What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Your classic this week is a somewhat harder read than most of the other books I have sent you. Many books are direct and frontal in their approach; immediately upon starting them, a reader senses what the author wants to talk about. To take an example from the books on your shelf, we are immediately familiar with the setting of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, even if we’ve never lived on a farm, and we see right away his allegorical intent. We appreciate that a real event, the tragedy of Soviet Russia under Stalin, is going to be examined by means of a fable set on an imaginary farm. Armed with that understanding, animated by certain expectations, we read on.

Books such as these, the majority of books I’d say, create a subtle interplay of familiarity and strangeness. The familiar brings the reader onboard, and then the strange takes that reader somewhere new. The two elements are necessary. A book that proves to be entirely familiar is boring. Even the most formulaic of genre fiction attempts to convey some feeling of uncertainty and then, only at the very end, reassures the reader that everything is as he or she would wish it to be, the boy getting the girl or the detective catching the murderer. Conversely, a book can’t be entirely strange, otherwise the reader would have no entry point, would flounder and give up.

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, published in 1927, will have you floundering a bit. Please don’t give up. For me, it starts working, it takes you in, on about the twentieth page (that is, on page 29 of the edition I’m sending you). Before that, you’ll be puzzled, perhaps even vaguely annoyed. So many characters coming and going, no clear plot in sight, tangents and digressions aplenty—where is the clarity and pace of good old Victorian literature? What is Woolf up to?

Well, it’s anyone’s guess—good literature is forever open to interpretation—but by my reckoning Woolf is exploring at least two things here:

1) She is exploring the mind, how consciousness interacts with reality. Woolf’s experience of it, one that I’m sure will be familiar to you, is of intent buffeted by intrusion, like a salmon swimming upstream. Her characters think, but their thinking is constantly interrupted by events that are either external in their origin—other characters coming up—or internal, the mind distracting itself from its own thinking. I’m sure you’ve heard of the term “stream of consciousness”.  Woolf’s narrative technique is like that. What she is exploring in To the Lighthouse isn’t so much an ordered series of events—although those are present in the novel—as the mind filtering those events.

2) She is exploring time, the effect and experience of it, which explains why the novel is given its cadence not by the regular, objective tick-tock of a clock, but instead by the subjective reactions of the characters to time, which goes by slowly when the characters are engrossed, and then seems to leap forward years in a blink. Isn’t that how time is for all of us, both crawling and leaping, like a frog’s progress. Those two animal images might help you as you read the book. Try to recognize the salmon and the frog in To the Lighthouse.

Woolf’s prose is dense, detailed and repetitive, but in a mesmerizing way. Not surprisingly, another of Woolf’s novels is called The Waves. Her novel is like that, lulling and mysterious.

It’s always nice to know a little about the author of a book. Virginia Woolf was English. She was born in 1882 and she died in 1941 by suicide. She was mad at times and mad most of the time; that is, she was periodically plagued by mental illness and she was always angry at the limitations placed upon women. Virginia Woolf was a bold, experimental writer and a feminist figurehead of great importance.

One indication both of Woolf’s literary approach and of her character is her fondness for the semi-colon. The period is final and unsubtle, might be termed masculine. The comma, on the other hand, is feminine as some men might want women to be, indefinite and subservient. Woolf instead favours the punctuation mark that most resembles where she wanted to be as a writer and as a woman, a mark like a sluice gate, one that is more open than the period but more in control than the comma, a feminist punctuation mark. Woolf famously wrote an essay called A Room of One’s Own, in which she describes the difficulties of being a female writer in a field dominated by men. Well, her prose is like that, full of thoughts that are related but wouldn’t fit in the oppressive big room of a single sentence; they rather inhabit the many smaller rooms of a sentence punctuated by semi-colons.

I invite you to enter slowly, mindfully, taking your time, the many rooms of Virginia Woolf’s prose.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

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