Friday, March 31, 2023

The Eternal Other


A marked-up, post-it-flagged copy of Marian Engel's Bear (1976) in the neighbourhood library box. Not so marked up to distract me from its great writing and wry wit, especially after I removed its multicoloured flags. As for the marked passages (underlines, in blue ball-point), some references to "Indian" or "Indians", though most of them focused on the protagonist's feelings, what it is to be a woman in a mid-1970s Canadian novel.

I enjoyed Engel's Monodromos (1973, re-released a few years later as One-Way Street), which I have learned over the years is the book Engel lovers (or Bear lovers) never get through. Bear is shorter and more contained than Monodromos, and more symbolic, if not more hallucinatory. Once Engel describes the island estate that her protagonist, Lou, is there to catalogue, it's pretty much the bear and the woman who wants him.

Lucy Leroy is the "old Indian woman" who appears on the island (suddenly out of nowhere, we are led to believe?) and whom Lou discovers "babbling" to the bear, who is half inside and half outside his shed.

"Lucy's face crinkled with some inconceivable merriment. She did not look one hundred years old, only eternal. 'Shit with the bear,' she said. 'He like you, then. Morning, you shit, he shit. Bear lives by smell. He like you.'" (35)

The "eternal" other, right? Recall Ethel Wilson's description, via her Swamp Angel (1954) protagonist Maggie Vardoe (née Lloyd), of the Chinese in Vancouver's Chinatown: "... nearly all of them had the immemorial look which distinguishes their race." (18) 



No comments:

Post a Comment