I found The Diviners to be somewhat of a shallow ocean; over 400 pages of a KunsterRoman coming of age story. Far too many peripheral characters and, to be honest, a lack of depth in most of the main characters as well. However, I will not shy away from admitting that there were moments in text where I would read for well over 50 pages without noticing the passage of time; the singular indicator, in my opinion, of a good read. Confession aside, I find that Tin Flute and Sunshine Sketches are the superior works, though their respective genres do allow for more enjoyment, again, in my opinion.

My favorite aspect of 'Diviners is how there is a flux and change in the narrative as the story goes on. This, of course, is similar to the bronze(ish) river that flows in both directions. Just as the river is constantly in flux, so does the narrative voice, attitude, and development.

For example, Morag--age 6-7--is different than, say, Morag--age 16, and even more so, Morag--age 22. Each episodic change is followed by a change in narration.
Example, while still in the Nuisance Grounds chapter we have an instance where Morag is ashamed of Christie in front of other children (though she always is regardless, to an extent). "Oh. Christie is grinning. he is twisting his face like different crazy masks. his tongue droops out like a dog's tongue. He crosses his eyes, and his mouth is dribbling with spit. Then he laughs. Oh. He laughs in a kind of cackle, like a loony." (pg. 47). Here, we have a child-like voice and tone. The narrator says Christie's tongue droops out like a dog's tongue, there is no need for a second "tongue" in that sentence, but, in the way that a child's sentences work, that's how Morag views the description.

Later on, a Morag in her teens is becoming more confident with herself and coming into her own. She reads a poem. However, she appears to be passionate about two things in this episode: clothing and poetry.
"Morag is dressed nicely. Nobody can deny it. She spend son clothes everything she earns Satursday working at Simlow's Ladies' wear. Her hair is done in very neat braids, twisted around her head, and her hat is that very pale natural stray, with just a band of turquoise ribbon around it, in good taste. Her coat, also turquoise, matches the ribbon exactly and is princess-styled, fitted and flaring at the bottom. It shows off her figure, which is a goddamn good one--that is, a very nice one." (121).

In fact, I believe that it is during this time that Morag is most passionate about...anything. For much of the rest of the story, her writer's block, her hangups with Jules...and others, Pique, her time with Fan (or, if one prefers, Eureka, Snake Dancer) etc. etc. just seem to lack this sense of focus as in the chapters where Morag is becoming a woman and is completely clothes crazy (as oppose to later on, where she is...man crazy). It may be possible that I like these scenes most because they are the scenes where Morag is at her most collected and confident; later on, she'll doubt herself, cry a lot, and fester emotions to the point of, nearly, no return. Even during her time with Brooke, which is the first time that we see her "happy" is stifled with a lingering issue of concern, Morag is playing "housewife" and has changed so much from the confident youngster that I became used to that I almost stopped pitying the character all-together. I acknowledge that these coming of age stories require--no, demand--hardship, however, the way in which a love-stricken Morag handles said hardships essentially ruined the character for me, and it isn't until Christie's death scene that I begin to see something to be empathetic to.

One of the passages I cannot get over is the passage in the Nuisance Grounds when Christies talks about finding the dead baby in the trash. This has to be one of the most shocking, insignificant parts of the novel. I thought this was a dark representation of how Morag sees her childhood. Unfortunately Morag’s paretically dies with the death of her parents; she even mentions that around the same time of her parents death that she doesn’t conjure her imaginary friends anymore. Not only does the dead baby comment on Morag’s childhood, but it also comments on the wealthier class of the town. Christie says, “what is strange is that some people think I don’t see what goes into the bins outside their back gates. They put it in and that’s the end of it to them”(86). Christie’s observation makes a strong social comment on the wealthy class. Whatever is an inconvenience to the members of the upper class is hidden as to not damage their “better society” image. The dead baby brings new meaning to the phrase “skeletons in the closet”. I think what is even more shocking is that the family who had the baby treated it as trash instead of a misfortune; “that’s what it was, wasn’t it, a nuisance?”(87). It is hard for me to imagine that this family would not try and give the dead baby a proper burial. It seems as if many families back then were so strongly religious that the thought of tarnishing their souls would be more detrimental than a damaged reputation. When Morag asks who the baby came from, I think it speaks highly of Christie, one who seems in keen on gossip, would not tell who the baby belonged, too. Although it is an extremely horrible act, Christie seems to understand that the girl must of had a hard enough time being convinced to throw the baby in the trash.

Laurence's work regarding the voices and angles of characters in this book is astounding to me. The way Laurence treats the novel itself as part of the inner workings of her own mind, and disregards formal technicalities is a fantastic way she is able to engage the reader. She plays with her words, which allows her to get many ideas into one sentence, but also entertain the reader with her wordplay. One great example of this is on page 226: "..hoisting that whalewoman, unwholewoman, unwholesome flesh, wholly alone inside her lost mind". Her narrative voice remains playful and amuses us, and also reminding the reader how we as people change and grow. Throughout the book instead of using formal punctuation, Laurence instead will simply put the thought in parenthesis or italics, and it is unclear as to whether the thought belongs to a character in the book, or Laurence herself. On page 194, "Morag studies in bed, the dirty wine satin eiderdown drawn around her. Feels ill. Writes home (home?) to Christie, saying she has flu and will not be back in Manawaka for Christmas. Flu or cowardice?" In this passage we can see the narrator questioning the word choice of "home", but also Morag's discontentment with writing the word. She speaks of writing a telegram, and the passage itself is in the style of a telegram. This is also connected to when Morag is writing a memory from age 6, in the style of a 6 year old's language. The constant transformation of the voice is something that is not common in literature, and Laurence is able to master this and offer is a new way of looking at the setup of a traditional novel.

Honestly, the Diviners did not truly impress me until its last stages, during the most intense emotional moments for the characters. I found much of the book to be somewhat of a slog through too much dialog and not enough action-- not action-movie type action, but just something that I could respond to, or that could get me to relate to the characters. I only found these types of moments late in the book, Morag's last moments with Christie being a great example:

"'I'm sorry I didn't come back before, Christie.'

He wants to speak desperately but cannot. His mouth opens, and he strains. No words come. His eyes are filled with such pain and knowing that Morag can scarcely endure the sight of them."

This is just the sort of depth of feeling that I did not find much of earlier in the book, though those earlier portions do serve a purpose, as without that build-up, without having gotten to know the characters so well, having an emotional reaction to this particularly heart-wrenching scene would be impossible. In any case, I found this to be, by far, the peak of the novel, where I felt the greatest emotional connection to what was happening on the page.

The thing I found most interesting about The Diviners was the way Morag perceived herself, responded to the outside world, and the truths about her character. Growing up, Morag was shy and distant and rejected her life. However, she thought of herself as being a step ahead of the crowd. While she knew she wasn't popular or well-liked, inside she felt superior with her intellect and family history. She says time and time again that she won't "let on" signifying that she is in control despite the fact that it is quite obvious to the reader that she is not.
As she grows and develops, Morag somehow comes to the conclusion that she is inferior. We see this the most clearly when she meets Brooke. At the prospect of having a "normal" family, she succumbs to his wishes and sacrifices her character. Before, even though Morag hated her situation, she was tough and realized her dreams. In marriage, she is like a lost puppy desperate for attention.
Again this side of Morag appears in her relationship with Pique. When Pique first comes home, Morag tries in vain to say the right things and hopes she'll stay. She is constantly checking herself, like on page 258 when she thinks "Morag had perhaps been talking not about Pique but about herself. She must not do that. No parallels. Dangerous". In this section she admits she knows she failed Pique and she doesn't even respect herself as a person. Pique would never want to be like her. Morag is weak.
All of this stems from the loss of her parents and her unfavorable upbringing, but while Morag was ashamed of Christie and Prin, they did the best they could for her and tried to give her strength. When she finally and completely rejects them, she loses that strength and forgets her identity. Christie and Prin weren't her parents, but they were her family. Later on in life, Morag doesn't realize the difference, and she thinks that just by being Pique's mother she is doing enough but she isn't.
Morag's transformation also explains why she is so interested in divining. Royland has control over the world when he is doing it, and Morag has never had control over anything. In the end, Royland reveals that anyone can be a diviner, and in a way this is calling Morag to go back and find that strength she once had, giving her reassurance that she can be happy after all.

What I found most interesting about this novel was reading it after having read The Tin Flute. I believe someone mentioned it in class last week, but everytime that I was reading this book I couldn't help but compare Morag to Florentine. The path in which she develops and how we are able to observe her growing throughout the novel is very similar to the way that Roy writes about her character Florentine. Half way through the book when Morag and Brooke are together, I found a striking similarity between them and Florentine and Jean. Florentine is constantly questioning herself and trying to shape her life in the way that she (at the current time) feels that she should live, like Florentine this is constantly changing. Although he tells her that he loves her and pretends to care about her deeply, I feel that like Jean, Brooke only was with Morag for his own benefit. There are countless times when they are together where he trys to lower he down to another level before him, like Mary above me said, make her inferior. He seems to only enjoy getting the pleasure that he desires out of her and when any responsibility switches to him or something is required of him, he shoots it down. For example on page 185 (I have a different edition than the one we used in class, so the page number is different) when Morag tells Brooke that she wants to have a child with him, he immediatly without hesitation says to her: "I know, love, and I'm glad you do, believe me. But once you have a child, you'll be awfully tied down to it, don't forget. You're still very young for that kind of limited life." To me that is not him caring for her and giving her the best advice, it is him avoiding the topic and discouraging her from bringing any sort of responibility on him that would hinder his life. While Jean was attracted to Florentine because of the relationship she had with his past and the fragility of her, Brooke seems to be attracted to Morag because of her young age (she is 28 while he is 39) and the carelessness of their relationship. He calls her "little one" all the time, which seems to symbolize his attraction of her young age and vulnerability. This is so prevalent that she calls him out for the nickname that he keeps calling her. This relationship to me seems very similar to that of Florentine and Jean's, and also the similarities between Florentine and Morag. I was constantly reminded of both and that was interesting to me because I had a harder time reading this book but I really enjoyed The Tin Flute so the connection kept me reading the book and helped me have a better understanding of it.

Inherantly metafictional and intensely dense, Margaret Laurence's The Diviners is a remarkable piece of literature. Using Morag to critique the development of memory through personal movies and snapshots, Laurence forces the reader to question the truth of what humanity considers as fact and fiction.

My favorite aspect of the novel was following Morag along her Kunstlerroman journey of discovering what it means to be a Diviner. Despite losing her parents at a young age, Morag is able to uncover her double ancestry. Laurence brilliantly employs the imagery of a river flowing both ways to symbolize the fluidity of time. Listening to the grand stories of her adopted father Christie, Morag inherits the gift of storytelling and become a Diviner like Royland. Both are blessed with second sight.

The one line that stuck with me was: "look ahead into the past, and back into the future, until the silence." (477) Initially I was unable to decipher its meaning. However, to me it suggests that the process of uncovering life's greatest questions is most important, not the end results that you receive. The struggle personal struggle between history and story, fact and fiction, allows Morag to come up with her own truths. The silence, to me, more literally symbolizes death. As a result, Laurence seems to suggest that the process of learning, remembering and divining is neverending.

What struck me most about the Diviners was the intertwining of memories. The entire book resembles a continuous reflection that in the end puts some kind of finality to the situation. The memory-bank movies offer the reader a glimpse into the world of Morag's perceptions and growth. The earliest memory-bank movies are rudimentary.

Morag is twelve, and is she ever tough. She doesn't walk all hunched up anymore, like when she was a little kid. Nosiree, not her. She is tall and she doesn't care who knows it. Her tits have swollen out already, and she shows them off by walking straight, swinging her shoulders just a little bit. (70)

This passage conveys how conscious Morag is of her physical appearence. She puts on an air of indifference that masks her growing preoccupation with her different stature. There is a loss of inocence of childhood.

One of the final memory-bank movies in the book offers a view of how Morag has changed as a person, and a writer, but also brings up the aspect of memory in general.

The bus spurts along the highway, and Morag looks out at the green wheat, the summers beginning, and at the tall couchgrass beside the road, the light yellow sweet clover, the dark yellow sowthistle and the purple wild asters. Bluffs of poplar and scrub oak slip past, the popular leaves as always catching the faintest wind, forever-moving leaves. (416)

The reader is given a beautiful visual aid from this passage. Rather than simply pointing out simple emotional feelings, feelings and emotions are provoked from the imagination.

The Diviners is in my opinion, the most challenging read that we have explored so far. The characters are linked together in compelling and complex ways. Morag is my favorite character because in her struggle to find herself I see my own issues with becoming an adult and making the transition to a self that is supposed to be known, but is so hard to find.

The memories that drive the story are planted throughout the story in a way that adds emotional weight an inspires the reader to think of their own memory snapshots and movies.

Story telling is a gift that was more widely revered in the past, but at the same time I see Morag's gift for story telling as a link between the writer's self and the main character. I feel that the writer had a deep connection and fondness for Morag that shines through in Morag's enthralling character.

The characters in the story are all struggling with their own issues, but I found Morag's issues with her past and her heritage to be the most important. We talked in class about this book being a coming of age novel and this is well represented through Morag's character. She is dealing with all the stresses of growing up, and at the same time is struggling with the fact that she has no parents. Loneliness, fear, self doubt; all these feelings that come with growing up are represented in the story.

Morag's self doubt and loneliness are what pushes her into a relationship with a man who is clearly a scumbag. She is so lonely that she does not see the bad side of this man and wants to have his children, even though it is clear he would make a terrible father. She is always reaching out for something to make her feel more human. This is a sad reality for many people. They would rather be in a bad relationship than be alone.

The author's sense of life as a young person is right on the marker and is an amazing read.

The quote that I liked the most is when the author says, "look ahead into the past, and back into the future, until the silence." I interpreted this as a formula for figuring out who you truly are as an individual. Looking ahead into the past is telling of learning from your mistakes and thinking of them before making decisions in the present. Looking ahead into the past could be represented as knowing that you tend to leave things until the last minute and that you should look ahead this time and start your work early. Looking back into the future means, to me, that one should always plan ahead and have goals that you feel have already been set for you.

This quote is a good formula for life, always be thinking ahead and know your past, this will lead to the silence, which I feel represents peace of mind. Everyone needs to find something that they are passionate about, and I feel this is the main theme of the story.

The Diviners is exceptional because it challenges our usual impression of time and truth. Time is not linear, but comes back to haunt us or looms ahead to scare us. The truth depends on the way you remember it. We live in the past, the present and the future simultaneously. Our bodies, like the book, follow a linear structure. But our minds drift in and out of time like the memory films and snapshots. We can never be sure of the authenticity of our memories or our worries about the future because we reconstruct them throughout time. Morag introduces herself through a series of photographs, which give as vague an impression of her childhood as most of us have. The memories are skewed with emotion, which comes back to the surface when Morag examines her snapshots. "Now I am crying, for God's sake, and I don't even know how much of that memory really happened and how much I embroidered later on." (15) The reference to embroidery is clever, likening the process of filling the gaps in our memory with embellishments to the process of sowing decorative trim for aesthetic value.

Life is a series of contradictions. We control the future through our reinvention of the past. Our foresight is dependant on our hindsight; the past ultimately leads us to the path we ultimately choose. Morag finds a piece of her past, Jules (Skinner), to escape her present misery with Brooke. Morag and Jules have a baby (Pique) which binds their lives together, like the stories of Christie and Lazarus. Only now the story is their own invention, and Pique, the future, is designed to replace Morag and Jules.

When Pique is 15 and Jules returns, he offers his daughter a plaid pin. Lazarus traded his knife for a plaid brooch, and the knife was sold to Christie for a pack of smokes. Through this shared remnant of the past, a knife with a “t” for Tonnere carved into it, Morag and Jules find that their paths intersected long before they met. Is it destiny? When Morag consults one of Christie’s books to identify the family crest on the brooch, she regards the family legacy as if it were her own. “It sounds like a voice from the past. Whose voice though? Does it matter? It does not matter. What matters is that the voice is there, and that she has heard these words which have been given to her. And will not deny what has been given.” (353) Morag catches herself in the process of invention, and embraces it, equally as active in the construction of her past as she is in the construction of her present, and of her daughter’s future.

I greatly enjoyed reading The Diviners by Margaret Laurence. For me it was one of the more interesting reads of the semester. It was the mixture of history vs. story that I found to be the most interesting part. Laurence was able to take the memorybank movies and snapshots from Morag’s childhood to give us a glimpse of what was real and what had been created by a child trying to reinvent her past. In looking at these things we can see that memory is not an infallible thing. We all change the way we remember things in our day to day lives. Whether it is the fact that Morag’s mother is “not the sort…to yell at kids” or the fact that her father always smells of “soap and greengrass,” we can see that Morag has changed her memories of her childhood. It is this fabrication of memory that makes us wonder what is real and what is not. The Diviners offers us a view of the ability for memory to create a new life and history for a person. Morag was able to invent a life for herself that she can look fondly on. As a reader, however, we can see that this is not true. We can see that Morag may have created this new history, but it does not make it true. She cannot change that way that things really happened as much as she would like to. As it says in the novel, “I used to think that words could do anything. Magic. Sorcery. Even miracle. But no, only occasionally.” This is true in Morag’s life as well. She thought that she could alter the way she viewed her life, but changing the story does not change the truth. It is this factor that helped draw in the reader and made it such a fun novel to read.

The most interesting part of Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (and I know this is nothing new) seems to be the unconventional and complex ideas she presents about the movement of time and memory. I was first inspired to ponder this in my own life in the beginning of the story, when Morag remarks on her inability to lose the envelope of pictures, and then goes on to explain, “Morag put the pictures into chronological order. As though there were really any chronological order, or any order at all, if it came to that” (14). She spends a great deal of time looking at this past, even though she tries so hard to slough it off throughout her life. This impulse to keep old photographs reminded me of the countless movie and concert ticket stubs, stickers, cards, shoeboxes of photographs, and albums that always occupy a messy corner of any apartment I live in, and this is the corner that comes to be known as the “vortex.” Things gravitate toward the pile because I can’t throw them away for some reason. Like the majority of people, we have this impulse to be cartographers of our lives.
When Morag explains that the effort to put the photographs in chronological order is somewhat nonsensical, though she does it anyways, it seems to be the attempt to use these images to make sense of her life, as though she were able to have physical evidence of meaning. Also, by looking at herself and things that are so personal to her in a form she is able to physically hold, this may be her attempt to look objectively at herself, to step into the shoes of the other and see just what kind of person she is. This attempt to look at herself as a character in a story would no doubt be helpful if she is attempting to write an autobiography, but as she learns in the story, it is impossible to do this. After all, she explains slightly later on page 14, “I keep the snapshots not for what they show but for what is hidden in them.” These “hidden” things would rely on her memory in order to be excavated, and so in this way, the pictures are just a stimulus for the memory. The problem that we realize, and that Morag realizes, is that memory is unreliable and will, at times, deliberately misremember.
Laurence’s past is a dynamic experience that changes, depending on her current self and its chosen memory of it. When I think about autobiographical writing, I usually remember some authors like Fredrick Douglass who insisted on rewriting, revising, and republishing their autobiographies, There is a certain level of self-awareness in this compulsion, I believe. This is interesting to me in this context of this novel, because we can step back even further from the book, and imagine that the Laurence that wrote The Diviners in 1974 is not the same Laurence that existed in 1964 or 1987. If she had tried to write this book in either of those times, the story would not be even close to the same copy we have here. So, like Morag presents short vignettes and impressions in this static moment, Laurence has provided us with an autobiographical impression at one brief moment in her dynamic life. In the grand scheme, this is her attempt at visualizing one interpretation of the encompassing snapshot of her life.

The Diviner's was definitely my favorite book thus far in the course. I loved Laurence's style of writing; using snapshots and memorybank movies in order to swiftly change the storyline from past to present. The usage of memories also makes the reader question what is truth versus imagined, since memories usually only tell part of the reality.
I loved the metafictional aspect of the Diviners.
My favorite parts of the novel were the 'stories' within the story. I enjoyed reading the historical Scottish tales that Christie told Morag, and the Metis stories Jules learned from his father. I love when authors are able to connect seemingly small details together in the end of the novel. As Viki noted above, I loved at the end of the novel when Morag realized that the knife Christie had given her which she saw as --I was actually a T for Tonnere, because the knife belonged to Jules' father.
Another great part of the novel was when Morag wrote Shadow of Eden, a novel about the Sutherlanders journey, towards the end of Diviners. This part was significant because she learns the 'truth' of the stories she had been told as a child. Morag writes a letter to Ella detailing what she discovered on page 341 (my copy has different page #s).
"Christie always said they walked about a thousand miles--it was about a hundred and fifty, in fact, but you know, he was right; it must've felt like a thousand. The man who led them on that march was a young Archie MacDonald, but in my mind the piper who played them on will always be that giant of a man, Piper Gunn, who probably never lived in so-called real life but who lives forever. Christie knew things about inner truths that I am only just beginning to understand."
At this point in her life Morag realizes that the line between truth and fiction is infinitely blurred. Morag says, "I like the thought of history and fiction interweaving" (341). In the end she understands that it doesn't really matter what is 'truth'; the meaning and pride the stories represent are more important.

The Diviners was a great novel that did a great job touching on all aspects of a characters life, and letting the reader in on so many experiences that shape a particular person. I agree with many other classmates that the issue of reality, and the flashbacks, telling of stories, and how much of it is actually true and how much was created in the mind of Morag or whoever is telling the story. I feel as though everyone can relate to a story in which two people who were there will recall it differently based on what they payed attention to or how they perceived what was acctually going on. What really jumped out at me and made me think came early on in the book, when she is looking at the photographs. Morag claims to be a good writer because she is able to offer something more than is just on the surface of things, and this becomes a very interesting aspect when looking at the snapshots. It makes you think that while a picture is two dimensional, there is so much more than just the figures in the pictures. One has to know the person or be there to understand all of what is present, outside the photo, what was happening that day, why people are posing in the way that they are, etc. It immediately made me think of the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words". When I reached this part of the novel I was intrigued to acctually see a picture not as an image but acctually presented completely in words.

"Snapshot:
The child, three years old, is standing behind the heavy-wire netted farm gate, peering out. The person with the camera is standing unseen on the other side."
"What is not recorded in the the picture is that after Morag's father has taken this picture, he asks her if she'd like to have hum help her climb the gate." p. 16

"The child is leaning out the window, an upstairs window. She is smiling down at the person with the camera."
"What the picture does not tell is that Morag is leaning out the window of her own bedroom, a room not too small and yet not too large." p. 17

This examination of the photographs through the eyes of someone who is there shows how much a photograph can tell or represent, but highlights the two-dimensions of a photograph, when the image in the mind when viewing of the photograph, depending on who is looking at it, can be very three-dimensional. I find this to be very interesting, and a great way to look at reality and how much a photo can do in relation to memory.

I have to admit that "The Diviners" was one of my favorite books that we have read so far. I love the way that Laurence uses rich langauge to describe her characters and their thoughts. One of my favorite descriptions in the entire text is when Morag describes Prin, "Prin is getting fatter all the time, and she looks like a great big huge pear." I love the way that Laurence makes Morag describe Prin, because it is exactly as a seven year old would describe a fat person, especially if that seven year old felt cheated by not getting any jelly donuts.

The other thing that Laurence does which in my opinion is wonderful, is the fact that she includes what she refers to as memorybanks and snapshots. I love these because you are able to see into Morags past, but not in a way where we learn about her entire childhood, which could include boring parts, but rather they are rich inserts into Morags past which she (Morag) feels are the most important parts of her life and need to be told.

The way in which Laurence wrote this book is ingenius. She is able to take Morag from childhood into adulthood and at every stage the dialect is changed. In the beginning when Morag is young her speech and her thoughts are those of a six or seven year old, "seven is much older than six. A person knows a hell of a sight more. And can read. Some kids still can't read yet. But they are dumb, dumb-bells, dumb bunnies. Morag can read like sixty. Sometimes she doesn't let on in school, though. Just depends on how she feels. So there." This to me is classic of how a young person would feel and think about something like reading. As Morag progresses through the book, her language ages along with her. "and I'm giving you a weeks rent in lieu of notice."
In the end I guess what I loved the most about the diviners is Laurences ability to make the characters come to life and deal with real issues. Without Laurences deep appreciation and ability to write a rich text, this book would just be another run of the mill book about a young girl growing up. I highly reccomend this book to everyone.

Diviners

I know that this is one of Paul's favorite books to teach, but it was hard for me to read. I am not saying that I did not enjoy the book but I was not able to connect with it like it did Tin Flute and Sunshine Sketches or even Skin of a Lion. There were sections that I would fly through the pages and then there were sections were I did not remember what I read. I don't know if I have a most interesting part of the novel but I have a most interesting character, Morag. We are able to see how she changes as she ages from six to twenty two. The novel seems to evolve as she ages, when she becomes older she has more self confidence and than becomes more of a character to me. When we are reading when she is younger it actually seems like I am reading the mind of a six year old. Than towards the end of the novel where she seems to lose this self confidence and she starts crying all the time. For me to read her raise to a person it made her fall much more personal.
What really surprises me is that this book was baned in many schools, there is a use of profanity and sexual content but what students gain by reading this book highly outweigh any vulgarity they would come in contact with. This book is a novel about history vs story or fact vs. fiction. From this Morag is forced to find the truth that is a combination of both. To me the photographs at that she uses to look at when she has writers block is a perfect example of this. I think she uses these to fictionalize her parents and make her think that she had a good life with them.
When Morag ages she realizes how important school is, it is a change in status and she will be able to escape her old life. On pages 420 and 477 we see the choices she makes and how she ends up in Scotland. She goes to to see Dan and to go back to her heritage and homeland. I found this interesting that it was so important to her because she wanted to get away and change her status but she goes to Scotland to go back to her heritage was interesting. I enjoyed this novel and am glad I had a chance to read it.

The Diviners was an insanely dense novel that probably took me three times as long to read as it should have because of how many times I had to re-read passages. I really liked the way that Margaret Laurence used "snapshots" of her childhood as a way to bring the reader into her past and the experiences she has had. I think that the use of the snapshots was an effective tool for Laurence to build Morag's character for the reader. It gives the reader a sense of who she is and where she has come from so that in reading it you don’t have to play a guessing game about what the last forty seven years of her life have been. Overall, I think The Diviners was a pretty good book, but I don’t think I would ever pick it up to read it again.
The controversy the book has raised in so many schools across Canada definitely adds to the books appeal. Reading it, I never wanted to put it down. Not because I was particularly interested, or because I really liked the book, but because I was anxiously waiting to read a passage that would be a center of controversy.
One passage that really put the book together for me came at the end of the book. On page 477 when Morag has finished writing her book and she needs to "set down the title". I thought this was a very creative way for Laurence to really tie up all the loose ends of the book at once. I took that passage as laying down the name for the book which ended up being The Diviners, the book I just spent two weeks to get through. It almost felt satisfying to some degree. It kind of made me feel as though I was part of this book being written all along and I didn’t know it.

In reading over my classmates' responses, there seem to be a vast array of feelings toward this novel. Personally, I felt a deep connection to Laurence's book. Morag's life does not mirror mine in the least (of which I am grateful!) but she/Laurence writes in such a HUMAN way. That may strike one as an odd comment, but I feel that it is rare that an author will expose humanity for what it is. Too often we read novels that are perfectly linear and somewhat concrete. Characters may be disturbed and experience conflict, but the emotions are always explained and we don't question the narrative.

In "The Diviners", the theme of memory runs throughout. Whether we are actively and consciously aware of it or not, memory is an extremely unstable and unreliable function of the intricate human mind. Every time we remember an event, we are one more step removed from the original incident and every memory omits or adds new details to satisfy our present selves.

I especially enjoyed Morag's early 'snapshots'. Although most of us have a clearer understanding and knowledge of our childhood, we can all relate to the experience of looking at old photographs of which we are a part of but do not remember. In Moarag's case, she creates elaborate stories that depict an ideal childhood (up until the death of her parents). Morag says we should "let the snapshot tell what is behind it" (pg 18). After an elaborate description of several photos, Morag claims that, "that is the end of the totally invented memories" (pg 18).

I think that a significant part of the novel, early on, is when the writer claims that she remembers those imaginary characters better than she does her parents. Then she poses the question, "what kind of character am I?" (pg 21). This is really the question of the book, not only for Morag, but for other key characters such as Pique and Jules. Everybody is searching for who they are and each character finds it necessary to dig up mysteries of their past in order to feel whole in the present. The river truly does flow both ways.

It is so difficult to isolate one part of the book and deem it "my favorite" because it all links together so beautifully and I appreciate each section for various reasons. I must admit though, I especially love Morag's later childhood memories when she kind of 'tries on' different personalities to see which fits her best. The writing is so authentic and actually made me laugh out loud in some places.

I feel like this response is very choppy, so I apologize! But lastly, I also loved how Morag is a writer (as we said in class, this is a somewhat autobiographical novel of Laurence's) and does not glorify the profession. She has an immense gift, but it doesn't come without times of anguish and frustration. Being an avid writer myself, it was comforting to read some of Morag/Laurence's reflections of the art.

Overall, I truly enjoyed this book, especially after tackling "Next Episode", this was a relief!

I really enjoyed reading The Diviners, however I thought that the length of the book turned me away from it initially. I thought that there was no way that I would ever get through it, especially because I am a painfully slow reader and have had a lot of work to do this semester. Needless to say, when I finished I was impressed with myself. I found that it was a quicker read than I initially expected.

I really liked the way that Margaret Laurence included the snapshots of Morag to allow the reader an insight to life and who she is. They really allowed the reader a better look at how Morag looks at fact vs fiction and history vs story. I especially liked when a snapshot was described and then Morag would continue with what and how she remembered about the snapshot that was just described.

"The child is leaning out the window, an upstairs window. She is smiling down at the person with the camera. her face is calm and serene. Her straight black hair, neatly trimmed, comes just to the level of her earlobes." (p. 17) Morag's response to this snapshot is, "I recall looking at the pictures, these pictures, over and over again, each time imagining I remembered a little more." (p. 17) Her response made me wonder whether she was remembering more and more or if she was remember what the picture was telling her. She was clearly young and must remember her childhood, however she asks questions about why she seldom smiles, which lead me to believe that she really does not remember as much as she might think she does.

The Diviners was certainly not my favorite book that we read over the semester but had some really good qualities. For me, it was the stark sense of reality throughout the work that really made it stick out. There's nothing inplausible that occurs which gives the whole plot more credence and for me, makes it more endearing. It's what makes the read sympathize with Morag and really feel for whatever plight she has to deal with. The richness of detail given in the various communities she resides in and the depth given to all of the memorable characters furthers this idea of realistic fiction. One can truly identify with the story and characters of this novel.
THe most interesting part of this novel for me comes from both the title itself and and a line at the end of the book which ties the whole story together. Royland tells Morag that his ability to find water has left him. She then philosipizes to herself about why he ever had this ability, how he got, why he got it, and so on. She then says to herself that it didin't matter, that "The necessary doing of the thing--that mattered"( Laurance 477). To me, this means that why we do things is not always as important is the implusion in ourselves that says "you have to do this", my feeling being that our gut instincts almost always tell us what we should do. Many things happan in life that just happan, maybe for a reason or maybe not, depending on what one believes. It's how you handle these sitations that occur randomly that makes who you are as a person as no one ever knows what will happan to them.

I absolutely loved this book! It was definitely my favorite book of the semester, although Monkey Beach followed close behind. Reading "The Diviners" started out with me getting through the first 88 pages and feeling not overly impressed by it, but of course as the due date of our final paper hangs over my head, I thought it was time for me to pick up reading where I left off. I really enjoyed Laurance's style of writing it was as though she knew just when to add a 'snapshot' or a 'memorybank movie'. As a matter of fact she didn't even stop with that she went on to include letters, 'innerfilms'(I think that's what they were called), and song lyrics. I almost felt as though I was reading a journal to some extent, the way the novel is broken down into different sections and chapters, but at times jumps forward and backward in time as well. In terms of the length of the novel I think it was just right, I feel like if parts of it would have been left out, the book would be lacking something.

I don't know if anyone else felt this way, but usually when I read books I form images of the characters in my head and these images change obviously as the novel progresses. However, I never felt as though I could picture Morag. For me it was almost as she described herself in the painting of her done by Dan McRaith where the only identifying features are her black hair and scared eyes. To a certain extent though this makes sense to me because throughout the novel Morag struggles to figure out who she is and where she belongs and with this her identity is somewhat unclear.

Now, realizing I have yet to answer the blog prompt...two of my favorite parts of the novel are at the very beginning when Morag finds the letter from Pique in her typewriter that reads, "Now please do not get all uptight, Ma. I can look after myself. Am going west. Alone, at least for now. If Gord phones, tell him I've drowned and gone floating down the river, crowned with algae and dead minnows, like Ophelia" (11). This quote gives a pretty good indication of Laurence's sense of humor throughout the novel.

The other part in the novel that I enjoyed was when Morag and Pique move in with Fan and her python. Laurence's descriptions of Fan with her hair all done up in a certain way, with her makeup, etc. remind of a character in the novel "Water for Elephants" who is part of a circus act. I love how Fan goes on to try and tell Morag that the python won't hurt Pique because "it's mostly in a comose state" (334).

I was looking over the blogs and trying to find my response to this question, but realized I must not have responded yet. “The Diviners” is an extremely creative novel and the characters are more accessible than some of the other novels we have read thus far. Much of the criticism that Margaret Laurence received for the language and sexual content was unwarranted. I believe that she took a big chance by giving more details in certain scenes than some people may have liked, but that it was brings her characters to life. Morag is a dangerously real character. At points, it seems as if I’m reading a genuine diary written by a friend of mine. Laurence’s impeccable ability to bring all the characters flaws to light and then exacerbate them is one of the qualities of the novel that makes it captivating.

Call me lame or a romantic, but I truly found the relationship between Morag and Brooke to be one of the most interesting parts of “The Diviners”. Up until this point in the novel, we are able to catch glimpses of Morag’s current life as an adult, and her childhood years. It is refreshing to learn about her lifestyle in-between childhood and motherhood. Also, I feel that this period of her life is one of the most crucial in shaping who she is as an adult. Undeniably, her childhood affects her as an adult as it is a dramatic and strange time; but throughout her relationship with Brooke we are able to get inside her mind and comprehend her actions and intentions in a much more profound manner. She is also more provocative during this time.

“Is that it? Heavens, I thought you’d been suddenly stricken with something serious,” said Brooke.

“I have. I have. But she does not say this. Odd- if you had a friend who had just aborted herself, causing chaos all around and not only to herself, no one would be surprised if you felt upset, anxious, shaken. It is no different with fiction- more so, maybe, because Morag has felt Lilac’s feelings. The blood is no less real for being invisible to the external eye. She wants to explain, but feels too tired.”

I love this thought that goes through Morag’s mind as a result of a character in her novel because it almost feels as if it’s a mirror thought of what might have been going on through Laurence’s mind when she was writing about Morag. Also, this statement sums up how I feel about “The Diviners” and articulates what I’ve stated above. Like Morag becoming attached to her character, I have become attached to Morag. Everything bad and good that happens to her affects me more deeply than characters in other novels we’ve read.

I really enjoyed the metafictional aspect of The Diviners, as Morag becomes a compelling conduit through which Laurence's semi-autobiographical tale gains such vitality. Laurence is able to interweave a vivid sense of place through her use of memory snapshots. This varied approach to the narrative is at once both objectively critical of the creative process and personally connected to the author, as Laurence is writing about her own origin and, thus, about how her narrative perception developed. She is not only writing about writing, she is writing about how memory and experience combine to form each of our own individual narratives of our lives in retrospect.

The Diviners was certainly one of my favorite books we read this semester (though it keeps getting harder to make that statement). I wanted to qualify that by saying that I think it's of particular importance because of it's place in the Canadian cannon of literature, but then again look at Sunshine Sketches and Next Episode and TIN FLUTE for gosh-sakes! All very important books (not to slight the others) and I suppose my comment really applies more to Margaret Laurence-- what an amazing writer. Her style of writing allows her readers a sort of comprehensive access into her consciousness. As a result, one cannot help but feel some sort of connection with her--with Morag. I wish I could explain my last statement better; I believe it's that inexplicable connection to a text that keeps a reader interested-- and let's face it, Diviners is not something that can be read in one sitting even by someone with the an above-average attention span.
I think the way Part One is formatted is incredibly important. From an Aristotelian point of view, it is the perfect introduction. Laurence builds her ideas in such a way that she can continue to work outward (forward motion) while continuing to look inward. I can't write this post without some mention of the Memorybank Movies. What an amazing idea. To me, the idea of Laurence creating these "Memorybank Movies" is kind of like a salesman creating the idea of "Bottled Water," that is to say, it's such a remarkably simple concept that it almost isn't really a concept at all. Everybody has their own Memorybank Movies--what's great about Morag's is the degree of examination--introspection-- that they yield. For example, the whole theme of "invented memories." I find that to be a pretty profound idea. "I can't remember myself actually being aware of inventing them, but it must have happened so." (18-19) Ok ok, so I picked a pretty standard quote, but I think it reflects well the divide and developement in one's (Morag's) consciousness of themselves. Sure, perspective changes with time, but I like that Laurence is able to use this idea to such a meaningful end.