CRAIG STEWART WALKER
Michael Cook, one of Canada's most admired playwrights, died in St John's, Newfoundland on July 2, 1994, at the age of 61. This essay, which was written before his death, analyses the poetics of his work in reference to one of his earliest plays. While the political stance of the play is indeterminate, Cook's reimagination of Newfoundland in terms of pastoral elegy, mythology and the romantic sublime creates a compelling vision of the struggle to make something coherent out of the fragmented experience of modernity.
Michael Cook, un des dramaturges les plus appréciés au Canada, est mort à St. John's, Terre-Neuve, le 2 juillet 1994, à l'âge de 61 ans. Cet essai, écrit avant sa mort, analyse la poétique de son oeuvre à partir d'une de ces premières pièces. Bien que les positions politiques de la pièce soient indéterminées, Cook réinvente ici Terre-Neuve dans le sens de l'élégie pastorale, de la mythologie et du sublime romantique, ce qui contribue à créer une vision fascinante de la lutte pour rendre cohérente l'expérience fragmentaire de la modernité.
On the evidence of his work for the stage, the geography of Michael Cook's imagination is as closely identified with Newfoundland as John Millington Synge's was with the Aran Islands. After Synge's death in 1909, Yeats described his friend as "a drifting silent man full of hidden passion, [who] loved wild islands, because there, set out in the light of day, he saw what lay hidden in himself' (330). Newfoundland has similarly inspired Cook, for his interest in the island and its people is less the straightforward mimetic interest of the realistic playwright he is too often carelessly supposed to be, than the mythopoeic interest of a poetic dramatist. This essay uses one of Cook's earliest plays, Colour the Flesh the Colour of Dust (1972), to demonstrate how, in his work, spiritual and social elements are interrelated to reimagine certain aspects of Newfoundland and create an imaginative framework within which the deficiencies of ordinary experience may be measured.
The comparison between Synge's relationship to the Aran Islands and Michael Cook's to Newfoundland may be found without reaching, for Cook drew the analogy himself in a 1982 interview in which he compared the Newfoundland dialect to the language of the Aran Islanders, and mourned its reformation to correspond to the speech heard in the mainstream Canadian media (Interview 161-62). Cook seems to regard the normalization of language as symptomatic of the inexorable loss of an entire culture and of a corresponding element in the human spirit. In an article arguing the importance of theatre to Newfoundland, Cook warns of:
... the threat to a language and culture which, if it is denied expression may succumb entirely to the assault of the media and the perpetuation of the myth that the cheapest and tawdriest elements of the American Dream are preferable to the realities of the Newfoundland experience. First the Beothuks, then resettlement. Finally, the people themselves. When the soul is gone, who rides the water? ("Under Assault" 138)
There is, then, an elegiac cast to Cook's vision of Newfoundland which parallels Synge's response to the Aran Islands. Of course both Synge and Cook were born to Anglo-Irish families, and it may be that Anglo-Irish culture is inherently predisposed to elegiac expression. Even the name itself speaks of loss-the alien conqueror permanently prefixing what little remains of the original indigenous culture. Certainly one may trace through Anglo-Irish literature what Robert O'Driscoll has called a "continuity in loss," a persistent suggestion that there was a power, dignity and spiritual integrity left behind in the earlier culture which may now be apprehended only through an effort of poetic recollection. That notion is closely related to the central myth of pastoral poetry, where the demise of a simpler rural life is regularly depicted as a recent tragedy and the blame pinned on certain historical events, though the very persistence of the tendency suggests that pastoral elegy has more to do with a sense of loss endemic to the development of personality than with any single fundamental change in the shape of civilization. In short, pastoral elegy is usually more productively read as a figurative rendering of the self than as a mimetic rendering of some real place.
In any case, the particular Anglo-Irish elegiac tradition in question differs from the general run of pastoral elegy in that the lost or disappearing Celtic culture is seldom presented as wholly paradisal. The searing of Christy Mahon's leg leaves an indelible scar on any simply idyllic picture of this society, and we find this savagely ironic view of the Irish heritage continued in the work of writers like Flarm O'Brien, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. There is also a more sentimental elegiac vein in the Anglo-Irish tradition, one which may be found in spades in Newfoundland, but Cook has argued that this is not the vein in which he writes:
... my work is still viewed with suspicion, because as an outsider I have not followed the current trend-the Irish trend, actually--of romanticizing and mythologizing the glories of the past. It was a very dark and soul-destroying past in many ways, a survival culture ... (Interview 157).
Assuming that Cook is using the terms "romanticizing" and "mythologizing" in a casual, pejorative sense-that is, to mean "sentimentalizing" and "falsifying"-this assessment of his own work is accurate. Yet if we use those verbs more formally, we find that, on the contrary, this is exactly what Cook has done with the past of Newfoundland. For while the Newfoundland of his vision is a harsh and unforgiving physical environment, Cook's presentation of the role of humanity in this environment relies heavily on both mythology and romanticism. Not only does he follow Synge in ascribing an unusually vivid presence of something like a "poetic soul" to a culture existing at the periphery of the modern techno-materialist world, but his descriptions of the relation between the people and the natural landscape of Newfoundland regularly evoke the Romantic sublime ("Trapped in Space" 117). 1 Cook has called Newfoundland "the edge of the world" (Introduction 74), and in terms of poetic liminality, it serves just that function in his work-a representation of the outer reaches of the civilized, quotidian world where it verges on the unknown or the noumenal.
At the centre of nearly all Cook's work is the death struggle of humanity caught between two mighty opposites: Nature and Civilization. This struggle leads to a deeply ambivalent portrait of human nature, for the scope of human action in his plays corresponds to the desperate amorality which we would expect of creatures in their death throes. Admittedly, there is some courage to be found in the drama; but there is more rage, brutality, stubbornness, cruelty and pusillanimity. This has been the source of some confusion and even open hostility, for Cook has often been perceived to be savaging Newfoundlanders, the very people whom he was expected to support. Colour the Flesh the Colour of Dust is an excellent example of the way in which Cook's conflation of a bewildering array of social, political and intensely poetic perspectives arouses and confounds audience expectations.
The play is set in St John's during the winter of 1762, when the French captured and held the city for several months before losing it once more to the English. The political and social ramifications of this national flip-flop draw part of the dramatic interest; the other part centres on the personal development of three characters: Gross, Captain of the defeated English battalion; Mannon, his Lieutenant; and a Woman, called Marie in one scene, with whom Lieutenant Mannon has an affair. The separateness of these areas of interest is, in some respects, compounded rather than mitigated by the diffuse dramaturgy. On this point Brian Parker has written that Cook's work "can be thematically confusing because it combines an almost reflex sympathy for the underdog with a more existentialist concern with the strain isolation imposes on human relationships" (22). These two themes elicit conflicting expectations: the former suggests a leftist political slant, and Cook's ample use of Brechtian dramaturgy certainly encourages this expectation; the latter suggests an individualistic struggle for authenticity which is largely in different to political ideology. To be sure, this is the combination of themes that Jean-Paul Sartre brought to his literature, managing to integrate these with varying degrees of success, but there is always a bedrock of philosophical and ideological certainty beneath Sartre's work which leaves the reader in little doubt as to the author's intentions. In Cook's work there is no such doctrinal certainty, and in this respect Colour the Flesh the Colour of Dust follows its most important stylistic prototype, Georg Bachner's Danton's Death. Hence, dramaturgical elements which, in certain contexts, might evoke Bertolt Brecht- such as the violent confrontations between soldiers and citizens, the use of ironic protest ballads and the parable-like characterizations of authority figures like the Merchant and Magistrate--do not signify a correspondingly focused political position like those associated with Brecht or Sartre. The representation of the crowd as, alternately, the victims of economic oppression and the perpetrators of senseless violence is simply in consistent with any such ideological intent; yet the political element remains a strong enough presence that the plot line which focuses on the "more existentialist concern," the affair between the Lieutenant and the Woman, has been "condemned as a misleading cliché.2
While there is no question that the dramaturgy of Colour the Flesh the Colour of Dust is diffuse, and it may even be that, as Brian Parker argues, "the overall effect is incoherent because [Cook] has tried to cram too much into it without a clear sense of priorities" (24), it is also true that a great many of the immediate difficulties with thematic focus would recede were the play presented to an audience primarily as a poetic work. I am arguing, in other words, that many of the elements in this play which are apparently working at cross-purposes philosophically and politically nevertheless may be easily united in a structure the purpose of which is to articulate an imaginative rather than a rationalized social vision. A sense of that structure would begin with its mythic shape, an overview of which is introduced to the audience in the heavily symbolic theatrical trope of the first scene.
A corpse is hanging from gallows and being watched over by two drunken soldiers. On the instructions of Lieutenant Mannon, the body is cut down and given to the dead man's former lover, Marie. She cradles it, creating the image of a pièta, then after the soldiers exit, she sings a ballad:
I sold my body
rich and warm
to poor fishy creatures
fleeing the storm
But to you I gave
As give I must
to colour the flesh
the colour of dust
[ ... ]
Swing by the neck,
hang by the toes
from birth to death
the swinging goes
But it's a fool
Who doesn't trust
to give himself
because he must ... (7)
Life persists in the face of death and death persists in the face of life; they are locked into a cycle and are the ineluctable fate of human beings. The theme, in other words, is the first and most basic mythic concern: to relate the interconnectedness of life and death. Against this stark background of fatalistic mortality, other concerns are more obviously secondary, so that the political allegory which the Brechtian stylistic affinity suggests always remains marginal. In the same scene, one of the soldiers, speaking to the Lieutenant about the hierarchy which assigns them such apparently different stations in life, observes:
I mean-we know that our lives and yours run on two different levels so to speak-but when it comes to loving and hating and owing, and breeding bastards while you're away, well-there's not much to separate us, is there ... (6)
Indeed, faced with the overwhelming concern for bare survival imposed by the harsh Newfoundland environment, political concerns are absurd except insofar as they immediately affect the individual's welfare.
The type of community built in an environment like this is, of course, a garrison, and if the simple fact that the play largely takes place within an actual garrison were not enough to remind us of Northrop Frye's "garrison mentality" theory,3 the ambivalence expressed by the characters with respect to their society would surely do so. The attempt to build a civilization on the survival of individual families is futile when faced with seemingly inimical natural forces. Captain Gross despairingly summarizes the difficulty:
I've watched year after year. People build. Then fire. Or drowning. Or famine. Or disease. Or just-failure of the spirit-Somebody else comes and carts the house away-for timber or firewood. The thin scrub marches back across the cleared land-The flake rots into the sea-I have seen places (Pause) I have seen places-where people once lived, where even the land no longer bears the scar-It makes me frightened. (36)
So, fearfully, the Crowd (the masses are represented in this play as a kind of single character or unified force) huddles together within the walls of a garrison, attempting to build some sort of civilization collectively, a bulwark against both human enemies and the harsh wilderness. Yet a union of this kind, while it may assist biological survival, apparently does little to mitigate the threat to the human spirit. Any such garrison society must maintain a high degree of social order, and the consequent intolerance for expression of unrest or dissent of any kind is demonstrated by the spectacle of the hanged man at the beginning of the play. Crushed in this way between the exigencies of survival and an overbearing social order, the Crowd quickly becomes cynical about traditional humane values such as honour (17) or honesty (15).
Yet the effect runs deeper than this (after all somewhat obvious) piece of sociological observation suggests, for the fearfulness of the power of nature combined with their consistent dissatisfaction with the ruling order also create in the Crowd a primitive tribal relation to power and hope. At one point the Magistrate sneers cynically:
The people. They'd cheer a flag a week. They need emotion to brighten their lives. Need causes. But when one is done, the old order re-establishes itself-They'll follow a saviour one day and hang him the next-Cheer the French for freeing them from British oppression and cheer the British for freeing them from French corruption ... (35)
Here lies the essence of Cook's mythic representation of history in this play. The cycle of life and death introduced in the first scene is specifically related to the flip-flop of power, and lest this sense of eternal recurrence should not resonate strongly enough, the story is further connected to the change of seasons. That the actual history took place from the Fall of one year to the Spring of the next is true enough, but Cook is careful to evoke a Frazerian vegetative myth for context. As the British order falls to the French, a crowd of people dance and sing a macabre song of bloody victory. When the song stops,
Suddenly the Spokesman snatches a grappling hook from one of the crowd- as the first [British] soldier, breathless, falls to his knees- he stands in front of him- the crowd fall[s] silent-[. . .] Magistrate and Merchant and Officer watch as the Spokesman pushes the point of the spike against the soldier's groin. He says one word.
Soldier 1: No. (The Spokesman presses harder-the soldier's voice rises to a
scream) [ ... ] I have a wife and children. (His hands clutch the spike)
Spokesman: And this is for mine. (He impales him-the soldier falls)
The crowd- as if after a communal orgasm- turn and drift slowly out ... (27)
The incident, while gruesome, is not gratuitous; it is, rather, another theatrical trope with which to provide the audience with a central exposition of the mythical structure of the play. 4 Readers of Frazer's The Golden Bough (430, 619) or Robert Graves' The Greek Myths (70, 75) will remember that in one version of the Adonis myth, the fertility demi-god is gored to death by a boar's tusk which catches him in the groin. The powerful sexual overtones to this death emphasize its ritual status-an allusion to a myth about fertility, death and regeneration. A phallic tusk (or grappling hook) emasculates the young male figurehead of the outgoing social order or season, in order that the sexual potency of the incoming order may be shown clearly to have superseded the Adonis-figure's sexual potency, which, until replaced, had been so important to the survival of the community. The penetration of the English soldier's groin, then, does indeed lead to something like a "communal orgasm," a not-so-petite mort, in which one world is lost and another begins.
The event provides a kind of mythological centre-piece for the play which may be interpreted in two interrelated directions: as a representation of cosmic order and as a representation of human nature. As a myth about cosmic order it recalls the theme introduced in the first scene of the play, where the cruel but ineluctable cycle of life and death was starkly set forth. In that first scene, the woman's name, Marie, together with her pietA-like cradling of the hanged man, encourages a Christian allegorical interpretation, but this notion is made explicit and derided by Soldier 2, who snarls sarcastically: "Is he Jesus Christ? Are we the Romans? Is she Mary?" (7). As we have seen, the woman's subsequent song offers a more brutal, atavistic interpretation of what life and death mean in this play, and the Adonis-like murder of Soldier I seems to reaffirm this view. Yet his comrade's proleptic dismissal notwithstanding, once mentioned, the Christian mythic vision hangs about in the air like the irrational hope of humanity-that a better world may lie ahead. What renders this hope unlikely is the view of human nature which the murder reveals: the inherent blindness of members of the Crowd to the real source of their misery, and the relish with which they vent their outrage in the ritualistic slaughter of an innocent man. For the present, humanity is crushed between the political alternatives of Tyranny and Terror (i.e., postrevolutionary proletarian violence), able to rest with neither but merely to cry out in anguish.
The veneer of civilization having been tom away and the underlying social order revealed as so cruelly correspondent to the cosmic cycle, the nihilistic inclination is to identify the human spirit with the feral natural world outside the garrison rather than the oppressive human world within. A figurative pattern of literary and theatrical tropes emerges that links inward despair with the harsh elements outside the garrison. Humanity, according to Captain Gross, is adrift at sea without a rudder (38). As to their fate under these conditions, he confesses at another time: "I see icebergs in my sleep. All the time" (23). His dream suggests a kind of morbid sublime, the Freudian death-wish attached to a primal force capable of obliterating civilization. Canadian literature has a long and ambivalent relationship with icebergs and similar awesome wintry threats. The monstrous, beckoning iceberg of E.J. Pratt's "The Titanic" or the mystic-sublime icebergs of Lawren Harris are only two of the most famous predecessors of Captain Gross's terrifying and seductive extra-garrison companion. As Margaret Atwood has pointed out, in Canadian folklore it was
established early that the North was uncanny, awe-inspiring in an almost religious way, hostile to white men, but alluring; that it would lead you on and do you in; that it would drive you crazy, and, finally, would claim you for its own (22).
Yet while the Captain may yearn after such absolute oblivion, he lacks the resolve to seek it actively, and instead shrouds himself in the temporary oblivion of the fog, which "makes life More bearable" (36). Cook's use of this image recalls Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, where Edmund, attempting to explain the source of his instinct for poetic expression to his father, speaks of a veil lifting for a momentary glimpse of meaning followed by the fall of the veil, "and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere, for no good reason" (153-54). Having lost or betrayed his faith in civilization as the source of meaning, Captain Gross finds himself, like O'Neill's "fog people," groping through his shroud of fog for some meaning on the other side of daily life and social order (such as it is), in his almost wistful relationship with the sublime.
The predicament of Captain Gross, it seems, is only partly understood by Lieutenant Mannon and not at all by the other characters. As a monomaniacal materialist, the Merchant is entirely uncomprehending of Captain Gross, and the two simply speak at cross-purposes (e.g., 38); while the Crowd understands only that, as a defeated authority-figure, the Captain is now impotent and therefore contemptible (e.g., 35). For his part, the Lieutenant is a bourgeois liberal humanist who is unwilling to renounce his faith in civilization as the Captain has done. He is the central figure of the play, and presumably represents the point of view of the majority of the audience: neither wholly militaristic nor wholly cynical, for the most part sceptical of ideology, but ultimately loyal to the ideal of supporting a range of humane values with a moderately ordered society. The ideal has certainly not been realized yet, he concedes; but to the Captain's despair at the evident ephemerality of any attempt to build a civilization, he responds: "There isn't enough of a hold yet. That's all. Children and children's children" (36).
Lieutenant Mannon is able to move among these three sectors-Captain, Merchant, People-fluidly and with some understanding of, if not sympathy for, their perspectives. There is also a fourth sector which is comprised by his relationship with the Woman. Each of these four sectors is presented in an appropriate dramaturgical form, so the play is structured in a pattern of blocks of linguistic and theatrical style; and while the divisions between these blocks are not strictly delineated, it is at least possible to see how they are roughly defined. The scenes involving the Crowd, as I have said, make use of a number of devices which we associate with Brecht or Arden. These include not only the obvious features such as the explicitly political ballads, but the device Brecht called social gestus. The impaling of the soldier is one example of this device, and another is the theatrical trope in which the Merchant forces a Boy to add sawdust to the flour, concretely symbolizing the sordid economic dimensions of the interpenetration of life and death (11). As for language, aside from the songs we notice that the language of the Crowd is relatively non-figurative. It shares this quality with the language of the group we may call the power-brokers, which includes the Merchant and Magistrate as well as the Captain before he is stripped of his authority. The main effect of the dialogue of these characters is to establish their interests and methods. In other words they are seen principally in terms of their investment in the power structure of the play, and their principal mode of understanding is instrumental reason. Their single-mindedness in this regard accounts for their status as virtually two-dimensional cardboard figures.
From this point of view, the marked contrast between the power-brokers and the other two sectors is obvious: they have little in common with either the Captain's realm of nihilistic despair, or the realm of the Woman's relationship to the Lieutenant, which, for the moment, we may characterize loosely as humanistic. We have already seen some examples of Captain Gross's mode of expression, his bleak ironic gloom and his figurative identification with violent and inanimate nature. The Woman also uses figurative speech in conversation with Lieutenant Mannon, but, in contrast to the Captain's speech, her imagery-at least insofar as it pertains to herself or the Lieutenant-is much more animate, earthy and organic:
Oh yes. Wash yourself in the blood of the lamb. It's alright for Jesus-but fer Chrissake-you can't fill the world with crucifixes to justify pain. And nobody wants a virgin. And even you-even you, with your dignity ruffled like a sparrow's in the gale-even you-you're not a Roman. [... Speaks of the relentless cycle of war ... ] It isn't even any good having children anymore because they grow away from the breast ... [ ... ] Once upon a time I had a man who was a trapper. We lived in the cold woods but there was meat and fire-and the world seemed to be in my stomach every day-and one morning, on the lake-some take-there are so many-we met an Indian. It was early morning, and he was paddling in a canoe. And the water was still. And the sky, a soft pink-soft-like a child's neck. And the ripples from the paddle seemed to stretch into the sky. [ ... ] He seemed to be at one with the water and the sky and the movement of water and the sky.
The mood of the speech is broken when the Lieutenant asks, "Did he just stay there?" and the Woman responds:
No. My man shot him. He didn't stop to think. I didn't stop to think to stop him. He raised his gun and shot him. And the Indian half rose in his canoe and spread out his arms and fell into the lake. And the canoe went floating onwards--on and on and the ripples stream out behind it-and the water was tinged with blood-and it seemed as if nothing had happened. I didn't think anything of it at the time-But often since (29-30).
Yet despite the contrast the abrupt and brutal ending provides to its idyllic imagery, the Woman's speech suggests that her role within the mythological structure of the play is to represent a conventionally female life-force. This accounts for the fact that she is almost always referred to as "Woman" or "Girl" (although she does have a name, Marie, which is used to make a Christian allusion-7). In any case, the formal effect of these defined sections is analogous to the segments of Playboy of the Western World which, in his manuscript, Synge had labelled "Comic" or "Poetic." Here we might label the sections as "Political," "Poetic: Nihilistic" or "Poetic: Humanistic." An audience should be given the impression in these sections not merely that different characters have taken the stage, but that the whole play has adjusted its bearings and is moving in a particular direction.
These different means of expression, and implied differences in performance style, signify different kinds of understanding; so although the play itself is a single body, it is fragmented in that it formally presents a struggle between (and, to a degree, an uneasy confluence of) different modes of consciousness. In a sense it is a struggle between two ways of understanding history. The political struggle between the authorities and the people conveys the material understanding which is accessible to instrumental reason. This is a vision of the world as a field in which various social interests vie for power and civilization, as a pattern of successive and overlapping hegemonies; essentially, it is what today might be called a Foucauldian outlook. Working against that idea is the notion of the Romantic soul, the notion that there is some kind of "depth" to a human being, that there are realms of experience which are not susceptible of purely rational analysis. This second notion, which we might associate with Schopenhauer, is antithetical to the idea of a human being as an environmentally determined tissue of various power-interested discourses. Whereas the first kind of historical understanding focuses on social relationships, the kind which supposes a Romantic soul focuses on individual experience. I include the Captain's poetry of nihilistic despair with the latter because it is presented very much in terms of sublime imagery which encourages the notion of potent human "depth"; to cite the most obvious example: "I see icebergs in my sleep" (23). Related to this is the Woman's natural imagery, suggesting an ideal of spiritual wholeness which, though it may have been squandered and so has now receded out of immediate reach, remains an experience in which meaning resides and which is at least potentially recoverable. In effect these latter two types of poetic expression are two sides of a single coin; not quite Experience and Innocence, because both are elegiac in tone, but we might say, respectively, Shelleyan despair (e.g., "Alastor") and Wordsworthian regret (e.g., "The Prelude").
Given that the main theme of the play is the paradox that death is an integral part of life, the varieties of survival and death presented in the play assume a certain significance. The Crowd lives on, of course, because they are an embodiment of the natural cycle. They are provided with a philippic against the status quo which is directed at the audience by the Spokesman: "We are the nature you try to subvert, divert, convert; and in general, screw up in a lot of ways he says, "But one day, we'll kill you all" (42-43).What was implicit in the impalement scene is here made explicit: nature will inevitably rise, however malevolently, to assert itself; and the oppression of humanity for political advantage begets a physically violent people. Lieutenant Mannon, having refused to surrender his faith in the notion of social order, decides to soldier on (literally) and "win peace in some bloody parody of heroics" (42). Bloody parody it is, too, for he dies absurdly, tom to pieces by "friendly fire" just as the battle has been won. The Captain, having lost his grip on the instrumental reason appropriate to the authorities, considers offering the fact of the Woman's existence (i.e., qua life force) as justification for his non-defense of the garrison. The possibilities of salvation for this society, then, are bleak. Yet the final image is of the Woman, pregnant and singing a refrain of the ballad from the beginning of the play, the song of the cycle of life and death; and this turns the salvation question back to the theme of procreation and the regeneration myth, leaving the question of the meaning of this cycle-that is, whether it is a static repetition leading nowhere but despair, or an eternal recurrence which, affirmed, leads to progress-open for interpretation.
Despite the unity which the poetic framework of Colour the Flesh the Colour of Dust provides for its dialectic of Romantic and existentialist outlooks, it must be admitted that there remains, finally, a confusion of mood in the play. Yet that judgement is too facile without some acknowledgement that such confusion is inherent in Cook's apparent intent: to achieve through historical perspective a compelling vision of the fragmentary nature of modern experience. His next attempt at elegiac history, On the Rim of the Curve (1977), about the lost race of Beothuks, is effectively an expanded exploration of the subject of the Woman's story about the murder of the Indian in the canoe, the loss of a unified sensibility. Given the immense difficulty of dramatizing the subject of absence, it is not surprising that although the play is in many ways a fascinating and innovative piece of work, it suffers problems of incoherence similar to Colour the Flesh the Colour of Dust. In Cook's third history play, however, The Gayden Chronicles (1978), he achieves a much more effective compression of theme by focusing on the internal struggle of a single, radical, Romantic martyr, William Gayden, and thus manages to synthesize the qualities of the three main characters of Colour the Flesh the Colour of Dust, Gross, Marmon and the Woman. Colour the Flesh the Colour of Dust is important, then, not only in its own right, but as an early essay of the themes which Cook would revisit in his later work, its troubled shifts from anger to despair to lyrical awe providing a sort of rough explorer's map of the Newfoundland of Cook's mind.
NOTES
1 For a definition of "Romantic sublime," see Weiskel, who stresses the most important point
when he declares that "the essential claim of the sublime is that man can, in feeling and in
speech, transcend the human" (3).
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2 The phrase is Brian Parker's (28), but the condemnation he is citing came from Urjo Kareda,
Toronto Star, 17 October 1972.
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3 Briefly, Frye argued that Canadian literature evinces a "garrison mentality" arising from a pattern that begins with the sense typical of a colonial garrison, in which a community desperately clings together in the face of hostile nature.
Later, as life moves to the metropolis, this is supplanted by the sense of stifling social pressures
and a corresponding romanticizing of the wilderness outside the social sphere. Thus, the garrison
is seen as both fortress and prison (225-31).
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4 VBrian Parker stops just short of the mythological reading that I am arguing, when he remarks that
the "specifically sexual nature-impalement through the groin with a hook-seems intended to reflect relationships between potency and survival, imperialism and sexual exploitation that Cook has not really managed to make clear" (26)..
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