Submission to Academia Letters

Margaret Laurence’s “The Merchant of Heaven”:

Unsettling the Unitary Web of Vision
Marta Dvořák , Sorbonne Nouvelle

In Margaret Laurence’s early African writings, the still semi-colonized Canadian

culture the writer emerges from collides with the African culture she encounters.
Set in the Gold Coast [Ghana], “The Merchant of Heaven” anticipates Tsitsi
Dangarembga’s more widely known Nervous Conditions (1988), set in Rhodesia
as it too marched to independence. Both texts upset the comfortable binaries
of black/white, colonizer/colonized, and oppressor/ oppressed. The vexing nu-
ances in Dangarembga’s case derive partly from a white minority government
which, believe it or not, also feels colonized and seeks emancipation. The descen-
dants of settlers rule, yet feel subjected (Stratton; Szeman), while the colonized
participate in an ancient hierarchical system. Both Laurence and Dangarembga
show that the intricate system requires context-specific behaviour and discursive
mode. Both writers overset an anticolonialist discourse and a feminist subtext
in polyphonic, often dissonant, melodic lines. Their dissonance points you to the
clash or slippage between context- sensitive and context-free societies (Dvořák).
In The Prophet’s Camel’s Bell describing her first voyage out to Somaliland,
Laurence presents her own anti-imperialist ideological positioning upon arriv-
ing. Yet she catches herself treading with Western army boots all over Eastern
sensibilities. Meeting educated young men, she assumes that their traditional
patriarchal values have been eroded and interrogates them from the vantage
point of her own “enlightened” cultural prism and belief-system:
“What did the Somali bride-price actually involve? Did men love their wives
or merely regard them as possessions? Could a woman divorce her husband
for infidelity? Did Somalis believe in magic? Did the clitoridectomy make it
impossible for Somali women to enjoy sex?” (36)

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 Such passages illustrate what my title gestures to. Namely Edward Saïd’s
claim that stories are synonymous with plurality and diversity, and that “Narra-
tive, in short, introduces an opposing point of view, perspective, consciousness
to the unitary web of vision” (Orientalism 240).
Introducing an opposing viewpoint and consciousness is exactly what Lau-
rence does in “The Merchant of Heaven.” The story sets out to question the
teleology of progress. It also satirizes (in general) the dogmatic clashes fissuring
Christianity, and satirizes (in particular) the attack on African religions by fun-
damentalist evangelists. As the value- loaded title of the story promises, Brother
Lemon, “proselytizer for a mission known as The Angel of Philadelphia,” lands
“replete with faith as a fresh-gorged mosquito is with blood” (The Tomorrow
Tamer 51). An eloquent equivalence. This story can be seen on one level
as an aggregation of irrational practices and superstitious beliefs, equivalent
and interchangeable, in the manner of Rudyard Kipling, that now rehabilitated
“innovator and virtuoso in the art of the short story” (Rutherford, Preface
viii). Kipling’s story “The Judgment of Dungara” deploys two main strate-
gies to distance readers from the Eurocentric, imperialist religious practices of
the newly-arrived German missionary Justus Krenk. The story confronts the
zealous Justus with his foil, the acculturated Assistant Collector Gallio, who
declares that “when you have been some years in the country…you get to find
one creed as good as another.” (Kipling 124) And it innovatively transcribes the
pastor’s idiolect, namely his foreignizing syntactic distortions: “We will these
Heathen now by idolatrous practices so darkened better make” (Kipling 122).
Miriam Toews recycles this technique to showcase the gap between older Men-
nonites and their new land of adoption: they say things like “slice me open a
bun and throw me down the stairs a facecloth” (A Complicated Kindness 163).
Laurence’s Brother Lemon is no monster. Her omniscient narrator concedes
his kindly intentions. Like Kipling’s narrator, Laurence’s narrating conscious-
ness complicates a potentially simplistic binary positioning by outlining the
daunting difficulties of Lemon’s task. You learn that
“A decomposing lizard was found in his plumbing. The wiring was faulty
and his lights winked with persistent malice. The first cook he hired turned out
to have both forged references and gonorrhea.” (Tomorrow-Tamer 57)
If you opt for an adventure in micro-analysis, what do you find? First a list

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(plumbing, wiring, cooking) that branches out in all directions (decomposing
lizard, winking lights, organized dishonesty, incompetence, and debauchery).
You already feel the weight of everything Lemon is daily up against. Then
you’ll notice the parallelisms that make you feel this can go on and on. Finally
you’ll notice the playful syllepsis that yokes two unlike terms, as if having forged
papers and having a venereal disease were equivalent. This cocktail of devices
engineers a shift from high to low. From the grand project of saving souls to the
lower body and its base sexual functions and dysfunctions. After all, as a closer
look at the title suggests, Brother Lemon is the merchant of Heaven (domain
of the high), but he is also the Merchant of heaven (the high contaminated by
the low — a practice castigated by Christ himself when he drove the merchants
out of the temple).
You soon see that Laurence gleefully spotlights this collision of high and low,
demonstrating her art of sinking. Brother Lemon
“looked for dragons to slay, and found cockroaches in his store-cupboard.
Jacob-like, he came to wrestle for the Angel’s blessing, and instead was bent
double with cramps in his bowels from eating unwashed salad greens.” (57)
How does Laurence deflate the sublime into the trivial? Through repeti-
tion and antithetical parallelisms, you’ll say. Also through substitution (drag-
ons/cockroaches; Angel’s blessing/ bellyache), and change in register. The Bib-
lical terms ‘slay/wrestle’ are debunked by the prosaic terms of cupboard, bowels,
and salad.
You’ve deconstructed Laurence’s dynamics of anticlimax and bathos. Now
watch how she unsettles any unitary web of vision through Lemon’s sermons.
She suggests that language is always subjective and always contexted (Saïd).
Laurence’s evangelist attacks the ju-ju of the indigenous fetish-priests, but in
his own temple he dazzles the natives with objects meant to embody the Apoc-
alypse, such as a peacock-blue gown embroidered with seven stars and seven
golden candlesticks — one of which a convert purloins as a fetish to touch his in-
fertile wife’s belly with. Interpreters translate into Ga and Twi Lemon’s sermon
based on The Book of Revelation, notably the verses the narrator reproduces:
“They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun
light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne
shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters, and God

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shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.” (73; Rev. 7: 16-17 KJV).
You of course are trained to context your reading. You quickly situate the
Biblical text within the broad framework of apocalyptic writing, and you recog-
nize the a-temporal metaphorical and allegorical resonances which characterize
the mode of prophecy. You don’t neglect to check the co-text either, to know
just who the pronoun “they” refers to. The preceding verses identify “they” as
those who have endured “great tribulations” and are now “before the throne of
God”(Rev.7:14-15). So you infer that the feeding and thirst-quenching are not
grounded in the factual and real, but in the visionary time and space of the
mythical and mystical: the court of Heaven.
But Lemon, who stands for all evangelists, has not tried to take into ac-
count the nature of the context-sensitive society he finds himself in. He fails
to see that for his listeners “God is no symbol but an everyday fact” (Rushdie
376). The evangelist fails to understand that for them “the miraculous and the
mundane…co-exist at the same level” (Rushdie 376), and that God and the ce-
lestial beings surrounding his throne are “as real to the faithful as their families
and friends” (380). So there follows a quid pro quo calling attention to the
instability of Western concepts and abstractions: what Rushdie calls “picture-
making” (377). Lemon has constructed pictures of the world, and the natives
equate his picture with their world. A group of blind old beggars accuse Lemon
of breaking his promises. They had got the impression that
“the evangelist intended to throw a feast for them, at which, in the tradi-
tional African manner, a sheep would be throat-slit and sacrificed, then roasted
and eaten. Palm wine would flow freely. Brother Lemon, furthermore, would
restore the use of their eyes“ (72, my stress).
The beggars have made the evangelist’s picture even more pleasing by tak-
ing it literally. An earthly paradise is after all in conformity with their sense
of the marvellous. So the Merchant of Heaven runs smack into consumer disap-
pointment, stemming from the cognitive dissonance between what he promises
and what he actually delivers. Quite disorienting for the sublime salesman, who
does not expect to have his promises tested until his consumers are dead.

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References
Dvořák, Marta. “Inhabiting the EdgeS: Transtextuality and Subduction.”
Commonwealth Essays and Studies 34.1, 2011: 11-23.

Laurence, Margaret. The Prophet’s Camel’s Bell. Toronto: McClelland &

Stewart, 1963.

—–. The Tomorrow-Tamer and Other Stories. 1963. McClelland & Stewart,
1970.

Kipling, Rudyard. The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories. Preface
by Andrew Rutherford. Oxford: OUP, 2008.

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta, 1992.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. 1978. New York: Vintage, 1994.

Toews, Miriam. A Complicated Kindness. Toronto: Vintage, 2005.

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