The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (21 page)

Because MacLeod is so natural a storyteller, so clearly an heir of what might be called the “oral tradition,” it should be noted that this writerly vision has evolved by way of such masters as Hardy, Lawrence, Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner (the young Joyce of
Dubliners
, that is, and the young Hemingway of
In Our Time)
. He so skilfully employs the present tense (“On the twenty-eighth day of June, 1960, which is the planned day of my deliverance, I awake at exactly six
A.M.
to find myself on my eighteenth birthday” [“The Vastness of the Dark”]) that it is never obtrusive but works, as Joyce Cary argued, to give to the reader that sudden feeling of insecurity that comes to a traveller in unmapped country; a sense of immediacy, cinematic in its vividness.

The Lost Salt Gift of Blood
contains seven stories, and it took seven years for them to be written. This is to confirm our sense that there is nothing in the volume at hand that has not been deliberated at length; nothing written in haste, or for ephemeral purposes. Virtually all of these stories, one feels, might be expanded into novels, and, indeed, they give the satisfying sense of being part of a large, generous, imaginative whole, not mere fragments. The voice varies from story to story, but it is recognizably
the same voice, addressing us from out of the same authorial consciousness.

These are tales of ritual-like initiation and sacrifice. In one, a child realizes adult complicity in death; in another, a young man comes to terms with the meaning of “manhood” and the connections, radiating outward like the tendrils of a living organism, between himself and his blood kin. In still another, a young man living far from Cape Breton feels himself both isolated and defined by his father’s sacrifice for him. If I were to name a single underlying motive for MacLeod’s fiction, I would say that it is the urge to memorialize, the urge to sanctify. This is a sense both primitive and “modernist” that if one sets down the right words in the right, talismanic order, the purely finite and local is transcended and the voiceless is given a voice. Ballads that link the living with their Scottish ancestors are sung by wholly unself-conscious men and women. They are likely to be accompanied by a boy like John who, in the collection’s title story, seems “as all mouth-organ players the world over: his right foot tapping out the measures and his small shoulders now round and hunched above the cupped hand instrument.” What is passing is the more urgently prized, as poets and writers of fiction have always known, from Hardy to Yeats to Joyce to MacLeod and his fellow Cape Bretoner D.R. MacDonald, another gifted elegist of the contemporary Maritimes.

In such fiction, with its autobiographical nuances and authority, the narrator is often a witness. And the reader, by way of the narrator, becomes a witness. In “In the Fall,” we participate not only in the child-narrator’s shock at the death of a cherished horse but in the child-narrator’s doomed rebelliousness against the intransigent facts of life (and death) that that horse symbolizes. In “The Boat,” that most appallingly beautiful of stories, the father in dying is memorialized in such incantatory prose –

– that the reader is made to understand he is no solitary man; his sacrifice of himself (he who was never suited to be a fisherman, nor ever wanted to be one!) no solitary sacrifice. One is reminded of the ancient English and Scottish ballads, in which the motive to preserve, to honour, to celebrate, to mourn and bear witness took the form of song.

In Alistair MacLeod’s short stories, one encounters the narrator as son and brother but above all as witness: embarked upon a life’s enterprise of forging not the conscience of his race, like young Stephen Dedalus, but being the means by which its conscience is expressed. For thoughts that lie too deep for tears, as we know, are not the sole province of those who can express them. I have always considered the term “regional literature” misleading as well as condescending. Isn’t fiction set in our world capitals (London, New York City, Paris, Tokyo, Toronto) regional literature in the most literal sense? Doesn’t it depend for its power, if it has power, on the specifics of streets, neighbourhoods, the vagaries of local accents and local weather, the contours of landscape its inhabitants take to be permanent, and of enduring significance? In this sense all literature is regional; or, conversely, no literature is regional. Alistair MacLeod’s Cape Breton is everywhere. And immediately accessible to us.

The selections in this volume originally appeared in the following periodicals, to which grateful acknowledgement is due: