A Quarterly of Criticism and Review i^^^^^^^^fcEjfc $15

A Quarterly of Criticism and Review i^^^^^^^^fcEjfc $15

Global/Locals the return of Hong Kong from Britain to Chinaapproached this summer, local and international media chronicled thecountdown and its effects on the Pacific Rim with something resemblingobsession. In Europe over Christmas, I shook my head at an article inFrankfurter Allgemeine (a leading German daily) which appeared to lament"the conquest" of Vancouver by "the Chinese" seeking "refuge" in this"satellite of Hong Kong" (Brigitte Scherer, "Der grosse Sprung iiber denPazifik," Frankfurter Allgemeine, 7 Dec. 1996; my translation). Although sherehearses the stereotypical observations about rising property prices andthe desecration of an Edenic natural environment by "monster houses,"however, the author also writes approvingly of the conversion of what sheconsiders a former hicktown into a global city whose population, hithertounsophisticated and devoted to sports, has learnt from the newcomers toshop in expensive designer stores and relax in outdoor cafes while "so far,the consumption of food outdoors has been prohibited [sic]."The errors in this piece range from the amusing to the infuriating (visastudents at UBC and SFU are rumoured to pay an annual $14,000 in tuitionfees each, and homeowners on the North Shore are said to suspend theirgarbage cans from chains to protect them from "racoons," "evidence of theever-present drama" provided by a "grandiose and cruel natural environment"),but these errors are to a measure typical of the discursive confusionsattending "rimspeak" (Bruce Cumings, "Rimspeak; or The Discourse of the'Pacific Rim'," What Is In a Rim?) generally and the rhetoric surroundingthe Hong Kong turnover in the Western media in particular. Returned toNorth America, I was instantly confronted with a series of articles on thesubject in the New York Times which, while not as scurillous as the item inFrankfurter Allgemeine, still trotted out a predictable mix of economic hype

Editorialand cultural cliché. Both the Vancouver Sun and the Globe and Mail havepursued the topic assiduously. Here, the misconceptions are perhaps not asglaring, but there is still ethnic innuendo galore. On a recent weekend, forinstance, the Sun featured a four-page report on "Hong Kong and Us," whilethe Globe translated art appreciation into stockbroker's jargon by declaring"the Asian cultural community on Canada's West Coast [to be] hot, hot,hot" (Chris Dafoe, "East Heats West," Globe and Mail, May 3,1997).Analysts of "rimspeak" have pointed out how its practitioners tend to positthe Pacific Rim as the quintessential postmodern space, all mobility andglobal access, but in describing the region's characteristics still adhere toentrenched binary constructs derived from orientalism or frontierism. Nevertheless,three remarkable recent collections of critical essays—What Is In a Rim*.Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea, ed. Arif Dirlik (1993), Asia/Pacificas Space of Cultural Production, eds. Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik (1995), andGlobal/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, eds. RobWilson and Wimal Dissanayake (1996), the first published by WestviewPress, the remainder by Duke University Press—go some considerable waytoward disentangling not only the corporate rhetoric of "rimspeak" but alsothe cultural studies lingo posturing as its analytic superior: "Too much ofcultural studies, in this era of uneven globalization and the two-tier informationhighway, can sound like a way of making the world safe and userfriendlyfor global capital and the culture of the commodity form" (RobWilson and Wimal Dissanayake, "Introduction," Global/Local). Workingfrom a variety of perspectives ranging from anthropology and geography topolitics and history, and drawing on literature, film, journalism, polemic andother forms of discourse, the essays collected in these three volumes remainalert to social injustice and uneven modernization, to orientalisms revivedor re-invented, and to energetic localisms which insist on formulating theirown imaginary, "transnationalization, that master-narrative of globalizedproduction" (Wilson, Dissanayake 4) notwithstanding.Thus, Karen Kelsky discusses alternatives to the Madama Butterfly mythwhich, with its vision of the East as feminine, mysterious, and passivelyready to give up its riches, continues to influence Western economic thinking,as headlines such as "Wooing the Orient: With Cash Reserves and GrowthRates on the Rise" (Ottawa Business Life, April 1988) or "Westerners [Are]Told Far East [Is] Glittering with Opportunity" [Calgary Herald, 13 Feb 1988)will readily attest. Kelsky, an anthropologist, describes the phenomenon of

the "yellow cabs," that is, Japanese women who aggressively pursue gajinmen in Hawaiian and other resorts, in deliberate provocation of Japanesepatriarchy and the deference expected of women within it. Kelsky, however,does not idealize this phenomenon into an act of feminist defiance, butrefers to "the forces of commodification [that] can dominate even as theyliberate desire" (Karen Kelsky, "Flirting with the Foreign: Interracial Sex inJapan's 'International' Age," in Global/Local). Donald Nonini, in "On theOuts on the Rim: An Ethnographic Grounding of the 'Asia-Pacific'" (WhatIs In a Rim, 161-82), agrees with bell hooks and, more recently, InderpalGrewal's contention that the study of travel has privileged Western conceptsof leisure and culture traffic and has failed to investigate involuntary mobilitiessuch as those enforced by labour inequalities or political unrest. Traveland tourism are also one of the bones of contention in the fiery and veryimportant ongoing debate between anthropologist Joyce Linnekin and theHawaiian sovreigntist Haunani-Kay Trask over questions of cultural appropriation,as chronicled in Jeffrey Tobin's "Cultural Construction and NativeNationalism: Report from the Hawaiian Front" (Asia/Pacific).Perhaps the most illuminating observations in the context of the HongKong turnover and its impact on the Pacific Rim occur in the geographerKatharyne Mitchell's essays in Asia/Pacific and Global/Local on changes inthe city of Vancouver. She speaks about the results of a massive influx ofimmigration and of the emergence of a new global citizen (although herobservations here seem to generalize the experience of a proportionatelysmall number of extremely privileged individuals). She also investigates thesystematic challenge to unexamined racial prejudice initiated by researchinitiatives like the Laurier Institute. Drawing on a wide variety of phenomena,Mitchell's work eschews the facile conclusions about the turnover that thepress all too often reiterates and instead develops the case of Vancouver intoa paradigm of multiculturalism as a policy "not naturally emancipatory, but[one which] must be constantly monitored and interrogated" ("In WhoseInterest? Transnational Capital and the Production of Multiculturalism inCanada," Global/Local).I read these books with relief, finding in essay after essay a patient attentivenessto the complexities of cultural identity and exchange, and anequally impressive determination to expose racism and exploitation, howeverwell disguised they might be. E.-M.K.

RobertB r i n g h u r s tZhàozhou CongshenCan't step twiceinto the same river, VisitingProfessor Herakleitos said.Zhàozhou rose. Sir, he said, farover your head there,treading flowing water,or standing in the middleof your one-inch squareof dry rock,five thousand miles from the closestshore, whereelse do you expect to step?Quite, said Herakleitos,and how oftencan you step there?Left right left, sang Zhàozhou,marching out the door.

MiguelMotaThe Tyranny of WordsMalcolm Lowry's Tender Is the NightWhen in 1949, in Dollarton, British Columbia,Malcolm Lowry turned from the novels and short stories he had in progressto work with his wife Margerie on a nlmscript, the massive project that suddenlyinspired him became central to his career as a writer and essential inhis struggle for personal spiritual redemption. 1 What began as a brief treatmentgrew by the spring of 1950 into a 455-page typescript adaptation of EScott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. 1 "We have become possessed by TenderIs the Night," Lowry wrote in a September 1949 letter to his contact inHollywood, Frank Taylor, "... I myself have never felt so creatively exhilaratedsince writing the better parts of the Volcano" (Cinema 19). Though theLowry filmscript retains many of the characters and some of the situationsof Fitzgerald's story, it nonetheless differs markedly from it. Among numerousre-writings, there are lengthy, completely original sections dealing withDick Diver in New York and on a mercantile ship to Europe, a dramaticallyrevised ending, and an overall Expressionist filmic aesthetic that aligns thescript much more with Lowry's other writings than with Fitzgerald's novel.Lowry's manuscript was the only major piece of writing that he completedafter Under the Volcano (1947); yet until its recent publication it remained arelatively obscure, eccentric document. 3 Even a recent reviewer of the publishedscript, though generally praising the screenplay, nevertheless suggeststhat Lowry undertook the task of adapting Fitzgerald's novel as a way ofavoiding his own writing (Binns 37). And for more explicit corroboration ofthis kind of indictment, we have biographer Douglas Day's comment that it10

was the later opinion of Frank Taylor—an opinion which Day does not contest—thatLowry "had taken on the scriptwriting chore as an excuse not todo his own work" (Day 422). 4The scarcity of critical writing and support surrounding the filmscript isindicative of the way in which response to a text, what Gerard Genette hascalled the horizon d'attente of the reader, is to a significant extent determinedby an assessment of its generic classification. To suggest that Lowrywas unable to do both Tender Is the Night and his "own work" is to distancethe filmscript from Lowry's other fiction and imply a hierarchy withinLowry's body of writing in which the script is accorded secondary status. Infact, Lowry's Tender Is the Night is a serious and significant literary work,and any insistence on first labelling it "simply" a filmscript and then categorizingthat genre as implicitly inferior denies the text both its multi-genericstatus and its important connections to Lowry's concerns as a writer. Bylimiting the script within generic boundaries, it becomes possible toemphasize its conventional shortcomings. 5 Such criticism, however, positsan actual film produced out of, but separate from, the physical writing containedwithin the text. A different and more productive study of the scriptmust first examine the writing that such a film would displace, a writingthat in this case is highly self-reflexive and passionately involved with theconditions of words themselves. The fact that Lowry had Fitzgerald's readymadematerial in front of him undoubtedly functioned as practical impetusfor Lowry's sudden obsession with the project at this time. The realization,however, that he was faced with having to transform someone else's wordsinto his own vehicle for self-representation also exacerbated Lowry's anxietiesabout language and self-authorization. For in the script Lowry mostclearly gives expression to his ambivalent and troubled relationship with thewritten word and looks to the different medium of film as the means bywhich he might successfully overcome the predicaments and exigencies oflinguistic representation. The filmscript is thus essential to an understandingof the fiction of Malcolm Lowry, accentuating concerns with whichLowry continually struggled, in particular foregrounding and illuminatinghis central obsession as a writer: the individual's arduous encounter withlanguage in his desire to represent himself.Brian O'Kill has called attention to what he terms a "strangulated hyperarticulacy"in the writings of Malcolm Lowry. "We witness an intense strugglewith language: a man not knowing which language to use, not even11

Lowryconfident that he speaks any language, feeling himself to be in a small curiouslinguistic recess, having great difficulty in writing at all, sometimeswishing that he were free from 'the tyranny of prose'" (180). One way inwhich Lowry attempts to overcome this tyranny is to embrace languagefully in all its excesses. Lowry loved words, and he took pleasure in pushingthem to their limits. But while Lowry embraced language, he also feared it.He was made anxious by its contradictions, its ambivalences and vicissitudes,its inescapable, uncontrollable interpretations. For all his obviousenchantment with words, Lowry also saw them as a threat.This struggle is often explicitly dramatized within Lowry's stories. InUnder the Volcano, for example, the sign in the garden—LE GUSTA ESTEJARDIN QUE ES SUYO? EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!—bothin its literal meaning and in the Consul's "misreading" of it, 6 functions as agraphic linguistic reminder of the threat under which the Consul lives, athreat here manifest at least in part by the very strangeness (to English eyes)of the words on the sign. (Significantly, these are the final words of thenovel.) In a related context, it is the Babel of voices in the bar Farolito duringthe novel's final scenes, with seemingly disembodied words appearing toliterally fly at the Consul from all sides, that prefigures the Consul's demise.Similarly, in both October Ferry to Gabriola and "The Forest Path to theSpring," signs threaten to control, or at least significantly affect, the protagonists'lives.Such dramatic manifestations of the threat of words are evident throughoutLowry's work, but this anxiety more significantly haunts Lowry at abroader level of writing. In a June 1950 letter to his Vancouver friend DownieKirk, Lowry expressed his fascination with Ortega y Gasset's notion of manas "novelist of himself" (Selected Letters 210)/ And in a 1953 letter to his editor,Albert Erskine, he spoke in detail of "Ortega's fellow, making up his lifeas he goes along, and trying to find his vocation" (Letters 331). Lowry hopedthat his belief in this notion of "man as novelist of himself," in "Ortega'sfellow," would allow him to escape becoming a character in someoneelse's novel. But he also understood all too well the inescapable, inexorablefact that these fictions or constructions of the self, however protean, howevermuch they might purport finally to be the product of an autonomous,authoritative subjectivity, existed nowhere but in language and were thusvulnerable to appropriation by other voices, subject to other discourses ofauthority. In a suggestive reading of Lowry's association of writing with12

self-entrapment and death, Patrick McCarthy has recently shown how theConsul in Under the Volcano fears the completion of writing because it willsignify his loss of control over the self-identity that is constructed within it(45). 8 This certainly accounts for the Consul's refusal to rest on any one ofthe series of provisionally held rhetorical postures within which he lives.Undoubtedly, Lowry himself dreaded the same loss of control. But if on theone hand he celebrated language's open-endedness, even its indeterminacy,as a way of avoiding closure and thus subjection, on the other hand Lowry,who sought to write himself in and through his writings, simultaneouslyfeared the destabilizing, the loss of grounding, of self that such indeterminacywould inevitably effect. 9 Though words were Lowry's necessary toolsin the process of his self-making, those same words would nonethelessthreaten the self's control and authority as the author became subjected byand to language. Thus, while Lowry at times celebrated the open-endednessof language, he also feared for the self caught in language and defined alongwith everything else as a component in the discursive field. In 1949, in hisand Margerie's shack at Dollarton, mired in the composition of Dark as theGrave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, a kind of gloss on the writing of Under theVolcano and a text which would come to illustrate the inherent difficulties inthe notion of "man as novelist of himself," Lowry turned to the filmscript ofTender Is the Night./\mong his examples of methods available to writers intheir search for voice, O'Kill cites what he calls a "style of transcription."This he defines as "using language which is, or professes to be, objective... .[The writer] can do this by putting into his work apparent transcriptions ofexternal reality—the language of public notices, signposts, menus, advertisementhoardings" (181). 10 By the time Lowry began working on Tender Isthe Night, he had already made use of signs, posters and advertisements inhis writing, most notably in Under the Volcano, and would do so again inOctober Ferry to Gabriola." In the filmscript, he contextualizes and justifiesthe use of such graphics and insists on their effectiveness on numerous levels."Cinematically speaking we might indeed here be right back in thephantasmagoric world of Murnau," Lowry writes of his use of signs. In thefilmscript, as in Lowry's other work, these graphics include words themselves.But because the envisioned final product in this case is a film, thesewords take on a peculiarly significant status.

LowryAccording to Lowry's view of his own work, no part of the project wasinessential to its intricately planned structure. It is possible to make a distinction,though, between writing which appears intended as background(though still significant) material, perhaps to remain unnoticed by themajority of viewers, and writing which is clearly foregrounded. Many of thereferences in the script to film titles, to names of plays on theatre marquees,to road signs, etc., fall into the former category. At times, however, Lowrypositions words on the screen so that it is impossible to miss their physicalpresence. There are numerous instances throughout the script of such useof the written word. When, for example, we first see, through Dick's memory,Dr. Dohmler's sanatorium in Zurich where Nicole has been brought byher sister Baby, the script dramatizes Nicole's condition through the use ofwords on a written report:The camera starts forward to focus on the report, and we see what is written,small, but coming closer and larger as we move in. First we see it as overDohmler's shoulder, written in Gothic German handwriting. Before we havegrasped this it has turned to French as we move up towards it:Diagnostic: Schizophrénie. Phase aiguë en décroissance.Before we have read even this much it has changed into English so that by thetime we have come up to it we can read it clearly:Diagnosis: Divided Personality. Acute and downhill phase of the illness.The fear...The other words are blurred and while we are reading, the words DividedPersonality have changed into the one word Schizophrenia, their anglo-Greekand more terrifying counterpart. The other words all drop away, and on thescreen, surcharged with horror and menace, accentuated by music, and comingstraight out of the screen at us, the one word:SCHIZOPHRENIA {Cinema 93; UBC 144)Clearly here the words themselves are meant to overwhelm the viewer'sconsciousness.Similarly, in the script's long New York sequence, the electric headlinesthat rotate round the top of the Times Building provide Lowry with countlessopportunities to emphasize the materiality of words. The screenbecomes engulfed by contemporary headlines which, as Dick watches,inevitably begin to act strangely:IDEOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES MAY . . . (the news can't make up its mind, addsincongruously) OSWEGO NEW BRUNSWICK . . . OUTBREAKS OF ... It is standinglike this when Dick looks up from his newspaper; everything suddenly blacksout save the ID of ideological at the very beginning and the EGO of Oswego; then,for a few seconds, either the Times Building goes mad or Dick has a delusion:

Lowrystopped talking more than a necessary moment or two here) Absolutely final . . .We'll be glad to see you. No, I said glad. G for Grand Guignol, L for Lanier, A forabracadabra, D for damnation. Glad. (Dick hangs up, throwing away the lastwords in the act.) (Cinema 127-28; UBC 230-31)On one level, of course, the words in these scenes are intended as graphicexpressions of Dick's consciousness, what Lowry sees as the consciousnessof humanity. The words atop the Times Building enact a herculean, universalpsychological struggle while simultaneously dramatizing Dick's particularpredicament. Similarly, the words from the telegrams convey Dick'scrisis in which (as yet unaware that the two are inseparable) he must choosebetween personal freedom and responsibility, with key words—LIFE,TIGHT, FREE, STOP—apparently shifting their allegiance at will. Insofaras these words operate in this manner, their function is largely thematic,determined to serve the purpose of the narrative.Yet these words on screen acquire additional significance which has littleto do with the actual narrative, though much to say about Lowry's relationshipwith words themselves. In his introduction to his recent study of writingin film, Tom Conley argues that writing can induce "a linear readingof an image, but its own nondiscursive traits can jostle or complicate itsmeaning enough to make of its signs a tabular, pictural, even tactile ensembleof letters" (xi). Its own form, in other words, can alienate the viewer/reader to the extent that the word itself can be analyzed graphically. Thisview of the written word is in fact suggested by Dick's own breaking downof the word "Glad" into each of its components: "G for Grand Guignol, Lfor Lanier, A for abracadabra, D for damnation. Glad" (Cinema 128; UBC231). By laying bare its composition, Lowry encourages us to confront theword as a constructed object, an entity unto itself, which can be brokenapart and played with: "G for Grand Guignol, L for Lanier," etc. Apart fromany of their other possible meanings, then, words become concrete objectson the screen and enter into relationships with human individuals, relationshipsin which they not only function as expressions of those individualsbut also at times as their masters. The word on screen in the Lowrys'script, then, often represents what we may call the tyranny of the object.Though the idea of the malevolence of objects and their power over theindividual can be traced back to nineteenth-century reaction to the mechanizationof everyday life, this obsession with objects also has its antecedentsin silent film. 12 As John Barlow has pointed out, where early American films16

(Chaplin's, for example) found comedy in the struggle of individuals withobjects, the German films of the 1920s, particularly the Expressionist filmswhich Lowry so loved and which so clearly influenced his script, usedobjects to "express the tragic hopelessness of the human predicament." 13"Individuals," Barlow argues, "fight with the objects that challenge them inthe American movies, and we laugh; they are overcome by them in theGerman movies, and we shudder" (135).This ambivalence surrounding the relationship between object and individualis central in the Tender Is the Night filmscript. Though it may notmake us laugh, for example, there is certainly comedy of a different sort inthe portrayal of one of the most significant objects in the script, the Divers'Isotta. Intended to replace the incest motif of Fitzgerald's novel, Nicole's caraccident (in which her father is killed) is meant to convey, superficially atleast, the origins of Nicole's illness. Later, the car takes on further ominousovertones when Nicole, during one of her breakdowns, is responsible for aserious accident during the family's return to Switzerland. Yet the car alsoallows Lowry to explore the possibility of freedom and hope. While theIsotta represents illness, doom, and menace at the story's beginning, itfinally stands as the sign of Nicole's freedom when she drives, alone, fromthe beach to the Villa Diana near the end. The car becomes that whichmarks the transformation from damnation to redemption.In the case of the word, though, the relationship between object and individualis more ambiguous and uncertain. Certainly, Lowry's camera oftenappears obsessed with words, specifically with words as objects. Barlow haspointed out that in Expressionist film, "[t]he camera tends to dwell on certainobjects ... and the actors hover about them, handle them, even seem tosubmit to them, as if the force that moved the action and determined thecharacters' destinies were contained in these things" (137). At the level of plot,it is Baby Warren's letter to Dick in Glion {Cinema113; UBC 20-01), askinghim to escort Nicole back to Zurich (after Dick has apparently completed asuccessful emotional break from Nicole), that initiates Dick's fate and precipitatesmuch of what follows. But it is the pervasive presence of words onscreen and their seemingly overbearing effect on both characters and viewersthat in the Lowrys' script best exemplifies the attempt to represent thetyranny of objects. For although these words are often intended as graphicarticulations of internal consciousness or struggle, just as frequently theyappear to exert control over the individual, in effect subjecting him or her.

LowrySeen as a pictural surface, as Conley has argued, "the letters of a title canbe broken apart, splayed and recombined," and he detects in such activitythe freedom of the viewer "to see writing as a compositional design that haseverything—as well as nothing—to do with what is meant" (xi-xii). Butthough he might at times encourage such playfulness, Lowry never allowsus to forget the tyranny of the object itself. He finally forces us to confrontthe words on the screen as objects ("visual weapons" he calls them in hisnotes (30)), objects over which no one seems to exert any control, as is suggestedby Lowry's practice of pairing them in the script directions withactive rather than passive verbs: "words ... keep sliding up"; "'agrees'refuses to move"; "DIS suddenly inserts itself"; "POSSIBLE disappears";"the ID swoops"; "the EGO still holds"; "the news can't make up its mind."The self's subjection to language is here represented to the extent that wordsreveal their own independence and superimpose themselves upon the individual.Once given expression, language appears to take on an autonomythat at times threatens to dictate the individual's fate and authority.Dramatized here is a struggle between self and language in which the latterthreatens to subject the former, a struggle that in Lowry's case translatesinto an anxious fear of losing control over his own life-writing. He hadcome to literally dread Under the Volcano's power over him, its threat to ineffect rewrite him as the Consul. 14 With the filmscript of Tender Is the Nighthe hoped to refashion himself as the heroic and redemptive figure of DickDiver. 15 Yet he seemed now to doubt that he could accomplish this withinthe medium of words. The difficulty lay for Lowry in the heterogeneity andelusiveness of the written word, with its formidable challenge to the authorityof the coherent, individual author. Never hesitant to take advantage ofthe possibilities offered by his modern technological world, Lowry quicklyseized upon the film camera as the most appropriate vehicle through whichhe believed he could successfully put the object back in its place, therebyguaranteeing the self's coherence. The written word would not standbetween him and his self-making.In his portrayal in the filmscript of the relationship between theword/object and the individual, Lowry finally embraced a paradox. As wehave already seen, he attempted to present a kind of allegory of the strugglebetween the writer and his words, dramatizing the latter's ability to subjectthe author, thus breaking down the traditional stable relationship betweenself and language. At the same time, by turning to the medium of film, as I18

will now try to show, Lowry articulated a desire to affirm and celebrate theauthenticity of the object (including the word as object) on the screen. In sodoing, he hoped to correspondingly posit the authenticity of the self andattempt to re-establish its stability.In the filmscript Lowry reveals his desire to embrace filmas the medium which would allow him to transcend the play of language byapparently solidifying the boundaries of the written word and reaffirming theprimacy of his own authority. Not surprisingly, Lowry stands precariouslybalanced between two opposing views of cinematic articulation, and heexpresses a wilfully self-contradictory attitude toward filmic representation.Though, as one would expect given his predilection for Expressionist representationalstrategies, he argues that film manipulates, amplifies, transformswhatever stands before the camera, Lowry nonetheless repeatedly insists onfilm's capacity to mechanically record the fullness and plenitude of the profilmicevent, to provide an objective rendering of the material world. In thishe resembles those who like Siegfried Kracauer claimed that through cinemaviewers could recover the "crude and unnegotiated presence of naturalobjects" (164), or who like André Bazin insisted on the "essentially objectivecharacter" of the photographic image (13). 16 As Kaja Silverman has argued,such faith in the "indexical relation of the camera to the profilmic event" (9)signals a desire to compensate for the loss inherent in the cinematicprocess—that is, the loss of the physical presence of the object itself. It wasprecisely this apparently lost stable object, with its necessarily correspondinglost coherent subject, that Lowry wished to recuperate.Muriel Bradbrook has suggested that Lowry "learnt from the cinema theart of suggestion, of collocation without comment, and transposed it intohis own medium" (67). The assumption that film can "collocate withoutcomment" seems questionable, for it denies the role of selection, apparatusand so on, in the filmic process. Yet Lowry often perceived film as functioningin precisely this innocent, disinterested way, revealing a desire for immediacyand lack of mediation perfectly in keeping with his insistence that filmimages could be uniquely profound because "fully realised—ten pages ofcondensed naturalistic technique at a blow each time they appear" {Notes15). As Paul Tiessen has noted, Lowry's "faith in the film image's ability tomove man seemed to surpass his faith in the ability of the literary image todo the same" ("Statements" 123). And this ability to move seemed for Lowry

Lowryto exist first and foremost in what he perceived as film's capacity to fullypresent to the audience the object already there, whole and complete.Lowry insisted on an existential bond linking the cinematic image to thephenomenal world. Like Kracauer, he believed that the power of the cameralay in its ability to seem as if it had "just now extricated [natural objects]from the womb of physical existence and as if the umbilical cord betweenimage and actuality had not yet been severed" (Kracauer 164).This is made explicit in Lowry's other attempt at an adaptation for film, the27-page screenplay for his short story, "The Bravest Boat." 17 The script begins:In long shot we see the rip-teeth of the winter-white mountains across the bay;closer in, the combers riding in toward shore; and close-up, what was there allalong: the single flare of a rain-drenched blossom on a flowering tree (1)The script directions here emphasize the role of the camera in recordingwhat was already there, "what was there all along." The blossom, in otherwords, is presented as possessing an autonomous (and poetically romantic)existence outside of the camera's perspective. The camera has no need to"create" the flower; it simply records its presence. Immediately following,during a description of a squirrel, the script directions insist that "He is neitherafraid nor curious; above all, he is not cute; he is merely a squirrel" (1).Again here the camera functions as objective observer and recorder; itremains non-judgmental, non-creative. Elsewhere, "the camera" is depictedas noting "without comment" (6) and as capturing suddenly also "anothersound which we haven't been aware of although it has been going on" (2).Such statements of belief in the camera's intrinsic objectivity have theirprecedent in the filmscript of Tender Is the Night and its accompanyingnotes. In the latter, Lowry expresses his trust in the ability of the camera tocapture the "superior power of the outer world," the "objectively real"(Notes 43). The very first scene in the script, calling for a panoramic shotreminiscent of the opening passage of Under the Volcano, begins with "atremendous shot of the night sky, the stars blazing" (47), and moves graduallydown to the words on a sign in a field, establishing the camera's capacityto capture the "objectively real" in all its fullness. Soon after, in one ofthe script's early scenes, Lowry writes that "the feeling should be ... of suchintensive realism that we feel ourselves actually to be on the beach" (52).Lowry was searching for a grounding of meaning and thus of self that hebelieved the camera's function as a mechanical recorder of the materialworld could provide. Though he saw the concreteness of the cinematic20

image as the basis upon which he could build a more subjective vision, thefocus on the materiality of the film image remains throughout. Though hebelieved that "the camera's evocative power is much greater than that ofwords, for it can say several things at once" (60), he also believed that suchevocation could somehow be controlled in a film in a way that would beimpossible to emulate on the written page.The medium of film afforded Lowry the opportunity to ground hisprocess of self-making in the "objectively real." And it allowed him, in a waythat he felt the written word never would, to enact a process of sharedhuman experience in the apprehension of the filmic depiction of the materialworld. Whatever room for the individual imagination the cameraallowed, Lowry believed that film had the unique capacity to involve a communityof viewers in a shared reality. Furthermore, he insisted that there wasan "inevitability" in the movement of film (Tiessen "Statements" 132). In hisnotes, he spoke of the audience as being "at the mercy of the momentum ofthe film itself" {Notes 9), and in October Ferry to Gabriola, his protagonist,Ethan, responds thus to the inexorable progression of the film: "And againstsuch a predetermined doom, as against one's fate in the nightmare, finallyyou rebel! How? when the film will always end in the same way anyhow?"(133). Implicit here is a desire to equate the inevitability of the film's movementand images with the inevitability of the viewer's interpretation of thoseimages, an interpretation which in effect would be formed for the viewer byLowry himself. Lowry believed in film's inherent capacity to capture andconvey a specific reality that can—indeed must—be shared by all viewers, ina way that the written word cannot hope to emulate. Thus his insistencethat film concern itself (as the script of Tender Is the Night did) with the"ennoblement of man." If film had a unique ability to move an audience andto unite them in the process of their apprehension of the film image, thenthe film of Tender Is the Night would take full advantage of that ability andmove that audience upwards, taking Dick Diver and Lowry with them. 18Much has been written about the "cinematic" qualities of Lowry's writing,but most of this commentary too easily elides the significant distinction inLowry's mind between the written word and the film image. Lowry's movementfrom page to screen reveals a desire for autonomy and authority, for amore strict interpretation of "reality," based on an insistence (however naiveor emotional) that the film image denotes the "real" more immediately andeffectively than the written word. If Lowry was to be successful in his literary21

L o w r yself-making, he needed to arrest the meaning of the literary work. Yet by thesimple though complicating fact that he undertook this task in language,such a project was impossible. This led him into a paradoxical engagementwith the idea of the object. While he sought in the filmscript to representthe word as object and dramatize its threat to the self, by turning to themedium of film he simultaneously placed his faith in what he saw as thefilm camera's unique capacity to ground meaning in the object through itsdepiction of the profilmic event.Thus, though the object on the page (as word) represented that againstwhich Lowry struggled in his self-making, the object on the screen becamethe means by which he sought to stabilize and ground meaning and, byextension, the self. Whereas words—his own words—would always remainelusive and thus threatening, film would offer a chance for personalredemption arising out of the shared experience of author, character, andaudience. In place of a solipsistic, weary Consul literally battered by words,Lowry foresaw the figure of Dick Diver sacrificing himself heroically amidsta community of viewers who would be transported by the simple force ofthe medium itself. The fact remains, of course, that the film of Tender Is theNight exists nowhere but in words, thus obviously complicating Lowry'shopes for such redemption. Yet though Lowry's camera thus never achievesmore than the status of metaphor, Lowry's filmscript nonetheless remainsas his most ardent, even desperate, expression of an inevitably unfulfilleddesire to overcome "the tyranny of prose."NOTESI wish to acknowledge the assistance of the Social Sciences and Humanities ResearchCouncil of Canada during the writing of this paper.1 Though the figure of Margerie Bonner Lowry (as editor and collaborator) problematizesall that has been published under Malcolm Lowry's name, in this case the issue ofauthorship is particularly relevant. The title page of the filmscript includes both theirnames, and in an April 1952 letter to Albert Erskine at Random House in which heexpressed hopes of using the script to meet the publisher's demands for a book, Lowryvoiced concern about the "joint authorship" (Selected Letters308). Although in thispaper my interest lies in what I take to be Malcolm Lowry's personal stake in the project,I want to acknowledge here that Margerie Lowry's involvement in the writing of thefilmscript challenges the attribution of the work to Malcolm Lowry alone. Consequently,when I refer to Malcolm Lowry, I do so keeping in mind that this construct is here constitutedby the relationship between two people.2 Lowry's filmscript was never filmed. It has recently been published in edited form in TheCinema of Malcolm Lowry. The original typescript is housed in the Malcolm LowryCollection at the University of British Columbia Library, Box 23, Folders 15-17.22

References in the text are to page numbers in both the edited script (as Cinema pg.) andthe original manuscript (as UBC pg.). The script was circulated in Hollywood by Lowry'scontact in the industry, his former editor Frank Taylor. Among others Taylor tried tointerest MGM and David Selznick, whose own interest in Fitzgerald's novel led to theeventual production of Tender Is the Night by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1962. Taylor hasrecently indicated that he sent Lowry's script to Selznick and scriptwriter Ivan Moffatafter Selznick, who had earlier sold the screen rights to the novel to MGM, repurchasedthe rights. However, they did not, according to Taylor, read the script.3 For good, though rare, early critical assessments, see Perlmutter and Tiessen, "Statements."Lowry's own extensive notes to the script (hereafter cited in the text as Notes) were publishedseparately as Notes on a Screenplay for F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. Thevolume features not Lowry, but a prominent photograph of Fitzgerald on its cover.4 Though Gordon Bowker, Lowry's most recent biographer, briefly discusses the script, henevertheless refers to it as a "disruption" (Bowker 461). In the book's index, Tender Is theNight appears under Fitzgerald's name but not Lowry's.5 Binns is justified in criticizing Lowry's Tender Is the Night as filmscript. As a screenplay, itin no way measures up to the "professional" Hollywood work of writers such as Faulkneror Fitzgerald (nor, for that matter, of countless "lesser" Hollywood hacks). Yet to judge itonly or principally on those terms (as Binns himself pointedly does not) would be to doLowry's work a disservice. When Faulkner wrote The Road to Glory (1936) or FitzgeraldThree Comrades (1938), they were composing, first and foremost, professional Hollywoodscreenplays and they were doing so from within a specific community that structured theconventions within which they could work. Lowry's Tender Is the Night, though ostensiblya filmscript, recklessly breaks generic boundaries (though it must be granted that suchadventurousness is often the result of ignorance of both the craft and the practical demandsof the Hollywood production machinery). In his afterword to The Road to Glory, GeorgeGarrett cautions us not to overlook "the essence of the creative process in movie making—thatit is corporate, that it is political, also, in the sense that the final product is achoice arrived at through constant negotiation and compromise," and he adds that "allthis was obviously understood by William Faulkner" (164). Whether it would have beenunderstood also by Malcolm Lowry had the filmscript raised more interest in Hollywoodis impossible to say. He referred to the work as a "blueprint" and repeatedly assuredFrank Taylor that he understood that the script might need further work. But unlikeFaulkner or Fitzgerald, Lowry was far from the world of Hollywood exigencies (he hadunsuccessfully tried to get work in the industry in 1936), and his writing reveals littleawareness of studio politics. Rather than a "professional" screenplay, then, Lowry'sTender Is the Night may best be described as a celebration of a cinematic imaginationenacted within a literary context that never hesitates to break generic conventions.6 Literally, the sign translates as "Do you like this garden that is yours? Prevent your childrenfrom destroying it!" The Consul portentously misreads it as "You like this garden?Why is it yours? We evict those who destroy!" (Under the Volcano, 128).7 Lowry is alluding to the "History as a System" section of Ortega y Gasset's History as aSystem and Other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History. On Lowry and Ortega, see Grace"Consciousness" and Virgili.8 On the relationship between writing and death from which McCarthy partly draws hisargument, see Foucault, "Language to Infinity" and "What Is an Author?" in Language,Counter-Memory, Practice.9 In "Language to Infinity," Foucault speaks of the inescapable excessiveness of language:

Lowry"Excessive because language can no longer avoid multiplying itself—as if struck fromwithin by a disease of proliferation" (65). But he also questions whether such excess doesnot lead to a loss of "ontological weight." Language's excess makes it "fated to extenditself to infinity without ever acquiring the weight that might immobilize it" (65).10 In the context of Lowry's writing as autobiography, Sue Vice reminds us of the "realistparadox that more words bring greater verbal opacity," "minutely detailed descriptionmoves steadily away from its object" (124). One way in which Lowry attempted to solvethis problem, Vice argues, was to allow the story to be told at times by "an assemblage ofautonomous words" (125), such as those on signs, posters, etc.11 For discussions of the typographical qualities of Under the Volcano, see Costa, Tiessen"Malcolm Lowry and the Cinema" and Grace Regression. Both Tiessen and Grace notethe influence of film in this context.12 "Things, inanimate objects," John Barlow has argued, "played an important role in thesilent cinema" (135). This is particularly true in German films of the period. "TheGermans," Lotte Eisner writes, "used as they are to savage legends, have an eerie gift foranimating objects... . Animate objects always seem to haunt German narcissism" (23).13 For lucid, insightful discussions of Lowry and Expressionism, see Grace "MalcolmLowry" and Regression.14 See Jewison: " Under the Volcano both validates the concept of world as text and shows how,if the will is destroyed, the library destroys life. The author/narrator is writing, but theprotagonist, because of a lack of will, has succumbed to the fate that Sigbjorn Wildernesswill later experience in 'Through the Panama'; he has allowed himself to be written. Hehas become product instead of process" (144). Lowry feared becoming product himself; hefeared being written, in effect, by and through the Consul. But he also was made deeplyanxious, I argue, by the possibility of losing self-coherence and stability through process.15 Lowry's Diver differs significantly from Fitzgerald's. While in the novel, Dick is left to avague, somewhat dingy end, moving from one small American town to another, in theLowrys' script he exits in a blaze of glory, going down valiantly and heroically in a sinkingship after having enacted the ultimate sacrifice for Nicole. Fitzgerald critics familiar withthe Lowrys' filmscript have not been generous toward the choice of ending. Phillips writes:"One must say in favor of the Lowry script that at least it did not reduce the plot line ofthe novel to superficial melodrama, as Fitzgerald's own scenario tended to do. On theother hand, the ending which Lowry supplied for his film version of the book is not anymore acceptable than the one that Fitzgerald himself had devised for his own adaptationof the novel" (139). (Fitzgerald had himself collaborated with Charles Warren in 1934 ona film treatment of Tender Is the Night.) Dunlap adds that Dick's "obscurely drawn-outpurgatory in the American hinterlands is a far more terrible and appropriate" kind ofending than that constructed by Lowry (285). Dunlap fails to notice that a "terrible" endis not what Lowry has in mind for his Dick Diver, and neither critic considers Lowry'sown significant emotional and psychological investment in the revised ending.16 "For the first time," Bazin adds, "between the originating object and its reproductionthere intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent. For the first time an imageof the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man. ... Inspite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real theexistence of the object reproduced" (13).17 Composition date for the screenplay is unknown. Day writes that Lowry completed theshort story by November 1,1951 (426). It was accepted for publication by the PartisanReview in 1954, and it is likely that the script was written after this. As late as 1956, in a

letter to David Markson in which he alludes to the story, of which he is "very fond"(Letters 385), Lowry makes no mention of the script. The screenplay is at UBC 7-18.References are to page numbers within the script.18 See Falk: "Lowry's plans for a 'drunken Divine Comedy' rested on a schematically simplepattern of self-transcendence, a ceaseless striving upward" (54). In a "preface" to thefilmscript, Lowry asks: "Is there any valid reason for literature and the movies to portrayman as ignoble and mean? How have we got that way?... Surely one place for this to becorrected is the film" (8). "Man wants to be drawn upwards. (Even should the protagonistgo downwards)," Lowry argues (10), projecting onto the audience his own desire forredemption. The manuscript of the Lowrys' preface (UBC 23-14) consists of abouttwenty-eight pages, mostly typed but also hand-written in parts. There is no conclusiveevidence as to whether a final typed draft was ever composed and sent to Taylor. Thepreface, introduced and edited by Paul Tiessen, has been published as "A few itemsculled from what started out to be a sort of preface to a film-script."WORKS CITEDBarlow, John D. German Expressionist Film. Boston: Twayne, 1982.Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? 2 vols. Selected and translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley:University of California Press, 1967,1971.Binns, Ronald. "Lowry's 'Tender Is the Night'." The Malcolm Lowry Review 27 (Fall 1990):35-44-Bowker, Gordon. Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry. Toronto: Random House, 1993.Bradbrook, M.C. Malcolm Lowry: His Art & Early Life. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1974.Conley, Tom. Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema. Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1991.Costa, Richard Hauer. "The Grisly Graphics of Malcolm Lowry." Apparently IncongruousParts. Ed. P. Tiessen. 71-79.Day, Douglas. Malcolm Lowry: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.Dunlap, Benjamin B. "Notes on a Screenplay for F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night."Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 8 (1976). 283-88.Eisner, Lotte H. The Haunted Screen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965.Falk, David. "Lowry and the Aesthetics of Salvation." Swinging the Maelstrom. Ed. S.E.Grace. 52-60.Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender Is the Night. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933.Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard andSherry Simon. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977.Garrett, George. "Afterword" in Faulkner, William and Joel Sayre. The Road to Glory.Carbondale: Southern Illionis University Press, 1981.159-74.Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes: La Littérature au second degré. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982.Grace, Sherrill E. '"Consciousness of Shipwreck': Ortega y Gasset and Malcolm Lowry'sConcept of the Artist." José Ortega y Gasset. Ed. Nora de Marval-McNair. New York:Greenwood Press, 1987.137-42.. "Malcolm Lowry and the Expressionist Vision." The Art of Malcolm Lowry. Ed.Anne Smith. London: Vision Press, 1978.. Regression and Apocalypse: Studies in North American Literary Expressionism.Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989.

Lowry, ed. Swinging in the Maelstrom: New Perspectives on Malcolm Lowry. Montreal &Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992.Jewison, D.B. "The Uses of Intertextuality in Under the Volcano" Swinging theMaelstrom. Ed. S.E. Grace. 136-45.Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film.London: Dennis Dobson, 1947.Lowry, Malcolm. "The Bravest Boat" [screenplay]. Box 7, Folder 18, Malcolm LowryCollection, University of British Columbia Library.. The Cinema of Malcolm Lowry: A Scholarly Edition ofLowry's "Tender Is the Night."Ed. with an introduction by Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen. Vancouver: Universityof British Columbia Press, 1990.. Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid. Ed. Douglas Day and Margerie Lowry.New York: New American Library, 1968.. "A few items culled from what started out to be a sort of preface to a filmscript." Ed.Paul Tiessen. White Pelican 4, 2 (Spring 1974). 2-20.. Notes on a Screenplay for F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. Bloomfield Hills,Michigan: Bruccoli Clark, 1976.. October Ferry to Gabriola. Ed. Margerie Lowry. New York and Cleveland: TheWorld Publishing Company, 1970.. Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry. Ed. Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry.Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1965.. '"Tender Is the Night.' A Filmscript by Malcolm and Margerie Lowry." Box 23,Folders 15-17, Malcolm Lowry Collection, University of British Columbia Library.. Under the Volcano. London: Jonathan Cape, 1947.McCarthy, Patrick A. "Wrider/Espider: The Consul as Artist in Under the Volcano"Studies in Canadian Literature 17,1 (1992): 30-51.O'Kill, Brian. "The Role of Language in Lowry's Fiction." Apparently Incongruous Parts.Ed. P Tiessen. 174-86.Ortega y Gasset, José. History as a System and Other Essays Toward a Philosophy ofHistory. Trans. Helene Weyl. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1941,1961.Perlmutter, Ruth. "Malcolm Lowry's Unpublished Filmscript of Tender Is the Night."American Quarterly 27 (Winter 1976): 561-74.Phillips, Gene D., S.J. Fiction, Film, andF. Scott Fitzgerald. Chicago: Loyola UniversityPress, 1986.Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.Tiessen, Paul, ed. Apparently Incongruous Parts: The Worlds of Malcolm Lowry.Metuchen, N.J. & London: Scarecrow Press, 1990.. "Malcolm Lowry and the Cinema." Malcolm Lowry: The Man and His Work. Ed.George Woodcock. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1971.. "Malcolm Lowry: Statements on Literature and Film." The Practical Vision: Essaysin English Literature in Honour of Flora Roy. Ed. Jane Campbell and James Doyle.Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1978.119-32.Vice, Sue. "The Volcano of a Postmodern Lowry." Swinging the Maelstrom. Ed. S.E.Grace. 123-35.Virgili, Carmen. "Malcolm Lowry y Ortega: El hombre como novelista de si mismo."Revista de Occidenteçô (May 1989): 45-56.26

David A. GroulxAcetoneI am a pigbecause beforethey made lampshadesout of youthey made buttonsout of medear Leonardand buttonsand knife handlesand walletsbefore Auschwitzthere was Cypress Hillsbefore youthere was meand my broken teeth

LeaLittlewolfcoldI dreamrasp breathing of pneumoniain, rattle, in, rattle, in, rattleoutside my bedroom windowminus forty-six Celsiusstraw bales bury doghouseI count nine muttsvicious throat strangle, yelp, heavy growllike penguins getting to centre of packwhite black body roils up and outsurvival of fittest in actionbiggest dog's the breather, guardian of my sleepever the alpha porcupine expert of the quilled nosevery lucky as betas of canine brotherhoodbite off the hollow needlesalways he runs just in front of my left tireso I must drive not too fast a half milesomeday black's luck will run out28

KevinMcNeillyHis Own Best NarratorFranz Boas and the Kwakiutl TalesIn the last ten years or so, ethnography has become anincreasingly self-conscious discipline. Anthropologists express a keenawareness of the problematic dynamics of cultural appropriation withintheir work, and have begun to pay much closer attention to the part played inthis dynamic by the act of writing itself. They have come to recognize themselvesas authors, and thus as agents within their own texts. The problem ofsubjectivity in ethnographic material has been acknowledged since the emergenceof anthropology as an academic discipline, but it is only recently thatthe anthropological observer has been understood as a rhetorical construction,and not simply a misleading "outside" presence to be filtered away. Thequestion of authorship, as Clifford Geertz points out in 1987, is "not usuallyacknowledged as a narratological issue, a matter of how best to get an honeststory honestly told, but as an epistemological one, a matter of how toprevent subjective views from colouring objective facts" (9). The ethnographer'stask, for Geertz, has become not simply a matter of pretending to animpossible objectivity or transparency, but instead a matter of discoveringhow such self-representations and cultural blurrings necessarily occur:Getting themselves into their text (that is, representatively into their text) may beas difficult for ethnographers as getting themselves into the culture (that is, imaginativelyinto the culture). . . . But in one way or another, however unreflectivelyand with whatever misgivings about the propriety of it all, ethnographers allmanage to do it. There are some very dull books in anthropology, but few if anyanonymous murmurs. (17)29

BoasWriting, even writing which aims to withdraw from any sense of "signature"or subjectivity, by its nature constructs an authorial presence, and it isparticularly crucial to attend critically to this presence in ethnographic discoursewhich is concerned with the analysis and interpretation of other culturaldiscourses. "No longer a marginal, or occulted, dimension," JamesClifford writes in 1986, "writing has emerged as central to what anthropologistsdo both in the field and thereafter" (2).Alongside Malinowski and Lévi-Strauss, Geertz cites Franz Boas as one ofthe "founders of discursivity" in anthropology, a man whose name comesto "set the terms of discourse in which others thereafter move" (19). JamesClifford calls Boas the "last virtuoso" of a coherent anthropology, apparentlyuntroubled by such discursive concerns (4). Little attention has beenpaid in assessments of Boas's work to the role played by his discourse inshaping his conception of anthropology, a conception which lies at the rootof much contemporary ethnographic practice. But his own discourse occupiesa crucial and fundamental position in his examinations of other cultures.To engage Boas's rhetoric of self-representation is to challenge, inpart, claims of objectivity and strategies of cultural appropriation not simplyas epistemological quandaries, but as issues of anthropological discourseitself. Boas's work on the Kwakwaka'wakw (formerly Kwakiutl)culture of Northwestern British Columbia occupies a particularly prominentposition in his oeuvre, and the discursive strategies which Boasemploys in that work evidence his own authorship or "signature" as muchas they explain anything of Kwakwaka'wakw life. His Kwakiutl Tales, publishedin two bilingual series as one of his crowning achievements in culturalrecuperation and analysis, are not merely narratives translated fromtheir Native originals so that they may be more clearly understood andassimilated by curious anthropologists; they are narratives of this anthropologicalprocess of discovery and disclosure, and their "scientific" discourse,rather than offering some sort of an objective stance for Boas, provides ameans by which he constructs himself figuratively as the protagonist, thehero, of his own anthropological texts.IVIuch of the critical rhetoric surrounding Franz Boasand his work stresses indebtedness. He is regarded as "the most importantsingle force in shaping American anthropology in the first half of the twentiethcentury" (Stocking 1). Claude Lévi-Strauss, in a 1980 interview for a30

television documentary on Boas, credits him with being one of the lastintellectual giants of the nineteenth century, who set in motion all thediverse currents of contemporary anthropology and whose like will not beseen again; he repeats this same praise in his "conversations" with DidierEribon, and affirms that "all of American anthropology issued from him"(36). Marshall Hyatt, in his recent biography, argues that Boas's life andthought had "a profound impact on many diverse elements of Americansociety," and is keen to stress his pioneering work on race, particularly withregard to black studies, and his political and social activism:As an intellectual. Boas attacked the misusers of science who promulgatedtheories of racial inferiority based on alleged mental differences between ethnicgroups. As a scientist, he directed the professionalization of the field of anthropology,overseeing its evolution from an amateur hobby to its maturity as a rigorousacademic discipline. As a social activist, he strove to eradicate prejudice andbigotry from American society, in an effort to ensure the promise of Americandemocracy was articulated in reality and practice, (x)Boas is widely credited with a sense of egalitarianism and of ethno-culturalrelativity, a sensitivity to the nature of difference and otherness whichinforms most anthropological practice. In actively campaigning against ethnocentrism,Boas gives rise to a certain cult of himself as an anthropologicalhero, a seeker of justice and liberty, a man of truth.In a 1990 special issue of Canadian Literature on Native writing, RobertBringhurst describes Boas as "a kind of midwife" at the creation of a writtenliterature for West Coast Native peoples, and credits his publications ofTsimshian and Kwakwaka'wakw texts with the salvation of West Coastnative cultures:To Boas and to other scholars whom he provoked, promoted and funded, weowe most of our knowledge of Northwest Coast mythology: the most coherentand intricate body of mythical thought that has been salvaged from the pre-colonialworld of northern North America. (New 36-37)This admiration and this feeling of indebtedness are carried over in thework of a number of Kwakwaka'wakw writers as well. David Grubb, himselfa Kwakwaka'wakw, composes a Kwakw'ala dictionary in which he revisesBoas's complex orthography to suit the needs of Native writers; he sees Boasand his collaborator, George Hunt, as setting in motion a grand schemeof cultural recovery which the Kwakwaka'wakw people themselves mustcontinue:

BoasMuch was done by Dr. Franz Boas and Mr. George Hunt in the early part of thiscentury, but even their tremendous efforts have only made a dent in the cultureand language of the Kwagulh. It is now up to the Indian people themselves tocontinue where Boas and Hunt left off. (1-2)Boas appears to be responsible for the rescue and continuation ofKwakwaka'wakw language and culture, and has provided the means for culturalsecurity which the Native people could not, at the time, provide forthemselves. Kwakwaka'wakw story-teller Chief James Wallas (at least, in theEnglish-language versions of his tales by Pamela Whitaker) includes amonghis own work texts and prayers salvaged by Boas as examples of the "beauty"of Kwakwaka'wakw culture; Boas seems to be credited with the same degreeof "authenticity" as a Native narrator (Wallas 13). Boas's Kwakiutl Tales thusoccupy a particularly important place in Native Canadian literature, in thatthey are the most complete and sustained record of Native writing that hasbeen preserved in text. As transcriptions of Kwakwaka'wakw story-tellingfrom almost one hundred years ago, they provide, in part, a basis for aNative literary tradition in this country, a tradition which is currently in theprocess of recuperating and rejuvenating itself.Boas is praised repeatedly both as an advocate for and as a saviour ofmany significant North American ethnicities and cultural groups whichmight otherwise have suffered extinction under the pressures of a white,Eurocentric cultural dominant. He has apparently been justly cast by hisreaders and admirers in the role of the scholar-hero. However, this roleremains a suspiciously rhetorical effect, a construction of the reception ofBoas's work by the North American and European scholarly and academicestablishment. It is not that he has been overpraised for his accomplishments,which are clearly significant, but that such praise cannot be allowedsimply to overwrite or obliterate the intercultural and interracial dynamicsof power and politics that such operations of "salvage" and advocacy entail.Boas's work, whether with Native peoples, with Blacks or with any of thenumerous American ethnicities, describes an ongoing encounter with thecultural Other. And the very fact of this alterity, of the "otherness" of thosefor whom he writes and speaks, depends on a well-defined sense of whiteAmerican normalcy, and on well-drawn boundaries between "us" (the "we"with whom Bringhurst implicitly sides, for instance) and "them."Without exception, Boas positions himself in his writing self-consciously(despite his own origins as an immigrant) as a member of the white

American cultural dominant, but as one who, while acknowledging his partin an oppressive socio-cultural hegemony, sympathizes with those who are"different." As he makes clear in his "Preface" to Race, Culture and Language(1940), this difference must no longer be regarded simply as an obstacle tonational or cultural or personal autonomy for "Americans," but forms acrucial part of "our" freedom:Growing up in our civilization we know little how we ourselves are conditionedby it, how our bodies, our language, our modes of thinking and acting are determinedby limits imposed upon us by our environment. Knowledge of the lifeprocesses and behaviour of man under conditions of life fundamentally differentfrom our own can help us to obtain a freer view of our own lives and of our lifeproblems, (v)Anthropology provides the means for the liberation of the human mind.This liberation depends on a direct encounter with the Other, and upon arecognition of the contingency and relativity of "our own" value-systemsand ways of life. Throughout his oeuvre, Boas is highly conscious of the relativityof cultures and of cultural values, and the purpose of anthropology, as"liberation," is to cultivate an awareness of this relativity. In an essay onnationalism (first published in The Dial on March 8,1919), he defines twosorts of cultural reification in the concept of national "feeling": an intolerant"imperialistic nationalism of political and economic power" which "setsits own kind over and above every foreign form of feeling," and what hecalls "the nationalism of ideas," which, by contrast, "endeavours to understandand appreciate foreign patterns of thought" (Race and DemocraticSociety 122). It is this second sort of nationalism which anthropology—as anorgan of "understanding" which returns the foreign, respectfully, to thedomain of "our civilization" for the sake of "our own" edification and identification—seeksto instill.In a 1930 essay on the "Religion of the Kwakiutl," Boas describes his suspicionsabout systematic anthropology, arguing in favour of analyses of particularphenomena over abstract "scientific" generalizations regardingcultural "laws" and systems, generalizations which, because of the amorphousand shifting nature of human cultures, will always be inadequatedescriptors:Generalizations will be the more significant the closer we adhere to definiteforms. The attempts to reduce all social phenomena to a closed system of laws33

Boasapplicable to every society and explaining its structure and history do not seem apromising undertaking. (Cited in Codera 66)Stressing the intractability of cultural difference for anthropologists, Boasalso points out that any attempts to generalize about the attributes of "culture"result only in an ascription of the observer's own values to the culturebeing observed, and in a reification of these particular values, an overwritingof this valuable difference by likeness and sameness: "Absolute systemsof phenomena as complex as those of culture are impossible. They willalways be reflections of our own culture" (Race, Language and Culture 311).Nevertheless, Boas is determined to argue the significance of anthropologyin terms of just such an overwriting, a systematic and ultimately coherentdiscovery of "ourselves" in these apparently unassimilable differences.Boas remains committed to the notion of personal and national progress,and of self-recognition, through the scientific, responsible encounter withthe Other:The character of a person is moulded by the social medium in which he lives andhis ideals and wishes reflect the national temper. Progress results from thepeaceful struggle of national ideals and endeavours, and from the knowledgethat what is dear to us is for that reason not the best for the rest of mankind, thatwe may cultivate our most valued ideals without ever harbouring the wish toimpose them on others—unless they adopt them by their own free will. ... Inother words, the background of nationality is social individuality that neitherbrooks interference from other groups nor possesses the wish to deprive othernationalities of their individuality.Conceived in this way nationality is one of the most fruitful sources of culturalprogress. (Race and Democratic Society 121-22)All of Boas's work on the socio-cultural construction of race—his antideterministstance and his critique of the abuses of power in the name ofracial conquest—is predicated on a recognition of the productive, positiveaspects of cultural difference for nationality, particularly American nationality.Education in anthropology offers, for Boas, a potentially just and balancedre-configuration of the American dream itself, as he makes clear in a1937 interview in Forum:We are not free from [racist] tendencies in the United States. .. . The obviousremedy is education—teaching the indisputable fact that colour of skin, class,religious belief, geographical or national origin are no tests of social adaptability.... It is time to restate the beliefs of the founders of this nation and drive home34

again the democratic principle that a citizen is to be judged solely by the readinesswith which he fits himself into the structure and by the value of his contributionsto the country's development. (Race and Democratic Society 14)The ideology of personal "liberty" encoded in the American Declaration ofIndependence, which has laid the foundation for the American dream ofsocial progress and freedom, lies closely behind Boas's own program of "liberation"through anthropological work. The call for liberty and equalityhere, however, are subtly belied by Boas's demand that good citizens "fitinto" the hegemony of American culture. Boas's sense of freedom and opennessactually involves a promulgation of conformity, a demand thatAmerican ideologies of "liberty" be recognized as universal truths. But the"structure" and "value" which Boas lauds are in fact by-products of a Whitecultural dominant, and are largely controlled and determined by Whiteinterests. The racism which he deplores in the United States likely dependsas much on this same demand for conformity as it does on any ethnic strugglefor power, and the call for liberty tends to mask the fact that those whopromote "freedom" are the same persons who have propagated the politicsof racial inequality in the first place.There is a latent contradiction in Boas's work, which is as concerned witha citizen accommodating American social structures as it is with a citizen'scritical enlightenment as to the contingency of these very structures. Boas isfairly careful to assert the national bounds of this imposition, such that,while Americans may choose to live out their civilizing dream of freedomand progress, this dream need not be applied imperialistically outside of thenation. Problematically, however, the "foreign" cultures with which Boas deals,especially the West Coast Native and Black cultures, lie within the domainof North American governments and nationalities, and the very othernesswhich Boasian anthropology demands we productively encounter is, innational terms, an internal otherness, one which is not so easily exemptedfrom the homogenizing pressures of White American nationalism. Boas himselfis well aware of this problem, and his own negotiations with the "American"Other, the counterbalancing of "us" and "them" within his anthropologicaltexts, forms the dialectical underpinning of his proper work. Andit is this negotiation, this troubling dialectic, which informs the anthropologicalwriting, and manifests itself vestigially in Boas's writing as narrative.Paul Ricoeur, writing in 1955, points to the potential anxiety in givenhuman responses to cultural difference:35

When we discover that there are several cultures instead of just one and . . .when we acknowledge the end of a sort of cultural monopoly, be it illusory orreal, we are threatened with destruction by our own discovery. Suddenly itbecomes possible that there are just others, that we ourselves are an "other"among others. [History and Truth 278)Ricoeur ascribes to this alterity a fundamental importance. In Oneself asAnother, almost forty years later, Ricoeur suggests that the Other is impliedintimately in selfhood per se, and, in a rather astute pun, that "one cannotbe thought without the other" (3). Otherness, in other words, is a constitutiveelement of self-determination, whether personal, cultural or national.While Boas is much less willing to describe this "freer view," this culturalalterity, as rigorously as Ricoeur, he nevertheless points to a certain socioculturalinterdependence based on economies of difference, a hesitant dismantlingof the (White, American) cultural monopoly which had levelledethnicities and dissimilarities, and a valuation of difference itself as a forceof cultural liberation. But Ricoeur is willing to ascribe to human existence afundamental alterity, while Boas, finally, cannot; the collective "we," for Boas,remains intact and vigorously assimilative, in the sense that it takes culturaldifference productively into its own sphere, as valuable knowledge to be possessed,as a form of self-knowledge. For Ricoeur, identification, the comfortof self-sameness, is upset by such an encounter, while for Boas this encounter,mediated by a scientific anthropology, can only intensify socio-culturaland/or national bonding, as we recognize the limits and capacities of ourbodies, our languages, our thoughts both through and against these others."The Kwakiutl have no better friend than I," wrote Boas in a letter toChief Hemasaka of the Fort Rupert Kwakwaka'wakw in February of 1899."Whenever I can, I speak for you" (Stocking 127). But what exactly do suchtexts of friendship, as the book of speeches Boas sends to the chief to provehis loyalty, offer these cultures whose substance they incorporate and whosecause they take up? Advocacy, speaking for others, is conditioned by a senseof palimpsest, of one voice overwriting another, even as it articulates theghostly presence of those for whom it speaks. Attending the texts and voicesof a given culture, the reader is pointed back, by the anthropologist's gesture,to some of the essential stylistic or constitutive elements of that culture.A given Kwakwaka'wakw text, for instance, appears to position itself asa bounded, fixed artifact, as utterances from a distinct elsewhere, as anemblematic otherness which can be regarded, categorized, interpreted and

known. But there remains, in the advocal text, a troubling multiplicity.Knowing and interpreting have already been inscribed into the advocal text,by the time it reaches its audience, in the gesture of advocacy. Who is it whospeaks in or through such a text? In what sense are the tacit "outsiders"given any legitimate voice, a voice which, in Boas's American context, mustbe rendered culturally acceptable or understandable in order to achieve itsmission of education and liberation? And if, in following his task, the advocateBoas renders these texts readable, how can he not violate the positiveestrangement, the liberating foreignness, which he aims so dearly to safeguardin the first place? The familiar and the strange, the Other, are by Boas'sdefinition incommensurable. How can Boas's advocacy possibly refrainfrom transgressing his own first principle, namely to maintain the sanctityof the other, not to lapse into an "imperialistic" American nationalism?Advocacy, by its very nature, runs dangerously close to appropriation.Anthologies of Kwakwaka'wakw texts and films of the Kwakwaka'wakwcompiled by Boas make no excuses as to their authorship; they are ownedby Boas himself. The title frames of his documentary footage The Kwakiutlof British Columbia, taken in the autumn of 1930, ascribe the contents offilm directly and immediately to him, in bold capital letters: "BY FRANZBOAS." His two series of Kwakiutl Tales, published as part of the ColumbiaUniversity Contributions to Anthropology which he himself edited, are similarlyascribed on their title pages: "By Franz Boas." Despite the internalcrediting of the tales to various native authors, it is Boas himself whoassumes the position, not of collector or translator or even editor alone, butof author. These are his tales, his films, his cultures. Boas adopts the proprietarystance of the field anthropologist obsessed either with safeguarding orwith shepherding "his" people, those whom he has discovered and to whomhe alone has the rights of access. One might recall here Boas's outrage overEdward S. Curtis's 1914 film on the Kwakwaka'wakw, In the Land of the WarCanoes, which he saw as distortional and subjective, or his repeated requeststo George Hunt not to offer information about Kwakwaka'wakw culture torival anthropologists. To get to the Kwakwaka'wakw, one must read throughBoas, look through Boas's lens.Boas's presence in his work, as photographer, editor, transcriber, collector,translator and writer, is articulated as a shadow. In his films of theKwakwaka'wakw, for instance, his subjects, positioned in obviously contrivedsituations, demonstrate certain aspects of their daily lives. They stare37

Boasinto the camera, and speak to someone apparently behind the lens; they drawour attention, in effect, to the presence of the filmmaker, of a shaping intelligence,someone in charge of our point-of-view, who is Boas himself. Attimes, the viewer catches a glimpse of his shadow in the lower portions ofthe frame; the sun behind him, the outline of his human form and cameraappears in the peripheral foreground, and one is suddenly made aware thatthis film is not simply a documentary record, but a carefully guided andcontrived perspective on the cultural material it presents. The presences ofphotographer and camera intrude upon what seems at first to be pristine,unmediated footage. A sense of the anthropologist inhabiting and shapingwhat he offers as objective evidence builds throughout the film. Each action,game and dance is categorized and separated off from any naturalistic contextby Boas's titles; single events in what appears to be the "daily life" of theKwakwaka'wakw are isolated, and the viewer watches, as the titles indicate,first a woman at a "Cradle," then a man "Woodworking," then "Drilling," thena woman "Weaving Mats" and so on. People are made to perform tasks withoutreference to the purpose or function of these tasks. In effect, the film imposesanthropological schema on the life of the Kwakwaka'wakw to the extentthat it erases this life in favour of its own formal, organizational principles.A clear example of this erasure occurs in a section of the second part ofthe film, dedicated to "Chiefs Boasting." Boas intends, evidently, to recreatesome of the hyperbolic gesturing associated with potlatch and with copperexchange, and he places two chiefs on a road behind a row of houses inorder to have them perform some of these gestures, however out of context,for his film. While the two are performing, two figures who seem to bewomen begin walking up the road toward the camera in the distance. Asthey approach, Boas suddenly cuts away, and they vanish before the chiefsgo on, apparently allowed to pass, or simply asked to step out of the camera'sway, while the camera is turned off. Boas wants no accidents of present,hybridized or Westernized Kwakwaka'wakw life to intrude upon his(almost) pristine, highly staged recreations. He wants to abstract certaininstances, traces, of pre-colonial Kwakwaka'wakw culture for the sake ofanthropological clarity.A famous photograph taken by O.C. Hastings for Boas also encodes thissense of erasure. Boas and George Hunt, at the edge of the frame, hold up ablanket to cover the Western-style colonial buildings of Fort Rupert, and toisolate an image of a Kwakwaka'wakw woman spinning, to locate this

image, in effect, in an ahistorical, decontextualized setting (Halpin 4). In acommentary on his own representational aesthetic, Kwakwaka'wakw photographerDavid Neel argues that such hypostatizing photographs of Nativepeople tend to perpetuate narrow stereotypes of Native peoples, either as"noble savages" or a "vanishing race," images which he deplores as dehumanizingand threatening (Neel 14). Citing the work, in particular, ofEdward R. Curtis, Boas's contemporary and "competitor" for West Coastanthropological knowledge, Neel suggests that what these posed photographsof Native life actually offered the White cultural dominant of thetime was a confirmation of their own superiority, held in sharp contrast toimages "of a primitive human, existing like a hunting trophy or a fish in anaquarium" (16). These photographs maybe "good art," Neel argues, artwhich adheres to the demands of a Western Romantic aesthetic of primitivenobility, but they also involve a sustained "campaign of misinformation"which has ultimately degraded Native culture, and locked it safely into ahistory of conquest and assimilation (18).Both Neel and Marjorie Halpin, who provides an afterword to his text,distinguish between the work of Curtis, who encouraged the expression of"some individuality" and artistic personality in photographs, thereby deliberatelyskewing the representation of the Native life to suit the photographer'spreconceptions, and the work of Boas, which situates itself in the"scientific" tradition and resists pictorialist impulses (186). Nevertheless,both Boas and Curtis resort to "bribery and deception" to appropriatesacred Native "artifacts" and to alter the Native realities they encountered tosuit their anthropological needs (17). The "desired image," Neel writes,is moulded by adding props, deleting signs of contemporary life, and selectingbackground to correspond to White ideas of the "authentic" Native person. ... Agood deal of omission, selection, and propping was required to mould a publicallyacceptable image. There was a market for photographs of the noble savage,not the degraded heathen. (15)While Boas may not have been so crassly commercial as Curtis, his representationsof Native life were nonetheless determined by the demands of hisown consumer culture. Halpin goes so far as to argue that "the attemptedremoval of non-native elements from their photographs" is in fact an assertionof directorial power, of control over their subjects, who, Halpin notes,show "few smiles and little evidence of presentational energy" (187). Boas'serasures, despite his pretence of objectivity and withdrawal, are in fact a39

Boasform of distortion that involves a calculated self-insertion into the seeminglyuntainted photographic frame. Boas is made present in his representationsby his supposed absence; the colonizing mind enters the picture bygesturing to remove itself.Boas also later used frames from his films in an exhibit on the HamatsaDance, but hired an artist to remove the western clothing of the Kwakwaka'wakwworn in the film in order to give the images more of a primeval,pre-colonial appearance. The pre-colonial, in other words, is not simply tobe collected in the vestiges of present Kwakwaka'wakw life, but must in factbe constructed imaginatively, conjecturally. And Boasian anthropology,despite Boas's objections to Edward Curtis, aims to perform just such animaginative leap, as it attempts to discover or to invent (whether scientificallyor not) what Boas calls, in an essay on Canadian ethnography, "the fundamentaltendencies common to humanity" (Race, Language and Culture 341).Authorial presence is manifested in Boas's texts paradoxically as a gestureof withdrawal. There is no actual withdrawal; after all, no such completeabsenting of oneself from one's "own" signed texts could be possible. Boas'sshadow casts itself across his texts as the appearance of a personal absence,of an objectivity. Boas's Kwakiutl Tales appear to be renderings of a numberof voices; each is credited to a particular author or to a given tradition, andthere is little obvious evidence of authorial mediation. They are presentedas if in the form in which they were first told, translations accompanyingtransliterations of the original language on facing pages, so that the knowledgeablescholar may confirm the accuracy of the English renderings.Problematically, however, this objectivity is an illusion of the Kwakiutl Tales.The transliterations themselves are Boas's, as he makes clear in his prefaceto the 1910 series. Boas alone mediates all levels of textuality; the translationswould naturally be accurate, then, given that both texts are by Boas. Infact, Boas claims all aspects of the texts as his own:The following series of Kwakiutl tales was collected by me on various journeysto British Columbia. ... I have published a considerable number of mythswritten down by Mr. George Hunt of Fort Rupert, B.C., who speaks Kwakiutl ashis native language. These tales were written under my direction, and the languagewas revised by me phonetically, the text being dictated to me in part byMr. Hunt, in part by other natives, (v)Despite his pretence of scientific objectivity, Boas remains the central shapingintelligence behind the recasting of these tales. They become his own stories.40

But how is it that this ascription takes on a specifically narrative form?Boas has argued that the "fundamental problem" of the anthropologist isthe description of the progress of cultures, and that the West Coast Nativesprovide remarkably favourable "conditions" for the fulfilment of this task(Race, Language and Culture341). The Kwakwaka'wakw provide a nearlyideal context for the writing out of an anthropological master-narrative, thestory of the discovery of these human fundamentals. But these "conditions,"in so far as they require the manifest traces of pre-White civilizations, arethemselves constructions of the anthropological mind. The collation ofKwakwaka'wakw tales occasions the potential solving of a narrative problem:the heroic, scholarly task of solving this "fundamental problem," ofdoing anthropology, through the creation of anthropological fictions of the'"basic tendencies" of humankind. Furthermore, Boas imposes on his collectionof tales another narratological sequencing, a meta-narrative whichoverwrites the individual narratives he translates and recounts, a masterplotof anthropological discovery of which he himself is the protagonist. Inhis zeal for human (that is, chiefly American) "progress" and liberation,Boas uses the tales to tell his own story of how these tales lead him towardpersonal enlightenment, through a productive conflict with and assimilationof cultural difference, with otherness. The gaps of difference, of differentiation,whether merely cultural or essentially human, are closed byanthropology itself, as it seeks a positive productivity in its Western contextby turning a relative cultural liberation into a holistic human enterprise.The anthropological becomes what Boas sees as the fully human, as theanthropologist assimilates and understands the differences of the peoples hestudies. Boasian anthropology, despite its provisos, aims then to determinewhat this humanity is, and to impose its standards, as if they were universal,on those for whom it purports beneficently to speak. Boas's scientific commentarieson the tales are not static or atemporal, not strictly "objective,"but narrate a progress toward the liberating resolution promised by Boas'sown westernized anthropological ideals.Boas's collation of two instances of the same Kwakwaka'wakw tale providesa clear example of this narrative in motion. In his second series ofKwakiutl Tales, Boas offers a 1932 re-telling by the same narrator, CharlieWilson, of the story of "Scab," which he had already collected in 1900 for hisfirst series of tales. In a note on the versions, Boas compares the two to eachother and to an unrecounted version of the same story (a version to which

he alone has access) which he heard and transcribed in Alert Bay in 1890(229). The purpose of this comparison, for Boas, is to offer, at a geographicaland historical separation, evidence of cultural continuity. Continuity ofoccurrence, he argues in his 1910 essay on ethnological problems in Canada,is a key to the determination both of cultural traits and of deeper humanpsychological laws (the "fundamental tendencies common to humanity"),both essential goals of anthropology itself (Race, Language and Culture 342-3). The collation is an attempt to fill in the gaps, to overwrite differencewith continuity, and to write his own efforts at achieving his goals acrossthe texts of the Kwakwaka'wakw stories."The two versions," Boas tells us, "are essentially the same in contentexcept on two points," which he goes on to list (Kwakiutl Tales New Series 229).Boas attempts to construct a narratology of the folk-tale and to establish, ina localized abbreviated form, an essential structure for this tale; one mightcompare similar efforts, conducted on a much larger scale, of VladimirPropp in Eastern Europe or of Claude Lévi-Strauss in his tristes tropiques.Boas offers a page-long schematic for the two stories, suggesting non-essentialdivergences and deeper continuities. At certain points, he even alludesto a more general morphology of the "Kwakiutl tale," as when, for instance,he notes that a particular figure in the later version is a man, while by "analogywith all other tales she should be a woman" (230). Boas's emerging narratologybecomes a narrative itself, a meta-narrative, as he intrudes into hismaterial, commenting on and modifying its essential elements to suit hisown synthesizing purpose. "I presume in a more complete version [of thestory]," he interjects, "that [Scab] would have hidden in a tree and been discoveredby the reflection in the water. Here the remark that the water waslike a looking glass seems uncalled for" (230). This commentary is not, as itmight initially seem, a passing critique by an erudite anthropologist, butinvolves a wilful, deliberate intrusion into the body of the texts, a presumptuousre-narration of these same texts in terms more amenable to theanthropological mission of understanding and progress. Boas announceshis own presence, asserts himself in the first person—no longer as mereshadow—in order to assume direct control of the process of discovery.Boas intrudes into the stories themselves as well, as translator and as akind of stylistic mediator. In most of his prefaces to the various collectionsof tales and verbal artifacts collected from the Kwakwaka'wakw, Boas clearlypositions himself as transcriber, translator, editor, and even author; it was

he, after all, who gave this language its first system of orthography, who ineffect gave birth to its written form. And as the source of this system, itscontrol remains ultimately in his hands, as he makes clear in a 1913 introductionto George Hunt's manuscripts:[George Hunt] was taught to write the language by Franz Boas in 1891, and byconstant correction of his method of writing, the system of spelling applied in thepresent manuscript was gradually developed. Nevertheless the phoneticsrequired revision, and everything written by Mr. Hunt up to 1901 inclusive hasbeen revised by Franz Boas from dictation. The materials contained in the followingvolumes [of manuscripts] have been published with such changes in thespelling, and a few times also in grammar, as seemed necessary.The appeal to scientific necessity and the tone of objectivity that Boasstrikes here by, among other things, referring to himself in the third person,suggest that the orthography fabricated and overseen by Boas, as well as theinterlinear glosses and translations in the text, are in effect as transparent aspossible to the Kwakw'ala "mother tongue" and consequently offer directethnographic access to that language through the supposedly corrective filterof Boas himself. Boas, as writer, positions himself as the singular advocatefor Kwakwaka'wakw culture in North America.This illusion of transparency, however, is precisely that: an illusion. WhileBoas wants to appear as scientifically objective, his texts, by their verynature, involve considerable intrusive meddling. Key evidence of such anintrusion into his material, of the presence of Boas's shadow self in theKwakiutl Texts, appears as a narratological feature of his translations themselves.In his prefatory note to Kwakiutl Texts, a 1902 parallel text inKwakw'ala and English, published by the American Museum of NaturalHistory and accredited to both Boas and Hunt, Boas offers some explanationof his own methods of translation:In all these texts the ever-recurring quotative, "it is said," has been omitted in thetranslation. In the English translation, words enclosed in parentheses have beenadded for the sake of clearness; words enclosed in brackets are literal translationsof the corresponding Indian text, but should be omitted on the English text.Indian proper names have been translated with considerable freedom to avoidencumbering the English translation with the strange phonetics of the Kwakiutllanguage. (4)Boas intends to make his translations as "clear" as possible, by which hemeans not, as one might expect, to offer access to some sense of the stylisticor narrative texture of the original, but instead to remove any traces of43

Boasawkwardness, strangeness and "encumbrance" of the phonetics or syntax ofKwakw'ala that may intrude onto the English translations. He wants to presenta smooth, readable, English text. In his famous essay on "The Task ofthe Translator," Walter Benjamin cites Rudolph Pannwitz to suggest thattranslation ought to allow the essential "foreignness" of the original toemerge in the target language:"The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his ownlanguage happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfullyaffected by the foreign tongue. Particularly when translating from a languagevery remote from his own he must go back to the primal elements of languageitself and penetrate to the point where work, image, and tone converge."(Benjamin 81)For Benjamin, this deliberate commingling of languages is necessary for thework of re-creation, liberation and discursive "flux" which he understandsas the prerogatives of linguistic artifacts. Boas refuses this commingling inhis translations, preferring instead to reinforce the contingent boundariesof his own English, to make the Kwakw'ala into good English, and thus toeliminate any destabilizing "foreign" elements in his language.This normalizing carries a certain force in any translation, but where thetext aims for scientific objectivity, its presence is particularly troubling: why,after all, ought the anthropologist attempt to remove all the awkward tracesof "foreignness" when, according to Boas himself, the goal of comparativeethnography of the sort he undertakes with the Kwakwaka'wakw is preciselyto enlarge mainstream American knowledge and to "liberate" the Americanmind from its ethnocentric confines? These stylistic encumbrances, thetrace elements of Kwakw'ala, ought to be the focus of any anthropologicalinterrogation of these translations, of the importation of Kwakwaka'wakwculture into the American mainstream.Benjamin recommends both literal (and thus agrammatical) word-bywordrenderings of original texts into target languages, and suggests thatthe form of translation which best comes to terms with the "primal elements"of language itself is the interlinear gloss (79, 82). Boas, in his 1910primer on Kwakw'ala (called Kwakiutl: An Illustrative Sketch), provides sucha double text (using his own system of orthography) to give some sense tothe English reader of the textures and word-orders of Kwakw'ala speech,which he then follows up with what he calls a "translation" of the work intoa normalized English (553-557). In Kwakiutl Texts, which had appeared sev-44

eral years earlier, he follows a similar procedure, offering the first text withinterlinear glosses and then all subsequent works as parallel texts, with thetranscribed Kwakw'ala originals on the left of the page and a normalizedEnglish version on the right. Once students have mastered the first literalrendering and are somewhat familiar with Kwakw'ala syntax and Boasianorthography, Boas asserts that they will be more readily able to identify parallelsbetween Kwakw'ala and English texts (4).But these "parallels" are deceptive; instead of allowing scholarly access tothe original, they obscure the Kwakw'ala in a form of anglicization. By erasingthe literal stylistic markings of the Kwakw'ala, Boas forces his readers, inlearning the language, to anglicize it. Instead of sensing the Kwakw'alaimpinging on their anglocentric world-views, in other words, comparativereaders end up imposing the forms and shapes of English onto theKwakw'ala, effectively reversing the "task" of translation that Benjamin andPannwitz describe. The cultural "liberation" that Boas wants to bring aboutis thus merely a cloaked form of linguistic imperialism, an overwriting ofthe "foreign" text by an English cultural dominant.To demonstrate how this anthropological overwriting is realized in Boas'stranslations, I want to look briefly at the sample text he supplies in hisKwakw'ala grammar, and then turn to the Kwakiutl Tales themselves to suggestsome of its narratological consequences. Here is an extract from themiddle of the text as Boas provides it, with his own glosses:Hë'x-'idaEm'Iâ'wis G-ë'dEn là qâ's'ld lâ'xa Wâk-!ëgèsLa.That began referred to it is said G-e'dEn went walk-began to the Bent-Bay its name.Là''laë dôVwaLEIaxa 'nEqâ'ts!aqé xwë'kluna mExë's lâq.Then it is said he discovered the ten long canoes hollow things on beach at it.Lâ''laê 'w'un'wïg-aq, laE'm'Iàwis lâ'x â'La'yasa xwà'xwakîuna.Then it is said he hid back of them, then referred to it is said at landward of the canoesand so he wentBoas's subsequent "translation" normalizes the glosses, making them grammaticaland recognizably English: "At once G-ë'dEn went to bent Bay. Therehe discovered ten canoes on the beach. He hid behind them landward fromthe canoes" (557). The most obvious emendation to the text is the expurgationof what Boas wearily refers to as the "ever-recurring quotative," whichhe transcribes as Là'laê, "then it is said." To him, this term is apparently littlemore than a narratological tic which impedes the unfolding of the story45

Boasitself; his own narratology here, in other words, centres on event-content,and he regards such quotatives as incidental, of no consequence to theactual matter of the tale at hand. But such an assumption depends on a certainnarrow notion of what it is to tell a story, or of what a story is. Giventhat the quotative is "ever recurring," it should be self-evident that it playsan important, even a key, role in Kwakwaka'wakw narration; where Boas,because of his own notions of what is essential here, chooses in translatingto emphasize the mimetic and the representative in the tale, the "original"transcribed text, by employing some form of quotative in every sentence,points to a more diegetically-oriented sense of story-telling. The Kwakw'alatext emphasizes the process of telling itself, which suggests a very differentrole for story in that culture than Boas's content-centred renderings indicate.It is possible even to speculate, based on the stylistic evidence from the"original" texts Boas provides, that stories in Kwakwaka'wakw culture focusas much on the importance of the act of narrating as on what is narrated, arole which is obscured by Boas's ethnocentric re-tellings.Such overwritings pervade the Kwakiutl Tales. For instance, in the firstversion of "Scab," Boas offers (in parallel with the Kwakw'ala "original")what appears to be a very straightforward rendering of a myth into English:Then he sat down with his child. He felt lonely. He felt really lonely. Then Scabspoke, and said to his father, "Don't long for me. I shall go to the other side of thebeach." Then the child Scab started and went to the other side of the beach. Hewent to a river. He waded across, and went straight to the place where the deadsisters of his father were (buried in) boxes on the point of land. Then he took needles(of an evergreen tree) and put them in the fold of his shirt. Then he startedand went into the water at the mouth of the river. He went straight down to themouth of the river. (43)His sentences here employ a predominantly simple syntactic form, which,along with the folkloric repetitions, makes them seem rhetorically to gestureback to a primitive origin. Boas clearly wants to offer some sense of thenarrative style of the original, as Charlie Wilson told it. The aspect of thetranslation that one might take at first glance as intrusive, the parentheseswhich he has said he includes to clarify the meanings of the original, in factmake obvious the self-conscious presence of the anthropologist, and hisapparent unwillingness to tamper with his source material. They indicatetypographically for the reader that he is an editorializing presence here.Such intrusions deliberately disrupt the smooth surface of the text itself andconfirm its hybrid state for us.46

What is actually troubling here, however, are the numerous tacit emendationsand smoothings that Boas does not indicate. His two parentheticalgestures cannot rhetorically redress, as they seem intended to do, the subtlenarratological distortions that he has managed in this brief passage. Everysentence in the Kwakw'ala version, with the exception of Scab's speech,begins with the quotative "Lâ''laê" (42). Boas makes a limited effort to gesturetoward the narrative form of the original by occasionally beginning hissentences with "Then," but this practice is evidently capricious and hardlyapproximate to the texture and substance of the Kwakw'ala. (Boas may havetaken his cue from George Hunt here. In the original manuscript transcriptionsof this and other tales by Hunt, "Lâ''laê" is rendered alternatively as "itis said" and "then," though it encompasses both meanings.) This hyper-useof the quotative maybe peculiar to Charlie Wilson, but if one peruses theother tales, it becomes obvious that, while the quotative may not beginevery sentence, its appearance is frequent, and Boas has almost withoutexception purged it from his text. The diegetic nature of the Kwakiutl Talesthemselves has thus been altered, and in normalizing the text by erasing the"foreign" qualities of Kwakwaka'wakw narrative practices, Boas hasimposed his own notion of what a "primitive" story ought to sound like,and what it should contain. The anthropologist, as a seemingly objective"scientist," tends largely to discover in the Other his own preconceptions ofwhat he ought to find, preconceptions which are informed not by the experienceof so-called "primitive" cultures, but by the ideas of the Native thatwere current in American society at the time.This erasure is closely akin to the elimination of colonial or "Western"detail in the photographs that Boas had taken at Fort Rupert. But here Boashas eliminated not simply the apparent Western European "contaminations"of Kwakwaka'wakw culture, but elements of that culture itself, thosewhich do not conform to his own preconception of what a Kwakwaka'wakwstory ought to sound like in English. He tends to substitute, on the level ofstyle in particular, a narratology of his own making for one which mighthave been more "objectively" determined from the Kwakw'ala originals. Thiserasure still operates under the guise of objectivity, but now it is proactive,in the sense that it calls for the scientist not to be recordist but co-creator,maker. Boas himself, through his apparent withdrawals and clarifications,becomes a narrative filter, a mediating presence in his tales. By reshapingthe narratology of the Kwakiutl Tales, he manages to mould the "Native"47 ,

Boasstories to suit his own tonal and conceptual demands. The stories herewrites are hybrids, as much his own as those of his appropriated subjects.What the reader finds manifest in such texts as the Kwakiutl Tales areepisodes, events, in this narrative process. Boas positions himself, finally, asif he were Kwakwaka'wakw—or at least, as he says, their finest friend—speaking through the stories he collects, correcting them to suit his ownvision of who the Kwakwaka'wakw essentially are. But instead of articulatingcultural difference and diversity, Boas imposes his own anthropologicalframework on this work, so that speaking for others, in this case, becomes amode of speaking for himself, and of narrating events in his own autobiographyof progress and liberation through anthropology. The Kwakiutl Tales,despite their value as cultural artifacts, artifacts without which theKwakwaka'wakw would certainly be poorer, are indelibly overwritten byBoas's own personal narration, as he endeavours to construct his ownethnographic tale.For Boas, the interplay between the normal and the strange which conditionshis salvage and rescue of "other" cultures manifests itself as a narrative:not so much a cultural history—whether of others' or of his ownculture—as an autobiography, a writing of himself into the position of theprotagonist of the very texts and artifacts he aims to salvage, as the hero ofhis own life's work. The advocate and saviour described by his readers andinterpreters is not simply the creation of a cult of admirers, but is based inBoas's own methods of collection, of transcription, and of rewriting. Thesemethods, finally, subtend a decidedly narrative presence, a tale-tellingwhich writes itself episodically into the interstices and the margins of themyths and stories Boas sought so ardently to preserve. The Native offers theWhite dominant of North America, with Boas as its key scientific and culturalrepresentative, a functional counter-discursive space, in which thedominant discourse can discover itself as otherwise than it is, as fully selfconsciousand fully known and articulated to itself, a space in which it canconstruct a "freer view" of its limitations, and thus assert its universalvalidity. In Boasian ethnography, the Native is "recovered" for the Whitecultural dominant, and installed in the position of the valuable Other, butan Other, this time, which cannot escape the determinations of the Whitedominant, which has been rewritten and overwritten by a narrative ofWhite self-discovery.48

WORKS CITEDBenjamin, Walter. "The Task of the Translator." In Illuminations. 1955. Tr. Harry Zohn.New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 69-82.Boas, Franz. Kwakiutl: An Illustrative Sketch. Washington: Government Printing Office,1910.. Kwakiutl Tales. 1910. New York: AMS P, 1969.. Kwakiutl Tales New Series: Parti—Translations. New York: Columbia UP, 1935.. Kwakiutl Tales New Series: Part II—Texts. New York: Columbia UP, 1935.. The Mind of Primitive Man [Revised Edition]. New York: Macmillan, 1938.. Race and Democratic Society. New York: J.J. Augustin, 1945.. Race, Language and Culture. New York: The Free P, 1940.Boas, Franz, dir. The Kwakiutl of British Columbia [film]. 1930. Archives of the BurkeMuseum, University of Washington, 1973.16mm, 37 min.Boas, Franz, and George Hunt. Kwakiutl Texts. Memoirs of the American Museum ofNatural History, Volume V. New York: The Knickerbocker P, 1902.Clifford, James and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics ofEthnography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.Codera, Helen. "The Understanding of the Kawkiutl." In Walter Goldschmidt, ed. TheAnthropology of Franz Boas. San Francisco: American Anthropological Association,1959-Francis, Daniel. The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian In Canadian Culture.Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp P, 1992.Franz Boas 1858-1942. Vidéocassette. Prod, for Odyssey, PBS Video, 1980.Galois, Robert. Kwakwaka'wakw Settlements, 1775-1929: A Geographical Analysis andGazetteer. Vancouver: UBC P, 1994.Geertz, Clifford. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, Calif.: StanfordUP, 1988.Grubb, David McC. A Practical Writing System and Short Dictionary of Kwakw'ala(Kwakiutl). Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1977.Halpin, Marjorie M. Our Chiefs and Elders: Photographs by David Neel, Kwagiutl(Museum Note No. 29). Vancouver: UBC Museum of Anthropology, 1990.Hyatt, Marshall. Franz Boas, Social Activist: The Dynamics of Ethnicity. New York:Greenwood P, 1990.Lévi-Strauss, Claude and Didier Eribon. Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss. 1988. Tr.Paula Wissing. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.Lutz, Hartmut. Contemporary Challenges: Conversations with Canadian Native Authors.Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1991.Neel, David. Our Chiefs and Elders: Words and Photographs of Native Leaders. Vancouver:UBC P, 1992.New, W.H., ed. Native Writers and Canadian Writing. Vancouver: UBC P, 1990.Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. 1990. Tr. Kathleen Blaney. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.. History and Truth. 1955. Tr. Charles A. Kelbley. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1965.Stocking, George W., ed. The Shaping of American Anthropology 1883-1911: A Franz BoasReader. New York: Basic Books, 1974.Wallas, Chief James. Kwakiutl Legends, as told to Pamela Whitaker. Vancouver: HancockHouse, 1981.49

DavidMcGimpseyToo Much Slouching,Not Enough SlumpingI loved her but she made me forgo my plansto become an airport minister:those little bibles and those little vodka bottlesalways in my linty, gabardine pockets.The good lord helped me metabolizebut she made me check into a Minnesota clinic,forcing me to go under an assumed name,so I picked the unlikely sobriquet "McGimpsey."What kind of name is that?I told everybody it was all things Europeanand that I came from a long line of paprika millersand disreputable computer salesmen.And sooner rather than later I felt better anyway—ain't it funny how butter melts away—she made sure when she said she was off to T.O.I could feel every single syllable.

CatherineOwenEros, 1911(from a painting by Schiele)As Freud coined the term,Eigenbeziehung to encompassthe attachment to self, youwere slouched naked on a chair,thighs ajar, in the first stagesof ecstatic discovery. Thoughyour face was not defiant, but soft,simian, awash in hidden, Victorianguilt. Though your body was limp,unformed, excluded from femininereverence. Though your mind had not yetcrystallized the death-instinct. Still your sexlistened to the times, reared against themits red and lambent weapon. Its honest organ.In the throes of Sophocles' frantic and savagemaster, you learned to counter blindness:stoking a slow-burning fire, immenseand fixed in the apex.

DavidHeinimannIronized ManA Jest of God and Life Before ManI: EssayI have always had more sympathy for Nick Kazlik, in Margaret Laurence'sA Jest of God, and Nate Schoenhof, in Margaret Atwood's Life Before Man,than is usually reserved for them. I view them as eirons that Laurence andAtwood use to show how the problem of women's misapprehension of mencontributes to the dysfunctional relationships their novels portray. ThoughLaurence and Atwood may not have intended the irony I ascribe to the creationof Nick and Nate, Linda Hutcheon's assertion of intentionality in ironycan help us view them in a way not usually seen but useful for deeper understandingof the novels: "The major players in the ironic game are indeed theinterpreter and the ironist. The interpreter may—or may not—be the intendedaddressee of the ironist's utterance, but s/he (by definition) is the one whoattributes irony and then interprets it: in other words, the one who decideswhether the utterance is ironic (or not), and then what particular ironicmeaning it might have" (11). As difficult as ascribing intent is for poststructuralists,I can assert that Laurence and Atwood intended Nick andNate to be as deserving of our sympathy as are the women they are involvedwith, and that without that sympathy the novels are only partially understood.Hutcheon's intentionalist irony takes me a certain way in reading malepresence in A Jest of God and Life Before Man. To further structure my reading,I rely on the humanist and contingent irony defined by Richard Rorty.Both Laurence and Atwood write as Rorty's ironist as they portray theuncertainties that drive the characters of A Jest of God and Life Before Man.

Rorty defines an "ironist" as "someone who fulfills three conditions: (1) Shehas radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currentlyuses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabulariestaken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes thatargument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nordissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation,she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that itis in touch with a power not herself" (73). Laurence and Atwood test vocabulariesof power through interactions of Nick and Nate and the women withwhom they are involved. The proximity to reality at the end of each novelremains as ambiguous as at the beginning, but Rorty says we are left with abetter understanding of the proximity when we see, through such novels,"the ways in which particular sorts of people are cruel to other particularsorts of people" as a result of "the blindness of a certain kind of person tothe pain of another kind of person how our attempts at autonomy, ourprivate obsessions with the achievement of a certain sort of perfection, maymake us oblivious to the pain and humiliation we are causing" (141).What I am looking at here, then, is how A Jest of God and Life Before Manpresent blind cruelty in the attempt to achieve autonomy and how menneed to rid themselves of their pain before they can be expected to respondto women's demands that men stop being such a pain. As curative demonstrations,A Jest of God and Life Before Man are useful to compare for howRorty's "private obsessions" create the (mis)understanding of men. Laurence'sview of Nick is exterior only, through the obsessions of another, Rachel;Atwood's view of Nate is interior, through his own obsessions. With opposedagency yet similar outcome, the novels create a dialectic within which misapprehensioncan occur—and can be resolved.Laurence in limiting the view of Nick Kazlik to perception through Rachelcreates the impression that he has used Rachel, but with closer examinationof Rachel's behaviour the impression is not entirely justified and is balancedby her personal difficulties, which Nick helps her overcome. Laurenceironizes their relationship to represent Rachel's need to escape the traditionshe clutches, and Nick becomes the eiron in her realization of the need to letgo. In Life Before Man, Nate becomes Atwood's means to show the consequencesof the ethical misprisions of Elizabeth and Lesje, requiring that he,like Nick, also be read ironically. The term "ethical" itself could be wonderedat here: I understand it as the description not of the desirable but53

Laurence & A t w o o drather what is, as does Wayne C. Booth (8). Ethics does, however, prescribethe desirable when irony enters; Hutcheon locates ethics as the "somethingelse that characterizes irony", beyond the unsaid: "irony involves the attributionof an evaluative, even judgmental attitude" (37). Innocence andguilt can be debated and attributed after the terms of debate are defined;the irony in A Jest of God and Life Before Man shows those qualities in therelationships to emphasize the importance of definition before judgment.In both novels, it is not that the men abuse the women but that their presentationin the development of problem behaviour in the women makesthem appear abusive. At the same time, Laurence and Atwood do not grantthem complete innocence either. It is the distinction between that guilt andinnocence that interests me here, the ambiguity of presence and agency inNick and Nate.The ambiguity of Nick's position is established when Rachel recalls thathis eyes are "seemingly only friendly now, but I remember the mockery inthem from years ago" (62). Nick's seeming friendliness is Laurence's signalthat his mockery continues, and Rachel's failure to see that grounds hermisapprehension of him, especially on the problem of acquiescence to control.Ironically, if much of Rachel's problem with control is situated inpatriarchy, patriarchy's example of control permits her self-control, as whenthe prophetic Murray Lees says that her father '"had the kind of life hewanted most'": Rachel realizes that if'her father "had wanted otherwise, itwould have been otherwise" (124). The realization encourages her to beginliving the life she wants, and despite feeling that "Women shouldn't phonemen" (131), she phones Nick and begins to break the rules that have controlledher life. The realization also situates Nick as enforcing Rachel's continuingneed to break those rules, set primarily by her mother, an ironicagent for patriarchy. Laurence, however, requires that Nick be seen as passivein Rachel's struggle—otherwise, a novel of female independencebecomes, ironically, contingent on male consent.Nick's reticence encourages Rachel to fantasize about him, and her fantasyestablishes the basis for his unwitting control of her. Desperate toescape tradition, she denies the truth of her observation that he "doesn'treveal much. He only appears to talk openly. Underneath, everything isguarded" (85). The denial in the fantasy makes Nick the unwitting delivererof the hard truth to Rachel about her self-deception. When Rachel succumbsto "dramatizing" him in order to make their affair "seem mysterious54

or significant, instead of what it is, which is embarrassing" (86), he becomes"one of the hawkish and long-ago riders of the Steppes" (86). The image ofrapacity reveals the innocence and passivity of Rachel's romantic naivety asit also puts Nick in a difficult predicament: if he really did behave as one ofthose riders, Rachel would be terrified. If Nick eventually appears to suit theimage, he also leaves Rachel with more than he takes. Her benefit raises thehistorically recognized irony that difficult men are characterized as sometimesbeneficial for women. 1 Laurence asks, as did Emily Brontë withHeathcliff, and as does Rorty in describing his ironist, what can be done toprevent that ironic agency.In Life Before Man, the impression of Nate is established by his confusionover the trait that is considered primary and unique to Man: love. He realizesthat, with Elizabeth, "He doesn't know what 'love' means between themany more, though they always say it" (14). His realization defines the novel'smetaphor about love: absence of meaning leads to obsolescence, and theobsolete becomes extinct. If Nate loses the definition of what defines hisspecies, he—and the species—is destined for extinction. The metaphor representsthe ethical vacuum of the inability to take a position on an issue, asshown in Nate's finding it hard "to blame anyone for anything" (31). Themetaphor makes us re-examine the anti-teleological relativism that definespopular culture's ambiguous ethical purpose and direction, an ambiguityfound in the evolution of Nate's impression of Martha: "What he likedabout her at first was her vagueness, her lack of focus, an absence of edgesthat gave her a nebulous quality," but when she becomes demanding, herpain makes it seem that "she's been dropped on the sidewalk from a greatheight and frozen there, all splayed angles and splinters" (34). Martha existsonly as matter for Nate—she has no soul. Liking her for being vague, unfocussed,and nebulous, he also lacks position and a soul.Yet Atwood presents positionality itself as a problem. Believing that hiswork as a lawyer compromised his intergrity, Nate decided to take "an ethicalstance. Grow. Change. Realize your potential" (41). He stood on shakyground, though: the pop human-potential movement, with its emphasis onthe self, is as misapprehending of ethics as was the law distant from thesocial justice Nate thought possible in it. His pursuit of the answer onlyleads him to blame Elizabeth for his dilemma: "It's partly her fault. Half ofher wants a sensitive, impoverished artist, the other half demands a forceful,aggressive lawyer. It was the lawyer she married, then found too conven-55

Laurence & A t w o o dtional. What is he supposed to do?" (41). Atwood here identifies the difficultymen have in meeting perceived demands that they be one or the other.A partial answer, as another question—what prevents being both?—onlyleads to the further question of what societal pressure made both impossibleand caused Elizabeth's dilemma of insisting that he be just one or theother so that she could better define herself by either.Definition through a man is Rachel's problem as well. Her passivity is evidentin her response to Nick's voice, a sense-related concern similar to thesensualist ethic Atwood critiques. Rachel likes the simple sound of Nick'svoice and wants "just to sit here beside him, in this security and hear hisvoice, whatever it happens to be saying" (105). Paradoxically, Rachel's stateof security is her greater danger: listening only to the sound and ignoringthe sense, she is most open to deception. If Laurence here cautions womento be wary of the seductive deception of a man's voice, it also appears that aman is responsible for a woman's seduction when the real problem is herinattentiveness. Desiring security, she seeks protection with a man. In makinghim protector, though, she assigns him responsibility to determine thebounds of protection. The determination can be a sacrifice of liberty andeven amount to repression. Rachel is unaware of that and will suffer for it,but Nick is also victimized in being made the mistaken repressive agent.Nate lives with a dilemma similar to that which Rachel imposes on Nick.His mother looks down on him from her pedestal, having engendered insecuritybecause of the contradiction between her forbidding him to fight inself-defence when a boy and her willingness to "kill" over bigotry (83).Respecting her yet confused by her hypocrisy, he can only respond in fantasywith the hostility toward women that the dilemma generates in him:bathing while Elizabeth glares at him, he imagines diving for a raw spongeand "combat with a giant squid" whose tentacles enwrap him, and he has"Nothing to think about but getting free," which he does by "Plunging theknife right in between its eyes" (105). Yet, though hostile, he follows hismother's injunction and does not plunge the knife where he really wants to,and he still desires her presence in his lovers, as when Martha perceivesElizabeth's continued influence on Nate and berates him for it: "'When areyou going to get your own bellybutton back, Nate"' she scolds, sneeringwith a metaphor that recalls Elizabeth's marrying him as easily as puttingon a shoe: "'I bet she even ties your goddamned shoelaces for you'" (233).With Nate in this dilemma, Atwood can use him as a foil to qualify the

status of the women around him. Neutral—maybe "neutred" is better—ashe is and as his mother believes he should be, Lesje finds him attractive yetambiguous in his "making a gift of himself, handing himself over to her,mutely" (116). Yet her attraction to being able to "do something" (116) withhim, just as he implicitly let Elizabeth form him, is frustrated by his continuedvalue for his marriage. The frustration challenges Lesje's own ambiguousethics, which are pop-oriented like Nate's and founded on the view ofher women's group that spouses are not "property" but "living, growingorganisms" (127). "Organism" is particularly apt in describing the absenceof any consideration of the soul. Without that consideration, ethics areimpossible. Atwood problematizes the solipsistic sensualism that Lesjebegins to perceive, the hypocrisy of the pseudo-ethic that justifies what italso condemns: "What it boiled down to was that man-stealing was out butpersonal growth was commendable" (127).The beginning of Nate's affair with Lesje also begins what appears to bethe development of his new ethic. Its basis is his change from passive toactive involvement, which Elizabeth identifies, and it parallels Rachel'sassumption then rejection of Nick as her protector. Nate once "wanted tobe protected. He wanted a woman to be a door he could go through andshut behind him," but now, "he wants to protect" (162). While Elizabeth'sunderstanding of Nate's involvement with Lesje may not indicate how Nateis, and regardless of the identification as protector, Elizabeth finds herself,like Rachel toward Nick, in a compromised and threatened condition. Thetrick of the irony here is to recognize that Elizabeth and Rachel have put, orallowed themselves to be put, in that condition and that Nate and Nickappear blameworthy if not responsible when they were unwitting participantsin the development of Elizabeth's and Rachel's reaction of fear. But asdoes Laurence in exposing Nick's injury over his father's absent love,Atwood questions this ambiguous role of protector by undercutting its supposedstrength with an image of Nate's weakness. Having realized that hecan and will leave Elizabeth, he nonetheless feels acute helplessness over theimpending separation from his children. His bewilderment leads to thefundamental questions he has to answer, just as his physical position suggestshis need to return to grace, to recover his soul: "Yet he kneels; tearscome to his eyes. He should have held on, he should have held on moretightly. He picks up one of Nancy's blue rabbit slippers, stroking the fur. It'shis own eventual death he cradles. His lost, his kidnapped children, gone57

Laurence & A t w o o dfrom him, kept hostage. Who has done this? How has he allowed it to happen?"(166). The introduction of death to the image of desire for redemptionis foreboding, despite Nate's realization of the questions he needs to ask abouthis state. Yet Nate's eventual realizations about himself, his developing abilityto assert himself, especially against his mother, together with the provocativeending which may either destroy or redeem him, show the possibility forredemption, if the right questions are asked.Traumatic separation from others, as the means of final discovery for Nickand Nate, is the means also for Laurence and Atwood to represent the severestconsequence of misapprehension. Not having anticipated his own traumaover separation from Elizabeth, Nate is shocked to discover that "He can'tconnect any act he can think of with any consequence he can imagine," andthat as a result he feels "Segmented" and "Dismembered" (244), a worse statethan he was in while with Elizabeth. He suspects that the truth about himselfis that he is a "patchwork, a tin man, his heart stuffed with sawdust" (246).The character he becomes by the allusion to the tinman and the lion in TheWizard ofOz is one in need of courage and a heart. With those needs, hisdesire to view Elizabeth as "morally neutral" (245) becomes the stand of thecowardly and the witless. Just as Laurence problematizes Rachel's traditionalism,Atwood through Elizabeth indicts moral neutrality with the evaluativeirony that Hutcheon describes. Nate's reaction to Elizabeth asserts the needfor the position that will raise the novel's characters from their moral stupor.The same need for elevation in Nick is suggested when the possibility ofpregnancy makes Rachel fantasize about how he would ask her to marry him.She constructs and rejects scenarios, then realizes the futility of her fantasiesand is finally able to act on her knowledge of her self-deception. When sheasks Nick to stay in Manawaka despite his desire to leave, she has "no pride"left, yet, paradoxically, she is also "calm . .. almost free"; she asks herself,"Have I finished with facades? Whatever happens, let it happen. I won't denyit" (142). The epiphany of her visit with Hector makes her see herself and heraffair with Nick in a new way. But Nick, also the unwitting agent of revelationyet in a relationship of lover rather than father, is not seen as an emissary butas a deceiver who has been discovered. Nick has done nothing more thanRachel permits, yet Rachel in discovering her facades implicitly accuses himof responsibility for it. Just as Elizabeth's self-righteous contempt of Nate permitsher a moral relativism, Rachel's self-deception continues but now with ahostility toward a scapegoat who permits her a false virtue. Laurence's focus

on Rachel's delusion makes it less evident that Nick has become a victimthan that Rachel has been wronged, but Rachel has wronged herself asmuch, if not more.Rejecting facades, Rachel is capable of a new assertiveness with Nick andis strengthened as she recognizes her weakness. The ambiguity of her newstatus is evident when she inwardly quotes John Donne to silence Nick: "ForGod's sake hold your tongue and let me love. But it's the man who is supposedto say that" (145). The assumption of male responsibility seems to repeatRachel's passivity earlier in the phone call to Nick, but here Laurence ironicallyshows Rachel's change. In quoting Donne, Rachel feels that conventionhampers the expression of her love. Her usurpation of the male role is ameans to mock the convention to discredit it and then act without referenceto it. Yet, at the same time, the statement is a plea for the ability, whichRachel is painfully aware she lacks, to talk enough that Nick would quoteDonne to her. The tension between the two possibilities shows Rachel'suncertainty with her new vision of the world without her formerly reassuringfacades. The impression it leaves of men, though, is that they are domineeringand must be mocked into realizing their imperiousness—Nick getshis mockery turned back on him. Rachel looks the better for it, but onlybecause Nick looks worse.Mockery of his state finally makes Nate act as he needs to, as when hereturns to the morally suspect world of his law practice, a world in whicheven his hero René Lévesque has succumbed to "compromise and hedging,like the rest of the country" (274). Yet Nate's disappointment turns into atautological defence of compromise: "It's a world of unfreedom after all.Only a fool could have believed in anything else, and Lévesque is no fool.(Like Nate: not any more)" (274). Such a defence, if adhered to, justifies themockery that Rachel feels necessary to jolt a Nick into awareness of hisbehaviour, and Atwood forwards the same idea when Nate confronts themoral fervor of his mother and her imposition on him of her vision of anideal son. He scoffs at her enthusiasm for what she believes is his idealisticreturn to law: "'Mother,... anyone who thinks they can really help people,especially doing what I'm doing, is a horse's ass'" (286). But his triumphantassertion is erased by his mother's revelation that not only has he alwaysbeen afraid of being a horse's ass, but also that she contemplated suicideafter his father's death. Appalled that she shares with him a despair of life,he realizes that his mother is not the idol he had in turn set her up as, that59

L a u r e n c e & A t w o o dhe can no longer depend on her. This is the point of total alienation forhim. Like so many others in literature whose illusions have been shattered—Updike'sRabbit, Hesse's Harry Haller, Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov—he attempts to flee to the absence of the knowledge of mortality: runningand leaping and soaring, "he aims again for it, that non-existent spot wherehe longs to be. Mid-air" (288).Such flight is also evident in the last time that Rachel and Nick aretogether, a moment of inversion in his involvement with her growth toautonomy. As Nate does from Elizabeth and Martha, Nick withdraws inwhat appears to be an escape from Rachel, and the reason for his flightmakes him seem even more an ironic emissary for her. In the scene, theyhave made love for what will be the last time. Rachel affectionately says thatif she were ever to have a child, she would like it to be his. She feels immediatelyhis withdrawal from her, and he replies '"I'm not God. I can't solveanything'" (148). Apparently he believes she thinks he can put her life inorder. Rachel has meant a compliment, and whether he desires to evade itor fails to perceive it, he is implicitly discredited as not only egocentric butalso spiritually dead when he directs Rachel's attention to the cemetery.Puzzled, Rachel asks, '"Nick, why don't you ever say what you mean?'"(149). This anxiety-laden gap in signification is, at the same time, Rachel'sfirst challenge of another, the first example of her new independence ofmind, whose strength makes Nick try to defend what he knows he cannot:'"Don't make a major production of it, eh?... I've said more than enough,about everything'" (149). It is uncertain whether it is Nick or Rachel whounderstands the other better. Rachel has had difficulty speaking and interpretingherself and the words of others, but Nick evades her because he knowsthat his position is indefensible, just as Nate evades Elizabeth and Martha.Existence for Nate after his annihilation and flight, however, is not quitethat of the automaton he wants to become. He still works for political justiceand "longs for a message" even while suspecting that the message is a "joke"(306). He will, at the end of the day, "lose himself among the apathetic, thefatalistic, the uncommitted, the cynical; among whom he would like to feelat home" (306). But his suspicion is unconfirmed; he does not feel at home.The sense that Atwood gives that the human spirit endures after the lastillusion has been shattered—the illusion that makes Nate "sway at the lip ofthe abyss" (287)—makes Lesje's pregnancy at the end, despite Nate's desirenot to have a child, not a push into the abyss but a step back from it.60

That is one choice for the ending. The other is that his suspicion will befulfilled and that he will feel at home with the alienated. Though we last seehim running, which is the metaphor of control for him in the novel evenwhile it suggests his desire to escape, a small but significant detail shows thefragility of his new state: when he stops, he will smoke a cigarette, "Perhapshe'll throw half of it away" (313-14). Immediately after, he will meet Lesje,who will tell him she is pregnant. Will he continue running, or will he rejoice?Atwood leaves the choice to us, as something of an ethical test for ourselves.Given his love for children, yet his despair of the world, either is possible. Ifwe choose flight, we succumb to despair. If it is joy, we revel in the new life.Ambiguity determines the final view of Nick also. After Rachel learns thatNick is not married, she first concludes that his own "demons and webs"made him "draw away, knowing that what I wanted from him was toomuch," but then she objects, "Was that it? Or was he merely becomingbored?" (189). Nick had been fighting the demon of his dead brother and hisfather's attachment to that brother to the detriment of himself. Rachel'sconclusion implies isolation on two counts: over personal problems thatarise, and the boredom that ensues. In both cases, the reference is to Nick:the problems that she perceives in him take precedence, and he is deridedfor not realizing that departure does not end boredom. Rachel can now dismisshim: "I don't know whether he meant to lie to me or not. As for whatwas happening with him and to him this summer, I couldn't say what itreally was, nor whether it had anything to do with me or not" (190). Theaccumulation of negatives in the statement nullifies the modicum of sympathyin it. Laurence shows Rachel as hardened, with the resolve to finallyleave Manawaka, even over the protests of her mother, less a happy choicethan an enforced decision.The ambiguity of its conclusion complicates A Jest of God. Rachel washeaded for disaster in her life, which was suggested by her bizarre speakingin tongues and her undesired friendship with Calla. She seems to have cometo her new strength as a consequence of her summer with Nick, to whomshe was drawn from Calla, the absurd spiritualism, the clutch of her mother,and the static memory of her father. Nick, though, in Rachel's view, developedinto something other than what he led her to believe he was—or,more accurately, what she wanted him to be. Just as Atwood problematizesthe last view of Nate, Laurence symbolizes Nick's final effect on Rachel withher suspected pregnancy being a tumour. The autonomy Rachel achieves is61

L a u r e n c e 8t A t w o o dmade ironie through the cancer metaphor for her hardened emotionalstate, but without a consideration of Nick's difficulty with Rachel, it isunclear whether or not her conviction of his deceit is justified.The ironized view of Nick in A Jest of God and Nate in Life Before Manreveals the sensitivity of Laurence and Atwood to a representation of malepresence founded on uncertainty and binarism, not just in relation towomen but within men themselves. Both writers reject the simplisticascription of blame for the complex irony that better represents the nuancesof their characters' relationships. The representation is more than a valorizationof the shaky relativism that Atwood critiques in her novel; it is theextension of her victim status to acknowledge the possibility that the perceivedvictimizer—as Laurence shows through the effect of Nick's fatherand brother on him—is himself a victim. Adherents to contemporary men'smovements that are concerned, even obsessed, with their claimed victimizationunder feminization would do well to understand their perceivedplight through the irony that Laurence and Atwood employ. The solace ofthe recognition of their victimhood would at the same time encouragethem to see the legitimacy of women's anger against them.II: DifferencesIrony and identity criticism on A Jest of God and Life Before Man can beaddressed partly through the issue of language. Diana Brydon says thatRachel's speaking in tongues is a "release of speech" and freedom from therestriction on speaking within patriarchy (189), though Brydon does notpraise Nick for his role in freeing Rachel where she should: Calla is Laurence'srepresentation of the isolation that awaits Rachel if she denies the need tospeak not within patriarchy, but to it. Rachel speaks only to herself if herlanguage is premised on speaking in tongues, and Laurence refuses thatsolipsism as she shows the need Rachel and Nick have for each other if theyare to move beyond restriction. Diana M.A. Relke defines Calla as doesBrydon, calling Calla's "gift of tongues... a metaphor for communication—not merely verbal communication, but emotional, sexual and spiritualcommunication as well" (35); again, though, as Calla can be understood byno one when speaking in tongues, she communicates with no one but herself,which is not the end Laurence wants for Rachel.Frank Davey, discussing Life Before Man, claims that the characters'"insights into themselves are . . . restricted to conventional language" (85);62

that restriction indicates the need for an ironized reading to determine thevalue of the binarism that Davey identifies in the novel: "Life Before Manthus makes exceedingly clear the fact that Atwood's male versus femaledichotomy of order versus disorder, solid versus liquid, stasis versus process,segmentation versus wholeness, is a metaphor, rather than a literal distinctionbetween men and women. It is a feminist vision of nature rather thanof politics" (90). Yet to restrict the metaphor to nature is to deny the identitypolitics of feminism. The ironist position permits the necessarymetaphors of both politics and nature: each becomes a metaphor of theother as the characters grope toward understanding through the limitationsof their language. Like Davey, Cathy N. Davidson and Arnold E. Davidsonargue by trope as they describe a limitation like the one Davey sees: "deaddinosaurs . .. are Atwood's ambivalent icon of the life before man and hermultivalent symbol for the life of man" (221). Davey's metaphor and theDavidsons' symbol go further with the addition of the embracing trope ofirony, which extends their arguments to the ethical vacuum that equatesboth the male and female characters of the novel.Nick of A Jest of God has received extensive consideration, both positiveand negative. The negative treatment centres on the perception of him as aworthless seducer. Elizabeth Waterston asserts that "Like the other male figurewho dominated Rachel's life, Niall ('nihil') Cameron, Nick offers nothing"(88), but she unfortunately lets slide the potential for the ironic readingthat shows what Nick offers after she earlier states that "Nick is Rachel'sdouble" (83). Kenneth James Hughes is even more severe: "Nick coldly usesRachel... for his own selfish gratification, and in the process he misleadsher about his marital status" (110); Nick is a "failure as an individual," havingBuberian "I-it relationships of power" rather than "I-thou relationships"of intimacy (119), which repeats Davey's observation on the novel'snature-politics division. The negative impression has led to Harriet Blodgett'sdisputable claim that Nick "pretends to be married" (11); Blodgett, as doesHughes, reads too much into the ambiguity-laden photograph that Nickshows Rachel, showing more their own desire that the photograph be Nick'sson—it could also be Nick as boy, playing on his lost boyhood (see Stovel38), even his rival brother; the point is, the photograph has no certainty: itis Laurence's signatory gap in the novel to play on the gap between Racheland Nick—what is, she asks, the true identity of these people?The discussions about Nick reveal Laurence's success in conveying the63

L a u r e n c e fit A t w o o dirony of his role, even if the perception of that irony is seldom announced.Yet both Waterston and Hughes see some value in Nick. Waterston sees himas something of an example to women who, "emphasizing their equalitywith men in everything but opportunity, came to say, like Nick, 'Peopleused to group us [Nick and his brother] together ... I wanted to be completelyon my own'" (89); Hughes admits to the presence, if limited, of adidactic role: Nick, "not without some distress, gives [Rachel] a sexual education"(118). Clara Thomas is closer to the ironic reading that objects toNick as solely a "casual seducer," arguing that is it Rachel's mediated visionof him that prompts the description (90), and Patricia Morley disputesHughes' impression that Nick uses Rachel as a "commodity" and thatRachel's tumour represents a colonial past that A Jest of God argues against(97), though Morley does not consider the irony the tumor symbolizes.CM. McLay also discusses how Rachel's view of Nick, "uncorrected by anomniscient narrator," though "closer to reality," does distort him (188), adistortion corrected with the ironic reading. Nora Stovel has directly notedthe irony, if briefly, with the facts about Nick emerging to "form an ironiccounterpoint to Rachel's misinterpretations" (37).Nick's role as Rachel's teacher is regularly alluded to. Margaret Ossachoffbelieves "Nick sets her straight" about the colonialist mentality (232), thoughhere again the irony of Rachel as willing participant in this colonialization,through her self-doubt, is missed. Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos concludesthat Rachel and her sister Stacey make "internal changes through connectionswith dynamic animus figures that the women internalize although themen themselves are ephemeral" (50); Waterston also notes the dynamism,claiming that "Nick is Rachel's double" (83). Clara Thomas believes thatNick "understands Rachel better than she understands him" and thatRachel is unaware of "the depth of his meaning" when he says "'I'm notGod, I can't solve anything"' (85). Totally opposed to the casual seducer rolefor Nick is CM. McLay's assertion that Rachel's demand for a child "ultimatelydestroys her relationship with Nick"; the child, Nick realizes, is for"her own fulfillment" (180), which is the ironic response to the view of Nickas colonizer—he now becomes the colonized and exploited.As with Nick, criticism of Nate varies. Barbara Hill Rigney sympathizeswith but implicitly dismisses him: if he is victimized as a "Segmented man,"he creates his victimhood, as when his "sexual fantasies about Lesje, asabout all women, are firmly grounded in arrested adolescence" (87, 86). Just64

the same, Elizabeth's viciousness and Lesje's pop-psych romance are as retrogradeand in need of ironic reading to reveal Atwood's concern for theproblem of being kept adolescent rather than choosing to be. Cathy N. andArnold E. Davidson also see Nate as living "mostly in his fantasies" (213),with the result that "Nate remains the same Nate" at the end (220); theirview is limited, not taking into account Nate's overall ethical change, whichthe use of René Lévesque suggests and which Atwood posits with the ethicaltest at the novel's close as Nate runs toward Lesje and the knowledge of newlife that could either condemn or redeem both him and us. The Davidsonsin comparing the men in Life Before Man employ a binarism that hints atthe irony they nonetheless do not discover: "Nate is Chris' emotional andphysical opposite" (211); to the extent that Chris' brutality is developed,Elizabeth's attraction to it affirms her adolescent arrest, and Nate's differencefrom it reveals him to be, ironically, far beyond that plead-shout-andpunishromance.The ending of Life Before Man has been difficult for critics, ranging fromKolodny's belief that Lesje "makes a commitment to the future by throwingaway her contraceptive pills" (96) to Barbara Hill Rigney's disagreementwith the tendency to view Lesje's pregnancy as life-affirming (99); GayleGreene disagrees with the usual "hopeless" view: "I see the characters aschanging and countering the processes of repetition" (81), which is the closestany previous reading has come to recognizing the irony at work in thenovel.Frank Davey's argument that, because the characters' "insights into themselvesare ... restricted to conventional language," Life Before Man "has noclimactic moment" (85), could have defined an alternative language throughirony. The definition would have permitted identification of any number ofpassages as the climactic moment—Nate's realization of the loss of his children,or his mother's revelation about suicide, for example.While not opposed to these criticisms, others do not consider Nate exclusivelyas a man of limited worth or appeal. Sherrill E. Grace believes thatAtwood created "a sympathetic picture of Nate" (136), and Atwood herself,suggesting the irony fundamental to the novel, said that "Peter [in TheEdible Woman] is not terribly likable; Nate, in Life Before Man, is very likable"("Interview" 179). The ambiguous readings of both Nate and Nick begfor some further understanding of their value to the novels. The ironicreading both accounts for the ambiguity and establishes their value.

L a u r e n c e fit A t w o o di Work on the historical presentation of this irony in women's fiction includes LydiaBurton and David Morley, "A Sense of Grievance: Attitudes Toward Men inContemporary Fiction," The Canadian Forum LV.654 (Sept 1975): 57-60; ElaineShowalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing,(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977); Carolyn Zonailo, "Male Stereotypes in The Diviners andThe Edible Woman" Room of One's Own: A Feminist Journal of Literature and Criticism31 (i977) : 70-72; Janet Todd, éd., Men by Women (Women & LiteratureVoLi, new series,New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981); Jane Miller, Women Writing About Men (New York:Pantheon, 1986); Helen M. Buss, "Margaret Laurence's Dark Lovers," Atlantis: A Women'sStudies Journal 11.2 (1986): 97-107.WORKS CITEDAtwood, Margaret. "Interview: A Conversation with Margaret Atwood." MargaretAtwood: Reflection and Reality. Living Author Series Vol. 6. Ed. Beatrice Mendez-Egle and James M. Haule. Edinburg, Texas: Pan American UP, 1987.172-80.. Life Before Man. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979.Blodgett, Harriet. "The Real Lives of Margaret Laurence's Women." Critique: Studies inContemporary Fiction 23.1 (1981): 5-17.Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P,1988.Brydon, Diana. "Silence, Voice, and the Mirror: Margaret Laurence and Women."Crossing the River: Essays in Honour of Margaret Laurence. Ed. Kristjana Gunnars.Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1988.183-206.Davey, Frank. Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1984.Davidson, Cathy N. and Arnold E. "Prospects and Retrospects in Life Before Man!' TheArt of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism. Ed. Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy N.Davidson. Toronto: Anansi, 1981. 205-22.Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie A. "Laurence's Fiction: A Revisioning of FeminineArchetypes." Canadian Literature 93 (1982): 42-57.Grace, Sherrill E. Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood. Montreal: Véhicule, 1980.Greene, Gayle. "Life Before Man: 'Can Anything Be Saved?'." Margaret Atwood: Visionand Forms. Ed. Kathryn Van Spanckeren, Jan Garden Castro, and Sandra M.Gilbert. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1988. 65-84.Hughes, Kenneth James. "Politics and A Jest of God!' Margaret Laurence: An Appreciation.Ed. Christl Verduyn. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1988.101-27.Hutcheon, Linda. Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London: Routledge, 1994.Kolodny, Annette. "Margaret Atwood and the Politics of Narrative." Studies on CanadianLiterature: Introductory and Critical Essays. Ed. Arnold E. Davidson. New York:MLA, 1990. 90-109.Laurence, Margaret. A Jest of God. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966.McLay, CM. "Every Man is an Island: Isolation in A Jest of God!' Margaret Laurence: TheWriter and Her Critics. Ed. W.H. New. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1977.177-88.Morley, Patricia. Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home. Montreal: McGill-Queen'sUP, 1991.66

Ossachoff, Margaret. "Colonialism in the Fiction of Margaret Laurence." SouthernReview: Literary and Interdisciplinary Essays 13.3 (1980): 222-38.Relke, Diana M.A. "Pillar, Speaker, Mother: The Character of Calla in A Jest of God"Studies in Canadian Literature/Etudes en la littérature canadienne 13.1 (1988): 34-46.Rigney, Barbara Hill. Margaret Atwood. Totawa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1987.Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.Stovel, Nora. Rachel's Children: Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God. Toronto: ECW, 1992.Thomas, Clara. The Manawaka World of Margaret Laurence. Toronto: McClelland andStewart, 1976.Waterston, Elizabeth. "Double is Trouble: Twins in A Jest of God" Critical Approaches tothe Fiction of Margaret Laurence. Ed. Colin Nicholson. Vancouver: U of BritishColumbia P, 1990. 83-92.67

BeverleyBrahicObjets d'ArtSliding into Brussels on the southboundtrain—on elevated tracks—we flashedthrough a red light district where a rowof second story picture windows framedwoman after woman, each one pressed upagainst a sheet of glass suggestivelyfor the stopping-over inter-citytraffic. Rooms Chambres Zimmer the signs tapedin bottom corners said, behind themdeepening chiaroscuro labyrinthsof imaginary spaces: tiled roomswith curtained double beds, vestibulesopening on a damp square of pavementwith an arched doorway where an aging procuressflashes a coin ... a Flemish genre paintingwith dollhouse perspectives and trompe-l'oeil.Sometimes when I'm feeling sexyI imagine a whorehousefor women—a sort ofRoman bath with Doric columnsand mosaics, where male modelslounge about like flesh and bloodclassical statues, recliningwith draperies loosenedand wakening erectionsto make me feel desirable.I'd be done in sheer black stockingsas for a visit to the Louvrewhere guards in uniform would winkat visitors who fondle sculpture.68

At the Picasso Museumonce I joined a group of peoplegazing at some blown-up black and whitephotos of Picasso at Antibes.In one of them he stared straight backhis torso bared, seated on a stool or chairin skintight trunks with legs agape(his nails are painted, someone whispered,awestruck), the image of a fertile god:Priapus offering his gibbous crotchlike a ripe mango on a plate, a sliceof shade along one nether edgeyou knew you could see upif only you could get the right angle.69

TomWaymanA poet is allowed to use theinterjection Ojust once in alifetime.—rule for writingThe Big OEach time I face the fleshly o-val, the folded and enfolded entrancewith its hairy capI wonderis this it?is this the OI am permitted?The tongue, teethmy whole mouthworking diligentlydelicatelydraft after draft after draftis this sweet flow I suckthe Muses' fount thatrises in the cleftstruck by Pegasus?When a version workseach breathI take, releaseeach tongued syllablevibrates all Mount Heliconquake after quakeIn another versionthe seismic probingsthat trigger shockbelow groundcause ripple upon ripple to curlacross the field of her belly—the tempestuous earth-surfthreatening to swampthe coracle of the navel

Such momentsbring us closerevery timeto the bellowringingthe prolongedye-ESand counter toall laws, theO the O theO

JohnPassAristotle's LanternWhen perspective is new who knows where we tend.Piero's St. Mary Magdalen is realizationof purposeful form, a specimen.The good work done, the halo in placethe act of grace subsumed in the state"the curves in the regular bodies"her hair remains bedraggled with oilits emptied decanter transparently glassher luminous weight, humanas any woman's who hurries, warm from her bathin candlelight across the room, to bed, a lover."Beauteous night, O night of love, smile at our excesses,"sings the whore in the dwarf's arms, departing . ..Hoffman's captive soul in towa rival's blood on his handsthe gondola's lone lamp fumblingwith the architecture, the stupified water.Cry him a river. I pinned my hope earlyon Ping the duck, who, late and afraidof the swishing stick, just punishment,hid in the reeds as his family waddledonto the junk on the yellow Yangze, at sunset.Alone, disconsolate, he saw them gobut found them again by luck, downstream!Though a man might have his balls chewed offby another, at a guard's whim, in Bosnia.

At length, at last, past the fish-count shackwhere the forest opens west to release uspast unnatural history, past the little wheezeat the bottom of your breathing: salt-water.And perhaps a crevice concealingthe urchin arianamed for the great teacher: orchestrationof forty skeletal pieces meshedin muscle or ligamentfor the synchronous movementof five teeth, ever-growing, ever-grounddown on the rock, reaping algae. Appetiteinsistent, blind to even the aqueous light,couldn't be that virtuous striving, aspirantform within the form: active soulful happiness.Fresco, melody, story, faith.A theory of evolution.O the taste, the pleasureas we lick and kiss each other theregrooming the metaphysics.Twenty-three hundred years and counting.The same observable mouth-parts, apparatus.73

K a t h l e e nW a l lRepresenting theOther BodyFrame Narratives in MargaretAtwood's "Giving Birth"and Alice Munro's "Meneseteung"lAf hen I think of the framed depiction of women'sbodies, I cannot help thinking of the nineteenth-century nude, those womendepicted by Ingres, Bonnard, Courbet, and Manet in their baths, their beds,their dressing rooms. Those paintings might be said to represent an iconographyof what Simone de Beauvoir identified as early as 1952 in The SecondSex as the woman as "other" in a culture where the masculine was the same,the norm. Additionally, paintings like Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe emphasizethe extent to which the body that is the object of the male gaze is, inthis iconography, reified and abstract. Zola, trying to justify Manet's inclusionof the nude woman among the clothed men, the unlikeliness of the wholescene, wrote "Thus, surely the nude woman of Le déjeuner sur l'herbe is thereonly to furnish the artist an occasion to paint a bit of flesh" (Brooks 133).Further, the poses of these representations suggest an oxymoronic knowingunself-consciousness: for how can a woman be both self-absorbed inher own toilet and yet be posing for the man who paints her? Thus wemight see her as self-divided or doubled, depending on whether we attendto the painting's frame: she is alone and subject to her own self-absorptionin the context of her representation within the frame that contains her. Yetbefore the frame separates her from the context of the artist's studio, she iscertainly not alone, but rather object of the male artist's gaze. Thus theframed female body typically might be said to represent female otherness,to embody woman as both object and subject. Such a status renders herboth self-divided and doubled, in contrast to the unified, singular male of74

whose gaze she is the object. Subject of her representation, she is the objectof the desire to know and understand, but is finally unknowable and incomprehensible.In Body Work, Peter Brooks writes about the traditional connectionbetween the desire to know the body and narrative, as well as about"the inherently unsatisfiable desire resulting from the drive to know":The body in the field of vision—more precisely, in that field of vision which is socentral to realist narrative—inevitably relates to scopophilia, the erotic investmentof the gaze which is traditionally defined as masculine, its object the femalebody. ... As the fictions most consciously concerned with the epistemology ofobservation demonstrate, scopophilia is inextricably linked with epistemophilia,the erotic investment in the desire to know . . . [Yet] another body never is whollyknowable; it is an imaginary object that returns us to questions about the meaningof difference. (122)Both Margaret Atwood's story "Giving Birth," from her 1977 collectionDancing Girls, and Alice Munro's story "Meneseteung," first published inthe New Yorker in January 1988 and subsequently collected in Friend of myYouth in 1990, contain framed representations of women. Yet unlike thenineteenth-century nudes and the objects of scopophilia that Brooksdescribes, the bodies depicted in the stories of Atwood and Munro are notthose that are traditionally the object of the male gaze, almost suggesting aneffort on the authors' part to de-romanticize and de-reify the female body.In "Giving Birth," the protagonist is a woman in labor; in "Meneseteung,"she is a nineteenth-century "poetess" awaiting the onset of menses. In yetanother way they are unlike those nudes: their enclosure is not effected by apicture frame, which we might see as a supplement to or reification of theirrepresentation, but by a frame narrative, the kind of frame that Derridadescribes as " not incidental; it is connected to and cooperates in its operationfrom the outside. ... [I]ts transcendent exteriority touches, plays with,brushes, rubs, or presses against the limit" (Derrida 20-2i). In these two stories,the frame and the framed bodies interact in a way that subversivelycalls attention to the margin and the marginal. Such a strategy, as MollyHite notes, questions our tendency to ignore frames and to view them asmeans of cutting off, and hence making an object of, that which is framed:"To call attention to the margin is to render it no longer marginal and consequentlyto collapse the centre in a general unsettling of oppositional hierarchies"(Other Side 121-22). As a consequence, both the nature of the bodyrepresented and the authors' ways of framing that representation challengethe iconography of those nineteenth-century nudes as well as articulating75

A t w o o d & M u n r othe nature of self-division and otherness that their framing entails.The narrators of both stories (who are, not coincidentally, both writers)evince ambiguous relationships to their respective protagonists that, inevoking both similarities and differences, correspondences and discordancesbetween themselves and the women they represent, recall anotheraspect of painting, the mise en abyme (Dàllenbach 33).' A further similarityin the structure of these two stories is the author's use of a second mise enabyme that depicts what Atwood's narrator terms "the other woman" whoseexperience of her body, related to yet different from that of the protagonist,highly colors the protagonist's own interpretation of and reaction to herbody and its distinctively female experiences. First explored by André Gidein 1893, the "mirror in the text" reflects both what is and what is not representedin the narrative or in the representation between the frames. Onethinks here of The Arnolfini Marriage, with its convex mirror that depictsthe backs of the husband and wife as well as the painter and the weddingguests, all of whom are outside the space that van Eyck is ostensibly representing,but all of whom are represented nevertheless. The mirror thus presentsa different version of what is represented within the frame (the backsof the couple) as well as what is beyond (the wedding guests and painter)the field of representation. 2 Velasquez's Ladies in Waiting provides anotherfamiliar example; the King and Queen appear in a mirror on the wall of thesalon. In both paintings, the mirrors—the convex mirror in The ArnolfiniMarriage and the badly silvered one in Ladies in Waiting—distort as well asreflect. Hence, Dàllenbach concludes that the mise en abyme reflects anddistorts, articulates differences and similarities, concordances and discordancesbetween the field of representation and the mirror in the text.Inevitably, we see played out in the doubled, mirroring structure used byMunro and Atwood three major and interrelated concerns identified as centralto women's writing. The first is woman's often multiple and contradictoryreactions to the experiences of her body perhaps first theoretically articulatedby de Beauvoir, and then differently focused by Luce Irigaray in This Sex WhichIs Not One (for an illustration of the interrelatedness of these issues, notehow Irigaray floats from the issue of a woman's pleasure to that of language):the geography of her pleasure is far more diversified, more multiple in its differences,more complex, more subtle, than is commonly imagined—in an imaginaryrather too narrowly focused on sameness. . . . "She" is indefinitely other in herself.This is doubtless why she is said to be whimsical, incomprehensible, agitated,76

capricious . . . not to mention her language, in which "she" sets off in all directionsleaving "him" unable to discern the coherence of any meaning.(28-29; ellipses in original)The second concern central to our explorations of women's writing is theproject of "writing the body" easily summed up by Cixous's injunction, in"Laugh of the Medusa," that because so much of our experience is mediatedby a variety of social discourses, including literary texts, woman must "writethe body," re-create it as—or in—discourse for other women, change andchallenge the representations that shape our perceptions and experiencesof ourselves. There is some concensus about the characteristics of literaturethat writes the body: Cixous describes discourse that overflows, exceeds,that "jams sociality" (344), that "does not contain, it carries; it does nothold back, it makes possible" and that expresses "the wonder of being several"(345). Certainly, "writing the body celebrates women as sexual subjectsnot objects of male desire" (Dallery 58). Writing the body involves, in addition,the recognition that the body, as it is now represented, is the equivalentof a text; that, like a text, it is constructed of and by the discourses incirculation around it. That equivalence is humorously acknowledged byCixous when she threatens to show men women's "sexts" (342).The third concern addressed by feminist criticism is the belief thatwomen must or should write differently from men (whether they are "writingbodies" or not). Yet this belief is fraught with problems and contradictions.On one hand, Irigaray believes that a civilization that was capable ofexpressing women's desire "would undoubtedly have a different alphabet, adifferent language . .. Woman's desire would not be expected to speak thesame language as man's (This Sex25; ellipses in original). On the otherhand, the practice of an "un-masculinized" language produces. . . the "other" language of witches advocated by some women—a language ofthe body, singsong, visceral cries, etc.—(silence even, which supposedly can beheard, what was the point of asking for your turn to speak then?), this languageof the body, this cry-language, is that enough to fight oppression? If one shouldnot hesitate to cry out one's guts against the words that leave you out in the cold,there is no good reason to reject as "masculine and oppressive" a certain form ofconceptual discourse and thus give men the exclusive control over discourse.(Marks and Courtivron 221).Finally, belief in a female style or language is not born out, Nancy K. Millerargues, by examinations of style on the sentence level, except in the case of77

A t w o o d & Munroindividual authors whose individual styles do not provide an adequate basisfor generalization about a female one (37). Thorne, Kramerae and Henleysimilarly found that "few expected sex differences have been firmly substantiatedby empirical studies of actual speech" (640).Hite, discussing Irigaray's metaphor of the speculum (another mirror; thereverse of van Eyck's), writes: "If there can be no clearly delineated Otherlanguage, no direct route to the articulation of difference, it followed thatdifference must use the language of the Same—if rather differently. That is,representation must be skewed or oblique, a perverse mimesis employingthe sort of concave mirror that is the primary image of the speculum forIrigaray, the mirror that inverts the image as a condition of reflecting it.Mimesis as mimicry; representation with a difference" (Other Side 144).Might not that "mirror in the text," Lucien Dàllenbach's phrase for the miseen abyme, be these narrative structures that frame, multiply, and problematizethe bodies they represent? What I propose here is that narrative structure—theuse of the doubled mise en abyme along with the variousinterrelationships that this device creates—constitutes another language. 3It is no coincidence, then, that Atwood's story opens with just such a referenceto the problems of using the available language to represent women'sexperience, as the narrator questions the appropriateness of the phrase"giving birth" for the experience that she is about to describe. The story'svery first sentence 'overflows' boundaries by interrogating the title in a gesturethat already problematizes the relationship between the inside and theoutside of thetext, given that we assume that it is authors who give textstheir titles, but narrators who tell stories: "But who gives it? And to whom isit given? Certainly it doesn't feel like giving, which implies a flow, a gentlehandling over, no coercion. But there is scant gentleness here, it's too strenuous,the belly like a knotted fist, squeezing, the heavy trudge of the heart,every muscle in the body tight and moving" (228). 4 The narrator, nevertheless,resolves to "go ahead as if there were no problem about language"(229), even though language will often fail her or her protagonist, Jeannie,in this depiction of childbirth, late seventies style with the pre-natal classesand breathing exercises, the emphasis on breastfeeding, the eschewing ofpainkillers that arose out of the belief that "pain" in childbirth is caused bythe wrong attitude. While Atwood's depiction of childbirth has a curiouskind of historical and cultural accuracy, what is most significant about itsrepresentation is the disconnection of Jeannie from the experiencing body.78

When Jeannie's labor pains begin to intensify, the narrator reports: "At themoment she can't remember why she wanted to have a baby in the firstplace. That decision was made by someone else, whose motives are nowunclear" (239). When yet another strong contraction begins, Jeannie'soptions seem to be escape or dissociation from her body: "she slips backinto the dark place, which is not hell, which is more like being inside, tryingto get out. Out, she says or thinks... . When there is no pain, she feels nothing,when there is pain, she feels nothing because there is no she" (241).Frequently, this disconnection is related to the inadequacy of a languagethat has no words for "the events of the body" (239), for the kind of pain or"whatever it is" (240) that she is experiencing. The fact that there is no she isaccounted for by the "disappearance of language" (241). 5But Jeannie's disconnection from her body is mainly projected onto "theother woman," a pregnant figure that Jeannie may actually have seen a coupleof times, but who is "not real in the usual sense" (235). Jeannie may feel thatthe decision to have a baby "was made by someone else whose motives arenow unclear," and that the language for her experience is inadequate. But "theother woman's" pregnancy has even less to do with her own volition; andthe language for what is about to happen to her is even more non-existent:She, like Jeannie, is going to the hospital. She too is pregnant. She is not goingto the hospital to give birth, however, because the word, the words, are too aliento her experience, the experience she is about to have, to be used about it atall. . . . She is a woman who did not wish to become pregnant, who did notchoose to divide herself like this, who did not choose any of these ordeals, theseinitiations. It would be no use telling her that everything is going to be fine. Theword in English for unwanted intercourse is rape, but there is no word in the languagefor what is about to happen to this woman. (234; italics mine)Placing the "other woman" in a mise en abyme allows Atwood to depict whatis paradoxically contained in yet absent from Jeannie's own experience.Consider again The Arnolfini Marriage (with its pregnant woman), and theconvex mirror (the obverse of Irigaray's concave mirror) that depicts what isjust outside the represented plane: the wedding guests, the painter, the couple'sbacks. Yet of course, the picture does represent these others in theirdistorted, mirrored forms; they are there and not there; they are simultaneouslyoutside the space the artist represents, yet are inserted into that representation.Similarly, the other woman, who is real and "not real in the usualsense," shadows Jeannie throughout her experience of giving birth, representingthe "other" side of childbirth. It is the "other woman" who screams79

A t w o o d & M u n r ofrom pain. It is the "other woman" who doesn't want to have a baby—perhaps,Jeannie hypothesizes, because she's been raped, because she has tenother children, because she's poor and starving. It is the "other woman"whose childbirth is fraught with complications (238). In other words, Jeanniecan project the anxieties that she doesn't want fully to claim onto the otherwoman. Such a projection expresses Jeannie's disconnection from her body'spotential experience and her fears. Thus, "the other woman," who occupiesa miniature, distorted place in Jeannie's narrative of giving birth, allowsJeannie to construct the saving fiction that it is "other women" who are[more] disconnected from the experiences of their bodies, and that thesedisconnections are caused by external circumstances (like rape or poverty),not by some inherent disconnection between [the female] body and mind.As the recipient of these projections, the other woman also functions as atalisman. The morning after her daughter's birth, Jeannie hears footsteps inthe hallway: "She thinks it must be the other woman, in her brown andmaroon checked coat, carrying her paper bag, leaving the hospital now thather job is done. She has seen Jeannie safely through, she must go now tohunt through the streets of the city for her next case" (245). In someuncomfortable way, then, she seems both to protect and represent all thosewomen whose experience of childbirth does not involve choice, supportivehusbands, natural childbirth, healthy and desired babies, and she thus symbolizesall of the possible ways in which women can be alienated from theexperience of giving birth.But just as this figure plays the "other woman" to Jeannie, so does Jeannieplay the other woman for the narrator, who wants both to claim and disclaimidentity with Jeannie, though, in the telling of the story of Jeannie'schildbirth, the gap between the two is slowly closed. The first sentences afterthe preamble about the inadequacy of language deny any equivalence betweenthe narrator and Jeannie: "This story about giving birth is not about me. Inorder to convince you of that I should tell you what I did this morning,before I sat down at this desk" (229). Yet her proof is not particularly convincing;in fact, one is all but directed to wonder how this description of amorning with a child proves that she is not some one who gave birth.Once Jeannie's story properly begins, the narrator makes use of severaltechniques that keep to the fore her ambiguous relationship to Jeannie. Onone hand, Jeannie's story is told in the present tense, a kind of Atwoodiananti-convention that theoretically makes the narrative immediate, but that80

also has the paradoxical effect of suggesting that the story is a construction,is "made up," since, according to narrative conventions, "real" stories canonly be told after the events have occurred. Because the frame narrative usespast tense, and the mise en abyme makes use of the present, the naturalnessof the frame and the artificiality of Jeannie's story are emphasized. Second,the psycho-narration is not entirely consonant: the narrator frequentlymakes judgments about Jeannie's behavior that distance her from Jeannieyet indicate the narrator's privileged knowledge. 6 As Jeannie waits for herlabor to become more strenuous, for example, the narrator comments:"But—and this is the part of Jeannie that goes with the talisman hidden inher bag, not with the part that longs to build kitchen cabinets and smokehams—she is, secretly, hoping for a mystery. Something more than this,something else, a vision" (239). What kind of person takes a Turkish glasstalisman into a modern hospital? What kind of woman expects that childbirthwill bring mysteries with it? the narrator seems to ask.At the same time, this narrator attempts to reassure the reader that shereally wants to shrink any distinction between herself and Jeannie. In a parentheticalnote that interrupts the story of Jeannie's childbirth, the narratorremarks: "(By this time you may be thinking that I've invented Jeannie inorder to distance myself from these experiences. Nothing could be furtherfrom the truth. I am, in fact, trying to bring myself closer to something thattime has already made distant. As for Jeannie, my intention is simple: I ambringing her back to life)" (232). But why the reader should suspect the narratorof creating distance is unclear. Does the narrator sense that the culturetext tends to separate women from the experience of their bodies? Or thatthe culture text teaches women to separate themselves from their bodies,particularly with respect to childbirth? (Shirley Neuman's survey of mothersin autobiographical literature certainly reveals the rarity with which mothersare presented as subjects in their own right, as mothers, experiencingmotherhood.) Or is she suggesting that our lack of language about childbirthmakes memory difficult? Or are women encouraged to pretend theseintimate, immediate events happened to someone other than our "proper"public selves, to bracket off in a kind of emotional mise en abyme the experiencethat is there and not there, because it is not nameable—and thereforenot to be spoken of?In the narrator's second parenthetical remark on her relationship toJeannie, she is more forthcoming about their precise relationship: "(It was81

A t w o o d & M u n r oto me, after all, that the birth was given, Jeannie gave it, I am the result. Whatwould she make of me? Would she be pleased?)" (244). Jeannie, a numberof readers agree, is a previous incarnation of the narrator who is using thenarrative to recapture an experience not easily remembered, partly becauseshe has been so transformed by childbirth and motherhood that her earlierself is not readily recalled (Davey 142; Rosenberg 125), partly because thereis no language to facilitate memory. Thus, she narrates, literally, "to know."There are no real words for this identity, this similar difference, this differentsimilarity. There is only the mise en abyme with its inherent distortionsand paradoxes regarding what is within the frame and what is not, what isoutside the sphere of representation, yet represented. Hence, the narrativestructure articulates a relationship for which we have no ready language; itis the narrative structure with the complex inter-relationships between thenarrator, Jeannie, and the other women that gives this new meaning to thephrase "giving birth" that was questioned at the story's outset.The relationship between the narrator of "Meneseteung" and AlmedaJoynt Roth bears some resemblance to the parallel relationship in "GivingBirth" in that the narrator establishes a distance from and a sympathy withthe sensibilities of her protagonist. But her representation of Almeda ismediated by a number of framing devices, almost amounting to frameswithin frames, areas of differing degrees of narratorial authority or omniscience.In section I of the story, Munro's narrator might be seen as selfconsciouslyengaged in "writing the body," since Meda is presented as a textto be read and interpreted. In this frame, which extends nearly to the end ofsection III, the narrator ostensibly constructs her protagonist out of textualevidence: Meda's book of poems with its autobiographical preface; thepoems themselves; gossipy commentary in the local paper, the Vidette. Sucha construction of Meda reminds us "that woman's body is always mediatedby language; the human body is a text, a sign, not just a piece of fleshy matter"(Dallery 54), particularly given that the narrator's goal is eventually anintense exploration of that body's experience of a menstrual period.The narrator establishes her identity as a kind of researcher, and as suchher narrative pretends to a kind of historical authority. 7 This authority is atits strongest when she cites documents like the Vidette, or when, based onthe Vidette's accounts of life in this western Ontario town, she can makegeneralizations about the mores and values of the town's citizens. 8 Herauthority is increased even further by her knowing, twentieth-century com-82

mentary upon the values of the time, upon the town's fear that, should a"man and woman of almost any age [be] alone together within four walls, itis assumed that anything may happen. Spontaneous combustion, instantfornication, an attack of passion" (59). Her authority similarly appears inher critique of the doctor who "believes that [Almeda's] troubles [with herhealth] would clear up if she got married. He believes this in spite of the factthat most of his nerve medicine is prescribed for married women" (62). Butthis authority only serves to highlight those moments when she admits touncertainty, as when she attempts her initial description of Almeda—though note here the fluctuation from twentieth-century analysis of theroles and habits of women to the questions about Meda's life:Almeda Roth has a bit of money, which her father left her, and she has her house.She is not too old to have a couple of children. She is a good enough housekeeper,with the tendency toward fancy iced cakes and decorated tarts that is seenfairly often in old maids. (Honourable mention at the Fall Fair.) There is nothingwrong with her looks, and naturally she is in better shape than most marriedwomen of her age, not having been loaded down with work and children. But whywas she passed over in her earlier, more marriageable years, in a place that needswomen to be partnered and fruitful? She was a rather gloomy girl—that may havebeen the trouble. The deaths of her brother and sister, and then of her mother,who lost her reason, in fact, a year before she died, and lay in her bed talkingnonsense—those weighed on her, so she was not likely company. And all thatreading and poetry—it seemed more of a drawback, a barrier, an obsession, in theyoung girl than in the middle-aged women, who needed something, after all, to fillher time. Anyway, it's five years since her book was published, so perhaps she hasgot over that. Perhaps it was the proud, bookish father encouraging her? (58-59) 9The narrator uses, then, a whole host of narrative devices to suggest herinability to have any intimate knowledge of Almeda's consciousness. Shedoes so by establishing herself as a researcher who is constructing Almedafrom texts, or by reminding us that she is a twentieth-century person whocan comment on the social mores of Almeda's time, or by framing questionsabout aspects of Almeda's and Jarvis Poulter's lives and personalities thatshe cannot construct from the "evidence" that remains. Like Atwood, shefurther reminds us of this distance through her jarring use of the presenttenseof the verb "to be" in such statements as "The population [of thistown west of Kingston] 25 younger than it 15 now, than it will ever be again"(54; italics mine). Or: "the grand barns that are to dominate the countrysidefor the next hundred years are just beginning to be built" (61; italics mine).But these frames, these claims to authority and admitted lapses of83

A t w o o d & M u n r oauthority all serve the same purpose: they foreground the impossibility ofthe narrator's entry into Almeda's consciousness, given that we conventionallyexpect some consistency in a narrator's knowledge and presentation ofa character's inner states. Or, to put it another way, the limits that the narratorplaces on her knowledge highlight those anomalous moments whenshe exceeds those limits. Thus, if the narrator does present Almeda'sthoughts, she's clearly "making it up." So it is interesting that the narratormost simply and confidently enters Meda's consciousness when she describesMeda's experience of her body: her physical reaction to Jarvis's heavy clothingand masculine smell, her thoughts and feelings on the hot afternoonwhen, under the influence of laudanum and the flow of menses, she sits inthe dining room and plans the poem from which the story takes its title.Unlike "Giving Birth," which places the question of language in the outerframe, "Meneseteung" places that question at its centre. Here, "Almeda inher observations cannot escape words" in her attempt to articulate thecomplex relationship between body and mind, body and society. Herthoughts about the heat, her menstrual period, the woman found beatenand unconscious at the bottom of her garden, the effect of the laudanum onher frame of mind are expressed in language that recalls in style and contentCixous' descriptions of writing the body:Soon this glowing and swelling begins to suggest words—not specific words buta flow of words somewhere, just about ready to make themselves known to her.Poems, even. Yes, again, poems. Or one poem. Isn't that the idea—one very greatpoem that will contain everything. . . . Stars and flowers and birds and trees andangels in the snow and dead children at twilight—that is not the half of it. Youhave to get in the obscene racket on Pearl Street and the polished toe of JarviePoulter's boot and the plucked-chicken haunch with its blue-black flower. Almedais a long way now from human sympathies or fears or cozy household considerations.She doesn't think about what could be done for that woman or about keepingJarvis Poulter's dinner warm and hanging his long underwear on the line.The basin of grape juice has overflowed and is running over her kitchen floor,staining the boards of the floor, and the stain will never come out.... She doesn'tleave the room until dusk, when she goes out to the privy again and discoversthat she is bleeding, her flow has started. (69-71 ) 10Munro has violated a near taboo against the representation of menstruationin literature," and perhaps is engaging with Cixous's poetically expressedconnection between women's bodies and their language by connectingMeda's period with her creativity. In some ways, Munro challenges Cixous,whose good mother "writes in white ink"—which of course privileges the84

odily experience of motherhood (Cixous 339). Cixous' metaphor wouldcertainly be questionable in the case of Almeda Roth, given that the majorityof nineteenth-century women who were able to create writing careers forthemselves had no children. In addition, that metaphor, besides excludingwomen who choose not to be mothers, potentially renders a woman's creativityinvisible: white ink is not visible on white paper. Meda's creativityinstead is linked to her menstruation, to the impossibility—this month anyway—ofmotherhood, to her rejection of convention and conventional rolesfor women, to her aesthetic critique of her mother's "bunchy and foolish...crocheted roses ... [that] don't look much like real flowers," to her refusal ofJarvis Poulter's significant invitation, to her rejection of the cozy domesticityof grape jelly which, we are told in the framed narrative, she nevermakes. In Munro's story, poems come out of embracing the experience ofbody and rejecting society's constraints, and in this sense, is very much likethe writing of the body that Cixous envisioned. Furthermore, through themétonymie connection between the experience of menses and the conceptionof Almeda's poem, "Meneseteung," body has literally become—flowedinto—text.But this scene does not depict the experience or thought of the diegeticallyhistorical Almeda Roth; rather, it represents the narrator's invention orimaginative leap—a fact emphasized by the narrator's admission in the lastsentences of the story: "I may have got it wrong" (73). This assertionreminds the reader that the story's central, intense scene, along with themetonymy that connects Almeda's menstrual period with her creativity is a"fiction." That the narrator does not know precisely why Almeda nevermarried, but feels comfortable "inventing" this intimate experience of thebody speaks to the nature of the relationship between the narrator andMeda, and the extent to which this narrator can "imagine" the experience ofanother body. Yet the narrator, by constructing the mise en abyme, as well asby purposefully emphasizing the aporia, suggests that half the point of herrepresentation is an exploration of the relationship between the two of them.Yet the narrator fails to explore Meda's relationship to "the other woman"who is beaten and raped 12 at the bottom of Meda's garden on the hot summernight before the onset of her period, in a scene which comprises thisstory's inner mise en abyme. What little we do know suggests that Meda'srelationship to the other woman remains distant. We are told, for instance,that her dreams have transformed "something foul and sorrowful" into an85

A t w o o d 8* Munroinert and unoffending "wheelbarrow" (64); or that "[i]f she had touchedthe woman, if she had forced herself to touch her, she would not have madesuch a mistake" as calling on the help of Jarvis Poulter (66). Beyond that,there is much that we do not know about Meda's reaction to the otherwoman except for the helpless panic that sends her to Jarvis Poulter's housefor help and advice. Why does she taste "bile at the back of her throat" (66)?Is it a reaction to the prostrate, half clothed female body at her feet, or areaction to Jarvis Poulter's gesture, to the fact that he "nudges at the legwith the toe of his boot, just as you'd nudge a dog or a sow" (66)? Why doesshe feel she will retch? Is it because of the body that "weaves and stumblesdown the street"? Or is it caused by Jarvis Poulter's tone of "harsh joviality"(67)? If the narrator can present us with Almeda's reaction to her period,she can also fill in these gaps. But Almeda's reaction to the ambiguous, disturbing,destructive and violent sexuality of the other woman she finds atthe foot of her garden is never articulated—beyond the important fact thatit must be included now in the view of her world she presents in her poetry.The final frame returns us to the narrator's original relationship to herprotagonist, presenting Almeda Roth as a historical figure whose tombstonethe narrator eventually found, as well as someone whose experience andconsciousness she has partly invented: "I may have got it wrong. I don'tknow if she ever took laudanum. Many ladies did. I don't know if she evermade grape jelly" (73). In the context of this re-established frame thatreminds us of the limits of the narrator's authority—and inevitably of herwillingness to burst those limits when she chooses—we can only concludethat the narrator has chosen to facilitate our view of Almeda's experience ofher own body, and has blocked (or cannot help blocking) Meda's experienceof "the other woman."The similar narrative construction of these two quite different stories,then, reveals something about women writers' representation of bodies.The respective narrators' representation of the bodies of their protagonistsis variously problematized by the construction of a "frame" around the representedbody, and by psychological or temporal disconnections betweenthe narrator and the protagonist made manifest in that frame. The narratorof "Giving Birth" does this simply by affirming that she is not Jeannie; whilethe narrator of "Meneseteung" accomplishes this distancing by appearing inthe guise of a twentieth-century writer doing research on a figure who livedin the past. Yet each narrator can, nevertheless, relate to her protagonist,86

and can claim some identity with her, either by attempting to define thatidentity or by intense, imaginative engagement in an experience that is, giventhe limits of the frame narrator's knowledge, theoretically unknowable.Despite the ambiguous, qualified, and problematic relationship between theframe narrator and the protagonist in the primary mise en abyme, then, thepotential for identification is foregrounded. Munro and Atwood, ratherthan defining woman "by an act of marginalization, by a thrusting of'women' to a position outside the order of the Same" (Hite Other Side 159),have used their frame narrators to redefine the margins and then to proceedto place women's bodies firmly at the centre. Those women, moreover, arenot defined by their relationships to men (pace A, the good childbirthcoach) or to the male gaze but rather by their own inward gaze, their intenseengagement with their experience of childbirth or menstruation.The inner mise en abyme, in contrast, highlights the distance between thestory's protagonist (and her experience of her body) and "the other woman"(and her experience of her body), even while the possibility of identificationis admitted and rejected. The relationship between the protagonist and theother woman is rather like that between the young women in Manet's Bar atthe Folies Bergère and her reflection: regardless of where one stands toobserve that painting, a viewer cannot get the woman and reflection tocohere spatially, in spite of the fact that they belong to the same figure.Similarly, each protagonist senses the possibility of becoming [like] theother woman, but it is a possibility which each of them finally seeks toavoid. The other woman—who is largely silent, in contrast to the framenarrator whose profession is words—is frightening because she is (seen as)the helpless object of various typical abuses—rape, poverty, violence, and itis perhaps precisely the protagonists' fear of her and her experience thatmakes her 'Other.' Or, to put it another way, while the other woman may besocially marginal, her position within the centre of these frames rendersher—and her experience—central. In spite of the admitted difficulties thenarrators have representing her experience, she is "Other" only by virtue ofbeing, in some ways, the "Same." In the context of the doubled frame, andin spite of her silence, the other woman is not marginal but central.87

At wood & MunroNOTES1 I am here entering the fiction of these stories that conventionally equates the authoritativenarrator with the author. Thus when I refer to the "narrators' protagonists," I am notmistaking the implied author for the narrator (something which several readings ofAtwood's story tend to do) but am addressing the conventionalized situation the storiesestablish.2 It is possible that Atwood was thinking of this painting when she wrote the story, giventhat the narrator's life in "Giving Birth" is compared to Dutch genre painting andAtwood uses the image of this mirror in The Handmaid's Tale.3 I intend to argue elsewhere that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the prototype of this narrativestructure; like these two stories, Frankenstein makes use of a double frame thatasserts numerous (and well-documented) similarities between Victor Frankenstein andhis interlocutor, Robert Walton, thus recalling the painterly mise en abyme. Also similaris the "other body" of Frankenstein's monster, whose experience comprises the innermostnarrative.4 Conventionally, the implied author is "heard" only in devices like titles and epigraphs;otherwise we "hear" only the narrator. For the narrator to respond to the title blurs thisdistinction. See Chatman, Coming to Terms, Chapter 5.5 Once Jeannie's baby is born, this inadequacy is once again posed as the mother contemplatesher daughter: "Birth isn't something that has been given to her, nor has she takenit. It was just something that has happened so they could greet each other like this" (243).6 See Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds. Psychonarration (for which Cohn provides no succinctdefinition) is the presentation of a character's consciousness that utilizes (largely)the narrator's style, diction, and viewpoint. One of its trademarks is a predominance ofverbs of consciousness—"she thought" or "she felt." Psychonarration always impliessome degree of superiority on the part of the narrator, who generally remains more"knowing" than the character. Nevertheless, psychonarration can be consonant or dissonant,depending upon whether the narrator shares or critiques the thoughts or perspectiveof the character.7 The influence of Susan Lanser's exploration of the issues of authority in Fictions ofAuthority permeates my discussion of this issue in Munro's story.8 She frequently engages in a kind of social psychonarration, in which her voice mergeswith the values of the townsfolk, as in this description of a hot summer day:One day a man goes through the streets ringing a cowbell and calling, "Repent!Repent!" It's not a stranger this time, it's a young man who works at the butcher shop.Take him home, wrap him in cold wet cloths, giving him some nerve medicine, keephim in bed, pray for his wits. If he doesn't recover, he must go to the asylum. (55)9 There is a passage that similarly asks questions about Jarvis Poulter: "This is the Vidette,full of shy jokes, innuendo, plain accusation that no newspaper would get away withtoday. It's Jarvis Poulter they're talking about—though in other passages he is spoken ofwith great respect, as a civil magistrate, an employer, a churchman. He is close, that's all.An eccentric, to a degree. All of which may be a result of his single condition, his widower'slife.... This is a decent citizen, prosperous: tall—slightly paunchy?—man in a darksuite with polished boots. A beard? Black hair streaked with gray. A severe and self-possessedair, and a large pale wart among the bushy hairs of one eyebrow?" (57).10 See Pam Houston's essay, "A Hopeful Sign: The Making of Métonymie Meaning inMunro's 'Meneseteung'," page 85, for a discussion of the métonymie connections betweenthe story's title, Almeda's menstrual flow, and the grape juice.88

11 Doris Lessing was quite aware of breaking this taboo in The Golden Notebook, in whichAnna, who has resolved to write an uncensored day in her journal suddenly finds herselffaced with the unrepresentable: her period. She resolves to write anyway, to break thetaboo, but is aware of the extent to which her experience of her period may distort herrepresentation.12 The word "rape" may be only partially appropriate, since the other woman's reaction towhat happens to her remains unclear, filtered as it is through Meda's sleepy consciousness.The narrator describes the sounds Meda hears almost oxymoronically, and certainlyequivocally, as "a long, vibrating, choking sound of pain and self-abasement,self-abandonment, which could come from either or both of them" (64).WORKS CITEDAtwood, Margaret. Dancing Girls. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977; rpt. Toronto:Seal, 1989.Bordo, Susan. "The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: A FeministAppropriation of Foucault." Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions ofBeing and Knowing. Ed. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo. New Brunswick, N.J.:Rutgers UP, 1989.13-33.Brooks, Peter. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. Cambridge: HarvardUP, 1993.Carrington, Ildikô de Papp. Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of Alice Munro.DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois UP, 1989."Definitions of a Fool: Alice Munro's 'Walking on Water' and Margaret Atwood'sTwo Stories About Emma: 'The Whirlpool Rapids' and 'Walking on Water'." Studiesin Short Fiction 28 (Spring 1991): 135-50.Chatman, Seymour. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film.Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP,1989.Cixous, Helene. "The Laugh of the Medusa." Feminisms. Ed. Robyn Warhol and DianePrice Herndl. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1991. 334-49.Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1978.Dallenbach, Lucien. The Mirror in the Text. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.Dallery, Arleen B. "The Politics of Writing (the) Body: Ecriture Feminine."Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing. Ed. AlisonM. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1989. 52-67.Davey, Frank. Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1984.Derrida, Jacques. "The Parergon." Trans. Craig Owens. October 9 (1979): 3-41.Hite, Molly. "Writing—and Reading—the Body: Female Sexuality and Recent FeministFiction." Feminist Studies 14 (Spring 1988): 121-42.The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary FeministNarrative. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.Houston, Pam. "A Hopeful Sign: The Making of Métonymie Meaning in Munro's"Meneseteung." The Kenyon Review, 14.4 (1992): 79-92.Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP,1985.

A t w o o d & MunriLanser, Susan. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca: CornellUP, 1992.Marks, Elaine, and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. New French Feminisms. New York:Schocken Books, 1981.Miller, Nancy K. "Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction." PMLA96.1 (1981): 36-48.Munro, Alice. Friend of My Youth. Toronto: Penguin, 1991.Neuman, Shirley. "Your past/Your future: Autobiography and Mother's Bodies." In Genre,Trope Gender: Critical Essays by Northrop Frye, Linda Hutcheon, and ShirleyNeuman. Ed. Barry Rutland. Ottawa: Carleton UP, 1992.Redekop, Magdalene. Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro. New York:Routledge, 1992.Rosenberg, Jerome H. Margaret Atwood. Boston: Twayne, 1984.Stovel, Nora. "Reflections on Mirror Images: Doubles and Identity in the Novels ofMargaret Atwood." Essays on Canadian Writing-}-} (Fall 1986): 50-67.Thompson, Lee Briscoe. "Minuets and Madness: Margaret Atwood's Dancing Girls" InThe Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism. Ed. Arnold E. Davidson and CathyN. Davidson. Toronto: Anansi, 1981.107-22.Thome, B., Christine Kramerae, and Nancy Henley. Language, Gender, and Society.Newbury, MA: Rowley House, 1983.90

JohnDonlanCrow ChildSparrows squat for a dust-bathoutside Alpha Video, near the cool shadeof a hacked shrub and three kinds of weed.The Crow Child drags its beak (sideways,head tilted, nostrils foremost) through the bird-bath,trolling for softened bread-crusts left by its loudand unremittingly instructive parents.From below, near the base of the trunk,the silver maple in Trinity Parkcould be a green brain.Delicious—the airabove the great branches, under the leaves!

CraigB u r n e t tLandscape with CowherdPipingIt's later than usual. Around the corner,a streetcleaner swallowed a pennyand troubled the spirits of nameless treeswith the roaring of its engine.A man on the street accused the treesof worshipping old gods and driftingto the lands of their ancestors.Time needs funding. I kept at it for years, fightingstrangers clothed in flaming purple, dodging arrows hissingthrough the clammy, blood-drenched air of battle.It was horrible, if nothing I wasn't used to.The war continues elsewhere,but I've retired to my cavein the country where I spend my days avoiding schedules.Pan visits me quite a bit, and we go fishing together,walk along the river, play our pipes, drink wine,watch videos—just hang around. "Now that the lustof gain is dead, the pure may rest," he often says, his handon the remote control.But haven't you noticed that the gods92

have forgotten how to throw a good party?Look at some of Poussin's paintings. Women squeezegrapes into the gaping mouths of naked sylvan boys,people ride goats, satyrs goof off with drunken pipers,and masks lay strewn all over the ground—now thatlooks like fun!Today, however, we have only three waysto go about our business:we can make money, help other peopleto make money, or claim to know the truth.Basho and Theocritus meet in Hawaiito discuss fragmentation and downsizing.Cows eat weeds in the country,and along the broad avenues of our suburbstrees overflow with the chatter of starlings.But starlings are from Europe, too.93

JamieOoppAffirming Mysteryin Eric McCormack'sThe Mysterium"Just out of curiosity, though," I said, "what do those words on the title page mean—certum quia impossible?" "They're a short form of another Latin phrase—a paradox. .. .Loosely translated, they mean that something you always thought to be quite impossiblemay actually be the only solution to your problem. Worth remembering, in our profession."—JAMES MAXWELL AND REEVE BLAIR in The MysteriumThe last decade or so has seen the consolidation of asub-genre variously called the "anti-detective," "metaphysical detective," or"postmodern detective" novel. 1 Probably the most famous example is UmbertoEco's The Name of the Rose, but novels as diverse as Paul Auster's New YorkTrilogy, Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, and Timothy Findley's The Telling ofLies may also be said to fit the type. What these novels have in common is arewriting of traditional detective motifs for "serious" literary purposes.They all foreground the detective novel's built-in meditation on reading(from Dupin on, detectives are portrayed as exemplary "close readers") inorder to raise questions about the construction—or even possibility—ofmeaning. They also subvert the traditional "closed" ending of the detectivenovel, in which the criminal is identified and the mystery "solved"; in sodoing, they seek not to dispel but to affirm mystery. As Stefano Tani puts it:Anti-detective fiction restores and assimilates [detective conventions] to twentieth-centuryman's acceptance of the nonlogical in everyday life. Once decapitatedby the nonsolution, detective rules no longer epitomize a genre but a contemporaryattitude towards life as a mystery to be accepted. (151)Like its cousins in the postmodern detective genre, Eric McCormack's TheMysterium (1992) both asserts and celebrates mystery. The Mysterium offersthe same distinctive mix of metafictional playfulness and macabre eventsfound in McCormack's previous books, the story collection Inspecting theVaults (1989) and the novella The Paradise Motel (1990). 2 It also builds on94

the parodies of detective conventions evident in stories like "Eckhardt at aWindow" and "The Fugue." Like McCormack's earlier work, The Mysteriumuses metafiction to foreground the complex relationship between languageand reality, and thereby, as Stanley Fogel puts it (with reference to Inspectingthe Vaults), to "[jeopardize] our confidence in the relationship betweenwords and things" (Fogel 137). By affirming the inevitable mystery in reality,The Mysterium—in good postmodernist fashion—dramatizes the need forhumility about claims to knowledge. At the same time, the novel seeks toexpand our understanding of what affirming mystery might mean. Indeed,as McCormack himself explains, The Mysterium grew out of a meditationon the word "mystery," which can refer not only to a detective "mystery,"but to religious "mystery," and to "mystery" as the "mastery" of a trade orart ("Less Than Meets the Eye" 10). The Mysterium exploits the potential inall these meanings to create a multi-layered meditation on what it mightmean to take life "as a mystery to be accepted."The Mysterium tells the story of James Maxwell's investigation into thestrange events at Carrick, a small Scottish-like town in the "North" of the"Island." As told in the document authored by Robert Aiken, Carrick hassuffered three acts of vandalism, a brutal murder, and a mysteriousplague—or poisoning—in which the victims "chatter about this and that tillthey abruptly [die]" (61-62). Maxwell's investigation uncovers an earliermystery that seems connected to these later events: the mining deaths of anumber of prisoners of war, in what was ruled at the time an "accident," butin what seems to have been an act of revenge for the death of a platoon ofCarrick men during the War on the Continent. This earlier mystery seemsto explain the malaise of the town at the beginning of the story.The opening lines of the novel, which exhort the reader to "smell" thebook, establish the importance of affirming mystery. According to the openinglines, anyone who can smell "scents a north-east wind carries on aMarch day in the northern part of this Island" and also "a hint of somethingstrange" is "probably still safe." But anyone who smells only "the paper andthe binding," anyone without imagination and a sense of mystery, is probablylost (1). A strange smell permeates the town of Carrick within the storyas well, and it is clear that those who are "lost" or "safe" may be identifiedby who is or is not aware of it. James Maxwell, the narrator, is aware of itthroughout; certain figures of authority—the warden in the insane asylum(100), a soldier (222)—are not. Near the end of the story Maxwell discovers95

McCormackthat the smell emanates from the body of Robert Aiken, the character, morethan any other, who is the "author" of the mystery at Carrick.The smell is closely related to another key image in the novel, the fog.Carrick, we are told, is often shrouded in a fog that "wipes out the bordersbetween countries and the lines between earth, sky, sea and shore" (5).Allusions to the fog stress the way it dissolves the solid world. So MissBalfour "disintegrated for a while in the dark" (32) and the fog on the Green"was so thick the far side was quite obliterated" (43). Reeve Blair makes theobvious interpretation:Nothing's straightforward here. People keep things hidden, even trivial things,and it's hard to know why—maybe it's just a natural liking for secrecy. In theNorth real mysteries become even more mysterious. (75)In various places, the novel suggests a necessity—even a certain comfort—tothe fog. For the residents of Carrick, sunshine is the weather that isdisorienting (36); they only pretend to prefer sunny days, only pretend"that they could see just as clearly in sunshine as in more discreet light"(48). The idea that you can see things more clearly in "discreet" light ispicked up by Reeve Blair in one of his pedantic lectures:And remember, James: it's not always the clues that are right before your eyesthat are significant. Some of the most important things in life can only be seenwith peripheral vision. (112)The connection between the fog and the smell is made explicit by Maxwellwhen he observes that "the fog seemed to be that bitter smell madevisible" (151).The images of fog and smell are only two of many devices that signal TheMysterium's intention of offering a self-reflexive meditation on the constructionof meaning. Indeed, in typical "postmodern detective" fashion,The Mysterium regularly foregrounds the parallels between James Maxwell'sexploration of the mystery at Carrick and the act of reading. Maxwell himselfis presented at first as a kind of ideal reader. He admits near the beginningthat he has left much of his life "sleeping in books" (68). As theinvestigation unfolds, and he becomes more active in making up his owninterpretations of events, Maxwell takes on the role of writer as well asreader. At the end he tries to write a book about the events at Carrick, butdoes not finish it because he is haunted by the possibility that he andRobert Aiken (and Kirk, another "author" of the mystery) might be relatives.The thought of such a co-incidence lying at the heart of his investiga-96

tion appalls Maxwell, for it implies "a world so patterned, so contrived" thatit is "a world without mystery" (253).If Maxwell performs the role of reader/writer, the witnesses are explicitlylikened to characters in a novel. "These people are as good as dead," explainsReeve Blair, with his usual mix of pedantry and double-entendre. "Theyaren't much more than cadavers who can still talk... They may be interestingcharacters but they're no more substantial than those people you meetin your dreams" (109). The fictional quality of the witnesses is suggested bythe fact that their testimonies are in the third person, as if they are themselvesproducts of an observing narrator. Literally, of course, within the termsof the novel, this narrator is James Maxwell, and the shift to third persononly highlights Maxwell's tendency to organize the clues he encounters intoa coherent story (Reeve Blair criticizes him in the end for the "very selective"quality of his "transcriptions and condensations" [251]); still, becausethe testimonies are so completely in the historical voice, with a level ofdetail which far exceeds what is likely in an actual interview, there remainsthe impression of some other, anonymous voice. Another hint of fictionalquality is that each witness has a highly marked peculiarity of speech,apparently as a result of the poisoning or plague (which adds new meaningto the idea of "speech pathologies"). So Kennedy speaks his sentences backwards(79), Miss Balfour has a "unique dialect" (139), Dr. Rankin's conversationis "peppered with childish insults" (160), and so on. The blatant natureof the speech differences foregrounds and parodies a key novelistic conventionfor constructing characters. Maxwell's interviews with the witnesses arefilled with parodie elements. Before each interview an authority figureimposes an arbitrary time limit, half-an-hour, an hour, and so on—a commondevice for generating suspense in mystery stories (124,138). The witnesseseach also have a specific piece of the story to tell and no more (indetective fiction, as in Carrick, a witness's "life" runs out "with her string ofwords" [151]). Interestingly, the witnesses seem to be aware of their own roleas characters: they come right out to tell Maxwell when they've told all they'repermitted to tell (137,150). They are also uniformly unconcerned abouttheir impending deaths; instead, they worry whether the portraits of themselvesin Robert Aiken's account are sufficiently "interesting" (136,150, 220-21).Intertextual references intensify the metafictional quality of the tale. Likemany of McCormack's stories ("The Fragment," "Sad Stories in Patagonia,"and "One Picture of Trotsky," to name only three), The Mysterium uses the97

McCormackdevice of texts within texts to foreground that mise en abymeso beloved ofpostmodernism: is it real? is it fiction?. .. lost again in the funhouse of language.The novel contains references to at least two earlier works byMcCormack, The Paradise Motel ("Do you remember when the MotelParadiso affair hit the headlines, James?" [179]) and "The One-Legged Men"("The most popular" artists at the later day festival are the elderly minersfrom Muirton who have "each lost a leg in an accident that killed andmaimed half the town's miners" [189, see also 201]). It also contains a longand hilarious discourse on criminology by Reeve Blair that is a thinly veiledparody of contemporary literary theory:The originator of the revolt [against the old methods of investigation] was a mannamed Frederic de Nossure. In his treatise, A Course in General Criminology, heset the world of criminal theory on its ear by the simple statement: 'the nature ofthe crime is totally arbitrary and requires new systems of analysis' ... He proposedthat an altogether new set of terminology be introduced, built around thetriad: CRIMINIFIER—CRIMINIFIED—CRIME. (174)These references, in conjunction with the other devices, make clear that theevents in Carrick are "staged," in more ways than one, that the inhabitantshave "set us a test" (171) and that the town itself is "a theatre of some kind...some intricate performance" (108).What does this performance teach about the construction of meaning?Not surprisingly, the "message" is not at all straightforward. Take, forexample, the thematic pronouncement repeated at various points in thenovel: "Telling the truth is only possible when you don't know very much."This pronouncement—like everything else metafictional about TheMysterium—is tellingly ambiguous. On the one hand, it seems to refer tohow the "truth" of the situation in Carrick becomes more difficult to pindown as more information is revealed. Truth, then, is superceded by how"one possibility melts into another," as Reeve Blair says (245), or it is like thesand that slips through the festival artist's fingers (190). This side of the pronouncementwarns against those who would claim too confidently to tellthe truth. Indeed, as Fogel has pointed out, much of McCormack's writingworks to unmask the "ease with which we classify, sort, and organize" as a"dubious virtue" (Fogel 137). In this context, truth becomes the province ofthe narrow-minded or ignorant—rather like the moralistic monks in TheName of the Rose, who try to protect their ownership of truth by limitingwhat can be disseminated from the library.98

On the other hand, an alternative reading of the pronouncement is alsopossible. According to this reading, limiting what you know is a necessaryenabling act. James Maxwell's situation at the end of the novel hints at theold saw about creative writers, that they should only learn as much as theyneed to know to tell the story. John Barth puts it nicely when he says that anovelist's homework is "the opposite of ice-bergs: Eight-ninths of [it] ... isin plain view on the surface of [the text]" (Barth 180). To learn too much isto forgo an important kind of "affirming mystery"—the writer's ignorancewhich leaves a space for imagination—and thus to be threatened by asilence in which no truth can be told.The first interpretation of the pronouncement aligns The Mysterium withother postmodern texts, which commonly argue for (and dramatize) theneed for humility about claims to knowledge. Such humility is one of themost valuable lessons Maxwell learns in the novel: "Now, I wonder if anydecision can ever be that simple. I ask myself, does any of us know, really,why we do what we do? That was one of the lessons I was to learn inCarrick" (68). At various places in The Mysterium, the lesson is reinforced,as, for instance, when Maxwell admits "I'd made up a cause and effect thatwas understandable and convenient. And quite wrong" (169; see also 220and 239). A similar plea for humility about claims to knowledge is at theroot of the idea of affirming mystery in postmodern detective novels. InHawksmoor, for instance, the two time periods in the novel, with their mazeof almost-but-not-quite parallel events, foreground how causal explanationsobscure as much of history as they illuminate. Ackroyd's novel can beread as elaborate demonstration of the childrens' joke that a History lessonis a "Mystery lesson" (Ackroyd 29). In The Name of the Rose, William ofBaskerville backs into a solution through a totally incorrect chain of reasoning.The lesson William draws from his experience could stand as a moralfor Hawksmoor or The Mysterium as well:Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at thetruth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselvesfrom insane passion for the truth. (Eco 491)A number of McCormack's most gruesome earlier stories have containedexplicit warnings against fanatical quests after "absolute truth." The sect in"The Fragment," for instance, horribly mutilate their bodies in an attempt"to make themselves the perfect embodiments of spiritual self-sufficiency"(Inspecting26), while Da Costa in "Lusawort's Meditation" is literally "too99

McCormackgood to live," so the world begins to invade his body (194). In The Mysterium,the most obvious absolutists are the three men who apparently engineer thedeaths of the prisoners of war: Alexander Aiken, Jakob Grubach, andDoctor Rankin. Alexander is, quite simply, an ego-maniac. He is capable ofintellectual brilliance (many of the most resonant metafictional pronouncementscome from him) but also great evil: when he discovers that one of theprisoners of war is having an affair with his wife, he sets out to kill all ofthem (166). Jakob, on the other hand, is obsessed with history. He believes"that to possess a country's past was almost the same as possessing the solidearth of it" (162). As a result, his bitterness at his own persecution and exile,which involved a proclamation that his version of his country's history was"officially unacceptable," seems to know no limits, and he agrees to go alongwith Alexander's plan in order to "strike a blow against those who hadruined his family and his homeland" (161,166). Doctor Rankin absolutelybelieves in his own authority. He is the town patriarch, the one who usuallyhas "the last word" in the decisions of the town council (34). He feels nocompunction about sexually assaulting his patients (166). He goes alongwith Alexander's plan, presumably, as a way of revelling in his own power.Similarly, though more benignly, the limit of Reeve Blair's authority inthe text is signalled by his own traditionally detective-like adherence to reason.So when Maxwell recognizes the Reeve's love of mystery for its ownsake as an attitude like "one of those old religious cabalists," Blair denies it,saying that those in his profession "are concerned with mysteries—notmumbo jumbo" (73). Tellingly, the Reeve puts dreams in the same categoryas religious "mumbo jumbo," a tendency that seems to be connected to thefact that he is a Southerner (where there is less fog and more sunshine),and, as a result, he is fundamentally at a loss for how to deal with the eventsin Carrick. He projects confidence at every turn, but the fact is, he has hadto bring in James Maxwell, a more "creative" reader/writer, in order for thestory to unfold. Maxwell, unlike Blair, believes that dreams "could be deeplyrevealing, no matter how puzzling they might appear" (73), a necessary attitudein a place in which, as Robert Aiken points out, "the crazy logic ofdreams [has been] introduced into the rational world" (212). 3Humility about claims to knowledge is not, of course, the same thing assaying "nothing can be known" (just as the "crazy logic" of dreams is notentirely beyond understanding). Although The Mysterium warns against theabsolutisms of Alexander, Grubach and Dr. Rankin, and gently satirizes the100

ationalism of Blair, it doesn't suggest, as an alternative, that everything issimply relative or undecidable (a common misrepresentation of texts thatforeground epistemological uncertainty). One of the most interesting thingsabout McCormack's work—as in the best postmodern texts—is the waythat metafktional elements have a way of doubling back to commentpolemically on "reality." The very ambiguity of the metafictional elementsinvites this doubling back. Remember the enabling side to the idea of "notknowing very much." Or consider again the image of the smell. As I mentionedat the outset, the smell signals the importance of affirming mystery,but the smell itself is "bitter," which implies that awareness of the smell—for all its value—is not necessarily a pleasant experience (just as neither theunconscious nor "reality" is necessarily pleasant). Awareness of the smellmay "save" us from the plague, from that involuntary—if joyful—release ofthe repressed, but it also implies that we are not fooled by the bland surfaceof the town: something truly "smells" in Carrick, and those who are awareof it are half-way to perceiving the underlying reality.The red circle perhaps most powerfully illustrates this "doubling-back"quality of images in the novel. Red circles (or just circles) show up at variousplaces in The Mysterium: at each act of vandalism (14, 30, 45), as Swainston'smutilated mouth (51), in the fish affected early on by the plague (they swim"in tighter and tighter circles before rising to the surface" [56] ), as Kirk's"stigmata" (the imprint of the gun barrel left after the guerrilla leader murdersKirk's lover [102-03] )> an d s ° on. As signs (and as clues), these circles are bothempty and full: they point to the vagaries of history, to the possible worth ofour explanatory systems (a big zero); and yet they are pregnant with meaningat the same time. The red circle is the mark for Camp Zero, the prisonerof war camp around which the mystery behind the mystery seems to revolve.The recurrence of circles in the novel, the way they strike terror in the townspeople,underlines the fact that the present of Carrick is deeply conditionedby the earlier incident. The red circles foreground all that was at stake whenthe townspeople closed ranks to "let history re-write itself just a little bit"(169). The closing of ranks is both origin and effect of the town's decay,emblematic of the stultifying insularity of the place. And yet, as the signitself suggests, the connection to Camp Zero is, from one point of view, anelaborate nothing: the miners were not in fact killed to avenge the Carrickmen; the townspeople (most of them, anyway) have nothing really to hide.The doubleness in images like the red circles throws light on McCormack's101

McCormackclaim, in his introduction to Inspecting the Vaults and in a recent article,that his fiction testifies to "the power of the written word" (Inspecting xii;"Less" 6). McCormack's texts dramatize that the power of words is rootedin what makes words hard to control: the multiple meanings they invoke,their profound connection to imagination and the unconscious. Like theelixirs Robert Aiken learns to concoct from his father, words are inherentlyambiguous—they are always both poison and cure—and this ambiguity isthe very source of their power (37). For this reason, what words offer isalways a kind of "peripheral vision," to return to Reeve Blair's term, a visionthat foregrounds epistemological uncertainty (affirming mystery) while atthe same time hinting at some of "the most important things in life" (112).Like the red circles, words—and the stories they form—are an elaboratenothing, "lies" that nevertheless, indirectly and obliquely, can expose the"truth." 4 One of the best images for the duplicitous power of words in TheMysterium is the Carrick bend. It turns out that the knot was not namedafter the town, that the connection is spurious, a lie, and yet as a metaphorthe knot still represents the town remarkably well (190, 221).A favourite McCormack motif for portraying the power of words mightbe called "the return of the repressed text." 5 A number of his stories portraysituations in which the destabilizing power of words asserts itself in spite ofefforts to the contrary. In "The Fugue," for instance, a man who masqueradesas "a scholar and a man of culture" is caught up in a moebius strip offiction and reality in which the pattern of the "cheap novels" he so loves,but which he claims to be able to contain within "their place in his ownparticular jungle," come back, in a most direct way, to haunt him(Inspecting231-4). 6 In "Inspecting the Vaults," an Orwellian regime imprisonspeople for crimes of imagination (one prisoner belongs to a family thatconstructed an entire forest of papier mâché [Inspecting 6], another isaccused of being a "mouth-sorceress, a manipulator of spells" [10]) andthen rationalizes its activities with administrative jargon (the prisoners livein "Vaults'... not 'basements,' and especially not 'dungeons'—a mostunsuitable word" [3] ). For all the regime's efforts at control, however, whatthey try to repress comes back to haunt them. For one thing, the vaultdwellersare prone to a "wailing" that "penetrates all barriers." This howlinghas an inexplicable power: "It should be impossible for the other vaultdwellers,underground, to hear the cry, yet invariably they all take it up" (3).And the narrator of the story, the "Inspector" in charge of these vaults,102

turns out himself to be a suspect. His crime? He may or may not be implicatedin the disappearance of his entire village, on the site of which theauthorities have found "something unthinkable:" a disemboweled body"completely tattooed from head to toe with columns of words" (18).By foregrounding the return of the repressed text (which, after Derrida,you might also call "the return of textuality") McCormack implies thatwords can create a space of freedom, even, potentially, of resistance: there issomething hopeful in the way that the wailing—even if it is, in itself, a horriblewailing—exceeds all attempts at control by the regime. The fact thatwhat words tap into is often mysterious and chaotic is all the better forthose who share the condition described by JP in The Paradise Motel:Some men do not need to search for order, they are overwhelmed by it, everywherethey turn. They feel as though they're in a prison where each moment ofthe day is planned, every action overseen. They hunger for the smallest particleof chaos, for things that do not fit. (105). 7Certainly, from a writer's point of view, the power of words can be a tangiblepleasure: it means that there is no "last word" to a story, no final version,only an infinite sequence of possibilities each with its unsolved and potentiallyabsorbing mysteries. One message of The Mysterium, like the story"Eckhardt at a Window," is that the value of the performance is simply inthe contemplation of all the various possibilities. Inspector Eckhardt, at theend of his unsolved case, realizes that he "is not discontented with the waythings have worked out. He knows now that he has no wish ever to solve hismystery .. . only to contemplate it, to delight in its complexities" (Inspecting54). Similarly, the open ending of The Mysterium seems to invite theresponse of James Maxwell: let whiskey "oil the machinery" and then sitback for hours "discussing the mysteries at Carrick from this angle and that,considering such matters as guilt, innocence, doubt and certainty" (249-50).At the same time, as The Mysterium implies, what "returns" with a repressedtext is an oblique indication of the "truth." Recall that in the novel theplague induces normally reticent people to talk volubly until they die. Thesubject of their talk, and sometimes the nature of their speech impediment,is directly connected to what they had repressed in their lives before theinfection. Kennedy sets the pattern by monologuing endlessly about hiswife's twin sister, the "first time" he's told anybody about her (79). 8 Anna, touse just one other example, talks about Robert Aiken, her first lover. Herspeech impediment involves violent displays of emotion triggered by certain103

McCormackkeywords, which is appropriate, since a cause of her alienation from Robertis that she could not say "I love you" (she "had no wish to express suchemotions in words" [95] ). It's also interesting to note that the plague firststrikes animals (rabbits, fish, dogs, and sheep) and children (youngCameron who "talked and talked, day and night" [59] and then five others[61]) and only finally adults. In other words, the plague takes effect first onthose least "repressed" and gradually progresses to those most repressed.Understanding the plague as a return (and release) of the repressed alsoexplains why it is such a "benign killer"; the threat of death pales before theeuphoria of the unburdening (82).The unburdening of the townspeople emphasizes that Carrick's presentstate comes from a failure to affirm mystery adequately, either by actuallydispelling mystery (love does not flourish in the town because lovers "knoweach other too well" [195] ) or by absolutist perversions of the need to affirmmystery (the closing of ranks after the mine disaster). In either case, thetownspeople have drawn a (red, bloodied) circle around the town, imprisoningthemselves in an insular certainty and defining everything outside asthreatening and other. They have internalized the lesson of "the taming"described by Miss Balfour, in which the town collies are terrorized by a ramso that they repress their deepest desires and never go near the sheep thatare "the fulfillment of [their] essence" (147).The "essence" from which the townspeople are alienated is hinted at in TheMysterium by the various intertwined meanings of "mystery." For instance,one signal of the town's stultified condition is the fact that the church is shutdown. According to Robert Aiken, "no sound" has emanated from the churchsince the end of the War (17). When Kirk asks him about this silence, Robertexplains that his father said "we don't need churches anymore," because "we'velearnt everything the Great Executioner in the Sky had to teach" (47). At itsbest, the religious sense of "mystery" implies a certain humility in metaphysicalmatters. The OED puts it succinctly when it describes a religiousmystery as "a doctrine of the faith involving difficulties which human reasonis incapable of solving." Alexander thinks he has solved everything, but, creatureof reason and ego that he is, his "solution" only feeds his fearful obsession withdeath: "The body is nothing but a food supply for a million maggots" (202).Most crucially, however, the novel implies that the townspeople are alienatedfrom the idea of "mystery" as "mastery of a trade or art." This mysteryis intimately connected to the festival at the literal and metaphoric heart of104

the novel. McCormack has shown a fondness for rituals and festivalsthroughout his work. 9 Fogel argues that such rituals "act subversively tocontextualize ironically our own value-making practices" (143). In TheMysterium, there are some good examples of the way ritualized activity canbe used to rationalize atrocity: the taming (147), the almost ceremonialmurder of Kirk's lover (102), the "rites" attendant on the persecution of theGrubachs (161). At the same time, however, these abuses of ritual are shownto be perverted expressions of a fundamental—and fundamentally empowering—humanactivity. The nature of this activity is suggested by Carrick'smedieval Festival of the Mysterium, the disappearance of which is the keysignal of the town's present malaise.According to the account by "Johannes Peregrinus," a text within the textof The Mysterium, the medieval Carrick festival began with "a great procession"in which "eech crafte and mystery" was represented (84). The variousmysteries assembled at the church to make their oath: "Wee swear that wewill well and truly oversee our mysteries. And all good rules and ordinances weshall keep" (85). After the day of processions and solemn oaths, there followed"much drinking and eating and wenching," in the middle of which,on the third day, there was a stage play of the "Mysterium Mysteriorum—theMystery of Mysteries" (86). Peregrinus remarks negatively on all the"wicked sorte" who descended on the town, but his criticism is tempered bythe tangible benefit he himself received from one of the mysteries celebratedin the festival: the Carrick town apothecary gave him a "sovereign remedy"against "a sleeplessness conducive to a melancholy" (86).Clearly, in these various details, the festival embodies an ideal of communityin which responsibility and freedom, internal cohesion and openness tothe outside, are balanced. From one point of view, the festival is a carnivalesquecelebration that invites outsiders into the town and gives license to"wickedness." As Reeve Blair points out, with his usual double-entendre,Peregrinus uses erratic spellings in his account because "[in] those days thereweren't any rules" (110). Blair, however, misses the fact that the disorder ofthe festival is contained within a larger—but not oppressive—commitmentto the common good. The procession and other organized activities are astrong expression of solidarity, and the guild members swear on the steps ofthe church to keep "all good laws and ordinances" of their mystery, laws andordinances which, judging from the original English guilds, always beganwith respect for the "common law" (see Smith xxxix).105

McCormackThe Carrick festival also celebrates a condition of relatively unalienatedlabour: during the festival week, as Reeve Blair points out, Carrick becomesfor the tradespeople not just a workplace but "the stage of their performance"(m). For this element, McCormack taps into views sometimesexpressed in scholarship on the medieval guilds:The early English Gild was an institution of local self-help which, before the Poorlawswere invented, took the place, in old times, of the modern friendly or benefitsociety ... [Their] main characteristic was, to set up something higher than personalgain and mere materialism, as the main object of men living in towns.(Smith xiv-xv)Or, in the same vein:The rules laid down by the Gilds, and to which all men of the trade had to submit,had reference (1) partly to securing the good quality of the work, and (2) partly,like all Gild-Statutes, to the temporal and eternal welfare of their members. Bothkinds of rules were consequences of the fundamental principle of all Gilds, namely,care for the common interest by means of association. (Brentano cxxviii- cxxix)These quotes highlight how the guilds put the general welfare of the communityover the free pursuit of profit. Brentano describes a very telling incidentfrom the fourteenth century in which certain "rich" merchants called"Grocers" began to deal in "all manner of merchandize vendible," much totheir own profit. After a complaint, the king, Edward III, responded with adecree "that all artificers and people of mysteries shall each choose his ownmystery before the next Candlemass; and that having so chosen it, he shallhenceforth use no other" (cxxiii-cxxiv). Though the social inequities of themedieval period warn against taking these accounts naively, the loss ofcommunal values represented by the disappearance of the guilds and theirfestivals is, as McCormack seems to argue, something to mourn.The Mysterium suggests that, at its best, to take "life as a mystery to beaccepted" means to adopt an attitude to life analogous to that embodied inthe guild festivals. It means to forgo certain efficiencies deliberately—certainadvances of technology and reason—in order to affirm other values. Thatthe festival is now "out of fashion" is particularly poignant when you considerthat Carrick, at the beginning of the novel, is not only psychologicallybut economically depressed (191). Smaller communities almost always surferfrom capitalism's mania for rationalization and efficiency. As Robert Aikenpoints out at the beginning of the novel, the town still "contains practitionersof the various trades as it did in its heyday," but these practitioners arenow no longer "townspeople" but "strangers" (7). In economic terms, there106

maybe something impossible about declining to be efficient (are we not allprisoners of international financiers and the competitive global economy?)and yet "certum quia impossible" (as the epigraph to Peregrinus's account ofthe festival says): "something you always thought to be quite impossiblemay actually be the only solution to your problem" (84,112). 10The Festival of the Mysterium, then, intertwines the aesthetic or epistemologicalimplications of "affirming mystery" with more directly practicalconcerns. In fact, the festival embodies within itself all the various "mysteries"in the novel. There is an explicit connection between the "mystery"practiced by other craftspeople and the "mystery" of the writer (all thosefreedoms and responsibilities): Maxwell's own task in Carrick is likened to aguild member "learning his trade" (68,187). The rituals acted out have areverential quality to them, and in the Mysterium Mysteriorum—theMystery of Mysteries—Peregrinus discovers something that highlights thelimits of his own knowledge: he cannot tell what this stage play involves—itremains a permanent gap in his account—because he is not one of the initiates.The festival also feeds back into the novel's metafictional account of"the power of words." The "exotic" experiences offered by the festival("staged" or not) nicely parallel the experiences offered by literature. Notsurprisingly, the first part of the testimony of Robert Aiken deals with hislove of the festival, and the elements he most loves offer clear parallels to thebest functions of art: the artist whose impressionistic portraits revealed"characteristics his sitters never knew they possessed or had managed to keephidden," and the sailor who tells the story of the Carrick bend, that thing ofdeceitful beauty, only to be trusted if you "had tied it personally" (190).To affirm mystery, then, the novel seems to argue, is a festive business. Itis to tap into and affirm all the intertwined "mysteries" implicit in theFestival of the Mysterium. There is something licentious and not entirelyserious about the process—the power of words implies a carnivalesqueindulgence in "wickedness," in things marginal and transgressive, and alsowarns against taking absolutist positions (especially, perhaps, with regard tothe "ideals" represented by the festival). At the same time, to affirm mysteryis to speak to a range of more prosaic human needs: the needs for community,reverence, and for a dignity in labour. As Robert Aiken points out, thepeople of Carrick, like all human beings, "wanted to be part of somethingcoherent like those tradesmen at the festival hundreds of years ago" (221).107

McCormack1 My own preference is to use "postmodern detective." "Anti-detective," Stefano Tani'sterm, implies too much of a binary, as if the later novels are acting only in opposition tothe "traditional" mystery. In fact, the later novels simultaneously exploit and undercutthe received conventions—a typically postmodern tendency (see Hutcheon, Canadian 1-8 or Poetics 3-8). "Metaphysical detective," on the other hand, a term used by PatriciaMerivale and Michael Holquist, implies that earlier mystery novels somehow do not havea metaphysics. They do (which is one reason so many critics have been fascinated bythem): just that it is not the metaphysics of Nabokov or Pynchon or Borges. So, as muchby default as anything else, "postmodern detective" is a term I will employ in this paper.2 Though he has published only three books so far, McCormack has established himself asa distinctive voice in contemporary Canadian fiction. There is not another writer inCanada who does quite the kind of work he does—all those Borgesian echoes inInspecting the Vaults, the dizzying mix of playfulness and horror throughout. TheMysterium is McCormack's most sustained effort to date. It doesn't have the tour deforcequality of some of the stories, but is, it seems to me, a highly successful novel that raisessome complex issues in a winningly playful and dramatic way.3 I was at first tempted to link Kirk, because of his mane, to the level of religious mystery.Kirk does, after all, explore the region with a fishing pole that seems a "divining rod"(10), and he contributes to the return of the repressed mystery in Carrick. Alas, however,that was as far as I could make the connections go. It is possible that Kirk's name is oneof those teasing clues, empty and full at the same time: it turns out it is not even hisoriginal family name, but rather an easily spelt patronymic given to his mother whenshe emigrated to the Colony (237).4 In this context, it is well to remember the paradoxical effect of Kirk's acts of vandalism.At first glance, the acts seem designed to defile or obliterate the town's past, but ultimatelythey have the opposite effect. The acts, by their very appearance as attempts toefface history, end up posing the question "Why would anyone want to obliterate thetown's past?" and thus make history a subject of urgent concern.5 As my examples below indicate, this motif is similar to one of the devices Borges claimsis fundamental to all fantastic literature: the contamination of reality by dream (Irby inIntroduction to Labyrinths xviii). In both cases, the power of words and of what wordstap into (imagination, the unconscious) has a way of destabilizing everyday assurancesabout reality.6 This story reads like a one-upping of Julio Cortazar's "Continuity of Parks," a possibilitysignalled by the spurious quotation from Cortazar that makes up its epigraph. It alsohas parallels with a story like Borges's "Tlon, Orbis Tertius," in which the fantastic worldof Tlon makes intrusions "into the world of reality" (Borges 16).7 In the context of this article, it is also well to remember the epigraph from R.P.Blackmur that begins The Paradise Motel: "What, should we get rid of our ignorance,the very substance of our lives, merely in order to understand one another?"8 Her story presents another image for the necessity of mystery. Turns out that the sisterthat was born blind had an operation at twelve to restore her sight. But she didn't likebeing able to see. Everything was disappointing to her, nothing was as beautiful as shehad imagined it, except her dog and shadows. As a result she blinded herself again andlived "happy as a queen" (79).9 See the saturnalia festival described in "Inspecting the Vaults" {Inspectingis) or the ritesof the spider-god in "Sad Stories in Patagonia" (30-32) or the Kafkaesque festival in"Festival" (115-28).108

îo The values represented by the guilds remind me of a story from my hometown ofWaterloo, Ontario, where there are many Mennonite farmers. Some years ago, it seems,the Ministry of Agriculture wanted to do a cost-benefit study comparing modern farmingmethods with the traditional methods of the Mennonites. How was it, the Ministrywondered, that the Mennonites could survive—even thrive—while forgoing such efficiency-producingdevices as fertilizers and tractors? When it came time to do the study,however, the Mennonites had trouble cooperating, for the simple reason that they couldnot understand the surveys they were asked to fill out. It seems the survey listed "labour"as one of the "costs" of production, but, from the point of view of the Mennonites,"labour" is one of the "benefits."By a quirk of circumstance, Eric McCormack lives in Waterloo, Ontario (though Ihave never met him).WORKS CITEDAckroyd, Peter. Hawksmoor. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985.Barth, John. "Historical Fiction, Fictitious History, and Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs, or,About Aboutness." The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction. New York: G. P.Putnam's Sons, 1984.180-92.Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Eds. Donald A. Yatesand James E. Irby. Norfold: New Directions, 1962.Brentano, Lujo. "On the History and Development of Gilds and the Origin of Trade-Unions: A Preliminary Essay in Five Parts." English Gilds, xlix-cxcix.Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1983.Fogel, Stanley. "McBorges." Essays in Canadian Writingyj (Spring 1989): 137-45.Holquist, Michael. "Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories inPost-War Fiction." The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory. Ed.Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.150-74.Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-CanadianFiction. Toronto: Oxford, 1988.. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988.Irby, James E. Introduction. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. By Jorge LuisBorges. Eds. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. xv-xxiii.McCormack, Eric. "Less Than Meets the Eye." The New Quarterly 13.4 (Winter 1994): 4-12.. Inspecting the Vaults. Markham: Penguin, 1987.. The Mysterium. Toronto; Viking, 1992.. The Paradise Motel. Markham: Penguin, 1989.Merivale, Patricia. "The Flaunting of Artifice in Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge LuisBorges." Nabokov: The Man and His Work. Ed. L. S. Dembo. Madison: U ofWisconsin P, 1967. 209-24.Smith, Lucy Toulmin. Introduction. English Gilds, xi-xlvii.Smith, Toulmin. ed. English Gilds: The Original Ordinances of More Than One HundredEarly English Gilds. London: Early English Text Society, 1870.Tani, Stefano. The Doomed Detective: The Contributions of the Detective Novel toPostmodern American and Italian Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984.

RobertB r i n g h u r s tThe Living Must NeverOutnumber the DeadIt is that simple. The livingmust never outnumber the dead.With us, at the moment, they do.We have broken the rule.They are hard wordsto say to a woman,preposterous wordsto say to a child.And I do not know what to doexcept leave them behindhere in the airwhere no one will find them.no

B o o kNorthern MysteriesMargaret AtwoodStrange Things: The Malevolent North inCanadian Literature. Clarendon $29.95David C. WoodmanStrangers Among Us. McGill-Queen's $29.95Reviewed by Sherrill GraceAs Margaret Atwood's title reminds us,after Robert Service—"There are strangethings done 'neath the midnight sun"—andthese strange things, such as going mad,cannibalism, murder, mysterious disappearances(and reappearances), continue tohaunt the Canadian imagination. Thebooks under review here are just two moreproofs that the Canadian North, howeverwe define it, holds an endless fascinationfor us. Whether we go there or not, weseem to have an insatiable capacity to read,write, paint, film, or just imagine it.Atwood's Strange Things is a collection offour lectures which she gave at Oxford in1991 as part of the Clarendon LectureSeries. In them she explores four of thepossible topoi of our northern mythology:the lost Franklin Expedition, what she calls"the Grey Owl Syndrome," cannibalism,and "women-in-the-North stories." Nowthis is all familiar territory for Atwood whohas given us examples of all four topoi herself.But here she sets out to trace whatother writers do with the Franklin story,the Grey Owl desire to "go native," theWindigo legend (and psychosis), and thefate of the woman who dares to enter anorthern space already designated as deadlyand female.My favorite chapter is the one on Franklin.Atwood follows our obsession with "thehand of Franklin reaching for the BeaufortSea," which Stan Rogers celebrated, througha wide range of texts as different as MacEwen'sverse play Terror and Erebus and Richler'sparodie narrative of nation Solomon GurskyWas Here. Not surprisingly, she missessome key texts from her catalogue ofFranklin-mania, but that's the subject ofWoodman's book. Stories about the Northalways seem to return to Franklin! TheGrey Owl chapter is less satisfying, perhapsbecause it is less spectacular—Franklin is ahard act to follow. Here Atwood considersKroetsch's Gone Indian, M.T Kelly's BreathDances Between Them, and once moreMacEwen, for whom Grey Owl (aka ArchieBelaney) was a "doomed hero."The Wendigo chapter, "Eyes of Blood,Heart of Ice," is altogether another matter.If Franklin is a rather tragic ghost and GreyOwl a rather confused one, there can be nomistaking the terrible power of theWendigo—or of going Wendigo. If wewanted one myth to sum up what Northmeans, this would be it. Stories of theWendigo are indigenous to eastern andnorthern parts of Canada, and the Wendigois all too real a presence to the Ojibway andNorthern Crée. Euro-Canadians, whobrought with them to the frozen wastestheir own prohibitions on cannibalism andwere just as susceptible as the natives (if notmore so) to starvation or the "last resort"111

Books in Reviewof cannibalism, were quick to recognize agood story when they heard one. Atwoodtracks the Wendigo from legend to ghoststory and from metaphor to gothic thriller,where this quintessentially northern monsteris one's dreaded double; a choice exampleof this latter type is Wayland Drew'snovel The Wabeno Feast (1973), but onecould do worse than look to Atwood's story"Death by Landscape."I find the fourth chapter the most problematic.Although it is true that most ofthose who go North have been and continueto be men, the fate, narrative or otherwise,of the women who do so is far morecomplex than Atwood allows. Here I wishshe had considered Aritha van Herk's PlacesFar From Ellesmere or Elizabeth Hay's TheOnly Snow in Havana, and if she had consideredplays she might have reflected uponWendy Lill's powerful monodrama TheOccupation of Heather Rose. Instead, shefocusses attention on another Wendigoincarnation, Ann Tracy's novel WinterHunger (1990) in which the monster is awife and mother. And we are left to concludethat women who go North becomeNorth—a fate worse than death!Strangers Among Us is a sequel to Woodman'sstunning achievement in Unravellingthe Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony(1991). As he explains in his introduction,he had material centring on the discoveriesand speculations of the American explorerand would-be Franklin expert CharlesFrancis Hall that would not fit in the firstbook. However, Strangers is something of alet-down. Although it is structured in thesame way, interspersing Inuit stories withHall's and other white men's accounts, itdoes not carry the same inherent drama,and the attempt to sort out who saw whomwhere becomes confusing.But let me backtrack briefly. The eccentricHall, captivated by the news comingout of the Arctic in the mid-i85os, quicklybecame obsessed with the Franklin disaster.What most intrigued him was the possibilitythat some of Franklin's men had survived.By i860 he was in the Arctic and,having failed to reach King William Island,where the search for Franklin had beenfocussed, he spent two years living with theInuit and establishing friendships with anInuit couple who became his assistants,allies, and companions: Joe Ebierbing andTookoolito (Hannah Ebierbing).By 1864 Hall had returned with his Inuitfriends to spend the next four years livingwith the Inuit on Melville Peninsula nearRepulse Bay, interviewing anyone whocould remember the Franklin disaster, orhad other stories to tell about strange whitemen, and visiting sites to search for evidence.He quickly became convinced thatsome of Franklin's men had indeed survived;he postulated that, instead oftrekking south for the Back River and perishingat Starvation Cove, a small group ofthem led by Captain Francis Crozier, whomthe Inuit called "Aglooka," walked northand east to Melville Peninsula in the hopeof meeting whaling ships or of travellingsouth down the west coast of Hudson Bay.What convinced Hall of this possibilitywas the set of stories told by Inuit of sightingsof three or four strangers and a dogwalking and hunting at several points onthe peninsula. Other Arctic veterans likeDr. John Rae dismissed Hall's theory ofsurvivors, claiming that Inuit tales wereuntrustworthy and the sightings could beexplained more simply. What Woodmanhas done is to weave the various stories,relayed to us through Hall, with Hall's ownspeculations and to compare the compositepicture with the evidence from othersources, such as Rae's accounts. His ownconclusion, however, remains tantalizinglyinconclusive. If there were two or three survivors,and if they were led by Crozier, theydo not appear to have made it south towhite outposts—their trail dies out somewherenear Chesterfield Inlet, and we will112

never know precisely what happened orwho exactly they were.Although I find Strangers Among Us lessgripping than Woodman's first Franklinbook, it is nonetheless fascinating. It isanother example of the northern tale thatAtwood extolls—a mystery story withghostly presences that cannot be confirmedor explained away. Certainly, whatever theInuit saw and heard over one hundredyears ago provided them with the stuff oflegend and myth, and these tales continueto haunt our imaginations, our literature,and our arts. As Woodman reminds us inhis final remarks: "the Inuit knew [that] thebest stories are those that survive on theirown merit, and bear endless repetition."BibliotherapyBeckylaneWhere the Rivers Join: A Personal Account ofHealing from Ritual Abuse. Press Gang $16.95Nancy Owen Nelson, ed.Private Voices, Public Lives: Women Speak on theLiterary Life. U North Texas P US$16.95Reviewed by Barbara PellBoth of these books explore the realm ofliterature as therapy. The first, a personaljournal of horrific revelations, finds solacethrough writing. The second, an academicanthology of intellectual intertextualities,records the life-impact of reading. Bothbelong in the categories of autobiography/women's studies rather than in the traditionalgenres of literature/literary criticism,but their feminist voices proclaim that theyare no less valuable and that they will nolonger be silenced by patriarchal structures.Beckylane is a pseudonym for a writerfrom Turtle Island who, as the afterwordindicates, cannot use her real name becauseshe is vulnerable to lawsuits for the revelationsof ritual, sexual abuse she makes in thisbook. It is a personal journal from March1991 to June 1992 that records her recoveryof the memories of her childhood: herprostitution, until age seven, to a cult thatpractised physical and sexual abuse of children,bestiality, murder, and cannibalism;and, between the ages of seven and eleven,her sexual abuse by her father after he nolonger offered her to the cult. The journalentries reveal the essence of her story withintwenty pages, then detail, repeat, and psychoanalysethe events as her counsellortherapistenables her to relive her repressedmemories. As Lee Maracle says in the Forewordto the book, the nightmarish fragmentsare horrific and challenging; they arenot sensationalized or self-indulgent.What weakens the autobiographicalimpact of this courageous book are the selfconsciousliterary interpolations of the selfconfessedwriter and grad student: ironicfortune-cookie sayings; numerous quotationsfrom authorities on child abuse;dialogue from "Readers" who instruct herto make the text more "feminist"; even"A Scholar" who praises her courage andwrites the book review—"the interweavingof quotations from other accounts of abusesurvival, diary entries, images welling upfrom repressed memories, fortune cookieproclamations etc. is very effective." Thisreader feels manipulated. The cover blurbclaims that this "record of a woman's healingfrom ritual abuse does not pander toskeptics and does not apologize." The problemis that it does both. The author is soobsessed with the accusation of FalseMemory Syndrome that she constantlyforegrounds a critique of her own materialthat compels the sympathetic reader tobecome a skeptical judge. Ultimately, as sheinsists, this brave book is primarily a therapyfor herself and other abuse survivors.Private Voices, Public Lives is an anthologyof twenty-four essays by Americanwomen scholars who attempt to liberate literarycriticism from an adversarial "masculinist"mode by foregrounding an113

Books in Reviewautobiographical, gendered reader responseto literature. They hope their "I-witness"will "reconcile the conflict between [their]private worlds and [their] public lives,"promote "collegiality in academic life," andencourage teachers and students toacknowledge "the reality of emotional life."Ranging from the trivial to the traumatic,these essays practise what they preach: anintegration between, and an illuminationof, both literary texts (in the broadest definition)and individual lives.The book is divided (somewhat arbitrarilyand redundantly) into three sections.Part One, "The Work/Love Paradigm"includes essays on Katherine Anne Porter,Willa Cather, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Inthe first essay, Ann Putnam documents thetrivial distractions of daily life that keepher from analysing "Pale Horse, Pale Rider"(her child forgets a note; her dog swallowsa sock). This banal beginning shocks thereader with its subversion of objective,impersonal, intellectual literary criticism.Other essays present more traumatic lifeexperiences or more profound literaryanalyses but the point has been made:women, at least, cannot separate life andscholarship.The second and longest section, "TheText as Mirror," explores the therapeutic"mirror" effect of literature on the lives ofthirteen women. Their studies of detectivefiction, Western American literature, women'ssea logs, and the works of AdrienneRich, Emily Dickinson, Amy Tan, AnneMorrow Lindbergh, Toni Morrison,Kathleen Norris and others have enabledthese female critics to come to terms withchild abuse, sexism, divorce, lesbianism,infertility, menopause, relations betweengenders and generations, and geographical/spiritualdisplacement. One of the bestin this section is Melody Graulich's article,which integrates literary references to theloss of a child from women writers of disparateraces and eras (Gwendolyn Brooks,Harriet Beecher Stowe, Leslie Silko, BethBrant, Mary Austen and Charlotte PerkinsGilman) with her own poignant memoir ofinfertility to demonstrate "the consolationof knowing that other women can understand,despite often living far apart."The essays in Part Three, "Teaching andWriting The Self" discuss the theme ofindividuation through the acts of teachingand writing. Lynn Z. Bloom narrates a fascinatingstory of achieving independencefrom family racism and academic snobberythrough writing a biography of Dr.Benjamin Spock. Other essays documentthe educative effects of our "literary grandmothers,"multicultural literature, women'sliterature, and gender studies. BeverlyConner's brave account of the disappearanceof her daughter, the discovery (ninemonths later) of her murdered remains,and the comforting parallels she foundwhile teaching Anne Tyler's The AccidentalTourist is the most moving essay in this collection.The final article provides an appropriatecommentary on, conclusion for, and,to some extent, subversion of this text.Elsie Mayer "attempts a reconciliationbetween masculinist criticism and feministepistemology" illustrated in VirginiaWoolf 's The Common Reader. The essays inNelson's anthology are generally honest,interesting, and personally insightful—butnot always critically illuminating. As Mayerpoints out: "While I want others to respectmy right to express my personal relation toa text, I in turn must weigh my experience,sifting the important from the unimportant.I must judge the value of my experiencefor the reader if I hope to movecriticism beyond expressionism." Nevertheless,she valorizes "the fruits of connectingthe self and the text." This feministdiscourse is necessary in order to liberateliterary criticism from masculinist argumentationand analysis and "move it closerto a position that acknowledges equalityand difference."114

Novels for the Masses...Carol BeranLiving Over the Abyss: Margaret Atwood's LifeBefore Man. Canadian Fiction Studies #23. ECWP $14-95Donna PennéePraying for Rain: Timothy Findley's Not Wantedon the Voyage. Canadian Fiction Studies #21.ECW P $14.95Lorna IrvineCollecting Clues: Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm.Canadian Fiction Studies #28. ECW P $14.95Arnold E. DavidsonWriting Against the Silence: Joy Kogawa's Obasan.Canadian Fiction Studies #30. ECW P $14.95Reviewed by Patricia MerivaleTo review these four titles is to review samplesof a genre, i.e. to review, in a sense, thegenre itself—the concise, strictly formattedintroduction to a single major work of fiction,one almost certainly "canonical" andcertainly a title taught in schools and universities.All four authors have followed the formatsuccessfully: Chronology, the Importanceof the Work, and Critical Reception take upabout twenty-five pages; a segmented"Reading of the Text" fills out each monographto a total of about a hundred pages;Works Cited and Index conclude each slimvolume. Twayne, the Next Generation ...On the whole, nothing in these volumesand, in all likelihood, nothing in theirthirty or so fellow-volumes, will eithershock, surprise, or inspire the criticalreader reasonably acquainted with thesenovels (and with some of the alreadyreceived opinions on them), or grievouslymislead the innocently inquiring mind.The latter readership is clearly the primaryone for this series, and they have been wellserved, with accurate information andclear, useful interpretations and emphases.The Critical Reception sections are, however,inevitably 'bitty' and joyously selfcontradictory:they might, in fact, be moreuseful to, or at least safer in the hands of,the warily critical reader.Having said that, I must confess that myown opinion of the novels inevitably affectsmy judgment of the critiques. Irvine andBeran will have some difficulty persuadingme that Bodily Harm is not one of MargaretAtwood's more problematic novels and LifeBefore Man not perhaps her most tedious,while Pennée and Davidson can, just byhumming softly, persuade me to hear themassed choirs of Not Wanted on the Voyageand (above all) of Obasan.Carol Beran's introduction asserts, implausibly,some special novelty in Life BeforeMan's expansion of "Canadian" elements.She makes heavy weather throughout of thefictional genres and types deployed in thenovel: "At this point we are aware [actually,somewhat earlier: page one, perhaps . .. ]that depressed Elizabeth and macaroniand-cheesemaking Nate are not the standardheroine and hero of a romanticnovel." The study, short though it is, is stillvery repetitive, especially in regard to thisnon-problem of how different the charactersand events are from those of her textualstraw person, "a typical popular novel."Beran notes the frequency of "hands"images in Atwood, but misses many otherchances to explicate Atwood's intra-textualities,e.g. "dancing", Ezekiel's bones (cf. notonly Atwood's "Good Bones," but also,interestingly, Kogawa's), and suchAtwoodian apocalyptic themes as"Lifeboat" (the game). Like other Atwoodcritics, she overuses (or under-understands)the word "ironically" as applied toAtwood. She gives a good reading of apocalypticimages in the novel, and of theCheshire Cat image, yet seems to misunderstand"a piece of cake" as connectedwith the very different slang phrase, "havingone's cake," and, somewhat unprofitably,links Chris (the person) with kris(the curly knife).115

Books in ReviewBeran's conclusion exemplifies her argumentas a whole. Her exordium, "readingthis novel demands that we learn to readfor something other than marriages andbirths and passionate sex scenes among likablecharacters" constitutes a wantonpatronising of her readership, even if shehas been told to write 'down' for highschool students.Donna Pennée 's study of Nor Wanted on theVoyage indulges in some heavy politicallycorrect breathing over the fictional exemplarsof Findley's admirably humane principles:"let us hear from the defeated, fromthe silenced,"—in short, from the oppressed,both human and animal, and (perhaps)angelic as well. She catches nicely Findley'samalgamation of humour, fantasy, and severaldifferent prose genres, including his"revisionist" (like More, Bunyan, Swift),defamiliarizing of received texts.Not Wanted on the Voyage is a definitively"postmodern" novel on "the revolt of thelower orders." Pennée gives a very fairaccount of how power-relations are narrativisedvia Noah's apocalyptic, worlddestroyingactivities, and how Noah's ownaesthetic production, his grand magicshow, "The Masque of Creation," leaves noroom for the past, or for imagination, orfor human liberty. She plays patriarchaltexts—the Bible, of course, Dante, andMilton—against alternative texts throughouther "reading". For Noah's binaries canbe resisted by, for instance, the strugglingMrs. Noah in the mystery play, or by thesubversive genre of the beast fable: "somefictions are preferable to others."Further, she makes dear that the conclusionto the book must be seen as unhappy,or at best a compromised solution, for thesheep no longer sing, and Mrs. Noyes' elegyis for all of us: "in blind Mottyl's mind wasthe last whole vision of the world before itwas drowned." Findley is (self)-defined asfeminist and as a defender of the marginalized,in Pennee's postcolonial reading of hisovertly postcolonial text. As a fringe benefit,she provides a useful tutorial in postcolonialattitudes and vocabulary.Lorna Irvine, in her account of MargaretAtwood's Bodily Harm, comes out firmly,in the "Critical Reception" section, for the"readings that stress complexity," and herown is creditably consistent with that principle.She is concerned throughout withAtwood's use of perspective, reified asRennie's ways of seeing, to convey politicalthemes: Rennie's naivete decreases as,despite herself, her political involvementincreases. Other characters, Dr. Minnowspeaking as her conscience, or the (notcoincidentally Canadian) Lora, whomRennie constructs as her dark double, playroles in what is essentially Rennie's privatepsychomachia.Rennie comes to see that sexual gamesand cruel playfulness are on the same genderedpolitical spectrum as sadism,pornography, and even the torture and thechopping up of women which is an integralpart of revolutionary activity (cf. Naipaul'sGuerillas, on which much of Bodily Harmcould be read as a commentary). As in somany political novels, revolution shouldappear "real, not faked;" it involves theclosing of the airport, and the imprisonmentof subversive elements (like Lora andRennie), but the police can stop it, whenthey choose to, "without much shooting."A narrative notable for its "holes, undergrounds,and textual gaps," Bodily Harmforces the reader to follow the prisoner'sconsciousness as it struggles to make meaningfuldeductions from fragmentary clues(hence Irvine's title).The uncertainties of the narrative structurein the prison scene introduces theproblematics of the novel's ending, orindeed of its various endings, as Rennie,sequentially, becomes capable of imaginingthem. Irvine's strategy for "InterpretingBodily Harm" includes a good account ofAtwood intra-texts, such as Bluebeard's116

Wife, as well as typescript clues from theAtwood archives, which show, for instance,Rennie being explicitly in-and-out of herbody in other versions of the manuscript.With this material in hand, Irvine proposesa combined solution to the double problemof the time scheme of the novel and itsambiguously "open" ending.Starting from an authorial clue—Atwooddescribing the time scheme of the novel as"a few hours"—Irvine presents a couple ofother solutions, and then suggests, intriguingly,"that Rennie never leaves the hospitalroom where she is undergoing an operationfor cancer." There is surgical imagerythroughout the Caribbean action of thebook; items from Rennie's 'real' life recur indream circumstances, building up suspensewhile providing clues for Irvine's final, andnovel, reading of the story by way of itsnarrative structure: "[T]he whole of themulti-layered narrative [is] contained withinRennie's consciousness." So she considersBodily Harm to be what I would call a"time-bubble" story, like Ambrose Bierce'sclassic, "An Occurrence at Owl CreekBridge," and a dozen others, notably JorgeLuis Borges' stories "The Secret Miracle,"and "The South" and Conrad Aiken's "Mr.Arcularis." In such stories, the protagonistlives out instantaneously a whole alternativesequence of events, in what is usuallyan at-death experience: both "The South"and "Mr. Arcularis" take place in the nontime-just-beforedeath on an operatingtable. But as Irvine claims that Rennie "willsurvive this operation," we presuppose anequally feasible near-death experience.This hypothesis helps to explain the"bookishness" of the Caribbean scenes,playing as they do with Naipaulian andDidionesque versions of Greene-land;Irvine suggests The Quiet American as the"Somerset Maugham novel" Rennie isimagining herself into, but Atwood mayhave, or perhaps should have, imaginedRennie in the Graham Greene novel of thatname, or even in Joan Didion's remarkablysimilar gendered inversion of Greene in ABook of Common Prayer. It is as if Rennie,having read such books, acquired materialfor her own fictional construction, whetherwith or against the grain of those conventions.Had Irvine had the space or inclinationto use the other 'time-bubble' storiesas supportive analogues for this one, herinvigorating hypothesis could have beenmade even stronger. This is such a brightcritique that it is bursting the corsetedbonds of the ECW series format.Arnold E. Davidson's understated eloquencedoes not compete with, but tactfullyreinforces, Kogawa's own. Hisformat-enforced selective summary is aclear account of a complex work notoriouslydifficult to explicate (including,again, a tricky time scheme).He writes particularly well on the internalechoes that build Kogawa's "poetics of dispossession";he is subtle on interlocking"takings in" and closures of the family tree,of loss in contextual relationships. Amongthe many "parables of displaced parenthood"which form one of Obasan's keyimage-"webs," we see that the story ofMomotaro prefigures all of them; thatCanadian bureaucracy deprives Naomi ofmother and father separately, but,unknown to her, at about the same time,that the story of the chicks reciprocatesinversely the story of Old Man Gower's sexualabuse of her, and that Naomi's complicity("silence") with her own sexual abuseimplies parallels to Japanese-Canadian"silence" in the face of racism.Davidson makes good use of of what helearned during his own stay in Japan. Forinstance, he met a woman in her mid-seventies,who says that the Nakanes would, asJapanese-Canadians, have been far worsetreated in wartime Japan than they were inwartime Canada. He speaks of Kogawa'sstyle as "almost Japanese"—imagistic, indirect,allusive—and praises those critics who117

Books in Reviewhave, despite all the "difficulty of readingacross cultural differences," given the non-Japanese reader some clues as to how to do it.He understands how the book is built:"Obasan is therefore a circular Kiinstlerroman,the story of how the protagonist/narrator finally became an artist by reachingthe point where she could produce thenovel which we have just read" (StephenKellman calls such a narrative "a self-begettingnovel"). Exactly: a beautiful summationof the story-structure.To conclude, Davidson makes a case forthe book he's discussing as one extendingthe range, scope, and generic possibilitiesof Canadian fiction. Obasan is both lyricaland political at the same time; Obasanbrings into being, almost single-handedly,and masters at once, the genre of theCanadian ethnic novel; Obasan mirrors tous one of our less lovely collective selves;Obasan has played its own ameliorating rolein the public, historical world. Obasan is anovel to re-read, he reminds us, and Davidson'sis a critique to re-read alongside it.Sacred GameLeonard BloomfieldSacred Stories of the Sweetgrass Crée, (facsimilereproduction of the 1930 edition, originally publishedby F.A. Acland, King's Printer, Ottawa.)Fifth House Publishers $16.95Michael J. Caduto and Joseph Bruchac.The Native Stories from Keepers of the Animals.Fifth House Publishers $14.95Basil JohnstonThe Bear-Walker and Other Stories. RoyalOntario Museum $19.95Reviewed by Jillian RidingtonThese three books all address a similartheme, the relationships between humansand other animals as portrayed in the legendsand myths of Canada's Aboriginalpeoples. However, they address their topicsfrom very different perspectives and willappeal to very different audiences. BasilJohnston's The Bear Walker and OtherStones is by far the most attractive book ofthe three; its brilliant illustrations in traditionalWoodlands style by Anishinaubaeartist David Johnston will appeal to children,and Basil Johnston's simple renderingsof the stories of his Anishinaubaekpeople will also find an audience amongyounger readers. Yet, to an adult critic, thestories lack the depth and complexity thatis a feature of the most authentic renderingsof native stories. They are too simple,too diluted, rendered too much into everydayEnglish, they have lost their magic inthe translation process.Unlike the other two books, which focuson one particular culture, Joseph Bruchac'sThe Native from Keepers of the Animalsattempts to bring together stories from allover Native North America. Unfortunately,in doing so, it fails to respect the very greatdifferences that exist between and amongthe diverse Native cultures of our large continent.This problem is most evident inVine Deloria's foreword to the book.Deloria fails to point out, for example, thatrelationships between northern huntingpeoples and the moose, caribou and deeron which their lives depend are bound tobe very different from the relationshipsbetween the animals of the southern U.S.and the pueblo peoples, who have longbeen much more dependent on agriculture.Another problem is that Bruchac's bookseems to be two books in one. It is hard toascertain which readers the editor is hopingto attract. Deloria's foreword and Bruchac'sown introduction seem to be aimed atadults. Their vocabulary is mature, theconcepts they discuss are complex, and thetype is tiny. Yet the stories themselves, all ofwhich Bruchac has adapted—he calls them"my own retellings"—are obviouslywatered down for young children. In theretelling, they have lost their individuality,118

original resonance and vivacity. They aretold in a uniform voice that denies theintricacies of individual Aboriginal culturesand serves up a solid meal with all the consistencyof pablum, though perhaps withoutits nourishment.Yet this group of texts is not without aworthy member. Leonard Bloomfield'sSacred Stories of the Sweet Grass Crée is agem, a true treasure trove of wonderful,well-told stories. This book is a facsimilereproduction of a 1930 publication of theNational Museum of Canada. The stories init were collected by Bloomfield, a linguist atYale University, in 1925, when he spent fiveweeks at the Sweetgrass Reserve nearBattleford, Saskatchewan. The stories weretold to him by three middle-aged andelderly men, two of whom were blind, andby one middle-aged woman, whom he consideredto be "something of a sorceress."Each story is written as it was told, in Crée,and then an English translation is provided.These are tales of creation and transformation,tales of wonder. They arecomplex and convoluted, sometimes violent,but never dull. They give the readerfood for thought, and material for discussionand dreaming, long after the reading iscomplete. "The Birth of Wisahketchahkand the Origin of Mankind" is a "creation"story that has elements of themes commonin Crée narratives—the trickster-transformerWisahketchahk, the rolling head—together with such biblical themes as theseductive snake, the flood, and the creationof women from the ribs of the first man."Wisahketchahk Preaches to the Wolves"also has religious overtones, including apseudo-mass—but it is a tale of resistanceand subversion, not a tale of compliancewith the colonizers.The book is not without flaws. It wouldhave benefitted greatly by the addition of anew preface giving the historical and culturalcontexts under which the stories werecollected. We will have to look to othersources to understand what the Cree's relationshipwith missionaries was at the time,and what economic and cultural pressuresthey were under. There are no illustrations,although there is something far more usefulto students of linguistics—a six-page guideto the pronunciation of Plains Crée.Because of this guide, and the stories' complexity,and the Cree-English format,Sacred Stories of the Sweet Grass Crée will beof particular interest to students of linguisticsand anthropology. They are also a goodread for anyone who is interested in Créeculture, and likes a good tale well told. Butdon't put your babies to bed with these stories;they are made of very strong stuff, thestuff of nightmares.Subliterary Victorians?Laurel BrakeSubjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender &Literature in the Nineteenth Century. New YorkUP US$15.00Ellery SedgwickA History of the "Atlantic Monthly" 1857-1909:Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb. U ofMassachusetts P US$40.00Reviewed by Deborah BlenkhornWhat can we learn from the newspapersand magazines of over a century ago?Recent work by Laurel Brake and EllerySedgwick shows that the socio-literary historiesof Britain and America respectivelyemerge from the nineteenth-century periodicalpress. Both Brake's SubjugatedKnowledges and Sedgwick's History of theAtlantic Monthly herald the Victorian popularpress as chronicling the age through abroad representation of fiction, poetry,essays, and other literary genres.Brake's analysis comprises a discussion ofthe "gendering" of this "literary space,"beginning with the question of how the"startling growth" of periodicals influenced119

Books in Reviewliterary and social criticism. The periodical,as a genre, increasingly featured so-called"lighter"—indeed, "sub-literary"—literaryfare. That relatively unknown women writerscould and did contribute to this genre,while women readers made up an increasingsector of its audience, reinforces Brake'sthesis of gendered space: this discourse was,in significant part, second-class literaturefor second-class citizens. At the same time,literary journalism developed as a vehiclefor serious literary and social commentary,so that the blending of "news" and "culture"reflected a broad social spectrum ofmen's and women's lives and interests.Tracing the development of the genre fromThe Academy (1869), through The NineteenthCentury (1877), Harper's (the i89o's),and The Savoy (1896), Subjugated Knowledgesconsiders en route the role of several forceswhich shaped nineteenth-century journalism:publishers; major authors includingPater (a consuming interest for Brake, hereand in her other works), Arnold Shelley,Tennyson, and Swinburne; and even theDictionary of National Biography.Notwithstanding the immense value ofBrake's more general comments onVictorian literature and criticism, her greatstrength and appeal is in her ability todescribe case studies which illustrate theconcepts she explores. A highlight of thebook, for instance, is its chapter on "OscarWilde and The Woman's World" whichexamines the dynamic between a homosexualdiscourse and a female readership.Brake adeptly describes the way in which,covering trends in fashion, literary criticism,sport, and drama, this periodicalreflects Wilde's significant editorial choiceof work from women writers.Placing her own work in the context ofthe "interrogation of authorship by RolandBarthes and Michel Foucault, and latterlyby postmodernist theory," Brake puts forwardthe intriguing hypothesis that all areas "indebted" to the publishing history ofthe nineteenth century as to the "technologyand nature of the twentieth-centurymedia" in understanding cultural productionand formation.A strong sense of the indebtedness of literarycriticism to the journalism of the previouscentury also underlies EllerySedgwick's History of the "AtlanticMonthly". Focusing on the "most respectedliterary magazine" in U.S. history, Sedgwickbegins with an overview of the magazine'sevolution 1857-1909, and organizes his discussionin subsequent chapters chronologically,by editor.Sedgwick identifies the magazine itself asan "expression of the humanist tradition ofthe New England cultural elite," andexplores its "idealism and pragmatism"through a series of seven editorial chiefs,including James Russell Lowell, James T.Fields, and William Dean Howells.Throughout its history, Sedgwick contends,the magazine functioned within theWestern humanistic tradition to representthe "educated minority" which was strivingto educate a cultural majority while resistingits "tyranny."As such, the Atlantic Monthly's ideal(albeit one it fell short of, says Sedgwick)was to encourage individuality and evendissent, to oppose a static hierarchy of culture.Women's contribution to the periodicalinitially comprised works of fiction,such as work by Louisa May Alcott, KateChopin, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. AsSedgwick tells it, Stowe proposed in the1860s that editor-publisher James T. Fieldsestablish a women's department; herefused, but did agree to feature severalarticles on "domestic" subjects, while Stoweproceeded to write a series of political articlesunder a male pseudonym.In each of his chapters, Sedgwick providesbehind-the-scenes detail of theAtlantic Monthly's publishing history; particularlyengaging are his assessments ofeach editor's tenure. Fields, for instance,120

cornes alive for Sedgwick's readers as the"intelligent, handsome, and goodhumoured"son of a sea captain who rosethrough the ranks in journalism from aclerk apprenticeship to an editorship whichwas characterized by a willingness toaccommodate public tastes.James Russell Lowell, Fields's predecessorfrom 1857 to 1861, Sedgwick identifies as a"Yankee Humanist" with a "propensity totake editorial liberties." Balancing praiseand criticism, Sedgwick describes Lowell as"sometimes disorganized, arbitrary, orinsensitive to the rights of contributors,"but nonetheless a chief who "brought ingood material through personal contacts"and often showed generosity in his supportof unknown writers. In all, Sedgwickargues, Lowell's "high-culture aspirations"and his desire to appeal to a wide audiencemade him a fitting figurehead for theAtlantic Monthly.A less glowing description is of ThomasBailey Aldrick, whose editorial voice governedthe Atlantic from 1881 to 1890: herewas "an indolent and inefficient editor, andan amusing but somewhat languorous,shallow, and supercilious human being,"according to Sedgwick's assessment.While emphasizing the individualapproach of each editor, Sedgwick observesthat "the changing of the editorial guard atthe Atlantic has always, at least publicly,emphasized continuity rather than change."The magazine's evolution, he maintains, isbest understood as its becoming "morefully national and democratic in its authorship"—indeed,more "progressive."The Atlantic, then, "one cultural voiceamong a great many," underwent a processwhich significantly mirrored the evolvingpolitical and social reality of the times inSedgwick's New England, as did the popularpress in Brake's nineteenth-centuryBritain. Both Subjugated Knowledges and AHistory of the Atlantic Monthly illustratethat nineteenth-century periodicals playeda significant role in recording—and inmaking—literary and social history.Do we still view journalism as a subliterarygenre? To take a step forward, thesetexts suggest, we may well have to take twosteps back.Boys, Booze & TwangBonnie Burnard, ed.Stag Line: Stories by Men- Coteau, $14.95Mark Anthony Jarman, ed.Ounce of Cure: Alcohol in the Canadian ShortStory. Beach Holme n.p.Lorna JacksonDressing for Hope. Goose Lane $15.95Reviewed by Tamas DobozyShort story anthologies that pursue a particularline run up against mediocrity,bulking-up on lesser stories to provide fillerbetween the ones that count; first-timeshort story writers encounter a similardilemma in picking extra material over andabove their half-dozen or so stories thatmerited publication in various literarymagazines. Unlike the compilers of yourstandard "best of" collections, thoserestricted by theme or experience findthemselves in uncharted country, withouta tradition of previous anthologies behindthem or enough experience with theirauthorial strengths and weaknesses. I thinkall three books stack up well in overcomingthese rookie drawbacks either against eachother or against other collections "outthere."I have to admire Bonnie Burnard andCoteau Books for publishing collection ofmale writing at a time when blatant malenessis far from fashionable. In her introduction,Burnard claims: "I am notreceptive to writing which observes maleviolence in a way which is suspiciouslyenthusiastic or, conversely, to writing whichattempts to apologize for the masculinity of121

Books in Reviewmen. Some would say this limits me." Ascontradictory or impossible as it seems, thestories in this book—the majority writtenby whites—do manage to discuss violenceand emotion without slipping intospaghetti-western mode or running off tothe park to bang on drums and weep. Byfar the best story in the collection, "ThinBranches of Rainbow," by Patrick Lane,captures the contradictory essence of masculinity—dangerousbut playful, seriousyet comic, and its sometimes infuriatingcombination of emotional disinterest andattachment—in a story that focuses asclearly on Rayanne as it does on her husband,Charlie. I also marveled at how aprose so ordinary and unassuming couldconjure up such emotional intensity. Othernotable pieces include the late CraigPiprell's "Machinery of Night," with itstongue-in-cheek chronicle of sexual maturation,and MichaelVSmith's bleak tale ofteenage homosexuality in backwaterOntario. Most of the writers Burnard choserender stories of hard-boiled realism, thekind of stories, apparently, that a womanlike Burnard would "choose." And Burnardadvances individual taste as her onlydefense for content: "Justification for thisanthology is personal. I wanted to read abook such as this, and I wanted a woman tochoose what would be in it."Mark Anthony Jarman also grapples withjustifications for his choice of stories dealingwith "most people's drug of choice"—alcohol—and its addicts. He writes: "It'simpossible to justify such stupidity andcruelty and damage to themselves andthose within range, but many still findthese figures charming sirens, hard-living,brutal, selfish sirens, adding something toour lives while subtracting it from theirs."Like Burnard, Jarman favours the realisticmode, with a few notable departures suppliedby Michel Tremblay and Levi Dronyk.Interestingly enough, many of the storiesby women—such as Linda Svendson'sexcellent "Who He Slept By"—arouse theatmosphere created by many of Burnard'smen (which suggests that Burnard's picksmay indeed have less to do with gender andmore with a preference for a particular typeof story). Like Burnard's book, this alsoperforms its own balancing act—makingthe alcoholic an entertaining clown(Vanderhaege's "Man Descending"), andwretch (Findley's "Real Life Writes RealBad"). The collection investigates this irresolvabledichotomy. Otherwise highly readable,the book is unfortunately marred bynumerous typos.Lorna Jackson, on the other hand, needsno justifications. Her impressionistic storieshang not on rationale, but on the lazy,lyrical drive of country and western musicand the deductions of the heart. In "EliteHotel," her narrator states: "Once I'mupstairs I will no longer have what I have atthis moment down here, behind the wheel:a feel for locomotion." And a sense of locomotionand the moment proves integral toJackson's stories, many of which involve sittingbehind the wheel and allowing visualsto crowd the windshield and vanish, withoutever letting one particular configurationof images settle into a clear picture.Jackson feels "content" to provide informationfor those, like the brother in "ScienceDiet," who want a "precision memorybank, photographic"; but instead ofinforming us with answers, Jackson servesup a sensual interplay of syntactical rhythmand snapshot. We do not agree withJackson, we empathize, missing the messagebut always recalling the song.122

Critical ActsL. W. Conolly and D.A. Hadfield, eds.Canadian Drama and The Critics. Talonbooks$22.95Keith GarebianA Well-Bred Muse: Selected Theatre Writings 1978-1988. Mosaic $14.95Neil CarsonHarlequin in Hogtown: George Luscombe andToronto Workshop Productions. U Toronto P$5O.0(/$i9.95Reviewed by Louise LadouceurThe revised and expanded edition ofCanadian Drama and the Critics, edited byL.W. Conolly and D.A. Hadfield, includesreviews, interviews and articles from newspapers,books and scholarly journals onforty-three Canadian plays which havebeen collected in separate anthologies byRichard Plant, Richard Perkyns and JerryWasserman. The eight new plays covered inthis edition correspond to those added toWasserman's revised anthology, for which itserves as a critical complement, "providinga body of criticism against which readersand audiences can test their own judgements."For students and scholars, this is anopportunity to trace the development ofmodern Canadian theatre criticism, toexperience its inner contradictions andprejudices, and to evaluate the criteria bywhich the plays have been considered successfulor not.For the most part, this book providesaccessible, sometimes puzzling, often entertainingreading for the critically inquisitivemind curious about Canadian drama. Thecritical commentary offered for the playsthat caught my attention was chronologicallypresented by date of publication,beginning with the initial production, but Iwas at times confused when trying to identifywhich subsequent production certainmaterial referred to, a problem that moredetailed references would have certainlyalleviated. I also wonder how somethingreferred to as Canadian drama could dealso frugally with plays from Quebec, particularlywhen theatre is such a vital andvibrant cultural item in Quebec and sincemuch of it has been produced in translation.The aforementioned Canadian dramacritics are not spared the wrath of KeithGarebian in a collection of his own criticalwriting A Well-Bred Muse: Selected TheatreWriting 19/8-1988. With an incisive, whennot furious, tone and decidedly elitist modulations,Garebian condemns the nationalism,provincialism, populism, banality, andsheer tastelessness that accounts forCanadian theatre's current status as "fabulousinvalid," a state of affairs he attributesmostly to the lack of aesthetic standards tobe found amongst playwrights, directorsand, above all, critics. It is this critical laxity,which Garebian deemed acute in thepioneer alternative movement of the seventies,that has hindered the emergence of theimmortal and universal art form that couldhave, according to Garebian, propelledCanadian theatre to the forefront of theworld stage. Although I don't necessarilysubscribe to this view of theatrical ambitionand art's raison d'être, I found the controversialcomponent of the bookstimulating in the sense that it invitesexamination and debate on what is meantby "Canadian" and by "theatre" in theongoing discourse on this subject.Covering a wide range of venues, with aninsistent fondness for those well-bred, anda wide range of theatre artisans, from directorto actor, playwright and scenographer,Garebian's excerpts offer an eclectic criticalpanorama divided into three parts, eachintroduced with a rationale and presentationof the material selected. It is a convincingattempt at illustrating the book'sepigraph, borrowed from Alexander Pope:"Tis hard to say if greater Want of Skill /Appear in Writing or in Judging 111; / In123

Books in ReviewPoets as true Genius is but rare, / True Tasteas seldom is the Critick's Share."If there is a theatre that resisted the tendenciesdecried by Garebian, it is GeorgeLuscombe's Toronto WorkshopProductions. As Neil Carson suggests withhis title, Harlequin in Hogtown: GeorgeLuscombe and Toronto WorkshopProductions, the history of this theatre companyreads primarily as a biography ofLuscombe and his unfailing commitmentto international socialism and politicaldebate through an art rooted in experimentation.With the memorable success of HeyRube! in 1961, the company attacked thecornerstones of then-current theatricalpractice by replacing text-based performancewith actors' improvisations and bybreaking away from the traditional prosceniumstaging. Using the subversive techniquesof Marxist ideologies and dedicatedto revolutionary social change, TorontoWorkshop Productions survived the initialindifference it encountered in the sixtiesand confronted the preoccupation with theindividual and nationalistic obsession ofthe seventies only to succumb in the eightiesto its own inflexibility. Refusing to adaptto new circumstances and cede control,Luscombe couldn't save the theatre he hadfounded almost thirty years earlier fromfinancial disaster.Well documented and written with anevident admiration for the ground-breakingwork accomplished by Luscombe andthe Toronto Workshop Productions, thishistorical account underlines what Carsonconsiders a previously neglected "sense ofthe novelty of the enterprise," while sheddinglight on the social and artistic contextin which this work took place and on theincreasing complexity of the Toronto theatrescene.Fiction and Nature WritingMargaret CréaiSinging Sky. Coteau Books Regina $14.95Peri Phillips McQuayThe View from Foley Mountain. NaturalHeritage/Butternest P $16.95Reviewed by Peter A. TaylorBoth of these books are collections ofpieces of writing that first appeared in differentforms: Margaret Créai has broughttogether seven stories that first appeared ina variety of U. S. and Canadian magazinesover several years, together with three newstories for this collection. Peri PhillipsMcQuay has reissued eighty-three piecesmost of which she originally wrote for acolumn in the Kingston Whig-Standard.Both groups work well in their new environments:Creal's as a narrative of imaginationand power of a Canadian girl's comingof age set in Saskatchewan in the twentiesand thirties, and McQuay's as a naturealmanac which focuses on a wildlife sanctuaryin Ontario through the seasons,arranged as about twenty pieces in each ofthe seasons. What brings both these bookstogether is a powerful sense of place andvaried reactions in response to that place.One is fiction, the other is not.The border between fiction and non-fiction,though, is a porous one, as recent criticaltheory makes clear. This is especiallytrue for what we have come to call, for lackof a better name, "nature writing." AsWestern fiction developed, it co-optedwider and wider domains of non-fictionalrhetoric. At the same time, so-called "creativenon-fiction" is not an oxymoron, buta counter-aggrandizement. Farley Mowathas said that he never lets facts get in theway of a good story.So too, Margaret Créai has put together atransparently autobiographical novel in theform often short stories: the main characteris named Margaret Créai, who lives first124

in Grenfell, Saskatchewan as the daughterof the Anglican rector there and thenmoves with her family to Regina during thedepression, just as the author did. Despitethe formulaic disclaimer that "Names,characters, places and incidents are theproducts of the author's imagination or areused fictitiously" this last word points to acentral theme of this Kunstlerroman: theinteresting relation between fiction andlying, as the narrator realizes as sherecounts her parents' reaction to one of herschoolgirl stories: "Of course we know it'sonly a story, don't we? We know it didn'thappen." She also comes to realize thatthere is power in lying, as she candidlyreveals in several different episodes of hergrowing up.In McQuay's almanac the pieces cover adozen years or more when McQuay and herteacher-husband were living at and lookingafter a wildlife sanctuary near Perth,Ontario, named the Foley MountainProvincial Sanctuary. These newspaperrenderings of the natural world seem toassure a sense of recurrence in a mediumthat thrives on change and innovation: thefalling leaves, the drifting snow, the blossomingtrees. These disparate pieces coherebecause of their evocative sense of placeand a consciousness that responds in variousways to the seasons: wonder, narrativeincident, the urge to share and teach, nostalgiaand anger in the face of change.A regular column in a newspaper demandsa wide variety of discourses. For example,McQuay draws on the anecdote of pathos, astory told by a friend of chance acquaintance,the story of an old widower whocould no longer keep up his farm. She drawson reminiscence of childhood, a centralstrategy for both fiction and autobiography,as for instance in McQuay's Christmasarticle in "Winter" that tells of her artistfather,Ken Phillips, who would begin eachChristmas season by designing a card, linoblock or ink-drawing, which makes for heran enduring family record. Creal's "PrairieWinter," which first appeared in Ladies'Home Journal, reads like a non-fictional, orsemi-fictional evocation of several wintersand several Christmas seasons, a child'sChristmas in Saskatchewan.And central to one kind of nature writingis the journey out and back, with itsvenerable echoes of Romance. McQuayincludes a number of these, like her canoetrip on the Snake River in summer or hertour of winter ponds on skis. Near the endof the final section of the book, the Wintersection, the narrator of this episode, on acircuit of the Reserve on skis, has detectedabundant life even in the middle of winter:"I sat very still, staring at the hard, cloudlessblue sky and the writing a broken reedmade scraping back and forth across thesnow in the wind, and I listened deeply."She hears the sound of a beaver below herunder the ice, and she catches the rustlingof "some dead everlasting flowers from lastsummer rustling in the breeze." But it is notnature, writing this episode with a reed pen,but the author on a typewriter. It is also along tradition of nature writers before her,many of them making similar good use ofthe almanac format, including the CanadiansHarold Harwood in Nova Scotia, F. P.Grove in The Turn of the Year in Manitoba,Marilyn Halvorson in To Everything aSeason in Alberta, Roderick Haig-Brown inThe Measure of the Year in British Columbia,and Margaret Créai in Saskatchewan.Créai is most novelistic in her long finalstory which recounts her narrator's visit,years later when she is herself a grandmother,to the Scottish island where hermother was born. She finds that she cannotreally find her dead mother there and thatthere will always be parts of her motherthat she can never know. At the same timeshe finds that the experiences recounted inthe earlier episodes of the book are thewarp on which her present self has beenwoven.125

Books in ReviewIn a similar way, McQuay appends anAfterword to this second edition of herbook. There she affirms many of the consolationsof raising a family at FoleyMountain. At the same time she frequentlyechoes something implicit in much ofnature writing: the landscape today is notwhat it was years earlier. The tone is themelancholy of pastoral elegy that so muchof what we love has passed away. As Créaiputs it at the end of "Prairie Winter":"Remembering, my heart is seared withlonging, not for parents and childhoodhome and surroundings ... but for childhooditself, for youth, for those bright daysof hope and possibility."Figures and FactsDavid FishelovMetaphors of Genre: The Role of Analogies inGenre Theory. Pennsylvania State UP US$32.50David E. ShiFacing Facts: Realism in American Thought andCulture, 1850-1920. Oxford UP $51.95Reviewed by Diane StilesIn the opening chapter of Metaphors ofGenre: The Role of Analogies in GenreTheory, David Fishelov reminds us thatmetaphors are not simply ornamental, noreven descriptive; they can actually influenceour perceptions of reality. His bookexplores the roles of four "deep metaphors"that both illustrate and shape our understandingof literary genres, analogies basedon biology, the family, institutions, andspeech acts. Each section investigates thenature and history of one of these analogies,then demonstrates its usefulness andlimitations by applying it to a particulargenre. Although his study is sophisticatedmetatheory, Fishelov writes clearly enoughto engage a reader unversed in the intricaciesof genre theory.Frequent carelessness in comparing literarygroupings to biological species hasprompted many critics to discredit biologicalanalogies altogether. In so doing, saysFishelov, they are rejecting such promisingconcepts as the comparison of generic withspecies survival; cultural environment canbe seen to influence the productivity of agenre, as the natural environment selectscertain genetic make-ups over others. Hedescribes the generic "struggle for survival"as the epic poem was supplanted first bythe mock-epic and then by the novel.Fishelov maintains a close connectionbetween biological and literary concepts,and we see here as in no other section ofthe book how an analogy can function as alens, bringing into focus a new perspectiveon a complex cultural phenomenon.A literary genre is frequently compared toa family, in that no single characteristic isshared by all members, but Fishelov arguesthat even proponents of this view actuallydo assign necessary conditions for membershipin a genre. He proposes an alternateversion of the family analogy: thegenre as a structured category with a coreof prototypical members which highlyresemble each other, and through whichcan be traced a textual ancestry, with newertexts both imitating and rebelling against"parental" texts. He analyzes this generic"anxiety of influence" through the conflictsbetween romance and realism in DonQuixote and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.Fishelov acknowledges that his last twoanalogies differ from his first two, in thatinstitutions and speech acts are culturalphenomena which are related to literaturein many direct and non-analogical ways.The metaphorical relationship he proposesbetween institutions and literary genresfocusses on two concepts common to both:conventions and roles. The problem here isthat while conventions and roles are characteristicsof institutions, they are alsocharacteristics of other social groupings, sothat his analyses, for example of the "blocking"role in romantic comedies, are inter-126

esting in themselves, but do not seem toillustrate specifically the analogy he has setout to establish.Isolating a specifically metaphoricalaspect of the relationship between speechacts and literary genres is even more challenging.Literature is often seen as a highlycomplex speech act, the difference betweenthe two being of degree rather than kind;certain literary genres, however, such asamemus poetry using the carpe diem motif,have also been described as artistic imitationsof "natural" speech acts. HereFishelov's logic becomes confusing; heseems to claim that insofar as literature ismimetic of speech acts, speech acts can beseen as analogous to literature. He does notclarify the relationship he sees betweenmimesis and metaphor: in what sense is atree a metaphor for a painting of a tree?Fishelov concludes by advocating a pluralisticapproach to the use of analogies ingenre theory, stressing that no one analogyis superior to the rest, and that each illuminatesdifferent aspects of literary groupings.His study is interesting not only for itsinsights into genre theory, but also for thequestions it raises about the nature ofmetaphor itself.Facing Facts: Realism in AmericanThought and Culture, 1850-1920 is a meticulouslyresearched interdisciplinary study,intended for general readers as well as forscholars. It focusses primarily on literature,painting and architecture, also tracingdevelopments in science, philosophy, andsocial thought. Shi acknowledges that hehas no new thesis about the nature of realism,but is working toward a more "textured"understanding of the term byexploring a range of realisms, their culturalcauses and effects, and the affinities andconflicts between them.There is a potential thesis in Shi's documentationof the connections betweennineteenth-century gender politics and therise of realism. Women were vilified bymale and female artists and intellectualsalike, for both demanding and producingthe sentimental in literature and art. Afterthe Civil War, women flooded into thework force and higher education, causingmany men to fear being "swept away by therising tide of femininity." Realists claimedto have the "virile" and "masculine" visionthat would counteract the dangerous trendtoward "weakness" and "effeminacy" inAmerican culture. Paradoxically, Shiargues, female sentimentalists broke theground for the realists who so despisedthem, by challenging prevalent attitudesabout what constituted acceptable materialfor fiction, and daring to depict commonpeople and common social experiences.Shi opens his study with a synopsis ofvarious strains of idealism dominatingAmerican culture from 1830 to i860, andthen isolates three main causes of the riseof realism: the impact of the Civil War, thegrowing influence of scientific materialism,and the rapid development of urban culture.This section of the book is both informativeand animated, including briefbiographies of such figures as WaltWhitman and William James, culturalcommentary from a wide range of sources,statistics, and descriptions of early realisticwork and contemporary responses to it.Most of Shi's analysis is devoted to literature,from the aesthetically and philosophicallymotivated realism of William DeanHowells and Henry James, to the bleaker,more socially conscious "naturalism" ofStephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. Herea clearer organizing principle would rendermore assimilable the sheer mass of information.Shi's discussion of parallel developmentsin visual art is more focussed, andincludes proportionally more analysis ofspecific works, from those of earlier realistssuch as Winslow Homer and ThomasEakins to those of the later, more sociallyconscious "Ash Can School." The only disappointmenthere is that paintings are127

Books in Reviewreproduced in black and white instead of incolour. Shi opens his comparatively briefdiscussion of architecture by wonderingwhat a "realistic" building might be. As henever establishes a clear connection betweenmimesis in fiction and painting and "function"in architecture, this section seemsunintegrated with the rest of the book.He concludes with a fascinating accountof the modernist revolution against realismand an epilogue defending his interest in acultural phenomenon currently regarded asnot only irrelevant, but even irresponsible.Describing it as "thoroughly unfashionableand fundamentally important," Shi maintainsthat however compelling the individualvision of a modernist may be, realism isstill crucial in exploring and reaffirmingpeople's connections with each other.First Nations' WritingDawendine (Bernice Loft Winslow)Iroquois Fires: The Six Nations Lyrics and Lore ofDawendine. Penumbra $19.95Drew Hayden TaylorToronto at Dreamer's Rock; Education is OurRight: Two One-Act Plays. Fifth House $10.95Connie Fife, ed.The Colour of Resistance: A ContemporaryCollection of Writing by Aboriginal Women. SisterVision $19.95Reviewed by Helen HoyThree books. One of drama, the other twoof mixed genres. Three instances of the currentburgeoning of First Nations writing inCanada. Or, rather, two contemporaryinstances—and one reminder that theflourishing of literary production, withinprint culture, is subject to the fiat of editorsand publishing companies. The latter text,Dawendine (Bernice Loft Winslow)'sIroquois Fires, is the welcome retrieval ofmaterial which apparently came close topublication in the late 1940s (and acts, onehopes, as the harbinger of more suchrevivals). The unwillingness fifty years agoof Ryerson Press to provide remuneration—andthe death of illustrator C.W.Jefferys whose sponsorship had advancedthe project—meant that copies ofDawendine's poems, prose, and stories layamong Jefferys' papers until Jefferys'grandson Robert Stacey came upon them.Bernice Winslow, in her nineties as IroquoisFires went to press and living inMassachusetts where her marriage took herin the 1940s, is quoted in the Afterward onthe unexpectedness of her ultimate publication:"Thump! That's me!—deposited bya cloud on Terra Firma again."Drew Taylor's play Toronto at Dreamer'sRock, one of two one-act plays comprisingthe volume reviewed here, confronts a contemporaryNative teenager with youngNative men from the past and future. Theilluminating dislocations of Taylor's play,the frictions of culture, history, and idiom,are echoed in the encounter within theconfines of this review between Dawendine(b. 1902), on the one hand, and Taylor (b.1962) and the forty-five contemporaryfemale contributors to The Colour ofResistance, on the other.Dawendine, of the Six Nations Reservenear Brantford, Ontario, daughter ofCayuga mother Elizabeth Ann JohnsonLoft and Mohawk chief William D. Loft,conversant in five of the Iroquoian languages,performed as poet and orator ofNative traditions and stories in the 1920sand 30s. In its belatedness her collectionIroquois Fires inevitably suffers, at least as apublication, from what Joseph Brodskycalled "the falsification of time," the lostopportunity to intervene historically at itsown time. In its appearance now it risks afalsification of response, as the discourse ofone time ("wee," "tryst," "lore," "braves,")makes its inaugural appearance to a readershipschooled in another. (Even withoutthat gap, Dawendine struggles with otherdivides, speaking back deliberately to the128

dismissal of Native spirituality, for instance.)Among Iroquois Fires's more original contributions(to non-Iroquois readers, atleast) is Dawendine's introduction into lateAnglo-Victorian poetic traditions—through the elegiac and rhythmicallycumulative commemoration of her mother,"Wild-Flower Petals Fall"—of what shedescribes as "the slowly developing ritualstyle of the Longhouse Condolence [which].. . begins in a conversational tone, increasingin length, until it again dies away inbrief closing chant." The collection isdiverse, including conventional poetry(making discreet and subtle use of rhymeand using the poetic line flexibly, but notnoticeably influenced by modernism),accounts of Iroquois rituals and seasons,explanatory narratives ("The DancingStars, or the Pleiades," for example), personalaccounts (reflections on a medicineman mask or memories of a maternallyheroic mouse), and historical chronicle, allframed by the issue of racial difference.Dawendine negotiates and deploys a rangeof ideologies in some tension with eachother. The traces of her shifting location("Indians were the lone inhabitants of theAmerican wilderness," "this so-called stoicalrace"; emphasis mine) reveal the challengeand complication of that negotiation.Drew Hayden Taylor's Only Drunks andChildren Tell the Truth recently played withcomic and poignant power under the aegisof Native Earth Performing Arts (Toronto).His Toronto at Dreamer's Rock andEducation is Our Right aie earlier ventures,produced in 1989 and 1990 respectively bythe De-Ba-Jeh-Mu-Jig Theatre Group(Manitoulin Island). Both display Taylor'strademark amalgam of political urgencyand self-deflating humour, ("My home, mypeople, my beer store"). Rusty in the firstplay, a somewhat aimless Odawa 16-yearold,is galvanized by his encounter with apre-contact young man from his tribe anda future counterpart, each throwing Rusty'spresent into negative (and occasionallypositive) relief. "We achieved self-governmentin the 2020s," boasts Michael. "Selfgovernment?"asks Keesic, "When did welose it?" Education is Our Right draws onthe structure and at times the melodramaof Dickens' A Christmas Carol (thewretched children Want and Hunger huddleat the feet of one of the spirits), asEbenezer Cadieux, Minister of IndianAffairs in charge of capping Native postsecondaryeducation, meets EducationPast, Present and Future. In both plays,Taylor utilizes theatre's capacity for confrontation,along with clever self-reflexiveironies, to ensure that over-statement (orover-seriousness) does not sap the impactof his dramas' conviction.The Colour of Resistance anthologizesNative women's poetry, fiction, and somenon-fiction prose, approximately half ofthe material being original to this volume.The writers are Canadian and USAmerican, with the latter predominatingslightly, and with a welcome representationof lesbian voices. How to convey the pleasuresof scores of divergent and eloquentvoices? The rhythms of Vickie Sears: "cushcush le toong/ripples the windtaken katydidsong." The powerful succinctness ofMarilyn Dumont, writing in "Helen BettyOsborne" of "a town with fewer Indians/than ideas about Indians." The poignantironies of Kimberly Blaeser's "Certificate ofLive Birth," where the speaker wonderswhether to correct her mother's checkmarksat "Father, Caucasian" and "Mother,Caucasian"— "It is my heritage more trulythan any account of bloodlines/ It tells thestory of a people's capture"—concluding,"And, Mother, this poem is the certificate ofour live birth." The visual effect of NicoleTanguay's "Half Breed":I fight I struggle to keep2 feet plantedin oneself.129

Books in ReviewThe engaging indirectness of the unfoldingrelationship between tough-talking streetwoman and well-meaning researcher inChrystos' monologue "Interview."Like the heterogeneity of the three booksreviewed here, the diversity in this anthology'scontents (the non-fiction sectionincludes analysis of Native Americanpoetry, reflections on two-spiritedness andon substance abuse, and a Cherokee alternative/supplementto the Genesis Edenstory—and contributors address quite differentaudiences) is reassuring. A Nativelesbian editor and small presses are factorshere; editing and publishing present a lessmonolithic front than when Dawendinefirst faced the industry.Fathering PoemsGary GeddesThe Perfect Cold Warrior. Quarry $14.95Paul WilsonDreaming: My Father's Body- Coteau $9.95Joseph McLeodThe Rim Poems. Penumbra $995Tom MarshallGhost Safari. Oberon n.p.Tom HenighanHome Planet. Golden Dog $6.95Allan SafarikOn the Way to Ethiopia. Polestar Book $11.95Reviewed by Stefan HaagThe three sections of Gary Geddes's ThePerfect Cold Warrior display a fine sense forthe relations between form and content, adimension in his poetry that addsimmensely to its effectiveness. The sectionthat most directly lives up to Geddes's reputationas a "political poet" is "Palestine."However, in dealing with political realities,Geddes focusses on the personal, thus providinga context for the political. Truly anoutstanding achievement in its simplicityand hurt outcry against injustice is "WhatDoes a House Want?" which deals withPalestinians being evicted from theirhomes, which are then demolished by theIsraelis. As I write this review, I hear on thenews of the most serious clashes betweenPalestinians and Israelis in decades andGeddes's poems seem to document a desperationthat reaches beyond the politicalor personal.At first, the fourteen poems of "TheDrive" seem forced into regular stanzas ofthree to five lines. But the more one readsthese poems, the more one realizes that thisprocrustean bed leads to interesting effects.Especially where a new stanza begins in themiddle of a sentence, the aural tensionbuilds up and emphasizes the tension ofliving on the Drive, as in this example:Meanwhile, the bike grows moreflamboyant,sprouting bright plastic streamersfrom the handlebars, metal rattlersmounted to the frame with clothes-pinsto strike rotating spokes and shatterthe early morning silence of The Drive.(27-28)In this way, we appear to be constantly onthe edge of a new turn in the poem, relivingGeddes's experiences of growing up in thisneighbourhood. The atmosphere of "TheDrive" is one of insistent and ubiquitousapprehension of the unexpected. Just as thespeaker of the poems knows that there maybe "days when the pay cheque / doesn'tmake it home" because of a drinking bingeof his father, we know that there may bestanzas that do not end on a full stop andleave us on the edge.Geddes's father appears often in thesepoems. "It's the other I seek. .. the timebombof the father I carry like a tickingclock inside" is a memorable sentence thatechoes through several poems in this section.Geddes seems to use these echoes toexplore his father's influence on his own130

sensibilities, such as in this instance: "Withluck and a measure of forgiveness I scribblepoems instead of wreaking havoc." Theunspoken presence here is the father andhis weaknesses, a ubiquitous danger andtemptation to be aware of.In Dreaming My Father's Body, PaulWilson carefully probes the reasons formoments of closeness as well as distancebetween his father and himself. WhileWilson seems to achieve a sense of understandingfor his father and his actions, Icannot help wondering about the nature ofthis understanding. The title of his volumeis revealing because through dreamingabout his father's presence, Wilson gainsonly insights into his own character. Thusthe blurb on the back cover asking "whywas it so difficult for his father to showaffection, why couldn't they talk about sexor express their feelings?" may give theimpression that Wilson achieves an understandingof his father. When the understandinghe achieves is one of his owncharacter and his own limitations andstrengths, only through these insights doeshe learn something about his father.Perhaps it is not as ironical as it firstseemed to me that in pursuing dreamsabout his father, Wilson finds out quite alot about his mother, who emerges as astrong presence throughout this volume.Rim Poems by Joseph McLeod consists ofsixteen mythopeic "Rim Poems" and hisuncollected poems from 1950 to 1990. Theformer are based on a quasi-Aboriginalmyth of the world's creation and the byproductof the trickster who is forced to dogood through humour and wit. What weget in the poems are not a re-telling of thismyth, but rather variations on life underthese mythological conditions. Even inthese sixteen poems a flaw in McLeod'spoetry is apparent that is even more in theforeground in the uncollected poems whichcover a period of forty years. Neither hisvoice, nor his approach towards the subjectmatters, nor the forms of his poems changevery much in Rim Poems. One could ofcourse say that such a consistency in poetryis admirable, but I found it too monotonous.While these poems work very well ontheir own, having them side by side maywork against their effectiveness and detractfrom what they do best, namely conveyMcLeod's responses to a world that has byand large rejected mythical explanations oflife.The term "safari" is a Swahili word meaninganything related to a journey and travelling.In Ghost Safari, Tom Marshall seemsto think back to the root of this word andtraces various of his journeys as well assome of the people that accompanied himboth in the flesh and in the spirit. Hereflects, however, not only on people andjourneys, but also on cultures and their histories.In a note to a poem on a journey toChina, Marshall remarks on the students'outspokenness on sex and politics in the"dusk of Tiananmen Square." It is chillingto learn that his journey took place twoyears before the Tiananmen massacre.Especially admirable is the ease with whichMarshall glides from the aesthetic mode ofthe poem to the documentary mode of proseor from the rhythm of the poetic line to thatof a prose passage. Perhaps it is this ease ofdrifting between modes, of merging themeven, that makes Marshall's poems particularlyforceful to our current sensibilities.Before I began reading Tom Henighan'sHome Planet, I expected a volume of genrepoetry, namely science fiction poetry, forthat is what Henighan is known for andwhat the blurb on the back coverannounces. All in all, I got that but also agood deal more. Most significant is his fineability to detect ironies in our attitudestowards technology and science fictionthemes. More than once, Henighan surprisedme with a tongue-in-cheek turn inthe last stanza of a poem or an uncannyself-awareness that threw new light on a131

Books in Reviewpoem or an entire genre as in "Visitation"where an alien visit serves to satisfy primarilythe human desire to escape their surroundings.Henighan, not surprisingly,shows a liking of ritual and myth in hispoetry. While at times the expression ofthis liking becomes formulaic, in someinstances it adds to the richness of thispoet's vision.The poems in Allan Safarik's On the Wayto Ethiopia have a restless quality to them.On the whole, Safarik's poems work bestwhen he uses a short line to present apointillistic portrait of things or situations.From Post-age to New AgeBarbara GowdyMister Sandman. Somerville House $24.95/313.95Ann-Marie MacDonaldFall on Your Knees. Knopf Canada $28.95Reviewed by Julie BeddoesIt is wonderful to see so many Canadianwriters on fiction bestseller lists in thiscountry and earning big advances for publicationabroad, especially at a time whenthe publishing industry is having a hardertime than ever keeping solvent. Most of thefiction that appeals to reviewers and prizejuries now is, however, a long way from theinnovative work of fifteen or twenty yearsago (to which, surely, a lot of the credit forthis notice must go). Perhaps this isunavoidable: socio-economic regression isthe condition of literary regression; conservativefiscal policy accompanies conservativefiction. As well, it is easy to sympathizewith publishers tempted to promote thesort of books that attract the sort of mediaattention that brings sales that balanceledgers. And probably the over-workedjuries for the various prizes have no moretime to look beyond surface appeal thanovernight reviewers and interviewers forradio and TV shows.The reviewer who cares passionately forthe well-being of Canadian publishing butis a bit bored by the stuff that is paying thebills might find herself in a dilemma if shedidn't remind herself that there is enoughadventurous and intellectually rewardingwriting going on that once in a while abook that is more than middle-brow andsecond-rate receives some recognition.When times are so hard for the small publisherswho have in the past nourished thiskind of writing it is surely up to the guyswith the big promotion budgets to work abit harder to find it. It is up to the hypeindustry to be a bit more discriminating inthe praise it gives and not to fall for the sortof literary tricks that seduce quick-readreviewers.Fifty years after the nouveau roman and agood century after the Modernists beganthe work of demolishing Victorian assumptions,one has a right to expect that novelsthat operate according to those assumptionswill give readers their money's worthby using the proven techniques. The bestrealist fiction has always offered its readersmany rewards: well-structured plots, crisesand denouements, engaging characterswith believable dilemmas and a satisfyingfeeling at the end that, no matter howimplausible the events described, thingshad to be that way.These novels by Gowdy and MacDonaldhave given joy to reviewers and sold a lot ofcopies. Mister Sandman has been nominatedfor four awards (Giller, Governor-General, Trillium and International ImpacDublin Literary Award) and won one(Marion Engel). Fall on Your Knees hasbeen nominated for a Giller. Gowdy isfamous for writing a story (in her collectionWe So Seldom Look on Love) that askedus to share the point of view of a necrophiliacwhile MacDonald is a successful actressand the author of the wonderful play, GoodNight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet).However, Macdonald's book contains more132

hints of the Gothic than Gowdy's. Bothbooks, however, are pretty conventionalrealist family sagas similar in many ways.Both have collections of daughters withvarious eccentricities; in both a baby ispassed off as the child of its grandparents;both have a lot of references to songs; bothplots build up to revelations of the truthand end with everyone set to live happilyever after. In MacDonald's often tragicstory, however, not many of the charactersare left alive for this. One of the ways inwhich MacDonald's book is more engagingis that the reader is left to discover some ofthe secrets herself; Gowdy's narrator tellsthe reader everything and one finds thecharacters tiresome for being so blind towhat is going on.In addition, what is revealed is prettyunremarkable. If Gowdy's Mister Sandmanis about anything at all, it is asking us to besympathetic to oddballs because they mightbe very nice people and have jobs and familiesjust like us. The problem is, her peopleare so ordinary that they don't qualify asoddballs at all, unless an audience in 1996 issupposed to gasp in shock when a fatherturns out to be gay or a woman with a successfulcareer likes sex. The book is setmostly in the sixties, perhaps to make suchcharacteristics seem more of a burden.Many people are having real problems ofacceptance in our common sense society.The powerful rhetoric of realism could bebetter used to resist the myth that the livesof the new underclass are not worth payingattention to.The main plot events in Mister Sandmanare the birth of the child and the evening ofrevelations she engineers. The child is anidiot savant, though perhaps not idiotic atall, as hints are given that she is much morecapable offending for herself than she letson. Anyway, she keeps all those goodheartedpeople with interesting sex liveswaiting on her hand and foot and rewardsthem by causing much anxiety. The bookcontains enough suggestions of the supernaturalto please New Agers but notenough denials to appease the rest of us.Gowdy's style is much praised in its jacketblurbs. I would say, however, that she haspicked up too many of the mannerisms ofTimothy Findley's last few books (presumablyedited out of the early great ones):incomplete or one-word sentences, cute butredundant little comments. Sometimes thegrammar is peculiar; I had to read this sentenceseveral times: "Her parents and Sonjamutate compared." The narrator sometimesslips into present tense, sometimesaddresses a "you" but is most of the timeinvisible and omniscient so one neverknows whether lapses into the demotic aresigns of a switch in focalization or the lackof a clearly constructed narrative voice.This might all be part of the message in adifferent kind of book, but this is realismand so such glitches are irritating.MacDonald's much more satisfying bookis surely the first about Cape Breton inwhich all the characters are not Scottish. It,too, starts like a Findley, with someoneexplaining some photographs to someoneelse. The last words are, "sit down and havea cuppa tea till I tell you about your mother,"suggesting that this telling is to be the novelwe have just read. The teller, however, becomesmiraculously omniscient; the story,covering more than seventy years, has manyevents and characters and, like much of themost satisfying Victorian realism, it takesits time to introduce and develop its situations;the reader encounters its surprises atsatisfying intervals. Its touches of spookinessseem more at home in Cape Breton than doGowdy's in Toronto. The family qualifiesmore genuinely as eccentric according tothe standards of present-day readers; onlytheir taking place ninety years ago makes itfeasible that some of its activities did notput anyone behind bars. The book, despiteits Gothic elements, is more satisfying asrealism than Mister Sandman, both because133

Books in Reviewof its scale and density and because itscharacters are richer, the situation of thefour daughters often truly horrifying.MacDonald's prose, despite its improbabilityas the words of the supposed storyteller,is less irritating than Gowdy's, herheartwarming touches less sentimental.This is MacDonald's first novel and itshows she is capable of being more adventurouswith form in the next. I look forwardto it.The Work of TheoryGayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn, eds.Changing Subjects: The Making of FeministLiterary Criticism. Routledge $15.95E. Ann KaplanMotherhood and Representation: The Mother inPopular Culture and Melodrama. Routledge$16.95Reviewed by Penny van ToornChanging Subjects is an anthology of autobiographicalessays focusing on the lives oftwenty women academics, as they negotiatethe connections and disjunctions betweenthe personal, the professional, the political,and the theoretical. The list of contributors'names reads like a who's who of Americansecond wave feminism, and the collectioncommemorates their struggles and achievementsfrom the time they entered the professionin the 1960s and 70s, up to thepresent when they currently occupy seniorpositions in major American universities.What makes Changing Subjects different,engaging, and enjoyable to read is that itworks simultaneously as a forum for theoreticaldebate and as something resemblinga transcript of a women's consciousnessraising group. In this way, the design of thecollection honours a networking processthat proved historically crucial to the women'sliberation movement in the US.The cutting edge of feminist theory hasmoved some considerable distance beyondthe positions initially adopted by thewomen who write in Changing Subjects.Some have welcomed the changes, movinghappily with the times, and joining theranks of third wave feminist scholars andtheorists. Others, however, are sceptical,but nor out of a blind refusal to acknowledgethe limitations of their old, hard-wonintellectual resources; indeed, there is muchself-questioning, humility, and even someconfessions and apologies for former blunders.A number of the writers look back toa time when they moved enthusiasticallyinto third wave feminist theory. Now, however,they find themselves "coming out" onsome yet to be defined other side, and theyinvite us to look back with them as theysort through precisely what has beengained and lost along the way. In this "comingout" they consciously run a risk ofbeing labelled theoretically deviant orregressive, yet they take that risk becausethey see their responsibility as being to alarger constituency of women—a popularconstituency that may have considerableuse for ideas that are well past their academicuse-by date.Part of the problem here is that talkabout numbers, waves, and cutting edgesworks to obscure the fact of the synchronicityof disparate feminist positions.Calling different strands of feminism"waves" can imply that each new majortheoretical development sweeps earliermodes of thought and action away, asthough the time for thinking and speakingin a certain way were now irretrievablypast. Similarly, while the assignment ofnumerical labels to different modes of feministthought is a useful shorthand way ofreferring to the chronological order inwhich they first emerged, it can also activatea politics of progressivism by implyingthat newer is automatically better, and thatfeminist theory can only change by"advancing" (or "cutting") along a single134

straight line. Debate and diversity are stifledwhen theoretical difference is reduced tospatial distance on a single time-line thatsupposedly gauges progress from more primitiveto more advanced states of thought.The question posed by Changing Subjectsis not "which theories correspond to actuality?"but rather: "how have various theoriesworked historically and politically foror against (which) women's interests?"Gayle Greene and others argue that thirdwavefeminist theory, for all its potentiallyliberating powers, has ultimately played intothe hands of political reactionaries by beingunconcerned with the pragmatics of change.In the present age of "post-feminism" andthe anti-feminist backlash, "it's no accidentthat this [unpragmatic approach] is thegoing thing" (Greene). Quoting NicoleWard Jouve and Nancy K. Miller, Greeneworries that women "have been asked to goalong with Deconstruction whilst we havenot even got to the Construction stage. Youmust have a self before you can afford todeconstruct it. ... Only those who have itcan play with not having it."A number of contributors to the collectionidentify biases in the criteria determiningwhat counts as "theory," and analyzethe way theory presently functions in theacademy to distribute authority unevenlybetween women and men (and honorarymen). When "theory" is narrowly associatedwith names such as Lacan, Foucault,and Derrida, once again "a group of whitemale-authored canonical texts is at the centre."The worry is that when feminist scholarsand theorists invoke these "big names"to establish their credentials, they are consolidatingthe very structures of authoritythey are concerned to dismantle.E. Ann Kaplan's Motherhood andRepresentation offers itself as a case inpoint. Kaplan spends considerable energyand many pages discussing Freud, Lacan,and various feminist revisions of theirwork; she also endeavours to link psychoanalyticinsights with certain Marxist fundamentals,and prefigures how they will allbe put to work in her analysis of fictional,dramatic, and filmic narratives. She evenincludes two theoretical appendices in themain body of the text. All of which is to saythat Kaplan's theoretical framework seemsto be designed to do much more than simplygenerate questions, categories of analysis,and new readings of the popularcultural texts on which she focusses. It'stempting to say that the theoretical sectionsof Kaplan's book function largely to signifyher authority. But if this is the case, why isher painstakingly forged badge of intellectualauthority not worn up front in thebook's title? Has someone decided that thisis not "real theory" after all, but only "feministtheory"? Freudian and Lacanian theoriesplay an extremely ambivalent role inKaplan's discourse: at times, they boost herauthority; elsewhere, they are examinedcritically as discursive instruments forkeeping women in their place; on otheroccasions, Kaplan invokes them with a fundamentalistfaith in their literal truthvalue,and proceeds to use them as skeletonkeys to unlock all puzzles of character andnarrative.Kaplan analyses the mother in threeseparate but (confusingly) related representationalspheres—the historical, the psychoanalytic,and the fictional. (FollowingLacan, she assumes the "real life" mother isunrepresentable.) Analyzing the historicallife of narratives, she establishes interestinglinks between nineteenth-century melodramaand twentieth-century film, andbetween new reproductive technologiesand sex, work and mother/fatherhood. Yetshe does not pursue the materialist level ofanalysis in as much detail as she could have;she lapses on occasion into essentialism,gender stereotyping, and circular argument;and there are some weak links ofvague speculation in certain of her chainsof logic. It is difficult to predict whether135

Books in ReviewKaplan's elaborate but rickety theoreticalframework will form a foundation forfuture feminist scholarship and theory.Caribbean Word PowerChristian HabekostVerbal Riddim: the Politics and Aesthetics ofAfrican-Caribbean Dub Poetry. Rodopi US$44.00Pamela Mordecaide Man: a Performance Poem. Sister Vision $10.95M. Nourbese PhilipShe Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks.Ragweed $11.95Reviewed by Brenda CarrChristian Habekost blends a formalist andcultural studies approach to engage the"word, sound, power" aesthetic of African-Caribbean dub poetry and provide a correctivefor a critical problem he diagnosesat the outset of Verbal Riddim. That themusical press has given the dub mediumattention, while the academic press has typicallydismissed it is symptomatic of thechallenge posed by a hybrid cultural formin which spoken word lyrics are oftenaccompanied by reggae rhythms in a liveperformance context. Habekost's answer isa "methodological pluralism" comprised ofcomplex engagement with relevant culturespecificpolitical, social, and aesthetic contexts,as well as "old-fashioned" closereading. This is an important interventionfor those sceptics who see formalism andtheory as incompatible approaches. It isalso appropriate for a volume that appearsas #10 of the Cross/Cultures series. TheWestern reader is not naturally an ideal orcompetent reader of dub poetry. We neednew forms of cultural literacy for cross-culturalencounters.In his close readings, Habekost models asound working method for reading dubpoems in light of a sound/performance aesthetic.He is meticulously attentive to multiple"versions" of dub poems—printed,recorded, and live performance. This iscontextualized within a useful cultural historyof dub, including protagonists, majorevents, times, and places, along with introductionto relevant cultural frameworkssuch as the Jamaican popular music scene,dance-hall DJ talkover, Rastafarianism, andthe evolution of Jamaican patois as a legitimateform of English. Kingston, Jamaica,London, England and Toronto are threemetropolitan centres where dub poetry hasflourished since the early 1980's. Key playersin the international dub scene includeJamaicans Oku Onuora and Mutabaruka;Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jean Binta Breeze,and Benjamin Zephaniah from England;and Lillian Allen, Clifton Joseph, and AhdriZhina Mandiela, each of Toronto.My quibbles with Habekost are small.There is a hint of unexamined culturaltourism in Habekost's references to the"exotic beats" of Reggae, to the "blackenigma," and to Oku Onuora's prison biographyas a "spectacular adventure story."Despite Habekost's careful attention tocontext, some of his social assumptionsprovide a cautionary tale for how difficult itis to undo centuries of self/other conditioningin Western colonial history.Habekost's book could have used some ofthe dynamic "verbal riddims" of themedium under study. It is somewhat plodding,repetitive, and cumbersome in itsweighty citations. However, it exemplifiesan ethical undertaking to engage dub as aserious art form. Habekost upholds theneed for the ongoing expansion of dubpoetry's repertoire and range in order for itto continue as a living, changing medium.This is true of all poetry; it must keep anear to the ground, an eye to the street,reflecting the pulsing and changing lifeconcerns of the communities to which itgives witness.While Jamaican Pamela Mordecai's deMan: A Performance Poem and Tobagoian136

M. Nourbese Philip's She Tries Her Tongue,Her Silence Softly Breaks are not dub poetry,they are in a continuum of Caribbeanpoetry practices that draw upon the "word,sound, power" equation. Mordecai'sretelling of the passion of Christ or "deman" from the perspective of Naomi, ahouse servant to Pilate's wife, and Samuel,a disabled carpenter friend of Jesus' family,is consistent with an African diasporic liberationtheology which has its roots in theslave spiritual tradition of renderingBiblical narratives as allegory for sufferingand deliverance. Not only does Mordecaicast the entire retelling in the "Caribbeandemotic" as Philip terms it, but her protagonisteye-witnesses are working-classheroes. Further, Rome is representative ofthe colonising powers and "Backra," or thewhite master, is typified by Pontius Pilate.Mordecai puts a fresh spin on a familiarstory to remind us of a neglected truth. Thehistorical Jesus intentionally walked alongsidehis society's most marginal—prostitutes,tax collectors, fishermen, carpenters,domestic workers, and the disabled.M. Nourbese Philip's suite of poems iscontextualized by her superb introductoryessay on the centrality of language to anymovement for self-determination in theAfro-Caribbean. She argues persuasivelythat English has historically been expressiveof the "non-being" of the displacedAfrican, while the various forms of theCaribbean demotic or vernacular "languageof the people" seek to "heal the wordwounded by the dislocation of the word/imageequation." Poems such as "UniversalGrammar" and "The Question of Languageis the Answer to Power" enact an alternativegrammar and phonetics lesson, usingwhat Philip calls "unmanageable form" tosignify the diasporic African subject'srefusal to be managed. Through juxtapositionand fragment, she raises importantquestions around the interrelation of language,history, and social power.Most moving for me is her elegiac tone, the"ordeal of testimony" that gives witness tothe "anguish that is English" in the historyof Empire and its aftermath. The speaker'slast prayer is that "body might becometongue." Philip's emphasis on body, voice,"polyphony and rhythm" returns poetry toits physical roots, as it returns the speakerto her cultural roots where the pulse ofAfrican drums is never far from the page.This book, rich in craft and questions, willreward readers interested in questions ofpostcoloniality and poetic form alike.Fictive OrderMelissa HardyConstant Fire. Oberon S2795/$i3.95M.A.C. FarrantAltered Statements. Arsenal Pulp $12.95Reviewed by Sharon R. WilsonAlthough Constant Fire and Altered Statementsare both promising new works offabulist fiction, they offer two rather differentreading experiences. Hardy, an Ontariowriter born in Durham, North Carolina,draws from Cherokee oral narrative traditionsin writing about the Eastern Band ofCherokees she came to know as a childspending summers on the Qualla Boundaryreservation. Resembling the U.S. writerBarbara Kingsolver in her dedication of herbook to the Cherokee nation (in her case,the Eastern Band) and in her ability to representrather than colonize voices of FirstNation or Native peoples, Hardy's interwovenmythic, historical, and folkloric intertextspresent authentic and often humorousanecdotes of human endurance. In connectedstories about split identities, constructedrealities, and displaced culturaltraditions following Andrew Jackson'sforced evacuation of the Cherokee to Oklahoma(the Trail of Tears), Hardy exploresthe role of ritual and magic in healing137

Books in Reviewand in regaining cultural connections.Hardy's fictions use traditional oral storiesto comment on contemporary frame stories,thus bringing Cherokee folklore and historyinto current events and helping readers feelthe hidden or subversive, "constant fire"still burning in Cherokee culture. In "Blood,"for example, Juanita Tuskateeskee, maybe ahundred years old, sings folk songs, such as"Who Killed Cock Robin," that an amateurfolklorist records while Juanita sees in hermind's eye what the Black Raven sees: hergrandson, Coming Back, locking BobPricey in the sweathouse to die. ComingBack, a descendant of a man with the samename who walked the Trail of Tears andback again is, like other Tuskateeskees,blood proud. A conjurer with uncertainpowers, he has been spending summersunder a plasticized teepee wearing a bigfeather headdress unlike what anyCherokee had worn. Tourists have beengiving him five dollars "for the loan of hisred face." Pricey, an Indian "Wannabee"who tried to buy noble "blood with seed"by impregnating Coming Back's granddaughter,was "a running sore on two legs."As Juanita "rides" old songs "like they washorses taking her to a far place," she singsof Coming Back telling Bob "how it feels tobe an Indian, alone," and sees him givingBob's soul to Black Raven. The story endswith her thinking how "We Tuskateeskeeswas ever a mystery to the white man" asComing Back successfully makes an offeringto the monster turtle and discovers that"the earth is not angry."Farrant, who lives in Sidney, B.C., usesmagical realism and surrealism in connectedstories revealing "altered" realities:in "Vacation Time," "monkeys, lions, andsnakes trade places with accountants,lawyers, and priests"; in "The MissHaversham Club," Grandma gangs terrorizemen in a "geriatric plague"; and in thetitle story, the Department of Hope warnspeople to take "imagination suppressants"to avoid the dangers of independentdreaming and other seditious practices.Endowing abstract concepts, such asKarma, with grotesque physicality—in thiscase a scapegoat character's scabs—andcreating similes and metaphors that "alter"readers' conceptions of family, gender roles,traditional values, societal expectations,and reality, Farrant possesses a fresh andsometimes bizarre imagination. Here theinfant Jesus becomes "a cocktail wienerwrapped in a Kraft cheese single"("Kristmas Kraft"); a parent takes a "fornicationkit," the family dog, and Grandmaalong on her daughter's date ("The Date");the pensioners' Thanksgiving dinnerfeatures a dump truck of broccoli("Broccoli"); and the airport locatedunderneath the bedcovers sends the RescueFlight for those stranded when a bridgeover a churning sea of red jello gives way("Covers"). In contrast to the reverenceHardy inspires by using traditional NorthAmerican indigenous narratives, Farrant'sdeconstructive postmodernism amusesand amazes.Farrant, like Hardy, writes beautifullyintertextual metafiction critical of mainstreamculture. Both Constant Fire andAltered Statements are fictions preeminentlyabout fiction; and both delight not only inthe textures, language, and shapes of fictionbut also in self-reflexive statements aboutfiction and its relationship to various realities.According to Hardy and PeggyWhistle, a character in "Little People StillLive in the Woods," "a story is not onlywhat you choose to tell, but what youchoose not to tell." As June Lily in "StarFeathers" adds and all the stories illustrate,unlike white stories, which "end with greatand clear finality,.. .Indian stories merelybreak up like fights or modulate like musicinto a different key or drift away likesmoke." As in Farrant's fiction, the reader isinvited into the work.In five parts and differing print styles,138

Farrant's metafictions often focus on unappreciatedartists who, like Farrant, create"jewels from the trash of the age"("Thunder Showers in Bangkok"). The titlestory, in the section called "THERE ISCOMPETITION FOR THE HEARTS ANDMINDS OF THE PEOPLE," presents a governmentwith Departments of Hope,Depth, Experiments, Diversity, Silence, andSecrets which attempts to control and subvertunsanctioned images, messages, and"exotic reading" from such groups asSPEIV (Society to Prevent the Eradicationof Inner Voices), "the perpetuators andguardians of the novel." While the officialposition is "to integrate minority groupsinto mainstream culture," it keeps anapproved list excluding Boring WhiteWomen and Dead White Males and suggeststhat old people "abandon the pursuitof joy." Advising that artists try "workingwith empty spaces" or make "novel houses,each room a chapter," it wishes to save thelast existing sheet of paper for "somethingof importance." This government usesaudiences for market research "target practice."Expected to rate televised natural disastersand to behold rather than to interact,they are allowed only fifteen shades of pleasureand must "colour-coordinate [their]ideas to match the prevailing winds."Neverthless, in "THE WORK" section,Farrant's self-conscious artists continue tobake poems ("Oven") and collect "straystories" forbidden by rules ("Rules").As Hardy says in a Contemporary Authorsentry, she "writes to understand or imposeorder, however fictive, on [her] life."Farrant seems to do the opposite: to explodethe ordinary complacencies with whichmost of us try to impose order. LikeFarrant, however, Hardy parodies her drugaddicted"Reality Therapist" and recognizesthat "reality is just a construct." Bothauthors create what Hardy calls "openingsbetween worlds" to offer us glimpses intoalternative realities.Back in That Skin AgainJack HodginsThe Macken Charm. M & S $18.99Reviewed by loel MartineauThe events that make up the action in TheMacken Charm are simple: the one Mackensister and eight surviving Macken brothersand their spouses congregate at an old hotelsite; they travel into the nearby small townto attend the funeral of Glory, deceasedwife of the youngest brother, Toby; thebereaved husband lives up to his reputationas hellion with various outrageous stunts,and, late in the afternoon, disappears; theseventeen-year-old narrator, Glory's andToby's nephew Rusty, recounts his infatuationwith Glory and probably understandswhy she drowned; after the funeral the clanand various friends regroup at the hotel siteand, during their night-long wake, refurbishGlory's dilapidated shack; Rustylocates Toby and reintegrates him into thefamily while realizing that he, Rusty, mustleave the family arena. All this occurs intwenty-four or twenty-five hours, from onemorning through to the next.Jack Hodgins spins these events into arollicking novel—albeit restrained by hisstandards—by the tried-and-true narrativedevice of beginning the story as close aspossible to the end and then going backand filling in. We learn just enough aboutRusty's parents and their generation, andabout Glory—an enigma who bridges thegap between the generations—to makesense of the funeral and wake. An observationin A Passion for Narrative, the guide towriting fiction that preceded The MackenCharm in Hodgins's oeuvre, points toward afuller understanding: "You can find storiesrecorded while the events are occurring,stories recorded immediately afterwards,and stories recorded long afterwards." Anearly passage in The Macken Charm signalsthe temporal span between the narrated139

Books in Reviewevents and the storytelling event:The Island Highway was still a strip ofpleasant tarmac in the year of Glory'sfuneral—1956. A whole half hour mightpass between cars. More than three hoursof driving and two hours of steamship away,Vancouver could have been in a foreigncountry. You expected to see it two or maybethree times in your life: optometrist appointments,the Exhibition. Ferries hadn'tyet been built to haul tourists by the thousandsevery hour across the Strait and setthem racing up our roads, trucks andWinnebagos nose to tail from dawn till night."Rusty's "our roads" reveals Hodgins'snarrative intent. Historically, islanders havetended to feel a sense of community. Theyhave seen themselves, like their islands, asself-contained and independent from theoutside world. By seeing themselves as separatefrom the rest of humanity they havebecome closer to their fellow islanders.Population influx brings a contradiction: asmuch as islanders want to stick together,they tend to distinguish between nativesand those who are newly arrived, betweenthose who belong and those who wish tobelong, between those whose island this isand those whose it is not. This sense ofcommunity available to islanders is severelychallenged in an era of satellite dishes, theChunnel, and high-speed catamaran ferries—theuniverse is made up of very differentstories in 1996 than was the case in1956. Jack Hodgins wants his readers toreflect upon the difference, and to extendthe analysis beyond Vancouver Island toour culture at large. As an edge-walker ofthe continent he shows us how preposterouslyour culture has become tangled in thecentury's and the centre's glitter.The imbrication of Rusty as narrator andHodgins as author shimmers throughoutthe novel. Rusty's maturation necessitateslearning to valorize the local, an approachhe predictably rebels against as a youth. InJuly 1956, about to turn eighteen and anxiousto leave Vancouver Island for "the farside," he wondered whether "the world outthere had much in common with us." Theold hotel, which once provided his childhoodimagination space to try out variouslives, becomes naked and skeletal:"Somewhere along the way I'd stoppedbelieving." Hodgins has stated that his parents,like Rusty's, started their marriage inan old, abandoned hotel and that as a smallchild he would wander through that hoteland imagine all the stories that had takenplace there: "I knew I had to do somethingwith that image and as I wrote the book, itcame to be a symbol of opportunity." Thestoryteller in the novel, by implication anolder and much wiser Rusty, understandsthe hotel as a symbol for the culture of theextended family which the Mackens represented.He keeps "busy at narrative" inorder to poetically reconstruct that hotel,and by extension, all the stories and livesthat can take place there.Key to appreciating The Macken Charm—and this is equally true for Hodgins's tenother books—is a certain degree of comfortwith the sense of "opportunity" that pervadeshis writing. Which isn't to say that histhinking is grounded in some sort of positivismwhich excludes speculation uponultimate causes or origins. His criticisms,however, often seem if not muted then perhapsoverly subtle. One example: a welcomecritique of British Columbia'slackluster forestry policies is woven into thestory. The passage quoted above continues,"Developers hadn't yet begun to replacestands of timber with cement-walled shoppingcentres"; later the storyteller expressesunease with his youthful dream of "ridingon horseback over logged-off slopes"; atanother point he ironically observes thatduring a ceremony a dignitary (representingthat centre of exploitation, BuckinghamPalace, no less) "planted two small trees inland where every effort was being made toget the trees out"; and, while driving140

through a valley of hobby farms he reflectsthat "all this area had been dense with timberonce." Now, as delighted as I am by thiscondemnation of the heedless pillaging ofBC's forests—reproach which metonymicallyquestions the entire narrative ofprogress and development—I do think thatsome readers will impatiently seek a morevigorous assertion of outrage.Hodgins reconstructs the island, thecoast, and the region as a community—offlesh and blood, and of narrative—in orderto challenge its portrayal as a frontierordained to supply the centre with rawmaterials, consumers, and rustic moviesets. In "The Lepers' Squint," a short storythat first appeared in 1978, Hodgins had anaspiring Irish writer point out to a visitingNorth American novelist the inevitablecommodification of the region. "Someday," she said, "they will have converted allour history into restaurants and bars likethis one, just as I will have converted it allinto fiction." She went on to explain that"this place exists" for her because a greatregional writer "made it real. He and others,in their stories." Hodgins's narrativeproject has, of course, long been to makehis region real. His superior achievement inThe Macken Charm is to manifest thatregion in place and time as direct commentupon the contemporary western world.The Macken Charm is to be the first of atrilogy. Hodgins has said that the thrill ofonce again working in the idiom of his earliestyears was "like finding Spit Delaney,like finding all those characters in the SpitDelaney stories, it was, Oh my gosh, I'mback in that skin again." This is Rusty'sstory; the second in the trilogy will beSonny in middle age, set "vaguely in theearly nineties"; the third will be set in 1922:"One character will be important to allthree." Rusty's mother Frieda or fatherEddie? Thousands of Hodgins's aficionados,in Canada, in Europe, and downunder, will be eagerly guessing.Proper Amazement 'Greg HollingsheadThe Roaring Girl. Sommerville House $22.95Reviewed by Constance RookeThe Roaring Girl, Greg Hollingshead's 1995Governor General's Award winning storycollection, has two epigraphs:Jesus said, "Become passers-by"— The Gospel of St. ThomasThere are no innocent bystanders.What were they doing there in the firstplace?— William S. BurroughsTogether, they signal the motifs of watchingand complicity that pervade the collection,the artist's stance in the world, his sense ofself and relationship to the other, and alsosomething of the bemused but laser-sharpsensibility that for me links Hollingsheadwith three giants of the contemporary shortstory: Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, andAlice Munro. Like them, he is both wizardand muddler—a superbly talented writerwho knows that his material (the life hetaps, alongside which he travels) is stillmore potent than he can show. In awe oflife, staggered by the reality of other people,hard on himself, he chisels away in storyafter story, trying to get it right.These are masterful stories, marvelouslynuanced, accurate, and well-made—butwhat they speak to is the sense of beingmastered, whether by plenitude or bypoverty. It's a wonderfully attractive thingin a writer this good. He knows the strangenessof this dialogue, the weirdness of theselives; he cannot ever get over it. He's in perpetuallove, perpetual pain—because it's allso astonishing and so recalcitrant, andbecause we keep on missing the point.There is something harsh in Hollingshead'ssensibility, too—the odd, ugly twist thatmarks a wrenching away from the goodnessto which he is profoundly drawn.141

Books in ReviewIn "The Side of the Elements," the narratorand his wife are leaving the city for ayear and so must rent their house; his storybegins, as ours would, with an attempt tofind tenants who will take proper care ofthat house. But from the very beginning wesee that the narrator has other, philosophicinterests—and the use of all his everydayencounters is really to explore these, to seeand talk his way into deeper and deeperpuzzles. The house—as Hollingshead andthousands of writers before him haveplayed it—is an archetype for the life wehave constructed, under threat from theelements without; its job is to represent us,to stand for us, and to keep death away.When tenants invade, and behave unpredictably,our personal construction (as wellas our property) is at risk. Meanwhile, thestory's everyday nightmare comes true:loud parties abound, tenants change,cheques bounce.The remarkable thing that Hollingsheaddoes with this material is to have his narratorweigh in on the side of the elements andof the tenants. When he returns, he goes tothe funeral of Frank, his tenant—sufferingthat stranger's death as if it were his own,and for a time thereafter "fighting on theside of the rains and the wind and thehowling night. . . . [Making] big pushes fordisaster. For Frank. For disappointment, souseful to sustain proper amazement thatorder should ever prevail." This split consciousness,the inability to shut out theother, is a signature element in Hollingshead'sfiction. And the image of the house,in this first story of the collection, sets thestage for much that is to come.The second story, for example, "ThePeople of the Sudan," is also quite explicitlyan invasion-of-the-house story. This timethe invader is huge parcel—containing"relief" for the people of the Sudan—towhich the narrator and her husband havegiven house room, pending its collection byunknown friends of friends. And the boxsits: a presence, a memento of the world'spain and our insensitivity. Again, the narratoris imposed upon by others, quiteabsurdly; and again, Hollingshead swingsaway from that enclosed, suburban readingof the situation to another that is generousand open-hearted.The house figures again in "The Death ofBrule," when "suddenly one entire wall ofthe doghouse lifted off," exposing a youngboy's sexual "depravity," as "there with theimmediacy of God's was my mother's face."Again and again, against the illusion ofsuburban solidity, the notes of vulnerabilityand exposure and also of the yearning forsome expansion are sounded. "RoseCottage," "The Roaring Girl, "A Night atthe Palace," "The Appraisal," and "TheNaked Man" are other stories that developthe house motif in interesting ways. In theclosing story, "Walking on the Moon"—whose very title suggests the strangeness ofwhere we REALLY walk—the protagonisttakes "a tour of the roof," looking down athis neighbourhood from a new perspective.I read this as Hollingshead's final look atthe terrain he has been exploring in thiscollection. Again, we find the split consciousness—"Sameworld, differentworld"—and an astronaut's "hunger ... forthe love and respect of my fellow creatures."There is also a gesture at the foolishness of"insulation," and a recognition that for thevery old woman next door, "a new roof hadnot been worth it to her for a long time."The story ends with the protagonist patchinghis roof, as the quotidian requires, butalso with his hearing a distant "backbeat,""the sound of flowers bursting from thesurface of your body." In that closing imagewe see both the antidote and the sequel tothe house, ecstasy and death—the romanticmerger.This is in some ways a dark book, with aroar of pain at its heart. It is also very rich.I've pursued the house image because I wasparticularly struck by it, and because it is142

used to develop a number of Hollingshead'smost pressing themes—but there is much,much more here. A Roaring Girl is a bookI'm sure I will read again.Images of "Japaneseness"Marilyn IvyDiscourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm,Japan. University of Chicago P US$45.95/S17-95-Jodi CobbGeisha: The Life, the Voices, the Art. Knopf$63.00.Reviewed by Millie CreightonHere are two books with very differentapproaches to traditionalistic icons ofJapanese culture. One is highly visually oriented,a photographic promenade throughthe lives, loves, and arts of Geisha, the othera highly intellectual, deeply textual analysis.One appeals to the popular consumption ofJapan in the modern West, the other,although profoundly academic, is largelyabout popular consumerism in modernJapan. Where one is a visual montage ofGeisha, embraced by Westerners as anexotic symbol of Japan, the other exploresfor the mind's eye how within Japan suchtraditionalistic images, amidst aWesternized lifestyle and fears of a vanishingcultural heritage, become newlyembraced symbols of self-exoticism.Geisha: the Life, the Voices, the Art, a photographictestimony to the lives of Geishaby award-winning photographer Jodi Cobb,is, like the Geisha it presents, an alluring,vivid, and colourful book. Its primaryappeal is the photographs capturing themoods and spirits of Geisha both as "lifestyleartists" and "real people". An introductionby Ian Buruma provides a thoughtprovokingbackground to the visuals.Textual portraits of Geisha, interspersedamong the visual portraits, mingle Japanesepoems, snatches from songs Geishaperform, and the voices of Geisha tellingtheir own stories, to capture a deeperunderstanding of Geisha experiences. Thesevignettes reveal an ideal of Geisha life ascombining sexuality, pleasure, and cateringto the male ego, with an attitude of professionalismin the development of a Geisha'sart and hostessing skills.Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity,Phantasm, Japan, is a provocative andinnovative work that makes a major contributionto academic discourse on Japan. Inthis gift of scholarship to the field, MarilynIvy shifts paradigms from previous canonsof scholarly inquiry on Japan in the socialsciences.Ivy provides several separate but connectedessays exploring traditionalisticimagery and its place in the fabric of modernJapanese life. She enables the reader toembark on a paradoxical journey ofencounter with contemporary constructionsof Japanese selfhood through heranalysis of the 1970s and 1980s domestictravel advertising campaigns created byDentsu (Japan and the world's largestadvertising agency), "Discover Japan" and"Exotic Japan". Ivy suggests the real goalunderlying the recent popularity of ruralhamlets and villages as Japanese touristhaunts, is the desire to journey to a placemost Japanese can never reach—or returnto—home; home to the Japanese kokoro orheart/mind, and to a Japanese culturalidentity unadulterated by internationalizationand an increasingly Westernized dailylifestyle. Although the sought-after destinationremains always out of reach, travelbecomes the operator allowing at least atemporary recuperation of a fading self.In an essay about the origins of nativistethnology, this North American anthropologisttakes Japan's most famous anthropologist,Yanagita Kunio, author of the classicTales ofTono (Tono Monogatari. 1910;Tokyo: Yamato Shobo, 1972) and proclaimedfounder of Japanese folk studies, to143

Books in Reviewtask. Utilizing contemporary critiques ofWestern anthropology and anthropologists,she evaluates this early icon of Japaneseethnology, by probing the often ignoredrelationship between Yanagita and his primaryTono informant—the teller of the Tonotales to the folklorist. Emerging questionsinclude, 'Who has claim to authorship?', and'Where are the boundaries of creativity andcollaboration in this early work of Japaneseanthropology, as in all anthropology?'Ivy provides an intriguing ethnographicaccount of memorializing the dead onMount Osore, suggesting that ritual practicesof recalling the dead serve eventually,not as a means of remembering, but as ameans of forgetting those who havedeparted from this life. A subtle suggestion,which links such practices to other waysJapanese are attempting to recall their culturalpast, which Ivy claims is proof of itsvanishing. A final essay on taishu engekiprovides another rich ethnographicaccount of localized folk theatre, while suggestingthat the revitalization of this traditionaltheatre art involves a shift in contextto accommodate modern capitalist underpinningsof contemporary Japanese culture.Such marginalized events and theefforts made to preserve them are againseen by Ivy as elements of a vanishingnational identity, as Japanese culture isreplaced by the culture of capitalism.Although I believe Ivy has made animmensely important contribution with thiswork, I cannot fully agree with her stancethat Japan's extensive cultural loss is sopotentially painful that full realization mustbe resisted. I would instead suggest thatimages of yesterdays traditionalist lifeways,help Japanese cope with the fear of culturalloss in the present, enabling them to movefurther into an ever changing future.Postmodern FamiliesWayne JohnstonHuman Amusements. M & S $18.99Russell SmithHow Insensitive. Porcupine's Quill $14.95Reviewed by George WolfWayne Johnston writes family histories, butnot the sort—The Time of Their Lives(1987) excepted—that span generations.Like social historians who sacrifice scopefor depth, Johnston represents a vivid senseof dailiness, the feel and texture of being ina particular family in a particular time andplace. In his three earlier novels, the placewas his native Newfoundland. In HumanAmusements (1994) it's Toronto. But whereverhis fictions unfold, his deepest settingis the family, his distinctive skill the creationof those small, significant events thataccumulate toward eruptions and landslidesfew families manage to escape.Human Amusement's Prendergasts—Audrey, Peter, and son Henry—are anuclear family, cut off from the sprawlingcollections of quirky relatives and friendlyaccomplices peopling the worlds of TheStory of Bobby O'Malley (1985), The Time ofTheir Lives, and The Divine Ryans (1990).With neither clan nor regional bonds toanchor them, the Prendergasts fix theirlives to television. The TV Prendergasts thetabloids call them, Audrey having scripteda hit syndicated kids' show in which she asMiss Mary and Henry as the Bees (BeeGood and alter ego Bee Bad) star. "RumpusRoom" (older readers may flash back to"Romper Room"), a classic of its kind,becomes the site in television land whereHenry, mutely encased in his Bee costumes,miming the didactic roles his mother hasscripted for him, lives much of his boyhood.For him, as he recalls at the openingof his richly comic narrative, "the earlydays of television are the early days ofeverything." Only his skeptical father, a144

substitute high school teacher and wouldbenovelist who'll have nothing to do withhis wife's TV enterprises though living constantlyin their shadows, offers his sonrepeated doses of sanity and perspective,coated in bracing wit. Peter's bible isGulliver's Travels, "a book to be consulted ...when one is set upon by optimism ...plagued with hope and cheerfulness,"father advises son. But satire is ultimatelyno match for Audrey's scheme of "keepingthe family intact" by living the future in TV.From the Prendergasts's sixteenth floorToronto condo she launches her secondventure, "The Philo Farnsworth Show," afoolish and fabulously successful seriesabout the invention of television in whichHenry spends his adolescence playing leadingman. Eventually incapable of bearingsuch a weight of unreality, the familynucleus splits, blasting Henry out of anoverextended infancy (TV would makeinfants of us all) into the swirling realm ofmysterious motives and puzzling betrayalsin which mature folk most often dwell.For all its engaging zaniness and comicdistortion, Human Amusements is fundamentallyabout the hard experience ofgrowing up—hard in any age, but complicatedin Henry's by the mass popular fictionsthat promise the protections ofinfancy in the form of simplistic moral certitudes.It is Henry's powerful sense of hisunintended complicity in his family'sbreakup that thrusts him into the world ofguilt and sorrow where he can finally beginto see his parents—reunited but unreconciled—asAudrey and Peter, the complicated,groping, victimized and victimizingmixed affairs not even fantasy or his childishneed can keep them from being.Russell Smith's take on coming-of-age inHow Insensitive, short-listed for theSmithBooks/ Books in Canada First NovelAward and the Governor-General's for1994, also reels out in Toronto, but not theToronto the Good of distant memory orthe Toronto the Not-As-Good of Johnston's1960s and 70s setting. Ted Owen of NewBrunswick, by way of a master's program incultural studies at Concordia, arrives bytrain in "glittering" Toronto thePostmodern—a city whose recognizablestreet names and neighborhoods and contemporaneitymake it no more substantialthan those earlier urban incarnations—to"try to get into film," he thinks, or "somekind of writing." An ingénu despite hisM.A., Ted is quickly immersed in the heretoday-gone-tomorrowworlds of lifestylemagazines (bearing trendy names likeReferent, Haze, Cities, Next, ApacheSurgery), voguish dance clubs (Spleen,Dionysus, Penumbra, Aquarium,Holocaust), and a cultural life made up offilm promotion, grant writing, low endexperimental theater, and talk TV. HisMaritimer's innocence, though no perfectcharm, permits him to move through theseworlds remarkably unscathed. Not that he'simmune to this Canadian vanity fair'stemptations: he falls for two women atonce and becomes sexually entangled witha third, he falls easily into habits of selfpromotionbased on bogus credits, he fallsinto fashion. And in one of many resemblancesto Hawthorne's Robin Molineux,he falls into imagining that someone else, asophisticate named Max whom he met onthe Toronto train, will fix him up, get hiscareer and future moving, help him makehis way. When the humiliation of having tolive on handouts from his mother andfather grows intolerable, Ted weakens,accepting a job with a software companywriting manuals ("I have a cubicle with acomputer and my very own noticeboard,"he writes a friend)—the "veal-fatteningpen" fate that caused Douglas Coupland'sCanadian Generation Xet, Dag, to flee thisvery city. Ted is also tempted to flee, back tothe womb of graduate school, but a seriesof freeing epiphanies triggered by desperationand a glorious winter thaw, as well as145

Books in Reviewan exhilarating sense of the possibility ofhis making his own future, leave him at thenovel's close in Toronto "with a sudden andintense feeling of relief, of relaxation, ofarriving home."Whether Ted Owen's coming-of-age is asauthentic or durable as HenryPrendergast's is impossible to say. RussellSmith, after all, is more interested indeploying his protagonist as a recorder ofthe vacuous, sensation-driven realm ofToronto chic in the early 90s than in developingcharacter. And in this he succeedsnot with a novice's luck but genuine talent.His club scenes erupt in satiric flame, hisrenderings of Rosedale's twenty-somethingsleave no prisoners, his images ofToronto's cultural hip and hipsters aresharp and devastating. Yet behind all thisone senses Smith's fascination with theimpulse to make things new that to somedegree generates the very curiosities he caricatures.Whether he can or wishes to movefrom the role of satirist to Wayne Johnston'sposition of introspective, humane storytelleronly further novels will tell. On thebasis of How Insensitive they're well worthwaiting for.InteranimationsHilda KirkwoodBetween the Lines. Oberon $12.95Reviewed by Catherine AddisonBetween the Lines is a collection of interviewsconducted by Hilda Kirkwood withvarious Canadian writers and artists. It iscompelling reading, mainly because ofKirkwood's rapport with her subjects. Eventhough the discussions include lively debateon such issues as gender, censorship, theAmerican influence and the crafts of writingand sculpture, much of the interest ofthe book lies in the sense of relationshipsunfolding.Kirkwood has selected her subjects carefully.They are all people whom she clearlyholds in esteem and all except one—so shetells us in her headnote—are acquaintancesof hers already. She is a virtuoso in theolder sense, a collector. Her collection consistsof Margaret Laurence, Joe Rosenblatt,Robertson Davies, Aritha van Herk, LeonRooke, Almuth Lutkenhaus, WilliamMcElcheran, Barker Fairley, Northrop Frye,Joan Murray and Tom Marshall (who diedjust before he was to be interviewed and sois represented only by a tribute). She showsoff her collection in the special light of herintelligent appreciation, which may be thebest kind of illumination for most people.Freed from the necessity of defendingthemselves, they are able to unmask anddisarm; they do not feel compelled to consistencybut may go off on revealing tangents,fascinating digressions.One of Kirkwood's best ploys is to use, inher questions, metaphors that seem appropriateto the artist or work. Of JoeRosenblatt, poet offish and insect life, sheinquires: "Are the poet's antennae moredeveloped, or has he got better equipmentfor finding the depths?" And Rosenblatttaking and passing the thread, willinglyweaves his own motifs into the conversation:"Only a masochist would write abouthis or her job experience. Better to observethose super-prols [bees] buzzing away attheir blessed productions." Leon Rooke,questioned about his ability to "tap into"both male and female in his fiction, commutesKirkwood's metaphor into "networking]both continents of the psyche"and "entering] other skins." OnlyRobertson Davies refuses to take up thiskind of cue. Asked whether a "Merlin orProspero myth" underlies the action of AMixture of Frailties, he replies grumpily that"To talk of a Magician Theme is to miss thetruth of the story." Kirkwood perhaps getsher revenge in her interview with the sculptorAlmuth Lutkenhaus, who is quite happy146

to accept Kirkwood's suggestion that herportrait of Davies captures the "Merlinquality" of the novelist himself.Kirkwood is not a self-effacing interviewer;she works by offering suggestions of thiskind to her mostly very receptive subjects.Sometimes her suggestions actually surprisesomeone into self-knowledge, for examplewhen Aritha van Herk at first rejects butlater embraces Kirkwood's query about aJoycean influence on her novels. Usuallythe suggestions act as bait in a very satisfactoryway. A particularly good example isthe way she angles for an explanation of theporkpie-hatted businessman figure whorecurs in so many of William McElcheran'ssculptures. McElcheran rewards her withtwenty-three lines for her bold assertion thatin the maquettes for The Gates of Limbo hehas "given [this figure] a soul." And, characteristically,these twenty-three lines expressconfirmation, not refutation, of her theory.So warmly do some of her subjects agreewith Kirkwood's suggestions that there isoccasionally no discussion at all. When sherounds off her questions aboutLutkenhaus's "Crucified Woman" with aconjecture that the controversy about thestatue did not so much concern its artisticmerit as "[touch] off a charge of emotionregarding women's role in Christian society,"Lutkenhaus answers: "Exactly, youhave put it as it should be said." But this isnot a failure on the part of the interviewerto elicit a response; it is a point of perfectcoincidence between two protagonists in adialogue. Moreover, since Kirkwood is theprotagonist with whom we, as readers, aremost inclined to identify, it is a triumph ofunderstanding. The fact that a constantrepetition of such triumphs could obliteratethe dialogue does ijot matter.Lutkenhaus, like all the people interviewed,does express herself at length elsewhere.But this assurance of rapport between herand her interlocutor assures the authenticityof her longer responses too.Of course, the same degree of warmthbetween interviewer and interviewee doesnot kindle every encounter. Kirkwood generallyseems most comfortable with herfemale subjects, actually trading autobiographicalinformation with them. In theinterviews with Laurence and van Herk, forexample, she confesses to having beenbrought up with brothers by strong womenand she also describes her first glimpse ofthe Rockies from Calgary. Both Laurenceand Lutkenhaus, unlike any of the malesubjects, reciprocate by discussing aspectsof their personal lives—specifically, thedilemma of the married woman as artist.Laurence ruefully confesses that it "took[her] years ... to get over the socially conditionedfeeling that [she] had to make thebeds and do the dishes before [she] startedwriting."But the discussions with men may be justas revealing of Kirkwood's own life andopinions. Both Rosenblatt and McElcheranfeel strongly about the difficulties of theirart as a craft to be learned with patienceand effort; both decry the "easy" poemsand paintings of the postmodern era. Inresponse, Kirkwood declares herself of thesame camp:I resent the use of the word art todescribe a thing like a fence going acrossthe country or a piece of junk being calledsculpture, because I think it's debasingthe language and as a writer, I reallyresent the debasement of words such asart and artist. Let it be done, but byanother name.Thus, the whole book is revealed as a tributeto an old-fashioned ideal of artisticexcellence—Yeats's "old nonchalance of thehand," acquired by years of dedication.Kirkwood has clearly elected to converse init with people whom she considers to live upto this ideal. Let us hope that her dialogueshave some power to change the fashion.147

Books in ReviiA Daughter's DilemmaJoy KogawaThe Rain Ascends. Knopf $28.95Reviewed by Arnold E. DavidsonThe silence that sounds so persistently inJoy Kogawa's first two novels, Obasan andItsuka, figures prominently in her third aswell. But whereas Obasan richly exploitedthe silence of dispersal and death, of devastatingcollective and individual traumas inorder to tell the story of Canada's mistreatmentof Japanese-Canadians during andafter World War Two, Itsuka explored theless resonant silence of the country's longrefusal to acknowledge explicitly or in anyway redress what it had long recognized tobe a blatant miscarriage of justice. With theThe Rain Ascends, however, Kogawa examinesquite a different silence, one that is situatedin contexts other than the experienceof successive generations of Canadians ofJapanese ancestry. Now the focus is on howa middle-aged, proper English-Canadiandaughter of a much admired clergymancomes not quite to terms with but at leastto the acknowledgment of the fact that herloved and respected father has long sexuallyabused young boys.As even that brief summary of the plotsuggests, the silence of The Rain Ascends ishardly univocal. There is, first, a deep divideover the question of whether to speak ornot to speak the disgraceful truth. Millicent,the daughter, wants to protect her fatherfrom the consequences of his past actions,whereas Eleanor, his daughter-in-law (withthe emphasis falling on law) insists that hemust be forced to confront those consequences.The novel thus partly restages thedivision in Obasan between Obasan determinedto silently endure injustice and AuntEmily insistant on denouncing it andloudly demanding justice, but with the significantdifference that the protagonist ofThe Rain Ascends, unlike Naomi in Obasan,is not poised between those two poles butattempts to occupy one of them.Yet the daughter clearly does not fullybelieve in either the silence she advocates orthe mercy she would thereby bestow. Partlyher problem is the dual nature of herfather. In some ways, as various vignettessignify, he was a good man and even anexemplary clergyman. In other ways he wasa moral monster who preyed on those whotrusted him and preyed all the more effectively—andappallingly—by masqueradingas a virtuous man of God. This division inthe father is, moreover, reflected in thedaughter as well, for she does not care forhim quite as much as she regularly claimsshe does. From the very beginning of thenovel, the lady protests too much, vociferouslymaintaining that her love for herfather consigns her to silence with respectto the crimes she knows he has committed,and in the process she is of course partlyrecounting the very story that she insistsshe would not voice for the world. Thenovel itself is thus testimony to the instabilityof the speaking/silence polarity wherebythe daughter figures her own self divisionand which she tries to resolve externally bycasting herself as the figure of silence (withrespect to her father) in opposition to hersister-in-law who readily serves as the figureofspeech.Furthermore, the daughter's early attemptto speak but yet also to remain silent, to tellonly her story but not his, is, as she wellknows, doomed from the start. Thus theprologue to the novel begins by recountingthe "proudest moment" of her childhoodwhen "[t]he town of Juniper, in thefoothills of Alberta, celebrated the openingof the Juniper Centre of Music by declaringit C.B. Shelby Day after the founder of theCentre, [her] father, the Reverend Dr.Charles Barnabas Shelby. School childrenwere given a holiday. Banners and balloonsdecorated the stores. The Shelby FamilyQuartet [the narrator, her brother, her148

mother and father] sang with the combinedchurch choirs in a free concert in the shiningnew auditorium." But this opening noteof harmony and grace does not hold eventhough the father goes on to found threeother "centres of music and healing" in otherparts of Canada, and the prologue concludeswith a complex reversal of the Biblicalaccount of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. It isthe child, the daughter, who is sacrificingthe parent. Her implement is the pen, notthe knife. And most of all, she rightly suspectsthat there will be no last-minute rescue:I bind him and lay him on the altar on topof the wood. I stretch out my hand. Itake the knife and raise it high. Andhigher.Where is the ram? Where in thebushes is the alternate sacrifice? Where isthe voice that says, "Don't kill"?She hopes that "if I hold the pen tightenough" and "let it fall just to the point—right up to the throat—that's when the ramwill appear" and "I won't have to say thelethal words, will I?" And of course she isdoubly wrong. First, how better can youspeak the unspeakable than by so pointedlynot saying it? And second, the ram hasbeen there all along. She herself as well asmany others have been the sacrifice that thefather made in his own perverted reenactingof Abraham and Isaac, and this point isemphasized by the daughter's editorialinterjection into her quoting of the Biblicalaccount: "It is innocent blood that is to beshed. You shield the child from the awful,the unspeakable truth. It's Isaac, your love,your laughter, your joy, your everything,that is the sacrificial lamb to be slain andoffered to your ravenous God." A pointedcontrast to her father's case: he didn't shieldchildren from the awful truth and sacrificedthem to his ravenous God who wasthe father himself.The father's sins, blatant as they are, arenot, however, the main subject of The RainAscends, just as its implication of the perverseand the unnatural is not the mainpoint of the title. Centering the novel onthe daughter's anguished response to herfather and in the ambiguous ways that shehas been and continues to be his victimboth in her own life (for example, her sadaffair with an older clergyman also given tomusic—a clear stand-in for her father) andin the price she pays for trying to protecthim (especially when she discovers howclose to home his sexual prédations cancome), Kogawa clearly intends somethingmore than a post-Mount Cashel fable ofabuse in black and white. The father's gooddeeds are played out against his bad. We seehow he can finally plead that he too hadbeen sexually victimized as a child. We seehow his prédations were a search for hisown lost innocence and we also see howuntenable those extenuating considerationsalso are. We see the divisions in the familythat is itself partly the product of homophobia,of the father's attempt to pass assomeone that he is not, and we also see thedaughter's painful attempt to resolve conflictingclaims—to love her father and tojudge him. We see, in short, a complexinterplay of good and evil. The rain falls,after all, to make life possible, only becausethe rain also ascends.The Rain Ascends is an ambitious novel;in many ways it is an impressive novel; but,for me, it was finally in some ways also adisappointing novel. To start with, Obasanremains a hard act to follow, and Kogawa'sthird novel, like her second one, falls shortof the artistic success she achieved with thefirst one. For example, the deployment inthe prologue of the Biblical account ofAbraham and Isaac is rather mechanical inits implications, and the regular referenceto and rewriting of The Island of Dr.Moreau is even more obvious in its suggestionof men turned into beasts. Similarly,although one strength of the novel isKogawa's poetic prose, so, unfortunately, isone of the weaknesses. Thus the fog of the149

Books in Reviewopening—"In the beginning is the fog, thethick impenetrable fog. The lie is the sourceof the fog, and the lie is the fog"—lies asheavily symbolic as the fog at the beginningof Dickens' Bleak House or T.S. Eliot's "TheLove Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and at thislate date rather more mechanically so. Orcondemning her father, his daughter, late inthe novel, declaims: "You took the pastelshadings of their dreams and splashedcrimson and dung across the canvas of theirinnocent days. You swooped upon the shelterednests of infant birds, their beaks open,their heads awkwardly angled upwards in atrust as large as the sky. With your unseeinghunger, you plucked the trust from theirupturned faces and fed yourself until youcould eat no more." Rhetoric, here, toomuch outweighs recrimination.But even if the silence of a daughter tryingnot to admit her father's sins is rather lessringing than the silence of a country tryingnot to admit its own and even if the art ofthe third novel falls a little short of the artof the first, The Rain Ascends is still a novelwell worth reading. First, it tells, for the mostpart effectively, a powerful story withoutslighting the larger moral complexities ofthat story, as victim's narratives are proneto do. And second, it is an intriguing studyof how one of Canada's better fiction writersis still striving to surmount the handicapof having written a great first novel.Women & EroticismEvelyn LauIn the House of Slaves, Coach House $12.95Lynn CrosbieVillainElle, Coach House n.p.Reviewed by Luise von FlotowWomen and eroticism seem to go together,with images of "women" traditionally triggeringerotic fantasies and erotic writing.For some time, however, erotic writing hasbeen appearing in a different guise. Womenare the ones writing, describing situations inwhich female narrators or protagonists testand act out erotic fantasies, perceptions andadventures. In Quebec writing, this has beencalled "tenter l'erotique", a phrase that evokesthe erotic as both a temptation (une tentation)and, more prosaically, an attempt ( unetentative). Women writers, such as AnneDandurand (1987,1994), Claire Dé (1989),and Danielle Roger (1990), have beentempted by the heterosexual erotic, long ataboo for women writers, and haveattempted to make inroads into this areaconventionally defined and occupied by malewriters. Others, such as Nicole Brossard(1980) have approached the lesbian erotic,also fraught with taboos. In both cases—the heterosexual and the lesbian—womenwriters have had to write against a long historyof male fantasies that occupy much ofthe space and much of the imagery of eroticism.They have had to dismantle clichés,invent words to express what has so far beenlargely inexpressible, and imagine or describesituations beyond the scope of thoseassigned to women in the more traditionalforms of erotic writing. Further, they havehad to contend with the overlap betweeneroticism and pornography, whose relativelyfluid boundaries demand negotiation.The collections of poetry under reviewhere are two women writers' approaches tothe erotic in English. At least, that is whatthey appear to be at first glance. EvelynLau's collection In the House of Slaves isdivided into two sections; the first introducedby a quotation ostensibly taken fromWanda von Sacher-Masoch's "Confessions",which, by alluding to the male "founder" ofmasochism evokes what is to come. Thesecond section, introduced by a tellingquotation from Czeslaw Milosz,Somewhere there are happy cities.Somewhere there are, but not for certain.prepares readers for Lau's melancholic contextualizationof contemporary attempts at150

erotic behaviour in cities of Canada and theUnited States. VillainElleby Lynn Crosbieannounces its eroto/sexual content with itstitle: a villainous "she" must surely bedoing something "sexual", and the title ofthe first poem "All About Eve" would seemto confirm this expectation. However thequotations that introduce most of theworks in the collection are drawn from avariety of literary texts as well as pop songs,somewhat dispersing first impressions andpointing toward a precious amalgamationof literary sources and popular culture.Upon leafing through Lau's collection thereader is struck by recurring words—buttocksand lips, nipples and cherubs, Armanisuits and withered bodies. They indicatethe thematic direction of her work: sexualcontact between "fresh" young women withwhite bodies, bright red fingernails andpitch-black hair and aging, yet well-heeled,gentlemen, in not very happy cities. In Crosbie'swork, there are fewer and less directreferences to bought sex; instead, women'saggressive sexual fantasies, curiously mixedwith images of murder and haunted by figuresand moments from the pop culture ofcomics and film, as well as snippets of Frenchand Italian (to mark the well-travelled?),seem to determine the content of thesepoems. While the subject matter of work byLau and Crosbie may seem deliberatelydesigned for, and may actually lead to, acertain voyeuristic reading, a search for thekinky erotic bits, this does not appear to bethe main focus of these works. They areinteresting for their imagistic language andbrilliantly coloured juxtapositions of eroticfantasy "gear" and the drab and seedy realitiessuch "gear" seeks to transcend.Evelyn Lau opens her collection with aseries of prose poems that depict s/m situationswhere the woman prostitute alternatelyplays the role of sadistic dominatrixand masochistic victim. The calculated violenceand pain of these situations, thedearth of any emotional attachments, thehistrionics and superficial theatricality areapparent, and emphasized. So is the sensual:bright splats of colour "the stripes ofthe crop cardinal across your buttocks,"overpowering smells "the ebony roomsmelling of orange brandy and freesias","the smell of fear [...] hung over the bedlike a nuclear mushroom," sounds of agony"the groans round and red as apples inyour mouth," and sensations "falling waxlike hot seed spilled across your loins," "tipsof the whip fling gold stars." Yet beyond thetechnicolour flashes of the poems, the scarletsand golds, the ebonies and aquas, thered and white fishnet, or the eyes like bluetorches, lie the years of loneliness, livedeither among successfully stunted trees inthe Japanese gardens of affluent suburbiaor in some anonymous highrise, and nowspent as "dismal reflections" amid a "saddab of underwear," silk or otherwise. For allthe voyeurism they encourage, and for allthe striking and garish metaphors, these aremoralistic poems.The moralism becomes clearer in the secondpart of the collection in which thefemale "I", the young mistress/prostituteobserves and describes her role in her middle-agedlover's life. The relationship is apainfully surreptitious one for her, livedafter midnight, or when the family hasgone on holiday, or during a business trip.The wife and the "four absent daughters"are omnipresent, however: their make-up,their clothes, their "first efforts in kindergarten",or simply the wedding band arenoted by the envious, angry, lonely youngwoman who is hardly compensated by tripsto New York and Hollywood. The moralismof these texts is alleviated, not lifted, by thedetailed and tight descriptions, the precise,coloured language and the startlingmetaphors evoking the tackiness of the"heat-haze nights, purple sky, palm frondscrackling on the boulevards like lightning"and late-night liquor stores of L.A., the textureof unreal blueberries "dull and sullen"151

Books in Reviewand "lidded with apprehension" that arebought en route, or the defiant despair ofthe prostitute's "tragic opera" that drivesher to "test all your daughters' beds forcomfort, steal their lunch money, destroytheir teenage trinkets."Lynn Crosbie's work provides few narratives.Her poetry circulates around surrealsituations that leave fantasy/reality breaksunclear. Crosbie's writing moves through thecity, starting from relationships of sexualdesire, revenge, power struggle and despair.In the poem VillainEHe, the abused child,turned murderess, calls up Medea "Nosecret murder earns renown" and announces"I have killed seven men [...] I put themout of their misery." In / Eat Your Flesh, theobsessive "love" for her therapist, brings ona woman's delirious murder fantasies; inStrange Fits of Passion the would-be lover isignored for surreal reminiscences aboutwhat "happened to me when I was amadam"; in Skirt, My Pretty Name awoman, prepped with valium and coffee,whispers to the waitress my husband'sbrains are in my hands and "remembers"fragments of her past loves to disperse therelentless loneliness she now seems to live.Ambiguous sex/death scenes prevail inthese poems, often written from the perspectiveof a clearly female narrator, whosepower is, however, not always as tangible asin the poem I Am Curious (Yellow) in whicha former "lover" is humiliated: "he is mortified,as he reveals himself/ beneath thegale winds, the cruel force/ of my predatorygaze." Often, the narrator is anguished, ormad, or growing "more and more perverse"in her exploration of her personal histories,of popular myth-ologies, and in herrecourse to fantasies of violence.Crosbie's writing is most effective for itsmoments of colour and its precise detail;indeed, when her eye for descriptive detailflags, when, for example, a dull account ofthe activities of a dominatrix provides alame ending for the poem Strange Fits ofPassion, it can only be deliberate:he was quiet also, and I whipped him, Iground my heels in his chest untilhe begged for mercyThe tediousness of having to apply physicalpunishment when there is no emotionalreason for it becomes clear, preciselybecause the contrast to the descriptivemoments in the poetry is so stark. Someexamples: the woman in "love" with hertherapist sees him "luminous, a sheet ofperforated/ wafers, and your blood flowscarelessly, wine-purple on my lips." Thejuxtaposition of pale white skin and lushwine red occurs frequently, as in All AboutEve. "His wounds are the wine velvet/seams and lining, she pencils in my eyebrows,/a radiant arch, the M dark blueagainst/ my pallor." Much of the colouringconnotes certain conventions of eroticism:"pink, tender, barely blooming," "purplesatin sheets that cling to his thighs," "cassis—theblood of black currants, heavy andsweet," "my tiger-skin bustier", "my redruffledgarter"; it becomes more interestingin situations where "love" is deciphered as"a bitter taste—small green apples—hismouth is insistent" and the lover is reallyseen for the first time: "there are amberscales on his crooked teeth;/ once I thoughtof golden scarabs, pressed/ gold leaf."In VillainEHe, the blurb on the back coverassures us, we have "poems of the mouth:tasting and speaking, kissing to wound andkissing to heal". These poems are also asearch; they are a search for some way toexpress a woman's declaration of lust anddesire as well as her need for intimacy andtrust. Isolation and loneliness are the prevailingsentiments in both Lau's andCrosbie's work: the brightly coloured eroticencounters they describe or "remember"scarcely seem to compensate for the endemicisolation of their female protagonists.152

Canadian ReprintsRosanna LeprohonArmand Durand. Tecumseh/Borealis $14.95Margaret M. RobertsonShenac's Work At Home. Tecumseh/Borealis $13.95Joanna E. WoodThe Untetnpered Wind. Tecumseh/Borealis $16.95Grant AllenThe Woman Who Did. Oxford UP $13.50J. G. SimeOur Little Life. Tecumseh/Borealis $20.95Reviewed by Janice FiamengoOver the past few years, a number of longout-of-printnineteenth- and early-twentiethcenturyCanadian novels have been reissuedin paperback by Tecumseh and other presses.These «printings contribute to Canadianliterary studies by broadening and clarifyingour understanding of the forms andstyles of early Canadian fiction. To the genresconventionally associated with the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods—thesettler narrative, the frontier adventure, thehistorical romance—are added the sentimentalromance and the social problemnovel. The range of concerns and narrativestrategies in the five novels reviewed belowtestify to the diversity of Canadian culturallife during these formative years.Rosanna Leprohon is a fascinating andsomewhat paradigmatic figure in nineteenthcenturyCanadian letters. As an Irish Catholicwho married a French Canadian, settled inMontreal, and went on to publish successfullyin both French and English, Leprohonseemed to typify the cultural harmony anddiversity for which Canada was celebrated.As an orthodox Catholic woman who borethirteen children while producing also asubstantial body of fiction about the socialconstraints facing young women, Leprohonwas both orthodox and moderately feminist.Armand Durand (1868) is perhaps less representativeof Leprohon's feminist concernsthan her earlier Antoinette de Mirecourt(1864), focusing as it does on young menrather than young women, but it is anexcellent example of Leprohon's general fictionalinterests. Narrating the estrangementbetween two brothers and the tragic consequencesfor one of an ill-matched marriage,the novel is a classic sentimental romance,from its quaintness of diction to its insistenceon the importance of sound domesticeconomy. Although I prefer the contradictoryfeminism of Antoinette to the conventionalmorality of Armand Durand,Leprohon's skill in shaping the materials ofQuebec culture into readable moral allegoryis undeniable.More evangelical in purpose and narrativesymbolism is the contemporaryMargaret Murray Robertson's Shenac'sWork At Home (1866). Robertson was apopular Protestant novelist and teacherwhose nephew, Charles Gordon, achievedfame under the pseudonym Ralph Connoras the chronicler of muscular Christianityon the Canadian frontier. In Robertson, wecan see the source of Connor's interest inthe moral dynamics of Scottish communitiesin Canada—minus Connor's celebrationof machismo. Robertson's focus is onfeminine heroism. Shenac tells of theChristian education, through suffering, ofits Scottish-Canadian heroine, who holdsher family together after her father'suntimely death. Through poverty, hardship,and the loss of loved ones, Shenaclearns that only faith can bring comfort orchange in a world of strife. Although itssentimental didacticism may strike somereaders as excessive, the novel is compellingin its representation of Canada as a potentiallypure nation built by strong, self-sacrificingwomen such as Shenac. The novel'sconnection of domestic and national concernsexemplifies the complex social andpolitical dimensions of sentimental fiction.Joanna Wood's The Untempered Wind(1894) is notable for its unconventionaltreatment of a controversial subject and for153

Books in Reviewits sombre social realism. The novel tells ofMyron Holder, "a mother, but not a wife,"and her persecution by the villagers ofJamestown. It seeks to expose the hypocrisyof the women who scapegoat Myron and toexpress the legitimacy of Myron's sexualtransgression. The novel is remarkable forits struggle to articulate a language offemale desire outside the boundaries ofpatriarchal tradition. Significant narrativeand stylistic parallels with NathanielHawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, ElizabethGaskell's Ruth, and Thomas Hardy's Tessestablish the international context for thisambitious social problem novel, whose nowforgotten author was once declared by theCanadian Magazine to rank amongCanada's very best writers, alongsideCharles G. D. Roberts and Gilbert Parker.Grant Allen was a Canadian by birth whospent the years of his writing career inEngland. The Woman Who Did (1895) is aliterary curiosity which generated controversyupon its publication and its belligerentlyconservative vision of social change.Herminia Barton is a beautiful, highly-educatedNew Woman who deliberately sacrificessocial respectability to protest thetyranny of marriage. She enters into a "freeunion" with her lover and raises their childalone after his death. Ostensibly concernedwith the overthrow of "the evil growth ofman's supremacy," the novel that so upsetcritics and readers is in fact a baffling mixtureof outrage at English morality andrigid prudishness about women's social andsexual destiny. For example, on the samepage that the narrator rails against "the leproustaint of that national moral blight thatcalls itself respectability," he also pronounceswith censorious smugness that thenovel's heroine "was far removed indeedfrom that blatant and decadent sect of'advanced women' who talk as thoughmotherhood were a disgrace and a burden,instead of being, as it is, the full realizationof woman's faculties." Such misogynyannouncing itself as feminism indicates thecomplex ideologies mobilized by the nineteenth-centuryWoman Question.The novel that is perhaps closest to contemporarytaste in style and subject is J. G.Sime's Our Little Life (1921). A remarkablyserious and sustained exploration of urbanpoverty, the novel presents a Dickensianportrait of life in the slums, emphasizingboth the harshness and the poignancy ofpoor peoples' lives. The novel centres onthe unlikely friendship that developsbetween the aspiring writer, Robert Fulton,and the aging seamstress, Katie McGee.Through scenes in which Robert reads sectionsof his "Canada Book"—a treatise onwhat Canada is and could be—to theuncomprehending Katie, Sime develops thecontrast between the intellectual pretensionsthat fuel Robert's disdainful withdrawalfrom the world and Katie'suneducated but passionate participation inlife. The relationship between these twodown-trodden people is handled with considerablepsychological depth and subtlety.The novel presents a grim urban vision ofCanada that is at odds with the wheat fieldsand wide open spaces most familiar in representationsfrom the period.Intervening in HistoryMichael MasonThe Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes. OxfordUP $49.50Franca lacovetta and Mariana ValverdeGender Conflicts: New Essays in Women's History.U Toronto P $4O.oo/$i6.95Reviewed by Janice FiamengoTwo studies of the nineteenth century seekto reappraise and revise conventional ideasabout the period. The Making of VictorianSexual Attitudes re-examines the assumptionthat the repressive sexual moralityassociated with Victorianism was rooted inconservative Christian theology; on the154

contrary, Mason argues, "explicit anti-sensualattitudes tended above all to emanatefrom secularist and progressive quarters."Mason surveys the attitudes towards sexualityarticulated by a variety of Victorianthinkers. In Gender Conflicts, FrancaIacovetta and Mariana Valverde broadenthe scope of scholarship on nineteenthcenturyCanadian women, gatheringtogether essays by distinguished historians,sociologists, and political scientists. Thetwo volumes could not be more different intheir perspectives, but both texts complicateand enrich the standard portraits ofthe period.Mason demonstrates that theologianswere in many cases more permissive intheir pronouncements on sexuality thanwere their more radical, secular counterparts.This rather counter-intuitive argumentmakes for fascinating reading asMason explores some "unexpected lines ofthought on sexuality" in his first chapter.Some of the most unexpected include theSwedenborgian emphasis on "erotic matrimonialism,"Reverend G. D. Haughton'sclaim that souls in heaven would experienceimpassioned sexual fervour, and theApocalyptic Princeite belief that a new erahad dawned in which not only man's spiritbut also his flesh would be redeemed by theHoly Ghost. In the course of his survey,Mason reveals that thinking about sexualmorality was far less homogeneous thanhas often been thought.In his second chapter, Mason examinesthe pervasive and complex heritage ofEvangelicalism, focussing on the range ofresponses to the prostitute rescue work ofEvangelical societies. In the third chapter,Mason outlines the relationships betweenworking-class radicalism of the 1830s and40s, dissenting religion, and ideas abouthuman sensuality, examining Owenitesocialism as a microcosm for the period'sradicalism and contradictoriness on sexualmatters. Chapter Four looks at theories ofsexual liberation in progressive movementsof the later century, with a focus on controversiesover birth control. Throughout,Mason convincingly demonstrates thatanti-sensualism was most often connectedwith left-wing ideologies.In any study of such ambitious scope,there are bound to be omissions and oversightsfor which Mason cannot be severelycriticized. Because Mason aims for maximumcoverage of his diverse subject, hisbook contains more reporting than analysisof primary sources. Given the complexityof the subject, this limitation is disappointing,if understandable. In his treatment ofprostitute rescue missions, for example,neither the founders and operators nor therescued women themselves are given muchopportunity to speak for themselves. In hisattempt to separate the punitive from thebenevolent aspects of Magdalenism, Masonrelies on brief summaries of, or quotationsfrom, mission statements, rescue tracts,and theoretical treatises, which provideonly the barest sampling of the complexviews held by individuals and societies. Amore serious inadequacy is the lack ofattention to feminist thinkers. In a studyconcerned with the relationship betweenprogressive secularism and anti-sensual ideology,feminist anti-sensualism would seemcrucial to the overall picture. But Masonfinds the views of such feminist radicals asElizabeth Blackwell and ElizabethWollstonecraft Elmy baffling and distasteful,commenting at one point with uncharacteristichostility that "[t]he Social PurityAlliance was a grotesque affair, a great bubbleof extreme anti-sensualism whose onlylasting achievement was to discredit sexualmoralism." Such historical judgementalismis misplaced; indeed, if "lasting achievement"were the only justification for historicalinvestigation, then very few of thewriters and thinkers in Mason's studywould have any claim on our interest.Despite these limitations, though, Mason's155

Books in Reviewstudy is lucid and informative.In their collective introductory essay, thecontributors to Gender Conflicts explain thatthey are united in recognizing the complexitiesin the historical experiences of women.Interest in gender should not obscure thestructuring force of race, class, and ethnicityin women's lives. This recognition thathistorians cannot posit a single, heroicfemale subject is fairly standard in contemporaryfeminist scholarship, almost alwaysbut not always successfully practiced. Theessays in Gender Conflicts, however, followthrough on their ideological commitment.The result is an eclectic, wide-ranging andsubtle collection of essays that examinegender conflict in terms of resistance topatriarchal oppression and the tensions andstruggles among women themselves. Forexample, Ruth A. Frager explores how thecomplex interrelations of gender, class, andethnicity produced both powerful alliancesand damaging dissension among strikingworkers at the T. Eaton Company. LynnMarks' discussion of women's work in theSalvation Army grounds her analysis of therelationship between non-conformist religionand working-class women. Iacovettaexplores how hegemonic ideas about theNorth American, bourgeois family influencedsocial service work with immigrantfamilies in the first decades of the welfarestate. These essays demonstrate detailedknowledge of their subjects and sensitivityto complex theoretical issues.The collection is notable for the variety ofits disciplines and research materials. KarenDubinsky examines the history of seductionlegislation and court records of seductioncases to demonstrate how ideologies ofmale sexual desire and female sexual purityare produced and maintained through theinstitution of law. Valverde explores theracist assumptions and strategies thatshaped the sexual politics of maternal feminism.Cynthia Wright looks at floor plansfor Eaton's department store to analyze theinculcation of the consumer ethic at theturn of the century.The collection makes no claim to accountfor the experiences of all women; still, Iregret that there are no essays about Nativewomen, rural women, and women ofcolour. This caveat aside, I recommend thecollection. The essays provide fascinatingaccounts of the ideologies, experiences, andinstitutions that have shaped Canadianwomen's history.Mainstreaming MarginsMasao MiyoshiOff Center: Power and Culture Relations BetweenJapan and the United States. Harvard UP US$15.95M.N.S. Sellers, ed.An Ethical Education: Community and Moralityin the Multicultural University. Bergus$54.95/$it).95Reviewed by Marilyn IwamaIn Off Center; Power and Culture RelationsBetween Japan and the United States, MasaoMiyoshi promises to offset the symmetryendemic to the familiar traditionalist andpostmodern extremes of scholarly and populardiscourse on Japan. Off Center succeedsin displacing this discourse by detailing theextent to which Japanese and American literaturesand culture are mutually implicated.Through his translations Miyoshialso gives English-speaking readers greateraccess to Japanese prose and criticism.Miyoshi divides his book into three parts.In the first, "Perspectives," he tracks theWest's imperialistic relation to Japan bydeconstructing "Eurocentric" readings ofJapanese literature, then situating bothJapanese and Western novels within widerliterary and economic histories.In Part Two Miyoshi examines postwarJapanese literary history, first generally,then by focusing on the writing of TanizakiJunichiro and Mishima Yukio as respectively"ambiguous" and "homogenizing."156

Miyoshi proposes an alternate discoursein Part Three ("Problems") as he exploreswhat he calls "Japan's own centralism" andsuggests that Japanese look to women'swriting as the most likely way "out of thehierarchic order of control."Such a proposal demands that Miyoshichallenge the mythology of homogeneitypermeating the idea of Japan. Miyoshiattempts this, stressing that Japanese writing"is unique only as any other literatureis," and acknowledging his complicity inthis mythology by predicating his analysison the virtue of striving to find a way out ofhomogeneity. Yet searching in Off Centerfor the same depth of reflection on marginalitythat Miyoshi demands of Japan "apologists"and "bashers," I read an argumentdeeply flawed by the selectivity of itsengagement with the deconstruction ofessentialist and patriarchal discourse.A major problem with Miyoshi's argumentis structural. Because he is concernedto displace the symmetry inherent in hisearlier texts, As We saw Them: Japan's FirstEmbassy to the United States (i860) andAccomplices of Silence: The Modern JapaneseNovel, he must still assert the heterogeneityof Japan vis à vis the United States. Thus, inhis first chapter Miyoshi decides that thesignifier, "Japanese" should satisfy all butthe "Ainu, Okinawa, and other minorityproductions." More than five million peopleinhabit these categories; hundreds of thousandsof them are excluded from "Japanese"citizenship regardless of the number of theirgenerations in Japan. By relying too heavilyon the coarse opposition of Orient andOccident that he seeks to displace, Miyoshi'stext gags the very agents of intraculturalheterogeneity that would be his allies.Equally serious are other ideologicalcompromises Miyoshi makes in this text.Encouraged as I am by Miyoshi to viewwomen's writing as Japan's "way out," Iexpected him to integrate women's textsinto his analysis. What Off Center proffersis an uneven treatment of texts by womenand men. Miyoshi introduces Japanesewomen writers often overlooked by westerncritics (Yosano Akiko, Hiratsuka Raicho,Hayashi Fumiko, and Sata Ineko, amongothers) but generally confines them to aseparate chapter on women and womenwriters. Aside from the section onMiyamoto Yuriko in this "women's" chapter,women writers are absent from the discussionof literary resistance to World WarII, despite significant contributions such asHayashi's The Floating Cloud. Consistently,Miyoshi characterizes the "less serious" oreven absent writing of men during this timeas "bold attempts at resistance," whereas hedismisses the absence or "lightness" ofwomen's writing as "compromised."Another opposition on which Miyoshiinsists is the alignment of Japanese narrativeswith "third word" orality versus "first world"literacy, despite the early and high degree ofliteracy in Japan and the often writtenmode of the "collective" forms he stresses.This third world construction neatly supportsMiyoshi's depiction of Japaneseimperialism as a "decolonization" responseto nineteenth century "Western conquest,"an argument that depends on his neglectof, for instance, Japanese invasions of Koreadating from the sixteenth century.Simply put, Miyoshi's challenge toreceived ideas of "Japan" and "the West"remains compromised by his refusal to dareenough in confronting his complicity in thetraditionalist discourse.Another examination of cultural diversityis the collection of essays in An EthicalEducation: Community and Morality in theMulticultural University. Coming as it doesfrom the Hoffberger Center for ProfessionalEthics in Maryland, the majority of thecontributors are from the disciplines of lawand philosophy. Nonetheless, the essaysrange widely from the densely philosophicalto the concretely pragmatic as they theorizea pedagogy sufficient to the changing157

Books in Reviewdemographics in the (American) academy.From a Canadian perspective, NicholasSteneck makes a timely observation that universities'lack of ethical self-evaluation seemsdirectly related to an increased emphasis on"outside" faculty interests, that is researchand professional advancement, and thechanneling of decision-making away fromfaculty to administrative boards, leavingethical matters up to corporate "outsiders."J.L.A. Garcia criticizes reductive notions ofethics, as Steneck's concern with influenceappears to be, exhorting the university toprovide "sentimental education," that nurtures"sensibilities and desires." In turn,Robert Lipkin disagrees with the notion of"truth" underlying Garcia's discussion. Heenvisions the university as "a bastion of...radical critique of the dominant culture,"therefore ultimately supportive of multiculturalismbut not, for example, prepared toban a priori all hate speech, a position K.Anthony Appiah shares in his essay, "FreeSpeech and the Aims of the University."The conversational nature of the firstthree essays reflects the collaborative processof this collection. Overall, the conversationsare lively and elucidative of each other, untilthey reach a low point in Robert K. Fullinwider'sessay, "Indefensible Defenses." Thispiece is an inadequate and misdirectedresponse to Sharon Rush's exhaustive explorationof the tensions in affirmative actionpolicies, "Understanding Affirmative Action:One Feminist's Perspective." Carelesslyargued and mean-spirited, Fullinwider'sessay tarnishes the whole.Rush defends affirmative action on pragmaticgrounds. Not only does it meet ethicaldemands by redressing past injusticewhile recognizing and facilitating diversity,affirmative action is an investment in afuture likely populated by a majority ofwomen and people of colour. Rush arguesher case tightly, grounding her discussionin a substantial body of jurisprudence andcultural critical theory.Undergirding several of the remainingessays is discussion over the role of the universityin the search for truth. Althoughperiodically zealous over this quest,Kathryn Mohrman's contribution, "EthicalImplications of Curricular Reform," positsdiversity as a stimulant to academic excellence.Andrew Altman would curb hatespeech whose illocutionary intent is to subordinateothers because it does not aid thesearch for truth.Robert L. Simon's essay is helpful in thatit deals at length with "politicization" ofcurriculum. My main concern is not withour disagreement: Simon believes a curriculumcan be sanitized of ideology while Ido not. More problematically, Simon drawson fragments of critical positions as evidence,and then argues his case on the"least sophisticated" or most narrowlyinterpreted form of those fragments.Such practice is symptomatic of a largerproblem with this text. In a volume thatrecognizes the urgency of the university'sneed to examine its ethical positionsregarding cultural diversity, the overwhelmingsameness of this collection ofgatekeepers reflects the liberal view of amulticulturalism which absorbs the marginsinto the center. Such a text, for all itsgood intentions, further marginalizes thosevoices that could have been present at theseminar table.Questions fondamentalesLouise Milot et François Dumont (dir.)Pour un bilan prospectif de la recherche en littératurequébécoise. Nuit Blanche $23.00Louise Milot et Fernand Roy (dir.)Les figures de l'écrit. Nuit Blanche $22.95Compte rendu par Jo-Anne ElderLa conception graphique de la couverturede Pour un bilan prospectif de la recherche enlittérature québécoise est provocatrice.158

L'extrait choisi commence ainsi: "moinsnégligeable qu'on ne le pense.. ." Parle-t-onde la recherche littéraire, domaine injustementnégligé? En fait, l'auteur de l'extrait,Pierre Popovic, discute de l'hétérogène(sujet repris par Pierre L'Hérault et SherrySimon, entre autres) et du rôle joué par lestextes littéraires dans la transformation dela pensée. Il poursuit en parlant des livresqui "font relire autrement" d'autres textes,qui éclairent "d'un nouveau regard" et quiincitent un "requestionnement du donné."L'extrait reflète la perspective offerte parl'ouvrage. Cependant, il ne s'agit pas tout àfait d'un bilan, dans le sens d'un inventairecomplet des recherches "à faire." Dans saréponse à la question soumise par LouiseMilot et François Dumont (qui est troplongue à reproduire ici, mais qui commencepar "à votre avis, et selon votre perceptionde l'état actuel de la recherche enlittérature québécoise, au nom de quelscritères doit-on penser, à moyen terme,l'avenir de cette recherche?"), ManonBrunet offre un tel bilan dans le domainedes études du 19e siècle, en se basant sur unrapport de 1978 ( réédité dans la Revue del'Université d'Ottawa, 49.1-2, [1979]), quisert également de point de départ impliciteà certaines autres réponses. Elle réponddonc directement à la question de ce quireste à faire: question fondamentale, dugenre de celles que nous posent nos étudiantesparticulièrement éclairées ou nosenfants particulièrement innocent.e.s, maisque l'on n'ose pas se poser entrechercheures. Quel est le but de la critique?Qu'est-ce que la littérature québécoise?Qu'est-ce qu'il faut faire? Où allons-nous?Impossible de donner des réponses complètes,cela va de soi. Première question difficile:puisque la subjectivité va aussi de soi,comment choisir ceux et celles qui répondront?Ce sont des chercheurs "particulièrementactifs dans la rechercheactuelle", ayant "déjà réalisé des travauxsubstantiels" et qui vont "sans doute entreprendred'autres recherches." Le choix a desairs de famille. Ils et elles s'entre-citent etcertaines empruntent les mêmes pistes: lesapproches sociocritiques et historiques, parexemple. Cela reflète l'état actuel desrecherches. Jacques Pelletier, qui analyse lessubventions du F.C.A.R., note que "ces projets... portent essentiellement sur l'histoirelittéraire du Québec et sur desphénomènes institutionnels: l'édition, l'appareilscolaire"; dans le choix de sujets dethèse, il note la "domination d'uneapproche historique" et que "les étudessociohistoriques sont également trèsimportantes dans la critique littéraire destrente dernières années." En lisant cetouvrage, on a parfois l'impression d'entreren plein milieu de l'institution littéraire. Enchoisissant certaines chercheures et enprivilégiant ainsi certaines approches, estcequ'on contribue à la consécration de certainesidées sur ce que c'est, la recherche enlittérature québécoise? Ce n'est pas pourcritiquer le choix; j'ai été ravie de retrouverdes noms et des références que je connaisbien (et, dans presque tous les cas, que j'admire),ainsi que des recherches et des idéesqui me semblent importantes. Mais il mesemble que, pour faire un vrai "bilan", ilfaudrait chercher la plus grande diversitépossible. Offrir des bibliographies plusextensives, historiques aussi bien queprospectives, aurait permis, en outre, d'utilisercet ouvrage comme un genre demanuel scolaire pour les chercheur.e.s enherbe, ainsi qu'une révision utile pour lesplus experimenté.e.s. Cela répondrait à uneautre question qui me semble aussi naïve etpertinente que les autres: qu'est-ce qu'ilfaut lire/ qu'est-ce qu'il faut produire dansle domaine de la recherche en littératurequébécoise?Les figures de l'écrit, c'est tout le contraired'un bilan. L'approche est spécifique, laméthodologie exemplaire. Les collaborateurs.tricesinterrogent le fonctionnementde divers types d'écrits, que ce soit159

Books in Review"référence littéraire,. . . découpure de journal.. ., message griffoné sur un bout depapier" ou même une légende ou autreforme de discours oral. Les points deréférence sont également bien situés, et serventà orienter la recherche, parfois en permettantde leur tourner le dos; l'ouvraged'André Belleau, "en partie responsable denotre intérêt pour les figures de l'écrit" est"constamment questionné, ne serait-ce quepour démarquer notre problématique de lasienne." La rigueur des Figures de l'écritimpressionne autant que le caractère personnelet éclectique du Bilan.Les deux ouvrages font partie des Cahiersdu centre de recherche en littérature québécoise.Ce fait témoigne du dynamisme dutravail d'équipe mais soulève d'autres questions.Aurait-on eu des réponses différentessi l'on avait posé la question uniquement àdes chercheur.e.s non subventionnée.s,non affilié.e.s à des équipes ou des centres,ou autrement plus isolé.e.s (cinq centresquébécois sont représentés; peu d'universitésnon-francophones / non-québécois nele sont)? En diversifiant le choix, est-ce que"les risques augmentent de voir les réponsesproposées gagner en esprit d'aventure et enprétention égoïste ce qu'elles perdent enpertinence et en esprit d'ouverture," ce quecraint Pierre Popovic, ou est-ce qu'on contribueà une "histoire du désir littéraire,"selon l'expression si séduisante proposéepar Manon Brunet?Le moment est propice aux questionnements.Les sources de financement nousexigent des réponses. Au Forum sur les Artsau Nouveau-Brunswick, on a récemmentdébattu la lacune discursive entre les arts etla bureaucratie. Comment se parler?Première réaction: résister. L'artisan PeterPowning raconte la réponse de la directiond'une galerie lors d'une exposition particulièrementdifficile, provocatrice: la réactionde la communauté? On s'en fiche!Mais après, comment aller chercher desfonds chez un public aliéné, non par l'expositionelle-même, mais par de tels commentaires?Dans une situation qui me sembleparallèle, on m'a fait remarquer que demoins en moins d'universitaires féministesont travaillé dans les centres de femmes,chez les victimes d'agression sexuelle ou lesfemmes peu scolarisées, par exemple,comme c'était le cas il y a quelques années.Le rôle que jouent dans la communauté leschercheur.e.s et les artistes demeure occultépar un certain discours académique quipasse au-dessus des questions essentielles:pour qui, pourquoi faire de la recherche?Ce Bilan prospectif ouvre la voie auxréponses possibles.Politics and PeaceArmin WiebeThe Second Coming of Yeeat Shpanst. Turnstone$17-95Farley MowatAftermath: Travels in a Post-War World. KeyPorter $28.95Reviewed by Bryan N.S. GoochOf the many responses to Canada's post-Meech deterioration—a kind of venominducedconstitutional sickness which,unchecked, rapidly affects the national nervoussystem, turning the country into anirrational, bilious mess—Armin Wiebe'sThe Second Coming of Yeeat Shpanst is oneof the most amusing. The book's primarysetting is the fictional prairie town ofGutenthal, a Mennonite hamlet of essentiallyfamiliar proportion, complete withgrain elevator and other amenities. Anunsuccessful local politician, Yeeat Shpanst,suddenly returns to his town—shortly aftera Prime Minister delivers a patheticallyhopeless plea to the nation—to appear as akind of messiah, only to vanish while leavingbehind a curious black book full ofvisionary speeches. The national cause istaken up by Oata Siemens and other locals160

who seek to restore the country's sense ofplace and direction, the whole narrativesustained both by Oata's prolix creativitymade tangible by her incessant fictionalscribblings with carpenters' pencils in a virtualtruckload of Farmers' Union notebooksand by periodic sightings of Shpanstin a wildly honking Lazy Leisure Camper, asource of inspiration and instruction to hisgroup of farm-based and curiously drivendisciples. What emerges is a dream-likeview of the national fabric, with elementsranging from the rural field, to the localrailway branch-line, to Parliament Hill;such features are the national touch-points,yet here, as in a real dream (and dreamshave their own reality for the dreamer), thefactual and fictional, the past and the presentare stirred and blended into a mythicmix of heady proportion which, since thereader can remember and re-explore thedream in whole or in part, will serve toremind one of what has been lost in theintrospective and selfish provincial ditheringabout the collective pattern of thenational quilt. (The search for unity in thiscountry ironically goes on just whenCanadian institutions and symbols arebeing deliberately compromised, dismantled,and expunged.) Even Sir John A.comes thundering by, riding the pilot of the"Countess of Dufferin." Haggling, ineffectivepoliticians and bizarre policies do notfare well. The citizens can be roused—evenby the wide-spread systematic air-droppingof plastic pop bottles containing visionarypolitical messages. And the omnipresentpower and economic pressure of the UnitedStates gets its share of coverage through aninterior mythology. Like James Reaney'sColours in the Dark with its marvelous"play-box," Wiebe's fantasy will stir manymemories and emotions in the course of itsoften hilarious, hazy romp: perhaps theantidote concocted from our combinedmemories will indeed remove the effects ofthe political snake-bite. The humour rangesfrom the subtle to the bald. The local language—"flatGerman"—is not a problemwhen it appears: Wiebe's glossaries takecare of that. However, the occasional candidreporting of the physical relationshipsof certain principal characters may causesome readers dismay; such passages canseem both unnecessary and unamusing.Though Farley Mowat's Aftermath takesthe reader away from Canada's shores tothe now peaceful sites of the battlefields ofFrance and Italy over which Canadiansfought and often died in World War Two,and to locations in England where theywaited and trained for the raging conflicts,this book also brings a clear sense of thepast, of Canada's place on the internationalstage, of the way in which, despite internaldisagreements, it was possible for thiscountry to work in a focused way to defeatutterly sinister forces both military andintellectual. Here is classic Mowat—withclear, lucid, delightful prose—offering apost-war tour (with his wife) of splendidscenes with charming, kindly people to talkto set against the shadow of carnage andloss. The emphasis, though, is on beauty,on re-growth and re-building, on humanityand the necessity of humane response.Mowat does not preach—he does not needto. The sense of revulsion at the destructionwhich he witnessed—some of which herecounts—during military service is clearenough. And so is the gratitude of the peoplewhose lands Canada helped to free fromNazi dominion. Mowat's account of histravels is not pure nostalgia and is, in theend, far from sombre; the vision and toneare positive, and the vignettes are instructiveand often delightful, despite some nervousmoments as the reader rides with theMowats in their little English Hillman(named "Liz") as they challenge narrowroads and mountain passes while threatenedby careering Citroens and Renaultsdriven by maniacal locals. The charactersmet along the way come alive—the imme-161

Books in Reviewdiacy of the dialogue plays an obvious rolehere, as do the descriptive details which soclearly delineate person and place, whethermaster brewer in England or the environsof Positano. And Mowat's diction and controlof pace are superb—there is simply nota weak moment or a loose passage in thebook. There is none of the sense of a pedestrian"battlefields I have known" approachor of the basic travelogue—"places youought to visit." This is a remarkable seriesof reflections, some funny and somepoignant, by a distinguished writer, clear inhis vision of himself and his national identity,reflections which take the reader tonew/old worlds through Mowat's gaze andwhich reveal much about the writer himself—akind of double experience which,ultimately, is the gift of the best of artists.If Wiebe offers a riotous brew—a longishtherapeutic draught in The SecondComing... —which may go some way tohelp us remember and reorder our nationalpriorities, Mowat's Aftermath provides aclear, restorative cordial, a first-rate vintageof superlative and unforgettable quality.Myths of HistoryDavid MuraTurning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei. AnchorGish JenTypical American. Plume n.p.Wayson ChoyThe Jade Peony. Douglas & Mclntyre $18.95Larissa LaiWhen Fox is a Thousand. Press Gang $16.95Reviewed by Guy BeauregardNear the end of his memoir, David Muraasks a series of remarkable questions aboutidentity and culture: "Does culture ordinarilyform a net of remembrance, a safetyguard against forgetting? Does it providethe individual with at least some clues,some vague outlines, from which to discernhis family history? All I have are thesedoubts and feelings of loss, these questionswhich pull me on, step after step, a dance offolly. Over and over, knowing it is futile, Itry to create my own myth of history." Anengagement with these myths of history—acommitment to remembering and imagininglives, desires, and identities in diaspora—linksthe narratives of David Mura,Gish Jen, Wayson Choy, and Larissa Lai,narratives that sketch out important detailsin the increasingly heterogeneous field ofAsian North American writing.David Mura's Turning Japanese is a selfreflexive,theoretically-informed memoirthat narrates the story of a JapaneseAmerican poet's year-long stay in Japan.Make no mistake about it: Mura's narrativeis not a naive search for lost "roots" or anessential "Japanese-ness." Instead, Muraworks through the more difficult task ofrethinking what precisely "home," "nation,"and "culture" can mean to a JapaneseAmerican who would rather have gone toParis than Tokyo to spend a year writing.Mura realizes the need to imagine himselfin a tradition that has left him unimagined.By seeing himself as a bricoleur, one whohas to make do with the tools at hand,Mura draws upon and extends an importantcharacteristic of Asian NorthAmerican writing from The WomanWarrior onward: the need to negotiate acultural identity out of half-understoodphrases and half-remembered stories.Mura's search for "a perspective that wasnot white American" is urgent andinspired—the cultural continuity impliedby the figure of his unborn daughter providesTurning Japanese with an emotionalwallop that defies easy paraphrase.There is nothing as moving in Gish Jen'sTypical American, an ironic novel thatcharts the woeful consequences of Chineseimmigrants buying into the AmericanDream. Yifeng, a young, Shanghainese-162

speaking man, comes to the United States tostudy engineering; he changes his name toRalph Chang and dedicates his life to academicsbefore shifting his desire to the accumulationof capital. Typical Americanunflinchingly presents the price of capitalistimperatives: Ralph's entrepreneurial obsessions(he spends long evenings making phonycash register tapes to avoid paying taxes);his violence toward Helen (at one point hethrows her through a window); the cracksthat appear in the walls of "Ralph's ChickenPalace" due to its location on unstableland—all ask the novel's readers to rethinkwhat it means to buy into the AmericanDream. In the mid-1990s, however, TypicalAmerican's ironies verge on triteness—is itnecessary to read a novel telling us that theAmerican Dream is inherently racist andsexist? Is it enough to wonder, as Ralphdoes, how a nation involved in sendingsatellites into space could also have homelesspeople collapsing in doorways?Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony is a muchmore sympathetic novel, one that offers thepleasures of making small connectionsacross gendered, sexual, ethnic, and racializedpositions. The action of Choy's narrativetakes place between 1933 and 1942 inthe increasingly familiar literary geographyof Vancouver's Chinatown. As such, Choybuilds upon the work of Sky Lee andDenise Chong, and adds his own subtlevoice to the process of historical and culturalre-creation. The character ofGrandmama metaphorically enacts thishistorical search when she makes windchimesfrom discarded pieces of glass andcostume jewellery, searching the garbagecans of progressively more distant neighborhoodsfor "splendid junk." In turn, theyounger generations of characters maketheir own forays outside of Chinatown'sracialized boundaries. A notable example isthe illicit affair between Meiying andKazuo, an affair that defies the tensionsbetween Chinese Canadians and JapaneseCanadians during Japan's military conquestof China. In Choy's narrative, the characters"met at the Carnegie Library onHastings and Main, between the boundariesof Chinatown and Little Tokyo." Here,as always, Choy's understanding ofVancouver geography allows him to find itsseams and to create previously unimaginedmeeting spaces. And although the meetingspaces can be distressingly pluralistic—Choy's cast of characters includes a kindlywhite woman who brings a freshly-bakedapple pie, and a white teacher who wantsher students "to belong to a country thatshe envisioned including all of us"—Choyends The Jade Peony with the aftermath ofMeiying's gruesome self-performed abortion,reminding us of the risks and difficultiesinvolved in crossing the borders thatmark locations and identities.Larissa Lai's When Fox is a Thousand alsosearches for connections, but it completelyrejects pluralism and its easy elision ofhierarchies and exclusions. Lai is uncompromisingin her depiction of the violence—whetherracist, homophobic, ormisogynist—that characterizes life in contemporaryVancouver. Racist dialogue andmedia images (of Asian gangs and Asiandrug trafficking, to give only two examples)drift through the narrative, slamming intothe novel's characters with a deadeningthud; and, in what is perhaps the novel'smost powerful section, the voices of fiveAsian Canadian women narrate their ownmurders in Stanley Park—such is the grimsocial landscape exposed and challenged inLai's novel. What rescues When Fox is aThousand from total despair is Lai's desireto recreate history and redeploy myths fromfeminist and queer perspectives. Particularlyeffective is the wonderful wry commentaryof the Fox, a figure from Chinese mythology,who at one point realizes:how history gathers like a reservoir deepbelow the ground, clear water distilledfrom events of ages past, collecting sharp163

Books in Reviewand biting in sunless pools. How starsdream like sleeping fish at the bottom,waiting to be washed into the bowl of thesky some time in the distant future whenenough myths have collected to warrantnew constellations.I plan to see this come to pass.Of the four works discussed in this review,When Fox is a Thousand comes closest toimagining the new constellations of mythsneeded to understand the past and transformthe present.A Passion For DesignColin ISIaylor, ed.Contemporary Designers. St. James US$145.00Nancy Ruhling & John Crosby FreemanThe Illustrated Encyclopedia of Victoriana.Doubleday Canada $32.95Christopher BrewardThe Culture of Fashion: a New History ofFashionable Dress. Manchester UP £40.00/14.99Reviewed by Maria Noëlle NgContemporary Designers is a hefty book whichruns to 641 pages. According to the brief"Editor's Note," the "more than 600 entrants[are] intended to reflect the best and mostprominent of contemporary designers" inthe fields of architecture, fashion, graphicsand so on. The research for the book wasdone mainly in London-based institutions(Victoria and Albert Museum, BritishLibrary, amongst others), which mightexplain the paucity of Canadian entries. Ofthe 600 plus designers included in thisbook, only 4 are Canadians: graphicdesigners Allan Fleming and Rolf Harder,environmental designer Ernst Roch, andphotographer Nelson Vigneault. An obviousomission which comes to mind wouldbe the architect Arthur Erickson.I have tried to decipher the selectionprocess of the contributors and advisorypanels, and have failed to find any discerniblepatterns. The entrants seem heavilyweighted in favour of Scandinavian andGermanic nationalities. In the field of fashion,the contributors at least include theFrench, Italians and Americans, althoughagain, the selections are highly idiosyncratic,to say the least. Why would GilAimbez, a non-factor in the world of fashiondesign, be included, while ReiKawakubo, one of the most influential andoriginal designers today, is excluded? Someof the text is more puzzling than illuminating,as for instance, the entry on KarlLagerfeld. Of Lagerfeld's designs the contributorwrites, "Lagerfeld is so good at cutthat really he does not need to strive for asensational revival every season. He couldproduce the same classics every year ..."Not only are critical remarks like thistotally irrelevant to the field of fashiondesign which is excessively market-oriented,but they tend to reflect the personal tasteof the contributor rather than the art ofthe designer.The Culture of Fashion is both a socialsurvey and a theoretical study of the historyof fashion in England from 1300 to today. Itprovides fascinating information, such asthe effect sumptuary laws exerted on theconsumption of textiles in the 16th century.It also challenges the normative acceptanceof clothing as merely a utilitarian part ofdaily life, as well as expanding the discussionof fashion beyond the confines of aestheticand ceremonial functions. ToBreward, fashion touches and changes allparts of social life, and it is in turn changedby history. Thus, speaking of "the militarisationof male dress and the rise of a moresober patrician appearance from the 1750sonwards," he sees a direct link betweenthese sartorial trends and the rise of socialphenomena such as the public schooland fox-hunting, and the reform of thearmed forces.Breward's book is a work of carefulresearch. Each chapter is separated into twoparts. The first part outlines the historical164

development of the fashion of one particularperiod. The second part provides thetheoretical analysis. If there is a problemwith The Culture of Fashion, it is an embarrassmentof riches. It attempts to cover 700years of fashion history in a mere 7 chapters;sometimes, this abundance of materialscreates clutter rather than clarity.Breward also reproduces extensive quotations,at times running to over twenty lines.In one instance, Breward cites a social historianwho in turn quotes Arjun Appaduraiand Igor Kopytoff. This methodology hasits intertextual interests, but one wouldprefer to hear the author's voice moreoften. The problem of the over-crowding ofmaterials becomes most noticeable in thelast two chapters, which are devoted to the20th century. Although Breward allows thiscentury extra space, his study of the intricaciesand tremendous innovations of 20thcenturyfashion design still lacks coherence.As Breward himself admits, when speakingof late twentieth-century fashion, "Theexplosion of the fashion system into a fragmentedand highly diversified market...makes the task of constructing a linear historyof style change impossible and perhapsirrelevant." There is simply too much ofeverything to be treated in the allotted space.Such is not the case with The IllustratedEncyclopedia ofVictoriana. Lavishly illustratedwith colour-plates, it is the type ofcoffee-table book which gives pea-size definitionsof everything. The IllustratedEncyclopedia includes all kinds of abbreviatedinformation on the nineteenth century,from knick-knacks to architectural movements.Sometimes, this format is more thansufficient as, for example, the 12-line entryfor "summer dress." But for terms such as"prisons and jails," the cursory explanationof the social implication of these institutionsseems ludicrous. It would make moresense to exclude terms which deserve somedetailed attention and concentrate on thearchitectural and design items.Where The Illustrated Encyclopedia is adelight is in its handling of such obscureitems as "newel post light": "If the newelpost of the central stairway did not have afinial, chances are it had a light." The languagein this instance is crisply professionaland precise. Entries like this save the bookfrom over-indulgence. After all, how muchlace lambrequin can one take in a book?International CancritMickey Pearlman, ed.Canadian Women Writing Fiction. UP ofMississippi US$32.50Coral Ann HowellsMargaret Atwood. Macmillan £10.99Reviewed by Barbara PellThese two books represent the two poles ofinternational criticism of our national literature:naive, superficial generalization andsophisticated, knowledgeable literary analysis.In this case, as in some others, the formercomes from American sources and thelatter from a British critic.Mickey Pearlman is the editor of severalsimilar collections of essays and interviewsand of the companion volume to this,American Women Writing Fiction: Memory,Identity, Family, Space. She has assembledten critics who, according to the notes onContributors, are all Americans with nopedagogical or scholarly background inCanadian literature except for one Ph.D.student at Stanford who "is a displacedCanadian." They attempted to apply thefour "pervasive themes" from herAmerican text to a "similarly representativegroup of Canadians" and discovered,instead, that "the issue of identity was thelinchpin of Canadian writing by women—at least as we were seeing it." She tops thismind-boggling cliché by defining the differencebetween Canadians and Americansfrom the New York Times, the meaning of165

Books in ReviewMétis from Webster's, and the ethnicity ofour aboriginal people as "nativeAmericans." This collection of introductoryessays on fourteen living Canadian womennovelists (Margaret Lawrence [sic!] is onlymentioned twice) is obviously intended fora novice American audience. Each essay isfollowed by an extensive primary bibliography;secondary source references are cursoryand buried in the Endnotes (forexample, two journal articles and a NewYorker review on Margaret Atwood).The chapter on Alice Munro follows thethesis that "because her work is so closelyrelated to her life, and so thematically consistent. . . generalizations about setting andsubject are possible" with homogenizedlists of biographical fallacies and examplesof "fathers," "writers," "death," "sex" etc.Mavis Gallant is represented by plot summariesof five of her stories. The fifteenpages on Atwood's seven novels (up to Cat'sEye) are inevitably superficial, predicatedon the themes "that they are women's confessionalnarratives on a theme as old as'Know thyself" while "retaining that keytheme of the national literatures, the struggleto survive." The Québécois writers farebetter. Anne Hébert gets a solid, thoughbrief, introduction, and Martha M.Vertreace gives a twelve-page analysis ofMarie-Claire Blais's Deaf to the City,though never indicating why that novelshould be especially favoured.Some of the chapters on less well-knownnovelists would be useful as introductionsfor American readers. While it is not truethat "scant attention has been paid to theissues of identity that pervade [JanetteTurner Hospital's] novels," Margaret K.Schramm gives them competent, if conventional,readings. Eight pages on AudreyThomas' six novels highlight a few keythemes. A chapter on Isabel Huggan andJane Urquhart has some good insights onboth but never justifies juxaposing these"very different writers." Similarly, the sectionon Sandra Birdsell and Carol Shieldscontains some competent readings butfounders on the appalling intentionalityand oversimplification that these writers"responding to the call to explore Canadianidentity using postmodern techniques ...depict women who may be profitablyviewed as metaphorical of the Canadiancondition," and therefore the "Canadianborn"Birdsell depicts Canada with "angerand prejudice" while the "American-born"Shields writes of "the nature of happinessand of love." The final chapter on Canadianwomen of colour and the theme of immigration/assimilationbegins some interestingcommentary on Marlene NourbesePhilip, Joy Kogawa, and Beatrice Culletonand is therefore, for me, the most frustrating(and typical) section in the bookbecause, promising so much, it can deliverso little in eight pages of analysis.Coral Ann Howells, Reader in Canadianliterature at the University of Reading, hasalready written the kind of book that MickeyPearlman's should have been. Private andFictional Words: Canadian Women Novelistsof the 1970s and 1980s was a respectableaddition in 1987 to the Cancrit canon. Thepresent volume is part of the MacmillanModern Novelists series, the first of forty-sixstudies to be devoted to a Canadian (if oneexcepts Malcolm Lowry). This honour, ofcourse, confirms Margaret Atwood's internationalstature. Although these volumes areintended as "introductions" to the novelistsand their "major texts," Howells has produceda comprehensive and sophisticatedcritical study of all of Atwood's novels withdetailed close readings carefully supplementedby archival evidence and informedby a jargon-free use of contemporary theory.The first four chapters trace the "refigurations"of three significant Atwood themesacross her career with examples from earlyand late texts. The second four chaptersgive analyses of the remaining novels inchronological order, applying the same the-166

matic and textual insights. Chapter 1 introducesAtwood's life, the multiple representationsof "Canadian" and "feminist" in herwork, and her concerns with textuality andgenre—reflexivity, re-visionism, and intertextuality.These themes are expanded in the nextthree chapters. In Chapter 2, with "wilderness"as the key signature, Howells demonstratesAtwood's shift from the nationalistwritings of Surfacing and Survival to thepostcolonial interrogation of traditionalnarratives in "Wilderness Tips." Chapter 3reverses Toril Moi's terms to indicate theprogress of Atwood's "Feminine, Female,Feminist" themes. Howells reads The EdibleWoman through the lens of Betty Friedan'sThe Feminine Mystique in contrast to "TheFemale Body" (from Good Bones) whosegendered representations suggest parallelswith Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous.Chapter 4 examines Atwood's "reworkingof traditional Gothic motifs within theframes of realistic fiction" in Lady Oracleand The Robber Bride as exempla of her revisioningof cultural mythologies.The second half of the book devotes achapter each to detailed readings of fourlater novels. Life Before Man represents (inHomi Bhabha's vocabulary) a site of heterogeneousdiscourses within the "slippages"between genres. Similarly, BodilyHarm rewrites the female body "from thatborderline territory between fantasy andreality." The Handmaid's Tale, a feministdystopia, also interrogates gender andgenre and calls the reader to moral responsibility.Finally, Cat's Eye, Atwood's "lifewritingin the feminine," expands on Paulde Man, exposing the limits of female subjectivity.The conclusion summarizes withoutbringing artificial closure to a studywhich is both an intelligent introduction toAtwood and a worthy addition to the manycritical texts on her which Howell lists inher bibliography.MasqueradesBob PerelmanThe Trouble With Genius: Reading Pound, foyce,Stein and Zukofsky. U of California PUS$40. oo/$i6.00Gerald NicosiaMemory Babe: A Critical Biography of JackKerouac. U California P US$18.00Reviewed by Christopher Brayshaw"In a critical context, genius is anembarassment," admits Bob Perelman onthe first page of The Trouble With Genius,his study of four very different modernistwriters: two with well-established criticalindustries founded on the explication anddissemination of their work (Pound,Joyce), and two who have only recently metwith sustained critical attention (Stein,Zukofsky). According to Perelman, whatdistinguishes the writings of these fourfrom those of other modernists likeWilliams, HD, and Marianne Moore, is anencyclopedic inclusiveness which tends "toresolve into a record of the writer's mind atwork (or play), and hence into a kind ofongoing autobiography."Pound, Joyce, Stein and Zukofsky all conceivedof their sprawling works as "masterpieces—bibles,permanent maps or X raysof society, blueprints for a new civilizationor demonstrations of the essence of thehuman mind." But paradoxically, theseworks, which were meant by their creatorsto be practically useful to non-specialists,are stylistically challenging and deliberatelyobscure. Their social value has been consequentlymediated through a body of criticalwritings which legitimate the authority ofthe masterworks themselves. But asPerelman argues, the accessibility offeredby critical mediation often comes at theexpense of its value to anything but criticalor scholarly interests: "[I]n many cases thevalue that is asserted to inhere in [critical]reading is only at the service of narratives167

Books in Reviewof critical authority. . . .which can force usinto situations of permanent debt—a freedomto read that entails submission to endlessfree play where the playground is analready-written page re-constituted by professionalinterpretation." Perelman consequentlyprivileges the non-specialistreader's response to these masterworks asan integral part of their appeal "Although itcould easily be argued that this naive readingwould be worthless, it would be moreaccurate to consider it a constitutive featureof these works. The blankness that theyproffer the neophyte needs to be consideredas an integral part of their meaning,and not simply blamed on inadequatereaders, schools, or societies." Here, as insubsequent chapters, Perelman is at painsto demonstrate how "the referential, formaland syntactic singularities of this [genius]writing can also be read as the conflictedvehicles of polemics, appeals and pronouncementsaimed at, if not exactlyaddressed to, the writers' contemporaries."For instance, Perelman elides the distinctionmany critics have drawn between EzraPound's lyric poems and "the rhetoricalviolence and moral blindness of [Pound's]later politics," in order to show how "thesupreme social importance of a highly specializedconception of literature is the spurthat drives [Pound] out into public space."Pound's poetry and politics proceed fromthe same impulse. Lyric images, like thewell-known light images near the Cantos'end, are continuous with the "Fascist light"of the radio speeches. While lyricism maytemporarily mark out a "transcendentdimension" in the poetry, this lyricism is"never free from literary and politicalengagements."Perelman's chapters on Joyce and Steinare similarly engaging. Discussing Ulysses,with particular reference to "WanderingRocks" and "Nausica," he convincinglyshows how Joyce's stylistic experimentseventually overwhelm and subvert the narrativeimpulse of Ulysses' early chapters.And Perelman's chapter on Stein enabledthis non-specialist to see the effects of hernotoriously difficult phrasing on contemporaryCanadian poets like Betsy Warlandand b.p. nichol.Perelman draws upon a number of surprisinganalogies to support his arguments.Early on, he compares the "transcendentimpetuosity" of the Romantic conceptionof genius to the old ads for Tabu, the"Forbidden Fragrance." Later on, heinvokes a Bugs Bunny / Wile E. Coyote cartoon("The plot revolves around the title ofgenius. Coyote keeps naming himself one,pronouncing the title with obsequious selfcongratulation, Wile E. Coyote, Genius,and informing Bugs that it's no use runningbecause he is doomed to be eaten byhis superior.") Perelman's ideas crackle likeCoyote's famous flying dynamite; weemerge from The Trouble With Genii» witha sharpened sensitivity to the social relevanceof Pound, Joyce, Stein and Zukofsky'swritings, and the uncomfortable awarenessthat unscrupulous (Wile-y?) academics canemploy dead writers in the animation oftheir own pet theories.A different kind of masquerade isexposed by Gerald Nicosia's Memory Babe,the most exhaustively researched JackKerouac biography published to date. Oneof the most valuable aspects of this encyclopedicstudy is the care Nicosia has taken topreserve the complex, often totally contradictoryelements of Kerouac's personality.In an early chapter, Nicosia describes youngJack dividing himself into myriad fantasyselves. "Wearing a gunny sack for a cape,and his father's old slouch hat, Jack wouldburst out of the dark or from behind treeswith a sinister Mweel heel heel ha! ha!Starting with the Shadow character, heimprovised a range of personalities—though it is hard to say just when he gavethem definite names: 'Count Cordu' for thevampire, 'Dr. Sax' for the rather clownish,168

vaudevillian detective, etc." Kerouac'schildhood masquerades, which Jack usuallyperformed in front of an audience ofneighborhood children, are described as animportant precursor to the breathless outpouringsof words which characterize thefirst drafts of all of Kerouac's major works.Kerouac's masquerades closely resemble themultiple selves of his acquaintance WilliamBurroughs. According to Nicosia, whileundergoing "depth analysis," Burroughsonce "seemed to contain 7 or 8 separatecharacters." A favorite book of both menwas Melville's The Confidence-Man, whosecynical slapstick masquerades mirroredtheir own.If there's a failure in Nicosia's exhaustivelyresearched biography, it's that Nicosiais not a very insightful literary critic.Memory Babe constantly makes comparisonsbetween Kerouac's fictions and hislife, but reads the fiction through outmodedcritical lenses like color symbolism."Brown, grey and yellow all commonly signifythe mortal world, time, and decay; but[Kerouac] uses these colors in a more positiveway, emphasizing the warmth and tendernessof life." A little of this goes a longway; applied to every Kerouac novel, it getsdownright embarrassing. The end result ofNicosia's amateur criticism is that thoseaspects of Kerouac's fiction which are atodds with the Beat persona (like the mountaintop meditations transcribed in TheDharma Bums and the "Desolation inSolitude" section of Desolation Angels) arenever fully explored or used to illuminatebaffling or contradictory aspects of the fiction.By the end of Nicosia's book we knowKerouac the man in intricate detail, buthave no better understanding of how hislife was transformed in the masquerades ofhis fiction.Life ClaimsPenny PétroneBreaking the Mould: A Memoir. Guernica $18.00Elizabeth BrewsterAway From Home. Oberon $25.95/$i2.95Ann CharneyDobryd. Douglas and Mclntyre $16.95Reviewed by Melanie KolbeinsA proverb from Breaking the Mould: AMemoir, which states "whoever leaves theold road for the new knows what he [sic] islosing but not what he will find," aptly situatesPenny Petrone's memoir as well as twoothers: Elizabeth Brewster's Away FromHome and Ann Charney's Dobryd.Memorializing the authors' experiences ofthe 1940s and early post-war period, eachtext examines personal loss, uncertain subjectivity,and the author's sense of belongingor not belonging to a place.In Breaking the Mould, Penny Pétroneexplores her family's place of exile duringWorld War Two when Italian Canadianswere deemed to be "on the wrong side".Growing up Italo-Canadese in the northernOntario town of Port Arthur, Pétrone findsher parents' customs clash with localexpectations.Pétrone explores the implications of her"foreign" name, language, and "exotic"looks. For example, she frames her namechangefrom Serafina to Penny as anattempt to "erase the Italianness that thedominant culture despised" when she"should have been honoured by" her name.Photos that display Pétrone as a NorthAmerican ideal of feminine beauty contrasther memoir's attempts "break" with stereotypes.Breaking the Mould successfully revises,however, Petrone's adolescent rejection ofher working-class Italian-Canadian identityas represented by her mother. Regrettingher younger dismissals, Pétrone asserts that169

Books in Reviewher mother "defied all stereotypes," and"was by no means the Mamma mia of thetelevision ads—jolly, naive and round." Shereflects:Although I accused Mamma of being 'oldfashioned,'she was, as I think back today,ahead of her time. Canada waschanging her. There has always been thetendency in Calabrese culture to dote onsons, but I never felt that Mamma didthis. Nor did she put pressure on her girlsto get married. . . . She made me my firstpair of slacks.The concrete detail of sewing slacks representsPétrone and her mother's sharedbreak from gendered conventions and culturalnorms.Away from Home continues the selfexplorationof New Brunswick writerElizabeth Brewster's first memoir TheInvention of Truth (1991). Away From Homeconstructs most of Brewster's life through1946-51, retaining the "gaps" she deemsnecessary to "obtain some of the mystery offiction."Brewster's travels to Indiana and Britainbecome the means to considering questionsof national and fictional construction ofsubjectivity as the memoir considers thecondition of being "away." AlthoughBrewster admits that "the places journeyedto are not especially strange or exotic," sheasserts that "they were far enough and differentenough to cause some homesicknessas well as some sense of adventure, thatinevitable tension between the desire forchange and the yearning to be rooted toone sheltered spot."Brewster's inclusion of her own poetryand short stories, which elaborate and contradicther narrative, initially appears morecompelling than the life she narrates. Shejuxtaposes autobiographical and fictionalversions of her life story, emphasizing herliterary identity. In a poem, "In Favour ofBeing Alive," she introduces a despair thatis startling, given the mostly benign journeyingthat dominates the memoir. Thesecontrasts signal Brewster's construction ofsubjectivity as a mobile, ongoing literaryproject, which leads me to anticipate athird memoir that explores recent reflectionsof a mature writer.Ann Charney's memoir is named afterthe now-vanished Polish city Dobryd,which "left behind it a mythical legacy."Charney's text begins with her emergencefrom the loft that concealed her Jewishfamily. She recalls the young girl's need tohide, lie, avoid speculating about thefuture, and hate journeying because it signalledinstability and possible death. Shealso reveals that it is her early life inDobryd and her aunt's recollections of thelost town that teaches her the "secret vice"of storytelling. Her childhood fantasy life,which acts as a survival tactic, becomes heradult memorializing.Dobryd recovers lost lives and memoriesthe author has previously concealed.Connecting others to her own writing act,Charney writes: "Their emotions and myown flow through me, while I control theirgestures by transposing my own longingsand desires into their existence." The storiesof her aunt, mother, and the romanticizedsoldier Yuri who joins their family, createand obscure the past. Dobryd builds itself,like the resurrected town, from theseshared stories.Breaking the Mould, Away from Home,and Dobryd will be a valuable resource toautobiography theorists interested in theconnections between identity claiming andlocation. By recalling her and her family'scontradictory positions, Pétrone, for example,challenges the notion of a coherentgendered, "white," "Canadian," or"European" identity. Each of the memoirspoints to how the authors write themselvesinto particular locations—to accept andreject elements of their lives—and movesthem out of them again.170

Angel of TokyoMargaret PrangA Heart at Leisure From Itself. UBC $39.95Reviewed By Marilyn IwamaIn an age when many scholars privilegenotions of ambiguity over truth and viewmissionary evangelizing as aggressive colonizing,attempting "to portray the day-to-daylife of one woman missionary" is (at least)a provocative undertaking. Margaret Prangchose not to write the biography of CarolineMacdonald some years ago, she says, becausethe project also seemed "illegitimate" in anacademic climate which favoured the livesof "great" men. Now retired, Prang declaresherself unconcerned with such hierarchiesand blesses readers with her telling of a lifethat influenced prison reform, feminism,and the spread of Christianity in earlytwentieth-century Japan.Caroline Macdonald refused University ofToronto's offer of a graduate fellowship inphysics in 1901 to become general secretaryof the Ottawa YWCA. From 1904 to 1916she served as the first secretary for the "Y" inJapan, consistently working to reform thesocial conditions of women's lives and toensure their salvation. Macdonald's spiritualsupport of one prisoner led her to exhaustiveinvolvement in prison work, earning herthe title "white angel of Tokyo," as well asthe Emperor's Order of Merit. In later yearsshe actively supported the Japanese labourmovement and established a settlementhouse in Tokyo where a variety of classeswere offered to all, but especially designedto provide women a means to achievingmore than a life as "good wife, wise mother."Prang's effort is substantial. Intermixedwith her telling of the dailiness ofMacdonald's life are sociological and politicalinterpretations of events in the Meijiyears of "reformation," the optimism of theTaisho era, the years of increasing militarism,and the shattered illusions of postwaroccupation. There are necessary tensionsbetween descriptions of Macdonald'spersonal life and this environment whichshe made "home"—indicative of the changeJapan was working in Macdonald, even asshe was "reforming" Japan. These tensionsmay have distracted less from Prang's workhad she included more excerpts from correspondenceto Macdonald as well as longerpassages from Macdonald's own letters.Such inclusions may also have compensatedsomewhat for the lack of informationon Macdonald's early life. Nonetheless,Margaret Prang's sympathetic introductionto one who shunned feminist causes whilepractising a feminist Christian life is a stimulatingreflection on the ambiguities of aparticular life and time.Collaborative FireMarie Elyse St. George and AnneSzumigalskiVoice. Coteau $9.95Anne SzumigalskiZ: A Meditation on Oppression, Desire andFreedom. Coteau $9.95Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane, eds.Breathing Fire: Canada's New Poets. Harbour $16.95Reviewed by Susan GingellThe marvellous collection of Marie ElyseSt. George's paintings and Anne Szumigalski'spoetry that constitute the volumeVoice began as a response to the tarot, butas the artists caught fire from the spark of adetail, a mood, an image from the other'swork, the project acquired other referencepoints. The self/other portrait on the coverof a closed-eyed woman serenely playing aharp of human bones, veins, and organs isa signature piece for the collaboration'sunsettling blend of medieval and contemporary,of contemplative mood and physicalgrotesqueries evoking life, love, and death.Szumigalski playfully leads off her 1995Governor General's Award-winning collec-171

Books in Reviewtion with "Goodbye," and then addresses aparadox of life-writing in "Voice" to bringout the philosophic dimension of beginningsand endings: "How to begin a storyat the end, when the battle is fought andlost, and crows are picking the bones of allflesh?" But if at times the volume's dwellingon death gives it the feel of a farewell volumefrom a poet who, having lived a richlife, is content to take leave to embrace thechallenges of realms beyond, its clarity ofimage attests to lovingly attentive observationof what animates this life, and thetransformative energies of the text argueequally powerfully for the poet's insistentdwelling on the details of earthly existence.Szumigalski's strength as a poet oftensprings from the way she realizes one thingby representing it as another. Thus parachutistsdescend "like delicate mushrooms /with double stipes" and "The sun burns thelips of the waves / until they crisp and foldover, / pancakes ready for jam and cream"in "Goodbye." Poetry that pushes towardsallegory is a characteristic mode, "Malus"being a typical instance. The persona'ssurge of joy in the "small but uppity thing,"a seedling crab that has "volunteered in themiddle of [her] windflower patch," givesway to a more dubious response that itselfinvites readers to think beyond the literaltree. In this way the crab seedling comes tosuggest all that life unexpectedly gives us tonourish and that will then grow beyond us:"My darling seedling will you flourish? Whenyou're a sapling will you remember whowatered you on dry days? And will I still loveyou when you're four times my height... ?"Szumigalski has so often worked withother artists that her entry into the necessarilycollaborative medium of theatre in Z:A Meditation on Oppression, Desire andFreedom seems a logical extension of pastpractice. Her play, like her poetry, makesconsiderable demands on its audience,working as much through metaphor, paradox,and ambiguity as it does through concreteimages, like those of cages. Sparse inaction, the play opens not with stark realismbut with the joyless chanting of "Arbeit.Arbeit. Arbeit," and an elliptical lyric spokenby a female voice. This disembodiedcharacter prefaces the revelation her childwas snatched from her and smashed againsta wall with the enigmatic assertion "I wasmy own mother and I nursed myself. /1was my own child and I suckled myself."Z is an attempt to put down the heavystone that Szumigalski has carried since shewent as a Red Cross worker into the justliberatedNazi concentration camps. Widespreadknowledge of holocaust historymeans audiences have preconceptions aboutthe weight of that stone, and the play quicklyacknowledges the humiliations and genocideof the Jewish prisoners in the chant ofthe male voices "We are captive, / We arepowerless. / Nothing nothing remains / Butashes, ashes, ashes." Even the fact that gypsies,who are represented in the play by thecharacter Z, were considered lowest of thelow among the captives, will come as nosurprise to many. However, the particularoppression that the play brings newly tolight for most audiences is the presence ofsex huts in the camps, evidence that even inthe most humiliating circumstances malescontinued to assume and exercise the rightof sexual access to females. My dissatisfactionwith the playscript comes from itswasting the opportunity to explore moredeeply the fact that in the midst of theirown degradation, male prisoners could yetparticipate so willingly in the degradationof women from their own oppressed ethnicgroup. Instead Szumigalski uses the secondact of her play to present the rather clichédobservation that contemporary women andmen dishonour the memories of holocaustvictims by commodifying their suffering,here in the context of visitors and guides tomemorial gardens.Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane haveextended their on-going collaboration in the172

editing of a volume of new Canadian poets,in the tradition of Al Purdy's Storm Warningvolumes. The enthusiasm of both Purdy'sbrief foreword and the editors' introductionfor the quality of the work in general seemsexcessive in light of much that follows, butthe volume is worth its price for the range ofpromising new poets it introduces to a widerCanadian public and for the new territoriesthey open up: Evelyn Lau's gripping representationsof the emotional life and materialconditions of a sex worker, Mark Cochrane'schallenging evocations of latent homosexuality,and Heather McLeod's figuration ofthe mapless condition of some contemporaryInuit life are noteworthy exemplars.So is there one poet in particular towatch? For me the clear answer is MichaelCrummey. Like the other poets in this volume,he still has much to learn about thepossibilities of form, but the maturity ofvision and acuity of image in"Rivers/Roads" stand out:Consider the earnestness of pavementits dark elegant sheen after rain,its insistence on leading you somewhereA river is less opinionatedless predictableit never argues with gravityits history is a series of delicatenegotiations withtime and geographyGood, Bad and RealWomenMona ScheuermannHer Bread to Earn: Women, Money, and Societyfrom Defoe to Austen. UP Kentucky US$29.00George Holbert TuckerJane Austen The Woman, Some BiographicalInsights St. Martin's Griffin $19.99Reviewed by Barbara DarbyBoth Scheuermann and Tucker positionthemselves as antithetical to recent criticalapproaches. Scheuermann's target is criticswho emphasize the weakness and confinementof eighteenth-century fiction's femalecharacters rather than reading what theauthor wrote about them. John McAleer, ina Foreword to Tucker's book, praises thefact that "faddist criticism" can no longerobscure "Jane Austen's true image," whichTucker now provides. Scheuermann's"images of women" approach is valuablefor its concentration on female characterswho demonstrate financial acumen, selfdirection,and creative responses to problems.The painstaking archival research thatunderlies Tucker's observations about JaneAusten is admirable, but its contribution toour picture of Austen is ultimately unclear.By Scheuermann's account we should not"arbitrarily limit our images of women towomen authors." However, she also assertsthat "images of women in novels by womenare not obviously different from the imagesin novels by men," so the need for a correctiveis not always obvious. Defoe is praisedfor his financially capable women, whileRichardson and Fielding's images are condemnedas conservative or stereotypical.The radical novelists—Holcroft, Godwin,Bage, and Inchbald—present women whoare the intellectual equals of their malecounterparts. Wollstonecraft, by contrast,"condemn[s] characters to ... helpless dysfunction."According to Scheuermann,Austen's characters demonstrate her acceptanceof the social status quo.Scheuermann's subordination of gender toclass produces revealing comparisonsbetween male and female characters. Attimes, however, she seems dismissive ofgender-specific experiences of social, legal,or familial inequality. Indeed, for example,Scheuermann notes that it was "notunusual for very large sums of moneyeither to be controlled by a woman or tocome with her as her marriage portion,"but lamentably makes no distinctionbetween these financial situations.173

Books in ReviewScheuermann examines female charactersin books published over the course of acentury, providing excellent examples offemale characters who manage money welland prove themselves industrious. Somespeculation about why characterizations ofwomen have changed would have been useful.Another shortcoming here is the equationof characters' statements with authors'sentiments or the appeal made to ironyonly when it seems convenient. Defoe issaid to speak through Moll and is to betaken "at his word," "naked of any sort ofirony" when Moll describes her desire to bea Gentlewoman. Speeches by Roxana, however,are read as ironic. Fielding is not distinguishedfrom the narrator, andanti-feminist remarks by trustworthy charactersor bad ones are, "so to speak, on therecord." Austen's failure to comment on hercharacters' speeches is taken as an indicationthat she is unquestioningly supportiveof them. Scheuermann seldom allows thatreaders (then as now) may read betweenthe lines or may not require explicit commentaryon the inequities of gender or classin these fictional worlds. While I disagreewith Scheuermann's sense that gender is soirrelevant to social or private life, her mainpoint is a good one: the capability of femalecharacters is often obscured by critics whoemphasize the drawbacks to being awoman in the eighteenth century.Tucker attempts to avoid "the groves ofacademe" and provide a picture of "JaneAusten as she actually was." His bibliographyreinforces the sense of antipathytowards the academy; it includes nothingpublished on Austen more recently than1991 and excludes most of the studies considered"major" in Austen scholarship. Thebook includes chapters on Austen's homes,travels, beaux, and reading, and her relationshipto scandals, political events, religion,and so forth. The "true" imagepresented by the anecdotes and statementsabout Austen is framed by Tucker so thatwe are always encouraged to admire thenovelist. For example, the "vulgarity andcontemporary slang" in Austen's juveniliadoes not indicate any moral failing, but a"tolerance of human fallibility." This informationis often interesting, but is seldominterpreted convincingly and its relevanceto Austen critics is unclear. Evidence is usedselectively: Henry Austen's "BiographicalNotice" is both relied upon as accurate andreproached as misleading. And one must becareful about the time frame of Tucker'sevidence: one observation about Austencomes from a woman fully 57 years afterher last contact with the novelist.One may often disagree with the relativeinattention to gender issues inScheuermann's book, but she is thoughtprovokingand reminds us that differentand contradictory viewpoints produce usefuldiscussion. To my mind, Tucker's workoffers tidbits of information that are interestingbut unsynthesized. The reader is leftseeking an overview of the archival informationon Austen that would alleviate thesense of being bogged down by too manyunrelated details.Guy TalkBill SchermbruckerMotortherapy. Talonbooks $15.95Gerald LynchTroutstream. Random House n.p.Keith MaillardHazard Zones. HarperCollins $18.00Reviewed by Brett Josef GrubisicWhile the themes and preoccupations ofMotortherapy, Troutstream and HazardZones are diverse, one informative way tolook at them is as presentations of (white,heterosexual) male concerns. Certainly,beneath Motortherapy's melancholy,Troutstream's manic comedy and the mutedpain of Hazard Zones questions are beingasked about male friendship, father and son174

communication, as well as the perennialfavourite, the state of affairs between womenand men. Of course, Schermbrucker, Lynchand Maillard have themes to develop outsidethe one I have mentioned, so they documentcontemporary masculinity withvarying degrees of intensity.The title of Schermbrucker's story collectionpoints to things associated with conventionalmasculine activities. In his brief"Written in Car: A Preface," the author recollectsthat at a very early age his fatherwould drive him around as a means ofcalming his tears. Since then cars and drivinghave played a significant part in hislife. And motor vehicles figure prominentlyin the stories. The youth in "The RightTools" drives in a rickety 1949 Austin fromNairobi to Johannesburg through desertterrain and tsetse fly infestation. In another,a drunken academic hitchhikes from hishome in the Gulf Islands and assesses thepeople in whose vehicles he rides.Motortherapy is a baker's dozen of storiesthat describe life in places near and farflung—fromKenya and England to Torontoand the Gulf Islands. Schermbrucker's storiesare economically designed and matterof fact. By and large they focus on men andthe bonds between them. Women, thoughclearly important in the lives of the men,remain background figures outside the primaryfocus of the stories. Whether asdrinking buddies, rivalrous siblings orpartners sparring over metaphysical questions,Schermbrucker quietly celebratesmale relationships without looking tooclosely at the complex mechanisms whichpropel them.The stories are often imbued with a sadnessthat comes with realizing things have notturned out as expected. Schermbrucker'scharacters are plagued by divorce, lostopportunity, lack of direction and generalunhappiness. They are befuddled—it is asthough the bravado they were taught toexhibit has led nowhere, and now theymerely have diminished hopes and memories,or worse, alcohol and a refusal to grow up.Unfortunately, the stories are often tootransparent and, at times, Schermbruckerseems overly eager to highlight his principalpoint. In "North Burnaby, The Herdsmanand Freud," or "Spears," for instance, helabours his point—the Freud of the formerand the femme fatale of the latter remaincardboard devices utilized for an obviouseffect. Schermbrucker seems most comfortablewhen he is elegizing male camaraderie.In trying to incorporate othertopics—whether Africa or Freud—he is lesssuccessful.Not for a moment melancholic,Troutstream is a funhouse of misanthropicsatirical intent. With (at least) seven mendescribing their takes on life inTroutstream, Ontario, it is also a skilledventriloquist's act featuring both bizarreand mundane voices. The place itself, anaward-winning 1958 design representativewe are told of "the epitome of the 1950ssuburban dream," has more to it thanmeets the eye. Like David Lynch's film, BlueVelvet, Gerald Lynch shows that beneaththe spotless "heritage" veneer reign corruptionand misguided passions. It turns outthe "suburban dream," so much a part ofthe architect's vision, is easily dispelledonce humans come to town.Lynch intersperses first-person narrationwith chapters dictated by an all-seeing narratorwho points out connections and providesbackground. The narrators range indemeanor from the garden-variety jealousto the certifiably sociopathic, and in professionfrom graduate student to tavern proprietor.Lynch's narrative strands neverentirely coalesce, and I suspect that is theway they were designed: by displaying themultitudinous idiosyncrasies ofTroutstream's citizenry, Lynch is interrogatingthe boundaries of community and disputingthe very possibility of a humansettlement with no discord.175

Books in ReviewOn a less serious note, Lynch is just havingsatiric but affectionate fun peeking intosuburban life while simultaneously stretchinghis largely realist narrative to the breakingpoint. In Troutstream, psychic visions,grisly murders and tea-cup divination gohand in hand with interdepartmental rivalriesand tense backyard barbecues.Troutstream is like one of RobertsonDavies' strange little towns, but moretwisted and far less cohesive.The carnivalesque finale, "TroutstreamFun Fest," with its missing persons, Elvisimpersonators ("Elvii"), blind child andironic affirmation of community values,brings all Lynch's characters in one place.Frank O'Donaghue, high school teacherand self-confessed incarnation of Elvis andEvil (at once) is pushed offstage by anangry bouncer—normalcy returns toTroutstream, Lynch implies with a smile.Keith Maillard's Hazard Zones flows casuallyand is reminiscent at a glance of SaulBellow and Walker Percy. It tells a familiarstory of a man forced by circumstance toreturn to a hometown he associates withsadness, loss and disappointment. Once intown he revisits the past, comes to termswith it (sort of) and finally leaves it behind.My immediate difficulty with Maillard'snovel is that Larry Cameron, its problembesethero, is difficult to like and because ofthat his angst seems insincere and of passinginterest. Middle-aged and comfortablysituated, Cameron is nevertheless plaguedwith personal problems and self-doubt.Once he returns to Raysburg and his problemsintensify he becomes even moresullen, moody, uncommunicative.Cameron, a recovering alcoholic who stilldrinks frequently, often comes across aswhiny and smug. He has problems but isunwilling to look into himself or challengehis beliefs. When, for instance, he speaksabout university politics or literary theory,and even when he walks around Raysburg,he seems so self-satisfied that it is difficultto empathize with his current or past problems.It is clear in the way he has structuredhis book that Maillard wants readers tounderstand Cameron's journey into hispast has psychological resonance, but forme it was hard to accept.Hazard Zones is also hindered by its failureto add much new to a conventionaltheme. Even with allusions to Conrad andTwain, Cameron's trip home, to his past,himself and his heart of darkness, remainsfirmly within the boundaries of convention.As such, Hazard Zones risks appearinglike a pat literary exercise. When Cameronleaves Rayburg to return to his comfortablehome, career and family life, it feels likenothing has happened at all.Live SubjectsGabriele SchwabSubjects without Selves: Transitional Texts inModern Fiction Harvard UP US$34.50Reviewed by Geoffrey Winthrop-YoungWelcome to a kinder and gentler poststructuralism.Subjects may enter provided theyadopt an unpretentious demeanour. Afterplummeting from the heights of RenéDescartes—the imperial self grounded incertainties—to the depths of RodneyDangerfield—the concept that gets norespect—the time has come to rediscoverthe subject "not only in its psychologicalbut also in its theoretical constitution."This announcement sets the stage forGabriele Schwab's analysis of the dynamicsof literary subjectivity. Schwab knows thatthe success of her project depends onwhether she can provide a "theoretical constitution"of subjects and subjectivitieswhich will not be pronounced DOA by acritical discourse that delights in proclaimingthe death of this, that and the other. Sheenlists D.W. Winnicott's psychoanalytictheory of play and object relations and176

enriches it with Anton Ehrenzweig's theoryof creativity. The story goes like this: Asinfants learn to create mental supportstructures to cope with the mother'sabsence, they develop a "transitionalspace." Initially located between motherand child, this "no man's-land between Iand not-I" employs transitional objects likesecurity blankets and teddy-bears to stagedifferentiation and otherness to helpendure real-life partings and boundaryshifts. In time, children develop a capacityfor symbolization that will eventuallyenable them to handle somewhat moresophisticated cultural objects such as MobyDick and Gravity's Rainbow.These "transitional texts" have less to dowith mother-child boundaries than withthe fluid "horizontal" rupture within theself separating primary and secondaryprocesses. To assess Schwab's (re)evaluationof the primary processes of the unconscious,it is important to realize what, inher reading, the unconscious is not. It is notthe unruly Freudian cesspool waiting foranalytic drainage; it is not some pseudo-Lacanian Bastille of the symbolic order;and it is not something to be "liberated" byreversing the traditional hierarchy of secondaryand primary processes and lettingthe juices flow. Rather, poetic languageserves as a "mediator" tapping the creativepotential of the unconscious by bridgingthe gap between primary and secondaryprocesses, thus creating a "third-orderlevel" where these processes "are mediatedin a significant way".Schwab proceeds to analyse Moby Dick,The Waves, Finnegans Wake, TheUnnamable and Gravity's Rainbow. Thesechapters tend to be less original than theintroductory theory sections, frequentlyrephrasing, albeit very precisely, standardcritical insights. Many critics have arguedthat the texts in question—witness Joyce'sdebunking of Descartes' cogito ergo sum as"cog it out, here goes a sum"—are subvertinglinguistic, cultural and psychologicalconventions that come with a pétrificationof secondary processes; and they did sowithout the help of Winnicott andEhrenzweig. This, however, is what makesthe discussion of Gravity's Rainbow sointeresting. While many celebratePynchon's alleged celebration of releasedprimary processes, Schwab argues againstsuch a "postmodern infatuation with transgression",emphasizing that in the "thirdorder"rendezvous of primary andsecondary processes the latter's structurationis every bit as important as the former'sdéstructuration, a case the text itselfmakes by pointing out how easy it is co-optundifferentiated transgressions.In two concluding chapters, Schwab linksher findings to epistemological shifts inother areas, speculating on a "holonomy oftexts and subjects" by drawing connectionsto systems theory (Bateson), (re)interpretationsof entropy (Arnheim), and the holographicparadigm of Bohm and Pribram.Ambition breeds generalization. As interestingas these analogies may be, they forceher to ascend the abstraction scale andoffer formulations like "differentiation anddedifferentiation as complementaryprocesses of systemic regeneration andreorganization", which is a very elaboratedway of saying the very obvious.Nevertheless, this is an engaging andoriginal study; its originality rests to nosmall degree on its informed return to earlierformalist and psychoanalytic models.For all those lost in the "twilight of the ageof poststructuralist and postmodern sensibility,"here is an approachable camp-fire.You just have to step back a bit.177

Books in ReviewVoices and ChoicesJason Sherman, ed.Solo. Coach House $17.95Jerry Wasserman, ed.Modern Canadian Plays, 1970-1990, Volume II.Talonbooks $19.95Reviewed by Mark BlagraveGiven that printing a collection of texts willalmost inevitably be interpreted by someonesomewhere as an attempt at canonizing,and given current pressures torepresent "otherness" (while somehowmaintaining some kind of balance), thevery act of making any anthology is fraughtwith hazards. Such hazards are compoundedwhen the material collected isgathered under the rubric "Canadian"—thecountry is so large, so diverse.Jerry Wasserman and lason Sherman havebraved these challenges to produce twoworthwhile additions to the available selectionof anthologies of Canadian drama. Theirvolumes are as different in content and presentationas it is possible to imagine, suggestingthat the rich variety of contemporaryCanadian theatre is only to be properlyreflected through a collection of collectionsand not through any singular "textbook."Wasserman's collection replaces his 1985pioneering anthology. The second volume,under review here, concentrates on plays ofthe late 1970s and the 1980s: Zastrozzi, BillyBishop Goes to War, Balconville (allincluded in the earlier edition too), Doc,The Occupation of Heather Rose, Toronto,Mississippi, I Am Yours, Moo, Polygraph,and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing.As his introduction states, the selection featuresplays frequently produced and criticallyacclaimed (even commerciallysuccessful), being careful to include women'swriting (50%), Native writing, andQuebec writing. Specific choices seem torest at least in part on Wasserman's personaltaste and in part on the availability ofrights, but the editor recognizes the constantneed to revise "The List" of modernCanadian plays.Sherman's anthology, building on a componentof his earlier work in editing, alsofor Coach House, Canadian Brash, limitsitself to plays for one performer (a genrerepresented in Wasserman's collection byWendy Lill's The Occupation of HeatherRose, and, in a different way, by John Gray'sBilly Bishop Goes to War). Writers representedinclude Robin Fulford, KenGarnhum, Linda Griffiths, Joan Madeod,Judith Thompson, and Michel Tremblay.Notwithstanding the book jacket's aestheticallybaffling claims that the pieces are"intoxicating hybrids of theatre and fiction"(as if theatre were usually somethingother than fictional) and that they are evidenceof "drama's enduring role as themuse of literature," the plays represent abroad spectrum of approaches to the formalchallenges of single-performer drama.Device-motivated confession (talking totape recorders, videocameras, absentfriends or lovers) is joined by self-consciouslytheatrical confession and by overtperformance art.Some of the differences of approachbetween these two anthologies may beexplained through the differing backgroundsand pursuits of the anthologists.Sherman, himself a playwright and formereditor of what magazine, adopts a deliberatelyhands-off style as editor: "I wish I'dwritten each one myself. But since I didn't,I did the next best thing. I put themtogether in this book, so that more peoplecould hear them." Apparatus is limited to asimple but informative listing, at the backof the book, of production histories. The"foreword" is written in a style intended tobe savoured for itself. While its apparentthesis that 'these people are lonely' hardlydoes justice to the works (who could belonely with so many voices inside themselves?),it at least does little to interfere178

with readers' own responses to the texts.Wasserman, on the other hand, goesbeyond simply reprinting the texts themselvesto provide a wealth of additionalgrist to the critical mill. His volume, true tothe aspirations of its academic editor, providesan excellent bibliography section,including both a listing of biographical andcritical citations and a select listing ofnewspaper reviews—where possible, ofmore than one production. His generalintroduction to the volume provides a usefuloverview of developments in Canadiantheatre for the period covered by theanthology. The general introduction alsoseeks to offset the canonizing tendency ofanthology-making by providing criticalnotices of dozens of plays that are notincluded in the collection. Each of the individualplays in Wasserman's collection is, inaddition, provided with its own introduction.These describe production histories,and place each play within its author'sentire work, as well as providing a shortdescriptive and analytic critical essay. As aconsequence of all of these measures,Wasserman's volume appears very wellsuited to use as a textbook.The respective decisions to provideextensive critical apparatus for one collectionand relatively little for the other mayalso relate to the differing contents of thetwo volumes. Considerable attention is currentlybeing paid to the relative potentialsof conventional dialogue-based drama onthe one hand and monologue on the otherto give equal play to several voices—theargument being that a finished conventionaldrama usually bears the sound of asingle authorial voice and is susceptible tounified interpretation, while monologue,paradoxically, may often present a muchless unified view, thus allowing many voicesto be heard. On the surface, it might appearthat Wasserman's efforts to analyze for hisreader the dramatic texts in his collectionrepresent a need to tame and unify themultiple positions expressed in the plays—to compensate, in a sense, for their "dramatic"nature. His success in providingcogent analyses, however, may in fact indicatethe essentially "monologic" nature ofhis material: it is amenable to a unifyingview. By contrast, the absence of analysis ofthe plays in Solo may be best suited to theessentially "dialogic" nature of these monologues:their many voices must be allowedto speak separately for themselves.In compiling their anthologies, bothWasserman and Sherman have given "airtime" to many of the important writingvoices in contemporary Canadian theatreand to the various kinds of voice and numbersof voices involved. Neither Shermannor Wasserman confuses anthologizingwith canonization. These are not intendedto be "last words"; we can look forward tofurther volumes. It is interesting to note,moreover, that in neither anthology is thereany attempt (by editor or by playwright) tobe explicitly "Canadian" or to define"Canadian" or "Canada." The transcendenceof self-conscious "Canadian-ness" byboth of these volumes of Canadian playsmay be their most significant comment onthe state of contemporary Canadian drama.Littératures et altéritéUNEQDéveloppement et rayonnement de la littératurequébécoise: un défi pour l'an 2000. Nuit blanchen-P-Sherry SimonLe trafic des langues: Traduction et culture dans lalittérature québécoise. Boréal $24.95Reviewed by Alain-Michel RocheleauÀ l'aube de l'an 2000, force nous est d'admettreque les littératures nationales, historiquementliées à la définition des espacesculturels, sont désormais marquées pardiverses formes d'altérité. La littératurequébécoise, qui s'est autonomisée au fil du179

Books in Reviewtemps à coups de coeur et d'ambitionsidentitaires, n'a pas échappé à ce phénomène.À titre d'exemple, nombreux sont lesauteurs qui, par le biais d'oeuvres traduiteset diffusées dans plusieurs langues,rejoignent aujourd'hui la sensibilité denombreux lecteurs vivant à l'extérieur duterritoire québécois ou, encore, témoignentde la présence de l'«Autre» dans un Québecde plus en plus cosmopolite. En quelstermes peut-on définir la littérature québécoisecontemporaine? Est-elle toujourssynonyme d'identité et de fierté chezceux—écrivains, éditeurs, professeurs, critiques,traducteurs et lecteurs—qui en fontla promotion? L'altérité, de plus en plusvisible dans les textes d'auteurs québécois,correspond-t-elle à un désir de reconfigurationsociale et identitaire sur le territoire duQuébec? Telles sont, entre autres, les questionsabordées par les auteurs d'un ouvragecollectif intitulé Développement et rayonnementde la littérature québécoise: un défipour l'an 2000 de même que par SherrySimon dans Le Trafic des langues.Le premier ouvrage, qui correspond auxactes d'un colloque tenu en mai 1992 parl'Union des écrivaines et écrivains québécois(Uneq), est le fruit d'une vaste réflexionsur l'évolution de la littérature faite auQuébec. Cinquante-quatre textes,regroupés autour de cinq grands thèmes dediscussion—la «spécificité» de la littératurequébécoise, sa promotion et sa circulationdans les médias, le rôle de l'écrivain dansune société en mutation, l'avenir de la lecturede même que celui de l'industrie et del'économie du livre—, guident l'intelligencedu lecteur dans le double sentier dela «retrospection-prospection» tout enfaisant un bilan de santé de l'institution littérairequébécoise. Si pour certains participantsla littérature québécoise s'identifieencore beaucoup trop à un geste de repli,donnant du même souffle autorité à un discoursnationaliste quelque peu étroit, pourd'autres, au contraire, le rapport entre cultureet littérature québécoises se déploie,depuis quelques années, sous l'angle del'altérité en permettant à des auteurs d'originesdiverses—italienne, marocaine ouhaïtienne—de s'affilier à la littérature d'expressionfrançaise du Québec. Ce nouveautype de rapport forcerait les intervenantsdu monde littéraire à s'interroger sur lesliens que l'on peut établir entre une littératuredite «nationale» et la pluralité des écrituresqui la constituent. Plusieursparticipants au colloque font égalementallusion dans leur texte à une mutation durôle de l'écrivain que l'on reconnaîtraitdans la diversification des écritures et dansles références faites, par bon nombre d'auteursquébécois, à des contextes culturelsmultiples. Évoluant dans un monde pluralisteet étant sollicité par le multiculturalismequi l'entoure, l'auteur de texteslittéraires ne pourrait plus écrire en vaseclos. Cette diversification dans l'écriturevaudrait tout autant pour la lecture. Lesdifférents auteurs de Développement et rayonnementde la littérature québécoise: un défipour l'an 2000 s'entendent également pouraffirmer que la littérature, à la remorquedes médias électroniques, est mal desserviepar ces derniers et que, dans l'ensemble, lemilieu médiatique reste assez indifférent—pour ne pas dire ignorant—face à la littératurequébécoise. La politique éditorialeconcernant la couventure des livres sembleraitprivilégier, aux dires de plusieurs, lalittérature des «autres»—Français etAméricains—et laisserait de côté la plupartdes écrivains québécois. Bien que l'actualitélittéraire ne tienne que très peu compte dela présence des auteurs du Québec,plusieurs admettent toutefois dans leurcommunication que la situation généralede l'industrie et de l'économie du livre auQuébec s'améliore au fil du temps. Le livrequébécois serait traité, selon certains, sur lemême pied d'égalité que les productionsétrangères, autant en bibliothèque qu'enlibrairie.180

Dans Le Trafic des langues, Sherry Simonaborde, quant à elle, des oeuvres de la littératurequébécoise qui mettent l'accent surla traduction entrevue comme un processusde négociation linguistique et culturelle.En "faisant de la relation d'altéritéculturelle la matière [.. .] de leur travailtextuel," bon nombre de productions culturellesdu Québec interrogent, aux diresde l'auteure, "cette étrangeté «en nous» quiest aujourd'hui caractéristique de touteidentité culturelle." Partant du principe quela traduction d'oeuvres québécoises actualiseles frontières linguistiques et crée lerapport à l'altérité, madame Simon examinetout abord le travail de Jacques Braultpour démontrer comment la «non-traduction»illustre le caractère tributaire de touteparole poétique. Puis, en explorant l'oeuvrede Nicole Brossard, Sherry Simon montrede quelle manière les traductions en langueanglaise de certains textes de l'écrivainequébécoise, en parfait accord avec les versionsoriginales, interrogent les structuresrépressives du monde patriarcal. L'auteuredu Trafic des langues parvient également àillustrer comment l'écriture d'A.M. Kleinintensifie différents mécanismes dedépaysement linguistique, à prouver que lamixité langagière des personnages deDaniel Gagnon et de Jean Forest témoignedes problèmes d'expression de soi dans uncontexte de non-maîtrise culturelle et àexpliquer de quelle manière Régine Robin,Francine Noël et Monique LaRue réussissent,dans leurs oeuvres respectives, àtraduire la confusion qu'engendre lecaractère cosmopolite des villes lorsque différentscodes—linguistiques et culturels—entrent en contact. Madame Simon exploreenfin les effets engendrés par le pluralismelinguistique dans les oeuvres théâtrales deMarco Micone et de Robert Lepage, àsavoir, la mise en cause des évidences del'ethnicité et la mise en valeur des processusd'affrontement et d'accommodation culturelsqui en résultent.S'il faut saluer la qualité du travail accomplipar Sherry Simon, comme l'ont déjà faitd'ailleurs plusieurs critiques, on peut dumême souffle déplorer la «minceur analytique»des propos consacrés par l'auteure àla Trilogie des Dragons de Robert Lepage.Développement et rayonnement de la littératurequébécoise, bien que négligé par la critique,prend l'allure d'une réflexionpertinente et nourrie sur la littérature—roman, poésie et essai critique—duQuébec. On peut cependant regretterqu'aucun espace de cet ouvrage n'ait étéconsacré au théâtre québécois, comme si lestextes dramatiques joués et publiés auQuébec n'avaient que très peu contribué aurayonnement de la littérature québécoise.Cultural ElegiesTerry WatadaA Thousand Homes. Mercury $11.50Pindar DulaiRagas From the Periphery. Arsenal Pulp Press $12.95Reviewed by Scott McFarlaneThese two recent volumes of poetry engagethe limits of identity politics in interestingways. I'll start with Terry Watada's AThousand Homes. The Japanese Canadiancommunity is undergoing radical self-critiquein the "post-redress" (1988) era. Thedominant socio-historical narrative whichtraces the arrival of immigrants and thestruggles to adapt by succeeding generationsis falling sway to a less stable sense ofhistory and self characterised by globalmigration and an identity politics foregroundingcultural differences within thecommunity. The post-redress period is alsocharacterised by an outburst of writing byJapanese Canadians whose texts are notcentred on the internment.The lyrics that compose Watada's firstvolume of poetry seek both to "coax thevoices/ of [the] dead" and to presence thepermanent spirit of his various family181

Books in Reviewhomes symbolically represented by Genyo,the name of the family estate:The ghosts were everywhere.The creaks of Genyobetrayed their presence.The text is replete with ghosts and hauntings,head stones and graves, death andfuneral pyres as the poet honours his parentsand mother in-law, searching for aspiritual ground within the flux of history.The volume is composed of two sections,Waka, and A Thousand Homes. Watada is awell-established musician in the communitywith several recordings to his creditand Waka, or songs, is a collection of sixteenpoems written between 1981 and 1992.These ballad-like "folk songs" offer portraitsof family members and homes forgedthrough a communion in music as the poetechoes the laughter that lay "beneath oldJapanese songs."The second section conjures the life of thepoet's mother, Chisato, which literallytranslates as "a thousand homes." Theseelegies record the arrival of Chisato fromJapan and her experiences of both theinternment and the dispersal and the raisingof children in a variety of "homes" inCanada. This poem-series is steeped in thenarrative of immigrant arrival and adaptationwhile trying to cling to a culturalessence. Interestingly, the poems continuallystruggle against the poet's hesitations,self-doubts and sense of alienation andblindness. One can only have so much confidencein a vision of ghosts and the makingpresent of those departed. It is thistenuous vision, this sense of a fragiledream-scape which most eloquently andpersistently records not only the poet's relationshipto his mother and past generationsbut also honours the death of a particularway of recording Japanese Canadian history.The elegiac here, has become the necessarydiscursive mode for the hauntedhistorical narrative of immigrant arrivaland adaptation—as well as the culturalidentities established by it.The cultural relations between what thepoet refers to as the "dominant culture"and those on "the margins" are the subjectof Pindar Dulai's Ragasfrom the Periphery."Raga" refers to the melodic conceptualsystem of Indian classical music and is aSanskrit word derived from the verb ran;,meaning "to colour, to tinge with emotion."The extremely subtle melodic structures ofragas coupled with the stress on impartingemotions—often at a particular time ofday—makes them highly performative innature and not readily rendered from scriptor recordings. Some masters will only perform"truly" for their disciples. Dulai thustakes on quite a challenge in trying to produceragas for his first volume of poetry.Dulai works by means of melodic interventions,incorporating the sounds of thetablas drum, often in order to fragmentwords and their metre. Slashes, bracketsand the insertion of other sounds are alsoused to this effect. The play of rhythm conteststhe grammatical drive of the English,insisting on "peripheral" melodies fromwhich the lyrical quality of the poemsemerge. It is the need to be heard and tomake present a sense of his own peripheralexperiences that drives the emotional rangeof this text from anger and surly disillusionmentto celebration and love.These emotions from the margins arealways rallied against a dispassionate "centre"which takes the form of a monolithic(read "white") national culture, a traditionalEnglish canon, or a culturallyimpoverished cityscape:This retrospect explosionof nightmare syncopationadds subtlety to the screamthat carries down the earof a deaf suburbDulai does not take on the many pitfallsof the centre-margin binary he employs tounderstand cultural relations and as a182

esult the poet often engages with clichésand risks simplification. On the one handthis problem seems with the poet's ownexperimentation with melody. On the otherhand the melodramatic, perhaps, emergesas an important means of articulatingracialised experiences in Canada. We seethis in the nine poems dedicated to thepoet's experience as a parking lot attendant—particularlyin poems such as "TheMonthlies." In "The Booth," stereotypesdrive in and out of the melodramaticunderground that seems to be both oursuffocating "lot" and the machine-like endsof an identity politics vacant of ethics.Ground level and underground are bothplaces of alienation, though of differentforms. At street level people come and go,talking of Michelangelo:On the streetI wear a Michelangelotieand my navy bluepantsflap in the breeze . . .Enter the booth . . .[and] i becomepart of the parkingmachineryWhen both the "periphery" and "centre"cruise and crash within the autos of liberalidentity politics the question is asked:"Who's financing the assembly line?" Asour literary industry continues to assembleand bind the lines which commodity raceand race politics, in what ways is "race"becoming a discursive fact? It's cultural elegiesand melodrama here, haunted by theforce of a global political economy.Sketches, Fragments andEchoesCarol Anne WienTurtle Drum. Oberon, $25.95/512.95Helen McLeanSketching from Memory: A Portrait of My Mother.Oberon,Reviewed by Coral Ann HowellsThere is still one more Brazil story somewherein the back of my head, but I cannotquite get the shape of it. It's not oneof those stories where you start with asingle taut sentence . . . It's just threeimages, fragments that roll over the floorof my mind like shells on polished hardwood:they leave an echo.The opening of "Shells" from Wein's firstcollection signals both the promises andfrustrations of narrative, together with thenarrator's search for significant form whichwould give order and sense to raw materialswhich haunt the memory. Such quests formeaning characterise the efforts of Wien asfiction writer and of McLean as biographer,so that generic borders blur in the storytellingprocess.The eight stories in Turtle Drum, mostlyabout nomadic women, are held together ina loose design which comes into focus withthe title story at the end. They represent avariety of women as narrators or protagonists—naiveyoung students, brides andmiddle-aged divorcees, old women remembering—anda variety of locations, fromearly stories set in Toronto and Cape BretonIsland, through a group of three set in SouthAmerica: "Transient," "How Far Is It toOuro Preto?" and "Shells," to a final storyset on a Native reserve on an island in theGreat Lakes. Scattered locations and diverseexperiences, but there are common denominators:thematically, in these women'sawareness of being outsiders sometimeseven in their own lives and their dawningrealisations of what they do not—cannot183

B o o k s in R e v i e wpossibly—understand; and stylistically, inthe use of bizarre and spectacular imageslike the monstrous severed head of a cow in"Bride on a Carousel" or the terrible face ofthe monkey "like a Hallowe'en mask" in"Shells." Indeed, the criticism might bemade that these images generate moremeanings than do the stories in which theyare embedded.Despite such imagery, these are stories ina minor key where well-meaning whitemiddle-class Canadian women try to cometo terms with otherness in cross-culturalencounters, and signally fail to do so. Lisa,a young student from Cornell, finds herselfholding an abandoned baby in a red jumpsuiton a deserted railway platform inMexico, and an enthusiastic young womanon a summer job at a Native reserve"accepts turtle claws from Fox and dancingbells from Montgomery and for the firsttime it occurs to me that maybe a nativegirl wouldn't do this." Whether stories arein the first person or the third, it is as if theauthor is wiser than many of her characters,for they are revealed as dangerousinnocents abroad who wreak havoc withthe best will in the world:I would protect Fox if I could from my culture,but it is already too late. I have nothingto give back, nothing to give back,and Mink and Fox's child are lost.However, not all the stories are quite sodevastating in their social critique. Thereare moments of grace and forgiveness containedin revelations of human intimacyalthough Wien's protagonists remain"watchers on the outside" and are left withnothing but glimpses and echoes.Helen McLean's Sketching from Memory:A Portrait of My Mother shares this fragmentedquality as she tries to figure out hermother's life, first in the cover sketch (forMcLean is best known as an artist) and thenin the narrative. It is an unfinished portraitwhich retains some of the tentativeness of asketch, as the ambiguously weighted titlewould suggest. The story opens with thesight of a ninety-year old woman in a nursinghome suffering from Alzheimer'sDisease and a daughter's flood of grief atthe prospect of losing Mother: "I had neverbefore imagined this world without mymother in it. I hadn't realized how much Iloved her until now." This is a curious andfascinating biography, written undoubtedlyout of love but love of a sometimes tormentedkind, and it is as much autobiography,family history and social chronicle oflife in Toronto in the 1930s and 40s as it isthe mother's story.McLean manages to write without sentimentality;she who is now the keeper ofmemory goes in search of her lostmother—as an unloved foster child fromGeorgian Bay, later as the wife of a farmer'sson who becomes a Toronto lawyer and as amother who is who is "alternately affectionateand ferocious." McLean's narrative,like Wien's, is constructed from images or"mental snapshots" as she calls them,which cannot be fitted neatly togetheralthough they occur in chronologicalsequence. The most vivid memories of themother are from a child's perspective: ofbeing ill with scarlet fever in the 1930s (inthe days before "antabeeotics") with"Mother leaning over me in lamplight atnight, raising my head to get me to drink,"or of Mother as family tyrant whose emotions"would make or break any occasionfor all of us."As if to contain these irreconcilables,McLean offers brilliantly detailedMunroesque descriptions of 1930s houseinteriors (several of them) for her familymoved many times during the Depressionand then again to Forest Hill during theupwardly mobile 1940s, when automaticwashing machines and supermarkets werenew and exciting. She is an astute chroniclerof the subtleties of Toronto middleclasslife, though her forte is the bizarre,184

like the sign of her mother's worseningmental condition: "Her mink scarves andstoles had deteriorated to the extent that Iwould find, with a shriek, their detachedpaws and tails among her blouses andunderwear."There are traces of ferocity and pain in thisnarrative where the mother's life remains asunaccountable as an "irrepressible naturalforce." Yet storytelling does effect a kind ofreconciliation for the narrator at least,when she is able to resolve contradictoryemotions into elegiac contemplation of hermother's death:When that time comes, we will go back tothe rattling pebbled shore where sheonce supervised our swims, play a littleBach on a portable machine and add herashes to the memories, one superimposedupon another.Repulsion and DesireRobert J.C. YoungColonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture andRace. Routledge n.p.Sui Sin FarMrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings. Ed.Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks. University ofIllinois P us$39.95/$i5.95Annette White-ParksSui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton. A LiteraryBiography. U of Illinois P US$34.95Reviewed by Maria Noëlle NgIt is a convenient but misleading belief thatthe relationship between nineteenth-centurycolonizers and their colonized subjectswas implacably hostile, that the colonizersdespised the natives, and in turn, werehated by the colonized people. If the situationwere truly of such manichean simplicity,research on colonial and postcolonialtopics would soon have come to a halt.Historical realities indicated a somewhatdifferent picture, one of cross-culturalcomplexities and ambivalent responses.Robert Young is one of the scholars whodesire to unravel the intricacies of colonialrelationships. He believes that contactsbetween races invariably leave traces whichbecome incorporated into both cultures,and in Colonial Desire, he argues with rigorousscholarship that the dialectics ofcolonial culture in the nineteenth centuryinvolved unconscious practices of acculturation,and sometimes, intentional transgressionand subversion. Young's purposein Colonial Desire is to examine the "historicalgenealogy" of cultural hybridity bytracing "the strange and disquieting ramificationsof its complex, forgotten past."He begins his exploration of the "forgottenpast" of cultural hybridity with a discussionof Johann Gottfried Herder, theeighteenth-century German philosopherand philologist. Some of Herder's writingsare fine expressions of the dilemma culturalistsfaced, and are facing still, in discursiverelation to the "Other": how does onediscuss another culture without assigningalterity and value judgement? Herder,according to Young, wrote against ethnocentrism,yet at the same time he had tocome to terms with the "obvious" racialdifferences between the Europeans and theinferior Africans. This pattern of culturaldesire tempered by racial repulsion wasrepeated by various anthropologists, ethnologists,biologists and so on throughoutthe nineteenth century.Young reminds the readers, in his discussionof the rise of racialism and itsentrenched position within nineteenthcenturythinking, that "modern racism wasan academic creation." This claim is supportedby careful readings of works byinfluential culturalists such as Arnold andGobineau. Perhaps the best illustration ofthe ambivalent attitude Europeans nursedtowards racial purity and contamination isa long poem by Issac Teale, which wasincluded in a history of the West Indiescolonies by Bryan Edwards in the 1790s. In185

Books in Reviewthis poem, both the "sable and saffronbeauties of the West Indies" are praised asdesirable objects. Edwards made quite clearin his colonial text that he would condonesuch an attitude only for commercial reasons;otherwise, white men desiring native womenwould be "a violation of all decency anddecorum." To Young, this is an instance of"the corrupt conjunction of... hybridizedsexual and economic discourses" which hasfuelled the concept of race.The last chapter of Colonial Desire seemsto be a brief revisit of subjects Young hasdiscussed in his previous book, WhiteMythologies (1990). Indeed, his latest bookwill read very well as a companion volumeto the earlier one.One of the products of cultural contactsis the children of mixed-racial origins.These results of "miscegenation" historicallyoccupied a position fraught with anxietyand shame within European society. SuiSin Far, an Anglo-Chinese writing at theturn of the century, addresses this situationin some of her writings. Born Edith Eaton,Sui Sin Far came from a large Victorianfamily of shabby gentility. Unable to make acomfortable living in England, Mr. Eatonmoved his family to Montreal in 1872/73. Atan early age, Edith Eaton tried to supporther family by writing. She changed her nomde plume to Sui Sin Far when she began toexplore more exclusively the world ofChinese immigrants in Montreal and alongthe Pacific coast. Mrs. Spring Fragrance andOther Writings is a selection from her journalisticand fictional works, edited by AmyLing and Annette White-Parks.This collection is divided into two parts.Part 1 contains short stories from Mrs.Spring Fragrance, published in 1912, andPart 2, newspaper articles and other uncollectedstories. As the name of the eponymouscharacter suggests, there is anold-fashioned quaintness in all the stories.That Sui Sin Far herself did not know theChinese language contributes considerablyto this stylistic archness. Writing to herhusband, Mrs. Spring Fragrance coyly pens,"Greeting from your plum blossom, who isdesirous of hiding herself from the sun ofyour presence ..." The writer no doubtwas desirous to convey the syntax of a foreignlanguage; the effect is to render thecharacters cartoonish.In contrast, her newspaper and magazinearticles are written in an unembroideredstyle, and are some of the most interestingrecords of early Chinese immigrant lives inCanada and in California. One can detect ashift in allegiance in Sui Sin Far's writings.In her reports in the early 1890s, Sui Sin Farsees the Chinese immigrants with an outsider'seye. But her later pieces, such as "APlea for the Chinaman" (1896), prove thatshe had come to identify more stronglywith the Chinese side of her background.Annette White-Parks' Sui Sin Far/EdithMaude Eaton is an exhaustive and generousbiography of this Eurasian writer. The bookprovides a detailed account of the Eaton'sfamily life as well as an analytical summaryof Sui Sin Far's writings. The biographer iswell aware of the question of quality whichbesets any evaluation of non-canonicalwriters, and she returns to this issue periodicallythroughout the book. For White-Parks, Sui Sin Far's pioneer status as thefirst Eurasian woman writer in NorthAmerica itself merits critical attention."[T]he issue of quality in [Sui Sin Far's]writings cannot be addressed in the absenceof the cultural and literary contexts withinwhich she wrote," contends White-Parks.Thus the first two chapters of Sui SinFar/Edith Maude Eaton deal with the beginningsof the Anglo-Chinese union betweenEdward Eaton and Lotus Blossom inShanghai in the 1860s, and the large family(fourteen children) which they eventuallyengendered. This marriage alone deservesthe interest of Asianists. How did LotusBlossom meet Eaton, and what kind ofcourtship did they conduct, during the very186

tense decades when western nations firstforced their attentions on an unwilling andxenophobic China? Why did Edward Eatonnot desert his Chinese woman, as was thecustom of so many of his compatriots, andreturn to England for a conventional marriedlife? Of course these are not the mainconcerns of White-Parks' study, but theanswers would no doubt provide furtherinsight not only into cultural contact in thenineteenth century, but also into the consciousnessof cultural hybridity.The brief comparison between the twoeldest Eaton daughters also makes for fascinatingreading. Edith Eaton became Sui SinFar, a champion of Chinese immigrant culture,while Winifrid Eaton wrote popularnovels with Japanese themes under thepseudonym of Onoto Watanna. She alsodenied her Chinese ancestry by concoctinga highly romanticized imperial Japaneseand aristocratic English background for herfamily. One could not but be reminded ofYoung's contention that in cross-culturalsituations, repulsion is in constant conflictwith desire. The sisters represented bothsides of the equation. Although White-Parks does not dwell on this aspect of theEaton relationship, the materials are certainlythere for further research.187

L a s tP a gMapping 1996W.H. NewAt the beginning of Gerald Lynch's newedition of Stephen Leacock's SunshineSketches appears a "map" of Mariposa. Thestreets are carefully laid out, the sites indicatedwhere fictional episodes "take place."In a way, this impulse to map—to mapthere and here, then and now, and maybe aworld to come as well—epitomizes the literarypublications of 1996. The desire tomake relationships clear, to explain why theworld is as it is: that seems to have been ofoverwhelming concern—even if it ledsometimes to a certain arbitrariness ofsolution. The illusion of knowing all took akind of precedence over the will to enjoyambiguity.Consider some of the other reprints of theyear. Besides Leacock's text (which comesfrom Borealis, complete with criticalessays), Tecumseh Press published AgnesMaule Machar's Roland Graeme: Knightfrom 1892, a didactic account of theAmerican social gospel movement, andBasil King's The Garden of Charity from1903, in which a bigamous Nova Scotiandies, leaving two wives, who courageouslyif sentimentally resolve to bring uphis/their one child together. I admire theediting here, and as always the desire toknow more about the past; but some textsreally don't reward rereading. I enjoyedD.W. Higgins's Tales of a Pioneer Journalist(Heritage House) more—journalisticaccounts of history reprinted from Victorianewspapers of the 1860s; and the 54 excerptsfrom Roderick Haig-Brown's writings thathis daughter Valerie collected in To Know aRiver (Douglas & Mclntyre)—includingone of my favourite of his essays, "TheNature of Estuaries"—though in a numberof cases the excerpts do read a lot like dutycolumns, stylish but less far-reaching thanone might hope. I am less persuaded by theessays that Arthur Davis has collected asGeorge Grant and the Subversion ofModernity (UTP); though Davis earnestlyargues that Grant sought a religion toreplace the "religion of progress," whattroubles me is that Grant seemed to wanteveryone to be like him: that's order of apeculiarly limiting kind.Collections of letters seemed also to servea desire to know all, and I found the editionof the 266 personal letters betweenNorthrop Frye and Helen Kemp ( TheCorrespondence... 1932-1939, ed. RobertDenham, UTP) to be, frankly, an intrusioninto two perfectly ordinary people's privatelives. Yes, the letters provide insights intotheir circle, their devotion, their interdependence,and Helen Kemp's role in Frye'slife; and yes, the "Collected Works of Frye"is not truly "collected" without them; butdoes a reader need to be cast as voyeur? Oris it just temporal proximity that worriesme here? I seem to have fewer qualms aboutreading the selected letters of CatharineParr Traill (I Bless You in My Heart, ed. CarlBallstadt et al., UTP); the insights here intothe specifics of pioneering, into the nascent188

publishing industry, and into the intricaciesof family hopes and hurts all informTraill's (and Moodie's) published works—perhaps the difference lies in the editorialdecision to print a selection. Similarly, AllanPritchard's admirable edition of the VancouverIsland Letters of Edmund Hope Verney1862-5 (UBC Press) also provides some fascinatinginsights into colonial history, andinto the competing circles of social powerin early Victoria; Verney, with his upperclassEnglish family connections (toFlorence Nightingale and Lord Shaftesbury,among others), was contemptuous ofNatives and of local politicians such asSebastian Helmcken ("gross, treasonable,insolvent"), dismissive of American notionsof equality, and keen to have B.C.'s firstgovernor, Sir James Douglas, dismissed,perhaps with himself in mind for a positionof favour and power. William Christianedited George Grant's Selected Letters forUTP: they occasionally reveal a sense ofconflict within Grant, as well as betweenhim and the world.A different kind of selection governs arange of 1996 anthologies. Oberon's ComingAttractions 96, ed. Diane Schoemperlen,includes stories by Murray Logan, whichexperiment interestingly with point of view,though they do not always lead satisfyinglyto narrative conclusion; U Ottawa Presspublished The Quebec Anthology 1930-1990,ed. Matt Cohen and Wayne Grady, an historicalrange of translated texts; Joel Maki'sLet the Drums Be Your Heart (Douglas &Mcln-tyre) introduces 40 "New NativeVoices," none of whom (despite their questsand their dissatisfactions) yet captivatesattention; Douglas Glover's Best CanadianStories 96 (Oberon) gathers nine writers, ofwhom Thomas Wharton (on the categoriesof the novel), Connie Gault (for sheer liveliness),and Alan Cumyn (for a wonderfulstory called "Survival Golf") stand out;Olive Senior's The Journey Prize Anthology(M&S) includes a good story by DavidElias; and the retrospective, celebratory ThePQL Reader (Porcupine's Quill), edited byTim Inkster and John Metcalf, demonstratesby its selection from PQL writers—Adderson, Blaise, Fraser, Heighton, EliseLevine, Urquhart—just how important thispress has been in advancing the art of contemporaryshort fiction. Poetry anthologieswere, on the whole I think, of less interestin 1996.1 like Carmelita McGrath's ownpoetry in her collection of Newfoundlandwomen writers, Signatures (Killick); andthe baseball poems that William Humberand John St James collected for UTP; andSmaro Kamboureli's continuing considerationof the range of the multicultural characterin Making a Difference (Oxford). Yetin some ways none of these anthologiesmatches the quirky range of Peter White's ItPays to Play: British Columbia in Postcards1950S-1980S (Arsenal Pulp); it is not thequality of art that impresses here, but thelively analysis of social mores: "while postcardsare banal," the editor writes, "theirfictionalized quotations of reality are notaltogether innocent." Derrida runs upagainst Bermingham here, in a clever studyof the ideologies that the prevailing mythsand symbols of a given time project; thereare sharp comments here on nature, ecology,and industry, on gender hierarchies,and on the culture of the family and the car.This recognition of the relation betweenhistory and the present—perhaps even ofan integration between the two—governsthe strategy of a number of works of fiction,prose, and poetry as well. (Anddrama, as in Guy Vanderhaeghe's Dancock'sDance [Blizzard], about a soldier in aninsane asylum who has to come to termswith his own actions in wartime.) Perhapsmost obviously, it generates the tensions ofboth Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (M&S)and Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman'sBoy (M&S). To be clear, I declare right offmy huge enthusiasm for the latter, myreluctant distance from the former. Unlike189

L a s tP a g e sa lot of readers, I could never connect withAlias Grace—nor, for that matter, withanother book that attracted some people'sattention, Ann-Marie MacDonald's pioneersaga Fall On Your Knees (Knopf). To be fair,Atwood takes substantial risks with this newbook, and significantly extends the range ofher prose style, creating this time a fullermale character than her works have previouslymanaged, as well as a female with animaginably documentable history, a womanvictimized by desire as much as by socialregulation. The woman is "Grace Marks,"the celebrated murderess (or was she?)whom Susanna Moodie once attempted tofree from incarceration. Extensivelyresearched, the novel recounts—throughGrace's relentlessly sequential talks with herdoctor—the life that led (perhaps) to murder;and then the narrative turns its attentionto its subplot and closes in a kind ofparody. Those who admire the book areintrigued by the mystery; I found far moreinteresting the novel's enquiries into thenineteenth-century "sciences" of the mind:phrenology, mesmerism, spiritualism, andthe like. Indeed, Atwood's interest in science—ecology,archeology, string theory—remains yet to be adequately examined.The Englishman's Boy, however, I think isnothing short of brilliant. Juxtaposing twostories—one tells of the title character, andof the events in which he became involved,events in the US that crossed the MedicineLine and led up to the Cypress HillsMassacre in southern Saskatchewan in the1800s. The other records the quest of a youngCanadian scriptwriter in 1920s Hollywood,who (like the Englishman's boy, in somerespects) comes under the influence of thelocal moguls; handed an assignment, hesets out to find an old reclusive cowboy, inorder to get him to tell his real-life story,for money; a writer, he then takes over theold man's life—but also finds himselfresisting taking it over, or rewriting, withmoral and monetary consequences forthem both. Is the old man (with a Scotsname) the "Englishman's boy"? I don'tthink so; but I think he's been along on thetrip, himself noting down the lives of others,until the nature of "real life" becomesindistinguishable from narrative. Who thenis the listener? And to what ends? This is anarrative of narratives, rich stylistically,rich in implication; read it and marvel.The Selected Stories of Alice Munro andMavis Gallant (both M&S) separately rangeacross each writer's extraordinary work;each book offers opportunities to savourhow perception, in the hands of an accomplishedstylist, turns into understanding.Short story collections by newer writers donot yet have either the history or the rangeof these, but among such writers, the worksof several stand out: Michael Kenyon'sDurable Tumblers (Oolichan), with itsseemingly intuitive recognition of hurt andisolation; Eden Robinson's Traplines(HarperCollins), a series of devastatingglimpses into the lives of teenagers who aretorn into violence by their surroundings,their families, their friends, and theirdivided loyalties; Keath Fraser's Telling MyLove Lies (Porcupine's Quill), a unified collectionwittily designed as the creative (andcompetitive) accomplishments of themembers of a book club; Andrew Pyper'sKiss Me (Porcupine's Quill), with its portraitsof under-3os youths and their discussionsof sexuality, inadequacy, violence, and theimpermanence, the disarrangements, of love.There were also able, if less universallycompelling, narratives by Marilyn GearPilling, Isabel Huggan, Meeka Walsh, andothers, and the collections of stories by JamesReaney and L.M. Montgomery, reprintsand rearrangements, are tributes to thecontinuing interest in these writers' works.Once again: that endeavour to map thepast, or to redesign its relation with thepresent. So many fictions took up thisstrategy, so often without quite making itwork. Daphne Marlatt's Taken (Anansi)190

comes alive when it tells of the past, of thewartime separations of the narrator's parents'generation, when battle, prison camp,distance, and the Coral Sea separatedAustralia from the Malay Peninsula; but the"present-time" story, of the narrator's separationfrom her lover, provides only anintellectual counterpoint. So with AnitaRau Badami's Tamarind Mem (Viking), inwhich a young woman seeks to find out theconditions in India that made her mother arebel. So with William Chalmers' No MoreWorthy (Oolichan), about the James gangin the Okanagan, and Dionne Brand's InAnother Place, Not Here (Knopf), aboutrace and lesbian love. Peter Trower's DeadMan's Ticket (Harbour) demonstrates anaccurate ear for 1950s idiom, but puts itawkwardly into represented conversation;Paul-Michel Ratté's The Gathering of theAspects (Cormorant) engages earnestly withapocalypse; Leo Simpson's Sailor Man(Porcupine's Quill) seeks the comedy ofelegant language and an extravagant plot.Timothy Findley's lyrical novella You WentAway (HarperCollins), about family lossduring World War II, is more engaging, ifnot always, it feels, precise.More sustained are the translations ofLise Bissonette's Affairs of Art (Anansi) andparticularly François Gravel's Ostend(Cormorant), the latter a close analysis ofthe way a Montreal boy becomes involvedin political ideologies following the deathof JFK (Che, Jimi Hendrix, Allende, Lennon,Mao), but who finds that defying the system(which he does) is often as self-indulgentas the system being defied. But therewere other successes as well. I enjoyed theenergetic individuality of Patrick Kavanagh'sGaff Topsails (Cormorant), with its livelyportrayal of an outport community; andDavid Adams Richards' Hope in theDesperate Hour (M&S), about pretense, andthe sources of moral fortitude. MattCohen's Last Seen (Knopf) represents, Ithink, a major breakthrough stylistically,telling a moving, funny, sad, fragmentedstory about a man's slow acceptance of hisbrother's death. Anne Michaels' fugitivePieces (M&S) is something of a tour-deforce,juxtaposing two separate narrativeswhose centre is the Holocaust: the survivorsdeal with memory; the children ofsurvivors deal with the impact of memoryand history, and with the (moral, social)challenges that face them as they deal withthe fact of living in a post-Holocaust world.Nancy Huston's Slow Emergencies (LittleBrown)—her own translation of La virevolte—isanother narrative whose effectderives from its stylistic measure; it tells,seemingly simply, the life of a dancer, fromthe sexual enjoyment of love, throughchildbirth, friendship, jealousy, and separation,to some form of reconciliation—butthe story reads as though it were beingdanced, the choreography of being aliveserving as a way of expressing the centralcharacter's relation with experience: not ofresolving it (indeed, her children end uprepeating, re-enacting, the forms ofremoval that she has danced), but ofaccepting the distances out of which her lifeis composed. And Gail Anderson-Dargatz'swonderful A Cure for Death by Lightning(Knopf) is in a category by itself. Like otherbooks, it is a narrative about youth and theback country, and like other books it tellsof molestation, attack, protection, strangeness(Coyote?), treatment, recovery, andaccess at the last to friendship, self, andpower—but in addition it is told throughrecipes. If Huston asked the reader todance, Anderson-Dargatz asks the reader totaste: in this access to memory, entire livescome to life.David Helwig's A Random Gospel(Oberon) wrestles with related issues: theChristian gospels and life's mysteries inpart; Gregory Scofield's Native Canadiana(Polestar)—a series of vernacular "songsfrom the urban rez"—wrestles with streetlife, street language, and the disparities191

LastPagesbetween inheritance and environment; RooBorson's Water Memory (M&S) evokes asense of relationship with other writers:McKay, Zwicky, Bowering, McFadden;Crispin Elsted {Climate and the Affections,Sono Nis), Charles Lillard (ShadowWeather, Sono Nis), Al Purdy {Rooms forRent in the Outer Planets, Harbour), andDennis Lee (Nightwatch, M&S) also producedvolumes of new and selected poems.Purdy's occasional comments on the natureof poetry punctuate this selection from thelast three decades; and Lillard's occasionaldemons counterpoint the poet's engagementswith B.C. coast and history; whilethey fasten repeatedly on the specific,Elsted and Lee produce more extended,meditative works—Lee's new "Blue Psalm"series being particularly striking. Closeobservations of natural cycles centre JohnReibetanz's Midland Swimmer and MikeBarnes's Calm Jazz Sea (both from BrickBooks). Reibetanz ranges from science andlanguage to painting and parks, from sex tostreet scenes and political morality; fishingis Barnes's main metaphor, which thepoetry takes to the observation of relationships—male-femalearguments and reconnections,male-male recognitions of lust,pity, concern. Steve McCaffery in The Cheatof Words (ECW) pursues the artifice of language;Lorna Crozier, in the less successfulA Saving Grace (M&S), tries to reanimateSinclair Ross's character Mrs. Bentley;strong volumes appeared from MargoButton (her text an agonizingly personalaccount of her son's schizophrenia and suicide)and from Ted Blodgett. MarilynDumont, in a fine volume called A ReallyGood Brown Girl (Brick), writes a deeplycommitted Métis statement about place,language, race, exclusion, and education;the poems include reflections on railwaydreams and notions of a united Canada,with a "reply" to Sir John A. Macdonald,and a brilliant third section of protestpoems proving especially powerful. And ina scintillating series of nonsense rhymes forchildren, Eenie Meenie Manitoba (KidsCan), Robert Heidbreder proves once againthat the joy of language lies at least in partin the rhythms of the imagination.Among reference and critical books ofnote—a class of books that by definitiontries to make present sense of the past—aredictionaries (W.B. Hamilton's lively PlaceNames of Atlantic Canada, UTP; volume 4of M.K. Aubrey's Place Names of Alberta, UCalgary P, which is unfortunately undermined,like the earlier volumes in theAlberta series, by the format in which it hasbeen published; and the useful volume 31 ofWho's Who in Canada, UTP); bibliographies(Robert Lecker's CWTW Fiction 12,ECW, with extended commentary especiallyon Birdsell, Kinsella, and Richards);cultural data-bases (N.M. Distad's solid,fact-filled analysis of categories of 19th-centuryCanadian papers and magazines, inJ.D. Vann and R.T. VanArsdel's Periodicalsof Queen Victoria's Empire, UTP; andRosemarie Tovell's A New Class of Art,National Archives, an account of printmakingbetween 1877 and 1920, by suchpainters as Homer Watson, ClarenceGagnon, Walter Phillips, Dorothy Stevens,and C.W. Jefferys); anthologies (IanMcKay's edition of Colin McKay's For aWorking Class Culture in Canada[Memorial University History Department],a collection of writings from the period1897-1939 on economics, trade unions,Marx, the failure of Bolshevism, capitalismand property, and the degree to whichwomen are women's foes in the labourmovement). Lien Chao's essay on Chinese-Canadians' modes of cultural communicationis one of the most arresting of thestatements collected in WinfriedSiemerling's Writing Ethnicity (ECW).Other critics brought psychoanalysis andphenomenology to bear on Atwood, religionto bear on Davies, Glenn Gould tobear on Mazo de la Roche, and (in Dennis192

Duffy's instructive A World Under Sentence,ECW) James Fenimore Cooper to bear onJohn Richardson's regionalism. IreneGammel's Sexualizing Power in Naturalism(UCalgary P) brings solid close commentaryto a reading of Grove and Dreiser;informed by a theory of the sexuality ofnaturalism, this critic writes in a particularlyilluminating way about A Search forAmerica. In On Coasts of Eternity(Oolichan), J.R. (Tim) Struthers bringstogether the first booklength collection ofessays on the work of Jack Hodgins. And inA Celebration of Canada's Arts 1930-1970(Canadian Scholars' Press), GlenCarruthers and Gordana Lazarevich assemblea series of cross-disciplinary essays onthe arts: especially on music, literature,broadcast policy, and the corporate worldof the 1930s and postwar decades.In works of general prose, where onemight anticipate unbounded range, 1996saw yet another desire to map the pastmore than to hazard plans for the future, atleast in the few dozen books that I had theopportunity to read. Whether dealing withart, local history, Native identities, ecosystems,women's lives, class, or other subjects,writers seemed to be trying to find order inthe present by trying to prevent anythingelse from going wrong. Some works werefrankly recuperative, such as BrianMaracle's Back on the Rez: Finding the WayHome (Viking), a well-written recovery ofthe writer's Iroquois post, and (in itsexpression of a desire for the longhouse) apersonal reassertion of the power of communitythat it might be possible to experienceif community territory can ever itselfbe reestablished or reclaimed. Lily Chow'sSojourners in the North (Caitlin), though itbadly needs further editing, reclaimsanother forgotten or suppressed history;gathering available records, the bookreestablishes the presence of Chinese settlersin northern British Columbia—whatis now needed is an extended analysis of theimportance of their contributions to theculture at large. In a way, works such asRichard and Sydney Cannings' BritishColumbia: A Natural History (Greystone/Douglas & Mclntyre) also claim to locate acommunity territory—or, by bringing scientistand photographer together to focuson the intricately related world of land,water, animal, and vegetation—they recallthe necessity of the community of nature toecological survival.Personal encounters with the world donot always prove so engaging. Pierre ElliottTrudeau's essays, collected in Against theCurrent (M&S) continue to make politicallyarresting reading. But, oddly,Kristjana Gunnars' Reading Marcel Proust(Red Deer College P) and Marie-ClaireBlais's American Notebooks (Talon) arelikely more interesting for the student ofother books by Gunnars and Biais than forwhat they say here. Joan Murray'sConfessions of a Curator (Dundurn), bycontrast, has some fascinating, forthrightthings to say about foreign condescensionand the taste that once shaped Canadiancultural institutions; and John HerdThompson's essay on Canada and culturalsovereignty, in S.J. Randall and H.W.Konrad's Nafta in Transition (U Calgary P),offers some cautionary models of currenteconomic and political trends. Neitherattention nor inattention, of course, guaranteesobjectivity. Allen Sapp's autobiographicalessay in / Heard the Drums(Stoddart), which contextualizes the 75paintings reproduced here, somewhatplaintively asks if he is looked at because heis a painter or because he is an Indian.Robert Lanning, in The National Album(Carleton UP), traces—largely through statisticalanalysis—the relation between the"collective biography" (the biographicaldictionary, for example, or a book such asLisa Hobbs Birnie's Western Lights[Raincoast], a collection of brief, somewhatimpressionistic lives of fourteen contempo-193

L a s tP a g e srary British Columbians) and the shapingof middleclass values. Chris Gudgeon looksat Milton Acorn's resistance to middleclassvalues, at least at one level, in Out of ThisWorld (Arsenal Pulp). Stephanie KirkwoodWalker, in This Woman in Particular(Wilfrid Laurier UP), though there are anumber of typos in the copy I read,nonetheless raises interesting questionsabout the character of the assumptions thathave been brought to the writing of the lifeof Emily Carr: was she insider or outsider, aperson of soul, a nationalist, an interloper,a nature-lover—and what do these characterizationssay about the person, and aboutthe biographer?Categories often coalesce, of course, sothat Robert Stacey and Hunter Bishop'smagnificent J.E.H. MacDonald: Designer(Carleton UP) is both a visually splendidcatalogue of MacDonald's career as an illustratorof book jackets, menus, Christmascards, and the like, and a document in thehistory of book design in Canada, forMacDonald's illustrations of McArthur,Stephen, Sullivan, Salverson, and Johnson,among others, stand as benchmarks ofaccomplishment. David P. Silcox's PaintingPlace: The Life and Work of David B. Milne(UTP), likewise, ably traces the painter'slife, from childhood, through adolescence,to his life in New York (vividly illustrated),his experiments with "non-colours," hiswartime experience, and (in to my mindthe most absorbing passage of the entirebook) his less-than-happy relationshipswith his would-be backers, the Masseys.Matthew Teitelbaum's collection of essayson Paterson Ewen (Douglas & Mclntyre),with an introduction by Michael Ondaatje,admirably draws further attention to thispainter. George F. MacDonald's Haida Art(Douglas & Mclntyre/Canadian Museumof Civilization) brilliantly moves beyondcataloguing artifacts to take account of theindividuality of the artists (CharlesEdenshaw, Bill Reid, Robert Davidson),and the character of social conventions:myth, shamanism, social organization,warfare, trade, feasting. Grant Arnold,Monika Kin Gagnon, and Doreen Jensen,in Topographies (Douglas & Mclntyre),bring together three separate visions of currentB.C. art, chief among which (to myeye) are the works of Jin-me Yoon (insertingAsian faces into local scenes), SusanPoint (for contemporary Salish design),Judith Currelly (for an extraordinary 1994triptych called Landmarks: Tracks, Maps,Memories), and Janis Bowley (reinterpretingthe conventions of landscape by siting itagainst and through the urban). DavidMorrison and Georges-Hébert Germain'sInuit: Glimpses of an Arctic Past (CanadianMuseum of Civilization), where one mighthave expected to find similar range, providesinformation and some fine illustrations,but tends to read rather archly, notpushing beyond the limits of museum catalogueformat.Another Arctic book, however, does reachwidely; Richard C. Davis's Lobsticks andStone Cairns (U Calgary P) looks at theNorth as a place, and conceives of theNorth as an idea, and then goes on to sketchthe lives of a hundred Arctic persons, lookingfor their "landmarks": John Ross toJohn Hornby, Matonabbee to Henry Larsen,R.M. Ballantyne to Catharine McClellan,Franklin, Bekher, James, Bering, Peary,Sverdrup, Davis, Frobisher, and none morestrange than Warburton Pike! Davis rangeswidely; so does Arthur Ray, in I Have LivedHere Since the World Began (Key Porter), anillustrated, accessible history of the FirstNations. Jan Peterson, in Cathedral Grove(Oolichan) looks at the world much moreclosely, at a single forest on VancouverIsland, its survival related in part to thework of Martin Allerdale Grainger. RobertMcDonald's Making Vancouver 1863-1913(UBC Press) usefully distinguishes betweenclass and status, emphasizing the latter asthe working category of Canadian social194

power. Cole Harris's The Resettlement ofBritish Columbia (UBC Press), analyzingthe historical geography of distance, disease,and multiculturalism, demonstrateshow elegantly and gracefully the social sciencescan be written, and how much historicaldata there is on subjects too oftenconsidered to have been invented in 1995.Three remaining books, all more personal,and all ecologically committed, concludethis mapping of 1996 publications.Don Gayton's Landscapes of the Interior(New Society Publications) is a series ofmeditative essays on the nature of natureand the need for "strangeness," both in theexternal landscape and in the human spirit."There is a subtle coherency and truenessto the way nature arranges its objects inspace, and its trees on this mountain ridge,"Gayton writes, appreciating ecosystems,acknowledging the life of cities, enthusingabout Jane Jacobs and cowboy fiction, andcelebrating, finally, love. Deeds/Abstracts:The History of a London Lot (Brick), by thelate painter Greg Curnoe, is one of theyear's most idiosyncratic and fascinatingbooks. It traces the particular history ofCurnoe's own studio and home (38 WestonStreet in London)—by description, byownership transfer, by Indian treaty, from1797 to 1992. A kind of year-by-year directoryof occupancy, together with appendicesnaming successive occupants (Weston,Gumb, Bartlett, Knowles), Curnoe's bookattempts to understand the idea of historynot through broad generalizations butthrough its local detail. The cumulativeeffect of his enquiries is to question thevery legality of ownership, to call attentionto the ambiguous nature of "deeds" and"abstracts" (and of misdeeds and theabstract), and so to question the conclusionsabout history—the conventionalmap—that still serves generally as NationalTruth. The final book in this survey, E.N.Anderson's Bird of Paradox (HancockHouse), which edits the previously unpublishedwritings of the anthropologistWilson Duff, in some ways takes up thisdisquisition. Duff's name will be familiar toreaders of Phyllis Webb as well as studentsof Haida culture. These writings, notalways rising beyond notebook jottings,nevertheless invite participation in a personalattempt to unlock meaning in aworld that for Duff often remained persistentlyobscure. Freud governs some of hisattempts to understand—to understandsexuality, often; so does Raven, in a seriesof almost incantatory poems. Duff, as thewritings, and Anderson's extensive introduction,make clear, tried hard to find pattern("We say that the basis of culture ... isthe shaping of symbols. What is most crucialis that the symbols we share have theform of patterns"). He also knew that thepatterns he found were fundamentally afiction, a recognition that articulated forhim the dilemma he never knew how toresolve ("Art is the making of beautiful disguises,"he observed, "and its essence is thesystem of disguises.. . Style is the contrivedanswer to the brute inside").Academic DebatesMargery FeeA new interest in English as a discipline, inwhat constitutes a discipline, and in thesocial function of the university has produceda group of books that add to thework of Edward Said, Gerald Graff, TerryEagleton, Etienne Balibar, Pierre Bourdieu,and Gauri Viswanathan, among many others.Clearly these books are an attempt toanswer questions about new trends in theuniversity, including a rise in interdisciplinarity,the impact of theory on manyHumanities subjects, the cutting of universitybudgets even in the face of risingenrollments, and the debates about Westernculture/ Eurocentrism in the curriculum.195

LastPagesFurther, Bourdieu's assertion that universitiesexist to reproduce social stratificationrather than to challenge received notionshas encouraged a certain self-consciousnessin the field.The founders of the universities studiedin A.B. McKillop's Matters of Mind: TheUniversity in Ontario 1791-1951 certainlyagreed with Bourdieu: all "regardless ofreligious affiliation, saw the fundamentalpurpose of their institution to be the continuedpreservation of a social order thatbecause of its British and Loyalist originswas more conservative than that of theAmerican colonies" (xviii). This massiveand fascinating book (568 pages of text, 50figures and tables, 112 pages of notes and 31of index) sensibly takes an "issues" approach,tracing such matters as university governance,the woman question, and nationalismthrough time. A complementary focuson crises such as wartime, funding cuts,enrollment spurts and various media-drivencalls for the resignation of outspokenprofessors reveals the faultlines in universityadministrations. McKillop's overalltheme is the struggle between those whosaw universities as preservers of Christianmorality and guardians of tradition andthose who saw them as agents "of social andintellectual transformation firmly rooted inthe industrial order".Heather Murray's Working in English:History, Institution, Resources (Toronto: Uof Toronto P, 1996) is divided into threesubsections, with the headings of the subtitle.The first section contains three chapters,the first of which gives a detailed account ofthe controversies swirling around theappointment of the first professor of Englishat Toronto, W.J. Alexander, appointed in1889. The second examines the MargaretEaton School of Literature and Expression,a school for women in Toronto whichflourished between 1907 and 1926, focusingon physical education, dramatic arts andliterature. The third examines, through afocus on the ideas of Charles G. D. Roberts,some of the backgrounds to literary theoryin Canada. The second section contains sixchapters: on women in English; close readingas a critical and pedagogical technique;the relations between canon and curriculum;an examination of the "psychoanalyticclassroom" as gendered; an analysis ofthose staples of literary studies pedagogy,the lecture and the seminar; and finally, thedebate as the structure as academic life.The final section contains a bibliographicessay on English studies in Canada to 1945followed by a chronological handlist ofworks on the same subject from 1945-1991,briefly annotated to indicate content whenthe title does not do so. Murray's accountsare informed by critical theory, includingthe ground-breaking work on pedagogy offeminist theorists and the most recent workon education as an institution. It is also fullof fascinating anecdotes about the historyof the university in Canada, particularly theUniversity of Toronto, and rewardingmoments of mordant wit, as where Murrayascribes the rise of the "feminist authoredEnglish department murder mystery" tothe resistance in the discipline to women inpositions other than those of transcendentmuse or submissive student. It provides aremarably variegated, stimulating and theoreticallyinformed survey of the field.David Simpson's The AcademicPostmodern and the Rule of Literature: AReport on Half Knowledge (Chicago: U ofChicago P, 1995) argues that "we risk mistakingthe internal migration of terms andpriorities among the disciplines inside theacademy for a radical redescription of theworld outside the academy." What we see asnew, he feels, is "not... the world in general,but rather the degree to which 'radical'philosophers, social scientists, historians,anthropologists, historians of science, andeven some scientists are prepared to acceptthe traditional vocabularies of literary criticismas viable for their own descriptive196

tasks." The move to the fictive, the anecdotaland the personal in many disciplines, inreaction to any concept of the universal, hasat least some of its origins in the Romanticperiod, and Simpson argues for the rethinkingof what this means for our concepts ofthe postmodern. He cautions that "wewould be foolish to pretend that little narrativesare true alternatives to grand onesrather than chips off a larger block whoseshape we can no longer see because we arenot looking." The book ends by examiningthe popularity of the "postmodern postdoctoralromance," including such works asUmberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, CarolShield's Swann (reprinted as Mary Swannin 1993) and A.S. Byatt's Possession.Stanley Fish, in Professional Correctness:Literary Studies and Political Change (Oxford:Clarendon, 1995 The Clarendon lectures for1993), asserts (as he has elsewhere) that academicscannot act as public intellectuals, atleast in the United States in the late twentiethcentury, because the structures ofpower in modern society prohibit contactbetween the academy and the public sphere.He suggests that if academics want to reachthe public, they insist that their universitypresidents take up the challenge, or betterstill, act like any other interest group andhire a lobbyist.Three recently published collections dealwith the study of disciplinarity and literarystudies in India: Literary India: ComparativeStudies in Aesthetics, Colonialism, andCulture, edited by Patrick Colm Hogan andLalita Pandit (Albany, NY: State U of NewYork P, 1995), The Lie of the Land: EnglishLiterary Studies in India, edited by RajeswariSunder Rajan (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1993) andTexts of Power: Emerging Disciplines inColonial Bengal, edited by Partha Chatterjee(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995).Literary India examines basic concerns inIndian and Western literary theory and aestheticswith a view to expanding the possibilitiesof comparative and post-colonialliterary critique to examine not only thosetexts that "write back" to Western texts, butalso indigenous literary traditions and noncolonialcontemporary literary concerns innon Western literatures. The collectionincludes interviews with Anita Desai andHomi Bhabha, a discussion of literarytranslation into English, as well as studiesof similarities between 8th century Sanskritromances and Shakespeare's late plays,between contemporary Indian cinema andSophocles, between Asian folk and populartheatre and Brecht's epic theatre, betweenKipling's Kim and Tagore's Gora, as well astheoretical articles by Ashis Nandy andPatrick Colm Hogan.The Lie of the Land is not a study of literarytexts as such, but of the ways in whichthese were and are deployed in Indianclassrooms, sometimes quite specificallylocated classrooms. The authors, includingGauri Viswanathan, Meenakshi Mukherjee,and Gayatri Spivak, cover a range of topics,from the Indian resistance to theory,through studies of particular texts, such asA House for Mr Biswas, Nectar in a Sieveand Mansfield Park, official education policy,the British Council, social attitudes toEnglish to pedagical concerns.Texts of Power comes out of work done atthe Centre for Studies in Social Sciences inCalcutta, where four of the six authorsincluding the editor are employed. It collects"exploratory studies into the genealogyof... contemporary intellectualmodernity in India," with chapters onprinting/publishing, art, political science,child rearing, cartography and history.Many MansionsIain HigginsIn my father's house are many mansions,Jesus is said to have said, and though hewasn't talking about poetry, his words197

L a s tP a g e sapply nonetheless. The house of poetry,which until recently has been pre-occupiedby the earthly Father and his traditions,truly does have many mansions or dwellingplaces (from the Latin manere, to remain);they range in kind from the architectonicallyelaborate constructs of the epic through theexquisite private chambers of the formallyric to the makeshift lean-tos of the freeverseanecdote—not to mention the disparateantechambers and outbuildings setup in protest by dissenting insiders andindependent extraterritorialists, whoseirregular ranks include men as well aswomen poets. Poetic traditions, in thisview, are nothing so much as sprawlingmental domiciles under perpetual (de/re-)construction on a singular, semiautonomoussite without location inNewtonian spacetime and open to all whocan crack the local building codes.One measure of a poet, whichever codesshe works with and whatever her stancetowards the Fatherdome's presumptive andoverarching reach, is the habitability of herverbal dwelling places, the capacity of theircadences, their silences, their soundings toget inside you as you read to get insidethem, unsettling you even as they welcomeyou in. If a poet's poems are places thatreaders can and will go back to or throughbecause taken by the words, sometimesagainst their will, then these shared spacesare on their way to becoming permanentstructures. Much of Milton, for example,rubs me the wrong way as a human being,and yet parts of Paradise Lost have a permanenceindependent of their disagreeabletheology or reactionary sexual politics,since they have what Dr. Johnson called theforce of poetry, the irresistible power todislodge me as a reader from my presentplace and transport me into the poem'scommodious space—which power, incidentally,is not simply a function of poeticscale: some of Sappho's or Li Po's lyricshave the same effect, as do early Englishsongs like "Westron Wynde" or "Sumer isicumen in."The direct experience of that power typicallyand perhaps ironically requires mediation,but mediation of a sort that clears away towards the poems themselves.Sometimes the clearing will be critical, theresult of someone else's published meditationsand advocacy (Kenner, Perloff, andDragland spring to mind as exemplary gobetweens),but as often as not it will be editorial,the result of selective representation,either in an anthology or in a separate volume.Anthologies serve a real need, ofcourse, but they do not serve most goodpoets any better than does the publicationof a collected poems; for if the former caneasily mis- as well as under-represent apoet's distinctiveness, given that anthologiesby definition have their own designs,the latter too often resembles an archaeologicaldigsite, where the deadweight of alife's work obscures or crushes the odd genuineachievement. Hence the value of aselected poems: it offers readers the contoursand context of an oeuvre withinwhich to appreciate the pleasures andinsights peculiar to the poet in question,thereby confirming (or not) earlier guestsin their original impressions and attractingnew company as well.In the past year or so, some ten selectedshave come my way, most of them by poetsnow in their forties or fifties (Bringhurst, diMichèle, Elsted, Geddes, Jiles, Lee,Shikatani, Whiteman), a couple by poetswhose lives are done or whose reputationshave long since been made (Nowlan,Purdy). Commemoration and reassertionare the primary aims of the latter selections:remember me, they say; my stanzas(from the Italian for room) can still accommodateyou, whatever the attractions of themansions built by newer wordsmiths. Incontrast, the selections by the youngerpoets are at once retrospective andprospecting, attempting not only to define198

for each an oeuvre that will both confirmand expand a circle of readers, but also tostake a claim for the possible permanenceof certain word-dwellings. Literary forecastingis an older practice than economic,and about as accurate, but if I were to playbuilding inspector and no-stakes roller, Iwould wager that Bringhurst, Lee, andPurdy will be seen as significant architectswhen I am no longer around to carewhether I have lost or won. Which is not tobelittle the work of the others—Elsted andWhiteman in particular and di Michèle andGeddes at times write compellingly—sincemost of them offer the modest but revitalisingpleasures of resting in well-made,deeply-felt, or morally-worthy wordworlds.What follows is in any case only one reader'slikings and impressions, set down infull cognizance of the Chaucerian maxim,Diverse folk diversely they sayn.Every place-in-time has its poeticeccentrics, and they are therefore centralthere, though typically little known. Nowand here on the west coast two such poetsare Robert Bringhurst and Crispin Elsted,and the measure of their at once local andlarger eccentrality is a pair of selecteds thatcomplement each other like the foci of anellipse—or more accurately, like the majorand the minor modes of an idealized poeticscale. Bringhurst's creative reach andachievement are greater, that is, whileElsted's smaller ones (and it is no insult tocall them smaller, since Elsted would be thefirst to recognise Bringhurst's capaciousness)sometimes take in what the former'sdo not (ordinary erotic love, for example);but both have composed poems that movethose who care to dwell in them: releasingthe breath, unfurling the tongue, refocussingthe eye, attuning the ear, openingthe mind, steadying the hand, flexing theheart, and enlarging a part of language andthe world. Few readers would ask for more.Elsted's Climate and the Affections:Poems: 1970-1995 (Sono Nis, 1996, $12.95)offers only twenty-one poems in its ninetyoddpages, not even a poem a year for thequarter century of making that the volumedocuments. "I have gathered / what I cangather in one hand and spread it / on thefloor at my feet," Elsted says in one poem,speaking perhaps of what Stevens called"The Planet on the Table," both of whichimages acknowledge the "affluence ... / Inthe poverty of their words." More than ever,I am grateful for such affluent reticence; itis a rare quality amongst writers, andmarks Elsted out as a resident alien on thepoetry scene, where some poets publishbooks as often as Conrad Black acquiresnewspapers. What most distinguishesElsted's published handful is the unpredictabilityof the poems. There is no suchthing as "an Elsted poem," the sort of piecethat reads like the poet writing like himselfinstead of writing (late Layton, for instance,as well as early); rather, there is considerableformal variety, and the poems assumea reader able and willing to follow the intelligent,extended play of lineation and syntax;you never get that sinking feeling aftera couple of lines that you've seen this poembefore, that your temporary dwelling is justanother seat on a routine poetic route followedby a writer on autopilot. Thisinstead: "Someone playing various instrumentsskillfully / in another room, someoneintent on scales, / modes, privations oftunings, someone / living in the possibilitiesof song, plays, / plays...." Where Elsted'sselection is somewhat less varied is in itstonal range, a range that, like the book'sreticence, has a visual echo in its evocativecover: the title and author's name in blackinline capitals on a grey background neatlyframe and themselves echo a black-andwhitephotograph of a leafless copse, a leafstrewnground, an unpeopled bench; theresult is a picture paradox bespeaking therichness of limits, the poignant fullness ofthe biological arc—unique, final, and yetrecurrent—towards absence.199

LastPagesBringhurst's The Calling: Selected Poems1970-1995 (McClelland & Stewart, 1995,$16.99) resembles Elsted's book in articulatingthe richness of reticence: it is "no morethan a spindrift of language," suggests itsauthor, "a planktonic bloom of thought, onthe surface of the flood, instead of anythingso fancy and consoling as an ark." But whata bloom, what a drift; for me personally,this is one of the books of post-WW IIEnglish-language poetry, built—like planktonand unlike arks—to last, and far toobio-poetically diverse to appreciate fully ina brief review. Indeed, there is nothing likeit at all anywhere else in English, a sure signthat Bringhurst has understood that a poet'spurest task is to achieve that originalitywhich comes of a profound dialogue withone's forebears, paying them homage whileyet finding out places they could not reach(in "The Book of Silences," for example, or"New World Suite No. 3"). The SwedishAcademy has in recent decades severaltimes reaffirmed the high calling of poetryby giving its literary prize to poets, includinga couple of Anglophones whose work iscertainly no worthier than Bringhurst's ofsuch recognition; Bringhurst clearly sharesthat rarified vision (audition?) of poetrywith laureates since Milosz in 1980, but differsfrom all of them in being an ecoratherthan a socio-poet, raising his exquisitelychiselled and stunningly spun worddwellingswithin a radically differentconception of the spacetime of history andtradition: not only are Bringhurst's poemsmore actively, consistently, and deeplyengaged with non-Western thought- andword-worlds, recording elemental conversationswith worthies dead only in body;they also pointedly neglect to centre themselvesin the lyric ego, or even sometimes inthe human sphere; whereas many of ushabitually truncate the phrase "humanbeing" to "human," Bringhurst effectivelytruncates it to "being," and his poemshaunt an ontic domain unconstrained bythe anthropic: "The mind is light rain gathered/ on the ice-scarred rock, a crumpledmirror." Not for him the stock-in-tradepoetic personae of sensitive soul, wild bore,or hardboiled egghead; rather, a set ofunlikely, often archaic avatars and totems,amongst them toad, squid, and the stonebone of the earth's breathing body. Theresult of this anti-Viconian and statelessindependence is a book of fiercely intelligentpoems that regard their readers as certainbirds do their watchers: like northernflickers, they are at home in the air, thetrees, and on the ground, refusing to beknown except in motion and only then ifyou dwell with them as they go.It is hard to think of a poet more unlikeBringhurst than Dennis Lee, whoseNightwatch: New & Selected Poems 1968-1996 (McClelland & Stewart, 1996, $15.99) iscrammed with the very poetic stuff that theformer's poems seemingly repudiate("true" confessions, for one); yet it is alsopossible to think of their work as traversingsimilar ground from opposite directions,with opposite sensibilities, and in oppositeways (opposite, not necessarily opposed),each poet composing his poems from whatthe other ignores. Both are, above all,highly musical poets; but whereasBringhurst's strict and searching thoughtsongrises in mobile structures learnt fromearly polyphonic music, as well as fromBach, Beethoven, and Coltrane, Lee's agile,loopy, and often self-lacerating meditationsflit and flow (and sometimes flatulate) likebravura sax solos, highly articulate improvisationsdetermined to wring from a singleinstrument whatever it will give: elegiac,jazzy, bluesy, psalmic, cheesey, squawky,ecstatic, wacky, classic, slangy, tangy, frothy,and variously filling. Worrying their waythrough the national, the civic, the social,the literary, the psychological rather thanconcentrating against them, as Bringhurst'sdo, Lee's poems nonetheless often share thesame aim of getting at a profounder appre-200

hension of being; and like Bringhurst's,they are too discontinuously continuous tobe easily or adequately caught in quotation.Where Lee differs most decisively fromBringhurst is in this: like Jorge Guillen (orPound, or Zukofsky), he has in effect beenwriting the same self-obsessed poem all hismature life, varying its modes, its moods,but not its fundamental concerns: the characteristicmetaphysical hankering, psychosocialautopsying, and carnal hungercourse and pulse corpuscular through thebrooding largo of Civil Elegies and thescherzando gambol of Riffs, mating withthe probing musics of Dylan, David thePsalmist, and San Juan de la Cruz in thenew—at times marvellous, at timesmaudlin—sequence entitled "Nightwatch":"Y'gonna hafta I serrve some-body, thankin/ yew Mister Dylan. / But it's out pastwords, to the thrash of calamity midnight, /where the bass line skids like a whip, like /acetylene balm, like a liquid wisp of foreverand / what am I being? / Lost in the dark,with a slam-bang case of extremis. / Lost inmy molten body...."The molten body—especially in the sexualfusion of two separate bodies—figuresalmost everywhere in Bruce Whiteman'sVisible Stars: New and Selected Poems(Muses' Company, 1995, n.p.). Unlike Lee,Bringhurst, and Elsted, whose work I haveknown since I began reading poetry in mytwenties, Whiteman is a discovery for me,another admirable outrider whose writingsare deeply informed by music (he is also anable translator, as witness his and FrancisFarley-Chevrier's After Ten Thousand Years,Desire: Selected Recent Poems [ECW, 1995,n.p.] by François Charron, Whiteman'sQuébécois coeval and yet another poet ofnote). As selected here, Whiteman's nimbleand engaging poems recall Rexroth's intheir commingling of erotic ardour,tongue-in-cheeky wit, and speculativeintellection—nothing so erogenous as themind embodied, they suggest—but deriveformally from seventeenth-century song(Donne in Lovelace, so to speak, madeslightly Creeley) and the poème en prose.Two examples, though like the others'poems Whiteman's motile and self-awaremakings are hard to quote without falsifyingtheir manysidedness: "... O laugh / atmy metaphors & / take me in your / arms. Itell you // there are no words / where we'regoing, / or they are shards / & bits of shredded// cloth ..."; "The world, then, isdearer to the body than its own interiorpreoccupations. Whose body is whose bodybecomes finally a necessary confusion. Thisis the care and saving grace of passionateattention. What heron, plane-tree, andsnail draw from the body is its sheer naivephysicality. The metaphor of outer spacewhich is where the heart starts. . . ."The heart's starts, false and true, flutterand thok through Mary di Michele'sStranger in You: Selected Poems & New(Oxford UP, 1995, $12.95)—Oxford's other1995 selected, Paulette Jiles's Flying Lessonnever got off the ground with me; Jileslooks in my view like a stronger poet inLee's choice in The New Canadian Poets(1985), but only three of Lee's ten poemsfind their way into the recent book. Thepoems in di Michele's gathering resonatewith something of what I would call thecreative-writing-school-beat, centred asthey are in and on the confessional lyricego expressed anecdotally and defined inrelation to the personal, the domestic, thefamilial (specifically, the self-forming, selfdividingexperiences of immigration, bilingualism,and female-into-feministconsciousness); and yet as Jan Zwickywrites in her accomplished Songs forRelinquishing the Earth (self-published,1996), "though it cannot fly, the heart is anexcellent damberer"—which is to say thatdi Michele's tones and turnings sometimesget her out of school, as here: "Because it isdark because / the room must be illuminated/ and because in winter chill the crickets /201

LastPagesretire their legs, those cellos locked in cases,/ we write music as if we were caged, / as ifwe were the moths, white and thin- /winged stumbling against the pane."The poems in Gary Geddes' ActiveTrading: Selected Poems 1970-1995 (GooseLane, 1996, $12.95) share with di Michele's aformal commitment to the apparently documentaryand testamentary transparenciesof the plainspoken, but expand the poeticdomain to the historical and the political(in perhaps the traditional sense, since diMichele's feminist psycho-poetics thoughtfullyexplore the politics both of the patriarchalfamily and of the mating game); inaddition, his poems rely much more thanhers do on ventriloquism, the speakers typicallybeing given a lively demotic idiomand an "unrealistic" self-consciousness thatallows them to be who they are while yetreflecting upon their situation. They aremouthpieces, in other words, but often inthe best sense, articulating Geddes' aliveand thorough decency and his humaneresponses to strangers, friends, and family.Capable at times of the lamest verse("Sometimes during spelling bee /1 get towondering about the origin / of words."),Geddes writes most engagingly when thereis a leaven of humour (e.g., "MahatmaGandhi Refuses an Invitation to Write forReader's Digest"; "Kravinchuk"; "At theDowntown Hotel"), or when he is outsidehimself, as in The Terracotta Army, HongKong, or "Girl by the Water"—perhapsbecause in such cases he cannot evade art'scold mandate to qualify, complicate, andtransform what it purports to document.Al Purdy has long understood the claimsof poetic art on experience, which is onereason why the overfull 150 pages of Roomsfor Rent in the Outer Planets: Selected Poems1962-1996 (Harbour, 1996, $16.95) are somuch richer and more satisfying than thecrammed 400 of Starting from Ameliasburgh:The Collected Prose (Harbour, 1995, n.p.),both edited by Sam Solecki (the poemswith Purdy's assistance). The latter book,which is actually a selected, shows Purdy tobe a thoughtful as well as a regular guy (weknow this anyway from the poems) and afitfully insightful reader of his poetic compadres,but most pieces leave you feelingthat the author's getting paid by the wordand (understandably) determined to makethe most of an income his poems will neverbring. Even some of the poems can leaveyou feeling that way, since the characteristicPurdy mode is the loose, sometimes goofy,yet paradoxically alert and controlled personal,meditative ramble (shades of Purdyin Lee): a mode that misses more oftenthan it hits, firing as it does on any numberof grey-cell cylinders, but when it hits, as in"The Horseman of Agawa" or "TheCountry North of Belleville"—well hell, it'sa purple surprise in the river's white racket,as the man sez of arctic rhododendrons.What's more, the loutish-husband andhorny-toady shtick happily collapses underthe force of the most moving poetry,becoming mere grit in the deliberatelyunpolished pearls. Rooms offers the wholerange of Purdy's poetic—in the first fivepoems, in fact—and so has begun theprocess of sifting out the essential work, ifnot always certainly: the Birneyesquethrowaway "When I Sat Down to Play thePiano," for example, which must get theyuk-yuks going at readings, takes up twoand a half pages that could have been givento more compelling pieces like "Love atRoblin Lake," "Private Property," or "NewsReports at Ameliasburg." "I regard myselfas an odd kind of mainstream poet," Purdywrote recently, ". .. as eccentric-conventional,"a self-evaluation that the presentselection confirms and that explains whysome poems should last, pitted, like thepainted Horseman, against oblivion:"which is kind of ludicrous or kind ofbeautiful I guess."That habit of confirming while undercutting,of mocking without quite negat-202

ing, the conventional response—the realtears amongst the glycerine drops on theclown's painted face—sets Purdy apartfrom a poet like Alden Nowlan, whoseSelected Poems has now been edited andintroduced by Patrick Lane and LornaCrozier (Anansi, 1996, $18.95). Nowlanemerges in this book as a genuinely fine fellow,one you might invite home for dinneror trust your life to, but his quiet, competentpoems (too many)—"messages of loveand wisdom," the editors call them—rarelyfail to dissolve their potential power in aclosing wash of awkward mawkishness, atonal timidity oddly celebrated in the editors'introduction (e.g., "It takes a fine poetto realize that such huge concepts as patriotismand love of country can be eloquentlyexpressed by focusing everything upon asingle thing, an image, an ordinary man.").How many times in these 175 pages of conventionaleloquence did I long to be asthrown by a poem as Nowlan's poetic ego isby a fantasy come-on near the frozen-foodbins: "It's a kink that I have: / my nipplesharden when I envision / those mountainousmoons of flesh above me."Fleshy encounters occasionally punctuatethe touristic wanderings recorded inGerry Shikatani's Aqueduct (Mercury/Underwhich/Wolsak and Wynn, 1996,$!9-95). but the prevailing concern is veni,vidi, scripsi, most of the scribbling offeredup in a sort of portentous murmuringabout innumberable teas, espressos, etc.,etc. Aqueduct is not strictly speaking aselected; rather, apparently, an unselected:400 pages of what the cover describes asPoems and Texts from Europe 1979-1987.Stephen Scobie's blurb calls the book "atravelogue of ecstasy," but Lola LemireTostevin's backcover praise ("the vibranthum of words where there is never toomuch noise") strikes me as more accurate,since you have to be awfully fond of hummingto enjoy page upon page of this kindof thing: "And so, Kate, / we've come here: /smell offish / 'n' chips, hands / grease 'n'vinegar / lingering // in the coach"—completewith earnest endnotes explaining suchthings as "Le Figaro: A Paris newspaper" or"Exterior Façade: Much of this text is froma tourist information leaflet from Perugia."Found Pound poems apart, most of usexpect to read tourist brochures only out ofan immediate and transient need, andwhile we all know that coaches can be ashabitable as any other verbal mansion,most of us expect them to move a little.CorrectionIn Marjorie Garson's article "I Would Try ToMake Lists: The Catalogue in Lives of Girls andWomen" in CL 150, pp.45-63, "prerequisites"(p.57) should read "perquisites."203