I mks in Yeview POSSIBLE STORMS - University of British Columbia

I mks in YeviewPOSSIBLE STORMSJAMAICA КШКАГО, A Small Place. Collins PS,$19-95-BARBARA HARLOW, Resistance Literature. Routledge,Chapman & Hall, $11.95.LAWRENCE D. KRiTZMAN, ed., Michel Foucault:Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews andother Writings 19JJ-1984. Routledge, Chapman& Hall, $35.00.EACH OF THESE BOOKS makes a distinct,thought-provoking contribution to currentdiscussions of post-coloniality and allthat that term implies. Although predictabletopics appear passim (e.g. the correlationof political and literary power, themeans of linguistic oppression, possiblemethods of liberation, legacies of FrantzFanon, and so on), the real strength ofthese books is that each goes beyond suchnew clichés to explore the convoluted conditionsof possibility for a tangible, effectivepolitical resistance. Taken as a groupthese three books constitute a serendipitoustriangulation, because here we haveillustrations of the practice (Kincaid),study (Harlow), and theory (Foucault)of possible resistance cultures. The writingin each is critically interrogative ; readingbecomes an act of forced participation.There's no room for lazy/liberal apologetics.And that makes the process disquietingin all senses of the word.Disquiet, in fact, is the primary andlethal effect of Jamaica Kincaid's all-toobriefA Small Place. This is a short,sad, and extraordinarily angry book thatlobotomizes the touristic mindset of depoliticizedreaders. The perfect antidoteto Cruise Brochures, A Small Place speaksabout Antigua from within a context similarto that of Derek Walcott or GeorgeLamming.Kincaid addresses the peculiarly Caribbeanaspects of decolonizing readers andwriters; that is, how do you create a textthat ( 1 ) resists economic and cultural imperialism;(2) seeks to dismantle a culture'sself-representations as both delusiveand mystifying; but (3) recognizes thatthese representations fulfil crucial economicand psychic desires of both localand overseas interests? More specifically,how do you convince European and/orNorth American readers (read maggotwhitewinter sunseekers) that their paradisical"getaway spot" is a third worldghetto? Worse, a ghetto that their cultureand their own tourism has selfishly createdand sustained through various shadings ofhistorical, economic, and political imperialisms?The project is fraught withwriterly risks from the outset ; most liberalreaders, after all, don't like to be caughtwith their politically-correct designerswimweardown around their ankles.A Small Place, in other words, is anintensely irritating and incontrovertiblyhonest book. Kincaid parodically appropriatesthat grand expansionist mode —the travel essay — for her own purposes ofdeconstructive "re-misprision" ; throughoutshe exposes and re-exposes the morefungoid substructures that underlie thosesustained images of blue lagoons andhappy rhythm-laden natives. Behind theguise of a dispassionate travel reporter hernarrator coolly itemizes corruptions inAntiguan political circles, examples oftouristic ignorance, and specific forms ofhistorical and economic exploitation. Asin Findley's The Wars, Kincaid, subtlydeploys the open-endedness of that maddeningword, "you", thus continuallymanipulating her readers into either complicityor hypocritical disgust. Unsympatheticreaders will rightly foreground Kincaid'sshrill arrogance — a kind of perverseParnassian sneer against anyoneunlucky enough to be a non-Antiguanand /or unwise enough to ever have been141

BOOKS IN REVIEWa tourist. But such a response would beunfair because partial. Despite its tonalor attitudinal coarseness, its pervasive selfrighteousness,and Kincaid's own bizarre(and delusive) denial of self-implication,A Small Place is an important andsophisticated irony : a small hit of counterpower,delivered in a deceptively pedestrianidiom against a deceptively benignantagonist.Although considerably less subtle, BarbaraHarlow's Resistance Literature is anequally earnest attempt to trace alternativescenarios to official, fossilized world/literature views. Rejecting from the outsettraditional Western categorizations of literature,Harlow bases her study on N'gugi'srevolutionary division of all writing into"the aesthetic of oppression and exploitationand of acquiescence with imperialism; and that of human struggle for totalliberation". Ambitious, self-consciouslypreliminary, and bracingly aggressive, thebook focuses on little-studied guerrilla/political activist writings (in English)from Africa, Latin America, and theMiddle East (with a strong focus on Palestine,Kenya, South Africa, Lebanon, Nicaragua,and Egypt.)Over five chapters Harlow investigatesresistance poetry and narratives, prisonmemoirs, Utopian, dystopian, and postindependencedevelopments. Underpinningeach is a commitment to the necessityand possibility of peripheralized groups toreclaim, "re-member" their own amputatedhistories — to use literature as are-historicizing process, and as such a siteof crucial ideological struggle. For all thisadmirable idealism, however, ResistanceLiterature is something of a bumpy ride ;it is not an altogether successful mixtureof introduction, survey, theory, close textualanalysis, and proselytizing.At its best, Resistance Literature forcesa more elastic definition of metaphors andBritish legacies, but on N'gugi's toughand demanding dialectic. More particularly,Harlow is able to deploy her considerableskills in "allegorizing" texts tore-direct her readers into their own rereadingsof literature. Hence one of hermost off-handed comments on the shapeof resistance writing—"the very barenessof the language is part of the offensive" —brilliantly re-focuses the impulses andeffects of a text like Kincaid's A SmallPlace. Overall, then, Harlow opens a vastnew literary terrain, one offering theoretical,political, and critical enrichment.Harlow partially derives this kind ofhybrid enrichment through a careful useof various contemporary critical theorists,most notably the "subject" of the lastbook under consideration: Michel Foucault:Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviewsand Other Writings igjj-ig84.Lawrence Kritzman, the editor of thissubstantial volume, has performed an enviableact of academic courtesy in thisparticular compilation. To begin, thesesixteen interviews, four lectures and oneextract (apparently from the projectedfourth volume of The History of Sexuality)are important in their own right:the entries are divided into such generaltopics as "Theories of the Political: History,Power and the Law," "The Politicsof Contemporary Life," "The Ethics ofSexuality," and "Notes on the Power ofCulture." Many of these pieces appearfor the first time in English. The title isa bit misleading, however, since one ofFoucault's most interesting interviews("Power and Sex") is transcribed from ataped conversation made in 1975. As suchthis volume offers not only an extraordinarilyrich variety of insights into Foucault'slast ten years, but a fascinatinganalogue to the major books.I use "analogue" advisedly because thisbook is not, as the blurb proclaims, "aguide by Foucault through Foucault'sown works." This suggests a kind of autobiographicalColes Notes. Foucault sawthe interview genre, rather, not as a site142

BOOKS IN REVIEWfor simple-minded reduction, but as astrategy for either further exploration,additional démystification, or both. Inthis sense Kritzman's real contribution isthat he provides Foucault one compressedspace in which to problematizefurther our interpretations of his entireoeuvre. Readers wanting a simple explanationof what, for example, powerreally is are told, "It would be bold of meindeed if I were to tell you my ideas onthis subject are clearer now [1978] than[in 1972]"; what then follows is a meticulousand demanding re-speculation on"the strategies, the networks, the mechanisms,all those techniques by which a decisionis accepted and by which that decisioncould not but be taken in the way it was. . . while refraining from seeing powereverywhere, I also think there is a specificityin these new techniques of training."Interestingly Foucault emphasizesthroughout the truly revolutionary/conversionarypotential of these "strategicknowledges" ; against those critics who seeonly the pessimistic arch-reactionary,Foucault himself counters in an anonymous1980 interview in Le Monde:I can't help but dream about a kind ofcriticism that would not try to judge, but tobring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an ideato life; it would light fires, watch the grassgrow, listen to the wind, and catch the seafoam in the breeze and scatter it. It wouldmultiply, not judgements, but signs of existence;it would summon them, drag themfrom their sleep. Perhaps it would inventthem sometimes — all the better. All thebetter. Criticism that hands down sentencessends me to sleep; I'd like a criticism ofscintillating leaps of the imagination. Itwould not be sovereign or dressed in red. Itwould bear the lightning of possible storms.For me such poetic language is both beautifullybizarre and jarringly uncharacteristic;for here Foucault is reminiscentof Blake and Shelley, pre-figurative ofN'gugi and Kincaid ; characteristic of virtuallyall those resistance writers of Harlow.A point of convergence amongstresistances, a testimony to the many unpredictabilitiescontained in Kritzman'svolume.Given Foucault's tremendous importance(and frequent misuse) in contemporaryliterary criticism and theory, giventhe fact that these many interviews arespliced with four powerful lectures and anextract (on "The Battle for Chastity"),this volume is indispensable. It representsthe possibility of resistance thought at itsmost demanding.GARY BOIRESUN, RUM & ROMANCEGÉRARD ETIENNE, La Reine Soleil levée. Guérin.PIERRE KARCH, Noëlle à Cuba. Prise de Parole.THE ACTION OF THESE two novels takesplace in a Caribbean country — Haiti inthe case of the first, and Cuba in thesecond; in each case the locale plays animportant role in the narrative, but thereends the similarity, for Etienne's récit isvery much the insider's view of the placeand Karch's the tourist's; Etienne's to beread by those seriously seeking enlightenmentabout the sorry reality of life in hisbenighted country and Karch's to bepacked for a good read on a vacation trip— perhaps to Cuba.To begin on the lighter side : Noëlle àCuba is a playful novel whose games beginwith its title. It is only marginally abouta character called Noëlle, but it is aboutChristmas-time in Cuba with a group ofvacationing Montrealers. Among thegroup is an amateur astrologer calledAstrid and a ubiquitous outsider calledIcare who has a bathetic encounter witha para-sail operator called Dedalo. Anunnamed writer makes occasional incursionsinto the text with his own text whichironizes on the first, and make weightystatements on philosophical issues. Thereare intriguing reflections upon representation: 'le but de toute forme d'art est de143

BOOKS IN REVIEWmultiplier les points de vue,' says theanonymous narrator. One of the mainelements of the story is the search for thelost paintings of the Canadian painterJames Wilson Morrice whose works representlife in Cuba. Ernest Hemingwayenters the narrative in the form of amonument to him made out of themelted-down propellers of the fishingboats of the village immortalized in TheOld Man and the Sea. Enid Rinseau-Despres, a prunish school-marm, becomesa figure of fun in a comic scene ofover-representation when she reads herlatest children's book to the exasperatedcompany.Despite its length, the novel is describedwithin strict limits, both physical andtemporal. The physical space is, of course,the island, which we see for the first timeas the travellers fly in from Montreal:'Cuba n'était plus une île quelconque surlaquelle on pouvait construire des systèmeset écrire des romans. Cuba, depuisqu'on l'apercevait, était une île qui baignedans la mer, qui a ses limites, son corps defemme qu'on convoite et dont on se demandes'il nous rendra heureux ou ridicule.'Since Lise has brought with her ayear's worth of outdated newspapers, shekeeps up with the frequent past in Montrealand the rest of the world and Liljanaevokes her exotic travels as a young womanin Europe. The temporal limits areobvious: 'Les vacances, j'entends surtoutcelles passées à l'étranger, permettent àchacun d'être ce qu'il voudrait et de vivreses phantasmes à l'intérieur de parenthèsesbien définies, rassurantes, donc, car onsait qu'il est impossible de les déborder.'The key to the fantasies of the characters— and of the reader — is the mysteriousIcare. He is unusual because,although he lives in Toronto, he is afrancophone. His charismatic effect isestablished at the very outset when theeven more mysterious Black Widow hashim picked out of the hotel bus andescorted into her car. Throughout thenovel he continues to give satisfaction ofvarious kinds to various people : consolationto a bereaved member of the party,safety from a sinister encounter with thelocal populace to another, a movingChristmas reminder of her desperatelymissedfamily to the grandmotherlyEuridice, a reincarnation of a long-loststranger to one family and the restitutionof a lost object to another. For a group oflocal children he is a benign Pied Piper— 'l'enchanteur venu de quelque payslointain.'But in the foreground is adventure, violentbecause a death is foretold and couldhave occurred on several different occasionswhen there are attempts at murder;romantic because there are various couplingson the dance floor, on the beach, inbedrooms. Most encounters end in asatisfying conclusion — though the BlackWidow drops out of sight disappointinglyearly. Events come full circle and endwhere they began with a flight, but thistime a flight back to reality. The passengersreturn with a sense of a new truthlearned : 'le bonheur ne se vit pas au jourle jour comme on est trop porté à le croire,mais il est fait de souvenirs.' The memorythat we will retain of this book is that 'lespalmiers jetaient sur tout une ombre différentede celle des érables' and the headymix of sun, rum and romance will havebeguiled us even if they have not broughtabout the same transformations in thereader as in the characters.If the Cuba of the first novel is anisland of palm-fringed beaches and limpidblue sea, the Haiti of La Reine Soleil levéeis a place of urban pollution, where thelush interior serves to hide squads of viciousofficials who swoop down to inflictraids of casual brutality upon the alreadyhard-pressed populace.The main protagonist is Mathilda,devastated by the sudden, painful paralysiswhich has stricken her husband Jo144

BOOKS IN REVIEWGannel, and desperate to find a cure forhim. In her frantic search, she is trappedin the terrifying space between conflictingelements of Haitian reality: the dehumanizingsqualor of the alien hospital onthe one hand, and the sinister court ofthe familiar voodoo priest on the other.Mathilda is 'd'une beauté foudroyante, cequ'on appelle, dans le pays, une femmedahoméenne de sang propre.' Jo is 'bonvivant, respectueux, ami de tout lemonde!' Their understanding is so completeand so self-sufficient, that it causessome envy among their acquaintances;they seem, by their very perfection, to betempting providence. For their impeccablecredentials are no proof againsttheir country's régime. Jo's sickness is ametaphor for the paralysis and impotenceof Haitians in the face of the corruptionand oppression rife in their country. Therulers 'ont créé un enfer sur une terreautrefois belle, généreuse, parfumée. Avecla complicité des autres dieux, ils nous ontenlevé notre âme.' Of course there is nocure for Jo's illness when the whole hierarchyof the country is sick.The position of extreme hopelessnessgalvanizes Mathilda into extreme andquite unpremeditated action. Like thehero of Etienne's earlier novel, Un Ambassadeurmacoute à Montréal she becomesa magically inspired leader; andlike the crowd in Montreal, Mathilda'sneighbours rally to her: 'L'espace d'uncillement, voilà une bande de mortelsconscients de la dynamique d'un tempsqui se fait, d'une présence encore plusriche que le quotidien, celle d'une Noireà l'image des femmes traquées prenantla tête des mouvements d'insurrection.'In this densely written novel, the twodays of Mathilda's calvary are meticulouslyand movingly documented againstthe background of the clearly delineatedHaitian social order. It is a story of devotionand sacrifice and of the triumph ofthe human spirit. One suspects that thecritic Léon-François Hoffman is rightwhen he says 'aucun roman n'a jamais,que l'on sache, contribué à réformer quoique ce soit en Haïti.' If such a reformthrough literature were possible, La ReineSoleil levée would be the novel to bring itabout. If it is not, we can be but gratefulthat Gérard Etienne continues to write inthis vein and speaks of the specific in avoice which we all understand.VIVIEN BOSLEYD'UN PAYS L'AUTRENAÏM KATTAN, Le Repos et l'oubli. HurtubiseHMH, $16.50.DANIEL POLIQUIN, L'Obomsawin. Editions Prisede Parole, $14.95.Le Repos et l'oubli est un recueil d'essaisqui s'inscrit assez bien dans le prolongementdes oeuvres précédentes de l'auteur,toutes plus ou moins placées sous le signede l'hybridation culturelle. Collection de20 essais précédés d'une préface de l'auteur,et répartis en deux sections nontitrées et du reste assez librement séparées.Comme à l'habitude, Kattan se révèled'emblée l'homme "venu d'ailleurs" quiobserve et analyse la réalité nord-américaine.Ici cependant, il va plus loin danssa réflexion, du moins dans certains essais,les plus forts, qui entraînent le reste del'ouvrage. C'est en gros, mais sans faireinjustice au livre, la trace d'un hommequi a baigné dans plusieurs cultures fondatrices(Islam, Judaïsme, Christianisme)et qui réfléchit sur les rapports qu'ellesinstaurent (et présupposent) entrel'homme et de divin. D'où l'examen decertaines notions essentielles: autorité,pouvoir, prière, écriture, temps, origine,instant/durée, sur lesquelles est centrétout discours contemporain.Kattan paraît au plus dense dans lespremiers essais, e.g. "Temps et saisons,""Suite et succession" puis "Histoire et145

BOOKS IN REVIEWdestin" où il éclaire pour l'occident moderne,mal instruit, des nuances sans lesquellesl'Islam, le Judaïsme d'aujourd'huiresteraient opaques, et opaques du mêmecoup certains soubresauts et certains anathèmescontemporains. Ainsi, voir Rushdiecomme un révélateur de cette véritéen Islam : la littérature est toujours transgressioncar l'empire de Dieu est le monde,dont le Verbe est la Loi (Torah) et laLecture (Coran). Point de place dansl'ordre de la pure glose, pour l'invention ;encore moins pour le rêve. Cet Islam estbien le vrai: le livre de Kattan vient àpoint pour nous le rappeler.Ailleurs dans cet ouvrage, soit des réflexionspertinentes, encore que pointforcément convaincantes — comme parexemple sur la crise contemporaine dusens, que Kattan déclare analogue à larupture survenue entre les champs iconiqueet verbal et constatée dès la Bible et leCoran — soit des remarques plutôt banales,comme sur l'amitié, la connaissanceet le savoir, la censure et la tolérance.La cohérence est souvent le point faiblede tout recueil d'essais. Le Repos et l'oubline fait pas exception, malgré le soin queprend l'auteur de cheviller l'ensemble parla répétition dans le corps de plusieurstextes de la formule du titre. Les cahotssont plus vivement ressentis sur le plan dela syntaxe et du style. Hurtubise HMHnous avait habitués à plus de rigueur rédactionnelle,et plus de vigilance sur ceplan est à recommander. A recommanderégalement de lire ce livre qui, malgré desinégalités inhérentes au genre, est le témoignageintense d'un esprit venu d'unpays d'ailleurs et sincèrement préoccupéde deviner "le sens de l'instant et dumonde" d'ici.C'est d'un tout autre pays que parlePoliquin dans son Obomsawin (prendrela phrase comme la réponse à la doublequestion: "De quoi est-ce que ça parle?"et "D'où est-ce que ça parle?"). Sur unestructure de reconstruction du passé —ici thématisé par le procès différé d'unmétis, Thomas Obomsawin, peintre célèbre,et qui aurait mis le feu à sa maisonde Sioux Junction dont on voulait faireun musée de l'art amérindien — Poliquinexploite très adroitement, et sans jamaisdécoller de l'attachant récit, l'espace narratologiquecontemporain.Le roman est donné à lire comme l'histoired'un procès ("Qui a incendié lamaison du peintre?"), mais aussi d'unprocessus ( "Comment trouver la paix parl'écriture?").Si le narrateur-déprime (le Déprimé),comme le François du Grand Meaulnes,apprend au contact d'un autre le sens dela vie, et du même coup la signification dela sienne, il a en outre la révélation de lavéracité du texte définitif. Il règle sescomptes avec lui-même, avec l'écriture, etdécouvre la source de la joie ou la fin de ladéprime, autre forme ici de la névrose.Après quoi, logiquement, il ne resteraitplus que le silence. Rien là le nouveau,mais l'on reste bien en pleine réflexioncontemporaine . . .Au coeur de l'intrigue, se trouve le combatdu narrateur avec la langue. Des troisbiographies du peintre amérindien — dureste appelé "Palingue" — les deux premières(l'un en anglais, l'autre en français"international") parlaient faux. Seule latroisième, appelée par le retournementlinguistique du biographe, sera la bonnecar écrite en français d'ici et de maintenant,porteur des effets de réel canadienévoqués plus haut. Elle est en fait un actede foi ("autodafé") thématisé et ritualisédans le roman par la destruction parle feu d'une biographie ancienne ("lapourriture de menterie" p. 154) afin d'incendierla maison de Thomas.Pour faire justice à ce court roman "romanesque"mais qui est cependant unfascinant traitement de techniques narrativesmodernes, il faudrait parler de sonécriture "immédiate" qui met le lecteuren pleine situation, selon un mode de146

BOOKS IN REVIEWsaisie du réel quasi cinématographique(grâce en particulier à l'emploi du présent); et parler aussi de sa forte valeurdocumentaire: ce Canada, à la "jonction"(Sioux Junction) des trois cultures fondatrices(d'où la nécessité de trois biographies?)est bien le nôtre. Du reste SiouxJunction est bien donné à diverses reprisescomme le lieu de l'origine, le point dedépart d'où tout et tous sont partis. Yrevenir pour y voir clair, pour faire lalumière (sur cette affaire de feu) au coursd'un procès officiel ne peut donc manquerde mener à des révélations. Et l'onreconnaîtra la vitalité, mais aussi les mesquineries,les complexes, la rudesse, l'intoléranceet la fascination de l'argent etdu sens des affaires qui caractérisent lemonde actuel.L'Obomsawin est un livre à mettreentre le plus de mains possible. Il ne dépareraitpas un programme universitairede littérature canadienne.CLAUDE BOUYGUES"DEUX SOLITUDES"APPRIVOISÉESКАТНУ MEZEi, Bibliography of Criticism onEnglish and French Literary Translations inCanada/Bibliographie de la Critique desTraductions Littéraires Anglaises et Françaisesau Canada, Ottawa Univ. Press,$'9-95·ROBERT MARTEAU, Voyage to Vendée, trans.David Homel. Exile Edns, $9.95.Dans un pays comme le nôtre où il existeune barrière quasi insurmontable entre lesdeux cultures et langues nationales, latraduction implique a priori quelquechose de positif. En pratiquant une brèchedans ce mur de silence, généré et entretenupar nos "deux solitudes", elle contribue,symboliquement et concrètement,à promouvoir le dialogue entre nos deuxcultures. Vus sous cet angle, Bibliographyof Criticism on English and French LiteraryTranslations in Canada j Bibliographiede la critique des traductions littérairesanglaises et françaises au Canada deKathy Mezei et la traduction de Voyageen Vendée que signe David Homel représententun effort considérable dans cettedirection.L'enseignement de la traduction pourformer des traducteurs existe à peine depuistrente ans. Ceci explique en partie laraison pour laquelle il existe de graveslacunes en matière de textes critiques etthéoriques portant sur la traduction littéraire,champ d'études qui, au Canada,n'en est qu'à ses débuts. La bibliographiecommentée de Kathy Mezei vient à tempsremplir une de ces lacunes et représentedonc un indispensable outil de travail tantpour les chercheurs que pour les enseignantset les étudiants oeuvrant dans cedomaine. Cette recherche, qui se veut untravail de "filature", comporte 581 entrées.Celles-ci recouvrent les quatredernières décennies (1950-1986), et sesubdivisent en 9 sections: articles, bibliographies,livres, entrevues, introductions,comptes rendus de fond, comptes rendus,thèses et, en dernier lieu, notes des traducteurs.Par ailleurs, cet ouvrage fouilléet bien structuré, auquel ont collaboréPatricia Mason et Maureen Hole, témoigned'un respect inné non seulementdes deux langues (les annotations étantsoit en français soit en anglais), mais aussides traducteurs littéraires qui, en fin d'ouvrage,sont arrachés à leur anonymat traditionnelpar le biais d'un index qui leurest consacré. Ce travail enregistre l'histoirede la traduction littéraire au Canadaet offre, par ricochet, une base solide pourles recherches futures.Dans sa préface à la traduction desTableaux parisiens, de Baudelaire, WalterBenjamin avança en 1923 l'hypothèse147

BOOKS IN REVIEWselon laquelle la traduction se situe à micheminde la création littéraire et de lacritique. De nos jours, cette hypothèsen'est plus contestée, la traduction étantreconnue comme discipline connexe de lacritique. A cet égard notamment, les notesdu traducteur jouent un rôle incontestabledans la documentation des procédésde traduction. Or, il est regrettable queDavid Homel se soit abstenu d'incorporerà Voyage To Vendée des commentairessur les opérations auxquelles il s'est livréau cours de sa rédaction. Cependant, cettetraduction confirme à nouveau un fait:pour qu'il y ait "bonne" traduction, laprédilection du traducteur doit aller versl'auteur qu'il traduit. David Homel a, eneffet, à son actif plusieurs traductions detextes de Robert Marteau parmi lesquelleson trouve: Mount-Royal (ig82), Pig-Skinning (1984) et River Without End:A Logbook of the Saint-Lawrence (ig8j).Sa connaissance du style alambiqué etde l'univers imaginaire hermétique del'auteur lui ont certes été de bon secours,car Voyage To Vendée met indéniablementen évidence sa virtuosité. A titred'exemple, notons que cette traductionlittéraire n'est pas "inflationniste," selonl'expression de Steiner. En effet, le textesource se résume à 88 pages, et le textecible, lui, à 89 pages. De plus, le traducteurs'est gardé d'adopter le parti de larationalisation, de la clarification. Ce quin'est pas "clair" dans l'original conserveson mystère dans la traduction, preuveirréfutable que le sens profond de l'oeuvren'a pas été déformé. Par ailleurs, il neremanie jamais arbitrairement la ponctuation,et réussit ainsi à respecter la rythmiquede la prose marteaunienne. Dansce sens, David Homel s'incrit dans lecourant des traducteurs littéraires qui,parce qu'ils privilégient "la lettre" dutexte source, parviennent à en rendrel'altérité.ANNE BROWNCULTURAL MEMORYANTONiNO MAZZA, The Way I Remember It,with music written and performed by AldoMazza, and with their parents Domenico andAngela. Trans-Verse Productions, $11.95(record or cassette).IN ITS EDITORIAL on the death of PierPaolo Pasolini, Tel Quel wrote that thiswas more than just Italy's loss, for 'we areall Italian intellectuals' in the sense thatso much of our cultural history has beenwritten there. Antonino Mazza—who hasproduced exceptional translations ofPasolini, the first to be done in Canada —is concerned with this paradoxical universalityof a particular history. In thishe echoes Pasolini's concern with the culturalpast as evidenced by the personalpresent. So keenly did Pasolini feel thisthat we find him lamenting, in La Divinamimesis, the disappearance of certainphysical types, for with them vanished anentire history. This is, admittedly, a populisthistory based on an oral tradition —hence the great importance Pasolini attachedto dialect forms — and so it isfitting that Mazza should address thistheme in a recording which mixes his ownlyrics with the music of his brother Aldo.The cover of the album, The Way IRemember It, reproduces, on the front, aphotograph of Antonino and Aldo takenwhen they were very young, together withtheir mother. Along the left edge a photoof an office tower extends over the backcover, and is superimposed on a picture ofAntonino as a child, seated in a pedal car.Here, in visual terms, are his themes, asannounced on the album cover, whichspeaks of the swallowing up of differenceexperienced by those who emigrate tosuch homogenizing cultures as our own —what Pasolini referred to as 'anthropologicalgenocide.' The album proposes arediscovery of ethnicity to counteractthis levelling effect, and commemoratesMazza's own discovery of his father's148

BOOKS IN REVIEWability (unknown to him before) to accompanywith the tambourine a recitationfrom his vast storehouse of Calabriandialect poems in the altercatio mode, amode which extends back to Theocritusand Virgil.That recitation is reproduced in thealbum and is its center, the (re) discoveryof the father who is absent from the photoon the cover. Antonino's words flow outof this poem and Aldo's music takes usback into it, although the distinction isundermined both by the musicality ofAntonino's words and the resistance tosonority of Aldo's electronic compositions(and in that use of technology we hear atonce the alienating factors of which thealbum cover speaks and of their recuperationinto cultural memory).The first poem speaks of the "cosmicear" which contained the house intowhich Antonino was born, of the "nightingale"which was between his mother's lips,of waiting for his father to return fromthe sea, and of a dream which containsthe word which contains the house.Mazza's talents are most fully revealed intheir lyric mode, as in this poem. Yet,paradoxically, he declaims his poetry,sacrificing an aural lyricism for the declarativeformality of the oral tradition, asacrifice which is redeemed by the music.In addition to "Our House is in a CosmicEar," the album contains other lyrics,such as "Fuoco"; "Viaggio," a poem ofjourneying ("home so soon after solong") ; "Muscoli" and "In the Threshold"on the immigrant experience; anelegy ( "Giovannina" ) ; "Release the Sun,"a poem about poetry ("Poetry is aboutlearning about sailing a boat / in the rain/ in the rain and one acre of light") ;and an epigram called "Doors" : "Placeswe go through / to come from."But the heart of the album remains thatwonderful calabrese poem recited byDomenico Mazza, "Si si vera poeta." Aseries of riddles with solutions, it containsthe other poems on the disc, just asits percussive accompaniment containsAldo's music. "Tell me," asks the poet,"who does its journeying with no feet";"who sends you greetings from afar";"who while breaking remains intact.""The ship," he replies; "the letter"; "thesea." While listening to this album I rememberedwhen Antonino and I werestudents in Toronto, and the conversationsabout Calvino and Eco, but I alsoremembered my grandfather who, like theMazza family from Calabria, never alludedto the past, and who was never heardto speak a word of dialect. "My house isyour house, take it." Thank you, Tonino.IMAGE/TEXTRICHARD CAVELI.NAOMI JACKSON GROVES, One Summer inQuebec: A. Y. Jackson in 1925: A FamilyView, Penumbra, $14.95.ASHELEiGH MOORHOUSE, Art, Sight and Language:A Reading/Writing of Some ContemporaryCanadian Art. Penumbra, $21.95.FROM Ι 92 Ι TO 1947, A. Y. Jackson wouldgo on sketching tours (usually in earlyspring) downriver from Quebec Cityalong the North and South shores of theSt. Lawrence. However, in 1925, owingto teaching commitments at the OntarioCollege of Art, Jackson missed his springtour, going instead in the summer of thatyear, and spending most of his time onthe Ile d'Orléans. Accompanying Jacksonwere the ethnologist Marius Barbeau, andArthur Lismer, like Jackson a member ofthe Group of Seven. The 59 pencil sketchesreproduced here are a record of thattrip.Naomi Jackson Groves (A. Y.'s niece)has provided a fifty-page introduction inwhich she describes the sketches (now inthe McMichael collection at Kleinburg,where Jackson himself went to live towardsthe end of his life) and how they149

BOOKS IN REVIEWcame to be. The sketches are valuable asdocuments of this trip and as sources forpaintings by Jackson, some of which arereproduced here in black and white. Itwas perhaps Barbeau's presence whichlent Jackson's sketches a documentaryquality, with their precision, their annotationsand their measurements, a qualitygreatly suffused in the paintings derivedfrom them. Groves points out that Barbeauand Jackson were lifelong friends,and confirms that the paintings by Jacksonwhich serve as illustration to Barbeau'sThe Downfall of Temlaham (1928)were done expressly for that book (consideredto be one of the most beautifulproduced in Canada). Jackson's sketcheshave much in common, in fact, with illustrationshe did for W. H. Blake's translation(published 1924) of Adjutor Rivard'sChez Nous; indeed, they have so much incommon, in some instances, that one isleft wanting more information on howGroves (who is the cataloguer of A.Y.'sworks) came to assign these particularsketches to that particular year, especiallysince none of the sketches appears to beara date. Groves remarks rather curiously,in this context, that some of the sketches"would seem to be illustrations for somework along the lines of the already publishedChez Nous," without connectingthe sketches to that work itself.We tend to elide the importance of thefact that most of the Group provided illustrationsfor literary texts, that theirwork derived from the textual milieu ofsuch magazines as Studio, and that theirwork in design made them acutely awareof the interaction of text and image. It isprecisely the imbrication of textual withartistic practice which Asheleigh Moorhouseseeks to confront in Art, Sight andLanguage, a "reading/writing" of six contemporaryCanadian artists : Shelagh Alexander,Janice Gurney, Rae Johnson,Joanne Tod, Jeff Wall, and Shirley Wiitasalo.These six readings are preceded by atheoretical introduction in which Moorhouse(himself an artist) discusses thenotion of "the subject who makes art andof the subject who looks at it," drawingon the writings of Sartre, Levi-Strauss,Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, Kristeva andDerrida in the process.Seeking to elucidate a relationship betweenthe biological self and the conceptof the Subject, Moorhouse begins hisintroduction with a discussion of cellbiology. The essential connection Moorhousemakes is between the contingencyfactor opérant within DNA molecules andthe processual nature of the Subject; hecomplicates the ambiguity of the Subjectfurther by arguing for the necessity of aSubject position which is neither Malenor Female but androgynous (again employinga biological analogy). Moorhouse'savowed program is, thus, not toprovide a "critique" or an "analysis" ofthese works, but rather "a very personaland admittedly passionate reading/writing"of them. Passion, however, is neverin evidence, and one would think that thepossibility of a "personal" reading (ratherthan one constituted by the codes governingthe possibilities of such a reading)would be undermined by the theoreticalstance elaborated in the introduction.One of Moorhouse's central concerns isthe "male gaze" and the ways in which itis deconstructed by artists such as JaniceGurney in her 1982 mixed media work,"Portrait of Me as My Grandmother'sFaults," where the full-length portrait ofa naked woman has white lines superimposedon it which divide it into neat parcels,as if the woman were a piece of meat,or perhaps an anatomical specimen, theartist thereby making us see "the violenceof the look." Similarly, Gurney breaksdown likenesses in her self portraits, indicatingthe futility of any attempt to fixthe Subject.In both his theoretical introduction,and throughout his essays, Moorhouse150

BOOKS IN REVIEWstates that ideology has no place in art,or in art criticism. It is ironic, then, thatone of his best readings occurs in thechapter on Joanne Tod, whose work foregroundsmany of the ideological assumptionsof art and society. Tod's 1984 workin oil called "Shh . . . They Own theRestaurant" is seen as a meditation onthe "comfortable" nature of Realism.Just as that comfort is undermined bycertain technical inconsistencies, so thecomfort of the scene is undermined forsome of the viewers within it by the presenceof difference — in this case, racialdifference, and hence the title. Thus,Realism and racism are seen to have certainideological underpinnings in commonrelating to the colonization of difference.The chapter on Jeff Wall is likewisevery good. Moorhouse argues that Wall'suse of cibachrome transparencies, enlargedoften to lifesize, raises immediatelythe issue of presence, while the quiteclearly posed nature of the images theycontain undermines it, revealing the imageas a signifier rather than a signified,and in this context the association of thecibachrome blowups with advertising isinstructive.The final reading, of Shirley Wiitasalo'swork, becomes a writing, a prose poem inits own right/write, but it is at this pointthat the greatest gap in Moorhouse's programbecomes evident : why must we writeart to bring it into being? What is thisfundamental interrelationship betweentext and image? Moorhouse is aware ofthe importance of the question, but nevergets far enough out of what he calls the"semiotic muskeg" to address it fully. Yet,if Art, Sight and Language lacks thetheoretical sophistication evident in PhilipMonk's Struggles With the Image ( 1988),which overlaps with it considerably insubject matter, it remains important forits often successful readings of artists whowould otherwise remain too little known.And although there are some serious slipsin the production of this volume (includingwandering footnotes, typos, and a reproductionwhich fails to show the detailsdiscussed in the text), values at PenumbraPress (winner of the George WittenbornAward of Excellence for publishingin the visual arts) remain admirably high.OPACITYVS. ACCESSIBILITYRICHARD CAVELLj. MICHAEL YATES, Torpor: Collected Fiction,ig6o-igj8, Volume s. Cacanadadada, n.p.LINDA LEiTH, ed., Telling Differences: Newfinglish Fiction from Quebec. Véhicule,$12.95·LESLEY KRUEGER, Hard Travel. Oberon,$25.95/12.95."SMOKESTACK IN THE DESERT," the first ofseveral fabular pieces in J. Michael Yates'Torpor, begins at the end : civilization hasdiminished to a few attendants stoking apollutant furnace and welcoming the rarestraggler who, attracted by the mysterioussmokestack piercing the clouds of toxicfumes it emits, has made a successfuljourney across the desert. But we, presumablypart of the stragglers, are warnedthat the stack and furnace "won't confrontyou as mystery for long. You mightsay there aren't any mysteries here." Thepieces that follow are, as Yates' dedicationasserts, "For the suicides, both swiftand slow," perhaps the slowest of all beingcontained in the concluding fable, that ofphotographer Sono Nis whose passion forintrospection reduces his life to an absurd,frenzied attempt to record everythingabout his past, present, and future self.His future has already been destroyedsince he has rendered himself sterile withhis "deadly routine" of x-raying his interiorself several times a day. In Sono Nis'journal is to be found another warning:"'Come out of your musty studios and

BOOKS IN REVIEWmiserable dreams. While you destroy yourselveswith your paintings and your literature,attempting to falsify time and space,your own present is passing — withoutyou.'" These warnings bode ill for thefuture of a civilization whose art hasgrown so introspective that it fails toestablish any connection to its audience.Ironically, Yates' own Torpor providesthe most extreme example of introspectiontransforming potentially excitingpieces of fiction into obscure tours deforce. One of the epigraphs to Yates' firstvolume of collected fiction, Torque, a passagedrawn from Paul Valéry's The Artof Poetry, reveals that Yates recognizesthe risks that he takes: "Obscurity, aproduct of two factors. If my mind isricher, more rapid, freer, more disciplinedthan yours, neither you nor I can do anythingabout it." Opacity does have itsrewards when the dense fog yields glimmersof beauty, poignancy, insight, orprovocation; in Torpor, however, opacityproduces little but tedium. Weaving anoverwhelming sense of the scientific, technical,and mechanical properties of lifeinto an occasional sense of its poetry, thedismally prophetic "Smokestack in theDesert," the vividly etched narrative of"The Sinking of the Northwest Passage,"and the intricate description of the webweavingprocess of "Latrodectus Schoicetans"provide a compelling introductionto this collection. However, with the perversityof "A Naive and StraightforwardNarrative," the collection becomes increasinglymonotonous.By contrast, there are spontaneity andvariety wanting in Telling Differences,edited by Linda Leith, which joins thegrowing number of anthologies devoted to"New English Fiction from Quebec."Widely differing cultural backgroundsand a variety of styles and interests preventtedium, although the self-consciousnessof these writers is mannered andtherefore annoying. While the stories byAnn Diamond, Kenneth Radu, P. ScottLawrence, Robyn Sara, Stephen Henighan,Ludmilla Bereshko, Michael Mirolla,Richard Lanoie, Yesim Ternar, GeorgeSzanto, and T. F. Rigelhof are generallycompetent several are also seriously flawedby pretension ; however, two very differentstories emerge as truly superior. First is astory of fragile beauty, Renato Trujillo's"The Winding Staircase." Set in BuenosAires, this story traces the initial resistancebut ultimate initiation of the narrator, agrocery store clerk, to the dangerouslyenticing world of beauty, art, and dreamswhen he and his friend Jorge are invitedinto the home of a great Argentinianwriter. Equally successful is Trevor Ferguson's"Thundering." In forceful prose,it tells the story of how Trudy obtains theprivilege to ride in the pack with theother bikers.Several of the stories in Lesley Krueger'sfirst published book, Hard Travel, alsochallenge the dire prophecies of Yates'Torpor. Despite a few shortcomingsKrueger generally tells her stories well.The collection opens with an evocativedescription of Lake Atitlan in "Guatemala."Monroe, on assignment to photographthe beauties of Guatemala, confrontsthe mediocrity of his talents and hislife as he searches for an image to givehis pictures a fulcrum.A girl with a deformed eye gives himhope. Most of Krueger's stories are hauntedby odd faces. "Talk about SufferingHere Below," tells the story of a rapevictim who is deceived by a trustworthyface. In "The Way We Live Today,"Richard discovers and attempts to adaptto his wife's new "face", when she becomesa lesbian after the birth of theirchild. Three of the remaining stories areuneven, although "Mary Ellen Amongthe Tarahumara" has a fine ending: whenher son constructs a chessboard fromsouvenir carvings and baskets, a motherrealizes that he is remembering his father,

BOOKS IN REVIEWa face she wishes to escape. The story thatcompletes Hard Travel — "Merle-oh!"—is the strongest in the collection. Here,Krueger shows her own face and uses thefirst-person voice. The narrator undertakesthe "hard travel" to the buried memoryof Merle's black face, a perilousundertaking captured in the epigraphfrom Thomas à Kempis prefacing Krueger'sbook. "They who travel seldom comehome holy."LESLEY D. CLEMENTENVIRONMENTALTHEATREJOHN KRizANC, Tamara. Stoddart, 1989,$24.95.A COLLABORATION OF John Krizanc anddirector Richard Rose, Tamara was firstperformed in Toronto by the NecessaryAngel Theatre Company on May 8, 1981.The present text is based on the third production,which was staged in November,1987 at the Park Avenue Armory in NewYork City. The action takes place onJanuary 10 and 11,1927 at Gabriele d'Annunzio'scountry villa, II Vittoriale degliItaliani (The Shrine of Italian Victories),where Mussolini is supposedly keepingItaly's "greatest poet and patriot" underhouse arest. Each scene (there are onehundred and nine altogether) is set in oneof the villa's many ostentatious rooms,stairways and passageways, and the audienceparticipates directly in the action byobserving and following one or more ofthe ten characters from room to room.Because the scenes are performed "simultaneouslywith different actors . . . oftenplaying as many as eight scenes at onetime," several stages are required, a complexstructure which Krizanc and Rosecall "environmental theatre."The current script includes an engagingforeword by Alberto Manguel, and is designedto facilitate the reading of theplay: the text "is divided into twenty-onedifferent sections — A through U — witheach section approximately a unit of timein which a number of scenes occur simultaneously."My only complaint about theeditorial apparatus is that while the textis generally free of typographical errorsthere are a number of inaccuracies in thespelling of Italian words: examples include"Padoua" for Padova, p. 76; "Toccatta"for toccata, p. 144; "patrono" forpadrone, p. 161 ; "Capice" for Capisce, p.179; "Italiano" for Italiani, p. 198; and"Turina" for Torino, p. 283.On one level Tamara is a Brechtian allegoryof Italian society during the 1920'sand 1930's, the period that gave rise tofascism. The spectators purchase passports,rather than tickets, which they arerequired to submit to the sneering fascistpoliceman upon entering the theatre.There are also stringent regulations governingthe audience's participation. Eachspectator must remain within his/herdesignated group and is permitted to followa different character only when twocharacters meet. We are further warned :"do not talk, do not get in the way, donot go wandering about on your own, and... do not stand in front of a door. . . ."The behaviour of both the characters andthe audience is closely monitored by thesecret police and by a snarly Captain whoinforms us that "Anyone found wanderingaround on their own will be deported."If one belongs to a large group of spectatorsit is easy to miss a good deal of theaction. Thus what appears initially to bea radical and liberating theatrical experienceis undermined by a tyrannical superstructure.Paradoxically, however, theplay, whether read or observed in performance,becomes, as Manguel observes,"the exact antithesis of fascism, becauseit condemns the audience to the unbearablefreedom of a concerned and activewitness."153

BOOKS IN REVIEWThe title of the play refers to Tamarade Lempicka, the "aristocratic FrenchspeakingPolish exile" and art-decopainter who has been invited to paintd'Annunzio's portrait. The character isbased on the historical de Lempicka,whose decadent paintings and social lifeinspired Krizanc to write the play. Therelationship between de Lempicka andd'Annunzio, whose libertine life was ascelebrated as his exotic and morbid art,is similar to all other relationships in theplay: sadistic, obsessive, and spirituallyempty, like fascism itself. Although therelationship constitutes only one trajectoryof the action (another plot-line revolvesaround a murder mystery), itaddresses a subject which is central to allof Krizanc's plays, namely the artist'splace in society. The most celebratedItalian writer and war hero of the earlytwentieth century, d'Annunzio could havehelped to prevent Mussolini's rise topower. (A few years earlier, at the age of54, d'Annunzio had enlisted in and influencedItaly's decision to join WorldWar I.) His response to the fascist regime,however, was to yield passively to exile inexchange for material well-being and asteady supply of cocaine.Tamara has had a distinguished stagehistory, winning the Dora Mavor MooreAward, the Los Angeles Drama Critics'Circle Award, and the Mexican Associationof Theatre Critics and JournalistsAward. Yet while the play's creators purportthat its serious critique of decadencein politics and culture has universal appeal,Tamara has primarily attracted affluentNorth American audiences andcritics, many of whom have ignored itsdarker themes, delighting instead in thechase of characters and in the lavishbuffet catered during the "intermezzo" ind'Annunzio's stately dining room. "'Tamara',"wrote one critic, "is not to betaken too seriously. It is basically a clever,diverting whodunit" (Mel Gussow, TheNew York Times, 3 December 1987).Ticket prices, including the buffet and achampagne cocktail upon admission, haveranged from $85 to $ 135 per performance.And in order to appreciate the play's multiplestructures audiences have been advisedto see it more than once. In itslimited accessibility the play is problematicand decidedly anti-Brechtian.VIVIANA COMENSOLISTRUCTURE OF BELIEFRiNA LASNiER, Ou Le Langage des Sources:Essais. Estuaire, Ecrits des Forges, $8.00.RINA LASNIER'S ELEVATED conceptionboth of poetry and the poet's role as partof a firm structure of belief has been afeature of the Quebec literary scene forfifty years. Her output of work has beensteady and impressive, her intellectualinterests wide. Few comparisons can bemade with poets in English Canada, althoughClément Moisan's study of analogieswith Margaret Avison (whose workis minimal, quantitatively) has opened uppossibilities for further exploration. Atfirst glance, writers of Rina Lasnier's owngeneration such as Dorothy Livesay orP. K. Page might offer parallels. But theformer's commitment to socialism doesnot enter into her perception of the imaginativeprocess, and in the latter's workit is difficult to detect any expression ofpersonal belief. And both these writers aredeliberate adventurers in modernity. Onthe other hand, Rina Lasnier's work celebratesa unity where the word is part of asacred cosmos and echoes the intellectualperception of a moral order expressedthrough the Christian symbolism of theCatholic church. As conscious as anyonecan be of the way in which the creativeact occurs in the mind, she answers the"lucidité profanatrice" of Valéry's LaJeune Parque with La Malemer, whosemarine imagery of the subconscious154

BOOKS IN REVIEWmerges in the birth of the poem withChristian revelation.It would be difficult for any collectionof critical essays to rival the breadth anddepth of those appearing in Liberté(Nov.-Dec. 1976), but the short studies inthis volume can be perceived as a kind ofaddenda to that issue. There is, for example,an updated selective bibliographyby Lucie Bourassa which supplements theexhaustive study published by YvanLajoie.Jean-Pierre Issenhuth finds Rina Lasnier'soeuvre comparable to a caravanwinding its way with slow dignity acrossthe landscape of Africa, its starting pointunknown, its destination eternity. Henotes the love of beauty which ties herto the mystic theology of the EasternChurch, analyses the role of nature inher work, and comments on the denselypacked verses which recall certain Orientalpoetry, "Les vers ont horreur du vide,comme la nature." In a stimulating butsomewhat impressionistic sketch, MoniqueBosco uses the cathedral as a symbol,first to link Rina Lasnier's successive variationson a theme with Monet's series ofshimmering façades, and second to presentthe whole work as a solidly built stoneedifice, constructed "pierre à pierre. Versà vers. Prière après prière."André Brochu contributes a perceptiveanalysis of the poet's short poems (helimits the discussion to quatrains and tercets)which, he believes, are the seedsfrom which the longer poems grow. Healso touches on the question — as vexedin French as in English — of the modernuse of classical imagery, without neverthelesspointing out the obvious fact that,sad though it may be, classical figureshave ceased to carry for most readers theelectric charge of subliminal associationswhich used to be the common property ofthe reading public. In much of Rina Lasnier'swork, one also has to contend witha heavy freight of biblical referenceswhich, in spite of the archetypal associationscommonly attached to them, are notalways immediately accessible as poeticexperience.The interest of the collection, laudatoryfor the most part and somewhat unevenin quality, lies also in its reflection of theincreasing cosmopolitanism of the Quebecliterary scene which has, since i960, developedits own sophistication. Criticshave been arriving in the last few yearswho bring, along with their French culture,an experience of other languages,literatures, and places — Spanish, for example.It is a healthy sign to find someonenoticing analogies between Lasnier andNear Eastern poets. But it seems to mefoolhardy to make judgements about herwork in English without being fully conversantboth with the nuances of the languageitself and the changes which havetaken place in poetic expression since theearlier part of the century. There are realgaps in this critical field which need tobe filled by informed studies on the osmosiswhich can occur between French andEnglish not just at the level of vocabularyand image, but, a more subtle matter,between the rhythmic patterns of twolanguages co-existing in the poet's mind.Rina Lasnier's own statements about herdebt to Francis Thompson and GerardManley Hopkins (neither of them appropriatemodels for the young writer) wouldprovide a starting point for such a studyand offer an unusual angle from whichto observe the development of this Quebecpoet.AMBITIONGWLADYS DOWNESL. M. MONTGOMERY, Along the Shore: Tales bythe Sea, edited by Rea Wilmhurst. McClelland& Stewart, $19.95.Along the Shore, the second collectionof Montgomery work to be rescued from155

BOOKS IN REVIEWobscurity by editor Rea Wilmshurst, contains16 short stories linked thematicallyby the sea. With one exception, thesestories were written before 1908, that is,during Montgomery's apprentice years,when she was learning how to deal withweaknesses in her writing and build onstrengths. In order to develop as a writerMontgomery had to rise above limitationsimposed by the literary fashions of herday and by the restrictions of the facts ofher life.The stories in Along the Shore catchher at a time in her career when she wasstarting to realize her ambition. In the firstplace, the stories reflect Montgomery'smarkets — children's periodicals andhomemaker magazines, publicationswhich demand superficial treatment ofthe subject, one-dimensional charactersand happy endings. Not surprisingly then,the stories are populated with beautifulproud women, handsome noble men,faithful children and dogs. For the mostpart, theme is obscure, story line predictable,although the writing is deftenough.But it is when romance gives way topassion, sentimentality to emotion andstereotype to character, that the gameturns exciting. "A Strayed Allegiance"begins with the main character, EasterbrookElliott, a cold fish if ever there wasone, engaged to beautiful and wealthyMarian Lesley. Then he sets eyes on themagnificent, Magdalen Crawford, an unspoiledgirl from the cove, and is sweptaway. While there is still a lot of melodramagoing on here, the characters areable to rise above it. They are real peoplewho feel deeply and, because of theirfeelings, make decisions which change theoutcome of the story and of their lives.It is evident in the writing itself thatMontgomery struggled with her writing."A Strayed Allegiance" (1897) containsthe two following descriptions : "The sun,red as a smouldering ember, was halfburied in the silken violet rim of the sea;the west was a vast lake of saffron androse and ethereal green, through whichfloated the curved shallop of a thin newmoon, slowly deepening from lustrelesswhite, through gleaming silver, into burnishedgold, and attended by one solitary,pearl-white star" ; "The houses ... seemedlike .. . larger shells washed up by thesea, so grey and bleached were they fromlong exposure to sea winds and spray."Clearly, her penchant for purple prosewas being brought under artistic controlin the concise, apt simile, and this controlhappens only with the extended effort ofartist. Character descriptions, too, indicatethat Montgomery worked toward anawareness that specific details bring acharacter to life and general terms createstereotypes.Long before 1930, when "A HouseDivided Against Itself," the last story inthis collection, was written, Montgomeryhad learned to reach for the particularthat makes the difference, but in the bookunder review, this story is our strongestevidence of her achievement. Here, shegives us two crusty old fishermen cousins,Big George and Little George, who, afterliving together for thirty years, have aserious falling out over a naked woman.Big George is five foot one ; he knits socksand writes poetry and has anchors tattooedon the backs of his hands : "He wasa Liberal in politics and has Laurier's picturehanging over his bed." Little Georgeis six foot two ; he cooks up pea soups andclam chowders and his picture of Sir JohnMacdonald hangs over the clock shelf:"He had a harmless hobby of collectingskulls from the old Indian graveyard."Montgomery's voice speaks a lilting,lyrical sea. Her characters' dialogue is, forthe most part, gentle. Her horizon is gracious,her hills swell softly, her sea issparkling, her gales are seldom more thanbracing. Storms and drownings occur, tobe sure, but not with the onorous dark156

BOOKS IN REVIEWquality which is always present in thewriting of, say, another Maritimer, AlistairMacLeod.The greater threat of the sea in Montgomery'swork (a threat presented metaphoricallyin several scenes where unawarecharacters become caught in cavesand coves by tides) is the manner in whichit traps and holds those born and bred toit, so that they can never leave, not evenif they try. In "The Magical Bond of theSea," the first story in the collection, NoraShelley tries to leave by letting herself beadopted and educated by a rich couple.Her return at the end of the story appearsto be a happy ending. However, thewriting at this point takes on a disquietingtone which suggests that Nora has chosenthe easy way out, that the more difficultchoice of staying out there would haveallowed her greater freedom of growth.After her marriage, Montgomery returnedto Prince Edward Island only tovisit. Perhaps she knew that she had tokeep her distance in order to maintainperspective and objectivity. Perhaps, too,she knew that to seek discomfort is tosharpen self-knowledge and self-confidencewhich, in turn, allows full selfexpression.CECELIA FREYUN PAYS INCONNUYVES BEAUCHEMIN, Du sommet d'un arbre.Québec/Amérique, $9.95.ANDRE BROCHU, La Visée critique. Boréal, n.p.Du sommet d'un arbre: journal is a collectionof four texts broadcast on Radio-Canada between 1979 and 1985. Selfreflexiveand impressionistic, these diariesprovide glimpses of the life and times ofYves Beauchemin, their first-person narratorand chief character, from his earlychildhood in the 1940s in Glova, Abitibi,to his adulthood in Montréal in the 1980s."Mon père travaillait pour les Américains,"and "Je fus le premier de maclasse à utiliser dans une composition l'expression'ruban d'argent' pour désignerune rivière. Le choc que cela causa dépassetoute description," the sentencesthat begin and end the first section of"Enfance," the opening journal, introduceimportant themes of "cette autopsychanalysepour diffusion publique."Born in 1941 in Noranda, the youngchild, who already wore "des lunettes auxverres épais," moved to Clova in 1946,where his father worked for "une filialede VInternational Paper de New York."In this isolated company town, the doctor,the general manager of the company,and the priest were the "trois piliers" ofsociety; the arrival of the train was "legrand événement de la journée"; andforest fires, especially the "grand feu" of1953, were objects of both fascination andterror. Beauchemin enjoyed these surroundings,yet his bad eyesight and poorphysical co-ordination led him to the intellectualpursuits of books, films, music,and, ultimately, his own verbal compositions.These pleasures, introduced to himby his mother, who inoculated him with"le virus de la lecture," and encouragedby his grandfather, who "lisait comme unenragé," became even more available inJoliette, where the family moved whenBeauchemin was thirteen, and in Montréal,where he moved in 1962 to attenduniversity.References to books and music helpboth the content and form of the threediaries set in Montréal that comprise thebulk of Du sommet d'un arbre. Balzac,Jules Romain, and Proust mark stages ofBeauchemin's reading — and writing.The source of his most profound happiness,and, in some ways, of his best estheticinspirations, however, is still his family.This collection of diaries is most importantlya series of illuminations about YvesBeauchemin as son, husband, and father,157

BOOKS IN REVIEWand as lover and creator of aural andverbal artifacts.For the anglophone reader, however,perhaps Beauchemin's observations abouthis role in Quebec society are even moreinteresting. Introduced in the descriptionof his father as working "pour les Américains,"the theme of cultural alienationcontinues in his designation of Montréalas becoming, because of the new constructionof the 1960s and 1970s, "un minablesuccédané de New York." It was Montréal,nevertheless, that made Beauchemindiscover that he was "québécois," and the1970s that gave him hope, with the riseof René Lévesque and the PQ victory in1976, of an independent Québec. InMarch 1985, when Du sommet d'un arbreconcludes, Beauchemin still admires Lévesque.Yet he worries profoundly aboutthe good faith of Mulroney as he negotiatesa new deal for Québec withLévesque and the "tendance aveugle" ofQuébec "à l'autodestruction développéepar trois siècles de colonisation." Becauseit is fundamentally a series of autobiographicalsnapshots, Beauchemin'sjournal does not place these politicalobservations in a fully-developed context.That is done deliberately, and for ananglophone Canadian, with much moresobering effect, in La visée critique.La visée critique: essais autobiographiqueset littéraires is a collection of twentyarticles, all but three previously published,prepared by André Brochu between 1974and 1987. For their new appearance,Brochu has organized them into fourparts — "Autobiographies" (3), "Circonstances"(5), "Positions" (5), and"Lectures" (7) —and added an "Avantpropos."In this he explains that "L'ordonnancedes matières reproduit le mouvementd'une visée : de l'alpha, qui est lasubjectivité critique, à l'oméga — l'oeuvre,le texte, l'infini des mots — par le jeudes circonstances et des positions qui confortentle sujet et l'objet." In "Autobiographies"Brochu reminisces about hischildhood in Saint-Eustache, describesthe writing of his first novel, Adéodat, asa kind of therapy for a serious bout of hischronic manic depression, and records hisdiscovery in 1961 of "la littérature canadienne-française"through his reading ofGérard Bessette's Le libraire."Autobiocritique," written in 1986 —his review of his career as a critic ofFrench and Québec literature from the1960s to the present — moves from innocenceto experience, from joy to melancholy,and from agitation to resignation.Transition structures many of the essays,each part, and the entire work. Sincethe cultural "circonstances" condition thecritic's "autobiographies," define his "positions,"and pervade his "lectures," it ismoreover both a personal pattern forBrochu as writer and critic and a publicpattern for Brochu as a Québécois. Thus,although these essays discuss many subjects,their central preoccupation is thefact, and fate, of Brochu as a Québécoiswho shares a culture with France and acontinent with the United States and whois dominated by both.In the essays this preoccupation takesvarious shapes. In "Le mimétisme culturelau Québec" (1975) Brochu presentshis "conception marxiste" that Québechas gone from a pre-industrial societyproviding raw material for export to apost-industrial society consuming imports,and that Quebeckers must find themeans to become productive and participatedirectly in the development of themeans of production if they are to achievean autonomous culture, "originale et accordéeà notre époque." In "Le nouveauconsensus," written in April 1977, Brochusuggests that the victory of René Lévesquein November 1976 allows for such a possibility.In "Littérature Québec," however,written in 1984 but not publisheduntil 1987, the bright hopes of the 1970s,through a combination of factors that158

BOOKS IN REVIEWhave to do with such matters as changesin education and reading habits, the developmentof computer technology, andthe vogue of theory in the teaching ofliterature, have darkened into the sombrereality of a Québec culture that seemsstrong but is actually "comme une métaphoreen l'air à laquelle l'oxygène risquefort de venir à manquer".And can the destruction implied inthese images be averted? Both Beaucheminand Brochu would probably reply"non!" Yet for an anglophone Canadianthe Québécois position seems far fromfutile, especially when it is compared withthat of the rest of Canada. For althoughFrance and the United States may influenceQuébec, its geographical distancefrom the first and its linguistic differencefrom the second protect it from totaldomination. In that way the "circonstances"and "positions" of Québec giveit both a unique position within NorthAmerica and a special status withinCanada. Yet, although we anglophoneCanadians also grew up in small "American"towns, read "foreign literature" beforewe discovered our own, and sufferedvarious kinds of cultural alienation, neitherBeauchemin nor Brochu appears toknow. And that is too bad. For, becauseof their self-imposed isolation from otherCanadians, these Québécois have failedto learn the biographies, circumstances,positions, and readings of the "pays inconnu"of Canada, a "viseé critique" inwhich they would discover certainly asource of comparison, probably severalmatters of interest, and possibly even ameasure of hope.MARY JANE EDWARDSDIFFICULT PASSAGEJEAN DELisLE, Translation: An InterpretiveApproach. Univ. of Ottawa Press, trans. P.Logan and M. Creery, $14.95.GERARD BESSETTE, The Cycle. Exile Editions,$14.95. (Trans. A. D. Martin-Sperry. )jovETTE MARCHESSAULT, Like a Child of theEarth. Talonbooks, $11.95.THE UNIVERSITY OF Ottawa Press collectionof Translation Studies (Cahiers detraductologie) is a much-needed forumfor research in the field. Translation is thetranslation of the first part of no. 4, JeanDelisle's L'Analyse du discours commeméthode de traduction: théorie et pratique( 1980). Patricia Logan and MonicaCreery are to be complimented on theirexcellent work in translating this work ontranslation.Delisle's approach to translation issummed up in the preliminary statement:"The translation of pragmatic texts is anart of re-expression based on writing techniques."The statement may seem simple,but the importance of writing has beenunder-emphasized by linguistic theoriesconcentrating on code and competencerather than text and performance in describinglanguage transfers. Discourse analysis(the French title of his book is moreexplicit about Delisle's method) deciphersmeaning in a particular text and determinesthe appropriate manipulation oflanguage. The exercise, which I dislikecalling a set of techniques, is applied to"pragmatic texts" which Delisle describes,though not without some necessary ambiguities,as tending to be denotative,objective, contextualized, didactic andpossibly codified. Although an effectivedescription of literary texts is offered,literary texts are excluded from study forpragmatic and pedagogical reasons, becausethe language used in them has"little in common with ordinary languageand writing" and is the most difficult totranslate.159

BOOKS IN REVIEWThrough Delisle's method, languageskills are directed from the level of competenceto performance. In the chapteron the theoretical foundations of themethod, Deslisle describes the stages ofcomprehension, reformulation and verificationin an illustrative text. The discussionwhich follows, on the differencesbetween his method and the comparativeapproach of Darbelnet and Vinay, wouldhave found a better place in the unfortunatelybrief summary of "Theories ofTranslation" earlier in the chapter. Thethird chapter, on the "Levels of LanguageManipulation," adds details about theanalysis and reformulation of discoursewhich are the "proper focus" of hismethod. This ordering makes the developmentof the text, from theory to method,a little inconsistent. However, the onlyreal drawback of the book is that it reproducesonly the first part of the Frenchversion. Teachers of translation, Delislehopes, will be able to develop their ownexercises out of the particular problemsraised by language combinations and directionsof translation.Klein and Martin-Sperry enthusiasticallymeet the challenge of translating Lecrachat solaire, the first version of Marchessault'strilogy, and Bessette's Le cycle.In both examples, readability in the targetlanguage is problematic, not because ofthe work's contextualization and the difficultyof directly transferring cultural relanguageis problematic, not because ofthe anti-conventional use of language.Marchessault's translator chose to replicatethe source text in a rather literal versionof it. Her linguistic choices highlightMarchessault's idiom, which is sometimes"far-fetched," that is, drawn from a vastand rich space approached from manydirections at once. Marchessault delightsin listing sometimes incongruent objectsand contorting linear definitions of spaceand time, for instance in "the NativeAmerican land"conceived for giants, for weavers, for potters,for farmers, for nomads, for architects, formusicians, for jaguars, for Mothers, forsnakes, for bison, for American elks or treeeaters,for white, black, and brown bears,for scribes.The translator has reproduced as preciselyas possible these disparate elementsrather than forcing them into more habituallexical and semantic structures.Some of the more obvious gallicisms, suchas "dental caries" and "Javel water" seemunnecessary. However, the translationstrategies chosen are a consistent and usefulreminder that this is a translation.Martin-Sperry has been successful ininterpreting the "seven streams of semiconsciousness,"an exercise which mightbe compared to keeping track of sevenmelodies at a time. The characters' ruminationsinclude interactions and a commonsituation, making the walls betweenthem, through which we listen with aswell as to them, very thin indeed. Theirvoices, in translation, retain their distinctionsof age, sex, family relation and character,although some tonalities are moreeasily heard than others. Perhaps this hasto do with how the translator and thereaders listen. My preference goes toJacky, who starts the book by saying:Grandpa's lying there in the big brown boxhe's not moving any more Mama said"Your grandfather's dead" her eyes were allred she looked ugly When you're deadyou don't move any more you stay in a bigbox all the time all alone . . .and whose affection for his grandfather,confused sense of loss, and urgent need tofind someone to take him downstairs sustaina tension. On his way to the bathroom,little Jack introduces us to thecharacters who provide the focus of otherchapters and whose idiolects are wellserved by the translation.The passage from signifier to signifiedand referent is never smooth, and it ishard to say where Marchessault's grey-160

BOOKS IN REVIEWhound is leading us, or whether, in Bessette'suniverse, life goes on or simplyaround.JO-ANNE ELDERPRAIRIE WOMENLINDA GHAN, A Gift of Sky. Western ProducerPrairie Books, $22.95.BRENDA RICHES, Rites. The Porcupine's Quill,$8.95.WRITING WITHIN THE tradition of prairiewomen's fiction, Linda Ghan focuses on aspecific place ; a new community of immigrantsa few miles from Estevan, southeasternSaskatchewan, and the life of ayoung girl growing up on a prairie farmduring the 1920s and 1930s. BrendaRiches, on the other hand, avoids all referencesto time and place in Rites, herfirst collection of short stories, and wouldargue that authenticity in fiction need notrely on geography. Saskatchewan, however,has been her home since she leftEngland in 1974 and she has played a significantrole in Saskatchewan's literarylife as fiction editor and then editor-inchieffor Grain. In an interview publishedin Voices and Visions: Interviews withSaskatchewan Writers (1985), she saysthat the prairies have exerted a strong influenceon her work: "So often the happeningson the prairies that make theprairies so alive — the germinating seed,the growing grain — are secret processeswhich take place underground or in hiddenways."Riches explores these secret processes inthe fourteen stories collected in Rites,stories ranging from realistic to magicrealism to fairy tale. The collection openswith a story about a beginning — a newday, a newly hatched bird, a book opento the first page; it ends with a woman'srambling monologue on death, but shekeeps the focus on the important ritualsof her everyday life. As the title of thecollection suggests, rituals shape thestories, including the rituals of the playgroundand a girl's sexual initiation in"Leavings" ; the wine-and-writing regimeof a woman in "Hannah's Day" ; the deathby fire of the mother in "When HelenWakes."Plot is subordinated to image, metaphor,and wit. One story ends with thepowerful image of a woman entering herhouse "Like a nail into knotted wood."In "Breeding Ground" a man finallyaccepts the end of his marriage as hepours hot water on the maggots in thegarbage, a disturbing but suitable metaphor.In "Leavings" the narrator's descriptionof seesawing thrusts the readerback into childhood as the narratorrecalls that "The best part was when Iwas on the high end because I was throwninto the air a little way, and the comingdown was spongy, then hard." Riches' useof image and language can be powerful,as in a passage where a woman wants tohelp her husband, "to take him out wherethe black sea broke in white pieces againand again, show him how the sea went onanyway, and walk him beside its suck andswing" ("Fall"). The use of wit, however,is sometimes jarring. For example, in"The Maid" an angel falls in love with aragpicker, and her maid observes thatsome are "fortified by purity; others findstrength in martyrdom," but "many usecrotches for crutches."Ghan, too, explores the secret processof her narrator's life — Sara's shiftingstates as victim or victimizer, outsider orinsider, powerless or powerful. One specificincident that takes place when Sara isnine prefigures the adult she will become.She takes the train to Estevan, byherself, to go to the dentist. As she sits inthe chair, Dr. Lyons says, as he had on aprevious occasion when drilling her tooth,"I hear they're going to get that Jew."But Sara is ready for him:161

BOOKS IN REVIEWThis time, I pushed his hand away."I'm Jewish, too, you know.""Oh, I didn't mean — ""You did. You did mean it."I left his green office. (32)She had turned a humiliation into a smallvictory. This scene is one of many inwhich Ghan focuses on a single eventwhich, though describing external events,nevertheless enables the reader to interpretthe secret processes behind theaction.Sara's "being" is inseparable from theprairie landscape that she loves, but theprairie and nature are not represented insentimental terms. As her mother notedbefore the hail storm, "The sky is sobeautiful. And so deadly." In choosing thetitle, A Gift of Sky, Ghan emphasizes thepositive aspects. Douglas ThielPs coverpainting, Island in a Timestream, providesa complementary message: a girlwith arms outstretched to each side balanceswith ease and confidence on therail that slices through the prairie landscape.Both writers have been shaped bythe prairies. Linda Ghan has lived andworked in Jamaica and presently lives inMontreal where she writes drama andfiction in addition to teaching writing;however, her novel demonstrates that theSaskatchewan prairie where she lived herfirst ten years is still very much alive inher creative mind. As a result, she hasmade a major contribution to the traditionof prairie women's literature.CAROL FAIRBANKSMAUDITSJEAN-PAUL MARCHAND, Maudits Anglais! lettreouverte aux Québécois d'un Franco-Ontarienindigné. Stanké, $13.95.JACQUES LECLERC, La guerre des langues dansl'affichage. VLB, $27.95.JACQUES SAMSON ET ANDRÉ CARPENTIER (eds),Actes. Premier colloque de bande dessinéede Montréal. Analogon, n.p.MAUDITS ANGLAIS! est au phénomènefranco-canadien ce que, dans les années60, l'essai de George Grant Lament for aNation fut au phénomène canadien luimême.Gomme son illustre prédécesseur,il procède à partir d'une hypothèse extrêmementpessimiste — le progressif phagocytagede la culture et de la populationfrancophones du Canada par la sphèreéconomico-politique anglophone que symbolisentl'Ontario et les provinces del'ouest — et aboutit à une dénonciationdu bilinguisme et de la complaisance dugouvernement du Québec à l'égard desAnglo-Québécois.Les quatre premiers chapitres retracentles grandes étapes des politiques fédéraleset provinciales concernant les francophoneshors-Québec, notamment dans lesdomaines scolaire et juridique. Faisant enguise de transition une comparaison entrela situation linguistique respective desFranco-Ontariens et des Anglo-Québecois,l'auteur stigmatise ensuite la politique,selon lui anglophile, de RobertBourassa et particulièrement la loi 178sur l'affichage en anglais à l'intérieur descommerces introduite en réponse à la décisionde la Cour Suprême sur l'inconstitutionnalitéde la loi 101. Démontrantenfin comment le bilinguisme, en tantqu'argument politique, vise davantage àl'assimilation qu'à l'égalité linguistique, ildénonce la propagande de l'organisationanglophone Alliance Québec et préconiseune application intransigeante de laCharte de la langue française afin que,finalement libéré de la menace d'assimila-162

BOOKS IN REVIEWtion anglaise, le peuple québécois deviennele partenaire authentiquementégal des Anglo-Canadiens.Idéalisme et prosélytisme sont inévitablesdans ce genre d'essai. L'argument développén'en reste pas moins convaincantet quoiqu'il y ait lieu de questionner lerejet en bloc du bilinguisme comme politiquede compromis, l'ouvrage de Jean-Paul Marchand constitue très certainementune étape dans l'interprétation politiquedu fait francophone au Canada.Ouvrage de sociolinguistique où légisteset politologues trouveront leur compte,l'essai de Jacques Leclerc présente unpanorama synchronique portant sur centquatre-vingt un Etats souverains et régionaux(i.e. provinces canadiennes, cantonssuisses, Etats américains, etc.) deslois et usages linguistiques dans le domainede l'affichage, au sens le plus largedu terme. Le livre est divisé en troissections.La première présente "une typologiedes politiques linguistiques en matièred'affichage." L'auteur y examine d'abordles Etats avec législations sur l'affichage etl'application de celles-ci, puis les Etatssans législation. Après avoir exposé dansle premier segment tous les aspects del'interventionnisme étatique en matièrelinguistique, il bat en brèche l'idée que lanon-intervention soit toujours synonymede respect des minorités. Adoptant dansles deux chapitres suivants une perspectiverésolument tournée vers le politique,il définit les raisons poussant les pouvoirscentraux et locaux à légiférer ou non dansle domaine de l'affichage : en fait de motifséthiques, il faut plutôt voir dans l'attitudedes Etats envers les langues un désir, pourles minorités, de maintenir le statu quo,et pour les majorités, d'exclure les idiomesconcurrents; parallèlement, l'auteur stigmatisele discours sécurisant sur les loislinguistiques propre aux démocraties occidentalesen démontrant combien peutêtre important l'écart entre les dispositionsjuridiques et leur application sur leterrain. Allant jusqu'au bout de sa problématiqueréaliste, il établit finalement qu'ilest impossible de trouver une corrélationentre types de régime politique et loislinguistiques.Les deux sections suivantes, en faitd'imposantes annexes, présentent l'une lasituation actuelle de chaque pays et Etatétudiés au regard des politiques linguistiquesen matière d'affichage, l'autre lestextes législatifs illustrant chaque cas.Avec ce livre intelligent aux illustrationssouvent ironiques, Jacques Leclerc,en plus d'exposer l'hétérogénéité des législationslinguistiques de par le monde, témoignede l'inquiétude d'un universitairequébécois pour l'avenir de sa langue,minoritaire dans son propre pays. C'estpourquoi on ne peut que louer la luciditéet l'objectivité qui font la force decette étude.Actes: premier colloque de bande dessinéerecueille l'essentiel des communicationsdu colloque organisé à l'UQAM sousl'égide de la "Société québécoise de recherchesur la bande dessinée" au printemps1985. Cette manifestation reçut àl'époque un écho favorable, ses deux axesthématiques, Québec et bande dessinée,ayant été très intelligemment exploités.Le recueil est divisé en trois parties:"Bande dessinée québécoise," "Enseignementet BD" et "Etudes diverses." L'hétérogénéitédes thèmes, reflet du désir desorganisateurs d'attirer un maximum d'intervenantspour un premier colloque, nenuit en rien à la qualité propre de chaquetexte. En fait, il y a lieu de se réjouir queles différents aspects abordés au cours dela conférence aient été a posteriori si judicieusementcompartimentés : l'exploitationde l'ouvrage n'en est que facilitée.En matière de contenu, les deux dernièresparties n'apportent pas vraimentd'éléments nouveaux à la compréhensiongénérale du medium: bande dessinée etenseignement ont donné lieu à maints163

BOOKS IN REVIEWouvrages depuis les années 60 ; quant aux"Etudes diverses," à l'exception du textede Christiane Ghassay sur le regard dansla bande dessinée érotico-pornographique("L'homme au foyer"), on ne peuts'empêcher d'éprouver à leur lecture lasensation que, bien trop souvent, la bandedessinée est prétexte à des exercices universitairesde ce type où la complexité dupropos le dispute à une certaine gratuitéde la problématique.C'est finalement grâce à sa premièrepartie que l'ouvrage mérite le plus d'éloges.Toutes les contributions de cettesection apportent éléments inédits etéclaircissements sur le domaine encoretrès mal exploré des "comics" québécois.Rétrospectives historiques, analyses debandes et entrevues avec des créateursconcourent à mettre en évidence une idéeforce:medium minoritaire chez une minoriténord-américaine, la bande dessinéeau Québec s'avère être un des aspects dela difficile résistance francophone à lapénétration culturelle des Etats-Unis.En en dégageant certains traits particuliers,cet ouvrage présente aux canadianistesun aspect ignoré de la culture demasse au Québec qu'il serait malencontreuxde négliger dans la perspectived'une définition globale du fait francophoneen Amérique du nord.FIXED SMILEJEAN-PAUL GABILLIETMARY MCALPiNE, The Other Side of Silence:A Life of Ethel Wilson. Harbour, $26.95.LIKE ETHEL WILSON'S FICTION, the story ofher life as told in Mary McAlpine's biographyThe Other Side of Silence is appealing,its tone conversational, its styleeasy, and its material interesting. Thebiography begins with Ethel Wilson's beguilingaccount of a smiling doll that hadassociations with loss and bereavement.Its owner, a tailor, had lost his wife andwas about to lose his minister, youngRobert Bryant. Newly outfitted by thetailor in exquisitely sewn clothes, the dollwas to be a farewell gift for the minister'sdaughter, Ethel Bryant, still a baby whenher mother died and her father decidedto leave his post in the African town ofPort Elizabeth. "Smiling radiantly andsweetly," the doll was the child's companionthrough her few happy years inEngland and through her bereavementwhen Robert Bryant died. Young Ethelwas passed among her "well-manneredrelatives" until she was retrieved by hermaternal grandmother, Annie Malkin, agentle but adventurous woman who at theage of sixty-three had emigrated to Canadato join her sons in Vancouver. Shehad brought with her two maiden daughtersand a young son ; she returned to Englandto bring back her granddaughterEthel. During the years of dislocation,bereavement, and change that broughtthe young orphan to British Columbia —the famous locale of Wilson's fiction —the doll kept its "enchanting" smile,though its delicate handsewn clothes becamefrayed and its features pale andnearly obliterated.Reading McAlpine's biography, I beginto see this fixed smile as emblematic ofWilson's persona as she passed throughthe stages of her life, from cherished child,to orphan, to émigré, schoolgirl, teacher,and wife of a highly successful doctor.During professionally required social occasions,Wilson's smile would remainbright, though, McAlpine writes, it mayhave felt "as if it would crack into a thousandpieces and clatter to the floor." Despiteher smile, her gushing talk, and herlaughter, Wilson seemed aloof; for shewas concealing behind her amiable andelegant social façade a secret persona —"the writer" who was observing and storingmaterial for her stories. How she beganto fit writing into her marriage to Dr.164

BOOKS IN REVIEWWallace Wilson may be suggested by adescription of her sitting alone at nightin a car, waiting for her husband who wasvisiting a patient. Meanwhile, alone andin the dark, she wrote. She may have beenwriting for years, but if so, she kept heractivity in the dark. The visible aspectsof her life were identified with her roleas wife.By all accounts, Wilson's marriage wasremarkably happy, and her fiction capturesa sense of quiet married happinessthat is rare in modern literature. Theanxieties inseparable from a loving relationshipare reflected in the short storiesrevolving about Mrs. Forrester, an autobiographicalcharacter; the biography depictsWilson's suffering over Dr. Wilson'smysterious ailments and the heart attacksthat finally proved fatal. Sadly, her husband'sdeath seemed to end Wilson's writingcareer.To ask why Wilson gave up writingmay be as fruitless as to wonder why shebegan. Wilson was secretive about herbeginnings as a writer and modest abouther accomplishments. However, her lettersto editors show her discreetly promotingher career. In her essays, she expressedthe hope (and belief) that herwriting transcended the regionalism of itsCanadian setting to achieve universal appeal.She may have been implying that italso transcended the boundaries of genderwhich she carefully observed in her personallife. As a well-brought-up woman,she preferred illness to confrontation as away of expressing disagreement or defiance.She took to her bed when she feltoverwhelmed by her mother-in-law, camoflagingher anger against the older womanas physical weakness: "She did notrage. She became silent. Her smile becamea little stiff, . . . She took to her bedquite often." As "a smart orphan who hadbeen properly brought up," Wilson hadlearned that the way to deal with problemswas to have "a little breakdown";health returned "when the problem wascleared up."Whether she had learned the lesson of"a smart orphan" too well is a questionthe biographer might well have raised.For some problems, like widowhood, nevercleared up for Wilson, and she spent manyof her long final years in bed. She wasarthritic, but also bereaved and "enraged":"It enrages me [she wrote Mc-Alpine] that now that I have more sparetime than ever in my life, I have no desireto 'write' ... A bare desert, & nothingin it, not a weed, nor a flower." Perhapsher feeling of aridity can be traced backto the way she had learned to repress rage,especially her rage over loss, a traumaticexperience of the child and the womanand wife. I wish McAlpine had givenserious consideration to Wilson's rage, butshe excuses herself from probing analysisby saying that though she knew Wilsonfor over thirty years, she can offer thereader only "glimpses" of a life ratherthan "the truth." The Other Side of Silenceis an amiable collection of glimpsesgathered from letters, photographs, reminiscences,verifiable facts, and the fiction."Truth is so hard to know," Wilson hadwritten in her story "Truth and Mrs. Forrester."If we cannot have truth, we doexpect interpretation and critical insight,both made possible by, but constitutingmore than, a collation of quotations andglimpses. What lay hidden behind Wilson'scarefully constructed brilliant surface?,we might ask. What of the ragecontained by the radiant smile? Was itenergizing as well as depleting? Did itfigure in Ethel Wilson's art as well as inher despair?BLANCHE H. GELFANT165

BOOKS IN REVIEWMYSTERIESWILLIAM DEVERELL, Dance of Shiva. BantamBks now O-U-S, n.p.WILLIAM DEVERELL, Platinum Blues. McClelland& Stewart, n.p.HOWARD ENGEL, A Victim Must be Found.Viking, $22.95.MAUREEN MOORE, Field Work. Women's Press,$8.95.ERIC WRIOHT. A Question of Murder. Collins.IN JULY 1989, Greg Gatenby, the perspicaciousdirector of Harbourfront, scheduleda week of "mystery readings." Forfour nights, Canadian authors of whodunnits,thrillers and suspense novels readto full houses. It was an unusual event,in that Harbourfront, which has hostedmany of the prominent living writers,rarely if ever recognizes genre fiction.Gatenby, perhaps the first literary impresario,scheduled the event because he believedsomething important is happeningin Canadian writing, something whichought to be taken note of by people whocare about Canadian writing.Ten years ago there was very little mysteryfiction being written in Canada; publishersbelieved that the form, rooted as itso often is in its place, and knitted as it sooften is into the sociology of crime andpunishment, could not take hold in ourbland settings and our respectable communities.Writers who tried to publishbooks set in Canada were usually rejectedin Canada and, when submitting in theUS, told to change their settings.But over the past ten years the formhas changed, publishing has changed andCanada has changed. The result is thatCanadian mystery writers have found aplace. Some have succeeded in the timehonouredCanadian way; they have writtencrime fiction indistinguishable fromAmerican or British, setting it in American,English or Scottish scenes and peoplingit with the stock characters of thegenre that mystery readers enjoy rediscovering.Others have played with theform, expanding it, making somethingthat throws a peculiar and interestinglight on how Canadian writers are adaptingto the increasingly global competitionin the publishing world and still managingto hang onto their souls.The year 1989 saw new books by mostof Canada's most successful mysterywriters: Bill Deverell, Howard Engel,Laurence Gough, John Reeves, EricWright, and L. R. Wright. As well newpractitioners have appeared who are wellworth following, including Ron Base, JackBatten, Alison Gordon and MaureenMoore. The most interesting of these —for different reasons — are Deverell,Engel, Eric Wright and Moore.Each of Bill Deverell's five thriller/mysteries has been intriguing in differentways. Each has expanded his range andshown development of his powers as awriter. His Dance of Shiva is the bestmodern mystery ever, perhaps the bestmystery ever. It includes, among otherastonishing accomplishments: a brilliantplot, constant surprises, excellent pacingand creation of suspense, beautiful evocationof place and perceptive illuminationof the power and ambivalence ofunalloyed good. This would be enough tomake the book important. But what ismost astonishing is that Deverell succeedsin developing the character of a murdererthrough the development of the plot. Asa result, when the murderer is unmaskedwe realize that we ought to have knownwho it was by the character developmentalone, but we did not. That is, the craftilyplaced clues were clues of character, notfingerprints or deceptive alibis. This is thehardest thing to do in a mystery and, inmy view, the thing most worth doing.In his most recent book Platinum BluesDeverell sets his story on the Californianorth coast, a setting which is a disappointmentto his Canadian readers whotreasured his development of the ВС coast166

BOOKS IN REVIEWin Shiva. His main characters are a smalltownlawyer and a clutch of rock musicians.The plot is clever, the courtroomdrama — always well done by Deverellwho is a lawyer — is excellent. The conflictscreated when artistic creativity,greed and amorality clash with the "smalltown values" of family love and loyaltyand straight dealing make for an entertainingwork. In the character or the hero,Oliver Gulliver (a peculiar name, onecould hardly believe any parent couldhave a ear tinny enough to inflict it)Deverell gives us a version of the Canadianhero, who, characterized by his naturalunaffected goodness, struggles to geta purchase in the corrupt world wheremurders are committed. Of course, Gulliveris not Canadian. Perhaps, since Deverellis dealing with genre fiction, whereclichés can be used as archetypes, or viceversa, the book would have worked betterif he had been.The quintessential Canadian fictionalgood guy is Howard Engel's Benny Cooperman.Cooperman is a fictional phenomenon:the nebbish as hero. A manwho has no passions, no fears, no ego. Heis simply a nice guy shlumping along tryingto make it in a tough profession. Andthis character, whose Jewish motherwould rather watch television than havehim over for dinner, whose idea of a stressrelievingtipple is a glass of milk, has succeededin breaking open the competitiveUS mystery market for other Canadianwriters. Benny Cooperman, a southernOntario wimp, can be found in stacks onthe mass markets racks all over the US.Why? It isn't Engel's writing. He rarelyventures beyond a compound sentenceand the world seen through Benny's eyesis extremely two-dimensional. It isn't hisplots which rarely offer a surprise twistor an ingenious complexity to keep thereader on his toes. Perhaps Benny's successderives from his extraordinary innocence,and the satisfaction we get from its triumph.He took the nice-guy bland Canadian,put him into the world of meanstreets and a "man's gotta do what aman's gotta do" ethic that is the hardboileddetective story and let us enjoywatching him schmooze the sin and corruptionright out of the detective story.In Engel's most recent Cooperman novel,A Victim Must be Found, Benny getsinvolved with upper-class rich people,business people, art galleries and even adrunken and rather unpleasant artist.Benny can barely understand these to-himexotic people. In fact, he solves this mysteryby nagging the suspects until theyfind him so annoying that they let theirsecrets out just to get rid of him. It is atypical Benny triumph and we just haveto love him for it.While Engel is writing what seem to besly spoofs on the American hardboiled detectivenovel, the Toronto writer, EricWright, takes another form, the policeprocedural, plays it straight and does agood job of it. Wright's hero is a Torontopoliceman Charlie Salter who finds himselfinvolved in homicides no one elsewants. In the Salter mysteries we get slicesof Canadian life, usually Toronto and alook at the Canadian class system as itplays itself out between the families of theworking-class Salter and his upper-middleclass wife. The police procedural is avenerable form. In England it has a longhistory where readers watch ScotlandYard detectives tediously unravel clues inthe works of authors as diverse as FreeWill Crofts and P. D. James' Daglieshnovels. Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo usedit to show the despair and anomie ofSwedish Socialism while Simenon's mysteriescan be seen as studies of Frenchsociety's ability to grind down the individualFrenchman.Not surprisingly, the form in the UShas been exploited in a violent, dark andsometimes corrupt way. Police work in theUS appears in these novels to be a descent167

BOOKS IN REVIEWinto the hell of American cities, into theminds of psychopaths and into the morallycorrupt, repressive brutal police forcesthemselves. Sometimes the authors explorethis world, often they appear toglorify in it.Looked at this way Salter is to the policeprocedural what Cooperman is to thehardboiled. He is a gentle unassumingfellow who rarely experiences corruptionor evil; his personal life is upright, hisfamily relationships wholesome, his city,though far from perfect, is livable and themoral order he is policing is worth defending.Spending a few hours with anEric Wright book, unlike those of his UScounterparts, rarely gives one the intensedesire to take a shower.In his most recent, A Question of Murder,Wright's Toronto policeman, Salter,is involved in preventing what seems tobe a terrorist act. This book is a definitefalling off for Wright. The plot is confusingand the continual character developmentof Salter we have been watchingfrom book to book doesn't quite work.Worst of all is Wright's adopting a secondpoint of view — the point of view of oneof the perpetrators. This is a device which,if not handled perfectly, can be very annoying.In this book it is annoying.Deverell, Engel and Wright are all establishedpopular writers with loyal followings.Maureen Moore, however, is anewcomer to the mystery genre. Her book,Fieldwork, belongs in the newly emergingcategory of feminist murder mysteries.Most feminist whodunnits are American.In some cases they take the hardboiledgenre and bend it by creating a toughdetective, of the kind the Sunday TimesLiterary Supplement recently called a"bulldyke Drummond." A good Canadianexample of this approach are the HelenKeremeos books by the Vancouver authorEve Zaremba. A more commercially successfulauthor, the Ghicagoan Sara Peretsky,has created a woman detective whodrinks, hangs out in a sleazy office andeven tangles physically with stylized Americanhoodlum baddies. Making such womencharacters believable is a difficultfeat and both Zaremba and Paretskystruggle to maintain the suspended disbeliefupon which their chosen form relies.Maureen Moore has taken the wisercourse. She has written a standard whodunnitpolice procedural with a limited setof suspects and a believable feminist hero,Marsha Lewis, a criminology student.Marsha's position allows her to help thepolice yet retain her detachment fromtheir points of view. Moore has thus solvedthe feminist conundrum of giving awoman an active yet believable role insolving crime.Fieldwork does other things nicely aswell. There are lots of the detailed slicesof life which mystery readers enjoy: thepersuasively realized Vancouver scene,the struggles of the feminist movement,and the inner conflicts of a young, vulnerablewoman coping with a child on herown. Best of all, Moore pulls off the trickychallenge of the contemporary whodunnit;she manages to balance the moralissues and right the moral order in theend. As readers we may be disappointedthat we never got to know the villain aswell as we did some of the other suspects,nor to understand his motives in any butthe most superficial sense. Yet the booksatisfies at the moral level where murdermysteries must work to be true to whatis most important in the form.Watching what happens to the Canadianmystery in the coming years is goingto be very interesting. Our best writersseem to be subverting the form as it ispractised in America and Britain. In itsplace they are giving us a kind of crimefiction which reflects some of the ways inwhich Canada is different. And they aregiving us Canadian heros with the power168

BOOKS IN REVIEWto amuse, to entertain and possibly toenlighten.ELLEN GODFREYBACKTRACKINGANNE CAMPBELL, Red Earth, Yellow Stone.Thistledown, $9.95.ANDREW WREGGITT, Making Movies. Thistledown,$9.95.PERHAPSTHERE IS SOMETHING to belearned about men's and women's writingfrom two new books of poetry publishedby Thistledown this year. Andrew Wreggitt'sMaking Movies and Anne Campbell'sRed Earth, Yellow Stone provide,when compared, a curious difference : notjust in poetics, but in sensibility. Entirelydifferent ways of processing experienceare portrayed. This difference becomesconspicuous when time is compared, asused and perceived by the two authors.Time in Making Movies moves so fast thewords themselves seem to begin to crumbleduring reading, while in Red Earth,Yellow Stone time appears to be so stillthat an eternity might be encased betweenwords dropped onto the page as if theylanded there accidentally : as if the writerhad passed by a sheet of paper holding asubstance from which drops unintentionallyspilled. The difference in the readingexperience between these two books islargely one of speed and stillness; noiseand silence; images and a curious cessationof images.Because Andrew Wreggitt writes a numberof poems about his childhood, thereis a strong flavour of the fifties in his book(he was born in 1955). There are vaguememories that turn out to be surprisinglyclear about being a young boy fallingasleep while a boxing match with SonnyListon is on the radio; of burrowing instiff grasses not much taller than he; ofyoungsters playing at making movies andshowing them to each other; of cars infront of the house, "a different car everyweek." He writes of his father as a memory,a presence, which remains in the formof very substantial images. The cars areone; the burning of the deceased father'sclothes another; the memory of seeingsomething like a Sasquatch while huntingwith his father yet another. Perhaps thedecade in which we were born stamps us :it would seem so with Wreggitt. Memoriesare turned into settings that are as vividas if they were on the screen. Photography,and moving photography especially, marksthe nature of this collection. And it doesso as if the image on the screen were morereal than the memory. There is a sensethat what is replayed has more value thanwhat was lived in the first place. In thefifties, in any case, movies were somethingrare and special.The same sensibility and treatment ofexperience comes through in the secondsection of the book, "Grossing the Dateline";only here the author deals with thepresent. He travels through Japan and recordshis impressions. The effect is muchlike a movie, again. There is even an auraof the screenplay about Wreggitt's poetry :a writing that focuses on description of ascene. Sometimes the result is very pleasant,such as this setting in Japan outside"Time Time Cafe" :Rain hammers outside againstwide awnings,tangles of bicycles on the sidewalk,rain running through them,crazy tablature up and down the streetCymbal brush of tires. . . .There is Mika, the blind girl, who massagesthe narrator's back as he attemptsto describe America to her. This is anotherreplaying motif, as if the author's descriptionof things would make them more realto the (blind) reader. There is an assumptionin this sort of poetics that only writing— the word on the page — can endowreality with its own being. Perhaps this isa literal extension of the idea that in the169

BOOKS IN REVIEWbeginning was the word. Whatever it is,the implication comments on the writingexperience in general — and perhaps themovie maker's as well.In section three, "The Living," Wreggittgoes back even further, to the decadesbefore the 1950s. Here lurk the Depressionand the Second World War. The poemsreflect the scars that are left by thosetimes. Characters emerge who have sufferedand memories confound the author/narrator with their perpetual presence:"Some things that end / just go on ending,year after year. . . ." And a senseemerges that life somehow goes on withoutresolution, as in "Dolomite Pass" inwhich the narrator is mountain-climbingwith his friend and says :You and I have been climbing a long time,years, I think,pulling ourselves over the stubborn shouldersof our lives. . . .The closing poem, "The Living," is abeautiful display of an old man's fadingmental presence: he is ill, has to takemany pills, and keeps losing his focus asif he were lying in "a perfectly still pool /with himself at the centre."Time, in all these poems, passes at whatseems like breakneck speed. Time is alsoa confusing element, as in "Crossing theDateline" where the plane the narrator isflying in seems to remain on the datelinewithout committing itself to either side —either day. The past and present, memoryand current experience, are mixed to apoint where chronology does not matteras much as the replaying of the event does,cinematically. There is also a strong focuson the scene : this is not so much a focuson the image as on the setting where anevent is to occur. The setting, as it turnsout, tends to be full of images the narratoruses, so there is perhaps a crowding ofimages. But even so, images are not obtrusiveor overpowering in this book. Theyare simply there: they cannot help beingthere any more than a photograph canhelp showing what was in the scene.Anne Campbell's Red Earth, YellowStone is an altogether different, moretransparent, reading experience. This isa short book and the poems in it are brief.Every word seems weighed for its owntrue weight — nuances, implications, inherentassumptions, sound, feeling, sothere is a much stronger sense of uncertaintyabout language than in Wreggitt'sbook. Often the author/narrator has toresort to the dictionary in her uncertainty,only to find that obscurity deepens, andpoetry opens up more avenues of verbalexperience. Sense and logic are confounded,and as a result, the narrator's truefeelings become uncertain, as do her memoriesof what is actually occurring. Whilewith Wreggitt we seem to have a veryfirm grasp of what world we are in andwhat function the author/narrator/filmmakerhas in that world, with Campbellwe are invited into a kind of cloud ofunknowing.In many ways Red Earth, Yellow Stoneis a candid book. The narrator displaysher emotional life: her feelings aboutdomesticity; long-term relationships; herown body; the physical world and thespiritual; love; friendship. The narratorfinds herself in a relationship she likes andapparently needs. But she also likes andneeds her own solitude. Whatever conflictemerges is treated with doubt. Thenarrator hesitates, backtracks, rethinksstatements, as if it were hard to keepthings straight:This is getting out of handthat is to saywhile I (the person I think of as me)decide to keep open to youwonderwho you are what Jungianpart you're playingin my life this body soarswith other ideas to put it plainlywants youand not only that. . . .170

BOOKS IN REVIEWNothing can be taken for granted in suchself-stopping writing. In an unusual way,Campbell manages to unite the lyric withspeech. We sense there is a woman talking,yet it is also a refined lyric. The resultis a kind of poetic candour. The narratorhas a poetic sensibility, but will not drumup poetry per se, to use as a vessel for herideas or thoughts. Her ideas and thoughtsare the poetry.There is a real identity question inCampbell's book. The problem with livingwith another on an intimate basis is anidentity problem. Two people merge inmore ways than was perhaps sought for.The poem "From One to Two" shows upthe conflict, which riddles the whole book :. . . but I digressbegin againcoming from my bodyin my mindthe notion of becomingonewith another oneknowingthere is a differencein this frombeing onetouching everything(all the other ones)all the timefrom herealonecoupling doeschange things you knowmakes you thinkbefore you act(the you I am speaking about is me). . . .Here Campbell is using her words with allthe implications they contain intact. Theground is swept away from under us: wecannot be sure we know what is passing inthe brief lines and single words. As a result,we do not know who the narrator isany more, or who the "other" is. Ultimately,perhaps, Campbell is writing aboutthat "moment of giving self over. . . ."Because this book seems to be in searchof a "moment" and its meaning(s), thesense of time is markedly different fromWreggitt's collection. Campbell attemptsto reach the centre of a circle of sorts;the stillness inside a hurricane. It is aspiritual search for transcendence of asort, peace of mind, a cessation of metaphoricalstorm. Red Earth, Yellow Stoneis not a book to be read quickly: if youdo, you will miss it. There is a great dealof thought behind every line and wordand reading may possibly be as hard aswriting when it comes to this kind ofpoetry. There is a veneer of simplicity butyou have to pay, so to speak, to get thegoods that are underneath. Wreggitt'scinematically portrayed passages remindingus of fleeting time, passions that comeand go, the tragedy of life and death andduty, may be more appealing reading. ButCampbell's candid doubt-inducing lyricsthat backtrack on themselves and thatclaim and declaim in succession, may takeus (the readers) further into our ownlives and illusions.LANDSCAPEOR LANGUAGEKRISTJANA GUNNARSROBERT THACKER, The Great Prairie Fact andLiterary Imagination. University of NewMexico Press, $32.50 (U.S.).KENNETH G. ROBERT, ed., Writing Saskatchewan:20 Critical Essays. Canadian PlainsResearch Center, $12.50.The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imaginationand Writing Saskatchewan illustratea classic opposition in perceptionsof how literature is conditioned by place.Thacker pursues the thesis that prairielandscape has been the prime influence onthe literary imagination : "the land speakslouder than the people." The essays inWriting Saskatchewan seek the distinctivenessof Saskatchewan writing in cul-171

BOOKS IN REVIEWtural rather than natural influences. Oneof the few consistent impressions to begathered from the collection is that languagespeaks louder than the land.Any comparison must, of course, takeinto account the different scope and intentionsof the two books. Thacker surveysresponses to the North Americanplains environment from the earliestEuropean visits to the present. He offersthe most comprehensive examination todate of accounts by explorers, traders andtravellers, from Pedro to Gastaneda withthe Coronado expedition of 1540 to themore familiar figures of Henry Kelsey,Anthony Henday, David Thompson,Lewis and Clark, W. F. Butler, ZebulonPike, Edwin James, and Josiah Gregg. Hereviews, with illustrations, the paintingsof George Catlin, Paul Kane, Carl Bodmerand Alfred Jacob Miller and thewritings of Washington Irving, MargaretFuller and Francis Parkman. In theseearly accounts, Thacker finds consistentfeatures that will be basic to later literaryresponses to the plains: wonder, a senseof illusion, ambivalence instilled by theprairies' promise of freedom and threat topersonal identity, a need to assimilate thenew experience to a known world, as inthe ubiquitous sea metaphor, and a struggleto adapt forms of expression to theinsistent demands of the new experience.He sees in the differences between finishedwork and the artists' sketches andjournals "a confrontation between theirinculcated European aesthetic and theprairie."Thacker finds a version of this confrontationin the pioneer fiction, where thenineteenth- and early twentieth-centuryliterary landscape becomes a battlegroundfor romance and realism. He focuses firston Hamlin Garland and especially onJames Fenimore Cooper, credited as thefirst to present "a prairie landscapethrough its own terms." While acknowledgingthat Cooper worked not fromexperience but from Edwin James's Accountof an Expedition, Thacker maintainsthat Cooper transformed an actualexperiential landscape into "a symbolic,mythic one." Garland worked from personalexperience but rendered an essentiallyromantic landscape, while the later pioneerfiction of Willa Cather, F. P. Grove,Ole Rolvaag and Wallace Stegner movesuncertainly toward realism. Thacker devotesmore attention to Cather's prairiefiction than to any other author, tracingher development from early tales of bitteralienation to the more accomplished ОPioneers! and My Antonio,. In the process,her fiction is said to move, like Cooper's,"away from the literal prairie toward asymbolic one," her writings defining "apattern of the ways in which landscapeforces literary adaptation."Thacker's final section, "Inhabitants,"surveys briefly a range of post-pioneeringwriters, including Martha Ostenso, ConradRichter, Sinclair Ross, W. O. Mitchell,Wright Morris, Margaret Laurenceand Robert Kroetsch, for whom the humanproblem is how to live on the prairieonce it is no longer new. In this contextthe prairie's challenge to personal identityemerges in images of traps and mirrors,and the writers work more self-consciouslythan their predecessors to devise "strategiesto enclose prairie space, somehow,within the covers of a book." The landremains the prime determinant; asThacker says, in a statement that couldstand further explanation, "Laurence'sromanticism is, of course, derived fromthe landscape itself."What Thacker's survey demonstratesmost convincingly is that the prairie landscapehas made a powerful impression onboth travellers and inhabitants, thatwriters have found it challenging to represent,and that it has served not only assetting but as theme and as a potentsource of imagery in much fiction.172

BOOKS IN REVIEWLess convincing is his thesis that theland "dictated the terms of its usage asliterary setting." This does not seem todescribe the process by which Coopertook an already written landscape and appropriatedit to a symbolic system designedto articulate his New York view ofthe meaning of America. Similarly, whenCather takes a prairie seen in her earlystories as a place where Danes are to befound swinging from their own windmilltowers and most of the Poles, "too carelessand discouraged to shave themselves keeptheir razors to cut their own throats with"and transforms it into a "retouchedmythic garden," the terms of its usage areagain dictated less by the land than bywestern ideologies. What remains mostdifficult to explain is how a land coulddictate such contrary uses as those ofCather and Sinclair Ross. The deterministthesis splits on the rocks of its ownenvironment, as though Thacker hadfailed to learn the lesson of his own firstchapters so aptly restated in a passage hequotes from G. B. Crump:In the nineteenth century, the pioneer projectedon the plains his version of Americanpromise; in the twentieth, they became thewasteland where the dream turned to dust.On a metaphysical level, their empty expansessuggest the void of reality before ithas been processed and given shape by theconsciousness of the perceiver.Thacker's absorption in his thesis alsoleads to occasional insensitivity to actualuses of the land in the texts under review.The ranch scenes in As For Me and MyHouse, for example, he situates in thefoothills though the text specifies that themountains are "four or five hundred mileswest." And in Wild Geese he fails to addressthe apparent contradiction thatCaleb represents the land, while hisdaughter Judith hates Caleb as passionatelyas she loves the earth. More generally,an argument so dependent on theeffects of physical environment requiresmore careful distinctions between prairieand parkland, rural and town settings,Illinois and North Dakota, and betweenthe effects of landscape itself and thoseof climate, solitude, deprivation anddiscomfort.In contrast to Thacker's broad survey,Writing Saskatchewan collects the papersfrom a 1987 symposium at Fort San devotedto contemporary writing in a specificpart of the prairies. The papers are mostnotable for their variety and the interplaybetween contrasting approaches and contendingviews. There are papers with atheoretical bias. The Australian criticRussell McDougall elaborates a series ofreading strategies or positions for an outsiderapproaching Saskatchewan poetry;Dennis Cooley develops a theoretical contructfor distinguishing poetry of the eyefrom poetry of the ear. There are equallypractical approaches, as in Susan GingelPsstudy of the adaptation of language toplace. There are a number of generalviews like Fred Wah's formal classificationsof the poetry and Kim McCaw'sreview of trends in Saskatchewan playwriting,and there are a few specificstudies like Diane Bessai's analysis of thegenesis and structure of Linda Griffiths'and Marie Campbell's Jessica. Traditionalpoetics, as in Sharon Butala'sdown-to-earth defence of realism, are setoff against post-realist poetics, as in GeoffHancock's polemic for a fiction as proteanin its inventive strategies as science and asresponsive to a world of change. In additionto more conventional essays, there arealso Rudy Wiebe's stern admonition to thewriters to regard their craft and Arithavan Herk's whimsical personification ofSaskatchewan. There are, inevitably, someweak papers, like Robert Currie's romantic,anti-intellectual defence against thecritics, and there are strong ones, likeSimone Vauthier's creative reading ofEdna Alford's "The Lineman." Vauthier'spaper is notable for its fullness of173

BOOKS IN REVIEWimaginative response and range of linguistictactics. By applying a set of criticalconcepts with deftness and subtlety, sheinvites the reader to a precise yet fluidre-engagement with the story.In the many oppositions among thepapers there is an element of dialogue.Wayne Tefs's distinction between realistand visionary fiction is contested by DavidWilliams and Sharon Butala; Rex Deverellresponds directly to Diane Bessai. Thestructuring of the conference to promotesuch dialogue is most apparent in the lastsection, "Fear of the Novel: The LinkedSequence of Short Stories in SaskatchewanFiction," containing short papers byDavid Carpenter, Andreas Schroeder,Guy Vanderhaeghe and Edna Alford,none of whom can agree on the properties,the significance or even the existenceof such a trend in Saskatchewan fiction.The disparity of views extends to the centralquestion implicit in the topic of theconference, the influence of place onliterature. Some writers assume or arguethe existence of a distinctive Saskatchewanliterature, while others consider thequestion premature or, as Patrick Lanecontends, irrelevant: "What is importantis not that poetry is written here, but thatit is written at all."There are, nonetheless, some inferencesabout Saskatchewan writing to be drawnfrom the diversity of these essays. Thewriters see their place as marked by adistinctive Saskatchewan experience anda vernacular that expresses it. They sharea related concern for language and formas means to either capture or transcendthat local culture. One unusual featureof that culture may be the sense of communityamong the writers, seen in acknowledgementsof mutual influence andrespect and in frequent references to collectivecreation, the importance of theatrecompanies, the Summer School of theArts and other co-operative institutions.What they do not seem much concernedabout, despite the geographical definitionof their subject, is the influence of theland. Fred Wah, for example, finds thepoetry, "not as qualified by the landscapeas I first thought." It may be, as SharonButala says, that a generation of writersat home on the land can "turn to otherconsiderations." The contrast with Thacker'ssurvey would thus be a result of thedifferent periods examined. But the contrastmay also reflect national differences.The Saskatchewan writers' preoccupationwith the influence of community, cultureand form rather than landscape may betypically Canadian, while Thacker's approachthrough nature and landscape isin the tradition of western Americanstudies, in which America itself tends tobecome an environmental determinist'sthesis. The two volumes should makevaluable complementary reading for thegrowing number of scholars interested incomparative study of the two Wests."OTHER"TREVORDICK HARRISONCLARK, Born to Lose. ECW Press,$12.00.DAVID HOMEL, Electrical Storms. RandomHouse, $21.95.STAN PERSKY, Buddy's: Meditations on Desire.New Star Books, $19.95.THOUGH THEY HAVE little in common,the characters in these three texts — gaymen, working-class teenagers, street peopleand eccentric academics — do sharetheir marginality in a society unwilling toaccept, at times even acknowledge, elementsdifferent from itself. What a pleasureit can be, then, to hear these voices,too often silenced or gone unheard. Butwhat a disappointment, too, when theattempt is awkward and unconvincing.Trevor Clark's collection of stories,Born to Lose, is an uninspired literarytriptych meant to evoke the gritty realities174

BOOKS IN REVIEWof life close to the edge. On the streets, orat the brink of suicide, Clark's underdogfigures more often than not fail to convince.At moments, people and places docome to life. But too easily Clark relies onvirtually nonsensical physical descriptions:"Her face was fragile, yet the boneswere strong. It was tough but cute, primitivebut sensitive, ugly but attractive."Such passages, and there are many, areunenlightening, substituting paradox fordepth. "I've become acquainted with acharacter," says another of Clark's downand-outers,"This is literature." Surely theauthor is as deluded as the character whospeaks these words."Malaise," the middle story, shows amore deft hand. Written in the form of alengthy, autobiographical suicide note,the story's tone is ironic, self-mockingand, as a result, rather more believable,even touching. Angela, a depressed Englishprofessor, after asking herself how asensitive mind can "do anything but breakdown in a world as fraught with horrorand calamity as this one," ultimately rejectssuicide and decides instead to fixherself another drink. Malaise triumphsover death in this reassuring story.In David Homel's Electrical Stormsteenaged Vinnie Rabb professes to speaka different language, identifying not onlywith life in a somnolent Chicago suburbin the 1960's, but with the universal conditionof adolescence. Evoking a moderntradition that began with Salinger'sCatcher in the Rye, Homel's coming-ofagestory chronicles not only the growthof Vinnie, but of his entire misfit gang,the Kensington Krazies. The group watcha friend being bludgeoned, burned andthen buried alive; years later they uniteas young adults to avenge the murder.The murder, the belated act of vengeance,and a pseudo-Freudian explanation forthe killer's hostility, forsake reality forsilly contrivance. Better for Homel tohave relied less on absurd plot twists andfocused more on the lives of these teenagers,who resemble the de-sensitizedadolescents in the work of Brett EastonEllis.Stan Persky's Buddy's: Meditations onDesire, in its bold attempts to deconstructpornography and delineate gay desire,forges a rather remarkable synthesis of thesacred and the profane. Buddy's is a sensitive,and sometimes elegiac, series of personalaccounts and recollections. Alreadycelebrated by the gay press as a gutsyexploration of gay sexuality, its style andintelligent commentary will attract areadership beyond the gay community. Infact, this is precisely Persky's wish :Let it serve then as the beginning of thesemeditations on desire, discourse, darkness.They invoke the locales and language of thehomoerotic. But, of course, they're not intendedsolely for those who share that particularsexual "preference" — which is, infact, not a preference but a passion.With a broad gaze upon his environs,Persky explores gay life in all its complexity,pains and pleasures. Two of thepieces are especially apropos. "Gay: ATale of Faerie" traces the genealogy ofthe word "gay" to reveal its varied historicalmeanings; "Personals" looks intopersonal ads as "countless testimony tothe pluralism of desire." Persky's unabashed,and often personal, honesty isimpressive. He unapologetically explainsthat the gay community has not "ceaseddesiring" as a result of AIDS, although ithas been "baffled by how to continuedesiring in the midst of its horror." Thetext's implicit answer is that by continuingto desire, and to love, gay life and culturewill continue to flourish.Buddy's dazzles with its dizzying flightsfrom the banal to the poetic, and backagain. These breathless flights, however,are not without their rough spots. In"God" Persky sets up an absurd syllogismcomparing his sexual partner of the momentto God. In "Eros," the author tries to175

BOOKS IN REVIEWelucidate the inherent democracy of gayrelations, but fails to see that they are asconscious of class and of age as any otherkind of social relationship. Still, Buddy'sis an important social document thatshould inspire much debate.THOMAS HASTINGSL'APRES - "MATOU" ...YVES BEAUCHEMiN, Juliette Pomerleau. Québec/Amérique,$24.95.IL EST FACILE d'imaginer la pression quele créateur du Matou a dû ressentir, toutau long de la création de son dernierroman, Juliette Pomerleau. Que de lecteurset lectrices il avait captivés! Et qued'attentes il avait ainsi créées! En effet,l'on sait que Le Matou, paru en 1981,s'est vendu à plus d'un million d'exemplaires,et qu'il a été traduit dans au moinscinq langues. En outre, il ne serait sansdoute pas erronné d'affirmer qu'avec LesFilles de Caleb, d'Ariette Cousture, LeMatou est à l'origine du courant des bestsellersquébécois amorcé au début desannées quatre-vingt.Avec Juliette Pomerleau, Yves Beauchemin,alliant la matérialité du texte àl'aspect physique de son personnage principal,a fait paraître un énorme roman —quelque sept cents pages — , et uneénorme personnage; de plus, fidèle à samanière, l'auteur orchestre plusieurs intrigues,dont la principale sera la recherchequ'entreprend Juliette Pomerleau desa nièce Adèle Joannette, dont elle estsans nouvelles depuis neuf ans. Mais cetterecherche n'a pas été déclenchée parhasard: Juliette avait jadis fait la promesseenvers sa soeur Joséphine, en 19763de s'occuper d'Adèle, promesse qu'ellen'avait tenue, en fait, que quelquessemaines.Mais voilà que Juliette est atteinted'une grave maladie, et c'est presque àl'article de la mort qu'elle se rappelle cetengagement et qu'elle demande à ses amisde poursuivre cette quête à sa place. Mais,ô miracle!, Juliette sera sauvée par ... lamusique ! En effet, des concerts de son amiet voisin Bohuslav Martinek lui font unbien immense, pour finalement la guérir.Elle pourra donc elle-même poursuivrecette recherche qui la conduira, on s'endoute, à travers toutes sortes de voies imprévues.Le début du roman semblera sans douteà plusieurs quelque peu laborieux. Eneffet, à la manière de la musique qu'ilsemble affectionner et à laquelle il consacreune large place, Yves Beaucheminessaie d'orchestrer divers niveaux d'intriguesavec pour résultat que quelquesfausses notes se glissent ici et là, ou encoreque l'ensemble n'arrive pas à être totalementhomogène. Il faut dire, à la déchargede l'auteur, que Pénormité de la fresquene rendait pas la tâche facile: le romancierdevait nous présenter non seulementson personnage éponyme, mais aussi tousceux qui partagent le même immeublequ'elle et qui seront de près ou de loinliés à l'intrigue principale : Denis, le neveude Juliette; sa soeur maléfique Elvina;l'étrange dentiste Ménard; les musiciensau dernier étage, Rachel et BohuslavMartinek; et, enfin, Clément Fisette, quijouera un rôle important dans la recherched'Adèle.C'est d'ailleurs lors de cette rechercheet des démêlés avec un certain Livernoche,qui occupent la partie centrale duroman, que les fans du Matou en trouverontpour leur compte. L'intrigue est iciplus serrée, plus captivante aussi.Dans une entrevue tenue au sujet duMatou, Y. Beauchemin déclarait: "Pourmoi, un romancier c'est un peu comme unami ou un voisin qui arriverait devantmoi et me dirait : 'Ecoute, il m'est arrivéune histoire absolument extraordinaire ; ilfaut que je te la raconte.'" Quêtes, déplacements,rebondissements: l'on trou-176

BOOKS IN REVIEWvera, comme dans Le Matou, un romanqui là encore ratisse large. Mais y croirat-onvraiment? Suivra-t-on la cure-miraclede Juliette ou encore les manigancesd'Elvina sans froncer les sourcils? Est-ceque l'on parcourra cette intrigue zigzagantesans avoir l'impression que le procédél'emporte sur le naturel? Le romanpourra parfois sembler obèse: des mots,des mots, qui s'efforcent de montrer. Maisque disent-ils, au juste? A cet égard, lapatience du lecteur sera heureusement recompensée: au fur et à mesure qu'avancela lecture, le roman prend de la consistance,se raffermit, et l'on a l'impressionque l'auteur ficelle mieux cet énorme morceau.Comme l'écrivait Jean-Roch Boivin,dans Le Devoir, ce roman est bel et bienun Titanic . .. qui flotte!SILENCESPIERRE HEBERTE. D. BLODGETT, Musical Offering. CoachHouse, $10.95.ANN ROSENBERG, Movement in Slow Time.Coach House, $12.95.AT THE CENTRE OF E. D. Blodgett's MusicalOffering the reader encounters a"Song of Silences," a sequence of ninepoems which takes as its epigraph T. W.Adorno's famous remark: ". . . afterAuschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric.. . ." This remark is of course as much achallenge as a statement of fact, and morethan a few poets have tried to answer it,some of them even making answering ittheir life's work: the names of NellySachs, Paul Celan, and Tadeusz Roziwicz,amongst others, spring to mind. BeforeMusical Offering, however, Blodgett wasnot one of them, except perhaps obliquelyin the mythological meditations on violencefound in Beast Gate (1980), especially"salamander for nelly sachs." Notknowing Blodgett personally, I cannot saywhy he has attempted to answer this challengeonly now, in his fifth volume ofpoems, some four decades after Auschwitz.Yet this much at least is clear : whateverthe reasons, he is concerned herewith matters that have always informedhis work in some manner.Right from the first poem of his firstvolume (take away the names [1975])Blodgett has made language and its vexedrelation to whatever is not language themagnetic centre attracting and patterningthe iron filings of his verse. For the mostpart, not-language has meant Nature,Culture, Myth (the capital letters are intendedto suggest the level of abstractionat which Blodgett usually writes ). Notuntil his fourth volume (Arche/Elegies[1983]) did he begin seriously to considerHistory as well, a shift marked by thevolume's epigraph from F. R. Scott:"How shall we speak of Canada, / MackenzieKing dead?" Blodgett's answer wasanything but as whimsical as Scott's question:meditate interrogatively on personsand places, acknowledging all the whilethe insufficiency of language: "And sothis book of giving up . . ." ("Epistre dédicatoire(epilogue)"). Giving up is failing,of course, but it is also, paradoxically,succeeding, since giving up can be seen asmaking an offering. One pushes languageto the limit, "where falling is cadence"and "to sing is flight, a figure / etchedagainst a tomb" ("Wintering Over,"Musical Offering) ; and in doing so, oneattempts to answer Adorno's challenge,to write poems which are — however barbaric—at once mystical, musical, philosophical,memorial, if not always memorabletherefore.The offerings in Blodgett's latest bookare arranged in three sections, "Preludes,""Fugues," and "Postlude," and all ofthem except those in "Preludes" are arrangedas sequences. Following quitestrictly this musical ideal of form, Blodgettannounces his central theme in the177

BOOKS IN REVIEW"Preludes": "I do not believe in gods /that play at green. / I believe // hunterssurround us, / the music we hear counterpoints/ red:green" ("Colours of War").To try to fix the meanings of these wordswould be foolish, yet the counterpoint"red:green" clearly gestures towards thecontrasts of death and life, war and peace,tragedy and pastoral, and so on. In "Fugues"these contrasts appear over andover again, nearly always in involvedmeditations on language, music, andsilence intended, it would seem, to exemplifythe claim that "the order / of theuniverse [is] the art / of fugue" ("FireMusic") — the absent copula perhapssuggesting that this connection exists beyondthe realm of grammar. In the singlepoem of the "Postlude," these musicalmeditations find a conclusion in an unanswerablequestion (the metaphor of"becoming fish" occurs throughout Blodgett'sfive volumes) : "How to become /fish, wholly contained // and containing. . . / to sing and become // singing"("Naming the New Kilns").Not all of Blodgett's musical offeringsby any means succeed in their givingup: the prose-poem sequence "NightThoughts on Glausewitz's On War" maybe the best /worst example, and parts of"Epigraphs," "Song of Silences," and"Naming the New Kiln" rival it in labouredobscurity. Even at his best — asin parts of "Leavings," "Cadences,""Wintering Over," and "Fire Music" —Blodgett is a difficult and often preciouspoet, and he writes in what might becalled a Mallarméan mode — possiblyderived from Celan — presenting hisreaders with the sorts of difficulty thatGeorge Steiner has called "ontological,"in order to call into question poetry aswe think we know it.Blodgett's work is not for everybody,and he can try the patience of even asympathetic reader. Yet he is attemptingmore than many poets currently writingin Canada, and his "givings up" aretherefore worth offering.The same cannot necessarily be saidfor Ann Rosenberg's Movement in SlowTime, "a tribute to Dante and his nature"modelled on the Commedia and recountingthe "author's journey through anidentified terrain [Vancouver] during aspecific but untrue period of time [a singleday in the early 1980s] ... in which thereporting of character-revealing conversationsand the expounding of philosophy is[sic] paramount." For this verbal, graphic,and pictorial composition is with few exceptionsboring and banal. One quotationshould suffice to make the point: "OhDante, you knew more and differentthings than I.... But your vision is basedon a similar world, on men and womensimilar to the ones I know. ... I will . . .write about them in my vulgar tongue forthe same reasons that you did." Rosenberghas clearly learned from writers like Joyceand Eliot that the Ordinary can find aplace in High Art if one only hangs thedirty laundry on the Golden Bough (theso-called mythical method ), but she seemsto have forgotten that there is more thanone way to hang a sheet. Anyone familiarwith her Bee Book, a similar verbal,graphic, pictorial, and musical compositionabout the difficult sex life of a certainHabella, will probably find Movement adisappointment. Both works manifest thesame concern with female sexuality in amasculine world, but Movement lacks theoccasional wit and genuine strangeness ofThe Bee Book, which takes its models,sometimes quite imaginatively, from anthropologyand entomology.IAIN HIGGINS178

BOOKS IN REVIEWPOSTMODERNPARADOXESLINDA HUTGHEON, The Canadian Postmodern:A Study of Contemporary English-CanadianFiction. Oxford Univ. Press, $16.95.The Canadian Postmodern: A Study ofContemporary English-Canadian Fictionis the second of two book-length studiesLinda Hutcheon published in 1988. Inthe first, A Poetics of Postmodernism:History, Theory, Fiction, Hutcheon continuesher study of the "self-reflexivity" ofcontemporary art forms, an inquiry shebegan in Narcissistic Narrative: TheMetafictional Paradox (1980) and furtherdeveloped in A Theory of Parody:The Teaching of Twentieth-Century ArtForms (1985). In The Canadian Postmodernshe attempts to develop her occasionalwriting on contemporary English-Canadian fiction — reviews, essays, aEGW monograph — into a more coherentand sustained "investigation not into thegeneral phenomenon of postmodernism,but into the particular forms in which itappears in contemporary Canadian fiction."As a sustained investigation, however,The Canadian Postmodern can onlybe found wanting. Although Hutcheonhas revised — indeed, at times, extensivelyrewritten — the original materialin keeping with her stated intention, TheCanadian Postmodern reads more like acollection of occasional texts — alwaysinteresting and often thought-provoking— than a coherent argument. What ismore, despite the increasing emphasis inHutcheon's writing on the historical andideological nature of postmodernism, hertheory remains primarily structuralist andahistorical in its orientation. Finally,despite her frequently stated concern withprocess rather than with product, withreading rather than with the text written,her criticism remains, for the most part,fixed on the text as object — successivechapters of The Canadian Postmodernalmost invariably resolve themselves intointerpretations of particular texts.The Canadian Postmodern consists ofa preface, eight chapters (one of which istitled "Introduction"), and an appendix.Of the eight chapters, the first six (includingthe Introduction) are revisedversions of previously published texts.Only the last two chapters represent substantiallynew writing. "Process, Product,and Politics : The Postmodernism of MargaretAtwood," and "Seeing Double:Concluding with Kroetsch." Arguing thatThe Canadian Postmodern "grew out ofattempts to work out for [herjself variousissues arising from the writing of thechapter on the novel for the fourthvolume of the Literary History of Canada,Hutcheon includes "The Novel (1972-1984)," an early version of her contributionto the fourth volume, as an appendix.Although her work on "The Novel(1972-1984)" undoubtedly provided oneof the contexts for the writing collected inThe Canadian Postmodern, the singlemost important context — as her choiceof title for the volume suggests — is surelythe "investigation of the postmodern that,in fact," she acknowledges, "I discoveredto underlie all my work over this periodof time." That investigation, which reallybegins with Narcissistic Narrative, has ledHutcheon into a series of "contradictions,"a word that in A Poetics of Postmodernismshe uses as a synonym forparadox; indeed, her conception of thepostmodern — Canadian or otherwise —is inextricably bound up in the notion ofparadox. "I would like to begin," shewrites at the outset of A Poetics of Postmodernism,"by arguing that, for me,postmodernism is a contradictory phenomenon,one that uses and abuses, installsand then subverts, the very conceptsit challenges." In Hutcheon's writing paradoxesor "contradictions" serve, in effect,179

BOOKS IN REVIEWas binary opposites; out of the tensionbetween such oppositions as process/product, art/life, fiction/history, margin/centre, and most notably "the presence ofthe past," she structures both her theoryand her criticism.But are these postmodern paradoxesmerely "seeming contradictions" ? Do theymerge dialectically? Or do the doublesremain doubles? While Hutcheon wouldundoubtedly respond with a resounding"no!" to all such suggestions, her articulationof a poetics of postmodernism assumesthat, while the opposites may notmerge, while the doubles may stay double,at some level the contradictions give wayto some fundamental laws — even if it isonly the law of paradox. As TzvetanTodorov points out in his Introductionto Poetics,the object of [poetics] is to transpose thework into the realm considered fundamental: it is a labour of decipherment and translation; the literary work is the expression of"something," and the goal of such studies isto reach this "something" through the poeticcode.Linda Hutcheon's poetics of postmodernismis grounded in "difference" ; however,her ability even to conceive a text titledThe Canadian Postmodern suggests thatHutcheon regards the differences betweenCanadian writing and writing elsewhereas less significant than the general laws orparadoxes she sees operating not only inthe literatures of Europe and North andSouth America but in their "architecture. . . painting, sculpture, film, video, dance,TV, music, philosophy, aesthetic theory,psychoanalysis, linguistics, [and] historiography"as well. When she notes thatThe Canadian Postmodern is "an investigationnot into the general phenomenonof postmodernism, but into the particularforms in which it appears in contemporaryCanadian fiction" Hutcheon is declaring,in effect, that she is concerned in TheCanadian Postmodern not with the establishmentof the general laws of postmodernismbut with particular Canadian textsas the product of those laws.In the final chapter of The CanadianPostmodern, titled "Seeing Double : Concludingwith Kroetsch," Hutcheon arguesthat Kroetsch is "at the paradoxicalcentre of the decentred phenomenoncalled postmodernism" and celebrates himas "Mr. Canadian Postmodern," "themaster of double-talking paradox." However,with the publication of both APoetics of Postmodernism and The CanadianPostmodern, and with a career-longcommitment to the double-talk of paradox,it is Hutcheon rather than Kroetschwho is at the "paradoxical centre" and itis to Hutcheon, too, that the title of"[Ms.] Canadian Postmodern" mostfittingly belongs.NEW FICTIONPAUL H J ART ARS ONFRANCES iTANi, Truth or Lies. Oberon, $12.95.SUSAN KERSLAKE, Blind Date. PottersfieldPress, $9.95.AT FIRST SIGHT, Frances Itani's first shortstory collection, Truth or Lies, does notseem to be a book to cherish. Itani is apoet and children's writer whose threeprevious books of poetry, No Other Lodging(1978), Rentrée Bay (1983) and ASeason of Mourning ( 1988), are, with theexception of a few poems, minor, and donot point to greater achievement. Whatis more, the cover illustration of Truth orLies consists of an obese naked woman,smudged in black, grey and white, againsta background of the same colours: theresult is repulsive. The seven stories insideare, however, a pleasant surprise.Itani's fiction, with its perceptive heroines,and wide variety of settings, includingAustria, Canada and Japan, are writtenin precise prose ; there is rarely an instance180

BOOKS IN REVIEWof sloppy diction, or a section that needstighter editing. Consider the perfection ofthe following paragraph, which is fromthe story "Grandmother" :But Grandmother extends her free arm,holding them back. She takes a deep breath,looks around her and her shoulders shift withthat fine sense of determination we havesomehow always known. Her head is thrownback, the reddish streaks in her hair caressingthe grey. And then, she beckons: first toher children, who file past one by one. Thesons and daughters, the wives and husbandsof these, their children and their children'schildren. All of us pausing before her, alone,for a brief and private communication withGrandmother, spending our confusion, oursadness, our love, or whatever it is that wehave brought to her to spend.If Itani does have a fault, it is an occasionaltendency, in such otherwise memorablestories as "Foolery" and "Songs forthe Children," to explain situations to thepoint that she walks the edge of didacticism.Such a complaint, however, shouldnot prevent readers from consideringItani's stories: Truth or Lies is, as RobertWeaver has stated, "a mature andthoughful book." So far, Itani's greaterstrength lies in fiction, rather than poetry.It is a pity that "Clayton," a moving,powerful story, was not included. Biographicalinformation on the author isalso missing.I started Susan Kerslake's collection oftwelve stories, Blind Date, with high expectations;I knew her as the author ofthe good, if overwritten story collectionThe Book of Fears (1984), a book nominatedfor the Governor General's Award.Unlike the cover in which Oberon enclosedItani's collection, Kerslake's bookhas an attractive illustration of two flowingmauve and purple curtains, a coverwhich invites the reader to raise the curtainsand see what Kerslake sets upon herstage.Kerslake, however, fails to convince.Her themes and settings are similar toItani; she, too, uses observant female protagonistsand international backgrounds,her settings, in this case, being Canadaand Africa. But where Itani's prose iscrisp and clear, Kerslake is a sloppywriter, with little feeling for the potentialelegance of English. Her sentences oftenrun on ("They had stirred a halo roundmy head and tried to scare me, but Iwasn't scared and I ran back, which wasall downhill and out of the dark and towarda sunlight that still sparkled up fromthe lake and the walls of our cottage withflaking paint and mossy spoors in thecreases, with the same old folks sittingthere, laughing, slightly blued by then,even Travis on plain old ginger ale andcherry syrup."). What is more, Kerslake'swriting needs additional punctuation("My cousin who was two understoodand put his face in") ; she frequentlylacks a gift for suitable description ("Itwas at this time of night that he experiencedhis 'all's well with the world' feeling"); and her similes are sometimes unfortunate("She sees a small blue wrinkledmouth. It looks like her grandfather'sanus the time she'd been too close andMama was wiping him up"). I am fullyaware that literature sometimes demandsthat conventions of style and taste bebroken, but I can see no reason for thisprocedure here. Even worse than the text,however, is its design; Blind Date is repletewith typographical errors, absurdlylong spaces after periods, hyphens usedwhere long dashes are required, accentsthat have been scribbled on the page, unevenright-side and left-side justification,and words that are underlined rather thanplaced in italics. Judging from the dictionand the design, it is as if an editor nevertouched the book, either before or afterformating. But the failure of Blind Datemust, in the end, rest with its author,coming after The Book of Fears, Kerslake'snew work is a major disappointment.BOYD HOLMES181

BOOKS IN REVIEWDYNAMICSOF MEMORYNEIL к. BESNER, The Light of Imagination:Mavis Gallant's Fiction. University of BritishColumbia Press, $29.95.MAVIS GALLANT IS ONE of the most admiredof Canadian writers internationally,yet until quite recently one of the leastacknowledged in Canada. It has beenGallant's way to elude traditional Canadiancategories of classification, partlybecause of her internationalism (living inParis for nearly forty years while alwayswriting in English) and partly because ofthe riddling quality of her narratives andtheir resistance to analysis. As Neil Besnerremarks, it was only with the appearancein 1979 of From the Fifteenth Districtthat Gallant's reputation in Canada wasestablished, though by that time she hadbeen a regular contributor to The NewYorker since 1951 and had already publishedfour short story collections and twonovels. During the 1980s she has had herchampions in Ronald Hatch, DonaldJewison, and John Metcalf. Now withBesner's book comes the first full-lengthcritical study of Gallant's fiction and nonfictionalessays, to be closely followed byJanice Kulyk Reefer's Reading MavisGallant.Besner's approach subdues thematics tonarrative and stylistic strategies, as hetakes the story collections and novelschronologically, constructing throughthem a narrative that sustains Gallant'sdialectic between personal memory andsocial history in the cross-cultural encountersdocumented by her fiction. Payingclose attention to the language andstructural shifts within particular stories,Besner focuses on those moments of potentialrevelation which characterise Gallant'sdistinctive blend of modernism andpostmodernism. It is to these glimpsedepiphanies that 'the light of imagination'(a phrase from 'The Moslem Wife') ambiguouslyrefers. Besner enacts a kind ofreading process which attends to the verbalsurfaces of Gallant's narratives, seeingthem as radical refigurings of truths whichalways remain provisional, available to bereconstructed.This study describes the permutationsand combinations of memory, history andimagination in Gallant's work. Besner'schapter titles like "Memory's FictionsAgainst History's Reports" and "Historyand Memory in the 'Light of Imagination'" signal continuities and shifts, whilethe evocation of Paris in his first and lastchapters ("The Other Paris" and "Overheadin a Balloon: Another Paris") measuresthe distance Gallant has traversedover thirty years in her narratives of imaginativeresponses to that city and itshistory. Gallant has been an assiduouschronicler of postwar European culturein her fiction and essays (Could anyonebut a foreigner display such detached perceptiveness?)and through determinedanalysis of particular stories in every collectionsince The Other Paris (1956)Besner charts Gallant's explorations of aEurope haunted by a recent past it wouldlike to forget. While displacement, disinheritance,and fragmentation characterisethe European experience, theNorth American experience of Europe ismarked by those same feelings, thoughengendered through a dangerous innocenceof history. Gallant's stories alwaysseem to hinge on the non-coincidence betweenimmediate and remembered experienceor between romantic inventionand historical reality. Besner traces a developmentin narrative technique fromthe early stories where disparities arerealised only by the reader to the laterones where such perceptions are sharedby the protagonists themselves.If the weakest chapter is the one onGallant's two novels, where Besner's methodologyso finely attuned to the short182

BOOKS IN REVIEWstory genre shows its limits when dealingwith the longer narrative form, then hisdiscussion of The Pegnitz Junction (thebook which Gallant told Geoffrey Hancockshe liked better than anything elseshe wrote) is the most resonant. Takingthe context of fragmentation and culturalcollapse in postwar Germany, Besnerstudies the shape of this collection as awhole before analysing individual storieswith their jolts, shifts and changes offocus. In the process he shows how theyform a constellation of narratives wheresocial breakdown is mirrored in individualprivate dramas of paralysed feelings andatrophied memories at a particular pointin European history.Besner is also attentive to some extentto Gallant's Ganadianness, and his biographicaldetails of her Montreal Standarddays as a reporter in the 1940s areinteresting for what they reveal about herknowledge of Canadian postwar literatureand society with its war brides, refugees,and other displaced persons. Hepresents a careful discussion of the LinnetMuir stories (collected together in HomeTruths), heeding Gallant's warningsabout making easy connections betweenautobiography and fiction, treating themas fictional (or metafictional) statementsabout coming to terms with the inventionsof memory and the psychological necessityfor habitable fictions.Indeed there are other narratives forreading Gallant that might be offered, forinstance seeing her stories as being aboutthe elusive search for identity and originsin a world where language reflects onlyconflicting cultural codes, or a feministreading of her investigation of women'srelation to history and tradition. Besner'scritical narrative does not accommodatethese possibilities, though Gallant's ownnarratives do not rule them out. WhatBesner's reading does offer so ably is oneway of interpreting Gallant's historicalimagination and her narrative strategieswhich enact the dynamics of memory andimaginative invention.MID-VICTORIANCONCERNSCORAL ANN HOWELLSWILLIAM WESTFALL, Two Worlds: Studies inthe Protestant Culture of Ontario, i8soi8yo.McGill-Queen's, $34.95; pa. $29.95.IN HIS CONCLUSION TO A Literary Historyof Canada, Northrop Frye points out that,until two or three generations ago, religionwas, perhaps, the major cultural forcein Canada. He adds that this religionstressed doctrine at the expense of imagery.WestfalPs study of nineteenthcenturyProtestantism in Upper Canadaconfirms Frye's first observation but questionsthe second. It argues that especiallyimagery related to time and place reflectsmid-Victorian concerns that historianshave overlooked. Because of the centralityof religion in nineteenth century culture,this image reveals not only the developmentof religious thought but also theevolution of a national consciousness.Before the 1837 rebellions, Protestantismin Upper Canada suffered from division.This division was reflected in a fragmentedconcept of time, both betweenand within denominations. Anglicans,who stressed reason, order and the unityof church and state, opposed Methodists,who emphasized emotion, God's savingintervention in human lives, and separationof church and state. Further, fromthe 1820s into the early Victorian period,pre-millenialism, based on the Revelationof St. John, decried the evils of the presentgeneration and prophesied an apocalypticend of the world — an end of time.Though Methodist emotionalism especiallyfostered this dangerous doctrine,apocalyptic thought plagued Baptists,Presbyterians and Anglicans as well.183

BOOKS IN REVIEWSocial change after 1837 altered culturalalliances. Within the religious structureof Upper Canada, Anglicans andPresbyterians lost their positions of stateprivilege. With the Baptists and Methodists,therefore, they soon found themselvesbattling not each other but the growingforces of Mammon. Rejecting the fatalisticpre-millenialism, the mid-centuryProtestant churches together developed apost-millenialist theology, which projectedan evolving Christian society worldwide,a society that would ultimatelyusher in the Biblical thousand years ofpeace.As the interpretation of time movedfrom chaos to progress, church architecturealso reflected the new Protestantunity. As if stressing that, in spite of itstheological accommodation with progress,official church dogma opposed a risingmaterialism built on capitalist greed thatfueled the engine of economic development,Protestantism affirmed medievalGothic forms as uniquely religious. Gothicchurches, therefore, rose as architecturalrebukes to public buildings constructed inthe neo-classical style. (The Gothic castof Ottawa's parliament buildings wouldthus suggest the near-religious ideals ofConfederation for a new land in 1867.)Unfortunately, WestfalFs study fails toreach its potential, largely because ofweak writing. Instead of an initial, carefullycrafted introduction that coherentlyanalyzes the relationship of time and spaceto culture, Westfall offers interesting butessentially isolated examples of religiousattitudes. To compensate for the theoreticalweakness of his base, Westfall latercontinually repeats the importance oftemporal and spatial images without developingfurther theory.Nevertheless, Westfall provides valuableinsights for cultural historians. Hesuggests that, by Confederation, CanadianProtestantism, having developed aprogressive doctrine of time, was able toaffirm Darwinian evolution in officialtheology, thereby averting a break betweenscience and religion. Further, asocially engaged theology symbolized bymetaphors of progressive time and idealizedspace was able to foster the socialgospel movement, so important politicallyin the early twentieth century. Unfortunately,in the very process of incorporatingmaterial progress into its vision of thefuture, Protestantism allowed the secularto replace the sacred and thus underminedits own foundation, thereby initiatingits own future failure.The relevance of Two Worlds is underscoredby its close relationship to otherimportant analyses of the same period.Westfall offers important background forRamsay Cook's The Regenerators, whichalso presents the evolution of Canadianreligious culture from sacred to secular atthe end of the Victorian period. Moreover,WestfalPs discussion adds an earlydimension to A. B. McKillop's work onthe rise of philosophical idealism in the1870s, an idealism that continued toinfluence Canadian culture well into thetwentieth century. Finally, WestfalFsstudy of Ontario's religious history presentsa new approach to the secular historyof Canadian culture, an approachthat locates in Ontario's Victorian culturethe roots of modern attitudes as well as anational cultural uniqueness that manyhistorians have, until now, overlooked.HENRY HUBERT184

BOOKS IN REVIEWALTERNATIVETHEATREDangerous Graces: Women's Poetry on Stagefrom "Fire Works!" Scripted by Susan Me-Master. Balmuir Book Press, $9.95.McClure: A Play in two acts, Scott Munroe.Pierre Press, $8.95.WITH THESE TWO SCRIPTS Munroe Scottand Susan McMaster remind us thatEnglish-Canadian theatre has shown tremendousvitality and variety in recentyears. Dangerous Graces was scriptedfrom contributions by seventeen Canadianwomen poets, including the work of wellestablishedpoets such as Bronwen Wallaceand Ronnie R. Brown and of relativenewcomers such as Patricia Rowe, NadineMclnnis, and Sylvia Adams. The script of"Dangerous Graces/Saving Sins," it wascomposed as a poetry-in-performancepiece for Ottawa's month-long festival ofwomen's theatre Fire Works!, producedby the Great Canadian Theatre Companyin 1987. Munroe Scott's McClure wascommissioned by Theatre Aquarius ofHamilton, Ontario. First performed inMarch of 1986, it has also played in Torontoin October, 1986 and at the GuelphSpring Festival in May, 1987 and has recentlycompleted an eight-month tour ofCanada. The appearance of DangerousGraces and McClure in book form furtherenriches the repertoire of contemporaryCanadian drama available for both performanceand study.The affinity of feminist theatre forpoetry-in-performance dramaturgy wasdemonstrated as long ago as 1976 in thelandmark New York production of NtozakeShange's For Colored Girls WhoHave Considered Suicide/ When theRainbow is Enuf. While not as overtlypolitically charged, like Shange's work thepoems in Dangerous Graces work throughthe manifold frustrations of women's experiencein patriarchy in order to realizewomen's empowerment through spirituality.Embodied by three actors, archetypalvoices speak to the five thematic divisionsof the play: "Original Courage,""Dangerous Love," "Saving Curiosity,""Dangerous Wisdom," and "SavingCare." The speakers are represented inthe text by symbols of the moon: "the newmoon for the Maid, or young woman;the half moon for the Matron, or middleagedwoman; and the full moon for theDame, or old woman." Sign language iscalled for at one point in the script anda "wordmusic" score is provided at another,indicating only two of the challengesto performance conventions offeredby the play. In addition to the script, thebook includes valuable commentary onthe development of the original productionby the director of Fireworks! BarbaraLysnes, the director of the show JenniferBoyes, and the composer of the scoreAndrew McClure. McMaster's scriptaffords well-varied pacing, at times playful,provocative, contemplative. Her skilfulinterweaving of woman-orientedthemes and performance art makes DangerousGraces an innovative example ofalternative theatre.Munroe Scott, a long-time writer anddirector in Canadian films, television, andtheatre, gleaned material for McClurefrom his two-volume biography of DoctorRobert Baird McClure, McClure: TheChina Y ears and McClure : Years of Challenge.The play ranges over McClure'stwenty-five years in China as a UnitedChurch missionary doctor and surgeon.Opening in 1926, the play documents hisearly encounters with war-lords and bandits,and his later role as Field Directorfor the International Red Cross for NorthernChina during the conflict betweenChinese Nationalists and Communistsand the Sino-Japanese war. In this onemanplay, the actor, a role originated byWayne Best, plays not only McClure butalso several other characters, including185

BOOKS IN REVIEWMao and Norman Bethune. A set placementdiagram, properties lists, reviewsfrom Performing Arts and the FinancialPost are included in the book as well asthree black and white photographs fromthe original production. Robert McClure'sown brief introduction and a chronology,covering the period from the appointmentof Robert McGlure's father to China bythe Presbyterian Church in 1880 toMcClure's return to China in 1981, providehistorical and biographical backgroundfor the events of the play. Therapid pace of McClure contributes to asense of the hero as a missionary IndianaJones, with many ethical issues brieflytouched upon, ranging from the imperialistpresence of Western nations toMcClure's dislike of a drunken Bethune,left unexamined.Regrettably, although original musicwas composed for each play, neither scorehas been reproduced. However, bothbooks (attractively printed and bound)attempt to give a sense of the overalloriginal production through other material.The differences between these twoplays, in approach, subject matter, andtheatrical experience offered by eachproduction, demonstrate the variety of alternativetheatre activity currently takingplace in Canada. It is to be hoped thatmuch more of this activity will be madeavailable in book form.DEJA VUHEATHER JONESKENNETH RADU, Distant Relations.$29·95/$ΐ4·95·Oberon,AN EXAMPLE OF THE ethnic novel(Ukrainian this time) set initially on theprairies and offering a vivid if oftenviolent picture of the conditions of earlyhomesteading; a novel in which an obstinateold woman casts up accounts at theend of her life, the book alternating betweenscenes set in the present and eventsremembered from the past.I have tried in the above paragraph tooffer as neutral an account as possible ofthe contents and effect of Distant Relations.Having done so, I can readily imaginetwo reviews of the novel that woulddraw opposed conclusions from this sameevidence. A thematic critic, if in patrioticmood, might well praise it for its Canadianness,assign it a central place withinthe Canadian tradition, and theorizeabout its social and cultural significance.A grumpier critic would probably jib atthe derivativeness of the conception {anotherethnic novel; another rendition ofdour life on the prairies; Hagar Shipleyrecycled once again).What both critics are likely to ignore —and what for me is of the utmost importance— is the style, the author's conspicuouscontrol over the rhythms of hissentences, the flow of his paragraphs, hiscapacity to move smoothly between thenarrative voice and that of his protagonist.So far as I am concerned, it is his abilityas a stylist that distinguishes KennethRadu from the majority of his contemporaries.While it is obviously impossible toillustrate such qualities in the course of abrief review, the fact that he is always infull control of his prose needs to be emphasized.For the serious reader, his stylisticsophistication represents a considerablepart of his creative achievement.Nonetheless, the novel has its problems.While "Hagar Shipley recycled" wouldbe unfair, an uneasy sense of déjà vuhangs over the book. While it is absorbingto read, it does not earn high marks forfreshness of conception or formal originality.Above all, while at its best DistantRelations is impressive and moving, at itsworst it becomes infuriatingly repetitious.The seventy-four-year-old protagonist,Vera Dobriu, is the vehicle for a devastatingattack on the state of the contempor-186

BOOKS IN REVIEWary world, and at first the scathing referencesto contemporary violence andphoniness, the offensivenes of the worldof cheap plastic, seem refreshing and evenexhilarating. But as the list lengthens andthe absurdities are reiterated again andagain, the law of diminishing returns setsin. If her unsatisfactory husband hadbeen described as a fungus one more time,if I were reminded once again that shewas in the arms of her black lover at thetime of the atomic explosion over Hiroshima,I might well have screamed.Oberon Press policies do not favourthe spreading of authorial information.Clearly, however, Kenneth Radu is nofledgling writer. To my knowledge he haspublished two children's stories, a movingbook of poems {Letters to a DistantFather, 1987), and a collection of shortstories (The Cost of Living, also 1987)that I found impressive indeed. DistantRelations may have its snags, but thetalent behind it is unmistakable. It isclearly a very respectable first novel, andRadu is a writer to be watched.COSTUME PARADEW. J. KEITHMICHELLE GADPAiLLE, The Canadian ShortStory. Oxford.88 Best Canadian Short Stories, ed. DavidHelwig & Maggie Helwig. Oberon, $25.95/$12.95.Coming Attractions, ed. David Helwig & MaggieHelwig. Oberon, n.p.IT HAS BEEN CLAIMED often enough thatCanadian literature excels in the shortstory, a genre which gains its strengthfrom its steady development over almosta century and from its more recent growthin productivity and diversity. The relativelylong tradition, the thriving presentand the promising future of the English-Canadian short story form the basis ofthe three books under review.All in all this survey is a useful introductionto the English-Canadian shortstory providing, within its scope, a considerableamount of information throughthe discussion of paradigmatic texts andsummary assessments of the authors in asuccinct, straightforward style. Gadpaillerelies heavily on the canon of realist,modernist stories — a recurrent criterionfor a story's importance is how frequentlyit has been anthologized — and only occasionallydoes she draw attention to undulyneglected stories (as in the case of HughGarner's "Our Neighbours the Nuns").There are gaps in her account — HenryKreisel, for instance, is missing — butthese may be as unavoidable as the reductivelabels attached to some of the brieferreferences. Still, one could argue thatMalcolm Lowry, once included, woulddeserve fuller treatment, and the capsulecharacterization of Timothy Findley as agentle, leisurely teller of tales strikes oneas far off the mark. In the long chapteron Munro, Lives of Girls and Women ispassed over presumably because its authorhas, hesitatingly, classified it as a novel.But how does it differ structurally fromLaurence's A Bird in the House, which asa sequence of linked stories is properlydealt with? Gadpaille's reluctance to takesuch borderline cases into considerationprobably has something to do with hergeneral avoidance of genre theory, whichis most conspicuous at the beginning andtowards the end of the book, where questionsof defining and stretching genreboundaries are constantly implied ratherthan explicated. Similarly, she refrainsfrom comparative approaches. Apart fromoccasional references to the Americanshort story, there are no comparisons withdevelopments in French-Canadian orother post-colonial literatures. In all ofthese respects the lack of a bibliography,which could have guided the reader tofurther sources, is particularly deplorable.Gadpaille mentions the Oberon antho-187

BOOKS IN REVIEWlogies as an influential forum contributingto the present flowering of the Canadianshort story in its more "conservative andmodernist" mode. Therefore, the latestbatch of these collections invites close inspectionas it should indicate the presenttrends within an established tradition. Amoderate version of modernism in postmodernisttimes is, indeed, what givesthe majority of the stories assembled heretheir stamp, and it may be said at theoutset that the best stories and the mostpromising writers of 1988 as chosen bythe Helwigs do not yield a particularlygood vintage. While 88 Best Canadian-Short Stories is advertised on the blurb asa "rich and varied collection" and announcedin the editors' introductory noteas a selection of unique stories taken froma great bulk of deserving texts on offer,one feels rather let down by the narrowrange of thematic concerns and the conventionalmethods of presentation whichby and large inform the actual stories. Theanthology opens with a slight piece byCarol Shields which strikes the keynote ofmuch that follows by lining up a costumeparade of people posing images of theirselves in everyday situations and promptingthe final question: Who does he/shethink he/she is? Variants of this questionin the Munro vein recur in a number ofstories and are asked, more often than not,rather overtly, patronizing the reader evenwhen uttered by a character or an authorialpersona. The limits of the stories'world become evident in conspicuousabsences: the focus is exclusively on thecommon tribulations of people's privatelives, especially the intricate relationshipsbetween individuals of different sexes andgenerations, to the total neglect of themore public sphere in political affairs andsocial problems, even at the level of workinglife, or of the more fundamental dimensionof relating one's existence to theworld at large. What we have here is anendless array of men or women and theirlovers or friends, of mothers and daughters,fathers and families entangled incritical situations which throw their livesinto relief and shade their self-images withirony yet remain bound up with the Mewrit large. Technically, these stories followthe conventions of psychological realismwith a noticeable preference for adolescentor female angles of narration, fora structural linearity interrupted only byshifts to the reporting of past events andfor an equally straightforward style.There are stories like Ernest Hekkanen's"The Violent Lavender Beast"and Tom Marshall's "The Other Mexico,"which venture near or cross theboundary of fantasy to present obsessivevisions and apparitions. We come underthe spell of a few striking images as inDavy James-French's "Heaven Full ofAstronauts," where the attempt of asmall-town community to attract the attentionof an early space flight comesacross as a pathetic gesture towards recognitionby the outside world. Some storieslead up to a final ironic twist or a doubleedgedopen ending: Joyce Marshall's"Blood and Bone" confronts a womanwith her daughter, whom she had to giveaway for adoption under painful circumstancesand who returns with all the obstinacyof a religious zealot.The stories concentrate on Canadiancharacters of the urban middle class,especially the world of the arts and academia.Where small-town life comes intofocus it is either as an adolescent experience,and as such a matter of the recollectedpast, or as an encounter with anunfamiliar territory in the present. Settingsin foreign countries are seen mainlythrough the eyes of Canadians abroad.The one exception is Rohinton Mistry's"Facing the Precipice," which describesthe shattered self-confidence of a Goanin Bombay faced with loss of control overhis grown-up daughter and the dilapidationof the neighbourhood, a story which188

BOOKS IN REVIEWonly by implied parallel may also saysomething about the immigrant's experiencein Canada. International events orinternal multicultural tensions do not impingeon Canadian life as depicted inthese stories. Only the rumbling of worldWar II and its disrupting impact onfamily life are registered in Jane Rule's"War's End," whereas more recent developmentslike the conflict betweenAnglo-Canadians and Franco-Canadiansor that most topical fear of an increasingdependence on the United States are noteven hinted at.The story that deserves to be singledout is Timothy Findley's "Bragg andMinna" because it surpasses the rest ofthe collection on most accounts. Its titlecharacters are two opposing kinds of personalitiesand writers, the man worriedabout the future and devoted to meticulouscraftsmanship, his wife full of indomitablevitality and committed to writingon behalf of the underprivileged andinarticulate, both of them involved in thebirth of a severely handicapped child andentangled in a triangle with a homosexualfriend. The story touches upon the complexityof life and death, reason and compassion,self and society, writing andreality, and links the archetypal imageryof Australian aborigines with the ominoustimes of AIDS in order to provoke a shockof recognition in the man which bringshim closer to his wife after her death fromcancer. The story is told in a terse styleand marked by a segmental structure oftime shifts within a retrospective frame.Findley's "Bragg and Minna" opens aseries of linked Stories in Stones (1988),which is going to be continued beyond hislatest book. In this respect it is much morepromising than the samples anticipatingthe future of the genre in Coming Attractions.This anthology contains three storieseach by Christopher Fisher, Carol AnnWien and Rick Hillis, all newcomers atleast to the short story. Fisher's stories areabout life in the fictional prairie town ofDolguard and, in striking contrast to theother anthology, present glimpses of arural microcosm with working class oreven marginal characters dramatized in asuitably sparse style. Fisher obviouslyjoins the tradition of realistic prairie fictionbut, unassuming as his pieces are, hemay well have the edge over the other,more sophisticated, writers. Wien's recurrenttheme is the encounter in transience :Canadians abroad (Brazil, Mexico) or inan unfamiliar region (Nova Scotia) haveto face challenging situations which bringtheir whole being under scrutiny. TheJames-Gallant tradition is as importantfor the narrative mode as it is for herthematic interest. Hillis comes closest tothe other two in a lengthy story about theordeal and self-assertion of a boy duringa holiday on a farm, whereas his shorterpieces concern the world of the rodeo andfootball enhanced by popular mythologizingand approached here in a rather moredeviant way.One does not have to share JohnMetcalf's reservations about the selfconsciousnationalism and naive provincialismof Canadian literature to findthese anthologies largely disappointing.Even within their self-imposed thematicand technical limitations most of thestories fall short of the standards set bythe better stories of Munro and Atwood.EBERHARD KREUTZERARTIFICIAL PARADISE?BRIAN BARTLETT, Planet Harbour. Goose Lane$8.95, pa.PHIL HALL, Amanuensis. Brick Books, n.p.HAROLD RHENISCH, A Delicate Fire. Sono Nis$6.95, pa.FOR ALL THEIR DIFFERENCE in outlook,experience, and aesthetic, these threewriters share a serious engagement withmany of the same questions. Bartlett,189

BOOKS IN REVIEWthough the most obviously delighted inthe play of poetry, knows the dangers towhich absorption with the self and theplay of words may lead: it is in keepingwith this awareness that both Donne andStevens echo through his pages. Hall,much less willing than Bartlett to letwords merely play, makes play with wordshis means of questioning formalist aesthetics.And Rhenisch, though generallymore serious in tone than the other two,holds a vision of language that only failsof Bartlett's practice by his awareness thatlanguage outside the poem ever fails toapproach his vision: how, ask many ofRhenisch's poems, can the poet remainlong satisfied in an artificial paradise?Tom Wayman, for one, cannot: "I findit discouraging that the literary arts —which are touted (and funded) as epitomizingthe human spirit — should helpperpetuate the taboo against accuratelydepicting daily work and thus contributeto human pain." Nor can Hall: "Whenwe handle things and then write words /we speak of that interchange of prayers /but when we handle only / pens / webegin to pray to our pens / for words /that are solid / excuses for having let go."But though Wayman's insistence on bringingwork — real work — into poetry isthe dominant theme in Hall's Amanuensis,his first book of poems, anarchy is itschief impression, as if it sought to resist,sis (his first book of poems), anarchy is itsunsettling mix of poems and graphics— the graphics themselves unsettlinglymixed, ranging from the German classicpainter, Anselm Feuerbach, to sketches byHall of office workers, to photographs ofa chair's shadow — by its mostly untitled,fragmentary poems, and by its practicaljokes. This unsettledness is one of thevolume's strengths; another is its frequentprecision of perception: "A chickadee /imbeds itself / in the fog." Like EdwardThomas, whom he praises along the way,Hall can be a "meticulous listener."A Delicate Fire, Rhenisch's third volumeof poems, suggests a different distrustof language. His poems seem constantlyalert to man's pride before nature.Poetry becomes not so much an artificialparadise, as it threatens to become forHall, but rather a place of authority fromwhich the poet can both pronounce onthe deficiencies of language beyond thepoem and perfect that humility before thenon-human world that itself seems to corruptdaily speech. "It's not purity we askfor," he writes in "The Drive Home fromCalgary," "but to be able to live with ourwords — which means, in part, to facilitateexchange between men, / but doesnot mean profit, / and does not mean tolie." Some judgements called forth by hisobservations seem based on slight evidence.In "Bella Coola (Komkotes),1873," the poet scrutinizes the membersof the expedition of Dr. Israel Powell,Indian Commissioner, in an old photograph.Selecting the details by which tocharacterize Powell — "out-thrust belly,fat, / supporting himself / stiffly on acane" — Rhenisch concludes that hecould not "sit down for a drink" withhim: "in some lace-windowed bar / inVictoria. He looks a fool."Planet Harbour, Bartlett's first book ofpoems, by indulging itself in the world ofwords refrains from larger judgements."A Distant Stream on Madonna Mountain"pardons the vagaries of human perception:"who's pure enough / to stopcomparing?" A similar conceit appears in"Out There" : "Tempting to say my blueink flows out / from here, turns black,then coats / all the shapes and forms outthere, / leaving a night or a nothingness /in which I can create what I want. Theanchor — or "harbour" — of his wit isthe relationship between two intimates.His poems seem written first for that intimateother, and only secondly for a largeraudience. The feeling, then, is often thatthe private world so displayed is delightiqo

BOOKS IN REVIEWful, but that its delight is bought at thecost of ignoring its fragility and relativeslightness in the world. Donne's example,among others', returns with a vengeanceat this complaint : do we feel cramped andconfined in love poems? Perhaps TomWayman or Phil Hall, among others, may.But Rhenisch, for one, would agree withBartlett that the expression of the bondbetween lovers adds something to thelarger world. Why is it, then, that someof Bartlett's poems diminish rather thanmagnify? The problem may lie in his pronouns,"I" and "you," which seem to enforce,when they should unsettle, the rolesof gifted maker ("I") and grateful reader("you"). The effect is to confine the poemto its small world, walled-in by its pronouns.DARRELL LAIRD(UN) FRANK: DAVEYFRANK DAVEY, Reading Canadian Reading.Turnstone, $14.95.IN THIS COLLECTION of sixteen essays onvarious aspects of Canadian literature andcriticism, Frank Davey identifies himselfas someone deeply committed to all theright issues aligned with current theory.He would ( 1 ) concern himself with"theories of 'interest' or 'conflict'"; (2)be upset about our continuing ignoranceof critical theory and about our unwillingnessto realize that "every critical act. . . assumes at least one theory of criticism";(3) argue against those who are"blind to the implications of their ownapproaches" (those who don't see that"there can be no absolute values" in criticaltexts — only "ideological positions") ;and (4) valorize those critics who celebratetheir ideological positions and whoinsist that criticism is a political act.This is all very au courant; the problemis that Davey speaks as if he hadjust discovered the relation between ideologyand theory. He seems impressed bythis discovery, though he never reallyclarifies what the nature of his involvementis. Perhaps this is because his ownrole and political status as a critic remainunclear. The "discourse theory" Daveyendorses makes it easy to get around thisproblem of self-definition because "Discoursetheory avoids the metaphysical difficultiesof positing a freestanding andconsistent self but, by positing that allutterances are mere rhetoric, appears togive all hortatory or political expressionequal standing."While Davey might argue that ego isrelative to rhetoric, his book demonstratesthat his own development as a critic hasquite a bit to do with the recognition ofhis aims as an ambitious, freestandingyoung academic. His accounts of how hisvarious critical books evolved are embarrassingbecause they suggest thatDavey received contracts for some of hisearlier studies because he spoke to theright party at the right time.Davey's confessional mode suggests thathe is trying to justify his career, to explainwhy he lacks canonical status as a poet,to excuse his participation in an ideologicallycorrupt and sickening bourgeoisuniversity superstructure, to distance himselffrom previous associations that nowstrike him as politically incorrect. Inother words, Davey is trying to rewrite hislife. No wonder he sounds like someonetrying to be someone else.This brings me to explain why readingDavey's book made me feel sad. I likedthe old Davey, when he was just plainFrank. His books broke new ground. Theywere fresh, and Frank was frank. But inReading Canadian Reading, it's muchharder to find Frank. Davey has betrayedFrank's faith. If Davey tells us that hisstudy of Birney now seems questionablebecause it is organized chronologicallyaround Birney's life as a historical subject,then how can I credit Reading Canadian

BOOKS IN REVIEWReading, which is framed by a chronologicalanalysis of the texts that seem tofocus Davey's historical (and presumably"real") life? If Davey argues that certainCanadian writers are selected for study inschools and universities because they donot provoke "significant theoretical discussion"we must ask how it is that Daveyconsiders a writer such at Atwood to beeasier to "consume" than, say, GeorgeBowering. The answer is not hard to find :Davey devalues Atwood's intellectual andideological import because it is in his interestto do so. Davey's entire study attemptsto argue that literary value ("interest")is radically contingent. If this isso, then he wastes his time trying to determinewhy one author is or is not the subjectof study in the schools. And if valueis not radically contingent, then the antiessentialiststance that Davey adopts isworthless.But Davey wants it both ways. This iswhy he is able to include several essays(on such figures as Atwood, AudreyThomas, Pratt, and on such topics as thelong poem and prairie poetry — to list afew) which are, despite a few deconstructivetrimmings, written in the voiceof Frank. There's some directness here.Fresh insights turn up. And though mostof the essays are thematic and new criticalin orientation, that does not stop Frankfrom drawing our attention to interestingdetails and connections. What a relieffrom the book's opening pieces, in whichDavey's discourse-ridden ego is flashed infront of us at every turn. But the relief isshort-lived. Davey seems to be growingbigger in his mirror. Frank is shrinking.The old excitement is getting harder tofind.ROBERT LECKER192LECKER'S BLAISEROBERT LECKER, An Other I: The Fictions ofClark Blaue. ECW, $16.00.REFRESHINGLY UNCONVENTIONAL andhighly appropriate in its approach to itssubject's self-absorption, An Other I isboth a perceptive reading of Blaise's textsand an intriguing contribution to the discussionof the relationship between authorand critic.Lecker argues that over the course ofhis career Clark Blaise's work becomes "increasinglypreoccupied with the autobiographicaland self-reflexive impulses thatform his shaping vision," and that it showshim searching for what James Olney calls"metaphors of self." Lecker approachesBlaise's work in its own terms, embroilshimself in it, and gives an account of itfrom within. Clark Blaise, Lecker writes,"is all that I want the Author to be, andhe is all I know the author can never be.He is my (critical) dilemma and the storyI will read and write." This, in otherwords, is not only Lecker's reading ofBlaise and Lecker's writing of Blaise ; thisis Lecker's Blaise. "My project: to enteran other I, to speak into his otherness, tolet his otherness be mine."After his own prefatory remarks,Lecker allows Blaise to introduce himselfin his own autobiographical "Chronologyof Salience." This was a good idea, but itturned out to be disappointing becauseBlaise has written more interesting accountsof his own formative experiencesin almost everything he has published.Though the introduction of Blaise's ownvoice here at the outset of Lecker's studydoes help dissolve the distance betweenauthor and critics, the "Chronology"adds very little that is new to the familiarstew of Blaise's early life, and it collapsesinto a matter-of-fact list of the jobs he hasheld, the books he has published and theplaces he has lived over the past 30 years.

BOOKS IN REVIEWLecker's discussion of the fiction is organizedchronologically, and it shows howBlaise feeds not only on himself — on hisown life—but on the selves he has createdthrough his writing, as if a Frankie Thibidault,a Norman Dyer, or another of hisfictional alter egos, were more real to himthan his actual self. The kind of intenseautobiographical (also "autohagiographical,""auto-erotic," and "auto-cannibalistic")self-reflexivity that Lecker discernsin Blaise's fiction raises questions about itsvalue: "Can such self-reflexive fiction,"Lecker asks, "ever go beyond self to embracea reality that is larger than thespeakers', or does his narcissism doom himto gaze perpetually upon himself?" Blaisehas discussed these questions in terms of a"tragic dilemma," and he has wrestledwith them in his fiction, most obviously inhis novel Lusts, in which the writer RichardDurgin ultimately fails to go beyondhimself. And although Lecker wants toargue that Lusts, in portraying Durginironically, "must also be seen as a partialcondemnation of self-serving art," this isalso Lecker's (critical) dilemma. For thequestions implicate Lecker too, and to hisgreat credit he does not shy away fromrecognizing this situation. "Why supportthe obvious narcissism that seems to motivatethese texts? Why write about anauthor who persists in telling us about hisown fundamentally uninteresting life?"Lecker concludes interestingly by commentingon how thoroughly Blaise's existentialproject seems to fail. If we wanthim to resolve the conflicts that define hislife, we will inevitably be disappointed inBlaise. This is a writer who quite deliberatelyrefuses to resolve his owndilemma.Limiting himself as he does to the termsof reference that Blaise sets for himself,Lecker is unable — as Blaise is unable —to accommodate an other truly as anOther. A critic less embroiled in Blaise'sown world might comment on his treatmentof women, who are either subsumedas part of himself (as his wife Bharati issubsumed in Days and Nights in Calcutta)or are shabbily caricatured (e.g.the pipe-smoking McGill professor EllaPerleman in "North"), and might be lesssatisfied with an oeuvre that is only attemptingto move beyond self-referentialityand that evidently refuses, finally, tomake that very move. Such limitation notwithstanding,Lecker's approach enableshim to understand Blaise as only a sympatheticreader can, and to send us backto his fiction with renewed interest.ARPROACHLINDA LEITHJOHN HAYMAN, ed., Robert Brown and theVancouver Island Exploring Expedition.UBG Press, $29.95.IN THIS BOOK John Hayman gathers togetherthree articles by Robert Brown:"The Land We Live In," "A Guest at aPotlatch" and "A Collection of IndiansMyths and Legends," plus the 100-page"Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition."Illustrations are plentiful and fallinto four categories : contemporary photographs;maps; sketches and watercoloursby Frederick Whymper, a member of theVIEE; and maps drawn specially for thisbook. The editor supplies a Preface, Introduction,copious notes, and two appendices.The dust jacket informs the reader that"Robert Brown, a twenty-one-year-oldScot, arrived on Vancouver Island in1863 for the purpose of collecting seeds,roots, and plants for the Botanical Associationof Edinburgh. It soon becameapparent, however, that he was not contentwith being a mere gatherer of specimens,and his relations with his sponsorrapidly soured. So when the opportunity193

BOOKS IN REVIEWarose in 1864 to head the VancouverIsland Exploring Expedition, Browneagerly agreed to be its commander." Toput Brown's work into perspective, wemust know Vancouver Island is barely280 miles long and is at its widest onlysome 85 miles. Its coast was explored withsome thoroughness by the Spanish in the1780s and 1790s; through to the 1820sthis same area was a marketplace for themaritime fur trade; after 1843 there werepermanent trading posts on the island. Inthe 1840s and 1850s few Europeans hadreason to cross the island (there being notrade worth the name on the west coast) ;those who did found it crisscrossed byIndian trails. No one, Indian or white, topass through the interior reported anythingworth a second look.In contrast, Brown did his job and didit thoroughly. He led this expedition eastand west, north and south; he mappedthe "unknown interior" (the attemptedreproduction of Brown's beautiful map inthis book resulted in a Rorschach blot) ;he and his men kept journals of varyingvalue; and he published a series of newspaperreports followed by VancouverIsland, an account of the VIEE.However the real point here, and it isone never drawn by the editor, is not thatBrown did his work so well, it is that noone really cared. The VIEE's purpose waseconomic: in 1864 Victoria needed a financialboost, so the city fathers sent theVIEE out to find gold. His expeditionfound gold, copper and coal, but only thegold had immediate, though fleetingvalue. For Brown the summer-long expeditionled to nothing. He mapped theIsland but the result was published inGermany and had no local effect; hisnewspaper articles were never reprintedand his Vancouver Island is, for practicalpurposes, unreadable. Two years laterBrown returned to Britain and a life onGrub Street.The value of this book is to be foundin the editor's annotation; his notes arewide-ranging and up to date. Brown'stexts are stimulating, as I have found repeatedlywhile working with his coastalwritings; typically what he does not say ismore to the point than what he does say,and it often leads the researcher off alongbyways.Comparing Brown's published work toJ. Despard Pemberton's Facts and FiguresRelating to Vancouver Island and BritishColumbia (i860), Matthew Macfie'sVancouver Island and British Columbia(1865) and G. M. Sproat's Scenes andStudies of Savage Life (1868) provesBrown a dilettante, one so interested inbeing an authority he rarely wrote perceptivelyabout anything; had the editorattempted to put Brown into perspective,he might have discovered Brown was onlyone of a dozen or more English writersworking on Vancouver Island in the1860s. Learning that Brown was not workingin isloation, that Victoria was thensomething of an international community— and one in which Brown, it seems, wasnot well thought of — might have forcedthe editor to deal more thoughtfully withhis subject.Before putting together a collection ofthis nature, an editor must decide whetherthe material can speak for itself. If so,then notes and commentary should beheld to a minimum. Quite another approachis required when a work is episodic.The contents of Robert Brown demana third approach. The material inthis book, along with all of Brown's uncollectedwritings, could have been betterused as the primary source material for amonograph or biography. Because theeditor did not consider the available approacheshe created an anthology, a weakone at that, for Brown's style lacks thevitality to make his various articles cohere.CHARLES LILLARD

BOOKS IN REVIEWLOYALISTCYNTHIA DUBiN EDELBERG, Jonathan Odell:Loyalist Poet of the American Revolution.Duke University Press, $24.95.ONE OF THE PERSISTENT cultural differencesbetween Canadians and Americanslies in their respective attitudes to thosewho supported the losing side in theAmerican Revolution. Tory traitors onone side of the border become Loyalistheroes on the other; a War of Independencein one country becomes a revolutionaryrupture in another. Cynthia Edelberg'ssubtitle is a statement of her subject'sposition — Jonathan Odell was a"loyalist poet of the American Revolution."As an American scholar, conscious ofnational perceptions, Edelberg works hardto be fair to Odell in explaining his worldview,its effect on his political attitudes,and its effect on his writing. To establishthe philosophical basis for his thought shebegins by analyzing that part of OdelPslibrary which still exists in the New BrunswickMuseum. Her conclusion that hiswriting was greatly influenced by theAugustan ideas of order, virtue, and theimperfectibility of man is undoubtedlycorrect, but since there is no indication ofa purchase date for the books it is difficultto know whether they are ones which influencedhis thinking as a young man, orwhether they suited his personal taste andpublic image as a New Brunswick officialin later years. T. B. Vincent's emphasison the influence of the satirical writing ofthe Augustans, Butler, Pope and Swift onpolitical satire in post-revolutionary Canadain Narrative Verse Satire in MaritimeCanada (Ottawa: Tecumseh Press, 1978)is a more secure starting point for theanalysis of Augustan influence on Odell'swork.Edelberg proceeds chronologically onthree intertwined lines: the politicalevents of the period from a loyalist perspective;Odell's documented activitiesbetween 1766 and 1784; and an analysisof the ideals contained in his publishedliterary work of the same period. She hasbeen particularly successful in outliningthe Loyalist view of events — on the onehand a sense that a few unprincipleddemagogues were leading the unwittingcolonists to destruction, and on the othera frustration with the incredible stupidityof British policy both before and duringthe revolution. Having initially definedthe Loyalist ideology, her analysis highlightsits elements in each successive work.She is not concerned with subtleties inOdell's attitudes, nor in his poetic abilities.A few initial pages of biography take usto 1766, when Odell's first poems werepublished, a few concluding pages dealwith his New Brunswick career after 1784.The remainder of the book is devoted tohis writing and activities in that eighteenyear pre-revolution and revolutionaryperiod. While this approach is completelydefensible, it does give a rather distortedimpression of the life and works of a manwho had lived to be over eighty and whosepublications extended over almost sixtyyears.In most instances, Edelberg has beencareful not to resort to unsupportedhypotheses in order to round out her subject.Where biography and bibliographyare concerned, she generally sticks to thedocumentation which she has unearthedin a wide variety of American and NewBrunswick sources. She does not seemto have investigated holdings in GreatBritain.Yet, for all her scholarly care, her neutralityfails her in one important respect.She evidently did not find Odell an attractiveperson and, without adducingsupporting evidence, repeatedly ascribesmotives of expediency and greed to him.Motives are always difficult to analyze

BOOKS IN REVIEWbecause people rarely put that informationin writing, but surely it is possible forsomeone to be genuinely motivated bywhat he perceives to be duty and loyalty.If Odell did not hold his beliefs strongly,why did he not take the easy way out bygiving them up and seeking prefermentfrom the winning side, as others did? Justin case the reader should still think ofOdell as admirable, Edelberg's final chaptershows him job hunting in England,winning a plum appointment thanks tohis patron Sir Guy Carleton, oppressingblack Loyalists in New Brunswick, andexpounding out-of date political philosophyto an antagonistic assembly. Yet allLoyalists made claims to the LoyalistClaims Commission and Odell, who haddone considerable service to the Crownand had seen all his property confiscated,had a legitimate claim. He was certainlyluckier than many in the reward he receivedfor his services. New BrunswickAssemblies were almost always hostile tooffice-holders, regardless of ideology, andone wonders, also, just how out-of-date atleast part of the Loyalist ideology was andis. Her final quotation, intended to provethat OdelPs ideas were anachronistic,could, with the deletion of a reference tothe King, be incorporated verbatim intothe speech of any conservative U.S. Senatortoday. Nonetheless, she concludes"Loyalist ideology supplies answers, butthey are not the right ones."For Canadian readers Edelberg's bookwill be most useful in its correlation ofevents with the content of OdelPs "AmericanRevolutionary" poetry, and in itsgathering of available North-Americanbiographical information about Odell'slife in the revolutionary period. T. B. Vincenthas already published a completeannotated bibliography; perhaps someonewill now write a biography whichtakes into account Odell's entire life andwork.MARY LU MACDONALDNIAGARAтом MARSHALL, Voices on the Brink. Macmillan,$14.95.TOM MARSHALL SETS HIS third novel,Voices on the Brink, in his native NiagaraFalls. The Battle of Queenston Heights,the Natural Wonder of the New World,Love Canal, two towns with one name,the quintessence of wild North Americafor nineteenth-century European connoisseurs,the Great Lakes mecca for kitschand sleaze — Niagara is redolent of these,and thus of Canadian history, and of anidentity fraught with confusion, shame,and degeneration. The richness of associationsand symbolism, a potential virtueof this novel, is ultimately one of its weaknesses.Marshall summons so much of thismaterial that the effect is a literary phonebooth-crammingstunt of seeing howmany allusions can be accommodated inone narrative, though the narrative doesnot accommodate them very well. MarilynMonroe, in town to film Henry Hathaway's"Niagara" in 1953, is supposed tocounterpoint, in her allure and fatal sexuality,the novel's femme fatale Lisan. It isa nice conjunction, but, less nicely, we gettold that it is. The rhetorical equivalentof winking neon Niagara Falls lights surroundand announce all the symbols; theimplication is that most readers will betoo thick to notice them otherwise. Thisis too bad because the idea of Niagara asa metaphor for the violent yet seductiveborder between banality and evil is potentenough without pedantic glossing.The novel is told by, and about, RonBenson, who grew up partly in NiagaraFalls, partly around nuclear research sitesin the United States, during World WarTwo. Like the protagonists of many ofClark Blaise's Florida fictions, Ron is uncertainhow he feels about Canadians andAmericans. Mainly he feels dull. Thenovel begins as a bildungsroman, and it196

BOOKS IN REVIEWcarefully evokes both the extraordinaryphysical presence of the Escarpment landscapeand the ordinary sexual obsessivenessand bragging of adolescent boys. Ronand his three closest boyfriends wonderwhat it would be like to have a crack atMarilyn Monroe, while she is in town,and they compare notes on sexual initiations.Mostly they run over to the Americanside of the border, where the actionis better. Marshall succeeds in accuratelyrealizing the dreary uneventfulness oftheir cruising. Then one night in a bar inBuffalo, Ron meets Lisan, and his lifefor the first time partakes of both ecstasyand disaster.The process of relieving Ron's naïvetéis the main movement of Voices on theBrink. Through Lisan he discovers thatthe price of having an emotional life isthat it may become unstable and complicated.Lisan's gangster brother has probablyabused her sexually, she is estrangedfrom her parents — her shadowy existencetinges the banality of Ron's. Thenovel's radical thesis: bad things happeneven in small-town Ontario. Ron's fatherdies of cancer, and environmental crimesare invoked; Lisan makes Ron witness tothe aftermath of a murder, for reasonsthat are neither explained nor very importantin the end; the boyhood quartetof buddies breaks up, and Ron tries torescue his friend Carl, who betrayed himby heading west with Lisan, from the SanFrancisco heroin scene.I am afraid that I read Voices on theBrink much as I watched David Lynch'scelebrated film "Blue Velvet," whichMarshall's novel closely resembles intheme, structure, and tone. The news thatsqueaky-clean America (or Ontario) isreally a freakshow is scarcely news at all.Treating the revelation of this truth asshocking requires an implicit assumptionthat most readers or viewers believe thesqueaky-clean surface.Even granting that Henrik Ibsen's workof shocking the bourgeoisie from theircomplacency needs doing over and over,Voices on the Brink has technical weaknesseswhich blunt the sense of horror.The narration alternates between Ron'sfirst-person voice and another third-personpoint-of-view which is sympathetic toRon's. Why? The narrative wobbliness ismore annoying than ingenious — an experimentlooking for an effect. The shiftto dramatic monologue in Chapters Tenand Eleven is also pointless, for Marshallhas done nothing to prepare for a trulypolyphonic narrative.The style is dull, wooden, awkward, becauseRon Benson is. Marshall's insistenceon making Ron's adult personality theonly truly mysterious object in the novelmeans that a reader cannot understandthe results of his suffering, nor readilyconnect the stylistic ungainliness of thenarration with the narrators' struggleagainst the chill that experience has setupon their feelings. By default, too muchof the writing feels poor, and this povertytransfers from the narrators' emotionaldeficits to the author's technical incompetence.Mark Twain would not have letHuck Finn do that to him.In very rare winters, the falls at Niagarafreeze. The awesome power then seemsall the greater for being so strangelysuspended. Experimentation-for-its-ownsakeblows a chilling wind through Voiceson the Brink, leaving readers on the brinkof a powerful metaphor yet ultimately unmovedby its senseless, arrested downwardrush.MARK MADOFFPOSTCOLONIALANGUISHNEIL BissooNDATH, A Casual Brutality. Macmillan,$22.95.THOSE WHO ADMIRED Neil Bissoondath'sfirst book, the collection of short stories197

BOOKS IN REVIEWentitled Digging Up the Mountains, willbe delighted to read his second — a novelthis time: A Casual Brutality. Carefullycrafted, it demonstrates the writer's commandof narrative technique. It also confirmshim as an accomplished storyteller,whose characters are impressively welldelineated, at time mystifying, but alwaysengaging.The novel is set in a West Indian,newly-independent island-state called Casaquemada,which bears similarities toTrinidad, Bissoondath's native country.The concoction of such a name is quitesuggestive: its Spanish roots, as the textreveals, mean a "house that is burning" ;this choice, together with a title that indicatesfrightening, gratuitous violence, augursthe bleakness of life in the postcolonialCaribbean. After two portentous epigraphsfrom Jacques Brel and JacoboTimerman, the novel thus ominouslyopens:There are times when the word hope is buta synonym for illusion: it is the most virileof perils. He who cannot discern the difference— he whose perception of reality hasslipped from him, whose appreciation ofhonesty has withered within him — will face,at the end, a fine levied, with no appeal,with only regret coating the memory likeash.The narrative shifts between Torontoand Casaquemada, with the chronologyfollowing the perceptions and recollectionsof its narrator-protagonist: Raj. Hecomes from a middle-class Hindu family,whose status has evolved from indenturedlaborers — brought to the island in hordesfrom India during colonial days — to influentialbusinessmen and governmentofficials. Despite this happy twist in hisfamily's fortunes, Raj does not see Casaquemadaas a paradise, for there exists asubculture of racial tension between theIndians and the Blacks, who too were importedin hordes to the island but asslaves. According to the narrator, thecause of this racial crisis is rooted in theresentment the Blacks feel for not achievinga fair share of economic and politicalsuccess as the Indians, some of whom —like Raj's cousin, Surein — are contemptuousof Blacks.The novel opens with Raj's second andfinal departure from Casaquemada towardsCanada, severing all ties with hiscruel, native land. The first departureoccurs years earlier when Raj leaves theisland to study medicine in Toronto,where he marries Jan, the smart waitressin a strip club. Finishing his studies, hesettles in Toronto, content both professionallyand familially. However, familypressures and hope for wealth cause Rajto return to Casaquemada. Ironically Jan,who by now has turned cynical and apathetic,agrees to move with her husbandto the Caribbean because, as she puts it,"I could use some adventure in my life."Indeed, the adventure turns too risky ina land where "life ... is a lottery" andwhere the oil boom has turned to bust,precipitating a bloody political conflictthat has strong racial overtones; arson andassassination become norms: two victimsof this "casual brutality of collapse" areJan and her child from Raj.Here the novel becomes subtle, demandingcareful delineation of the novel's ideologicalstance. There are constant hints ofcorruption at high places in Casaquemada,of promises broken and dreams betrayed,and of a state of chaos, crueltyand social disintegration in the postcolonialisland-state. Significantly, given thenarrator's Indian identity, the discoursesuggests that Black activists and/or theLeftists are mostly to blame ; yet the racialconflict does not totally polarize thenovel's characters. Wayne, a sympathetically-drawnblack figure who representsRaj's alter ego, undertakes to protectthe physician's family during dangerousnights; on the other hand, the unscrupulousSurein constantly pronounces racist! 9 8

BOOKS IN REVIEWslurs against Blacks, even in the presenceof his Black employee, Lenny. It is thelatter who eventually avenges himself byparticipating in the ruthless killing ofRaj's wife and son.One wishes at certain points in the narrativethat Raj's political ambivalenceand hesitancy had been rendered morelucidly and that the counter-argumenthad been more fully formulated. Despitethis ambiguity, or perhaps because of it,A Casual Brutality remains an impressivelyreadable novel.EXPLORATIONSAMIN MALAKNICHOLAS CATANOY, Amanita Muscaria; Carnet,ig8o-ig88. Collection Jalons, Barré etDayez, п.р.YVES GOSSELIN, Connaissance de la Mort. Triptyque,n.p.JOËL pouRBAix, Le Simple Geste d'Exister,avec six tableaux de Michel Casavant.Noroît, n.p.GUY CLOUTIER, Beau Lieu, avec douze dessinsde Valère Novarina, Noroît/Cismonte éPumonti, n.p.CÉLYNE FORTIN, D'elle en elles, avec trois dessinsde Dominique Blain, Noroît/Bremond,n.p.MARIE SAVARD, Les Chroniques d'une Secondeà l'Autre, livre et cassette. La pleine lune,n.p.THE Amanita Muscaria is a deadly poisonousfungus and a powerful hallucinatorysubstance. It is greatly sought afterby the Lapps who are reputedly preparedto trade a reindeer for a single large specimen.Those who have tasted a smallamount have slumbered for fifteen hoursin a deep and pleasant sleep. NicholasCatanoy has written a kind of commonplacebook under this title containingquotations and aphorisms from the years1980-1988. Catanoy's previous publicationsin various languages have appearedin New York, Canada, India and finallyEurope. This бо-year-old La Rochefoucauldhas the world weariness of theglobe-trotter, the calm stoicism of a Buddhist,the gloomy fatalism of Schopenhauer,his favourite philosopher. Deathand melancholy recur frequently in hismusings and, rather disturbingly, he favoursartists such as Montherlant, Mac-Orlan, Berlioz, Wagner, Lawrence, Mahler,prophets of blood and apocalypse. Allof these yearn for some heady Nirvanaand not infrequently are tainted withmisogyny.The cover of Yves Gosselin's Connaissancede la Mort reproduces an allegoricalpicture of three ages of woman and deathby the Alsatian engraver Baidung Grien,showing the baby, the beauty, the crone,and death with scythe and hour glass. Thetone of this meditation on the death of amother is clinical, detached, a kind ofstifled passion. I translate the climax ofthe emotional response to her death toconvey something of this detachment:Scarcely assembled, note the extreme ageof the arsenal of grief. The purest weaponsalready break their watchfulness. Incapableany longer of protecting himself in this placeagainst the obvious, a man unlearns life.Albert Camus, quoted in an epigraph, is agood guide to this laconic tribute, a confessionthat the death of a well-loved womanputs us suddenly beyond the limitsof our powers of expression.Joël Pourbaix lives in a deconstructed,fragmented world where the "seams oftime no longer hold." Harassed by the"atrocious presence of meaning in ourworld," he seems to favour the persistenceof desire and "surrender to the mysteriesof his material being." The extravagantvocabulary: 'au-delà,' 'indéchiffrable,''informulable,' 'abîme,' 'irréparable,' 'inapaisé,''archarnement,' 'reptation,' callsfor a tragic lyricism this generation ofpoets seems incapable of and belies theplea implicit in the title, Le Simple Gested'Exister. Barely 1,000 words in this ele-199

BOOKS IN REVIEWgant plaquette, laconic phrases timidlyclaw at 'un silence dévasté' and ask plaintivelybut neatly : '. . . et si l'univers rêvaitl'oeuvre.'Guy Cloutier's Beau Lieu is coedited inCorsica. The title alludes to Corsica'sother name, Ile de beauté, and the workwas completed in Muro, central Corsica.It was inspired by the news of the deathof the poet Michel Beaulieu (the otherreference in the title) in 1985. Cloutierhad been on the point of writing to inviteBeaulieu, a personal friend and one Cloutierregards as amongst the greatest inQuébec literature, to come and enjoy thepeace and seclusion of the island. BeauLieu is a reflection on the 'rapport dynamiqueque l'on peut établir entre écrirel'espace et écrire l'amitié.' Cloutier's poetryis an intertextual celebration of literaryindebtedness. The poems are adornedwith epigraphs, dedications, quotations inthe text, indicating his poetical preferencesfor Guillevic, Valère Novarina,René Char, Paul-Marie Lapointe, PaulBélanger, Pierre Morency. Michel Beaulieu'spresence is supreme. He is identifiedby the reference to Lettre des saisonsas the 'Tu' of the dialogue proceedingthrough the poems of Beau lieu. Beau lieuis above all a powerful and highly expressiveevocation of place. Michel Beaulieuwould have savoured this tribute howeverremote from the humdrum world of 'larue Draper.'The last two volumes of verse to be presentedhere are from established womenwriters. Célyne Fortin in D'Elle en ellesbegins with a quotation from Lise Gauvinand ends with one from Gaston Miron.Both raise the crucial question of the subjectpronoun in modern verse. This seriesof short poems starts in fine style, 'àmesure le récit psalmodie,' and the writerseems not to be overwhelmed by the excessesof life or the fragmentation of theself. The section 'Je cherche elle' has thesyntactical clumsiness of this title, butsoon the writing improves when Fortinseeks her true genealogy in female forbearswhose resonance she feels in herself.'Vues d'elles' contains fine poems examiningthe portraits of women in the art ofEurope from Cranach to Vermeer toMonet, just as an earlier section summonsMozart and Mahler to lend their powerto poetry. 'Sensuelles,' Célyne Fortin concludeswith some lively erotic poetry,delicate but unrestrained.Marie Savard performed for Radio-Canada and wrote for the ONF a prizewinningplay and protest songs in 1970.She also published feminist tracts later inthe 1970s. Her latest collection is accompaniedby an audio-cassette on whichshe sings and recites the complete text.Her rich and attractive voice, adds greatlyto the impact of this poetry, and we wonderwhy this dual presentation is notadopted more frequently. Les Chroniquesd'une Seconde à L'Autre ends with a listof references to authors quoted; these includethe erotic Old Testament poem TheSong of Solomon. In 1975 the versatileMarie Savard founded the Editions de laPleine Lune which publish this work.The poems and prose form a rather disjointed,dream-like fable set in the darkstreets of night-time Montreal. Underlyingit all is a very serious preoccupation.How do women achieve a consensus anda sense of common heritage and purposeif the essential line of transmission forcultural, social and human values thatpasses from mother to daughter is broken?The healing process, says Marie Savard,begins within the individual, and shefollows this dark path of reconciliation.CEDRIG MAY200

BOOKS IN REVIEWANTITHESESCARY FAGAN, Nora by the Sea. Shaw StreetPress, 1989. Limited edition of 150 copies.$15.00.w. p. KiNSELLA, Five Stories. William Hoffer/Tanks, $17.50.DON MURRAY, The Fiction of W. P. Kinsella:Tall Tales in Various Voices. York Press,$12.95.MARius KOciEjowsKi, The Machine Minders.William Hoffer/Tanks, $5.00.CARY FAGAN SHOWS a masterful controlof narrative technique in Nora by the Sea:regulating the pace through descriptivepause and scene and juxtaposing conflictingimage clusters Fagan creates an"elegant and quietly powerful story."The setting is a hotel in France whereNora and her artsy film industry husbandare at Cannes for the festival. They havealso brought along their children andNora's artistic father, all delightfully portrayed.The text is focalised largelythrough Nora, an aging Jewish ex-hippie,now yuppie, who, although she keeps aKrishna next to her menorah neverthelessforces her children through Hebrewschool "to learn about being Jewish," andkeeps "a kosher house" in order that theymay acquire some "cultural definition."Playing with the hermeneutic codeFagan introduces an enigma that motivatesthe plot: Will Ananda, Nora's 15-year-old son, have his first sexual experiencewith the hotel maid? And can Norabe as liberal as she thinks she is and letthings go as they might, or will she interfere?Be forewarned, this tale has a verysurprising ending.Five Stories is a delightful volumeshowing Kinsella at his best. Consideringthe tenderness of the subject matter, thefine illustrations by Carel Moiseiwitschand the quality of the print and binding,this collection would make a fine gift.Kinsella combines the postmodern presenceof the writer as self-conscious narratorwith the humour and fantasy of thetall tale, and shifts in the order of thereferential worlds of his stories from the"real" to the surreal. "Frank PierceIowa," the first tale, is a reworking of astory Kinsella wrote when eighteen andconcerns the disappearance, or rathermogrification of a town in the middle ofa baseball game. "Oh Marley," is a movinglove story between two losers: awriter, and a woman who was stabbed73 times but survived because she was sofat that the knife couldn't find any vitalorgans. "Diehard," my favourite, exhibitsa feel for the ordinary person and theordinary situation. It is based on "a newsitem about a woman who planted herhusband's ashes on the fifty-yard linewhen they were building B.C. Place" althoughKinsella transfers the scene to the"Metrodome in Minneapolis." It is, ofcourse, about baseball. "A Hundred Dollarsworth of Roses" is one of Kinsella'sIndian tales told by Silas Ermineskin.The mixing of tenses, ellipsis, iteration,and use of dialect do make for interestingnarrative, but the moralizing lacks a convincingvoice, and makes Kinsella's Indiansseem too Hollywood. The last tale,"Homer," about a white prospector whohas married an Indian, is perhaps alsospoiled by moralizing dialogue that is inconsistentwith the characters themselves,and that, as a result, appears intrusive.Although the extremely small print ofThe Fiction of W. P. Kinsella: Tall Talesin Various Voices makes the book difficultto read, and the "discussions" of Kinsella'sworks are previously published andnot sufficiently edited this monographdoes have its good points. The bibliographyis extremely useful, as well as theexcellent interviews. We find that Kinselladoesn't "read much humour," andconsiders "Leacock kind of juvenile,"gets much of his material from tabloids,reworks his material interminably, considersCalgary "the asshole of the earth,"201

BOOKS IN REVIEWputs a disclaimer to his being a Canadian,and states that "If it weren't for the medicalinsurance thing, I guess we would livein the U.S." When asked if the "artist hasa social function, perhaps a moral role toplay in society?" Kinsella replies: "That'slike getting involved in politics. I don'tsee the writer or artist meddling in suchareas.. . . The fiction writer's role in lifeis simply to entertain." Elsewhere, hesimply says he's in it for the money.The epilogue of The Machine MindersLells us that this series "has been publishedin objection to the continued creation ofState Literature through governmentsubsidies to the Arts. The first volume ofTANKS will consist of five books, all ofwhich share the characteristic of beingobjectionable to the government." MachineMinders is short, well-written, andcomes with fine illustrations by MaureenSugrue; it is, however, a very troubleàomebook. Focusing on the work of CraigRaine, Kociejowski claims that the onlyreason some artists are in the public arenais that our age is "an age which is incapableof poetry," because we have lost "theidea of Original Sin," and "recourse to alarger orthodoxy."The "values" Kociejowski wants us toembrace are those of the Right, his"orthodoxy" the tradition of the elite —poorly defined and not ecclesiastical. "Badtaste," "moral authority," the belief that"no atheist can be a great artist," allharken back to a critical position inimicalto the modern mindset, and to manywriters antithetical to creativity. I thinkthis provocative volume is a giant stepbackwards.C. D. MAZOFFHIDDEN POWERSANN DIAMOND, Snakebite. Cormorant Books,$10.95.ANNE CAMERON, Daughter of Copper Woman.Press Gang, $9.50.ANN DIAMOND IS AN anglophone writerfrom Québec best-known for her prosepoem A Nun's Diary (1984, 1989) andfor her novel Mona's Dance (1988). InSnakebite she has, with one exception,put together ten stories set in Québec.There is no narrative link between thesequence of the stories, yet her idiosyncraticvoice where realism and the fantasticare blurred connects them all.The cover depicts twin-like figures,similar yet opposite. This image is in harmonywith the binary oppositions dominatingthe stories. The title story "Snakebite,"to some extent autobiographical, isa distinctive example for this kind of composition.It is the story of a young child :she suffers from all the contradictions thatshe acutely observes in her surroundings.Her mother is Catholic and her fatherPresbyterian. She is not encouraged tospeak French and is very much discouraged,from making friends with a Jewishgirl next door. Thus she lives in a spiritualexile which causes her to have nightmaresfull of devilish creatures. Diamond wonderfullypenetrates the soul of this torturedchild.Diamond's characters are mainly women,both English and French. They aremore powerfully depicted than men in thestories. Some are artists, involved in thewomen's movement and trying to placethemselves in this world. Others havemagic power and misuse it. Others yet areunder the influence of supernatural forcesof some sort, against which they feel defenceless.There are also witchdoctors,vampires, criminals, mermaids, androgynes,individuals whose identity is halfhuman and half animal.202

BOOKS IN REVIEWOne of the most successful of the storiesis the carefully constructed "Roses," afictional representation of Ann Diamond'scritical observation: "Québec is Canada'sunknown 'Other,' where all evil is to originate.We're like the wife in an extremelypatriarchial marriage. Our concerns havenever really been incorporated into themainstream consciousness. And if you'reEnglish here your situation is even moreambiguous." Joan, a writer, goes to Montréal,because she wants to discover "thereal Québec" and assimilate into its fascinatingintellectual milieu. She tries hardbut it is difficult for her because she remainsbasically an anglaise, because of the"language thing," because of the differencesbetween love and amour. Ann Diamondhas proved again that she is certainlyamong the most promising anglophonewriters in Québec. Her stories areset in a concrete milieu yet they surpassthese boundaries and can be read as perplexingtales for adults.Anne Cameron is best-known forDaughters of Copper Woman, but amongher other acknowledged works are Dreamspeaker(1979), The Journey (1982),Stubby Amberchuk and the Holy Grail(1987). Daughters of Copper Womanran into its thirteenth edition in 1989. Inthis collection of tales the legends of theNootka Indians are told. Anne Camerontransmits to us what she received from theSecret Society of Women and was allowedto share with outsiders.The first half of the book familiarizesus with the creation myth of the NootkaIndians; our common ancestor from thedawn of time is the omnipresent and omniscientCopper Woman : "With the loomshe weaves the pattern of destiny," andshe will never abandon us. Indeed, herpresence is felt all through the book. Weare all related to her from either of thetwo genealogical lines: the children ofhappiness or the children of the fourcouples.The second part of the book is muchcloser to us in time; before it reaches thepresent, however, two important eventsare pointed out which shattered the harmonyof the matriarchal society. First,hundreds of years back, men started todominate women and thus violate thepeace of the society. Second, the whitemen arrived and tried to destroy and wipeout the community. Life became fragmentedand moral degradation followed.But wisdom survived.While reading the book, we too, gainwisdom. Unnoticed, we become part of thecommunity listening to these legends. Wehear different voices: the first part is inthe third person narrative, then we hearGranny and her granddaughter talking inturns, and thus producing tales withintales. We also hear the monotonous rain,the crackling of the fire, Granny knitting,the kettle boiling. Eating is often mentioned,reminding us of the potlatchfestivities. The descriptive passages andGranny's talking flow into one another.In the end, it becomes clear that actuallyall the narrators are inspired by the OldWoman.This again is a book about womenwritten from the viewpoint of women andfor women. The book is a moving remythologizationof women's spiritual, mentaland physical universe. The women weread about testify to the hardships andjoys of womanhood, the experience of loveand solitude, the challenges women havehad to face even as warriors, and the waysthey "Endured and Survived." They haveeducated younger generations; this theyregard as one of their obligations. Realvirtues are taught to us: ability to love,friendship, sharing, accepting, listening toeach other. One wonders to what extentAnne Cameron shares the apprehensivefeeling of Ki-Ki, the grandchild, concerningthe future of the book. Ki-Ki andAnne Cameron have much in common.Granny's, and thus Copper Woman's en-203

BOOKS IN REVIEWcouraging words are addressed to AnneCameron, too : "There's gotta be a reasonthat you been scratchin' stuff on papersince you was eleven years old. There'sgotta be a reason that your writin' happenedat a time when women everywherewas standin' up and sayin' they want toknow woman's truth, no more longrobebullshit."We are fortunate that such a talentedand sensitive writer as Anne Cameronhas undertaken the task of sharing thetales. She has done it so successfully thatfurther reprints may easily be required.CRAFT& FRIENDSHIPJUDIT M. MOLNÂRBRIAN DEDORA, With WK in the Workshop. AMemoir of William Kurelek. Introductionby Ramsay Cook. With photographs, drawingsand paintings by William Kurelek. Aya/Mercury, $9.95, pa.IN TORONTO in the 1960s, Brian Dedoraworked with William Kurelek in AvIsaacs' framing shop. Dedora acknowledgesthe painter as his mentor, and ateacher in the craft. He makes no prétentionsto biography. His insights are scatteredand sketchy, but valuable.Why so? The significance is two-fold.On the one hand, framing meant a greatdeal to the prairie painter, and Dedoraextends our understanding of his intimateconnection to Kurelek's life and art. Onthe other, Dedora is a skilful creativewriter, and many passages of With WK inthe Workshop are prose-poems of considerablebeauty and strength.After leaving the British psychiatrichospitals which had sheltered him forseveral years in the early 1950s, Kureleklived for a time by executing small, incrediblydetailed trompe l'oeil paintings.He then found work in the Blue BallYard, a prestigious framing shop ownedby an artist. He was hired because of theskill which the tromp l'oeil demonstrated.It was there that he learned many of theskills which he later used in his paintings,skills such as gesso application, colourmixing, and gilding. The work promotedhealing, and he wrote that he "reallyloved" it.Dedora makes very brief references tothe London scene, but quotes at lengthfrom Kurelek's autobiography, SomeoneWith Me. However the memoirist showsthat the camaraderie in the Isaacs workshopcreated a second family for thedeeply introverted Kurelek. His anecdotescatch the artist's humour, his generosity,and something of his inner pain.Ramsay Cook's biographical Introductionorients the reader with regard to thelarger life. The three-page Introductionsketches the painter's Ukrainian heritage(Dedora is also a Ukrainian-Canadian),his passionate religious faith, and the anomalousfriendship with Av Isaacs whichgave Kurelek his first chance in the Torontoart market and underlay his rapidrise to prominence in the Canadian artscene in the 1960s and 1970s. Cook concludesthat Dedora's evocation of theworkshop brotherhood and his emotionalrecreation of mood and place lead to anew understanding of the painter: "LikeKurelek, Dedora has translated memoryinto art." Justified praise.The family atmosphere of the settingnurtured occasional frictions and frequentpractical jokes. The memoir highlights thepainter's humour and love of pranks. Onone occasion Dedora reached for his sandingblock only to find it nailed to thebench. Clawing it off, he found Bill'snote, "April Fool." A drawing presentedto Isaacs when the latter was hospitalizedin the early 1970s shows a cat confined toa hospital bed while mice run free in theworkshop, scampering over benches and204

making all manner of mistakes in theframing process.Dedora's poetic language is at its bestas he catches the smells, the look and thetacile memories of the workshop. Take,for example, Kurelek's lesson on gilding:"He almost thwacks the gold in place:thwack, thwack, thwack. The gold in thelight rippling, swooning into place, formingitself to the contours of the frame tocatch light and hold shade, the glow of itin our faces : Bill excited, me in awe." OrDedora's description of his regular arrivalat the back door of the shop : "The yellowlight shining in the morning gray throughthe door. Into the warmth, the white ofthe gessoed benches and walls, smells ofwood, shellac and glue."The memoir includes seventeen photographstaken by Kurelek in 1971, sixcoloured illustrations of Kurelek paintingsof framing tools, and several drawings inpencil and mixed media. Dedora writesthat Kurelek's gift of the negatives of hisphotos of the workshop became his incentiveto write the book. Some of the photosresemble Kurelek drawings, and one (asheaf of work orders clipped to a board)could have been the subject of one of hisown trompe l'oeil. The paintings evokeemotional and tactile experience andcarry (like all of Kurelek's work) symbolicovertones.With WK in the Workshop is a smallbook with a very short text, since illustrationstake up a large portion of the space.It is nevertheless a significant contributionto literature, to Kurelek studies and to ourunderstanding of the intimate bond betweencraft and creation. We need thatreminder. Dedora's memoir is an elegy,and a poetic meditation on friendship, artand the artisan.PATRICIA MORLEYBOOKS IN REVIEWQUEBEC DRAMAJEAN-RAYMOND MARCOUx, La grande opérationou quand les rêves refusent de mourir. VLBéditeur, $10.95.LA NOUVELLE COMPAGNIE THEATRALE, EnScènedepuis 25 ans. VLB éditeur, $25.00.LE THÉÂTRE DE CARTON, Les enfants n'ont pasde sexe? VLB éditeur, $15.95.THESE THREE NEW TEXTS prove thatVLB éditeur is fast becoming the majorpublisher of theatrical works in Québec.Marcoux's play belongs to the collection"théâtre"; Les enfants n'ont pas de sexeis part of the collection "Théâtre pourenfants" started in 1986; En scène depuis25 ans celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversaryof La Nouvelle Compagnie Théâtrale.Theatre lovers of all ages shouldthank VLB for these three volumes sobeautifully presented with photographs ofstage productions.La grande opération was first performedat the summer theatre l'Escale in1984 and it continues to be popular withsummer theatre crowds because it dealswith the subject of marriage in the 1980swith humour and understanding. Marcoux'swork is part of a larger phenomenonin Quebec drama: the reconsiderationof sex roles which reflects socialchanges and responds to the feminist critiqueof patriarchy. Marcoux's first publishedplay, Bienvenue aux dames, ladieswelcome (VLB, 1985), examined a groupof construction workers facing individuallife crises which challenged them to makecompromises between their male egos,financial realities, and emotional needs.In Les Mensonges de papa ( 1985), Marcouxdealt with a middle-aged divorcedfather trying to understand his teenageson and adjust to the sexual liberationmovement. La grand opération also exploresnew male roles, this time in the contextof the middle-class, middle-agedcouple.As the play opens the couple is celebrat-205

BOOKS IN REVIEWing their fifteenth wedding anniversary,but it quickly becomes apparent that thehoneymoon is over and the mid-life, midmarriagecrisis has begun. Richard Castonguayis a forty-year-old engineer temporarilyon leave from his job at HydroQuebec where they don't seem to needengineers anymore. He is a witty, romanticdreamer, not afraid to show his vulnerability.His wife, Michelle Lanthier, is athirty-seven-year-old nurse exhausted bythe strains of her job, her union activities,her three children, and her slightly alcoholicmother. Michelle responds irritablyto all of Richard's romantic advances becauseshe does not want any more childrenand they don't use any birth control precautions.When she asks Richard to havea vasectomy, he balks, unsure of how "lagrande opération" will affect his masculinity.Richard and Michelle love eachother, but their relationship is sufferingfrom the boredom of habit, from stressand the lack of fulfilling work. As theyreach forty and contemplate the prospectof "the empty nest," they must renegotiatetheir priorities, their sex life, andtheir roles in order to renew their marriage.Michelle's demand provokes acrisis : Richard quits his job, takes a separateapartment, sees a psychiatrist, andhas a vasectomy. He explains that heneeds to reassess his life before it is toolate, before the dreams have all died. Thepersonal and professional crises of Act Iare all resolved in Act II during whichRichard and Michelle begin a new courtshipleading to bed and to reconciliation.Despite the predictability of the happyending, the amused spectator/viewer applaudsthe dénouement because Marcoux'sprotagonists are believable andlikeable. While dealing with serious issuesfacing many couples, Marcoux never forgetsthat he is writing light entertainmentin the tradition of romantic sex comedy.He has a gift for writing comic dialogueand his laugh lines use sexual innuendoand double-entendres without vulgarity.Contemporary attitudes toward sexuality,gender roles, and family arrangementsare also the main topics of LeThéâtre de Carton's Les enfants n'ont pasde sexe?, but here the target audience ispre-adolescent school children. In the"Présentation" preceding the text, JacinthePotvin of the Théâtre de Cartontraces the history of the play. She explainsthat in 1978 Professor Hélène Beauchamp,a specialist in children's theatre whoteaches at UQAM, asked the Théâtre deCarton to adapt Sex is not for kids, JackZipes' translation of the Berlin theatrecollective Rote Griitze's play, Darüberspricht man nicht, for presentation duringan international symposium, "Enfance etsexualité," scheduled for September 1979.The success of the collective creation performedten years ago led to more thanone thousand performances in theatresand school auditoriums all over Quebecand the French-speaking countries ofEurope. The text was first published byEditions Québec/Amérique in its "Jeunespublics" collection in 1981. The text ofthis new edition differs from the first version,reminding us of the dynamic natureof collective creation. The new editionalso includes numerous performance photographsand a "Dossier pédagogique" intendedto reinforce the educational valueof the play.It was inevitable that a sex-educationplay for children would provoke controversyand Les enfants n'ont pas de sexe?has stirred up some lively debate ! Despiteattacks and censorship attempts by conservativecritics, the overwhelming consensusamong educators, teachers, parents,and schoolchildren is that the play dealswith sexuality and reproduction in anhonest, amusing, and affectionate mannerwhich is both informative and entertaining.The four members of Le Théâtre deCarton (two men and two women) playmultiple children's roles and sing a num-206

BOOKS IN REVIEWber of songs. They wear funny costumes,carry props, use large anatomical drawingsand puppets, and make exaggeratedgestures — all calculated to keep the attentionof their juvenile spectators. Theplay suggests that despite the old prohibitionsand taboos on dealing openly withsexuality, parents should talk about it inorder to create healthier attitudes. Thesuccess of Les enfants n'ont pas de sexe?over the past ten years guarantees it apermanent place in the growing repertoireof Québécois theatre for children.The target audience of the NouvelleCompagnie théâtrale since 1964 has beenhigh school students. Founding membersGilles Pelletier, Françoise Graton, andGeorges Groulx defined what continuesto be the primary mission of the N.C.T. :to make the classics of world drama accessibleto student audiences. En scène depuis25 ans is a handsomely illustrated anddocumented collection of essays, reminiscenses,and personality profiles which payhomage to what has become one of Quebec'smost enduring theatre institutions.With the financial support of the Ministèresdes Affaires culturelles and Education,the N.C.T. has presented almost4300 performances of 130 productions,reaching over 2,800,000 spectators! Thisvolume was conceived and edited byN.C.T. general and artistic director Jean-Luc Bastien and administrative councilmember Pierre MacDuff. Its list of contributingauthors reads like a Who's Whoin Montreal theatre: playwrights, directors,production specialists, actors, critics,and scholars.The volume is organized chronologically,taking the history of the troupe in fiveyearperiods. In addition to descriptionsof the company's productions season byseason, there are essays which examineother activities of the N.C.T., for exampleits publications {Les Cahiers de la N.C.T.,Acte 1, En scène), new play competitions,workshops, public readings, co-productionswith "jeune théâtre" and avantgardegroups. Reading these retrospectivechapters in the first part of the volume, itbecomes apparent that the history of theN.C.T. parallels the history of Quebectheatre in the last 25 years. Over the years,the names Dubé, Gélinas, Barbeau, Tremblay,Laberge, et al. began to take theirplace alongside the names Corneille, Molière,Shakespeare, et al. For technicaltheatre people, there is an article whichdescribes the space of the N.C.T.'s firsthome, la salle du Gèsu, and the renovationof the old Granada Cinema into itsnew home, the Théâtre Denise-Pelletierand the salle Fred-Barry. There are alsochapters on scenery, lighting, sound systems,costumes, and administrative organization.The text ends with thumbnailsketches of the permanent company members,congratulatory letters from variousdignitaries, and an excellent index of allproductions from 1964 through 1988. Likeall collections of this nature, the essays ofEn scène depuis 25 ans are occasionallyrepetitious and of uneven quality. However,minor failings do not distract fromthe interest of this volume.MAELSTROMJANE MOSSHRANT ALiANAK, Lucky Strike. PlaywrightsCanada, $8.95.JANET FEiNDEL, A Particular Class of Women.Lazara, $7.95.Lucky Strike by Hrant Alianak starts atdecibel level 80 and, incredibly, goes upfrom there. The audience is assailed by thecacophony of rising and falling policesirens, amplified heart beats, waves, stridentmusic, and human screams (theyaverage approximately one per minute ofplaying time). Alianak reinforces the stunningeffect with glaring or flashing lightsalternating with frequent and suddenblackouts. The feeling of anxiety that207

BOOKS IN REVIEWresults is accelerated further by havinghuge fans blow full speed at the audience.With the play starting at such a pitch, onewonders where the playwright can go fromthere. But on he does go with the maelstromrising to a climax of violence, noise,and hectic light in the fourth scene (act)which gives shape to the whole play. Andwhen it is all over, it is clear that Alianakhas done something more than rape thesenses of his audience; he has writtensomething serious about betrayal andsomething very funny about the clicheriddenway we see and think.Lucky Strike is largely mime. The actorsparody gangster films as far back asthe 1920s — clutching bullet wounds,dangling cigarettes (Lucky Strikes) fromcynical lips, gulping slugs of Jack Daniels.The stage directions even suggest that thegestures imitate Lee Marvin's, RichardWidmark's, Robert DeNiro's, and others.In fact, the whole play is a construct ofgestures rather than action. Scene oneestablishes five or six stereotypical"stances" : tripping, dropping the loot,pressing bloody guts, searching for a cigarette,etc., which are repeated in scenetwo with only the slightest variations andmore or less the same order. From therethe play edges forward, repeating, repeatingwith variations, overlapping,backtracking these same minimalist gestures,and adding bits until the two climacticfights in the fourth scene — thefirst between Eddie and Charlie describedas an orgy and the second between Charlieand Lolly as an orgasm. Played straight,the violence and cacophony of both thesescenes would have been unendurable butAlianak transforms the beating into rituals,parodying movie violence. Both sceneshave a wild black Kafkaesque humour.Alianak has carefully built up this effect.The play is almost entirely stage directionswhich he has written not in the usual laconicmode of conventional playscripts,but in a rich plummy style :Will this ever stop, he wonders as he feels achill and remembers Kafka and Munch.Deep in the grip of fear he begins to yellunceasingly as he holds his about-to-explodewith-vertigohead and with extremely frustratedfear hopes that his senseless screamwill help clear the equal senselessness of thesituation. But to no avail he feels himselfsink deeper and deeper into pure fear. Hetruly feels trapped and truly feels there isno exit, no way out in sight. The windscreams with the lush despairing MUSIC,blowing the drapes away.This richness contrasts vividly with thegangster movie clichés of the five or sixshort exchanges which make up the entiredialogue of the play.Lolly:Eddie:Maybe . . . maybe I better leave.You're not going anywhere. Nobody'sleaving this place till Charliegets here. (He stares at her along time.) That is, of course, ifhe gets here.Lucky Strike is great fun to read, butin a way its readability constitutes thechief problem of the play as a vehicle forthe stage. How, for instance, does theactor produce Eddie's "existential expression"for an audience, or the "memory ofKafka and Munch"? At the same timethe play is paradoxically, intensely theatricalwith its very effective use of claustrophobicsets, sound and light equipmentand parody of film and stage conventions.In the end Lucky Strike is two plays, pageand stage, like fraternal twins, not identicalbut both astonishing, ugly, effectiveand funny in their own ways.Where Lucky Strike has only a halfdozen short dialogic exchanges in 11 οpages, A Particular Class of Women byJanet Feindel is exclusively talk for itswhole 59. It is the raw, funny, human,authentic-sounding talk of eight strippersin their dressing room and on the ramp,not as dialogue but as a series of monologuecharacter sketches held loosely togetherby the manager's firing of Lil, theoldest stripper. Each woman reveals her-208

BOOKS IN REVIEWself through her attitude towards Lil'sfate, her affection for or rivalry with theother strippers, and judgements about thevarious men in her life. It is a tidy pieceof work, efficiently designed to be playedby one actress and an M.C., with a cleveruse of music and extravagant costumechanges to emphasize the differences betweenthe eight characters as they emergefrom a "particular class" of sex objectsinto human beings like ourselves.HUMAN NEGLECTDOROTHY PARKERRan-JANICE KULYK KEEFER, Constellations.dom House, $12.95.JANICE KULYK REEFER'S first novel examinesthe effects of long-term, selfimposedhuman neglect in a smallAcadian fishing town in Nova Scotia.Keefer's novel succeeds in conveying thebrutal consequences of extended lonelinessand isolation. However, the selfconsciouslyliterary writing tends to overshadowthe story, slowing (sometimeseven dragging) the unfolding of an interestingplot.The novel begins and ends in the firstperson using the main character's point ofview. For 15 years Claire Saulnier hasbeen teaching music at the local college byday and keeping company with cognac bynight, bolting the doors and windows ofher house to secure herself from "humanpossibilities." She spends her modestsalary importing books, classical recordsand fine chocolate, having committed herselfto a life of sexless solitude.After Claire's first-person introduction,the narrative voice shifts to third personand jumps among the central charactersof the novel. The events leading toClaire's eventual self-destruction are dependenton her (successful or unsuccessful)attempts to manipulate, punish, andhelp others. The most interesting, albeitromantic, character is the poor and beautifulMariette, a little madonna who caresfor her sickly toddler brother instead ofattending school. She was the victim ofrape at puberty, followed by a botchedhome abortion which left her infertile. Atseventeen she is abused again, emotionallythis time but with even more dramaticconsequences. The violator in this case isthe man from whom she seeks redemptionfor her alleged past sin; his crime is hisinsensitivity to her desperation. Clairesees to it that this abuser, a visiting lecturerfrom France, pays for his offense byarranging for one of his students toseduce him, thereby upsetting his wellplannedfuture of marrying into Frencharistocracy and securing a post at theSorbonne.Although Claire can avenge the wrong(even at great cost to herself), it is herfailure to help Mariette that finally destroysher. She has become such an expertat manipulating other people's lives anddenying her own needs that she is helplesstrying to develop an ability to love and toalleviate someone else's suffering. Marietteand Claire have in common a loveless,psychologically isolated life, sealingthemselves off from the possibility of painfulhuman interaction. However, whileMariette's solitude and eventual breakdownare expected given the combinationof her experiences and her naivete,Claire's behaviour is more difficult to explain.That the emotional scars of herchildhood could overcome her emotionalneeds as an adult is difficult to accept.She suffers from years of self-inflictedneglect, never having loved or been loved.One might wonder why such an intelligentwoman can't come to terms with herpast, her parents' unsatisfying marriageand the link between sex and death (hermother had suffered repeated miscarriagesbefore finally dying in labour).Also, what was it that she wanted but209

BOOKS IN REVIEWfailed to obtain as a young woman? If weknew the "human possibilities" she sacrificedin an attempt to silence her parents'voices inside her head, perhaps it wouldbe easier to understand her unhappiness.Although Keefer's writing, brimmingwith visual imagery, does justice to theenchanting landscape, sometimes thefocus of the narrative is lost in the manneredstyle. For instance, a waitress isdescribed as having "hair like a senilepoodle's." With the exception of Mariette'ssection, written in a simple, naivevoice, the story often takes a back seat tothe eloquent but self-conscious prose. Perhapsif the writing were more relaxed itwould not drag its heels in the developmentof the well-structured and interestingnarrative.ELIZABETH PARKINSONMESSIANISMERÉJEAN BEAUDOiN, Naissance d'uneBoreal, $19.95.littérature.LA PARUTION D'UNE ÉTUDE sur la littératurecanadienne-française du dix-neuvièmesiècle, encore trop peu explorée, esttoujours bienvenue. Réjean Beaudoinveut nous conduire à sa source dans Naissanced'une littérature: Essai sur le messianismeet les débuts de la littératurecanadienne-française (i8§o-i8go). Lespremières tentatives sont associées à l'idéologiedominante de l'époque. L'effortconcerté du Canada français de i860culmine dans le projet de créer une cultureet une littérature nationales et "ilsemble qu'il faille y voir l'effet de l'idéologiequi s'impose au même moment etqu'on s'accorde à désigner sous le nom demessianisme canadien-français."Les deux premiers chapitres traitentdes principaux définisseurs et du discourstenu sur la littérature nationale. Ils réfèrentà une panoplie de textes dont certainsétaient peu connus. L'abbé Casgrainaura nécessairement la vedette. Une attentionparticulière est aussi accordée auxdeux formes du romantisme européen quiimprègnent notre pensée et notre littératurenaissantes. Place est faite aux légendesassociées à l'âme du peuple. Il sembleà l'auteur que "la mode des légendespopulaires constitue . .. un aspect importantde la poétique du texte national."Ce courant traverse aussi plusieursgenres littéraires et manifeste sonimportance tant au point de vue moralque nationaliste.Dans les quatre derniers chapitres, RejeanBeaudoin analyse dans le texte cinqoeuvres en particulier: Les Légendes canadiennesde Casgrain, Forestiers et voyageursde Taché, Les Anciens Canadiensd'Aubert de Gaspé (père), Jean Rivardde Gérin-Lajoie et La Légende d'unpeuple de Frechette. Il s'attache à démontrerla féminisation du discours du père(incarné par Laflèche et Labelle) : "c'estlui qui est altéré, contrefait, travesti parle travail de la fiction." Pour lui "lestraits virils du héros, qui est censé garantirla grandeur prédestinée de la nation,demeurent le masque souffrant d'unemère éplorée."Les deux chapitres initiaux sont bienstructurés et présentent un ensemble detextes convergents qui établissent efficacementles lien étroits entre le messianismeet la littérature. Les chapitres consacrés àl'étude des textes offrent une analyse détailléeet originale qui permet de les relireavec un regard neuf. L'hypothèse de laféminisation du discours littéraire est biendéfendue par l'interprétation de l'auteur.Sans doute y aurait-il lieu, dans une autreétude, de pratiquer une approche similairesur le corpus du roman historique dela même époque pour vérifier encorel'hypothèse. Ce genre romanesque prendaussi racine dans le romantisme nationalisteimporté par Garneau.L'auteur conclut que le messianismecanadien-français est "l'idéologie d'un210

BOOKS IN REVIEWgroupe social particulier (le clergé)." Leclergé a un rôle fort important dans sadéfinition. On gagnerait peut-être à vérifiers'il s'agit surtout du haut-clergé. Legroupe n'est pas monolithique commel'ont démontré ses réactions variées à laRébellion de 1837. D'autre part le discours"libéral" ne semble pas non plusétranger au courant messianique, à commencerpar celui de François-Xavier Garneau.Comme le signale Maurice Lemire(1970), Garneau n'est certes pas l'initiateurdu messianisme canadien-français,mais l'influence de ses maîtres "l'incite àvoir dans l'histoire canadienne une expressionnouvelle de la destinée quasi providentiellede la race française." Notonsaussi que Louis-Joseph Papineau ne semontrait pas insensible à une dimensionreligieuse de l'histoire du Canada. Dansun discours prononcé en 1849, dans le butde favoriser l'établissement des Canadiensfrançais dans les Cantons de l'Est, en présencede Mgr Bourget et également depersonnages comme Dorion et Doutre, ilévoque le souvenir de nos pères qui "furentles martyrs volontaires de leur piétéet de leur patriotisme." (L.-O. David,1924)·L'auteur fait maintes allusions à "cequ'on appelle le mouvement de i860," àl'importance de son rôle dans l'implantationdu messianisme et littérature. Àaucun moment il ne définit ce "mouvementde i860 qui travailla à la mise enoeuvre du projet de création d'une littératurenationale" et qui "allait ouvrir aumessianisme le champ du discours poétique."Dans le contexte de l'analyse institutionnelle,à laquelle Réjean Beaudoinest sensible, il eût été important de préciseren quoi consistait ce mouvement et cequi en faisait un véritable mouvement.Ceci aurait contribué à solidifier encoreplus les assises de sa thèse. Le dit mouvementest problématique. Le dix-neuvièmisteDavid M. Hayne pose le problèmedans un article intitulé: "Le mouvementlittéraire de i860: mythe au réalité?"Roger Le Moyne met même son existenceen doute dans son article intitulé:"L'École littéraire de Québec, un mythede la critique." Hayne conclut dans sonétude: "L'existence d'un mouvement littérairede i860 est réelle et doit être admise,mais ce mouvement n'avait ni l'originaliténi l'importance dont on l'a parédepuis." Il invite alors à poursuivre lesrecherches sur le sujet.En dépit des quelques questions soulevées,l'essai de Réjean Beaudoin demeureune très sérieuse et originale interventiondans les études sur l'histoire littérairedu dix-neuvième siècle. Une écriturebrillante contribue également à l'intérêtde sa lecture.ANTOINE SIROISUNPALATABLE TRUTHSJAMES WIELAND, The Ensphering Mind: History,Myth, and Fictions in the Poetry ofAllen Curnow, Nissim Ezekiel, A. D. Hope,A. M. Klein, Christopher Okigbo, and DerekWalcott. Three Continents.ARUN MUKHERJEE. Towards an Aesthetic ofOpposition: Essays On Literature, Criticism,and Cultural Imperialism. Williams-Wallace.JAMES WIELAND'S The Ensphering Mind,an ambitious comparative study of sixpoets from six Commonwealth countries,demonstrates the inherent weakness ofusing a political/historical term like "theCommonwealth" as a basis for literarystudy. Assuming their "Commonwealth"similarities as a basis for comparison, Wielandattempts no less than an inclusiveand comprehensive account of "history,myth, and fictions," and the relationshipbetween them, in the work of these widelydisparate poets. Underlying this assumptionof Commonwealth commonality isanother, more dangerous one that informsthe entire study, namely that in theirexamination of history and the poetic fictionswhich enable understanding of, and211

BOOKS IN REVIEWaccess to, the "eternal truths" of myth,these poets believe in, and are trying toarticulate coherent, unitary visions whichhave "universal" meaning. Interestingly,the forefather of these poets is, accordingto Wieland, Wallace Stevens, whose ancestralvoice echoes throughout the text,without regard for historical, cultural,national, racial, or ethnic difference.This is not to suggest that Wieland'sown text does not at times recognize thespeciousness of his task. His chapter divisionsmake explicit the split between hisdiscussion of Hope, Klein, Curnow andEzekiel, Walcott, Okigbo: the "white"poets are always treated separately fromthe "non-white." Indeed, it is precisely inhis discussion of history and myth thatWieland's all-encompassing rubric mostoften reveals its fault lines. Despite hisefforts, Wieland grudgingly acknowledgesthat Curnow's poetry, for example, rejectsany notion of mythic transcendence, andis rooted in the local and particular, whilehe imposes on Walcott's anti-mythic rigorousre-examination and re-vision of historyas process the eternal qualities ofmyth. The following quotation reveals theprocess by which Wieland effects thismagical and presumptuous transformationthroughout his book:But Walcott's Adam-Crusoe . . . now servesas a paradigm for universal man facing his[sic] destiny. The fragmentation of the Caribbean,its sense of history-in-transition, its continualprocess of growth and decay throughtime, stands as a type for an ever fragmentingworld, as the great monolithic societiesof the past . . . break up ; and individual manfaces the isolation and cosmic loneliness ofWalcott's figures on the beach. But out ofthe loneliness, the poets of this study suggest,may come wisdom and faith, and a stayagainst a submission to a seemingly hostileand chaotic world. For, by making fictionswhich strive to make sense of reality out oftheir very act of naming the presences andabsences of society, and out of their variationson particular themes, the poet risestoward the mythic and he gives to the mundaneand the ordinary an illumination.This insistence on making these poetsinto spokespeople for a questionable anda contextual universalism creates a peculiarand somewhat blind reading of A. M.Klein, whose Jewishness — an identitythat Wieland fetishizes in his discussion ofKlein and, to a lesser extent, Ezekiel — isseen to be a stumbling block to his developmentinto the maturer artist who inhis more inclusive "Canadian" poetry wasinstead concerned with "society as awhole." With Canada as a paradigm for"the whole of the Western cultural tradition.. . . the mark of these last poems istheir universality." In his earlier discussionof Klein's "Indian" poems, Wielandquotes uncritically Klein's '"braves' ofyesteryear, 'the feathered bestiaries,' 'thechief who spoke with his throat' " and approvinglycompares Klein's poems toDuncan Campbell Scott's "Half-BreedGirl" and "The Forsaken," thus revealinghis characteristic blindness to, in this case,the prevalence of the stereotyped indigenein Canadian literature.Despite his references to "presencesand absences," to the role of the reader inre-creating the texts of history, fiction,and myth, and to the notion of process,Wieland's study is essentially a conservativeone which overlooks, even denies,history and the creation of fictions toaffirm the omnipotence and transcendenceof myth, Truth, and the universal.Ironically, Aran Mukherjee's title takesits cue from A. M. Klein's "Towards anAesthetic," and opens with an essay attacking"The Vocabulary of the 'Universal':The Cultural Imperialism of theUniversalist Criteria of Western LiteraryCriticism." Concise where Wieland iscompendious, Mukherjee's text is an essentialcompanion volume. All of theessays, reprinted from various journals,indict cultural and academic imperialismand complacency. As if in direct responseto Wieland, here is Mukherjee :212

BOOKS IN REVIEWAnd yes, there were some other themes:modern sensibility, i.e., the pain of living ina Godless universe . . . and, finally, the celebrationof complexity that perpetually wringsits hands in the face of the grandeur and theterror of the universe. . . . Obviously thethemes of history — conquest and subjugation,anti-colonial struggles, racism, sexism,class conflict — are all absent from thisworld view. Hence the works that deal withthis world view are also largely absent from thecurricula of departments of English in Canada.The shrines at which they worship areto be seen in their course offerings. T. S.Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, EzraPound, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens dominatemodern literature curricula.Unfortunately, even Commonwealthscholars apparently engaged in such curricularchange contribute to this hegemonicand imperialist world view. Tocombat this tendency, Mukherjee offersreadings of Michael Ondaatje and NeilBissoondath that are substantially differentfrom mainstream critical views ofeither author. Part of Mukherjee's projectas well, in her essays on South AsianCanadian poetry and on poets RienziCrusz and Cyril Dabydeen (here, effectivelycontrasted to Ondaatje), is to gainmarginalized writers a place and somevisibility in the study of Canadian literature.But Mukherjee's best, and most needed,polemic is found in her essays on the formsof cultural imperialism found in cinema,literary criticism, and in the Canadianundergraduate English course. (In "Ideologyin the Classroom: A Case Study inthe Teaching of English Literature inCanadian Universities," Mukherjee providesa radically different reading of, andapproach to, teaching Margaret Laurence's"The Perfume Sea").I suspect that Mukherjee's book is notlikely to be popular, particularly in Canada,where national, and literary, selfdefinitionis one of cultural tolerance andpluralism. Mukherjee's frontal attack ona great deal that we hold dear, and herconsistent and overt political and personalinvestment in all of her writing, is goingto be unpalatable for many. Mukherjee'sarticles have in the past provided me withmuch-needed ammunition in a resistantacademy; I, for one, am thus delighted tosee her essays finally in collected form.ARUNA SRIVASTAVAMICHAEL ESTOK, A Plague Year Journal. PulpPress, $8.95.DEBORAH GODiN, Troubling a Star. Penumbra,$9-95-TONY COSIER, Landsinger. Penumbra, $9.95.A Plague Year Journal is a record ofMichael Estok's coming to terms with hisimpending death: "the point of this issimple : / to tell you what it's like" ( "let'sget this straight,"). The poetry is heavilypunctuated by anger as well as despair ofthe human enterprise, although there area few moments of tender reminiscence.Throughout the volume, images of warand political tyranny are used as metaphorsfor AIDS as well as social malaise.In fact if there is anything questionableabout this volume, it is not its candid depictionsof homosexual love, frank treatmentof AIDS, or its philosophy of despair;rather, it is anger. The almost relentlessanger overwhelms both the poetry andthe reader alike, and unfortunately attimes even comes across as trite andclichéd, distanced from, rather than involving,the reader ("dog days", "codes,"and "symptoms").Estok's vision of AIDS is symbolized inthe association of AIDS victims with Jewsin the Nazi death camps ("the historians"), the innocent victims of foreignexploitation in third world countries ("thetroops"; "meanwhile out in the country"),and the continuing corruption ofour already fragile environment. He also213

BOOKS IN REVIEWreminds us of the ugliness of a latenthomophobia that erupts all too often inviolence ("in the parks and cemeteries";"back then").Occasionally, Estok does break throughto convey a sense of impending finality:what's left are sums more manageable:the apples on our leafless treeeggs nesting coolly in their own smug shapesin the refrigerator doorthe essays I have left to markthe days till springthe pages in this bookpotatoes in a dusty bag.("counting")Or he does engage the reader's empathy,as in such poems as "killing the porcupine,""the children," and "night again,"where man's inhumanity is revealed in allits hideousness.Mercifully, the anger sometimes ceaseslong enough for the peace of some poeticinsight to be shared :like them, we find nothingbut our own wild, whooping heartsfor a moment stilled in the centreof an expanding ring of watera vast mournful О that moves to fit anydarknessany crazy horizon("the loons")In Troubling a Star, Deborah Godinasks the reader to try a new way of seeing :to let go of conventional labels and perspectives.But her poetry, for the mostpart, offers no paradigms of newness thatcould lead the reader beyond the conventional,nor do her typographical deviationssuggest any meaning or sense thatcould not be conveyed through wordsmore poetically crafted. At times, however,she does accomplish what she setsout to do, manifesting the technical polishand lyricism characteristic of her earliervolume, Stranded in Terra:This is a raw unnameable seasonneither winter nor springrank with its own civet, smell ofthawed compost, rotten iceand blackened greasy snow("March")The trouble is that the rhythm, languageand imagery so perceptible here areconfined to only a few poems in thevolume, and to those found mostly towardthe end, poems based on traditional religiousthemes from both the East andWest. Most of the poems that do not workeither rely on difficult similes, typographicaloddities that attempt to affect thephenomenology of reading, or allusionswhose referents are so cryptic, eclectic,and ultimately reductive, that unless thereader is of the same persuasion (Nu-Age?), little of import is conveyed: "youfind, you are / the on-going answer whichpervades / the entire question" ("TheDance of Shiva"). As for the volume being,as the blurb on the back says, "philosophicalautobiography," there is, unfortunately,little here in the way of clearstructured thought that any serious philosopherwould recognize.Landsinger, by Tony Cosier, is a joy toread. Apart from some weak poems in thethird section, "Mountains," the poetry ispunctuated by a diction that is consistentlymusical and rhythmic, engaging theimagination :And what of the subtler, deeper voicehushedBeneath moss that slidesThrough breathing pores, hisses throughsediment,Trembles along the grain?To the one who listens, the rocks speak.("To the one Who Listens")The volume is divided into four sections,each reflecting a geographicaltheme, and moves from an almost Whitmanesquelyricism,I have been told not to eat the berry of thehoneysuckle.I have plucked two by mere chance boundA larger and a smallerBoth red214

BOOKS IN REVIEWDeep redBoth roundBut for their joining . . .("Honeysuckle")to a celebration of nature both passionateand transcendent :О earth, great earth,Close under solid deepdown roller, moveand take me turning crosswise."Fool's Dance"Where Godin tells unclearly, Cosiershows the reader of his poems a world ofcolour, texture, passion and sublimity:Where Godin's verse struggles to find thesource, Cosier's lyrics manifest presence:There are relics that tell of the old time.And fjords that tell of the powerthat squeezed the height into placespilled down the waterfalllike a coin for the dazzling sunflattened the lake at its footand the clear high stars.("Summering North")The poems are not, despite the title, confinedto the merely terrestrial, but mapout the geographies of the heart and soulas well, ranging in their scope from theelegiac ( "Wavebeat, Ottawa River" ), tothe dramatic ("The Widowmaker"), andthe metaphysical ("Not This Leaf HauntsMe").C. D. MAZOFFBEST OF INTENTIONSRoo BORSON, Intent, or The Weight of theWorld. McClelland & Stewart, $9.95.THE LASTING IMPRESSION ROO Borson'sIntent, or The Weight of the World leavesis that it is a book of remembrance,loss, and mourning. It creates an overwhelmingsense of nostalgia. In a note onthe text, Borson herself describes the workas "a collection of whatever's been on mymind the last few years," and says thatthe "point to be taken" is "to preserve thedark in the light and the light in thedark." The light does appear in thesepoems, but the darkness is ever-present.Such issues as change, ageing, and deathseem to have been on Borson's mind;however, she succeeds in crafting out oftroubled and troubling poems that aresimultaneously disturbing and enlivening.In several of the 81 poems in the collectionBorson does come dangerouslyclose to trivializing her thoughts bymaking the past a golden age of fun andfriendship now lost. These poems do seemintimate, letters to friends and familywhose first names appear in the poems.But Borson's concern with "the old highschool crowd" ("Tracy") or "that dinnerparty, one of the last / of a certain era"("Some Thoughts and a Letter") seemtoo much like arrested adolescence. Yeteven in these overtly nostalgic poems, especially"Toronto," Borson succeeds bymaking her particular past a part of theculture of a generation :Along Bloor, toward one end of the Annexor another,or up Yonge, half-eclipsed already,or Kensington before a storm —in all kinds of weather, it seemed, we keptwalking toward dinner,bouquets for friendship, a bottle to unlockthe night,to report, while our lives stood still,the snubs, infatuations, gossipwe called itbut really it was our common life.("Toronto")And what seems more important is Borson'srecognition that the past is not lostbut takes the form of memory. The tensionbetween memory and loss permeatesthe poems that are the most moving inthe collection, the many elegiac workssuch as "And," in which Borson says"goodbye to memory" but finds that"much / stays with us," although at timesmemory is not enough to bring back thedead. Borson's accomplishment is in being215

BOOKS IN REVIEWable to give voice to that grief which isalmost beyond expression.For Roo Borson, then, the light and thedark are never far away from each other,perhaps no further than thinking makesthem, yet each has its power. In an imagefrom "From the Island," one of severalpoems in Intent, or The Weight of theWorld, Borson sees the city, "incandescentagainst thunder-bearing skies which admit,now and then, briefly, beams whoseapparent purpose is to cauterize excessivebeauty from the grass and then move on."While the weather has "an inscrutableintent," ever simultaneously f orboding andpromising, Borson, in "On the Island,"recognizes that even something that isnow dead "still casts its shadow. Thingsthat have lived have this light in them."It is perhaps this acknowledgement of thespiritual being that allows Borson, in"Leaving the Island," to conclude thecollection with what she calls "our imageof happiness."ROBERT ATTRIDGEREFERENCERECENT BOOKS include the Gage CanadianDictionary (Gage, n.p.) : excellent because ofits clarity and its inclusiveness of Canadianwords and usages, though some users may wellbe puzzled by a few of the definitions. This isthe first place I have even seen "skookumchuck"spelled as two words; and the leapbetween the definition of "skookum" ("powerful,big, or brave") and the example provided("a skookum bacon-and-egg breakfast") raisesunintended questions, surely, about food additives.The 1200-page encyclopedia compiled byVirginia Blain et al., The Feminist Companionto Literature in English (Yale, $49.95), providesbrief lives of scores of women writersfrom the Middle Ages to the present day, includingnumerous writers outside the USA andthe UK. Data is generally up-to-date, thoughoccasional errors creep in: Katherine Mansfield'smother is listed as Annie Burrel, instead2l6of Burnell. The commentaries focus on eachwriter's attitude to the position of women insociety and on their literary evocation of sensibilityand psychology. It is a valuable resourcebook. David Cairns and Shaun Richards'Writing Ireland (Manchester Univ. Press/McClelland & Stewart, $17.95) reflects on theimpact of English colonial policy on the constructionof Irish nationalism and culture, witha useful bibliography. Alan F. J. Artibise'sInterdisciplinary Approaches to CanadianSociety (McGill-Queen's, $34.95; pa. $16.95)assembles six useful bibliographic essays on thecurrent state of enquiry into such issues aslabour, ethnicity, religion, immigration policy,and Native studies in Canada. The BritishLibrary's Occasional Papers No. 12 (£25) isdevoted to Women's Studies; edited by AlbertineGaur and Penelope Tuson, it gatherspapers delivered at a 1989 British Library colloquium,on such issues as Mansfield's BritishLibrary manuscripts, European resources forwomen's studies, oral history, the life of Asianwomen in illustrated manuscripts, newspaperresources, 19th century black American womenwriters, suffragettes, missionaries, and littleknown novelists such as Emma Robinson.W.N.AMONG THE HANDSOME Poetry chapbooks issuedby Ecrits des Forges are: Petits formatsde Donald Alarie; Dans la distance des liensde Come Lachapelle; Par la peau du cri deHuguette Bertrand; L'Oeil de l'idée de SergeMongrain; Portraits du souffle possible de DominiqueLauzon.Paperbacks for teenagers by La courte échelleinclude: Quatre jours de liberté de SylvieDesrosiers; Le père d'Arthur de Ginette Anfousse;Une tempête dans un ver de d'eau deMarie-F. Hébert; L'Idole des inactifs de DenisCôté; Sauvez ma babouche! de Gilles Gauthier;Awa dans le desert de François Pratte; Lacourse a l'amour de Bertrand Gauthier.Reprints from Bibliothèque québécoise include:L'Appelante de Yves Thériault; Lesorcier d'Anticosti de Robert Choquette; Kestende Yves Thériault; Andante de Félix Leclerc;Allegro de Félix Leclerc; Adagio deFélix Leclerc.Penguin editions of Canadian works feature:A Dedicated Man by Peter Robinson; TheGoldfish Bowl by Laurence Gough; In Transitby Mavis Gallant; The South Will Rise at Noonby Douglas Glover; The Middleman byBharati Mukherjee.

cjximns Ahh ndesAUTHOR AND CRITICA correspondence between novelist GeorgePayerle and scholar W. J. Keith. Edited byJohn Munro.In the spring of 1989, the Toronto scholarand critic W. J. Keith published a reviewof George Payerle's novel Unknown Soldier(Macmillan, 1987) in CanadianLiterature# 120. Mr. Payerle respondedwith a somewhat outraged letter, andthereby initiated a lengthy correspondence(approximately 40,000 words)touching on some of the larger issues ofthe art of fiction vis à vis the art of criticism.The following are excerpts fromthat correspondence, edited for publicationby John Munro of UBC's CreativeWriting Department. His credits includeediting the memoirs of both John Diefenbakerand Lester Pearson.PAYERLE то KEITH, 2i September 1989... I have profound respect for the humanintegrity and professional astutenessyou evince in your review, but I am atonce dismayed and disgusted that the firstmajor review in a major journal shouldrefuse to read the book the way it is written,but instead expect it to be like a bookby Mr. Davies or Mr. Findley . . .[Ultimately, I fear your honesty is selfprotective,your thoughtlessness limited byan apparent unwillingness to look intoyour own closet and discover why, for instance,you feel like an embarrassed voyeur."Supposed 'realism' of the final sexscene"? "Inevitably sex (of the dampand-spongyvariety)"? You also seem tofind bars beneath the dignity of literature,as indeed drinking and pissing. So yourastuteness turns against the book. I feellike a fool, or at least that I have beenmade out to be a fool, with little recourse.I feel that you have taken the positiontaken by some veterans holding down"responsible position[s] in society": thatthey do not wish to be identified with asocially marginal asshole like Collister.You object to the fact that a characterwithout "any powers of reflection"should be represented as having "poetic"thoughts. You say you wonder, "unfairlyperhaps," if I had fully worked outwhat kind of man Sam is. I am offended.]*... I did think Sam through, havingknown him in many men (many of them"successful," one, for instance, a bankmanager and painter of portraits andlandscapes) over a period of at least fifteenyears. During the nine years ofwriting I "became" Sam Collister to theextent that my wife remarked, not unkindly,"No wonder you're worn out.You're living your life with us, your lifeas a writer, and Sam's life." In that sense,I have no doubt whatever that the"poetic" material arose from Sam's consciousness.One of the finest, and mostlyrical, lectures on James Joyce that Ihave heard came, in a bar, from a bigbrute of a vet of whom I had never previouslythought that he would read anythingbeyond Mickey Spillane. . . .For a long time, I resisted writing battlescenes in this book. Not because I didn'tknow how (I've been told ad nauseamthat I should write war stories to makemoney, which I refuse to do) but becauseI'd never been there. I thought of it assacred ground upon which I could nottransgress, ethically. But there was agrowing demand from readers of the workin progress that I write such scenes. "Noone will understand what you're talking* This paragraph is a reasonable, althoughmuch reduced and modified, representationof an enclosure to Payerle's original letter toKeith.217

OPINIONS & NOTESabout otherwise," they said, civilians. SoI essayed the battle scene in which Samuses his bayonet. . . .This, I think, has something to do withthe role of imagination : to know what onewould otherwise not know. And thus, inthis case, to serve as a bridge betweenthose who know what it's like to kill inwar, and for that reason don't talk aboutit, and those who "can't know becausethey haven't been there." Although it'sbound to happen eventually, I've neverhad a veteran tell me I didn't know whatI was talking about. I wrote a preface tothe book, which has not been published,in which I speak of Sam Collister as a realman made of real words. Collister is thething itself, not ideas about the thing, andI abjured a narrator who would imposesuch ideas on him. Insofar as possible, thebook is Sam, a man one meets in thestreet. Or in a bar.I see the artist (writer) as Stevens's"Man with the Blue Guitar." If I were towrite about a man who stutters, the bookwould stutter a lot. To read UnknownSoldier is to know Sam, not intellectually,but as experience. Swearing. Drinkingand pissing. Not every time, but selectivelyoften enough that it feels like all the time.Which is how it feels. The imagined pine.The imagined jay."I am a native in this world / . . . Andlike a native think in it." Whether or notthe "poetic" in Unknown Soldier is "selfconscious"is in the eye of the beholder.Certainly it wasn't so in the writing, atleast not any more so than any of theother "carefully worded prose," which isall of it, believe it or not. To me, for themost part, it is not at all self-consciousbecause it wasn't. But, if the reader findsit so, it isn't working. "If it does not seema moment's thought, / Our stitching andunstitching has been naught." I canhardly gainsay Yeats. The whole questionis fascinating, especially since so muchcontemporary prose (not Findley's) isself-consciously unselfconscious to thepoint of synthetic aridity.. . . Despite my crankiness here, anddespite what I perceive as your crankinessthere, I like your mind, and you seem tolike much of what I did in Unknown Soldier.I thank you for your thoughtfulness,your professional acuity, and your willingnessto place these in the context of yourpersonal experience. A generous, "unacademic"thing to do. At the same time, Ithink that with the best will in the world,you read the wrong book. My hope is thatwe might in fact engage in some dialogueon the issues raised in your review andhere, in their larger dimensions as well asin relation to my own work. . . .KEITH то PAYERLE, 29 September 1989. . . One problem when one is reviewinga book like Unknown Soldier is that oneknows that other reviewers will be puffinglesser books with unjustified superlativesand that, by contrast, one's own responsewill seem ungenerous — or won't be understood.I do a lot of reviewing, and Ihave always made a point of attemptingtwo things: (a) giving as accurate anaccount as I can of the kind of book it is(or seems to me to be), and (b) giving ashonest an account as I can of my personalresponse to it. (When this last iscomplex, I always try to lay my own cardson the table by explaining my own viewpointand so revealing my possible prejudices— as I did in your case, and as I'mglad you acknowledge.)... In the jargon of literary criticism(which I try to avoid), what I've beentalking about is, as you probably know,called "the affective fallacy." A similarterm, "the intentional fallacy," warnsagainst evaluating a work according towhat the author is known to have intendedrather than by what he actuallyproduced (which may not be the samething). You have told me, impressively218

OPINIONS & NOTESand convincingly, what you intended inUnknown Soldier, and I think I understandthat. But when you claim that I"read the wrong book," all I can reply isthat I made every effort to read the bookin my hands and find out what was there.God knows, I may be wrong, but I stillthink that I gave an accurate representationof what is there on the printed page.Between the conception and the execution(to misquote Eliot) falls the Shadow.. . . [With regard to] the treatment ofsex scenes: I don't think it's fair to say Ishould "look in my own closet" to discoverwhy I feel like an embarrassed voyeur.This is everyone's closet. It's virtuallyimpossible in this day and age toquestion sex scenes in art without soundinglike some life-denying and sick "Puritan."But it does seem to me that a realartistic difficulty is involved here. Thesexual act, we know (or at least most ofus know, and I am confident that thatincludes both of us), can be a beautiful,even supreme experience. But it is only sowithin a context of privacy (not secrecy,but privacy). The same act (physically),performed in public, becomes somethingvery different. This is most obvious infilms ( Woman of the Dunes was, in part,about this) — and it's exaggerated on thescreen by the magnification ( I am invariablyreminded of Gulliver in Brobdingnag),and by the fact that we are all, Ithink, at least partly conscious of: thatthese are actors "performing" within acommercial contract. The effect in literatureis not so extreme, but I think it's verydefinitely there. The more vivid and immediatesuch a scene is — the more "realistic,"if you will — the more this "voyeur"effect is there. This is a basic problem thatthe serious artist must, I believe, acknowledgeand come to terms with. Of course,there's no answer — but I'm convinced(unfashionable as it may be) that "directness,""honest openness," etc. are notadequate defences in themselves. Here isan instance where one must "by indirectionsfind directions out." Very few novelistsfind a way around this problem;rightly or wrongly, I don't think you did.And here is another major problem: theinarticulate hero. Let me say at once thatI don't believe in the impossibility of presentingsuch people successfully in fiction,but I do think that it's extremely difficult.If someone hasn't got the sufficiently precisewords in which to express his thought,then how can one know that such thoughtexists? I mentioned Davies only becauseI find his discussion of the matter (AVoice in the Attic, pp. 343-4 in the NCLedition) one of the best I know. Incidentally,while I am unashamedly anadmirer of Davies at his best, I do notwant everyone else to write like him. Idon't want "much more" of him — nor,for that matter, do I want less "real life,"as you suggest. But I do think that a senseof real life can only be communicated inart through artistic means and artisticeffects. Your letter has a lot to say aboutthe real life you wanted to convert intofiction, but remarkably little about theartistic problems that are involved in thisconversion. These were what I was tryingto indicate.Another point. I do not "find bars beneaththe dignity of literature." .. . WhatI do say is that enough is enough, andthat, if a novelist has a protagonist whospends much of his time in bars, then hemust take special care to avoid beingboring by repetition. Bars don't guaranteereal life. The same with pissing. I justget tired of being told about it all thetime. We all do it, and there's nothingshameful about it, but it just isn't veryinteresting.So there we are. . . . I'm genuinely sorrythat you felt "offended" or "like a fool."I assure you that I didn't intend thatresponse and I honestly can't see how it'sjustified. If I read the wrong book, youcertainly read the wrong review! I've re-219

OPINIONS & NOTESread it, and I think that it's a balancedreview. Obviously, you believe that you'vewritten a major book and I don't think itquite makes it. But I have surely madeclear that it was an admirable attempt(that sounds a bit condescending, but it'snot meant to be). I paid the book thecompliment of judging it by the higheststandards, and the majority of novels inany age don't even try to qualify. I endeavouredto make that clear. If the otherreviews you get are all more responsiblethan mine, then I think you'll be lucky. Ididn't insult your book with the usualchitchat that so many book-reviewers resortto. I spoke out — because the bookstimulated/provoked me into speakingout — on what I believe to be the largecritical questions that lie behind it. Hencethis correspondence. . . .PAYERLE то KEITH, 3 October 1989... I note that you find my letter to"have a lot to say about the real life [I]wanted to convert into fiction, but remarkablylittle about the artistic problemsthat are involved in this conversion," andthat you were trying to indicate theseproblems in your review.... I suppose I "have" a theory of art,as I have a way of being and perceiving.But I have seldom attempted to developsuch a theory because it feels like alien,and for me rather barren, ground. Theoryoccasionally pops out in discourse, but hasnever been written down or worked outin a thorough way, and is not readilyavailable on demand. This was essentiallythe way in which I became a writer ratherthan a scholar. . . .At the moment, I regret to say, I don'thave ready access to various theoriesabout my novel which have popped outat various times as secondary sunspots inthe process of creation. I do know, forinstance, that the "utterance" of the bookis based on a structure of four "voices" orfour voiced perspectives. These can alsobe seen as a point-of-view structure beginningin the region of Sam's bowel,working up through his chest/voice box tohis head/mouth and beyond to a perceptionhe can, in effect, touch but not grasp— a point-of-view and consciousnesssitting like a camera on his shoulder, informedby his consciousness, but beyondit. This last is the "voice" or "point-ofview"of the book. (Part of this rumoured"theory" of mine is that a work of art has,embodies, its own point-of-view, or perspective,or way-of-being, which is thething greater than the sum of its parts,including the "creator's" contribution orperspective as a "part.") Trying to determine,or at least see, how this totality ofperspective comes to be, or "works," is mychief interest in critical analysis. It has agreat deal to do with the relationship ofparts, from micro to macro. . . .Insofar as possible, everything in thatbook is not only there for a reason, butworks with everything else to achieve"artistic effects." Ideally, everythingwould, but despite the fact that the thingtook nine years from inception to realization,I don't believe in the perfectibility ofa work of art. In terms of books, I thinkthat the version published is simply theversion that happens to be published. Onehopes that it is the best version possible atthat time, but I do like your misquotationof Eliot.When I say "everything," I mean itliterally. Including, for instance, swearingand drinking and pissing. The word"fuck," for instance, is often used, but itsintonation, context, and echoes vary. Itsuse, and the use of all the other "repeated"elements, are variational and developmental.... I hold the view thatthese "parts," small or large, are, if youwill, the atoms, molecules and bricks ofthe edifice. So we have the notion ofrepetition-and-variation, cumulative and"progressive" or developmental. "Bricks"220

OPINIONS & NOTESof varying size, shape, colour and density.There's also mortar in there somewhere,but as I said I'm not in top theoreticalform. (Things like the "flat" or "toneless"attributives "he says/she says" are probablysmall instances of mortar, used"rhythmically" rather than "melodically"— to thoroughly mix my theoretical metaphors.)I'd rather there didn't have to bemortar, but I haven't achieved the technologyof the ancient masons of Egypt andthe Americas.. . . Whether or not one finds the book,or aspects of it, boring, depends, I think,on whether or not one (a) perceives thesort of thing I've been describing, and (b)likes the results. Most people deal with(b). You deal with both (a) and (b), butnot, I think, with a perception of the waythe thing works "as it is written." I don'tmind accepting that that could be myfault, since you are not by any means imperceptive,but that's what I mean, or oneof the sorts of things I mean, when I sayyou read the wrong book. Why, for instance,do you not wonder, if you thinkthe book is worthy of judgement by thestandards of a major work, why things areas they are in it? Why, for instance, therepetitions of swear words and details ofdrinking and urinating occur? To saysimply that the skilled novelist doesn't dothese things is to say simply that I am nota skilled novelist. You suggest in fact thatI am simply following "1980s fashion."Is that how one writes an almost-majorwork? By being unskilled and followingfashion? Perhaps, but to me that soundsmore like a possible definition of mediocrity.. . .I didn't read the wrong review. Yourgracious apology for unintentionally leavingme offended and feeling like a foolis welcome, and accepted. The fact thatyou were judging the book by the higheststandards in a way that you wouldn'taccord to most books does come through,and is appreciated. That's why I couldwrite to you as I did. . .. But the tone, andmuch of the substance, of your rejectionof Unknown Soldier as a major novel isstinging in allusions such as "Supposed'realism' of the final sex scene". . .. Thething I was really offended by was thesuggestion that I hadn't fully worked outwhat kind of man Sam is. It was in aidof answering that accusation (not muchsoftened by the "unfairly perhaps") thatI wrote much of the "real life" stuff inmy last letter. That together with the businessabout Sam being "intellectually limited"— without "any powers of reflection."There are "thoughts" (ideas), butthere also "visions," within or extendingfrom intuitive vision. And he does thinkabout, reflect upon, a lot of subjects, includinghistory, time, place and humanrelationships. He just does it, often, notin intellectual/conceptual terms, but interms of perceived experience, employingall five senses plus "the sixth," but mostoften the (viscerally?) visual tendingtoward the visionary.... I am most interested in the issuesof "affective" and "intentional" fallacythat you raise. And the issues of "direct"sexuality, and whether or not you were"seriously affected" by your own experience/perspective.. . . For instance, inwhat sense, or with what significance, isyour perspective "very different" frommine? Is your view of artistic means andeffects, or your view of representations ofsex, significantly informed by your being"old enough to remember" the War? Isthere a societal perspective implied thathas standards of acceptable social behaviourand success . . . which Sam doesn'tmeet? That would imply a kind of classbias. ... I think that could be taken toconstitute a "serious effect" on your response.. . .Which leads by the low road to thesecond aspect of the question of the affectivefallacy. What does it mean to "see anovel as a novel and not as something221

OPINIONS & NOTESelse" ? You say that you're the last personto believe that anyone can be objective,and yet if you're not calling for objectivity,what are you calling for other than thesort of (self) consciousness that permitsone to place one's literary judgement ina personal (affective) context? This issomething like the distinction betweencant and honesty. The affective fallacywould seem to be a fallacy if it is indeedfallacious, i.e., "cant." The term seemsrather like "murder," defined as "wrongfulkilling." To equate killing with murderis, at best, inaccurate. It all dependson how one defines "wrongful." Toequate the affective with fallacy either dependson how one defines "fallacy," orit's an error in logic.. . . So to representations of sex ... ifthis is everybody's closet, Bill, then I verymuch think everybody should look in it.... I do not offer "directness" or "honestopenness" as a defence. I don't reallythink a defence is necessary. But somesemblance of understanding is. I am suspiciousof indirection in sexual matters,artistically, for the same reason that I refusedto present Sam from the "outside".... I am no more willing to trust the audiencean inch in this regard that I am inassuming that their view of Sam will beperceptive of the real character ratherthan their preconceptions about veterans.Both in the sex scenes and in my representationof Sam from the inside, I tookthe risk of putting people off, but I farpreferred that to putting them on, or allowingthem to put Sam on as a kindof debased icon to place comfortablyamongst their existing shibboleths. . . .This is perhaps a confrontational attitude,but it is not finally an ungentle orunkind one. I simply believe, artistically,that one must have the thing itself. That'snot the same as arguing "directness" as akind of socioethical imperative transplantedinto art. In fact, a lot of what I'vedone is so bloody indirect that hardly anybody'sseen it yet, much less grappled withit. What I'm saying is based in Stevens,noted as an aridly intellectual poet, whichI think is another major misreading ofthings. I do not believe that seeing or feelingis believing. But I do believe that believingwithout seeing and feeling is abstractand dangerous. That is not so mucha notion of "felt thought" as it is a fairlymystical notion that "thought" is physical,and it's not unrelated to Einstein's famousequation. . . .KEITH то PAYERLE, ι November 1989... In using the phrases "intentionalfallacy" and "affective fallacy," I wasn'tunderwriting them, as it were, but usingthem as ways to define a problem. Personally,I don't think one can be rigid inthese matters. . . . Ultimately, one canonly (legitimately) judge what is there,but to explore an author's intention is, forme, thoroughly legitimate as an initial criticalprocedure: it can help one to understanda work of art, though one's evaluationshould not be dependent upon it. Asfor "affective fallacy," it can be a fallacy,as in the case of a radio station beingflooded with wreaths when a characterdies in a soap opera. . . . On the otherhand, as Thomas Hardy saw, the deathbedof anyone is the fifth act of a tragedy.Of course we are affected by the storiesof Lear, Tess, etc., and our "literaryjudgment" cannot but contain this response.But I am reminded at this pointof how moving Death of a Salesmanseemed when I first saw it, but how disillusionedI felt recently when I saw aseemingly competent performance — becausethe whole construction and writingseemed so tawdry.. . . The matter of monotony in art isa very complicated one. (I would preferto say "monotonous" rather than "boring,"and should have made the distinctionin my previous letter.) Polonius is a222

OPINIONS & NOTESbore, but is he boring in Hamlet? Obviouslynot.... At best, I suspect, monotonyis an effect to be used with caution andrestraint. I confess I did find the drinkingand pissing in Unknown Soldier monotonousbecause, after we'd had severalsuch scenes, I couldn't see that anythingadditional was being communicated.( Why not mention every time Sam blinked?). . . When I referred to "1980s fashion,"I merely meant that the so-called"age of permissiveness" allows a novelistto employ these references if he (or she)wants to, and thus does not require theexploration of possibly more subtle waysof representing our bodily repetitions. Myown experience in reading is that, afterthe initial sense of refreshing shock hasworn off (at least fictional characters pissjust as we all do! ), the law of diminishingreturns sets in with depressing rapidity.. . . The next point I need to take upis what you say about my possible "classbias." In part, I'm prepared to pleadguilty here, but only in the sense that weare all inevitably affected by such matters(yourself as much as myself). But I can'tagree that I don't "wish to be identifiedwith a socially marginal asshole like Collister";I might well not wish to be identifiedwith the asshole, but the "sociallymarginal" is irrelevant. The reservationswould be moral ones, not social ones. But"identified with" is the wrong phrase anyway— other veterans might "identifywith" him but it would be arrogant of meeven to try, since I lack the experienceyou give him. What you mean, I assume,is "empathize with" or something likethat, and here I would plead not guilty.I am prepared to empathize with suchcharacters in art — I think of Shakespeare'sPistol, Defoe's Moll Flanders,Dickens's Magwitch, Cary's Gulley Jimson,Beckett's tramps, etc. — in varyingdegrees depending on the effect aimed atand achieved by the writer. . . . With Collister,I'm split — I understand his bitterness(itself an inadequate word — "hatred,"perhaps, but that's not quite righteither), but I'm still uncertain why hisexperience should have affected him morethan similar experiences must have affectedothers. .. . Does this sort of experienceabsolve one from the responsibilities ofmarriage and fatherhood? If that soundsquaintly old-fashioned, so be it. I can onlyreport that a reading of Unknown Soldierdidn't make me clear about these points,and I feel that I need to be clear in orderto come to an adequate understanding.In addition, I was a bit uneasy aboutwhere you (as author/narrator) stood. Igot the uneasy feeling that I was expectedto respond more positively than, given theevidence I was confronted with, I could.(And degrees of positiveness are involvedhere — I don't mean that I was whollynegative. ) I sensed, rightly or wrongly, anattempt to exalt this figure into a kind ofheroic stature that I wasn't convinced hecould sustain.One place where we may find ourselvesdisagreeing on more general grounds isthe matter of "the perfectibility of a workof art." I agree that it is ultimately unattainable(if one doesn't happen to beGod), but I do think that every artistshould work to that end. I don't followyou when you go on from there to say that"the version published is simply [simply?!]the version that happens to be published."Shouldn't one be able to do more than"hope" that it's "the best version possibleat that time"?. . . "Finally (at last, he says)" — ! Ifind it difficult to reconcile your statement... "I simply believe, artistically, that onemust have the thing itself" with yourstatement... "I wasn't attempting 'reallife,' I was attempting real art." I don'tsee how you can have "the thing itself"in art. Perhaps one of the things we arearguing about is the possible paradoxthat, the closer one gets to trying to present"the thing itself," the more the chasm223

OPINIONS & NOTESbetween the thing itself and the artisticapproximation to it becomes a problem... . All this will sound dryly academic,and I know you will find yourself resistingit vigorously, but I write out of a convictionthat I can think of no extended workof art that has survived to become a permanentpart of the world's literature thatdoes not have a challenging appeal to themind. Of course, this has to be meldedwith feeling and emotion ; a creative writerdoes not think like a philosopher, butthe mind is always conspicuously involved.What I'm impressed by in your lettersare your hints concerning the "fairly mysticalnotion that 'thought' is physical."My point is that, if genuine, it remainsrecognizable as thought, and provokesfurther thought. Another of the shibbolethsof our age that makes it a difficultage for major art is the simple-mindednotion that art is "self-expression" — theopening of the floodgates and all thatcrap — that there is a democracy of feelingby which everyone's reactions are asvalid and interesting as everyone else's.And I know in my bowels (as D. H. Lawrencesuggested, in "inner-light" Puritanfashion, on another occasion) that it isfalse. To challenge it is to be called anelitist, but I no longer care. Art is an elitistactivity, so why should we be embarrassedabout the label? . . .PAYERLE то KEITH, 6 & 7 November 1989. . . You say I seem defensive regarding"the academic," and I am. It is not mymétier, and yet I feel subject to it as awriter in a way similar to my subjugationto the vagaries of publishing. Publishingsuffers from a cynicism which you havenever betrayed, and which I strongly believeyou are incapable of harbouring.But. Your letter I feel gives me unlookedforjustification in my defensiveness.. . . Sam is a real man made of realwords. That is an inspiring paradox. Thelion in the lute, not the lion locked instone, to paraphrase Stevens. "As if a lionknelt to kiss a rose, / Astonished into passionaterepose," to quote that good manTed Roethke.... I can say that I "hope" that theversion published is the best version possibleat a given time because I've earnedthe right to do so. Unknown Soldier tooknine years from inception to publication,and the final revisions were done withinfour months of publication (the publisher'shard deadline). The first five yearsof that time were, essentially, first draft.During the following four years therewere about five more drafts, although Ican't recall accurately without recourseto files that are now obscure. . . .You say it's impossible to prove a negative.Well, I feel as though I've been astunning failure at demonstrating or provinga positive — for instance, the possibilityof using relatively "meaningless" wordsin a meaningful and revealing way. ...The fact that this remains impenetrablyinvisible to you troubles me greatly. I findmyself most uncomfortable cast in the roleof critic of my own work saying "Lookwhat I've done, huh? Ain't it good?" Iwant someone else to do that. Critics,namely.I don't gainsay your abilities and wisdom.Quite the contrary. But we seem tobe in a... standoff. I had hoped youwould be able to say, "Ah, that's what hemeans by four levels of voice, or a developmental/variationaltechnique". ... Asit stands, you seem to have subsided intoagreeing with yourself. And together weseem to be a pair of conjurers with analarming lack of rabbits.Do you really think I would agree that"this is boring, but it's art"? I am notAndy Warhol."Identified with," as I used it in context,means "by others," not by your self.I know and respect your reluctance to"identify with" combat veterans, as I ex-224

OPINIONS & NOTESplained at some length earlier. But I didnot mean "empathize with"! Goddamlanguage. I meant what the Catholicsused to call "human respect," meaning, bybizarre inversion, the fear of social disapprobation.I am somewhat offended by the "age ofpermissiveness" argument, ... as I was bythe original "1980s fashion." Likewise"the simple-minded notion that art is 'selfexpression.'" Is that what you think I didin Unknown Soldier? Is that what youthink I'm arguing for? . . .KEITH то PAYERLE, 3 December 1989. . . After the exchange of several letters,in which the genuine George Payerlecame across in a way that he couldn'tpossibly in the novel (I'll spare you anacademic lecture on the difference betweenthe implied author and the nameon the title page), I reread the novel andcame to the conclusion that, whateveryour intentions and whatever the wholehistory of writing the book, and whateverblood and guts went into it (and I do recognizethat), my opinion as a reader, andso as a reviewer, hadn't changed. I canonly express an opinion on what is there— or rather what I can recognize as there.You ask for "an appreciation of UnknownSoldier based on the terms in which it iswritten" — but I honestly don't see howI can do that.AMONG RECENT publications on photography,Robert M. Levine, Images of History: Nineteenthand Early Twentieth Century LatinAmerican Photographs as Documents (Duke,US$72.50) presents remarkable deconstructionsof colonial tropes. Levine analyzes formalportraits of masters and slaves, family pictures,snapshots of visiting anthropologists with their"objects," and so on. He probes manifestationsof overt and covert culture, comments on perspectivalchoices in landscapes and cityscapesand analyzes the conventions of "posed decorum."After Images of History, Stefan Richter,The Art of the Daguerreotype (Viking,$29.95), i s difficult to tolerate. The reproductionsare very good, but too many of them arepornographic and too many are merely describedas "charming," "playful," or "amusing."The author seems to be little disturbed bythe information that the models for thesepictures were "washerwomen, needlewomen,housemaids, messenger-girls and prostitutes."After stating that their "names are not known,"he comes to the startling conclusion that in"the daguerreotype, as in the brothel, class barrierswere transcended." By contrast to Levineand Richter, Mike Weaver, ed., Photographyin the Nineteenth Century: The Fine Art Tradition(Cambridge, £25.00), pursues neithersocial nor prevalent concerns. The book presentsa series of scholarly essays on pictorialismand other Victorian photographic styles andthemes. The book is good on the naturalisttradition (there are three essays on the workof P. H. Emerson), but there are also noteworthycontributions on topographical and architecturalphotography. Of related interest toLevine's book is John F. Bauman and ThomasH. Coode, In the Eye of the Great Depression:New Deal Reporters and the Agony of theAmerican People (Northern Illinois, $25.00/9-5°)·THE FOLLOWING NCL EDITIONS have been received:Hetty Dorval by Ethel Wilson, afterwordby Northrop Frye; The Innocent Travellerby Ethel Wilson, afterword by P. K. Page;The Equations of Love by Ethel Wilson, afterwordby Alice Munro; Swamp Angel by EthelWilson, afterword by George Bowering; MadShadows by Marie-Claire Biais, afterword byDaphne Marlatt.225

OPINIONS & NOTESHUGH MACLENNAN(1907-1990):IN RECOLLECTIONWHEN Canadian Literature began toappear in 1959, Hugh MacLennan wasone of the first writers to appreciate thecontribution it was likely to make to ourliterary life, and he wrote me a letter ofcongratulation immediately the first issuecame out. It was perhaps his own peakyear as a novelist. The Watch That Endsthe Night, his best novel and one of thebest Canadian novels yet written, had appeared,and in many ways he seemed tohold that symbolic relationship to his timewhich Wilde has declared a writer shouldsustain. In an age of rising nationalism hisearlier and more polemical novels, romansà thèse like Barometer Rising, Two Solitudesand The Precipice, gave voice inmemorable ways to current anxietiesabout the condition of Canada as anemergent nation, with its problems of internal{Two Solitudes) and external {ThePrecipice) relations. And his appealseemed perfectly fitted for the thematiccriticism which began to flourish at thattime. But, apart from these ideologicaland critical considerations, MacLennanseemed to have a stature which — withCallaghan in decline and Margaret Laurenceonly rising to the zenith of herachievement — made him seem par excellancethe novelist of the 1950s, whichstarted off with his dark second-best novel(in terms of sheer writing), Each Man'sSon {1951), and ended with his best, TheWatch That Ends the Night.I had actually known MacLennan foralmost a decade by the time he wrote to meregarding Canadian Literature. When Ireturned to Canada in 1949 John Sutherlandsent me a parcel of MacLennan'snovels with the request that I write anessay on them for Northern Review fromthe viewpoint of a critic from London.In England by that time, with a fewexceptions like George Orwell and ArthurKoestler, we were in retreat from polemicalfiction and poetry, but in MacLennanI found an old-style preacher-novelistwho combined exciting accounts of disastrousor perilous action with political lessons.I admired his set pieces, like theevocation of the Halifax Harbour explosionof 1917 in Barometer Rising, and Ifound his male characters satisfying. Buthis women seemed softly outlined andsentimentally conceived, and eroticism ofany kind he handled with a strangelycommunicable embarrassment.I said all these things in my essay andvery soon, out of the blue, came a letterfrom MacLennan, thanking me for thepiece, granting my points with reservations,quietly explaining his intentions. Itwas the beginning of a cordial, courteous,and cautious relationship, with letters exchangedwhenever I wrote on his books.He contributed several articles to CanadianLiterature, more about the financialand publishing problems of writers thanabout the craft of writing; he rarely discussedthe work of another writer. Occasionallyhe came to Vancouver and wehad genial lunches in restaurants lookingover the unique mountain-and-sea-scapeof Vancouver, which MacLennan appreciatedfor visits (I remember one springwhen he got very excited over the azaleasblooming early in March on the Universitycampus), but which never led him todesert Montreal, his conflict-ridden adoptivehome.There was a particular burst of letterswhen I published my little book on him,Hugh MacLennan, in 1969, and I developedmy idea of the parallels to Odysseusto be found in his leading characters.MacLennan claimed he was surprisedwhen he read what I said but had concludedI was right; it was all, he main-226

OPINIONS & NOTEStained, an unconscious process, and healso was probably right.I very soon encountered the opinionthat MacLennan was really an essayistwho had found his way into fiction, and Ipartly subscribed to it. He wrote somevery fine essays and helped to keep thatfragile art alive in Canada; the kind ofstately and slightly pompous prose he developedhad much in common with thatof the Augustan essayists, while in the sensethat they carried very obvious messageshis first three novels and his 1960s work,The Return of the Sphinx, could all beconsidered as extended essays as much asnovels. But it might also be said thatMacLennan was best as an essayist whenhe kept away from fiction, as in TheRivers of Canada, and that his fiction wasbest the more he distanced himself fromthe roman à thèse. He never abandonedthe development of issues, philosophical,social, or political, but he was best whenhe treated them most broadly and allowedthe archetypes that haunt every truenovelist's mind to take control, as in EachMan's Son, that tense and vivid study ofthe tragic effects of Calvinist guilt, or TheWatch That Ends the Night, that monumentalbook about people involved in thegreat world issues of the 1930s.MacLennan showed a curious and notalways happy mixture of vanity and insecurity,the latter particularly shown inthe massive revisions and rewritings hefound himself forced to do for each book.I have never known another writer whoactually boasted, as MacLennan did,about the thousands of pages he woulddiscard to get the 300 or 400 pages of thefinal book. It was not perfectionism thatled him to this so much as a nagging senseof imperfection. He reacted deeply tocriticism; he was quite aware of the unchallengedposition he held for a periodin the Canadian literary world, but heseemed to see it as precarious, and reactedemotionally to negative reviews. He was,I remember, particularly mortified whenmost of the critics found The Return ofthe Sphinx both polemically and fictionallyinadequate.I last heard from MacLennan early inthe 1980s, and I assumed when letters nolonger came from him that, like me, he wasbecoming more reclusive as he grewolder. Now I gather that he felt lonelyand neglected in his last years, and I amsad at the thought that I might have donemore to keep in touch with him.I feel sad in a different way because theclock of public opinion has made an extraordinaryturn, and in the year of his deathwe are back again heavily involved in thetwo cultural solitudes of Canada, theessential unity of the nation, Canada'srelations with the United States. To thesepreoccupations, one might say, MacLennansacrificed his art during his firstdecade as a novelist, only truly fulfillinghimself in his second decade. But, consideredapart from fictional virtues, whathe had to say was honest and deep andimportant. As we turn back to our renewedand often despairing debate on thefuture of our confederation of regions andpeoples that once offered so much, wemiss his voice. But at least books likeBarometer Rising and Two Solitudesshould be read again, and particularly bythe young; as tracts for the times, theyhave maintained their vitality and theirpoint.GEORGE WOODCOCKTHE Dictionnaire des auteurs de langue françaiseen Amérique du Nord, eds. ReginaldHamel, John Hare, Paule Wyczynski (Fides,$125.00) is more than an update of theauthors' 1976 Dictionnaire pratique des auteursquébécois, because it now also includesentries on non-Québécois francophone authors.The result is a remarkable reference workdistinguished by the catholicity of its selection.The book documents literary canons inthe making: the bibliographies for Marie-Claire227

NOTESBiais, Nicole Brossard, Hubert Aquin, AnneHébert, Antonine Maillet speak for themselves,as does the entry on Emile Nelligan which providesnew information on myths woven aroundthe poet's life and work. Authors who had notyet come to public attention in 1976 receiveappropriate entries, among them Louky Bersianik,Denise Boucher and Marco Micone. Atthe same time, nineteenth-century authorswhose work has become interesting againagainst the background of recent developmentsare included, such as the Curé Labelle. As itspredecessor, this dictionary lists informativeentries on historians, essayists, and linguists,and the reader will find much information inthe contributions on authors as different as Trudeau,Vallières, Léandre Bergeron and PierreSavard, particularly since these updated versionsalso reflect on the business of history inthe post-referendum age. A few minor quibbles:the updated entries do not always appropriatelyshift the focus in an author's work. Thus, Tremblay'sChroniques de Plateau Mont-Royal isgiven only scant attention. And the editors seemto frown on criticism written in English. Withfew exceptions, the latter has been ignored andthat, considering available excellent work onAquin, Brossard, Hébert and others, is a pity.E.-M.K.Re(dis)covering our Foremothers: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Writers, ed. LorraineMcMullen (U. of Ottawa) will be animportant source for anyone interested in earlyCanadian women writers. The contributionsrange from detailed practical advice such asMarion Beyea's "Archival Sources for Researchon Nineteenth-Century Women Writers" andcogent diagnoses such as Francess G. Halpenny's"Problems and Solutions in the Dictionaryof Canadian Biography, 1800-1900" toprogrammatic essays such as Carole Gerson's"Anthologies and the Canon of Early CanadianWomen Writers" and analyses of individualproblems and literary figures, including womenjournalists (Marjory Lang), travel narratives(D. M. R. Bentley) and autobiographies(Helen Buss). Much emphasis is predictablyplaced on the Strickland sisters and Sara JeannetteDuncan, but none of the pieces is redundant,and editor and contributors alike areto be congratulated for performing the rarefeat of turning a series of symposium papersinto a substantial collection. Barabara M. Freeman'sKit's Kingdom: The Journalism ofKathleen Blake Coleman is a felicitous choicefor the first volume in the Carleton Women'sExperience Series. The book documents the lifeand achievement of a woman whose energy,wit, and unorthodox views and behaviour haveattracted attention in several previous books.Freeman sketches the fullest picture we haveof Coleman to date, drawing on her papers inthe Public Archives of Canada and on the testimonyof her descendants. "Kit," as she signedher famous column in the Mail and Empire,was an even more complex person than has beenacknowledged so far, and researchers interestedin women's studies will be intrigued by hervarious attempts to create different personae forherself, which kept her readers guessing as toher real age, gender, and marital life. Also new(although not surprising considering the elaboraterope-dance she had to perform betweenconventionality and intellectual independence)is the revelation that Coleman suffered fromsevere bouts of depression which left her incapacitatedfor weeks. Freeman is much to becommended for her effort to place these phenomenawithin the larger cultural and socialfabric of Coleman's times. Particularly goodis the assessment of Coleman's much-toutedcoverage of the Cuban War as the only accreditedwoman journalist, an achievement forwhich she was only in recent years admittedto the Canadian Journalists' Hall of Fame.Freeman readily acknowledges the quality ofColeman's work, but this is no hagiography:she also points out the publicity motivating herexpedition and the inaccuracies in her reporting.Freeman's writing is perceptive, vigorous, andengagé; this is a fine book, a few misquotationsnotwithstanding. "Kit" observed places, charactersand events with the keen eye of theflâneur, and her efforts to classify the socialtypes among the urban masses gained muchfrom the contemporary "science" of physiognomy.Mary Cowling's The Artist as Anthropologist:The Representation of Type andCharacter in Victorian Art (Cambridge) offerswelcome insight into the Victorians' fascinationwith human appearance and its alleged correlationwith personality and behaviour. If JamesFenimore Cooper provided Eugène Sue, Dickensand others with the metaphor of the cityas jungle, then physiognomy suggested thatcriminals substituted for savages, " 'as worthyof study in an ethnological point of view, asthose of the people of other countries,' as distinctfrom average law-abiding citizens 'as theMalay is from the Caucasian tribe'." Cowlingpays special attention to the work of the painterWilliam Powell Frith, whose panoramic paintingspurport to depict the full range of Victorianhumanity. M. Jeanne Peterson, Family,228

NOTESLove, and Work in the Lives of VictorianGentlewomen (Indiana UP, $14.95 paper)sets out to do for 19th-century British womenwhat Peter Gay's The Education of the Senses(1984) did for their American counterparts,namely to correct their image as frail, submissive,and inactive creatures and, instead, toemphasize their role as resilient, productive andpassionate members of society. Many of Peterson'sfindings are intriguing and her descriptiveapproach to her sources will provide researcherswith much useful documentary material, buther sample is too small to "revise our understandingof women's relationships to theirfamilies and their work," as the informationaccompanying the review copy claims. Of relatedinterest is Frances B. Cogan's All-AmericanGirl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood inMid-Nineteenth-Century America (U. of Georgia)which undertakes to correct the view that"the majority of American women [were] mindlessconsumers and drudges of a male-dominatedcapitalist world." Cogan's chief sourcesare advice books and manuals which advocatedhealth, intelligence, and resourcefulness inwomen. One of the areas in which daringwomen attempted to prove themselves wasin criminal investigation. Kathleen GregoryKlein, The Woman Detective: Gender andGenre (U of Illinois) explores the adaptationof a notoriously gender-specific genre to femaleprotagonists, or rather the adaptation of theprotagonist to the genre. Chapter after chapterof this thoroughly researched volume comes tothe depressing conclusion that "the golden ageof detective fiction which codified so much ofthe genre's structure reaffirmed the old rulesfor women's behavior and kept its prioritiesfirmly in place." Klein is good on the contradictorycodes attached to identical behaviourin male and female detectives. The bookcomes with an extensive bibliography. An essayon detective novels also appears in Readingand Writing Women's Lives: A Study of theNovel of Manners, eds. Berge W. Bowers &Barbara Brothers, a recent addition to UMI's"Challenging the Literary Canon" Series. "TheDetective Novel of Manners" by Carolyn Heilbrunalias Amanda Cross is, however, less ascholarly study of the subject than an angrymanifesto, and a similar tone appears in othercontributions (on Austen, Trollope, Eliot,James, Woolf, Pym, and others), including theintroduction. The result is a provocative, if notalways fully informative, book, although thereis a detailed bibliography. Like Reading andWriting Women's Lives, Women's Writing inExile, eds. Mary Lynn Broe & Angela Ingram(U of North Carolina) originated in an MLApanel, but the result is somewhat more substantial.Besides exploring various forms ofexile, the book also presents a number of movingpersonal testimonials by Annette Kolodny,Esther Fuchs, Sneja Gunew, and Gayatri ChakravortySpivak, whose passionate rhetoric maywell make them the most valuable parts ofthis volume. Last but not least: from EdwardArnold comes a series of compact introductionsto women writers. Available are volumes onVirginia Woolf by Susan Dick, on Doris Lessingby Jeannette King, and a book on ContemporaryWomen Novelists by Flora Alexander withchapters on Drabble, Weldon, Carter, andothers.Le Premier quartier de la lune (Leméac, n.p.)concludes Tremblay's five-volume Chroniquesdu Plateau Mont-Royal, a monumental achievementwhich sustains the imagination and historicalsweep initiated by La Grosse Femmed'à côté est enceinte from beginning to end.The cover of Le Premier Quartier is adornedby a child's drawing of a cat, smiling craftilylike the Cheshire Cat. The similarity withLewis Carroll's feline is not accidental ; Marcel,who reassures himself of his friend's elusivepresence by drawing his portrait over and over,suddenly finds his works riddled with holes. Togetherwith Duplessis, the Fates are about todisappear and leave the apparently abandonedhouse which has been Marcel's refuge for manyyears. Marcel himself has evolved from the enchantingfour-year-old in La Grosse Femme toa sweaty adolescent unfit for school and tormentedby the other children. He is also givento epileptic seizures, an illness which his familyshamefully tries to conceal from the neighbours.At the same time, he partakes of a world offantasy and dream which remains largely closedto his counsin, "l'enfant de la grosse femme"— Michel Tremblay himself. A star student,"l'enfant" still senses his limitations, and theday covered by this book, June 20, 1952, painfullyreveals some of them as he writes his endof-yearexaminations. As in the previous books,Thérèse et Pierrette à l'école des Saints-Angesin particular, school is above all the place wherethe power of language is taught, but also oftenabused. As her son agonizes over his French test,"la grosse femme" graduates from reading totelevision, an invention she considers capableof breaking through the reader's and radiolistener'ssolitude, particularly extreme in hersister-in-law Albertine, "renfermée, buckée, bougonne."Here, Tremblay may locate the origins229

NOTESof his own fascination with television as a potentiallyeffective popular art form: recentstatistics have confirmed that popular serialsare the top-ranking shows in Québec, comparedto sports broadcasts in English Canada. Thisday in 1952 may also be Tremblay's awakeningto the importance of joual as he watches hisclassmates yawn at their teacher's assurancethat "le français . . . c'était une langue passionnantedont il fallait être fier, que les règles,compliquées au début, se simplifaient au furet à mesure qu'on les comprenait. . ." Thisbook is a chronicle of despair then, as Marceland "l'enfant" relinquish their childhooddreams, and Marcel attempts to mark his griefwith an apocalyptic burning of the Fates'abandoned house. At the same time, this daymarks a beginning, "le premier quartier de lalune," and the book concludes with a brilliantevocation of the images of flight which permeatethe Chroniques as a whole, whether it bethe "chasse-galérie" in La Grosse Femme or thelittle hanging angel in Thérèse et Pierrette:"Au creux du croissant de lune, un petit garçonétait étendu, bras dernière la tête, jambe croisées;il semblait rêver; au bout, suspendu dansle vide par le col de sa chemise qui risquait dedéchirer à tout moment, était accroché unadolescent qui se débattait."I READ BARRY MiLEs's Ginsberg: A Biography(Simon and Schuster) in the hope of findingout more about Ginsberg's participation in theVancouver Poetry Festival in 1963, but thereis little beyond the announcement that the"poets all lived together, and many of thestudents spent nights with them." The book asa whole is a loosely sewn together series ofquotations with little analysis, and the fewcomments offered on Ginsberg's poetry arejejune paraphrases. The most valuable item,to this reviewer, is the photograph of Ginsberg'sparents as young and very beautiful lovers;the image makes Ginsberg's lament forNaomi in Kaddish so much more poignant.Students of Canadian poetry will find much ofinterest here, especially in the chapter on"Open Form." Unfortunately the book does nothave a bibliography; some of the questions onlycursorily raised here have surely been analyzedin some detail elsewhere. One of the centrallinguistic strategies of the Ginsberg era wasrepetition, the legacy of Whitman and Stein.Explorations of repetition interesting to criticsof the short story and poetry alike, appear inSusan F. Beegel, ed., Hemingway's NeglectedShort Fiction: New Perspectives (UMI), particularlyin the two essays by Michael S.Reynolds and Erik Nakjavani on "Homage toSwitzerland." Another book, Thomas Gardner'sDiscovering Ourselves in Whitman: The ContemporaryAmerican Long Poem (U of IllinoisP), does what the title promises, by taking aclose look at John Berryman, Galway Kinnell,Theodore Roethke, Robert Duncan, John Ashbery,and James Merrill.E.-M. K.Canadian Travellers in Italy, ed. Barry Callaghan(Exile, n.p.), is an anthology of poems,short stories, the occasional scholarly piece, collages,drawings, and photographs. The volumetraces a journey from northern Italy to theSouth, with excerpts from Anna Jameson'sDiary of an Ennuyée interspersed throughout.Besides Jameson, there are also older works bySara Jeannette Duncan, James deMille, WilliamWithrow (not quite as unknown to theworld as Callaghan would have it), and a fewcontributors to The Week, but the emphasis ison contemporary authors. The texts are wellchosen for variety of tone, ranging from JaneUrquhart's languid "Hotel Verbano" to RalphGustafson's satirical "On the Top of MilanCathedral" and Alice Jones's Ruskinian "FlorentineVignettes." The reproductions, both inblack-and-white and in colour, are superb.Notes on the contributors would have beenwelcome, as well as a somewhat more ambitiousintroduction. Although they are concerned withAmerican travellers, the two volumes of WilliamL. Vance's America's Rome (Yale,US$30.00) make excellent complementaryreading to Callaghan's book. The chapter onthe Colosseum, for instance, discusses topicsand metaphors which also dominated Canadiantravellers' narratives. America's Rome is a goodsource for the numerous ways in which Americanpoliticians ransacked Roman thought, architecture,and city planning to legitimize theirown republic. A special aspect of Italian cultureto which both American and Canadian travellersresponded extensively is its Jewish population.Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of JewishLife in Italy, ed. Vivian B. Mann (Univ. ofCalifornia, US$55.00), presents historical essaysand beautiful illustrations. Of particularinterest to literary historians is Allen Mandelbaum's"A Millenium of Hebrew Poetry inItaly" and his comments on the artistic scenein Trieste. The book comes with a movingpreface, published posthumously, by PrimoLevi.E.-M.K.230

NOTESAMONG THE MANY publications spawned bythe Bicentennial of the French Revolution,L'Image de la Revolution française au Québec178g- 198 g, éd. Michel Grenon (HMH,$25.95), is probably the most interesting toCanadian readers. The cover reproduces Jean-Paul Mousseau's painting La Marseillaise( 1956). To François-Marc Gagnon, in his contribution"La Révolution dans la pensée automatiste,"this work embodies an importantchange in Quebec's perception of the Revolutionfrom a destructive to an inspiring event.Other essays also chronicle the significance ofthe year 1789 for Quebec art, such as LaurierLacroix's account of the Desjardins collection— paintings saved by two French priests fromvandalized churches and museums and shippedto Quebec, where they formed one of the firstimportant art collections in the country, providingseventeenth- and eighteenth-centurymodels to local painters. Claudette Hould's "LaGravure révolutionnaire et son impact sur lesconsciences" discusses images of a differentkind, opening a potentially intriguing sourceof comparison with contemporary politicalcomic-strips and cartoons. The enormous resistanceamong Quebec conservatives to the ideasrepresented by the Revolution is discussed particularlywell in Pierre Savard's account of theCentennial, when French-Canadians (and theBritish!) boycotted the world exposition inParis. Literary allusions are the subject ofReginald Hamel's thorough "Révolution françaiseet littérature québécoise: Paroles geléeset idées gelées." Besides other illuminating contributions,the volume contains a meticulouslyprepared annotated bibliography bySerge Leroux. The reader's understanding ofthe issues raised in Grenon's collection is muchenhanced by consulting general works like EmmetKennedy, A Cultural History of the FrenchRevolution (Yale UP, £35.00), or A CriticalDictionary of the French Revolution, eds.François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Belknap Ρ,US$69.95). The former ranges through a wideselection of topics, such as "Paris Milieu andCultural Institution," "Popular Culture," "Enlightenmentand Christianity," literature, thefine arts, and education, while the latter is dividedby the headings "Events," "Actors," "Institutionsand Creations," "Ideas," and "Historiansand Commentators." Particularly engrossingwere the sections in both works on therhetoric employed by the revolutionaries. Kennedy'sdiscussion of "vandalism" (a wordcoined during the Revolution) is exemplaryand, unwittingly or not, evokes alarmingly closeparallels with recent and present political propaganda.Both books are richly illustrated andwell documented.E.-M. K.THERE HAVE BEEN several reminders that thecollage is a central technique in avant-gardistCanadian art and poetry: a new edition of jazzmusician-artist Al Neil's Changes (Nightwood,n.p. ), an autobiographical account of ajunkie's life in 1960s Vancouver; "Rezoning,"an exhibition of assemblages and collages byNeil, bill bissett, and others at the VancouverArt Gallery; and a special issue of The CapilanoReview on "Six West Coast artists whosework is often concerned with the literal andmetaphorical reconstruction of the fragmented."Important discussions of the collagehave been collected in Collage: Critical Views,éd. Katherine Hoffman (UMI, n.p.), a particularlytightly edited volume in which individualcontributions extensively respond to, andoften challenge, each other. Predictably Schwitters,Picasso, and Ernst receive much attention,but there arc also essays on "femmage" and"montage" and general discussions, such asGregory L. Ulmer, "The Object of Post-Criticism," and Donald B. Kuspit, "Collage:The Organizing Principle of Art in the Age ofthe Relativity of Art." Marjorie Perloff's metaphoricaluse of the collage in her work onmodernist poetry is not acceptable to HarryPolkinhorn, who insists that the term is onlylegitimate and useful if applied within a specifichistorical context. The collage also featuresin John Golding, Cubism: A History andan Analysis igoy-igi4 (Harvard, US$39.95/now mto 19.95), ^ third edition, and inDada/Dimensions, ed. Stephen C. Foster(UMI, n.p.). Collage is often the work of outsiderswhose work cannot be subsumed underestablished categories. Two seminal texts on theart of outsiders are Jean Dubuffet's manifestoon "art brut," Asphyxiating Culture (FourWalls Eight Windows, $17.95), now availablein a translation by Carol Volk, and John M.MacGregor's The Discovery of the Art of theInsane (Princeton, US$49.50), a richly illustratedwork written from a Jungian perspective.231

NOTESON THE VERGE***** CHARLES TAYLOR, Sources of the Self.Harvard UP, $37.50 cl. Sources of the Self iswritten by the McGill scholar Charles Taylor,who combines professorships of Political Scienceand Philosophy, an appropriate pairing in viewof the scope of his book. It is an importantwork of a stature that one is rarely able towelcome from a Canadian scholar, and it comesat an appropriate time, when outdated conceptsof historical determinism are being challengedrepeatedly by events created by humanbeings acting in freedom. Sources of the Self isnot a book about the contemporary world perse,but it searches back for the causes — or perhapssometimes for the anti-causes — that over thecenturies since Plato have helped to producethat world and its attitudes. Ranging historicallyover the fields of philosophy, politics, sociology,artistic creation, Taylor comes to thedefence of the modern concept of self and itsattendant subjectivity. He hails the "essentiallymodern predicament" that has left "Most of us. . . still groping for answers about what makeslife worth living or what confers meaning onindividual lives." The need to question ratherthan the hope of answering has always guidedthe great philosophers, and Charles Taylorshows very convincingly how modern life, forall its faults, leads us towards identifying thepossible rather than becoming obsessed by thefear of the impossible. A major book of fascinatingdetail and grand simple concepts thatwholly defies summary in a single paragraph.*** J. L. GRANATSTEIN and ROBERT BOTH-WELL, Pirouette: Pierre Trudeau and Canadian-Foreign Policy. U of Toronto P, $35.00. Pirouetteis a curiously mixed study on the waveringcourse of Canadian foreign policy in the yearsimmediately following the Pearson period ofhonest brokerage. But it is also a partial biographicalstudy of our own small Canadian roisoleil, past Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau.And rarely in books on recent Canadahas there been a more disturbing study of theputting into practice in a democracy of theBourbon maxim, "L'état, c'est moi!" It seemsto trace out accurately and honestly the manoeuvresbetween governments and withingovernments that provided the context forCanadian foreign policy, and in doing so italarmingly shows how little say Canadiancitizens or even their parliament have had. Forthis is really a chronicle of the activities ofpersons in power, whether politicians at theministerial level or high bureaucrats, Canadianand other, and it is strikingly evident that onno occasion did the Canadian parliament playany important role in formulating our country'sforeign policy. As for the public, theciphers to be counted every five years and thendismissed from mind, they not only had no sayin what Canada did abroad, but were nevertold till afterwards what was happening andthen not very much of it. At one time, yearsago, there was a great outcry against secretdiplomacy and the secret arrangements headsof government would make among themselves.But diplomacy is by definition secret, whethercarried on by authoritarian of soi-disant democraticgovernments. And, as Pirouette clearlyshows, we are kept in the dark about its activitiesuntil success or failure becomes evident; inthe latter case we are likely to be the firstvictims of the failure.**** GWYNNE DYER and TINA VILJOEN, TheDefence of Canada: In the Arms of the Empire.McClelland & Stewart, $34.95. The Defenceof Canada is a military history of Canada intwo volumes ; this, "In the Arms of the Empire1760-1939," is the first. Its authors, GwynneDyer and Tina Voljoen, are already wellknownin Canada for their NFB/CBC series,"Defence of Canada," and their book, like theirtelevision programmes, approaches its subjectin a somewhat different way from that of themore conformist military histories. For theirthesis is that in all its warlike adventures,costly in human lives and in other resources,Canada has never been truly defending itself,but has been acting as an appendage to othercountries and furthering their policies. Thismakes The Defence of Canada a book with athesis, which is the necessity of neutrality as aprerequisite of true independence. The case isput well, and in the process we are given whatis certainly the most interesting and wellwrittenhistory of our country's military adventures.One looks forward to the second volumewith sharp anticipation.G.W.*** BRIAN FAWCETT, Public Eye: An Investigationinto the Disappearance of the World.Harper & Collins, $16.95. Public Eye is a pieceof bright post-MacLuhanism, a group of essays,commentaries and quasi-fictions aimed rathermodishly at describing the disappearance of the"world as a recognizable environment in terms232

NOTESof reality as well as of our conditioned perceptions."It is the kind of book, intricate but notobscure, that could do with more than onereading and doesn't lend itself to one-paragraphsummary. But every intelligent readerwill be able to pick a gem or at least a plumout of it. What about this, for example, forreaders of Canadian Literature? "I'm not surewhat most literary writers think they're doingthese days, but it's evident that they don'tthink about it very often beyond questions ofhow to milk the traditional machinery of literaturefor maximum effect. It's also evident — bythe sheer number of university professors whomake their living interpreting literary works —that the primary intellectual interest and energysince the 1940's has been curatorial."**** JOHN RODDEN, The Politics of LiteraryReputation: The Making and Claiming of 'St.George' Orwell. Oxford, $38.50. John Rodden'sThe Politics of Literary Reputation is a notablepioneer work on literary sociology, analysingwith a great deal of intricacy and perceptionthe way in which the media, political interests,literary critics, and even personal friends combinedto make a myth about George Orwell sogigantic and so involved that the real Orwell —and even more the pristine Eric Blair — havelong been hard to find. Of interest to Canadianreaders will be the chapter dealing with theinfluence wielded by George Woodcock's TheCrystal Spirit and of his other writings onOrwell. Woodcock, we have heard, believesthat Rodden has exaggerated his role.L.T.C.* Towards a Just Society: The TrudeauYears. Ed. Thomas S. Axworthy and PierreElliott Trudeau. McClelland & Stewart, $29.95.Politicians rarely have the gift of irony,and even when they do they can rarely directit at themselves, which is why their accounts oftheir past achievements are usually so smug,self-serving, and unconvincing. Towards a JustSociety is no exception. Before it appeared itwas much touted as Pierre Trudeau's book, butin fact it is nothing of the kind. One essay outof fifteen is written by Trudeau, and with theintroductory notes inserted by him and Axworthybefore each section, his contribution tothe book cannot be much more than 10 percent. The rest is written, mostly with impeccabledullness, by ministerial colleagues likeMarc Lalonde, John Roberts and Jean Chrétien,by old friends like Jacques Hébert and GérardPelletier, by civil servants of the time like TomShoyama, and by political courtiers like Axworthyhimself and the ineffable Jim Coutts.The Trudeau Old Guard, in other words, withonly one woman among them, though there isone person whose presence in this setting raisesone's curiosity, the historian Ramsay Cook."Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère?"THREE RECENT illustrated books record arange of interconnections between visual representationsof places and persons and thepolitics of intercultural relationships. BritainPortrayed: A Regency Album 1780-1830 (BritishLibrary, £r8.oo ci.), by John Barr, handsomelydemonstrates ways in which picturesqueconventions, in watercolours of the time, constructedcareful images of social contentmentand established order. Flocks graze withinsight of the shepherd and the estate house;urban dwellers roam freely within territoriesprotected by soldier and cathedral tower; steamserves progress, and the lines of perspectivedraw an orderly frame within which relaxedindividuals pursue leisurely aesthetic pleasures.Something of the same impulse directs thedesign of the works assembled in J. P. Losty'sCalcutta: City of Palaces (British Library,£12.95 P a -)> but with significant differencesof "home" and the exoticism of "elsewhere."Losty selects from travellers' accounts of Calcutta,primarily those from the late 18th andearly 19th centuries, recording in this way ahistory of British-Indian contact and a historyof versions of order, disorder, and cultural demarcations.Illustrations reiterate these messages.The fascination with geometrical perspective,as highlighted in Regency architecturaldesign, not only reveals a particularaesthetic taste, for example; it also shows howsize and distance, height and space, prospectand vista, can all function as visual determinantsof power. John Merson's Roads toXanadu: East and West in the Modern World(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £17.95, cl.), based onan Australian Broadcasting Corporation series,pursues this notion over time, using both EastAsian and European illustrations to trace thehistory of East-West cultural contact fromMarco Polo to Mao. Partly the contact tells avisual narrative of economics and power: thepower of paper, gunpowder, money, and belief.Partly it tells how yin and yang suggestedsocially useful and culturally variant versions ofharmony and barbarity, how "China" turnedinto the fashion of "chinoiserie," how car-2ЗЗ

NOTEStooning propagandizes the politics of race, andhow "progress" was invented as a social idealand marketed to others in order to serve interventionistends. Merson's own desire is for harmoniousglobal development. This, too, is anideal born of perspective and time, and mayyet find its visual counterpart.W.N.LAST PAGEIT IS SOME TIME since I have read a children'sbook as captivating as Salman Rushdie's Harounand the Sea of Stories (Granta/Penguin,$ ! 9-95)· Especially at a time of acute politicaltension, it's refreshing to be reminded that childrenhave minds and the capacity to wonder —but while Rushdie's fable is, of course, relatedto current politics, it can't be bound by thatinterpretation, just as it can't be bound by asingle sourcebook. The iooi Nights lurks in thebackground here; so does Carroll's Alice; so doThe Beatles. The book crosses boundaries. Thenarrative punningly tells of a storyteller who haslost his gift because he's lost his faith in wonder,and of his son, Haroun, who masterminds thesolution to this dilemma by encouraging hisfather back to the Sea of Stories. The sea ishaving its own problems; it's being polluted bya tyrant who exercises his control by denyingothers their inventive voices. To such problemsHaroun — with his desire, his imagination, andhis love — is more than equal, but not beforethe narrative embarks on its wonderful, funny,and emotionally engaging voyage. (For informationon Rushdie's own recent politicalexperiences, see two recent "instant" books: apopular biography based on interviews, W. J.Weatherby's Salman Rushdie Sentenced toDeath [Carroll & Graf, n.p.], and an anthologyof various people's responses to Khomeini'sfatwa of 14 February 1989, The Rushdie File,ed. Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland [SyracuseUP, $12.95].)Children's sense of wonder perhaps providesan appropriate way to comment on severalother recent works, of different kinds. It seemsto me that the fascination with biography inrecent years has something to do with voyeurism(the desire to know secrets) and somethingto do with a desire for order (which inanother sense is also a desire for secret knowledge).Secret understanding also motivatesmuch of the appeal of religious and fantasticsystems. The approach of the year 2000 stirsin many people a rage of uncertainty, againstwhich almost any revealed "truth" will seemacceptable, even miraculous. Interventionism isthus granted indirect approval: interventionismin others peoples' lives, in their minds, intheir politics — some notion of divine approvalsetting out "sides," and granting to those whooperate in this way the so-called "right" toseparate the acceptable from the un-.Among recent biographies are ChristopherSawyer-Lauçanno's An Invisible Spectator(Ecco, $17.95), which finds that "the real PaulBowles" was "an individual alone, isolated inhis self-involvement, in some way drummingout the music in his own head, for his ownbenefit." It's an interesting metaphor, onewith reverberations: is isolation an unacceptableposition? or does the metaphor suggestthat individuals should not benefit from theirown minds? Or is the problem, if that's whatit is, that "drumming" can never be altogethersilent, nor individuals as isolated as they sometimeslike to think? Peter Ackroyd, in his massiveand absorbing Dickens (McClelland &Stewart, $39.95), argues that an individual canrepresent a time, which is the premise thatunderlies the detail of this work. "Trifles makethe sum of life," says David Copperfield. Nottrifles but "origins," says Ackroyd: "what doDickens's own novels tell us, but that a passinggesture, an image, or mood, can form a wholenetwork of meaning. ... It is a perception intothe very nature of the world, and it is one whichbiography must strive to exemplify. To seeDickens day by day ... is to turn biographyinto an agent of true knowledge. . . ." This isnot, however, a position all biographers — orautobiographers — willingly adopt. The playwrightand poet Dorothy Hewett, in WildCard: An Autobiography igs3-igs8 (Penguin,$!9-99)> is concerned to assert her reputationas sexual, linguistic, and political rebel ; writingher life as poetic process, she represents herselfin a series of present, tense, encounters. PeterF. Alexander's William Plomer (Oxford,$20.50), by contrast, is resistantly lodged in thepast but it, too, constructs a version of a lifelived at tangents to "respectability." Precocityand homosexuality are recurrent concerns, perceivedas forces governing life choices. Paula R.Backscheider's dense Daniel Defoe: His Life(Johns Hopkins, $29.95) finds religion to beDefoe's chief motivator; in a world where sinis defined as "indifference to God," Defoe constructedCrusoe not (solely) as an allegory ofimperial expansion, the author writes, but as aPuritan claim that religion can be learned.Learning "truths" — discovering "the coincidence,the chance remark, the unexpectedmeeting" that (as Ackroyd says of Dickens'234

NOTESworld) "can change a human being" — can ofcourse be a product as well as an activity; if"changes" can take place "naturally," arguethose who would sell us "solutions" to theworld's (or our own) ills, then why not arrangenature, as it were, and induce "proper"changes for a "better" life? Better for whom,one might ask. Better for those who sell thechange, is one answer. Utopias and fantasiesare filled with alternative designs, and as manyof these are economic plans as they are virtuousdreams — but while many Utopias and politicalfantasies probe interesting rearrangements offamiliar forms of social order, most of themdiscover either the virtues of accepting oneselfor the imperfections of the so-called IdealWorld (itself a glimpse of the flawed present).Frances Bartkowski's Feminist Utopias (U NebraskaP, $21.50) examines a variety of theseplans, from Herland onwards, including TheHandmaid's Tale and The Euguelionne, less forthe "success" of the designs than for the "gaps"they show in conventional "normal" reality,and for their signs of social desire. (The bookcould have drawn more on Nan Albinski's workon Utopian intent in women's writing, but itdidn't; the two writers do complement eachother, however.)And what of the science fiction imagination ?There's a lot of anti-academic snarkiness inthe interviews (with William Gibson, UrsulaLe Guin, and eight other sf authors) collectedin Larry McCaffery's Across the WoundedGalaxies (U Illinois P, $29.95), and a lot ofcurious faith in generalizations. The interviewwith Larry McMurtry observes that religionand technology (technology because it represents,we are told, human beings' drive forefficiency in Capitalism) are related to people'sfear of death and their desire for immortality.Some fantasy consequently invents technocraticfutures in order to probe religion's illusions andvice versa. But the choice between these optionsremains a binary one, apparently, and thereforeas limited as anything Defoe could design. Formore options, one can at least re-read Dickens,and find multiple possibilities again, in worldsas rich with imagination as Utopians couldwish: transcending boundaries by insisting onconcurrences — good as well as bad and middlingand ordinary; imaginary as well as knownand unknown ; young as well as aged and agingand old.Finally, there is R. K. Narayan's recent novel,The World of Nagaraj (Viking, $26.95),which returns to the South Indian author'sfavourite invented locale, Malgudi, to tell of ascholar whose commitment to privacy — hecalls it his mission — is upset by his nephew,and by the younger generation generally; forcedto accommodate to the new world that is beginningto take over the orderly society he hadthought he knew, he realizes that in his old agehe has to become more active. He begins, therefore,to take on local politicians, to confrontthem with values, and (this is a fiction) thepoliticians shrivel before the force of goodnessand worth. It's a gentle sort of rebellion. But asHaroun reminds us about the Sea of Stories, itis a terrible world we live in if imagination andlove are thought fanciful.235