Pathos-as-Praxis in The Legend of John Hornby

Abstract

PATHOS-AS-PRAXIS IN THE LEGEND OF JOHN HORNBY JAMES CRANTON Dalhousie University I n 1927 John Hornby, a man knowing in the ways of the North, led his cousin Edgar Christian and another young man named Harold Adlard to their deaths in Canada’s Barren Ground. After first coming upon the diary of Edgar Christian1 in the spring of 1938, George Whalley “tried to write something that would cast the diary into a different mode; but the time was not right” (Barren Ground 6). The diary’s first impression, however, was enduring; fifteen years later Whalley wrote “a radio version of the diary scored for four voices and silence” (Barren Ground 6), and he himself would later see to press a second edition of the diary, to which he gave the title Death in the Barren Ground (1980). Whalley’s most significant recasting of the diary “into a different mode,” however, appeared in 1962 with The Legend of John Hornby, the culmination of a “seven-year inquiry into the life of John Hornby, the leader of the three-man party of which Edgar Christian was the last surviving member” (Barren Ground 6). Reflecting upon his early research into Hornby’s life, Whalley writes in his Introduction to The Legend that “What little could be found suggested not so much the working of accident or fate, as the process of necessity — as though a man may from the start lay down his life for what he is” (3). The following paper will attempt to trace something of the nature of that inevitable “process,” a process that Whalley suggests in The Legend calls to mind the processive action of tragedy. Responding in his as yet unpub­ lished translation of and commentary on the Poetics2 to Aristotle’s central definition of tragedy (“A tragedy, then, is a mimesis of an action [praxis] — that is, it is [morally] serious and purposeful” [Aristotle on the Poietic Art 1449b24-25]), Whalley offers the following comment on what this kind of action entails: praxis (action) is a key-word which Aristotle uses consistently not only in the Poetics but also in the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics: not just any action, but an action arising from choice, directed towards and im­ plying a telos, and to which other subsidiary movements may be attached without deflecting it. It is therefore by its nature complete, purposeful, self-contained, end-implying (teleios). Also, proairesis (choice) is one of the paramount capacities of the spoudaios [the superior or serious man]. 301 The tragic action (praxis) is a psychic trajectory, declaring itself as arising from choice and bringing itself to a telos. (32/1) I want to consider the trajectory of John Hornby’s action with the argu­ ment of the Poetics in mind because it seems to me that Aristotle’s view of tragedy — in particular his analysis of praxis and how it relates to pathos — figures prominently in The Legend of John Hornby, and perhaps even in Whalley’s own analysis as a literary critic of the poetic process. Remembering that Aristotle frequently names the architect as an exem­ plary maker, we might begin by noting two architectural images from The Legend that seem to serve as traces of the form of Hornby’s action: the windbreak he constructed on Dease Bay in 1912, and the cave he and James Critchell-Bullock designed and maintained on the Casba River during the bleak winter of 1924-25. George Douglas, who wintered with Hornby on Dease Bay, described his friend’s windbreak by saying that it “excelled in the variety of its materials and the picturesqueness of its appearance, a re­ sult attained, not by sudden flight, but the sum of successive inspirations; there was no underlying central idea consistently worked out” (73). The cave, which, because of a lack of wood and time, was a rather desperately conceived structure to begin with, exhibited a worrisome tendency to sag at the top, a problem Hornby addressed by bracing the ceiling with thin poles: The house was already “sinking badly and looks dangerous” ; but Hornby saw no reason to do anything about this until bedtime when, growing restless, he set to work to...