Abstract
In the story 'More than Conquerors' in Jack Hodgins's latest book, The Barclay Family Theatre, a Finnish painter, asked why he has chosen to hide himself away on Vancouver Island, answers that the island is 'a big enough country': 'Insist that he become a Canadian painter, or a North American painter, and he would panic. How was it possible to identify with anything so unimaginably huge except by induction, except by seeing the small first and knowing it so well it must include all of the rest?' No one can fail to recognize that Hodgins is setting out here the paradoxical principle upon which his own art is based. He does not of course claim any novelty for this idea that the best way to the universal lies through the local. Thomas Hardy long ago in his General Preface to the Wessex novels provided a classic statement of the principle, and it has been well understood by those Canadian writers who in recent years have given us Deptford, Manawaka, and Jubilee; but no Canadian writer shows the paradox more sharply than Hodgins or combines the opposites in more extreme forms, the most intensely local elements with the largest themes and the most universal myths.
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