THE NEWFOUNDLAND QUARTERLY :: ONLINE EXCLUSIVES
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Online Exclusive for #434 (c) There's such a thing as an imperfect librarian? Aren't they all systems people programmed to locate a pinpoint of space wherein lies that treasured book we desperately need? This is one of the stereotypes Elizabeth Murphy takes on through Carl Brunet, her central character, an initially bumbling, irresolute weakling, and Henry Kelly, his scurrilous, Luddite mentor, both librarians at the fictional King Edward University in St. John's. Indeed, they are imperfect, as we all are, but Murphy's accomplishment here is to show us how imperfections can be normalized and even seen as integral to our identities. In fact, Murphy underlines the premise that mature development is predicated somewhat on our acceptance of our innate flaws. For Carl, most of his identity markers are problematic, but he works with them, negotiating his sense of places and people until he finally adjusts to life in St. John's, Cliffhead, and Peat Bog Cove. Instead of acculturation, there is a gradual enlightenment that involves exposure to an eclectic string of artists, most notably Jorge Luis Borges, Ron Hynes, Jim Payne, and Daniel Defoe, and several epiphanies centered on his girlfriend and her home.
At the start, Carl is a 20th century Robinson Crusoe washed up on the shores of Newfoundland. His nemesis: Francis Hickey, the cunning, manipulative manager of the library's Special Collections department. Carl is in collusion with a history professor, Norah Myrick, to recover her father's research documents. Carl can't handle Francis, or tolerate Henry; doesn't know how to get his estranged wife back from her lesbian punk girlfriend; is unsettled in his family history; and eventually falls in love with Norah. I think Crusoe had it easier.
However, Carl remains admirably unassimilated by the various cultures he passes through, retaining his core sense of identity through it all. Here's how he sees it in the chapter subtitled "a portrait of the librarian as a young man": "Apparently, I don't look like a Newfoundlander. Same reaction when I tell people my father's French and my mother Spanish . . . I don't resemble a librarian either . . . One of these days, I'll experiment, grow a bun, borrow a pair of round-rimmed spectacles, a turtleneck, put a finger like an oboe reed to my lips for shush, wear a long skirt instead of a tie and see what happens. Not even my colleague Edith is that stereotypical, and if anyone looks like a librarian, it's her."
Carl is relentlessly pressured by others to conscribe to their expectations of him. Henry wants him to aggressively expose Francis, Ellie wants him to be the ideal husband, Norah wants him to passively ignore her relationship with Francis, Mercedes wants him to date Nancy, Edith wants him to date her, and on it goes.
Then things take a turn. Novelist Murphy allows Carl to accept his imperfections. Once this happens, he starts divorce proceedings with his wife and follows his instincts to be with Norah and settle in Newfoundland. He also reconciles himself to his mixed racial ancestry and ceases his appeals to his Spanish birth mother and his absent father for recognition as their successful son. However, he does not metamorphose into a Newfoundlander, despite settling in a "nook" in a bay and accepting the island's imperfections of foul weather and the locals' tedious questions about his family background. And it's here that Murphy tackles the interesting question of our culture.
Newfoundlanders are incessantly focused on people's identities. Through questions about birthplace, parental lineage, accents, and so on they try to distinguish the simon-pures from the rascals, culling one group from another to determine whom to befriend and whom to shun. By the way, Murphy seems to ask, is this emphasis on identity a Newfoundland phenomenon? Carl's comments midway through the novel could stand as an answer: "Even in Norway, where I hardly spoke the language, no one ever singled me out. They didn't say, 'Who's your family?' or 'where do you belong?'"
Carl's ingenuous response to this issue positions him as a counterweight to our fetishistic attention to identity, and Murphy manages to strike a nice balance without blemishing either side of this cultural coin. For example, at one point Norah tells Carl: "I can see the Spanish in you. If you'd come to St. John's thirty years ago you would have been mistaken for a sailor. You have an exotic look about you." He replies, "Please don't remind me."
Norah eventually plays the role of Newfoundland's cultural ideologue. Working in St. John's, but with a home in a nearby community, she's an urban rustic who picks berries in the fall, spends time on beaches, hikes through the woods, and rides horses. She's the one who defines home for Carl: "Being a Newfoundlander is not about being born here. It's about how you connect with the place. It's about missing the island when you go away, putting up with the fog, walking face-first into gusts, that sort of thing." She also helps us focus on Murphy's larger ideas about imperfections: "The weather here isn't the scoundrel people make it out to be. Besides, there's so much else that makes up for it. You don't mind putting up with someone who makes your life more difficult if they have finer qualities to compensate. We may not have the weather but we have other things."
This debunking of the weather myth is part of Murphy's larger program of cultural-historical review that leads to references and allusions to our current Premier, the secret nation, Christmas traditions in the outports, and historical figures such as Sir William Whiteway and Henry Mainwaring.
But there are several unsettling things about Murphy's depiction of Newfoundland culture in An Imperfect Librarian. For one, St. John's and its environs cannot convincingly or legitimately represent the culture of either the island or the province. Fishermen, farmers, loggers, miners, natives, hard physical labour, immense poverty and destitution, and the gritty side of outport life are passed over in favour of academic St. John's and its pastoral neighbours, a version of which is encapsulated in Carl's dream of Cliffhead when he is in Norway: there is "a rowboat floating on a pond with the trout jumping out of the water after flies, the white-throated sparrows calling to each other and two people lying in the bottom of the rowboat in each other's arms." Although Murphy does acknowledge a few rough realities elsewhere that offer a counterpoint, they are mostly rhetorical.
This issue of Newfoundland culture, though, is a tricky one, partly because there is an outport culture, a St. John's culture, a French culture, an Irish culture, an Inuit culture, a Labrador culture, and so on, none of which by itself represents a unified provincial culture. Yet, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians do assert vociferously that there is such a thing as a "Newfoundland" culture, and, in moments of fervent patriotism, even a Newfoundland nation.
Ironically, An Imperfect Librarian warns us of the pitfalls of cultural representation in a scene with Carl's father, Georges, who declares: "I've done my reading about Newfoundland. No need to hear about or go there." Of course, Murphy sets him straight with Carl's argument that "You can't know a place by reading about it anymore than you can know a person by reading about them." It gets more interesting when Georges qualifies his reading material: "I'm talking about novels, not travel books: The Shipping News, Random Passage, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams." Here we need to think about the furor surrounding the myopic depiction of Newfoundland culture in Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, a novel of reputed technical virtuosity but ignominious cultural representation, patently dramatized for marketing reasons but interpreted as virtual truth by those armchair travelers in other countries.
In fact, An Imperfect Librarian has obvious affinities with Wayne Johnston's early novels such as The Story of Bobby O'Malley, but can't quite match Johnston's humour, especially with Carl's slapstick or the weak chapter subtitles. There are also thin characters such as Edith, Henry, and the Chief, who are predictable as stereotypes. And the many obtrusive references to Fahrenheit 451, which seem artificially embedded in the narrative, don't take root.
Nevertheless, An Imperfect Librarian is an affirmation of the power of place to orient the human soul and allow it to thrive, regardless of the defects of either. Like Carl and his literary hero, Crusoe, we had better ease up on misery and accept our own and others' imperfections if we want to find that ultimate treasure, peace of mind.
Ed Balsom currently teaches Business Writing at College of the North Atlantic-Qatar in Doha, Qatar. Back to Online Exclusives main page. |
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