T H E T H E M E OF H O M E I N T H E F I C T I O N OF C A N A D A , T H E U N I T E D S T A T E S , A N D T H E W E S T I N D I E S * THEODORE COLSON University of New Brunswick H a r o ld Bloom has written that all "romance is a journey toward hom e."1 The New World has been the setting for so many searches for home that it is not surprising that there are many kinds of such journeys. And it is interesting that certain differing patterns emerge in the literature of the United States and Canada and the West Indies. Thomas Wolfe's "You can't go home again" has seemed a truism for the attitude toward home in American literature. The protagonist of Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, however, wonders if the reverse may be true, that "You have to go home again, in some way or other," and in the case of Canadian literature this may be so.2 But Derek Walcott's simple "I have no home"3 is representative of West Indian literature. Consider the typical American ending oiHuckleberry Finn: "I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest." How different is the Canadian conclusion of Charles Bruce's The Channel Shore: "He would never live on the Channel Shore. But it was home."4But the West Indian in Andrew Salkey's Escape to an Autumn Pavement says, "Can't you see that I don't belong anywhere?"5 In America literature nostalgia is not for an actual home, but an idealized home. This is expressed most clearly in Agee's A Death in the Family: "You can go home; it's good to go home, but you never get all the way home in your life." The little boy Rufus thinks about his feeling when he hears "Swing Low Sweet Chariot": "He did not even try to imagine what home was like except of course it was even nicer than home where he lived, but he always knew it was home. He always knew how happy he was in his own home when he heard about the other home."6The nostalgic ideal is mixed up in the American Dream and the Edenic myth. The Great Gatsby is typical: Gatsby's nostalgia is for that fleeting relationship with Daisy, the symbol of all desire, and that relationship is the only 'home' he ever had. On the other hand, Nick Carraway turns from the corruption of the East in a little set piece about falling snow and lights at Christmas back home in the West. In this manner the novel can have it both ways by using the home and the girls as symbols. The Catcher in the Rye is the simplest exemplar of this, for it shows that growing up or leaving Eden is phoney and dangerous and that all goodness is to be found in home - specifically in the little sister, Phoebe. The greatest example of this is found in The Sound E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , i v , 3 , F a ll 19 7 8 3 5 2 and the Fury, in which the terrible beauty of home is embodied in Caddy. And then there is All the King's Men, a novel which begins with trips back to two homes, each representing a political pole, with the girl next door, Anne Stan ton, as the object of desire. But of course you can't go home. The theme permeates American literature from a straightforward little myth like "Rip Van Winkle" to minor yet important passages in a work like Moby Dick, which is not about going home but has near its conclusion those moving passages in which Starbuck and Ahab feel their wives and children calling them, while they know they cannot return. How much like Wolfe or Faulkner Ernest Buckler is in his nostalgic evocation of the details...