The relationship and prominence of an individual with his or her society in Canadian stories
Canadian stories are often about the relationship of the self to others - or about the individual and society. Stephen Leacock's story, "The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias" is a perfect example of this topic in the Canadian literature. In this story, Leacock creates an embodiment of a typical provincial small Canadian town at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as the people who lived in it.
"The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias" deals with a small town in the prairies, when old-fashioned rural societies were still going strong. Furthermore, Stephen Leacock is writing about the turn of the 20th century, practically a century ago from today, and that makes "The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias" even more interesting to read. "The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias" vividly describes the social situation in a non-descript rural town in the Canadian prairies, and the town's social structure between the entity of its members and every single individual in particular - or more correctly, the lack of both, due to the inwards-oriented attitudes of the residents of Mariposa.
The understanding of this fact begins with the narrator of "The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias" - a partially omniscient character with no definitive name or personality of his own. At the same time, however, the narrator appears to be `one of the guys' - or, more correctly, one of the town's natives, who got involved in a humorous disaster of the story.
For a character and a native of Mariposa in his own right, the narrator is quite talkative, usually chattering about an event in the story that appears to be insignificant, inflating it by using humorous hyperboles. (In reality, however, this event is still quite significant, just in different ways than the narrator has prepared you for.) Since the narrator, for all of his all-knowing wisdom, is still just one of the residents of Mariposa, meeting him gives the audience an initial idea of what to expect from the members of the town's society.
Incidentally, the story's mode of narration bonds the narrator to the author proper; the author's literary omniscience transfers onto the narrator as a form of narrative hindsight. Consequently, this hindsight enables the narrator to know as well as the author does, what the story will be, and what he is talking about. In other words, this method enables the author to be mildly sarcastic, to poke and have fun at the story, at Mariposa and the people living in the town via the narrator's small-town storytelling tricks, such as repetition and hyperbole.
Turning to the story proper, at first the narrator tells in his own way about the town's social organization, for: "...everybody is in everything. <...> On St. Andrew's Day every man in town wears a thistle <...> on St. George's Day <...> why shouldn't a man feel glad that he's an Englishman?" and so on. ("The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias" pg. 225-26)
Everybody in Mariposa seems to be in perfect connection with everyone else, regardless of any differences between various age and social groups, a society that is seemingly composed of a single unit:
"So you will easily understand that of course everybody belongs to the Knights of Pythias and the Masons and Oddfellows, just as they all belong to the Snow Shoe Club and the Girls' Friendly Society". (226)
Naturally, such type of a collective - almost communistic - society is far from being beneficent to the town, as it, in fact, creates an essentially inwards-oriented social organization that cares only for its immediate components, and is concerned with preserving its apparent uniformity, no matter how absurd it gets. Furthermore, it also creates and encourages the qualities of provincial ignorance and inwards-oriented isolationism (Bunker Hill supposedly took place in Dakota, George Duff did not feel that he wanted to visit his sister in eight years), generating so-called small-town atmosphere, where everything, including the mental prowess of the residents, is small and extremely insignificant in scope.
To show an example of the groundless pretensions of the residents of Mariposa, how they want to appear erudite, when really they are not, Leacock has the narrator talking about the steamer Mariposa Belle, using repetition to show the narrator's frustration with the abovementioned task:
"Whether they are built by Harland and Wolff of Belfast, or whether, on the other hand, they are not built by Harland and Wolff of Belfast, is more than one would like to say offhand". (226-27)
However, people living in Mariposa, like to pretend in much more than just erudition and possessing greater knowledge than what they actually have. As the story begins to foreshadow the steamer having an accident, the narration turns to premonitions: for various reasons, several people did not end up on Mariposa Belle. If the accident had not taken place, people would have forgotten this fact by the evening, but the accident took place and spiced up the usually rigid, uneventful and routine lives of the residents of the town. Therefore, anything related to the accident becomes a hot topic immediately, and the citizens' love of embellishing every event (no matter how small) causes accidental decisions and insignificant choices to transform into supernatural events. It inflated their personal prominence within the town's society by allowing them to lay a claim to possessing supernatural premonition powers.
On the steamer itself, meanwhile, something new happens society-wise: the formerly monotonous group of the people begins to actually separate into smaller groups - women go to one deck of the ship, boys and young men to another, Dr. Gallagher and Dean Drone form one group, Mr. Smith and his cohorts form another group, and so on. Apparently, if the society as a whole is not present to impose the overall homogeny on its members, the separate inhabitants of Mariposa do have different natures, different interests, and form different groups, each composed of specific members from the original society. This fact counters the story's earlier statement, which is that everyone in Mariposa essentially acts and possibly dresses in a manner almost identical to each other no matter what.
Another thing that becomes clear now is that as far as societies go, the society composed from people on Mariposa Belle, i.e. residents of the town of Mariposa, has absolutely no sense of organization, due to their town-wide lack of proper interaction between people. Everybody in Mariposa just goes with the flow without feeling the least need to properly co-operate with the others and form any sort of a plan other than whatever the custom will dictate. Everybody will be doing the same thing anyways, as the majority of the residents of Mariposa will opt to do (or carry out) the same thing in any case. As a result, this lack of co-operation and co-ordination creates complete, utter deterioration of plans. For example, at the beginning of the story, the steamer was supposed to depart at six-thirty - but instead the time for the departure moves forward first to seven o'clock, and finally Mariposa Belle departs at seven-thirty - an hour late as compared to the original schedule. This absence of responsibility and organization of the people from the town will prove very important when later in the story the steamer flounders and sinks, challenging and disturbing the planned routine of their lives.
Surprisingly though, the story hardly mentions at all the supposedly actual goal of "The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias" - the picnic itself. Once again, the people of the `overall' society of Mariposa split themselves into various smaller subgroups such as "boys under thirteen and girls over nineteen". (232) Back in the mainland town the residents of Mariposa may act as if they all are a single-unit society, without any discretion for age or gender, but here the author again makes it obvious that that is not so, not in everything. People of Mariposa do split themselves into smaller subgroups within the original "residents of Mariposa" group, and subconsciously they stick to their subgroups regardless of what they consciously believe.
However, once the passengers from Mariposa get back on their steamer and begin to head back to the mainland, they begin to blend back from "little clusters" into a single, large, homogeneous group once more, "blended into unison by the distance" (233). That is when disaster strikes, as Mariposa Belle strikes a sandbar and gets stuck on it - in other words, the story finally approaches its climax, as the conflict of man versus nature unfolds in all its grotesque glory.
The actual event is not that big or problematic: as the narrator hurries to explain, babbling from panic, the steamer is in reality stuck on a sandbank in rather shallow waters - a very commonplace event for Mariposa and the neighboring towns. However, while most people would be more irritated than afraid, a disorganized crowd of people on Mariposa Belle begins to slowly panic nonetheless, in part because they were never mentally prepared or equipped to handle it, no matter what the narrator says on the contrary. Soon there is a widespread panic all over the steamer - due to the lack of organization and self-defining traits such as common sense and personal bravery, the inhabitants of Mariposa are not really people with individual personalities. In fact, they are more like social animals, for example salmon, who lack the ability to make any independent decisions, and just go following their shared group instinct, as well as the non-official `rule of the majority' of Mariposa. It is here that the lack of definite order in the peoples' life, as the author noted earlier, becomes rather crucial in the story's development: the passengers of the steamer do not know what to do, because they never expected to do something about it in the first place.
At first, they pretend to act as if nothing was wrong at all - "they were all running round looking for sandwiches and cracking jokes and talking of making coffee over the remains of the engine fires." (235) As the realization that things are wrong and not a part of the routine settles in, they go for the lifeboat. They actually succeed in getting several boatloads of people back to the shore, even though the lifeboat appears to be "a frail, clumsy thing". (235)
However, when the survivors re-unite with their counterparts in Mariposa, their initial panic infests the rest, and they get involved with the disaster in a big way, going to rescue people in a leaking boat. It backfires upon them - badly. During the story's development, various characters did develop personal traits to make themselves more three dimensional and less cartoonish, but none of them showed any memorable traits or social status - rather, they still appeared as comical figures, getting into comical shenanigans like Judge Pepperleigh at the picnic with his speech. (232) Therefore, by now, the distinctive lack of initiative and reason of any sort, derived from the lack of ordinary, not custom-forced interaction and genuine social order with other people among most of characters in "The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias" is obvious.
However, as the routine of their lives seems to break down because of the boating accident, the society of Mariposa begins to transform at last. Unfortunately, this transformation changes the residents of the town into a panicked, unorganized crowd, even a herd. Panic sets in, and the lack of organization makes it worse. The author has great fun showing his audience, via the narrator, the superficiality of Mariposa's social uniformity and communal good cheer, as both begin to deteriorate under the pressure and lack of social order into nothingness, for due to the lack of a real inter-town society, there is nothing to hold the people together. There are no interpersonal relationships, but for the communal "good-fellowship", and right now it is not working all that well.
To make things worse, as the people on Mariposa Belle encounter their fellow-citizens ashore, the panic spreads from the boat back to the town itself, and people practically lose their heads. They start rowing all over the lake, seeking safety on Mariposa Belle, forgetting that they were initially safe and came to rescue the people on the steamer instead, thus bringing even more absurdity into the situation, making it really extremely enjoyable for the reader to read about, but which would be absolutely inadmissibly ludicrous in real life.
Then the author finally introduces perhaps the only real individual with an identity of his own to speak of, Mr. Smith, who alone does not panic in this essentially ridiculous situation and instead makes a bet that he can fix the steamer - and he does. Furthermore, Mr. Smith gets to pilot the boat back to the town's wharf, successfully saving everybody. The man (as the narrator slips at the end) does not have much experience with piloting steamers, but other passengers are so awed by his level-headedness, that they do not care, as they can now get back to the daily customs and routine of their pseudo-communal lives.
Such unreasonable, yet enthusiastic behavior from the people on Mariposa Belle makes an appropriate ending to the story. Since the town of Mariposa embodies a Canadian provincial town at the turn of the twentieth century in general, and Mariposa Belle embodies the town of Mariposa itself, we can see that during that time in such a society there were practically no people that could be considered `great leaders and motivators of men'. In the land of the blind, however, a one-eyed man is king, and Mr. Smith seems to be just that sort of a man. A rather unscrupulous character in reality, he nonetheless does have the right individuality, clarity of mind, adequate level of self-control to be able to save the day before something actually bad really happens. In a normal society, he would be just a face in a crowd, most likely; in a rather small, provincially isolated society of Mariposa he is hailed as a hero - and perhaps justly so. None of other citizens of Mariposa has any specific personal characteristics or initiative that are needed for an emergency that could challenge their society in any way, like the one described in the story; they have only daily routine and customs to help them get through life, and when that fails, they got nothing to fall back on. To contrast them, by showing his initiative, Mr. Smith saved the day and prevented the society of Mariposa from transforming into a truly panicking mass of individuals, who sought safety that was never gone in the first place. Thus, perhaps, in the land of the blind a one-eyed man is rightfully the king.
Works Cited:
Leacock, Stephen. A Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias.A New Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Editors Donna Bennett & Russell Brown. Canada: Oxford University Press, 2002. 224-237.