couldnt catch me stayin here. I don give a shit about this place. It stinks (116). Piquette knows that Manawaka holds nothing for her in the sense that no one there believes in her chances for a better future. When she fabricates engaged to be married, she remarks that, All the bitches an biddies in this town will sure be surprised (117).The deduction that the town gossips have nothing good to say about Piquette is underscored by Vanessas own answers. On seeing Piquette several years after the summer at the cottage, Vanessa is repelled and embarrassed by her, and although she is mortified at her own attitude, she give s way to an emphatic outpouring of animosity towards the teenage girl I could not help despising the self-pity in her voice. I wished she would go away. I did not want to see her. I did not know what to say to her.It seemed that we had nothing to say to one another. (117) 16 The force of this expression suggests a negative identification with Piquette on Vanessas part. It is as if Piquette represents the photo negative of Vanessas life the turn up of poverty, illness, and lack of education made flesh and standing there as a threat to the integrity of Vanessas identity as a middle-class, reasonably well-educated girl with a future. There is no indication in the story that Vanessa ever overcomes this violent rejection of Piquette during the Metis girls lifetime.This moment of intense emotional confrontation is followed by what may be seen as the storys signature moment For the merest instant, then, I saw her. I really did see her, for the first and only time in all the years we had both lived in the same town. Her disobedient face, momentarily, became unguarded and unmasked, and in her eyes there was a terrifying hope. (117) 17 These last two words encapsulate the relative positions of the two girls.Where Piquette reveals her most guarded treasurehope, arguably the most positive emotion which exists, Vanessa reproduces the condemning judgement of the town with the word terrifying, she declares this hope to be without any ground. It is therefore coherent with Vanessas view of Piquettes life that the Metis woman should be left as a single mother, follow in the drunken path of her father, and finally die in a house fire along with her two children. Vanessas reaction to this news is, I did not say anything. As so a lot with Piquette, there did not seem to be anything to say (119).It is not that there is nothing to say about Piquette, but rather, that what there is to say would involve a question of community values which would also have to be a form of self-que stioning. The narrative does not take the direction of a critique of human and social relationships it deals with the vague sense of guilt expressed by the narratorI wished I could put from my memory the look that I had seen once in Piquettes eyes (119)by sublimating Piquette into the symbol (along with the loons) of something lost.The ground is prepared through the falling action of the story which lists the roll down of losses which Vanessa experiences after having heard about Piquettes death The MacLeod cottage had been sold after my fathers Journal of the Short Story in English, 48 Spring 2007 Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurences The Loons 6 death The small pier which my father had built was gone Diamond Lake had been renamed Lake Wapakata and finally, I realized that the loons were no longer there (119).These different elements reinstall the triad of the father, the loons and nature as the paradigm of loss and the narrator then brings Piquette into this sphere of symbolism I remember how Piquette had scorn to come along when my father and I sat there and listened to the lake birds. It seemed to me now that in some unconscious and totally unestablished way, Piquette might have been the only one, after all, who had heard the crying of the loons. (120) 18 19 Piquette, father, lake, birds, loons all of these words are given a place in the final paragraph.The narrator too, is present amongst these elements, and her place as the one who reconstructs meaning is affirm I remember how . But it is affirmed, finally, as a process of questioning in the phrase, It seemed to me now that in some unconscious and totally unrecognised way, (where it is uncertain as to whether it is the narrators unconscious or Piquettes which is being invoked), the narrator seems to romanticize Piquettes Metis status into the natural world and confer on her the positive charge of nostalgia related to loss. In this tilt of restricted awareness, it would seem that the narrator is trying to resolve the problem of her own position in relation to Piquette the irreconcilable distinction between how she felt towards Piquette and how she felt she should have felt, if only for her fathers sake. The solution to this is to change Piquette from the living girljudged by society, including Vanessa and her motheras sullen and gauche and badly dressed, a real slattern, a mess (118), into a symbol a young girl, representative of an oppressed minority, with a sad destiny, doomed to die. In this form, the loss of Piquette can be associated with both the death of the father and the disappearance of the loons the desire to bring Piquette into this association suggests an unresolved sense of guilttowards the girl character, on the level of the diegesis, but also towards the Metis people, whose long silence (108) is echoed in the quiet all around me experienced by Vanessa (119) as she becomes aware of the disappearance of the loons.Silenced by death, Piquettes ot herness can be neutralized and romanticized into nostalgia. The contradictions which structure The Loons give the story its force. In spite of the control of the adult narrator in the choice and request of memory, there is no attempt to beautify the emotions of her childhood self. The limited, often selfish aspects of her childhood perspective are rendered, so that the readers bounty goes out towards the other girl, Piquette. This construction of perspective may be een as a form of generosity, whereby, in spite of Vanessas statement that there was nothing to say, the narrators rendering of the past has allowed the reader to achieve an awareness of Piquettes specificity as a character she has moved from the general sense of absence which characterizes her in Vanessas memory, to a form of visibility in which the reader may see her as the victim of multiple vectors of oppression in this context, her defiance and sullenness become the marks of a fighting spirit, and her hope, the sig n of her humanity.Through these effects constructed by the narrating voice, the earlier generosity of the father is ultimately echoed and loss takes on its complex human dimension. Bibliography Howells, Coral Ann. Private and Fictional Words Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970s and 1980s. capital of the United Kingdom Methuen, 1987. Laurence, Margaret. A Bird in the House (1970). Chicago The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Stovel, Bruce. coherence in A Bird in the House, in New Perspectives on Margaret Laurence Poetic Narrative, Multiculturalism, and Feminism.Ed. Greta McCormick Coger. Westport Greenwood Press, 1996. Vauthier, Simone. A Momentary Stay Against Confusion A recital of Margaret Laurences To Set Our House in Order. The Journal of the Short Story in English vol. 3 (1984) 87-108. Ware, Tracy. Race and Conflict in gets One-Two-Three Little Indians and Laurences The Loons. Studies in Canadian Literature vol. 232 (1998) 71-84. Journal of the Short Story in Englis h, 48 Spring 2007 Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurences The Loons 7 Notes I am grateful to my colleagues in Besancon who participated in a discussion on The Loons. 2 See Vauthier (96-99) for a detailed analysis of Vanessas function as narrator (based on the short story To Set Our House in Order, but equally valid here). 3 Indeed, Tracy Ware argues that the association of Piquette with nature, on the basis of her Metis origins, denies Piquette her full humanity, and it also makes a tragic outcome inevitable. We will never be able to imagine a future for people whom we regard as separated from us by aeons (80). Margery Fees comment, quoted in Ware, that Native people are so rarely depicted as individuals, because they must bear the burden of the Otherof representing all that the modern person has lost (Ware 82), seems relevant to the construction of Piquette as a character who comes to bear the symbolic weight of the very idea of loss. 5 Ware declares that this symb ol is a misrecognition because it ignores the historical struggles of both Natives and Metis (79). References Electronic referenceJennifer Murray, Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurences The Loons, Journal of the Short Story in English Online, 48Spring 2007, Online since 01 juin 2009, Connection on 01 avril 2013. URL http//jsse. revues. org/index858. html Bibliographical reference Jennifer Murray, Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurences The Loons, Journal of the Short Story in English, 482007, 71-80. Jennifer Murray Jennifer Murray is an associate professor at the University of Franche-Comte.Her research is focussed primarily on Canadian literature and on American writers from the South. Ms. Murrays publications include articles on Margaret Atwood, Carson McCullers, Flannery OConnor and Tennessee Williams. She is currently working on the short stories of Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro. Copyright All rights reserved Abstract Je me propose ici detudier li mpact symbolique de la disparition du pere dans The Loons, une nouvelle de Margaret Laurence.Au niveau de lintrigue, lhistoire est celle dune amitie impossible entre la narratrice, Vanessa, fille de medecin, et une jeune metisse, Piquette, soignee par le pere de Vanessa. Les differences de niveau social, deducation et dorigine ethnique creent une incomprehension fondamentale entre les deux filles et vouent a lechec les tentatives de Vanessa de sympathiser avec Piquette. Cet insucces attriste Vanessa elle pense avoir decu son pere qui esperait que le sort de sa jeune patiente serait adouci par le contact avec sa famille.Devant son incapacite a transformer la realite et le remords quelle en eprouve, la narratrice transforme son souvenir de Piquette, lexclue, en symbole. Ce symbole se developpe autour dun noyau delements semantiques associes a lauthenticite, la nature, et la nostalgie du passe des concepts valorises par le pere, et qui, pour la narratrice sont lies au sentiment de pert e occasionne par sa mort Journal of the Short Story in English, 48 Spring 2007