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 nuances in Dangarembga’s case derive partly from a white minority government
which, believe it or not, also feels colonized and seeks emancipation (Dvořák, “Dangarem-
bga”). The descendants of settlers rule, yet feel subjected (Stratton; Szeman), while the col-
onized participate in an ancient hierarchical system. Both Laurence and Dangarembga show
that the intricate system requires context-specific behavior and discursive mode. Both writ-
ers overset an anti-colonialist 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, “Inhabiting”).
In The Prophet’s Camel’s Bell describing her first voyage out to Somaliland, Laurence
presents her own anti-imperialist ideological positioning upon arriving. Yet she catches her-
self 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 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 infi-
delity? Did Somalis believe in magic? Did the clitoridectomy make it impossible
for Somali women to enjoy sex?” (36)

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Marta Dvořák , martadvorak1951@gmail.com

Citation: Dvořák , M. (2021). Margaret Laurence’s “The Merchant of Heaven”: Unsettling the Unitary Web of
Vision. Academia Letters, Article 3427. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3427.

1
 In this particular case, Laurence becomes appalled at her own brash interference. Still, as
you will notice, the questions remain raised and roil under the surface. On another occasion,
she – a woman and thus a subaltern – offends three Somali elders by daring to discuss her
engineer husband’s work with them, in his absence, to boot. While she in her subject position
inscribes this as an error, you are likely to applaud the grain of sand which disrupts the So-
malis’ comfortable conviction that their worldview is universal. Such passages illustrate what
my title gestures to. Namely, Edward Saïd’s claim that stories are synonymous with plurality
and diversity, and that “Narrative, in short, introduces an opposing point of view, perspective,
consciousness to the unitary web of vision” (Orientalism 240). As a corollary, it discloses
that unitary webs of vision are plural.
Introducing an opposing viewpoint and consciousness is exactly what Laurence 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 fundamentalist evangelists. As the value-loaded title of the
story promises, Brother Lemon, “proselytizer for a mission known as The Angel of Philadel-
phia,” 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 man-
ner 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 strategies 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 of derision 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 consciousness complicates a poten-
tially 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)

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Marta Dvořák , martadvorak1951@gmail.com

Citation: Dvořák , M. (2021). Margaret Laurence’s “The Merchant of Heaven”: Unsettling the Unitary Web of
Vision. Academia Letters, Article 3427. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3427.

2
 If you opt for an adventure in micro-analysis, what do you find? First a list (plumbing,
wiring, cooking) that branches out in all directions (decomposing lizard, winking lights, orga-
nized 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, demon-
strating 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 repetition and antithet-
ical parallelisms, you’ll say. Also through substitution (dragons/cockroaches; Angel’s bless-
ing/ bellyache), and change in register. The Biblical 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 opposing unitary webs 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 Apocalypse, 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
infertile wife’s belly with. Interpreters translate into Ga and Twi Lemon’s sermon based on
the Bible’s Book of Revelation, notably the verses the narrator reproduces:

“They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sunlight 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 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 recognize the a-temporal metaphor-

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Marta Dvořák , martadvorak1951@gmail.com

Citation: Dvořák , M. (2021). Margaret Laurence’s “The Merchant of Heaven”: Unsettling the Unitary Web of
Vision. Academia Letters, Article 3427. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3427.

3
ical 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 account the nature
of the context-sensitive society he finds himself in. Nor, as you soon remark, do his listeners
allow for that “uncanny structure of cultural difference” (Bhabha 163). The evangelist fails
to see that for his listeners “God is no symbol but an everyday fact” (Rushdie 376). He fails
to understand that for them “the miraculous and the mundane…co-exist at the same level”
(Rushdie 376), and that God and the celestial beings surrounding his throne are “as real to
the faithful as their families and friends” (380). So a quid pro quo inevitably erupts. It calls
attention to the instability of both Eastern and Western concepts and abstractions, which are
relational and dependent on place, time, and the nature of both speaker and listener – 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, outraged from a
broken illusion, 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 traditional
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).

Strangers to any notion of uncanny cultural differences, the beggars had made the evange-
list’s picture even more pleasing by taking it literally. An earthly paradise is after all in confor-
mity with their sense of the marvelous. So the Merchant of Heaven runs smack into consumer
disappointment, stemming from the cognitive dissonance between what he promises and what
he actually delivers. Disorienting for the believers in miracle products, and disorienting for
the sublime salesman, who does not expect to have his promises tested until his consumers
are dead.

References
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2001.

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Marta Dvořák , martadvorak1951@gmail.com

Citation: Dvořák , M. (2021). Margaret Laurence’s “The Merchant of Heaven”: Unsettling the Unitary Web of
Vision. Academia Letters, Article 3427. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3427.

4
Dvořák, Marta. “Inhabiting the EdgeS: Transtextuality and Subduction.” Commonwealth
Essays and Studies 34.1, 2011: 11-23.

—–. “Dangarembga, Fanon, et Sartre: la relation dialogique entre œuvre littéraire et texte
théorique phare bicéphale.” Academia.edu. Based on a talk given at Paris’s Ecole Nor-
male Supérieure Ulm on 16 March 2012, “Splitting into two disconnected entities”: glisse-
ments de terrain dans l’interface reliant esthétique et politique,” within the framework of
a postcolonial seminar organized by L. Zecchini & L. Guilhamon.

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.

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Marta Dvořák , martadvorak1951@gmail.com

Citation: Dvořák , M. (2021). Margaret Laurence’s “The Merchant of Heaven”: Unsettling the Unitary Web of
Vision. Academia Letters, Article 3427. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3427.