Consolation and Articulation in Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners

Abstract

Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners is a novel of attentive social consciousness examining the interaction of the individual and the constructions of Canadian society in the mid-twentieth century. Unusually for its time, the novel presents a relentless refusal to be heroic or to search for determinist patterns. Yet rather than the bleak canvas of modernist writing or the brightly coloured juggling collage of the postmodern, Laurence draws a picture of necessary action, for her an action of articulation, in the midst of social and political structures that work by repressing articulation because it exposes the points of contradiction in their agenda. The exposure of contradiction is part of the humanist resistance to a determinist/liberal tyranny, that shuttles between fixed structure and positionless flux breeding both complacency and fear, grabbing at tradition or heritage or genealogy in the face of change that appears to bring community breakdown.