The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

Winnipeg, over to Toronto, down to
Mexico City, back up to Salem, and over to
New York." This line traces an autobiographical
journey, its psychological dimension
"the hairline crack of [the narrator's]
particular coming apart and staying
together." The sections may be exerpted
and read separately, but their strongest
effects are cumulative and sequential. The
narration is poetic, internal, associational,
retrospective; the text is dense with verbal
echoes, motifs, puns.
One of the most important themes is fur,
"the connecting thread, the hair in my
soupy geography"; its implications are
teased out as Canada's historical raison
d'tre, the grail of the early explorers' quest,
the only warm Cathay ever found in the
cold north. More symbolically, fur is death
and sexuality, the outer shell of the dead
animal hung on the body of the woman
whose own fur is denied, hidden. Though
its warmth may seem to place it in
Manichaean opposition to the snow from
which it protects its wearer, Hay erodes this
sort of opposition in the course of her
book. Both snow and fur are ambiguous—
they are "two forms of ambivalent softness":
Snow appears simple and isn't. It's cold
and warm, light and dark, soft and hard.
Snow is solid but it flows, fur is continuous
but composed of millions of hairs.
Fur ... wraps us against death and wraps
us in death.
All the major oppositions set up by this
book are similarly eroded. "North elides
into south" as the narrator gradually comes
to terms with her own conflicts. Seeing herself
as essentially Canadian in this quest,
she goes south to Mexico "to get warm,"
but pines for snow, despite falling in love
with Alec, an American "who love[s] anything
Latin." When she becomes pregnant,
she persuades Alec to return with her to the
north, where he is unhappy. Her sense of
guilt and inadequacy in this relationship
initiates the quest for reconcilement with
self—and, coincidentally, with Alec—
which the book outlines. She identifies her
shyness, her colourlessness, her inarticulateness
as Canadian characteristics, and
this feature explains the book's historical
dimension. It is partly a poetic revision of
Canadian history—along the lines of W. C.
Williams's In the American Grain—in
which the mute voices of the past are given
imaginative life. Though not all of these
voices are female, the most memorable are
the Inuit woman Tookoolito, and the
eleven-year-old wife of Champlain, Hlne
Boull. The resuscitation of these and other
marginalized figures is an important step in
the narrator's recovery of herself, as is a
sense of the mythic significance of her
beloved north, and its interdependence
with other mythologies:
Lachine was the starting point, that
wistful fur outpost eight miles west of
Montreal. The end was Cathay—where
furs were prized and ivory made into
snowballs.
In between ... ourselves, of course.
Looking for Cathay and finding fur.
Looking for fur and finding various
Cathays. As though we're off the map,
casting about between climates of love.
This kind of poetic and psychological resonance
is not to be found in Henighan's
collection. Though symbols, such as the
"bog people" motif in "North to South"
and the Janus-faced distaff in "My Last
South American Story," are skilfully handled,
the stories' resolution is achieved
mainly in terms of action and character.
They are all well-crafted, and if their characters
seem rather shallow this may be a
result of the brevity and closure of the
form. But, in any case, many readers will be
more interested in setting than in either
character or action. Henighan has a distinct
talent for description; his stories are above
all travel tales, regardless of the fictionality
or otherwise of their protagonists. He has