The Loons

daybook of the Short falsehood in English 48 (Spring 2007) Varia Jennifer MurrayNegotiating deequationture and otherness in Marg aret Laurences The Loons Electronic reference Jennifer Murray, Negotiating sack and Otherness in Margaret Laurences The Loons, journal of the Short paper in English Online, 48Spring 2007, Online since 01 juin 2009, Connection on 01 avril 2013. universal resource locator http// jsse. revues. org/index858. hypertext markup language Publisher Presses universitaires dAngers http//jsse. revues. org http//www. revues. org Document available online on http//jsse. revues. org/index858. html Document automatically generated on 01 avril 2013.The page be does non match that of the print edition. totally 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 belongs to Margaret Laurences story-sequence A Bird in the House wh ich is built around the character genus genus genus genus genus genus genus genus Vanessa MacLeod and her growing-up years in the fictional t stimulate of Manawaka, Manitoba. Following on from the collections title story which has the demise of Vanessas receive as its central event, The Loons is slew in a duration prior to the sticks death and is the first of three stories which deal with Vanessas progressive opening up to the world around her and her increasing awareness of the suffering, poverty and forms of oppression forbiddenside of her family circle (Stovel 92). More specifically, The Loons gives us Vanessas perception of a young girl called Piquette Tonnerre who is of Metis descent and who accumulates the tender disadvantages of poverty, illness, ethnic unlikeness and being female.The story has been moderaten to task for the questionable values attached to its use of Piquette as the separate of the doomed minority figure, most(prenominal) notably by Tracy Ware who asks To what extent does this short story confirm a debased master narrative that regards Natives as victims of a triumphant white civilization? (71). At the afore verbalise(prenominal) time, Ware recognizes the enduring intellect of the aesthetical merit (71) of this story which so clearly has its mystify at bottom the give noticeon of Canadian literature.Evaluating the text against its depiction of the Metis can only lead to the negative conclusions that Ware arrives at, namely, that Laurences The Loons falls ideologically short of the expectations of todays politically-conscious reviewer. 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 role of Piquette as such, merely in the storys treatment of loss and in the central role of the catch in the symbolics of this particular knot of meaning.In the context of the full story-sequence, loss and the baffle would instruct m more naturally associated in A Bird in the House, where the death of the father is the central event. In The Loons, the death of the father is recalled and reactivated as an informing event related to other bites in Vanessas life and to her family relationship to others, Piquette bearing the weight of this role as other. On one levelthat of Vanessas childishness perception of Piquette2the story is round incomprehension, misconstruction, defensiveness and the impossibility of communication between the two girls.But the entire recital of this failed relationship is revisited through the narrating voice of the fully gr throw Vanessa in the telling of the story, she reshapes past events through the develop of loss provoked by her fathers death and invests them with symbolic value. Like the dreamer and the dream, Vanessas story is more nearly Vanessa than about those around her it is her attempt to fit her own sense of loss into a world which is, more than she issues, beyond her.The fathers role in giving Vanessa access to symbolic values is central to the story indeed, the first event in the story is the fathers announcement of his concern (as a doctor) for the health of the young Piquette, who is in his care. aft(prenominal) having inclined(p) the ground briefly, he asks his wife Beth, I was thinkingwhat about taking her up to adamant Lake with us this summer? A couple of months rest would give that bone a much unwrap chance (110).This act of kind generosity, which is to involve his whole family, introduces the reader to the fathers values it likewise inaugurates the continuing affiliation in the text between the father and Piquette. The father is a reference pane for Piquette she invokes him to justify her refusal to accompany Vanessa on a short walk Your dad said I aint supposed to do no more walking than I got to (113), and in ulterior years, Piquette tells Vanessa, Your dad was the only per male child in Manawaka that ever done anything good to me (116). This substantiating assessment of the father is Journal of the Short Story in English, 48 Spring 2007Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurences The Loons 3 6 the only shared ground between the girls. In response to the comment above, Vanessa nodded speechlessly certain that Piquette was speaking the truth (116). In the name of her love for her father, Vanessa leave behind need few(prenominal) attempts at approaching Piquette these attempts are regularly met with rejection, leading to a moment of hurt for Vanessa Want to come and play? Piquette looked at me with a sudden flash of scorn. I aint a kid, she said. Wounded, I stamped angrily away . 112) 7 8 This pattern recurs twice on the quest page, with Piquettes scorn taking on other forms Her voice was distant (113) her large dark joyless eyes (113)and her refusals becoming more verbally aggressive You nuts or somethin? (113) Who gives a good diabolic? (114). The impossibility of sharing bet ween the girls is determinen both from the perspective of the child Vanessa, who is mystified, wondering what I could shake off 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 insensitivity on which Vanessas attempts at communication are based. Where Vanessa fantasizes Piquette into a real Indian (112) and projects onto her the cogniseledge of the secrets of nature, Piquette lives her identity as a Metis through the social rejection which characterizes Manawakas pile 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 ameliorate shut up, by Jesus, you hear? (113) 9 While the child cannot understand the defensiveness of Piquette, as readers, our knowledge of Piquettes social condition s, outlined in the opening paragraphs of the story, leads us to a position of empathy with the offended girl. Similar make are produced by Vanessas enthusiasm about her summer cottage, I love it, I said. We come here every summer, (113)expressed in the face of Piquettes poverty, which habitually excludes her from the world of lakeshore summer homes. Just as much as Piquettes social disadvantages, Vanessas egoistical immersion in the comforts of middle-class Manawaka is the source of the girls mutual wariness. As the narrator of the story, the older adaption of Vanessa puts forward expressions of ruefulness at the failure of the relationship between herself as a child, and Piquette.This regret, however, is not distinct from childhood, provided a part of it, recounted in the past tense Piquette and I remained ill at ease with one another. I felt I had somehow failed my father, but I did not know what was the matter, nor why she would not or could not respond (115). The linguistic markers somehow and did not know call down that the emotional experience of failure remained confusing for the child, but the ability to formulate this metadiscourse indicates that things have become 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 inside information 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 peradventure 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 emphasis is on the fathers symbolic role in attributing potential value to the possibility of their friendship. on w ith 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 a priori communication (we waited, without speaking), mystery and transcendence (They rose like phantom birds), a reproach to forgiving civilization (Plaintive, and yet with a quality of chilling mockery, those voices belonged to a world separated by aeons from our keen world of summer cottages and the lighted lamps of home) (114). The idea that the loons belong to a separate world is strengthened by the fathers comment that the loons had been at that p lace before 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 at that placefore 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 betoken future lossthe enduring presence of the loons is endangered, as Vanessa tells Piquette My dad says we should listen and try to concoct how they sound, because in a few years when more cottages are built at Diamond Lake and more people come in, the loons will go away. 114) 12 We can also see the metonymic association 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 suspected that this would be the last time we would ever sit here together on the shore, listening (115). The sym bolic charge of the loss of the loons is at that placefore capacious for Vanessa, but meaningless to young Piquette, who, on learning of the precarious situation of the birds, says Who gives a good goddam? (114). For Piquette, they are literally, a bunch of squawkin birds (115). Meaning 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 winter my father died of pneumonia, afterward less than a weeks illness.For some time I saw nought around me, being completely immersed in my own pain and my commences. When I looked outward once more, I scarcely noticed that Piquette Tonnerre was no longer at school. (115) 13 14 The quarrel which tell of the loss of the father are alm ost immediately followed 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 in channeliseion, 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 final Manawaka story, The Diviners, she suffers from the weight of too much thematic relevance (Howells 51) since, as I noted earlier, she accumulates an extraordinary number of handicaps, all of which are seen to be indirectly related to her Metis origins.In bitchiness of the older Vanessas gentle mocking of her earlier self in her desire to naturalize Piquette into a folkloric In dian, 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 nonetheless supported by the storys symbolism, as is the attempt to fix 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 principally 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 junior self at that time, Piquette was but a vaguely embarrassing presence who moved somewhere at bottom my scope of vision (109). Moreover, Piquette can drop out of si ght 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 enumerate 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 separate them to others When she saw me approaching, her hand squashed flat the sand castle she had been building, and she looked at me sullenly, 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 throttle of minor(ip)-townspeople 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 becomes engaged to be married, she remarks that, All the bitches an biddies in this town will sure be surprised (117).The implication that the town gossips have nothing good to say about Piquette is underscored by Vanessas own reactions. On seeing Piquette several years after the summer at the cottage, Vanessa is repelled and embarrassed by her, and although she is ashamed at her own attitude, she gives way to an emphatic outpouring of animosity towards the teenage g irl I could not help despisal 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 appellation with Piquette on Vanessas part. It is as if Piquette represents the photo negative of Vanessas life the publication of poverty, illness, and lack of education made flesh and standing there as a threat to the honor of Vanessas identity as a middle-class, reasonably well-educated girl with a future. on that point 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 touch modality 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 defiant face, momenta rily, 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 capture, follow in the inebriated 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 often 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 questioning of community values which would also have to be a form of self-questioning. 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 board 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 avalanche 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 field of study of symbolism I remember how Piquette had scorned 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 unrecognised 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 affirmed 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 statement of restricted awareness, it would seem that the narrator is trying to resolve the difficulty 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 transform 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 tragic 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 quietly all around me experienced by Vanessa (119) as she becomes aware of the disappearance of the loons.Silenced by death, Piquettes otherness can be neutraliz ed and romanticized into nostalgia. The contradictions which structure The Loons give the story its force. In spite of the image of the adult narrator in the choice and ordering of memory, there is no attempt to beautify the emotions of her childhood self. The limited, often egocentric aspects of her childhood perspective are rendered, so that the readers sympathy 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 seizure 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 sign of her human ity.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. London 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 interpretation 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 Garners One-Two-Three Little Indians and Laurences The Loons. Studies in Canadian literary productions vol. 232 (1998) 71-84. Journal of the Short Story in English, 48 Spring 200 7 Negotiating Loss and Otherness in Margaret Laurences The Loons 7 Notes I am grateful to my colleagues in Besancon who participated in a news 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 show as individuals, because they must bear the burden of the Otherof representing all that the modern person has lost (Ware 82), seems pertinent 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 symbol 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 focused 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 limpact symbolique de la d isparition 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 miscellany 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 perte occasionne par sa mort Journal of the Short Story in English, 48 Spring 2007