The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

and class, already mixed, are mixed yet
again; Sarsfield's antagonist is a son of trade
(hence the reference to muslin), and
Sarsfield automatically defines himself in
opposition to the mercantile. This antagonist,
Arch Kimbell, eventually becomes a
most docile Horatio to Sarsfield's Hamlet,
and together the two boys form a cult of
male heroes like Teddy Roosevelt and Dick
Davis, though here, too, gender exclusivity
must crumble. At one point, Sarsfield wonders
what his male heroes would have to
say about the repeated rape of his mother.
He finds no answer.
The mixed female par excellence in this
novel is the socialite Julia Eberhardt, who
deserves mention as a literary creation of
unusual power. Her novelistic predecessors
are Hardy's Sue Bridehead and Fowles's
Sarah Woodruff, for she is, to Sarsfield,
maddeningly incomprehensible, luxuriating
in her privileged existence at one
moment, and raging against it the next.
Sarsfield never does understand her rages,
her ambiguous social position as both powerful
and powerless. Light in the Company
of Women has convincedme, as no other of
Maillard's works I have read to date has,
that he is a writer to pay attention to.
Uncomfortable Tradition
Fee, Margery, ed.
Silence Made Visible: Howard O'Hagan and Tay
John. ECW n.p.
Sparrow, Fiona.
Into Africa with Margaret Laurence. ECW $25
Reviewed by Dorothy F. Lane
Michael Ondaatje uses the term "uncomfortable
tradition" to describe writing that
promotes a peripheral counter-tradition
and resists the conventions of realism. Both
Howard O'Hagan's novel, Tay John, and
Margaret Laurence's African writings can
be regarded as "uncomfortable" within the
Canadian literary scene. While Tay John—
first published in 1939 and virtually ignored
until its republication by New Canadian
Library in 1974—is the principal work of a
writer excluded from the Canadian canon,
Laurence's involvement in East and West
Africa has often been overlooked in examinations
of her writing. These two studies,
then, have more in common than one might
initially expect, since both are attempts to
take a more critical and comprehensive
look at Canadian writers, and at Canadian
literature in general.
Questions of canonicity and reception are
implicit throughout Silence Made Visible, a
dynamic collection that places Tay John
within the context of O'Hagan's life, his
early writing, and critical responses to his
work. In both her introduction and a convincing
article, editor Margery Fee illustrates
that "the positive reception of a
literary work depends on more than its literary
quality". Tay John was initially
neglected, Fee suggests, because it did not
conform to the realist-naturalist tradition
celebrated by many of O'Hagan's contemporaries.
Ironically, however, O'Hagan's
writing can now be viewed as an early stage
in the development of contemporary
Canadian fiction and the convention of the
"wilderness man."
Silence Made Visible incorporates a wide
variety of material and thus encourages
readers to take yet another look at the
period that produced MacLennan and
Grove. The chronology, bibliography, and
selection of short pieces by O'Hagan are
valuable for those who wish to get a clearer
sense of O'Hagan's life and writings. For
instance, his first published story, "How It
Came About," is a chilling study of racial
exclusion and resistance that shows
O'Hagan's characteristic depiction of violence,
as well as the influence of Conrad's
experiments with language and atmosphere.
Fee also includes a fascinating interview
with O'Hagan, in which interviewer