Margaret Laurence’s Living-Room War: Bringing Violence Home in The Fire-Dwellers

Abstract

ABSTRACT Margaret Laurence’s The Fire-Dwellers (1969) meditates on episodes of racialized and colonial violence occurring around the world as the news brings images of the Vietnam War and shootings of African American men into Stacey MacAindra’s Canadian home. This article assesses what Laurence called the novel’s “audio-visual” form. It reads the descriptions of TV reports and newspaper photographs in the novel alongside Judith Butler’s and Susan Sontag’s writing on war photography and Caroline Levine’s recent work on literary forms. Contextualizing Laurence’s central metaphor of the house on fire in the mass-mediated reception of “television’s war” and Canadian responses to violence in Vietnam and the United States, the article examines the debate over ethical witnessing embedded in the novel’s preoccupation with what John Berger called “photographs of agony” and argues that The Fire-Dwellers is an important text for scholars involved in the current reappraisal of Laurence as a political writer.