To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
ing of Davey as a critic with his own
polemical purpose, one yielding "a morality
play in which Modernism is the villain
and postmodernism the hero." Blodgett
does so byway of the "problematics of thematology,"
as seen from a European comparatist
perspective, while Bonenfant (in a
fruitful overlap of concern regrettably
uncharacteristic of the volume as a whole)
usefully discusses the history of both the
term and the approach as the French
understand it. But Belleau's "sociocritique"
seems lonely in this section, though no one
comes right out and says that Anglo-
Canadians don't do that sort of thing.
André Vanasse's lively and stylishly
metaphorical essay on psychoanalytic criticism
perks up the book, though like many
of the other essayists, the Québécois more
than the Anglo-Canadians, he feels obliged
to run his argument into the dry sands of
survey, with lists of critics and texts.
Vanasse at least (unlike for instance David
Hayne, on "historical" criticism) makes no
vain attempt at thoroughness.
Monk, regretting the lack of psychological,
or even of the more common (in her
useful distinction) psycho-cultural criticism
of Canadian literature as of 1975 (an
awkward closing-off date), leaves it unclear
what difference the past seventeen years
would make to her assessment, while
Godard, whose full and learned paper is
frankly un-updated, lays more stress on
phenomenology and (or against) structuralism
than she would be likely to do
today.
As Philippe Haeck, only a bit unkindly,
puts it—in aphoristic and "journalesque"
formulations which remind us of George
Woodcock's equally eloquent claim for the
virtues of the 'public' critic with which this
collection begins—the criticism of one creative
person by another constitutes "la critique
libre, résolument non académique"
with "vertige" and "joie" unknown to "professeurs
qui coupés de la création citent
abondamment leurs collègues..."
Somehow his essay (1983) seems to have
dated less than some of the others...
Portraits of the Artist
Robert Majzels
Hellman's Scrapbook. Cormorant $14.95
Reviewed by Patricia Merivale
Montreal Anglophone Jewish writing is
the literary 'bridge' between the two more
notorious Canadian solitudes, suggests
Michael Greenstein in Third Solitudes.
Robert Majzels' novel, Hellman's Scrapbook,
seems to have been written expressly to
confirm this generalization.
Hellman's Scrapbook is ludically but unintimidatingly
postmodern in its narrative
tricks and strategies, several of which are
hinted at by the title. It is the Bildungsroman
of a self-conscious, politically sensitive
young Jewish Montrealer, David
Hellman, whose "Bildung" must be put
together by the reader of his antiphonally
structured "scrapbook," constructed in that
home-away-from-home of the Canadian
postmodern narrator, an insane asylum.
(Prochain épisode and The Studhorse Man
come to mind, for starters). It is a growingup-in-Montreal
story, with many echoes
and elements of its predecessors, both
(Jewish) Anglophone (like Richler) and
Francophone (like Victor-Levy Beaulieu),
and numerous relatives abroad, such as
Alexander Portnoy. David's re-telling of, in
order to come to grips with, his father's
sufferings in a Nazi concentration camp
presents interesting parallels with Art
Spiegelman's son-of-a-survivor story, the
two-part comic-strip novel, Maus.
The episodic autobiography of David, as
child, adolescent, and young man, is (on
one level) set into motion by and (on
another) alternates with, the narrative
shadow of his parents' awful past. He
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