To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

essays as a whole in her French introduction,
but George Woodcock makes no such
survey of the Anglo-Canadian essays.
Neither introduction relates one group to
the other; Bayard, in her sketchy English
introduction, alludes only briefly to the
problems that might be raised by attempting
it. Where were the Canadian comparatists
in 1980, by which time most of these
essays had already been written? Two of
these authors at least, E.D. Blodgett and
Godard, are eminently capable now (and
doubtless were then) of bridging some of
these gaps: perhaps they weren't asked to.
The second major editorial problem is
the dating: Bayard, in her 1992 (French)
introduction, makes a virtue out of the
apparent necessity of a 1980-ish terminal
date for most of the essays. But by the time
we reach Jon Kertzer, who handily updates
his bipartite argument on historical criticism
to reach a tripartite conclusion, it is
evident that the editor requested more
updates from her contributors than she
received. However, several essayists confuse
matters further by doing some internal
updating, for instance by mentioning en
passant the CWTW series of the 'eighties
(as Woodcock does). Frequent temporal
locutions, like "aujourd'hui," or "recent," or
"in the last fifty years," are made ambiguous
by the uncertainty as to how much, if
any, revision has taken place. Several conclusions,
exhorting us in some way, or
inquiring about the future of such and such
a concept or situation, are left hanging in
the air, for in all probability some partial
answer, or even some alteration in the
terms of debate, has emerged in the last
decade. Finally Fisette (writing on the
movement from structuralism to semiotics)
lets the cat out of the bag by mentioning
an editorial request to update and
then sensibly supplying a neat and useful
coda, rather than emending the essay itself.
Would that the other contributors had
done likewise. For it is simply not the case
that essays of 1980 can meaningfully make
their way in the world twelve years later: we
need a far clearer focus on this material
from the most recent point of view available,
if they are not to seem, collectively,
like objects found in a critical time-capsule.
Dating each of the many references within
the essays might have clarified the individual
time schemes; most of the dates can be
picked up, with some labour, from the bibliography,
admirably thorough for references
before 1981, but distinctly haphazard
(like the essays themselves) thereafter.
In this limited space, I can indicate only a
few of the accomplishments of these sixteen
essays, whether individually or as paired by
topic, that is critical approach. There seem
to have been occasional misunderstandings:
Woodcock writes to say that the criticism
of authors by means of critical
biographies is weak to the point of nonexistence
in Anglo-Canadian prose. (Does he
still find this true in 1990?) Then Laurent
Mailhot follows with a thorough account of
biography, the genre, in Québécois literature,
making the point, almost in passing,
that good biographies of writers are not
numerous. Given these negative conclusions,
their differing starting points, and
the non-centrality of "biographical criticism"
in the current literary scene (as well
as the overlap of Woodcock's essay, stressing
the importance of "public" as against
"academic" criticism, with his introductory
essay a few pages earlier), perhaps this category
should be re-thought.
The controversy over "thematics" links
several of the Anglo-Canadian essays, starting
with Woodcock's; Northrop Frye and
Frank Davey are, by a wide margin, the
critics most often referred to. Both Blodgett
(on thematics) and T.D. MacLulich (on formalism),
try, in different ways, to protect
"good," subtle, sophisticated, thematics
from the obloquy into which Davey and
others have cast the whole approach.
MacLulich does so by his vigorous qualify-
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