To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
genealogies, place names, maps, songs, and
narratives provide reference material for
programs initiated by the Nuxalk Cultural
Centre and for Nuxalk collaborations with
the Canadian Museum of Civilization. In
October 1991, as this book neared publication,
the Nuxalk community invited
Mcllwraith's children and editor John
Barker to a potlatch at Bella Coola.
Ethnographies do, indeed, begin as conversations.
But such conversations do not
end with a printed text. Just as Nuxalk people
drew on narratives to explain important
issues to Mcllwraith in 1922-23, the narratives,
the songs, the photographs in The
Bella Coola Indians continue to take on new
meanings in a contemporary community.
As First Nations draw on oral tradition and
material culture to represent their identity
both to themselves and to cultural outsiders,
ethnographies come under critical
scrutiny by a new generation of young people
struggling, as their ancestors did, to
make connections between past and present.
This ethnography will continue to be an
invaluable work of reference for the Nuxalk,
for ethnographers, and for anyone interested
in oral narrative or in the history of
Canadian anthropology. John Barker has
done an admirable job of framing these conversations
for us. His introduction deserves
careful reading before and re-reading after
immersion in the ethnography.
Irony
Linda Hutcheon (Ed.)
Double-Talking: Essays on Verbal and Visual
Ironies in Contemporary Canadian Art and
Literature. ECW P $25
Reviewed by Axel Knoenagel
Double-Talking is devoted entirely to the
study of the presence and significance of
irony in various Canadian artistic productions.
The starting point for this project is a
remark by E.D. Blodgett that the Canadian
language—and consequently what is said in
it—is "by law ambiguous " In the brief
statement that Hutcheon sent to the contributors,
she defines this ambiguity as
inherently ironic and suggests that
"obsessed with articulating its identity,
Canada's voice is often a doubled one, that
of the forked tongue of irony." In that case,
Canada's art would also have to be ironic, if
not exclusively, then at least to a significant
extent.
The contributions to Double-Talkingwere
written in response to a brief statement,
"'Speaking Canadian': The Ironies of
Canadian Art and Literature", in which
Hutcheon suggests two possible functions
of irony, a deconstructive critique and a
constructive assertion of multiple meanings
which opens up new spaces between
meanings "where new things can happen."
One of the underlying motives for this
statement was "to combat the customary
diffuseness of essay collections," but to
claim that this goal had been reached
would in itself be ironic. The ten contributors
work with a variety of definitions and
applications which is so wide that the
recurrence of the term "irony" in connection
with Canadian cultural products frequently
appears the only bracket that holds
the collection together.
The opening essay, "Who Says That
Canadian Culture is Ironic?," is the best
contribution to Double-Talking. In the
piece, Jamie Dodd discusses Canada as an
essentially ironic country which profits
from the postmodern acceptance of multiple
meanings. Dodd's main concern is literary
criticism, and he debates the works of
various Canadian critics (Frye, Kroetsch,
Davey) in the context of irony and the
problem it poses for canonization.
Six of the essays are devoted to the study
of irony in Canadian literature. The most
impressive of these is Arun P. Mukherjee's
investigation into "The Discursive
Strategies of Some Hyphenated Canadians."
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