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CANADIANSpring, 1988

1 & OTH€RR€7IUSMS

A QUART6RLY OF CRITICISM AND R6VI6W

I eeiUrUl

INFORMATION UNDERLOAD

W E HEAR ON ALL SIDES that we suffer today from Information Overload. Yetfrom trends in the 1980's — affecting journalism, criticism, political economy,and the communications industries — it would seem that the reverse is more likelyto be true : we get more comment, but less information ; more statistics, but fewerfacts. Perhaps facts have gone out of fashion. In their place, however, has comenot the informed commentary that might be expected from such freedom (if,indeed, it is that) •—the pursuit of differing perspectives for the sake of theillumination that they might cast on individuals and events — but a greaterdesire, in the face of clear uncertainties, to have existing preconceptions recon-firmed. People can create order by refusing to recognize that their version of theworld ignores the realities of other people's lives. Such "order" is meaningless,fundamentally, but there's no argument with faith, even when the faith is placedin something that history and experience repeatedly deny. At any time when themirror seems to be more attractive than the lamp, we are in danger. We are indanger all the more when the mirror is marketed to us as a lamp and we do notuse our minds to question why.

We get into such situations when the journalist, instead of investigating thereasons why some stories are made public (to divert attention from the storieskept covert, perhaps?), merely interviews other journalists, in the name of in-depth commentary. Or when the politician, more keen to be leader of lemmingsthan to be leader, period, dismisses those who disagree as disloyal. Or when theeconomist, keen for neatness and consistency, ignores the values that differingcultural systems were designed to serve. Or when the critic, more mindful of egothan of text, savages others' reputations in the name of scholarship but does soin the greater desire to hold some perceived dimension of power alone. Suchpersons create the illusion of authority, market themselves as authorities, but arereally authoritarians in disguise, limiting options — often in the name of democ-racy. "In the name of": we are repeatedly asked to respond to the format, butnot to listen for the likelihood. Thus we make ourselves susceptible to big lies.Whenever there seem to be more things to read and listen to, the sheer bulk of

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information leads most people to grab onto any easy, comprehensible guidethrough it. But the bulk, like the easy guide, is frequently misleading; the increasein mass does not always mean an increase in data or in different perspectives,and the absence of difference leads to further complications still. In an age ofstatistics, we are rhetorically convinced by numbers-—hence if "everyone" saysthe same thing, it "must" be true. Too often, however, everyone "says the samething" because of information underload, because instead of analyzing data,people exchange and repeat it, until the illusion comes to seem factual and anychallenge to the illusion is dismissed as the voice of a crank.

Sometimes such active marketing of mass opinion — the selling of bigotry andracism, for example — is patently vicious. Sometimes it appears innocent enough,and takes an apparently passive form, as in most news broadcasts, but is none-theless not neutral. Sometimes it is based upon — and so actively perpetuates —a distortion of terminology. Sometimes it misrepresents history, partly becauseCanadians do not understand their history adequately enough to know that it issomething (strengths and biases included) which for all their differences theyactually share.

Consider first the small (though by no means trivial) presumptions that directthe shape of the nightly television news. We might note to start with that televisionnews differs from radio news in substance as well as method, but if we do notattend to both, we won't know that : television news, clearly, is marketed as visualspectacle — so much so that any opportunity to replay a scene of riot or privatedisaster has lately been sufficient invitation to do so, even if this means that "news"is being manufactured more than reported. There is, moreover, a standardpattern to Canadian evening news programmes that expresses a set of presumptivepriorities about "Canadian" culture, but these are priorities that have more todo with the particular origin of the news programming than with the nation asa whole. Distinctions between English- and French-language news priorities offerthe most immediate demonstration of local differences (why was René Lévesque'sdeath headlined in the English news as "QUEBECKERS MOURN . . . " — why notALL CANADIANS?) ; there are others. The basic format on the English-languageCBC seems to consist of three initial steps: the Ottawa story, the Washingtonstory, the Toronto story •— but each of these often seems less like a "story" thana news release, a report of a briefing session rather than a report of an investi-gation. I am not saying that the CBC does not investigate, but it often reservesits investigative journalism for programmes other than the evening summary,and so (rhetorically) separates the two functions. By personalizing the news, too— by taking the time to tell TV watchers whether the news-reader will be withus tomorrow (or is not with us today!) —the news-writers make the personalityof the news-reader seem as newsworthy as the events chosen for summary (orvice-versa: the events are made to seem as inconsequential as the presence on the

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screen of any particular "star" reader). Some handouts are thus marketed asnews ; some news is marketed through the star system ; the economics of audienceattraction governs how things are said, and therefore governs what is said andwhat is present to be interpreted, accepted, or received.

By extension, the visual rhetoric of cultural presumptions extends to the nationalreports that follow the lead stories. Here the reiteration of conventional tropesserves curiously covert political ends: if a human-interest story is wanted for aparticular night's "news package," then the camera shifts to the Maritimes; ifthe show needs comic relief, it turns to British Columbia. The Prairies, the North,and Northern Ontario occupy similar rhetorical niches. Some cultural status quois thus reconfirmed. B.C. does not have to be taken seriously, even though whathappens there might be having extraordinarily serious impact not only on thepeople in B.C. but also on the character of the culture at large; and the Maritimesare kept at bay, preserved as "down home," therefore consigned (as Leacockonce consigned Orillia/Mariposa) to a past which "sophisticates" can be con-fident they have outgrown. Such presumptive categories feed regional resentments;they are also symptomatic of the kinds of easy exchange of existing attitudes, themirror-imaging of the world, that masquerades as each night's new information.

With politics itself, the consequences are even more acute. When the boardroomdesire for reflective reconfirmation (yes-man; yes, Minister) affects government,then larger securities are involved. When political rhetoric in Canada confusesthe Canadian system with the American, and when news commentators do notrepeatedly challenge this confusion, then a whole cultural history is in danger ofdisappearing. People do not, it seems, differentiate adequately between parlia-mentary and congressional systems of governance. In Canada, in the parliamen-tary system, "government" has a very special meaning, but it is not one that isreflected in current speech. By tradition and design, "H.M. Loyal Opposition"(the oxymoron of the title is important) is part of government; it is an intrinsicelement in a system of governance which ostensibly takes serious considerationof alternatives and options before embarking on any course of action. In practice,that isn't true. "Government" increasingly refers, in the rhetoric especially ofgoverning parties, to the governing parties alone, with serious ramifications.Not the least of these is that opposition, in the form of any notion of alternativepolicy or possibility, is rejected summarily, and "government" is deemed to beresponsible only to those in the electorate who support the party in power. Here,the desire for the reconfirming mirror actually affects legislation and the pro-cedures of disagreement. We live in a time when one of the governing bodies inCanada seriously attempted to introduce legislation that would have imposed theterms of the federal sedition act to prevent the expression of "opposition togovernment policy." That such legislation was thrown out by the courts before

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being enacted is some comfort, but not a resolution to the presumptiveness thatled to the desire for the legislation in the first place.

Inherently, such authoritarian attitudes derive simultaneously from a commit-ment to a restrictive definition of what constitutes value and from an undeclareduncertainty about that very value system. If something is good, says the believer,then any opposition must (absolutely) be bad — hence it is easy to reject oppo-sition and easy to construct a binary rhetoric that dismisses its potential value.The need to dismiss potential value, however, declares a fundamental insecurity.For the so-called "good" performs for the "believer" a second function: it recon-firms position, especially in a world beset with changes and uncertainties andapparent masses of information. The committed authoritarian resolves contra-dictions by denying them, attacks all "liberal" positions (the term has in tenyears' time turned from being an epithet of approval to being an epithet ofabuse) because these positions explicitly encourage the expression of alternativeideas (and hence intrinsically challenge the order of the fixed universe in whichthe authoritarian rules). The authoritarian defines "education" as a trainingprogramme in the social status quo rather than in terms of questioning, andin the name of facts markets his or her own answers to insecurity as the onlyguide through uncertain times. Authoritarianism depends, in other words, oninsecurity, and thus can make easy use of the illusion of information overload.

Because numbers and articulate speech alike make many people feel insecure,control over both becomes part of any authoritarian system. Populist forms ofauthoritarianism repeatedly invoke the "real" values of vernacular speech; eco-nomic forms of authoritarianism surrender reflective thought to numeric pattern.The October 1987 upheavals in the stock market, aggravated as they were byprogrammed computer reactions, exemplify this process clearly. Many stocks wenton the market because computer programmes had been designed to sell stocksautomatically, as a fail-safe, if prices fell in any given day beyond a pre-setmargin; the effect of the mass sales caused further selling, engendered this timeby simple panic, which continued to encourage a spiral downward. The pointhere is that people surrendered to the numerical accuracy of the computer, asthough they could respond better to uncertainty by not thinking than they couldif they engaged their minds.

Engaging the mind — and this is one of the challenges involved in thinking —requires us not to respond automatically, not to presume that we know all thefacts already — or, indeed, that we know enough facts for the occasion, or thatfacts exist to be known at all. Gradgrindism is no more a solution to socialuncertainty now than it was in the days of Dickens' Hard Times. Closed systemsrepeatedly insist that the world behave in accordance with pre-determined data;they do not take people's active, imaginative, inventive, flexible, and often con-trary lives into account. Within closed systems, plan supersedes possibility. That's

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why they can promise order. Yet for all their appeal, closed systems are only anartificial defence against uncertainty. One of the points that Evelyn Cobley makes,in her striking essay on Foucault and Formalism in the Spring 1987 issue ofMosaic, addresses this very question. In Foucault's terms,

. . . the explanation of a system is in turn a system in need of explanation, so thatall systems are open, unstable, and unknowable in their totality. The hierarchicalarrangement of a system is the result of interpretive acts rather than of naturally-given properties. Conflicts of interpretation .. . are . . . ideologically interested.Interpretations are sanctioned not only because they are adequate for their objectbut also because they have been appropriated by a power structure. All inter-pretation is implicated in an ideologically-nurtured power struggle and can neverbe innocent or neutral.

It's a process that encourages more interpretation, not less. Order is not free.Satire and polemic are, of course, two open forms of declaring an ideological

disagreement. They are rhetorical forms resistant to the mirror-wishes of closedworlds. They call for more information, and for the rethinking of available data.They reject passive acceptance. "Comedy is the best exorcist," writes DonaldJack. But it is more than that, potentially. Thomas Chandler Haliburton an-nounced his blunt purpose in one of his Sam Slick sketches more than a centuryago, in a way that specifies why people need to resist authoritarian command:"When reason fails to convince, there's nothin' left but ridicule." It is a commentthat bears thinking about. For not only does it deal with issues of hierarchicalpower, it also clearly rests on some basic suppositions about the reformative effectsof language. These suppositions also make presumptions. And B. W. Powe, writ-ing about Wyndham Lewis in 1987 in The Solitary Outlaw, makes a remark thatunderlines how much the public culture no longer necessarily shares in them."Laughter," he writes, "cannot overthrow the tyranny of inarticulacy." The im-plications here are not comforting. When the structures of power in any societyare deaf to language and blind to all images of possibility except those that reflectthemselves, then the authoritarians have taken over the ordinary avenues ofchange.

0 W.N.

POSTTIGe-STTIMP SURVIVALMona Elaine Adilman

Some marriages surviveon skulduggery.A sleight-of-hand mystiquekeeps the relationship going.

POEM

He plays the fieldwith the zealof a religious fanaticburning passion at the stake.

She could win an Oscarfor her performanceas the apotheosisof the charming, caring wife.

Some governments surviveon the same principle.Corruption of the heart,like formaldehyde,

preserves a country,a flag,or a dying marriagewith equanimity.

TH6 piecesA. F. Moritz

Here we have the pieces of that hour, of our two mothersand our two fathers. When we were in it,we swore : "You at least will not end."

Just now, over the pieces, yet again, we swore the same.Pieces : it was a small thing, like a dish or a vase.Yet ruins, because it was our city and our country.

The dead sister and dead brother are waiting to come back,to eat there, to walk there : nowhere,for here in this house we keep pieces of that hour.Not all the pieces, a few that stay with uson a dark shelf, a thought we share.

Their waiting has not been long yet.But it is growing longer.

MAGIC REALISM ASPOST COLONIAL DISCOURSE

Stephen Slemon

ΤI H E

LHE CONCEPT OF MAGIC REALISM is a troubled one for lit erary theory.1 Since Franz Roh first coined the term in 1925 in connection withPost Expressionist art, it has been most closely associated, at least in terms ofliterary practice, with two major periods in Latin American and Caribbeanculture, the first being that of the 1940's and 1950's, in which the concept wasclosely aligned with that of the "marvellous" as something ontologically necessaryto the regional population's "vision of everyday reality";2 and the second beingthat of the "boom" period of the Latin American novel in the late 1950's and1960's, where the term was applied to works varying widely in genre and dis cursive strategy. In none of its applications to literature has the concept of magicrealism ever successfully differentiated between itself and neighbouring genressuch as fabulation, metafiction, the baroque, the fantastic, the uncanny, or themarvellous,3 and consequently it is not surprising that some critics have chosento abandon the term altogether.

But the term retains enough of what Fredric Jameson calls a "strange seduc tiveness"4 to keep it in critical currency, despite the "theoretical vacuum"5 inwhich it lies. In Latin America, the badge of magic realism has signified a kindof uniqueness or difference from mainstream culture — what in another contextAlejo Carpentier has called lo real maravailloso or "marvellous American reality"6

— and this gives the concept the stamp of cultural authority if not theoreticalsoundness. And recently, the locus for critical studies on magic realism has beenbroadened outward from Latin America and the Caribbean to include specu lations on its place in the literatures of India, Nigeria, and English Canada,7

this last being perhaps the most startling development for magic realism in recentyears, since Canada, unlike these other regions, is not part of the third world, acondition long thought necessary to the currency of the term in regard to litera ture, though not to art. Further, critics until very recently have been singularlyuninterested in applying the concept of magic realism to texts written in English.8

The incompatibility of magic realism with the more established genre systemsbecomes itself interesting, itself a focus for critical attention, when one considers

MAGIC REALISM

the fact that it seems, in a literary context, to be most obviously operative incultures situated at the fringes of mainstream literary traditions. As RobertKroetsch and Linda Kenyon observe, magic realism as a literary practice seemsto be closely linked with a perception of "living on the margins,"9 encodingwithin it, perhaps, a concept of resistance to the massive imperial centre and itstotalizing systems. The established systems of generic classification are themselves,in my view, examples of these centralized totalizing systems, for they have beenconstructed through readings of texts almost exclusively of European or UnitedStates provenance. The use of the concept of magic realism, then, can itselfsignify resistance to central assimilation by more stable generic systems and moremonumental theories of literary practice, a way of suggesting that there is some thing in the nature of the literature it identifies that confounds the capacities ofthe major genre systems to come to terms with it.

What I want to do in this paper is employ a little of the liberty provided bymagic realism's lack of theoretical specificity and, rather than attempt to definethe concept in terms of genre, attempt instead to place the concept within thecontext of post colonial cultures as a distinct and recognizable kind of literarydiscourse. To this end, I plan to focus on two magic realist texts from within asingle post colonial culture — English Canada — and attempt to show the waysin which these texts recapitulate, in both their narrative discourse and theirthematic content, the real social and historical relations that obtain within thepost colonial culture in which they are set. I have chosen to work with JackHodgins' The Invention of the World and Robert Kroetsch's What the CrowSaid, but I should add that other texts set in English Canada could also carrythe argument, Susan Kerslake's Middlewatch, for example, or Keith Maillard'sTwo Strand River. My focus will be on elements in these texts that help us worktoward a clearer concept of magic realism in a post colonial context, and so Iwill be concentrating on aspects of these two novels that share characteristicswith prevalent concerns in other post colonial literatures. Behind this project isthe belief that, in the first place, the concept of magic realism can provide us witha way of effecting important comparative analyses between separate post colonialcultures, and secondly, that it can enable us to recognize continuities within indi vidual cultures that the established genre systems might blind us to: continuities,that is, between present day magic realist texts and apparently very different textswritten at earlier stages of a culture's literary history.

ΤI H II H E TERM "MAGIC REALISM" is an oxymoron, one that sug

gests a binary opposition between the representational code of realism and that,roughly, of fantasy. In the language of narration in a magic realist text, a battle

io

MAGIC REALISM

between two oppositional systems takes place, each working toward the creationof a different kind of fictional world from the other. Since the ground rules ofthese two worlds are incompatible, neither one can fully come into being, andeach remains suspended, locked in a continuous dialectic with the "other," asituation which creates disjunction within each of the separate discursive systems,rending them with gaps, absences, and silences.10

In The Invention of the World, Hodgins achieves this effect through a processof undercutting. His formal beginning to the novel (following a brief prologue)declares the work to be clearly within the conventions of realism :

On the day of the Loggers' Sports, on that day in July, a mighty uproar brokeout in the beer parlour of the Coal-Tyee Hotel, which is an old but respectablefive-story building directly above the harbour and only a block or two from themain shopping area of town.11

But soon a fantastic element enters the text, appearing first in the second-degreeor intradiegetic level of narration told by Strabo Becker, the historian/taletellerfigure, and soon beginning to appear in the extradiegetic narration — Horseman'smiraculous escape from Wade's fort, for example (162). As the novel progressestoward the status of a twice-told tale, the motif with which it ends, the reader ispulled away from a tendency to neutralize the fantastic elements of the storywithin the general code of narrative realism and begins to read the work as beingmore closely aligned with the fantastic. Yet a complete transference from onemode to the other never takes place, and the novel remains suspended betweenthe two.

The progress of narration in What the Crow Said is the opposite of that inHodgins' book. Kroetsch's novel opens in pure fantasy or myth: a description ofthe impregnation of Vera Lang on a spring afternoon by a swarm of bees. But atthe close of the novel, the past-tense narration that has prevailed throughout thework is replaced by a present-tense realism describing Tiddy Lang and Liebhaberrising from their bed into a new morning; and here, for the first time in the novel,the crow will caw, not speak. The fantastic element in the novel never quitemanages to dominate an undercurrent of realism; as Kroetsch says elsewhere, weare "always in the world,"12 despite the lighthouse made of ice, the war with thesky, and the ghostly image of dead Martin Lang perpetually present, ploughingthe snow.

Although most works of fiction are generically mixed in mode,13 the charac-teristic manoeuvre of magic realist fiction is that its two separate narrative modesnever manage to arrange themselves into any kind of hierarchy. In MikhailBakhtin's formulation, the novel is the site of a "diversity of social speech types"14

in which a battle takes place "in discourse and among discourses to become 'thelanguage of truth,' a battle for what Foucault has called power knowledge."16

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MAGIC REALISM

In magic realism this battle is represented in the language of narration by theforegrounding of two opposing discursive systems, with neither managing tosubordinate or contain the other. This sustained opposition forestalls the possibilityof interpretive closure through any act of naturalizing the text to an establishedsystem of representation.

This use of language has important consequences in the context of post colonial cultures. One of the most common assumptions operating in the small,but rapidly growing, body of theory that undertakes comparative analysis acrosspost colonial cultures is that the act of colonization, whatever its precise form,initiates a kind of double vision or "metaphysical clash"16 within the colonialculture, a binary opposition within language that has its roots in the process ofeither transporting a language to a new land or imposing a foreign language onan indigenous population. "Our way of seeing," as Coral Ann Howells puts it,"is structured by the forms in which our language enables us to 'see',"17 andonly through a long process of transmutation through time can this language,and the cognitive system it carries, express local reality. In a post colonial con text, then, the magic realist narrative recapitulates a dialectical struggle withinthe culture's language, a dialectic between "codes of recognition"18 inherentwithin the inherited language and those imagined codes — perhaps Utopian orfuture oriented — that characterize a culture's "original relations"19 with theworld. In other words, the magic realist text reflects in its language of narrationreal conditions of speech and cognition within the actual social relations of apost colonial culture, a reflection Garcia Marquez thematizes in One HundredYears of Solitude as a "speaking mirror."20

Τ "SPEAKIN G MIRROR" of the language of narration inmagic realist texts, however, does not only reflect in an outward direction towardpost colonial cultural relations. I t also sustains an inward reflection into thework's thematic content, initiating a fascinating interplay between language andthematic network similar to that which Michael Holquist, in another context,describes as a "templating of what is enunciated with the act of enunciation."21

In other words, the real social relations of post colonial cultures appear, throughthe mediation of the text's language of narration, in the thematic dimension ofthe post colonial magic realist work. These social relations tend to be expressedthematically in three separate but related ways. The first involves the representa tion of a kind of transcendent or transformational regionalism22 so that the siteof the text, though described in familiar and local terms, becomes a metonymyof the post colonial culture as a whole. The second is the foreshortening of historyso that the time scheme of the novel metaphorically contains the long process of

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colonization and its aftermath. And the third involves the thematic foregroundingof those gaps, absences, and silences produced by the colonial encounter andreflected in the text's disjunctive language of narration. On this third level, themagic realist texts tend to display a preoccupation with images of both bordersand centres, and to work toward destabilizing their fixity.23

In The Invention of the World, Hodgins' portrayal of the Vancouver Islandcommunity, and especially the Revelations Colony of Truth, now renamed theRevelations Trailer Park, always remains grounded in the real world of knownand familiar space. The realism of the site is destabilized, however, by the con-densed historical re-enactment that transpires within it,24 a metaphorical repre-sentation of the process of colonization which serves to transform the novel'sregional setting into a métonymie focal point for English-Canadian culture, andfinally for post-colonial culture as a whole.25 This historical re-enactment reachesback from the present-tense setting to the near-mythic, and now vanished, Irishvillage of Carrigdhoun, the point of origin for the Revelation colonists' flightfrom history26 to the New World. Even before Donal Keneally arrives in Car-rigdhoun and brings to the isolated villagers their first experience of fear, thevillage is already the emblem of colonized space. An English bailiff owns allproperty, and his dogs are the agents of his administration of law. Keneallydelivers the villagers from the first phase of colonialism only to initiate a secondphase in which he employs the authority of Celtic legend and Prospero magicto establish a system of absolute patriarchal domination over them. Still "slavesto history" (99), the villagers are brought to the New World and another kindof isolation in the Revelations Colony of Truth where, in what Cecilia CoulasFink calls a "replay of history,"27 Keneally becomes the figure who releases hisdogs on them. As the agent of a neo-colonial domination, Keneally "representswhat most of the world believed anyhow" (257), and when he dies, he neverquite disappears : he is buried underground in a collapsed tunnel whose entranceis never found, and his ghost appears at the close of the novel at Maggie andWade's carnivalesque wedding celebration. The legacy he leaves is a paralysisin regard to history and a preference for fabricated historical monuments suchas Wade's phony Hudson's Bay Company fort, a dysfunctional "umbilical chordto the past" (223) except to the American tourists who can't tell the differencebetween it and the real thing, anyway. Given the very unappealing nature of realhistory, this preference for fabrication is entirely understandable. But it is anevasion, not a creative response, and at the end of the novel, Maggie, the symbolicheiress of the process of colonization, achieves her longed-for liberation fromcolonialism's foreclosure of the imagination precisely by going back into historyto where the Keneally legend and the process of New World domination began:a mountain top in Ireland upon which a circle of standing stones exercises"dominion" (315) over the landscape.

MAGIC REALISM

The novel recapitulates a process, then, of psychic liberation from Old Worlddomination and its cognitive codes. But a fascinating aspect of Hodgins' treatmentof this theme is that this re-enactment process seems to energize a release fromhistorical domination that those who do not undergo do not achieve. Nowherein the novel is the colonial encounter depicted more violently than in the Reve-lations Colony of Truth, and those characters who come later to inhabit its siteeventually attain new conditions of liberation and community. But those not in orheir to this community, those who have historically opposed its presence amongthem, remain caught in inherited ways of seeing that blind them to new imagina-tive possibilities and seal them off from significant communal participation. Thestatement of Coleman Steele, one of the excluded, and now living on HospitalRoad, makes this clear:

This is an English town, mister. Or was. The people who settled here knew whatkind of life they were building, they had fine models at Home they could follow.But do you think that bunch paid any attention? The Indians went along with it.Why shouldn't they? And all those Chinamen they brought over to work in themines went with it, some of them turned into the best Englishmen of all. Andthere were other Irishmen who came over and weren't afraid to fit in with thescheme of things, doing the things that Irishmen are meant to do. But not oldWhozzit, Keneally! He comes over here with his pack of sheep-people and setsup his own world like the rest of us don't exist, see, like the world stopped andstarted at the edge of his property. He was a King in there, like something out ofthe Dark Ages, and the fact that the rest of us out here were busy building amodern civilized society with decent values never occurred to him. And you maynot agree with me on this, but I'm entitled to my opinion as they say, I thinkthat's when everything started to go wrong. First thing we knew you have peoplepouring in from all over the world, your Belgiums and your Italians and yourUkrainians, pouring in from all over the place, which is just fine with me, butwhen they get here do they fit themselves in? No sir. They look around and theysee this one bunch that isn't paying any attention to the rest of us and so theythink it's all right for them to do what they want, too. So I blame him for that,mister, and it's no small matter. I blame that Keneally for throwing it all off thetrack. Just look around at what's happened to this town and blame him for that.Drugs and sex and socialism. None of it would've happened. You can't tell methey have things like that in England. (174-75)

What we have at the thematic level of Hodgins' magic realist text, then, is afairly direct portrayal of the process of colonization, one that recapitulates prob-lems of historical consciousness in post-colonial cultures. This focus on the problemof history is shared by the body of theoretical criticism in post-colonial culturalstudies which argues that people in post-colonial cultures engage in a special"dialogue with history."28 Here, the double vision or metaphysical clash takesplace between inherited notions of imperial history as "the few privileged monu-ments"29 of achievement, and a cluster of opposing views that tend to see history

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more as a kind of alchemical process, somewhat analogous to a way of seeing, inwhich the silenced, marginalized, or dispossessed voices within the colonial en-counter themselves form the record of "true" history. The "re-visioning" of his-tory, then, takes place when the voices or visions — what J. Michael Dash calls"the counter-culture of the imagination"30 — come into dialectical play with theinherited, dominant modes of discourse and cognition in colonialism's "phenom-enal legacy"31 and work towards transmuting perception into new "codes ofrecognition."

It is this framework that provides a way of observing how What the CrowSaid functions on its thematic level as a "speaking mirror" of post-colonialculture. Kroetsch's novel is set in a region lying "ambiguously on the borderbetween the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan,"32 and in it people enjoyabsolute control over the horizontal dimension. The "vertical world" is "all amystery" (158) to them, however, and in a series of motifs such as the strandingof the dying Martin Lang "between sky and earth" (26), JG's fatal fall from thetree, Jerry Lapanne's, or Joe Lightning's, fall from the sky, or the townsfolk's waragainst the sky, Kroetsch establishes that human control in this second dimensionrepresents an impossible goal. This constriction within distorted binary oppositionssuch as that between horizontal control and vertical incompetence is a constrain-ing one, as is shown by Isadore Heck's transference, in pure either/or fashion,from the relative security of believing in nothing that can't be seen, to the oppositeposition of believing that everything that can be imagined exists. This secondposition eventually kills him, for it lies behind his decision to shoot himself out ofa cannon into the air in a futile attempt to end the war with the sky.

The text also presents a range of similar binary constrictions in parallel to thisspatial one — two conflicting time schemes, for example, so that the passage ofonly a few seasons contains several years of calendar time, and all of colonialhistory from the horse-and-buggy period to the appearance of oil derricks on theCanadian prairies. Binary constriction, in fact, represents a key principle in thebook, and it provides the vehicle for reading the site of the novel as a metonymfor post-colonial space. In What the Crow Said, the binary opposition betweencontrol in one dimension and incompetence or bewilderment in the other reflectsthe dialectic operative in post-colonial cultures between inherited, sure, and con-straining codes of imperial order and the imagined, precarious, and liberatingcodes of post-colonial "original relations." At the close of his novel, Kroetschemploys the image of Tiddy and Liebhaber coming together in the "naked circleof everything" (215) to posit a point beyond binary constriction. In post-colonialterms, this represents an imaginative projection into the future, where the frac-tures of colonialism heal in the "re-visioning" process that produces a "positiveimaginative reconstruction of reality."33

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τ IMAGINATIVE RECONSTRUCTION in post colonial culturesrequires the recuperation of lost voices and discarded fragments, those elementspushed to the margins of consciousness by imperialism's centralizing cognitivestructures, and both Hodgins and Kroetsch share an interest in thematicallydecentring images of fixity while at the same time foregrounding the gaps andabsences those fixed and monumental structures produce.34 In The Invention ofthe World, Hodgins raises images of fixity and centre in "a certain piece of thisworld" (viii) —"cer t a in " here carrying a dual meaning — only to work towardundermining them. The central house of Keneally's Revelations Colony concealsa subterranean tunnel whose entrance is never found, an absence in the monolithof his legend evocative of his mother's loss of all memory at the time of hisconception and of the Carrigdhoun villagers' absence of fear. In Keneally'sdeath, absences become ghostly presences, as Strabo Becker begins to sift throughthe "shreds and fragments" (69) of events, and to comb the beaches for "thedebris of history" (viii), that will form the base elements for his story. Throughthe agency of Becker's tape recorder, a plurality of voices joins in the narration;and through the ruminations of the characters, history's dispossessed "voices" aredrawn into the novel. Julius Champney's reflections on landscape, for example,conjure the presence of two Indians from the early colonial period who were triedand subsequently hanged for a murder they did not commit:

The trial is in English. Though an attempt is made to provide an adequate trans lation, the long exchange of foreign mouth sounds could be the yattering ofsquirrels to the ears of Siam a sit. . . .

On the platform, beneath the nooses, the flat chocolate eyes shift to the hang man, whose hands could be made of old rope. Throats, dry with fear, can onlywhisper. Cannot refuse to whisper.

You could tell us, first, what we done.There was no record, anywhere that he had seen, which ever hinted that the

two condemned men, or one of them, said those words before the ropes snappedtheir necks. Nor was there anything in official records or in the newspaper reportsto indicate that they said anything at all, or if they did, anything that could beunderstood by the white men who were witnesses... .

And the voices existed out of time, anyway . . ." (240 41 )

These official records, like all monuments to fixity, omit what they cannot hear.Hodgins likens them to maps, projections of line and order that do not cor respond to the "real island," which defies geometry (229) and whose landscapeis "ungovernable" (223). Keneally's life, symbol of high colonialism, is plannedat birth like a "map of roads" (90) ; but for Maggie, his symbolic heir, mapsonly block the guiding capacities of her instinct and memory, and they can't helpher find her way home. But for her to realize this, to finally discard them, she has

16

MAGIC REALISM

to encounter directly the fixed spaces of alien order, and this process is an impor-tant one in The Invention of the World. Seen from within new "codes of recogni-tion," fixed systems betray the presence of their own "otherness" hidden withinthem, as is symbolized by Donal Keneally's brief fragmentation into identical twins,one of them the opposite of the tyrannical self that will finally own him. The ab-sense of this missing self in the New World is his legacy to Wade, who sees himselfmirrored in Horseman only to be told that he has buried his own hidden twinwithin him (307). Through images such as these, Hodgins' text conveys that thesilencing of otherness is inscribed into the colonial encounter. But it also suggeststhat awareness of this can provoke the imagination into recovering lost aspects ofself, habitual absences in the post-colonial consciousness.

It is obsession with fixity that betrays, then, and Hodgins' most sustainedapproach to undermining it is his destabilization of the fixity of origins. Criticsof the novel have noted the astonishing number of mythic and historical originsupon which the imagery of the text seems to be based.35 These range throughclassical origins (Taurus-Europa, Lycaon, Charon), Celtic origins (the Tain boCuailnge, the war between the Fomorians and the Tuatha de Dannan), Christianorigins (Genesis, Exodus), and historical origins (the Aquarian Foundation ofBrother XII) . This wide pluralizing of origins annihilates the privileging ormonumentalizing of any one of them and suggests that the "shreds and frag-ments" that come down from them in distorted form are our real historical legacy.Madmother Thomas, a direct victim of colonialism's violence through her child-hood trauma under Keneally's patriarchal order, must learn this. For most of thenovel, she wanders in the margins of the text, searching obsessively for her birth-place, but finally, she relinquishes her need for fixed and known origins andreturns to the uncertain centre of the Revelations Trailer Park, thus becoming atlast a sustaining presence in the community. The operative process of cognitionhere is one of imaginative, not factual, recovery and at the novel's close Hodginsreleases it into full play on the metafictional level in the parodie carnivalizationof the wedding ceremony, where he summons into presence all those figures madeabsent from the text by the formal system of writing itself :

The mayors of several towns on the island, with their wives, and more than oneelected MLA and several judges, lawyers, doctors, and businessmen had come. .. .Mainlanders had come across, and sat silently along the wall benches, wonderingwhat to expect. Victoria people had driven up, and sat together near the punchbowl, with their backs to everyone else. The premier of the province, who wasunable to attend, sent a representative, a little freckle-faced man who shook hands,before the evening was through, with every person in the hall, including thelieutenant-governor of an eastern province who had flown in at the last minuteand had to leave for his plane as soon as the cake was cut. The Prime Ministerof Canada was rumoured to be in the crowd somewhere, but the Queen of Eng-land had disappointed everyone by accepting an invitation elsewhere. (346)

17

MAGIC REALISM

Kroetsch's technique for foregrounding the gaps and silences of the dispossessedin What the Crow Said differs from Hodgins' in that Kroetsch works less with thematerial of history in this thematic level and more with the portrayal of constrict-ing binaries, a thematic equivalent to the dialectic operative in the language ofnarration. From a post-colonial critical perspective, these binaries can be seen aslegacies of the colonial encounter : a condition of being both tyrannized by historyyet paradoxically cut off from it, caught between absolute systems of blind cog-nition and projected realms of imaginative revision in which people have nocontrol. In Kroetsch's handling, these binary constrictions undergo a process ofdialectical interplay between opposing terms which undermines the fixity ofborders between them. Each term invades the other, eroding its absolute natureand addressing the gaps or absences, the distanced elements of "otherness," thatfixed systems inevitably create.

Liebhaber, for example, editor and printer of the local newspaper in the townof Big Indian, has forgotten the past but three times in the course of the novelremembers the future. At the root of this loss of memory is an obsession withprint: Gutenberg, he feels, has "made all memory of the past irrelevant" and"only the future" is free from his "vast design" ( 116). Print, in obliterating theneed for memory, inevitably contains and fixes the past as dead record of themonuments of achievement, but it also creates marginal spaces in which thesilenced voices of totalizing system can speak. The prisoner Jerry Lapanne, anemblem of incarcerated desire, is one of Kroetsch's images of such a voice. Herepeatedly tries to escape into the site of the text toward Rita Lang, sender oferotic love notes to prisoners all over the country. It is print, then, that motivateshim, and his movement is always toward it, his action one of struggle to inhabitthe locus of textuality. But the police are always there on the borders of munici-pality to stop him; and his one breakthrough results in his death. Through thisimage, Kroetsch foregrounds the absence on the other side of writing, a humanequivalent to suppressed memory that Gutenberg's print seemingly makes obso-lete. A corresponding image is that of the cattle-buyer who makes a brief appear-ance in the text to court Tiddy Lang and then vanishes "like a character gentlyremoved from the vast novel that all the printers in the world were gallantlywriting for Gutenberg's ghost" (73). In thematizing print in this manner,Kroetsch portrays the process by which a totalizing system can initiate its owndialectic with its "other." Print excludes, but it also energizes. It is like the"phenomenal legacy" of post-colonial history: it silences, but within it lies thepossibility of voice, a dialectic that can produce a "positive imaginative recon-struction of reality."

Binary constriction is also thematized in the novel's representation of race andgender. Both are seriously imbalanced, dominated by one pole of the binary insuch a way as to produce a paralyzing separation between terms. For example, the

18

MAGIC REALISM

name of the town of Big Indian resonates against the almost complete absenceof native peoples from its site. The only exception is Joe Lightning, and he livesin a car, not a house. The "Indian list" (115), a racist term for the list of thoseproscribed from being served alcohol, contains the complete register of "everywhite male over the age of twenty in the Municipality of Bigknife" (114), butno Indian names appear on it. These patterns of exclusion seem to be intricatelytied to the process of language, where "Gutenberg's curse" (163) links thepresence of print to the condition of becoming "anonymous, almost not inventedin [one's] own story" (73). Being caught between presence and absence, how-ever, is also a way of mediating between binary terms, of crossing the bordersbetween them and thus beginning the process of breaking them down. Except forLiebhaber, Joe is the only adult male in the district who is not at war with thesky, and thus his ambiguous status in one binary constriction enables him tomediate in another: that of the division of male and female modes of activity.

An interesting thematization of the way in which binary terms themselvesenergize a crossing over between poles, and the creation of gaps within each ofthem, lies in Kroetsch's presentation of the black crow and the character JG.The crow, whose gender is ambiguous (97) and who thus mediates in anothercontext the polarization in male and female power relations, speaks on JG'sbehalf in the human world. JG, on the other hand, is for most of the novel silent,"forever innocent" (62), and able to walk only in a figure-eight, the symbol ofinfinity. John Thieme writes of the way animals in some Canadian texts stand for

a world which may exist before Western rationalist thought imposes dualisticmodes of description. They represent life before discourse, before history, andbefore gender stereotyping.36

Something of the same process of signification is operative in this text, but itrequires both terms of the JG-black crow binary to produce it. The crow's am-biguous gender combines with JG's silence, innocence, and association with infin-ity to suggest all that is opposed to Liebhaber's word-centred rationality. But atthe same time, the JG-black crow binary works toward deconstruction of thispre-rational signification when JG begins to speak pig-Latin and we recognizethat what the crow usually says are judgmental, arbitrary pronouncements onhuman behaviour that seem to issue from the parodie mask of an omniscient,patriarchal God.

The novel closes on an image of resolution in binary separation, a symbolicdrawing together of the oppositions of male and female, past and present, absenceand presence, and silence and voice in a suspended moment that requires bothterms of the text's narrational mode — realism and fantasy — to sustain it.Throughout the novel, Liebhaber and Tiddy Lang, opposite poles in a binarysystem, have been held apart, the dead Martin Lang, who represents absence to

MAGIC REALISM

Liebhaber but pesence to Tiddy, throwing up an uncrossable barrier betweenthem. But at the novel's close, Liebhaber, whose obsession with words has beenat the root of his loss of memory, and Tiddy, who had "meant to make a fewnotes, but hadn't," and who now "remember[s] everything" (214), are broughttogether, he "the first and final male" and she the world-dreamer, "dreaming theworld" and unable to "tell her memory from the moment" (214, 216). As eachof them embraces otherness, the crows, outside, "are cawing" (218) in the in-finitely suspended moment that fuses the real with the numinous in the actuatingimagination.

L/OTH The Invention of the World and What the Crow Said,then, thematize a kind of post-colonial discourse involving the recuperation ofsilenced voices as axial to a "positive imagined reconstruction of reality." Bothtexts foreground plurality and gaps — those produced by the colonial encounterand those produced by the system of writing itself; and in both texts, marginalizedpresences press in toward the centre. The site of each text is a localized regionthat is métonymie of the post-colonial culture as a whole. And in each text, historyis foreshortened so that the forces operating in the real social relations of theculture are brought metaphorically into play. The metaphysical clash or doublevision inherent in colonial history and language is recapitulated in transmutedform in the text's oppositional language of narration and mirrored in its thematiclevel. This mode of narration requires the reader to read the novel in a dialecticalmanner, forestalling the collapse of either one of the two narrational modes intothe other, but recognizing the erosion in massive and totalizing system that thedialectic effects in each. The texts thus demand a kind of reading process in whichthe imagination becomes stimulated into summoning into being new and liberating"codes of recognition." These elements, I argue, are characteristic of post-colonialmagic realist texts.

If magic realism is read as a post-colonial discourse in this way, a frameworkfor reading texts across post-colonial cultures can be established not merely onthe basis of shared conditions of marginality in relation to metropolitan cultures,but also on the basis of shared literary response to post-colonial conditions. Thismay correspond to what E. D. Blodgett has in mind when he speculates on thepossibility that Spanish-American literature provides a matrix for "dialogue be-tween deaf Canadians,"37 English and French — Garcia Marquez mediating, asit were, between Aquin and Miron, on the one hand, and Hodgins, Kroetsch,and Ondaatje on the other. Such a matrix can provide a basis for comparingworks differing widely in genre, and against it a comparative reading of SalmanRushdie and Rodney Hall, for example, might prove fruitful, though at first sightodd. Radical modes of reading post-colonial texts are constantly coming into

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MAGIC REALISM

being, challenging the fixed certainty of traditional generic systems, so that whenWilson Harris, in his groundbreaking critical work The Womb of Space, notesthat within the "so-called realism" of Patrick White's Voss there exists a "curi-ously subversive fantasy," he proposes not just a new strategy of interpretationfor the text itself, but also a way of reading the text back into the cross-culturalimagination that post-colonial studies, at their best, promote. The text of Voss,he argues, can allow us

to perceive realism and fantasy as a threshold into evolution and alchemy. Thatthreshold is a component of the "mental bridge" within and across cultures. . . .3S

Within the separate post-colonial cultures themselves, this approach to magicrealism can operate in such a way that this seemingly new mode of fiction canbe recognized as continuous with apparently dissimilar works of fiction in whichan oppositional style, and a consequent privileging of pluralism, also echoesagainst the post-colonial legacy: Ethel Wilson's Swamp Angel is one example;Sheila Watson's The Double Hook is another. As W. H. New notes in Articulat-ing West, an opposition between a need to formalize experience and a realizationthat the Canadian wilderness is "formless" creates "a tension at the heart of theCanadian experience,"39 one which lies at the centre of the language of narrationin present-day magic realist texts. This suggests that the critical position thatwould see the Canadian, or for that matter any post-colonial culture's, literarytradition as "discontinuous," one in which writers find no "usable past"40 in theapparently colonized literary productions of earlier times, may itself be blind tomodes of continuity that can prevail beneath the surface of established genericclassifications.

Read as post-colonial discourse, then, magic realism can be seen to provide apositive and liberating response to the codes of imperial history and its legacyof fragmentation and discontinuity. By conveying the binary, and often dominat-ing, oppositions of real social conditions through the "speaking mirror" of theirliterary language, magic realist texts implicitly suggest that enabling strategies forthe future require revisioning the seemingly tyrannical units of the past in acomplex and imaginative double-think of "remembering the future." This pro-cess, they tell us, can transmute the "shreds and fragments" of colonial violenceand otherness into new "codes of recognition" in which the dispossessed, thesilenced, and the marginalized of our own dominating systems can again findvoice, and enter into the dialectic continuity of on-going community and placethat is our "real" cultural heritage.

NOTES1 Surveys of the critical use of the term appear in Amaryll Chanady, "The Origins

and Development of Magic Realism in Latin American Fiction," in Magic Realismand Canadian Literature, ed. Peter Hinchcliffe and Ed Jewinski (Waterloo: Univ.

21

MAGIC REALISM

of Waterloo Press, 1986), 49-60; Roberto Gonzales Echevarria, Ale jo Carpentier:The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), pp.108-29; Fredric Jameson, "On Magic Realism in Film," Critical Inquiry, 12(1986), 301-03; Jean Weisgerber, "Le Realism Magique: la locution et la con-cept," Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate, 35, Fasc. 1 (1982), 27-53;and Robert Wilson, Review of Geoff Hancock, ed. Magic Realism in Quarry, 32,No. 2 (Spring 1983), 84-91. Important distinctions in the term's use are alsopointed out by Susan Beckmann, "The Place of Experiment," Canadian Litera-ture, 89 (Summer 1981), 152-55; Enrique Anderson Imbert, "'Magical Realism'in Spanish-American Fiction," International Fiction Review, 2, No. 1 (Jan. 1975),1-8; James Irish, "Magical Realism: A Search for Caribbean and Latin-AmericanRoots," Literary Half-Yearly, 11, No. 2 (July 1970), 127-39; and Seymour Men-ton, "Jorge Luis Borges, Magic Realism," Hispanic Review, 50 (1982), 411-26.

2 Jacques Stephen Alexis, "Of the Marvellous Realism of the Haitians," PrésenceAfricaine, Nos. 8-10 (June-Nov. 1956), 269. For discussions of the "marvellous,"see also M. Ian Adams, Three Authors of Alienation: Bomba, Onetti, Carpentier(Austin and London: Univ. of Texas Press, 1975), p. 82; and J. Michael Dash,"Marvellous Realism — The Way Out of Négritude," Caribbean Studies, 13, No. 4(1973), 57-70 and Literature and Ideology in Haiti: igi5-ig6i (London: Mac-millan, 1981), 190-202.

3 The term, writes Echevarria, pp. 111-12, 116, has "neither the specificity nor thetheoretical foundation to be convincing or useful," since ".. . the relationshipbetween the three moments when magical realism appears are not continuousenough for it to be considered a literary or even a critical concept with historicalvalidity." In regards to the novels of the Latin-American "boom," critical use ofthe concept has "rarely gone beyond 'discovering' the most salient characteristicsof avant-garde literature in general."

4 Jameson, p. 302.5 Echevarria, p. 108.6 Ibid., p. no.7 Jean-Pierre Durix, in "Magic Realism in Midnight's Children," Commonwealth,

8, No. 1 (Autumn 1985), 57-63, applies the concept to Salman Rushdie's work,while Jameson, p. 302, mentions it in reference to Amos Tutuola. The discussionof magic realism in the context of English-Canadian fiction was initiated by GeoffHancock in "Magic Realism, or, the Future of Fiction," Canadian Fiction Maga-zine, 24-25 (Spring/Summer 1977), 4-6 and followed up in his introduction to hisanthology Magic Realism (Toronto: Aya Press, 1980), 7-15. Since then, numerouscritical works have continued this trend. See, for example, Beckmann, pp. 152-55;Cecelia Coulas Fink, " 'If Words Won't Do, and Symbols Fail' : Hodgins' MagicReality," Journal of Canadian Studies, 20, No. 2 (Summer 1985), 118-31; GeoffHancock, "Magic or Realism: The Marvellous in Canadian Fiction," The Cana-dian Forum (March 1986), 23-35; Keith Maillard, "'Middlewatch' as MagicRealism," Canadian Literature, 92 (Spring 1982), 10-21; Shirley Neuman andRobert Wilson, Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch (Ed-monton: NeWest Press, 1982); Uma Parameswaran and G. Sekhar, "CanadianGothic," CRN LE Reviews Journal (May 1982), 65-67; and Robert Wilson, Re-view of Hancock, ed., Magic Realism, pp. 84-91, and "On the Boundary of TheMagic and The Real: Notes on Inter-American Fiction," The Compass, 6 (1979),37-53·

8 See Weisgerber, p. 45.

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MAGIC REALISM

β Linda Kenyon, "A Conversation with Robert Kroetsch," The New Quarterly, V,N o. ι (Spring 1985), 15. See also Stanley McMullin, "'Adams M ad in Eden ':Magic Realism as H interland Experience" (in Hinchcliffe, pp. 13 22), who readsmagic realism as implicitly "ex centric."

1 0 This reading of magic realism's mode of narration takes issue with those ap proaches that suggest a seamless interweaving of, or synthesis between, the magicand the real: see, for example, Maillard, p. 12, and Fink, p. 119.

1 1 Jack H odgins, The Invention of the World (1977; rpt. Scarborough: Signet,1978) j P· 3· F urther references are to this edition and appear in the text.

1 2 Robert Kroetsch, The Crow Journals (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1980), p . 23.1 3 See Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of

Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 108.1 4 M . M . Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael

Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin and London: U niv. of Texas Press, 1981),263.

1 5 David Carroll, "T h e Alterity of Discourse: Form, History, and the Question ofthe Political in M. M. Bakhtin," Diacritics, 13, N o. 2 (Summer 1983), 77.

1 6 H elen Tiffin, "Commonwealth Literature: Comparison and Judgement," in TheHistory and Historiography of Commonwealth Literature, ed. D ieter Riemen schneider (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1983), p. 32.

17 Coral Ann Howells, "Re-visions of Prairie Indian History in Rudy Wiebe's TheTemptations of Big Bear and My Lovely Enemy," in Revisions of CanadianLiterature, ed. Shirley Chew (Leeds: Univ. of Leeds, Institute of Bibliographyand Textual Criticism, 1984), p. 61. For detailed discussions of this process withinthe languages of post-colonial cultures, see David T. Haberly, "The Search for aNational Language: A Problem in the Comparative History of Post-ColonialLiteratures," Studies in Comparative Literature, 11, No. 1 (1974), 85-97; D. E. S.Maxwell, "Landscape and Theme," Commonwealth Literature, ed. John Press(London: Heinemann, 1965), 82-89; W. H. New, "New Language, New World,"in Awakened Conscience: Studies in Commonwealth Literature, ed. C. D. Nara-simhaiah (New Delhi: Sterling, 1978), 360-77; Uma Parameswaran, "Amid theAlien Corn: Biculturalism and the Challenge of Commonwealth Literary Criti-cism," WLWE a 1, No. 1 (Spring 1982), 240-53; and Helen Tiffin, "Common-wealth Literature: Comparison and Judgement," pp. 19-35 an<^ "CommonwealthLiterature and Comparative Methodology," WLWE 23, No. 1 (Winter 1984),26-30.

18 Howells, p. 62.19 See R. E. Watters, "Original Relations," Canadian Literature, 7 (Winter 1961),

6-17.20 Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa

(1967; rpt. New York: Avon, 1971), p. 383.21 Michael Holquist, Introduction to Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. xxviii.22 John S. Brushwood, The Spanish American Novel: A Twentieth-Century Survey

(Austin and London: Univ. of Texas Press, 1975), 282-84, notes a link betweena "telescoping of time" and the use of "transcendent regionalism" in novels thatemploy abstract narrative techniques in depicting seemingly "real" people attachedto a familiar world. W. H. New's observation in "Beyond Nationalism: On Re-gionalism," WLWE 23, No. 1 (Winter 1984), 17, that the region in post-colonial

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MAGIC REALISM

cultures can stand for the "social variations within the society" suggests that thisapproach to regionalism is not restricted to works of magic realism in the "new"literatures.

23 Robert R. Wilson, in "The Metamorphoses of Space: Magic Realism" (in Hinch-cliffe, pp. 61-74), conceives of magic realism as a "fictional space created by thedual inscription of incompatible geometries." Wilson's "principle of spatial fold-ing" could provide yet another means of envisioning magic realism's thematiclevel as a "template" of what I read as the oppositional system of incompatiblediscursive modes in magic realism's language of narration.

24 See David L. Jeffrey, "Jack Hodgins and the Island Mind," Book Forum, 4, No. 1(1978), 72-

25 In an interview with Alan Twigg in For Openers (Madeira Park: Harbour Pub-lishing, 1981), p. 192, Hodgins notes: "It's possible to see the history of VancouverIsland as the history of failed colonies. So I chose [the title] The Invention of theWorld because it implies that the different levels of the novel are allegorical.. . ."

26 See Jeffrey, p. 75.27 Fink, p. 125.28 Dash, "Marvellous Realism — The Way Out of Négritude," p. 65.29 Echevarria, p. 259.30 Dash, "Marvellous Realism — The Way Out of Négritude," p. 66.31 See Wilson Harris, "The Phenomenal Legacy," The Literary Half-Yearly, 11, No.

2 (July 1970), 1-6.32 Robert Kroetsch, What the Crow Said (Don Mills: General Publishing, 1978),

p. 36. Further references are to this edition and appear in the text.33 Dash, "Marvellous Realism — The Way Out of Négritude," p. 66.34 Jameson , p p . 303, 3 1 1 , notes t ha t La t in -Amer ican magic realist films depict history

as "history wi th holes, per fora ted history," a n d he advances ". . . the very p ro -visional hypothesis t h a t t he possibility of magic realism as a formal m o d e is con-stitutively dependent on a type of historical raw material in which disjunction isstructurally present. . . ." This observation helps explain why magic realism maybe especially viable as a mode of discourse in post-colonial cultures.

38 See Fink, p. 122; Jan H omer, "Irish and Biblical Myth in Jack Hodgins' 'TheInvention of the World'," Canadian Literature, 99 (Winter 1983), 11; Jeffrey,p. 75; Robert Lecker, "H aunted by a G lut of Ghosts: Jack Hodgins' The Inven tion of the World" Essays in Canadian Writing, 20 (Winter 1980 81), 85, 95;and Joann McCaig, "Brother XI I and The Invention of the World" Essays inCanadian Writing, 28 (Spring 1984), 128 40.

3 6 John Thieme, "Beyond History : Margaret Atwood's Surfacing and RobertKroetsch's Badlands," in Re visions of Canadian Literature, p. 74.

3 7 E. D . Blodgett, Configuration: Essays on the Canadian Literatures (Downsview:ECW Press, 1982), p. 34.

3 8 Wilson H a r r is, The Womb of Space (Westpor t , C o n n . : G reen wo o d , 1983) , p p .69 70.

3 5 W. H . N ew, Articulating West ( T o r o n t o : N e w Press, 1972) , p . xxv.4 0 D ia n e Bessai, "C o u n t e r fe i t in g H in d sigh t , " WLWE, 23, N o . 2 ( Sp r in g 1984) , 359.

24

YOU 71R6 W71T6RM71RKS ON C U S SGillian Harding-Russell

(Ultra-sound at 21 weeks)

Like watermarks on glass, a silhouetteof head, ghostly — the delicatebones of femur and tibula, wavinggently, independent of me.I watch the fist of heart, poundingsturdy four-chambered sending out bloodat 150 beats a minute (twice my ownheart's beat, I'm told). I can seeyou are determined to live — ifI don't interfere — to becomewhat you will, without my help.I cannot see your sex, thoughI look, half-curious.

What are you dreaming in the depths of me?You are attached to me, undulatingon the chemical waters of love and hate,distress and content half my own.You are part of myself and another,the sides, perhaps, least knownto ourselves. Will you diveheadfirst, jubilant into the worldor, in breech position, slitherdown afraid? Then will youwatch the whirling world, begrudgingone-eyed set onits overthrow? Orsimply ride with the tideoutside as inside?

You are watermarks on glass, a first draftof a manuscript I cannot polish.I cannot see the intricacy of bloodvessels articulating the feeling fleshyet

You are the brilliant bones.

25

POEM

Still

my heart leapsat a flickering light

in the four-roomed cageof filigreed bones.

IRON SHIRT MOV6SGay Allison

I

I watch you doing Tai Chiand Kung Fu moves on the back lawn gatheringenergy from the earth. You have risen earlyto meet the sun, changed the baby and fed the catswho brush your bare legs.

You take Meagan for a walkto the cornerstore for papers, honey anda quart of milk.Over tea we discussapartheid in Africahow Canadians aren't that interestedin freedom or racism at homeor the rising cost of bread and pearsand how we accept violence andits influence over our lives.

In the afternoon I watch youreading under a tree, singing to our daughterin the park. She swings her legs, babbleswhen dogs race by, barking their wisdoms.An older boy approaches, offers hera handful of stones, how easily she acceptsa smooth round one that darkensin her mouth.

26

POEM

II

In the evening you prepareginger and chicken, bowls of rice, watch the newsand fill the sink for Meagan's bath. We argueover the temperature of water, feel its warmthwith our elbows. When the action dies down you beginyour iron shirt moves : a man grasping a treea phoenix washing its feathersa farmer spreading grain.

In the quiet of birds beginningto sleep, our lovemaking easy and gentlewe hear the neighbour's music:a surprised tiger leaps from a caveand the praying mantis foldsits wings for the world.

While we drift into touchingyou toss the golden bowl into the darknessof night the coolness of sheetsand the turtle emerges from the sea.

BR67ITHINGM. Macfarlane

Listen to the islandbreathe, it sighs

Like a lung in its liquid body

deer stretch silentlyin its soft pulse,grass quivering with nerves beneath them

We wear the island's skinas a balm, a benediction

adjusting our footstepsto its softer boundaries

27

POEM

The islandshivers in its sleep

the women are pregnant,words are chlorophylland earth

Gut woodburns like an offering tonight,

the islandbreathes us in.

(Hornby Island)

DEDICATIONJohn Baglow

a fallow ground.lovers and friendsare scattered like landmarks.

i make a few wordsbear the brunt of this living: adream of converse, a

prayer to a graven image, and sorisk your answer,all of your voices.

a labour of love? morea sentry's qui vive,aware you could chill to sheer stone, or

vanish at firstlight — which breaks at all hours in thuuncertain weather.

28

"THE DOUBLE HOOK'S"DOUBLE HOOKS

Arnold E. Davidson

Τ

I HE OSTENSIBLE FUNCTION OF TH E MODERNIST EPIGRAPH

is to point a way into the work (presumably difficult and thus requiring someavenue of entry) that follows. But the epigraph to Sheila Watson's The DoubleHook, by implicitly posing a series of questions, points mostly to its own prob lematic status as statement:

He doesn't knowyou can't catchthe glory on a hookand hold on to it.That when youfish for gloryyou catch thedarkness too.That if you hooktwice the gloryyou hooktwice the fear.1

Just who are "h e" and "you"? What does he know? What can you catch? Doescatching "the darkness too" mean that you can, after all, also catch the glorythat earlier you could not? Furthermore, how do you hook, even conditionally("if"), both "twice the glory" and "twice the fear"? From no catch to a catchto a dubiously doubled catch and all in the same brief passage which is beginningto sound rather like a tale told by a fisherman — full of sound signifying exag geration. Somehow metaphor has merged into mysticism or hyperbole but withoutever making clear its terms, its tenor, and its transformation, all of which "hedoesn't know." Perhaps Coyote does, for the entire novel, we are early told,unfolds "under Coyote's eye" ( 19). At the outset, however, Coyote is not talking,and could we believe that traditional trickster if he did? The same passage fromthe novel that provides the epigraph explicitly notes "that Coyote . . . himself isfooled and every day fools others" (61), which means, as Stephen Scobie hasrecently observed, that "Coyote . . . is a master of lies."2

Furthermore, the origin of the opening voice is also problematic. The epigraphto the novel, Douglas Barbour has pointed out, "was the result of an editorial

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decision which McClelland & Stewart made without consulting Mrs. Watson.Because Professor Salter's Preface did not quite fill all the pages set aside forit . . . , Kip's statement. . . was inserted as a prefatory quotation."3 That promi-nent placing, unsanctioned by the author, has made the passage "appear far moreimportant to critics of the novel than might have been the case had it existed onlyas the thoughts of a single character at a certain point in the narrative."4 Con-sequently, for Barbour (and for Scobie too), the intrusive epigraph can onlymisdirect the too-attentive critic or reader.

Yet I would suggest that the epigraph unauthorized fits the novel far betterthan it ever could authorized. A promised preface a little too short along withthe exigencies of publishing give us a separate page and a "prefatory quotation."This is contingency, accident, and misdirection at work, or, in a word, Coyote.Since the narration unfolds "under Coyote's" vision, how appropriate that itstransmission into text, into the artifact of the book, takes place at least in partunder his supervision too.

The novel unfolds under the watchful eye of Coyote and, up to a certain point,it just as much unfolds under the watchful eye of Kip, who is, after all, designatedby Coyote himself as "my servant Kip" (35) and who also intends to profitpersonally from his watching. More specifically, Kip plays a kind of Pandarus tothe unfolding affair between James Potter and Lenchen Wagner but a Pandaruswith a program of his own. He will not only vicariously take part in the action,he will also presently take James's part. Thus the lovers, even at their most secretmeeting, could not elude his keen vigilance, and that attention, as intended, castsa certain shadow over their love-making, a shadow under which James's personalcrisis grows marvellously to include even matricide. James is, in effect, being castas Kip's servant — and as Coyote's. Through the agency of James, Coyote canhave the old woman and carry her away, as Kip sees or foresees, "like a rabbit inhis mouth" (57), and through the agency of James, Kip will have the youngwoman. That at least is his plan, and as he watches it unfolding and finds it good,we encounter the passage that appropriately — it sits in the middle of the mischiefof the text — provides the epigraph :

Kip's mind was on James. James's strength. James's weakness. James's oldmother. James and Greta. James and the girl Wagner. The messages he'd takenfor James.

He's like his old lady, Kip thought. There's a thing he doesn't know. Hedoesn't know you can't catch the glory on a hook and hold onto it. That whenyou fish for the glory you catch the darkness too. That if you hook twice the gloryyou hook twice the fear. That Coyote plotting to catch the glory for himself isfooled and every day fools others. He doesn't know, Kip thought, how muchmischief Coyote can make. (61 )

Some of the earlier questions prompted by the epigraph can now be resolved.

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"He" is no doubt James. The "glory" and the "darkness" reflect those dualitiesin which James, his baby about to be born and his mother recently killed, is atthis point seemingly inextricably entangled: family (either one) as refuge andtrap; love as gain and loss; life as birth and death. James, as fisher and as fishedfor, is himself doubly and thoroughly caught. But so, too, is the reader in a passagethat seems to be both Kip's and Coyote's and that, with Coyote's epigraph juxta-posed against Kip's anticipation, suggests another juxtaposition, Kip's anticipationagainst Coyote's resolution. And rereading this passage again in the context of thewhole text still more becomes clearer, for what Kip said about James, we nowsee, can also be applied to Kip. He has been fishing, too, and it is he who espe-cially catches the darkness. He is, indeed, literally blinded in the text preciselybecause of what he did not see even as he prided himself — "these eyes seenplenty" (56) —on missing nothing. He certainly misperceives just "how muchmischief Coyote can make" for his own servant as much as for anyone else.

Blinded, Kip does begin to see better. He can, for example, finally admit justwhat he was trying to do and recognize the justice of the consequences: "I keepthinking about James, Kip said. I kept at him like a dog till he beat around theway a porcupine beats with his tail" (133). Defeated in his attempt to claim aplace in the secret affair, Kip is at last given a place in the community. In thefirst half of the novel he is ever apart, the distanced observer of the activities ofothers who, when he does try to play a larger role, is characteristically shown thedoor. In the second half he is taken in, tended. At the end with Felix as Felixfishes, he answers the other's question as to how he would "pick up a living now" :"There's no telling at all, Kip said. There's no way of telling what will walk intoa man's hand" (133). Compared to what Kip earlier thought he knew, theuncertainty and ignorance here acknowledged constitute a kind of wisdom.

Is JAMES EXONERATED for the blinding when Kip takes theblame on himself, and even more to the point, can a matricide, too, be laidmostly at the "dog's" door (attributed to Kip as a would-be Coyote makingmischief badly) or be seen as a kind of innocent "porcupine" reaction to Kip's(or Coyote's) badgering? Those are questions that the novel neither specificallyanswers nor, for that matter, specifically poses. Indeed, one of the more idiosyn-cratic features of this idiosyncratic text is the resolute indirection with which itnever faces the crucial killing on which so much of the action turns. Do we havegrounds for a charge of murder or of manslaughter? Was the death mostly anunfortunate accident, a misplaced push on the stairway that got out of hand?When James much later "asked himself now for the first time what he'd reallyintended to do when he'd defied his mother at the head of the stairs" (98), he

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does not himself have an answer and declines to accept the one that Coyote atonce conveniently provides. Was there even any "death" at all or do we havemerely a transformation from one continuation to another, for the post-pushmother gone fishing, grimly endures her death in much the same manner thatshe apparently endured her life.

There is something coy in the presentation of the killing from the very start.Corresponding to the epigraph is another passage set apart from the text to follow.The novel proper begins with a poetically cast troupe of characters, with a list ofthose who "lived" "in the folds of the hills / under Coyote's eye" (19; emphasisadded). Heading the list is "the old lady, mother of William / of James and ofGreta." In short, the dramatis personae is provided only to be at once renderedinaccurate. We can notice, too, how it trails off into an appended, qualifying,textually isolated phrase — "until one morning in July" — that serves to call theinformation just presented into question, whereupon, with another break in thetext but no break in punctuation, the action of the novel commences:

Greta was at the stove. Turning hotcakes. Reaching for the coffee beans. Grindingaway James's voice.

James was at the top of the stairs. His hand half-raised. His voice in the rafters.James walking away. The old lady falling. There under the jaw of the roof.

In the vault of the bed loft. Into the shadow of death. Pushed by James's will.By James's hand. By James's words: This is my day. You'll not fish today. (19)Baking hotcakes, making coffee, and killing mother: those actions make an

odd mixture with which to begin the morning and the novel. The dead-panconjunction of the three evokes the grim humour of the theatre of the absurd.More specifically, the equation of the mundane ("Greta was at . . .") and thematricide ("James was a t . . .") denies any particular special meaning to eitherside of the equation even as it also hints at the ineffable meaning of meaningless-ness as set forth by, on the one hand, the hotcakes and the coffee and, on theother, the crime.5 The double hook is already being set. Or considering the"crime" and, by extension, the "criminal," we might notice that James himselfhas already "walked away" and left responsibility to "James's will," "James'shand," "James's words." Does will defer to hand and hand to words (which are,of course, also Coyote's words — the text taking place under his vision — andthe author's words too)? Furthermore, does not an excess of agents call themall into question, with each cast as at most an accomplice reluctantly implicatedthrough the agency of the other two? In short, James's action, broken down intoconstituent parts, does not give us a human calculus whereby that action can bereconstituted and fully explained. It might also here be noticed that the desirefor explanation is itself mocked in the text from the very beginning by beingcomically embodied in James's prolix elder brother. As the authorial voice earlyobserves, even before this character is encountered, "William would try to explain,

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but he couldn't. He only felt, but he always felt he knew. He could give half adozen reasons for anything" (20-21). The test case is "a spool of thread" Williamwas asked, as postman, to fetch "from the town below" for a woman on his route."He'd explain that thread has a hundred uses. When it comes down to it, he'dsay, there's no telling what thread is for" (21). As with agents, an excess ofexplanations cancels explanation out, and the account devolves from assessmentinto anecdote: "I knew a woman once, he'd say, who used it to sew up her manafter he was throwed on a barbed-wire fence" (21). But we notice, too, that thenarration explains William even as it calls explanation into question and thencagily verifies its own explanation with the anecdote into which his devolves.Characteristically, he does not see how close to home his story metaphoricallycomes and that his own family is largely beyond mending. What the text takesaway with one hand, it gives with the other.

It gives, however, no full explanation for the crucial killing, so a number ofcritics have laboured to remedy that lack. The simplest explanation is to blame thevictim, which has led to a good deal of critical Ma-bashing, starting with the earlyreviewers who described Mrs. Potter as the "sinister force which has held [Jamesand Greta] since childhood in a net of fear and sterility" ; as James's "tyrannous,possessive mother"; as "the old lady whose tyranny had held [James] and hissister in thrall."6 In much this same vein, Margaret Morriss in 1964 describedthe mother as a woman "whose concentrated ferocity brought fear, darkness anddeath" to the community.7 Or Nancy Corbett in 1974 sees her as embodyingdestruction and domination, as a woman who has "given life only to strangle it."8

Or still more recently, Stephen Putzel, writing in 1984, argues that even if themother does not obviously deserve to die, it is still somehow right that she does:"James had to kill the old woman, to descend into the 'valley of adversity,' toconfront his fear, before he can be redeemed."8

In its more modest form that last quotation still gives this whole explanatoryenterprise away. It is James whose fate matters, whose actions must somehow beredeemed, rendered reasonable and just. Such literal and figurative privilegingof the male protagonist constitutes what could well be termed a cowboy readingof the text — the hero claiming his home on the range and establishing himselfin that inhospitable territory. This privileging of the male protagonist, however,strangely domesticates him at the cost of whatever radical innocence may haveinhered in his original action as portrayed in the novel. A fable seemingly, in theNietzschean sense, beyond good and evil is mythologized in the most mundaneBarthesian sense into the simplistic virtue and vice of the conventional western,as if James wore a white hat and was never the first to draw, while Ma twirledher black moustache and cheated at poker.

The critics' charges are grounded more in a reading of James's "rebellion" thanin any description of Mrs. Potter's pre-textual tyrannical reign. The mother is

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written into the novel after her death, and the problem of interpretation thatcentres in Mrs. Potter is not what she, living, might have done but what she,dead, still does or, we are told, might do :

Still the old lady fished. If the reeds had dried up and the banks folded andcrumbled down she would have fished still. If God had come into the valley, comeholding out the long finger of salvation, moaning in the darkness, thunderingdown the gap at the lake head, skimming across the water, drying up the bluesignature like blotting-paper, asking where, asking why, defying an answer, shewould have thrown her line against the rebuke; she would have caught a pieceof mud and looked it over; she would have drawn a line with the barb when thefire of righteousness baked the bottom. (20)

Action beyond apocalypse; the dead woman's design defying God's; this is stillfishing with a vengeance, all of which poses the question of just what does shefish for with such implacable determination. Is it the very salvation that in thissame passage concerns her so little?

Q"NE IS TEMPTED TO CONFLATE the numerous biblical ref-erences in the text: the possible Christian implications of Mrs. Potter's livingsearch; her subsequent fishing ("the fish is, of course, a conventional symbol ofChrist"10) ; and the way in which the dead Mrs. Potter apparently at last findspeace, "just standing [by a "pool"] like a tree with its roots reaching out to water"(118). Put them all together and they do seem to spell out a Christian parableof life lost in life but all resolved in salvation after death, a parable that is doublytempting in that it can also be seen as underlying the living fate of the othercharacters, who are also finally allowed to work out a more earthly model ofredemption as they, too, make their way through a sterile wasteland world to thesymbolic waters of rebirth and regeneration.

A number of critics have argued this essentially Christian interpretation. ThusMargot Northey asserts that "the message of The Double Hook is religious. It isa story about redemption written from a Christian vantage point."11 Or BeverlyMitchell maintains that through "the process of identifying the biblical associa-tions one makes in reading The Double Hook" even "Coyote's identity is re-vealed."12 Coyote turns out to be God, or at least to have "his prototype in theJehovah-figure of the Old Testament,"13 Mrs. Potter, carried off by Coyote, "is'redeemed' like the other characters," and the whole novel becomes "a re-tellingof the universal, supra-regional, and timeless story of God's love for mankind."14

The problem here, however, is that Mrs. Potter's proclaimed salvation, like herproposed sinful life, is a postulation largely extraneous to the text. "By the processof association, then," Mitchell argues, "Mrs. Potter appears to have her prototype

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in those figures of the Old Testament whose actions brought suffering to others."15

But Mitchell has provided the associations that "define" the character. "Like thecunning and crafty men described in Job, Mrs. Potter is one of those who 'meetwith darkness in the daytime, and at noonday . . . grope as though it were night'(Jb. 5:i4)."16 Why these fumblers from the Book of Job? Why not a femaleDiogenes with her lantern looking for an honest man or even perhaps an honestson? Essentially, the critic tells us what the crucial blanks in the text are andthen bridges them over. Those bridges give us not what the character searchesfor (for that is still missing in the text) but what the critic elsewhere has found,not the character's quest but the critic's certainties.

Furthermore, once masquerade is admitted, the possibilities are myriad. Whatis essential visage and what is superficial mask? Mitchell, for example, slides oversome of Coyote's more dubious counsel to concentrate on his final claim that it ishe who has provided the redeeming baby, and Coyote thereby almost becomesJehovah. In contrast, Northey notes Coyote's frequent advocacy of seduction andsuicide to view him, in Leslie Monkman's terms, as a figure "who functions insatanic opposition to the Old Testament Jehovah."17 Would the real Coyoteplease stand up.

Coyote does frequently speak with a biblical cast, but by borrowing the dictionof the Christian God, does he become a stand-in, even an agent for that God, ora mock, a parody? Does the double demonstrate identity or difference, and, evenmore to the point, what does identity or difference itself prove? Mitchell, as noted,equates Coyote with God to make Coyote God. But why could not the sameequation have the opposite resolution and make God Coyote? Similarly, Putzelargues that "Coyote's biblical echoes transform the dry rocks of British Columbiainto a Palestine, a holy land," and never stops to consider the possibility that theechoes might reverberate quite the other way to translate even a Palestine, a holyland, into more dry rocks and just another British Columbia.18 And neither doesdifference necessarily define. Disputing Mitchell's interpretation of Coyote, Scobieinsists that "these parallels do not establish an identification. Rather, they establishthe fraudulent nature of Coyote's claim; for Coyote to assume the language ofJehovah is presumptuous parody, seen at its most blasphemous when he welcomesGreta's pitiful suicide."19 Yet the very privileging of God implicit in blasphemy ishardly sanctioned in a text in which Coyote has all of the best lines (not alwaysbiblical) and gets the last word too. No defining differences between God andCoyote are specified in the novel. On the contrary, functioning as both God(ubiquitous, controlling, beyond human ken) and not-God (contingency, acci-dent, a trickster often tricked himself), Coyote delights in calling the very possibil-ity of definitive difference into question. Indeed, from the Coyote point of view,God is just another Coyote who wildly, comically overstates his claims.

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^ FOR WHAT, METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING , might the oldwoman have gone fishing? One possibility is for Coyote himself. With his sign —tracks, voice, spittle in the form of prickly pear — everywhere and he himselfnowhere, Coyote is, after all, one feature most obviously missing in the text. Andappropriately so. Coyote as an Indian trickster god given to Christian claims andphrasings is a supernatural figure half in one cosmos and half in another, with eachcalling the other into question. Consider, too, that the little community of thenovel is indistinctly placed in a roughly analogous fashion. I t is set apart fromboth the residual world of the surviving Indians and the larger world of whitecivilization with its local outpost of the town below. Presided over by Coyote,there is a conjunction between the broken present (the state of the town) andthe broken past (the state of the reservation) enacted in and on the broken land scape — "as if it had been dropped carelessly wrinkled on the bare floor of theworld" (22) —i n which the novel is appropriately grounded. Caught in thatconjunction are all of the characters. Mrs. Potter, "fishing upstream to the source"(21), might therefore be seen as finally attempting to resolve after her death oneof the ambiguities of her life. Searching for Coyote, she could at last ground herbeing in its Indian source, a source that well may be itself in process of disappear ing or at least becoming something else as indicated by Coyote's propensity(protecting disguise?) to pass himself off as the Christian God. But the reader canhardly rest comfortably with this inconclusive postulation either. Perhaps Mrs.Potter fishes to evade Coyote, merely to be (after death as before), to just gofishing. Or perhaps she fishes to become Coyote, which is a possibility alsobroached in the novel when her appearance after death is also evidenced by thesignature of Coyote's paw print left where she had cast her line.

The fate of the dead mother never becomes clear, and neither do we fare muchbetter with the surviving son who, late in the novel, claims for himself a newfreedom (freedom from freedom) and then attempts, with the full complicity ofthe text, to put that limiting freedom into definitive practice. It is a freedomfounded, first, on the almost preordained failure of his attempt to flee from boththe death of his mother and the affair with Lenchen but a freedom also foundedon his own and the text's duplicity in claiming it. As such, it cannot be takeneven at its own paradoxical and oxymoronic face value.

Arriving in the town knowing nothing as to how he might proceed farther • —"H e had no idea what a railway ticket would cost. He'd no idea where to buy aticket to. He knew nothing about the train except that it went to the packinghouse, no way of boarding it except through the loading pens" (99) —Jam eswithdraws from the town bank all his family's money, flaunts it, and consequentlysoon loses it. He is taken in hand, taken to the bar, taken to the whorehouse, and

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then simply taken. After he has already paid for food and company but enjoyingneither, one of the girls follows him out into the night. Pretending a specialattraction, she lifts his wallet with all his remaining cash and then leaves himfor Traff, the same "friend" who had been showing James the town. Peering inthrough the whorehouse window, James sees Traff counting the money, knowshe has been robbed, and accedes to that fact with the realization that carries himthrough to the end of the novel :

The flick of a girl's hand had freed James from freedom. He'd kissed awayescape in the mud by the river. He thought now of Lenchen and the child whowould wear his face. Alone on the edge of the town where men clung togetherfor protection, he saw clearly for a moment his simple hope. (121)We might notice, first, that the paradox of James being freed "from freedom"

by a fortunate theft highlights a problematics of freedom characteristically ignoredin typical westerns. The freedom to abjure the constraints of civilization and, inHuck Finn's terms, light out for the territories is a freedom not so much of radicalpossibility but of evasive action. It is a freedom rigorously patterned into thevery form of the standard western and consists of little more than the hero's per-petual potentiality for dislocations in space and action (particularly romanticaction). In other words, the western hero's requisite refusal to be bound in oneplace, to be claimed by domicile and domesticity, leaves him bound by movement,bound in and for many places instead of one. Thus, in the old-fashioned westerns,the hero at most kissed the girl and rode away. In modern versions he mightsleep with her first, but he still moves on. To wait almost nine months and thento ride frantically away a day or so before the baby arrives spoils the whole effect.The call to further adventure ("a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do") beginsto look suspiciously like a desperate shedding of responsibility. Yet what funda-mental difference can a few months make? So James's hasty and belated flightcompromises departures more judiciously timed. Neither does the immediate endof that flight — to be willingly robbed by a prostitute — counterbalance the sup-port he was not prepared to provide for Lenchen.

James claims to be saved by his fortuitous fleecing; by accident and hazard;by, if one will, Coyote. Yet the duplicity of freedom that this character exposes iscountered by the duplicity through which he achieves his own different freedom,and that second duplicity is, of course, James's complicity in his own victimiza-tion. His first purchase in town, for example, is a wallet for which he pays cashbecause then "you've got ownership rights on it and can smash it up if you sochoose" (95-96). In his fashion he so chooses. It requires no great perspicacityto see what trash Traff is and what he is after. It requires no particular subterfugeto part James from his money either. Even the parrot in the bar, convenientlytrained to proclaim "drinks all around" and "drinks on you," was plucking theyoung man clean, which is one of the reasons Traff hustles James off to better

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things. As he observes, "it might as well be me as someone else" (102), especiallya parrot. Furthermore, even after Traff has the cash, the town knows that he isa thief, so any kind of outcry could have brought action and James well mighthave recovered most of his money. The obvious fact is that James desires theresolution he achieves but he also wants it to seem as if that resolution is quite outof his own hands. Consequently, the forced non freedom (contingency) that freeshim from the false freedom of opportunity and escape is itself a fraud.

The novel participates in the protagonist's strategy of claiming a deservedpunishment and disclaiming it, too. We can notice, for example, how James atone point acknowledges his unconvincing rationale for being "drawn to Traff. I twas the cap of hair, straight and thick and yellow as Lenchen's" (106). Theauthor and the character here contrive not just for James's desired victimizationbut for a victimization that somehow reverses and thereby cancels out his vic timization of Lenchen. This time he will be the one seduced and abandoned andby a Lenchen at that. We might notice also how "the slanted edge of the bank"(107) and "her hands pressed against his chest" (108) as the wallet is takenevoke the stairway and the killing of James's mother. Again he suffers a parodiediminuendo of what he has already done, and the text writes his coming restitutionevery bit as duplicitously as he sought it in a dubious theft.

ΤI H II H E TEXT LABOURS IN ANOTHER WAY, too, to return the

reader and the protagonist to the impending resolution. As Morriss early observed,the "nature [of the town] is basically that of the wilderness," and "in effect, Jameshas merely escaped to another wasteland." The two are "parellel" to such adegree that the second can even give James versions of what is concomitantlyhappening in the first. Thus "the brothel smells of 'bodies and kerosene burningaway'" evoke "G reta's self destruction of which James is unaware."20 Similarly,Lenchen is briefly replaced in James's fumbling and ambivalent embrace by Lilly("G o away, he said. His arm pulled her close" [108]), and neither Lenchen norLilly is, at this point, the pure flower of the latter's name. Angel, up above, alsohas, in name anyway, an analogue down below. The other prostitute at Felicia'sis named Christine. She is onomastically closer to Christ but in action somewhatfurther away. Although Angel has also gone from man to man, she has done soessentially for the sake of her children and on a much more limited scale thanChristine. And Felicia is, of course, the feminine form of Felix, and, like Felix,offers (admittedly, for a price) food and other comforts to those who come toher door.

The smallest and most dubious of communities, the prostitutes and their pa trons, mirrors, especially in its imperfections, the very mess from which Jamesfled, and thus the limit of his escape, the farthest that he can go (experientially,

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psychologically, financially), returns him to his origins and the reasons for hisflight. Lilly, moreover, tells him as much. "We all mean all right, Lilly said. It'sjust there's no future in it. Drinking and crying, and everything being washed upthe next day" (106). It is precisely that "no future" that the novel arranges forJames in the town which allows him a future back in the folds of the hills. Sothe fourth section is forced, contrived, something less than the textual free play ofthe other parts.21

The Double Hook forces itself into plot and pattern, into regionalism andpsychological realism in order to force a resolution. With that resolution coming,the novel too can come home again, can return to the mythic play of its firstparts, a turn which comes at the very conclusion of Part Four :

The life which TrafF and Lilly led behind Felicia's dull glass belonged underFelicia's narrow roof. In the distance across the flats James could see the lightsof the station and across from them the lights of the hotel where the parrot wholived between two worlds was probably asleep now, stupid with beer and age.

James stood for a moment in the moonlight among the clumps of stiff sagewhich shoved through the seams and pockets of the earth. (109)

Opposed to life as narrowly constrained, as dull and stupid, we have the poten-tiality of the man in the moonlight with life burgeoning around him even throughthe cracked and broken earth. Whatever the message or meaning that might beabstracted from those moon-illumined clumps of sage thrusting through a desertlandscape, it is qualitatively different from whatever the significance of the drunkparrot at last silently asleep.

The same suggestive scene of contemplating the finally indeterminant poetryof things which ends Part Four is then repeated in a slightly different key as thefirst sentence of the final section of the novel. "William stood looking into thecharred roots of the honeysuckle" (113). How does one read those "charred rootsof the honeysuckle," the smoke that "rose from the charred logs," the "bones[that might] come together bone to bone" for one to "prophesy upon" ( 113-14) ?Ara's answer is a vision of welling water and leaping fish. Coyote's is a bark froma dry rock ledge : "Happy are the dead / for their eyes see no more" (115).Although the rock is definitely there whereas the water is not, the novel does notparticularly privilege one answer over the other. Life goes on, as marked by thebirth of the baby, which gives a focus to the end of the novel. And so does death,as indicated by the continuing passing of Mrs. Potter whose active dying has beena focus from the start. The end of that process — the end of her fishing — seemsin sight when she is last seen "standing by [Felix's] brown pool. . . Just standinglike a tree with its roots reaching out to water" ( 117-18).

The married couple reunited, the young lovers together again, the baby born,the house of Potter to be rebuilt •— the end of the novel does tempt with thepromise of a new beginning and the possibility of an affirmation of life. It is a

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temptation easily acceded to. As George Bowering notes, "all readers of the textagree that we have a more-or-less happy ending, a kind of transformation, orresurrection, a new testament. A revelation (I, Coyote, saw this) under the seer'seye." But Bowering also rightly warns against going "too far" in positing "Jamesas redeemer and renewer," for he did kill his mother, blind Kip, and abandonLenchen.22 We can remember what he has previously done and have also seenhow much his return is premised on his continued misreading of who and whathe is. Ara, near the conclusion, maintains that James "never in all his life hadstrength enough to set himself against things" (123), an observation that seemsas true then as earlier. James let himself be carried away and he let himself becarried back. So any proclaimed regeneration of this character at the novel'send is doubly dubious in that it, first, premises a capability not previously observedin James and, second, remains conveniently untested.

Particularly germane here is James's first reaction to the "seared and smoulder-ing earth, the bare hot cinder" of what had previously been his home. "He felt ashe stood with his eyes closed on the destruction of what his heart had wisheddestroyed that by some generous gesture he had been turned once more into thefirst pasture of things" (131). The gesture, however, is only his own still self-deceived desire. At the end of the disastrous process he dreams origins again.Despite the different evidence all around him, he posits some green Eden inwhich, by definition, there will be no trace of what he has already done. Yet thatEden cuts two ways, for any restored paradise can only await a fall.

The same point is even more implicit in James's immediate promise to rebuildthe family house. His decision to locate the new dwelling "further down thecreek" can well represent a wise move from the previous disastrous site but hisdecision to build "all on one floor" (131) is strangely suspect. Does he reallybelieve that without the requisite stairway henceforth no Potter can be pushedto premature death? Coyote, in the last words of the novel, set the feet of James'sand Lenchen's baby "on the soft ground / . . . on the sloping shoulders / of theworld" (134). As has been amply demonstrated, those same shoulders slope forparents too.

Narration here slides out of text as ambiguously and unclearly as it slid into it.In the conjunction of set feet and soft ground, set feet and the sloping shouldersof the world, the novel demonstrates again its ability to unsay what it says evenin the act of saying it. In other words — and this book both perpetually demandsand precludes "other words" ·— the reader is caught on the double hooks of thetext (living/dying, articulation/silence, God/Coyote, meaning/meaninglessness,even, if one wishes, construction/deconstruction) as firmly at the end as at thebeginning. Or as the epigraph in retrospect suggests, you can't catch the glory ofthis text on the hook of a final definitive interpretation, for when you fish for storyyou catch the darkness too.

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WATSON

NOTES1 Sheila Watson, The Double Hook (1959; rp t Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,

1966), p. 15. Subsequent references to this New Canadian Library edition of thenovel will be made parenthetically in the text.

2 Stephen Scobie, Sheila Watson and Her Works (Toronto: ECW Press, n.d.),P· 35·

3 Douglas Barbour, "Editors and Typesetters," Open Letter, 3rd series, no. 1 (1974-75), reprinted in Sheila Watson and 'The Double Hook, ed. George Bowering(Ottawa: Golden Dog, 1985), p. 9.

4 Barbour, p. 9.5 Angela Bowering, in "Figures Cut in Sacred Ground: Illuminati in The Double

Hook" Line, 2 (1983), 47, effectively points out how, in this opening scene,"narrative and imagery marry domesticity and death, doubling back on them-selves."

6 Hugo McPherson, "An Important New Voice," Tamarack Review, 12 (1959) ;Don Summerhayes, "Glory and Fear," Alphabet, 3 (1961); Philip Child, "ACanadian Prose-Poem," Dalhousie Review, 39 (1959); all reprinted in SheilaWatson and 'The Double Hook', pp. 24, 29, 32.

7 Margaret Morriss, "The Elements Transcended," Canadian Literature, 42 (1964),reprinted in Sheila Watson and 'The Double Hook1, p. 87.

8 Nancy J. Corbett, "Closed Circle," Canadian Literature, 61 (1974), reprinted inSheila Watson and 'The Double Hook1, p. 117.

9 Steven Putzel, "Under Coyote's Eye: Indian tales in Sheila Watson's 'The DoubleHook'," Canadian Literature, 102 (1984), 14.

10 Margot Northey, The Haunted Wilderness (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press,1976), P· 9°·

11 Northey, p. 88.12 Beverley Mitchell, "Association and Allusion in The Double Hook" Journal of

Canadian Fiction, 2 (1973), reprinted in Sheila Watson and 'The Double Hook',p. 102.

13 Mitchell, p. 111.14 Mitchell, pp. 105, 113.15 Mitchell, p. 104.16 Mitchell, p. 104, ellipsis in the original.17 Northey, p. 89; see also Leslie Monkman, "Coyote as Trickster in The Double

Hook," Canadian Literature, 52 (1972), 71.18 Putzel, p. 13.19 Scobie, p. 33.20 Morriss, p. 93.21 In "Sheila Watson, Trickster," from The Canadian Novel, Volume III: Modern

Times, ed. John Moss (Toronto: NC Press, 1981), reprinted in Sheila Watsonand "the Double Hook1, George Bowering more fully argues this point. See espe-cially pp. 196-98.

22 Bowering, p. 197.

41

F7!ITHINTH€W€7ITH€RRhea Tregebov

I have to travel through so much weather to get to you,your distant death:my suitcases stuffed full as your mother's griefor your father's wordlessness.A whole, big country between us, as always.As always, I'm travelling at 30,000 feet, at 600 miles an hour,flying into sadness, my body tame to the machine, my faith.Flying over Manitoba all I can see ismarks on the absolute snow. The weather.The curlicues of the big, fancy river.What I know of your life the nothing I know;this gut pain, for you, for anyone I can imagine dead at 38.The words for loss — orphan, widow —do not include your undaughtered parents,unsistered brothers, me. I think of your faith,your body tame to the machine that killed you. The weatheryour husband in the driver's seat, wandering.I think how we each stood by a window, a country between us,examining the story of our hands, thinkingabout next Wednesday, the spring.All our fine, our beautiful wandering certainty, our faith.Your life run head on, run through too fast.How long these moments can last —between now and your last Sunday.You perhaps seeing it come towards you forever;your heartbeat, like an athlete's, infinitely slowedto catch that last sweet second forever,to breathe it all in.

42

NARRATIVE, CARNIVAL ANDPARODYIntertextuality in Antonine Maillet'sPélagie-la-Charrette

Michèle LacombeAu dire du vieux Louis à Bélonie lui-même, ce rejeton des

Bélonie né comme moi de la charrette, seuls ont survécu aumassacre des saints innocents, les innocents qui ont su se taire.— Et c'est comme ça que je sons encore en vie, nous autres lesexilés, par rapport que j'ons consenti à sortir d'exil et rentrer aupays par le cul d'une baleine!1

A.LCCORDING TO LINDA HUTCHEON, the intertext is gener-ated by a reader who recognizes, responds to, and activates the textual referentsbrought into alignment by the author in a contract with the reader.2 As with anyself-reflexive text, Antonine Maillet's epic novel Pélagie-la-Charrette (1979) isbrought into being, in the reader's mind or experience, by the interplay of threefactors: text (in this case the unique combination of story and narrative that issignalled by the hyphenated title) ; context (historical referents, here specificallypertaining to the survival of the Acadians) ; and intertext (the sum total of allu-sions, influences, parallels, and comparisons, both implicit and explicit, with othertexts) .3 The foregoing quotations from the novel suggest that the relation of iden-tity to fiction is a central paradox explored by Pélagie ; according to Maillet, in acomment which echoes both Jacques Ferron and Gilles Vigneault, "mon paysc'est un conte."4 Into this known equation she introduces a new element: ifAcadie survives primarily through its storytellers, and if Maillet literally findsherself situated at the transition point between orality and writing, then her textenacts or translates for the reader the simultaneous birth and death of history,culture, and language.5

Acadians have survived, rather paradoxically, through their silence, that is tosay through the growth of a strong oral tradition in the face of ever-present threats— illiteracy, expropriation, assimilation: "Apres ça, venez me dire à moi, quifourbis chaque matin mes seize quartiers de charrette, qu'un peuple qui ne saitpas lire ne saurait avoir d'Histoire" (12). Pélagie's, reader must therefore confront

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MAILLET

the presence in the intertext of a considerable body of Acadian legend, myth, andfolklore in addition to echoes of the Bible (specifically Exodus), the Odyssey,Rabelais' Gargantua, and Longfellow's Evangeline, among other texts.6 Simplefolk elements include songs ("Et j'ai du grain de mil"), proverbs ("N'éveille pasl'ours qui dort"), and oaths ("Et merde au roi d'Angleterre"), leit-motifs thatillustrate the billingsgate aspect of popular speech located by Bakhtin at the heartof Rabelais' work and of the linguistic marketplace.7 These tags are also used topunctuate folk narratives based on Acadian legend, narratives which begin byinterrupting the action only to merge with major episodes in the story : Bélonie'straditional tale of the white whale, for example, is significantly altered by theexiles' escape from Charlestown prison, "the belly of the beast," while an Acadianvariant of the Flying Dutchman legend is radically revised by Beausoleil's captureand rechristening of an English ship used to deport the Acadians. In both casesthe oral tradition rescues the action but is irrevocably changed in the process. ForMaillet, this complex, shape-shifting relation between signifier and signified isfurther complicated by the added movement from oral to written forms of dis-course. The oral tradition becomes part of the canon questioned by subsequentgenerations of chronicler-storytellers, and joins the classical texts (all epics tra-ditionally situated at the margins of the oral and the written) parodied by theauthor through her primary narrator.

This playful treatment of the oral tradition situates Pélagie within the domainof fantasy rather than historical realism as a more appropriate genre for exploringthe relation of myth to history. The model for this fabulous blurring of story andnarrative, the real and the imaginary, writing and the oral tradition, does notcome from Latin American fiction so much as from Mikhail Bakhtin's work onthe carnivalesque in Rabelais and popular culture. For Bakhtin, Rabelais is ofconsequence precisely because he bridges the gap between medieval and Renais-sance world-views:

The primitive and naive coexistence of languages and dialects had come to anend [with the Renaissance]; the new consciousness was born not in a perfectedand fixed linguistic system but at the intersection of many languages and at thepoint of their most intense interorientation and struggle. . . . In these exceptionalconditions, linguistic dogmatism or naivety became impossible. The language ofthe sixteenth century, and especially the language of Rabelais, are sometimesdescribed as naive even today. In reality the history of European literature presentsno language less naive.8

Creating the illusion of orality, Maillet is in fact writing at a stage of Acadianculture which reproduces these conditions: ". . . au dire du vieux Louis, cetteAcadie-là qui sortait du bois en riant des yeux et en roulant les rrr . . . ne se seraitpoint marié en blanc" (349). Maillet's approach to narrative, carnival, andespecially parody, a term which Linda Hutcheon has recently expanded to dis-

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MAILLET

place the notion of plagiarism,9 are the three aspects of Pélagie's language that Iwill address as part of its self-reflexive strategy for subverting the lapses of history.

MIARRATTVE VOICE AND THE MULTIPLICATION of narratorsthrough a combination of framing and Chinese box effects are those aspects ofthe novel which, despite their complexity, have received the most critical atten-tion to date.10 René LeBlanc has recognized that the novel's action, constitutingthe return of the heroine and her people to their devastated homeland andencompassing a fifteen-year journey by oxcart from Georgia to Grand Pré, isrelatively simple, while the narration of that journey, filtered through many gen-erations of conflicting storytellers, is extremely complex.11 Kathryn Crecelius,focusing on doubling motifs and patterns of repetition, argues that these serveto underline "une narration en abyme," and describes the novel as "le récit dela (re)création d'un passé à la fois vrai et imaginaire."12 James Quinlan, address-ing the novel as poetry, identifies the dual function served by the title's personifi-cation — Pélagie-the-Cart is both "object and subject, vehicle and sign."13 Inthis context I am reminded of Craig Tapping's reading of George Lamming'sIn the Castle of My Skin as a post-colonial text — citing Kristeva, his commentscould easily apply to Pélagie: "the novel is the truth about which it writes,embodies and unfolds the process it describes."14

If Maillet's response to the injustices of history seems to substitute poetry forpolitics, it is because she recognizes the strong links between language and free-dom. The breastcloth/handkerchief which Pélagie opens to the winds and foldsinto her apron pocket is a dominant symbol for the relation between what NairnKattan terms "desire and power."15 At once empty and full, it is a female emblemof potentiality, a "country of the heart" or realm of possibility never finallydenied/fulfilled. This "uncertain country" is nonetheless linguistically embeddedin a world that is fully realized and fully Acadian :

Et dans sa poche de devanteau, elle enfouit aussi des mots, des mots anciensaveindus à cru de la goule de ses pères et qu'elle ne voulait point laisser en hairageà des gots étrangers; elle y enfouit des légendes et des contes merveilleux, horri-fiques ou facétieux, comme se les passait son lignage depuis le début des temps;elle y enfouit des croyances et coutumes enfilées à son cou comme un bijou defamille qu'elle laisserait à son tour en héritage à ses descendants; elle enfouitl'histoire de son peuple commencée deux siècles plus tôt, puis ballottée aux quatrevents, et laissée moribonde dans le ruisseau . . . jusqu'au jour où un passant laramasserait, et la ravigoterait, et la rentrerait de force au pays . . . (340)

This passage follows the climactic moment when Pélagie faces the double realiza-tion that she is dying and that home no longer exists in Grand Pré, and as suchit locates Acadia within the ever-renewable world of fiction. The narrator's iden-

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MAILLET

tity finally merges totally with that of her ancestor and namesake; this dualPélagie in turn is closely identified with Maillet herself, in keeping with Hutch-eon's recognition of the author's role in the reader/text interface, and clarifyingthis author's insistence that "je suis parole."16 In the breakdown of subject-objectdistinctions that accompanies the verb made flesh, history is personified, femi-nized, and appropriated. Rather than quietly containing her tears, Pélagie'shankie amplifies sentiment, making room for the deluge: it is large enough toaccommodate the white whale metamorphosed into the sleeping giantess. Becausethe tale is never ended, the quest can go on.

At this juncture a double diagram might clarify Pélagie's form : the first repre-sents the two conflicting story lines, and focuses on narrative; the second rep-resents the triple odyssey, focusing on story.

i i τBélonie I — — .Bélonie III

1

Louis-à-Bélonie ·*

Phantom Cart

1. Death — Bélonie2. Exodus — Christian

3. Myth — "Légende"(Whale)

__ 1780

1880 ~~~2^ZZ

DIAGRAM I

Pélagie's Cart

Life — PélagieGreat Disruption —

AcadianHistory — Genealogy

(American Revolution)

Pélagie-the-cart

: MPélagie-the-grouch

-^•Pélagie Leblanc

Antonine Maillet

Phantom Ship

Rebirth — BroussardOdyssey — Classical

Literature — "Conte"(Rabelais)

DIAGRAM II

It should be noted that in Diagram I, Pélagie Leblanc is the name of the novel'sprimary narrator. The multiplication of narrators is now seen to be marked by

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MAILLET

circularity as well. The fact that Bélonie I descends from a Parisian immigrantnamed Antoine Maillet, really the author's ancestor, like the dedication of thenovel to the memory of Virginie Cormier, the name of Maillet's mother but alsoof the character who becomes the cart of life's mascot, underscores the inter-penetration of real and imaginary observed by Crecelius. The use of repetitionwith difference in the prologue and epilogue which frame the novel marks thedistance which the reader has travelled in the interim: with the ritual chantingof family names at the end, a form of greeting in the imperative mode, we arenow informed and prepared to enter the narrator's carnivalesque world. Theplayful recognition and celebration of identity is complete as soon as the readeracquires the knowledge for bringing it to life, a context which only the novel andits reading can provide :

— Grouillez-vous, bande de flancs mous ! Personne viendra vous nourrir à la loucheni vous border au lit. Aveindez-vous de vos trous et venez prendre votre place ausoleil. (351)Our entry into the text is facilitated, for example, once we are familiar with

the events signalled and assumed by Diagram I: 1880 is the date of the firstAcadian national conference in Memramcook, when the people literally andmetaphorically emerged from the woods and entered recorded history/writing.This was an occasion for Rabelaisian feasts of storytelling, and for Maillet everyreading of the chronicling tradition, however contentious, becomes another suchoccasion. As the first to write the feast, however, she has had to invent a new,"nonexistent" language, one which I have already indicated convinces us thatit is not writing at all but true Acadian speech. The power of this illusion is suchthat my first complete reading of the novel, on December 25, 1979, was whileseated at my mother's feet: for the first time since my childhood, she quitenaturally adopted the highly formal role of storyteller, decoding the text byuncritically breaking into song in a way that I, the would-be bearer of gifts, couldnot. Maillet at once suspends an endless number of layers between the reader andthe truth/past, and recreates "original" events by conferring upon them theimmediacy of an archetypal fairytale endlessly repeated. Citing Bakhtin, LindaHutcheon reminds us that parody (here directed to the oral tradition) can cele-brate as well as satirize: "through the paradox of its authorized transgression,the parodie appropriation of the past reaches out beyond textual introversion andaesthetic narcissism to address the 'text's situation in the world.'"17

ΤI H E MULTIPLICATION OF NARRATORS evident in Diagram Iis matched by the multiplication of carts in Diagram I I , first and foremost by thehyperbolic growth of the original cart into a caravan and ultimately an entire

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MAILLET

people. The circularity emphasized by my diagram of the narrative structure,however, is not reproduced here, but rather is replaced by the parallel lines of thethree principal players' movements. These intersect at several crucial momentsand in one crucial locale, Salem marsh, to explode the illusion sustained through-out that their journeys progress independently. Pélagie's quest is at once threat-ened and renewed by her predilection for the wily captain, as it is by the hauntingpresence of Bélonie, the chinwagger who at first appears to embody the dead past.The point of intersection, when the Cart of Life is rescued from the "slough ofdespond," occurs when Broussard's phantom ship defeats Bélonie's phantom cartby bringing with him into battle Bélonie II, the centenarian's last living relative,long presumed dead. However, Broussard wins only because Bélonie agrees tostave off the Grim Reaper, and because Pélagie offers up her life in exchangefor that of her lover. It is at this point that my two diagrams also come intoalignment: "car sans ces conteux de Bélonie, fils de Bélonie, l'Histoire auraittrépassé à chaque tournant de siècle" ( 11 ).

In addition to summarizing the broad outlines of the story, Diagram II servesto introduce the topic of intertextuality as yet another layer of the novel's action,leading us to the related issues of carnival and parody. The diagram provides themain textual points of reference for the three protagonists, referents in all casessupplemented by historical and legendary material, real or imagined, attributedto the oral tradition. Bélonie is repeatedly compared to an Old Testament prophetleading the chosen people into the promised land, or recording that quest fortheir descendants. Broussard Beausoleil, whose name associates him with pagansun-worship and fertility gods, blends the characteristics of king and outlaw, earn-ing him the nickname "Robin Hood of the Seas" and creating a parallel withHomer's Ulysses, while his crew, particularly the giant P'tite Goule and the dwarffool Pierre à Pitre, belong to the world of Rabelais' Gargantua. Finally Pélagie,accompanied by the ghost of Evangeline in the form of the silent, war-scarredorphan Catoune, is of course contrasted with the heroine of Longfellow's epic.

The parallels with biblical events are fairly straightforward; these provide epicanalogues that situate Pélagie within an old and honourable tradition. Evenwhen the allusions possess ironic overtones, "repetition with difference" serves torecontextualize and demystify both scriptural and Acadian episodes in a parodieenterprise that Linda Hutcheon sees as clearly distinct from mere "ridiculingimitation."18 Maillet plays with the limits of her text's relation to its precursors,even occasionally mocking intertextuality itself in order to privilege "pure" story— for example, when the narrator informs us that if the twins Charlécoco hadbeen literate "ils se seraient pris eux-mêmes pour de petits Pharaons" (31) butthat their ignorance of any history other than their own fortunately saved themfrom such a fate, tradition and education would seem to be a burden. The inser-tion of "eux-mêmes," however, implies the presence of an other/observer; here

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MAILLET

the reader is in collusion with the narrator in recognizing the relative merits oftextual innocence and experience. The original Pélagie, like Charlécoco, is con-fined to story (the myth of action), while the latest one is restricted to narrative( the myth of signification ).

The allusions to Homer are also fairly straightforward. References to thedouble odyssey of "l'Acadie du Nord" and "FAcadie du Sud," like that of Pélagieand Broussard, captains on land and on sea, emphasize general similarities andspecific differences in order to confer legitimacy upon the Acadian inheritancewithout deprecating the parodied text. The connection between Pélagie andLongfellow's heroine, however, is more complex and more central than the fore-going; it comes closer to what Hutcheon terms parodie satire, marked by a con-testing rather than a respectful or playful (neutral) ethos.19 According to RenateUsmiani, virtually all of Maillet's plays create anti-types of Evangeline,20 andthe author has repeatedly indicated that such a reversal also takes place in thenovel :

Pour moi, les femmes de Pélagie-la-Charrette sont justement plus près de ce qu'aété l'Acadienne que la fameuse Evangéline de Longfellow. J'ai donc pris unepetite revanche sur cette Evangéline qu'on a toujours trouvée plutôt mièvre. Ily a un paragraphe dans "Fanie" qui explique tout ça: "La voilà, votre véritableEvangéline! une courageuse, astucieuse gueuleuse, mère de onze garçons. Lâchez-là au milieu d'un poème, et elle saura bien en faire une épopée. Une épopéeétoffée non plus de vierges-symboles et de femmes éternelles, mais de tante Zélica,de maraine Maude, de Mariaagélas, de Fanie."21

As early as 19,71, when Maillet seems to have been at work on a new play com-bining the eventual approaches to Evangéline Deusse and Pélagie-la-Charrette,she articulated her concept of the relation betwen Longfellow and Acadianwriting :

Ma prochaine pièce . . . tentera de faire la parodie historique [emphasis mine]d'Evangéline première, l'héroine de Longfellow. Cette nouvelle Evangéline quise présentera comme la seule authentique femme acadienne offrira à son homo-logue le contraste amusant d'une femme d'un certain âge, mère de dix-septenfants, à l'allure d'une Mère Courage ou d'une Dulle Griet beaucoup plus quela virginale héroïne figée sur un certain socle. Et c'est cette nouvelle Evangélinequi, supplantant l'autre, devra faire face à l'armée anglaise, à la Déportation età l'Histoire.. . . C'est un genre de pièce qui tentera de forcer le temps, l'Histoireet le théâtre à se démêler dans les lois nouvelles.22

Longfellow is not easily exorcised, however, and Maillet's feminist discourse,embodied in a matriarchal story and matrilinear narrative structure, pays itsgrudging respects to the old man. Even the redoubtable Pélagie-la-Gribouillejoins the narrator in silencing the "conteurs-chroniqueurs de la mauvaise lignée"(26) who would query the heroine's intentions in admitting certain passengersto her cart. The reader might doubt the narrator's claim that Pélagie "ne pouvait

49

MAILLET

pas se prêter, dans les circonstances, à une telle gymnastique de mauvaises inten-tions" (27), but it cannot be denied that if the cart shelters the midwife Célinabecause she possesses no other family, it must accommodate the patriarch Béloniefor the same reasons. We are clearly confronted with what Hutcheon, in herchapter on Bakhtin, terms "the paradox of parody" when dealing with the ques-tion of origins and Longfellow as fictive father.

Maillet's solution, if any solution to such a paradox can be found, lies in thesubstitution of Rabelais for Longfellow in her quest for origins. As her "true"father, he emerges in the personification of Acadian legend in the form of theship which Broussard has reappropriated from the English and named the Grand'Goule in a personal attempt to rescue history. The importance of Rabelais toPélagie is manifold. First, Maillet's reading of his books and her Ph.D. disser-tation on their direct links with Acadian speech and folk culture23 prepared herfor the eventual benign imitation which Hutcheon locates at the centre of parody.The novel's many allusions to the Gargantua, combined with the generation ofnew giants' tales, are a "riposte" to the foreign vision and language of Long-fellow, who cannot help but be belittled in the process. As we have noted, Dia-gram II associates Bélonie with death and the past, Broussard with rebirth; inthe end it is Broussard who saves Bélonie by restoring to him his true heir. Yet itwould not do to establish too close a liaison between Bélonie and Longfellow;rather, Broussard and his crew embody and emphasize by contrast that Rabelai-sian/Acadian "joie-de-vivre," resilience and generous capacity for lying whichcontribute their share to survival and the success of the epic :

Car telle restera jusqu'au bout la différence entre les deux plus grands conteursde l'Acadie du retour: alors que Bélonie, durant près de cent ans, devait trans-mettre fidèlement à son lignage un répertoire de contes et légendes sorti du tempsdes Grandes Pluies, Pierre à Pitre, le Fou du peuple, allait verser dans ce réper-toire des versions, variantes, improvisations, élucubrations de son cru qu'il estbien malaisé aujourd'hui de distinguer de l'authentique ancien. (100)

If Longfellow dramatized the Deportation, together Bélonie and Pierre address"l'Acadie du retour" — the former preserves the facts of the return, the latterprovides the artful touches which transform it from tragedy to epic romance.

The inventiveness and occasional foolhardiness of Broussard and his crew bringus to our second major point : beyond specific debts to Rabelais, Pélagie is markedby a more general use of and dependence on the carnivalesque. The narrator, inthe first of many such comments, poses the following key rhetorical question aboutthe nature of the enterprise : "Les Basques étaient-ils en quête d'un pays ou d'unepromenade par les terres d'Amérique entre une fête et un carnaval?" (68). Itwould seem that the very episodes which confer interest upon the action areinterludes that as entertainment threaten to imperil as well as to prolong thequest. Thus "la Gribouille" would dearly love to relive the Charleston escape/

50

MAILLET

party interlude, described by the primary narrator as "une nuit de carnaval enprison" (81) but is repeatedly forced back to the main story line: "la seulehistoire qui compte, dans tout ça, c'est celle de la charrette qui ramenait unpeuple à son pays" ( 100-01 ).

Yet the pauses which punctuate the journey are an integral part of the story;like the tale of the white whale with which Bélonie entertains the carts, the Balti-more striptease and the celebrations surrounding Madeleine's wedding serve morethan just a decorative purpose. The cart only stops to accommodate life, whetherin the form of the birth of Virginie Cormier or the arrival of new pilgrims fromthe bayous. Speaking of the women in her fiction, Maillet has stated that "si Long-fellow avait dressé l'une de ces femmes en face des troupes anglaises, je ne dispas qu'il aurait sauvé l'Acadie de l'exil, mais il aurait donné au Grand Dérange-ment un certain ton de vérité qui nous l'aurait rendu plus réel et, qui sait? moinstragique."24 Carnival thus marks the difference between the perspectives of Long-fellow and of Maillet on the response of Acadians to official history. Although thelove of Pélagie and Broussard, like that between Evangeline and Gabriel, isdenied permanence, the narrator uses their first meeting to emphasize that Aca-dians recognize each other through the quality of their laughter (90). Speakingof Rabelais as both scientist and humanist, Maillet approves of his philosophy thatif you can't cure the patient, you can make him laugh long enough to forget/accept his ills.25 Such is the function of carnivalesque interludes during the pil-grimage, and of Rabelaisian allusions "during" the narration, as my two finalexamples will try to make clear.

U A K H T I N VIEWS CARNIVAL as the popular or literary expres-sion of laughter which parodies or inverts official culture, which flaunts the reli-gious and political rules of the waking, everyday world. It is marked by ritualspectacles, comic verbal compositions, billingsgate, and an absence of distinctionsbetween actor and spectator. For him, carnival is a second, festive life, based onlaughter:

. . . as opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrated tem-porary liberation from the prevailing truths and from the established order; itmarked the suspension of all hierarchies, rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions.Carnival was the true feast of the time, the feast of becoming, change andrenewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and complete.26

In the struggle for survival, the carts do not stop for law, convention, or propriety,whether finding food for orphans or husbands for widows, although they con-tinue to hold dear their traditions and to preserve folk wisdom. Thus the Bour-geois' chest (a parody of the ark of the covenant), the Basques' violin, and the

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Allains' crucifix paradoxically emerge as emblems of identity and symbols of whatmust, despite sentimental attachments, be abandoned in order for the journey tocontinue and the quest to succeed. Speaking of grotesque realism, Bakhtin remindsus that "degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destruc-tive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one," and that by "breaking up falseseriousness, false historic pathos, [Rabelais] prepared the soil for a new seriousnessand for a new historic pathos."27

Madeleine's wedding and the celebrations, poetic and bodily, which accom-pany it, set against the violent backdrop of the American revolution, illustrateMaillet's attitude to carnival as the expression of temporary liberation and a formof change, becoming, and renewal. In the "unfortunate" absence of priests andpatriarchs following the deportation, the women must evolve new traditions toreplace the old ways "before the fall":

Sa fille Madeleine n'avait point connu les moeurs anciennes d'avant le Dérange-ment. La plupart des chefs de familles avaient péri dans la tourmente, emportantau fond des bois ou des mers leur bâton d'autorité reçu au paradis terrestre. Lesfemmes avaient dû par la suite se dresser seules face à l'ennemi et à l'adversité,et ramasser elles-mêmes le sceptre de chef de famille. Madeleine en avait ététémoin, enfant posthume de son père et de ses aieux. Pélagie pouvait compter sursa fille pour continuer sa lignée. (241-42)

In the absence of the Basques' violin, Célina invents the "reel dit de la boiteuse,"and although "toutes les mélodies ne sont pas sorties de la lyre d'Orphée," theprimary narrator claims that this wedding alone must have enriched the oraltradition with half of its refrains and a quarter of its "ravestans" (247). Maillet'scharacterizations and choice of incidents thus serve at once to reproduce and todeconstruct Acadian folklore; the fictive fabrication of origins for such folkloreis joined by pointed alterations and inversions of established custom. This exampleillustrates what Hutcheon means by "the authorized transgression of norms":parody cannot help but posit the order which it transgresses. At the same time,Madeleine's wedding also underlines the difference between Rabelaisian andmodern parody; Maillet is much closer to the former than to the existential artexamined in Hutcheon's study of postmodernism :

We must stress, however, that the carnival is far distant from the negative andformal parody of modern times. Folk humour denies, but it revives and renewsat the same time. Base negation is completely alien to folk culture.28

Maillet's unique perspective as an Acadian and a woman enables her to narrowthe gap between Rabelaisian carnivalesque and postmodern parody; the myth ofthe fortunate fall acquires new meaning and poetic resonance in her iconoclastictreatment of "le grand dérangement."

The novel's multiplication of amorous encounters, both legitimate and deter-mined by circumstance, includes Célina's with the fool-poet, Jeanne Girouard's

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with her brother-in-law, Jean's with his Indian princess, and of course Pélagie'swith Broussard as well as Madeleine's wedding. They all serve to contrast withthe tragic tale of Gabriel and Evangeline; clearly the official order supersededfor Maillet by Rabelais is the static Acadia/Arcadia pastoral vision "immortal-ized" by Longfellow. Maillet does not object to the poem itself so much as to theinstitutionalization of Longfellow's vision by a conservatively nationalistic clericalélite out of touch with the people and their traditions:

Mais, entendons-nous bien, le but de l'élite qui propose une nouvelle idéologiefaite d'un mélange d'assomption, de tricolore étoile, de loyalisme envers la langue,la religion et la terre des aieux, idéologie que nous qualifierions d'évangélisme,si nous osions, n'a rien à voir avec la conservation des véritables traditions popu-laires d'Acadie.29

It is through art, that is to say through the politics of parody, that this "evan-gelism" can best be exploded: the spokesman's loyalty to the Acadian flag,language, and religion is replaced, for Maillet, by an allegiance to the Rabelaisiantrinity of "conte, roman, épopée."30

Two passages from the novel emphasize the relation between writing and free-dom mentioned in my introduction : Ti-Jean Fourteen's quest for the three magicwords that will allow him to marry and to live happily ever after; and CaptainBeausoleil's second, exaggerated account of his ship's miraculous rebirth andrechristening. The first involves Bélonie's tale of the white whale transformed,on the eve of the storyteller's death, into that of the sleeping giantess. At first thisnever-ending tale seems to be the literal embodiment of Bakhtin's "unfinished andopen body (dying, bringing forth and being born) . . .not separated from theworld by clearly defined boundaries."31 When the Acadian everyman Jean Le-blanc ("John Smith") half-emerges from the bowels of his ancestor clutchingthe three magic words which constitute the legendary buried treasure of his clan,he joins his latest creator Bélonie in partaking of the grotesque body which,according to Bakhtin, swallows the world and is swallowed by the world.32 Mail-let's contribution consists of the emphasis on language as the jewel buried in thedungheap: culture and identity emerge from the rediscovery of the word and itselusive, un/limited powers of renewal.

Just as the secretion of language in the grotesque body's nether regions mock-ingly celebrates Acadian dialects at the expense of codified French, CaptainBeausoleil's involvement in the "Charleston Whiskey Carnival," explicitly con-trasted with the Boston Tea Party, elevates Acadian history at the expense ofAmerican experiments and the high seriousness of their chroniclers. As Broussardrepeats to the carts the tale he told the crew of his ship's twin, an English vesseltaken over by American rebels, he simultaneously defers to and deflates his Ameri-can host's exploits. Foreign ears are opened and Broussard's tongue unfrozen bythe contraband Irish whiskey; his English gradually improves during the course of

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his tale about how the Pembroke/Grand' Goule came to speak only French. Thisprocess of translation invertedly mirrors the story itself, in which his crew is frozenalive when chased to northern climes by talking whales, only to return to life aquarter of a century later upon drifting south. When a melting hail of Frenchwords finally assaults the decks, we are once more confronted with a carnivalesquecelebration that blurrs distinctions between subject and object, signifier and sig-nified, story and narrative.

The reader joins an ever-expanding audience composed of the Virginian'screw, the caravan of carts, and the Acadians seated around the hearth a centurylater. Even in Philip Stratford's English translation,33 a version that the text seemsto anticipate, we run the risk of becoming Acadian under the influence. The text'sseduction of the reader, followed by a rude awakening from the illusion of freelyflowing speech, is in this instance accompanied by one of several literal explosions.The tower of Babel vies with a keg of gunpowder in a verbal revolution or artificeof fireworks:

La réserve de whisky d'Irlande fit un tel effet sur l'équipage de la Grand' Goule,que bientôt l'arsenal de Charleston se mit à résonner de mots sortis de tous lespays jalonnant l'Atlantique. On était en pleine Pentecôte. Ou à mardi gras. Unvéritable carnaval des mers qui vidait les tonneaux et striait le ciel de feuxd'artifice... . Un feu trop proche des poudres, à vrai dire : une partie de l'arsenal sauta.

On a accusé à tort la Grand' Goule: elle n'avait fait que fêter ses retrouvaillesavec le temps des mortels. (203-04)

The return to the land of the living, correctly translated by Stratford as "the landof mortal men,"34 is signalled by the breaking of a very long silence. "Frozenwords" suggest the sterile canonization of Acadian life by Longfellow; the meltingtorrent of words in Broussard's tale and in the telling of it suggests not a returnto pure primordial speech so much as the birth of Acadian writing and theacknowledgement of its debt to Rabelais' Gargantua as well as to the populartradition. Maillet's repeated emphasis upon narrative, carnival, and parody addspoignancy to her text, because these are not techniques so much as consciousstrategies for denying the ravages of time in the eternal struggle between thephantom cart and the Cart of Life.

NOTES1 Antonine Maillet, Pélagie-la-Charrette (Ottawa: Leméac, 1979), pp. 9, 84. All

subsequent quotations are taken from this edition.2 Linda Hutcheon, "Literary Borrowing. . . and Stealing: Plagiarism, Sources, In-

fluences, and Intertexts," English Studies in Canada, 12, 2 (June 1986), 231,234, 236-37.

3 Ibid.

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* Antonine Maillet, "Mon Pays c'est un conte," Etudes françaises, 12, 1-2 (April1976), 79-83·

5 Ibid.; see also Donald Smith, "L'Acadie, pays de la ruse et du conte: entrevueavec Antonine Maillet," Lettres québécoises, 19 (Fall 1980), 45-53, reprinted inhis Voices of Deliverance: Interviews with Acadian and Quebec Writers, trans.Larry Shouldice (Toronto: Anansi, 1986).

6 Allusions to biblical, Homeric, and Rabelaisian tales are fairly obvious. "Monpays, c'est un conte" is one of several sources which list the Gilgamesh, Iliad,Odyssey, and Don Quixote as influential epics, and Rabelais as "mon maître,"p. 81. The importance of Longfellow's Evangeline to Maillet's text is documentedand discussed below; in "Antonine Maillet: un entrevue de Jean Sarrazin," Forces,44 (1978), 30, the author reveals that she has also read Moby Dick in English,and Bélonie's tale of the white whale may owe as much to Melville as to Rabelais,parodically speaking. The author's repeated references to affinities with Ferronsuggest that she may also have had in mind a benign parody of his rather night-marish allegorical novel La Charrette (1968).

7 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Boston: TheM.I.T. Press, 1968), pp. 5, 187-88, 352, 422.

s Ibid., pp. 470-71.9 See note 2 above.

10 Alarjorie A. Fitzpatrick, "Antonine Maillet: the Search for a Narrative Voice,"Journal of Popular Culture, 15, 3 (Winter 1981 ) and especially Kathryn Crecelius,"L'Histoire et son double dans Pélagie-la-Charrette," Studies in Canadian Litera-ture, 6, 2 (1981).

11 René LeBlanc, "Structures et techniques du récit," Derrière la charrette de Pélagie:lecture analytique du roman d'Antonine Maillet "Pélagie-la-Charrette" (ChurchPoint, N.S. : Presses de l'Université Saint-Anne, 1984), pp. 15-16.

12 Crecelius, p. 211.13 James Quinlan, "'Pélagie-la-Charrette': Spoken History in the Lyrical Novel,"

Revue de l'Université Saint-Anne (1984-85), p. 29.14 Craig Tapping, "Witnessing the Lies of History: Archeologies of Truth in George

Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea."15 Nairn Kattan, Le Désir et le pouvoir: essai (Montreal: Editions Hurtubise HMH,

1983)·16 "Antonine Maillet: un entrevue de Jean Sarrazin," p. 34.17 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: the Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art

Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 116.18 Ibid., pp. 5, 55.19 Ibid., pp. 62-63.20 Renate Usmiani, "Recycling an Archetype: the anti-Evangelines," Canadian

Theatre Review, 46 (Spring 1986).21 Smith, p. 50.22 Antonine Maillet, "Témoignages sur le théâtre québécois," Archives des lettres

canadiennes, 4 (Montreal: Fides, 1976), 812.23 Antonine Maillet, Rabelais et les traditions populaires en Acadie (Quebec:

Presses de l'Université Laval, 1971).

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2 4 Smith, p. 50.25 Rabelais, p. 22.2 6 Bakhtin, pp. 8 10.2 7 Ibid., p. 439.2 8 Ibid., p . 11.2 9 Rabelais, p. 13.8 0 / . , p. 21.3 1 Bakhtin, pp. 26 27.3 2 Ibid., p. 317.3 3 Philip Stratford, trans., Pélagie (Toronto: General Publishing, 1983).34 Ibid., p. 142. Stratford's translation is both literal and lyrical; within the limits

of translation, I recommend it highly to readers who experience difficulty withMaillet's Acadian French.

Z0N6Erin Mourê

The freezing zone.Topical cartography.The chicken's neck, thawed & peeled to pinkness,broken off, stuck in the cavity where the lungs have been ruined,those soft organs with their wiring & bubbles,softer than the words "I love you."

0 small chicken with your window into the body, into whichmy hand.The ribs touched by, my fingers. Your aureole1 adopt, I am adopting.Your skin a covering not likeour skin, but so torn & wet & palethat when we say "skin" & touch it, we think of nothing, least of allourselves.

The cells of grief by which we know you.The cells of pleasure when we place you on our tongue.The same, finally.Topical.What separates us from the not-us, from the air.

POEM

Bags of water & membrane magnified a million times, feeding blindnuclei.

It is why we love our children, finally, becausewater craves water to live,that, & our eyesight, & their small arms calling us,their long eyelashes,& the blue of their eyelids. The chicken's wet chest on the table.The stutter of the child's body,its watery cells held against the mother, surely,& against the dreamer, against the friend.

STILLStan Rogal

(to Jack Spicer)

A retired sailor is a seagullwith one leg balanced at the end of a pier.Waiting.The sailor waits for his ship to come in.The seagull waits for what is offered.In the attitude of a child.Between them, the forgotten bait.Beyond is the ocean.Each side conceals its emptiness.Its danger. Its fear.Still. The bait is real &the gull leans from one eye.No poison can deter this craving.Still. The cast of a shiphooks a second eye.No ghost can deter this longing.

At the edge of the oceana child wanders unaffected.Still.

(January 20, ig8y)

57

LANGUAGE AND LONGING INJOY KOGAWA'S "OBASAN"

A. Lynne Magnusson

There is a silence that cannot speak.There is a silence that will not speak.Beneath the grass the speaking dreams and beneath the dreams

is a sensate sea. The speech that frees comes forth from thatamniotic deep. To attend its voice, I can hear it say, is to em brace its absence. But I fail the task. The word is stone.1

W

HAT DOES IT MEAN to attend a voice by embracing itsabsence? And why does a novel that finds such adequate language for a story ofsuffering persistently question the adequacy of words? Joy Kogawa's Obasan hasrightly been celebrated for its power as a political speech act, as a strong protestagainst the treatment of Japanese Canadians in the years of and following theSecond World War. What has received less attention is Kogawa's pervasive con cern with the act of speech itself. Naomi's individual drama is closely caught upin her linguistic anxiety, which comes to serve as a synecdoche for her estrange ment — from others, from her cultural origins, from the absent mother who pre occupies her thoughts, from her past.

Reasons for Naomi's distrust of words are not hard to find — some common place, others particular to the circumstances of Naomi's upbringing. Revelationsof the kind the novel builds toward — the private aftermaths of the Nagasakibombing — we are accustomed to think of as "unspeakable." And the printedwords — newspaper clippings — in Aunt Emily's file about the working con ditions of the Japanese Canadians in the beet fields of southern Alberta — "G rin ning and happy" — are far removed from the child Naomi's ordeal on theBarkers' farm. Not only do the official accounts in print — all that were availableto Aunt Emily, removed in Toronto from the actuality of the suffering in G ranton— misrepresent Naomi's experience, but Naomi herself cannot find words to tellEmily: "I cannot tell about this time, Aunt Emily. The body will not tell" ( 196).It is not just that to find words is to retrace the pain; language seems to yieldonly a shallow evocation of intense experience. Furthermore, these commonplacesabout what language cannot adequately express are characteristically the rhetori cal servants of the writer's adequate expression. Speaking of something as in

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expressible has the effect of intensifying what is expressed. For the skilful writer,deprecating the adequacy of words is more often a strategy for expression than anadmission of failed expression.

Direct references to inexpressibility are by no means Kogawa's sole resourcefor emphasizing this pervasive concern. The struggle to hear and the struggle tospeak are not merely the content of the proem whose opening lines I have quotedabove. The style of the proem and — equally — the style of many sequences ofthe novel itself bespeak an effort at speech. The characteristic style is poetic andimagist rather than novelistic or discursive. The images of the proem progresswith a dreamlike fluidity through association, with the linkages not fully articu-lated for the reader. Neither is the connection between the first and secondsentences made explicit:

There is a silence that cannot speak.There is a silence that will not speak.

The reiterative structure of the short sentences places emphasis on the differencebetween "cannot" and "will not" ; but the reader, without the guidance of logicalindicators, is left to determine whether two silences are being distinguished orwhether an initial formulation of an elusive proposition is being reformulated.Also notable are the universalizing use of the definite article ("the dreams," "thespeech," "the word," "the stone," "the sealed vault," "the seed flowers"), "thespeech" and "voice" attributed to no specified speaker, the disembodied " I"(Naomi? Kogawa?) : the language of the proem is indeterminate and, perhaps,for the reader, indeterminable. The writer's words, as tracks of the writer's mean-ing, are almost as elusive as the voice and words pursued in the writing: "Thesound I hear is only sound. White sound. Words, when they fall, are pock markson the earth. They are hailstones seeking an underground stream." Some mightattribute the pictorial and disjunctive qualities noted here to Kogawa's poeticvocation, or to her Japanese cultural and linguistic heritage, and consider that asufficient explanation. But Kogawa can and does vary her style, easily managing— for example — a direct and colloquial style in the diary entries of Aunt Emily.This suggests that variations in style within the novel are motivated by the desireto achieve particular rhetorical effects. In the proem Kogawa creates for thereader a model of reading analogous to the experience with words that is beingdescribed; that is, the style acts out the content.

Kogawa's use of Japanese in the novel further dramatizes her protagonist'ssense of language as isolating and alienating. Early in the novel, Naomi's dis-comfort with a new school year at Cecil Consolidated and her estrangement fromher students are expressed through linguistic difference :

"Miss Nah Canny," he [Sigmund] says."Not Nah Canny," I tell him, printing my name on the blackboard, NAKANE.

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"The a's are short as in 'among' — Na Ka Neh — and not as in 'apron' or 'hat'."Some of the children say "Nah Cane." (5-6)

The macaronic quality of much of the dialogue — mixing English and Japanesephrases — portrays Naomi as a linguistic amphibian, living in two verbal worlds,comfortable in neither. Naomi's movement between the two languages rendersboth languages opaque to her, distracting her attention in many instances fromany immediate sense communicated by words to their pronunciation or phrase-ology:

In love? Why do you suppose we use the preposition "in" when we talk aboutlove? . . . What does it mean to be "in" something? (6)

In the "Japanese English" which Stephen and Naomi spoke as children the rela-tionship between words and objects was complicated and confused: Stephen"called margarine 'Alberta', since Uncle pronounced Alberta 'aru bata', whichin our Japanese English means 'the butter that there is'" ( 13). This confusion oftongues motivates, in part, Naomi's longing for a "living" or "freeing" or "word-less word," a purer language in which the broken mosaic of speech is repaired,just as the diversity and transience of human languages — the argument of Babel•—• have led most civilizations to imagine a primal and perfect language. InChristian tradition, it is the language spoken at the beginning of time when Adamnamed all living creatures and the language to be spoken at the end of time when,as the passage from Revelation which Kogawa quotes as her epigraph announces,the saved will be given "a white stone / and in the stone / a new name writ-ten. . . ." It is the language which bodies forth the original Logos, the Word ofwhich human words are the broken shards.

U U T THERE ARE MORE SPECIFIC REASONS for Naomi's privi-leging of what is known without words over what is made known by words,reasons pertaining not to the universal quest for lost origins but to her privatequest for lost origins. Naomi's thoughts recur persistently to the mother she hasso little information about. The remembered quality most cherished in the lostmother is her knowing without words, her accepting without words. Naomi'smemories are of unmediated communication. What has been lost with the loss ofthe mother is the silent knowing, which shields

what is hidden most deeply in the heart of the child. She makes safe the smallstirrings underfoot and in the shadows. Physically, the sensation is not in theregion of the heart, but in the belly. This that is in the belly is honoured whenit is allowed to be, without fanfare, without reproach, without words. (59)

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Words signify reproach and separation; but the child that Naomi remembers isinseparable from the mother Naomi remembers:

I am clinging to my mother's leg, a flesh shaft that grows from the ground, a treetrunk of which I am an offshoot — a young branch attached by right of flesh andblood. . . . The shaft of her leg is the shaft of my body and I am her thoughts.(64)

Naomi longs to recover the sensation of her mother's immediate presence; andit is as a falling off from this original and fundamental security of her childhoodthat she measures and defines the qualities of her world after her mother's dis-appearance.

One can understand Naomi's reconstructed version of her early childhoodsecurity in a wordless world from two perspectives, one culturally specific, theother universal. Naomi remembers her mother as the epitome of "Japanesemotherhood," the embodiment of an ethical and social code of behaviour thatis part of the heritage lost in the dispersal of the Japanese Canadians. This codeis characterized by a precedence of deeds over words, or by a decorum of appro-priate gesture. The needs of the child are honoured and supplied before they arespoken, so that in Naomi's recollection of her early home : "When I am hungry,and before I can ask, there is food. If I am weary, every place is a bed" ( 56 ).Not only are deeds of service performed without the stimulus of words, but what-ever deeds are performed pass without words or signs of praise or blame. Thisethic is most fully illustrated in the episode where Naomi endangers the newchicks by placing them in the cage with the hen. When, to the child's alarm, thehen attacks the chicks, Naomi's mother reacts to save them "without a wordand without alarm" :

All the while that she acts, there is calm efficiency in her face and she does notspeak. Her eyes are steady and matter of fact — the eyes of Japanese motherhood.They do not invade and betray. (59)

By contrast, Mrs. Sugimoto's "glance is too long"; in the language of eyes shepasses judgment, holding a mirror before the child of her shame. Within thisvalue system, language impugns the integrity of action.

Yet while this myth of loss is embedded within a specific cultural and historicalcontext, we can also see it as a depiction of a universal psychological drama.Naomi's memory of a direct wordless possession of her mother — articulated inthe image of the flourishing tree — resembles the Freudian myth of a pre-Oedipalworld of plenitude, before the child is conscious of the differences that are to defineits subjectivity and individuality. In its general outlines, Kogawa's representationof the myth of separation from the mother perhaps approximates most closely toJacques Lacan's reinterpretation of Freud via Saussure and structural linguistics.Lacan rewrites Freud's account of the Oedipus complex in terms of a structuralist

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or post-structuralist conception of language. In this version the crisis of separationfrom the mother's body coincides with entry into the symbolic order of language.Language, in this view, is conceived as an unending process of differentiation anddeferral, in which each term has only a relative and negative value. One pre-condition of the sign is that it is not what it represents, that it presupposes theabsence of the object it signifies. Hence to enter into a world of relationshipsmediated by language is to enter into a world of endless yearning, where wordsand substitute objects always register a lack.2

To recover knowledge of her mother, the adult Naomi has only words, pictures,and other substitutes. These substitutes are devalued in the novel as signs of thelost presence that, like the "icebreaker questions that create an awareness of ice"( 225), themselves create an awareness of absence. Of the oppositions that providethe structure of the novel, that between the wordiness of Aunt Emily and thesilences of mother and Obasan is as prominent as the opposition between theabsence and presence of the mother. (Naomi studies the family picture takenin 1933, searching for resemblances between the two Kato sisters, Aunt Emilyand mother, and finds none.) Emily, the "word-warrior," regards written lan-guage as the political means of restoring the property and dignity that werestripped from the Japanese Canadians in the Second World War; moreover, herlumpy parcel contains in a grey cardboard folder the private letters in a languageNaomi cannot read that provide her only means to answer the persistent question,"Why did my mother not return?" (26). Yet Emily's naïve claims that wordscan render the truth about the past are always attended by the writer's irony andNaomi's skepticism. Emily exhorts Naomi to "Write the vision and make it plain.Habakkuk 2:2," yet her bold imperative is rendered in handwriting "as wispyand hard to decipher as the marks of a speed skater on ice" (31). Repeatedly, asEmily avouches the transparent truths of her words, the writer emphasizes theevident opacity of the signifiers. For Naomi, Emily's words are, like the words ofthe proem, only

White sound. Words, when they fall, are pock marks on the earth. They arehailstones seeking an underground stream. (Proem)

The more fervently Aunt Emily presses Naomi into the wordy world, the strongerbecomes her sense of alienation from it: the "words are not made flesh" (189).

α"BASAN'S POSTURE OF SILENCE supplies the alternative inNaomi's adult world to Emily's loquaciousness: "How different my two aunts are.One lives in sound, the other in stone" (32). Yet the novel presents an antithesisnot only between the distortions of words and the inviolability of silence but also

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between two kinds of silence. Whereas the mother's silence was understanding,Obasan's silence is inscrutable: "Obasan gave me no answers. I did not have,I have never had, the key to the vault of her thoughts" (26). Obasan's placewithin the patterned set of relationships articulated by the novel is more complexand ambiguous than Emily's. Measured against the wordless communion withthe mother, Obasan's silences and her oblique, indirect, evasive responses to ques-tions frustrate Naomi. They construct an impenetrable barrier against communi-cation. Furthermore, set against the remembered warmth of the mother's body,Obasan's affection is undemonstrative: a "hug would startle her" (27). For themost part, Naomi feels Obasan's silence and demeanour as lack or absence, ameasure of what she has lost with her mother's silent presence. Yet this strictopposition is not consistently operative within the novel, for Naomi seems tohonour Obasan's silences above Emily's words. She works more diligently todecipher Obasan's silences — though she never succeeds — than she does to de-cipher Emily's words. At times, Naomi's imagery articulates her confidence thatObasan's stony silence shields a more authentic language: "Obasan's languageremains deeply underground" ( 32 ). The imagery here is reminiscent of that whichrepresents the narrator's quest for the "living word" : "If I could follow the streamdown and down to the hidden voice, would I come at last to the freeing word?"(Proem).

Yet if Obasan's silence is found to be as empty as Emily's words, it is notbecause her silence is different in kind from the mother's, but because of therelationship Obasan herself occupies in Naomi's psychic language to the mother.Strangely enough, even while Obasan's qualities are usually cast in a negative lightwhen set against the mother's, one cannot fail to recognize in Obasan qualitiesthat are virtually identical to those attributed to the flesh-and-blood mother.Obasan, in fact, embodies the ethics of "Japanese motherhood" as fully as Naomi'smother. One of the many illustrations one can point to occurs during the traintrip to Slocan, when Obasan, seeing the solitary young woman with a "tinyred-faced baby" recognizes "hurt and a need for tenderness" (112-13). Obasansupplies her need, proffering a gift of fruit — without a word — and deliveringto her the old woman's makeshift gift of a diaper. Naomi remains aloof from thegift-giving, unwilling to deliver the gifts herself. Obasan tries to impart thissystem of value to the children by her own example, but as Naomi comes tounderstand what is expected of her, she registers impatience and feels constricted :

We must always honour the wishes of others before our own. We will make theway smooth by restraining emotion. Though we might wish Grandma andGrandpa to stay, we must watch them go. To try to meet one's own needs in spiteof the wishes of others is to be "wagamama" — selfish and inconsiderate. Obasanteaches me not to be wagamama by always heeding everyone's needs. That iswhy she is waiting patiently beside me at this bridge. That is why, when I am

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offered gifts, I must first refuse politely. It is such a tangle trying to decipher theneeds and intents of others. (128)

This expression of frustration is accompanied by nostalgic thoughts about thechild's lost home. One can perhaps explain why the child's reactions to twomanifestations of the identical code — in the mother's actions and in Obasan'sactions — are discontinuous. First, the code was ideal while it served the nar-cissism of the child, before any differentiation of the self and the other emergedto constitute the required behaviour as self-denial. Second, it becomes apparentthat this code does not, as was first supposed, bypass the complications andambiguities that beset language: "to decipher the needs and intents of others"requires the mediation of language, even if the signs to be deciphered are physicalgestures or signals other than spoken words. What seemed perfect in the mothercomes to seem curious in Obasan. Obasan's self-denial and her refusal to join inEmily's words of accusation and blame ("gratitude only" is her response to everysuffering inflicted by the arbitrary government decrees) win our admiration forher nobility and dignity; and yet we see these same qualities, reflected throughStephen's eyes and, to a lesser extent, through Naomi's eyes, as diminishing andvictimizing her, making her seem a fond and foolish old woman.

Only because Obasan stands in as a substitute for the mother in Naomi'spsychic language do her qualities have a negative value: "even with Obasan'swarmth and constant presence, there is an ominous sense of cold and absence"( 68-69 ) · The disturbing realization to which Naomi comes in the novel is thatwhatever lack there is in Obasan's silence is a lack that was always already there :"Gentle Mother, we were lost together in our silences. Our wordlessness was ourmutual destruction" (243). This realization emerges when the "wordless word"(241) of her mother's martyrdom — "Do not tell" (242)—finally reachesNaomi through the long-delayed mediation of the Grandmother's letters fromNagasaki. Her mother's "Do not tell" is juxtaposed in the adult Naomi's mindwith her suppressed memory of what the child "forever unable to speak . . . foreverfears to tell" (243) —the ugly story of her sexual violation by Old Man Gowerand the still more horrifying awareness of her own pleasure and complicity inthat violation ("I clamber unbidden onto his lap. His hands are frightening andpleasurable" [65] ). This juxtaposition leads the reader to recall how even theinitial account of her mother's silent knowing had to be supplemented:

There is nothing about me that my mother does not know, nothing that is notsafe to tell.

Except. . . Old Man Gower. (60-61 )

The Gower episode is carefully placed in the narrative sequence of events, imme-diately before the account of the physical separation of the mother and childwhen the mother's ship leaves the Vancouver harbour bound for Japan. Hence

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when we go back to the apparently definitive point of loss in the novel — themother's leave-taking — it turns out not to be the point of loss. The point ofloss appears instead to be the problematic episode of the child's seduction byGower.

A THIS POINT, the narrative sequence of those crucialepisodes delineating the child's initial relation to and separation from the motherdemands attention. The interposition of the Gower episode between the repre-sentations of wordless possession and of physical dispossession suggests a chron-ology of events which might lead one to identify Gower's interference as the causeof the child's loss. Before Gower: knowledge between mother and child is ante-cedent to words. After Gower: the silence hides a secret betrayal. But this formu-lation presupposes that Naomi's memory delivers an objective version of the earlychildhood events, unfolding in chronological order, while Kogawa instead invitesthe reader to regard the adult Naomi's search for lost beginnings as a highly sub-jective reconstruction: "All our ordinary stories are changed in time, altered asmuch by the present as the present is shaped by the past" (25). Naomi's effort inChapters Nine through Eleven to recreate her origins, to shape through memoryand imagination the story of her home life with her mother, is stimulated by anold photograph: "In the picture I am clinging to my mother's leg on a streetcorner in Vancouver" (47). Concluding Chapter Eleven and immediately pre-ceding the account of Naomi's physical abandonment by her mother are twocontradictory versions of the tree image I have mentioned earlier, the one inter-preting the physical adherence of child to mother represented in the photographas ideal unity, the other interpreting it as clinging parasitism :

I am clinging to my mother's leg, a flesh shaft that grows from the ground, atree trunk of which I am an offshoot — a young branch attached by right of fleshand blood. Where she is rooted, I am rooted. If she walks, I will walk. Her bloodis whispering through my veins. The shaft of her leg is the shaft of my body andI am her thoughts.

But here in Mr. Gower's hands I become other — a parasite on her body, nolonger of her mind. My arms are vines that strangle the limb to which I cling. . . .But the secret has already separated us. . . . My legs are being sawn in half.(64-65)

What Kogawa's use here of the present tense and her immediate juxtaposition ofconflicting versions of the mother-chHd relation signal is not temporal and causalsequence — before and after Gower — but the adult Naomi's competing inter-pretations of that one old photograph that provides such a tenuous link to herearly life.

What we find in Chapter Eleven then is a story and a counter-story, or apreferred myth of origins and unassimilated story elements that pull against it:

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the consoling story of a pre-linguistic paradise in tension with a supplement thatthreatens the consolation of the story. The violence which the Gower supplementthreatens to the preferred story seems to be played out obliquely in some ofNaomi's nightmares, as in the dream of Chapter Six where an idyllic scenepeopled by those with "no language" (28) or with a "language [which] has beenforgotten" (30) is disrupted by violent images of dismemberment.

The action of Obasan is Naomi's rewriting of her past:

The past, as Augustine said, does not exist, but our editing of the past, our imaging,our violence upon it — these are the most powerful of our activities, and ourdestinies turn on the strength, the direction, the anguish, and the wisdom we drawfrom or against those versions of reality.3

In Kogawa's words, the present alters the past: specifically, the mother's silenceafter Nagasaki alters the quality of her silence in Naomi's childhood: "GentleMother, we were lost together in our silences. Our wordlessness was our mutualdestruction" (243). After the long-delayed "telling" of Nagasaki, after Naomihas absorbed the hurtful betrayal of the "no telling" (232), Naomi relinquishesthe original myth of a pre-linguistic paradise. This revision of the past privilegesspeech over silence, language — with all its inadequacy ·— over a delusory word-less security. Furthermore, this new version of the past must alter Naomi's present.At the end of the novel Naomi leaves Obasan in the silence of her grief to revisitthe spot she had come to year after year with Uncle. As she leaves, she slips onAunt Emily's coat, perhaps a sign that she will enter Emily's (and Kogawa's)wordy world, that the new story of her past enables a new and richer story of herpresent.

NOTES1 Joy Kogawa, Obasan (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1981), Proem. All

further references to this work appear in the text.2 See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton,

1977). For Lacan's discussion of Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistiquegénérale, see especially "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reasonsince Freud," pp. 146-78. Anika Lemaire, in Jacques Lacan, trans. David Macey(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 1-64, reviews some of thedevelopments in structural linguistics and theory since Saussure that bear onLacan's views.

3 Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in RenaissancePoetry (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1982), p. 19.

66

INFLUENCESWm. B. Robertson

My father reached out and poked peoplewith his wordsmy grandmother's broguegiving them the thistle's jabas his voice rose,and it rose,to nudge his congregationto attentionin the pews

ranted, whispered, or calmevery wordwanted listening.

I still stare at the floorthrough the twenty minutesthat isn't singing, reading,or prayingmaybe still afraidof that much convictionbowed by that much power

remember his questionsabout my life of writinghow he pared away my reasonstill he got to hisand he asked me if I thought I hadsomething to say.

Talking over coffeeabout influences and styleI bandy big nameswith my friendshear beneath it allthe voicestill answering my fatheryes, yesnearly every day I answerYes.

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FRAMED VOICESThe Polyphonic Elegies of Hebert and Kogawa

P. Merivale

(ANADiAN WRITIN G IN T H E ig8o's — by Ondaatje,Munro, Bowering, Findley — seems to be characterized by an elegiac tone andstructure and a genealogical compulsion, which sets up not only "the writer aselegist," but the "reader as family historian." Books by Anne Hébert and JoyKogawa, Les fous de Bassan and Obasan, while forming part of this largergroup, resemble each other thematically and structurally in even more specificways.

The phonetic similarity of their titles, Obasan and Les fous de Bassan, is anagreeable coincidence which only a deconstructionist could love; more signifi-cantly, both were published by women Canadians within a year of each other atthe beginning of the 1980's ( 1981-1982)1; the key events of Hébert's novel occurin 1936, the very year in which the heroine-narrator of Kogawa's novel was born,and the stories continue up to 1972 and 1982 respectively; yet it is the manyframed voices of their elegiac telling that bring them most significantly together.

Two minority Christian communities, mythicizing themselves in biblical terms,2two chosen peoples being wiped from the earth by, in Les fous de Bassan, theircollective and individual guilt, by, in Obasan, their collective and individualsuffering: these communities are, in a sense, the central characters of these novels.Biblical allusions in each book, especially to the Books of the Prophets, speak ofloss, guilt, suffering, redemption, or the punishments of the Apocalypse. Exile,dispersal of families, bereavement, breaking of communal links, are recorded inboth books by survivors, who are themselves at a dead end of barrenness and ableto foresee only, and quite soon, the entire extinction of these chosen peoples.Miscegenation is the unspoken danger for one of these extended families, whileincest is the all-but-explicit terror of the other. Both books start and end — areframed — with cemeteries, church services, "pierres tombales," specific deaths.These books are both individual and communal elegies.

In Obasan, of the two families (Nakane and Kato) whose genealogy and closeinterweaving make their extended family into a synecdoche for the Japanese-Canadian community, we are repeatedly reminded that none of the three maincharacters, Naomi (the narrator), or her two aunts, Emily and Obasan, will bear

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children. Only Naomi's brother, Stephen, who has long since opted out of thecommunity, might still carry on the heritage: yet he may not even be Canadianany longer, but cosmopolitan (he is last seen keeping company with a Frenchdivorcée); at best his heirs will be Canadian — without a hyphen. A sombreparable for the Canadian mosaic.

In Hébert, the survivor who opens the book with his framing "livre" in presenttime (1982), the pastor Nicolas Jones, must, paradoxically, move backward tofind his progeny,3 back to the very beginning of the community, two centuriesearlier, in 1782 ; he must become, by a reversal of generation, the begetter of hisown ancestors :

Moi qui n'ai pas eu de fils j'engendre mes pères jusqu'à la dixième génération. Moiqui suis sans descendance j'ai plaisir à remettre au monde mes ascendants jusqu'àla face première originelle de Henry Jones, né à Montpelier, Vermont. (15)

He "frames" Hébert's book with the many little, literal, frames he places aroundhis ancestors, who are caricatured in his strange self-painted gallery, somewhat asNaomi's genealogical reflections are set off by the framed family photographsfrom the time of her early childhood in the coastal paradise of Vancouver, fromthe time before her mother's leaving ends her personal paradise, before the per-secution and expulsion of the Japanese community in 1941 ends their communalparadise.

As in that time of childhoods remembered in Hébert's book — all that appar-ently halcyon yet menacing experience which precedes the fatal summer of 1936— early paradise is followed by collective dispersal or death for most of thecharacters: "we disappear into the future" (O. 112); "résidu d'une tribu en voiede disparition" ( FB 15), but by a kind of emotional paralysis or living death forthe frame narrator. Kogawa's Naomi resembles Hébert's two survivors of thatearly time, Nicolas, "living in the frame" for forty-six years, caught in his patternof old habits, waiting to die, and Stevens Brown who, like Naomi, exiled from thecoast, is like Nicolas, living only to complete his confession, his last letter, theframing narrative which concludes the book, at which point he will kill himself.Only these doubtfully redemptive frames remain, in Hébert, as fractured elegiesfor the time before the fall, ambiguous confessions of guilt and complicity andmarkers for the forty-six-year-long borderline that stretches out between Fall andExtinction. Naomi, likewise (indeed more explicitly), writes an elegy for the deadand the almost-dead of her fractured community. She, too, has been "living inthe frame" of three decades of non-life, of emotional sterility and non-stop grief.She is "tired of living between deaths and funerals, weighted with decorum"(183), with endless absence, like "snow . . . burying me beneath a growing mono-chromatic weight" (200). But she is perhaps more hopeful of the healing powersof art than Hébert's narrators are: it seems that her elegy (the novel) may at

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last free her for a life of her own, by means of this adequate memorial, thisspeaking history of her lost community. Her emotional stunting has been a nega-tive, unflowering silence, "the silence that cannot speak" (Prologue) ; restored tospeech, and perhaps also to feeling, by the slow findings-out which constitute thechief patterns given to the events of the novel, she makes her book self-reflexivelyout of her account of its own making, out of the dialectic between the noise, thefacts, the history, the political polemics of Aunt Emily, the hyphenated Canadian,and the silence, the feeling, the sheltering, the unspeaking lyricism ("the silencethat will not speak," as it turns out) of Obasan, Japanese still, to the very end,and although in Canada, not yet Canadian. This book, once made, can at lastredeem, perhaps, the time of suffering.

In Hébert, we are told at once that the community founded by the Loyalistsin 1782 is being taken over — both the land and its history4 — by the Papists,the Francophone majority in Quebec. Conversely, in Kogawa, it is the Anglo-phone majority which brutally expropriates the Japanese-Canadian communityof British Columbia. Aunt Emily quotes the Prophet Habbakuk, "Write the visionand make it plain. Habbakuk 2:2" (31 ), in an exhortation to Naomi, not at thatpoint understood by either her or the reader. But if we seek the context of thepassage we find, among other relevant things, that "the wicked doth compassabout the righteous . . . to possess the dwelling places that are not theirs" (Hab.1:4,6).

Kogawa's extended opening frame is made up of eighty pages in which Naomi'sshifting lyric voice interweaves past and present to narrate the loss of early para-dise from the perspective of her remembered childhood. In present time (1972),she wrestles, both within and outside herself, with the voices of Emily and Obasan,her two aunts. Although she puts up considerable inner resistance to the demandsof the Emily voice, continually undermining with nervous humour its patentresemblance to a large part of herself, it is the apparently more congenial voice ofObasan which in fact puts off her questions, makes no acknowledgement of herneed for answers, and tells her nothing. Neither Obasan nor Emily at this stagei.e., September 1972, when Obasan's husband, Naomi's Uncle Isamu, dies, andNaomi, now in her middle thirties, starts to write this novel) can give any work-able answer to Naomi's psychic entrapment in her perpetually thwarted searchfor her lost mother: "we're trapped . . . by our memories of the dead — all ourdead — those who refuse to bury themselves" (26). But both of these seeminglyincompatible voices are essential to her eventual synthesis of her self, which is alsoher novel. Naomi is "living in the frame" until the novel releases her; in politicalterms, she is living in the hyphen of non-identity, until the recovered knowledgeof her mother can make possible some accepting synthesis of her two origins,Japanese and (hyphen) Canadian (the key oxymoron of this fundamentally

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oxymoronic book) ; at the end of her narrative she puts on "Aunt Emily's coat"(246) to return to the coulee where she had last seen Uncle Isamu (1-4).

But that synthesis is only achieved in the other framing section, also in presenttime, which concludes the book. In the second narrative section of the book(80-110), the voice of Emily, in letters and diaries from the war (closely modelledon actual archival materials5 ), gives a chronological historical account of the factsand feelings of persecution and exile, of which Naomi had only her partial child'sview. These letters, written for Naomi's mother but never sent — a narrativestrategy with analogies in Hebert — are first read by Naomi herself, thirtyyears later. Thus, obliquely, these letters reach their true recipient. The middleand longest section of the book (110-210) is Naomi's extended chronologicalnarrative of the family's first exile in the B.C. interior, which is, for all its hardship,another version of childhood pastoral. The essential patterns of exile are estab-lished by key symbolic episodes, connected by lyric bridges (often painful andcomplex dreams) which remind us of Naomi's ceaseless though largely subliminalsearch for reunion with her lost mother. Then follows the emotionally concen-trated, deliberately abridged account of the second exile, the "exile from our placeof exile" (197), the physical and psychological horrors of Alberta, a time ofsufferings which complete the destruction of the family.

The last forty pages, the concluding frame, unfold the revelation of the loss-and-gain implicit in the opening frame section, in a way that reshapes into fullsignificance the narrative content of the first three sections : Naomi's Vancouverchildhood, Emily's own version of that time, and Naomi's exile years. Shortlythereafter she at last hears the letters about her mother which fill the gap in herheart, answer the haunting question "What happened to my mother?" and solve,as far as possible, the mystery which the reader, following Naomi in her reluctantinterpretation, has also been trying to work out. A second document, only under-standable in terms of Emily's whole package, has thus by multiple oblique indirec-tion also finally reached its true recipient. Naomi's subjective experience can atlast be understood in terms of Emily's wider, more "factual" political and histori-cal context, as Naomi in the end undermines her own uneasy irony about Emily'sexhortation to her to seek the "vision" predicted by Habbakuk. Emily, cryptically,had quoted only "Write the vision and make it plain," but the biblical versescontinue :

For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak. . . . Forthe stone shall cry out of the wall. (Hab. 2:2, 3, n ; italics mine)

Naomi does indeed, in the novel, achieve such a vision, on behalf of Emilyand all the others. But without Emily's package of documentary information,including the key letters in Japanese (which language, significantly, Naomi isunable to read), this elegy for the lost, barren community, this history of the

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chosen, suffering people, could not have yielded Naomi's visionary novel of therecovered self. Its slim outer frame deliberately concentrates the separate effectsof the two main "voices," the Emily voice and the Obasan voice. The single(unnumbered) page of the opening prologue is a complex prose lyric from whichemerge most of the image patterns of the book :

Beneath the grass the speaking dreams and beneath the dreams is a sensate sea.The speech that frees comes forth from that amniotic deep. To attend its voice,I can hear it say, is to embrace its absence. But I fail the task. The word is stone.. . . Unless the stone bursts with telling, unless the seed flowers with speech, thereis in my life no living word. . . .

This hymn to stones, to silence, and to the freezing of poetic speech contrastsstarkly with the prosaic eloquence of the document which Emily has been thrust ing upon an unwilling Naomi at intervals through the book ( Memorandum. . .to the House and Senate of Canada, April 1946 ), which constitutes the last threepages of the book, and makes up the corresponding outermost frame, in thesebare and historical words of protest :

. . . now that hostilities have ceased for some time, it cannot possibly be suggestedthat the safety of Canada requires the injustice of treating Canadian citizens inthe manner proposed.. . . (249)

The very last voice heard is thus an Emily voice, a citational, documentary one,as the first voice, the lyric prologue, is Naomi's giving of a voice to the silence ofObasan.

ΤAH]I H E SE NOVELS BOTH FOCUS on relatively small and anoma

lous corners of the Canadian mosaic: one the Japanese Canadians, in a sea ofappropriative Anglophones, the other an Anglophone Protestant community in aFrancophone Catholic sea. Their collective historical life is seen in the apocalypticperspective of an explicitly theological image of the end of the world in Hebert,while Kogawa images a secular apocalypse, in the form in which, inevitably, weall imagine it in our time, the dropping of the atomic bomb. Yet that fieriest ofall furnaces is carefully anticipated by allusions to the biblical fiery furnace withits angel protecting the believers, and to the smaller funeral pyre lit in the moun tains for their Buddhist grandmother (131).

Although both books are strongly structured by biblical patterns, images, andcitations, Christianity itself provides only ambiguous answers in either. To besure, its rituals and services provide an unironic basis for community in Kogawa,a consolation for victims, a binding together of his people by the good shepherd,Nakayama sensei, through his arduous journeys — on foot, by bicycle, finally byjalopy — to bring messages of love and unity to his scattered flock.

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But if Christianity is the one major force of social cohesion left to them, it isalso, in its great commandment to "turn the other cheek," a pattern for victimiza-tion. It is ironic that the Japanese-Canadians are more truly Christian in theirbehaviour than the Canadians: it is with real bitterness that Emily notes thecharity with which the exiles donated money to the victims of floods in BritishColumbia, floods on those very lands which had been taken from them withoutrecompense (188). The other cheek has been turned with (or rather without) avengeance, and what might come to be seen as a moral triumph Emily sensesonly as an ultimate self-victimization. Yet Christianity binds together on levelsother than the political or social: it binds together the book, rather as the "longthread knotted to Obasan's twine," by making up part of a Japanese ideogramfor love (228), also binds up that package of documents which will in the endgenerate Naomi's book of revelation. They "are piled as neatly as the thin whitewafers in Sensei's silver box" (182), for communication is communion; they are"white paper bread," like the biblically oxymoronic "stone bread" by whichIsamu showed a love as true as the bread was, paradoxically, inedible. For beforethe poem-prologue there is an epigraph, which, in context ( Rev. 2:10, 17), pro-leptically supplies an answer to the cry of cold silence from the Prologue : "I willgive him . . . in the stone / A new name written" is a message from St. John tothe Churches to "fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer . . . prison . . .[nor] tribulation." Is this citational voice Naomi's or Kogawa's? In any case,Christianity "binds" the book explicitly in this epigraph as well as implicitly, inthe mere justice (yet a justice, in that historical context, which it took charity todemand) demanded in the epilogue. Within these frames, the rhetoric andimagery of Christianity bind together the text rather as Nakayama-sensei bindstogether his flock, particularly when we note that it is he, functioning both inmeta-text and story, who persuades the elders that the time has come to tell thenow-grown children of their mother's fate, and whose mediating "voice" trans-mits the "voice" of Naomi's mother in the final, crucial revelation of his readingout loud the letters (233 ) ; those letters, we remember, that Naomi could not readfor herself, which have thus been a present absence throughout most of the bookas we read it.6 It is a very "Japanese" literary touch, perhaps an undeliberate oneon Kogawa's part, to make documents so obliquely received so crucial to eventualawareness.

But Nicolas Jones, Hébert's shepherd over an equally aging and dispersedflock, is far more ironically observed than Nakayama-sensei is. "Honore tes pèreet mère" (54; italics Hébert's) he says, to his aging and entirely orphaned congre-gation, in a public expression of his own private reversing of generations; hiscongregation is, collectively, as barren as he is himself. The double sex-murderwhich is the main plot-element of the book suggests an absolute and general guilt,ample grounds for an apocalyptic punishment, as powerfully as the atomic bomb

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can suggest an absolute and general suffering. (Kogawa does not emphasize, butmost of Kogawa's readers are likely to remember, that the bomb was droppedby "us.")

Of course "guilt" and "suffering" are by no means mutually exclusive concepts:there are victims in Hebert (almost always women),7 while a sense of guilt, ofcomplicity in their own oppression, suffuses the entire Japanese community. Al-though the Japanese are destroyed from the outside, by relatively impersonal(or at least, within the book, depersonalized) forces, their sense of being punishedfor some (objectively non-existent) guilt is one of the major inner obstacles totheir recovery of a sense of self-worth. Naomi's experience of child abuse (at thehands, so to speak, of a white male serpent in the Vancouver Eden) is an encap-sulated example of a guilt which is a part of suffering. Her sense of complicitywith her abuser separates her from her mother even before the latter's departure,and this is one of the crudest effects of the abuse itself. The males of this com-munity are, in turn, feminized, deprived of the power to defend their familiesor to make choices for them : there is, in exile, a certain equality between the sexes— an equality of victimization, at any rate. If Hébert's is an explicit feminism ofthe psychology of male domination and sexual power politics, Kogawa's is largelyan oblique feminism of marginality, of a silence finding a voice.

ΤI HII H E FRAMING VOICES IN TH ESE TWO BOOKS are those of these

three compulsive narrators, Kogawa's Naomi and Hébert's Nicolas Jones andStevens Brown; the framed voices in these highly polyphonic texts are voices ofintertextuality, especially in Hébert, voices of divided selves, voices of dialecticalprinciples embodied in actual characters. But they are chiefly voices of memory(or remembered voices) tortuously recollected, chewed over, re-experienced("Everything we have ever done we do again and again in my mind" [O. 68]),as the narrators — Kogawa's paralyzed by loss and suffering, Hébert's paralyzedby guilt — stop developing morally or emotionally, stop relating to other people(if they ever did), stop living, in short, in order to live in the past, among theliving dead:

Dernier jour du monde peut-être. Et si on vivait depuis ce temps-là, nous tous deGriffin Creek, assommés comme des vieux chevaux, sans savoir qu'on est morts?(FB 162; "stunned, like old horses, not knowing we're dead?" H. 119)

They are living, not in the picture, but on its edge, in its frame."Il fallait oublier pour vivre" (FB 52): neither Nicolas nor Stevens can

forget, so neither can live. They are delivered over to the judgments of theirprojected selves (like some of the victim-selves in Naomi's dreams, or the twoparts of her "self" as seen in Emily and Obasan). In Nicolas Jones' case these

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are his self-begotten ancestors, who "watch" from the walls without seeing, andthe childlike old spinster twins, Nicolas's principal but quite impervious audience(like the listeners to his sermons), who "listen" without hearing. In their excessof doubling they pathetically replace the twinlike cousins who are endlessly beingremembered. Likewise Stevens writes to Mic, his American "brother" (Hebertuses the English word, which becomes in the translation, for no good reason,"buddy"), who is unlikely ever to receive the letters, indeed who may already bedead himself, or to whom, like Naomi's mother, the non-receiving recipient ofAunt Emily's letters, they may never even be sent. This American "brother"stands in for the other true affection of Stevens' unloving life, his idiot brotherPercival, who is, of course (like the twins), also incapable of understanding.Nicolas sees Percival, the idiot, as an angel announcing apocalypse; Stevensironically hopes that Percival, the one innocent being in the story, will love himand welcome him to heaven as if he too were innocent. The idiot stands forStevens' hope of an uncritical forgiveness, and for Nicolas's fear of apocalypticjudgment. All these non-comprehending characters are in a sense implied readers,whose imperviousness only adds to the narrators' compulsiveness : to make themlisten; to make us read. Similarly Naomi's grandmother writes, apologetically, to"extricate herself from the grip of the past" (236) ; her writing the letter is thusan inner duplication of Naomi's writing the book, while Naomi herself perhapsachieves the acknowledgement and forgiveness only ironically hypothesized ofPercival.

Nicolas's will to evil, his lustful desire, are morally equivalent to Stevens' fullyenacted sexual violence. Nicolas circles around his guilt, evasively but obsessively,while Stevens manifests a Byronic egotism in his attempts at self-justification, butfor both of them Percival is (like Faulkner's Benjy, on whom he is almost tooevidently modelled8) a visible conscience. As narrators they could both say, asStevens actually does, "les mots . . . me délivrent de ma mémoire" (FB 233), i.e.,writing frees one from memory, but only, it turns out, to death. Stevens will(Nicolas will too) die when his memory is emptied out onto the page; their livesare co-equal to their memories. Although Nicolas's text is explicitly his "livre,"he seems to be ruminating rather than writing; Stevens, on the other hand, re-minds us continually that he is writing this account of himself for Mic,9 that"reader in the text" who stands for us and who must (like us) read to the veryend. Stevens' last words are a quasi-documentary postscript telling why he was notconvicted of the murders: his involuntary, forced confession was ruled inad-missible. We must read to the very end, that is, in response to Stevens' need toreveal that he was released from the bar of justice to the bar of his own self-judgment, which has now, forty-six years later, at last convicted him.

Nicolas and Stevens, one at each end of the synchronous frames (autumn1982) of the present-time narration, are thus linked to each other by innumerable

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internal echoes: Stevens thinks, for instance, of painting and graffiti (albeit "in-visible," thus metaphorical, ones [233] ) at perhaps the same moment that Nicolasdoes. Thus their narratives are linked across the body of the framed texts of thepast : two confessions of guilt framing the central, absent mystery. These narratorsare always on the edge of some absolute impassable to consciousness ( "Après moile gouffre abrupte. Le vide." [20] ), the last day of self or world, or in some statebetween definable states, with "aucun présent ni avenir" (235), purgatorialheroes without hope of redemption.10

HIÉBERT AND KOGAWA are both well known as lyric poets,nal, Grandmother Kato's letters, and various other inserted documents. Bothas well as novelists, and much of the tightly packed, interwoven image patterningof their novels reinforces and indeed weaves the texture of their "framed voices."It is more obvious in Hébert, whose multiple narrative voices are disjunct in away that forces the reader to attempt to join them, but Kogawa, too, juxtaposesvoices in a kind of dialogism: substantial portions of text consist of Emily's jour-authors use epigraphs, indeed Hébert uses half a dozen: St. Matthew, Jean-Pierre Jouve, Hélène Cixous, Shakespeare (those lines from Macbeth whichof course suggest the Faulkner text to which she is so clearly indebted, The Soundand the Fury), Hans Christian Andersen (from "La petite Sirène," which isechoed throughout the "Olivia" section), and finally, and rather inscrutably,Rimbaud ("Parade," Illuminations 4:29); I have not been able to locate thequotations from Jouve and Cixous. Both authors use two languages; Hébert hasnoted11 her desire to make Les fous de Bassan seem like a translation from theEnglish by, among other things, employing English words embedded in her Frenchtext; Kogawa uses a great deal of Japanese, likewise, for exoticism, to emphasizedifferences, for lyric effect, and indeed for realistic effect, as in the speech ofObasan herself, or Isamu, whose Japanese is routinely translated for us by Naomi,or in the macaronic church services in which Japanese and English are employedalternately. Another "language" thematically significant in Obasan is of coursemusic; it permits Stephen's slippage from his national (i.e., linguistic) identity,which he rejects in so many ways from the very beginning, into cosmopolitanism,yet it binds Stephen to his father as the language of silence binds Naomi to hermother. Among many silences, there is also the silence of Japanese words andculture to an ear •— Naomi's — which cannot entirely hear them. All three of theframe narrators internalize silences and voices from the past, words and cries, thevoice (or the Word) of the preacher, and of course the extended echoes of theBible, all of which they share, although Hébert would otherwise seem to be farmore caught up in the intertextual "voices" of other authors (Gide, Camus,

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Baudelaire, Robbe-Grillet, to mention a few of the more obvious ones, in addition,of course, to those pointed to in the epigraphs, and the omnipresent Faulkner)than Kogawa is. As the abridged reference to Habbakuk serves as the kernel ofKogawa's meta-text, so the buried reference to the Book of the minor prophetMalachi expands into a key account of Nicolas's motives for tramping his ownendless round of self-justification. Is it significant that he is said to be reading"Malachie, son préféré parmi les douze petits prophètes" (165) at the time ofthe murder, and that it is Percival who asserts this fact? In any case the Bookof Malachi enunciates a curse upon priests who mislead their flock, who speakfalsely, who protect sinners and oppress "the hireling. . . the widow, and the fa-therless," but particularly addresses one such priest who has "dealt treacherously"with "the wife of thy youth . . . yet is she thy companion, and the wife of thycovenant. . . and a book of remembrance was written . . . the day cometh, thatshall burn as an oven" (Mai. 2:14, 3:5, 16, 4:1). There is much food here forNicolas's endless ruminations. But Malachi is, even more interestingly, a bookon the edge, where Hébert's characters obsessively position themselves; as the lastbook of the Old Testament (three very slim books further than Habbakuk), itis placed on the textual edge between the Old and the New Testament, withoutever reaching, of course, the "newer," and more merciful, commandments of theNew.

The "edges" of the book serve many thematic and structural functions: theseveral overlapping narrations approach closer and closer to the edge of the event,unspoken because unspeakable as well as unknown, the edge of the novel's absentcentre, fully revealed only at the very end of Stevens' confession. When thecharacters themselves reach, are stopped at, fall over that edge, it is in two ways :Nora and Olivia reach the time-stopping moment of their deaths. "Ah ça!l'horloge de la vie s'est arrêtée tout à l'heure, je ne suis plus au monde" saysOlivia (200; italics Hébert's) as she crosses over into the life-in-death of herghostly wave-tossed afterlife. But Stevens and Nicolas are, at that same edge-moment, pinned into the time-stopped frame of their death-in-life.

The edges manifested in the details of the imagery are diurnal and seasonal(up to the very end of the very last day of summer, the point at which "time,"in both senses, stops), topographical ("au bord de la mer" [14 and elsewhere];"la lisière du ciel et de l'eau" [51]), spatial (the last house in the town, thethreshold), and, repeatedly, the tideline on the beach, marked by the seaweedcrushed by the feet of Nicolas or Stevens or Percival, following in each other'stracks along the margin between the (male) land-realm and the (female) sea-realm, those border territories of beach and beach house on which the acts ofmale erotic aggression take place.12 As in Keats or Rilke, images of getting closerand closer to the edge suggest the unspeakable which is beyond, that which con-sciousness cannot reach. But this mystery is also put (surprisingly, by Stevens)

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in the homely terms of "une femme qui a pris sa couture trop au bord et qui voitson tissu s'effilocher, entre ses doigts" (FB 80; "a woman who's sewn a seam tooclose to the edge" [H. 58]), which will inevitably deconstruct itself, ravellingout into non-existence, or at least non-seamness. Stevens sees himself as the PiedPiper, who will of course lead the children of the town away, beyond, over theedge, to their unravelling, linking up with the many fairy-tale motifs of childrenseeking parents, or parents abandoning children, found in Kogawa and Hébert.

The motif of voyeurism permeates the book; there are numerous reminiscencesof Le voyeur, Robbe-Grillet's postmodernist porno-Gothic "absent-centred" novelwhose narrative gap, repeatedly approached, but never filled in during the courseof the story, also contains a sexual murder, whose victim, like Hébert's Nora,nibbled by fishes, returns from the sea. Percival, whose act of voyeurism betraysNicolas to Irène, thus causing her suicide, narrates a whole section based on whathe has "seen." There is something almost Japanese in this eroticism of the look,13

in these different "languages" of the look: Naomi's shame and sense of complicityat perhaps being "seen" in the garage corresponds to Nora's at being doubly"seen" (Percival seeing Nicolas seeing her) in the bathhouse, as does the repeatedadvice to the girls not to "look up" at Stevens, for as with the Japanese, to lookis to invite victimization. Stevens, who constantly sees others (the girls, the con-gregation) seeing him, is, himself, often seen darkly, framed in the "encadre-ment" of doorways (a point blurred in the English translation).

In Kogawa the structuring "frames" of imagery which open and close thebook are photographs, framed in a quite literal sense, ironically contrasted familyportraits : the united family of peacetime (17) is balanced against the cruellydeceptive publicity photograph of "one family, all smiles, standing around a pileof beets" ( 193) ; "the small black and white snapshot of a graveyard scene" (ofher father [211]) balances the photograph of father, uncle, and the beautifulabout-to-be-confiscated boat (21); the photograph of the infant Naomi clutchingher mother's leg recurs (46-47, 242). The emotional point of pages of politicalcomment is compacted into the depiction of Obasan going up into the attic tolook for . . . we don't yet know what, but finding a photograph of the dead Isamu :his deportee's ID card, which makes a mockery of his "identity," by framing thepicture, his face, in the frame of another culture's number for him, another man'swhite RCMP signature permitting his existence (24, 244).

In fact Isamu, seemingly not as important a character in the story as the threepresent women and the one present-yet-absent one, is nevertheless central to itsimagery. It is he whose saying "It is like the sea" frames the story with hispalimpsestic vision of irretrievably inland Alberta somehow containing the wavesof the lost Pacific, on one shore or the other of which Isamu, the fisherman, canhave his only true being. It is Isamu who finds shellfish fossils there, leadingNaomi, the "family historian," to wonder about "some genealogist of the future"

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(225), who will similarly marvel at finding the bones of so many fishermen buriedon the prairies, in a kind of "cimetière marin," as Hébert, echoing Valéry, wouldsay (FB 224). Olivia has the same palimpsestic view of sea and land: "L'avoinese couche au soleil, se relève et moutonne comme un mer peu profonde et verte"and the same sense of the seepage of memory into dreams (FB 214-15; italicsmine; cf. 199), and Lethbridge, like Cap Sauvagine, is "a city of wind . . . flat asthe ocean . . . the edge of the world" (O. 190-91 ). Naomi postulates of Isamu'sdying moments an almost metaphysical image of man as an inverted tree, as Isamumoves downward toward the subterranean ocean of his earliest memories, seekinga dream or vision by a process proleptically enacting Naomi's own search for visionthrough memory, which makes up the book:

Perhaps everything was reversing rapidly and he was tunnelling backwards top tobottom, his feet in an upstairs attic of humus and memory, his hands gropingdown through the cracks and walls to the damp cellar, to the water, down to theunderground sea. Or back to his fishing boats in B.C. . . . In the end did he man-age to swim full circle back to that other shore and his mother's arms . . . ? (14;italics mine)

His search, used as an emblem for hers, culminates in the almost verbatim repe-tition, at the end of the book, of the imagery of the sea/prairie with which itbegan. Naomi, on her own behalf, also tends to see palimpsestically : "Our atticsand living-rooms encroach on each other" (25), as she images her own regressionsback to her remembered origins, her return to her father's arms (170) or to hermother's (241).

Isamu's or Naomi's memory, going in reverse, operates much as Stevens' doeswhen he images the process of his painful recollections as fishing up drownedcities (FB 238). However, within Hébert's text that image operates to link hisconfessional procedures with Olivia's narrative of the ghostly mermaid kingdomunder the sea. And Olivia's account has been, as text, somehow generated byPercival's vision of her oceanic afterlife: three disjunct narrative voices are thuslinked by the textual voice, as we have already seen occurring in Stevens' andNicolas's frame narrations.

It is in Olivia's mermaid kingdom, suffused with reminiscences of the HansChristian Andersen fairy tale "La petite sirène," that Hébert's subplot of a femaleidentity quest comes to the fore. Not only Andersen's but also Hébert's heroinehas a grandmother who was especially fond of her granddaughters, serving as thematriarchal governing principle, like a less passive, more dominating Obasan.Stevens, a demonic version of Andersen's handsome prince, is responsible forOlivia's loss of the earthly version of this realm. If we look back at Andersen'sbaleful parable of female sexual awakening, we find that the mermaid, seekingto go on land as a human girl to seek out the handsome prince, must sacrifice herloveliest quality, her voice, in order to woo him, silently. By a mere coincidence,

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of the sort which conceals an underlying shared significance ( perhaps a Philomelamotif of woman muted ), one of Naomi's nightmares comes from the tale of theKing bird, who takes out the tongues of children who tell lies. When Oliviarecollects her relationship with her dying mother, their poverty, their diggingpotatoes, the female bonding of their society over against the patriarchal one, andasserts that "ma mémoire ressemblent à ces longues guirlandes d'algues . . ." (200)and that "Le mystère de la vie et de la mort de ma mère n'aura plus de secretpour moi" (211), we are reminded not only of Andersen's companionship ofwomen under the sea, and of the "feminized" Japanese community in the Albertabeet fields, but also, above all, of Naomi's oceanic imagery in her dream of hermother, whose "flailing arms. . .beckon like seaweed" (O. 241; italics mine),because, of course, the imagery of the "amniotic deep" is a constant for the femalerealm." There is nearly as much simile and metaphor from the sea in Obasan,where the sea is only a recollected setting, as there is in Les fous de Bassan, almostentirely set "au bord de la mer."

Naomi, like Nicolas or Stevens "skirt [ing] the edges" of the "whirlpool" ofmemory (O. 53) with uninterpretable dreams in tandem with unreadable letters(30), whose nightmares are of male violence, death, gruesome injury, and femalesuffering, is firmly sucked down into that whirlpool by new knowledge, indeed bythe "facts" which she has evaded or been deprived of for so long. Her questioninggets ever closer to the long-sought answer as the frames of the story close up oneach other toward the end. Her last dreams unite Aunt Emily's string to Obasan'stwine (the long thread of the heart), and both to the maypole image of hermother, departing, yet at last returning. And one of the finest elegies in Canadianliterature, of the 1980's or of any other decade, seems to complete the elegiacform in the traditional way by (albeit cautiously) reaffirming life: "The songof mourning is not a lifelong song" ( 246).

Evidently the male characters of Hébert's story are to be seen as a fragmentedconsciousness, whose various narrative voices (Nicolas, Stevens, Percival, theanonymous plural inhabitants of Griffin Creek)15 are to be pulled together by thereader into the total of its fragmented narrative perspectives. While Naomi finallysucceeds in joining the divergent voices of Emily and Obasan, history and poetry,document and lyric, into the unified elegiac voice of her mother found again inherself, Hébert's reader is left to make an elegy for Griffin Creek from the frag-mented confessions of its ghosts and its living dead. Framed voices haunt us fromboth these books.

NOTES1 A much briefer version of this paper was read at "Canadian Writing in the

Eighties," MLA, 1985. The phrase "reader as family historian" is from MagdaleneRedekop's paper on Alice Munro, and my opening paragraph is an ex post factocomment on that panel.

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Quotations are taken from Obasan (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1981),from Les fous de Bassan (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982), and from In the Shadowof the Wind, trans. Sheila Fischman (Toronto: New Press Canadian Classics,1983), using the abbreviations O., FB, and H. respectively, wherever the referenceis not self-explanatory.

2 Antoine Sirois, "Bible, Mythes et Fous de Bassan," Canadian Literature, 104(Spring 1985), 178-82, gives an admirable discussion of biblical references inHébert, but he confines himself largely to those related to Creation and the Fall(i.e., Genesis) rather than developing those related to themes from Revelationand the prophetic books.

3 See John T. Irwin, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 64-67, on the fantasy of the reversal ofgenerations, with special reference to Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.

4 Ronald Ewing, in "Griffin Creek: The English World of Anne Hébert," CanadianLiterature, 105 (Summer 1985), 100-10, defines this component of the story asa historically accurate view of population decline in rural English Quebec (p. 101 ).

5 Joy Kogawa, "The Japanese-Canadian Dilemma," Toronto Life (December1985), p. 32. By this account, Muriel Kitagawa seems to have served as a partialmodel for Aunt Emily; Kogawa's admiration for her is palpable. See Roy Miki,ed., This Is My Own: Letters to Wes and Other Writings on Japanese CanadiansIQ41-1Q48 (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1985), for a selection of sources.

For Kogawa's own deeply serious Christianity — the power of prayer, the im-portance of love and forgiveness of enemies, and the characteristically oxymoronicconceit of "limpfing] triumphantly" — see her essay "Is There a Just Cause?,"Canadian Forum, 63 (March 1984), 20-21, 24. See also an interview "A Matterof Trust," University of Toronto Review (Spring 1985), pp. 28-31, for furtherevidence of her complexly ambivalent relationship (that of "a closet Christian")to traditional Christianity, contrasted to the "arrogance" of institutional Christian-ity. But Erika Gottlieb's "The Riddle of Concentric Worlds in Obasan" CanadianLiterature, 109 (Summer 1986), 34-53, brilliantly accounts for both time schemeand narrative structure by demonstrating that it is the three days of the Buddhistwake, between Isamu's death and burial, that determines the 'present time' of thenarrative, and the recurrent ritual of Buddhist mourning for Naomi's mother thatstructures, over eighteen years, the 'secret' that three days of meditation on thepast must unravel. The article is, further, a fine account of the significance ofNaomi's dreams.

6 I owe this and other points to stimulating discussions with Dr. Richard Cavell,whose "Dialogic Form in Klein, Kroetsch, and Kogawa" {Canada Ieri e Oggi[Fasano: Schena, 1986], 45-53) opens up these questions of absence and presence.Note also that the key letters are written by Grandma Kato to Grandpa Kato,then handed on to Emily, who makes two attempts to bring them to Naomi beforeSensei, ventriloquising, finally transmits the mother's voice to her. lia Goody("The Stone Goddess and the Frozen Mother: Accomplices of Desire and Deathin Tanizaki, Toy John and Obasan" forthcoming in Nature and the Search forIdentity in Canadian and Japanese Literature, ed. Tsuruta and Goossen) makesuseful comparisons between Obasan and several works by the modern Japaneseauthor Junichiro Tanizaki (particularly his "The Bridge of Dreams") in respectto various kinds of narrative obliquity, maskings, and the cruel keeping of secrets,and especially to the obsessive search for and memorialization of the lost, inacces-sible mother, a matter highly eroticized in Tanizaki, however.

7 Neil B. Bishop, "Energie textuelle et production de sens: images de l'énergie dans

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Les fous de Bassan d'Anne Hébert," UTQ, 54:2 (Winter 1984/5), 178-99, esp.pp. 179, 186-87.

* See Ewing, pp. 102-05, for a cogent account of parallels with The Sound and theFury, in addition to similar but less obvious parallels with Faulkner's Light inAugust (Nicolas resembling Gail Hightower, who sits by his window for years,effectively one of the living dead, until he comes to some understanding of his guilttoward his dead wife; Stevens resembling Joe Christmas, the wanderer and cruellover of an older woman, perpetrator of the key violence of the book).

9 See Janet Paterson on the slipping over of "les cris des fous" into "l'écrits des fous"in the self-reflexivity of both Stevens and Nicolas, Anne Hébert: ArchitextureRomanesque (Ottawa: Éditions de l'Université d'Ottawa, 1985), pp. 159-77. Shealso suggests that Les fous de Bassan is fundamentally "anaphoric" in theme andstructure in much the same spirit in which I suggest that Obasan is fundamentallyoxymoronic.

10 See my paper on the "purgatorial heroes" of Joseph Heller, William Golding, andAlbert Camus, among others, " 'One Endless Round': Something Happened asPurgatorial Novel," English Studies in Canada, 11:4 (December 1985), 438-49,for a fuller discussion of this concept, into which both Stevens and Nicolas fitclosely.

11 Interview, Châtelaine, February 1983.12 See an unpublished paper read by Kathryn Slott at "Anne Hébert: A Table

Ronde" MLA, 1985, for fuller development of Hébert's gender-linked topogra-phies.

13 Gayle K. Fujita ("'to attend the sound of stone': The Sensibility of Silence inObasan" [MELUS, 1987, forthcoming]) discusses the peculiarly Japanese sensibilityof the look, and of a certain way of paying attention, finding that the Canadian-Japanese is sufficiently similar to the American-Japanese sensibility to make hersense of ethnic background usable in accounting for Obasan in culturally Japaneseterms (see also her discussion of the key Japanese children's story "Momotaro"),much as Goody accounts for it in literary Japanese terms. Together they, along withGottlieb, provide a necessary supplement to my reading in "Canadian" terms.

14 There is another community of women alluded to in Naomi's very name; almostthe only book of the Old Testament to provide an affirmative paradigm of femalebonding (and even that one has to be read rather selectively) is of course theBook of Ruth. That Naomi is probably the only woman's name to be usable inEnglish, Hebrew (in which it means "sweetness," "blessed," or "my joy"), andJapanese (Tanizaki has a novel, recently translated, called Naomi, but the namemeans, in Japanese, "direct, beautiful") probably dictated its choice, and thusKogawa's chiasmic reversal of the roles of Ruth (the biblical daughter-in-law)and Naomi, but resonances of Keats' Ruth who, in tears, "sighed for home amidstthe alien corn" are likely also. See Fujita and Goody for a fuller discussion of theparallels with the Book of Ruth.

15 Neil B. Bishop, "Distance, point de vue, voix et idéologie dans Les fous de Bassand'Anne Hébert," Voix et images, 9:2 (Winter 1984), 113-29, comments on thebalancing of the collective masculine voice of the town against the collective femi-nine voice of Olivia's mothers and grandmothers.

N.B.: A translation into French of Obasan is underway; there has been for some timea Japanese translation, under the somewhat misleading title of Ushinawareta sokoku(i.e., The Lost Native [or Ancestral] Land).

82

STINTITIGO FISH6RM7IN& SULTRY ^FTGRNOON

M. Macfarlane

Ashwan listens for the fishhe wants to takestill easy in the reeds,mud song and minnows

his boat, a carved trunkrotting at one endleans sideways into the waterunable to help it

turning the blurred sky darkfor all that's beneath —

fish eyes, histories of finsenticing Ashwan innocently in

A sunfilled day. Crumbswash in from my platesas I scrape sand over themat the water's edge

watching the women spread cut reedson rocks to dry, to weave them into matsthat will still smell of water weedand fish eggs

They call out to Ashwan in tsutuhil,language of little birds, giggling

Don't fall inas he leans out farther than everwatching, cupping an earto listen to his fish.

: 40John Baglow

(for rgb)

so all of it strange,high and dry,i leave myselfwhatever this body and mind,get out of the towerwindow, get out,where the sun is the same,walk down the air stairsto some piece of a continent.

this is real, takesa long time though, believe.

and you, first at thepoint (i guess) of noreturn, this daystill ours,all its odd shadows.

n.

hell, why's he always around here,bush carand his skull decal ? drives you nuts,i know, all this talk,must be someteenage hero the wayi do go on, yeah,go on. all the time.

in.

you. me. i, that is,and you. one pairof ol' blue jeansgone in the knees.

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POEM

csny, clapton, all thatgood stuff, ungodlysurface we walk onthese days,and don'tlook down.

BCTTYErin Mourê

darkness & the empty moons, womenspeaking light words into the cups of each other's fingers.Or the mouth that fills a whole room, whisperingblack air, not saliva, & not im/pertinence.We are here forever, unspoken, our undershirts stick in the room's

heat,stick between the breasts, in the flat place over the bonethat holds the chestfrom tearing open, like the metal traps' cold tensitywhere we laid them rusted in the city river,drown set for muskratOur small hands frozen, without fingers, claws of ice holding stiff

snouts of fur,strange sprung words leaking

into our sentences."Α girls," the 2 year old girl called out at the supper table.Let's not say "G race" again, she said, let's say "Betty."In the second public grade of school there were5 Johns & 3 Debbies, 3 Darlenes, 2 Tims,most of them grew up called D idi or Evan, & I stared out the

windowat the racks of bicycles, tipped any way over, flat prairie line scape,the one consistent image I have of school.

Why are so many women lonely, empty as the inside of bicycles, asthe mouths using all the room,

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POEM

the boys in their tight jeans &slimness that will leave them in their 22nd year,the boys & their hard laugh who is tougher,boys getting at each other's love, thru the insideof women, their intermediary, their confessional.

I want to speak sexually of one thing — not male lovebut physical knowing : the distancebetween the breastbone & the palm, the twoimportant parts of the body.Where the water runs in the long veins, curving thru space.The palm where you can dive in & drink & never come up again,& forgive no one, & feel, as you break the surface —your head wet, streaming, smelling faintly of milk or oranges.

NOCTURNEC. M. Donald

first there were the satisfactions of loving,late at night, falling asleep round-edged;

then there was the release of sexgrudging and perfunctory perhaps but effective;

for awhile the mock resolution of rowsdissolving into tears, tiredness and rest;

but now the futility, no ends, not

trust enough to give up control and sleep;

reading and not reading in the small hours;

will not cry.

86

A SPACE TO PLAY IN; OR,TELLING THE (W)HOLE STORYThe Recent Poetry of Robert Gibbs*

Susan Rudy Dorscht

"What's your dad do?" I asked him."Oh, I don't call him that," Tibby said."What do you call him? Isn't he your dad?""He's Mr. Coghill. That's what I call him. That's what we all

call him. That's what you'll have to call him. Flowers Coghill,that's his name, but we just call him Mr."

"But what is he?""He's the father.""But what does he do?""He doesn't do anything. He's a poet.""Oh," I said. "Does he make up lots of it?""Lots and lots, all the time."

(Gibbs, A Mouth Organ for Angels 4.0)

And I must make doagain with words. (Gibbs, All This Night Long 11 )across such gaps as I leave in the scoreyou singing must throw your own bridges.

(Gibbs, The Tongue Still Dances 81)

I,IN A 1986 REVIEW ARTICLE for Canadian Literature Maritimewriter, poet, editor, critic, teacher (and gourmet cook) Robert Gibbs reminds usof an aesthetics his poems have always suggested, that

poetry is language. Language is physical and metaphysical, opaque and trans-parent, static and dynamic, discrete and continuous.. . . There is the guise of trans-parency — the poet says, "Look, I'm telling you straight." There is the guise ofopacity — the poet says, "Look, I'm not telling you anything." ("Chinese Jars"180)

In his most recent work, Gibbs adopts this "guise of transparency." He writes apoetry that draws attention to its own constructedness. He says, with the speaker

* The author wishes to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canadafor financial support during the writing of this article.

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in a very early poem, "I n the Valley of the Sixth Patriarch," "See how everypoem / in the end / turns into an alphabet song" {The Road From Here 23).

The "alphabet song" has often been an underlying, if not an obvious, subjectin Robert Gibbs' poetry and his prose. Lines in the poem "All this night long,"for example,

All this night long and longerI've been . . . slogging . . . tomake connections more connected to sayHey you there insisting you arethere Hey I have you here {All Τ'his Night Long 8),

or in "F or Ralph Gustafson Writing on Pierre Laporte" — "somewhere a mantaps at a poem / too faint almost to hear / yet in his silences / I can half discernthe shapes / he has found no words for" {A Kind of Wakefulness 13) — indicatewhat has always been Gibbs' interest in language as a material process.

In writing of this kind, it is the absence (what he calls, in the following as yetunpublished poem, "word holes") rather than the presence (the "whole" story)which is articulated:

Telling the Whole Story

She's at it again with her scissorsthe storyteller shearing out wordsLook I say as I gather them upa whole lovely lexicon Yes

she says But they have to go Lookhere's curd and belly and whistle fringeand scuttle lovely words But they won'tdo she says They won't doBrine and slew and spinning watchword andjumpsuit cringe and strangle Theywon't do They won't do The way you're goingyou won't have anything left

So why this snowstorm on the carpet?To make it true she says To makethe story true Now her pages catchinto each other word holes

join and unstarch her paper unsignits signs But it's just a story you're writingafter all isn't it? All the more reasonshe says All the more reason.

Even the form of this poem points out the holes in the whole story ( the wholes inthe hole story) ? Much of Gibbs' work offers the openness of the gap or break in

GIBBS

the line rather than the closed certainty of the comma or period. The lack ofpunctuation in fact signifies the open-endedness of story. It is the absence signifiedby these open spaces which allows the presence of the black marks on the pageto approach meaning.

Like the title of his 1980 League of Canadian Poets pamphlet, A Space to PlayIn, "Telling the Whole Story" suggests that the storyteller (a woman, signifi-cantly) is one who participates in "shearing out words," making a space, literally,to play in, where signs may be "unsigned." This open space of unsigned signs, ofun/author/ized writing, may be interpreted as a feminine space, in opposition tothe starched-closed structures available in masculine discourse. Where the patri-archal, author/itative voice of the poet would impose unity, coherence, singularity— "Look I say as I gather them up / a whole lovely lexicon" — the space of thiswoman's story is the place of the lexicon of holes, the place of the gap, the tear —"She's at it again with her scissors. . . shearing out words."

Similarly, the central and yet continually decentred "figure" in A Mouth Organfor Angels is, as "she" is in "Telling the Whole Story," a woman, or rather, ayoung girl. In an extremely feminist gesture, the protagonist Madelaine is renamed"Iris" by her grandmother, and thereby given an "eye-dentity" and a voice withwhich to speak. The spaces of both "Telling the Whole Story" and A MouthOrgan for Angels become open spaces of word play, of semantic process, ofnarrative possibility. As the storyteller in "Telling the Whole Story" punninglyanswers the poet's pleas to look at the lovely lexicon of words, "Yes . . . But theyhave to go. . . . They won't do / she says They won't do" (my italics).

The "true" story in this poem, as in much of Gibbs' work, is "true" only in thesense that it is aware of words as material things: "Brine and slew and spin-ning watchword and / jumpsuit / cringe and strangle . . . so why this snowstormon the carpet?" Because the poem works by undoing story, by demonstrating thatthe "whole" story is made up, not of "true" events or experiences, but of piecesof language which are like "word-holes" that "join and unstarch" the paper, weare made aware of the similarly constructed nature of the poem in which thisstory of "cutting-up" stories appears.

The Tongue Still Dances ( 1985), Gibbs' collection of new and selected poems,takes its title and epigraph from R. Murray Schafer's The Tuning of the World:

But that the tongue danced and still continues to dance with the sound-scape,there can be no doubt. Poets and musicians have kept the memory alive, even ifmodern man has acquiesced into bespectacled muttering.

As this epigraph indicates, there is, in the collection, a distrust of the authorityof the written word which leads to "bespectacled muttering" and a desire that thepoet like the musician "dance," make a gesture, not a referential utterance. Thepoet should be one who says, with the title of a poem in All This Night Long,

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'"Mr. Speaker, Sir, May I At Least Be Permitted to Complete My Gesture' (anunfound poem from the Klein Symposium, Ottawa 1974)."

Both the first section and the first poem of the collection are entitled "Figures ina Wind," a phrase which signifies a paradox: the poet wants both "figures"(metaphors? dancers? women? reference?) and the "wind" (air[s] with [out of?]which to speak? nothingness?). The poem "figures" in an aesthetics of wind("nothing" but words) in the sense that it asks the question, what is the relationbetween poet and audience, poem and reader?

Your audience girl halflights thatglimmer across your hall and deepen

its pit Is it that you hold themor let them go?

Or are theythe animators? (9)

The poem is "figured" as a female space (a "girl") and the reader becomes theaudience before "her." But does the "you" as poem hold "them" as readers, ordoes the reader make the meaning in the poem — "are they the animators?" —the poem asks. The question raised by the poem seems to be answered in thewords, "It's an interchange / then something passed from them to you / andyou to them" ; meaning arises out of the interaction between text and reader. Butwith the final self-conscious realization that the poet too becomes both a writerand a reader of his or her own poems — "something passed . . . to . . . us Imean for I'm sitting here with them" — the question becomes reproblematizedand can only "end" with the narrator as poet as reader "sitting here" listening for"what's you in this music and what's no t . . . an unlullibying rocking that rocks /you both and rocks this curtain / wall of light and night." The curtain which is awall of both (paradoxically) light and night is, for the poet, the words themselves,the figures that both keep the real girl (/poem) from him and yet offer her to us.

Another poem in the collection, "Who asked me to be a reader of entrails,"parodies the questions the serious reader of poems asks the writer :

He asked me what the signs were of a latespring, a hot summer dearthI said I could not tell though theywere all around I was sure

He asked me where I'd look Was therean almanac of sorts or did we have our own

old Indian I said there must be one of eachfrom what I'd heard. ( 11 )

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In order to interpret the signs, we have traditionally looked to the Word/words(of men, God[s]), living authorities (our own old Indians), speech, or to dic-tionaries ( almanacs of sorts ), which are simply other signs, other words. But thepoet in this poem is uncertain of the authority of speech (he can not tell) and ofwriting (he cannot tell what the signs mean).

"Why be a poet in a needy time" is a three-part poem which, while seekingalternatives to the writing of poetry, finds words with which to write the poem :

I could as easily be drawing on this sun-litpage stroking short strokes lines one linemaybe sinuous enough to bring to so much lightthat blind girl with her cup her tray her book. (13)

As in so many of the poems in this collection, the speaker is self-consciously presentas poet before the sun-lit page which signifies both blankness, emptiness, absenceand the fullness, presence and light which his lines create. But this is a poem whichinsists on speaking the illusion of its own presence :

Hertransmitting fingers take from her page whatmay be as strange to her as she to me Wouldsuch a figure raised by dark marksas sunlight call out to her as I do nowcall out to this room this darkness ? (13)

"The Pines of Route 7" is another poem which insists that we recognize theillusion of the referential and instead delight in the material qualities of language,that words be the things of poems :

They're building a new bypassfrom the cutoff a roadback of all roads back ofthe river and riverside placesMartinon Ingleside Ononette Nerepis. (18)

The road back of all roads, the new bypass, is the other, or alternative route wecan travel when we read a poem. It is a road which bypasses the centre of town,the referential, and seeks new names (the signifier, not the signified) to fix onto:

I know the road I go over and overhouse to home and back again Ridingits rises and falls I'm findingnew names to fix onto where I amin spaces where I am in time. (18)

The road we know we go, over and over, is the old road, on which poetry is thenaming of experience. But here the poem moves, not from real place to real place

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(like a travel brochure) but from "house to home and back again," from wordto word, each connoting (ostensibly) a similar place, and yet present, linguisti-cally, as difference. The poem that is written out of such a journey is a poem ofnew names that seek to re/place the old poetic ones :

For the white pines that loom over scruband scour the old poetic ones NobleSentinel and Lofty And for this lastI love red and soft-shoulderedLonesome. (19)

The previous authority of the old poetic words is suggested by the fact that theyare capitalized and italicized. But these poems are poems that "scrub and scour"the old poetic words so that they become simply other words.

"A Morning's Service" is a five-part poem that insists on the tentativeness, thepartialness, and the incompleteness of story. The poem "begins" with a line thatsuggests a continuation, another telling: "that's the start of it again" (50). Eachof the five sections ends with a line that qualifies, and undermines, the apparentnarrative certainty of the previous lines: "this is how the story will be for now"(50). Another poem entitled (ambiguously) "March past" begins with a line thatarticulates, in another way, the outward, disseminating movement of story:"There are these departures" (58). Following a fairly straightforward narrative,the poem again qualifies itself, and self-reflexively comments on the nature ofpoetry in the final lines:

These departuresThese breaks in the rhythmthat are the rhythm. (58)

Both of these poems suggest that it is the unexpected, startling, incomplete aspectsof story, the "breaks" in the rhythm, that are the story, that are the rhythm.

The last poem I would like to look at is entitled "The Song I Have for You IsOne Befitting Your Gravity." This is a poem about the gaps, slippages, andsilences which occur in poetry, in "song" :

and when you singer sing this songI am making for you you must footyour own way down a half-runged shiftyladder. (81)

The metaphor of the foot suggests both a careful stepping and the kind of feetwhich occur in lines of poetry. The reader must in fact be prepared to ( re ) write("foot") his or her own poem ("half-runged shifty ladder"). The reader isoffered a space of inconsistency or of (w)holeness where any transcendence is ofhis or her own making :

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across such gaps as I leave in the scoreyou singing must throw your own bridges. ( 81 )

The poet writing, like the composer creating, cannot secure the meaning of thepoem/song; the writer cannot remain present to/in his or her "own" words forthey are no longer (never were?) his or her own:

my pitching skittering notations at youor reaching back a hand as now I wouldmay not keep you from slipping onslippery edges. (81)

In these lines the poet warns the reader, or rather, warns the overly serious reader("This Song I Have for You is One Befitting Your Gravity") of the "slipperyedges" of language, and of the inevitable play of meaning which occurs in anydiscourse.

Many of Gibbs' poems work hard to remind us that poetry, being made oflanguage, is always playful and material. They offer reader and/as writer a spaceto play in which is very like the field in Robert Kroetsch's work, a place "where(how) it grows," an open field of unexplored/unexplained possibilities (Mandel7 ). As "A Dog In A Dream" Part II suggests, the poem should be the place of"a squeak and its echo / with nothing between," the poet, "a mouse in the worksof the grandfather clock / whistling hickory dickory / arranging and deranging /his spring-filled nest" (31 ). Many of the poems in The Tongue Still Dances andin Gibbs' work generally teach us to arrange and derange, to construct and de-construct, that nothing between. We may also reconstruct the bridges betweenthe squeak and its echo, climb up or down the half-ranged shifty ladder of lan-guage and construct our own "foot"holds, if we will.

WORKS CITED

Gibbs, Robert. A Dog In A Dream. Fredericton: New Brunswick Chapbooks, 1971.. A Kind of Wakefulness. Fredericton: Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1973.. A Mouth Organ for Angels. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1984.. All This Night Long. Fredericton: Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1978.. "Chinese Jars." Rev. of Gary Geddes, The Terracotta Army and Patrick

Lane, A Linen Crow, A Caftan Magpie. Canadian Literature 108 (Spring1986) : 180-82.

. earth charms heard so early. Fredericton: Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1970.

. I've Always Felt Sorry For Decimals. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1978.

. The Road From Here. Fredericton: New Brunswick Chapbooks, 1968.-. "Telling the Whole Story." Unpublished ts. used by permission of Robert

Gibbs.Mandel, Eli. Intro, to Field Notes by Robert Kroetsch. New York: Beaufort Books,

1981. 5-8.

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LOOKING FOR 1_6 Raymond Souster

for Richard Woollatt

As it happens we've picked a hot July dayto track down the elusive Peter Sibbald Brownand his equally elusive Paget Pressin the countryside north of Toronto.But looking has to be at least half the fun,and as it turns out we have plenty before driving our carup an endless lane and parkingin front of his farmhouse. The welcome's cordial,and we leave an hour later clutching manuscripts, final

page proofsas if we'd almost won a victory.So, D uncan Campbell Scott, you'll have to waitanother year or two or three to get decently published,and you, Bliss Carman, will have to wait even longer,it seems there's no respect or little or it left,when it has to compete with the god of the dollar bill.

Back in town we eat on Sutton West's main street,then wonder what to do for an hour.I know, Dick says, there's the church up here

where Leacock's buried,I 'm teaching Sunshine Sketches this fall and it would be

usefulto have a picture of his gravestone if only to show the

classhe's a real person who lived and died, the students think

these authorsare unreal, almost inhuman. So before we know itwe've glided to the top end of town, cross a bridge,go up a country road, and at the top of a risesee the tower of a small church, St. George's, Sibbald

Point(the sign says outside the gates), and I 'm surprised

how smalland delicately structured it sits in park like surround

ings,noting as well it's only thirty yards from Lake Simcoe

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at the top of a slight rise of land. As the tombstone ofLeacock

is what we're looking for, we spread out to our leftthrough the finely-cut grass of the very large church-yard,but go all the way to the end without finding what we're after.Then, doubling back, we find several Leacocks buried,but no Stephen, even see that Jalna's Mazo de la Rocheis laid to rest here, an unexpected surprise.

Still hoping to get a clue,and not too unhappy to escape the white-hot glareof the early afternoon sun, we stroll into the church's

narthex,then into the sanctuary itself, childhood-tiny,finely decorated with wood-carvings, and I fall in love

with itright away, could sit here till Sunday servicebegins in another three days.But there's nothing anywhere to help us find Stephen's

gravestoneexcept a leaflet which tells us he's definitely buriedout there in the church-yard, and gives us the interesting

pictureof Captain Thomas Sibbald, R.N., who while supervisingthe building of the present stone church (c. 1876),observed the old Royal Navy custom at eight bells each dayof issuing a rum ration to the workmen,who in turn drank Queen Victoria's healthto complete the scenario. But there's no rum for us todayto ease the heat or anything else, and we make a second,last attempt to find our evasive tombstone.

Finally, when about to give up for good,discover it's on the back of another relative's stone,unusual to say the least, but perhaps a final ironyfrom our one great humourist. Dick now gets busy,takes three or four photos, just to make sure after all

our work;then we leave the quiet of this country afternoonto the ghosts of the ladies and gentlemenwho only wait our leaving to take leisurely strollswith top hats and silk parasols up and down between the rowsof their friends and neighbours of long-forgotten Bourchier's

Mills, now Sutton West:

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who finally gather around the chained-about plotof Susan Sibbald and her seven sons, exchange a few pleasantriesbefore moving on among the trees where they seem to vanish

ghost-like,or perhaps are only swallowed upin the magic shimmer of a sheltering heat haze.

7IRKSRussell Thornton

A river runs chasing its stillness

A leaf flying away in a postage stampsending itself back to itself

The grass is searching through the grass

The cresting sea waves are a crazed construction —gulls rise out of it crying ruin, ruin

And the travelling eye of lightis focusing through the rainfloating vast transparent arks in the shoreless air.

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THE ELEPHANT IN THENEXT ROOMAnatomy of a Long Work*

Hugh Hood

I HAVE OFTEN REPLIED in humorous terms to inquiries abouthow it feels to live with a literary conception of great magnitude lodged in myhead for thirty years, perhaps forty years. The metaphor usually developed is thatof dwelling in a smallish apartment consisting of drawing room, study, hall, bed-room and bath, and kitchen, with the looming presence of some enormous livingcreature, woolly mammoth or whale, persistently suggested by noises and ever-present shadows in rooms adjacent to the one that I happen to be occupying.

While I juggle happily with my rubber duckling in the tub, sounds of heavyfootfalls echo around the steamy bathroom tiles, an occasional trumpeting callmaking itself heard. Over solitary breakfast taken in the nook next the refrig-erator, I hear snufffings and the wheezes of great lungs. Perhaps the strongeststatement of this metaphor comes with intimations of evening when I find myselfseated comfortably in the softly lighted drawing room, reading or listening toHaydn or just relaxing, eyes half-shut, as the digital clock on the record playershows later and later times. I am separated from the study by a pair of inade-quately latched, glass-panelled doors, and I am certain that the big fellow is inthere moving restlessly about. I hear the swish of one tail-like appendage, thenof two, and I realize what sort of beast this is. Besides the caudal appendage itpossesses a forward or nasal pendant. It isn't a woolly mammoth; it isn't a whale;it's an elephant, and it's in the darkened study, all of it there in the next room.I never feel fear at this realization; what I feel is the urgent need to persuadethe creature into the light so that I can see all of it. I get up and throw open theconnecting doors, and there stands the enormous being in the dark, backing andfilling, turning massive head with hesitation towards the soft light, reflectingivory. I see what I am to become, the mahout, the little guy naked to the waistexcept for a floppy straw hat, who feeds and waters the great animal and leadsit to and fro, infinitely more the possession of the great animal whom he leadsthan the enormous breathing dreaming creature is his.

* This paper was first read at an interdisciplinary symposium on Hugh Hood called "Enteringthe New Age" (London, Ontario, ai-22 November 1986) ; symposium proceedings will appearin toto in WLWE.

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I wasn't sure at the start but I am now in a position to reveal that we are inthe presence of an Indian elephant, not an African, the ears, the stance of theforefeet now fully illuminated. I believe too that so far as I can judge throughthe shadows which still envelop the body this elephant is male.

I should perhaps ask myself how far this metaphor is tenable, how far indeedany metaphor delivers useful truth. Imagine if you will a body of literature fromwhich all metaphor has been excluded. What would that be like? Let us takemetaphor in the broadest sense to mean the detection and formal expression ofsimilarities between different things such that one can be called by the name ofanother: the Fifth Column, the elephant in the next room. Does the device conferany sort of truth? No names may be predicated of God, declare Aquinas and thegreatest of the mystics, except analogically. God isn't a Father but is like a Father,like a Mother too in many senses. How do we assure ourselves that these analogiesare apt, that they promote our understanding of the Being signified? When I tellyou that my long work is like an elephant in a darkened room next to this, whatam I conveying? A partial and ambiguous view? A misleading poeticism?

It might be thought that since The New Age/Le nouveau siècle seems to beformed in twelve parts of which the first was published about September 27,1975, the work as a whole belongs to the middle and later parts of my life as awriter. I had after all been publishing my work since 1958, seventeen yearsearlier. The Swing in the Garden was my tenth book. Certainly the books whichimmediately preceded it seemed at that date to bear no relation to it, particularlythe novel You Cant Get There From Here. Such an assumption, it now seemsto me, would be exactly wrong. I was getting hints and flashes and intuitions ofthe presence in my darkened study, or down the hall at the other end of theapartment, of an enormous work, for many years previously.

I am totally and unalterably convinced that the whole thing, trunk, tusks, tail,was present from the very beginning. I think that The New Age/Le nouveausiècle began to rise in my person, my nature, from the earliest moments I ad-dressed the typewriter keys, that suggestions of the work will be detected in mostof the stories written around i960 which appeared in my first book, the storycollection Flying a Red Kite of 1962.

I find there the profuse and fundamentally comic view of Toronto as the citydisplayed itself historically from the 1920's through the late 1950's, in the semi-fictional memoir narratives, "Recollections of the Works Department" and "SilverBugles, Cymbals, Golden Silks." I find there the place name "Stoverville" whichdenotes an imaginary pole of my experience of which an equally imaginaryToronto or Montreal may form another pole from time to time. When I first,idly and casually, chose the name Stoverville for my town of pastoral idyll andcountry peace, at the time of writing the story "Three Halves of a House" in

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i 9 6 0 , I h a d n o idea t h a t Stoverville wo u ld u n d e r p in A New Athens ( 1 9 7 7 ) , TheScenic Art ( 1984), and The Motor Boys in Ottawa ( 1986).

When I took a second glance in the direction of Stoverville in the story "Bicul tural Angela" written in February 1966 as part of the interrelated collection ofstories Around the Mountain: Scenes From Montreal Life, I gave the title char acter an education at Trinity College in the University of Toronto, made her aStoverville native, showed her in transit to Montreal, where I had already settledanother Stovervillian, Maura Boston. This same range of movement, Toronto Stoverville Montreal, has remained a constant property of my work, with occa sional excursions to London or Winnipeg or Zurich or Venice permitted, untilthe present day, as The Motor Boys in Ottawa demonstrates. There we see Mat thew Goderich and his Edie in transit, in the same pilgrimage endured earlier byAngela Mary Robinson and Maura Boston, both of whom seem now to haveaccomplished some sort of return to Stoverville.

Preoccupation with Stoverville goings on naturally led me to display them ona larger canvas in my next examination of the place and its meanings, in thenovel A Game of Touch, in which Jake Price attempts to fly from Stovervilleand all that it implies, especially the manners and morals of Robinson Court andenvirons, only to find them disguised and then transformed in the person ofMarie Ange, anti heroine of the novel. This brilliant lady rises miraculously likeAphrodite from a Montreal bathtub in which Jake, like an enchanted acolyte,administers a much needed shower, directing the cleansing waters all over thebody of the goddess as day breaks and extraordinary recognition occurs. Youcan't get away from Stoverville, Jake discovers.

I suspect that we haven't seen the last of Jake Price, just as we now realize thatwe hadn't seen the last of Duncan McCallum or "the elegant bond salesman,"earlier satellites of Angela Mary Robinson. It seems appropriate that another keyelement in this growing anatomy should reveal itself in A Game of Touch, the cityof Ottawa which together with Toronto, Stoverville, and Montreal — the empireof the St. Lawrence — forms the golden triangle of central Canada.

ΤI H II H E CITY, TH E PEOPLE, and the federal presence in Ottawa

seem to have situated themselves at an apex of this golden triangle sometime in1966, a time which proved an extraordinarily fruitful one for me and for mydream elephant. I 'm an unreconstructed and unashamed federalist and centralist.I believe in Canada as a great and united country with a rich and generous andcomplex people. The preparations for Centennial Year and for Expo 67 impressedme very much and seem to have unloosed special imaginative powers directedtowards preserving in art what Canada felt like in 1966, 1967, 1968. I t was a

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totally different feeling — this is worth noting — than the nightmarish sequenceof emotions which overcame our neighbours to the south at the same historicalmoment. Bliss was it in that 1966 dawn to be alive in Canada; it was a time whenit became clear to me that this is the best country in the world to live in. I'venever seen any reason to change my mind, despite the tumult and turmoil whichovertook us in the later 1960's.

In a lot of ways The Motor Boys in Ottawa treats the years from 1966 to 1970as the pivot, the turning point, in Canadian life. Let's see what I can show tosupport this notion.

On October 15, 1966, Peter Martin accepted my story sequence Around theMountain for publication in June 1967, precisely when I wanted it to come out,in the middle of both Expo and the Centennial festivities. Less than a week later,on October 21, Harcourt Brace, Jovanovitch, of New York, accepted my novelThe Camera Always Lies for publication in September 1967. These two bookscomplement each other in an almost ideal way, a collection of stories and a novel,a book about the most minute details of life in Montreal and a book about Holly-wood where I had never been. A publisher just getting started in Toronto on thesmallest scale, and the enormous, world-famous New York publisher of writerslike T. S. Eliot and Sinclair Lewis.

My whole artistic enterprise was starting to come into the light in my ownmind. I saw with accelerating excitement how the thing hung together. I beganto understand that what I was doing somehow existed as representative of thewhole of Canadian life. I began to have a sense of mission. I began to see mywork in Wordsworth's superb phrase as "a leading from above, a somethinggiven." I came to see that I was being proffered what seems to me a providentiallead through those "fallings from us, vanishings; / blank misgivings of a crea-ture / moving about in worlds not realised," whose obscure misleadings I hadcelebrated in the first story in my first published book. This sense of vocationgrew upon me in the closing months of 1966. Ideas crowded in on me so thickand fast (as John Dryden said) that I could scarcely find time to deal justly withthem. And besides, whoever gets two of his cherished darlings of the imaginationaccepted — and by such publishers — within a single week?

Stimulated by this sense of acceptance and mission, I conceived the idea forA Game of Touch, which I started to write on December 1, 1967. I completeda draft on my birthday the following year, April 30, which also happens to beMatt Goderich's birthday. The book was meant to put forward in as many modesas possible a group of images of reconciliation, merging of opposed forces, mostpublicly perhaps in the scenes depicting the working out of medicare legislation ina series of federal/provincial negotiations. A dull subject for a novel? It's onlydull if Canadians are dull, because it is as Canadian a subject as there is. Thefederal/provincial negotiation issuing in a compromise settlement at an important

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conference — that's our unique contribution to political theory and practice. Itmay be dull but by God it's us !

While I was getting the ideas for A Game of Touch and writing the first draft,I was reading the middle volumes of Anthony Powell's twelve-volume series ofnovels, A Dance to the Music of Time. Powell had reached the mid-point of hisnarrative with The Kindly Ones, 1962. It was by then clear that with this loosingof the Eumenides upon the world the action of Powell's series would pivot aroundthe events of World War II. The immediately following books showed me thatMr. Powell was developing his series as in effect a quartet of trilogies, with thebooks devoted to World War II carrying the action away in a descending down-hill rush towards the final trilogy which was to appear in the early logo's.

This arrangement suggested a number of fundamental principles which mightbe embodied in the parts of a long work. It must have been during CentennialYear that I saw at last where my proper direction lay. The extraordinary euphoriaand sense of achievement which the celebrations of that year yielded to a writerliving in Montreal, summering in pastoral eastern Ontario, publishing in Torontoand New York, teaching at l'université de Montreal, began to urge me to attemptsomething really big. A testament, a witness, a celebration, a leading from above,a something given.

Apart from my wife Noreen, the first person I ever said anything about this towas my friend Dennis Duffy, sometime in 1968 or 1969. I remember saying toDennis that I was starting to get strong signals in my imagination about somevery large thing existing in its murky recesses. This was just when Dennis wasworking on his essay "Grace: the Novels of Hugh Hood" which appeared inCanadian Literature, 47, Winter 1971.

Then on February 23, 1969, at 1:00 P.M., I stuck a sheet of bond paper in mytypewriter and typed out this :

NB: THIS IS THE FIRST THING I'VE PUT ON PAPER ABOUT THIS PROJECT, WHICHMAY TURN OUT TO BE THE GRAND OVERRIDING WORK OF MY LIFE FROM THE TIMEI'M 46 YEARS OLD TO THE TIME I ' M 69 OR THEREABOUTS, AS FOLLOWS :

Possible enormous twelve-volume roman-fleuve. A combination twelve-volumenovel-book of annals-memoir. My reason for conceiving it is that I'm so much atthe center of life in Canada now, seem to know everybody or know somebody whoknows everybody, without being at the center of power myself. This would be thefirst time such a book (Saint-Simon, Proust, Powell) has ever been done inCanada.

I felt like God, you see. No doubt about it. I felt like God overseeing the doingsof the Leviathan or the Elephant, the giant animal, the body politic. A crazedambition, really loony, the act of an egomaniac? Here's a man who thinks he'sAlmighty God? No. I hadn't got myself mixed up with God. I thought God wasmoving in me and I still do.

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I went back and looked harder at what Mr. Powell was doing. He had writtenfive novels in the 1930's. World War II had interrupted his career and he didn'tget back to the novel for a decade. Sometime about 1949 he must have begunwork on his series; the first volume appeared in 1951 when its author was forty-five years old. He lived to complete his series in 1975 at the age of seventy, inthe same publishing season in which The Swing in the Garden came out. Twenty-five years, I told myself. It takes twenty-five years. Time I bestirred myself.

XIHE SWING IN THE GARDEN swam into consciousness in themost remarkable way. In early 1969 my notes describe the opening book in somedetail.

Composed 1974/75. I: Depression, 1925-1935. Narrator is 0-10 years old.

I'd got the time span approximately correct, and the age of the Narrator, to whomI hadn't yet given a name. I knew just about when the book should be published,on a twenty-five-year timetable, but one very peculiar circumstance intervenedto keep the book from surfacing in my imagination. I had a marvellous idea forquite a different novel, which I knew that I would have to write before I at-tempted the first book in the series. You Cant Get There From Here seemed sovivid in the foreground of my thinking, and took on flesh so quickly as I thoughtabout it, that it simply had to be written.

I was now composing two novels in my head at the same time. A close readerof You Cant Get There From Here (1972) and The Swing in the Garden ( 1975)will spot how intimately the two books are connected as opposite poles of thesame consciousness. I could not have written either book if I hadn't been thinkingof the other one at the same time. A wholly imaginary, non-factual communitysomewhere in the world but not necessarily anywhere versus Summerhill Avenuein Toronto in the early 1930's. A bitterly tragic action of betrayal and intrigueversus a child's discovery of sweet and ever-widening freedom. Chaos versus safety,tragedy versus beatitude in the garden.

Both books issue in the end of something. "It made for a long fall." I conceivedYou Cant Get There From Here as an apocalyptic work. The Swing in theGarden begins in the garden of Eden and the swing is a growing inclinationtowards the long fall of the closing line. I had in mind the poles of Genesis andApocalypse, according to Northrop Frye the termini of departure and return inall literature, of which the Holy Scriptures are the divinely ordained model. Iwrote my apocalypse first, then swung around to the beginnings of things. "Inthose days we used to have a red-and-white garden swing set up in the backyardbeside the garage . . ."

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I wrote You Cant Get There From Here between February ι and June 18,1970. The book flowed out of my mind like maple syrup from a ten gallon can.The whole book was right there, almost on the end of my tongue. I wrote twentypages a week, four pages daily in a five day working week, and never missed aday for the first ten weeks. Never had to pause and think out the next sentence orthe next turn of the action. It is tremendously exciting to compose a book at thatpace with never a detail to search for, never any pause in the outpouring of ideas.I t is now, sixteen years later, perfectly obvious to me that The Swing in the Gar den was as it were standing in line behind the other novel, pushing it out into thelight, like the second child of twins kicking in the birth canal. These novels shouldalways be read as nearly simultaneously as possible.

You Cant Get There From Here was published by Oberon Press of Ottawa,with whom I issued ten books through the 1970's, in September 1972 to uniformlyfavourable reviews, better notices than any of my other early novels. By this timeI was talking to Michael Macklem of Oberon about a proposal for a long series.I have always felt enormously encouraged by something Mr. Macklem said to meduring these talks. "You write them, and we'll publish them." Very few publisherswould dare to give a blanket commitment like that without having seen so muchas a page of the proposed work. As late as the publication date of You Cant GetThere From Here I had nothing on paper, barring a few pages of notes, not evenan opening paragraph, yet Michael Macklem made that commitment before Ihad anything to go on except a terrible ferment in my head. By May 13, 1972,I knew the titles of the first three novels in the series and had some notion of theirstructural implications. I wasn't sure about the fourth book but even at that dateI knew that Number Five was to be called The Scenic Art and that Number Sixwould have something to do with cars. I thought that it might even be calledCars, Cars, Cars.

Now for some heavy drama. I can't for the life of me recover the precise datewhen this took place, but I know it must have been quite awhile before May1972 and I know that it was on an afternoon of extremely good weather in springor summer, dry, sunny, breezy, windows of the car well open, perhaps in mid 1971at about 4:00 P.M. Noreen and I were driving along Queen Mary Road inMontreal towards the borders of Hampstead in our comfortable old Chevy Novasedan. There are a lot of traffic lights and stop signs in that district so we weregoing very slowly. We came to the stop sign at the corner of Queen Mary andStratford Road. I could feel the breeze ruffling my hair, at that time worn veryshort. I turned to Noreen and said, "You remember that old garden swing wehad when we moved to H ampton Avenue, the one John liked so much? We hadit up till last fall, didn't we?"

She said, "We got rid of it in November. It was coming apart.""I t just struck me. That swing would make a terrific image to open my series

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with. The colours are good, red and white, and besides we used to have one in ourbackyard in Toronto when I was just a baby."

"So?""Well, you see how it all links up. I could show how father and son enjoyed the

same motions thirty years apart, no, forty years. It makes a nice point aboutordinary life. You can go forwards or backwards but you always come to rest inthe same spot."

"I think you might do something with that," she said.As soon as I had that picture in my visual imagination, I was off and running.

The title came immediately afterwards. I have to have a title right at the begin-ning or I can't fill in the blanks. That's why I've chosen the titles for the sixbooks in the series that are still to come.

I was beginning to feel unable to concentrate on anything else but the vesselwhich was coming over the horizon. I passed the summer of 1972 —the wettestand nastiest summer of recent memory until this year's — with my wife and fam-ily at our summer cottage. One midsummer afternoon, instead of taking advantageof momentary good weather, I found myself pacing up and down in the cottageliving room, gibbering excitedly to Noreen.

"It has to be an immediately recognizable familiar name, not trendy and notold-fashioned. I couldn't call him Sacheverell, or Dwayne. He isn't an Ambrose ora Bertram. Has to be something which will seem acceptable but not too ordinaryor too bizarre, available for current usage for a long while to come."

I think it was Noreen who suggested that we try over the names of the apostles."Peter?" I said. "Too common. Andrew? I might be able to use Andrew but

not for the Narrator. He isn't Scottish and I don't want reviewers making jokesabout canny wee Scots and haggis. Let's see, Bartholomew? Too far out andbesides there's already Bartholomew Bandy. That's a name for farce."

"Jude?""I don't want a one-syllable name. I might use Philip, but not for the Nar-

rator. What about Matthew?""Matthew's an Evangelist.""Right, but he's also one of the apostles. It's important that he's one of the

Evangelists. The name turns up in all the other European languages. Mathieu.Matteo. Matthias. Mathis. Sober but not out-of-date, in fact rather a fashionablename right now. . . . I think I'll call him Matthew . . . hello, Matthew, welcometo the club."

The surname arrived soon afterwards, out of a picture I'd seen as a child inone of our old high school textbooks, an aerial photograph of the town centre ofGoderich, Ontario, which was in the form of a great big wheel. This fused theprophet and the evangelist in my Narrator's name. I kept Andrew and Philip asthe names for the Narrator's father, who immediately turned into a personage

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equal in importance to his son, and for Uncle Philip, not quite as important butlonger-lived. The death of Andrew Goderich is the absolute centre of The NewAge /Le nouveau siècle, and I observe that Uncle Philip is present at his funerallending a proprietary hand to assist his brother's wife at the graveside.

I chose the name of the Narrator's mother largely as a matter of literary con-vention, "Is-a-belle" in the precise spelling which simply states that this per-sonage is a great beauty. I had James Joyce's Ici la belle of Finnegans Wake inmind, as well as the delightful and ill-fated heroine of Henry James' The Portraitof a Lady. Now the characters were springing to life in my head. Andrew andIsabelle, Matthew, his brother and sister, Tony and Amanda Louise, Uncle Philip,and the harassed troubled figure of the infant Adam Sinclair (whose name makesa lot of sense to me) who pops up on the second page of The Swing in the Gardenand has grown like Andrew Goderich into a figure of absolute importance in mystory because of what he has meant to the Narrator.

Every year towards the beginning of autumn I type out a short autobiographicalsummary of what I've been up to in the past year and what I'm about to tackle.At the end of my note for Thursday, October 5, 1972, I find this remark:

On Tuesday next, the day after Thanksgiving, I will put the outline on paper ofthe first novel of THE NEW AGE, and I hope to write the opening lines a day ortwo after that.

I almost always do what I tell myself I'm going to do, but I have to confessthat in this case I was out in my prediction by a couple of days. I drew up myscenario a few days later than predicted, on Friday, October 13, probably todefy superstition. I find this little sketch among my notes:

Draft Scenario: THE SWING IN THE GARDEN. 400 first draft pages. Covers period1930-1939, and main theme is narrator's become aware of himself as a person. Heis called Matthew Goderich, or Matt Goderich.

Five main sections, around eighty pages to a section, as follows :

Then follow the very briefest of remarks about each section, with some pencilled-in additions inserted during the writing of the book, and at the bottom of thepage in my scribbled handwriting: "Sketched out Friday, Oct. 13/72." One ofthe most important details of this plan is the note that I should take two months towrite each of the first three sections, finishing up the fourth and fifth sectionsmuch more quickly. I would write about forty pages in October, forty in Novem-ber, to complete the opening section, proceed in December and January to writethe second, "going to the movies" section. The same rhythm would apply to thethird, "Cornish Road, Moore Park," section.

By the end of March I would, I hoped, be sufficiently in possession of mymeans that I could finish the book with a rush, doing the "Lazy Bay Grill" partin April, finishing up with the "Toronto Island" conclusion in May 1973. I

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followed this plan exactly, and found it a very wise decision to write the openingparts very slowly, at half my accustomed rate of output. For many years I hadmade it a habit to write four typed, double-spaced pages a day, five days a week.I have sometimes written even faster. Strength Down Centre was producedagainst a tight deadline at a rate of five pages daily, which I found exhausting.I deliberately chose to approach the opening pages of The Swing in the Gardenvery gingerly. I didn't want to put a foot wrong anywhere. I wanted to take mytime and allow what was in my head to come out in its own form and rhythm.It was almost the middle of October. Without forcing the pace I could producean easy forty pages before Hallowe'en ; then I could take things even more slowlyand carefully for the next five months, a delightful, luxurious, treat for me. By theend of March 1973 I'd be all pumped up and ready for the sprint to the finishline. And I was certain that once I got the first book down on paper its successorswould come along naturally and easily in their turn.

On Sunday afternoon, October 15, 1972, at 1 :oo P.M., I sat down and typedout the opening lines of The Swing in the Garden, beginning with the words "Inthose days" as a conscious echo of the beginnings of the Gospel readings that I'dheard every Sunday from the pulpit since I was a baby. "In ilio tempore." Thenext day was Noreen's birthday, and I could show her the opening four pages oftyped manuscript as a kind of birthday present. The whole twelve-volume se-quence will in the end be dedicated to her. The first four individual books werededicated each in turn to our chUdren, the fifth to my sister and her husband, thesixth and most recent to my brother and his wife. I don't claim that I've smuggledAmanda Louise and Tony into those later dedications, but I wouldn't deny iteither. The first novel in the series was completed in rough draft on May 28,1973; the final draft was ready a year later.

My mother had been in failing health for some time in the early seventies. InJune of 1974 I went to Toronto and read the whole text of The Swing in theGarden to her, one section each afternoon for the inside of a week. I asked ahigh official at CBC Radio if he could lend me a broadcast quality tape recorderso that I could tape this reading, the only complete reading of a novel I've everdone. He refused on the grounds that the occasion was not sufficiently interestingor important to Canadian literary history or culture. Anybody could come alongand make the same request. He couldn't allow CBC equipment to fall intounqualified hands. This seems a pity. Anyway I went ahead, and my motherseemed to take great pleasure in hearing the book evolve from one part to thenext. When I had finished on the Friday afternoon she exclaimed, "Well youcertainly didn't use me as a character, did you?"

"No," I said. "Isabelle is a lot nicer than you, and Matthew isn't as smart asI am."

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We both laughed a lot over that. I got up to leave my mother's room, and afterkissing her good-bye I strolled along to the end of the corridor, then turned andcalled to her, "I'll be back in eighteen months to read the next one to you."

She blew me a kiss. "I'll be waiting," she said.But I never got to read A New Athens to my mother. She died four weeks

later in early June 1974. "I'll be waiting," were her final words to me. I couldhave recited A New Athens to her at that point — a work of almost whollyreligious conception and execution — or at least I could have given her a livelysketch of its dimensions, but I wouldn't have wanted to tire her and it neveroccurred to me to do it. I wish I had.

A New Athens was complete in its first draft before The Swing in the Gardenwas published in the fall of 1975. It was with A New Athens that I initiated thehabit of composing each new novel in the series from January to June, thenwriting a final draft in the same months of the following year. I see from myannual autobiographical notes of August 30, 1975, that:

Then between Sunday, January 5th, 1975, an(^ Friday, April 25th, 1975, I wrotethe first draft of A NEW ATHENS, the second volume in my series. This is simply agreat book, and a gift from heaven.Imagine how I felt, with A New Athens complete in its first draft (my first

drafts are always very polished and usually quite publishable) before The Swingin the Garden appeared. I felt mighty smug, I can tell you. All through that fall,whenever people asked me what guarantees I could offer of completing such afoolhardy, even presumptuous undertaking, I could respond by saying that I hadthe next volume drafted and about ready to go. This has almost always been true.I have the seventh book in the series completely drafted at this moment; it couldbe published as it stands so that if I break my neck tomorrow there will be atleast one more book in the series available to its readers. Tony's Book will appearin the fall publishing season of 1988, and that's all I'll say about it at this point.

I think I should record, writing on September 26, 1986, that besides a com-plete version of my seventh volume I have a very full conception of what myeighth book will do. I have the basic idea for the ninth, which makes a giant leapbackwards in time and unfolds in a somewhat surprising place. I have a very clearintimation of the long opening section of the eleventh book — where it will takeplace and what it will lead to — and I have a strong, clear, vigorous conceptionof the final book, which I could sit down and start to write at this moment.

There is an area of vagueness about Book Ten, though why this should be soI can't even guess. It might turn out to be the best novel of the whole series. It'scertainly going to be a novel in which Matt and Edie Goderich's children will takea prominent part.

On the whole, I'd be prepared to claim that the remainder of The New Age/Le nouveau siècle already exists in varying intensities of realization. More than

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that, I have to disclose that as the mahout shoves the big fellow's hindquartersinto the light, ropy tail lashing him across the face, he notes that the creature'sright hind leg is fastened to a stout length of rope, itself fastened to a heavy stake,well secured in the earth. The rope, the stake, the earth supply the forms for theseven or eight books I plan to write after the elephant is safely seated in his owncomfortable armchair in my big front room. I give you fair warning.

UNTITL6DC. M. Donald

For my christening, my parentsgave me a pot, sealed, containinga formless terror.Then they gave me clothes,manners, rules and a styleto make me acceptableas best they could.

Later I discovered that the shapeof the terror was theirsand the core of it, me.

TH€ LENGTH OF THIS L71NDAllan Ennist

they pursued reflections(on water)

they pulled shadows alongblending theirs with chinook

ospreyand grizzly among others

they invented a timemeasured by shadows

(perpetualrise and fall of empires)

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I bffffks in review

GRADUALISMBRYAN D. PALMER, ed., The Character of Class

Struggle: Essays in Canadian Working-ClassHistory. McClelland & Stewart, $12.95.

JUDY M. TORRANCE, Public Violence in Can-ada, i86y-ig82. McGill-Queen's Univ.Press, $32.50.

ROY MAC LAREN, Consensus: A Liberal Looksat his Party. Mosaic, $5.95.

T H E ASSUMPTION THAT CONSENSUS andcompromise represent the Canadian wayremains pervasive. By turns we have beenproud and ashamed of this legacy, some-times regarding it as seemly moderation,at other times suspecting that it mayreflect an essentially dull and unimagina-tive national character. Within the lasttwo decades, a number of Canadianscholars have maintained that this tra-ditional interpretation, with its emphasison gradualism and moderation, is mis-leading and inaccurate. In fact, theyargue, our history contains many inci-dents of violence, confrontation, and sup-pression: our society has been shaped byprofound divisions of race, class, andgender.

One result of this re-examination ofCanadian history has been the publica-tion of a number of books devoted torevisionism. The field of working-classhistory has become particularly rich, pro-ducing numerous monographs and col-lected essays, as well as a journal nowentering its second decade. Bryan Palmeris among the pioneers of this new workin Canada, and the collection of articleshe has edited is a good example of thewider interests and more sophisticatedscholarship emerging in Canadian his-toriography. The book's eight essaysrange over time and distance, from nine-

teenth-century dock workers in AtlanticCanada to the meaning of the recentSolidarity confrontation in British Co-lumbia. They deal with class and genderdivisions, the nature and meaning ofchanging industrial organization and therole of the government in underwritingthe status quo. The central theme, how-ever, is true to the book's title: thechanging nature and variety of classstruggle in Canada.

One hopes that this volume will findan audience beyond the universities, forit certainly deserves to be widely read.Few people are familiar with the remark-able popularity of the Knights of Labourin late nineteenth-century Canada, or thewidespread national support for "TheCanadian Labour Revolt" in 1919, justtwo of the topics explored in detail in thebook. Nor are contemporary issues neg-lected: Heather Maroney contributes athoughtful piece on "Feminism atWork," a more wide-ranging essay thanthe title suggests, while Bryan Palmer'streatment of B.C.'s 1983 Solidarity strikeprovides plenty of ammunition to thosewho wish to argue about the nature ofmodern trade union leadership.

Judy Torrance's book on Public Vio-lence in Canada is a more sustainedtreatment of a single topic than thePalmer volume, and as concerned withtheory and explanation as with historicalexample. Canadians continue to reflectsmugly about our allegedly low level ofpublic violence, particularly when com-pared to events south of the border. Tor-rance shows that our society is compara-tively less violent than the United States,but points out that if we examine Can-ada in true international perspective,comparing our level of violence with thatin other western democracies, the Cana-dian performance is middling at best.Violence has played a role in Canadiansociety, despite the rhetoric of "thepeaceable kingdom." For example, how-

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ever rare political assassination has beenin Canada, it is certainly not unknown.Within living memory, one can cite theFLQ's murder of Pierre Laporte, in themidst of the 1970 October crisis. Tor-rance's book explores Canadian violencein much detail, from the seemingly gra-tuitous excesses of a contemporary teen-ager to the FLQ campaigns, and fromthe "On to Ottawa" trek during the1930's to the Riel uprisings of last cen-tury. This is not simply a historical cata-logue, but rather an attempt to explainCanadian violence. Torrence reviews thetheoretical literature on violence andplaces Canadian violence within a va-riety of contexts. One of the strongestchapters concerns "Culture and Ideol-ogy": how violence is perceived (anddiscouraged) by our society. Torranceargues that "There is a conservative castto the culture that emphasizes restraint,acceptance of a less than perfect exis-tence, the rejection of sweeping ideo-logical changes in favour of incremental,evolutionary development within the tra-ditional framework, indeed a generalsuspicion of novel ideas as potentially toodisruptive in a fragile society." Moresuccinctly, she quotes Frank Underbill:"In Canada we have no revolutionarytradition; and our historians, politicalscientists, and philosophers have assidu-ously tried to educate us to be proud ofthis fact."

Rather than having us "bask in asense of ineffable moral superiority,"Torrance would rather we appreciateour good fortune, and recognize that wehave managed to benefit from "a uniqueand non-exportable combination of soci-etal, economic, and historical circum-stances." Her book argues convincinglythat it is this combination, rather than aparticularly virtuous national character,which constrains the resort to forcewithin our society.

If the books by Torrance and Palmer

reflect contemporary revisionism, RoyMacLaren's Consensus is a reminder thattraditional views are still alive, thoughperhaps not as dynamic nor as persuasiveas once they were. Written in the sum-mer of 1984, a tract for the times com-posed with both eyes on an imminentfederal election, the book attempts topersuade the reader of the wisdom,beneficence, and central importance ofLiberal policies throughout Canadianhistory. Beginning with the Reformers inthe 1830's and concluding with JohnTurner's assumption of the Party's lead-ership in Ottawa on June 16, 1984, Mac-Laren argues that there is a discernibleconsistency to Liberal policy and prac-tice ("like a watermark on fine paper"),and that this reflects a particular con-cept of (wo) man. The first five of thebook's eight chapters develop this theme,concentrating especially on the post-waryears. The last three chapters are moreconcerned with the Trudeau legacy, theleadership campaign which culminatedin Turner's victory, and Canada's politi-cal future.

It is doubtful whether MacLaren'sargument about "the powers of compro-mise, flexibility, creativity and innova-tion that the Liberal Party has broughtto federal politics over the years" willconvince any but the partisan and thevery uncritical. The book mis-reads thecontemporary electorate. In a brief de-scription of his own political career,MacLaren recounts the willingness ofone of his constituents to do campaignwork for him. She had first worked forthe party in 1911. That type of un-swerving loyalty is on the wane, and in-deed it is unlikely that party loyalistsstill elect governments. The crucial vot-ers now are the fickle "undecideds." Thisvolatile group is not won over by reasonor held by loyalty: its members have tobe persuaded each election by appro-priate advertising, packaged candidates,

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and appealing promises. Such strategieshave had a corrosive effect on the in-tegrity of contemporary political parties,whose ideology rarely rises above thebanal pulse-reading of the poll watcher.It seems unlikely that the Canadian elec-torate will be convinced by books such asMacLaren's, representatives of that mostold-fashioned device, the political pam-phlet.

The book, however, is more than ahistorical curiosity to be stored in somearchives along with other memorabiliaof the 1984 election. MacLaren attemptsto state clearly what Liberal ideology is,how it relates to past actions and how itmay be assumed to function in the fu-ture. Three decades ago, Frank Under-bill argued that one of the most note-worthy aspects of the liberal traditionin Canada was the lack of debate oreven informed discussion about its ad-vent, meaning, or importance. Whetheror not MacLaren proves Underbillwrong probably depends upon one's ownplace on the political spectrum. And un-believers will note that his title. Con-sensus, reflects the rhetoric of a Mul-roney as accurately as it does that of aTurner. Nevertheless, MacLaren is to becongratulated for at least making theeffort to understand and articulate pre-cisely what his Party stands for and why.

JEREMY MOUAT

A VOIX MULTIPLESCLAUDE BEAUSOLEIL, II y a des nuits que nous

habitons tous. Editions du Noroît, n.p.JEAN CHARLEBOis, Tâche de naissance. Edi-

tions du Noroît, n.p.CELYNE FORTIN, Au coeur de l'instant. Edi-

tions du Noroît, n.p.JEAN CHAPDELEiNE GAGNON, Le tant-à-coeur.

Editions du Noroît, n.p.

ECRIVAIN ET CRITIQUE LITTÉRAIRE, ClaudeBeausoleil a publié une vingtaine d'ou-

vrages — poésie et prose — dont Au mi-lieu du corps l'attraction s'insinue lui avalu le prix Emile-Nelligan en 1980.Collaborateur à la revue montréalaise,Lèvres, il se fait connaître égalementdans l'Hexagone, et notamment à tra-vers ses écrits qui paraissent dans larevue, Jungle. Divisé en huit "failles,"II y a des nuits que nous habitons tousest un monologue sur la nuit, à savoir surce qu'appelle le poète "une sorte de ver-tige où des réels s'infiltrent dans la haute-tension sous le regard ailé des circons-tances écrites et de la solitude." Premièrefaille, "la nuit s'invente," fait état de lanuit d'amour:

les frôlementsquand le gestesur la peaucomme un rythmeet des caressesaussi lentementun délirele jeu du désir

La fragilité du moment inspire chezBeausoleil le souhait, voire l'obsession,d'écrire, car c'est cette dernière quioriente la direction des mots qu'il couchepar écrit sans savoir échapper pour au-tant à la force du noir. Force est de noterque la noirceur n'est pas que ténèbres,elle est également lumière: "il y a desnuits pour tous les oublis comme il y ades nuits pour toutes les lumières." Lanuit qui s'invente est ultimement uneforce qui "nous précède / socle incertain/ sur la route à déchiffrer." Faisant allu-sion à Hubert Aquin qui, dans Trou demémoire, parle du temps qui instauremajestueusement le narrateur "dans sapropre immobilité," cette même partie del'ouvrage suscite chez le lecteur une ap-préciation singulière du temps qui s'é-coule. Exaltation mais tout aussi bienangoisse: autant de réactions devantl'impossibilité de fuir sa puissance im-prévue.

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Le lyrisme que l'on trouve dans cha-cune des "failles" de ce bel ouvrage semanifeste grâce à la sensibilité à la foisraffinée et contradictoire de Beausoleil;le poète semble être dominé par la pe-santeur des mots. Celui-ci constate effec-tivement dans la "faille cinq" des mo-ments où "la peau est trop tirée sous lesmots." Ainsi, la nuit guide l'homme "versla réponse / aussi le vide infini." Elles'avère de cette façon moment actuel etavenir, source d'espoir surtout, puisque— comme il le dit dans la "faille huit" —Beausoliel "renonce à ce temps sourd quinous précède." En somme, II y a desnuits que nous habitons tous est uneméditation sur le lien entre passage dutemps et écriture, inspiration et réalitéquotidienne. Rêveuse mais non irréelle, lavoix du poète exprime avec éloquence unphénomène que nous devons tous affron-ter un jour: ombre du passé qui s'avèrelumière de l'avenir.

Cités en épigraphe, les mots de PaulEluard, "Mon amour ton amour tonamour ton amour ton amour," serventd'ouverture et de clôture à Tâche denaissance de Jean Charlebois. Auteur deplusieurs recueils de poésie, Charleboisoffre des poèmes dépouillés, qui évoquentl'amour, le mystère de la vie, ou encorel'étouffement de l'élément vital chezl'homme. Non sans similarities avec lapoésie de Saint-Denys Garneau, les textesde la première partie, "Le Grand Grand[sic] manque d'air," dépeignent celui qui"court sur l'air / mais n'atteint rien /enfle rouge," mais aussi les yeux quivoient grand "parmi les plaisirs / ensavourant muets les choses." Dans "Neme touchez pas," deuxième partie durecueil, et émission de Radio-Québec quia remporté le concours des émissions depoésie de la Communauté des télévisionsfrancophones en 1985, il est question dumonologue, du "son sans bruit," d'unhomme condamné à mort:

Ne me touchez pasJe vous défends de prendre ma vieelle est à moi de toutes mes forcesparalysées, tremblantes

Je ne serai jamais votre mort à tout prixje ne serai jamais votre mort de circonstance

Cri déchirant, la voix du poète exprimeson grand amour pour les siens, et sonmépris pour la justice qui "s'attribue ledroit de tuer et tue / De plein gré, desang-froid, sans scrupule."

"L'Immense," dernière partie de l'ou-vrage sert à contrebalancer "Ne metouchez pas," car on y est sensible à l'in-dividu en mesure de suivre ses instinctsd'amant et d'apprécier pleinement lesmenus plaisirs qu'offre l'existence. Il fautnoter que ceux-ci s'inscrivent souventchez Charlebois dans le domaine de l'a-mour charnel, et rejoignent ainsi la voixéluardienne :

sur les dalles d'un jeune temple que la merallaite

deux corps inaudibles à lèvres découvertesà consommer dans le grand verdoiement

Symétrie, images somptueuses, violence etdouceur: autant d'aspects qui font deTâche de naissance un ouvrage à voixmultiples.

Célyne Fortin nous offre une oeuvrebien singulière qu'est Au coeur de l'ins-tant. Practicienne du haïku, Fortin y livreplus de trois cents de ces petits joyauxqui communiquent sous forme d'apho-risme son désir de capter l'effervescencede la vie, de Pinsoler à l'aide d'une for-mule concise et sans artifice. Sagessejaponaise? Il faudrait trouver une autremanière de décrire le contenu de ces vers,car ils naissent tous de la même inspira-tion, à savoir de pénétrer le mystèrequ'est la fuite du temps afin de mieux ensaisir le mouvement. Transposer enimages les grains du sablier: voilà engros le but que Fortyn se donne dansAu coeur de l'instant. Qu'il s'agisse d'undire universel:

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la grange bien pleinechamps et prairies moissonnées

l'hiver peut venir

ou encore d'un niveau plus personnel:je suis attachée

à cette terre à ce mondeson souffle me brise

l'on s'aperçoit que le lyrisme sans am-bages qui émane des vers cadre particu-lièrement bien avec la simplicité et de lalangue et de la forme utilisées par Fortyn.Au coeur de l'instant est un ouvrage bienréussi, unique en lettres québécoises ettout à fait susceptible d'enchanter lelecteur.

Auteur d'un mémoire de maîtrise etd'une thèse de doctorat sur Saint-DenysGarneau à qui il dédie Le tant-à-coeur,qui comprend une partition de Jean Phi-lippe Beaudin, Jean Ghapdeleine Gagnona écrit quatre recueils de poésie et denouvelles poétiques avant de faire paraî-tre l'ouvrage en question. A l'instar deson "maître à penser," Gagnon recrée"l'espace impondérable" que l'on trouvechez celui-là et renchérit sur ce thème enévoquent la difficulté d'écrire:

II y a tant de fois qu'il se répète : il faudraitque j'écrive. Pourtant il reste là, badaud,tout penaud, à regarder ses feuilles, grisesà force d'y poser les yeux. Il a du mal às'attacher à sa chaise, à s'asseoir à sa table,à prendre le crayon, à se mettre au travail.Peur de perdre son temps. Mais comme ilen gaspille à remâcher ses mots, ses envies,ses désirs.

"[SJ'agiter autour du vide," "plongerpour s'écraser": Gagnon est enclin àpeindre l'individu qui gravite vers l'a-bîme, vers un état figé. Le tant-à-coeurse caractérise par une parole acerbe, unesensibilité dominée par un pessimisme quisuggère l'impuissance de l'homme pen-sant:

Tourner la page — et pour quoi faire? Onn'a plus rien à apprendre, rien d'autre àattendre.

On désapprend à vivre. Et l'on sourcille àpeine quand l'autre, devant soi, tel un cail-lou se noie.

Silence, parole muette: autant de mani-festations de la difficulté d'être écrivain.Et pourtant, force est de noter que Ga-gnon se détourne de la thématique deSaint-Denys Garneau en vue de mettreen relief ce qui semble une préoccupa-tion fondamentale, à savoir l'inefficacitéou même l'échec de l'acte d'écrire. Onest donc loin de l'enfant chez Saint-Denys Garneau pour qui les regards etles jeux se traduisaient éminemment bienpar l'intermédiaire de la parole.

Les Editions du Noroît continuent defaire paraître des oeuvres soignées, ac-compagnées très souvent d'illustrationsbien faites et d'une qualité indéniable.Que le Noroît ne manque jamais desouffle !

KENNETH W. MEADWELL

UNE BOUTEILLEA LA MERVICTOR-LEVY BEAULiEU, Chroniques polissonnes

d'un téléphage enragé. Alain Stanké, $i 1.95.

Chroniques polissonnes d'un téléphageenragé est un recueil de textes écrits parVictor-Lévy Beaulieu et publiés hebdo-madairement dans Le Devoir entre avril1984 et juillet 1985. Ces textes, oucomme les appelle l'auteur "billets," serapportent tous à l'univers de la radioet de la télévision québécoises. Une trèsbelle introduction par Victor-Lévy Beau-lieu les précède; il y raconte son premiercontact magique en tant qu'enfant avecla télévision, contact qui constituait uneouverture sur le monde réel ainsi quesur le dépassement de celui-ci. Une "for-clusion" écrite une année après le dernierbillet suit le recueil des chroniques. Cu-rieux texte, car non seulement Victor-Lévy n'y conclut point mais encore,

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comme le titre "forclusion" l'indiquerait,il croit avoir perdu tout droit sur lui.Curieux d'autant plus que dans cette for-clusion Victor-Lévy Beaulieu parle nonplus en tant que le téléphage qu'il étaitdans les Chroniques mais plutôt en tantque le feuilletoniste qu'il est devenu parla suite. Bref, son point de vue dans laforclusion est entièrement changé, et s'ilne renie pas les textes qui précèdent c'estque dit-il "[il] ne sauraift] rien renier."Avant d'aborder les articles mêmes, no-tons l'illustration de la couverture exé-cutée avec intelligence et humour parSuzanne Brind'Amour. Il s'agit de com-parer les deux volets de la couverturepour en apprécier toute l'habileté.

Dans les Chroniques polissonnes, Vic-tor-Lévy Beaulieu se propose d'amuseret d'instruire à la fois: Rabelais qué-bécois, il nous invite à rompe l'os pourarriver à "la substantifique moelle" afinde pouvoir "s'en régaler et en retirerquelque profitable enseignement." Sansavoir la moindre prétention d'épuiser lesujet, Beaulieu parle du téléroman et dela radio du matin, des réclames publici-taires et du bulletin de nouvelles. Il ré-fléchit à la vidéo-cassette, au quizz, autéléthéâtre pour ne donner que quelquesexemples. Il examine la question de latélévision et de la radio régionales, celledes sports. Sans avoir toujours une ré-ponse, Beaulieu ne recule jamais devantles questions qui s'imposent à lui tant auniveau de la programmation des émis-sions qu'au niveau de leur réalisation.C'est en ceci que consiste d'après nousle plus grand intérêt des Chroniques:elles dénoncent le grand silence de lacritique au sujet de la télévision et de laradio, et ébauchent le début d'une ré-flexion à leur sujet. Elles nous secouentdans notre indifférence de téléphages as-soupis et de consommateurs inconscients.En démystifiant la télévision et en révé-lant la toute-puissance des cotes d'écouteet donc du public, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu

nous fait prendre conscience du fait quejuger ce que nous voyons et écoutonsn'est pas un simple privilège, mais uneresponsabilité et une obligation. LesChroniques proposent à leur lecteur cer-tains critères tant positifs que négatifs etqui pourraient lui servir de guide. Beau-lieu dénonce avec rage (ce n'est pas pourrien qu'il est chroniqueur polisson et en-ragé à la fois) l'ennui profond de cer-taines émissions : "cette débilité . . . danstoute la bêtise de son uniformité." Ilaccuse certains réalisateurs d'une "incu-riosité fondamentale," de prétention,ainsi que d'une "fâcheuse tendance à lafacilité." Les mauvaises émissions sontcelles qui recherchent le profit avanttout et à tout prix et qui afin de seconstituer un grand public visent bienbas. La pauvreté tant langagière qu'in-tellectuelle, les stéréotypes et les clichésfaciles sont dénoncés. Enfin, il relève"une absence absolue de commentairevéritable du côté québécois où le mâ-chemâlo et le lieu commun n'ont d'égalque la niaiserie." Quant aux valeurspositives qui constituent une bonne émis-sion, Beaulieu recherche avant tout lavérité exprimée en un langage qui "ditle fond des choses, délesté de toute hypo-crisie." Aussi veut-il un langage qui nesoit ni affecté ni pointilleux. Tout enreflétant à la fois la curiosité et l'hon-nêteté de ceux qui les réalisent, les émis-sions télévisées ou radiodiffusées de-vraient renvoyer à leur public leur rêvemais élargi, leurs mythes fondateurs maisdans ce qu'ils ont de singulièrement qué-bécois, rendant par là possible une véri-table découverte de l'imaginaire. Ainsidonc Victor-Lévy Beaulieu désire queplus de programmes soient consacrés autélé-théâtre, à la littérature québécoise, àla musique québécoise dans sa moder-nité, afin de pouvoir atteindre à "la re-connaissance de ce que nous sommesdans le meilleur de nous-mêmes" plutôt

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qu'au quotidien dans la corruption et laviolence banalisées.

Tout ceci et bien davantage, Beau-lieu réussit à le dire mine de rien, etsans tomber dans le style prêcheur! Bienau contraire, son style irrévérencieux estplein de verve et d'humour. Pourtantsoixante billets au rythme d'un par se-maine, soit deux cents pages se lisent mald'un seul coup, et Beaulieu est le pre-mier à l'admettre: "lorsqu'on relit toutd'une traite une flopée de textes qu'on aécrit à la petite semaine, j'imagine quec'est normal que la face de tombe commecela vient de m'arriver." En effet, lesChroniques se lisent mal d'un trait. Il ya là un certain désordre qui fatique: lestextes se déroulent sans suite ni liaison.L'ordre chronologique, bien que fidèlereflet de l'ordre de parution des billetsdans Le Devoir est presque sans intérêtpour le lecteur. Un certain regroupe-ment, le numérotage des "billets," ainsiqu'on bon index auraient été bien utiles.D'ailleurs l'honnêteté qui ne renie rien,tout en étant absolument admirable, nedevrait point justifier la paresse! Or,nous aurions préféré des textes quelquepeu remainés et où certains mots-ticsrépétés jusqu'à l'écoeurement auraientété éliminés ou remplacés par d'autres.Les termes "épais" et "épaisseur" con-trastés avec "mince" et "minceur" sontainsi répétés jusqu'au point de devenircomplètement dépourvus de sens, surtoutlorsque deux textes se suivant immédiate-ment emploient le même terme "épais-seur," l'un dans le sens de "manque definesse," l'autre diamétralement opposéde "riche." Une telle maladresse n'en estpas une lorsque les textes appraissentdan deux numéros séparés du Devoir,mais devient irritante dans un livre. Demême la vieille prédilection de Beaulieu,surtout lorsqu'il s'emporte (souvent avecraison!) pour un langage vulgaire estparfois agaçante. Et comme les chauf-feurs de taxis au gros rire et qui se tape-

ront sur les cuisses en lisant les Chro-niques seront plutôt rares, autant laissertomber certains passages tels ". . . des mi-dinettes . . . s'imaginent que branler de lacuisse quand on est fardé comme desvieilles cocottes, il y a là tout ce qu'ilfaut pour que le téléphage s'escoue dansses couettes." Et tant que nous y sommes,laisser tomber aussi quelques phrases delongueur proustienne mais sans en avoirla saveur. Peut-être même quelques pas-sages où se fait sentir la fatique du chro-niqueur hebdomadaire: le livre y gagne-rait en densité. Car Chroniques polis-sonnes d'un téléphage enragé est un livrequi répond à un vrai besoin longtempsnon satisfait, et dont les nombreusesquestions, remarques et observations s'in-sèrent dans le contexte plus large d'undépassement possible. C'est que Victor-Lévy Beaulieu aime le Québec "notrepays-toujours-pas-pays" et qu'il veut lesortir de son indigence! Dans son intro-duction, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu dit qu'ilpublie ces chroniques "comme une bou-teille à la mer." A nous de recueillir labouteille de ce naufragé et de lire son

message !IRENE OORE

MACMILLANBRUCE WHITEMAN, CHARLOTTE STEWART, &

CATHERINE FUNNELL, A Bibliography ofMacmillan of Canada Imprints igo6-ig8o.Dundurn Press, $49.95.

I F A PUBLISHER'S REAL MERIT — afterwe've forgotten the seasonal ballyhoo —is in his titles, then Macmillan of Can-ada can be proud that its imprints arepart of the cultural identity of three gen-erations of Canadians. These titles rangefrom Kipling to Callaghan, from Creigh-ton to Davies, from Livesay and Pratt toKroetsch and Trudeau. Not a bad recordfor one of the more enlightened branchpublishers, which, ironically, had its tri-

BOOKS IN REVIEW

umphs as a branch, and its decline as aCanadian-owned firm. Although it hassurvived two traumatic ownershipchanges since 1973, its achievement ap-pears to be in its backlists because, sadto say, this book is the epitaph for adistinguished house.

When a change in the CanadianCopyright Act in 1900 ensured that sub-sidiary publishing would be the best wayto protect foreign copyrights here, Mac-millan of London established its Torontobranch in 1905; its purpose was to mar-ket the trade and school books of theother Macmillan houses. The firm's twoexciting periods coincided with creativeexplosions, first in the 1920's and 1930'sunder the dynamic Hugh Eayrs, whoinitiated the policy of publishing Cana-dian books, and under the astute JohnGray in the 1950's and 1960's. In 1973,as financial troubles plagued the wholebook trade, the English directors soldMacmillan of Canada to Maclean-Hunter, which cut back the literarytitles; but unable to improve the Mac-millan finances, in 1980 Maclean-Huntersold the firm to Gage Educational Pub-lishing, which moved the Macmillanoperations to its suburban plant.

In 1979 McMaster University ac-quired the archives of Macmillan ofCanada and its library of printed books.In 1984 Bruce Whiteman published TheArchive of the Macmillan Company ofCanada Ltd. Part I, igoi-igß^; now heand his colleagues, Charlotte Stewartand Catherine Funnell, have compiledthis enumerative bibliography, alphabeti-cally arranged within each year, of morethan 2700 imprints that were issued be-tween 1906 and July 1980. They includealmost every publication (excludingagency titles) with the Macmillan ofCanada imprint. Each entry contains theauthor's name, the title as it appears onthe title page, pseudonyms where appro-priate, the publisher's imprint, the pagi-

nation, and the book's size. We also learnif the book appears in paperback, if it ispart of a series, and if there are revisededitions.

The editors do not itemize frequentreprintings of a book, a principle thatmay cause misunderstanding about thetotal number of titles issued annually, asdistinct from new titles. For instance,George Stanley's Canada's Soldiers(1954) appears as three separate itemsbecause it was substantially revised ini960 and 1970. On the other hand, Mac-Lennan's Two Solitudes, originally pub-lished by Collins in 1945, first appearsas a 1951 school edition and again as atrade edition in 1957, while the newtypeset paperback "edition" in the 1967Laurentian Library series is merely notedwithin the 1957 item. Therefore, sincethe figure of 77 titles issued in 1967 isonly a minimum, it is debatable whetherthe minimum number of titles issued inany year explains much about the firm'sprosperity, especially without informa-tion about sales. Nor does the bibliogra-phy include the foreign editions pub-lished simultaneously with these localones ; presumably such information wouldemerge in studies of individual authorsor of Macmillan of Canada. Neverthe-less, the Introduction provides a succinctsurvey of the firm's activities.

This handsomely produced bibliogra-phy, with its easy to read entries andIndex, is an invaluable resource fortracking down Canadian editions or trac-ing the directions of Canadian writingand society in this century. While lit-erary scholarship in Canada has beenwoefully hampered by the absence ofarchival materials on which to base let-ters, biographies, and textual editions,McMaster's acquisition of both the Mc-Clelland and Stewart and the Macmil-lan archives will facilitate our study ofpublishing and writing.

GEORGE L. PARKER

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DEPAYSEMENTJANET M. PATERSON, Anne Hébert: Archi-

texture romanesque. Editions de l'Universitéd'Ottawa, $15.95.

JANET PATERSON'S STUDY of Anne Hé-bert's novels consists primarily of a de-tailed analysis of Hébert's first full-lengthwork of fiction, Les Chambres de bois(1958). This initial analysis serves as abasis for conclusions which are subse-quently seen to apply in varying degreesto the later novels : Kamouraska (1970),Les Enfants du Sabbat (1975), Héloise(1980), and Les Fous de Bassan (1982).Short chapters are devoted to the firstthree of these, and a longer, concludingone to the last. Anne Hébert's poetry isreferred to peripherally, as one of severalelements of intertextuality evident in thenovels.

The methodology is primarily basedon Iouri Lotman's approach to textualsemiotics, with reference to other re-lated theories (Eco, Barthes, Ricardou).Les Chambres de bois is examined un-der several headings: first, the "produc-tion du sens," which is seen to stem fromthe word "pays" (introduced in theopening sentence), with all its denota-tions and connotations, both within thetext and in a (problematic) Québécoiscontext. The "pays" of the novel is seento shift, as does the universe evoked,from the "real," to the dreamlike, towhat is termed the "irréel." Paterson'sdetailed analysis of each of these aspectsis exemplary in its thoroughness andlucidity. She also manages to overcomethe dryness typical of this kind of syste-matic semiotic study. The distinction be-tween "dream" and "unreal" as cate-gories has been criticized by Alain Piette,but seems to me to be adequately jus-tified. It is shown to be particularly tell-ing in relation to Todorov's theory of the"fantastic," the "marvelous" and the"strange." Paterson's conclusions illumi-

nate the eerie effect produced by thisnovel — an effect, as she points out, of"dépaysement," connected to the "pays"as theme and structural component ofthe novel.

The title Les Chambres de bois al-ready includes two spaces: the enclosedone of Hébert's early poem "La Cham-bre de bois," and the open one repre-sented in Québec by the "bois" and as-sociated in the novel with the hunters'forest of the fairy tale. The shift from"l'irréel" to the world of the "conte"(also initiated in the opening sentenceby the formula "C'était au pays deCatherine . . .") is convincingly demon-strated. As Neil Bishop has remarked,there is a chapter in Jennifer Waelti-Walters's Fairy Tales and the FemaleImagination which is relevant here. Thepresence of the tale provides a bridge tothe second part of Paterson's study,which deals with the "inscription dusens" in Les Chambres de bois. Severalaspects of the narration are reviewed asdifferent ways of incorporating self-conscious commentary into the fiction.These include various types of "mise enabyme" (of stories within the story), re-curring images of embroidery and nee-dlework (associated with writing andnarration) and references within the textto other texts. The epigraph from Super-vielle, which heads the last section of thenovel and is echoed at the end, is shownto be particularly significant in relationto the interplay of representation andnarcissistic reflection of the process oftelling.

The symbiotic relationship of thesetwo elements in Les Chambres de boisis shown to be present, though modified,in the other novels. In Kamouraska it isaffected by the historical dimension ofthe story and conveyed by images of the-atricality. In Les Enfants du Sabbat thereal becomes unrealistic, the fantasticmore believable. In Héloise it is less de-

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veloped, but complicated by a web ofallusions to the author's poems. In allthese novels, as in the first, mirror im-ages recur. In Les Fous de Hassan thepreoccupation with representation andnarration becomes even more prevalent,as the same story is told by several nar-rators, and the birds' cries ("les cris desfous de Bassan") become "l'écrit desfous." This complex account of the pro-cess of creation is dominated by allusionsto "L'Ecriture" (Scripture) and "la Pa-role" (the Word). In this last chapterthe methodology gives way to a moreeclectic interpretation, with excellent re-sults.

Les Fous de Bassan serves to justifyPaterson's conclusion, that Anne Hé-bert's novels belong in the "postmodern"category of Québécois fiction, to whichshe assigns also those of Aquin, Du-charme, and Brossard. No distinction isdrawn between those novels produced inthe 1960's and those which are muchmore recent, yet Paterson's study demon-strates that there is an evolution in Hé-bert's fiction between 1958 and 1982. LesFous de Bassan is in fact the first inwhich she depicts writing as an activity,as opposed to other types of narration.There may be a need, on aesthetic aswell as chronological grounds, to refinethe categories of the postmodern, butPaterson's work in this area will no doubtclarify this aspect.

Janet Paterson's study will serve as anexcellent basis for further work on theaspects of Hébert's novels which it de-liberately leaves untouched. In particu-lar, the application of psychoanalytictheory would illuminate many elementsthat remain tantalizingly marginal inthis semiotic analysis. A Brazilian doc-toral thesis has compared Anne Hébert'swork with that of Clarice Lispector: thefeminist implications of Hébert's novelscertainly deserve to be explored further.

VALERIE RAOUL

POETIC TRAVELLERSCHRISTOPHER LEVENSON, Arriving at Night.

Mosaic, $8.95.F. w. WATT, It's Over It's Beginning. Porcu-

pine's Quill, $7.95.BERNICE LEVER, Sometimes the Distance. Mo-

saic, $7.95.PHILIP RESNicK & RON WALKEY, The Cen-

taur's Mountain. Pelion, $9.95.

IT MAY SOUND FACILE to say that eachof these books represents a journeythrough a poetic universe, for that is todescribe all books of poetry. But travelmetaphors immediately spring to mind,because what these four collections havein common is a preoccupation withgeography and mobility in space. A tripthrough a poetic landscape is alwaysmore satisfying when you travel econ-omy, and Christopher Levenson is by farthe most frugal of these four travellers.His language is economical and his im-ages tightly packed. Arriving at Nighttakes us from the England of his birththrough several Canadian towns and cit-ies, with stopovers m Cuba, Greece, andthe United States. A seasoned traveller,Levenson knows how to get the bestmileage out of experience as well as lan-guage. Here are a few lines inspired byMaple Creek, Saskatchewan:

. . . this place, the merest knotin a single tenuous line across a landscapeof silos and elevators, is shaved cleanas if for an operation. There is nothing herefor the mind to hold to unless it beits own power to invent; the sheer skillof the surgical early lightexposes every wrinkle in the tar-paper, every

dentin the corrugated asbestos roof. In such a

landscapewe are required to be honest, nothing can

hide.

This may be taken as a statement ofpoetics, for honesty, sheer skill, and thepower to invent are what characterizeLevenson's work. His destinations are

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often the junction where civilization andthe natural world meet:

Outside, conditioned night: I gazeon galaxies of refineries, airfields,light-plasma pulsatingover deeply-scored tablelands,where lakes of departing birdscoalesce in flight patterns.

Nature departs as culture encroaches,but "What shocks is the waste between"the two, "the landfill / of anonymity /[that] crushes the bird-hung marsh"("Near New Mills"). But Levenson alsohas humour: for example, "From A Ro-manian Phrase Book" is a hilariousfound poem, and "In The Ideal World"satirizes the trendy language used to de-scribe the architecture of a modern uni-versity complex.

F. W. Watt prefers to travel first class,and so does his publisher, the Porcupine'sQuill, which uses the services of CoachHouse. Consequently, It's Over It's Be-ginning is, like all books influenced byCoach House, a beautiful artifact. Butin terms of poetry, first-class travel some-times means excess baggage, and Watt'slanguage often lacks compression. Histravels are through time and space, fromthe rural experience of his youth to theurban space of adulthood. The ruralreminiscences, by far his best poems,move along a tightrope of positive ten-sion between two archetypal emblems,horse and tree. The horse representsspeed, freedom, and unlimited mobilityin space, while the tree is emblematic ofrootedness and belonging. Here is Wattat his best:

New sounds breaking (notthe silence but)

the low hummingof millions of biographies

a new rhythmthe muffled thud of hoof-beatssaddle-leather creakingbit-rings janglinghorse shaking his long head

in a storm-cloud of crazed flies

a few birds overhead overheard echoingacross the hollow stream-bedtall trees crowded together

arms sharing the motionless airwith vegetable calm

caught in the lens of the human eyewith bright sunlight slanting

between their dark trunks.

Although it's not clear why the texttakes this shape on the page, the dictionis careful, and there is some sensitivityto the way language moves. Absent inthese particular lines is Watt's irritatingweakness for adverbs: "resolutely," "dis-consolately," "freely," "aloofly," "des-perately," "distantly," or the like appearelsewhere with tedious frequency. Aseries of moving love poems vacillatesbetween sexual ecstasy and a state ofdespondent voyeurism into which thepoet retreats after a brutally honestevaluation of his assumptions aboutwomen. For example, tempted to offermale protection — a commodity once ingreat demand — "I suddenly realize /you're safer as you are, safe / from mywill to keep you safe" ("Portrait of aVictorian lady" ).

In Sometimes the Distance, BerniceLever's journeys are internal and con-sistently emphasize the universal femalefrustration with restricted mobility inspace. Part One of the book deals largelywith entrapment in violent sexual rela-tionships in which death often presentsitself as the only escape. Lever some-times likes to pack her psychic travelgear in elaborate conceits. The most in-teresting of these are drawn from sportand recreation. A baseball metaphorstructures "On Having Lovers"; "HandsOff" and "Concessions" utilize imagesfrom boxing; and "Man Overboard"equates the balancing act of love withthe tricky balance necessary to canoeing.The opening lines of "Divorce is Like aHockey Game" are typical of the waythese metaphors work:

BOOKS IN REVIEW

Divorce proceeds like a hockey game,but seldom is there time outjust lots of body checksa rush of wingersabout to be benchedfor high sticking is commonas is scoring from the end zone —

Part Two of the volume is a journey insearch of alternatives to the life-scriptsof violence featured in Part One. Thealternatives are between brutal self-analysis on the one hand and booze orsuicide on the other. There are no at-tractive role models among the "LiteraryLunch Ladies Preening"; nor is "TheNew Woman" an appealing alternative:"she drives — whatever man steers thesilver porsche, and leases the penthousewith the 4 bathrooms," and "she loves— when it's not too much commitment,it suits her career, and it pleases heranalyst." The book ends with a bitterlyironic search for peace through a de-graded landscape of polluted air, taintedwater, and the threat of nuclear anni-hilation.

The Centaur's Mountain, text byPhilip Resnick and pencil drawings byRon Walkey, is a loving tribute to theMount Pelion area of Greece. It is theleast poetic of the four volumes. Despiteits shape on the page, the text, althoughelegantly phrased, is linear and descrip-tive. Some of the poems, which attemptto universalize the poet's experiencethrough the use of the second person"you," sound more like excerpts from aVictorian tourist brochure :

You can count white surges in the sealike stripes on a blue flag,crashing wave after wave against the shoreswhere bathers only yesterdayswam with the octopi.You can feel the sun at the high point of

day,a cloud or two to dispel the glarewind buffeting the chestnut trees.

Despite these weaknesses, the book is notwithout charm. Enriched by Resnick's

knowledge and love of classical litera-ture, the picturesque depictions of localinhabitants, landscapes, tourists, sea-scapes, and villages are the harmoniouscomplements of Walkey's impressionisticsketches. The book is handsomely printedon high quality, textured paper, whichshows off the sketches to advantage.

DIANA M. A. RELKE

YUKON HISTORYROBERT G. MGCANDLESS, Yukon Wildlife: A

Social History. Univ. of Alberta Press,$14-95-

IN THE YUKON, we are quite familiarwith the many volumes of popular his-tory — some excellent, some not — writ-ten by Yukoners, which are prominentlydisplayed by local bookstores and eagerlypurchased by visitors. Florence Whyard'srecent biography of Ernie Boffa and thelate Al Wright's now classic Prelude toBonanza are two excellent examples ofthis genre. A few Yukoners are alsoaware of the many scholarly studies thatlitter the dusty shelves of universitylibraries and northern institutes, workswritten by "northern experts" who pe-riodically visit the north but write in thecomfort of their homes and offices in thesouth.

There is a growing group of people inthe Yukon for whom neither type ofwork is entirely satisfactory. In the for-mer we see a genuine commitment to thenorth but an often naïve understandingof scholarship. In the latter we see thecherished values of critical inquiry but,more often than not, we wish for a moresensitive, more personal commitment tothe north. Alternately frustrated asnortherners then as academics, we con-tinue to search for indigenous forms ofscholarship, returning always for modelsto the works of anthropologists like JulieCruikshank and Hugh Brody who, unlike

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most, have imaginatively and responsiblystruggled to balance the objective andsubjective in a manner which is accept-able to both scholar and northerner alike.

Robert McCandless's book is one ofthe few in a discipline outside anthro-pology to address this problem satisfac-torily. Using the development of gamelaws to measure social change betweenthe historical "earthquakes" of the Klon-dike Goldrush and the building of theAlaska Highway, McCandless demon-strates both a firm understanding ofscholarly research and a genuine "feel-ing" for the Yukon. His many yearsspent in the Yukon may explain why,after concluding the study which formsthe body of the book, McCandless sup-plements his analysis with the "stories"of a number of long-time Yukoners whohunted and trapped in the territory dur-ing the first half of this century. In hisintroduction to the verbatim transcrip-tions of his interviews with John Joe,Frank Goulter, and Johnny Taku Jack,McCandless writes:

These interviews took place after a draftof this manuscript had been completed.Consequently I knew, or thought I knew,the events and personalities described pre-viously. I suppose I was looking for someanecdotal material, yet it soon became clearthat each man's story should have a placeof its own in this book. Although they hadlittle knowledge of most of the events I havedescribed, they could talk for hours aboutthe people involved. Many other stories likethese could — and should — be recorded.They can be woven in and around moreconventional historical themes and bind thewhole into an enduring fabric. What followsdoes confirm the archival record, but alsoshows how limited that record is in givingus a glimpse of the Yukon's past.

Such a statement, and the accounts thatfollow it, not only acknowledge the limi-tations imposed by traditional historio-graphical techniques but sharpen thedesire for a history of the Yukon thatgoes "behind" men seeking gold or build-

ing a wartime highway to a studied por-trait of a Yukon of everyday acts andsimple lives.

Such a Yukon lies at the centre of thebook. Not only is this history carefullysubstantiated, but McCandless contra-dicts many contemporary imaginings ofthe Yukon, whether by writers seekingthe last frontier or bemoaning its pass-ing, or by scientists eager to work inNorth America's largest natural labora-tory, or by politicians seeking a northernsolution to southern Canada's economicwoes. Thus, the picture that emerges isa surprisingly novel one that shows littleregard for contemporary "urban" no-tions of nature, exploitation, and rela-tions between the sexes:

In the twenty years between 1921 and1941 the population increased by merelyten percent. A continuous labor shortageallowed Indians to participate as much oras little as they liked in the wage economy,and they had the alternatives of trapping,big game guiding, or even market huntingand fishing to earn cash. While in practicethere may have been some discriminationbetween Indians and non-Indians, therewere no incidents to foster ill-will; in fact,both halves of the Yukon community de-pended upon each other in a sort of culturalsymbiosis — separate, distinct, and interde-pendent.

They show that the hunter was not anintruder, but a guest who paid his way.

. . . they had difficulty in explaining thatconfidence about animal populations to out-siders, who continued to see the matter intheir own, continental perspective.

The Yukon's attraction lay in its imageas a northern Shangri-La, with game andfish in abundance. Whatever their motives,the newcomers had a profound and lastingeffect on the Yukon's wildlife, not becausethey shot everything in sight but becausethey imported a different perception ofwilderness and wild animals.

A full history of this firm [the merchants,Taylor and Drury] needs to be written, forit seems to depart from the usual modelsof mercantile exploitation. . . .

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Before 1947-48 families suffered throughfinancial or economic hardships as a unit;afterwards it was the men, the trappers,who lost the most. Recalling those years,qne man said, "the government became mywife's old man. She don't need me any-more."

Such statements force us to rethink thetraditional views of the north whichcharacterize much of the northern lit-erature and scholarship of southern Can-ada and show their inadequacy in ex-plaining life in this unique corner of thecontinent.

ARON SENKPIEL

CODES OF KNOWINGUMBERTO Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans.

William Weaver. Helen & Kurt Wolff,$US 15.95.

RiKKi DucoRNET, Entering Fire. Chatto &Windus, £3.95.

FRANZ K. STANZEL & WALDEMAR ZACHARASIE-wicz, eds., Encounters and Explorations:Canadian Writers and European Critics.Königshausen + Neumann, DM 32.

IN THE TITLE ESSAY of Travels in Hyper-reality, Umberto Eco describes his jour-ney through that part of America fromwhich intellectuals such as himself usu-ally recoil in horror: the America offurious and frenetic fantasy as enshrinedin such monuments of bad taste as LasVegas, Disneyland, Oral Roberts Univer-sity, Randolph Hearst's Castle, the For-est Lawn Cemetery, the Lyndon B.Johnson Memorial in Austin, Texas, aMarine World, a Ripley's "Believe It OrNot!" display, and innumerable waxmuseums. What fascinates him aboutsuch places is, of course, their semioticvalue, the way in which they reveal anAmerica so obsessed with the Real Thingthat it must compulsively, frantically,construct imitative structures so believ-able, so much "more real than reality,"that they can be taken for the objects

they represent. This is hyperreality, Ecotells us: a state of being in which every-thing, absolutely everything, is made tosignify. Here, the only valid knowledgeis iconic knowledge. Signs aspire to thecondition of the real, and reality isforced to aspire to the sign. The experi-ence of pleasure demands that some-thing be faked, and faked so persuasively,and with such technological competence,that thereafter reality must always seema pale imitation of it. In hyperreality,there must always be the promise ofsomething more.

Why is it that this kind of hyperrealityshould be so distinctively American? Theanswer, Eco suggests, is simply thatAmerica lacks history and so must at-tempt to construct it from the fragmentsof Old World culture which it imports,embellishes, attempts to improve. Thusthe polychrome Venus de Milo in thePalace of Living Arts in Buena Park, LosAngeles overwhelms the original (and inthe process recuperates from history theinevitable losses brought on by the marchof time) by virtue of having her armsrestored to her. All it takes is money.Lots of it. And complicity in the processof reading the signs.

What Eco is really saying is that thekinds of interpretations we make, thesemiotics we practice, are inextricablybound to questions of liberation and au-thority. In all of the essays in this col-lection of Eco's journalism, wherever theauthor's cosmopolitan gaze settles —clothes, movies, sport, religion, exposition(including Expo 67) —the process of"reading things" is always intertwinedwith basic questions of ideology: whoconstructs the semiotic field? whose in-terests does it serve? what kinds of un-derstanding does it want us to arrive at?what possibilities for conceptual resis-tance does it provide? These are im-portant questions, and in the case of"Travels in Hyperreality" they under-

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write a striking, devastating critique ofAmerican society — it's compulsive bri-colage, its magic need to assemble theshards from what it discursively con-structs as an "authentic" past into hyper-real monuments to its own astonishingpresence. Nonetheless, semiotics is not anexact science, and what disturbs me,faintly, is the utter confidence withwhich Eco's Old World, post-Saussuriansensibility constructs units of knowledgeout of the popular practices of a culturewhose underriding sensibilities are so farremoved from his own. For as Eco wellknows, "real" history — that sense ofdepth to the present which guards Eu-rope, somehow, from the temptations ofhyperreality — is also a rhetorical con-struction, a signifying system that enablesspecific beliefs and energizes specific ac-tions in the areas of culture and politics:in no way is it proof against the kind ofself-deceit that Eco sees America prac-ticing on itself. And the conditions ofinterpretation are never free from themediating influence of cultural relativity— a fact which Eco acknowledges inhis essay entitled "De Interpretatione,"where he questions why it is that China,a film made in admiration and respectby the antifascist director Antonioni,could be seen as "an inconceivable actof hostility, an insult" by Chinese view-ers. I t would appear that such safeguardsto the process of interpretation applyonly when the other is really Other : Chi-nese, for example, and not North Ameri-can. When it comes to "reading" theNew World, Eurocentric assumptionsseem to suffice.

In Rikki Ducornet's Entering Fire,however, the responsibilities of interpre-tation are integrated with a recognitionof cross-cultural difference. The two, infact, are central themes in this energetic,political, and at times grotesque, novel,and the author — who was born in theU.S., resided in Canada during the mid-

1960's and early 1970's, and now livesin France — makes the juxtaposition be-tween them the site of an inquisition intothe nature of historical inheritance andcognitive transmission. The novel pre-sents us with what at first seems to be asimple binary opposition between thetwo protagonists, who share the narra-tion of the book. Lamprias de Bergerac,a direct descendant of Cyrano de Berge-rac, reveres his ancestor, and employsCyrano's wisdom in carrying out experi-ments in alchemical botany in the Ama-zonian jungles of South America, experi-ments which lead him to inhabit, at leasttemporarily, a new paradise free fromthe constraints of civilization and to de-velop the exotic, hybrid orchids that willmake him famous. Lamprias is exuber-antly, erotically, in love with Otherness,as is evident in the mistresses he acquiresthroughout the course of the novel:Cûcla, a Japura River Indian, for ex-ample, or Dust, a Chinese woman whosefeet are bound, and with whom he has ason named True Man. His "legitimate"son Septimus, however, is marked by aninsane hatred for everything his fatherloves. One of his first acts is to burn thebooks in Cyrano's library, and he growsup to be a fanatic racist and misogynist,a vocal supporter of fascism and an ac-tive worker in the business of sendingJews and Gypsies into the ovens of Naziconcentration camps.

Lamprias's questing and questioningspirit, his dedication to hybridization,provides a resounding contrast to Septi-mus's syphilitic rages and misogynousviolence, but Ducornet will not allow herreaders to stop too soon in the complexprocess of interpreting this novel. Quitelate in the book, we realize that thechapters Septimus has written are, infact, letters to his father, letters Lam-prias has stopped reading because theycause him too much pain. And it is onlyat this point, when the cloud of fascism

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has followed Septimus from war-timeEurope to McCarthy's America, thatLamprias begins to suspect his own com-plicity in his son's activities and beliefs,only then that he resolves to read these"potent and poisoned" letters which canno longer be ignored.

In alchemical terms, the fusion of op-posities in the vas Hermeticum of historyleads not to the vegetal philosopher'sstone that Lamprias wants to concoct, butrather to the explosion of genocidal willthat reverberates throughout Nazi Eu-rope and colonial South America. Andat the root of this process stands theancestral force of Cyrano de Bergerac,whose Voyages provide the sub-text tothis work. As Timothy J. Reiss explains,Cyrano's works, imbued as they are witha fascination with experimentation as themeans of knowledge, help promulgatethe analytico-referential episteme thatwill dominate Western culture for thenext three hundred years. In fashioninga line of descent from Cyrano throughLamprias to Septimus, Ducornet suggeststhat this discursive system, and especiallythe part which Lamprias's nineteenth-century brand of humanistic imperialismplays in it, is invested in the genesis ofsome of the most truly hateful socialmovements in twentieth-century Westernculture. And thus Ducornet converts thenarrative of this cryptic and thoughtfulnovel into a powerful allegory of historiccausality, suggesting, in the process, thatthe possibility of breaking free of suchpatterns of transmission lies in the inter-pretive strategies her readers constructin their own encounters with the phe-nomenal, inherited world.

But if concern for the ideological im-plications of interpretation informs bothEco's and Ducornet's book, the collec-tion of creative and critical writing fromthe International Symposium of Contem-porary Anglo-Canadian Literature in

Austria, 1984, Encounters and Explora-tions, employs cross-cultural criticism forfar safer, and finally less interesting, pur-poses. As editors Stanzel and Zacharasie-wicz explain, the volume is aimed at aEuropean audience, and its imbroglio ofofferings — two stories, two poems, oneeulogy, five critical articles, three writ-erly meditations, one discussion, one edi-torial, and a postscript — attempts tocome to terms with that admittedlyproblematic question thought to be in-evitable to this group of readers: whatcomprises "the Canadianness of Cana-dian literature" ? In answering that ques-tion, the contributors divide, roughly,into two camps. On the one hand, JackHodgins, Graeme Gibson, and FredCogswell seem to argue for cultural dif-ferences that work against larger gen-eralizations such as "nation," "modern,""universal" — ones that constitute theirown behavioural mores and codes ofknowing. As Hodgins points out, "thesymbol of the country, a maple leaf, wasof a colour no one west of the Rockieshad ever seen on a tree." On the otherhand, Helmut Bonheim, WaldemarZacharasiewicz, and Walter Pache seemto seek specific examples of what theytake to be universal narrative structures,their project being the placing of con-temporary Canadian fiction within thecontext of international writing prac-tice.

Many readers, I suspect, will concludethat to pose the question of the "dis-tinctively Canadian" in such a contextis wrong-headed, for to ask it raises firstand foremost the question of criticalmethodology and the assumptions thatunderlie it. "Climate and the feel of theland," asserts Robertson Davies; "theseare the Canadian factors present in ourwriting. . . . " Perhaps so, but only withinan essentialist view of literature that seeswriting as narrowly reflective of experi-ence and that privileges literary content

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over form, narrative pattern, or rhetori-cal construction. In contrast, WalterPache, in examining the modernist/post-modernist debate centring on volumes ofshort stories collected by John Metcalfeand George Bowering, concludes that"the escape routes from the safe garrisonof 'GanLit' into the realm of interna-tional English literature clearly lead intodifferent directions." What remains un-examined here is the assumption that thetransmission of ideas, literary modes, andnarrative techniques is solely a matterof influence, an assumption that leavesunasked many pressing questions aboutthis particular moment in Canadian lit-erary practice. Why, for example, dothese writers not only adopt, but alsoadapt, specific writing practices? Whatdiscourses do they engage? What cul-tural work does this kind of writing per-form? For the possibility remains thatwhat constructs the "distinctively Cana-dian" in Canadian writing may have lessto do with the themes, motifs, and nar-rative structures that proliferate in thecontent of fictional and poetic worksthan with the cultural codes of recogni-tion against which they resonate, codeswhich cannot be so simply adumbrated,enumerated, known.

The bulk of the criticism in Encoun-ters and Explorations seeks empiricallyderived data against which to apply gen-erally structuralist or formalist methodsof inquiry, and as such the volume isunlikely to contribute greatly to the gen-eral fields of Canadian or cross-culturalstudies. It will, however, play an impor-tant role in encouraging the developmentof Canadian studies in European schools,colleges, and universities — an issuewhich the collection's closing discussionand postscript tackle head-on. In this re-gard the volume has a valuable contri-bution to make, and provides welcomeevidence of the growing interests by Eu-ropean critics in what one hopes will not

always be a "territory of experience offthe beaten track of English studies" ingeneral.

STEPHEN SLEMON

KURELEKPATRICIA MORLEY, Kurelek: A Biography. Mac-

millan, $34.95.

OVER MANY YEARS Patricia Morley de-veloped her interest in William Kurelekand his work. In 1973 she read his auto-biography, Someone With Me, and in1980, as she says, "Fate turned her atten-tion to me." By chance attending aKurelek exhibition at Toronto's IsaacsGallery, she learned that Avrom Isaacs'slong patronage and support of Kurelekhad resulted in a mass of letters anddocuments from the artist to the dealer.Another treasure-trove of manuscriptmaterial was held by Mrs. Jean Kurelek,the artist's widow. For six years, out ofthese archives, as well as scores of tapedinterviews and correspondence with fam-ily, friends, and acquaintances, this biog-raphy evolved, authorized in that JeanKurelek gave its author permission touse and quote freely from her late hus-band's writings and definitive in the au-thor's page-by-page effort to assemble allthe facts and finally to present the man,Kurelek, to us, immensely and obsessivelygifted and just as immensely troubled.

"My quest for the man behind theartist and his personal myth has beenboth satisfying and aggravating," saysMorley. The "myth" most Canadiansknow, if only vaguely, because Kurelek'soutput was enormous and he was famousfor upwards of twenty years of his shortlifetime (1927-77). His association withMay Cutler of Tundra Books in the lastyears of his life, which led to the publi-cation of the illustrated children's booksA Prairie Boy's Winter and A Prairie

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Boy's Summer, extended his name andfame to a far broader audience than Insart alone would ever have done. Thebasic "myth" that Morley speaks of is,of course, that of the prototypical mis-understood artist, romantic style. Thesuperstructure gives the myth its specificCanadian content: the story of the giftedimmigrant child of Ukrainian back-ground, hounded by his hard-workingfather, Dmytro, and reviled by his in-capacities as a Manitoba farm-child; thedevelopment of serious mental difficul-ties; the conversion to Roman Catholic-ism; and, finally, fame and contentmentin marriage and family. Kurelek livedthat myth, rightly enough, and he alsowrote it down, but until now we havemissed layer upon layer of the complexi-ties and ambiguities of the man.

I have never before read a biographywhose subject's strength of will was sofiercely Nietzschean in its power and sounremittingly ruthless in the service ofhis inner sense of vocation, both artisticand religious. He absolutely had to havea hard childhood — his obsessive driveto do what he wanted to do, what he feltimpelled to do, demanded an equallystrong adversary. The first one was hisfather, with whom in later years he pro-fessed to have come to terms, thoughMorley points out repeatedly the con-tinuing ambiguities and resentments inKurelek's attitudes to Dmytro. She isparticularly and objectively fair to bothhis parents — immigrants, strugglingManitoba farmers through the Depres-sion, trying to do their best for theirfamily of seven and gradually succeed-ing. In terms of what they could pos-sibly have given him in shelter and edu-cation, Bill Kurelek was not deprived.He graduated from the University ofManitoba in 1949. Loving nurture wasanother thing — what Bill required inthis area was not in their power, par-ticularly in his father's power, to give.

Furthermore, Morley shows us over andover again that Bill Kurelek clashedwith Dmytro so disastrously because theywere, at base, so very much alike.

Kurelek's second lifelong adversary,particularly potent after his conversionto Roman Catholicism in 1927, was theDevil, whose footprints he saw all aroundhim in the materialism and self-destruc-tiveness of contemporary society. To hisconstant wrestlings with the Devil, weowe many of his strongest paintings —as an adversary, the Devil had anothergreat advantage : he aroused in Bill noneof the debilitating guilt that his relation-ship with his father had left festering inhim.

Early in life Kurelek developed ago-nizing problems of insecurity and de-pression; but he also had, and developed,a fierce determination, a strong vein ofshrewdness, and a serendipitous abilityto find, or make, situations that wouldfoster his growth as an individual andas an artist. Morley is good at showingus both sides of the coin. In 1952 hewent to England, presenting himself,four days after arrival in London, at theMaudsley hospital, to whose head, Dr.Davies, he had written from Canada.Davies was in the forefront among pio-neers in art therapy for mental patients.At Maudsley and, later, at NetherneHospital, Kurelek received both medicaltreatment (including electric shock) andmassive doses of encouragement for hispainting.

Before he came back to Canada forgood in 1957 he also began the invet-erate travelling that was to be a majorpart of the rest of his life. Then andalways his many trips had a double goalof purpose and pilgrimage — Vienna, tosee the great collection of Breughel'spaintings, where "he spent three entiredays 'feasting' his eyes on details";Lourdes and the Holy Land, stages inhis journey to faith; a search for family

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roots and artistic inspiration in his fa ther's home village in the U kraine. TheArctic, India, H ong Kong, South Africa,Mexico — he travelled avidly, with aminimum of comfort and a maximumof both personal involvement and paint er's curiosity.

Kurelek always, ultimately, got whathe wanted and needed. H e was alwayswilling to pay, with his work, his writingand, later, his speeches, all the debts offriendship, shelter, encouragement, andsupport that he accumulated. They weremany — this biography has more "sub heroes" than any work I can remember,from his English doctors through a hostof long suffering but devoted friends,there and here, to his two major Cana dian patrons, Avrom Isaacs and MayCutler, and finally, I would say heroi cally, to his wife Jean and their fourchildren.

In many ways Kurelek was light yearsaway from being the gifted "son of theprairie soil" that his myth suggests; insome ways he was very close to it. Mor ley lets us see it all — her tapestry isimmensely complex in its detail. H ereinlies one of the two reservations I haveabout this biography: the narrative lineis sometimes swamped by the weight ofits load of data. Also, though she wiselyresists moving into the field of art criti cism, she does at times weigh down thetext with her descriptions of Kurelek'spaintings. H er work already has excel lent reproductions, ten of them in colour.Any one of them is worth a dozen para graphs of the description that breaks upthe narartive line.

The mythic Kurelek satisfies a simplis tic need for an heroic tale of struggleand success. This biography supplants itwith a portrait of the man, Kurelek,both tragic and triumphant. I am grate ful for it.

CLARA THOMAS

WAR & SEALOREJ. A. FOSTER, Heart of Oak: A Pictorial His

tory of the Royal Canadian Navy. Methuen,$12 95

HAL LAWRENCE, Tales of the North Atlantic.McClelland & Stewart, $19.95.

URSULA jupp, ed., Home Port: Victoria. SonoNis, $9.95.

URSULA JU P P , ed., Deep Sea Stories from theThermopylae Club. Sono Nis, n.p.

True Canadian War Stories, . , Jane De war. Lester & Orpen Dennys, $14.95.

CORNEL LUMIÈRE, Kalavrita: A Greek Trag-edy, A Strange Love. Simon & Pierre,$10.95.

SOME REDOUBTABLE CANADIAN institu-tions—the CPR, the CBC, and AirCanada among them — have observedimportant milestones in their corporatehistories in the mid-1980's. Nineteeneighty-five, for instance, marked the 75 thanniversary of the Royal Canadian Navy.Of books celebrating the event, two areunder review here. Two other works inthis group celebrate the ThermopylaeClub of Victoria, B.C., a select organi-zation of retired seamen which began itsmeetings more than fifty years ago. Acollection of war reminiscences from thepages of Legion Magazine, and a novelof revenge based on a tragic event ofWorld War II, complete a group mixingnostalgia, grit, and humour commemo-rating deeds great and small, and nefari-ous.

Heart of Oak and Tales of the NorthAtlantic recall in photographs and anec-dote the ships and personnel of Canada'snaval service. In presenting the RCN'shistory in pictorial form, making use ofdozens of black-and-white pictures ofvessels of all sizes and types, J. A. Fosterwears his heart on his sleeve. He andretired Rear Admiral W. M. Landy-more, who writes the book's preface, arestaunch defenders of the "old" Navyand of its traditions inherited from Brit-ain's senior service. Not for them the

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"modern" Navy, the "Sea Component ofthe Canadian Armed Forces." Studentsof naval ship design and specificationswill require more detailed informationthan this photo album provides; still,Heart of Oak is an attractive coffee-table item.

Hal Lawrence's compilation of "saltydips" is an appropriate companion vol-ume. A Bloody War (1979) establishedLawrence's reputation as one of the live-lier anecdotal historians of the Corvettenavy in World War II, and here heoffers a wide-ranging set of yarns aboutthe exploits of some of the famous cap-tains — Budge, Pullen, De Wolf, andHibbard — of RCN annals. (One ca-veat: Lawrence is too partial to theofficer class, for there are not manylower-deck reminiscences in Tales.) Forhim, as for most of his Royal Navy-trained comrades, the Navy was as mucha "religion as a profession," but whilehe writes with pride about the "band ofbrothers" there is none of the "pusser"rigidity one associates with the olderdays of naval discipline. Naturallyenough, most of the incidents recalledare from the Battle of the Atlantic pe-riod — tales of stormy passages, anti-submarine manoeuvres, sinking ships,sleepless watches, and miraculous sur-vivals. The wrenching experience of hav-ing to leave shipwrecked men adrift, soas to vacate dangerous waters, is noted.And there is respect shown for the tac-tics of former enemies like U-boat Cap-tains Kretschmer, Prien, and Schepke.But not all the narrative is grim. Thereis, for example, the gallows humour ofcrews who used to shout "Refit! Refit!"whenever their ships shuddered throughhigh-speed turns in sub-hunting opera-tions, thereby anticipating an early re-turn to port for repairs and welcomefurloughs. And further, where else butin the wartime Navy could a universitystudent be appointed "Acting Proba-

tionary Temporary Sub-Lieutenant" —which happened to publisher-to-be JackMcClelland when he joined the RCNVolunteer Reserve.

Another kind of sealore is found inHome Port: Victoria and Deep SeaStones, reissues of collections which ap-peared in 1967 and 1971 respectively.Ursula Jupp, the editor of both books,was the first woman accorded member-ship in a club which was originally re-served for merchant captains and otherold salts. The club was named in mem-ory of the tall ship Thermopylae, a teaclipper on the China-England run in the1860's and 1870's whose only reputedrival for the honour of being the fastestship afloat was the Cutty Sark. Even-tually she was bought by Canadian in-terests and registered in Victoria duringher final days in the 1890's. Since theclub began to meet in the 1930's, itspresident has always been called "Mas-ter"; in like style, the members areknown as "Bosun," "Shipmate," and"Carpenter." Meetings have regularlyfeatured talks by members about the be-ginnings of shipping along the northwestcoast or about months-long voyages todistant ports around the globe. As theclub historian, Jupp retrieved from herown records, as well as from B.C. pro-vincial archives and other sources, anentertaining blend of fact and legend.Hence the casual reader of these volumescan sample tales of sealers and gold-seekers, tramp steamers and mail boats,the perils of riding through typhoonsand hurricanes, and the glorious memoryof square-riggers in full reach of thewind.

Tales of army experiences are the sub-ject of True Canadian War Stories, per-haps the best of all these books in con-tent and narrative skills. In preparingthis anthology, Jane Dewar, editor ofLegion Magazine, made a selection ofnon-fiction memoirs which have ap-

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peared in the magazine over its sixty-year history. (Beginning life as The Vet-eran in 1917, the official voice of theGreat War Veterans Association becameThe Legionary in 1926 and Legion Mag-azine in 1969.) The book is divided intosections, recalling the three major con-flicts Canadian soldiers participated induring this century. The short WorldWar I section contains authentic ac-counts by two of the better-knownsoldier-writers of the Canadian Expedi-tionary Force, Greg Clark and Will R.Bird. Clark's is of trench raiders duringthe battle for Vimy Ridge, while Bird's"What Price Liberty?" is a suspensefultale of a prisoner-of-war who manageshis escape after many tries. Amongmemoirs appearing in the lengthy WorldWar II section are those by a number ofnatural writers: Ben Malkin, Dave Me-Intosh, Rosemary Hutchinson, DougSmith, and Kingsley Brown especially.Ben Malkin, a reporter for the WinnipegFree Press, had been a pacifist in the1930's; but after the Munich crisis, hisviews began to change. He enlisted in anartillery unit when war broke out, sawservice in Italy, and then put his skills towork as a war correspondent during thefinal phase of the conflict. He writes ofthe necessity of "numbed emotions"among battle-hardened soldiers: "A sol-dier would have one or two intimatefriends, but even with them, he exorcisesemotion. If they die, too bad. Otherwise,his heart would be torn too often." Onthe other hand, Kingsley Brown, an air-man who spent part of his war as aprisoner in Germany, recalls how neces-sary it was for one's morale to plan es-cape attempts, play pranks on the guards,and to gossip endlessly about food andwomen, while enduring the tedium ofincarceration. Mclntosh, Hutchinson,and Smith all tell anecdotes that shedlight on the daily routine of life in wartheatres. Whether in Newfyjohn, Derry,

or London Town, the peculiar atmos-phere of the "hurry-up-and-wait" wargave birth to many amusing incidentswhich left indelible memories. The sec-tion on the Korean War expresses a con-trasting note, however; few veterans ofthe "forgotten war" recalled that harsh,stalemated campaign with any fondness.

The final book is very different fromthe foregoing. It is a work of fiction, setchiefly in Greece, by Holland-born, some-time Canadian author, Cornel Lumière.The plot concerns the efforts of StavrosMilionis to revenge the deaths of hisfamily and hundreds of others who weremassacred by Nazi occupation forces inthe town of Kalavrita in December1943. Returning to his native land fromCanada — where he has grown up andbecome a successful lawyer — Stavrosostensibly plans to erect a monumentnear the town in honour of his fatherand kinsmen. Then his revenge takesshape as he murders a pair of Germanshe meets by accident. But this only whetshis appetite; soon he becomes a one-manterrorist squad as he systematically wipesout whole busloads of German tourists.Quite obviously Stavros is psychotic, hisretribution made ridiculous by a per-verse sense of patriotism and an almostincredible passion for the mysteriouswoman, I-Vuvi, a symbol of his coun-try's honour. At the end we must con-clude that Lumière's own anti-Nazifeelings have got the best of him as anauthor, since his story turns into an anti-German tirade. What began as an act ofremembrance, fizzles into small, mean-ingless acts of butchery.

ERIC THOMPSON

COMIC STRIPSJACQUES POULIN, Spring Tides, trans. Sheila

Fischman. Anansi, $7.95.T H E CENTRAL CHARACTER in the worksof Quebec's Jacques Poulin is often an

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introverted loner; in his latest novel,Spring Tides, this tendency is taken toan extreme as the book's protagonist in-habits a desert island in the St. LawrenceRiver where dictionaries replace thefriends he never had. Through Teddy'slife on the island, first with only hisdictionaries, his cat, and a tennis-playingmachine called the Prince, and then witha growing cast of strange visitors, Poulinexamines the nature of happiness andthe constraints placed on happiness bysociety. The book's simple story, spareprose, and gentle humour disguise amyriad of deeper ideas.

Christianity is evoked in the first threewords of Spring Tides — the same threethat open the Bible: "In the beginninghe was alone on the island." Teddy isemployed by a newspaper publisher totranslate comic strips. In an effort tomake Teddy happy, his employer (knownonly as the Boss) allows him to live andwork on the island. The Boss descends(God-like) from the sky in a helicopterto bring Teddy his food and his copy andto inquire after his happiness — whichseems to be the Boss's major concern.It is the Boss, also, who decides to sendthe visitors that change and complicateTeddy's life. Teddy seems content, butthe Boss senses (he is not told) other-wise, and sends a young girl to comforthim. First Teddy alone, then Teddy andMarie inhabit the island.

The presence of Marie is at first wel-come, but Teddy's translation work be-gins to suffer. Subsequent arrivals fur-ther confound him. First the Boss'slibidinous wife, then an ancient Frenchacademic and a surly, idealistic authorarrive, soon followed by even more dis-ruptive guests. Soon Teddy's world isturned upside down. The Boss hasbrought each of these others in an effortto make each of them happy, but theirneeds overlap, making individual happi-ness, for Teddy at least, out of the ques-

tion. At one point the Boss asks Teddy:'"Are you really happy?' 'Look,' saidTeddy, 'that's a difficult question. Howcan anyone know if he's happy or not?'"After consulting a dictionary and beingled from definition to definition, theydiscover that happiness is "Granting orobliging in what is desired." Happinessseems to be as difficult to measure as itis to achieve.

Poulin also presents other ideas alongwith much ironic humour. Teddy is atranslator obsessed with getting the exactsense of each cartoon balloon that he istrying to render. He treats the words ofHagar the Horrible and Charlie Brownwith the seriousness of a true languagezealot. Teddy also recoils at the sound ofEnglish expressions. It is not clear howfar to take this. However, the protectionof the French language would seem animportant duty of the Francophonewriter. At the same time Poulin puts theAuthor on the island to write a novel,intending to wed the idea-based Frenchnovel with the action-based Americannovel to form the great novel of Amer-ica. Significantly, Poulin has him blockedwithout having finished his first sentence.Even more playfully, he has the Ordi-nary Man call an encounter group a"group dynamite session. 'Dynamics,' theOrganizer corrected him." When the Au-thor mutters an obscenity, the slightlydeaf Professor thinks he has said theFrench word Phoques and launches intoa story about seals. This type of word-play keeps the tone light, and keeps thestronger medicine tasting sweet.

Poulin examines the psyches of lonerswho do not quite fit into their immediatesurroundings. He seems to conclude thatif happiness is fitting in — or grantingor obliging what is desired — then, forsome, happiness is not possible. Perhapsa new definition is required, or at least anew method of measuring. Or perhaps,as Spring Tides suggests, happiness is

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not something that can be pursued inand of itself, but is tied up in the variedaspects of a person's life, and cannot beseparated from them.

JOHN URQUHART

INADEQUATERESPONSER. GAiR, ed., A Literary and Linguistic History

of New Brunswick. Goose Lane, $14.95.

As A GENERAL assessment, one would liketo be able to say, "This is an unevenbook," or "This is a disappointing book,"but conscience forbids such gentle ad-monitions. The truth is: this is an em-barrassingly awful book, badly written,ill-conceived, and at times simplistic andpedantic. As a New Brunswicker, I amashamed and angered to see the substan-tial intellectual and literary achievementsof the province haphazardly filteredthrough minds that do not appreciatetheir import.

The book's problems begin with theuneven editing. You only have to lookat a work like William Toye's OxfordCompanion to Canadian Literature tosee the coherence and consistency that askilful editor can bring to a volume com-posed through the efforts of diverse au-thors. Here, the work has all the read-ability of a bureaucratic report or "cata-logue" (to use the editor's unfortunatechoice of words).

The first quarter of the book consistsof five articles dealing with New Bruns-wick languages (Micmac, Maliseet, Eng-lish, and Acadian). This is probably theworst part of the volume. It soon be-comes clear that linguists cannot write.They seem to have no feel for languageas a living thing and certainly no senseof how to use it to communicate effec-

tively with non-specialist readers. Attheir worst, they blindly crank out reamsof pretentious jargon; at their best, theyare awkwardly pedantic. What is mostdisturbing is that they evince no love oflanguage; rather, they seem obsessivelycaught up in rigid patterns of categori-cal organization and pass these off asintellectual accomplishments. By turningmeans to ends, they appear to be indus-trious while really telling us not muchat all.

The literary history part of the bookbegins with Yves Bolduc's article onAcadian poetry. It is a good start: thepiece is informative, has an analytical aswell as descriptive thrust, and supportsits observations with a generous servingof quoted passages. In the end, however,it appears tentative, even inconclusive.Its focus on what makes Acadian poetry"Acadian" blurs and slips away. Bolducat least tries to come to terms with some-thing (however elusive) ; Fred Cogswellpontificates from a vacuum. The firstquarter of his essay dealing with Englishpoetry before 1880 is taken up with anappallingly simplistic and pedantic dis-cussion of the universal development ofpoetry and society. What is worse, in theabsence of a more discerning criticalframe of reference, this preamble is usedas the basic analytical tool to evaluatethe verse of the period in question. Theresults are predictable : "garbage in, gar-bage out." With Barrie Davies's articleon English poetry between 1880 and1940, we move to firmer ground. Whileworkmanlike, his critical perspective issurer and has the intellectual complexityto allow him to reveal something of thesubtlety and conceptual integrity of thematerials he is dealing with. It is, how-ever, an area that has been well tilled byothers, and Davies's article adds nothingnew. The most interesting article in thebook is Bob Gibbs's essay on English

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poetry since 1940. It amounts to a mod-est memoir, a reminiscence, and justwatching the author cope with the de-lightful ironies that invade his discussionof himself and his own work makes thepiece worth reading. After Gibbs, thearticles are generally competent if some-what pedestrian. Granted, it is difficultto stimulate the reader's intellectual curi-osity when your first concern must besimply to chronicle literary activity, buttoo often these essays slip into a form ofprose-catalogue. The most readable areMary Smith's piece on English theatre,Don Conway's essay on early Englishfiction, and Fred Cogswell's article ontwentieth-century English fiction. Smithis thorough, especially on early theatre,but Conway seems at times to be strug-gling in unfamiliar territory. Like Gibbs'sessay, Cogswell's approaches a memoir,but is marred by a shaky critical appa-ratus and occasional indulgences in de-clamatory rhetoric. The pieces on Aca-dian theatre, folklore, novel, and essayare very prone to cataloguing, but suffermost at the hands of their translators.None of these translators appears towrite English well enough to representthe original at an acceptable level offluency. Their limitation has the insidi-ous effect of creating an apparent quali-tative difference between the work ofEnglish and Acadian scholars. Ironically,many of the problems H.-D. Parattepoints to in his essay on efforts to trans-late Acadian and English literary worksacross the language barrier are demon-strated in this volume itself.

At best, this kind of volume raises thequestion: is traditional literary historyan adequate critical tool to deal effec-tively with the kind of intellectual andaesthetic understanding of our literaturethat we now have and /or want? Thereis no doubt it fails in this case.

THOMAS B. VINCENT

SAISONS D'AMOURLOUISE WARREN, Madeleine de janvier à

septembre. Edns Triptyque, n.p.HELENE DORiON, Hors champ. Noroît, n.p.PAUL CHANEL MALENFANT, Les noms du père.

Noroît, n.p.

DÉDIE A LA MÉMOIRE de Michel Beau-lieu, Hors champ se compose en faitde textes intitulés: "Filatures," "Hors-champ" et "ce qui remue sous la chair"et "Comme une prise sur l'éphémère."L'exergue qui ouvre le recueil "Je faismourir de faim l'amour pour qu'il dé-vore ce qu'il trouve" d'Octave Paz, pour-rait bien s'intituler "Elle portait avec ellel'irrévocable miroir d'aimer."

Car il s'agit bien de souvenirs et decet "irrévocable miroir d'aimer" qu'ils'agit de retrouver depuis la rencontre"il y a eu ta venue Chaque cellule ap-pelant l'émeute / Cette façon de souve-nir," jusqu'au moment privilégié de cette"perspective d'éblouissement" :

II n'y aurait que ce jourCette façon de regarderPoindre la lumière à l'horizonPressentant cette levéeAu bout d'elle-même.

Ces reliefs d'une musiqueComme ce qui aligneraCes regards portésSur l'ombre alors devenueperspective d'éblouissementQui transforme tes chaminsCette façon dis-je d'articulerTes phrases tes peaux aussiDéplacera les espaces tuNe seras plus que ce gesteDe glisser vers toi-même versToi-même ne te retenant plus.

Ce qui constitue la beauté poignante deces images, c'est entre autres, le faitqu'elles contiennent toujours leur propremort — et l'acceptation de l'oubli.Comme ce moment de sincérité absolueoù l'amour affleure avec des mots trèssimples :

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Je t'aime ne veux plusRien direDes nuits que je passeA te chercher je m'épuiseEt pourtant sachant bienQuelque part consentirA l'oubli.J'ai beaucoup aimé ce recueil, qui

nous fait entrendre une voix pure, "au-thentique," comme Michel Beaulieu lui-même nous avait habitués, par sa poésieintimiste. Par contraste, Madeleine dejanvier à septembre qui porte sur lesrelations entre un homme et une femme,l'espace d'une saison d'amour, paraîtfade, bien qu'elle ne manque pas d'uncertain charme: "Par une histoire desgens qui s'aiment — Non malgré l'es-soufflement des mots d'amour — Ils nesont rien d'autre que l'exaspération deleur sensibilité." On peut mesurer la pro-fondeur qui sépare ce livre de celuid'Hélène Dorion — et le sentiment devide que nous laissent ces minces cespages — même si le projet du livre, nousdit l'exergue est de faire de notre chairle joyau d'une "invraisemblance."

Les noms du Père s'ouvre comme untriptyque, aux volets solennels, portant(i) les noms du père, (2) d'ailleurstoute musique, et (3) et tels, des indices.Le sujet, à prime abord surprend un peu,car on n'est pas habitué, en poésie, àécrire sur son père, ses parents, à leurconsacrer en tout cas, un livre. La dé-marche est lente, d'une beauté grave etciselée, car il s'agit du "fragment d'ori-gine" d'un grand poète en qui l'amourdes mots, du language, se révèle ici:

Tout mot, tu le prends à la lettre ;à la loupe les ailes brûlésd'un papillon de papier.

Le poème demande une lecture attentiveet ne se livre pas facilement. L'émotionest contenue et ne sourd que par mo-ment:

Si je persiste à ton histoireentre les mots désaccordéspêle-mêle entre les lignes,

tout sens suspenduquand je pense à tes hanchesquand le fleur de l'âgeet l'âge de raison,mon père si mort:c'est que je te porte,fils et folie,regards décimés dans la mémoireset la passion, femelle.

Dans les lieu dits: Italiques, sorte denotes d'un voyage en italie, rédigées enprose, Chanel Malenfant arrive à con-denser, d'une manière saisissante, descliches pris sur le vif, et des descriptionsde chef-d'oeuvre:

Des mains coupées sur un muret dans l'écho de lointaines prières:pour le rouge d'une tunique le bleud'un voile sur la vierge sans visage, onse souvient des roses dans le cloître etdu cèdre millénaire. De l'or couvesous le noir. Le temps est saisi, un raptdans le regard. Fra Angelico gît, frappépar la lumière sous l'ogive d'uncorridor, tandis que tout se tait, et queje lis les majuscules hallucinées dansla salle si bien écrite des antiphonaires.

Il s'agit d'instantanés, de ralentis, dezoom, pris par un photographe qui estaussi poète (la disposition de certainesphrases et de certains textes annule ladifférence qu'il y a avec les textes envers), amoureux de littérature et d'art.

THUONG VUONG-RIDDICK

DEUX VISIONSESTHER ROCHON, Coquillage. Edns La Pleine

hune, n.p.JEAN-PIERRE APRIL, Nord électrique. Edns

Préambule, n.p.Sous LA MÉTAPHORE d'un coquillagemonstrueux, le nautile multimillénairevenu du fond de l'océan, Esther Rochonnous décrit les dédales de la passionamoureuse, sa force d'attraction et dedégoût, ses laideurs, mais aussi ses im-comparables somptuosités. A travers lesrécits entremêlés de François (fils de

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Thrassl), qui se rappelle de son enfanceet de ses amours interrompus avec lenautile, ainsi que des souvenirs de Xun-mil (qui jadis a été la maîtresse deThrassl et maintenant aime Françoissans espoir de retour), nous voyonsévoquer le portrait de Thrassl, sa ren-contre avec le monstre et la terrible fas-cination que ce dernier exerce sur lui,puis la longue dépendance jusqu'à ladéchéance finale. A ses côtés nousvoyons aussi Irène (la maîtresse deThrassl et la mère de François), ainsique son amant Vincent qui deviendrapar la suite un ami de Thrassl. Maisnous avons surtout le point de vue duNautile lui-même, sa lente formation àtravers le temps, ses tentatives pour en-trer en communication avec les hommes,ses erreurs et ses réussites c'est à dire lerécit de ses amours avec une jeune fille,puis finalement avec Thrassl qu'il rendraenceint en déposant ses oeufs.

Esther Rochon, avec le goût des rela-tions que lui donne sa formation enmathématiques et aussi, peut-être, soninitiation boudhique, nous brosse, avecgrand raffinement, le jeu subtil de dif-férentes sujets, les uns envers les autres,et vis à vis d'un centre de gravité unique,le monstre. Elle nous donne avec unegrande force, cette ambiguïté centralequi a pour nous la passion, dans unelangue juste et étrangement poétique.

Dans le Nouveau Québec imaginairede J.-P. April, une armée de super-camions, exploitent le minerai de fer,sous la conduite de leur vedette le superMulti-Motor 23. A l'inauguration duprototype, sous l'oeil des cameramen, unaccident survient: le Capitaine LucienMénord est électrocuté. Les administra-teurs de la télévision chargent Jean, lenarrateur, d'enquêter sur l'accident, tan-dis qu'ils essaient de le camouffler enremplaçant Lucien par son fils SergeMénord. C'est ainsi que débute cettefresque du futur dans le grand-Nord

quand la haute technologie est mélangéeà la vodka et à la drogue, le voyagel, etqu'à tout ceci se joignent les incantationsdu sorcier Naskapi, le tout, orchestré parles tenants du théâtre total. Nous auronsune explication in intremis comme dansun roman policier classique. J.-P. Aprilne manque pas d'imagination et ses des-criptions du grand Nord dégagent unsens épique. Ses visions futuristes sontassez impressionnantes. J'avoue m'êtreennuyée mais c'est peut-être par goûtpersonnel.r THUONG VUONG-RIDDICK

TENSIONS IN TIMEDAVID WATMOUGH, Vibrations in Time. Mo-

saic, η .p .

THERE IS MUCH in this collection ofstories that would justify its having beencalled Tensions in Time, but David Wat mough's accomplishment is that a bal ance is struck between conditions ofrestraint or pressure that are unrelievedand those that give way to release, how ever tentative. I am not just speakinghere of the fictional world that Wat mough creates, but also of the way inwhich he presents that world throughthe vision and voice of his protagonistDavey Bryant. Tension arises becauseDavey tells his stories with remarkableauthority, but is not a wholly reliablenarrator. Watmough's ironic vision andvoice are always behind Davey's articu lation of experience, compelling thereader toward a larger consideration ofevents and people than Davey himself iswilling, for the most part, to provide.

There can be no doubt that DaveyBryant's homosexuality governs his viewof himself and of others, but Watmoughmakes it plain that if Davey is sometimestrapped by his sexual nature, he is moreoften victim of a world bias about homo sexuality that ranges from the sanctimo nious to the vicious. Thus in "The Way

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It Was" Davey follows his Americanlover from Paris to California, callingKen, among other things, his "muscle-shaped adonis" who brings only "Bliss!"and dramatically insisting on their coup-ling as "an ecstasy that could know notopography — celestial or otherwise!" In"The Savage Gardner" an older Davey("Hungry, horny me!") almost faints inhis physical admiration of a teenager inshorts who reminds him of the "honey-hued torso" of the young man who "gotaway" years before. But in each of thesestories Davey does not stay locked in hiscarnal perceptions very long, nor with-out paying a great price. When Kenleaves to continue his army career heand Davey must say good-bye publicallyand in a painfully formal fashion:

we enacted our farewells. Eyes met andhung in soft glances, but Ken's warmbreath remained remote from my face. Andthe permitted handshake was a blasphemyof what we felt and what our arms strainedto do as we submitted to the dictates of thestraight world as to what constituted alegitimate goodbye between grown men: asoldier and a civilian. . . .

Davey rails against a heterosexualworld that bullies him and Ken "intofalsely echoing their sentiments and act-ing in their fashion," and he fires off atelling riposte to an Anglican bishopwho preaches to him about St. Paul'sadmonition in I Corinthians to thoseinvolved in the "perversions and abomi-nations of the Cities of the Plains"; inthe same book of the Bible, Davey pointsout, St. Paul also insists that women be-long to their husbands and should keeptheir mouths shut in public places. ButWatmough makes his reader well awarethat such point-scoring does not alter theoutcome of the game and that the rulesremain inexorably fixed. The teenager inshorts reveals the violence behind therules when he takes all the money inDavey's wallet, confident that having tohit Davey would simply be condoned as

justifiable fairy-stomping. One senses thepsychic violence that has been inflicted,as Davey wonders about the explanationhe will have to invent for his friends ofmany years' standing (with whom he isstaying) and how he will ever be able toshare with them "the whole truth."

When Davey is not advocating his sex-ual rights or foolishly betraying his pref-erences, the world still comes at himwith its prejudice. Watmough pulls nopunches in his condemnation not onlyof the sanctimonious clergy, but also ofthose who in other times and positionsof power might have happily closed theoven doors on those they feared andloathed. In trying to interview a"distinguished west-coast photographer,"Davey encounters a boulder spray-painted with "i HATE QUEERS" and anexplanation from an obviously articulateindividual that is frightening in its close-mindedness and its closure. It seems thatwhen he was just starting out in NewYork the photographer discovered "'Youguys had everything sewn up '" and that"'Later it was the same in all the arts.. . .Look at the CBC for Chrissakes!'"Now that he is successful, his message isas loud and clear as that on the boulder;the photographer can overcome his lib-eral inclinations and "'try the truth.'"What unites the bishop, the savage teen-ager, and the photographer is their fun-damental refusal to deal with projectionsof their own insecurities and with beliefsthat are part and parcel of a largerworld gone awry. That it is the spirit ofthis world that is malevolent is empha-sized by "The Vancouver Spectre" inwhich Davey is haunted by a ghost/manwhose identity is uncertain but who rep-resents the prevailing hostility in a citywhose cultural richness and diversity ap-pear to provide security.

Watmough chronicles the limitationsof the world with which Davey Bryantcan only ineffectively deal when he faces

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it with the physical side of his homo-sexual nature; but several of the beststories in the collection reveal Davey'sstrength and insight that come from histolerance of and essential openness to thecomplexities of individuals who areworthy of attention, above all, becausethey are human. "Inside Out" hasDavey struggle beyond the call of dutyto aid an ex-convict who takes endlessadvantage of him. In "When the FathersWent Away" Davey meets a "recklessyoung girl peeling away her protections,"and sticks with her against his usualphysical predilections because he sensesher need while trying to comprehend hisown. In "An Immigrant's Tale" he be-friends a Polish painter/writer, fasci-nated by his crude energy, "the wholegamut of his extravagant emotions andcomic gestures." But in none of thesestories is Davey portrayed by Watmoughas a martyr to the sensitive life who can-not discern the parameters of the realityhe shares with others. Davey challengesthe ex-con about his dishonesty, but doesnot try to convert him to the "straight"life (Watmough's implicit irony here isinescapable) ; he backs away from thegirl who would, for her own psychologi-cal reasons, take him over; and he ac-cepts the "strange heritage of ills" thatbedevil the Pole and result in his con-finement in a mental institution.

The most memorable story aboutDavey Bryant is "The Wounded Christ-mas Choirboy" in which Watmough'sportrait of a Cornish village is redolentof Dylan Thomas's prose-poems ofWales. Davey recalls his boyhood envyof a fellow singer in the parish churchchoir. Such envy results in his oxymo-ronic image of the other boy's singing,an image simultaneously hilarious anddisturbing, given the context: "the sweetstream of sound spewed forth." Butyoung Davey's reading of the village'ssub-text of repression beneath a healthy

surface life is nowhere better capturedthan in his view of a carping womanwhose "thin mouth . . . slammed shutwith the same moist slap mother madewhen putting up pounds of fresh butteron the cold shelves of the dairy."

Watmough may write, through DaveyBryant, of a world gone awry and hint,at times, of apocalypse rather than salva-tion through personal experience, butwhatever the limitations of Davey's ex-perience, Watmough's vision is ulti-mately compassionate and his voice isone that transcends the babble of antipa-thy that surrounds.

J. A. WAINWRIGHT

WITHOUT A HEARTHELENE HOLDEN, After the Fact. Oberem,

$12.95·CAP DES VENTS IS a remote French-Canadian village whose inhabitants strug-gle for survival in a post-apocalypticworld. Something terrible has happened— whether revolution or war is neverspecified, although there are referencesto bombs, Blacklists, and Rebels — andsociety is in a state of shock. Food andjobs are scarce and frustration lingersclose to the surface in everyone. After theFact starts with this unsettling premisein order to depict what happens whenthe old rules and assumptions no longerapply.

Catherine opens the narrative with herown present-tense, first-person accountof how she comes to be in a place likeCap des Vents. Having just fled husbandStéphane Dubé, Catherine arrives in thevillage with one of her two daughtersand her lover in tow. All have assumednames: Catherine and Lawrence pre-tend to be married and the parents ofyoung Natalie. They rent a house on thebeach and try to blend in with lifearound them: Catherine paints, Law-rence writes, and Natalie attends school.

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But from the first the Lemoynes arousedistrust and suspicion: Catherine be-cause she is beautiful and Lawrence be-cause he is so energetic and self-suffi-cient. The populace of Cap des Ventsresents the trio for their apparent wealthand talent, especially after Dubé showsup in town and proves them to be liars.

No one despises the intruders morethan the novel's other narrator, ironi-cally named Marie-Ange. Her first-person, past-tense account of the growingtension between villagers and the Le-moynes provides a French-Canadianpoint-of-view which alternates withCatherine's. Under different circum-stances the two women might even havebeen friends, for they share similar artis-tic interests. But Marie-Ange resentsCatherine because her long-term fiancéJustin falls madly in love with the new-comer, siding with her finally against therest of the inhabitants of Cap des Vents.

The tension in this short novel is al-most palpable. It is clear from the begin-ning that something dreadful is boundto happen, and eventually it does. Butalong the way both Marie-Ange andCatherine document appalling acts ofviolence and brutality amongst the vil-lagers themselves. Unemployed and im-poverished, the men drink all day longwhile the women gossip and complain.And everyone always has at least one eyeon the Lemoynes: Natalie is picked onby school-mates and teacher Marie-Angealike, Catherine is sexually harassed bythe village men, and Lawrence — other-wise known as Le grand barbu becauseof his size and hirsute appearance — isdistrusted and feared. All are scapegoats,although it is never clear exactly why.The certainty remains that one act ofviolence breeds others; whatever theoriginal cataclysm, it spawns a series oflesser, although equally grotesque disas-ters. The book's ending is implicit in itsbeginning.

Despite the carefully cultivated toneof hostility, though, there never seemsto be any logic to the villagers' relentlessmalice against the strangers in theirmidst. Perhaps the point is, simply, thatsuch antipathy is always illogical andirrational. Still, it makes for gruesomereading when all but two inhabitants ofCap des Vents obsessively pursue theirneighbours. Even Marie-Ange, who isotherwise so articulate, seems unable tooffer any more compelling reason thanjealousy for her own mistreatment ofNatalie and her cruel complicity in theeventual violence. The reader must ac-cept a good deal on faith in order tomake sense of the events depicted.

More disturbing still are the numerousgrammatical and spelling errors. On onepage alone there are six examples ofsuch carelessness: "mod" instead of'mob,' "us" should be 'up/ and "Coursethey would found you" might benefitfrom 'have.' Errors such as "hour" in-stead of Our' and misspellings such as"momentoes" make for slow and frus-trating reading, as do occasional lapsesin the relation of pronouns to their re-ferents. Nor can such mistakes be at-tributed to the fact that this is an Englishversion of what occurs amongst French-speaking people — the errors are too in-consistent. Dialogue is Holden's weakpoint: exchanges between characters aremostly banal and awkward. And theauthor has an annoying habit of punc-tuating lines of conversation with ex-clamation marks. Style is not the author'sstrength, although there are some in-stances of arresting images: "The river-bed of caked sand shows like a dirty slipbeyond the pebbled beaches," and "hispretence of optimism comes between us,unreal as the moon in the pond."

After the Fact invites comparison withMargaret Atwood's The Handmaid'sTale, also published in 1986. Both novelsportray civilization in shock : each is writ-

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ten by a woman about violence againstwomen, and both point to increasinglyconservative, even fascist trends in think-ing as catalysts for the upheaval. Where-as Atwood evokes an entire, complexworld from the meticulous, detailedchronicle of her heroine, Holden suc-ceeds only in relating a series of externalevents. Her use of dual narrators couldhave been so much more convincing hadeach spoken in her own voice or had theauthor used the convention of the diary.It is never made clear whether Cather-ine's and Marie-Ange's narratives areculled from journal entries, but it wouldmake sense for that to be the case. Howis it, for example, that Catherine's lastentry, written in the present tense asalways, ends in the middle of the attackon her by the village men? Marie-Ange'slast entry, which closes the novel, picksup where Catherine's leaves off; however,it makes no sense for Catherine's nar-rative to end where it does in the lightof what eventually happens to her. Afterthe Fact is greatly flawed, yet it is morethan a little compelling in its depictionof a world gone awry. SUSAN WHALEY

ON HER OWNKAREN LAWRENCE, The Life of Helen Alone.

Villard Books, $15.95.

ELEGANTLY WRITTEN, carefully struc-tured, The Life of Helen Alone is aconsiderable first novel by Canadian-born Karen Lawrence. The work de-scribes one woman's coming to termswith herself by focusing on her relationto her lover, to his children, and to theland they farm. Along the way, Law-rence manages to bring a whole ruralcommunity to life. Helen works as apsychotherapist and lives, contentedly,alone in the city. That is, until Danielstrides into one of her groups and theninto her life. He reawakens her to herbody, to herself as a whole woman, and

to a more demanding life than that ofthe mind alone. Helen joins Daniel onhis farm in the north country and strug-gles against severe odds in the form ofDaniel's resentful children, the spectreof their absent mother, and her own un-familiarity with life on the land. Forthree years Helen fights, changes, andgrows; she becomes intensely committedto her adopted way of life and to hernew family, only to have it eventuallyswept from beneath her. Alone at theend, as at the beginning, Helen is, how-ever, a more complete person becauseshe has learned that being rooted, con-nected, and loved are what life is allabout.

The novel is divided into four partswhich follow the seasons of one year, be-ginning in the spring. Italicized pro-logues introduce each section; all aremoving, beautifully written odes to theirrespective time of year. Spring, for ex-ample, is "The river's voice awakening:it is a sustained, faint hissing, a mysterynoise — the sound of a heart breaking."The narrative proceeds in its third-person, mostly past-tense voice to relatethe events of that year from Helen's per-spective, and ends where it begins, withspring.

Each section is subdivided into shorter,titled parts recreating various peopleand events which shape Helen's life inthe country. Slowly these anecdotes orvignettes add up to a comprehensivepicture of rural existence. Some portrayDaniel's three children and their even-tual acceptance of Helen; others intro-duce community fixtures such as Potter(a nice chap but an abysmal failure as afarmer), or Homer and Maddy (an old,long-married couple still madly in lovewith each other), and Hannah ( "a deepriver of a woman" used to fending forherself). Other chapters delve into Ed-die's, Helen's, and Daniel's respectivepasts or relate episodes such as the

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slaughtering of a calf or the subduing ofbats in the loft.

One pivotal event is the arrival ofEddie, Helen's brother. He is an in-scrutable, confused young man whodrifts through life, settling finally on thefarm in order to feel rooted and con-nected to the rest of humanity. Despitehis lack of practical skills, Eddie proveshimself a willing worker and carves him-self a place in the lives of Daniel's fam-ily. Eddie turns his hand to all kinds ofhumorous, harebrained schemes such asmaking his own beer and selling lightbulbs in order to feel as though he be-longs. His tenuous hold on life illumi-nates for Helen some of her own doubtsabout her place in the world. Even afterhis sister moves on, Eddie stays at thefarm because there is nowhere else forhim to go.

Helen is an altogether engaging char-acter, as is Jenny, Daniel's young daugh-ter (Lawrence portrays teenage girls sur-passingly well). The male characters,however, are less deftly drawn. Danielwavers between the extremes of brutemasculinity and crippling vulnerability.He is good at carpentry and farming,marvellous in bed, and also a talentedmusician and teacher. Yet part-waythrough the novel he abandons homeand Helen for a job as a constructionworker. He decides to give up everythingto continue that career; when Helen op-poses his plans, Daniel strikes her out ofsheer, inarticulate frustration. Hurt, shebacks off and he seeks sexual comfortelsewhere. The two lovers seem to sharelittle in common ; their relationship is be-wildering and never really springs to life.For example, Daniel is much older thanHelen, yet his jealous, possessive actionsare those of a juvenile. Helen is awarethat violence bubbles dangerously closeto the surface in Daniel, yet even whenit explodes she does nothing. In this,Helen disappoints : she should be smarter

than that. Lawrence never manages toarouse much sympathy for Daniel al-though she does try to attribute some ofhis problems to his upbringing by dour,strict parents. Eddie is an equally vague,although more sympathetic, character,but Daniel's sons Travis and Hawk aredoomed, like their father, to two-dimen-sional life.

Still, Lawrence's writing is gracefuland engaging throughout. The narrativeproceeds at a slow, measured pace thatkeeps the action going and interest alive.Lawrence's style easily complements thenovel's subject matter; her diction andsyntax are good and varied, but it is hermetaphors that are particularly striking.About Eddie she writes: "his interiorwas something so soft and raw and blind,like a chick pecking its way out of anegg, with such excruciating slowness youweren't sure if it would live through theordeal." Certain breathtaking images,memorable because so precise and fitting,linger on long after the novel is finished :death is "a white whirling vortex ofenergy, a moment, a tornado of lightwhich swept the spirit from the body.There was wind, and a pure scent ofrose, voices whispering, wings vibrating,and at the center a flower in full bloomreversing its opening. . . the whole flow-ery green germ of life moving downthrough the stem into the roots, andfinally releasing itself, back into theearth." Many of Lawrence's best imagesare derived, appropriately enough, fromnature.

The Life of Helen Alone brims withstrong, complete v/omen who grapplecompetently with each other, with men,and with nature. The male principle isthe one found lacking. Lawrence writescrisp, poetic, meticulous prose thatranges confidently in tone from the hu-morous to the poignant. Here is a strong,commanding first performance as novel-ist. SUSAN WHALEY

BOOKS IN REVIEW

SCIENCE & FICTIONRICHARD ROHMER, S tarmage ddon. Irwin,

$19-95-MICHAEL DEAN, In Search of the Perfect

Lawn. Black Moss, $9.95.DAVID PORUSH, The Soft Machine: Cybernetic

Fiction. Methuen, $12.95.SCIENCE FICTION HAS BEEN with us formore than half a century. It is a well-established genre now, with its own con-ventions, even its own critical vocabu-lary. Some science fiction works andwriters are gaining the attention of thecritical establishment at large and forgood reason: as the genre grows olderand becomes more secure in its conven-tions, so it both attracts and producesbetter writers. Because it is still a rela-tively new genre, it also attracts writerswho wish to experiment with form, tech-nique, and style. And sometimes experi-mental writers are classified as sciencefiction writers simply because no oneknows where else to place their experi-ments.

Unfortunately, despite the much higherquality work now being produced in thegenre by many writers, there are stillthose who remain loyal to science fic-tion's more primitive beginnings. Likethose who still churn out "Conan theBarbarian" books with admirable regu-larity, or constantly find new and moreexotic adventures for heroes such as theStainless Steel Rat, Richard Rohmer inStarmageddon relies heavily on the stocksituations and characters that made sci-ence fiction so popular in the Gernsbackera of the 1930's. From the macho cap-tain of the CIA spyship (whose effortlesskilling of a spy "from the other side"with his bare hands occupies most of thesecond page of the book), so the futuris-tic president of the United States (whoseems to be a winning combination ofRonald Reagan and Richard Nixon witha small quantity of Kennedy charm, Kis-

singer tough-mindedness, and RobertRedford manliness), the good guys allshare the stock characteristics of the vir-ile, strong, forceful, handsome, foul-mouthed, and semi-rational macho typeswho populated early science fiction. Thetwo women who appear in the book areso stereotyped that I initially assumedthat the whole novel must be a parodyof old-style science fiction. The womenare weak-minded and vulnerable, need-ing reassurance and persuasion from themen at every turn before they are ca-pable of action:

He glanced at Ann Ross, who was still atthe wheel. She was steering a steady course.Her eyes nervously darted side to side; herface was white with fear. No one at An-napolis had been able to tell her about thispart of a man's world, about what fear wasreally like. Steen stood behind her for amoment.

The bad guys (referred to throughoutthe novel as "Commie bastards") areequally stereotypical. Totally irrational,demoralized and vodka-soaked, the con-stantly arguing and inefficient Sovietswould make one wonder what the Amer-icans were so worried about, if it werenot for their unrelieved viciousness totheir own people and, especially, to therest of the world.

The plot is equally predictable. Theentire book is devoted to a heavily prop-agandistic support of the U.S. Star Warsdefence system, which shows some degreeof bad taste as the writer is a Canadianwriting for a primarily Canadian audi-ence. In the novel, the Soviets are strug-gling desperately to put their own StarWars system into space to neutralize thedanger, to them, of the U.S. system,which is already up and about to becomefunctional. They do not win the race, ofcourse. But they do foolishly shoot downa passenger plane carrying the U.S. vice-president, which, through an unbeliev-able series of unfortunate coincidences,

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is flying directly over the Soviet secretStar Wars testing site at exactly the mo-ment the testing begins. The UnitedStates retaliates, logically, by dropping anuclear bomb on the base, destroying allthe top Soviet scientists along with it.The Soviets, with typical crude violence,declare war on Europe and mobilizeforces to take over, unless the Europeannations join with them against the U.S.Turning the tables neatly, the U.S. presi-dent, again quite logically, threatens todestroy all of the U.S.S.R. with nuclearweapons unless peace is restored. TheSoviets, knowing the U.S. is completelyprotected by a now-functional Star Warssystem, cannot threaten retaliation, andback down. The good guys win again,and Star Wars is shown to be the realhero of the story, along with the menwho have the courage to use it.

There is nothing new, different, oreven interesting about this novel. It sup-ports its pro-Star Wars arguments withcharts and diagrams, which simply con-firm that the book is a major piece ofpropaganda. Furthermore, the novel isbadly written, with holes in the plot andin the rationale behind it. It has a re-petitive, dull style that is simultaneouslyincompetent and condescending. Alsothe "virtuous" actions of the Americansare so similar to the damnable vicious-ness of the Soviets that any reader witheven a slightly open mind would havedifficulty keeping straight who is sup-posed to be good and who bad. Like theclose nuclear catastrophe it is about, thisnovel is well worth avoiding.

Unlike Starmageddon, which fits firmlyinto the science fiction genre, MichaelDean's experimental book In Search ofthe Perfect Lawn is classified as sciencefiction by default. That is, the work de-fies classification and therefore fits intothe peripheral area of experimental fic-tion accredited so often to the sciencefiction genre. It is not a novel. Perfect

Lawn is a collage of different approachesto and descriptions of the North Ameri-can lawn and its owner. It attemptspsychological, literary, mystical, histori-cal, sexual, and transcendental descrip-tions of lawns. What it achieves is unde-finable. If it is meant to be a parody, itfails to inform the reader what it is aparody of. Possibly it is a genuine at-tempt to deify the lawn, or force thereader to recognize the lawn as a centralpart of our North American culturalconsciousness, but it is far too silly to beconvincing. In short, this book is irrele-vant and trite, without being amusing inany way.

The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fic-tion by David Porush is the only bookworthy of serious attention in this group.It is a brief history of the developmentof cybernetics in science, and both a his-tory and analysis of cybernetics as itappears in philosophy and literature.The two chapters devoted largely to thescientific development of cyberneticscould have been left out of the bookaltogether. The discussion is highly tech-nical and therefore likely to lose or borethe literary reader very quickly. Thesechapters are also not necessary for thereader's understanding of the literaryconcern with cybernetics. On the otherhand, the chapter devoted to the philo-sophic response to cybernetics is most in-teresting and is relevant to the literaryanalysis which follows. Porush has de-scribed clearly some of the leading ideason the subject and has shown their in-fluence on the literary response to cyber-netics.

The central concern of the book is theapplication of the subject of cyberneticsto both the content and techniques usedby various postmodernist novelists intheir writings. An interesting and gen-erally competent analysis of works byVonnegut, Burroughs, Pynchon, Barth,Beckett, McElroy, and Bartheme consti-

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tutes the bulk of the book. Porush writesbest when working directly with thetexts. When he begins to theorize, he fre-quently becomes abstract and sometimesirrelevant. The only criticism that canbe levelled against his concrete studies ofthe texts is his constant tendency toaccuse both the authors and their char-acters of cybernetic paranoia, an accusa-tion which becomes suspiciously repe-tive when attributed to almost every oneof the eight authors he primarily dealswith throughout the book. Generally,however, the book is competent in itsanalysis and intersting in its presentation.It is also a book which once again en-courages us to believe that writers of thiskind of fiction can indeed create in-novative, well-written, and meaningfulworks of literature.

J . R. WYTENBROEK

TROIS POETESJEAN-MARC FRECHETTE, Le Corps de l'infini.

Éditions Triptyque, n.p.DANIEL GUENETTE, L'Irrésolue. Éditions du

Noroît, n.p.MARCELLE ROY, L'Hydre à deux coeurs. Édi-

tions du Noroît, n.p.

LE QUEBEG EST un pays riches en poètes.Chaque année, des maisons d'éditionpublient en nombre assez considérabledes recueils de poésie ce qui laisse penserque le Québec est aussi un lieu où cegenre se lit avec intérêt et bonheur. Cesrecueils sont généralement mis en pagesavec finesse et grand soin du détail. Defait, ce sont quelquefois de véritablespetits chefs-d'oeuvre.

Les sept dessins de l'auteure, inclusdans L'Hydre à deux coeurs de MarcelleRoy, illustrent en même temps que lelivre cette tendance des poètes québécoisà vouloir accompagner leurs textes dedessins, de photos, bref, d'images souventcréées par le/la poète même. On diraitqu'il y a là soit l'aveu d'une certaine

impuissance de croire dans le pouvoir dumot, soit l'expression du plaisir de pou-voir s'exprimer par plus d'une formed'art. Le domaine de l'imaginaire serévèle indivisible. L'hydra de MarcelleRoy a non pas sept têtes, mais deuxcoeurs ou consciences, ce qui fait d'elleune "déconcentrée chronique," cons-ciente de "tout le désespoir" du mondemoderne, mais en même temps désireuse"de pouvoir renifler en toute quiétude lechant des fleurs et l'odeur des oiseaux."C'est un déchirement qui mène néces-sairement au divertissement dans le senspascalien. "J'ai lu six simenon cette se-maine," avoue Roy, désemparée. La lan-gue lui paraît "paralysée et traître," d'oùprobablement la fuite dans le dessin.

Roy tente de confondre enfer et para-dis, peur et joie, le négatif et le positif.Sa métaphore est canadienne: "Gel etdégel confondus, donnant naissance auxroses: poème en acte, au sein de la pa-ralysie." En même temps, Roy se placedans l'univers, celui de l'âge nucléaireoù rien n'est certain. C'est peut-êtrecette appartenance qui explique certainesfausses notes qui semblent exemplifier lesdissonances du monde moderne. Desmots comme "foutre" et "idiotie" dansdes poèmes doux et musicaux surpren-nent, choquent et, en fin de compte, ysont de trop.

Rien de tel dans L'Irrésolue de DanielGuénette. C'est un livre sensible et in-telligent, d'une lecture tant soit peu la-borieuse, où chaque mot doit être saisi,compris avec beaucoup d'attention. Ce"soliloque racontant / l'égarement deson promeneur" exige une grande per-sévérance de la part du lecteur désireuxd'attraper au vol les images furtives ettendres qui habitent "les grandes ailesdéployées du discours" de ce poète qué-bécois. Regret, désenchantemment. Lerecueil montre un paradis bien perdu etun monde qui se révèle d'un "calmeplat":

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En sortant de l'école toujoursles mains dans les poches les enfantscaressent des projets et montent aux

arbresavec des livres d'astrologie

en guise de révoltepuis le pays finit par se faire

très plat et le monde entiertombe dans un long sommeil

Guénette propose deux remèdes à ce maldu siècle: la nature qui a le pouvoir defaire reverdir "le paysage d'ennui" et letravail des mots qui permet au poète defaire son auto-portrait que la table desmatières, ici appelée "table des poèmes,"évoque:

Étrangeté même / qu'il conviendra degarder / n'ayant

jamais eu lieu / comment donc narrer / detout temps /

ce cordon coupé / socialement / Histoireconsommée /

présent / désirs / impressions / ravisse-ments / Désenliser /

L'Histoire ne ce raconte pas / malgrél'écran / les bons

sentiments / farouchement / s'étant jetéd'un peu trop haut /

de l'expérience toujours commune /travaux et jeux de

gravité / Aujourd'hui.Une table des matières qui constitue àmon avis une sorte de poème trouvé etqui mène, à travers le jeu de miroirs dela poésie, à une pensée profonde.

Avec Le Corps de l'infini, les ÉditionsTriptyque publient une rétrospective del'oeuvre de Jean-Marc Frechette (1968à 1985), un des plus doués des poètesde sa génération. Ici aussi, l'enfance estle paradis. En exergue, le poète placecette phrase d'Heraclite: "Le royaumeest de l'enfant." Chez Frechette, l'en-fance "n'est jamais tarie" et "l'écoliergracile embaume la Nuit." Frechetteemploie une écriture du corps et dessens. L'aurait-il apprise chez les femmesde notre époque? En tout cas, c'estgrâce à cette écriture du corps que sesvers resplendissent de lumière, de cou-leurs, de sons, de parfums et de textures.

Des fruits "roucoulent," "les maïs lèventdes bras extatiques." Devant la beautéet la richesse de la nature, le poète sedemande "qui nous a enivrés de ce nec-tar du nombre pur / et de la propor-tion?" Est-ce Dieu? Mais c'est aussiMeera, figure mythique, créatrice d'unmonde aux montagnes "tendrementamoureuses," aux feuilles d'automne"rubis et topaze" et même "hostie debraise."

Fête des sens, fête de l'émotion, fêted'une foi célébratoire, la poésie de Jean-Marc Frechette nous enchante et re-monte à la Source. Sa voix rend visiblesla Beauté, la Lumière, la Douceur dansun monde qui amasse les horreurs, l'in-justice et les tortures. Sans prêcher, sansmoraliser, Frechette lance un appel à labonne volonté, à la raison, à la sensi-bilité humaines. La lecture de son oeuvreprovoque en nous des questions aux-quelles il est urgent de trouver desréponses.

MARGUERITE ANDERSEN

REAL ISSUESMONiOA HUGHES, Blaine's Way, Irwin, $9.95.CAROL MATAS, The Fusion Factor, Fifth

House, $3.95.

ALTHOUGH CAROL MATAS'S The FusionFactor and Monica Hughes's Blaine'sWay are very different kinds of adoles-cent fiction, both focus on the harshrealities of life. Matas brings attentionto the causes and consequences of nu-clear war, even while delivering thehopeful message that humankind's ex-tinction is not inevitable. Hughes's novelis a retrospective journey through thechildhood and teenage years of her pro-tagonist, Blaine Williams, and centres onthe need to temper youthful dreams withthe difficult lessons of experience.

The Fusion Factor begins with Re-becca partnered with Lonny for a school

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project. Lonny, she learns, is trouble, butwhen she sees him kidnapped and no onebelieves her, Rebecca feels she has a re-sponsibility to investigate. What Rebeccadiscovers is beyond her wildest dreams:a time machine which is used to kidnapchildren to an underground shelter,where in the year 2040 a few survivorsof nuclear war continue to live. The rea-son for the kidnappings is one of monu-mental proportions, and in large measureseems to justify what would otherwisebe an unacceptable action. As most ofthe children born after the bombing areretarded, young, healthy children areneeded to allow for the continuation ofthe underground community and, it ishinted, of the human race itself.

As well as recounting Rebecca's effortsto get herself and the other kidnappedchildren back to their own time so thatsomehow the nuclear holocaust can beavoided, Matas's novel is a depiction oflife after nuclear war. While there ismention of the obvious things — fallout,radiation sickness, nuclear winter — thesedo not make the greatest impression onRebecca or on the reader. Rather it isthe greyness of life underground, the lackof spontaneity in children who haveknown nothing else, the awareness thatthe world Rebecca so much takes forgranted is gone. It is a frightening realitymade even more horrifying when Re-becca and Lonny encounter mutantsfrom the surface who are neither animalnor human. The point is that the peopleliving in the underground shelter are nomore human than the mutants, in thatthey are denied the opportunity to growin the world.

Blaine's Way also focuses on howgrowth demands experience in the world.Presented with a tape recorder and a setof empty tapes, an elderly Blaine Wil-liams is asked to provide an account ofhis boyhood for his first great-grand-child. As a young boy, Blaine is mes-

merized by the trains that rush by thenorthern boundary of his parents' south-ern Ontario farm: they represent anescape to a world of excitement andriches far removed from the threadbareexistence of his parents. At the outset ofthe novel, Blaine promises himself thathe will eventually leave to "find the realworld, the world where dreams cometrue." What Blaine learns is that the realworld of dreams is not necessarily betterthan what he already has.

This lesson is a difficult one to learn,and most certainly Blaine experiences hisshare of adversity. First, Blaine's motherflees to the big city to pursue her owndreams, and then his father leaves towork in town, no longer able to faceconstant reminders of his failure as afarmer and a husband. Blaine must cometo grips with these losses, although it isnot a matter of him having to strugglealone. Throughout, Blaine is supportedand comforted by his loving grand-parents and good friends, one of whomhe discovers means far more to him thanjust being a friend. Always, however,Blaine retains his insatiable appetite forthe beyond, which romantic novels andtrips to the Canadian National Exhibi-tion will not satisfy.

When war comes, it presents the op-portunity for which Blaine has long beenwaiting. Lying about his age, Blaine en-lists in the Canadian Army, which, hediscovers, is drearier in many ways thananything he has yet known. He alsoexperiences the deaths of friends, and,when his own day of glory finally comesat Dieppe, the romance of dreams isshattered by the pain and ugliness ofwar. Home becomes the place of dreams,and, as one of the few survivors, Blaineis fortunate to have his dream become areality.

A strength of both novels is that theyteach without moralizing. The need forliterature that focuses young readers' at-

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tention on the nuclear threat is obvious,especially if one is mindful that thefuture really belongs to these young read-ers. Matas understands that social aware-ness is not achieved overnight; rather itis always evolving, and must thereforebe part of the educational process. Toooften, young people see themselves ashaving little influence; The Fusion Fac-tor makes clear that young people canmatter, as Rebecca and her friends re-turn to their own time intent on workingfor peace. Hughes's book is not so fo-cused, although her message is still un-mistakable: the bigger and better thingsin life are not necessarily the goals forwhich one should strive, and too oftenwe fail to realize what is valuable untilwe are in danger of losing it. Common-place though these ideals might be, theyhave particular significance for a genera-tion of young people enjoying a standardof living which Hughes's young protago-nist would never dream possible.

A further feature of both novels comesfrom each writer's ability to evoke moodand atmosphere. The sense of oppressive-ness is unmistakable in Matas's novel,and is especially heightened when Cath-erine and Lewis, two children from thefuture, finally see the sky and are over-whelmed by a world they had onlyviewed on videos. In Hughes's novel, thesummer heat, the back-breaking work ofpicking tobacco, and the carnage ofDieppe are equally real. Both novels arewritten in a language that, while to thepoint, does not simplify matters. Andboth novels, while possessing consider-able action, are sufficiently reflective toforce young readers to think about whatthey are reading. When, in The FusionFactor, the physician dying of leukemiatalks of the bombing, the horror he de-scribes has a profound effect on Rebeccathat is also experienced by the reader.Equally effective is the quiet conversa-tion between Blaine and his father before

Blaine goes overseas. In finally coming tounderstand his father, who, Blaine finds,is not without feeling and dreams,Blaine demonstrates how easy it is tomisjudge others.

There are, needless to say, a fewthings with which one might quibble.That in The Fusion Factor Catherineand Lewis are so easily accepted intoRebecca's family stretches believability,although Matas does allow that the ad-justment is not going to be an easy one.Arguments at the breakfast table startthe second day. Matas overlooks, too, aninevitable problem encountered in timetravel. If the children are to make adifference because of their experiencesin the future, then the future which theyexperienced will never actually occur.While Matas might be wise to avoid theproblem of tampering with history, it iscertainly an issue for any regular readerof science fiction. As for Blame's Way, itsometimes suffers from a sentimentalityincongruous with its realism, althoughthis sentimentality might be forgiven inthat the narrator is an elderly man look-ing back over his life. And the final pageof the novel is just too obtrusive, asBlaine talks of the "Grim Reaper," andprovides some last-minute preaching forhis great-grandson.

DAVID W. ATKINSON

COMIC RAGEJOHN METCALF, Adult Entertainment. Mac-

millan, $19.95.IN Adult Entertainment, John Metcalfonce again proves, to anyone who mightstill be demanding such proof, that he isa master of the contemporary shortstory, classic division. As a writer whohas long announced his love of suchcomic geniuses as Evelyn Waugh, P. G.Wodehouse, Beryl Bainbridge, and An-thony Powell, he takes his place in their

BOOKS IN REVIEW

company, a writer of wit and style, de-terminedly set against readers who ap-pear to be only interested in theme.

Metcalf has written at great lengthand with great power against those crit-ics who, as he sees it, miss the writing forthe theme, and he is, alas, right to seethat they still rule the roost in Canadianstudies. A few years ago, he published acollection of essays, Kicking Against thePricks, in which he both set forth hisideals and attacked all those who failedto measure up. They were essays, so theyasked for agreement or disagreement, butwhat struck me was that even when Iviolently disagreed with his assessments,I could not help but laugh delightedly atthe manner in which he made them.With stories, the demand for agreementis not really part of what is being offered.Indeed, Metcalf insists that "the onlyway of judging a collection of stories isby asking if each story, individually, suc-ceeds in creating a real world, if eachone, individually, is an entrancing per-formance. And if it does and if it is, inGod's name, what more could you askfor?" Well, some readers will ask formore, I guess, but I must say that by hisown criteria, Metcalf has scored veryhigh marks, indeed, with Adult Enter-tainment.

In the sometimes liberating art ofcomic rage, John Metcalf has few peers.Comic rage is not his only tone, andthere are moments of muted compas-sion, of deeply felt love, of painful self-awareness, and of youthful idealism,which glow in these stories; but a wild,comically overdone, rhetoric of rage isone of Metcalf's finest stylistic accom-plishments. In those moments when hischaracters give in to righteous anger, thewriting achieves an edge, a brilliantsharpness, that has me both clutchingmy sides with laughter and feeling veryunsettled indeed.

The greatest rage of Adult Entertain-

ment overwhelms Paul Denton, the pro-tagonist of "Polly Ongle," especiallywhen he has to confront his teenagepunkish son. Paul's anger erupts intolengthy perorations (of which this pas-sage is only an excerpt) which brilliantlyreveal a character at war with himself,discovered for us in the movement of thelanguage by which he thunders throughhis growing anger:

Paul was enraged by his son's appear-ance, manners, attitudes, reflex hostility,hobbies, and habits. He was reduced toincoherent anger by the boy's having muti-lated all his clothes by inserting zippers inlegs and sleeves, zippers which were se-cured by bicycle padlocks, so that he lookedlike an emaciated scarecrow constructed bya sexual deviant, by his smelly old drapedjackets which he purchased from what hecalled "vintage clothes stores," by hisbleached hair which he coloured weekendswith purple food-dye, by his ruminant of agirl-friend whose mousy hair was bleachedin two stripes intersecting at right anglesso that she looked like a hot cross bun, byhis wearing loathsome plastic shoes becausehe didn't want to be party to the death ofan animal, by his advocacy of the execu-tion of all "oppressors," which seemed tomean, roughly, everyone over twenty-fivewho could read, by his intense ignoranceof everything that had happened prior to1970, by his inexplicable and seeminglyinexhaustible supply of ready cash, by hisrecent espousal of self-righteous vegetarian-ism, which was pure and total except for adispensation in the case of pepperoni red-hots, by his abandoning in the fridge plasticcontainers of degenerating tofu, by hisrotten music, by his membership in analleged band called The Virgin Extermi-nators, by his loutish buddies, by the namesof his loutish buddies, names which re-minded Paul of science fiction about theprimitive descendants of those who'd sur-vived the final nuclear holocaust, nameslike Deet, Wiggo, Munchy, etc. . . .

One of the many joys to be discoveredin this passage is the unerringly accuratepresentation of a particular voice. Al-though it is all about Paul's son, it isPaul we come to know here. Certainlyone of the aspects which caught me was

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the power of the "adult" anger directedagainst the threatened "anger" of theyoung. And that anger is tied in some-how with the anger the middle-agedPaul once directed against his parents.And it is especially connected to his not-so-very-secure sense of self. Finally, how-ever, the passage is "about" the commaand the dependent clause; and it is awonderful exhibition of their use.

Paul is not, obviously, without blem-ishes himself, and a good portion of"Polly Ongle" is given over to lettinghim display them. Indeed, although it issometimes difficult to discuss "character"these days, one of the joys of Metcalf'swriting is its presentation of "voice" ifnot of character in the old sense. Thefigures of his text all perform their turns,each speaks and presents a unique shapeof language to us. For example, Norma,the "Polly Ongle" figure of Paul's day-dreams, finally loses his interest throughnot only what she says but how she saysit. The various members of the NorthPortage Thursday Evening who invitewriter Robert Forde to read to them arecaught in the amber of prose, each in atelling gesture of speech. And the samecan be said of almost all the figures whoparade through these pages. It is Met-calf's gift to hear the nuances of indi-vidual speech and capture them for us,on the page, using all the technicalmeans at his disposal to do so. That hetakes extreme care in capturing nuance,he makes clear in his fine essay, "Punc-tuation as Score."

If I have seemed to wander awayfrom saying what the stories in AdultEntertainment are about, it is becauseI agree with Metcalf that what countsis the performance of a story. There arefive fine performances in this collection,two novellas, and three shorter pieces."Polly Ongle" is one of the novellas; theother, "Travelling Northward," does amarvellously comic job of showing us the

worst side of public readings from theauthor's point of view and, in the mid-dle of all this awful comedy, presents adeeply felt image of married fidelity andlove. In "Single Gents Only," Metcalfreturns to his native England to tell atale of a young man's introduction to thebig city. "The Eastmill Reception Cen-tre," also set in England, appears at firstglance to be a typical story of the abuseof power by the educational establish-ment, but it opens up to a larger vision-ary darkness which not only interrogates"the system," but also questions the veryact of writing stories. In "The Nipplesof Venus," Metcalf offers another ver-sion of the traveller's tale, full of thekind of carefully observed detail whichhe is so good at and leading to a daringanti-epiphany of raw power.

Metcalf's writing has been called ele-gant, witty, mischievous, full of surprises,and painfully comic. It is all of these andmore. One need only look at the lunch-time conversation among a crowd ofsightseers in "The Nipples of Venus" todiscover how well Metcalf can inscribe adramatic situation. It is at textual "mo-ments" like this that we can see howimportant the tiny details of craft likethe use of punctuation and paragraph-ing really are. But all this craft is onlythere to serve the performance which isthe story we are reading with such in-terest and delight. The story means tocatch us in its spell, and in Metcalf's ablehands it does.

Throughout Adult Entertainment,Metcalf creates fictions which live up tohis highly ambiguous title: they are de-manding and continually doubled intheir presentation. They can make uslaugh but they can also make us cry. Inevery one of these five stories, Metcalfdemonstrates a concern for and com-mand of his craft which I can only ad-mire; the sheer bravura of the styleelicits my continual delight. But if all I

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did was admire, they would not beworthy of the praise I feel they haveearned; these stories are never simplyexercises, and the obvious craft whichwent into their making always leads tothe creation of fictions which insist uponemotional engagement. The reader maynot "like" all of these stories, but he(or she) will not be able to remain aloof,and I cannot think of higher praise thanthat. Adult Entertainment belongs onthat fabled five-foot bookshelf of neces-sary story collections, right alongside thebooks of such writers as Alice Munro,Ray Smith, and Mavis Gallant, to namejust some of the writers Metcalf and Iboth admire.

DOUGLAS BARBOUR

FIRE & ICEMAVIS GALLANT, Paris Notebooks: Essays &

Reviews. Macmillan, $24.95.

READERS OF MAVIS GALLANT'S short stor-ies may feel as if they are coming un-bearably close to both the fire and theice of a passion at once warmly engagedwith and coolly detached from recenthistory. The imagination at work in thisstunning collection often reports its per-ceptions of a related sensation: in theopening, two-part diary of the May 1968"events" in Paris (the word does notfully render the shadings of les "événe-ments," as they were referred to inFrance), Gallant describes her reactionto an exchange between a French motherand daughter:

Talk with young Barbara. "The Germanstudents are being deported," she tells me."But we need them here — they are or-ganized, they can tell us what to do. Oui,nous avons besoin des allemands." Hermother, who spent the war years in aconcentration camp, says nothing. I feel asif I were watching two screens simulta-neously.

The figure of the split-screen in this pas-

sage embodies many of the strengths ofGallant's account: its precisely frag-mented discourse, its eerie immediacy(demonstrating once again the paradoxi-cal effects of the simple present tense —suspension and engagement at once, be-cause on the page there can be no pres-ent tense, and yet there is only thepresent tense), its fluid migrations fromEnglish to French and back again, itssudden reflection on the recent past, al-ready a blurred film at best, at worstnothing at all to the students — and,above all, the contradiction Gallant de-scribes in her "Introduction": that themonth-long convulsions were both sig-nals of "a noble desire" and of a "collec-tive hallucination" that "life can change,quite suddenly, and for the better."

Always keenly aware of her position asparticipant in and reporter on the ex-perience and the spectacle of Frenchculture, Gallant opens the second essay,on the Gabrielle Russier tragedy, bytranslating the French social system intoAmerican terms, institution by institu-tion. Then she dismisses this translationas an impossibility and proceeds with herreport, in which the drama of the prin-cipal characters — Russier, ChristianRossi, and his parents — is set out withina comprehensive analysis of French codesof conduct for parents and children,teachers and students, and lovers. Inturn, these codes are explained within ananalysis of the French educational andlegal systems. And all of these networksare explained with reference to the per-vasive, complex influence of media verydifferent from their North Americancounterparts: Gallant's descriptions ofthe television, radio, and print reportageprovide ample evidence of her long-standing familiarity with contemporarymanifestations of the "news" on bothsides of the Atlantic.

As announced in the subtitle, the bookis divided into two sections, essays and

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reviews respectively. Five other essayscomplete the first section: a portrait ofPaul Léautaud, quirky and brilliantdiarist, misanthrope, and lover; Gallant'sintroduction to Joyce Hibbert's 1978book, The War Brides; "Paris: TheTaste of a New Age," a pungent surveyof selected highs and lows of Parisianarchitecture, recent and remote; "WhatIs Style?," Gallant's much-quoted 1982essay; and her tribute, "Limpid Pessi-mist, Marguerite Yourcenar," which, likeall of Gallant's nonfiction, is replete withpassages which make the striking, preciseobservation seem natural but never cas-ual, reflexive but never self-conscious:

Writers who choose domicile in a foreignplace, for whatever reason, usually treattheir native language like a delicate time-piece, making certain it runs exactly andthat no dust gets inside. Mme. Yourcenar'sdistinctive and unplaceable voice carries theprecise movement of her finest prose, thewell-tended watch.

The reviews — there are eleven of themhere, out of some fifteen Gallant haswritten since 1972 — are principally onbooks by or on French writers, althoughthere are also reviews of works by Grassand Nabokov and on Elizabeth Bowen.All of the reviews are instructive and, inthe best sense of the word, opinionated.Gallant is exasperated with de Beauvoir'sexhaustive and exhausting All Said andDone, annoyed with the pastiche ofGrass's From the Diary of a Snail, andfascinated with the shifts in French per-ceptions of the work, the figures, and theimages of Céline, Malraux, Colette, andGiraudoux. That Gallant is well andwidely read in French literature is nosurprise, but her range works to particu-larly effective ends in these reviews,which are, quite simply, exemplary intheir acuity, their breadth, and, at points,their angry clarity. Predictably, and jus-tifiably, Gallant is irritated with poortranslations from French to English, andseveral of the writers and translators un-

der review come in for scathing com-mentary on this count.

For those unfamiliar with Gallant'snonfiction, this collection provides awell-rounded introduction to her formid-able talents as a writer who by professionrejects those professionals — be they his-torians, literary critics, or social analysts— who by fiddling with jargon tamperwith reality, particularly the reality Gal-lant begins and ends with, language it-self. For those who have read some ofthese essays and reviews where they orig-inally appeared — most of them in TheNew Yorker, The Atlantic, The NewYork Review of Books, The CanadianForum, and The New York Times BookReview — this handsome book provideswelcome access, in one place, to an imag-ination equally and intimately at homein fiction and in the world.

NEIL BESNER

OUT OF LOVEMICHAEL PETERMAN, Robertson Davies.

Twayne/ECW, n.p.

I HAVE A STRAIGHTFORWARD tWO-partquestion to ask concerning any workwhich purports — as does Michael Peter-man's Robertson Davies — to discussDavies as a man of letters: How welldoes it help me to unravel the secret ofDavies's impact upon those to whom thecontinuing drama of Canadian literaryidentity is of little consequence, thosewho read our writers out of love, ratherthan out of a sense of national duty?The reasons for this question arise di-rectly from my experience in diverseuniversities, experience which illustratesthe effect of Davies's work upon theunprepared.

When I taught first-year English atthe University of British Columbia,"our" novel was Fifth Business. The classincluded a forestry student who claimednever to have read a book, and to have

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concealed this fact from previous teach-ers. Somehow, he realized that old trickswould no longer work; in a fine rage heapplied himself to Davies, whereupon atransformation occurred. The determinedsemiliterate was converted into a hum-ble Davies champion, a devourer of the(unassigned) remainder of the Deptfordtrilogy and the albatross of my studentconference hours, wherein he regaled mewith criticism, appreciation, and, whenother words failed him, a tape-loop para-phrase of each story. Time passed. A fewyears ago an American colleague at aJapanese university where I taught Eng-lish accosted me one morning, The RebelAngels in hand. Why, she demanded,had I never told her that there werereal writers in Canada, people who saidthings, people who could read, for heav-en's sake? In all cowardice I admit Iwould not have expected her to listen.But there are captive audiences. Lastyear, at a Canadian Literature seminarat the Tokyo University of Foreign Stud-ies, one of my brightest students, pressedto justify her preference for Davies aboveall other English- and French-Canadianauthors on my agonized-over list, sighed :Davies was different, and, "for we Jap-anese, such a relief from all those gloomyagricultural stories."

Indeed. So my question regardingDavies's appeal is understandable. Andnot, I think, unimportant. And, yes,Peterman does satisfy me by suggestingthe answer to it. Davies's success withvaried audiences comes, he indirectlytells me, from his writing about onetopic which is of obsessive interest toeverybody: How may I survive the cir-cumstances of my life, how best may Iknow myself, and to what use shall I putthat hard-won knowledge? That Robert-son Davies helps me deal with my ownquestion is in keeping with the book'sstated purposes, the most important itsinvestigation into what Peterman calls

"Davies's sustaining theme, the impor-tance of self in modern life." Details ofDavies's personal life are presentedbriefly, and then only to flesh out ourunderstanding of Davies the writer.Whatever questions concerning the worksare brought to this book, material foranswers probably is here, because Peter-man's pursuit of theme requires that hediscuss all Davies's published writings,from the Marchbanks days to The RebelAngels. Those who come to the studywithout questions may find that someoccur after they read Peterman.

On the gossipy level, for example, wemay find here no controversy suggested,no reasons spelled out for Davies's re-ceiving the Governor General's Awardfor The Manticore rather than for FifthBusiness, an arguably superior bookwhich preceded it by two years, but afterreading Peterman's perceptive assessmentof each novel we know we would notmind sleuthing them out. Neither wouldwe mind investigating Davies's sometimesconsiderable disdain for some of the verycharacters he has made symbolize ideasimportant to his works, a line of inquirysuggested by Peterman's observations. Inraising this and several other points con-cerning Davies's literary strength, Peter-man hints at the topic for an interestingpaper on the interplay of authors' andcharacters' personalities.

In fact, background material for manyinteresting papers is offered. If we sus-pect that, critically speaking, Deptfordhas been done to death, a short scanningof Peterman's useful bibliography willonly confirm it. But we can also learnfrom Peterman that fertile fields awaitthe drama student. To date, only onemajor work appears to have been writtenon his drama, Davies's first and perhapsmost persistent literary love, its quirks ofcharacter portrayal and its structuralthreads clearly discernible in the fabricof his novels.

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Peterman does well by the body ofplays, drawing attention to little-knownworks, offering synopses, suggesting ques-tions: Will General Confession ever beproduced? Is it stretching the point tosee in King Phoenix the elements of thetheme of individuation years before(Peterman claims) Davies found Jung?Were Davies's feelings of disillusionmentwith the drama as vehicle for his ideaswarranted, or was he simply too heavy-handed a dramatist to survive scrutiny?But twice as much space is given to thenovels, and this is probably as it shouldbe, for there is no doubt that it is throughhis prose fiction that Davies has reachedus most readily.

If there are reasons other than theobvious logistical ones for this popularpreference they may lie, as Peterman ap-pears to suggest, in the superior convic-tion with which Davies has managed tomake his novels' rather than his plays'characters vehicles for his most impor-tant ideas — those concerning individua-tion. In this connection, Peterman iden-tifies Leaven of Malice as a 1950's sign-post to Davies's directions of the 1970'sand 1980's.

The relationship of authors to theirrecurrent predominating ideas alwaysfascinates. In Davies's case, given thenature of the theme, this fascination hasbeen tinged sometimes (as Peterman re-minds us) with the attribution to authorand character alike to overweening van-ity, selfishness, didacticism, and even lackof commitment to democratic ideals.However, given — again — the nature ofthe theme, there is in Peterman's worksufficient material to build a case forthese accusations constituting an irrele-vancy, if only on the grounds that Davieshas spoken consistently to the need forboth individual and national self-assess-ment. I, for one, will find Peterman'swork an invaluable teaching and studytool. SHIRLEY BUSWELL

MAZE & FIELDMATT COHEN, Nadine. Viking, $19.95.

T H E PLOT OF Nadine is ingenious. Na-dine, born in Paris in 1941, should havebeen exterminated along with her motherand her Jewish father. However, thanksto a ruse perpetrated before her birthby her aunt, she does not exist officially;unofficially, she appears to be the childof this aunt and a resistance fighter whoposes as her father. Thus, Nadine's life issaved, and, in 1948, her aunt sends herto Toronto to be adopted by pityingstrangers. Nadine grows up to emulateher father's brother, a world-famous as-tronomy professor who teaches at theUniversity of Toronto. Eventually shehas affairs with this uncle; with Miller,her Toronto neighbour, who is also anastronomer; and with Yaakov, an Israelisoldier. Finally, on vacation in Jeru-salem, she is injured by a grenade. Na-dine is her memoir, written as a cathar-sis during her recuperation in her aunt'sParis apartment.

Nadine begins at the end and, likememory, jumps back and forth in timeuntil the whole story has unfolded. Edi-torial slips mar this plan — paragraphsare repeated or left out, people are intro-duced long after their entrances, Na-dine's uncle expresses a wish to hire anassistant whom he has already hired.These and other faux pas induce asense of disorganization, whereas actuallyCohen has built Nadine carefully tocreate emotional depth, psychologicalverisimilitude, and resonance of incident.

The narrative sequences set in VichyFrance are exciting. Cohen understandsthe characters and establishes their plightclearly enough to evoke the reader's em-pathy, and he makes impressive use ofthe situation, constructing his fictionalplot in the midst of a dreadful historicalepoch. He also creates a brilliant scenein which Nadine is caught up with Lang-

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ston Hughes in a Committee for NuclearDisarmament demonstration. But Na-dine's childhood in Toronto, her experi-ences as a student, her life as an astron-omy professor, and her accident inJerusalem fall flat. The reason for thisseems to be that in two areas crucial tothe book — astronomy and femaleness— Cohen doesn't know what he's talkingabout.

Nadine, her uncle, and Miller are pro-fessors of astronomy, but Cohen's knowl-edge of that science appears to be mini-mal. Miller discovers a comet by lookingin the right direction at the right time;this is all we are told, even though Milleris a major character in the book andthis is the central event in his life. Na-dine reflects that a speech made by heruncle "began with Einstein's statementthat mathematical constructs arise inde-pendent of observed reality — which isa fancy way of saying scientists, likeeveryone else, just make things up." Thata respected scientist would thus miscon-strue Einstein's remark is not believable.When Nadine's affair with Miller hits arough patch, she muses about her con-cept of the night sky:

When I was a child I saw those maps —with their angry gods, their animal con-stellations, their annotated borders — andI felt I was being invited to join a mythicheaven of victories and defeats. But whenfuture children see the maze of numbersto which the sky has been reduced, whatwill they think of the gods of science, ofthe conquests science has made? Will theyfeel invited to join in a universe wheremen and women are shadows of giganticgods with a destiny large enough to fill awhole sky? Or will they see, in the num-bered stars, the numbered blobs of matter,a clue to their own reduced destinies?

On the contrary, people attracted to sci-ence and mathematics may feel them-selves "reduced" by "gigantic gods" butexpanded in mind, spirit, and imagina-tion by the comprehensibility of a field(not a "maze") of numbers. Nadine's

reflections would be more suitable to anignorant and prejudiced humanities pro-fessor. Cohen wanted characters whowould reach for the stars. If they wereto do so not only metaphorically butliterally, as professional astronomers, heshould have learned more about astron-omy, mathematics, and the world-viewof scientists.

Evidently the symbolic content of thenovel also called for a female narrator/protagonist, and therefore Cohen choseto tell Nadine's story in the first person.However, Nadine is more a launderedmale than a female — her perceptionsand feelings have had "maleness" re-moved and, here and there, the author'sidea of "femaleness" inserted. This is ob-trusive only rarely, as when Nadine,aged 41, feels embarrassed while her doc-tor examines the breasts he has surgicallyrepaired, or when Cohen tries to describesexual encounters from a woman's pointof view. But throughout the novel, thevigour of character generated by the plotseeps away in the absence of the continu-ous subtle gender identification thatwould make Nadine a life-like woman.

In Jerusalem, Nadine throws herselfon a defective grenade tossed by chancein her direction. "I don't know if I'veacted by accident or design," she thinksat the time, and later, "Perhaps only myheroic gesture had caused it to explode."This incident epitomizes the book's mainproblem. Nadine's uncertainty directs thereader's attention to the question ofwhether we have control over our livesor only the illusion of control. Cohenseems to want to say that our destiniesare "written in the stars," and the struc-ture and plot of the book reinforce thisanalysis. However, by setting up an imi-tation woman and scientists conceived inignorance as his main characters, hemuddies the question rather than offer-ing answers, insights, or clarifications.

LAUREL BOONE

BOOKS IN REVIEW

MYTHIC & SURREALRONA MURRAY, Adam and Eve in Middle Age.

Sono Nis, $7.95.FRASER SUTHERLAND, Whitefaces. Black

Moss, $9.95.LiBBY SCHEIER, Second Nature. Coach House,

$8.50.

IN THE 1950's A POPULAR science andmechanics magazine featured a specula-tive article on robotics of the future. Inthe fanciful cover illustration a worker,strapped into a steel exoskeleton of servo-motors and mechanical joints which sup-posedly multiplies his normal strength,lifts a car engine single-handed. Sincethen our factories, like our poetics, havebecome less and less anthropocentric. Inthis context, Rona Murray's slim allegoryof aging domesticity succeeds in holdingour attention less by its occasionally over-built and creaky structure than by theelemental fascination of its subject. Theform is a dialogue between husband andwife, a long night of two souls bound inbitterness, habit, regret, resignation, and,finally, acceptance. The biblical ma-chinery with which Murray envelops herangst-ridden personae is intermittentlyeffective: although its mythic resonancesoccasionally amplify our sympathetic re-sponses, it seems at times merely strainedand cumbersome. Yet even in the societyrun by machine logic, these fragmentsshored against our ruins still retain someof their magical powers. They generatetension as the reader switches orbitsaround the poem's characters, now see-ing them as particular individuals inempty-nest vignettes, now as actors in adrama of universal significance.

One quotation perhaps inadequatelyconveys the relatively unmodulated gen-eral tone of existential weariness andfrustration filtered through a consider-ate and civilized restraint. The followingillustrates the book's grave, decorous dic-

tion, carried by a limited yet skilfullyhandled repertoire of prosodie devices:

The machine of me still functions,worn at the joints perhaps,not so well oiledas once perhaps.

Consuming its fuel,ithe machine of me drives pistonsback and forth,back and forth,time is shorttime is short,its song.

Fraser Sutherland's Whitefaces is oftena poetry of surfaces, of elusive meaningswhich shift and change. The collectionalso includes more precise and directpresentations of events and characters.This sophisticated and intelligent poetaims at effects which will stir the less-travelled corners of the heart. His toneranges through the cool irony of "Hersons' choice of wives / has not alwaysbeen as she wished — / nonetheless achallenge to statecraft"; the frank self-loathing of "some mornings I cannotbear to look / at the whiteface in themirror" ; and the unabashedly lyrical "wesavour each other's lovely weather."

The book's opening poem, "The Pi-azza," refers to

this de Chirico fleshthe ruined king's last playthingthis something studiedan effect, an overturethese sand-roadseternally made

The brief, tentative phrasing, like brush-strokes painting a complex of images,is reminiscent of early Poundian"Amygism," although discarding thatschool's emphasis on photographic clar-ity. De Chirico's metaphysical paintingsillustrate the mystery behind everydayreality by depicting dreamlike illusions,and several poems adopt this proto-

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Surrealist style, as in "The Train Mov-ing":

their hands flutterbending at the wrists farewellfarewell legs plantedgoodbye leaves growingin their hair

Yet other poems are bald narrative,almost empty of authorial comment:

She is 82. Her shaking handapplies lipstick every day.

What beautiful hair she has!Grey now;once red.

Here stressed line-endings reinforce theflat factuality of the content, while thelooser unstressed endings of the preced-ing two poems suit their more indirectpresentation of meaning.

Technically accomplished, shunningthe obvious and the trivial, Sutherland'sdeft understatement slips novel conjunc-tions of idea and attitude into the read-er's sensibility like viruses.

Libby Scheier approaches the highlycharged subjects of sex, love, family, andgender with a stripped-down vocabularyand colloquial style, as in "The House-wife's Poem to Her Sick Husband" :

When you're sick it's the onlytime I'm allowed to be strong.Stones fall from my shouldersand I become airborne,light as a moonwoman.

Some day you'll come home earlywithout warningand find me hovering over flowerssucking nectar and dizzy against the sky.

Here the simple language carries the sit-uation's spiritual content complementedby vivid metaphor. Without this imag-inative power she lapses into the clichéof "Cotton Bowl, New Year's Day" :

Football is beyond me.Entire groups of heavily padded men

men who are large to begin withcollide with each other.

Or the faux-naif banality ofRed and spongy, pumping blood, very

physical, the heart.The heart is not like the brain.Scientists and doctors and so on know a lot

about the heart.

Her from-the-mouths-of-babes man-ner is hilariously successful in "Penises,1", reminiscent of Lily Tomlin's scan-dalously confessional little character,Edith Ann:

Penises are funny.Sylvia said they look like chicken gizzards.I said sausage and eggsold monkey skinand hairs of an elephant's head.Let's face it.Penises are not goodlooking.They can be fun, but they're never pretty.

This deadpan directness gives some po-ems the unpremeditated casualness ofjournal musings. Others are amplifiedby dreamlike images of violence: awoman slices off her breast, which be-comes a flowered scarf, which she ties toher lover's wrist as she says good-bye;two women, one of them close to suicide,strangle and drown two seagulls; a manforces a woman to fire a gun at strangers,she magically escapes injury when heshoots her, and he falls to the ground asthe gun becomes a bird. Much of thebook's violence is transformed into suchSymbolist nightmares of men damagingwomen, women damaging themselves orsmaller creatures. Perhaps this is thepatriarchal Second Nature which hascontaminated the primal innocenceScheier mourns in "Fishing," the child-hood excursion of which she remembers"with a sad astonishment the ease andpleasure of my comradeship with themen and boys. What has happened sincethen? Why has everything changed?"

JOHN DONLAN

BOOKS IN REVIEW

ART ET REGARDJEAN MORENCY, Un Roman du regard: La

Montagne secrète de Gabrielle Roy. Centrede recherche en littérature québécoise, Uni-versité de Laval, $5.00.

I F WE NEED TO BE REMINDED that themost original and incisive critical workbeing done these days on Gabrielle Royis coming largely from francophone crit-ics, this rich volume of 99 pages bringsthe point home once again. Even thoughthe book deals with only one of Roy'snovels, it easily takes its place alongsidethe numerous noteworthy studies of thisauthor in French that we currently pos-sess. By way of comparison, three recentbooks on Roy in English are quite lim-ited. Allison Mitcham, The LiteraryAchievement of Gabrielle Roy (1983),Marta Gudrun Hesse, Gabrielle Roy(1984), and Paula Gilbert Lewis, TheLiterary Vision of Gabrielle Roy: AnAnalysis of Her Works (1984) do littlemore than provide a reiteration of theclichés of Roy criticism, seasoned withinterminable plot summaries and cata-logues of themes. Even the French trans-lation of the second of these three books{Gabrielle Roy par elle-même, 1985) isof greater interest than the original, inpart because the French text is of su-perior quality to the English, but espe-cially because of Alain Stanké's ownpreface and portfolio of illustrative ma-terials.

Morency's study deserves particularlycareful attention because it establishesmore forcefully than heretofore the reso-nances between La Montagne secrèteand a fruitful blending of critical tradi-tions and approaches that Morency isnot alone in exploiting. His point of viewhas obviously been greatly influenced bythat of Maurice Émond, who was histhesis supervisor at Laval. The methodsof both commentators hark back in asimilar fashion to the work of their mas-

ters, Gaston Bachelard, Jean-Pierre Ri-chard, Jean Rousset, Gilbert Durand,and Mircéa Éliade. Readers who havenot already read Bachelard et al., orÉmond's own La Femme à la fenêtre:l'univers symbolique d'Anne Hébert(1984), ought perhaps first to peruse theconcise description of Émond's methodprovided in his article "Les Approchesthématique et mythocritique" (Québecfrançais, March 1987). They will thenbe better prepared to savour the best inMorency and to understand the evolu-tion of his argument.

La Montagne secrète (first publishedin 1961 and available in English trans-lation under the title The Hidden Moun-tain) deals with the career of Pierre Ca-dorai, an artist who travels and paintshis way across northern Canada fromthe Mackenzie River region to northernQuébec, where he discovers a wondrousmountain that becomes his obsession.Later he travels to Europe in order todrink deeply at the well of the motherculture, but unfortunately dies of a heartattack (as Roy did) just as he is aboutto embark upon his envisioned master-piece: an all-encompassing tableau ofthe mountain.

In best French dissertation style, Mo-rency's introductory chapter sets out hismethod, definitions, and plan of attack.There we learn that the thrust of hisstudy will be guided by his perceptionof one of the dominant themes of thenovel, neatly summarized with a Car-tesian twist in the formula Je regarde,donc je suis with which the study begins.According to Morency, the novel is thuspreoccupied with the activity of the eye,with how it perceives and how it trans-forms what it perceives. Regard is anactive outbursting of perception, so tospeak, akin to the emission of light itself.In concentrating his attentions upon "lafonction imaginante," and in showingthat man is "un être qui rêve devant le

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mystère et l'inexplicable," whose reveriegravitates about certain themes expressedby means of images, symbols, and myths(all these terms are very carefully de-fined), Morency hints already in his firstpages that this study will transcend thecommonplace interpretation of the Roynovel in question as a somewhat ram-bling, thinly disguised allegory on theold theme of artistic creation. Morencyis quite right to insist that La Montagnesecrète is far more than just that.

The book's first chapter, entitled"L'Omniprésence du regard," demon-strates that "le regard" (the Frenchword connotes an element of serene lofti-ness that the English word "vision"seems to overshoot) is in fact an obses-sive, all-pervasive theme of the novel,characterizing not only the vision of Roythe novelist herself, but also that of herhero and of the whole universe she por-trays. Vision, light, sky, and divinity areisomorphically linked, affirms Morency,and perception of the vastness of thenorthern firmament, on the part of theartist, reaches out to the fringes of mys-tical experience. But regard touchesmore than just the celestial. A moreactive form of vision than contemplation(one recalls the passive/active dimor-phism apparent in the verb pair voir /re-garder) , regard interacts as well with anentire terrestrial universe: water, rock,elementary fire (the mountain gleamswith a singular incandescence whenPierre first looks upon it), as well aswith living forms such as trees (an ob-sessive anthropomorphic image in thenovel ), animals, and the rare humanbeings who populate the boreal land-scape.

In his second chapter, entitled "Art etregard," Morency investigates the waysin which the artist's particular form ofregard is linked to his productions. Thischapter, the longest of the three makingup the body of the book, seems to come

closest to achieving its stated purpose,and thus constitutes a robust central coreto the study. Artistic regard is an ag-gressive business, linked to a drive forpower over man and landscape, in orderto seize and fix their essence. Just asmany of Roy's characters, in all herworks, are obsessed with creating forthemselves cozy, protective enclosedspaces of refuge, in remembrance ofother paradises now lost, so the artistseeks to perceive and dominate the im-mensity of existence, with the ultimateaim of fixing it in his creation : "L'Art sedresse contre le temps." This artisticquest, which presents a means to revoltagainst mortal destiny, time, and decay,is reinforced in the novel by networks ofspatial symbols as Pierre wanders vaguelyeastward across the Canadian north,questing for light. Eventually he evencrosses the Atlantic and ends up in Paris.At the same time, both in Canada andin France, the south exercises a similarluminous attraction. Other symbols, of asimilar spatial nature, oppose the hori-zontality of decay through time, and theverticality of transcendence. (Most Roycharacters are, like cats, fond of highplaces.) The strength of Morency'sanalysis in this chapter lies in the fusionhe demonstrates between the idea of artas a transcendent presence in our midst,and the particular nature of PierreCadorai's interaction with his harshenvironment.

The third central chapter of the study("Regard humain et regard divin") at-tempts to establish links between thefundamental elements of Pierre's artisticendeavours, and basic human character-istics which have, across the ages, founduniversalizing expression in myth. Inparticular, Morency is concerned notonly with the Prometheus story, whichcombines a revolt against divinely estab-lished order and a quest for light, butalso with the theme of initiation, since

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Pierre's wanderings approximate, afterall, an initiating search of mystical pro-portions. The artist is in perpetual con-flict with the divine, and is in factattempting in his oeuvre to complete anotherwise imperfect creation process. Theartist fuses with the divine, becomes thedivine, as a result of the realization ofhis particular propensities. In illustratingthese ideas, Morency explores the textfor evidence of similarity between thesymbols of Pierre's creative energies andefforts, and those of the correspondentmythical accounts. And once again, withcommendable thoroughness, the criticelucidates the tight correspondence be-tween the novel's plot and its varioussymbolic frameworks.

Perhaps, as Morency himself states inhis conclusion, a reading such as this onein which an omnipresent and transform-ing regard is stressed, is possible onlywhen the critic seeks to impose upon thework his own interpretative regard:

En tant que regard étudiant le regard,nous avons pu saisir les symboles, les imageset les mythes à leur source profonde, dansle jaillissement même du langage de l'écri-vain, et c'est ce qui confère finalement ànotre thèse son caractère de nouveauté etd'originalité.

Morency's text is not the only goodstudy of this novel to appear recentlyin French. One's thoughts turn espe-cially, in this regard, to Alexandre L.Amprimoz, "L'Homme-arbre de LaMontagne secrète" {Canadian Litera-ture, Spring 1981); André Brochu, "LaMontagne secrète : le scheme organisa-teur" (Études littéraires, Winter 1984) ;and Marie Grenier-Francoeur, "Étudede la structure anaphorique dans LaMontagne secrète de Gabrielle Roy"(Voix et images, April 1976). However,Morency's approach to the novel is origi-nal, and his elucidation of some impor-tant elements of both this novel's fabricand Gabrielle Roy's preoccupations, will

no doubt be applied to other works bythe novelist with similarly praiseworthyresults.

Jean Morency and his publishers atthe Centre de recherche en littératurequébécoise realize that a low price on aworthwhile commodity is still likely toassist in generating demand. The bookis excellent value for the money. Infor-mative and persuasive, Morency's bookis also attractively presented and bound.However, a less displeasing typefaceshould have been used, and a bibliogra-phy of critical works other than thosedealing specifically with Gabrielle Royand La Montagne secrète included.

DENNIS ESSAR

DRAMATIC MEMORYCAROLINE HEATH, ed., The Land Called

Morning: Three Plays. Fifth House, n.p.PAT SMITH, The Oldest-Living. Lazara Pub-

lications, n.p.SHARON POLLOCK, Doc. Playwrights Canada,

$6.95.

WHATEVER ONE MIGHT think of Salva-dore Dali's "The Persistence of Mem-ory," as a phrase, it pinpoints the centraltheme common to these five Canadianplays, all published in 1986. Each ad-dresses the importance of recollecting thepast for members of a social minority:in The Land Called Morning, for na-tive Indians; in The Oldest-Living, foran old woman; and in Doc, for an un-married woman writer. In each, memoryis both persistent and allows charactersto persist: it impinges upon the con-sciousness of protagonists in the form ofdreams and recollections; and it allowsthe main characters to endure, to over-come forces that seek either to assimi-late them, as in the native plays, or tocontrol their sense of identity, as in thetwo plays about women.

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The Land Called Morning is an an-thology of short plays about nativeIndians. The first two plays, Teach Methe Ways of the Sacred Circle, by nativewriter Valerie Dudoward, and Gabrielle,a high school collective work performedin Gree and English from Ile-à-la-Crosse,Saskatchewan, use familial and historicalcharacters to represent dramatically theforces of memory. In Teach Me, a youngnative dreams about his grandparents'Indian folk tales and ancestral home.These experiences free him from hisinner conflicts, allowing him to embracehis Indian heritage while pursuing a ca-reer within the larger, non-native com-munity. Similarly in Gabrielle, a youngnative woman communes with her cul-tural past: this time, in the form of aghost — Louis Riel — who teaches herhow to defy the federal government byestablishing a local native government,as he did, with its own Bill of Rights.From their respective playing areas onstage, Gabrielle and Riel bridge a cen-tury to prove how a historical figure caninspire a minority group to fight for cul-tural and political issues. Though bothTeach Me and Gabrielle employ nativemusic, song, and masks, neither trans-lates these into the characterization andaction of the play: the characters nevertranscend their role as mouthpieces, andthe plays, their overt didacticism.

The Land Called Morning, written byJohn Selkirk (with Gordon Selkirk) forthe 1985 Edmonton Fringe TheatreEvent, fares better. As Selkirk says, theplay is "a story about two [native] teen-age couples trying to make their way in,and some sense of, the world aroundthem." Four times from individuallylighted areas on stage, the characterspause to reminisce about deeply felt,idiosyncratic experiences. These memo-ries are more fully integrated into actionand character than the first two plays,showing us why, for instance, Robin suc-

ceeds as a boxer; why Patsy finds fulfil-ment in marriage; why Anne commitssuicide; and why Peter must change.

Better yet is The Oldest-Living. Writ-ten by Pat Smith, a founder of the femi-nist Press Gang Publishers of Vancouver,The Oldest-Living was performed inSeattle in June 1984, as one in a seriesof plays by Northwest women play-wrights. The plot is simple: two elderlywomen, who have lived together forthirty-five years, come into $10,000 whenthe older woman, Muriel, becomes thetown's oldest-living citizen. These womenboth share memories and rememberwhat they share: in the first case, whenthey discuss such things as steamshiptravel and the community's fledglingyears; and in the second, when Muriel,as the "Oldest-Living," pronounces her"Two-Cents' Worth," publicly creditingMeredith as the source of her happinessand longevity. This play is about verymodest people, with modest desires, whoseem to know that contentment arisesfrom gratitude and a sense of one's iden-tity, reinforced by memory and com-panionship. As such, the play makesrather modest demands upon the audi-ence — there are no scenes of grippingaction nor deep psychological insight —but succeeds well enough given its care-fully circumscribed goals.

Best by far is Doc. Many of SharonPollock's earlier plays such as Walsh andThe Komagata Maru Incident deal withCanada's past, especially its suppressed,if not convenient, memory of itself. SinceBlood Relations and Generation, how-ever, Pollock's plays have focused on thefamily, on the psychological drama be-tween and within family members. Docpushes this trend to its limit: Pollockgives us an autobiographical play whichexamines the lives of her father, a work-obsessed Fredericton doctor, her alco-holic mother, Bob, and younger self,Katie. Most of the play, as Pollock notes,

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consists of "the sometimes shared, some-times singular memories of the past," asrelived by Doc and the older self, Cath-erine. Indeed, the act of remembering isthe play's action: an unopened letter toDoc from Catherine's grandmother pro-vides the catalyst for the memories whichchronicle the family history — fromDoc's courtship of Bob to Katie's leavinghome. Memory, too, expresses character:Catherine and Doc remember or forgetdifferent events, comment on the past,and even speak with the characters fromthe past, especially Catherine who inter-acts with her younger self, Katie, playedon stage by a different actress. Memory,then, is a source of catharsis for Cath-erine, who is now free to forge a newidentity, one which avoids both the pas-sivity of her mother and grandmotherand the obsessiveness of her father. Inthe play's closing frame, Catherine andDoc burn the grandmother's letter, set-ting themselves free from the past, andpresumably, free for the future. The per-sistence of memory is not only the themebut the effect of Doc: audiences willlong remember the playwright's emo-tionally charged and gripping confronta-tion with herself, her family, her past.

JILL TOMASSON GOODWIN

DEEP IN HIMSELFRUSSELL BROWN, ed., The Collected Poems

of Al Purdy. McClelland & Stewart, $29.95.

AL PURDY IS ONE of those rare poets wholeave their hallmark stamped on everypage they write:

I'm so glad to be herewith the chance that comes but onceto any man in his lifetimeto travel deep in himselfto meet himself as a strangerat the northern end of the world.

This, for example, and a hundred othernear-random quotes, could take the

place of the most eloquent review ("Anddamn well ought to!" I can hear thepoet say). Fortunately for the reviewer,any discussion of a collected poems —the garnering and winnowing of a life-time's effort — can be no ordinary re-view. Like the work itself, it is to be asumming up (for now), a celebration ofexcellence, and a cause for wonder andexplanation.

It is easy to praise the poems of AlPurdy. He's been admired and lionizedsince The Cariboo Horses came "batter-ing thru the wind" into our startled con-sciousness in 1965. And reading thisoeuvre from beginning to end confirmsour intermittent responses since then.Here are the dazzling anthology piecesarranged tamely in their original, chron-ological glory: "The Cariboo Horses,""Mountain Lions in Stanley Park," "TheCountry North of Belleville," "Post-script," "The Country of the Young,""Lament For the Dorsets," and twodozen more. Like Layton before him,Purdy has established his credentials asone of the fine practitioners of the mod-ern craft.

What more need be said? At least twothings, both of which are addressed byDennis Lee in his insightful, synoptic"Afterword" (Lee alas doesn't leavemuch for anyone else to say). Purdy iswithout question the premier poet of ourbrief literary history and one of thegiants of poetry writing in English dur-ing the twentieth century. While suchclaims may seem extravagant, low-cost,and even meretricious (why bother"ranking" poets as if they were dogs ina show?), they are for Canadians impor-tant considerations. This collection itselfadmits to no other conclusion. Foramong the acknowledged masterpiecesherein we find, reading straight through,the strength of all the poems and coinci-dentally the source of Purdy's power asa contemporary maker. Indeed, as Lee

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implies, questing for gems and applyingtouchstones (a bit of Whitman, a littleBeat, a dash of Black Mountain) as wedo out of habit is itself a sign of ourunexorcized colonialism. Reviewing Pur-dy's twenty-eight books one by one wehave dutifully ferreted out the polishedpieces and forgiven the unavoidabledross ("if only he'd quit writing thosebeery anecdotes!"). Well, here the drosshas been trimmed and what is left issurprisingly large — 300 from an outputwell over 700. What's more, we are ableat last to see what has been missed sofar: these are 300 superbly craftedpoems, almost all of them written in thefirst person, in a style that is unique,polyphonic, open-ended, and yet essen-tially unchanged during its mature phaseof twenty-five years. These are the di-mensions we use in discussing any majorpoet. Purdy fits them all; Lee has givenus a learned description of the prosody(and M.A. students will be kept busy fora century glossing Lee's script while Alguffaws with the gods at such splendidfoolishness) ; but the evidence is in thebook itself.

The Purdy voice and style is singularamong modern poets. Attempts to deter-mine its locus and fix the nature of itsmagic have been many and various. ButPurdy is no mere apostle of North Amer-ican vernacular (a favoured view), eventhough he's spectacularly vernacular.What he has achieved, and Lee explainsnicely, is a multi-voiced persona, a love-able doppleganger who can shift in a sin-gle poem or stanza up and down theregister, across a dozen "voices," so thathieratic and demotic contend, confound,blend, and illuminate. To achieve this,Purdy has had to deploy an astonishingrange of vocabularies, dialects, and idio-lects; he has had to integrate these intothe particular voice of his speaking char-acter, a voice that in all its multipleguises and inflections remains the "same"

for twenty-five years; and he has had tohave full control over line, stanza struc-ture, and harmonics. All of which he hasmade look easy — until you try to imi-tate or explicate. We have too longthought of Purdy as a "natural," a sortof miraculous bumpkin.

The technical achievement, then, isswiftly documented. But a persona needsto have human qualities, and extra-sensory ones at that, especially if he in-habits 300 poems. What we find, amongothers, is a blending of Chaplin, OliverHardy, and the early Socrates with themid-century, middle-of-the-road, bifocalhomo canadensis, the guy we all knowas Al Purdy (or is it A.W. or AlfredW.?). As Lee indicates, Purdy has donefor colonial English what the LatinAmericans have done for Spanish. Hehas taken the tongue of Shakespeare andDickens and reinvented it in the serviceof poetry — which is itself the businessof pulling experience (conscious and un-conscious) inside-out through language,and vice versa. And we needed to see thewhole corpus of this collection to realizethe stature of Purdy's lifelong work. Hehas done for Canada — and for the de-velopment of English poetry in general— what Whitman did for America, whatYeats and Joyce did for Ireland: in ex-plicating his own country's unconsciousthrough its blazing particulars and thenew-forged langue necessitated by suchan undertaking, Purdy has expandedthe possibilities of poetry-writing itself.Moreover, in doing so, he has renderedvisible an image of Canada to be readbackwards by Canadians and sidewaysby outsiders. Like those other great poets( I would include Eliot, too, that subvert-ing colonial pulling off his English dis-guise for forty years), Purdy's generosityof spirit, his erudition, the catholicity ofhis interests exempt him from charges ofnarrow nationalism or regional obsession(i.e., you don't have to be Irish to like

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Ulysses). Colonials have always had anadvantage over native British writers:they have fresh territory to map with anoutdated cartography; something mustgive, and it is usually the language itself.However, only the greatest talent canreconfigure the common tongue of po-etry to fit perfectly the concerns imme-diately in front of him.

Purdy has done so. His lack of formaleducation, his inexhaustible curiosity, hislaser-like innocence, and his stubborn re-fusal to be anything but himself — aCanuck from Prince Edward County,living the precarious stranger's existenceon the periphery of empire and history— all these factors have no doubt con-tributed to his achievement, and help ina small way to explain why a poet from amarginal nation by the world's standardshas not only forged a unique languagefor modern poetry in English, but hasused it to establish one of the voices andforms of conscience which none of us canafford to ignore. That the material, mat-rix, and vernacular for such a triumphshould have sprung from humble Cana-dian sources is both a surprise (aren't wealways?) and a cause for celebration. Be-cause of Purdy's work, minor Canadianpoets have a standard set for them intheir own house, not to intimidate orincite but to enlarge the rooms, freshenthe air, and allow all of us to feel moreat home. That outsiders might come torecognize the master's achievement andto learn more about us through him,might be a faint hope. But it really willnot matter much. The loss will be theirs.

Most of the foregoing would embar-rass the great poet, prompting horse-laughter of gargantuan delicacy. Let mesay it all another way, then, more in thePurdyesque manner we've come to takefor granted: P.S.: Thanks, Al. Youmake good poems.

DON GUTTERIDGE

FEAR & FORMNADINE MCiNNis, Shaking the Dreamland

Tree. Coteau Books, $7.00.ROBERT FINCH, For the Back oj a Likeness.

The Porcupine's Quill, $7.95.Shaking the Dreamland Tree is a decep-tive title for Nadine Mclnnis's first col-lection of poetry for there is nothingdreamlike about these poems. Most, infact, are painfully aware that human re-lationships, especially family relation-ships, are frequently complicated webs ofambivalent love and pain. Even the titlepoem, "The Dreamland Tree," a moth-er's reflection upon her young daughterand her own mother, yokes irreconcil-able phrases in uneasy tension: "I offermy daughter stories of innocence / andbitter exile / old rhymes / no onebelieves anymore." Mclnnis's speakersnever seem to transcend these tensions,although this appears to be less a weak-ness on the speakers' part than a fact oflife in a world threatened by nucleardestruction. Hence, in one poem, thespeaker tries to deny her daughter's in-evitable confrontation with the unpleas-ant: "I teach her only words / I thinkshe will enjoy / cat, hug, frog"; a fewlines later, however, the narrator's fearcrowds in on this denial: "Not long now/ before she learns / missile murderer."Occasionally the ambivalence of adultpain versus unconsciously powerful in-fant innocence is too glib, as in "Flights,"where the birthing mother, viewing herjust-born daughter, lies "in ruins / asshe rises." Somehow the images through-out this poem do not sustain these con-cluding lines, fail to communicate themother's experience of giving birth.

Mclnnis does not restrict herself tofamily relationships, although those po-ems about the mother-daughter relation-ship are among the most moving. Butthese intimate relationships are hauntedby apprehensions beyond the reach of

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family influence, especially the ominousthreat of nuclear holocaust. "1964" and"1965" look back to "our side's" militaryairshows, the purpose of which was "toconvince us we are safe"; "40 days,"written at Cold Lake, Alberta, in March1984, notes ironically the testing of theCruise Missile on Ash Wednesday. Heretoo, however, the resignation to defeatoverwhelms the effort to protest: "ashesto ashes / our signs are frozen / obsoleteas prayers." Perhaps such resignation isthe collection's limitation. The tone ofthese poems is so unrelentingly serious,their effect so grim, that one feels a littleassaulted by the end. The reader occa-sionally suspects there may be a sense ofhumour lurking behind the dark images,as in "a feminist doll," but it never quitesurfaces, remains too reined in, too re-strained. Of course uniformity of tone isnot necessarily a weakness, but the col-lection might have benefited from a littlegreater variety. There is power here butone might wish for a suggestion of hopeamidst the all-too-justified gravity.

If readers can get past the cryptic, ap-parently arcane, description of RobertFinch's poems on the back cover of Forthe Back of a Likeness, they will certainlybe rewarded for their patience. For thecover blurb, poetic phrases have beenlifted out of the context of a variety ofpoems and strung together to give theimpression of a poetry much more eso-teric than is, in fact, the case. Indeed,this new collection of poems from the1946 Governor General's Award winnerconveys intelligence, wit, and wisdom.Here is poetry the elegance and artistryof which charms the reader both with itsmusical lyricism and its lively sensibility.

The first section of this five-part vol-ume contains a number of sonnets (anda sonnet sequence) in both English andItalian style, with more or less adherenceto the rigidity of the form. The sequence"Day," for example, is a happy illustra-

tion of Finch's belief that "Form FollowsFunction," that "idea engenders form."In the second sonnet of the sequence,the poet weaves the rhythmic revolutionof day and night through the equallyformal abba exactness of the quatrain:

Day is creation's natural dialecticMornings, the formless veers to formal

sights,Evenings, form veers to formlessness, the

light'sPolarity grows dim with night's climactic.

Others among Finch's sonnets, like"Transcendence," resist the restriction ofform by combining the Italian octave/sestet structure with an English alternateline rhyme scheme for a more playfultonal effect. It is a tone echoed in theclosing two lines: "Some physicists atsaint and poet glower / Like tone-deafmen deriding music's power."

The second section, less philosophical,more intimate than section one, containsa number of poems lamenting the in-tense but fragile nature of transient ornever-born love. Probably the most per-sonal section, the poems here still expressthe cultivated sensitivity of a poet whosetask is not only to express but also toshift emphasis from the poet's voice tothe economy and artistry of pattern. Sec-tion five, at first perhaps surprisingly re-ligiously confessional in the context ofthe whole volume, in fact only focusesand articulates more explicitly the frame-work for all the other poems. Sometimesin the poems of this section the carefullyconstructed sonnet frame with its abbaand concluding rhyming couplets threat-ens to upstage idea (something Finchpointedly denies in the earlier "FormFollows Function") with too great at-tention to form. On the other hand, itmay be that the assurance and confi-dence of the religious sensibility here issuited to such a normative structure. Itis occasionally a little on the calculatedside, but the dependence on aesthetic

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form seems to work in the context ofFinch's faithful trust in the creative po-tential of form.

LESLIE-ANN HALES

SECRET TENSIONSGILLES ARCHAMBAULT, Standing Flight, trans.

David Lobdell. Oberon, $12.95.LEONA GOM, Housebroken. NeWest, $8.95.KEN LEDBETTER, Not Enough Women. Mosaic,

$8.95·O N E OF THESE TITLES is a major newfirst novel; one is a welcome translationof a Québécois work not previously avail-able in English ; and one is an attempt atworking-class authenticity that quicklydegenerates into a series of tall (andoffensive) stories. In Housebroken, Le-ona Gom moves between the two night-mares, domestic isolation and the hellthat is other people, depicting both withwit and a poet's eye for detail. The twowomen whose relationship is the subjectof the book are both facing the problemof redefining themselves. The older, El-len, is recently widowed, lonely, but re-sisting the expected widow's role thatChilliwack society has forced on her; theyounger, Susan, has recently moved toChilliwack because the bank her hus-band works for wants to see if he canmake his wife get used to living wherethe bank wants them to live. Widowhoodforces Ellen to see how cruelly restrictiveare the choices permitted to women inthis society. Yet Susan's feminist viewsdisconcert her. She is dubious and evensomewhat alarmed at Susan's angry pro-nouncement "for women this is an oc-cupied country," but she also wonderswhether it may not be partly true.Susan's frequent jokes about the banali-ties of consumer society, though genu-inely witty, seem more and more like theexpression of an anger that slips intodespair. For all her rebellious humour,Susan lives dangerously near the edge.

If this seems a predictable device forsetting up a consciousness-raising debate,I have given a false impression of thebook. Housebroken is not a staged argu-ment between a doctrinaire feminist andher reluctant convert, but the story of adeveloping friendship that has subtlestrengths, secret tensions, and even thesort of mutual exploitation of weaknessesthat is present in most friendships. Gomrelies on two familiar literary devices:indeterminacy, and shifts in narrativepoint of view. As the book begins, welearn that Susan is dead; her husband,Whitman, brings Ellen a box of Susan'spossessions — photographs, diaries, anddrafts of poems, a play, some short stor-ies. The cause of Susan's death is keptfrom us until later. Even then, the cir-cumstances remain ambiguous, so thatEllen's motive for recalling these eventsis in part that of self-examination. DidSusan guess that Ellen was having anaffair with Whitman? If so, did it matterto her?

Susan's voice is heard through herdiaries and her literary drafts — anotherfairly well-worn narrative technique, butone that Gom puts to good use, makingSusan's pain and anger more transparentto us. The Susan of the diaries is rebel-lious, cheeky, but finally rather irritat-ing. More interesting in the end is whatGom does with the "literary" papers inSusan's box, showing how even a womanof Susan's political alertness, her discon-tent with Canadian smugness, is com-pelled to romanticize some things in herown life. Behind Susan's screen memo-ries of an idyllic teenage romance, asdocumented in Susan's radio play, is adark sexual horror that may or may notexplain her behaviour in the last fewweeks of her life.

Housebroken is many things: an ex-ploration of the roles forced onto women,a story of a developing friendship, astudy of the madness that lies in wait

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behind the drip-dry shirts and cat food,an analysis of the defence mechanismsand other fictions that enable people tocheat their way into and out of relation-ships. The novel surprises us as the sup-posedly "normal" Ellen, "a person ofwhom there were no expectations," ac-tually becomes a more interesting figurethan the lively, rebellious Susan. And inthe way that she uses the fiction-within-a-fiction of Susan's radio play, Gomshows that not far from her mind is thequestion of where fictions begin. Withoutparading the fact, Gom makes House-broken a finely crafted piece of meta-fiction, a story about the psychologicalorigins of stories, and one that can standcomparison with Atwood and Kogawa.

Oberon Press has now made four ofGilles Archambault's novels available inEnglish. Standing Flight very definitelybelongs to the category of metafiction,with its sudden jumps from third-personto first-person narrative, its near obses-sive reiteration of the search for personalidentity, and its unexpected conclusion,with the simple disappearance of themain character, Julien, as if he were aninvisible character in a dream-narrativeof Borges. The story is delicately, skil-fully handled. Julien is a journalist on aMontreal newspaper, the kind of leftistintellectual who is sought out for inter-views on radio and TV (Quebec beingperhaps the only province where the pro-fessional journalist is widely treated withrespect, and credited with a certain au-thority). Yet Julien finds himself losinghis sense of purpose, even his sense ofidentity, and neither his career as a pub-lic person nor his liaison with an intelli-gent younger woman seems to be able tohelp him. As he thinks of turning hisrelationship with the woman, Laurence,into a story, he finds himself asking"suppose she had left her mark so pro-foundly upon you that you could nolonger write without speaking of her?"

In reaction against this unknown thinghe has become, Julien is compelled togo back to Côte St-Jean, the working-class district where he grew up, and, ashe puts it, "wander a little in the streetsof my childhood."

Like Leona Gom, Archambault usesthe uneven course of a relationship be-tween the main character and an out-wardly less stable, more tormented friendto precipitate the main character's crisisof identity and awarenes of having be-trayed another. Here the unstable friendis Louis, Julien's uncle, who is, however,only a little older than Julien himself.Punishing himself with drink and a quar-relsome relationship with the wrongwoman, alternately resentful of Julienand impressed by Julien's newly wonbourgeois status, Louis is neverthelessJulien's ticket back to his working-classroots. Yet he has betrayed Louis already,by quitting Côte St-Jean for an educa-tion and a middle-class job. "You're notmeant to be alone, Julien, you'll end upgoing mad," Julien is told, and madnessis so close by the end of the book that itsuggests itself as one explanation forJulien's final disappearance during thefuneral of his uncle and friend. But thisexplanation would not be in tune withthe undecidability that faces us at theend of the book. Julien is there while heis needed, a persona created by thosearound him — Louis, his mother, hismistress Laurence, his sister Nicole. Per-haps Julien was all along a non-entity;he vanishes as soon as others no longerneed him, so shifting and indeterminateis reality in Archambault's book.

Ken Ledbetter's Not Enough Womenis an attempt at a raucous, gutsy tale oflife among country people in Missouri.From the purely technical point of view,it is well crafted, and thickly populatedwith unlikely, legendary backwoods char-acters. However, the central premise ofthe story is repellent and the humour is

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offensive. A three-times-married woman,who as a child was sexually abused byher father, makes it her life's mission toteach every pubescent boy in the neigh-bourhood the joys of true sexual pleas-ure, so that the daughters of these youngmen will not suffer incestuous advancesthe way she had to. The recurrent sexualand scatological episodes quickly growtiresome, and the "tall tale" style is un-convincing as a vehicle of working-classtruth. The publisher's blurb for NotEnough Women claims that the book is"in the tradition of William Faulknerand Mark Twain." If only it were.

ANTHONY JOHN HARDING

FUTURE VOLUMESHUGH HOOD, The Motor Boys in Ottawa.

Stoddart, $14.95.

The Motor Boys is another volume ofHugh Hood's New Age series, a massiveproject which, if his claims are onlypartly realized, will place others, such asDos Passos's U.S.A., in the shade. How-ever, as The Motor Boys is only the sixthof a promised ten, the series cannot yetbe assessed; moreover, as it is styled anovel, the present work should have itsown integrity. It must not, for example,simply recall names, events, even the-matic material, from previous volumes,as if assuming that the reader will re-member them from at least three yearsago {The Scenic Art) or be sufficientlyintrigued to return to still earlier vol-umes. As well, it must not contain ma-terial which has little relevance to thepresent volume, but may provide con-tinuity for future volumes. Both theseprohibitions are neglected in The MotorBoys, and the book suffers for it.

Hood's references to material from theearlier books are, admittedly, often

merely annoying. What precisely May-Beth Codrington's visionary portraitswere like is less important than knowingthat Philip Horsbaugh presents him asJudas. Yet the many vague referencesto the whole group of portraits are irri-tants. References to people now dead aretantalizing but equally unfulfilled andissues involving them left obscure. Moreimportant, however, is that referencewith implied substantial relevance, suchas Matt Goderich's statement — "Whathappened around the reservoir and downthe ravine may proffer some explanationof [my] inheritance" — in the midst of agratuitous self-portrait. Unless the readercan remember the events that affectedMatt's character in Reservoir Ravine(1979), the comment is meaningless.

There is neither great harm, of course,in occasional small violations of the sec-ond prohibition, and Hood manages afew of these quite deftly, as when An-gela Robinson picks confidential papersoff her father's desk and immediatelysees their significance. But absolutely nocurrent use is made of the incident.Much more damaging is the record ofTony Goderich's love affair in London,spread through the book. That LinnetOlcott uses him to further her careerand then discards him may be intendedas a parallel to the use of his father byGeorge Robinson and the governmentparty, but the parallel is quite loose andthrows no greater light on the more sig-nificant action, Andrew Goderich's suc-cessful delicate negotiations and deathin China, suggesting martyrdom. In fact,Tony's lengthy affair seems simply to an-ticipate his appearance, probably as pro-tagonist, in a future volume.

On the positive side, Hood does em-ploy a clear, if minimal, main plot lineto unify the work. George Robinson,M.P., uses privileged information aboutthe forthcoming Auto Trade Pact, diver-sifying his pharmaceutical firm's holdings

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into auto parts plants on both sides ofthe border. After a brief defeat, he alsoregains his seat and becomes a parlia-mentary secretary to the new Prime Min-ister. He now has great wealth andpower. Afraid of Andrew, he suggeststhat the NDP Nobel Prize winner besent to reopen trade relations withChina, pre-empting the U.S. Belatedlyhe realizes that Goderich saw the pactin an international perspective, as goodfor Canada. For subplot lines we haveTony's affair, and Matt's self-revelationstogether with his family relations and hisfather's story. But plot-line linkage istenuous.

Hood's narrative technique does less tounify the work. Matt's commentary isprovided in first-person narration, andthe rest, over half the book is omniscient.There is no edict against mixing narra-tive modes, provided a strong reason ex-ists. Here there seems no obvious reason,unless first-person is to provide deeperinsight into Matt's rather shallow char-acter. If this is indeed the intention,then the resulting revelations should begreater.

Hood seems content to allow Mattsimply to tell the reader what he is like.He emerges as self-aware but not terriblyintrospective. His comments on art, ar-chitecture, politics, religion, and societyare apt but not particularly acute, yetultimately they acquire significancegreater than that of the character him-self, as milieu. Of George Robinson,little more is revealed than that he hasconsiderable innate cunning, an instinctfor the opportunistic move, and sheergood luck. The contrast of his characterand high achievement makes Georgeironically amusing; Matt is too oftencolourless. Actually, the most interestingcharacter in the book is George's enig-matic daughter, Angela. Her intelligence,self-possession, and animal vitality areglimpsed but rarely; however, she will

certainly be another major figure in theseries.

The greatest strength of The MotorBoys is, as perhaps expected, its descrip-tive richness. With real artistry, Hoodcaptures the decade of the 1960's in pe-culiarly Canadian colours. Issues andevents unroll, intricately bound withGeorge's ventures in the auto parts tradeand the Prime Minister's office, providedin pages of minute detail down toverbatim parliamentary news releases.Though with attenuating narration,Matt does reveal many standard pre-occupations and prejudices of the period.The resulting verisimilitude is bothconvincing and impressive: satisfyingenough that Hood may be forgiven whenhe expands to irrelevant detail. Still,with such abundance at his command,he could afford to be always selectiveand restrained, ever mindful of subordi-nation to some significant thematic state-ment.

If such a statement is not prominentin the book, inevitably the reader turnsto Hood's huge project and the way hehas chosen to present it. The exaltedclaims he himself has made for the NewAge series may be set aside; whetherthey are sincere, calculated, or both isnot an issue. That the six volumes whichhave appeared are not mere mechani-cally chronological sequels is so obviousa virtue as to go without elaboration.Nevertheless, as the large canvas fills, thereader is still left wondering what thefactors of coherence will be, what majorthemes will emerge, what perspectivewill encompass the minutiae and reducethem to a comprehensive whole. Mustthe last volume appear before all can bejudged, or is the reader justified in re-quiring that each individual work alsohave its own integrity as a novel? In thisrespect, The Motor Boys in Ottawa isbarely adequate.

H. A. HARGREAVES

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DIFFERENT DRAGONSJEAN LITTLE, Different Dragons. Viking Kes

trel, $12.95.MARTYN G OD F REY, Plan Is Total Panic.

James Lorimer, $6.95.PAUL YEE, The Curses of the Third Uncle.

James Lorimer, $12.95.

FEAR IS COMMON in childhood. Manychildren fear monsters, the dark, aban donment, loss of parental love, or death.For them, childhood is a time of humilia tion, of incompetence, of constant ques tioning of their own worth. Fear is thusclosely tied to a sense of identity. Thestruggle with fear and the consequentdevelopment of a secure identity is thetheme of three recent novels for chil dren. Although they differ in plot andgenre, each develops the theme throughthe circular pattern of the heroic journeyto adventure. In each novel, that is, achild leaves home and heroically facesfears. H aving thus defined his or heridentity, the child returns a more matureand competent individual.

In Jean Little's Different Dragons, thepattern shapes a gentle piece of domesticrealism. Timid Ben Tucker, sent tospend the weekend with his aunt, a fa mous writer of children's fantasy, fear fully protests that he is not like herdragon slaying heroes. His father sug gests that Ben is on a heroic journey:"You have different dragons to fight,that's all. I think you might even slayone or two this weekend."

Different Dragons is predictable. Benovercomes in turn each of his fears whilesimultaneously discovering that everyoneat some time fears something. His majorvictory comes with a Labrador retrieverhis parents plan to give him. Ben willhave nothing to do with the "monster"until he discovers that the big dog iseven more terrified of lightning than heis. Calming the dog by talking in the wayadults have always talked to him, he

slays his greatest dragon. At the end ofhis adventurous weekend, Ben is readyto return home with a new sense ofworth, and a new friend. Although toocontrived in its pursuit of a happy end ing, the novel avoids the pitfalls of sen timentality and didacticism. At the sametime, it maintains interest without resort ing to melodrama.

Martyn Godfrey's Plan Is TotalPanic is melodramatic, and the didacti cism is intrusive at the end, but God frey's flair for capturing the essence ofteenage self doubts in crisp, authenticdialogue compensates for many of hisstory's limitations. The narrator, N icholasClark, a self confessed "wim p" who hassuffered an ignominious beating at thehands of the school bully, undertakes hisheroic journey when he is invited on ahunting trip by a native friend. Encoun tering a bear, he does not, like his friend,freeze in terror. In fact, when the bearcomes back later, N icholas survives itsattack by playing dead and then chasesit away, thus saving the life of a downedpilot.

Designed to show multicultural har mony, the novel explores the living hab its and some of the beliefs of nativeCanadians through the natives' mildmockery of the greenhorn N icholas. U n fortunately, the book does not maintainthe high level of this entertaining socialcommentary. Godfrey tends to let thetheme control the plot mechanically:Nicholas's native companion freezes atthe sight of the very bear he has beenstalking, Nicholas's neglectful father sud denly becomes an understanding, sympa thetic parent, and the school bully ex presses interest in having N icholas cometo a party. Still, the blend of the tra ditional outdoor adventure tale andadolescent problem novel will make thebook appealing to both the reluctantreaders who form G odfrey's usual audi ence and some willing readers looking for

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an occasionally witty and fast-pacedentertainment.

More ambitious than either of the pre-vious novels is Paul Yee's The Curses ofthe Third Uncle, which combines ro-mantic suspense and gritty historicalrealism. Set in British Columbia in 1909,the tale traces the efforts of a youngChinese girl, Lillian (Ah-Lai) Ho, tofind her father, who has been trying togather funds for the revolutionaries inChina. Lillian's circular journey takesher to the wilderness outside Revelstoke,where she discovers her inner strengths.Returning to Vancouver, she is able tostop a counter-revolutionary plot and toaccept that her father has been mur-dered. She displays such courage inovercoming her fear of being sent toChina that her mother overcomes herown fear of Canada and decides that thefamily can stay in their new land.

Although part of a publisher's seriesdesigned to make Canadian history in-teresting for children, Yee's novel avoidsthe cloying didacticism and boring peda-gogy of a series book. Yee's glimpses intoChinese-Canadian life are as relevant asthey are fascinating. They create an ex-citing, exotic atmosphere, and they in-tensify respect for Lillian's courage whenshe proves that Chinese girls are not, asher "third uncle" declares, "garbage."Like the female warriors in the tradi-tional tales, Lillian proves they can beheroes. Yee falters when he tries to con-nect the girl's personal struggle with herpeople's similar struggle with fear of theChinese emperor. The connection isneither as smooth nor as coherent as itshould be, but it does suggest that apeople's courage begins with courageousindividuals like Lillian and her father.

None of these novels is destined to bea classic, but all are products of compe-tent craftsmanship. Yee's book, however,stands apart, adding to the promise he

displayed in his earlier collection, TeachMe To Fly, Sky fighter! (1983).

RAYMOND E. JONES

CAJUN/ACADIENMARGUERITE MAILLET, Histoire de la Littéra-

ture Acadienne: De rêve en rêve. Editionsd'acadie, $16.95.

WILLIAM FAULKNER RUSHTON, The Cajuns.Collins, $13.95.

MARGUERITE MAILLET'S De rêve en rêvereminds me of William Keith's recentstudy of Canadian literature in Long-man's "World Literature" series, in thatit is a brief history of a national litera-ture rather than a comprehensive liter-ary history, meant to be read for pleasureas well as consulted for profit. Unlikeweightier tomes compiled by distin-guished committees, it places the empha-sis on a contextual analysis of key move-ments and figures, rather than on theample prose bibliographies which candeter even the most enthusiastic of stu-dents. For those in quest of comprehen-siveness as well as authority, it shouldbe treated as a companion volume toMaillet's 1979 multi-volume anthologyof Acadian texts, which represents thecanon established by the author in con-junction with the University of Monc-ton's Centre for Acadian Studies.

Here, Maillet traces the growth of atradition and a voice which have onlyrecently broken free from the twin di-lemmas of anonymous "folklorization"on the one hand and domination by onevery articulate mainstream writer on theother hand. The subtitle refers to thedream of paradise regained promotedby well-intentioned conservative clergy-men and educators during the two cen-turies between the dispersion of 1755and the cultural explosion of the 1960's.The author traces four stages in themovement from para-literature buried

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on the margins of a rich oral traditionto the emergence of more writerly textsin the last few decades. The period 1604to 1866 encompasses enthusiastic ex-ploration, exile, and isolation. As quicklyas missionaries and colonizers rhetori-cally addressed Acadia in ultramontaneterms as the promised land, the settlers'struggle for survival, even before expul-sion, countered such assumptions withoutdirectly challenging them in writing.However, the events of 1755, rather thandenoting the end of the dream, repre-sent its consolidation as reflected in thenext two stages. The period 1867 to1928 is marked by a reawakening of na-tionalist orators, essayists, and historianspaying allegiance to the new trinity oflanguage, tradition, and religion — anecessary, even beneficial, developmentafter generations of insecurity, but alsoa problematic inheritance for later writ-ers. The third stage, 1929 to 1957, firstgives rise to the "proper" genres oftheatre, poetry, and fiction, but thesewere subordinated to the official ideologyor "cult of Evangeline" for which theyserved as vehicles.

These two intermediate stages reflectthose also identified by one of Maillet'smodels, the Quebec critic Georges-AndreVachon — literary development in Aca-dia reflects that in "la belle province"despite differences in voice and experi-ence, with the additional burden of afifty-year time lag. It is only in the fourthstage, 1958 to the present, that differenceis confidently asserted: the new regional-ism replaces the official culture of theCatholic "belles-lettristes" by rediscover-ing oral history and popular culture. Themyth of Evangeline is rejected as a na-tional icon of fear, inferiority, and colo-nization, and a new writing, verbally andpolitically aware, comes to terms withorality and a long-standing silence. Un-fortunately, a wider readership for thisnew writing has yet to emerge. It is in-

teresting to note that while numerousreaders were aware of Acadia onlythrough Longfellow's poem, Acadiansdid not read his epic, even after Pam-phile Lemay's early translation, butrather "translated" his fictional heroineinto a historical figure and model for thefuture. The "dream" of Maillet's subtitleis not without irony, for while the com-munity and its writers still struggle tosurvive, it is only with the slow deathof the visionary state that their truevoice has begun to emerge. Meanwhile,the milder, implicitly populist myth ofabundance, naming Acadie "pays decocagne," has achieved a modest success— the sea, that secret garden which pro-vides her being's dominant poetic ex-pression, is the source of dispersal butalso of sustenance according to Maillet.

William Faulkner Rushton's The Ca-juns, a very different type of book andone which fails to achieve all its goals,nevertheless addresses similar issues withsome insight in the domain of folkloreand popular culture. Rushton is a jour-nalist fascinated by the Cajuns and con-cerned about their marginal status inAmerican history and increasing margin-alization in contemporary American so-ciety. His capsule history of Acadia,"Trouble in the Sweet Promised Land,"is well informed, as is his critique of theoil industry's impact on the bayou, en-titled "Texas and the Oiligarchs." In hissections documenting the Cajuns' shiftfrom inland fishing to coastal rice-farm-ing and large-scale cattle ranching, how-ever, Rushton reveals a liberal romanticbias and a less forgivable tendency toshare some of his countrymen's attitudesabout financial success and the meltingpot. That these descendants of deportedAcadians are losing their French heritagedoes not preoccupy him much, nor doeshe really address the fact that as a de-scription of an American ethnic cate-gory the term "Cajun" is broad enough

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to encompass groups with conflictingeconomic interests, political loyalties, andcultural identities.

The culprit is not Rushton's sympa-thies so much as his training: his study,admittedly directed to a general reader-ship, lacks the academic's questioning ofhis own values and assumptions and theethnologist's meticulous attention to de-tail. The chapters on material history —focusing on architecture and textiles —are both intriguing and convincing, butthose on culture are weaker. Rushton'sanalysis of French accordion music openswith a promising description of "fais-dodo" music halls, and accounts for thedistinctive flavour of the music by exam-ining the availability of different typesof instruments over time. However, hedoes not distinguish between the folkand popular categories in music, lumpingblack Cajun "Zydeco" and electrifiedcountry with traditional songs, and ig-noring such major figures as ZacharyRichard. The chapter on Mardi Graslacks both an understanding of carnivaland an awareness of foreign influenceson the desire to "laissez les bon tempsrouler." The long section on cockfightsforegrounds masculine culture and over-emphasizes its place within the largerpicture. By contrast, GODOFIL, thegovernment agency for the preservationof the French language and heritage,merits a scant few pages, and the sectionon Cajun cooking, complete with recipes,hardly makes up for the loss. Whatshould have been a core chapter is rele-gated to the Appendix, and subtly dis-parages the dialect as "patois." Part ofthe problem with Rushton's book is thathe has restricted himself to a few town-ships and individuals encountered in hisresearch. To his credit, he does supple-ment his discovery of Mamou, a fasci-nating community, with ample secon-dary sources, and the book certainly issatisfactory as a general popular study.

Both Maillet and Rushton have un-earthed the work of previously ignoredindividuals, and this alone makes theirstudies valuable source books for studentsof Acadian culture. As an accessible,scholarly study by an insider, however,Maillet's project is the more useful andsuccessful overview. Perhaps it will someday be expanded into an institutionalliterary history. In the meantime, bothbooks fill a gap.

MICHELE LACOMBE

FAMILY STORIESGERTRUDE STORY, Black Swan. Thistledown,

$10.95.RONA MURRAY, The Indigo Dress. Sono Nis,

$9-95-THESE TWO COLLECTIONS of short stor-ies by western Canadian women revealthat the locale need not be only local.As William Carlos Williams put it: "Thelocal is the only universal, upon that allart builds." Certainly Gertrude Storyand, to a lesser extent, Rona Murraybrew and distil local materials to createa heady universal substance. Their artgrows from the ground of their commu-nities to elude the merely provincial andsectarian. As well, these women dancedeftly around the political conundrum,for though their perspectives and voicesare female and though they refuse to shyaway from women's social and psycho-logical repression, they do not use theirbooks for feminist grandstanding or, lesspejoratively, for dissecting female vic-timization. The feminist touches are im-plicit and subtle.

Gertrude Story's Black Swan is un-equivocally a fine, impressive book, al-though I have reservations about its lasttwo sections. Akin in structure to AliceMunro's Lives of Girls and Women, thebook can be read as a novel or a group

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of contextually related stories. It recordsthe life, times, and death of a centralprotagonist, Gerda Schroeder Beckmann,as she at fifty, crazed by a life of stymiedcreativity and repressed emotion — bothcan be chalked up to her Papa's ruthlesstyranny — breaks forth in a mad kind ofsong. Gerda writes to heal her woundedspirit, to tell her family stories, to lovewith words those she has not loved in theflesh. Like the proverbial black swan, shetells some disturbing tales. In the superb"Das Engelein Kommt," Gerda speaks ofElsa, who against the normal rules offairytale devolves from an "Engelein" toan ugly duckling. Papa's behind it all;just as he is the reason for the ten-year-old Elsa's suicide. A need for paternalattention drives Elsa to the stall of herfather's verboten white stallion, but allhe does is scrape his daughter's bodyfrom the hooves of the stallion and keepriding — his horse and his family.

Elsa's tale is the most dramatic; still,there are others. Story's intuitive graspof body metaphor houses the family in-side Gerda. Elsa is a voice haunting hersister, and demanding the liberationwhich depends on Gerda's speaking, well,really writing. Poor Mama — who "knewhow to work around trouble" — is anache in Gerda's throat. Murray, the sonwho "was always too good" and "lovedtoo much," another victim of Papa'scallous egocentricity, insists his tale betold. Gerda has survived because she hasalways looked the "sonofabitch, straightin the eye" and later willed his heart toburst — and it did. But the price of sur-vival is a steep one, imposing on Gerda alife of silence and loneliness, a mania fororder — she begins breakfast between6:00 and 6:05 A.M., because that was"the time." Finally, at fifty she mustlearn to love — and, though Gerda fightsthem all the way, the stories she writes(the book itself) are the love which re-deems her family and herself.

Story's elaborate use of metaphor andsymbol implies that Gerda's circum-stances are not significantly differentfrom those of all creators. True, Papa'sPrussian temperament drives his daugh-ter's potential inward until it explodesas "voices" from the communal past anda set of "fantastic" images, a winged,silver horse transmuted to an elegantunicorn. True, Gerda's isolation is com-plete and her craziness no joke, but howdifferent is this from any writer whofinally has to face blank pages and atypewriter, and to hear the "voices"?Creativity is painful, Story intimates, butshe also believes process and product givea measure of redemption.

All this ignores Story's fine craftsman-ship. Her elaborate imagery and her playwith "swan" and "singing" reverberatethrough Black Swan, delineating herconcept of the artist and his inability toescape the life to which many are calledbut few chosen. The tightness and econ-omy of her writing are impressive; it isfilled with understatement and nuance;her use of rural German-Saskatchewanidiom is flawless. Point of view is won-derfully controlled. For example, allWorld War II, the time "that the Hitlerwar got into full swing," means to Gerdais the end of "German" Church — thankGod. The last two sections where Gerda,having run out of stories and slit herwrists, meets her doppelgänger and en-ters a kind of female heaven, trouble me.Maybe we are not to take this literally?But D. M. Thomas got away with some-thing similar in The White Hotel, sowhy not Gertrude Story? Perhaps thisreader is being too "writerly."

Gertrude Story combines the rigour ofinspired story-telling with polished, cleverwriting. Rona Murray's qualities are dif-ferent — her strengths are sensitivity toimages and a mythopoeic consciousness.Her writing is quicker, yet more leisurely,and the best stories in The Indigo Dress

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unfold slowly, gracefully, compelling thereader to read if only to savour thebeauty of phrasing and the freshness ofthe images. Not surprisingly, consideringher myth-making qualities and her homein Victoria, Murray's stories abound inimages of growth, flowers, and gardens.In "Marina Island," a young girl ac-companies her great-grandmother on apilgrimage to Marina Island where theold lady remembers her passionate,Edenic affair of sixty years earlier — alove which has indelibly shaped her life.Sadly, Marina Island is a ruined Eden,and the knowing old woman cries in thespoiled Garden as she gazes at a beauti-ful emerald — a gift from her deadlover. The tragic reality escapes thegrandmother, but not the reader. Mur-ray's compassion and respect for thegrandmother invoke reader sympathyand understanding, some of which spillsover to the granddaughter who has con-fronted death and human eccentricity,and who will soon suffer, one suspects,the pain of lost love.

Sympathy and respect for human in-firmity, even downright weakness, typifyMurray's response to her people: espe-cially the elderly (Emily in "Nana" whocreates dreams of things past and dressesthem up) ; especially the young andfragile (the narrator of "The IndigoDress" who falls in love with the arche-typal older woman, his mother's friend) ;especially the dispossessed (the womanin "Blessed" whose married lover hasleft her to weep with her classical fa-vourite, Queen Dido). Unfortunately,charming as Murray's writing is, hercharacters are relentlessly middle-classwith the limited capacities and pettyproblems of the middle-class. Her mythsattempt redemption, but these charactersdo not deserve it.

DIANE MCGIFFORD

EXPECTED DEATHSEYMOUR MAYNE, Children of Abel. Mosaic,

$8.95.LUDWIG ZELLER, The Marble Head and Other

Poems. Mosaic, $9.95.JANICE KULYK KEEFER, White of the Lesser

Angels. Ragweed, $9.95.Two OF THESE BOOKS are firecrackerswhile one is a dud. The dud is Childrenof Abel by Seymour Mayne. Mayne is,as everyone knows, a disciple of IrvingLayton. But choosing a great master doesnot a great poet make. If Layton is oldnippy cheddar, then Mayne (in thisbook at least) is the blandest of pro-cessed products. Examples of this bland-ness are numerous. "Hiroshima: Draw-ing of a Survivor" turns the nightmareof the Bomb into a yawn: "How is itthese flies survived / the enormous flash-ing sunlight that burst / pod of skin,bone, and speech?" (that is the wholepoem). It is a shallow, commonplaceobservation masquerading as profundity.The same failure can be observed in"Caretakers":

Such men take good care of cemeteries,keep the plots neat at the edges —not running with sticky leaves, debris.Drain the troughs and keep them clearof oily water and rotting stems.The dead, too, need a modicum of order.

It just does not work. The power is miss-ing. Better luck next time.

We have all had one of these night-mares in which a monster is chasing us.We run away at full speed, watchingover our shoulders as the monster fadesinto the dark, only to find, when we turnto look ahead, that it is there just a fewyards down the path, waiting for us.Ludwig Zeller left Chile because of thepolitical turmoil, and came to Torontowhere he is a writer, artist, and publisher.His poems are not directly about Chile,or any other place in the world. Theyare surrealist, nightmare visions filled

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with images of birds that peck atwomen's nipples; bodies that are torn,wracked, and pulled apart; and torturerswho take erotic delight in their work. Byplunging into the unreality of nightmare,Zeller may, in fact, be drawing nearer tothe truth of Chile and other fascist-ruleddictatorships. Mere descriptions, facts,and statistics do not have the power ofthese poems to capture the mad logic ofa nightmare. Zeller reaches into thereader and draws out a twofold terror:the fear of being a victim and, moresubtly, the fear that one may have justthe faintest urge to be the torturer.

This book is actually a collaborationbetween Zeller and illustrator SusanaWald. The drawings are just as impor-tant to The Marble Head as the poems,and it is an injustice that Wald's nameis relegated to the small print on theback of the title page. The drawings arenot mere illustrations. The poems are notabout the drawings, nor vice versa. Im-agine a mirror in which one could lookand see not oneself, but an entirely dif-ferent image which, however, is still thatperson. This is the relationship betweenthe pictures and poems here. They makethe same statement in two media. Bothare disturbing. The drawings presentfaces distorted in pain and torn bodieswith torsos that are disturbingly erotic.They attack the eye immediately: thehorror and dismemberment are there atonce. The poems move more slowly to-ward the same end. By going throughthe horror at a reduced pace the readeris forced to think about the meaning, theimplications of the nightmare. Canadadoes not have a strong tradition of sur-realism in its poetry and only a minortradition of political poetry. PerhapsZeller will change that.

Zeller is an exotic; Janice KulykKeefer is back to basics. I do not meanthis in any pejorative sense. Her poetryis not an attempt to deal with modern

problems through a simple-minded re-turn to old values, but it does focus onthe basics of human existence: family,love, death, art. Her love for and use offigurative language is basic too. I t skipsback over the Bowering/Nichol genera-tion to the Layton/Page/Souster group.Thankfully her images are not as con-voluted as theirs can be, and they are anice change from the wordplay and lineending trickery of the last decade or so.Her poetry also shows a firmer commit-ment to life, as opposed to language, asthe motivator of poetry. Here is a bitfrom "Lookout : Evening" :

. . . Graveis ephemeral tonight, though mountainsbland and compassing as an expected deathhunch around us. Even the moon,climbing night's stairs to pull tide-blanketsup the shore, is our good mother,sings white lullabies.

She knows how to pick out the signifi-cant moment and how to make it sig-nificant without heavy-handedness :

. . . we move to kissand see the apple over us, frozenbetween rot and wither,perfect fossil of that fruitwhich put a swordpoint upon innocence.

Such excellent phrasing and imagery andmaturity in a first book of poems is causefor joy and hope. Janice Kulyk Keeferhas the potential to become one of ourmajor voices.

DON PRECOSKY

DIARIESPETER GAY. The Bourgeois Experience. Vic-

toria to Freud. Vol. I. The Education ofthe Senses. Oxford Univ. Press, $13.95.

Hopes and Dreams: The Diary of HenrietteDessaulies, 1874-1881. Trans. LiedewyHawke. Hounslow Press, $15.95.

FOR ITS LENGTH and breadth, scholarlyresearch and readability, the first volumeof Peter Gay's all-encompassing study of

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nineteenth-century life must be the bestvalue on the market. It provides a wealthof information, often of the most surpris-ing variety, on the relationships betweenthe sexes and of people and institutionsto love and sex, during a period gener-ally labelled by stereotypes which areconvincingly challenged here. Much ofthe material is based on private diaries,published and unpublished, and the bookincludes an intelligent discussion of thefunction of diary-writing in nineteenth-century society, particularly for women,as well as an analysis of the ambivalentideology which these journals reveal.Social and technical change is relatedthroughout to individual psychology, ina manner which makes one eager to readthe second volume. The illustrations andextensive bibliographical appendix aretwo further assets of this remarkablework.

One chapter deals in particular withthe private diary of Mabel Loomis Todd,the first editor of Emily Dickinson'spoems and mistress of Dickinson's re-spectably married brother, Austin. Shebegan her diary in Washington, D.C., in1871, and the first two books cover theperiod up to 1879, when she married atthe age of 22. She continued it after this,largely to record the intensity of herphysical relationship with her husband,her reaction to pregnancy and child-birth, and her later involvements withother men.

This diary is striking for its resem-blances to and differences from Hen-riette Dessaulles's journal, written inSaint-Hyacinthe, Québec, from 1874-1881. First published in French in 1971under the title Fadette, it has been trans-lated by Liedewy Hawke as Hopes andDreams. The translation follows the 1971edition exactly and includes the originalintroduction. It is regrettable that newinformation is not incorporated, whichwill soon be available in the new critical

edition being prepared by Jean-LouisMajor (Corpus des Editions Critiques,University of Ottawa). Nevertheless, theavailability of the diary in English is cer-tainly welcome. It is one of the mostinteresting examples of a nineteenth-century young girl's journal published inany language.

Henriette Dessaulles's record has im-portant documentary value for its depic-tion of life in the upper-class circles of asmall town. Saint-Hyacinthe was at thattime a bastion of free thought, under theinfluence of Casimir Dessaulles, Hen-riette's father (the mayor), and hisbrother, Louis-Antoine, a founder of theInstitut Canadien. Henriette herself wascaught between her father's skeptical hu-manism and her stepmother's involve-ment with the rival, burgeoning Catholicrevival. Her reactions to education at aconvent school, illness, deaths in the fam-ily, and day-to-day life are renderedpoignant by the intensity of her per-sonality and her talent for writing. Thediary covers the period (Henriette isaged 14 to 20) during which she rebelsagainst the rôle assigned to her becauseof her sex, faces the (real) possibility ofearly death, decides against a religiousvocation, and finally overcomes her in-itial reluctance to fall in love, in orderto leave home (and the hated step-mother) and become Madame MauriceSaint-Jacques.

Maurice, her neighbour and bestfriend's brother, becomes the focus of thejournal and eventually its narratee andactual reader. The diary reads almostlike a novel, as suspense builds up re-garding the outcome : will she marry himin spite of all opposition? Like the fairy-stories to which Henriette alludes, thebook ends with a wedding. Her last re-marks, concerning her curiosity aboutcontraception, would have providedgood material for Peter Gay's study. Infact, Henriette soon became the mother

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of several children (with, presumably, notime to keep a diary) and was left awidow at the age of 34. Henriette Saint-Jacques then turned once more to writ-ing, becoming one of the first and mostprominent women journalists in Québec,responsible for a regular column in LeDevoir from 1910 until 1945, a year be-fore her death, which bore the title"Lettre de Fadette." It is a pity that theterm "fadette," used by George Sand tomean magical, mischievous, as well aswise (in La Petite Fadette), which suitsthe Henriette of the diary, should havebecome a different model of moralizingfemininity in "Fadette's" later writings.These are unfortunately closer to themodern French meaning of "fade" (col-ourless).

However, Henriette retained her in-itial fascination with writing (she wasalso a graphologist), and her diary re-mains one of the liveliest accounts of thechoices forced on girls, as they wereturned into women, illustrating Simonede Beauvoir's axiom that "on ne naît pasfemme, on le devient." Some aspects ofthe diary do suffer from translation, par-ticularly the occasional essentially qué-bécois idioms. For example, "Je ne veuxpas pentoute" becomes simply "I don'twant to be." But on the whole, the trans-lator has managed to convey the toneand savour of Henriette's style. The Eng-lish version also contains a useful familytree and some additional photographs.

VALERIE RAOUL

SCHERZOCAPRICCIOSOJOSEF SKVORECKY, Dvorak in Love. Lester &

Orpen Dennys, $22.95.

IN HIS "Author's Acknowledgements,"Josef Skvorecky points out that Dvorakin Love is his "first attempt at writing a

historical and biographical novel." Thestatement is accurate enough, althoughhe could have added that he has writtenhistorical novels before. Both The Cow-ards (1958) and Mirakl (1972) dealwith critical periods in Czechoslovak his-tory: the action of the first occurs dur-ing the final days of the Second WorldWar; the second, using historical figuresas characters, focuses alternately on thePrague Spring and the Stalinist 1950's.Another generic pointer for the readeroccurs in the subtitle which calls thenovel "a light-hearted dream." Themodifier creates the expectation of acomic novel while the noun alerts us tothe fact that in this book about Dvorakthe demands of fiction will predominateover those of history.

The "dream's" focus is the novel'scentral love story, a triangle involvingthe young composer, his eventual wifeAnna, and his first, if brief and unre-quited love, Anna's actress sister Jose-phine who eventually marries a count.This story is Skvorecky's point of depar-ture for a novel dealing with Dvorak'sentire life — only his childhood is omit-ted — and through that life with thesocial history of the better part of a cen-tury. Receiving particular emphasis arethe nearly three years Dvorak spent inNew York in the early 1890's (the novelcould have been titled "Dvorak in Amer-ica"). If the novel is a "light-hearteddream" in the sense that the novelistassumes the imaginative freedom to in-vent conversations and to imagine thethoughts of historical characters, it's alsoa dream carrying the residue of historygathered from Skvorecky's impressive re-search in archives, musical scores, mem-oirs, biographies, and social histories.The bibliography appended to the Czechedition runs to several pages. In manyinstances Skvorecky reproduces letters,comments, and anecdotes directly fromhis sources. A particularly important one

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is Steeplejack, the lively autobiographyof the now neglected turn-of-the-centurymusic and literary critic James J. Hune-ker.

The effect of this use of archival ma-terial, as of Skvorecky's use of historicalcharacters, is to ground the novel in his-tory even as its purely fictive aspects turnit toward "dream." Probably the mostimmediately obvious of these latter is theform. Avoiding the standard linear nar-rative of traditional biography, Skvoreckytells the story of Dvorak's life and timesin a chronologically non-sequential man-ner and from a dozen or so points ofview. A careless reading would producea charge of formlessness but that canbe countered easily by pointing to thenearly countless small and large connec-tions among characters and scenes estab-lished by the various image clusters.Thus, the love stories are all triangleswith the complications of the first onebeing repeated in episodes involvingDvorak's daughter Otylia and his ac-quaintance Adele Margulies; images offlight — butterflies, birds, souls, clouds— link key scenes one to another; evensomething as symbolically insignificant asDvorak's cigar can be seen in retrospectas joining him not only to two blackstudents but also to Sigmund Freud who,in a scene with no basis in fact, entersthe novel to comment on what he takesto be "some subconscious obsession" inDvorak's music which indicates to himthat the Czech composer isn't "quite thehappy man" all take him to be. (It isworth noting in passing that Skvorecky isalso a cigar smoker.)

Those of Skvorecky's readers whoknow his works only in translation maybe interested in learning that, with twoexceptions, the order of chapters in theEnglish edition is completely differentfrom what it is in the Czech. While it istempting to say that this makes for asubstantially new or different novel, the

only really substantive change, I wouldsuggest, occurs in the ending whereSkvorecky has replaced an elegiac chaptermellow in mood with a darker one deal-ing with failure and death. There is anoticeable darkening of the palette butit is not inconsistent with some of themore sombre themes raised earlier. Alsoworth mention is the fact that, as usual,Skvorecky and his superb translator PaulWilson have purged the original text ofany Czech allusions and references po-tentially unintelligible to the Englishreader.

What Dvorak in Love offers then is abiographical novel with a variety ofpoints of view on its subject. And al-though Skvorecky enters the novel onoccasion as a novelist-researcher, no au-thoritative view of Dvorak's life andcareer is offered. If Dvorak in Lovedoesn't quite meet the demands ofBarthian scriptibilité, it neverthelessleaves the reader as the only one withaccess to all the points of view — in theposition, in other words, of being able tojudge the novel's characters and events.

Yet if the reader's primary engage-ment, both emotional and intellectual, iswith the great Czech composer, I wantto end this review by suggesting thatstanding somewhere in Dvorak's shadowis Skvorecky, and that another way ofreading this "light-hearted dream" is asa species of complex wish-fulfilment.From this point of view the novel canbe seen both as a biography and a dis-placed autobiography in which Skvo-recky re-imagines his own life and ca-reer through Dvorak's. Limitations ofspace prevent me from developing thispoint but I will end with five out ofnearly a dozen details which explain, tome at any rate, why a major Czechnovelist chose to write a historical andbiographical novel about a composerwhom he had never previously men-tioned in his work. ( ι ) Although Dvorak

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achieved international success he was al-ways conscious of his position as a Czechcomposer within the much larger Ger-manic tradition and empire (if we sub-stitute "Russian" or "English" for "Ger-manic" we have a rough approximationof Skvorecky's situation before and after1969). (2) Dvorak, like Skvoreeky, cameto North America in middle age but, un-like the novelist, was able to travel freelybetween his homeland and the UnitedStates. (3) Skvorecky's life-long interestin jazz is roughly analogous to Dvorak'sfascination with negro spirituals and hisimplicit connection to jazz through WillMercer Cook. (4) The tendency of somemusic critics to dismiss Dvorak as littlemore than a fine melodist is echoed inthe occasional criticism directed at Skvo-recky that he is simply a good entertainerand storyteller. (5) Both had to becomeaccustomed to having their names notonly mispronounced but misspelled byreaders, critics, and even publishers(Dvorak is not the same as Dvorak withthe hachek, or inverted circumflex, overthe "r" and the acute accent over the"a," just as Mallarmé is different fromMallarmé).

In other words, Skvorecky's entertain-ing new novel may seem at first glanceto be "a light-hearted dream," but likemost dreams it has several layers ofmeaning and an autobiographical core.

SAM SOLEGKI

ROHMER'S GAFFERICHARD ROHMER, Rommel & Patton. Irwin,

$22.95.Rommel & Patton is a novel about twoof the most fascinating personalities ofthe Second World War, and what couldhave happened had they been able tomeet in Normandy in the summer of1944. According to Rohmer's imagina-tive reconstruction of events, postwar

history would have been considerablydifferent if the Desert Fox and OldBlood and Guts had negotiated an armi-stice on the western front.

Rohmer clearly belongs to the "whatif?" school of history, and he is not thefirst to have questioned the motives andtactics of the generals and politicianswho fought the Normandy campaign.Nor is he at all modest in asserting hiscredentials as a second-guesser. DuringAugust 1944 he flew a P-51 Mustang onreconnaissance missions above the battle-fields. Below he could see the steadilynarrowing "gap" near Falaise throughwhich the remnants of the German Sev-enth Army struggled to escape envelop-ment by British and Canadian forces tothe north, and American ones to thesouth. He was, of course, not alone inobserving and reporting on what he saw.In recalling his experiences in Pattern'sGap ( 1981 ), he charged that the gapshould have, and could have, been closedsooner, so as to prevent an estimated200,000 enemy soldiers escaping to fightanother day and, thereby, prolong thewar. The responsibility for this tactical— nay, strategic — error, concluded Roh-mer, was none other than Field MarshalMontgomery, then the Allied groundforce commander, who spitefully refusedto allow his rival Patton to wheel north-ward in time to effect the decisive ma-noeuvre.

Rohmer may be right, of course, butthere is no excuse for the mean-spirited,galling manner in which he argues hiscase. However, his memoir is little morethan a footnote in the vast, continuingliterature about the war in NorthwestEurope, a literature which is notoriouslyreplete with controversies about the ac-tions of major figures — all of whomhad their say, and all of whom are dead.But Rohmer is a brash, opinionated manwho isn't cowed by superior authorities,be they military leaders or professional

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historians. My point in referring to hisnon-fiction Patton's Gap in this contextis, therefore, to underline the author'shighly personal approach to history.

It is helpful to be aware, too, of hisflamboyant reputation as the author often earlier novels. These works — whichone reviewer classified as "poli-fi" thrill-ers — are inspired by various political oreconomic crises of contemporary history,and they each offer the reader both anadventure story and a dose of Rohmerianpolemics. An added feature are refer-ences to the author's own accomplish-ments — a sort of Norman Mailer ad-vertisements-for-myself touch.

In writing Rommel & Patton heobviously found a subject congenial tohis own interests and wartime experi-ence; further, he seems to have done hisresearch well, for the plot rests on aplausible chronology of fact, or, at least,deduction. The action covers two months,from mid-June to mid-August 1944, asthe growing success of Operation Over-lord threatens to topple Rommel's com-mand. Attention is thus focused on theharassed field marshal as he tries des-perately to shore up his defences andlaunch counterattacks. But the war itselfseems remote. We are never given anysense of what it is like for the humbleinfantryman on either side. For Rohmer,war is rather more like a battle betweencorporation executives than a bitterstruggle for daily existence.

Certainly, the characterization ofRommel is not without skill. The readeris shown how the real Rommel mightwell have seriously considered an armi-stice as the only way to preserve thehonour of the army and the integrity ofhis country. His disagreements with Hit-ler on the prosecution of the war afterthe D-Day landings are well known. Be-sides, there is evidence that he was privyto some of the planning of the SchwarzeKapelle plot to overthrow the Führer.

Rohmer is at his best in exploring thismixture of motivations, even if he is notquite able to achieve a coherent portraitof his central character. Only rarely, aswhen the tough, austere Swabian arguesfuriously with his eventual successor, thearistocratic Prussian Von Kluge, doesthe narrative come dramatically alive.By contrast, Rohmer's characterizationsof the Allied generals remain woodencaricatures. His Patton, surprisingly, isan inert, shadowy figure.

There is, finally, a grand irony implicitin this whole story, real and imagined.For, if the author is to be believed, hewas in part responsible for Rommel be-ing rendered hors de combat before hecould put his plan to the test! Briefly,the facts are these: on July 17, BritishSpitfires strafed Rommel's staff car on aroad east of Caen, inflicting severe headinjuries on its famous passenger. Amonth later, in the wake of the failedassassination attempt on Hitler, Rommelwas curtly dismissed as head of ArmyGroup B. By October, Germany's mostillustrious soldier was dead, a suicide.Now, according to Rohmer, it can be re-vealed that it was he himself who beganthe great man's downfall; while flying aroutine recce mission, he spotted the carand radioed for fighter planes to attackit. As proof, he cites a notation for July17 from his squadron's operations recordbook. Hence, Rohmer's gaffe. We aresupposed to assume that a juniorR.C.A.F. officer was responsible for thefailure of a possibly history-changingventure.

Vintage Rohmer. In the event, ofcourse, Stalin would never have agreedto an armistice in the West, since hewould have feared that a coalition of hisformer allies and a Nazi-purged Ger-many would turn against Russian im-perialism. So, in all probability, the planwas doomed from the start. No wonder,then, that the novel falls flat in its final

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scenes. Anticlimactically, the hapless VonKluge meets a strutting Patton — theAllies' designated negotiator — at a sec-ret rendezvous, somewhere in Normandy.They talk, the plan is nixed by the politi-cians, the war continues. End of story.

ERIC THOMPSON

LIVESAY ARCHIVEThe Papers of Dorothy Livesay. Univ. of

Manitoba, $6.30.THIRTY-NINE ARCHIVAL crates faced me,stuffed to overflowing with manila fold-ers, envelopes, and expanding files. Itwas 1979 and I was introducing myselfto the recently acquired Dorothy Live-say Collection at the University of Mani-toba. So much, I realized, for my tidyresearch schedule, which had allowedfor a modest two-week visit to Manitobato stroll through the Collection.

Some of the papers had been roughlysorted before their arrival at the uni-versity, but family correspondence min-gled with business; diary notes and has-tily jotted inspirations bobbed to thesurface at random intervals; teachingmaterials and photographs, newsclippingsand prose drafts, bank statements andconference programmes were scatteredthroughout the boxes. Archival headRichard Bennett reminisces in the Pref-ace about "literally scooping papers andfiles haphazardly out of trunks and filingcabinets in the vague hope that someone,sometime, would bring the necessary or-der to what amounted to paper chaos."Overawed by the sheer quantity, I tookheart in the existence of a lengthy pre-liminary inventory; prepared by an in-telligent, anonymous person who hadapparently lacked extensive familiaritywith Livesay's life or work, the listingcould not do much more than record(occasionally very impressionistically andimperfectly) crude details of this sublime

disorder. As the only guide available inthose early days, however, the inventorywas a constant comfort, then and overthe next few years.

From oxcarts to Audis: such is theleap from that first listing to the fine newRegister compiled by the staff of theUniversity of Manitoba Department ofArchives and Special Collections andpublished in 1986. As Dr. Bennett ex-plains, the groundwork was accom-plished by Kathryn Dean in 1982-84,and an SSHRCC grant in 1984 permit-ted Pamela Banting, Kristjana Gunnars,and Susan Letkemann to settle into themassive task of reorganizing the Collec-tion, incorporating the eighteen supple-mentary acquisitions (the Collection re-fuses to stop growing, as is usually thecase with the papers of a living author),and producing an effective finding aid.The 419-page result not only handsomelymeets the needs of current Livesay schol-ars, but will certainly stimulate consid-erable new interest in this major Cana-dian poet.

The Papers of Dorothy Livesay is, tothis non-archivist's eye, a model of con-venient organization. A preliminary sec-tion offers a foreword by Livesay's liter-ary executor, the preface, an introduc-tion (unsigned, perhaps a collaborativestaff effort), statements of provenance,regulations and restrictions, sundry othertechnical information, and a reasonablycomprehensive Livesay chronology. Foursections follow. Section One, approxi-mately sixty percent of the guide, di-vides Livesay's manuscripts and papersinto 108 boxes, detailed in seventeen sub-sections. One begins with a "Personaland Professional Profile Essay" in whichGunnars describes and discusses the Con-tainer List it precedes, in the contexts ofautobiography, biography, bibliography,and business papers connected with Live-say's writing or her personal life. Eachof seven subsections — Correspondence,

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Poems, Short Stories, AutobiographicalFiction, Plays, Reviews, and Essays —has its own essay prefatory to the Con-tainer List. Then there are five sub-categories not needing introduction : Re-search and Isabella Valancy CrawfordNotes, Talks and Addresses, Journalism,Memoirs, and miscellaneous OtherWorks.

The other forty percent of the guidedocuments, among other things, the vis-ual and aural acquisitions. Section Twois a roughly chronological (1870-1984)photograph collection, grouped as muchas possible by geographical location, fam-ily (Livesay, Randal, Macnair), friends,and Livesay photographed by herself.Tape recordings of lectures, interviews,music, and conversations comprise Sec-tion Three. And Section Four itemizesthose parts of her personal library(books, magazines, journals, etc.) nowlodged at the University of Manitoba.

In a commendable approach to com-pleteness, there are three very sensibleappendices. The first generously providesa list of libraries and other institutionscategorized according to their possessionof much, some, or no Livesay material;the second bespeaks the expanding na-ture of the Collection in being a listingof late (1980's) acquisitions; the thirdsuggests relevant U. of M. Canadian lit-erature holdings of the papers of otherprairie writers. The Papers of DorothyLivesay concludes with an index to thenames, places, titles, and other propernouns in the Register, computer-gen-erated by the look of it, which shone ina spot-check of its accuracy that I con-ducted.

The format is attractive. An earth-brown cover features three faces of Live-say : photos as winsome child, as etherealyoung poetess, and as elderly sybil caughtin a smiling remark. Six other interest-ing black-and-white portraits appear inpairs: her father and her mother, near

the beginning of the Register; babyDorothy with parents ( 1913 ) and Doro-thy with husband (1937), about one-third of the way through; Dorothy inAfrica (1962) and in Ottawa (1977),at the two-thirds point. The double-spaced photo-offset type is easy on theeyes; typographical and grammaticalerrors are comparatively few; and de-spite its bulk, the Register handles com-fortably, a matter of some consequencein a reference book.

What moves the Register out of thecategory of mechanical compilation (use-ful as that is) into a more interesting —and problematic — category is the edi-torial apparatus. I have no bone to pickwith David Arnason's brief introduc-tion: while it gives the effect of a pre-mature literary epitaph composed atleast five years ago, it is a competentsummary of Livesay's career, and hisdeclaration of her importance is entirelysuitable. Ditto Richard Bennett's prefaceand his essay on the poetry holdings. Theserious problem lies in the intention, de-clared in the introduction, to avoid judg-ing merit or imposing interpretations.Yet most of the Gunnars and Bantingessays do both.

The "Personal and Professional Pro-file" is particularly freewheeling and sub-jective, suggesting, for example, thatLivesay in her autobiographical state-ments has been "unable to decide whatkind of self-portrait to draw, what em-phasis to place on events in her life, andwhat opinions she should have of whathas transpired." Of Livesay's writingsabout her father we are told that "muchof what she reveals is contrary to whatshe would like her reader, and herself,to believe." Her travel-sketch journalsare declared to have "an odd lack ofconviction." And the researcher iswarned to expect an "absence of un-flinching honesty," a scarcity of "directstatement" in the Livesay papers, a

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caveat that many people who know Live-say well would find astonishing.

Of Livesay's letters to her mother:"Hostility usually lurks below the sur-face"; then, by comparison, of sisterSophie's letters to her parents: "She isemotionally more distant from them.That is to say, for her they are parents,not titans to be wrestled with." Onestory is declared "not very successful"while another is evaluated as "marvel-lous." Of one unpublished novel it issaid that certain "interesting devices. . .fail because the work as a whole is flat";another novel manuscript is singled outas "the most successful" in that it "avoidsmany of the flaws which weaken the restof Livesay's autobiographical fiction." Inthe essay on plays we are offered pe-culiar causality: "For the most part,Livesay writes with a moral or a pointof ethics to convey. As plays, therefore[sic], many of these works are flawed,lacking as they do dramatic build-upand aesthetic resolution." As a writer ofreviews, Livesay is pronounced "far lesscreative and consistent" and possessed of"far less vitality" than she is in othergenres. Such are only a few of the manydozens of instances in which the com-mentators violate their intention to avoidjudgment or interpretation.

This is not to say that the essays arebadly done or even necessarily wrong-headed in their assessments. The analysisof Livesay's relations with her parents,for example, seems to me extremelyastute. The prose is lively, the evalua-tions often courageous. As an extendedevaluative essay in a literary journal,they would make fascinating and pro-vocative reading. Mine is a criticism oftheir appropriateness in this place, in theRegister of the Livesay Collection at theUniversity of Manitoba. The editors' en-thusiasm and intelligence, their willing-ness to point out untouched areas ofinvestigation, to raise productive ques-

tions, to demonstrate the importance ofthe Collection to students of any part oftwentieth-century feminist writings orCanadian literature are theoretically allworthwhile and welcome features of theRegister. The parts of the essays whichsimply describe and those other partswhich neutrally suggest arenas of inquiryfor prospective researchers are excellentsupplements to a straight inventory. Butin a reference tool, researchers should betold only what material is lodged in theCollection, not how to view or whether/in what way to value that material. Soone must approach the Register with ameasure of the same alertness and am-bivalence needed, for example, in con-sulting Margaret Atwood's Survival (alsocatalogued in the Reference section oflibraries) : useful it certainly it; objectiveit is not.

LEE BRISCOE THOMPSON

FLESHLESS3ONALD MARTIN, One Out of Four. Coach

House, $12.50.

DONALD MARTIN'S FIRST novel tells anintense, though narratively fleshless, storyabout human flesh. The four young menof the title, Daniel, Chuck, Benjamin,and Brad, arrive in Detroit from differ-ent directions (Daniel is from Montreal)and quickly stumble together within ashadowy domain of gay prostitution. Thesection of this domain in which theymeet and become friends is ruled over byan unlovely Sicilian overlord, TonyPilanzo. Gay prostitution is the basis ofhis wealth and power but he also runsdrugs across the border. He is also mur-derous. The final point provides Martinwith the plot-springs of his narrative.One Out of Four concerns friendship,male bonding in a gay halfworld, even(though not significantly) the cartogra-phy of desire, but its narrative impactdepends upon a number of intelligently

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handled movements in the plot: inno-cent hope, frustration, murder, fear, andrevenge.

The novel begins with Daniel flyingback to Detroit from Montreal to attendBenjamin's funeral. At the graveside, heremembers his three friends:

He could feel an oversized lump in histhroat as he looked down.

Benny was right beside Chuck, justwhere he had always wanted to be. Chuckand he had made the oddest of the oddcouples, Daniel remembered.

And there was Bart, back in Cleveland.Daniel was the only one left now. One outof four.

The inference is clear that the threefriends are not only dead but that theyhave been killed. Shortly after thisthought, squinting his eyes through therain, Daniel sees a man in a dark suit."His heart stopped for a second. Thatman. It was a man he hadn't seen in along time." The subsequent narrativeretrospectively brings into focus what hastaken place prior to Benjamin's funeral:The four friends are introduced, broughttogether, their careers as prostitutes fol-lowed, the deaths of three explained, themysterious man in the dark suit givenhis identity. A charge of suspense drivesthe novel forward. The reader looks forthe answers, receives them slowly, andreaches the conclusion, with uncertain-ties and a sense of ambiguity, knowingthat a plot has been spun out, a storytold.

Martin's command of swift, paracine-matic narration supports his skills inplotting. The characters in One Out ofFour are depthless, no fundamentalissues are raised, psychological motiva-tion is minimal, and language jerksahead, with the splattering intensity oforgasm, in fragments and single-lineparagraphing. Here is the whoremaster,Pilanzo, explaining to his stable the rulesof their world :

When I say spread 'em, you just betterspread 'em. The rules of this game aretough, kiddies. It's the big league here.Too much is at stake to allow your sen-sitive egos to take hold of the reins. Youare whores. Meat. All nice packaged, ofcourse, but meat none the less. And don'tyou ever forget that. You fuck an' yousuck on command. You shove it in or youget it shoved in. No more fantasies here.This is reality.

The novel's depthless language suits theworld it evokes. The young men are pre-sented as typical. Motivations, if they canbe said to exist at all, are generic (threeof the young men have negative moth-ers ; two have had early sexual experiencewith a male member of the family; onlyChuck, the butch with the "dick ofdeath," seems to emerge from an easy-going bi-sexuality), ambitions are equiv-alently abstract. Nothing is examinedmuch. Introspection, reflection, medita-tion are alien. Everything moves like thedownsuck of a drain: bubbles, flow,fleeting sounds and smells, increasinglynarrow swirls, flushed, dead.

Martin's control of plot and pacing isundermined by his lapses in the use ofcommonplace detail. If details (thegiant's fingers, Updike observes) arewhat give the solidity of specification tonarrative, then One Out of Four tendsto quiver, like ghostly ectoplasm, fromtime to time. This insouciance concern-ing the commonplace is particularly jar-ring in a novel that must make its claimspartly as a comment upon, even perhapsan insight into, an actual, more-or-lesscontemporary non-fictional world. In theopening funeral scene, Daniel observes,through the rain, an ant crawling withinBenjamin's grave. This seems to ingoreboth human optics and the behaviour ofants. Later in the narrative, what mustbe supposed to be a nun's wimple isdescribed as a veil. Other curiositiesstand out even more strikingly. Thetransvestite, Benjamin, yearns for a sex-

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change operation and his dyke lesbianlover (survivor of the Holocaust, dramaprofessor, high priestess of Method — ina word, no necessary dumb bunny) giveshim, in anticipation, a year's supply ofsanitary napkins. It is difficult to knowhow one should interpret this bizarre ges-ture. If it is the lesbian lover who failsto understand the physiology of sex-change, then it is a massively symbolic(belonging to the novel's entrenchedmisogyny throughout) , though anti-realistic, move. If it is a failure in thenarrative voice (or the author's behindit), then one can only shake one's headin bemusement. However, it is clearly thenarrative voice that assumes that sani-tary napkins are normally flushed downtoilets. Disease plays a marginal role inthe narrative (AIDS does not appear),with cases of clap and one of hepatitisoccurring late in the novel, more likenarrative afterthoughts than solid speci-fication. Disease is never conceived ofas a danger or a threat. No one practisessafe sex. There are other misperceiveddetails that tend to compromise the nov-el's claims to realistic accuracy.

One Out of Four marks a strong be-ginning for a young novelist. It movesintelligently on the levels of plot andstyle. Its depiction of grotesque scenes,at their best genuinely kaleidoscopic(even, occasionally, justifying the com-parisons that Scott Symons makes in his"Foreword" with Genet and Burroughs),can be striking. Its power lies in its swiftfleshlessness.

ROBERT R. WILSON

SHORT SUBJECTSDAVE MARGOSHES, Smalt Regrets. Thistle-

down, $10.95.KENT THOMPSON, Leaping Up Sliding Away.

Goose Lane, $8.95.

HERE ARE TWO collections of short fictionby American writers living in Canada —

or should that be by Canadian writersborn and raised in the United States?Whichever way we put it, the nationalorigin of these authors is probably whatFrank Davey would describe as irrele-vant, if not downright subversive infor-mation. But at the risk of not survivingthe paraphrase, I cannot resist making afew observations about what has becomea remarkable phenomenon in recent dec-ades. Since about i960, the ranks of lit-erary authorship in English Canada havebeen swollen with emigrants from theUnited States, as a part of the influx ofacademics and other middle-class edu-cated Americans during the expansion ofCanadian universities, and during theVietnam War. Northrop Frye says thatwe read Canadian literature not neces-sarily because it is on a par with thegreatest achievements of western culture,but because it tells us something aboutourselves that nothing else can. What dothese two collections of stories tell usabout communal or individual identities?

Most of this fiction seems to have beenwritten at least partly to present peopleinteracting in a distinctive social and cul-tural context. Some of Margoshes' stor-ies are, in fact, set in the United States,and feature only American characters.Thompson, on the other hand, is relent-lessly Canadian in his allusions. His char-acters say "Eh?," shop at Eaton's andCanadian Tire, drive to Fredericton orRegina, and sometimes, to add a littlefillip of biculturalism, turn out to beFrench Canadian. These touches strikeme as the 1980's version of Mounties,lumberjacks, and snow, a shorthand sys-tem to invoke superficial impressions ofplace, rather than three-dimensional im-ages of a culture. In fact, the social con-text of both Thompson's and Margoshes'fiction is that urban anonymity that Fryehas dubbed the "international modern":a cultural complex that emanates fromthe United States and is gradually en-

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gulfing the whole world in a blandness ofthought, custom, and emotional experi-ence. As chroniclers of this phenomenon,Thompson and Margoshes are effectiveenough, I suppose. But their subject mat-ter, as well as their notions of form andstyle, lead to a kind of fiction which issimply not very interesting.

In form, Thompson's Leaping Up isnot the conventional short story collec-tion. It is actually a series of very briefprose sketches, with an average length of500 words: little dramatic, cryptic epi-sodes beginning in médias res, involvingsome suggestive dialogue or descriptionwhich breaks off abruptly and inconse-quentially. Thompson explains in a pref-ace that some of these vignettes werewritten on postcards to friends, and thathe hoped not only to arouse the ad-dressee's curiosity, but to "make the post-man walk from my friend's address inwonder." Maybe the posties are differentin New Brunswick, but I've heard ourmailman say that one of the first thingsto be learned in his job is to read nothingbut the address: the day is long enoughwithout prolonging it by peeking into thedull and semi-legible lives of strangers.

So who is this book addressed to, be-sides the mailman who won't read it,and the friends of the author, who willprobably save the postcards to sell to theUniversity of Calgary archives? With itsimplied invitation to fill in the blanks, itmay appeal to academics interested inreaders' response theories of art. Or per-haps it is addressed to people who enjoystudying interviews, writers' notebooks,and photographic reproductions of firstdrafts. These are the finger exercises ofa writer at work, little showpieces ofstyle and characterization intended togive hints of what the writer could reallydo if he rolled up his sleeves and went towork at it. As such, they invite compari-son with the work of another Americanauthor who lived in Canada for awhile,

and published some of the finger exer-cises he wrote while working for a Cana-dian newspaper. Ernest Hemingway's InOur Time, in its first published version,was a collection of brief prose sketches,many of which were adapted from newsstories originally written for the TorontoStar. They also were experiments instyle, mood, and impression related tothe imagist movement. Hemingway'spurpose, however, was not to make hisreader "wonder," but to force an almosthypnotic focus on a central experienceand to recreate the emotional ambienceof this experience, by means of a near-perfect decorum of language. With anewsman's sense of what is interesting,he recognized that it was not the de-tached commonplaces of ordinary ex-perience that have the power to fasci-nate, but certain moments of high drama,pathos, or tragedy. Such moments, ofcourse, can be both internal and exter-nal. Thompson attempts to work ex-clusively with inward intensity, by in-voking moments of domestic conflict andindividual anxiety, sometimes elaboratedwith mild suggestions of irony or absur-dity. The following is the entire text ofone of his stones, "Working Both Sides" :

If I got off the train at this place, righthere, right now, at this place I refuse toname, how would I live — considering myclothes, my hat, my accent? I'd have toturn to crime. Could I do that? Last nightI killed two men without the least difficultyor remorse, but that was in a dream, and itremains to be seen if I can smash a handwith a baseball bat when it protects the tilland I'm hungry.

The ultimate effect, however, is neitherdramatic nor ironic; there is, perhaps, asense of absurdity in the inconsequentialmutterings of Thompson's characters, butthe real absurdity is unintentional. Thisis unconscious parody, of a kind that hasbeen done better, consciously, by an-other American writer. As I read thesepieces, I was frequently reminded of

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Woody Allen's hilarious versions of Rus-sian existentialism in the "Selectionsfrom the Allen Notebooks" :

Last night, I burned all my plays andpoetry. Ironically, as I was burning mymasterpiece, Dark Penguin, the roomcaught fire, and I am now the object of alawsuit by some men named Pinchunk andSchlosser. Kierkegaard was right.

Margoshes' stories are more conven-tional in form and length. As in a lot ofmodern fiction, his plots are sometimescryptic, bizarre, or ludicrous, and fre-quently hinge on some kind of sexualencounter. There are intimations ofFreudian symbolism in "Trespassers WillBe Violated," where a woman drownsafter reluctantly accepting a man's sex-ual advances, and again in the destruc-tive impulses of a middle-aged Americanin "A Change of Life." In the age ofStephen King, there is also an obligatoryGothic piece, "The Caller," which ex-ploits the hoary convention of the mys-terious phone call.

All of these stories were evidently writ-ten for various literary magazines, andmost of them deserve that kind of pub-lication. It is difficult to conclude, how-ever, in this day of proliferating littlepresses and volumes of poetry and fic-tion, that we really need this whole col-lection under one set of covers. Margoshesis, on the whole, a competent writer,although his figurative language some-times made me wince: "depression tookhold of Skinner . . . like deep snowaround a spinning tire"; "she liked towatch the countryside roll by, unfoldinglike one of those Chinese diaramas shehad seen at the Royal Ontario." Forreaders with standards based, for in-stance, on Emily Dickinson's definitionof poetry, there is nothing very scalp-tingling in any of these stories. In fact,the opening specimen indicates the mainweaknesses of the whole collection. "TheSame Thing" is an attempted tour de

force about sexual cruelty, male chauvin-ism, female vanity, human indifference,and meaninglessness. But the title neatlyand ironically sums up what Margosheshas to say about these and most othersubjects he turns his attention to.

There is, perhaps, more justificationfor Margoshes' book than for Thomp-son's. But neither volume is likely tomake you wonder. Neither volume willtell you anything new about the Cana-dian experience, or the internationalmodern experience, or about anythingelse.

JAMES DOYLE

FLUENT SHADOWSMARGARET ATWOOD, Selected Poems II: Poems

Selected and New igy6-ig86. Oxford,$12.95.

SUNITI NAMJOSHI & GILLIAN HANSCOMBE,Flesh and Paper. Ragweed, $9.95.

ANNE szUMiGALSKi, Dogstones: Selected andNew Poems. Fifth House, n.p.

READING THESE THREE recent works bywomen poets should do more than con-vince the reader that an exuberant, for-mally inventive women's poetry is thriv-ing in Canada. This is hardly news tomost of us. But what works like thesemay begin to do is to explain the reasonsfor this exuberance. Most of these rea-sons have to do with the new positiveawareness in women poets of an audi-ence, a "non-resisting reader," to alterJudith Fetterley's phrase. In spite of theheterogeneity of poets like Szumigalski,Namjoshi, Hanscombe, and Atwood,these works all seem to speak to eachother, to share a language. One keepsconfronting in these poets' personal land-scapes remarkably similar figures and no-tions: grandmothers, daughters, women'sstories, language both as liberator andoppressor, ageing or dying female poets.

If the purpose of a selected volume isto highlight change and development,

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then Anne Szumigalski's Dogstones cer-tainly does that. Szumigalski, along withLorna Crozier, has been an importantvoice in Saskatchewan women's poetry.This selection includes poems from herfirst important collection, Woman Read-ing in Bath (1974) as well as from AGame of Angels (1980), Doctrine of Sig-natures (1983), and Instar (1985).(There are also a dozen new poems.)But the development highlighted here isthat of a consciously female artist. Herearly poem "A Celebration" concernsthe grandmother whose knuckles, crip-pled by chalk deposits, are mysteriouslytransformed after her death into life-bringing twigs, sprouting upwards fromher grave. In later poems, though, Szu-migalski turns from celebration to analy-sis and theory, much as feminist literarycritics have turned from an emphasis onwriters providing "positive images" ofwomen to an analysis of the theory andpolitics of language. "The Disc," a prosepoem from Doctrine of Signatures, re-veals not explicitly this shift to meta-physical and theoretical questionings. Awoman tries to resist what she has beentold many times — that she is "not whatshe seems to be" (an echo of DorothyLivesay's "The Woman I Am") :

I'm not what I seem to be she confesses atlast then a

warm subservience floods through her andshe

becomes the fluent shadow of any names wemay

choose to throw at her.

Language truly becomes, for many ofthese poets, a particularly nasty ballisticmissile launched at us by the patriarchy.As Suniti Namjoshi and Gillian Han-scombe write in the Introduction toFlesh and Paper, "the worlds we inherithave been drawn and painted by the waywords are used in the minds and mouthsof heterosexual men." Here, then, is atheoretical crux which feminist poets

have always faced and will probably al-ways have to face: how does a womanwrite empowering, liberating verse if thevery words she must use are those of theoppressor? Poets and theorists have sug-gested various strategies for overcomingthis dilemma: deconstruct the language,break it up, "steal" it (to use CynthiaOszick's term), subvert it. But for Nam-joshi and Hanscombe, the linguistic stale-mate is broken not as much by the au-thor as by the reader: "It is lesbians whowrite and hear and overhear and under-stand. We have the awareness of a les-bian context and a lesbian audience."

In addition, there are strategies whichNamjoshi and Hanscombe adopt thatchallenge our very notions of authorship.By writing together — for each other, toeach other — they break the conven-tional idea of an author's possession ofhis or her work; he or she usually signspoems, just as a painter often signs hisor her name on a finished canvas. Evenin the most celebrated poetic collabora-tions (Wordsworth's and Coleridge'sLyrical Ballads is the prototype), theprinciple of individual authorship re-mains sacrosanct. But here, language be-comes a co-operative venture, naming anact of liberation :

you oh youhavediscovered meunsealed my longingappointed me mightynamed me.

Language and power do not part com-pany in a wildly Utopian dream-world;power still inheres in the word, butshared words manifest shared power.The lover is appointed, but mighty. Else-where in Flesh and Paper, by contrast,one senses the authors grasping at tran-scendence, at a surmounting of divisionsand conflicts. Parts Three and Four con-sist of poetic debates — often witty, butall too often suggesting that such de-

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bates, with a certain amount of spiritednegotiation, can be resolved, tidied up:"If you agree not to play pedant, I'llagree not to play poet. So we can beginin the middle," begins the last poem inPart Three.

In the poetic world of Margaret At-wood, however, not always can oneagree; one cannot even be sure of"beginning," in the middle or elsewhere,for that matter. Conflicts are often nottranscended, wounds are healed; as oneof Margaret Laurence's women declared,"things" are not there to be "gottenthrough." Rather, one is condemned tosight: "Witness," writes Atwood, "iswhat you must bear." Language isproblematic ; it is both boon and burden :"Your language hangs around yourneck, / a noose, a heavy necklace." Si-lence looms in every word, in every "truestory," and history remains, for Atwood,the nightmare from which we are trying— and failing — to awake : "History can-not be erased, although we can sootheourselves by speculating about it." Thosewho wish to be soothed should look else-where.

The concern with female lineage ispresent in Atwood as in Szumigalski, butthis Selected Poems tells a slightly dif-ferent story about an evolving femalepoet. Whereas Szumigalski moved fromcelebration to a concern with the me-dium, both are present in Atwood —and they make a powerful combinationindeed: "You will flicker in thesewords," she writes in "Five Poems forGrandmothers"

and in the words of othersfor a while and then go outEven if I send them,You will never get these letters.Even if I see you again,I will never see you again.

These Selected Poems II — drawing onthe collections Two-Headed Poems(1978), True Stories (1981), Murder in

the Dark (1983), Interlunar (1984),and including twenty-one new poems —invite the reader to form his or her own"story" about Atwood the poet. My ownstory would feature a crucial turningpoint — the collection True Stories from1981. Political urgency and technicalfinesse unite in the poems gathered to-gether from this collection, poems suchas "Notes Towards a Poem That CanNever Be Written" and "Train RideVienna-Bonn." Rarely in contemporaryCanadian poetry have free verse, simpleyet emphatic statement, and repetitioncreated such moving effects. SelectedPoems II shows us a mature artist bear-ing witness to joy, atrocity, language,and silence; it shows us, in short, thepath which led to The Handmaid's Tale.

LORRAINE YORK

SPEARS & ARROWSE. BRIAN TITLEY, A Narrow Vision: Duncan

Campbell Scott and the Administration ofIndian Affairs. Univ. of British ColumbiaPress, $24.95.The minds of men grow numb, their vision

narrows,The clogs of Empire and the dust of ages,The lust of power that fogs the fairest

pages,Of the romance that eager life would write,These war on Beauty with their spears and

arrows.

THESE LINES FROM Scott's "Ode for theKeats Centenary" (1921) bear seeds forcivil disobedience and life in the woods;they seem startlingly uncivil for a civilservant in Ottawa at a time when Cana-dian politicians and administrators werestill trying for the finest accounting, so tospeak, in the book of the British Empire.The liberal arts, however, transmutedScott's administrative work into forms ofelegiac romance as well as disillusion-ment in response to the narrow vision ofboth the collective mind of the commu-

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nity and the mind of an individual likeScott himself who, in poems of solitudeand self-reliance, had used his ownspears and arrows in vain, trying topierce "the Secret, golden and inap-pellable" from heights of land, to con-quer those "unrecorded deeps" where thePiper of Aril lies "Empearled within thepurple heart / Of the great sea for ayeand aye," and to fend off the spell ofPowassan's drum in the woods.

While the metaphysical and self-reflec-tive noble savagery of Scott's poet-selfmay have been awakened by his encoun-ters with Indians, his seemingly intransi-gent civil servant persona calmed thestorm of his inner world by dealing withIndians from the surface security of theAnglo-Canadian's turn-of-the-century be-lief in the manifest destiny of the TrueNorth as the culmination of Western civ-ilization. It was understandably difficultfor the Indians to defend themselvesagainst the white man's verbal weaponswhich tricked them with unfamiliar pre-understandings of social order, individualrights, and authority. The spears and ar-rows the administrators of Indian Affairsput into their monologues or treaties withIndians have by no means all beenpulled. Even today, despite civil rightslegislation and multiculturalism, nativerights tend to give rise to governmentspeeches rather than action.

A Narrow Vision sketches the coloni-zation of Indians from the days beforethe American Revolution to Confedera-tion and then focuses on the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centurieswhen Scott was "the leading official ofthe department [of Indian Affairs] andthe principal arbiter of policy." Relyingon the dramatic power of historical in-formation, Titley combines documentarysources with personal commentary sothat history becomes transformed intonarrative. Scott, his main character,works himself up the bureaucratic ladder

to Deputy Superintendent General of In-dian Affairs and dominates over nativeleaders as well as rivals within the civilservice, all the while maintaining thestatus quo in white-Indian relations. Hiseventual "retirement was a long andpleasant affair" — a new marriage, ex-tensive travel abroad, creative writing,and indulgence in the arts.

Titley's spears and arrows, of course,are pointing toward Scott's public careeras a long and Mwpleasant affair for theIndians and for contemporary Canadianswith a historical conscience. By the endof the book, Titley's Scott has become theirksome stereotype of an honourable Ca-nadian accountant. His public life, ineffect, serves as an exemplary mock-storyof Canada's pride in its growing grossnational product — commerce. Playingwith poetic justice, Titley ends his ownaccount with brief data entries of Scott'sdeath, his wife's departure for Ceylonand Eastern transcendentalism, and thedemolition of Scott's long-time Ottawaresidence which had "to make way forcommercial development."

Titley's contribution to the demolitionof white Canadians' hedges, fences, anddefences in their commerce with nativepeoples reveals a heart of greyness in thecountry's public history for which Scott,as the representative civil servant, be-comes a convenient scapegoat. Since aCanadian scapegoat may be hard to seein the greyness of Indian Affairs (noblatant finalist solutions as for the con-quistadors in Mexico, no significant prob-lems with Indian militancy as in parts ofthe United States), Titley begins hisstory with a loud overture — a biograph-ical digest of Scott from the NationalLampoon of June 1983. The satiric open-ing helps Titley to direct the reader's owninterpretive commerce with the book'sdocumentation of civil servants' and poli-ticians' conquests of the Indians' lands,the near-conquest of their culture, and

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the attempted liberation of C anada fromits Indian burden.

As a well focused history of IndianAffairs, Titley's study is informative andtimely, given the federal and provincialgovernments' persistent lack of will toaccommodate native demands for rightsand self government. As a narrative ofScott's central role in Indian Affairs,however, the book succeeds only in partsince Titley does not, as he puts it, "at tempt here to perform the biographer'sdelicate balancing act between psychol ogy and literature or to fathom the innersoul of D . C. Scott." A practical decision,no doubt, because Scott's private selfwould likely get in the way of his publicself as both a civil servant and a literaryfigure in the standard anthologies of Ca nadian literature. There is no questiontoday that, as a poet, Scott deserves bet ter than the satire in the National Lam poon implies; and similarly, as a civilservant, he cannot be lampooned withoutsignificant reservations. H e was, Titleyconcedes, "by no means the most inflex ible or authoritarian official of his day,"and he "was certainly a capable and effi cient administrator." Even if one seeks tocriticize him for merely following con vention, one should not forget that hisorders came from the political and cul tural authority of the British Empire,that Scott was born before Confedera tion, that he was no anthropologist, andthat his philosophy of life favouredEmersonian concepts of fate and self reliance.

U nfortunately, it seems, the Indians hedealt with were neither sufficiently self reliant nor sufficiently militant. Despitethe significance Titley assigns to theirleaders, such as F . O. Loft and AndrewPauli, they lacked the romantic statureand influence of earlier pan Amerindianleaders like Tecumseh and added littlepragmatic power to "the t r ium ph an t . . ./ Throbbing of Powassan's D rum "; in

short, they did not spellbind the civilservant in Scott as much as Powassandid the poet in him. In this respect, it isa pity that Titley sees little except racialand elitist overtones in Scott's poems.Such disregard for their often intenselypersonal and archetypal psychology doesnot, however, diminish Titley's exegeticalaccounting of the heart of greyness inthe administration of Indian Affairs. Hisprovocative findings corroborate JohnFlood's The Land They Occupied(1976), a sensitive collection of poemslamenting the wrecking of native culturein northern Ontario through Scott's mis guided treaty negotiations.

While civil servants tend to make con venient scapegoats, Scott's own poetrysends at least signals of a not so narrowheart and mind behind his civil servantpersona. Unlike Titley, an interpretivebiographer will have to read these signalsfor a broader vision of Scott's entangle ment in "the clogs of Empire."

. P . STICH

FEMINISME QUÉBÉCOISDIANE LAMOUREUX, Fragments et Collages.

Editions du Remue-Ménage, n.p.LISE PAYETTE, La Bonne Aventure. Editions

Québec/Amérique, n.p.L'ESSAI DE DIANE Lamoureux se veut uneréflexion sur le féminisme québécois desannées 70 et un point de départ pourrelancer un débat sur son avenir. Le motréflexion est très juste, car tout au longdu livre, elle oscille entre la position detémoin-participante, d'historienne et dethéoricienne. Il me semble toutefois quel'aspect théorique domine et, même sil'auteure a une attitude négative face au"processus d'académisation du fémi-nisme," elle y participe un peu dans sonanalyse.

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C'est par une préface de FrançoiseCollin qu'on aborde la problématique duféminisme. Cette dernière rejette l'analo-gie avec le modèle marxiste et affirmeque le mouvement féministe ne peut ap-puyer ses revendications sur aucun autremodèle préalable, même s'il est vrai queles femmes — les exilées — ont parfois"pensé leur lutte comme nationalisation."Ainsi "la femme est à elle-même son pro-pre avenir." L'ambiguïté que présente ladéfinition de la catégorie "femme" et ladésignation de l'adversaire — l'ami, lepartenaire, le collègue, l'amant — se re-trouve aussi dans le domaine historique,car le féminisme appartient à la crise dumoderne par son souci de réappropria-tion et du post-moderne par son refus del'opposition binaire des sexes, en faveurde la notion de différence et d'hétérogé-néité. Compte tenu de la nature du fé-minisme, son articulation à la politiqueest complexe, mais Françoise Collin nepeut se prononcer sur la situation québé-coise qui ne lui est pas familière. On sedemande pourquoi Diane Lamoureux achoisi une Française pour la préface deson essai. L'auteure ne nous éclaire d'ail-leurs pas sur ce point.

Dans son avant-propos, elle nous ditqu'elle fait partie de ces Québécoises quiont cru pouvoir provoquer des change-ments importants en luttant pour le fé-minisme, le socialisme et l'indépendan-tisme. Des espoirs sans lendemain!

A la question "Où en est le fémi-nisme?" elle répond qu'il a été récupérépar l'état, les syndicats et qu'il y a eu undéclin du militantisme collectif. Elleaborde alors l'histoire récente du fémi-nisme, qu'elle divise en trois courants:émancipateur, institutionnel et radical.Cette typologie cependant ne lui paraîtpas satisfaisante à cause des divisions en-tre le discours et les pratiques. Elle décidedonc d'en analyser le courant égalitaire,celui de la différence et celui de la pro-blématisation politique, d'abord du point

de vue théorique et ensuite de son articu-lation pratique. Cette grille va lui per-mettre d'être extrêmement synthétique,sans toutefois la rendre prisonnière de sastructure, car elle ajoute des pages inté-ressantes sur ce qu'elle entend par mou-vement et luttes des femmes.

La partie sur "l'égalité" me semblecontenir tous les éléments essentiels à unetelle analyse, en passant de la distinctionentre production des valeurs d'échangeet production des valeurs d'usage au con-trôle de la procréation, de la double jour-née de travail à l'attitude ambiguë dumouvement syndical devant la disparitésalariale entre hommes et femmes. Saconclusion: "à la femme fragile à pro-téger a succédé l'image sociale de lafemme bionique . .. égalité veut dire assi-milation dans un contexte où les femmessont systématiquement désavantagées" estune réponse à la question qu'elle venaitde nous poser dans le chapitre "Quelleégalité?"

Ayant ainsi rejeté la notion d'assimila-tion à l'univers masculin, elle questionnele concept de "la différence." Se servantd'exemples concrets, elle cherche à nuan-cer en quoi consiste l'identité communedes femmes qui vivent dans "des sociétésfragmentées et soumises à des logiquesdiverses de domination sans que l'onpuisse faire de l'une d'entre elles la quin-tessence de toutes les autres." Le statutde victimes a servi à rallier les femmes,mais elles ont continué à laisser leshommes organiser leur vie politique etsociale. Selon l'auteure, vu que les fémi-nistes ont craint de "s'aventurer hors duféminin tel que construit par la sociétépatriarcale," elles ont pratiquement con-senti à la séparation entre les domainesmasculin et féminin. Cette partie du livrese termine par une analyse du rôle théo-rique joué par les lesbiennes dans le fé-minisme québécois.

Son dernier chapitre, "A la recherchedu politique," soutient que l'autonomie

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organisationnelle amène à une autonomiepolitique. C'est en diminuant l'interven-tion de l'Etat dans la vie quotidiennequ'on pourra poursuivre cette lutte con-tre l'inégalité pour une transformationradicale de la société, surtout en ce quiconcerne les répartitions budgétaires etle concept du travail. Selon elle, cettetransformation radicale n'a rien à faireavec la pensée marxiste car "il ne s'agitdonc plus d'affronter l'Etat sur son pro-pre terrain, celui des institutions, maisd'en rétrécir les champs d'intervention aumoyen de l'investissement de la sociétécivile par les mouvements sociaux enlutte." Un exemple de ces interventionssont les centres d'avortement gérés parles femmes à Montréal et à Québec. Detelles pratiques auraient pu et dû se mul-tiplier dans d'autres domaines, selon l'au-teure.

Elle retrace ensuite l'histoire du FLF(Front de libération des femmes), duMWLM (Montreal Women's LiberationMovement) et du Centre des femmes;elle examine l'importance des journauxféministes et mentionne brièvement l'ex-plosion de la parole libérée et libératricequi marque la deuxième moitié des an-nées 70. Ici j'aurais souhaité trouver lenom de quelques auteures et oeuvrespour rendre plus concrètes ces quelquespages où l'on célèbre l'irruption du verbeféminin dans la sphère publique.

Même si l'essai se termine sur une noteinquiétante, puisque les années 80 nousamènent dans une nouvelle phase deconservatisme, Diane Lamoureux croit àla capacité de renouvellement du fémi-nisme québécois qui devra incorporerl'apport du lesbianisme "pour rendrepossible la progression de l'ensemble dumouvement."

S'il y a un fil conducteur entre cetessai et La Bonne Aventure de LisePayette, c'est que pour que les choseschangent il faut transformer les"Yvettes." Ce n'est plus Ariane qui dé-

tient le secret du labyrinthe. La BonneAventure, la version romancée du télé-roman, sert de catalyseur à une prise deconscience qui doit faire tache d'huile : ils'agit de déculpabiliser et de moderniserles femmes qui sont encore prisonnièresde leur rôle de mère, fille, soeur, épouseet collaboratrice de l'entreprise familiale.Lise Payette met au premier plan les"gestes" des femmes, viennent ensuitecelles des hommes et enfin des enfants.Cette transgression des codes habituels vapermettre aux téléspectatrices/lectricesde se comparer à ces personnages qui vi-vent dans une atmosphère où règne lasolidarité entre les femmes. Le litre re-trace l'histoire de quatre amies qui viventà Montréal entre les années 1982 et1986: Martine — la femme bionique,Michèle — victime métamorphosée enfemme libérée, Anne — mère poule etveuve choyée, Me Hélène Savoie — laBelle au bois dormant brusquement ré-veillée et aussitôt rendormie après unmariage éclair, mais à qui sa professiond'avocate conserve son statut de prin-cesse. Auprès de ces femmes de trenteans, il y a un petit nombre d'hommesassez sympathiques, capables d'évoluer ettout compte fait admirablement géné-reux. Les autres générations sont pluseffacées, à part une merveilleuse grand-mère qui semble sortie des contes de fées.

Lors d'une entrevue avec La Vie enRose, en mai 1985, Lise Payette nousdisait que les protagonistes de son télé-roman sont engagées dans le féminismedans leurs actions quotidiennes. Maismême Martine, qui exprime le mieux lesrevendications des femmes par son refusdu mariage, son expérience de l'avorte-ment et son succès dans le monde desaffaires, ne mentionne jamais le mot fé-minisme, car selon Lise Payette: "Si j'enfais plus que cela, je perds le public.J'aime mieux qu'il m'entende ; le messagen'entre pas comme une tonne de briques,mais sur quatre ans, il rentre." On peut

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lui faire confiance, car c'est bien elle quia payé un lourd prix lors de l'affaire desYvettes.

J'insiste sur cet aspect pédagogique,puisque j'ai du mal à justifier l'existencede cette version romancée: 542 pages,dix-huit chapitres, quatre parties, maissans table des matières. Les dialogues,une fois transcrits sur la page, perdentde leur vivacité et les compte-rendusévénemetiels qui leur servent de toile defond se libèrent mal d'un style journalis-tique où la lectrice reste à l'extérieur.Les personnages eux-mêmes semblent en-core mal libérés des poncifs. Il est vraique je ne regarde pas souvent la télévi-sion, mais je lis des oeuvres de roman-cières avec des personnages fémininsauxquels je peux plus aisément m'iden-tifier. Je reconnais la généreuse contri-bution de Lise Payette dans d'autresdomaines — radio, télévision, politique,féminisme — mais, dans La Bonne Aven-ture, je reste sceptique face au réalismedes situations et je me sens mal à l'aisedevant une langue envahie par lesclichés.

Le roman de Lise Payette se lit trèsfacilement et s'adresse à un public quiveut retrouver ses héroïnes du petitécran. Le livre de Diane Lamoureux de-mande une connaissance détaillée desévénements de l'histoire récente du fé-minisme québécois: le titre Fragments etCollages est une description appropriéede cet essai.

SILVIA A. BERGERSEN

SEEKING THEMIDDLE GROUNDCanada and the Arab World, ed. Tareq Y.

Ismael. Univ. of Alberta Press, n.p.GWENDOLYN MACEWEN, The Honey Drum.

Mosaic, n.p."THERE'S NO MIDDLE ground in the Mid-dle East," say the old hands. "If you

think you understand the Middle East,"declares a sign behind the desk of a U.N.official in Lebanon, "obviously youdon't." The nine contributors to Canadaand the Arab World (which grew out ofthe 1981 University of Calgary Cana-dian-Arab Relations Conference) dotheir best to transcend such defeatistbromides via scholarly objectivity andhumane concern. If the volume does notfinally come across as objective, that ispartly a function of the pro-Israeli cli-mate we inhabit, partly of its own failureto include even one Zionist perspectivefor the sake of balance. It has an air ofpreaching to the converted.

Canada and the Arab World beginsand ends with a Canadian politician call-ing for closer relations with the Arabsand a more evenhanded Mideast policy.A hurried reader could gain some senseof the book's arguments from SenatorHeath McQuarrie's sympathetic intro-duction, with its summary of the papers,while Robert Stanfield's appended Re-port on Mideast policy (1980) and his1981 "Reflections" thereon offer as fairand readable an assessment of the re-gion's problems as the volume contains.In between, academics from Carleton,McGill, McMaster and Calgary providean array of data and conclusions. If theyare sometimes dull and repetitious, theyare generally useful.

The Palestinian-Israeli dispute pre-occupies the writers — all agree that it iscentral — though not to the exclusion ofother concerns. Host and editor TareqIsmael's "Overview" does chronicle Ex-ternal Affairs Ministers' statements onbehalf of a Palestinian homeland from1981 to 1985, but also exposes Canada'sself-proclaimed "neutrality" in the Mid-east as a self-delusion, and notes thatincreasing trade with the Arab world hasgiven Canada a new interest there : twoof the volume's principal themes. PeytonLyon's short piece argues that Canada's

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"national interest" requires close relationswith Arabs as well as with Israelis, won-ders why our actual policy is different,and provides his own answer: "publicopinion polls have from the start revealeda consistently pro-Israeli bias." It is notonly the media, the Zionist lobby, andshort-sighted politicians these gentlemenare taking on, but also Canadian publicopinion.

Dr. Atif Kubursi takes up the questionof self-interest in Canada's economic re-lations with Middle Eastern countries.His useful tables make the point that ourimport-export trade with the Arab worldhas increased significantly since the1960's and could increase more; he neednot have exaggerated Israel's relative de-cline in his discussion. The leading Mid-dle Eastern importer from Canada in1968, Israel by 1978 ranked third, behindSaudi Arabia and Algeria, and slippedfrom second to fifth (behind those twocountries plus Iraq and Egypt) in ex-ports to Canada. Unfortunately his sta-tistics cut off in 1980.

The book's flawed centrepiece is PaulNoble's two reports on Canada ajid thePalestinians, which plod rather slowlyand mechanically through the years1967-1983. The first (1967-73) an-nounces the motif: a Canadian policy(usually "static" or "timid") deferentialto American wishes, responsive to Zionistpressures, and distracted by parallels be-tween Québécois and Palestinian nation-alism. A longer sequel (1973-83) chron-icles the growth of Canadian businessinterests in the Arab Mideast, the transi-ent influence of EEC policies, and thehopes briefly aroused by Carter andCamp David. Grasping at some straws,Noble manages to see a dawning recog-nition by Canada of Palestinian politicalrights, but his reliance on newspaper re-ports and interviews with unnamed"high-ranking" officials in External Af-fairs softens the edge of his argument.

Alan Bones' analysis of "Zionist inter-est groups" is balanced and useful in itsmore limited sphere; he depicts the vari-ous groups as superbly organized andeffective but sometimes fractious andoverzealous. After examining three sam-ples of their tactics (1975-79), he con-cludes that the Zionist lobby has notcrossed the "fine line" between influ-encing government policy and imposing"a minority's demands." Along the way,Bones exposes the rift between ExternalAffairs, which would prefer "a more bal-anced policy," and the Cabinet, which ismore sensitive to political pressures.

Unexpectedly, Rober t Stanfieldemerges as the hero of the conferenceand the book. He is cited respectfully byseveral writers who wonder pertinentlywhy his Report has not been revived inthese Conservative years. It is a goodquestion. Though marred by somenaïveté, such as a pathetic reliance onthe defunct Camp David accords, it is asensible and respectable piece of work,which might well serve as the startingpoint for a new initiative or policy re-view.

I suppose that The Honey Drum("Seven Tales from Arab Lands") couldbe seen as responding to Stanfield's callfor greater "cultural understanding" be-tween Canadians and Arabs; althoughtwo of the tales are original, five areadapted from Arabic sources (who trans-lated them we are not told). They rangein mode from the pious tale and Aesop-ian exemplum to dramatic irony. Themost interesting and substantial is "FourWays to Fortune," yet it is queerly bi-furcated and finally bland. This slightvolume, which could be read in an hour,will not add to the literary reputation ofArab authors or of MacEwen, whoseimage of the Middle East comes out ofThe Thousand and One Nights. (Onemight as well read Uncle Tom's Cabinfor an understanding of race relations in

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modern America.) She might more per tinently have told how the scorpion metthe camel on the banks of the N ile andasked for a ride across. "D o you thinkI 'm crazy?" scoffed the camel. "You'dsting me and I 'd drown." "You mustthink I'm crazy," retorted the scorpion."Then I 'd drown too." Convinced, thecamel took him aboard, but halfwayacross the scorpion stung him. "Why didyou do that?" asked the camel, startingto sink. "N ow we're both dead." "Wel come to the Middle East," said the scor pion as he too slipped under the waves.

RICHARD BEVIS

SPEECH ACTS WAYMAN, The Face of Jack Munro. H ar

bour Publishing, $7.95.ANDREW suKNASKi, Silk Trail. Nightwood

Editions, $7.95.STEPH EN CHAN, Songs of the Maori King.

Sono Nis, $7.95.

MARG INAL VOICES DO N OT usually reachthe top of the pops amongst literatemembers of the ruling class. Especiallywhen those voices preach social revolu tion, threatening to transform sound intopolitical action. Admittedly English Can ada is rarely pestered by such intrusions;here, revolutionary voice is usually eithersilenced or ignored by our universallyacclaimed apolitical national character.(As Robert Kroetsch once mused, itseemed just as natural for South Ameri can writers to be Marxists as it is forCanadian writers not to be.) One obvi ous exception to this opiate condition isRick Salutin; his astringent theatricalvoices originate within a politicized con sciousness which is itself situated on themargins of the Canadian mainstream. In1981 Salutin addressed a conference de voted to "the writer and human rights"and what he had to say is germane notonly to the critical issues raised by such atheme, but more specifically to the three

books here under review. Speaking on"N orth American revolutionary writing,"he observed :

Today I'm always struck, in listening towriters from such countries as El Salvador,by the naturalness with which they discussrevolution in all its aspects. H ere in CanadaI find that one feels a certain pressure toapologize and be embarrassed at discussingtopics in a revolutionary vein, and even atusing the language. In polite literary com pany, one doesn't use the term[s] "revolu tion" . . . "class" [or] "struggle." . . . Simul taneously, you have the problem that art isusually assumed in our society to deal pri marily with personal or private issues, asthough, for example, the conflict of workerswith a company, or of any collective bodywith whoever has authority over it, issomehow not fit material for artistic treat ment; that there's something impersonalabout the struggles of a union or a politicalmovement, whereas the conflict over "D o Idivorce?" or "Who do I sleep with?" isconsidered personal.

Obviously each of these collections hasits own distinctive voice; they are not allof a piece. Nor are they Marxist tractsattempting to incite the bogey of revolu tion amongst their readers. But each, inits own way, shares with Salutin a re pulsion from and fascination with Cana dian (or at least, orthodox) "politeness";each probes just how political is the per sonal. Whether it be Wayman's brashconfrontations, Suknaski's delicately mod ulated "haiku," or Chan 's awkward his toricizations, each collection tries un abashedly "to use the language" toengage History — to explore how andwhy we got to where we are. And justhow on earth we can make amends.

Although apparently the most angrilyoutspoken of the three, it is a mistake tosee Tom Wayman's The Face of JackMunro solely (and simple mindedly) asa collection of "political satires." Cer tainly familiar readers will get what theyexpect : the verbal flair, the hilarious hu mour, oral texture, the breath unit met rics, the parodist as subversive, as well as

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the allegories devoted to social situationsand demanded political change. Con-sider, for example, these lines from "TheHammer" (a poem which gains much ofits power from the quiet incorporationof some classic Pete Seeger) :

A hammer is rising. A hammerthrown up at the end of the day by a

carpenterwith blood on the handle where his blisters

jhave been.A hammer. It lifts as well on the wave of

steampouring up from the pots of a kitchen — a

tiny kitchenof an apartment, and that of a restaurantserving a hundred customers at once.

In this sense, poems like "Dream ofthe Generals," "Surplus Value Poem,""Bosses," and "Job Security" are all vin-tage Wayman; all retrospectively fulfilSalutin's desires for a poetic that rede-fines exactly what is proper literary ma-terial, a poetic that teases out the per-sonal lineaments entwined within thecollective social whole.

But the collection is not simply a poeti-cized version of Kapital; nor is it a seriesof mere squibs directed outward towardtopical "problems." Wayman offers avariety of beautifully handled emotionalsituations — pastoral fantasies, medita-tive moments (reminiscent of Suknaski'shaiku), comic farces, poems about "re-lationships," eulogies, odes — yet not oneoperates unconsciously within its theo-retical framework. In every case the po-etic voice springs from within a politicalawareness, one razor-sharp in its atten-tion to nuance, detail, and effect. Herepolitics are not something separable fromthe "other" parts of one's life; in Way-man they are the matrix in which allthought, all action is engendered. Sure,there are lapses; for example, when thespeaking voice allows the intensity of out-rage to interfere with poetic control."Dream of the Generals," to cite oneinstance, although an astonishing tour de

force, is quite simply too long, and sagsmid-way. "Sleep" and "Your clotheshave experiences you know nothingabout" border on the glibly inane ; goingfor the pub laugh has distorted thespeaking voice.

But these are quibbles. Most importantin this collection is the fact that Way-man seeks no less than to politicize ourperception and consumption of language.He develops a written poetry suffusedwith oral power and it is the power ofthe committed activist, the speaker whobelieves in the active potential of theword. Appropriately enough, the poemsreturn again and again to the polaritiesof speech and silence (including theeulogistic "Forrie, O'Rourke, Penner,Sorestad," and the self-reflective medita-tion, "Giving Another Reading: JasperPark"). In doing so, Wayman manifestshis considerable power as a self-consciouswriter of language. He scrutinizes notonly modes of production or surplusvalue, but the possibility of meaning inhis own writerly activities. A poem like"Paper" brings together many of Way-man's concerns in Munro, especially inits submerged comic reflections on thespeaker's playful exchange with the read-ing consumer:

Paper usually presents the worldas black and white. Where it suggests

colour,most people conclude the shades are not

accurate.Paper edits, omits,compresses complexity into a rectangle.Around it, the universe swirls with other

forms,hues, emotions, movementand sound.Anything on paperis a lie.

The poet as meditator/mediator/mentor;the poet as speech actor. Or, as Waymanhimself would probably have it, the poetas r/evolutionist. Re-visionist.

It is precisely this sense of the poet's

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"job" that informs Andrew Suknaski'sdifficult, exasperating, and brilliant col-lection of minimalist poems, Silk Trail.Ostensibly the haiku-like verse traces thegeography of the "silk trail" — the trad-ing route between China and the West— the story of how the secrets of silkmanufacture were first revealed, thensmuggled out of China into the tradingworld. It also traces the explorations ofthe early Chinese explorers to NorthAmerica; and it entwines these narrativeswith the spread across Canada of theCPR. A parody extraordinaire of TheLast Spike? Perhaps, partly; but hardlyessentially.

According to Suknaski himself:As a Canadian writer, I am mostly con-cerned with finding a cipher that willdecode a fourfold dream : the Anglo Saxon'sdream and search for the Northwest Pas-sage to further expand the British Empire(the human toll among many peoples beingIthe price of that dream) ; the Europeanimmigrant's dream of a New Jerusalem inthe new life (a second chance) in the NewWorld; the Chinese dream of the "GoldenMountains" in California, or the "GoldMountain" in Canada's West (the onlychance for three hundred dollars and pas-sage back home to be reunited with one'sfamily and find another home elsewherebeyond crowded cities and states) ; and fi-nally the Amerindian dreaming of home-land, Manitou's abundance to keep bodyand spirit where no boundaries are everdrawn — except by migration of game, andalluring mythical places where the gods im-part their secrets.

An ambitious project, no doubt. Whatinterests me is that like Wayman, Suk-naski begins to probe the role of thewriter as a writer of language, the writeras master/mistress of a secret script thatwill disclose the truth hidden behind theinherited/inherent/inhering distortions ofHistorical words. The collection is filledwith references to naming, working,transforming raw materials into beauty,map-making, surveying, to the act of"telling"; i.e., the speaking/writing poet

as the teller of fact, the orienteer whowill "place" his or her reader inside anew history and geography. Suknaski in-corporates historical photographs, ideo-grams, transcriptions of official docu-ments and bibliography — all conjoiningwith his verse to assert, in Barthes' words,"that this has happened." That exploi-tation of foreign, non-white workers didoccur in Canada, that history is not asmooth line of continuity from a mysticalorigin. But also that imagination can dis-close unities (as well as disunities) ; thatthe artist can recuperate as well as reveal.

As a series of quasi-/iaî'A;M, Silk Trailworks extremely hard. Suknaski pres-surizes the language to its limits — prac-tically to the point of writerly and read-erly exhaustion. As in the very besthaiku, the individual word or phrase isplaced so as to provide apparently limit-less possibilities to the reader's imagina-tion. The minimum number of words, ineffect, provides the maximum amount ofpure readerly participation. One way toachieve this "opening" is by havingeither a blank or wide amorphous con-text, separate from the demands of nar-rative progression. In Silk Trail Suknaskicontinually achieves this sense of end-lessly opening possibilities; consider hispinpoint portrayal of flight/immigration/pilgrimage/artistic process:

a telling of theywho flee

with childin womb

.. . the swallow's winga brushstroke/

naming yougod

in water . . .scant telling

of surveyorchao-kong

landkept

through hard workland

for keepingsilkworm

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But Silk Trail is not simply a looselyinter-woven series of discrete poems. Itpurports to be a narrative — a story told"after" three prototypes (an anonymouspoem called "mulberry by path," EzraPound's cantos LII-XCII, and MaHuan's fifteenth-century historical log,The Overall Survey of the Ocean'sShores). And it is here — in the inter-section of historical source, poetic form,and narrative demand — that Suknaski'scritical problems begin to arise.

Historical revisionism always places aheavy demand on the reader. By its verynature, the historically revisionist textopenly acknowledges its own contin-gency. The reader must read other textsin order to understand this one. But herethe reader is faced not only with both ascholarly bibliography ( is Suknaski strain-ing after an academic readership?) andthe progressive demands of narrative, butalso with the opposite needs of the mini-malist poem — the need for generality,open context, amorphous possibilities.What happens in Silk Trail, I think, isthat the sequential demands of narrativeprogression crush the chosen form's in-tegral needs for isololate particles. Theresult is a tremendously compressedwork of poetry that borders on the pre-cious in its attempts to achieve diametri-cally opposed aims. As a result one isdazzled by its virtuosity, yet irritated atits ponderous fragmentation.

Stephen Chan's Songs of the MaoriKing, although a lyrical prose-poem ofconsiderably different concerns, also func-tions within a similar politicized/poeti-cized context. A peculiarly appositepublication for a Canadian press, thecollection concentrates on certain keytimes in New Zealand colonial history(i.e., the establishment of the "KingMovement" amongst disparate Maoritribes in the 1850's. The Kingites, asChan's brief preface mentions, wereunited on one central issue: no more

land for the Europeans). A number ofCanadian/Commonwealth analoguescome immediately to mind: like Wiebe'sBig Bear, Such's riverrun, Achebe'sThings Fall Apart (or more immediately,Utu, Geoff Murphy's film about theNew Zealand Land Wars), this text at-tempts to disclose the meanings of coloni-zation by focusing on the emotional andmental upheavals of one dispossessedleader. Accompanied by (deliberately?)childlike woodcuts, the narrative tracesPotatau's ritualistic post-election sojournin the "forest" (a curiously Europeanterm for the Bush). Here he meditatesnot only upon the effects of colonizationon himself, his people, and the pakehacolonizers, but also the consequences ofhaving been elected a complex "symbol"of indigenous need and defeat.

I have a number of problems withthis collection, as well as a variety ofreservations about its literary merit. Onone hand the text is pre-eminently ad-mirable as what the jacket blurb termsa "deeply personal synthesis of the strug-gle of one Maori Chief." Within themythical structure of the scapegoatingritual, Chan often hits the mark directly,offering a precise and powerful image ofcolonial dispossession and deracination.Witness this miniature of the Europeansettler-soldier:

In many new lands whole nations resistedhim.

With fire and great ardour the nationsgreeted him.

He only fingered his embroidered coats.This single gesture was the greatest

insolence.He would march to his death in resplendent

dress.He would dirty a gold thread or two.

This, if not superb, is exquisitely acute inthe juxtapositioning of gestural "lan-guages" — a juxtaposition all the morepoignant given the ignorances on bothsides of the linguistic wars. But this kind

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of shocking insight arising from a preci-sion of detail is a rarity throughout thebook. Too often Chan lapses into mun-dane or cloying imagery; the colonizersare pale bringers of boundaries and op-pression. Or even worse, the Maoriemerge as vexing self-parodies, completewith greenstone clubs, tattooed faces, andmystical connections with the land. In hisattempt to be "authentic," Chan includesvirtually all we have come to expect frompost-card histories: marketable detailupon marketable detail. That is, in hissearch for an authentic voice Chan, asan outsider, has too readily depended onthe artificial, colonially proffered imageof the native people. Cliché overridesvision and what we get is a mimesis ofa mimesis; not the real thing.

But it is also a vision unsustained bythe poet's language. Not only do we havePotatau speaking with stilted nobility —à la Chief Dan George to Dustin Hoff-man — but we have a prose-poem whoselanguage echoes with predictability:

I shall become one with this land, hethought, so I shall know why I fight. . .

The tattooed whorls on his face and thecontours of the land seemed to fuse.

At this point one cannot help but recallPope's infamous one-liner from The Es-say on Criticism: "And ten low Wordsoft creep in one dull Line." WhereasWayman's intense anger over social op-pression can lead to poetic extravagance(which might well crash — but at leastwith a bang), Chan's earnest sincerityoften leads nowhere; it simmers andfizzles within the limitations of his mono-syllabic prose. As a result the collectioncomes across not so much as the commu-nication of a powerfully sensed experi-ence, but as a brittle and tenuous de-scription of what once was read in historybooks. Which is a shame, really, sincethe narrative seeks such a worthy aim asSalutin's disclosure of fact within fiction;the voice sounds throughout with the

sense shared by each of these books: theneed and duty to communicate some-thing of immense significance.

GARY BOIRE

MANDEL'S ESSAYSELI MANDEL, The Family Romance. Turnstone,

$12.95.SUCH ASSEMBLAGES OF diverse pieces arerarely so appropriately (directly? dupli-citously?) titled. The fugitive children ofEli Mandel's seminal intelligence findthemselves yet another home. Whichraises certain questions about the presentcollection's paternity. The different occa-sions for which the essays were originallywritten? The gregarious impulse wherebya writer's separate pieces take on greatermass simply by clustering together? Theway in which they really were one argu-ment all along? A publisher's desire tobring out another volume by such a ma-jor critic as Mandel? As with all ques-tions of origin, some quibbling here ispossible. But most students of Canadianliterature should be grateful that this isa gathering of — after all — Mandel'sessays. Clearly, it will be much more con-venient to buy (or borrow) this volumethan to have the Interlibrary Loan De-partment try to run down, say, Zeitschriftder Gesellschaft fur Kanada Studien(1983), where "History and Literature"first appeared.

The author, in his preface, gives whatmay well be The Family Romance's fam-ily romance. He recalls how, promptedby Grove's In Search of Myself, a child-ish musing on his own other possibleorigins allowed him to be "born anew,"freer and a future poet. This "innocent"misreading is presently modified into aBloomian "primal struggle" of "literary"father and son whereby the poet nameshis ancestors, his estate, and that "muchsterner" map of misreading is itself ap-plied to mostly contemporary Canadian

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literature to see how "strong writers mis-read and rewrite their precursors." Inshort, Mandel "seeks primal scenes . . . ofnomination, identification, origins." Thehumanistic and male biases of this enter-prise are both openly acknowledged andso, less directly, is the egotistical — theprivileging of one's own misreadings.

Mandel deploys those "misreadings"under three headings. The first of these,Origins, begins with "Auschwitz andPoetry," his "account of the writing of apoem." The first section also containsother major essays such as "History andLiterature" or "The Border League:American 'West' and Canadian 'Region' "as well as "Strange Loops" and "Aca-demic and Popular," all in differentways and to different degrees concernedwith questions of origin. The second sec-tion, Writers, the longest, names, intwelve separate titles, thirteen writers.These range from George Grant (thefirst considered) to Leonard Cohen (thelast) or, differently put, from Hugh Mac-Lennan, Saint-Denys Garneau, and Ir-ving Layton to Christopher Dewdneyand Jon Whyte. The final section, Writ-ing, consists of three essays, two on thelong poem, and "Modernism and Im-possibility," mostly about the making andunmaking of modern painting.

As even this crude catalogue suggests,the design promised in the title, thepreface, and even the division into partsis not so obvious either in many of theseparate essays or in the volume as awhole. Why, for example, is "The LongPoem: Journal and Origin" included inthe third section instead of the first? Orconversely, is not "Academic and Popu-lar," with its careful delineation of theconfusion between these two terms, morea matter of Writing than of Origins?One notices, too, that essays such as "In-troducing Irving Layton" or "SelectingP.K." better fit their titles than the largerargument of the book. Or sometimes

larger arguments do not seem to be quitethe argument we have been promised, aswith the apt and extended considerationof problems of translation in "Saint-Denys Garneau : Transcending National-ity" or the way in which a number of theessays in Writers set forth an analysis ofdifferent poetics : MacLennan's "poeticsof disaster"; Atwood's poetics of percep-tion, particularly the perception "of allthat isn't there"; Kroetsch's and Dewd-ney's poetics of "linguistic" and "neuro-logical" process; Layton's surface poeticsof clowning behind which the seriousbusiness of his poetry is conducted.

There are two possible answers to thisimplicit criticism. The first is to stress thequality of the separate essays. Thus, ifMandel does not place Layton in someBloomian/Canadian field, he still placesLayton as one of our most problematicpoets by defining the nature of the prob-lem. And that place itself can then besubsumed into the more magisterialplacement set forth in one of the mostimpressive essays, "The New Phrenolo-gists: Developments in ContemporaryCanadian Writing." Which brings us tothe second and more central answer. AsMandel, summarizing Bloom, observes inthe penultimate essay: "Critics in theirsecret heart of hearts . . . love continui-ties, but he who lives with continuityalone cannot be poet." Can we, then,fairly criticize the volume for a lack ofcontinuity, coherence, when one of itspurposes is to show such interpretiveicons as critical fictions?

Mandel frequently praises Bloom andKroetsch for their effective use of para-dox, but in that department he is a mas-ter too. He can, for example, cogentlyassess the contradictions at the heart ofGrove's literary enterprise: "Grove be-came involved in a search for the trueAmerica, but [for Grove] the true Amer-ica is, in fact, Canada, and Canada is theplace we have failed to create." Or he

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can just as cogently, in "The Post-Structural Scene in Poetry," the lastessay in Origins, unwrite the very entityof poet and of poem and thereby unwritealso the first essay in that section, thepoem he wrote and the way he, as thepoet who wrote it, could also write aboutit. In short, here is (and especially in themore recent essays) a postmodern con-sciousness at play, seeing what it canmake out of and unmake of the literarymaterials at hand.

Yet the volume still seems (for this re-viewer at least) to be more criticism ascollage than as bricolage and to be ratherless than the sum of its parts. The qualityof the parts, of course, remains. Everyessay rewards rereading. Eli Mandel isone of Canada's most perspective, so-phisticated, wide ranging, and widelyread social and literary critics. And forthat reason alone we can wish he hadgiven us two books instead of one. Hadthe present volume been published underthe more modest title of "Collected Es-says," Mandel might have gone on towrite a different Family Romance ofcontemporary Canadian literature. Ourgain is convenient access to the previ-ously published essays. Our loss is thestudy we do not have — what Mandelmight have done with the conceptualapparatus that does not quite hold thisvolume together.

ARNOLD E. DAVIDSON

STRATFORDJ O H N PETTiGREW & JAMIE PORTMAN, Strat-

ford: The First Thirty Years. 2 vols. Mac-millan, n.p.

TOM PATTERSON w i t h ALLAN GOULD, FirstStage: The Making of the Stratford Festi-val. McClelland and Stewart, n.p.

T H E FIRST OF THESE books is much big-ger and much more important, but thesecond is more fun to read. The first isa comprehensive history of the genesis

and checkered growth of the StratfordFestival, covering the people responsiblefor its success, the various conflicts andcrises that have marked its first thirtyyears, and the 200 or so theatrical pro-ductions that it mounted during thatperiod. The second book, Tom Patter-son's personal account of the beginningsof the Festival (he was its unlikelyfounder and first general manager), tellsthe story of how the naïve and inexperi-enced but astonishingly confident Patter-son, through sheer persistence and buoy-ant optimism, managed to get theFestival rolling. He was, of course, notalone, and his book gives full credit tothe many other people whose "aggregatefaith" (in the words of the contractorwho built stage and auditorium) keptthe project going; but he doesn't down-play his own contribution either. One ofthe keynotes of his style, in fact, is a kindof confident modesty, a wide-eyed sur-prise at his own success mixed with anunshakable assurance that he wouldsucceed. Pettigrew's history (finished byPortman after his colleague's untimelydeath) is breezy and fluent, but is neces-sarily more detached and comprehensive.It lacks the personal voice that makesPatterson's story so winning. ReadingPatterson, one senses how people likeTyrone Guthrie, Alec Guinness, or theMasseys must have responded to himback in 1952 — his self-delight makeshim almost irresistible.

The Festival is of course a nationalinstitution and has been so for manyyears. It was recognized as such from thevery beginning, by Patterson and otherstrying to put rich but unsophisticatedCanada on the cultural map, and byGuthrie himself, who wrote to Guinnessthat the Festival "should demonstrablybe a Canadian scheme carried throughby Canadians, but with help (indis-pensable and important help) fromGreat Britain." He felt that Canada was

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likely soon to become the "richest andmost powerful country in the world" andwanted to do his part to meet the "greatsentimental urge . . . to be influenced byBritain" and to offset the "great practicalurge to be influenced by the U.S.A." thathe sensed in those innocent years.

What Guthrie could not have foreseenwas that almost thirty years later, in thefall of 1980, the issue of the Canadian-ness of the Festival would erupt withgreat bitterness (as it also had five yearsearlier upon Robin Phillips' arrival ),when British director John Dexter wasoffered the job of artistic director overthe heads and behind the backs of theso-called Gang of Four, a group of Ca-nadian artists (so they were perceived,though one was a recent British emi-grant) who had assumed the task ofrunning the Festival upon Phillips' resig-nation. The nationalism issue was under-lined, and the hostilities that ensuedalmost destroyed the Festival. Althoughmost of the artists involved would insistthat the crucial issue was not nationalismbut the high-handedness, weakness, andvacillation of the Stratford Board, thepublic perception of the problem, fur-thered by the response of Actor's Equity,highlighted the nationalist question. Inthe end, Dexter's work permit was de-nied by Lloyd Axworthy and CanadianJohn Hirsch was soon hired to take over.Hirsch, while unhappy with the "sendfor the colonial governor" mentality andits continuing hold on Canadian artsboards, nevertheless believed in Stratfordand went quickly to work trying to fulfilwhat he saw as the Festival's "continentalmandate" (moved perhaps by the "prac-tical urge" Guthrie had spoken of 29years earlier).

There have, of course, been othersthrough the years who have not believedin Stratford, who have in fact seen it asa detrimental force in Canadian theatre— people such as Nathan Cohen, long-

time theatre critic for the Toronto Star.Stratford, in this view, has shifted thecourse of Canadian acting toward theclassical, mostly British, repertoire, hasplayed up the star system and its atten-dant ballyhoo (and foreign influence),has done little or nothing to encourageCanadian play-writing, and has in gen-eral diverted energy away from the de-velopment of an indigenous Canadiantheatrical tradition. Cultural nationalism,then, has always been an issue at Strat-ford and it is no surprise that it con-tributed so powerfully to the crisis of1980. Jamie Portman, in his fair andbalanced account of the crisis, tends todownplay the nationalist issue, as mostof the Stratford artists also did, but itseruption was consistent with the entirehistory of the Festival.

That history is told simply and fullyby the Pettigrew-Portman book. It ismost interesting in its treatment of theFestival's beginnings — especially thespirit and commitment that led to theimpossible excitement of the first night.Of that evening, even Nathan Cohencould write many years later: "That firstnight at Stratford was the single mostmemorable experience I ever had in thetheatre." How the idea was spun, thetheatrical personalities lined up, the landacquired, the stage designed, an architectfound to create a theatre around thestage, the whole complex built, a tentordered, made, and, after much diffi-culty, raised — all this makes fine readingin Pettigrew's account. In Patterson'sbook, which is devoted entirely to thisperiod, the same story takes on comicand mythic dimensions, anecdotesabound, and personalities emerge withgusto.

Throughout the whole period, moneyproblems are paramount ( Pettigrew care-fully traces these but Patterson, charac-teristically, slides over them). Stratfordcitizens are remarkably generous but the

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rest of Canada is indifferent. The Chi-cago tent firm, doubtful it will ever seeits money, refuses to release the tent;Oliver Gaffney's Stratford constructioncompany works all night on the theatrewithout being paid; Tom Patterson goesblithely on like a modern-day St. Francisconfident of a miracle; and at the lastminute anonymous donations save theday, the tent is released, a tent-master isfound to supervise its raising and main-tenance, and finally everything is ready.The ironic thing is that if the originalboard and especially Patterson had been"realistic" about money, they wouldnever have gone on — a point that Pat-terson makes more than once. Caution,such as that displayed by the new man-ager of the Royal Bank, would havekilled it — and so, through a casual con-versation at a party and the faith of alocal bank manager, the Bank of Mon-treal got and kept the Stratford account.

The story is a lively one and canhardly fail to please. But it takes up lessthan half of the first volume of thePettigrew-Portman history. What followsmakes less fascinating reading, but isvaluable as a reference tool and interest-ing as a record of theatrical tastes andfashions: a year-by-year account of thevarious Festival productions, interspersedwith occasional discussions of financialproblems, personality conflicts, and thecontributions made to the style and de-velopment of the Festival by its differentartistic directors. The book also containsworthwhile sections on the thrust stage,its uses, and later modifications, on thebuilding of the permanent theatre, andon the 1980 crisis already mentioned. Ithas two useful appendices; one lists byyear all theatrical productions and mem-bers of the company, plus any musicalperformances, workshops, exhibitions,and the like; the other describes all out-of-season activities, such as tours and TVperformances. So, both as a reference

work and simply as a good read, this setis definitely worth having.

Tom Patterson's book is more personal,with a more distinctive voice — amusingand engrossing as much for the characterit depicts as for the story it tells. It is abit sloppy as to dates (at least twice 1951appears when he means 1952) and isnone too reliable in other spots as well.But one should hardly read such a bookfor scholarly precision or accurate refer-ence. Better to enjoy the anecdotes : feel-ing that the original office address, 139Downie St., wasn't classy enough, Patter-son simply changed it to One MarketPlace and naturally "our local post officeaccepted it happily." Not knowing whatto charge for tickets, Patterson and pro-duction manager Cecil Clarke bought aNew York Times, looked through the en-tertainment ads for the theatre thatcharged the highest prices and "thosebecame our prices." He comments, "Thisis known as scientific entrepreneurship."(Incidentally, ticket prices that first yearranged from one to six dollars.) A moreextended anecdote concerns Patterson'sabortive trip to New York in early 1952to try to line up Olivier as artistic direc-tor. Unable even to get near the greatactor, Patterson tried the manager of theAlgonquin Hotel where he had gone tostay, hoping to bump into Olivier in theelevator. The manager kindly introducedPatterson to a sleazy agent who promisedhim "Laughton or Hardwick" ; Pattersonwas unimpressed, so he tried visiting vari-ous foundations, introducing himself as"Tom Patterson from Stratford Can-ada." But the best he could get was afriendly pat from the Rockefeller Foun-dation. All of this he parlayed upon hisreturn into interest and blessings fromOlivier and an almost-promise from theRockefellers. Written up in the local pa-per, the news eventually got back to theFoundation (despite Patterson's convic-tion that "no one in N.Y. reads the

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Beacon-Herald"). But their people saidnothing about it till years later, by whichtime they were in fact supporting theFestival.

Even Patterson's conversational, self-interrupting style, at times outrageous,full of bad jokes, folk "wisdom," andclichés ("little did I know that we werebeing hoisted on our own petard, to coina phrase"), contributes to our sense ofthe disarming straightforwardness of theman. There seems nothing hidden abouthim, though he is clearly shrewd as wellas confident. It is not clear what the roleof secondary writer Allan Gould actuallywas, but he seems wisely to have let Pat-terson speak for himself. Most of thebook was in fact recorded during con-versations he had with Jack Darcus inthe Hop & Grape pub in Toronto.

Aside from Patterson himself, the mostmemorable character we meet in the twobooks is, for my money, Skip Manley,tent-master extraordinaire who, for thefirst four years of the Festival, handledthe raising and, even more important,the managing and maintaining of thehuge tent that covered the stage andauditorium. Skip's bejewelled fingers, hislove for the tent and the intimacy he feltwith "her," his weakness for chocolatepies, and his straw hat in which he kept abunch of huge needles, "yanking one outwhenever he needed to repair the tent,"all these became legendary. The open-ing summer there were terrific stormsthroughout the rehearsal period, and aswater gathered in enormous pools onparts of the roof, Manley would dashabout underneath with a knife attachedto a long pole to slash the burgeoningpools. Guthrie describes the aftermath ofthis:

The storms passed. But, till half an hourbefore the public assembled for the openingnight, a tiny figure might be seen clamber-ing about on the enormous sagging expanseof terra-cotta-colored canvas; rubies anddiamonds flashed in the sunlight, and in

the moonlight too, drawing together withexquisite, tiny surgical stitches the woundshe had himself inflicted to save her fromdestruction.

Perhaps there is no better image for theambiguous history of the Stratford Festi-val than this dedicated circus- andrevival-tent master repairing the woundshe himself had caused.

ANTHONY DAWSON

ARCHIVESThe Alice Munro Papers: First Accession, eds.

J. Moore, J. Tener, A. Steele. Univ. of Cal-gary Press, $15.00.

The Robert Kroetsch Papers: First Accession,eds. J. Tener, et al. Univ. of Calgary Press,$20.75.

The Joanna M. Class Papers, ed. J. Moore,J. Tener, A. Steele. Univ. of Calgary Press,$18.00.

Literary Manuscripts at the National Libraryof Canada, ed. Linda Hoad. National Li-brary of Canada, n.p.

CRITICISM OF CANADIAN LITERATURE isbeginning to get serious about archivalresearch, looking behind as well as at thetexts. The University of Calgary hasbeen a major contributor to this process,through its collecting of authors' papersand, more recently, its preparation andpublication of descriptive inventories.The inventories themselves are essentialto the efficient, consistent, and intelligentuse of the manuscript collections. Theirpublication, while less essential, will sug-gest lines of investigation and reduceunnecessary preliminary research trips tothe archives for new researchers, whileproviding a convenient, available, refer-ence tool to scholars working in detailon particular papers.

The Alice Munro Papers: First Acces-sion describes the 2.5 metres of Munro'spapers (2073 items) received in 1980,documenting the period from the early1950's — Munro's first short story sub-

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missions — through 1979, ending withWho Do You Think You Are? and TheMoons of Jupiter. Munro's personal cor-respondence is currently closed to re-searchers and so not listed here, and thecollection contains no outgoing Munroletters. The Robert Kroetsch Papers:First Accession describes 3.5 metres ofKroetsch's papers (1873 items) receivedin 1975 and 1976, documenting the pe-riod from 1945 and his earliest writingsto 1976 with Badlands and The StoneHammer Poems. It includes his unpub-lished novel When Sick for Home, hisdoctoral dissertation at the State Univer-sity of Iowa in 1961. The Joanna M.Glass Papers describes one metre ofGlass's papers (1273 items) received in1978, documenting the period from 1967— and her stage play Santacqua — to1977 and the play The Last Chalice.Correspondence, promotional and pro-duction material, and final drafts, ratherthan early drafts and rough work, domi-nate this collection. The University ofCalgary Libraries have received subse-quent consignments of literary papers —two thus far from Munro and one fromKroetsch — which will be described inlater inventories. All three inventories re-viewed here include biocritical essays, byThomas E. Tausky, Aritha van Herk,and Diane Bessai respectively, as well asintroductions detailing general archivalprinciples and describing the particularcollections, and invaluable indexes (ex-cluding third-party and topical indexes ).In addition, they supply welcome facsim-iles of representative manuscript pagesfrom the collections, providing useful evi-dence, for example, about authors' leg-ibility.

The University of Calgary archivistshave maintained an admirable balancebetween preserving the integrity of au-thorial arrangement and providing help-ful groupings of related material. Papersare divided, generally, into correspon-

dence and manuscripts, the latter sub-divided by genre. (The collections, inci-dentally, may also include scrapbooks,photographs, newsclippings, publishedreviews and critical articles, and audiotapes.) Authorial arrangement of itemsinto files or packages is respected, as wellas, where applicable, order within files orbetween a sequence of files. At the sametime, fragments from various drafts, say,of a Munro manuscript have been rough-sorted chronologically, with explicitwarnings to researchers that this is ten-tative. The manuscript collection itself,in my experience, is similarly scrupulousin spelling out the archivists' assumptionsand any removal or consolidation ofitems. Inconsistencies, and difficulties forresearchers, may be imposed by an au-thor's own organization, as in theKroetsch papers where correspondence isgenerally grouped separately according tothe published titles of books discussedtherein (with some inevitable arbitrari-ness) but where correspondence relatingto individual poems and short stories isinterfiled with the related manscripts.The editors have compensated with bothchronological and alphabetical indexes ofoutgoing Kroetsch letters, as well as theusual alphabetical index of Kroetsch'stitles and index of personal and corpo-rate names. The method of notation bycollection, box, folder, and item (e.g.,MsC 37.12.26.2) will, as the archival in-troduction maintains, allow unambiguousscholarly citations. An inevitable discrep-ancy exists in the importance of individ-ual entries in the inventories, with abread-and-butter letter receiving thesame attention as a 221-page typescriptwith holograph revisions. Here the an-notations accompanying each entry aretime-saving.

The biocritical essays introducing eachinventory are all sophisticated ratherthan superficial, drawing on archivalevidence and personal contact with the

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author, and displaying a high level ofliterary analysis. Aritha van Herk's intro-duction to Kroetsch, in particular — el-liptical (cryptically circling around thedouble foci of life and works), frag-mented, and playful as perhaps all criti-cism on this postmodernist writer mustbe — presupposes considerable prior fa-miliarity with Kroetsch's writing. It thusraises the question of whether a chronol-ogy of the author's life, works, and publi-cation history might be all that is re-quired, a simple context in which theresearcher could situate individual manu-scripts. Since literary criticism of the au-thors is available in abundance else-where, original scholarship here mightmore appropriately focus on the compo-sition and publication history of thematerial in the collection. Diane Bessai'stwo-part introduction to Joanna Glass,with its separation of biography and per-formance and publishing history fromcritical analysis, provides an alternatemodel to the one I propose, particularlyfor less well-known authors. In any case,the inventories are the product ofthoughtful and painstaking work, andwill be immensely useful to researchers.

The bilingual Literary Manuscripts atthe National Library of Canada providesdates and place of residence of the au-thor, description of the collection (titles,dates, number of metres or pages, briefnote on contents), and information onfinding aids, preliminary inventories, orrestrictions on access, for seventy-threemanuscript collections. It also includesboth nominal and chronological indexes.The collections range in extent from asingle page or two (a letter say, fromT. S. Eliot or Sir Walter Scott) to 29.5metres (the papers of Bernard Amt-mann, Montreal antiquarian bookseller).Among the entries of interest to studentsof Canadian literature are those for Al-fred Goldsworthy Bailey, Arthur StanleyBourinot, Robertson Davies, Gratien Gé-

linas, John Glassco, Markoosie, Félix-Antoine Savard, and Elizabeth Smart,and the more extensive collections ofPhilip Child, Gary Geddes, Jack Hod-gins, Roger Lemelin, Claire Martin, Ga-brielle Roy, Laura Salverson, ElizabethSpencer, Phyllis Webb, and J. MichaelYates. This is the first published descrip-tion of the National Library's LiteraryManuscript Collection, and, like theUnion List of Manuscripts in CanadianRepositories but with a more specificallyliterary focus, it provides a crucial intro-duction to archival resources. The Uni-versity of Calgary's Canadian ArchivalInventory Series, of which the Munro,Kroetsch, and Glass inventories are butthree examples, takes the next giant stepmaking effective use of such resourcespossible and attractive.

HELEN HOY

LIVESAYDOROTHY LIVESAY, Selected Poems: The Self-

Completing Tree. Porcepic, $12.95.A Private and Public Voice: Essays on the

Life and Work of Dorothy Livesay, eds.Lindsay Dorney, Gerald Noonan, Paul Ties-sen. Univ. of Waterloo Press, n.p.

IN HER RECENT selection of poems, Dor-othy Livesay gives critical shape to herown career by setting down poems shewants to "be remembered by." Dividedinto seven sections by photographs ofLivesay and by her own brief commen-taries, the volume shares in the documen-tary elements of her memoir of the1930's, Right Hand Left Hand, and inthe spirit of her Collected Poems: TheTwo Seasons (1972), a self-proclaimed"psychic . . . autobiography." But it is alsodifferent from these books and from allbut her feminist work of the past fifteenyears in the way it seeks to marry privateand public worlds.

Here Livesay has arranged her poetryso that it moves outwards from the per-

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sonal statement to become a powerfulevocation of the universal worlds ofwomen, those seven spheres of feminineexperience that parallel Shakespeare'sseven ages of man: the world of theeternal feminine, the private haunts ofgirlhood, the world of love and marriage,the sanctuary of the lover and beloved,the world of social activism and the com-mon worker, the privileged place of ar-tistic creation, and, finally, that world atthe end of the world from which no trav-eller returns. But unlike Shakespeare'sschema, this one does not follow a chron-ological progression. "Wrapped aroundcertain themes," the poems avoid thechronological arrangement that might beexpected in the summing up of a life andwork. Instead, experiences are set freefrom the constraints of time and place.Childhood's innocence is conferred uponthe old woman and the joy of union andreunion with the "other" — alternatively,man, woman, "the struggle," art, or theland itself — is constantly rediscovered.That most sections contain poems whichspan the decades suggests Livesay's in-tention to generate a lively transgenera-tional dialogue and underlines her beliefin the cyclical character of woman's ex-perience.

Section one maps Livesay's world ofwomen, a world dominated by an un-equivocally feminine nature. To every-thing there is a season and a purpose inmother nature: "clouds stars in theirlegions / swing . . . into / their ordainedstations." In her reside the moral valueswhich a spiritually bankrupt humanityhas lost: even the heron's wings are"weighted with wisdom." A recurrentimage in this section, the tree is thequintessential symbol of the beneficentfeminine principle that animates theworld of creation. The tree "taps withher roots" earth's secrets, drawing intui-tively upon her ancient wisdom that "Todie is to create renewal." In this pre-

dominantly "yin" world (the title poemproclaims) immersion of the self in theeternal cycles of life is the secret ofwholeness and happiness: "Happy theself-completing tree that brews in secret,/ its own seasons."

In section two, "The Childhoods,"Livesay explores the cyclical pattern ofwoman's experience through her presen-tation of childhood as a rhythm foreverrepeating itself in the lives of women.Only a few of these poems deal withLivesay's own childhood; for example,"Green Rain," a lyric of the 1920's aboutgrowing up. Others describe childhoodfrom the perspective of mother andgrandmother. Most notable in the firstcategory are "Serenade for Strings,"probably the first poem on childbirthever written in Canada, and a sober yettender meditation on motherhood en-titled "The Mother": " . . . W h e n eve-ning's seal is set she must / Have chosenhere to stay. . . ." But perhaps most satis-fying are the poems written by Livesayas grandmother. In these poems she takesa broader, philosophical view of child-hood, interpreting it in lyrics like "FiveMonths Young" as a symbol of that stateof primal innocence to which a fallenhumanity aspires. Though he cannotspeak, the cradled baby's blue eyes "il-lume / every text" and his smile "invitesthe universe / to be plain human."

Though in Livesay's vision women'slives do not follow a linear progression,they do chart a pattern of psychicgrowth. The stages of life may be con-stantly relived, but always from moremature perspectives. In the same way,the "phases of love" are accompanied notjust by shifts but by deepenings of con-sciousness. The third section, "Rites ofPassage," documents these shifts and, inthe process, the evolution of Livesay'sfeminism. The "stages of ritual passage"which, as Livesay writes in her prefatoryremarks, "characterize the search for

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relationship between a man and woman"are fraught with struggle, but it is onewhich issues finally in a happy balancebetween self and other: "We must cele-brate / how to be one / with everyone /yet forever alone."

The shift from imprisonment to libera-tion, from silence to voice, marks theway on the road toward psychic integra-tion, a long, shadowy road haunted bythe ghosts of mother, father, and ahusband-lover, a road which begins atthe "prisoned place" of adolescent in-fatuation and ends at last with the poet'sdescent into "that darker cave," thewomb, in search of rebirth. She emergeswhole, healed, and renewed, with a bless-ing for mother in particular ("F.R.L.")and parents in general: "If I have comeout of it / shining / calm clear as glass/ it is because / you each one kissedme goodnight / without reprisals / sentme to sleep / on earth's pillow." A specialaspect of the poet's growing self-aware-ness is presented in poems like "TheThree Emily's [sic]," "Other," and "Dis-asters of the Sun." As explorations ofwoman's struggle to reconcile the "pullbetween community and private iden-tity," these three poems are seminal to anunderstanding of Livesay's feminism.

Section four, "The Unquiet Bed: Fireand Frost," picks up where the thirdsection leaves off, with a more in-depthexploration of the love relationship be-tween man and woman. But unlike theother sections of the book, this one dealswith only one phase of Livesay's emo-tional life and poetic development. Thesepoems are from the 1960's, a decade ofrejuvenation for Livesay as a result of herexperiences in Africa and a love affairwith a younger man. But the strong im-print here of the "breath" techniquespioneered by the American-influencedTISH group reminds us that there aremore reasons than pure passion for theopening up of poetic form that occurs

in Livesay's poetry at this time. Cer-tainly, poems like "The Touching" areamongst Livesay's finest and comparefavourably with the best love poetry inany language. But why not include lovepoems from other decades ? Why the sud-den silencing of the cross-generationaldialogue that makes this book so interest-ing and so unusual as a work of selectedpoems? A condensed version of Livesay'srecent collection of love poems fromacross the decades, The Phases of Love(1983), would have been more in keep-ing with the spirit of this volume.

Choosing a representative selection ofLivesay's social poems must have been adifficult task given the length of herdocumentaries. But still, Livesay doesmanage to give in this short space astrong sense of her evolving politicalcommitments over that critical decade ofher work, the 1930's. A poem forperformance, "Montreal, 1933: MassChant," vividly evokes the turbulence ofthe time: "In Cuba the masses have notblundered! / In Cuba the masses knowtheir foe!" Good poetry it may not be,but the point is that it was written andchanted and answered the needs of theday. Together with "Day and Night,""West Coast: 1943" (both of which aremilestone experiments in the documen-tary genre), and "Spain," "Montreal1933 : Mass Chant" provides an accurateand fascinating record of an era. Butagain, this section seems incomplete. Per-haps there was not room for more recentpoems on the environment and peace.Why leave us dangling with the postwaryears when Livesay has written so muchgood social poetry since then? The con-trast between early and later manifesta-tions of "the struggle" would have addedeven more interest here.

In a sixth section entitled "The Po-etry," Livesay self-consciously plays critic,giving us the poems which in her viewembody her poetics over the years. Some

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of these poems are period pieces; forexample, "Making the Poem," a com-mentary on Jack Spicer's popular 1960'stechnique of serial composition. Otherssuch as "Two Lives," a somewhat stri-dent apologia for feminist verse, will also,one suspects, be dated twenty years fromnow. But most of the poems point to anunderlying consistency in Livesay's ap-proach to the making of poetry. Follow-ing Shelley, she believes that the poet isan "unacknowledged legislator" and fol-lowing Neruda, that "Poetry is like bread.. . . It should be shared by everyone," notonly academics and intellectuals. It is "amessage / for survival," a "signpost andbanner' crying out against social injus-tice: "NO MORE WAR."

The subject of aging and death doesnot lend itself easily to lyric affirmation,but with a searing intensity that is remi-niscent of the later Yeats, the poems in"At the Finish," the final section of thisbook, celebrate life, love, and the onlymoment that we have: now. Of ap-proaching death, Livesay is unafraid:"The wall is death. / My death. Not tobe climbed / yet. / I have no fear." Andfor the past, she has no regrets: "Wouldyou have lived otherwise? / Speech withanother voice? / The question neverarose / there was never a choice." As forthe present, even an aging body can be-come consumed with desire "until all yes-terdays are gulfed / in freezing fire."

Sitting at the feet of grandmother-poet-sage, we are privy to rare bits ofpoetic wisdom and witness to an equallyrare (in these days of nuclear pessimism)soaring of the human spirit. Livesay hasalways been a romantic, a poet who seeshuman life as a "divine comedy," not atragedy. Nowhere is this spirit more evi-dent than in this concluding section ofa book which is distilled from almostseven decades of poetry making. Even ingrowing old, she tells us here, "Liesthe possibility of affirmation: seeing

younger." For in the end, the humanjourney leads back to the paradisicalgarden: "This is not paradise / dearadam dear eve / but it is a rung on theladder / upwards / towards a possible /breathtaking landscape." That landscapeis the province of Livesay's new world ofwomen, but it is accessible to all whowill respond to her invitation : "Loverbrother sister friend / enter here / im-pel me forward / without fear."

It is perhaps appropriate that concur-rent with the publication of Livesay'ssumming-up volume have appeared twopublications which also attest to her en-during importance as a Canadian poet.A recent issue of ellipse (1986), devotedto Medjé Vézina and Dorothy Livesay,includes some French translations fromLivesay's love poems and a short essayalso in French by Madeline Gagnon, theFrench-Canadian poet to whom Livesaydedicates The Self-Completing Tree. Itis obvious from the sensitive tone of heressay and her sparkling insights that shetruly is Livesay's "âme-soeur," just as itis evident from Jean Antonin Billard'slucid and musical translations — witnessthe following "Aubade" — that Livesay,in turn, is highly attuned to the passion-ate lyricism that is a part of Gagnon'sown tradition: "C'est toi qui, / lorsque,d'un bond, je te quitte / à l'appel dusoleil / peux me ramener au lit: /Femme, Femme, viens."

The other publication, A Private andPublic Voice: Essays on the Life andWork of Dorothy Livesay, also signals aburgeoning of Livesay's reputation. Inthis collection of nine papers from theLivesay conference which was held at St.Jerome's College, the University of Wa-terloo, in 1983, Livesay's multifacetedachievement and her eventful life aresubjected to close analysis. The emphasisin this "blending of biographical datawith poetic construct," the introductiontells us, "is upon criticism's roots in real

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life." This is legitimate enough, but oneregrets the "cult of personality" to whichthis approach lends itself, especially whenmany of the essays have been written bythose who have known Livesay and tovarying degrees fallen under the spell ofher compelling personality. This flawshows itself most obviously perhaps in thestated intention of the volume as "anongoing tribute" to Livesay's life andwork. Tribute and criticism — a contra-diction in terms — is just such a spirit ofuncritical admiration that has contrib-uted to the ghettoization of Canadianliterature on the world scene.

Nevertheless, each of the nine essayshas valuable insights to offer. DavidArnason's revisioning of the history ofmodern poetry places Livesay's earlywork in a new and more important posi-tion, while Johnathan Pierce's essay doesthe same job for the 1930's by pointingout the distinctive social concern of thepolitical poets of Livesay's generation.Wayne and Mackinnon take Pierce's lit-erary evaluation back to the poet's lifeand draw a more personal portrait ofLivesay's activities during the 1930'swhile at the same time analyzing reasonsfor her exclusion from the literary estab-lishment of the day.

The essays by Rota Herzberg Lister,Lee Thompson, and the Tiessens, how-ever, inject the freshest voices and mostoriginal research into the lively discussionpresented in this book. Their papers on,respectively, Livesay's political drama,her journalism, and her radio plays, arethe first, to my knowledge, on these sub-jects and point the way toward full-length studies on these important aspectsof Livesay's literary contribution. PaulDenham's paper, on the other hand, isvaluable for its summing up of thethemes of the conference and the generalconcerns of Livesay criticism. Papers byDennis Gooley and Ed Jewinski roundout this volume and highlight the wide

diversity of critical approaches featuredin it. Cooley's sensitive and exuberantanalysis of the changing images of womenin Livesay's poetry is true to the spirit ofher work, while Jewinski's analysis of theways in which linguistic structures com-municate poetic identity is in the tradi-tion of "academic" criticism which Live-say rejects and which is so at odds withher populism. These essays may not beequal in value and interest, but all aresignposts on the road to a fully matureLivesay criticism. Editors Lindsay Dor-ney, Gerald Noonan, and Paul Tiessenare to be commended for this addition toa still relatively slight body of criticismon Livesay.

SANDRA HUTCHISON

ISLAND & ROADw, D. BARcus, Squatter's Island. Oberon,

$9-95-PAULETTE TILES, The Late Great Human

Road Show. Talonbooks, $9.95.

CANADIAN NOVELS ARE too often casuallyconsigned to the backwater of "regionalfiction," a label that begs the questionof literary topography by reducing theimportance of local setting to a matterof relative accuracy. Although both ofthese first novels deal with universalthemes — growing up, in one, and theend of civilization in the other — each isfounded on a richly specific perceptionof place that informs every nuance ofstyle and attitude and gives imaginativebody to the enterprise.

Squatter's Island is both a chartablehump of land and the dream that sus-tains Andrew MacDonald as he gropeshis way toward adulthood through thenarrow channels of life in a post-warNova Scotia fishing village. Dangerous toapproach in tricky weather but lush withthe promise of solitary refuge, this off-shore locus amoenus draws Andrew into

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a quasi-mystical communion with nature,lending him a sense of identity he findsnowhere else in his bleak, unyieldingworld. The island holds another kind ofpromise as the legacy of Andrew's father,who years earlier had built a cabin,hunted, and kept sheep there. Once afisherman, now the village shopkeeper,Mr. MacDonald has abandoned theisland long ago, crushed by the violenceof the sea and by the desertion of An-drew's mother, who is known to her sononly as a pressing absence.

Although Andrew is clearly a home-grown product, cut off from the materialand cultural resources of "mainstream"Canada, his reflective, dreamy bent putshim at odds with his father and school-mates and links him with the island'sother resident alien, a Portuguese lobster-man who hunts on and fishes around theisland, and who shows Andrew the choic-est spots for lobster, hoping that hisyoung friend will someday take over histraps. Apart from this unlikely sage, An-drew receives little useful guidance,either from a callow young priest or fromthe schoolmistress, barely senior to herpupils, who has no idea what to do withher exceptional student. Andrew's mod-estly questing nature takes him as far asNewfoundland, whence he returns witha bride who is indifferent to his dreamsand hostile toward his island. Maturityfor the young husband is the result of aprocess of slow spiritual suffocation thatculminates in Andrew's taking over thestore from his ailing father and relin-quishing his dream place.

The soul-flattening poverty of thisworld is, however, partly redeemed bythe spirit it denies — a paradox that cre-ates almost as many aesthetic problemsas it solves. By plausibly limiting narra-tion to the scope of his protagonist's cir-cumstances, Barcus produces a Maritimesversion of that durable Romantic arche-type, the original genius uncorrupted by

artificially acquired culture. Andrew'sstream of consciousness flows characteris-tically in the twin beds of metaphor,simulating a "naturally" poetic cast ofperception that is sometimes surprisinglyfresh and moving, but at other timesproves cloyingly precious. The contrivedminimalism of a narrative style strippeddown to suggest an almost preverbalunderstanding, ultimately defeats its pur-pose by drawing attention to its art withoccasional logjams of incompatible anal-ogies and with distracting echoes ofearlier interior monologuists, especiallyJoyce.

A constant threat of death by water isthe common anchor of local identityamong Barcus's villagers, qualifying everyaspect of their lives and shaping An-drew's fate. The grim irony of a nuclearage in which life everywhere has becomeequally conditional seems to favour post-apocalyptic fantasy displacing the com-ing-of-age novel as the dominant fictionalgenre for the late twentieth century.Paulette Jiles's contribution to the grow-ing catalogue of speculative nightmare ismore prophetic than most, having beenwritten some ten years ago, well beforethe current spate of such fiction. Al-though similarly derived from a particu-lar genius loci, The Late Great HumanRoad Show is contrary to Barcus's workin tone and scope as well as in kind —an urbane conspectus of folly in ourtime as witnessed by a range of innervoices refracted through a deadpanthird-person overview. Like most worth-while fantasy, Jiles's jeremiad is con-cerned less with the possible future thatit projects than with the impossible pres-ent that it mocks, laments, and cele-brates.

In such works, premise generally pre-cedes plot and character is often dic-tated by concept. A mélange of someseventeen Torontonians has slept througha general evacuation of the city following

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an indefinite, presumably nuclear, catas-trophe. Overnight one of the world'ssafest, most comfortable places is desertedand shorn of all civil amenities, its skyominously streaked with greasy smoke,its unearthly silence punctuated by thealarming noise of windows as they popout of downtown office towers andsmash to powder in the street. Toronto'sCabbagetown makes an apt latter-dayboneyard in which to reflect on the de-mons of gross selfishness, frenzied con-sumerism, and paranoid aggressivenessthat in Jiles's view of history are drivingus toward self-extinction. Her detailedrendering of the desolate neighbourhoodprovides an additionally eerie shock ofrecognition for readers familiar with theterritory, a ready-made microcosm of ur-ban North America in socioeconomicflux, its long-resident underclass eitherabandoned or shunted into warrenlikehousing projects by the juggernaut ofgentrification.

Jiles's gamut of characters is calcu-lated to sound the basic intervals of thesocial scale. Most of them remain car-toonlike abstractions representing typicalproblems endemic to their respectivesituations, problems that emerge withdramatic definition as small groups ofsocially compatible survivors band to-gether for mutual protection and conso-lation. Like Barcus, Jiles is most sympa-thetic toward, and most convincing in,her handling of the marginal and power-less, such as the aging street busker andthe squad of singing orphaned street kidswho adopt her as den-grandmother andartistic director. Conversely, characterswho seem to have had their destinies wellin hand before the disaster — right-wingsurvivalists who garrison a stronghold inthe Riverdale zoo and the yuppie high-rise dwellers whom they seek out withpredictable results — are observed with amixture of amused detachment andmanifest disgust.

Within and among these variousgroups (and a few individuals who fallbetween the cracks) the noble and sordidhistory of the race is re-enacted, even asthe shadow of a common death, her-alded by the proliferation of mysterious,unhealing bruises, promises to overtakethe lot. For some readers, the cynicism ofthis sardonic farce will be counteractedby recurring evidence of an undefeatedwill to survive, to connect, to preserveour collective wits, however perverse ordoomed the attempt. A pregnant cowwho ambles through the novel attractingdifferent characters toward their mu-tually conflicting ends, is a whimsicalsymbol of this tenacious life force. Butunless we regard the story of universaldestruction as a kind of existential alle-gory — after all humankind has alwayslived under the threat of imminent death— the novel's teasing leaven of hopesimply blackens the jest with a morebrutal irony. Either way, Jiles's satire isusually too broad to be very instructive;but her imaginative empathy with herunderdogs — especially the children —and her memorable evocation of an ur-ban paradise after the nuclear fall ani-mate what might otherwise have re-mained an amusing but inert anatomy of1980's angst x-rayed in the flash of ageneric apocalypse.0 r >r PAUL JACOB

SHORT STORIESLESLEY CHOYCE, Conventional Emotions.

Thistledown, $20.00/8.95.JAKE MACDONALD, The Bridge Out of Town.

Oberon, $12.95.JANICE KULYK KEEFER, The Paris-Napoli Ex-

press, Oberon, $21.95/11.95.

INCLUDING Conventional Emotions in areview entitled "Short Stories" is a bitmisleading, for the items in this volumeseem more like sketches, quickly jotteddown and then published without re-

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vision. One problem with these tales ofadolescent angst is that the author rarelyis able to maintain a consistent narrativevoice in the first person, resulting in prosewhich lurches back and forth betweenteenage street talk and adult sophistica-tion. "Sophistication" hardly seems ap-propriate, however, given this collection'spervasive banality. Consider, for example,the following climactic insight expressedby the teenage narrator of "The TroubleWith Gharlene" : "I had finally learnedwhat it meant to be free in the worldand it appeared to be the equivalent ofshit." The trouble with ConventionalEmotions is that there is no reason for itto have been published. Like most vanitypress books, it will briefly increase theprestige of the author among his friendsand relatives, and then sink into a well-deserved oblivion.

In contrast, the interrelated stories inThe Bridge Out of Town provide athoughtful account of the fictional com-munity of Keewuttunnee, located on thenorth shore of Lake Superior. Jake Mac-Donald obviously is intimately familiarwith the real-life model for his "wearylittle northern Ontario town," and hedramatizes the stunted lives of its inhabi-tants with sympathy and understanding.But although this volume contains iso-lated highlights, such as one wonderfulparagraph written as if from the perspec-tive of a newly hatched dragonfly, thesestories are rather workmanlike and plod-ding in their final effect. Like the un-rewarding job of Keewuttunnee's policeconstable, who is constantly reminded of"what a complete non-event his life [is],"the stories themselves are generally dulland uneventful, emphasizing more oftenthan is necessary the dark irony of thevolume's title: "You'll never cross thatgaw-damned bridge till they carry youout in a box!" Yes, the characters areall buried, maimed, or trapped somehow,but MacDonald's purely functional style

rarely allows him to bring them vividlyto life, or to achieve more than yet an-other routine portrait of small-townennui and inertia.

There is nothing routine about thestories of Janice Kulyk Keefer, whoseThe Paris-Napoli Express may signal theappearance of a major new author. Littleexternal action occurs in Kulyk Reefer'sfictional world, for the main focus is onthe inner lives of the characters, as theystumble through their often hallucinatorymental landscapes. In "Mrs. Putnam atthe Planetarium," the seventy-year-oldMrs. Putnam sings to the stars, and thestars sing back. "They were not crystalsplinters as children imagined them," thenarrator explains, "but round, fragrantas waterlilies you might pick off the mir-ror of a lake and hold up to your face,breathing in the succulence and frag-rance." As this quotation indicates, KulykReefer's style is sensuous and haunting,well suited for expressing the vivid con-ceits of an imagination which, like thatof Mrs. Putnam, seems to wander freely,"climbing steep, black spaces in betweenthe stars." All nine of these stories areremarkably poised and assured for a firstcollection; eight of them are written inthe third person, suggesting a sensibilitywhich is sympathetic but detached, per-haps more prone to study people thanto interact with them, and (one feels)somewhat inclined toward melancholy.Certainly, a strong sense of melancholyand even dread infuses the dreams andreveries of the characters, as in "ADream of Eve," in which, after visiting ablissfully contented housewife, the pro-tagonist dreams not of happy families,but of "children with matchstick armsand legs and their mothers beating them,beating until the children caught fire andwere consumed in a pitiful, rancid flameof suffering."

A similar nightmare occurs in whatmay be Kulyk Reefer's most powerful

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story, the immensely disturbing "In ADream." Narrated in the first person bya young mother who is eight monthspregnant with her second child, the storyis divided into three parts, with a longcentral section framed by a brief pro-logue and epilogue. The prologue's firstparagraph refers to a dream so desolateas to make ordinary nightmares seemwelcome. It is a dream where "sleeping isan inching belly-crawl across split glass,shattered metal; where waking is to findyourself washed after shipwreck on a wel-come, opalescent emptiness of shore."The story's middle section describes thedream: during the stillest hour of thenight, two strange men awaken the nar-rator from "soft, dark sleep" and silentlytake her to a dank prison, where sheand other captured women are beaten,starved, and tortured. Just before thedream ends, the narrator is forced to con-front her daughter, who cannot recog-nize "the skeleton bandaged in flesh" asher mother: "It is so sweet for me tostand and look and neither remember norforget but only see her — such sweetatrocity." "Such sweet atrocity"! Thestory continues, ending with an epiloguewhich begins with the same paragraphwhich began the prologue, except thatnow two words in the final sentence ofthis paragraph are reversed: "Wherewaking is a belly-crawl over split metal,shattered glass; where sleeping is to findyourself washed after shipwreck to awelcome, opalescent emptiness of shore[my emphasis]."

The story ends with the description ofa second dream, diametrically opposedto the first one:

From our bed I can see the moon dis-entangling itself from the mazy branches ofa tree. Slowly it floats upward, lucent,buoyant in its liberty. I put my hands overmy own fullness and feel the baby, turningover in its blood-rich, blood-safe sleep. Ina month it will be born, will sail on theflood of its ruined shelter, washing up on

(this shore outside, to light and air andcradling touch. In this dream, I turn heav-ily on my side and press into the emptyspace against my husband's chest. Perfectlywe fit together, gently we touch each other.The house, the street, the city and the earthon which they crouch, all hold us carefully.We fit so perfectly, in our sleep.

Kulyk Keefer's narrator escapes from hersavage nightmare into her beautifuldream, leaving the reader with the imageof a unique fictional world dangling pre-cariously over a dark abyss. Against allodds, this world hangs by a thread, butit hangs by its thread in a shimmeringlight, still offering its anxious inhabitantsthe dream that it holds them gently andcarefully. "We fit so perfectly," the nar-rator concludes, "in our sleep."

PETER KLOVAN

INHIBITIONSAL PITTMAN, The Boughwoljen and Other

Stories. Breakwater, $9.95.KEVIN ROBERTS, Picking the Morning Colour.

Oolichan, $8.95.THESE TWO VOLUMES of short fictionshow how the obtrusion of sexual con-cerns can be as restrictive for literatureas their suppression. Overt in TheBoughwolfen and Other Stories, covertin Picking the Morning Colour, a pre-occupation with sexuality inhibits the fullconsummation of both Al Pittman's andKevin Roberts's artistic impulses.

In his prefatory note, Pittman quotesa definition of bough house from theDictionary of Newfoundland English,adding that it includes such synonyms ashough tilt, bough whiffen, and boughwhiffet for any "small temporary shelterin the woods, constructed of coniferbranches woven into a frame." From hischildhood, however, Pittman recalls us-ing the term boughwolfen. For his pres-ent literary purposes, his memory serveshim well. The vaguely threatening and

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female connotations of the suffix wolfenare entirely appropriate to this collectionof stories, where the protagonist isusually a boy for whom Catholic dogma,parental authority, male desires, and fe-male bodies combine to inspire "guilt,confusion, and fear." The boughwolfenis the place where a less-inhibited boyinduces him to drink stolen homebrew;where a "Sign of the Cross" formed bythe boughs prompts him to flee from agirl who wants to "do dirt"; where hetrades his "beloved Dodgers" baseballcards for a chance, finally, to "do it."Such boys build boughwolfens, one nar-rator observes,

because they have discovered the one thingin the world more compelling than theirdesire to do nothing.

They have discovered all at once, thewonder of womanhood in girls of all ages.

They have learned the craft of the bough-wolfen well. They know the better it isbuilt and the better it is concealed, thebetter are their chances of making theiradolescent wishes come true.

The shortcomings of this collectionstem not only from Pittman's use of suchstock issues, but also from his attempts torejuvenate them. He strives to invest theforms of stories for young people withcontent of abiding interest for adults.Even the book's layout and design reflecthis paradoxical goal. The front-coverdrawing shows a boy with a crucifix ona chain about his neck; his abstract looksuggests a dilemma about whether towatch the smiling and ostensibly nakedgirl standing by a waterfall. Her body ishidden by a large conifer bough that alsoveils a pastoral white house and greybarn on a dirt road flanked by whitepicket fences. Each story then begins andends with a smaller insignia of a coniferbough. Although the simple and inno-cent appearance suggests that this is ayoung person's book, the publisher'sblurb identifies it as "adult prose fiction,"

and the back-cover photograph shows aserious, almost scowling Al Pittman.

In like manner, his stories are pre-dominantly concerned with young peo-ple, and his uncomplicated narrativesreflect both their ingenuous views of ex-perience and their straightforward inter-pretations of it. Pittman has strippedtheir childhood, however, of almost allits innocence and simplicity, almost allits fun. The result is a book as claustro-phobic as a boughwolfen from which thestories yearn to escape. Two-thirds of theway into the volume, Pittman finally al-lows traces of his natural sense of hu-mour to emerge. Told by a priest duringconfession to avoid Protestant girls as"occasions of sin," a boy later prays in-stead for their "conversion to Catholic-ism." Pittman then permits two boysmiraculously to escape "hell" at thehands of their fathers. It is the almostcertain punishment for pissing into emptybottles to replace the stolen homebrewthey drink, but the fathers drunkenlylaugh that it "tastes like piss" to them.

One way for Pittman to relieve theclaustrophobia of this collection, there-fore, would be to give freer rein to hissense of humour. The most intriguingstory in the book, "The Thing in Ride-out's Woods," suggests a second way.Here, Pittman relegates to significantbackground the restrictive concern forsexuality that pervades almost all theother stories. He then lets the confines ofrealistic representation make way for thepossibilities of otherworldly fabulation.The "thing" in the woods seems to bethe ghost of the protagonist's father, whodrowned before he was born. The boynow believes he has persuaded it to killhis mother and then return "to stay for-ever on the bottom of Deadman's Pond."His hatred of his mother seems to ariseboth from an idealization of his "hand-some, heroic" father and from his out-right denial of a past relationship be-

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tween them — to which his mother'sphotographs still testify. The only picturein which the boy will acknowledge a re-semblance between his father's wife andhis own mother is one in which he per-ceives her to be "fat" and "ugly" — be-cause she is pregnant — and both ofthem to be sad. The reader's knowledgethat the boy's very existence originates intheir sexual union thus implicates inter-course as a subconscious source of hishatred. The story is unresolved andhaunting. It suggests, finally, that inorder to fuse subject-matter for adultswith the form of stories for young people,both aspects must be released from theirtraditional bonds. Al Pittman has yet torealize fully and consistently his idealparadox.

In contrast to The Boughwolfen andOther Stories, Picking the Morning Col-our is the opposite of claustrophobic. Itincludes sequences of surrealistic prose-poems as well as realistic short fictionin prose. Its settings range from BritishColumbian fishing grounds to South Aus-tralian orchards, from surreal beaches tomythological deserts. Here, there is noovert preoccupation with any one issue,as there is with sexuality in The Bough-wolfen and Other Stories. Topics thatfall under Kevin Roberts's imaginativescrutiny include the ethics of unionorganizing and the proper loyalties of ex-patriates. His themes range from discrim-ination through the exercise of politicalpower to the continuous cycle of procrea-tion. As such breadth of interest mayperhaps suggest, however, there is littleof original depth in Picking the MorningColour. Furthermore, sexual concernsalso inhibit the fulfilment of Roberts'sartistic aims, though in more covert waysthan they do Al Pittman's.

It would seem to be no coincidencethat in "Garcharhinidae," this collec-tion's best story, sexuality is noteworthyonly in its absence. Attractive but badly

scarred by the sharks that attack him onhis first skin-diving trip, an unnamedyoung man avoids any potentially sexualencounters with women, because "Hecannot stand the thought of them touch-ing him, of undressing and revealingwhat has become for him the great insultof his body, the great guilt of what hashappened to him." This guilt leads theprotagonist to identify his sufferings withthose of Christ and to conceive of sharks"as a modern manifestation of the anti-Christ." Coldly and noncommitally trac-ing his attempts at revenge, the narratoralso reveals the young man's growingspiritual corruption, both of which arerooted in his physical disfigurement.More chilling and taciturn than PeterShaffer's Equus, with which it bearscomparison, "Carcharhinidae" is excep-tional and memorable short fiction.

"Hunting Trip," the volume's leadstory, has the potential to be nearly asgood. Here, however, the obtrusion ofsexuality is a reductive flaw. The storyis concerned with the cultural contrastenacted by an unstable young Vietnamveteran, Robert, and a peaceful old In-dian shaman, Joe; with the reconciliationbetween Joe and Henry, an Indian whoabandoned traditional ways and, nowthat he is dying of cancer, wants to bere-initiated into them; with the ethicalquestions that arise from Joe's decision tohave Henry die with dignity. Yet Robertscannot refrain from introducing a love-sex interest between Robert and Becky,Henry's daughter. Because it detractsfrom the richness of the central issues,it has no place in this story, especiallywhen it leads to such sentimental linesas: "He felt Becky's hand on his shoul-der. He looked into her concerned browneyes."

One of the ironies of this collection,finally, is that Roberts fails to explorefully the implications of sexuality whenit should and does figure prominently in

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his concluding story, "The Junkman."The title figure seems to be a "Yank"Vietnam veteran, who now wandersthrough Australia operating an itinerantrepairs shop. In the dying town of Gold-break, his ability to fix broken appliancesinspires the admiration of the womenand the jealousy of the men. The gift ofan opal pendant he has made, as wellas his remarkable skills with his hands,also inspires the boy narrator almost toidolize him. But when his presence ex-cites sexual advances that he then fulfilsfrom the town's two most eligible youngwomen, the boy turns against him, say-ing: "Maybe that was when I began tohate the junkman. He was messing thingsup. Changing things. People were actingdifferently. I didn't like it." When themen then take their revenge, Robertsturns away from its sexual origins, sug-gesting that the physical abuse he nowsuffers has its source instead in the"curse" of his Vietnam experience. Os-tensibly brought on by vague apprehen-sions of sexual intercourse, this boy nar-rator's hatred of the junkman is similarto the boy protagonist's hatred of hismother in "The Thing in Rideout'sWoods." Yet neither Kevin Roberts norAl Pittman accounts for this hatredeither explicitly or implicitly. In post-modern no less than Victorian times, sex-ual concerns can be enigmas for a writeras well as inhibitions for literature.

PHILIP KOKOTAILO

COUNTER TRADITIONSTraditionalism, Nationalism, and Feminism:

Women Writers of Quebec, ed. Paula Gil-bert Lewis. Greenwood Press, n.p.

T H I S COLLECTION OF seventeen essayspresents a retrospective of women's writ-ing in Quebec from 1884 to the early1980's. The presentation follows a gen-

eral chronological movement and in theintroduction Gilbert Lewis explains herchoice of the three categories of the title.Traditionalism, nationalism, and femi-nism describe, for her, three essentialhistorical and literary periods. Women'swriting before the i960's was informedabove all by traditionalism; the period ofthe 1960's by nationalist concerns; andthe 1970's and 1980's by feminism. Gil-bert Lewis does, however, acknowledgethe artificiality of these divisions by stat-ing that there are no distinct boundariesamong the three and that very few ofthese writers fall solely within one cate-gory.

The collection hopes to introducethose readers who are unfamiliar withwriting by women in Quebec to an ex-citing new literature and to "aid in adeeper understanding of the vibrant anddistinctive québécois culture." This vol-ume is intended for general readers andnot for specialists in the field. Generallyspeaking, the essays give thematic over-views of the particular author's worksand sometimes fall into mere plot sum-maries. This is particularly evident in thefirst part of the book which deals mainlywith the writers who belong to the more-or-less "traditional" category such asGabrielle Roy, Germaine Guèvremont,and Rina Lasnier.

Among the notable exceptions is thefirst essay of the collection in whichFrançois Gallays examines the subtext ofLaure Conan's Angéline de Montbrun.Using a psychoanalytic approach, Gallaysconvincingly shows the incestuous natureof the sentiments uniting father anddaughter which are obscured by the dou-ble narrative. More interesting still is Gal-lays's interpretation of the third part ofthe novel as a re-enactment of the mythof Narcissus. Also worthy of note is SusanRosenstreich's essay entitled "Counter-Traditions: The Marginal Poetics ofAnne Hébert." In her study, Rosenstreich

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intends to give a reading of AnneHébert's poetry that will challenge theusual critical interpretations of Hébert asa poet who has withdrawn from the out-side world into a private, defensive one,thus escaping from real problems. Rosen-streich rejects the Sartrean theory thatminority literatures are most useful whenthey are political, an attitude that hasinformed much of the criticism devotedto Hébert. Rosenstreich bases her analysison Michel Benamou's theory of ethno-poetics which "attempts to abolish thedivisive thinking about literature thatcasts it into categories of central or mar-ginal according to its power base." Adistinction is made between minoritywriters who are participants in a politicalstruggle and marginal writers who areengaged in a literary struggle. Marginalpoets can "transcend the limits of repre-sentational art, and . . . exploit the abilityof language to transform our limited,quotidian view of the present into anexpanded, extraordinary vision of thefuture." The so-called verbal distance be-tween Hébert the poet and her readersis not therefore a withdrawal from theworld and a refusal to acknowledge pres-ent political problems, but rather an at-tempt to alter and expand the signifi-cance of words, her "mystery of words,"in order to broaden our perceptions.Rosenstreich states that in fact "Hébert'swords change our world" just as effec-tively as political propaganda.

The second half of this volume is de-cidedly more interesting than the first.The essays here which deal with womenwriters of the 1970's and 1980's examinethe writing of these authors in the lightof their nationalist and feminist views.Louise Forsyth's excellent essay on thepolitical in the work of Nicole Brossardtraces the emergence of this radical femi-nist author as one of the leading writersof Quebec today. Brossard has movedbeyond the political and social national-

ism of the 1960's to an affirmation of hersolidarity with women. Although sympa-thetic to the separatist cause, she believesthat women's struggle is always againsta patriarchal society. Her political andsocial commitment, inseparable from herwriting, has led Brossard to develop asynthesis of poetry, novel, and theorywhich she calls "theoretical fiction" inorder to achieve political goals throughher writing. Her works "release the en-ergy of woman's suppressed imaginationin order to cause her awareness of realityto explode in dynamic form as an aggres-sive denunciation of the destructive fic-tions which control our world."

Karen Gould examines the evolutionof poet Madelaine Gagnon from a Marx-ist/political orientation to a more overtlyfeminist position. The political turmoil ofthe late 1960's is evident in the earlytexts of Gagnon where political subjuga-tion and linguistic colonization combinedwith Marxist concerns predominate. Itsoon became apparent to feminist writersin general that the political projects ofthe Parti Québécois elected in 1976would do little to change the status quoof a patriarchal society. Since then a newfeminist current has been evident in Que-bec. Gould examines the ideological andpolitical dimensions of the poetry of thiswriter who argues with other womenwriters for "an approach to women'swriting that would put female sexualityand desire back at the very center of dis-course."

Other essays in the second half of thebook deal with various aspects of wom-en's writing. Micheline Herz examinesthe use of myths in the writings of Jo-vette Marchessault and Antonine Mail-let, feminist intertextuality or "dialog-isms" in the works of Louky Bersianikare studied by Maroussia Majdukowski-Ahmed and Marthe Rosenfeld exploreslesbian sensibility in the texts of JovetteMarchessault and Nicole Brossard. In

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the last essay, "Women's Theater in Que-bec," Jane Moss provides a brief over-view of the development of the "spec-tacles de femmes," collective workswritten and produced by groups ofwomen, from the early 1970's to the1980's. She discusses the political andartistic orientation of such groups as theThéâtre des Cuisines, the Théâtre Ex-périmental des Femmes and the Com-mune à Marie as well as the two well-known productions La Nef des sorcièresin 1976 and Les Fées ont soif in 1978.Moss also acknowledges the contributionsof particular women playwrights such asCécile Cloutier, Elizabeth Bourget, Ja-nette Bertrand, Michèle Lalonde, MarieLaberge, and Jovette Marchessault.

One of the main flaws of this collec-tion lies in the choice of writers foranalysis. It is regrettable that five of thethirteen authors presented here are thesubject of more than one article. Ga-brielle Roy is treated in two studies (bothby editor Gilbert Lewis ), as is AnneHébert. Antonine Maillet, Nicole Bros-sard, and Jovette Marchessault also ap-pear twice, usually in a comparativestudy the second time around. This sit-uation might lead one to believe thatthere are not enough women writers ofnote in Quebec to fill even one volume.Editor Gilbert Lewis explains that theomission of many other writers (she listsseventeen) is caused by an inability tofind scholars who are currently engagedin research in this area. Such an assertionis certainly open to question.

Although the quality of the analysesvaries greatly, this collection of essaysdoes precisely what it sets out to do, toprovide a good introduction for the un-initiated to the writing of women inQuebec, and as such is a valuable addi-tion to the growing body of criticalliterature in this field.

RAIJA H. KOSKI

DAUGHTERS& DEMONSCONNIE GAULT, Some of Eve's Daughters. Co-

teau Books, $8.95.ERIC MCCORMACK, Inspecting the Vaults.

Penguin, $8.95.

CONNIE GAULT'S FIRST collection of shortstories is an even mixture of the blandand the bizarre: her portrayals of wom-en's lives through domestic realism andthe remembrance of paradisical childhoodand awkward adolescence are offset byforays into the mythical-allegorical-fan-tastic and by varying degrees of magic-realism. Her ambitiousness is to be ap-plauded, although the reader may be dis-appointed by a discrepancy between theexpectations set up by Gault's choice of aMiltonic or Blakean title and theless-than-deathless prose which follows.Some of these stories work well: "ThisBright Night," for example, about awoman's need to fantasize familial disas-ter as a means of keeping it at bay, orthe succinct and startling "Providence,"which successfully marries the tender andthe grotesque in a fable intertwiningbirth and death, loyalty and betrayal. Yetin Gault's most ambitious fabulationsthere is a distinct element of overreach-ing: she has not yet the technical skill,the intricacy of imagination, and the fe-licity with or command of language tocarry off, for example, the metamor-phosis of humans into birds, the appari-tion of a Medusa head in a departmentstore, or the evocation of a Beckettianlimbo. In short: the cover of her bookis lovely, the epigraph portentous, but forthe most part the stories fall short of themark intended. Yet to use that most use-ful of clichés, this début can be calledpromising in that we can anticipate moreinteresting and rewarding fictions from awriter whose work is as varied, and solittle complacent as is Connie Gault's.

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Going from Some of Eve's Daughtersto Inspecting the Vaults is a little liketurning from a game of Crazy Eights toa round of Russian Roulette. If ConnieGault dabbles in the fabulous and magi-cal, Eric McCormack plunges into themurkiest and strangest of fictive seas: amobius strip of a murder story ("TheFugue"), a vitriolic account of JohnKnox's sojourn in the New World("Knox Abroad"), campfire tales of rit-ual torture and dismemberment ("SadStories in Patagonia"), and a host ofequally grotesque etceteras. McCormackis a ferociously accomplished writerwhose work combines echoes of Kafka,Borges, and (less felicitously) The Twi-light Zone. What distinguishes McCor-mack's fiction is an explicit element ofsexual violence deriving from neither theAustrian nor the Argentinian master, andwhich puts one in mind of the Britishwriter Ian McEwan (First Love, LastRites) or the American Robert Coover(Pricksongs & Descants). Murder, muti-lation, flagellation, necrophilia; sexualfantasies involving stabbings, impalings,harpoonings and other ingenious formsof penetration ; erotica, arcana, bizarrerie— such is the stuff of McCormack's fab-ulations, and he pulls off the most out-rageous narrative stunts thanks to a com-bination of serene narratorial assuranceand an arresting use of language. Thusthe "propositional" style of "One Pictureof Trotsky" : "Start with a morning blackand cold. . . . Let there be women, thir-teen of them, in hooded cloaks.. ." ren-ders the fiction's grotesque données asincontestable as the axioms of Euclid.The metaphors sprinkled throughoutVaults ("his balding skull pimpled withrain" or "dead leaves, the discreet vomitof the trees") often succeed in givingMcCormack's prose those qualities andfunctions ascribed to that earth-splittingphenomenon "The Swath": "It contra-dicts physics and the basic laws of na-

ture. It defies scientific understanding.It is completely convincing."

Yet because of the resolutely fantasticnature of McCormack's vision and thesinglemindedness of his narrative tech-niques his stories may become predictableto the assiduous reader: once we havelearned the iron laws and limitations ac-cording to which this uncanny fictiveworld is structured we may find thattales such as "Edward and Georgina" or"The Hobby" fail in that reversal or per-version of expectation on which theirsuccès d'éclat depends. There is a (de-liberately) repetitious quality to some ofthe fictions —"The Swath" or part IIof "The Train of Gardens" — which, forthis reader at least, diminishes the powerof the imagery and ideas involved. Mc-Cormack's fictive practice is a risky busi-ness: occasionally he crosses the line atwhich the fantastic becomes the coylywhimsical, the erotic, puerilely penile.(The question of gender must surely en-ter into any critique of McCormack'swork — a woman reader may find thenear-uninterrupted succession of malefantasies involving big-breasted, thewy-thighed, eminently penetrable Fata Mor-ganas tiresome rather than titillating.)

Finally, for all their intellectual energyand imaginative contortions, McCor-mack's fictions rarely succeed in creatingthat inextricable mix of the ordinary andthe unthinkable, that mood of quietlyreasonable angst which distinguishKafka's work; the reader of Inspectingthe Vaults will be disturbed, distractedbut not, finally, haunted by this text. Yetfiction which entertains as provocativelyas McCormack's does, deserves to beread; a sequel to Inspecting the Vaultsis to be welcomed.

JANICE KULYK KEEFER

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GRAZIEviNCENzo ALBANESE, Slow Mist. Cormorant,

$7.00.DORiNA MicHELUTTi, Loyalty to the Hunt.

Guernica, n.p.PIER GIORGIO Di cicco, Virgin Science. Mc-

Clelland and Stewart, $9.95.

ViNCENzo ALBANESE'S FIRST full-lengthpublication, Slow Mist, is best character-ized by its exuberance. The poems canbe seen from one perspective as a seriesof "cavalier lyrics" that celebrate wine,women, and "womansong." The sensualimpulse allows the poet not only toimagine himself a "knight in August"and to enjoy, like Byron, the night as abeautiful woman, but also to experience"eros among the meatballs" before aspread of his favourite spaghetti, home-made sausages and olives. Voices ofwomen laughing "at the secrets of wine"stir him to the point that "the ancientferment begins." These voices are notalways joyful, however, since they alsospur him to lament the ephemerality oflovers' pleasure. Reminders of mortality,such as the priest's message "dust todust," are haunting. So are the yellowdying leaves that shiver in their old age,but the poet proposes in that case to pun-ningly "play the rake." Despite this sur-face playfulness, the poet utters a deeperwish to transcend time and "trivialthings" as expressed through recurrentbird imagery, especially ravens, eagles,sparrows, and swallows. Throughout thebook Albanese metaphorically exhorts"sunward souls" to "rise up like birds,"and he captures their flight in a delicatelyricism.

The imagery of flight also dominatesthe first section of Dorina Michelutti'sLoyalty to the Hunt, a collection of whatcan perhaps best be described as prosepoems. Instead of winged eagles or spar-rows, however, the reader is here intro-duced to images of dead bees with worn-

out wings and to an Icarus mysteriouslycompared to a "shoebox filled withsand," all lying helpless on this acutelypersonal landscape. This shocking open-ing reaches its climax with a vision ofbodies, "pew upon pew," who rise forthe Judgment Day and who are ques-tioned about their fidelity to the goldenrule: "Have you undone in others whatothers have undone in you? Have youkilled your child for me recently? Indi-cate the scars with crosses." Hopefully,these are forgiven their trespasses and areurged to "levitate."

One of the features of Loyalty to theHunt is the bilingual section of the poementitled "Double Bind," consisting oftexts written in Italian dialect and thentranslated into English by way of indi-cating the two cultures within which thepoet lives. The final section consists ofletters, sometimes poignant yet often bit-ter, written to members of the poet'sfamily. Two pieces, "Hunter" and "She,"conclude the collection. In the formerthe hunter and the hunted includes notonly the familiar polarity of male/femalebut also the poet/reader, whose roles aresomehow reversed: "Hunt me. . . . Thecall binds us. I seek you in the under-growth. You trap the words. I stalk theopening of your eyes." The anonymousand elusive "She" is the dominant figurein these pages and it is her own risingthat seems most in doubt. Various imagesof "She" repel the narrator, including aMichelangelo woman who is describedas a "failed Venus." At the end the poetconfesses, "It takes me years to spit herout and feel lonely." Isolation is indeedthe keynote of this successful hunt ren-dered deftly in images of pain.

Pier Giorgio Di Cicco's Virgin Scienceis an ambitious work with a broad philo-sophical, theological, and scientific can-vas. In the opening section entitled"Dying to Myself" the poet adopts aconfessional mode, much like one of his

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authorities, St. Augustine, in sheddingpast selves. A recurring complaint is thata "Protestant" country has no "talent formetaphysics." The poet seeks to redressthe balance by turning at one point tohis Italian-Canadian friends who "gottheir metaphysics from / transubstantia-tion and their poetry from a happy /Christ." Accordingly, in the centre of thebook a sequence of meditative pieces re-flect on the relevance of science as aunique tool with which to unravel theultimate mysteries of the universe. Inadducing what he calls these "virgin fic-tions," Di Cicco relishes in intellectualand verbal playfulness. Thus, contem-porary science which speaks "ex cathe-dra" is infused with the "dogma ofimmaculate perception" and the glorifi-cation of "matter dolorosa," and refash-ions its own parable of the "prodigal"sun. Newton is a constant target ( "BeforeNewton / infants were / reported not tohave fallen out of bed. Parents are /Newtonian fabulists" ) as is Descartes andhis scientific progeny, the "quantumsolipsist." As opposed to the "material,mater, umbilical to itself," Di Cicco, inone epigraph, recalls T. S. Eliot's para-doxical prayer in Ask Wednesday to thevirgin Mother: "Teach us to care andnot to care." Di Cicco also invokesEliot's master, Dante, in Lux Aeternaand re-words the well-known ending ofthe Divine Comedy as "Love happens atthe speed of light." After dealing withuncertainty principles based in large parton seemingly irreconcilable antinomies,Di Cicco concludes "You cannot be intwo places at once: only God can." Thequantum leap leads to the proverbialleap of faith in the final section entitled"Hearing the Bridegroom's Voice." HereDi Cicco composes "Rosa Nova: A Mod-ern Prayer," a nuclear version of Dante'smultifoliate rose, and ends his spiritualOdyssey with a grazie, a note of thanks.It is impossible to do justice to the rich-

ness and complexity of this fascinatingwork in a brief review. The reader isinvited to explore its mazes on his own,but he must be acquainted with quantumphysics and holography to appreciate thepoem fully.

DOMINIC MANGANIELLO

VOIX INEGALESANDRE BELLEAU, Surprendre les voix. Boréal

Express, n.p.CLAUDE JASMIN, Alice vous fait dire bonsoir.

Leméac, n.p.EN DÉPIT DE LA VOGUE grandissante desthéories dites "déconstructionistes," l'ob-servation et l'analyse des systèmes designes qui parsèment notre vie quoti-dienne, demeurent une contribution ines-timable à la compréhension et à l'inter-prétation de notre monde. Commed'innombrables Monsieur Jourdain, nousfaisons tous de la sémiologie sans le sa-voir. Mais de même qu'être en mesurede commander un bifteck-frites ne faitpas de M. Toulmonde un poète, com-bien sont à même soit de réfléchir sur lessystèmes de signes soit d'en tirer des ap-plications sur le plan littéraire. Avec brioet un rien d'arrogance, Umberto Eco asu jouer sur les deux tableaux. A destitres différents, Surprendre les voixd'André Belleau et Alice vous fait direbonsoir de Claude Jasmin représententdeux de ces tentatives de déchiffrement.Quant à la différence entre ces deuxtextes, elle tient autant an fait que lepremier est un recueil d'essais et le se-cond un roman, qu'au fait que le pre-mier, par la justesse et la finesse de sesanalyses permet de mieux comprendreles limites du second.

A lire Surprendre les voix on se sur-prend — qu'on me pardonne le jeu demots — à entendre une autre voix,éteinte elle aussi: celle de RolandBarthes. Cette comparaison eût-elle plu à

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André Belleau? Car, au fond, l'on abeaucoup écrit et beaucoup dit sur Ro-land Barthes et pas toujours en bien. Uncommentaire de Barthes paru il y a déjàbien des années dans Le Nouvel Obser-vateur me revient en mémoire: Barthesy discourait de l'incongruité de pouvoirse procurer des cerises à Paris en pleinmois de février. Gela aurait pu donnerlieu à une réflexion sur la transgressionque représentait ce phénomène dans ledéroulement perçu comme immuable dessaisons et donc du temps. Au lieu de cela,le tout était d'une banalité parfaitementinsipide. D'un autre côté, les observationsde Barthes en matière de sémiologie so-ciale ou littéraire demeurent irremplaça-bles et ses Mythologies, si décriées furent-elles, représentent qu'on le veuille ounon, un tournant décisif dans la penséede la deuxième moitié du vingtièmesiècle.

Le lecteur de Surprendre les voix esttenté d'en arriver rapidement à une con-clusion similaire et tout aussi ambiva-lente. Les essais du recueil, qui sont re-groupés en quatre catégories ("Paysages,""Voix," "Débats" et "Codes") oscillenten effet des douces gentillesses (au sensclassique du terme) de "Mon coeur estune ville" ou de "La feuille de tremble,"à la perspicacité et à la force de "Lit-térature et polique" ou de "L'effet De-rome" pour se terminer sur le clin d'oeilpétillant d'intelligence de "Lorsqu'ilm'arrive de surprendre les voix." Maisqu'on ne s'y trompe pas, cette divisiondes essais en quatre parties est loin d'êtregratuite et sert un autre objectif quecelui, évident de prime abord, d'une sim-ple classification.

Prenons les essais de "Paysage." Ilssurprennent par leur caractère quasi-impressioniste mais aussi en ce qu'ils sontparsemés de métaphores et de comparai-sons déroutantes qui tantôt confinent aucliché ("Montréal porte au front lescicatrices hideuses de l'aube comme un

visage vieilli de femme," tantôt laissentle lecteur pantois et le cerveau en ebul-lition ("La France est le seul pays dumonde assujetti à ce qu'on pourrait ap-peler l'obligation du saucisson maxi-mum," tantôt frisent le mauvais jeu demots ("Une écriture moderne doit re-noncer aux noms propres [. . .] Cette no-mination propre est malpropre").

Toutefois, au-delà de ces surprises ren-contrées au coin des phrases, il devientévident que les essais de "Paysages" pré-parent le lecteur au caractère anti-conformiste de la réflexion d'André Bel-leau et au tour, sommes-nous tenté dedire, sensuel, de son style. Derrière le"genre de rêverie auquel on se laisse allerdans le torpeur de juillet" se profile eneffet une pensée pénétrante, lucide etrigoureuse, fondée sur une connaissanceapprofondie et synthétisée des discourscritiques de son temps avec une affectionmarquée pour les théories de MikhaïlBakhtine qui affinent et focalisent le re-gard d'A. Belleau.

Dès l'évocation de Marrakech dans"Maroc sans noms propres" Bakhtine estlà présent aux côtés de Belleau:

Au risque de paraître livresque, je prétendsque Bakhtine aurait considéré les bateleursde la grande place [de Marrakech] commedes émules de ceux de la place de grève del'époque de François ier.

Cette présence ne fera que se renforcerau fur et à mesure que l'on progressedans le recueil jusqu'à pénétrer le dis-cours même de Belleau. Dans les troisessais qui forment l'ossature de la qua-trième partie "Codes" et qui sont sansdoute les plus brillants du recueil, AndréBelleau nous livre ses observations sur lalittérature québécoise. La langue de Bel-leau, dans ces trois essais, est dépourvuedu jargon qui trop souvent masque unemauvaise assimilation des théories envogue. C'est une langue riche, aux re-gistres variés, une langue puissante quasi-rabelaisienne, d'apparence plus charnelle

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que cérébrale et qui ainsi évite le piègede l'ésotérisme.

Dans "Culture populaire et culturesérieuse dans le roman québécois" An-dré Belleau aborde en termes clairs laquestion trop longtemps taboue au Qué-bec du "conflit jamais résolu entre la na-ture et la culture" conflit qui "continuede déchirer les textes et de dissocier lesesprits." Et quand A. Belleau écrit: "Ondirait que dans notre littérature roma-nesque, l'écriture, se sentant à la foisobscurément redevable à la nature ethonteuse envers la culture, se censurecomme culture et mutile le signifiant," ilrévèle en fait au grand jour le fantômequi hante depuis toujours la littératurequébécoise. Or ce conflit n'existe qu'enraison même du refus par la société qué-bécoise de ce qui fait sa spécificité: soncaractère populaire au sens bakhtiniendu terme, autrement dit une société "pro-fondément marquée par la culture car-navalesque" et qui conserve donc, vertuinestimable, unique en Occident, "unevision totalisante du monde." Et A. Bel-leau de citer pêle-mêle Laberge, God-bout, Aquin, Ducharme, Carrier.

Dans "Le conflit des codes dans l'ins-titution littéraire québécoise," A. Belleaupoursuit et amplifie la réflexion entaméedans l'essai précédent et, dans "Codesocial et code littéraire dans le romanquébécois," il précise et illustre sa pen-sée par une analyse de Poussière sur laville d'André Langevin et d'Au pied dela pente douce de Roger Lemelin. Ausein de l'institution littéraire, A. Belleaudistingue deux fonctions: "la fonctionorganisatrice (la base matérielle, les ap-pareils)," qu'il nomme "l'Appareil" et"la fonction régulatrice (les normes dudire littéraire [. . .])" qu'il nomme "laNorme":

au Québec, l'Appareil et la Norme n'ontpas nécessairement la même origine, lasociété n'ayant pu produire les deux. Dansplusieurs secteurs majeurs de la sphère lit-

téraire, si l'Appareil est québécois, la Normedemeure française.

Bien entendu la conséquence nécessairede cette analyse en forme de constatationest:

qu'on ne peut comprendre un peu en pro-fondeur la littérature romanesque d'ici[. . .] sans tenir compte des tensions et dis-torsions produites par la rencontre dans unmême texte des codes socio-culturels qué-bécois et des codes littéraires français.

En mettant ainsi en évidence ce conflitdes codes, A. Belleau permet en fait larésolution du paradoxe qui domine lalittérature québécoise et contribue ainsià lui donner son identité et sa spécificité.

Si ces trois essais sont les plus densesdu recueil, d'autres méritent tout autantd'attention. Ne serait-ce que pour rendrehommage au sens inné que Belleau pos-sédait pour la formule bien sentie nousciterons les suivantes:

Le fantastique est [. . .] moins une formequ'une attitude sur les formes.Ce n'est pas parce que Bakhtine a cons-truit la théorie d'une vision carnavalesquepour rendre compte de certains textes qu'unpoète peut espérer "carnavaliser" ses pen-sées!

Si les observations d'A. Belleau frappentpar leur justesse, par leur franchise etpar leur simplicité d'un côté et par à lafois leur diversité et leur cohérencce del'autre, c'est parce que deux principesgouvernent la réflexion de l'auteur: larecherche de la limpidité et la conscienceaiguë de la pluralité des voix qui noushabitent. La citation suivante tirée de"Petite essayistique" en dit long sur lamanière dont A. Belleau percevait sonpropre rôle:

L'essayiste aime parfois prendre des ques-tions en apparence compliquées et leur don-ner une autre sorte de confusion que laconfusion reçue. Mais inversement, il peutlui arriver d'être possédé par le démon dela clarté, de la logique, du démontrable.

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Quant au dialogue à trois voix qui clôtle recueil, il en représente non seulementla conclusion mais aussi la synthèse. Carcette "conversation intérieure" (dos dela couverture) où "l'Intellectuel Beso-gneux Insomniaque" et porte-voix laissela parole à ses trois voix intimes, est unvéritable précis des théories littéraires quisous-tendent la pensée d'A. Belleau etqui guident son écriture et sa réflexion:pluralité mais aussi fusion et communionincessantes des énoncés; ambiguïté, mul-tiplicité et hétérogénéité du "je" énon-ciateur qui n'en finit plus de se faireavaler par l'Autre; unité du discours pro-duit qui jaillit de la diversité des dis-cours reçus; et puis la question éternelle,la question fondamentale, la seule peut-être, celle que se posait sans doute Aquinun certain jour de mars 1977 après l'a-voir posée dans ses oeuvres: "Dieucomme Sujet dernier, comme signifiétranscendantal" existe-t-il?

Par contraste, Alice vous fait dire bon-soir de Claude Jasmin paraît bien léger.Mais peut-être aussi ne prétend-il pas àêtre davantage ! C'est le quatrième romande Claude Jasmin dans la série des en-quêtes menées par l'inspecteur Asselin.Celui-ci a été engagé par une certaineMarlene pour surveiller les agissementsdes habitants d'un pavillon situé au328 rue Querbes à Montréal. La diffi-culté majeure qu'affronte l'inspecteur estqu'il ne sait pas pourquoi il doit surveil-ler cette maison. Surtout que les allées etvenues des divers habitants du pavillon(6 en tout) n'ont rien de particulière-ment suspect! Asselin se prend mêmed'affection pour la grand-mère et sapetite-fille, toutes deux nommées Alicejusqu'au jour où les deux Alice sont em-poisonnées et où il apparaît qu'Alice étaitune rescapée du camp de concentrationde Ravensbriick, que sa famille avaitloué le pavillon afin de mieux préparersa vengeance contre "la Garde maniaquedu camp" qui venait d'emménager juste

à côté, que Marlene était la fille de lagarde en question, et qu'un néo-nazi tropzélé avait provoqué la mort de la grand-mère et de la petite fille.

Enigme policière donc, de prime abordséduisante, surtout par la facture du ro-man qui est une série de rapports depolice fonctionnant en écho avec unhors-texte (les réponses de Marlene)dont on ne connaît que des bribes, maisénigme qui laisse le lecteur sur sa faim.Alors que la présentation du roman faitmiroiter au lecteur "un tourbillon defaits bizarres qui conduiront tous les per-sonnages de ce polar à un formidable etcinglant dénouement" (dos de la couver-ture) l'enquête de Charles Asselin qu'onne connaît que par les rapports que l'ins-pecteur fait à son commanditaire, donnedavantage dans le statisme et l'avachisse-ment. Charles Asselin enquêteur n'estpoint William de Baskerville et les rap-ports du même Asselin pâlissent en com-paraison des récits d'Adso.

En fait le reproche majeur que l'onpuisse faire à Alice vous fait dire bonsoirest de refuser d'avouer ce qu'il est et dechercher à être autre chose que ce qu'ilest en réalité. Après tout, il s'agit d'unroman policier, pas mal ficelé au demeu-rant mais qui cherche à se donner desairs. En somme, un roman qui serait àl'opposé du Prochain Episode d'HubertAquin qui, dès la deuxième page prétends'"insérer dans le sens majeur de la tra-dition du roman d'espionnage" et se re-trouve à être surtout autre chose qu'unroman d'espionnage. Alice est agréable àlire mais n'est pas de ces "polars" quel'on lit avidement, haletant d'énervementjusqu'à ce qu'on en ait tourné la der-nière page au petit matin.

En parodiant A. Belleau, on pourraitdire que Claude Jasmin mélange lescodes. Plutôt que de puiser à grandesbrassées dans le fond culturel universelet de fusionner ces traditions avec cellesde la culture québécoise, le roman de

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Jasmin semble être une parodie. Maismalheureusement, une parodie involon-taire où la culture, sous les traits du pro-fesseur Maynar Miller, se trouve cons-tamment plaquée au lieu d'être intégréepour être finalement évacuée et disparaî-tre comme c'est le cas dans La Sablière.Au bout du compte que reste-t-il sinonun large vide que l'écriture elle-même nepeut combler?

Avec A. Belleau, la littérature et lapensée au Québec ont atteint l'âge de lamaturité et de l'assurance. Avec Jasmin,elles balbutient encore. Oui "la mortd'André Belleau [. . .] avait quelque chosede catastrophique" mais cette voix sijuste continue de résonner et d'indiquerle chemin.

PIERRE-YVES MOCQUAIS

SURPRISED BY JOYNecessary Secrets: The Journals of Elizabeth

Smart, ed. Alice Van Wart. Deneau, $24.95.

IN THE SUMMER of 1979 I found my wayto Elizabeth Smart's hideaway in Suf-folk, England. She lived in an old brickhouse set in a tiny rounded valley. Thehouse sat in its wooded glen like a cherryin a teacup, with only the chimney visibleas one approached on foot (of necessity)across the pasture. The secrecy, thebeauty, the quality of surprise were alltypical of Smart's work. Memories of mystay include the red sheets on my bed,the miniature posy of flowers on mybreakfast tray. I felt the warmth of agenuine welcome and of a strong per-sonality.

A book of poems and Smart's secondnovel, The Assumption of the Roguesand Rascals, had been published theprevious fall. She was in the process ofbeing rescued from over thirty years ofoblivion. Her first novel, which tells inexquisitely lyrical language of her loveaffair with British poet George Barker,

had been banned from Canada in 1945on first publication after Smart's socialitemother had sought Mackenzie King's in-tervention. By Grand Central Station ISat Down and Wept, republished in1977, was hailed in superlatives by manycritics. Brigid Brophy called it a raremasterpiece of poetic prose.

Smart (b. 1913) died of a heart at-tack in March 1986. The previous sixor seven years had seen her literary repu-tation solidly established, like that ofMavis Gallant, another Canadian expat-riate. Critics and readers finally, if be-latedly, acknowledged Smart's excellenceand the unique quality of her writing.Earlier recognition might have made avery difficult life a little easier along theway.

Necessary Secrets is meticulously editedby Alice Van Wart of the University ofAlberta, whom Smart met in 1982 dur-ing a term there as Writer-in-Residence.The journals form a tiresome and fasci-nating work of considerable beauty anddepth. The tiresome bits belong largelyto the early pages and the very youngElizabeth, who is turning twenty at thetime of the first entries. Some rapturouspassages written in 1940 in the throes oflove might also tire the less romantic. Asfor the beauty and wisdom of this prose,however, they shine from every page.The journals disclose an exceptionalspirit and sensibility, a rare talent. Merci-fully it need no longer be secretive, sincemost of the great and not-so-greatnamed in its pages are now dead.

Smart's father was a prominent Ot-tawa lawyer. As Van Wart observes inthe Introduction, the journal offersglimpses into the lives of the politicaland cultural élite who travelled fre-quently between Ottawa and London inthe 1930's. The Smarts socialized withdiplomats, painters, and writers such asLester B. Pearson, Charles Ritchie, Gra-ham Spry, Frank Scott, Marius Barbeau.

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Abroad, Elizabeth's friends included SirStafford Cripps and his family, concertpianist Katherine G oodson, painter JeanVarda. In Van Wart's words, "the in sight into Smart's extraordinary back ground reveals the extremity of her finalabandonment of it. Yet, at the same time,the journals show that her eventual de fiance was not so much rebellion againstsocial conventions as the imperative of ahighly romantic sensibility."

Most students of Smart's work willagree with Van Wart that too much hasbeen written about the affair with thepoet who remained married to his origi nal wife, and that her first novel is "notso much about the love affair betweentwo people as it is about Smart's lifelonglove affair with language." The journalssupport this view.

They cover eight years (1933 41), acritical period for the Western worldand for Smart, serving her apprentice ship as a writer. Part One ( 1933 35 ) isthe weakest, not surprisingly, yet it offersintriguing insights into the budding sen suality and spirituality which co exist atthe heart of Smart's literary vision. Thatspirituality includes an almost mysticalfeeling for nature, and a concern forwhat Patrick White calls "lovingkind ness."

"Around the World with Mrs. Watt,1936 37" covers a trip through Canadaand the U .S., H awaii, Fiji, New Zealand,Australia, Ceylon, and Palestine as per sonal secretary and companion to awoman speaker. Smart calls it "a de tour," and seems to have embarked onit to avoid immediate confrontationswith questions of marriage and career.The last section covers two love affairsand the start of what became the grandliaison of her life.

In Mexico in 1939 Smart stayed withWolfgang and Alice Paalen, both writers.The relationship that developed with thebeautiful Alice must have been liberating

for Elizabeth, whose sexuality had beenconstrained by a conventional back ground and highly strung mother. I twould be celebrated later in a tendernovella entitled "D ig a G rave and LetU s Bury Our M other," the story of alove affair between two women whichacts as a means of confronting and break ing away from the mother/ womb. Thejournal records reflections and conversa tions such as this: "all the time her smil ing dream mouth, smiling, smiling. . . .'I t seems natural to you to be like thiswith me?' 'Yes.' 'Most women like men,some women like women, but it's rare tolike both.' like being' I said." Smartseems very aware of her amateur statusin the relationship and calls herself "ablunderer here, heavy handed, an Ameri can tourist in the Buddhist temple."

She soon moved on to Hollywoodwhere she lived briefly with a F renchpainter, Jean Varda. The diaries are pur posely ambiguous; from the wording itseems possible that the two were neverlovers. Throughout this period Smart'sthoughts were on Barker, whose poetryhad won her heart long before their firstmeeting. She had originally obtained hisaddress from Lawrence D urrell in cor respondence, and Barker had appealed toSmart for financial aid before they met.Initially she did not know that he wasmarried. Later, he told her that he wouldleave his wife, an intention that seemsto have never been genuine.

Smart agonizes over the pain they arecausing Barker's wife, but guilt had nopower to quench the fires. After thebirth of their first child she made a seri ous effort to break off the relationship bysailing for England in 1941, leaving noaddress. This was a dangerous action inwartime, and her ship was actually dam aged but not sunk. Barker followed andtraced her, and the two eventually hadfour children. Smart brought them up byherself, earning a living as a journalist in

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London. Small wonder that "labour" be-comes the central pun in her brilliantsecond novel.

The journals sparkle with vitality andwit. The span of eight years allows usto see the developing style of the womanwho was always a poet, one whose writ-ing abolishes the barriers between proseand poetry. The complexity of the stylematches and reflects the complexity ofSmart's personality, which stands re-vealed as vain, selfish, selfless, kind, gen-erous, humorous, cruel, voluptuous, anddeeply loving. Smart felt herself cursedwith "a New England conscience."Cursed or blessed, her life is one to con-found the moralists and edify the for-giving.

PATRICIA MORLEY

GOING BACKA. F. MORITZ, The Tradition. Princeton Univ.

Press, n.p.HAROLD RHENiscH, Eleusis. Sono Nis, $6.95.PETER STEVENS, Out of the Willow Trees.

Thistledown, n.p.BOTH A. F. MORITZ and Peter Stevensattempt to come to some sort of under-standing of their pasts in their respectivebooks of poetry. While Stevens writesstraightforward prose poems examininghis own childhood experiences and mem-ories, Moritz multiplies his experiencesby his cultural history and learning. Bothstart with similar aims, proceed withvastly different approaches, and producebooks successful in their own terms.

Stevens's work consists of a prose nar-rative surrounding individual poems,which often focus on a specific image.The transitions are smooth, the last lineof the prose section often providing theimage. For instance, the first prose sec-tion concludes, "At home we had thisbig c a t . . . " and is followed by the poem

titled "Tim," the first line of which reads"was a great lazy tomcat." In Stevens'scapable hands the twentieth-century poptopic of "roots" becomes vital and com-pelling, and it is not by capitalizing onthe exciting parts that Stevens achievesthis. He balances the intimate and theuniversal, the familiar and the foreign,as he traces his working-class childhoodin England through the Depression andSecond World War from the perspectiveof both the youngster and the grownup.Out of the Willow Trees is divided intofour sections: the first focuses on Ste-vens's earliest years, describing familyand immediate surroundings; the secondmoves out into the wider community offriends and neighbours; the third, titled"War Games," contrasts the games of theboy Stevens and his chums on the home-front with those of soldiers and would-besoldiers; and the fourth, titled "GoingHome," is really "everything else."

Stevens's father is the major figure inthe collection, while his mother remainsshadowy and indistinct. The war is themajor event, but it is played out oppositethe on-going struggle against poverty,against being "skint." Stevens's earliestmemories are of terraced houses, cobbledstreets, paved backyards, in the centre ofManchester. The first happenings he re-cords are injury, terror, hardship. Natureis vicious rather than a delight, and it isa "hard dark world" he inhabits. Despitethis oppressive beginning, there are manyrays of light in the book. On the adviceof a doctor and because of Stevens'shealth, the family moved to a housingestate on the outskirts of the city whenhe was four. The irony of the earlier mis-named "April Street" is replaced by thenow appropriate "Wythenshawe," thegroup of willows of the title. Stevens'schildhood of discovery now really begins.

In the first section some poems becomepictures from the family portrait albumbrought to life: Uncle Charlie, Cousin

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Betty, Cousin Winifred, Uncle Tom,Uncle Fred, Grandfather. There is muchpoignancy to the portraits, and some aredisturbing. There is a dark side to thepersonalized class struggle; in "CryUncle," for instance, where friends driftapart because of changed socioeconomicsituations. But particular memories ofStevens's father are clearest : hands doingtricks and games to enchant a boy, re-trieving the world's discards to restorethem to some magical use, bicycling offto his job on the railways. Always Ste-vens looks for some remaining link: aremembered physical trait now manifest-ing itself in his own body, the constancyof a night sky arching above them boththough now an ocean separates them.The tone Stevens achieves is warm andnot sticky or sentimental.

The portraits in the second section in-clude those of neighbours and chums:Mr. Bowden who became a jovial,motorcycle-riding disgrace after his wifedied; Ivy Simpson who gave Stevens hisfirst, ten-years'-old kiss; and Sid

On his tricyclefitted with a chest he filled with

knick-knacks: buttonsfastened on a card, laces, ribbons, and shoe

polish,he travelled round the district selling door

to door,collecting his small money, giving it to his

mumwho'd taught him patiently to talk, to

count —

We have here the castoffs and heroes,the late-bloomers and unseasonably up-rooted. The language is colloquial andrecreates the sensibility of the times.Neighbours and events from the largerworld are included to set the scene: theOxford-Cambridge boat races, Larry Ad-ler, Mrs. Simpson, Charlie Chaplin, Hit-ler, and "fat man Benito." The war,always in the background, becomes fore-ground in the third section :

Our sleep was striped with blood,disturbed by rumblings louderthan the childish cries of play.

Stevens's war consisted of sipping tea inshelters during air raids, listening to LordHawHaw broadcasting "Gairmany call-ing," playing games on the L.D.V.(Local Defence Volunteers), which Ste-vens and his mates dub the "Look, Duck,and Vanish." But there is also theharsher reality of seven boys investigating"the strange shape . . . they had found"in the schoolyard: "and in the last sec-ond as they opened it up / they discov-ered what made a bomb tick." One par-ticularly moving poem, "Grenade withFireworks," demonstrates Stevens'smethod of taking a remembered image,here a hand grenade polished each weekand set "squat on the hearth" at home,and expanding it metaphorically to reachout and touch his father :

Somewhere that grenade is waiting in coldash.

I want to lob these words across thatno man's

land between us, but they remain here,pinned

in my teeth, I cannot make a vast umbrellaof falling earth to shower over us where we

crouchin separate lines, huddled alone, in the

cornersof our lives, each standing silent, waitingto go over the top, not knowing what will

be there.

In the final section, the precise focus islost somewhat, as Stevens tries to knit upthe loose threads : his mother's illness, hisown first Canadian year, his return toEngland, and the changes of time:

The roll call closes after the quickbeginning

whatever happened to . . . ?pauses lengthen

do you still see . . . ?names

what on earth was her . . . ?dropping

into silence.

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Stevens concludes with the importantquestion which is the subject of muchcontemporary Canadian poetry (that ofpoets as diverse as Robert Kroetsch,Douglas Lochhead, Eli Mandel, DaphneMarlatt, Fred Wah, Phyllis Webb) : thenature of home and being "at home."The answers supplied by his poetry aremany and marvellous. Small incidentsand little people make compelling read-ing for all their seeming ordinariness.

The book Stevens wrote is similar tothe one Moritz apparently set out towrite. The dust jacket of The Traditiontells us that Moritz "wanted to write abook about my childhood home, Niles,Ohio."

In going back there and trying to do so,I found it necessary first to write anotherbook, about my growing up, in order toweigh my perceptions of the place. I didn'tfind there only the citizens of Niles, theirlives, their works and the landscape, butalso most of the ideas, stories and figuresthat people my thought and that weretransmitted to me through that place fromother places and times.

So Stevens's blood relatives and neigh-bours are replaced here by charactersfrom books, myth, literature, and history.Manchester, England, or Niles, Ohio, aremultiplied by Petra and Poland, Circe'sisland in the Aegean or one in the SouthChina Sea, the Egyptian desert or theRed Deer River badlands. Moritz is notas straightforward as Stevens, but com-plexity suits his task. The multiple playof meanings reflects the multiple tradi-tions he wishes to stress. As did Stevens,Moritz includes memories of his father— feeding pigeons and squirrels "underhorse chestnut trees." But Moritz in-cludes memories of other fathers as well :Lucretius, Virgil, Dante, Rilke. His po-ems are peopled by Oedipus, Orpheus,Aeneas, Prometheus, Caesar, Jonah, DonJuan, and Faust. He is on a quest himselfand recalls others, for grail or goldenfleece. There are also references to films

{King Kong or Pandora's Box) and mu-sic (Mahler or melodies in cafés). Noris this world the only one; the under-world too is explored. From this terri-tory, the overwhelming images thatemerge are of explorers or questers(those of the classics, Homer or Malory,already mentioned and those of morerecent times, searching in North Americafor fur routes or bone and fossil hoards)and of soothsayers (Tiresias or theSphinx as well as those of today prophe-sying the threat of "the Bomb" and "thecoming dissolution" ) .

Some answers, Moritz seems to say,can be found in examining source andorigin, of the individual, the naturalworld, and culture. They are inextric-ably involved each with each. The inter-penetration of myth and the naturalworld, for instance, works particularlywell in "Orpheus in Ontario," while themythic origins of art are demonstratedin a poem that presents Prometheus asa poetic model: "And so I hang here,slowly eaten away, / ever renewed inanguish and in joy."

Literally reaching beneath all surfaces,Moritz reviews the development of earthand man from prehistory and the firstsettlements through the roots of historyand myth to today. For Moritz our an-cestors, the dead of the past, look downthrough the ages:

Still loved for our blood,still hated for every failure, weremain to trouble the living.

In his poems Moritz assumes the per-sona of some of those dead from his heri-tage and travels through time and acrosscontinents. He outlines the impossibilityfor him of doing otherwise:

Sometimes I think of starting again, ofslowly building

a small monument out of the things of myown life.

But in fact there are none, and no humandesire can secure a work,

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however modest: say, a circle of six pebbleson the ground.

As here, Moritz demonstrates throughouthis book his command of images and lan-guage. There is often an awe-ful beautyto his lines: "Rarely, briefly, Ulysses, /do the gods permit / that outward andinward of a man should join." Thisseems to be Moritz's aim. His final poem,about sacrifice and resurrection, suggeststhat cultural awareness provides a formof immortality. Moritz thus gives mean-ing to the dead and the past that fewpoets can.

So far I have not mentioned HaroldRhenisch's Eleusis, not because it doesnot fit the comparison of Stevens's andMoritz's works outlined here, although itdoes not, but because it does not fit thecalibre of their writing either. Unfor-tunately, beside their work, Rhenisch'sappears pretentious and unfocused.

I enjoy difficult poetry ; I like the com-plex way of meaning and image thatchallenges the reader, but first the poetmust make you care enough about thelines to spend the necessary time. Un-fortunately, Eleusis did not make mecare. And even when I did spend thetime, I still did not appreciate the mean-ing or the persona of the poems. Theystill remained elusive. . . . Hey, is that thehomonymous reference of the title? —I clutch at straws. (In actual fact,Eleusis was the town which gave itsname to the great festival and mysteriesof Eleusinia. Unfortunately, Rhenisch'sbook also gives its name to mysteries, andnot the kind to be celebrated.)

The unfortunate image of the deadspeaking through the poet is repeatedwithout Moritz's elaboration. At onepoint Rhenisch says, "something re-mains beyond our speech," and thereader must sadly agree that in this case,it is much. Rhenisch mixes recognizedaesthetic ideas and practices: the bal-ance of speech and silence, light and

dark, dream and reality, the reflectionof love in the natural world, and art inlife, the use of paradox, and mythic allu-sions. Too often, however, the poem is"muddy," as is the persona at beginningand end: with "muddy arms" and"muddy face." The images and languagedo not seem natural to the speaker; theyseemed borrowed, and not in a con-sciously and artful intertextual way. Theframework of classical references seemsartificial, and the introduction of EzraPound needs relating more clearly towhat Rhenisch has to say. "I reach totear off my mask, but there is no mask."The fear of readers is the same, thatthere is nothing behind all this poeticfaçade once it is torn away.

Rhenisch's style is too often sententiousand pretentious : "faith is the explorationof limitation, / necessary"; "the greatexperiments have failed"; "Never awomb without a grave"; "In truth, lightmay be darkness; / in song it is neverlight." Suggesting what Stevens andMortiz attempt and achieve, Rhenischasks "What is memory / and what is for-getting?" but he provides few answers."I don't live in memory," he claims, andthe proof is that Stevens and Moritz pro-duce better poetry because they at leastrevere memory. Rhenisch continuallycontradicts himself in the long sequence"Songs for the Moon." On one page heclaims, "Of light I know nothing," whileon the next, "Only in the light are wemen." What conclusion are we to drawfrom this? "Of clarity I know nothing,"he admits, and here conclusion is obvi-ous. Later Rhenisch addresses "Whatevervoice of yours / can make it through tome" and says: "pull yourself together /and ask me in a language we canshare or keep." Again, the nod of agree-ment is unfortunate and misplaced.When Rhenisch does "come clear," as inthe simple lyrics exploring single images,his art is well maintained. I wish the

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writing exhibited by the natural de-scriptions in "March Apples," "SpringWood," and "Windbreak" was sustainedthroughout the book.

Stevens and Moritz, however, provethat clarity does not have to be clouded,that simplicity does not have to be sim-plistic. Neither "lives" in memory, butboth shape memory to successful poeticends and make it live for us.

ANN MUNTON

POETRY & WHISPERSWith Other Words, ed. Maria Jacobs. Nether-

landic Press, $9.95.Origins, ed. J. R. (Tim) Struthers. Red Kite

Press, n.p.HELEN HUMPHREYS, Gods and Other Mortals,

Brick Books, $7.50.LOLA SNEYD, The Concrete Giraffe. Simon &

Pierre, n.p.T H E S E FOUR BOOKS of poetry are verydifferent books indeed, and no amountof patting and coaxing is going to makethem sit comfortably in a comparativereview. With Other Words is a bilingualanthology of contemporary Dutch poetryby women. Origins is an anthology ofpoetry by a diverse group, all of whomhave or have had some connection withthe University of Western Ontario. Theremaining two books are single authored,but while The Concrete Giraffe is abook of poetry for children, Gods andOther Mortals is aimed at adults. I will,therefore, not attempt to stand you ormyself on our heads in order to makethese books seem like the cozy quartetthey are not.

With Other Words is a doubly mar-ginalized work, first by language andsecond by sex. I cannot comment on theoriginal poems, presented here on theleft-hand pages in Dutch, but the trans-lations on the right are of varying qual-ity. This is not the place to engage in a

discussion of the theories of translationand the distancing from the original atranslation implies, but the inclusion ofthe original is a positive step for thosewho wish to pursue this work. WithOther Words is an extremely handsomework, the best looking of the group. It isillustrated with the detailed paintings oftropical flowers and insects by the seven-teenth-century artist Maria Sibylla Mer-ian. This is a book with a definite pur-pose, and its success must be judged byits own standards. It intends to intro-duce Dutch women poets to the English-speaking world. In my case it has donejust that, and I cannot comment on theappropriateness of the selection of theeight poets. It would appear that theyare all established writers, as they allhave several publications to their credit.Perhaps the inclusion of at least one newpoet would have been an addition. Al-though edited by Maria Jacobs (whoseown book, Precautions Against Death, isa moving account of her experiences inthe Netherlands during the Nazi occupa-tion), this anthology is the work of fivetranslators, all members of the CanadianAssociation for the Advancement ofNetherlandic Studies, and the Forewordspeaks of their missionary zeal in bring-ing these Dutch female poets to the no-tice of an English-speaking audience.

The work of the eight poets selectedhere is intentionally different. We are tobe introduced to variety as well as ex-cellence. The space devoted to eachvaries as well. While Judith Herzberg isawarded twenty-four pages, Hanny Mi-chaelis receives only two. The othersrange between these amounts of space.Subjects vary as well, from the settlingof body fat to nuclear war, while stylesare generally simple and straightforward,with little experimentation. To general-ize, these poets seem to use irony andparticular details to propel their work.There is little evidence in the lines that

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they are women, even less that they areDutch, but there is much evidence thatthey are poets. Andreas Burnier addressespoems to Gertrude Stein, while FritziHarmsen Van Beek addresses an ironicone to her "downhearted cat, to consoleher / at the passing away of her brood."The tone is conspiratorial and coaxing,as she tries to interest her cat in theworld of appetizing birds out in the gar-den. That the cat should not trust suchsympathy is made clear by the admissionmidway through that "the undertaker" isnone other than "the familiar pourer oflukewarm milk" herself. My particularfavourites here are a longer sequence byHerzberg entitled "Late Couple II,"about the differences in perspective in arelationship :

The way the sun goes downthe way he sees itas a copper serving trayshe as a redhotcircular saw thatat the far end spins downinto the water, hissing.

And poems by the newest of the con-tributors, Ellen Warmond. Concernedabout poetic language, she says:

Contemporary names for contemporaryobjects don't make poetry any more

modern . . .but to write a well-worn word likesilverfor instance in a waythat makes you tastethe well-worn silver in your fillings.

To choose a poem that calls attention toword choice in an edition of translationsis a gamble, but one that pays off here.Even more chancy and still successful isa second actually entitled "Untranslat-able," which deals with the inability tofind true words to express some of ourdeepest feelings, "I can repeat / myselfagain : / . . . / love dearest you you / . . ./ but the best cannot be translated." Itwould seem that at least some of the besthave been translated here.

Six poets are represented in Origins.Either at present or in the recent past,all have been affiliated with the Univer-sity of Western Ontario. There is littleother point of connection evident in theirpoetry. As in With Other Words, equalspace is not allotted to each writer. Infact, nearly half the space is devoted totwo of the six, and in the case of Mari-anne Micros this is richly deserved. Theselection of her writing consists of onelong sequence about her origins in timeand place, the most obvious associationwith the title of the collection that isapparent. Micros writes of her childhoodand adolescence in Cuba, New York, lo-cating herself first as a dot on the map.She writes, reflecting in language thethought patterns of the age recalled, ofevents in her youth, real or imagined —the soothing cold from her father's ice-cream factory on a hot day, the hall doorthat hid terrors for a youngster, a woodenbridge, link to a special girl friend andspot for a rendezvous with a first boyfriend, and the trains in and out. Shealso recalls how, returning from college,she found the place and people changed.Summing up, as a Margaret Laurencecharacter might, Micros says:

The town shuts me outbecause I dared to climb out,but you won't forget me,it whispers,you will always want me,my ice cream,my creek, my bridge,(my hills,my train whistles . . .

The form that is most often repeatedby the other poets in this collection isthe elegy: to a dead brother, to the stu-dents killed at Kent State University in1970, to a past acquaintance, to a child.This last is a series by John Tyndall,"Red Sidewalks," which avoids beingsentimental by concentrating on memo-ries of the child alive with other children,

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and their petty struggles and quick exu berances when at play "on the sidewalk."Steve Higgins also deserves mention forthe oriental simplicity and cleanness ofhis poems which capture single images oremotions :

On a wet morningbirds circle high overheadwinging through my thoughts.So soft, the moist airagainst my cheek; under misttrees loom green and pale.

Gods and Other Mortals is a veryeclectic book with evidence of the pres ent novice as well as the future adept.Divided into four sections, the book isnot consistently successful. The first sec tion is a series of poems generally cen tred on concrete scenes, like a railwaytrestle bridge, or working settings, likean office, factory, or gas station. HelenH umphreys has a habit of overdoingpoetic devices and sometimes mixes hermetaphors: "I crawl along the land'sfurrowed brow. / The hills beside me aplatoon of spoons / sleeping on theirstomachs." The best poetry in this sec tion is a series of five short poems, titled"Scar Stories." These are more direct,and the shock value of some is well han dled. The second section consists of fivepoems for voices, reminiscent of DorothyLivesay's formal concerns. H umphreyshas a keen ear for dialogue, which iswell focused in "T h e D inner." H ere con versation is telescoped, and inane com ments blend into larger questions like themeaning of life and the purpose of thefuture. There is even a hint of humour:

Of course I have patience.Who doesn't? I t 's easyto be patient when there'snothing else you can be.Anger. I've tried it.One gets tired being angry.One gets patient when tired.Happy I've been; onceor twice. Content?Never.

One criticism is that H umphreys seemsto have read T . S. Eliot too recently andtoo closely: "Evening has waddled /breathless across / the table, / leaving apath / stamped with goodbyes." Andagain:

I have polished my lifetimefor this. . . .

I haverehearsed defection on subwaysin the morning, among elbowsand an air thick with thestink of business.

The third section seems to consist ofpoems that did not fit into any otherpart, while the fourth section is com posed of poems with classical subjects.At first I had misgivings about these lastpoems, but H umphreys manages to bringthe best of her abilities at capturingvoices to her lines, and they provide astrong finish for her collection. My fa vourites are a dialogue between Epime theus and Prometheus, a moving poemby Thetis addressed to her dead sonAchilles, and a poem which captures theagony of being Cassandra, foreteller ofthe future, doomed to be believed bynone.

"After," they said,"it will be as before."But she knew,Cassandra knew,that death was thefoundation of every world.That man wouldonly ever livebeak against shell.

Now I turn this review over to myeight year old daughter, Sarah, whoagreed to read and comment upon thebook of children's poetry by Lola Sneyd.I must just interject that her enjoymentof the book is coloured by the fact thatalthough she has spent the last two yearsin Vancouver, she still has fond memo ries of her previous four years in To ronto. Therefore, the many Torontoplaces on which this poetry is based are

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old, familiar friends to her (the CNTower, Casa Loma, High Park, etc.). Ifthis was not so, I hazard the guess thatthe book would not be so appealing. TheConcrete Giraffe is a very centrally lo cated book. The laughter I heard, how ever, while Sarah was carrying out hertask, was very real indeed.

Sarah's categories are more direct andless inhibited than some found on thepages of this journal. She affixed stickyyellow tags to each poem with such la bels as "silly," "funny," "good," "dumb,"and even one "sick" (this for a poemabout slugs). Her only "bad" wasawarded to the title poem, whose formreflects the CN Tower. It seems thatSarah has not yet received a taste forconcrete poetry. Questioned about this,she agreed that the shape was clever, butstuck to her opinion that the words didnot work.

Sarah really liked the humour in thepoems and the illustrations. A good manyof the ones she wanted mentioned had ayellow sticker seal of approval saying"funny." Sneyd capitalizes on the pleas ure children take in language and thenatural world:

The butterfly holds no butter,The sea shell holds no sea,But nature's greatest miracle is:An acorn holds a tree!

She also knows that children like tolaugh at themselves:

I 'd change the worldIf I could be partedFrom my toughest jobG etting me started!

Sarah particularly liked a short poemcalled "Main Switch":

Computer gadgetsMake my world perk,But I 'm still neededTo make them all work!

This last one emphasizes that childrenfind enjoyable what is familiar to them.

For computer adept Sarah, this is a spe cial poem, as are the ones that remindher of Toronto and her times there.Those with stars, signifying worthy ofmention, included a poem about themagic of going on school outings andlisting many of Toronto's special sights,a poem describing the Toronto City Hall("The Mushroom in the Clam"), an other describing Casa Loma, and onetelling of the fun of subway rides. Therhythm of "Eaton Centre" caught Sar ah's fancy:

1 Below 2 Below3 Below StopI press the buttonAnd zoom to the top

And the magic of the Ontario ScienceCentre is also captured:

No matter where I wanderI touch and hear and seeAnd best of all there's no one yelling"D on't touch, K id!" at me.

The final, serious poem received a doublestar award. "Portrait of Toronto" sumsup the multiple appeals of the city.

The balance of the familiar and thefunny is also reflected in Sarah's choicesof her favourite illustrations, done byDoug Sneyd. She particularly liked theones which were recognizably Toronto:the skyline with a prominent CN Tower,the Science Centre, and the interior ofthe Eaton Centre with soaring CanadaGeese. Also starred was a humorous pic ture of "Grampa," which goes along witha poem about Grampa's wonderful mem ories of "when I was a lad." Both Sneydsseem to know well what appeals to chil dren, but I would like them next totackle a book that would have more ap peal coast to coast.

ANN MU N TON / SARAH MU N TON

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POUVOIR DES MOTSJEAN JONASSAINT, Le pouvoir des mots, les

maux du pouvoir: Des romanciers haïtiensde l'exil. Presses de l'Univ. de Montréal,$22.00.

When the axe came into the forest, the treessaid the handle is one of us.

— Turkish proverb

JEAN JONASSAINT'S Le pouvoir des mots,les maux du pouvoir compiles shortsamples of works by Haitian authors liv-ing outside Haiti, some living in politicalexile. Also, Jonaissaint's investigative la-bour consists of working out, in extensiveinterviews with all the featured novelists,a unified theoretical approach for anunderstanding of novelists with umbilicalmemories connecting them to their origi-nal site of inspiration: Haiti. This is thegeo-literary political construction of thebook.

The most compelling writers are thosewhose works and interviews contain thegreatest degree of narrative complexityand methodological and linguistic con-flict. Conflict is the event which pro-duces exile, and exile is what providesthe detachment needed to lick woundsand/or to establish a method of survivingthe hostility of the receiving empires:France, Canada, and the U.S.A. Exile, tosome authors, has become an opportunityfor reflection and archival research in thelibraries of the West. Indeed withoutexile, and without the massive archivesin the colonial world, some writers claimthat they would not have become au-thors.

The interview with Gérard Etienneproves without doubt to be the mostfruitful regarding this understanding anddisjuncture between the subject imperial-ized (the authors) and the colonizinghost country, Canada in this case. Can-ada, it is appropriate to note, has beendogmatically silent on the Haitian gov-ernment's torture of political prisoners,

and, moreover, through CIDA (Cana-dian International Development Agency)has been an important contributor tosome economic ravaging of Haiti. GérardEtienne's Un Ambassadeur macoute àMontréal (1979) could well be consid-ered a significant indictment/allegoriza-tion of the Haitian body politic in Can-ada. Etienne pinpoints the problematicof oppositional writing: "Je voulaisFAIRE COMME, comme un Luc . Inno cent, par exemple, dénoncer avec la poé-sie l'injustice sociale, l'exploitation, l'op-pression de peuple. . . ." And, "Maisderrière chaque oeuvre littéraire il y aun projet."

This is clearly very different fromRené Despestre: "L'écrivain est un peule croniqueur des passions de son temps.On ne peut par faire une littérature seu-lement d'idées mais de passions, de con-flits, de contradictions." The apparenttactic in the interview with GérardEtienne is to reason out the particularpostulates in the game plan of being astranger in the home of the master, sing-ing in the master's language, about themaster's colonial adventures. Jonassaintquestions the use of languages: whyCreole, French colonial/proper or Frenchconjugated in such a way as to pro-nounce class linkages, class betrayals.Also an attempt is made to trace theindividual histories of the authors in re-lation to their particular use of past land-mark Haitian writers, oral narrative tra-ditions, and the overriding demarcationsof politics to literature.

Some of the other interviews straydangerously into the arena of dfscoursefor discourse's sake. For example, theconversation with Jean Métellus does notin any particular way deepen our under-standing of mimic men and radicals flunginto the post-colonial world. But the fun-damental raw material of the questionscan be illustrated by the following re-current examples :

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ι. Ton publique, c'est le publique haïtien,celui du dehors ou de dedans?

2. Vous dites vous privilégiez l'outil fran-çais. En privilégiant outil français, est-ce que vous ne privilégiez pas aussi unpublique qui serait français?

3. Vous vous êtes donc nourris à la littéra-ture orale haïtienne?

And finally the question of residual cul-tural belonging to two world views: "etpour vous, c'est important une 'place'dans la littérature française ou haïtienne ?Du mois, vous espérez la reconnaissancede pairs?" These questions, totally rele-vant though they may be to an under-standing of the relationship of literaryproduction to exile literature as at-tached/detached cultural objects, do lit-tle to advance a more serious stating ofwhy these authors actually left Haiti orwere forced to flee.

It goes without saying that a book de-voted to literature can not and ought notto contain just political and economicexplanations, but that a book about theliterary creed of exile might have frameda comprehension of Canada's role in thecolonization of Haiti. Le pouvoir desmots in fact pushes away from that im-portant kind of framework when it, inconclusion, uses a theory and grounds ofknowing the exile through the mimic-man objectivist grid of structuralism.And this process of simply measuring upa literary project illustrates the limits ofJonassaint's effort: everything in thebeginning, in the interviews, in the stageddebates, seems engaged, political, andinvestigative. But all that changes whenwe learn that those analytical and oftendramatic skills were used, finally, to cre-ate a topology of exile without the requi-site political balancing. With Jonassaint'sliterature we are not engaged in an activ-ist reading of the work of Haitian ex-iles but a statistical-critical constructionwhich seeks, in the end (in his aprés-propos), to manufacture an interpreta-

tion in perfect alignment with bourgeoiscritical traditions of the occident.

JULIAN SAMUEL

GROWN-UP CHILDRENSARAH ELLIS, The Baby Project. Douglas &

Mclntyre/Groundwood, $6.95.BILL FREEMAN, Danger on the Tracks. James

Lorimer, $12.95.WELWYN WILTON KATZ, Sun God, Moon

Witch. Douglas & Mclntyre/Groundwood,$7-95-

How DOES ONE review recent children'sbooks for a journal devoted to seriousadult literature? I know of only one way:to suspend any distinction between theway one reads "children's literature" and"literature." Bill Freeman's story of twochildren who become involved in a con-flict between a stagecoach company andthe Great Western Railway Companythus requires little discussion, not becauseit is written for classroom use but ratherbecause Freeman writes notably betterabout trains and horses than he doesabout characters, and draws repeatedlyon clichés for narrative and dialogue:twice there is a "smoking gun," manytimes "sweat on the brow," "watched likea hawk," and "brute strength" — the lat-ter always used to describe the railwaylabourers (suggesting that they arebrutes?).

Reading the first few pages of TheBaby Project just after finishing Dangeron the Tracks, I was struck by SarahEllis's attention to language, her wit, andher imaginative portrayal of charactersin what may seem a story with a mun-dane subject: the unexpected pregnancyof the mother in an already establishedfamily with three more or less grown-upchildren. (The title refers to a schoolproject undertaken by the protagonistand a friend when they learn of the preg-nancy.) Writing from the viewpoint of

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the youngest of the Robertson family,eleven-year-old Jessica, allows Ellis toavoid idealizing the "advanced" values ofthis family, in which the mother is anengineer and the father primarily ahousehusband. And Jessica feels that hermother has a tendency to speak "in capi-tal letters," and to depend upon articlessuch as "Fostering self-confidence in yourchildren" instead of relying on her ownexperience.

It is in connection with her noticingthis article lying open in the bathroomthat Jennifer's thoughts take a formwhich foreshadows the novel's crisis:

[Her mother] was an engineer and knew allabout math and computers. She knew allabout everything.

Suddenly Jessica felt tired. She didn'twant to be a kid anymore. She wanted tobe a grown-up right away. Grown-ups justgot to be what they were — jokey or seri-ous or obnoxious or weird. But kids had tobe what someone expected. It was likebeing a piece of play-dough.

Although Ellis does not make the pointdirectly, one of the things Jennifer learnsthrough the crib-death of the new baby,Lucie, is that adults neither "know ev-erything," nor do they, in contrast tochildren, have complete control overtheir own lives. Her mother becomes de-pressed and disoriented, while Jessicaand her brother Simon develop a newcloseness and strength in their sharedsadness.

Simon's and Jessica's cycling in therain until 5 :32 A.M. feels like the genuinereaction of children trying to deal withwhat seems to them an impossible situa-tion. Although the book's conclusionbrings some hope in the mother's amuse-ment at her children's night adventure,we get no sense that everything is backto normal. The instances of inventivehumour — not least in the character ofCharlene, who lives downstairs, composeshilarious country-and-western lyrics, andhas her head shaved because she wants

to see what it will look like — and un-sentimental poignancy in this novel aremore numerous than I have space to dis-cuss. I have no reservation about sayingthat whether intended for children ornot, it is literature of great originality.

Resembling some of the fantasies ofAlan Garner (in mirroring actual humanrelationships in legendary events whichrecur in the present) and of SusanCooper (in presenting a universe inwhich the forces of good and evil arebalanced evenly, and embodied in super-natural figures or in humans with specialpowers), Welwyn Katz's Sun God, MoonWitch does not match those authors'novels in quality of narrative or struc-ture. I do not find the Manichean ap-proach to fantasy very rewarding (evenwhen done by such a talented writer asCooper), but the greatest problem withKatz's book is that with all its trappingsof myth and legend it lacks mystery.The uncanny — and implicitly sexual —power of the villain, Mr. Belman, isspelled out by chapter 3, so that thereader can easily deduce in succeedingchapters that he is the evil one (the "Sungod") of the two opposing forces.

By chapter 5, the "Moon witch" makesher appearance to Thorny, the child pro-tagonist, telling her that she is destinedby her name (Hawthorn) to save theworld from chaos by saving the stonecircle that Mr. Belman in his guise as adeveloper has been given permission todestroy. Although there is some interest-ing material about theories as to the orig-inal purpose of stone circles in Europe,the story itself is not, as the blurb has it,a "riveting tale of good and evil," butrather one of arbitrarily opposed forcesthat have little relation to the earthly ex-periences of the human characters, eventhough the author creates such connec-tions — Mr. Belman's resemblance toThorny's father is made clear, but tooearly and too mechanically. The problem

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is partly one of structure and emphasis:what could be effective as truly mysteri-ous forces becomes banal when presentedso baldly, and sometimes in language thatis supposed to be dignified but is actuallyflat and awkward — as when the Moonwitch tells Thorny, "Thou art hawthornin more than name. Like it, thou arestrongest when thou strugglest."

I don't think it is the result of anygenre bias on my part to say that of thesethree novels, the domestic and "realistic"one turns out to be more imaginative,more gripping, and more skilfully writtenthan either the historical or fantastic.

MICHAEL STEIG

LOCATIONS& DISLOCATIONSEDNA ALFORD, The Garden of Eloise Loon.

Oolichan, $9.95.JANETTE TURNER HOSPITAL, Dislocations. Mc-

Clelland and Stewart, $12.95.

BOTH OF THESE BOOKS deal with disloca-tion. Janette Turner Hospital locates herstories in a variety of settings, includingher native Australia, India, New YorkCity, and central Canada. Some of hercharacters face dislocation because asnew immigrants they confront the old;other characters confront the new andunfamiliar. Edna Alford's fiction is lesswidely known than Hospital's, but clearlydeserves a wider audience. Set mostly inSaskatchewan or Alberta, her storiesevoke a strong sense of place as her char-acters try to deal with growing up, grow-ing old, or going mad. Most of the im-petus in both sets of stories comes fromwhat one of Hospital's narrators calls"disequilibrium" or what another refersto as a "lack of adaptability."

Hospital sets her opening story,"Happy Diwali," at a Hindu festival ineastern Ontario, which has attracted all

the local emigrants from India — Gujar-tis, Tamils, and Sikhs — including thedaughter of an Indian Parsee and aGoan Catholic who has a liaison with anemigrée Muslim prince (an Indian re-mittance man to whom nearly all stilldefer). She finally decides that "Onlyexile and isolation unite us." In a similarway, most of her characters are both ex-iled and isolated, even in their nativeland. Dislocation usually occurs as smugand successful people encounter unfa-miliar circumstances. A formerly beauti-ful young woman has to deal with severeburn scars; a comfortable young motherhas to deal with the sudden death of herbest friend, a self-absorbed mathemati-cian overhears others pitying him, or asuccessful businessman confronts theemptiness of his own success and that ofhis family traditions.

Different characters deal with theirdislocations differently: some try escapeor evasion; some discover that their ha-bitual evasions no longer serve; andsome are granted a broader, even spiri-tual, acceptance. The mathematiciantakes solace in the elegance of abstractform in art, and a printmaker evades herloneliness by trying to capture in her artthe dying stages of a Christmas plant. Agrief-counsellor finds that she cannotmaintain intimate relationships while sheassures the dying that death is not sohard, and a repressed teacher finds thatit is she who must learn from one of herworking-class students.

A more positive reaction occurs for theyoung mother whose best friend has beenkilled by a drunk driver. Her anger turnsto a muted but optimistic acceptance bya consoling dream. Or a young Indianengineer is able to put aside his dreamof Western technological success as hedecides to keep his word to a dying youngAmerican friend who has embraced In-dian spirituality. And a disillusionedbusinessman learns that he cannot escape

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his human responsibilities by escapinginto languageless, signless nature.

The locations (as well as the disloca-tions) that occur in Alford's stories arelargely internal, though they find an out-ward, mythic form in Trestle, Saskatche-wan, a town to which the CNR no longerruns. Even the rails have been torn up,as the retired railroad worker of the finalstory, "Lineman," admits, but that doesnot keep him from consulting his retire-ment watch to see that the train will beon time. He muses: "I seen it on TV. Iseen it on the news. There's no placethat's not screwed up somehow as far asI can see. The whole thing's crazy as abag of hammers."

Madness is not far from the centre ofmost of Alford's stories. In her title story,"The Garden of Eloise Loon," an ex-prostitute, abandoned on a desperatelypoor reserve without food by her batter-ing common-law husband, is driven tothe brink of madness by near-starvationand the pains of childbirth; an orderlyinitiates a young woman into sex in amental hospital where she has foundsummer work; a social worker fantasizesthat she is being followed by one of herpatients and spends the whole day on theCalgary buses trying to escape; a doctorslips into madness and suicide because itis so absurd to try to heal patients in aworld bent on its own destruction.

In one of the most powerful stories, aprofessor — perhaps disoriented by thefirst effects of radiation poisoning afterthe madness of a nuclear exchange —experiences a wonderfully surrealistic se-ries of images and events as she strives toget back to her family home in Trestle,knowing that it will provide no refuge.The prospect of this final act of humaninsanity breaks through even the conven-tions of fiction as one character refusesthe assigned role and addresses the readerdirectly.

Alford avoids romanticizing the small-

town values of Trestle, but some of hercharacters try. Trestle does not representa lost paradise, and its native people seemfar from noble, like the deserting Indianhusband on the reserve near Trestle wholeaves his white common-law wife preg-nant and without food or money. Andthe nature around her and around thatof her neighbour Eloise Loon is beingdevoured for the second summer in arow by a plague of tent-caterpillars. Evenso, Eloise Loon is somehow able to laughand coax a few scrawny chickens into sur-vival. Or a widow returns to the familyfarm in Trestle with a metal detector tofind a lost silver brooch that had be-longed to her Norwegian mother. All thatshe can find, though, are iron axe-heads,files, or machine parts that her husbandhad made when there was still work fora blacksmith in Trestle.

Lest all this sound like only anotherordeal of prairie pessimism, though, aconcern for the failed or the misguidedsifts through Alford's prose, sometimesrevealing itself in broad humour. In onestory, a man at a funeral tries to returnhis brother-in-law's severed fingers to thecasket without upsetting the widow. Inanother, a family ne'er-do-well recountsa story that is funny despite its macabreconsequences, a story which leaves hisniece puzzled about how truth relates toart. Hospital's humour is somewhat morebrittle, depending more on irony, thoughthe two stories set in India reveal awarmer sense of humour and compas-sion. One of her best stories, "Moise,"achieves its power and its humour fromthe language and point of view of a blackwoman, a widow who has for yearsscrubbed the floors of faculty apartmentsnear Columbia University. But it is thesurviving faculty widows who are dis-located as black culture and its under-class values begin to dominate a locationthat has been one of privilege and gen-tility. A frightened widow of an English

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professor wants Moise to get her a pistolfor protection — or for suicide. The hu-mour comes largely from the contrastinglanguages of the black underclass whodeal with immediate realities and thefussy, allusive idiom of the English pro-fessor's widow. It is almost as if Hospitalis unsure of the efficacy of her own allu-sion-rich prose. Still, as Moise asks rue-fully at the end, "And guess who goingto have to clean up?"

The prominence of widows in bothbooks reveals how often women are leftto clean up the mess. The final story ofHospital's book has the widow of a "self-absorbed pedant" leaving Montreal on afreighter to go around the world, againstthe advice of her daughters. Alford ismore openly political and feminist. Thewidow who returns with the metal detec-tor to Trestle wears a T-shirt emblazonedwith "Foxy Grandma," while her niecewears one whose message reads, "ThePlace for a Woman is in the House ofCommons." And when the actor refusesher character in the story of the nuclearwar, she observes: "I suspect that it willemerge that most women have had it upto here with the quiet fatalistic weepingover the systematic mutilation of humanbeings, their literal handiwork thus far."

PETER A. TAYLOR

POUR LA JEUNESSERAYMOND PLANTE, Le Dernier des raisins.

Québec/Amérique, n.p.BERNADETTE RENAUD, Bach et Bottine. Qué-

bec/Amérique, n.p.GABRiELLE ROY, L'Espagnole et la Pékinoise.

Boréal Jeunesse, n.p.

L A LITTÉRATURE QUÉBÉCOISE pour lajeunesse, malgré son envergure et sessuccès, est considérée par certains cri-tiques au parler ex cathedra comme dela sous-littérature simpliste et enfantine(au sens péjoratif du mot). Pourtant

ceux qui croient que les romans pour lajeunesse ne sont pas de "vrais livres"oublient qu'une telle forme d'écrituren'est pas facile. On n'écrit pas un romanpour la jeunesse sur le coin de la tabletandis que la soupe mijote. Comme danstoute autre forme d'écriture, il y a lesinévitables tâtonnements, ratures et re-collages, mail il y a en plus la recherched'un code stylistique précis afin que l'é-criture soit de qualité tout en ayant l'aird'un jeu d'enfant. Ce travail porte fruitcar depuis quelques années la littératurequébécoise pour la jeunesse fait des bondsprodigieux et prend de l'ampleur. Laqualité de la production s'est grande-ment améliorée et la quantité de conteset de romans a considérablement aug-menté. Par ailleurs, on reconnaît de plusen plus que la littérature québécoise pourla jeunesse est un genre littéraire par-ticulier, "respectable" (avec prix litté-raires, revues spécialisées, cours universi-taires, thèses) et qu'il nécessite des habi-lités particulières comparables aux autresformes d'écriture. La littérature pour lajeunesse crée un univers qui a prise surl'imagination et elle existera tant qu'il yaura des enfants (et des adultes) quiveulent se faire conter une histoire. Troiscourts récits parus récemment ont capténotre intérêt car ils donnent un échantil-lon du talent des auteurs et de la poly-valence du genre.

Barrés a écrit dans un de ses meilleursromans: "II est des lieux ou souffle l'es-prit." Bien que nous ayons des doutes ausujet de l'esprit qui souffle sur les cégepset les polyvalentes, ces lieux ont néan-moins inspiré maints auteurs tels Jean-Eudes Rioux, Où est passé MonsieurMurphy? (1983), et François Gravel, LaNote de passage (1985). A son tour,Raymond Plante situe son roman LeDernier des raisins dans le petit monded'une polyvalente québécoise. En re-vanche, l'auteur ne s'intéresse guère ausort des professeurs surchargés de travail

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ni aux "voyages" qu'entraîne la consom-mation de champignons hallucinogènespar des professeurs et leurs élèves(comme c'est le cas dans les romans sus-mentionnés) , mais aux amours quichot-tiques d'un étudiant de Secondaire V.Dans son onzième roman, RaymondPlante pose la question suivante: com-ment un "intellectuel-à-lunettes," un"raisin," peut-il séduire une jeune filleathlétique et aguichante, la "blonde"d'un irrésistible don Juan et championd'à peu près tout ce qui existe dans lapolyvalente?

En ce premier jour d'école, FrançoisGougeon juché sur une moto qui file àtoute allure avale une mouche et devientamoureux d'Anik Vincent. Cause à effetou coq-à-Fâne? Quoi qu'il en soit, depuisce jour, François a le coeur en ascenseur.

Tout d'un coup, j'avais le coeur dans lesgenoux . . . comme s'il avait pris l'ascenseurpour me laisser sans voix, le regard glau-que, l'esprit comme des mains qui s'achar-nent à saisir un savon de bande dessinée.

Pourtant, François connaît Anik depuistoujours, mais elle a tellement changé,tellement grandi au cours de l'été. Et lui,c'est l'amour qui le change, c'est l'amourqui le grandit et lui fait imaginer tous lesmoyens pour séduire cette fille qui ne leregarde pas. Et c'est l'humour, "l'humourdans la honte," qui l'empêche de se dé-courager.

François réussira pourtant, à force depatience et de bons sentiments. Il con-querra Anik, bien sûr, mais ce faisant, ildémontrera que les qualités d'esprit et decoeur valent mieux que la compétencesportive et la voiture de son rival. En cetâge de Rambo, Le Dernier des raisins estune oeuvre rafraîchissante. Un romantout simple, rempli d'humour et d'opti-misme, qui démontre que même le der-nier des raisins peut devenir un héros.

Qui ne connaît pas Bach et Bottine,ce film d'André Melançon qui a connutant de succès? Bernadette Renaud, la

scénariste du film, est avant tout une ro-mancière; elle a tiré de son scénario unroman passionnant, la quintessence de cefilm merveilleux. Jean-Claude est unvieux garçon passionné de musique clas-sique. Quelques jours avant Noël, onsonne à sa porte. C'est une vague petitecousine, Fanny, qui demande l'hospita-lité. L'orpheline n'a plus personne pours'occuper d'elle. Elle apporte avec elle samouffette Bottine à laquelle s'ajouteratoute une ménagerie. Fanny et Jean-Claude doivent s'apprivoiser, "créer desliens" comme disait le petit prince deSaint-Exupéry, mais il est plus difficiled'apprivoiser un oncle mélomane qu'unrenard. Jaloux de ses habitudes, Jean-Claude ne songe qu'à recaser l'enfant ail-leurs. Mais avec Fanny, c'est aussi latendresse qui fait irruption dans sa vieet l'espoir d'une famille recréée.

Ce roman plein d'humour et de bonssentiments, légèrement mélodramatique,à la fois amuse et interpelle le lecteur.Il rappelle des choses simples mais tropsouvent oubliées: le besoin de créer desliens, la patience nécessaire pour appri-voiser l'autre et le connaître. En cemonde d'ulcéreux solitaires, Jean-Claudedécouvre que c'est le temps qu'il a"perdu" pour Fanny qui la rend si im-portante :

Ça fait drôle à Jean-Claude de penser quece sera son tour de l'accueillir dans sa mai-son. De penser aussi que, pour compenserla famille qu'il n'a jamais eue, il suffisaitd'en rassembler une, aujourd'hui [. . .] aufond de son coeur, il est bien content queFanny ait bousculé sa vie.

L'Espagnole et la Pékinoise de mêmeque Ma vache Bossie (1976) et Courte-Queue (1979) sont de brefs récrits ani-maliers publiés séparément et illustrésafin de plaire à de jeunes lecteurs. Sousla plume de l'auteur, Gabrielle Roy, nousretrouvons la qualité franciscaine de l'a-mour des animaux, de la nature et de lavie; nous retrouvons cette tonalité par-

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ticulière déjà entrevue dans Cet été quichantait (1972).

L'Espagnole et la Pékinoise s'enten-dent comme . . . chien et chat. Coups degriffes, morsures, jamais deux animauxvivant dans la même maison ne se sonttant détestés, jusqu'au jour où trois cha-tons naissants viennent bouleverser l'or-dre des choses. Au début, les sentimentsde la Pékinoise sont bien mélangés maisdans l'univers familier de Gabrielle Roy,il est rare que l'amour ne réponde pas àl'amour. Dès lors, un nouveau pacte liel'Espagnole et la Pékinoise, un pacted'amour ou mère et seconde mère élèventles "enfants."

Nous redécouvrons dans ce récit cettegrande tendresse de l'auteur devant lesplus simples et les plus humbles. Nousvoyons s'affirmer son besoin de composerun univers serein, un monde accordé oùla haine tend a disparaître pour faireplace à l'échange et à la réconciliation, etce, grâce à l'amour maternel et à l'in-nocence désarmante de l'enfant:

Ce sont les enfants qui ont fait la paix. Unjour peut-être tous les enfants du monde sedonneront la main. Et il n'y aura plusjamais de chicane.

Si nous cherchions à désigner L'Espa-gnole et la Pékinoise par un mot, ce se-rait par un mot empreint de sérénité,celui de réconciliation. Réconciliationavec l'enfance, avec la mère, avec la fa-mille et avec soi-même; instauration d'ununivers édénique où l'homme dialogueavec les animaux et retrouve le tempsperdu de l'innocence. Dans ce dernierconte, Gabrielle Roy déploie une richesensibilité et montre une foi inébranlableen l'homme et en son avenir.

Le Dernier des raisins, Bach et Bottine,L'Espagnole et la Pékinoise, trois courtsrécits bien écrits. De beaux livres de qua-lité. Des textes où on refuse de nivelerpar le bas pour parler aux enfants. Destextes amusants et intelligents. Ce sontaussi trois récrits rassurants en ce sens

que s'il y avait une morale, elle se résu-merait à ceci: tous peuvent réussir àaimer, à être aimé et à créer des liens.

Ces récits donnent à l'enfant le moyende projeter sur le plan de l'imaginaireses besoins les plus constants, les plus te-naces, mais aussi les plus menacés, ceuxde l'amour, de la sécurité et du bienvivre. Son angoisse, incarnée dans despersonnages sympathiques, transmuée enaction dont l'issue est favorable, n'est plussi intimement la sienne; elle se dilue etse tempère dans les événements repré-sentés. L'adulte, à son tour, découvriral'humour, la fraîcheur, la simplicité dulangage, la force sonore des textes, en unmot: la qualité de ces récits qui, à pre-mière vue, ne l'intéressaient peut-êtrepas. Et dès lors il sera subjugué par lalittérature québécoise pour la jeunesse.

ROBERT VIAU

** FRANK R. SCOTT, A New Endeavour:Selected Political Essays, Letters, and Ad-dresses, ed. Michiel Horn. Univ. of TorontoPress, $12.95. F° r o u r studies of a writer ashistorically and intrinsically important as F. R.Scott, it is perhaps necessary that we shouldhave a good range of his nonpoetic as wellas poetic works available. But it is as well toremember that good poetry does not alwaysmean good prose, and F. R. Scott's politicalfragments, contained in A New Endeavour,really belong in the same areas of achievementas the more ephemerally polemical of hispoems. They are the occasional writings of along political avocation, and what they tellus most clearly is that Scott was a good soldierfor socialism. But the kind of socialism hesupported was of a rather unimaginative cen-tralist variety, Fabian in inspiration, to whichhe added no fresh theoretical insights, sincehis imaginative life found expression only inhis poetry. Northrop Frye has remarked hownear Scott's radicalism was to Toryism, andenough political rigidities emerge in the briefessays and letters included here to remind oneof that unexpected impulse of authoritarian-ism that led the civil libertarian Scott into hisinconsistent support of Trudeau's invocationof the War Measures Act in 1970. G.w.

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WEAVERS' HALLSTH ERE HAVE ALWAYS been strong nar rative connections between the humanworld and the other world. Greek my thology is full of stories attesting to thesexual relations between their gods andhuman beings. In many pagan culturesthe divine potency of the other world hasbeen drawn into ours through rulerswhose right living and symbolic couplingensured the fertility of the land and thesociety. In some cultures, the gods havebeen thought to need occasional humanhelp in solving their problems. Both Cel tic Ireland and Wales offer tales of ahero who strikes a bargain to fight forsupernatural beings in their world. Inmodern times, with the incorporation ofmythic and heroic patterns and charac ters into high fantasy fiction, the insightsof modern psychology allow for a morereciprocal relation between the twoworlds. The other world still needs mor tal aid, but the characters who cross intoit often find there the answers to theirown psychological problems. Such char acters are usually at an impasse in ourworld: adolescents who feel they do notbelong (as in O. R. Melling's The Sing ing Stone) or young adults who haveguilt or an unused talent (as in the firsttwo novels in Guy Gavriel Kay's trilogy,of which The Darkest Road is the con cluding volume ). Such fantasy fictioncan offer an appealing pattern of trialsand tests met with success in the otherworld, followed by change and growth onreturning to ours.

A parallel therapeutic pattern in fairytales has in recent years been valued byfollowers of both Freud and Jung. Psy choanalysis has also studied myths and

legends. Jungian investigators have foundthere not just models of emotional pa thology but of spiritual transformation.Since many serious fantasy writers areaiming to create a world more meaning ful than our everyday secular society, itis not surprising that some of these writ ers are influenced by Jung's emphasis onthe importance of an archetypal realm, apsychic model that emphasizes uncon scious mythic figures functioning withineach individual.

Since medieval times, authors and thereading public have shown a continuinginterest in the Arthurian cycle and itsCeltic roots : a world of druids and gods,of high kings and magicians, of knightsand damsels, of fairies and magic objects.With the modern evolution of romanceinto fantasy, the novel has become thefavourite vehicle for either retelling thetales, or embellishing them as heroic ro mance, or simply using their ambiance todevelop new fantasies. In a survey cover ing the last hundred years, The Returnfrom Avalon: A Study of the ArthurianLegend in Modern Fiction ( 1985 ), Ray mond Thompson notes that recentlythere has been a noticeable growth inArthurian fantasy fiction — at least threebooks a year have appeared for the lastten years. In a related area not coveredby his study, the present decade has seenthe addition of another two titles a yearof fantasy or science fiction dealing withIreland in Celtic times. Kay's three vol umes are in addition to Thompson'scount, while two Celtic books by Mellingare included in mine. In my discussionof The Darkest Road (1986) and TheSinging Stone (ig86) I shall try to pro vide some indication not only of the rich ness that myth based tales make availableto modern writers, but also of some ofthe broader narrative psychological andphilosophical issues that fantasies oftenraise.

Fantasy novelists whose literary

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strength is imagination as invention dobest in creating another world that canabsorb their whole attention and thereader's. But in modern children's litera-ture there is a popular convention, espe-cially in novels with teen-age protago-nists, of beginning and ending the storyin our world. This option has the struc-tural advantage of framing the other-world adventure which is its main focus,and the thematic requirement that thatadventure be made relevant to a prob-lem the protagonist has in our world.When it works, this pattern can producesatisfying fiction, as in the CanadianMarrow of the World, the AustralianPlaying Beattie Bow, or the AmericanSaturday, the Twelfth of October. Butthis option places a strain on the fantasyauthor whose interest or strength doesnot lie in realistic portrayal of our world.

The Singing Stone is Melling's secondchildren's fantasy. Like the first, TheDruid's Tune, it transports its protago-nist into the far past of Ireland, this timeto 2500 B.C., the period when the Celtsprobably invaded that island. Mellingwisely moves her heroine and her readerback there quickly, after only two shortintroductory chapters. The first begins inan unidentified country which is onlylater revealed as the United States.(Since the author is Canadian, I pre-sume this location and even its de-emphasis are gestures to the ethnocentricU.S. market.) The author is obviouslynot interested in the mundanities of ourworld (questions such as how an eight-een-year-old orphan and school dropoutcan teach herself Gaelic or afford to flyto Ireland for a month's holiday). Safelylanded, Kay, the heroine, benefits fromthe author's descriptive ability and famil-iarity with Ireland, as she moves fromDublin to Bray, a nearby summer resort.Her climbing in the Wicklow hills is alsoeffectively rendered, as is her passingthrough a dolmen arch into the Celtic

past. There she meets her companion-to-be, the lost amnesiac, Aherne. The twoyoung women seek out Fin tan (of Celticmyth, labelled a "wise old man"), andhe sets them on their quest to bring to-gether "the four ancient treasures of theTuatha De Danaan" (i.e., of the peopleof the Goddess Danu).

First the two travel to New Grange,where Kay begins to discover her power;thence they are taken by a stag man tothe north of Ireland (in one night; dis-tances are quickly travelled throughoutthe novel, but as the two maps makeclear, Ireland is not a large island). Onan island off the coast they recover thefirst treasure, the spear. They are thencaptured at sea by the Celtic invaders(who, in The Book of Invasions — theauthor's source — are shown replacingthe Tuatha De Danaan). Taken by shipto the Aran Islands off the west coast ofIreland, both heroines fall in love,Aherne with Amergin, the Celtic leader,and Kay with his ally, Cahal, leader ofthe Firbolg (earlier subjected by theTuatha). With Cahal's aid, Kay recoversthe second treasure, the bowl. The third,the sword, is gained by Aherne duringthe games of Tailtiu when she wins therace whose prize is not only the swordbut the queenship. Just before the race,Aherne had recovered her memory, rea-lizing she is Eriu, who would have be-come the rightful queen without anycontest had not the druids intervened:They had foreseen that she would betraythe country and her people to the Celts.Since she has meanwhile pledged herselfto Amergin, leader of the invaders, thisprediction will obviously come true.

The author handles well this perennialfantasy problem of the relation betweenthe destiny of events and the free will ofthe individual. The outlines of a mythicstory necessarily determine the outcomeof a fantasy based on it. In fact, manyfantasies create the problem even when

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they are not based on a known source,by introducing into the other world amyth, prophecy, or oracle which laysdown in advance what the reader canrecognize as the outcome of the mainplot. Although we might expect that thisdevice would spoil the enjoyment of theplot-oriented reader, there are two rea-sons why it does not. First, the oracle isalways ambiguous, the myth vague onspecifics. Second, any reader who beginsa fantasy already knows that a quest herowill be successful. That assurance is oneof the main reasons readers turn to such"escape" reading. At a more philosophiclevel, however, we can appreciate an im-plication of this convention which jus-tifies the genre as more than escapist.

Destiny is a favourite word or conceptin the quest fantasy. In Melling's talethe word appears frequently in the sec-ond half, along with the notion of mean-ingful coincidence. Carl Jung's conceptof synchronicity is in fact ubiquitous infantasies. It suggests a vital connectionbetween outer coincidence and innerneed, a connection that is the centralpremise of fantasy, since the genre insistson the power of mind over matter, theability of thought (wishes, dreams, willpower) to control events. The genre alsorests on the contraiy premise, the in-evitable fulfilment of larger patterns, nothowever as coercive of individual will,but in harmony with individual psychicdevelopment.

Thus Aherne is caught between herlove for Amergin the invader and for thepeople whom she must as queen protect— a conflict that is resolved by her suc-cess in the quest laid on her and Kay atthe beginning of their adventure. Whenshe brings together the four treasures ofthe Tuatha, she will provide the fulfil-ment both of her race's high destiny andof the wish of her own heart to be hap-pily married (to the man who will con-quer her people). Near the end the

visionary Fintan shows Eriu and Kay thefour mythic cities which produced thetreasure and tells them, "This is reality. . . woven on the fabric of space andtime. Here the past, present and futureare one." The treasures of Celtic mythwhich became quest objects in Arthurianlegend (the Grail, the sword of king-ship) are, in this modern fantasy, themeans for the people of the GoddessDanu to enter the archetypal realm oftheir ancestors. After Eriu (through thepower of the fourth treasure, the singingstone) opens up this destiny to her sub-jects, she is tempted to follow them intothe realm but is recalled at the brink tobe wedded to Amergin and becomequeen of Celtic Ireland.

This archetypal solution is true in itsfashion to Celtic myth, which reportsthat the Tuatha De Danaan did forsakethe physical realm for the supernatural.Such a solution may seem more appro-priate to an early medieval documentthan to a modern text (where it seems adeus ex machina or, more accurately,shows gods going into the machine). ButMelling handles it well. Her handling ofthe closure of her novel is adequatethough less impressive (as the return toour world is likely to be in fantasy).Kay's love problem is taken care of in aneat though unoriginal manner (whichreaders of Playing Beattie Bow will rec-ognize ). The explanation of Kay's originseemed forced to me.

In general, even discerning readers de-mand less plausibility and artistry in anovel for children than in one for adults.And, of course, a fantasy novel for eitheraudience invites even more suspension ofdisbelief. By this relative standard, TheSinging Stone stands up well (and earnsa higher rating than Melling's earlierbook). Judged by the slightly more rig-orous standards of fantasy for adults, GuyKay's novel, The Darkest Road, meritseven more praise.

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Despite the author's providing a four-page list of characters and a nine-pagerésumé of the previous two novels in thetrilogy, readers will not want to start TheDarkest Road without having read TheSummer Tree and The Wandering Fire.Not only will a latecomer find difficultymastering the intricate plot and largecast of characters, but the series is toogood not to be savoured in its entirety.In fact, it is excellent (of its kind, whichis the Tolkien type of high or heroic fan-tasy), replete with mortals and mages,dwarfs and giants, gods and demi-gods,and a cataclysmic confrontation betweenthe forces of light and dark. As narrative,The Darkest Road is an exciting tale, fullof suspense and enigma, of deft plotting,and insightful characterization.

The main focus of the series is on fiveyoung Torontonians who are transportedto the world of Fionavar where eachplays a key part in the complex story,discovering not only a previously un-tapped inner potential but also resolving(as suggested earlier) problems thatloomed large for each in our world. Thepsychological orientation of the narrativeis manifested in its use of point of view.Kay shifts among a dozen and a halffocal characters and their often tense,distraught, or confused responses. (Oneof his favourite devices is a character'sslowly dawning realization of an impli-cation that may be temporarily withheldfrom the reader.) While the charactersare not as intensely self-condemning asStephen Donaldson's are, Kay has obvi-ously learned from The Chronicles ofThomas Covenant.

The style varies much less than thepoint of view. Kay manages a few nicecontrasts between twentieth-century Ca-nadian and vatic utterance, but opts fora medium-high style most of the time. Itbecomes pronouncedly romancese in tworare circumstances, when Kay shifts fromthe point of view of an individual char-

acter to the omniscient ("and it came topass"), and with the scenes involvingGuinivere's responses to Lancelot ("Wiltthou who hast been my champion somany times before . . . " ) . Fortunatelysuch pseudo-biblical cadences and noblesentimentality are not common, thoughthe non-fantasy reader should be warnedthat a heightened emotional tone is stan-dard in heroic fantasy.

As the reference to Guinivere andLancelot indicates, Kay is drawing onArthurian material in the construction ofhis other world. But it is less the world ofMalory's Christian romance than themythic pagan world of The Mabinogion.Several of the character names derivefrom this Celtic-Welsh manuscript —Pwyll, Teyrnon, Taliesin — but the char-acters to whom the names are assigneddeviate in nature from their originals.Pwyll, for instance, is the name given toPaul (one of the Toronto five) after hehas suffered death and rebirth on theSummer Tree and been rewarded by in-sights from the two ravens Thought andMemory. His experience, in other words,approximates that of Odin on the WorldTree of Norse myth rather than to anyCeltic parallel.

The problem raised earlier of destinyand individual choice is thoroughly can-vassed in The Darkest Road. The forceof destiny is embodied in a key structur-ing concept for the other world and ourown — "the Weaver at the Loom" whofunctions as the presumed creator of thegods as well as the mortals in the story.The image of threads in the tapestry isfrequently used as a metaphor for a lifeor an event. Becoming aware of thisgrand design, the characters from ourworld begin to question how individualchoice can be meaningful. The answertakes several interesting forms.

Before discovering her other-world ar-chetypal identity as Guinivere, Jenniferis raped by Rakoth the Unraveller (the

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central antagonist, whose evil purpose isto destroy the fabric of the world) ; afterbeing rescued, she determines to have hischild because Rakoth doesn't want it tolive. The child, Darien, matures quicklyand is torn between his evil patrimonyand his good matrimony. At a pointwhere her companion Kim exhorts Jen-nifer to try to influence him towardgood, the mother coolly tells her son heis on his own. Darien, an emotionallyimmature demigod, goes off determinedto join his father. Upbraided by Kim,Jennifer defends her action: "I meanthim to be random, free to choose. . . . Ifwe bind him, or try, he is lost to us!"Her decision turns out to be correct.Darien is left free to fulfil a very highdestiny indeed. (Or, to move away fromthe fantasy language of paradox, Darienbecomes aware of his father's desire fordestruction and total control, and usesthe little free will left him to ensure theconditions which both by logic andthrough a magic spell bring about thedeath of Rakoth.)

The principle Jennifer has enunciatedis seen to be operating in the Wild Hunt,a random thread introduced by theWeaver into his own design. Even Kim,who had argued against Jennifer, comesto accept and act on the principle. Facedwith a situation in which she is intendedto use her ring of power to coerce anelemental force to help in the war againstevil, Kim chooses not to, instead divert-ing the power to another (good) pur-pose. As a result, she loses the power ofthe ring but helps in the final victory ofthe light over the dark. Similarly, Arthurknows he is fated to die in the last battle(since he always has in other incarna-tions) . But in the world of Fionavar,Prince Diarmuid steps into his place inan unfair battle against an unnaturallyaugmented mortal and thus changes thedesign by his wild (random) action.

By no means are all significant actions

random. Just as Kim could have boundthrough magic a force much strongerthan herself, so Pwyll uses the power hehas gained to bind the sea god Liranan(also known in Celtic myth as MananaanMac Lir). Near the end of the book, herecalls the god to send a tide inland witha ship, in order that Arthur may beborne alive to the promised land. Pwyllinvokes Liranan in the name of Mornir,the thunder god with whom he hadachieved atonement on the Summer Tree,and in the name of Dana whose moonhas risen out of phase. "The waters hadreached them now. The world hadchanged, all the laws of the world. Undera full moon that should never have beenriding in the sky, the stony plain . . . layundersea as far inland as the place wherethey stood, east of the battlefield. Andthe silvered waters of Liranan had cov-ered the dead." This estrangement of theby-now-familiar archetypal world is fol-lowed by an overt allusion to the sourceof all archetypes. Arthur, Guinivere, andeven Lancelot are to find rest throughsailing "by the light of the Loom to theWeaver's Halls."

By the end of the novel, it is evidentthat a variety of resolutions will be of-fered the five visitors from our world.Jennifer's chosen destiny as Guinivere wehave just seen. Another of the five haddied earlier to free the land from the gripof Rakoth's prolonged dark winter. Sinceone character elects to remain in Fiona-var, only two finally return to our world.Clearly the author has made good useof the opportunities he gave himself inopting for five protagonists.

In a CBC radio interview in March1987, Kay told Peter Gzowski that hewaited a year and a half after imagininghis other world before he began to createthe plot of his series. It thus developedout of a thorough acquaintance with thesetting and characters; even after thewriting began, Kay claimed he kept open

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possibilities for the plot and characters todevelop, finding it exciting when his sub conscious slipped something in. So therandomness which is important themati cally turns out also to have been a keyto the conception of the narrative. In itsvariety and coherence, its surprises andinevitabilities, The Darkest Road is animpressive fantasy novel.

ELLIOTT GOSE

"A RUM START"

The Redoubled Baptisms ofFrancis Chegwidden Cornish

. . . zv βάπτισµα— Eph. 4:5

ego tibi concedo sceleratos esse haereticos:sed haeretici baptisma Christi dederunt . . .

— Augustine, "I n IoannisEvangelium," Tract. 5, 16.1

TH R OU G H OU T What's Bred in the Bone,Robertson Davies alludes to the riteof baptism. The first child of Jacobine, having been baptized abroadas Francis Chegwidden, presumably byan Anglican chaplain, became ill, and"was baptized for the second time, as aCatholic," by F ather Devlin at Blairlogie,Ontario.2 A few days later, a little coffinwas buried at night in the Catholiccemetery, and "F ather Devlin read theburial service" (58) . Mary Jacobine wasalready pregnant again, and her secondchild, on the very day of birth, was"christened, in the Anglican Church,Francis Chegwidden Cornish" (58).When the second Francis, at the age ofthirteen, became very ill with whoopingcough, "Aunt got into a panic and sentfor F ather Devlin, who murmured and

sprinkled some drops of water on him.Francis was in delirium, and did notunderstand what had happened, butAunt was greatly comforted" (93). De spite the original lack of consciousness,in later years Francis is well aware of hissecond baptism. In 1933 when Saraceniasks, "Are you a Catholic?" Francis re plies, "Well — partly, I suppose" (239).In 1945 he tries to ask his parents about"the Looner," who had in fact lived foranother two decades before "anotherfuneral at night, though there was nopriest this time" (194). When both par ents make evasive answers, and his fatherpretends to "forget how he came to beburied" in the Catholic cemetery, Francisthinks: "You don 't know anything aboutit. You don't know that I 'm a Catholicby strict theological reckoning" (378).

The logic of the book supports F ran cis's idea of "strict theological reckon ing" : Aunt Mary Ben, who declares thatFrancis is "a Catholic forever" (205),F ather Devlin, and Francis himself allperceive the second baptism as effective.Mary Ben requested, and F ather Devlinperformed, the two rebaptisms to pre vent the disaster of either Francis's dyingwithout valid baptism; indeed it almostseems that Mary Ben expended consid erable energy in having F ather Devlinmade a Monsignor (127) in order toreward him for saving the soul(s) of hernephews. Even Ruth N ibsmith, whowants the date of baptism "because itsupplies a few shades to your central[astrological] chart," accepts the secondbaptism as "spiritual dandyism" (301).

The second baptism, however, by thestandards of the world outside the book,is totally invalid:

The Roman church . . . as early as the 3rdcentury . . . decreed that persons alreadybaptized by heretics, but reverting to thechurch should not be baptized over again,but only have hands laid on them.3

Thomas Aquinas, basing his logic on

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Ephesians 4:5, explains that, since bap-tism confers a permanent character, thosewho have been baptized by heretics, aslong as the heretics baptized in the nameof the Trinity, are not to be rebaptized.4This would have prevented a real-lifeFather Devlin from rebaptizing eitherchild, except conditionally. AlthoughMary-Ben would certainly not be famil-iar with Thomas Aquinas, she must havebeen subjected to some form of religiousinstruction at her convent school; atleast one text used in Quebec informedthe children : " . . . il y a trois Sacremens,le Baptême, la Confirmation et l'Ordre,qu'on ne peut recevoir qu'une fois, parcequ'ils impriment dans l'ame [sic] uncaractère ineffaçable."5 A Redemptoristpriest taught that ". . . Faith [is] often thefruit of a valid baptism . . . in the souls ofmany non-Catholics . . ." f many Angli-cans in Canada, and in other countries,have been received into the Catholicchurch without rebaptism.7 The decisivepoint is their request for further sacra-ments (reconciliation, confirmation, eu-charist) — a request which Francis, ap-parently, never makes. Davies plays thetheological ignorance of his charactersagainst that of his readers, and rendersthe whole book a vast learned joke.

The rebaptisms, however, are only partof a wider joke in the book. On firstarriving in Blairlogie, Major Cornish asksabout "the old party in the little cap,"and on learning that her name is "Mary-Benedetta, but [he]'d better call herMary-Ben," comments: "You're allMary-Something, aren't you? Jolly rum!"(53). In fact, the "Family Catholic cus-tom" extends to both families: Jacobine is the daughter of Marie LouiseThibodeau, and she has another auntcalled Mary Basil McRory, as well as ayounger sister called Mary Teresa. In herimmediate family she is known as Mary Jim, and her sister as Mary Tess, sothere are three nicknames beginning with

Mary, as well as five proper names. I t is,however, rather laughable for MajorFrancis Chegwidden Cornish to sneer ata family with repeated first names: heinsists on giving two successive childrenhis own first and middle names withoutvariation; there are ultimately five bap tisms of "F rancis Chegwidden," countingthe two rebaptisms (the first of which,"after a blazing row," took place with hisknowledge ) . F urthermore, the middlename "Chegwidden," which for a timedesignates three people, is the chiefsource of suffering for the youngestFrancis when he enters school. When hemurmurs "Cheggin," the correct pronun ciation of Chegwidden, the kindergartenteacher understands "Chicken," and theother pupils happily yell "Chicken" atthe unfortunate child (70 71 ) . H e sufferseven more when the same misunder standing follows him to Carlyle RuralSchool (77 79).

Aside from the jokes about the names,a new joke enters the story when Francisenters his own hell, Carlyle Rural, "oneSeptember morning when he was in thethird grade" (77) . Since he started kin dergarten in 1914 (68), and wentthrough the grades at the normal pace, itwould then have been September 1917.We are told that Miss McG laddery "wasangry with him because he was inatten tive" after beatings by other children(78) : thus he was in Miss McG laddery'sclass. We are also told that Miss Mc G laddery "ruled her three groups — forCarlyle Rural had only two rooms andshe took the most advanced classes — . . .with the leather st rap": thus she mightteach grades three, four, and five, leavingkindergarten and grades one and two tothe other teacher. This understanding,however, which seems quite clear at thefirst introduction of the redoubtable MissMcG laddery, is contradicted by the laterinformation that when Francis sickenswith whooping cough at the age of thir

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teen (which would be in the autumn of1922), Miss McGladdery is still histeacher, and eager to send him "sheets ofarithmetic problems" (92). Instead ofthe originally supposed three years, Fran-cis is now entering the sixth year of"what seemed to him an eternity" (77).Miss McGladdery has set us an insolublearithmetic problem: if her "three groups"include six grades, what can the other(unnamed) teacher possibly be doing?Miss McGladdery, "soldiering throughher teaching career until. . . she [could]retire . . ." (78), is hardly likely to takemore than a fair share of the load.Clearly, Davies is laughing not only atmembers of the teaching profession, andat human ideas of eternity, but also atreaders who hope to see mere realisticfiction.

Games with numbers pervade the text,and are particularly effective in the ac-count of Ruth Nibsmith's horoscope ofFrancis. Whereas the traditional astro-logical chart is based on knowing theexact date, hour, and place of birth,Ruth, boasting of her "great historicaldiscovery that the real astrologersguarded with their lives" (300), wants toknow in addition the time of her subject'sconception, and also of his baptism.Francis tells her that he was born "Sep-tember 12, apparently at seven o'clock inthe morning, in 1909" (300), and bap-tized (the first time) "September 30, ac-tually, at roughly four o'clock in theafternoon" (301). Both statements soundvery precise, and certainly plausible, butthe word "actually" is a warning flag:the record of the Lesser Zadkiel tells thereader that Francis "was born, and chris-tened" on the same day (58). All calcu-lations on the third chart are, therefore,inaccurate. Again, Francis does not knowexactly when he was baptized the secondtime, or when he was conceived. Ruthestimates that "as [he] seemfs] to be ahealthy chap" he must have been "a full-

term baby"; she can "count backward"and "get the date fairly near" (301).There are two problems hidden here:Francis has "got a dicky heart" (172),and he was more than a full-term baby,having been conceived, according to theDaimon Maimas, a full nine months be-fore his birth, "on December the tenth,1908, at 11:37 p.m." (58). When Ruthdeclares that the night of his conception"seems to have been quite a jolly occa-sion, if your first chart isn't lying" (310),she is unduly optimistic about the firstchart, as even an hour would make con-siderable difference, and her conjectureddate is probably two weeks wrong. Thusher supposed improvements to the tra-ditional system serve only to introduceinaccuracies; her successful observationsmust come rather from her "psychicgifts" (323) than from her "great his-torical discovery."

The joke, however, is not only onRuth. She has given Francis a seconddate of conception,8 and he has givenhimself a second date for his Anglicanbaptism; both of these new (hypotheti-cal) dates are somewhat later than theiroriginals. And then there was the Cath-olic baptism, considerably later. But withall the reduplication of dates and charts,Francis was born only once, and has onlyone name, Francis Chegwidden Cornish.Although Ruth considers the influence ofdates (most of them are, as we have seen,incorrect), she never considers the influ-ence of the name, and the book as awhole simultaneously reveals and con-ceals the meanings. The first hint comesin the account of the first baptism: he"was . . . christened, in the AnglicanChurch, Francis Chegwidden Cornish."In the Anglican Church, as in otherChristian communities, however, peopleare christened by Christian names only;the family name is not part of the cere-mony. "Cornish" is out of place in thissentence, and thereby emphasized. We

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realize "that the Cornishes were an oldcounty family of, understandably, Corn-wall" (39). We note also "the cuckold'shorns, painfully clear" in the astrologicalchart (311), and the cognate relation ofhorn and the Latin cornu. Francis fol-lows his father's pattern of marrying awoman already pregnant by somebodyelse, but more innocent than his father(for Francis is a Virgo, and has the in-nocence, though not the virginity, of hissign), he does not learn the fact untilmuch later, and does not understand theadvice to "be very careful about allmoney arrangements" ( 265 ). Cornwalland cuckoldry are explicitly connectedseveral times, most notably when Francis,at Tintagel, tells Ismay how, by "a magi-cal spell. . . Uther Pendragon was ableto come to [Ygraine] in her husband'sguise, and it was here that he begot themarvellous child who grew to be [King]Arthur" (254). Francis means the storyto enchant Ismay, and thinks that he hastaken the part of Uther, but learns laterthat he was more like Gorlois — or KingArthur, who also followed a family pat-tern. . . . Saraceni transforms the familyname to "Corniche" (291), the Frenchword for cornice (for which cornish is anold alternative).

The architectural meaning of corniceconnects with the family middle name.Major Cornish informs the Senator that"Chegwidden . . . meant, in the old Cor-nish tongue, the White House" (39).The name, proudly proclaimed in manybaptisms, is a deception : the family man-sion turns out to be "brownish-grey"(180). Furthermore, although the Majorhas a connection with the mansion, he isa younger brother, unlikely to inherit it,and therefore incapable of passing it onto his pretentiously named offspring. TheMajor did in fact build a ChegwiddenLodge in the new world (55), with hisfather-in-law's money, but he closed it inDecember 1914 (73) and never lived in

it again; it ultimately became a funeralparlour (14), while the Major went onto a new translation of the name, as aChap who Knew, at Whitehall. Francis,however, is as disappointed with White-hall as with Chegwidden: he advancesonly from being an "unpaid . . . snoopand lackey" (312) to performing under-paid "drudgery" and "dangerous misery"(365)·

Not only are the middle and familynames a complex of jokes, but the so-frequently-given Christian name "Fran-cis" becomes the biggest joke of all. Whenthe Major and Mary-Jim move to Ot-tawa, in December 1914 (73), Francisremains with his grandparents and AuntMary-Ben at Blairlogie. Mary-Ben wor-ries about his "neglected soul" (75), andis advised by the family doctor to intro-duce the patron saint. But Mary-Benfinds an unexpected problem:

Because he was born on September 12,Francis's only possible patron was thegrubby Guy of Anderlecht, a Belgian whohad lost all his money in a bad speculationand turned to God in his bankruptcy. . . .But it was also the day devoted to theHoly Name of Mary. . . . (76)

Davies is deliberately unfair to St. Guy,who was charitable and prayerful "evenin his youth."9 The big joke, however, isthat the word "patron" or "patron saint"is normally applied not to the saint whosefestival is celebrated on the day of birth,but to the saint after whom one is namedin baptism. Mary-Ben is depicted as anignorant and meddling person, but nei-ther she nor the doctor could miss know-ing the meaning of "patron saint"; aschool text, which both of them mighthave used, advised:

Next to your good [i.e., guardian] angel,honour particularly your patron.

The names of Saints are given us at bap-tism, that they may be our protectors andintercessors with God, and that by theirprayers, and the examples of their virtues,we may acquit ourselves worthily of the

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obligation of a Christian life, whereof wemake profession in baptism.10

Thus the patron of Francis would beSaint Francis, and the best-known saintof that name is Francis of Assisi. Davies,however, is careful never to mention thesaint, who remains an unseen counter-balance to the story. The very nameFrancis was not a Christian name origi-nally; it was given as a nickname to thelad at Assisi "from the readiness withwhich he acquired and spoke [the Frenchlanguage] . . . , though the name of Johnhad been given him at his baptism."11

The nickname, however, was sanctifiedby actions: Francis of Assisi, the son ofwealthy parents, renounced his inheri-tance and embraced a life of voluntarypoverty, preaching repentance and draw-ing thousands to join him for the love ofChrist; after his death, many childrenwere put under his patronage at baptism,and some of them in turn becamesaints.12 Such patronage was, however,neither requested nor desired for the heroof the book. Mary-Ben rejected the pa-tronage of the "grubby Guy of Ander-lecht," possibly because Guy was the sonof poor parents and a devotee of holypoverty; she was unlikely to chooseFrancis of Assisi. In later years, FrancisCornish found himself increasingly fondof money, valuing it above his humanloves. He told Ismay (who had forged acheque in his name) : "I can be awfullyserious about a hundred and fifty nicker"(246). After, as he supposed, seducingher, and faced with a hasty marriage, herealized that "the price of Ismay was —one million Canadian dollars, with ac-crued interest" (266), and "recognizedthat it was the money that really meantmos t . . . he wanted Ismay, but he didn'tlike her price" (267). Francis receivedthe million dollars as inheritance fromhis grandfather (231) ; he was not onlyunwilling to renounce it for a life of holypoverty, but also reluctant to undertake

the marriage promise, "with all myworldly goods I thee endow."13 Evenafter being warned by Ruth Nibsmith of"the dark things in your chart. . . You'remuch too fond of money" (312), Fran-cis proclaims to Ismay, "Money is one ofthe two or three primary loyalties," andrefuses to part with any (374). His latermeanness causes Aylwin Ross to commitsuicide, and almost causes the DaimonMaimas to depart (426-27). WhereasFrancis of Assisi preferred poverty to anyearthly love, Francis Cornish preferredmoney.

Twice baptized as Francis, and with athird supposed baptismal date, the heroof the book achieves only the externalmeaning of his name: "a quick boy . . .he learned not only two kinds of French,but two kinds of English as well" (74).Although he imagines that he has"drifted into a world where religion, butnot orthodoxy, is the fountain of every-thing that makes sense" (378), his ideasof "religion" are vague indeed.14 St. Paulwarns against covetousness as "idolatry"(Col. 3:5), but Francis, who is noBible reader, ignores that warning as heignores every other. He condemns all thesectarians of Blairlogie, "None of [whom]ever had a thought that wasn't a disgraceto anything it would be decent to callreligion" (378), but has no clear sub-stitute for those thoughts. Through Fran-cis, and the absurdities of the baptisms,the numerologies, and the misconcep-tions, Davies mocks the religious moronsdescribed in the book, and also thoseamong his readers.

NOTES1 Translation of epigraphs : " . . . one bap-

tism," Eph. 4:5; "I concede heretics to beimpious; however, heretics gave the bap-tism of Christ (i.e. Christian baptism)."

2 Robertson Davies, What's Bred in the Bone(Toronto: Macmillan, 1985), p. 58. Fur-ther references appear parenthetically inthe text.

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3 F rederick] C[ornwallis] C[onybeare], "Bap tism," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11 th ed.,vol. 3, p. 367.

4 Part 3, question 66, article 9, "utrum bap tismus possit iterari," Summa Theologiae,Latin Text and English Translations, In troductions, Notes, Appendices and Glos saries, ed. James J. Cunningham, 57 (Lon don: Eyre and Spottiswoode; New York:McGraw Hill, 975), 38 43.

5 Part 2, lesson 6, Manuel du Chrétien: Oùl'on trouve tout ce qui est nécessaire pours'instruire de sa Religion et se sanctifier(Toulouse, 1793; repr. Quebec: à la nou-velle imprimerie, 1813), p. 143. Transla-tion : " . . . there are three Sacraments, Bap-tism, Confirmation, and Holy Orders, whichone may receive only once, because theyimprint in the soul an ineffaceable char-acter."

6 George Thomas Daly, Catholic Problems inWestern Canada (Toronto: Macmillan,iga i ) , p. 130. (The book has an Imprima-tur.)

7 See, for example, Robert Hugh Benson,Confessions of a Convert (London: Long-mans, Green, 1913), p. 134.

8 Ironically enough, Thomas Aquinas baseshis argument on the fact that: " . . . a per-son is begotten only once. Therefore bap-tism cannot be repeated . . . ," SummaTheologiae, p. 41.

9 Alban Butler, "St. Guy, C[onfessor]," TheLives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and otherPrincipal Saints: compiled from OriginalMonuments, and other Authentic Rec-ords..., 2d ed. (Dublin: John Morris,1780), vol. 9, p. 126.

1 0 Part 2, ch. 13, The Catholic School Book,Containing easy and familiar Lessons forthe Instruction of Youth of both Sexes, inthe English Language and the Paths ofTrue Religion and Virtue, New Montrealed. (Montreal: Beauchemin & Valois,[1843]), p. 123.

1 1 A. Butler, "St. Francis of Assisium, C.Founder of the Friar Minors," Lives of theSaints, vol. 10, p. 72.

1 2 Alban Butler lists five Saints Francis and aFrances, "A General Alphabetical Table,"Lives of the Saints, vol. 12, [sig. 2G6].

1 3 "The Form of Solemnization of Matri-mony," The Book of Common Prayer andAdministration of the Sacraments andother Rites and Ceremonies of the Churchaccording to the Use of the Church of

England, The Coronation Prayer Book(Oxford: Univ. Press, 1911), p. 279. Thisis the form which Ismay's parents wouldhave chosen, and the one from which "thelocal parson . . . stressed the admonitionthat marriage was not to be taken in handwantonly..." (pp. 269-70; cf. "Form of. . . Matrimony," p. 276).

1 4 Davies does not create for Francis any re-ligious insights as he does for previous fic-tional characters; see P. Köster, "'Prompt-ings stronger' than 'strict prohibitions' :New Forms of Natural Religion in theNovels of Robertson Davies," CanadianLiterature, 111 (Winter 1986), 68-82.

PATRICIA KÖSTER

JOSEF SKVORECKYAND CANADIANCULTURAL CRINGEFEW CANADIAN WRITERS have receivedsuch generous treatment from the pressand media as Josef Skvorecky. Since hisimmigration to Canada in 1968, Skvo-recky has been the subject of countlessmagazine articles and television inter-views. This exposure has permitted himto express his political views to an un-usually wide audience, including manypeople who have never read his books.His prestige accrues in part from his ac-complished fiction and in part from hisromantic status as an exile from a coun-try languishing under Soviet oppression.During the last five years Skvorecky'svisibility has increased markedly, hisreputation enhanced both by the trans-lation of work previously unavailable inEnglish and by a swing to the right inthe public mood. In a climate of reac-tionary chic, Skvorecky's acid pronounce-ments on the evils of Eastern commu-nism and the naïve duplicity of Westernliberalism, both in interviews and in hisoften humorous, sometimes bawdy, fic-tion, have found a receptive audience : heis Solzhenitsyn with sex-appeal, as in

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tune with the fashionable wisdom of the1980's as Allen Ginsberg (whose workSkvoreeky has translated into Czech)was with that of the 1960's.

One of the dangers of being a repre-sentative of the dominant ideology ofone's time is the latitude a writer is al-lowed to indulge in statements which,seen in perspective, appear ludicrous.Ginsberg has stated that he now regardshis pro-communist rhetorical excesses ofthe 1960's as a public embarrassment.Unfortunately, the Canadian critical mi-lieu appears too tepid to call Skvoreckyto account for his excesses. One of therare attempts to challenge Skvorecky'sdeclarations was "Political Judgments,"Terry Goldie's review of Skvorecky'sGovernor General's Award-winning novelThe Engineer of Human Souls {Cana-dian Literature, Spring 1985). Pryingbeneath the protective armour of anti-communism, Goldie found a novel whichwas sexist, racist, and "also anti-union,anti-Vietnam war draft dodgers and gen-erally anti-anything which smells of left-ism." He predicted that most criticswould be too seduced by the novel'sfashionable commie-bashing to challengeSkvorecky's vision: "I can hear a thou-sand cheers for the anti-communism butat best a few muted rejections of theanti-feminism, the racism, and the gen-eral anti-social character of the novel."

Unfortunately, Goldie's predictionproved correct. This may be the era of"The Decline of the American Empire,"but few Canadian critics appear willingto question the U.S. media orthodoxythat while all writers are equal, anti-communist writers are more equal thanothers. Goldie's review earned him abarbed response from Skvorecky himself(of which, more later) in addition to asingling out for special opprobrium inMarketa Goetz-Stankiewicz's survey ofsome of Skvorecky's reviews (CanadianLiterature, Fall 1986). The fact that

Goldie's position is such an isolated oneserves as a damning comment on thetimidity of Canadian criticism, especiallywhen dealing with European-born writ-ers. The Australians refer to this habit ofself-abasement before the wisdom of themetropolitan centres as "cultural cringe."Skvorecky, as a European-born writerpromoting an ideology made fashionableby the current United States government,evokes the two centres to which Cana-dians habitually pay obeisance, bringingout a particularly ferocious strain ofCanadian cultural cringe.

The British reviews of The Engineerof Human Souls provide an instructivecontrast to the Canadian reaction. Goetz-Stankiewicz omits the U.K. critics fromher survey, noting only that these reviews"have a rather different tenor." Indeedthey do! Unlike those by both U.S. andCanadian critics, the British reviews donot reflect an assumption that supportfor Skvorecky's anti-Sovietism need nec-essarily translate into carte blanche ap-proval of his politics on all fronts. Eventhe neo-conservative magazine Encoun-ter, while granting Skvorecky full marksfor anti-communist orthodoxy, worriedabout "questionable attitudes smuggledthrough in the diplomatic bag of dissi-dent status" (July/August 1985). Re-viewer James Lasdun noted that thenovel "casts the dissenting reader intothe role of a brainwashed ideologue. . . .despite his affable manner, [Skvorecky]seems fundamentally short on toleranceand magnanimity; one would not relishhaving him in a position of power."Ironically, this conservative critic echoesmany of the concerns of the "leftist"Terry Goldie. Like Goldie, he is dis-turbed by the narrator's sexism; he re-marks that "his gleeful relish of the sex-ual opportunities his position as teacheraffords him . . . becomes somewhat objec-tionable." And where Goldie, to the ap-parent consternation of Marketa Goetz-

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Stankiewicz, speaks of a "failure ofhumanity," Lasdun concludes his reviewby criticizing Skvorecky for "a defect ofthe soul." One need not be a leftist dupeto be disturbed by Skvorecky's vision inThe Engineer.

The assumptions underlying this visionhave repercussions in the spheres of gen-der relations, race relations, and inter-national relations. Goldie remarks onSkvorecky's sexism, observing that hisfemale characters tend to conform tostereotyped portrayals of women as eithervirgins or whores. Skvorecky responds byaccusing Goldie of falling into the trapof the "ideological critic," who "asks thewriter not to recreate reality, but to cre-ate ideals, or to criticize reality if it doesnot comply with the ideal." He defendshis portrait of the virginal Nadia by ob-serving that, "in 1944, in the Czechmountain villages of northeastern Bo-hemia, there were no feminists." Fairenough — but Skvorecky's fictional alter-ego, Danny Smiricky, continues to por-tray women according to these stereo-types in the scenes set in 1970's Toronto,where there were feminists in abundance.Three of the four women characters uponwhom Goldie bases his remarks appearin the Toronto scenes, yet Skvorecky con-centrates his retort on the one whodoes not. Why does he not attempt todefend his portraits of women in theToronto sequences? The introductory de-scription of Margitka suggests that hisposition is well-nigh indefensible: "Iusher her in, admiring her . . . well-pro-portioned little bottom as she slips past.Progress does exist after all. In my par-ents' generation, forty-year-old womenwere usually three times that wide."

Both Skvorecky and Goetz-Stankiewicz,in their respective essays, lash out against"ideological" feminism. Goetz-Stankie-wicz excoriates Globe and Mail reviewer"Claude Corbeil" (by whom I assumeshe means Carole Corbeil ) who, she says,

"is too angry to notice that the professor-student seduction scene . . . is purposelycouched in the vocabulary of the plasticvalues of contemporary Western society."The contrast between the language of theseduction and that of the similar sceneinvolving the village girl Nadia is richand interesting, as Goetz-Stankiewiczsuggests. Her next leap, however, defiesall logic. "To speak here of anti-femi-nism," she writes, "is to miss the point."In drawing this conclusion, Goetz-Stan-kiewicz falls into the same trap (althoughin this case it may be a ploy) as thosereviewers who, beguiled by Skvorecky'santi-communism, turn a blind eye to hissexism, racism, and historical distortions.The fact that Skvorecky counterpointstwo sexist descriptions to create an in-teresting literary effect does not, asGoetz-Stankiewicz contends, make hissexism disappear. The French novelistCéline turned spite, and even anti-semitism, to literary advantage. Yet few,if any, critics would argue that Célinewas not an anti-semite simply because heused his anti-semitism creatively. It isintellectually dishonest to try to white-wash Skvorecky's sexism on similargrounds.

Skvorecky attempts to extract himselffrom the mire of racism by invokingForster's distinction between flat andround characters. Yet, if the charactersbelonging to visible minorities are to be"furniture," identified by one or twosalient traits, why does the narratorchoose traits that conform to raciststereotypes? "Mispronunciation of Eng-lish, I guess, is part of the Indian stereo-type," Skvorecky comments sarcastically.Unfortunately, one of the most commonslurs against Canada's East Indian com-munity does consist of mockery of Indianpronunciation; whether or not he isaware of it, Skvorecky is buying into thestandard racist line. His response toGoldie also contains some fast backtrack-

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ing on the subject of Bellissimo, the Ital-ian student. While the novel predicts forhim a future spent "disentangling morethan one Mafioso from legal embroil-ment," Skvorecky's reply to Goldie waxeslyrical on the intelligence of this youngman, who "will make a first-class lawyerand become the joy of his working-classfather's declining years." The reply has-tily revises the language and message ofthe novel.

Only on the subject of Larry Hakim,the radical Arab and Vietnam draft-dodger, does Skvorecky remain unrepen-tant. Arabs, he reaffirms, are inseparablefrom "wild, barbaric actions, hijackings,internecine wars, senseless bloodshed pre-sented as something 'healthy' for thepeople; to pre-adolescent boys being sentto the front in a senseless, unendingmedieval war." The final clause of thiscatalogue of horrors would seem to be areference to Iran's assault tactics on Iraq.This is puzzling, since most Iraniansaren't Arabs : they are Persian — as dif-ferent from Arabs as Czechs are fromGermans. At the beginning of The En-gineer Skvorecky quotes William Blakeon generalizers being idiots. His fictionalalter ego admonishes his ideological foes(Hakim among them) for employinggeneralizations that "cannot stand up tomicroscopic examination." Yet Skvoreckyscores many of his own ideological pointsby means of broad (and often inaccu-rate) generalizations.

Skvorecky's other favourite strategy isprecisely that which he accuses Goldieand his ilk of using: "that universal mal-aise of the Western leftist. . . 'selectiveindignation.'" The Engineer contains adiscussion of the Angolan civil war ofthe mid-1970's; Skvorecky returns to thistopic in his reply to Goldie. In both in-stances, he focuses obsessively on Cuba'sintervention in the war, portraying thearrival of Cuban troops as analogous tothe 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslo-

vakia. In Skvorecky's Ministry-of-Truthaccount of the war, crucial details vanish.While the Cuban intervention is con-demned, the South African invasion ofAngola, which prompted the MPLA tocall for Cuban help, is never mentioned.Skvorecky portrays the Cubans as Sovietlackeys, ignoring the Cuban role incrushing the pro-Moscow faction of theMPLA, allowing a more Third World-oriented faction to retain power. And, ifSkvorecky really holds the MPLA gov-ernment entirely responsible for Angola'scurrent misery (absolving UNITA, whosesabotage has destroyed the country's in-frastructure, from all blame), why doeshe focus his anger on Moscow to theexclusion of the U.S. oil companieswhich, by remaining in Angola, furnishthe regime with the hard currency thatallows it to survive? Granted, these pointsare details; but, as Blake reminds us,there is rarely much merit to the writerwho flees details for grandiose generaliza-tions such as "the Cubans . . . with their. . . Soviet-supplied war technology . . .subjected the . . . population to foreignsupervision."

Perhaps the most ludicrous of Skvo-recky's outbursts comes toward the endof his reply to Goldie, where he attemptsto fashion a causal chain linking Marxand Engels's recommendations for theliquidation of "reactionary nations" toStalin's oppression of ethnic minorities.Extending this chain into the present,Skvorecky writes, "The present ruler ofAbyssinia follows that recommendationand — in a milder way, because UncleSam is dangerously near — the Sandinis-tas are trying something similar with theMiskito Indians."

The quote on which Skvorecky basesthis polemical conceit is not necessarilya definitive statement of the Marx-Engelsposition. While Marx and Engels sharedthe racial and rationalist biases of othernineteenth-century Europeans, they were

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also capable of transcending these limi-tations. Witness, for example, Marx's1850 speculation that defeated Europeanreactionaries fleeing across Asia mightreach the Great Wall of China to find"the very stronghold of arch-reaction"transformed into a democratic republic.In any event, it is highly dubious to con-tend that Soviet imperialism against sur-rounding nations such as the Tatars andCzechs stems from a direct attempt toimplement Marxist principles. As anystudent of politics knows, institutionalmomentum often supersedes ideology indetermining policy; it was not Karl Marxbut the Red Army that marched intoPrague and deported the Tatars fromtheir homeland. In one of the British re-views ignored by Marketa Goetz-Stan-kiewicz, Ernest Gellner distinguishesSkvorecky from an earlier generation ofwriters on Soviet repression: "Skvorecky,by contrast [to Koestler, Orwell, etc.],belongs to a later generation whose in-volvement was no longer with a genuinecreed, but rather with the doctrinalsuperstructure of the Red Army" (TimesLiterary Supplement, March 8, 1985).Skvorecky has repeatedly voiced his im-patience with those "who have not hadmy life experience." While respecting hishardships and insights, one should notcollapse into cultural cringe and submis-sively take his experience to be more in-clusive than it actually is. Skvorecky is avaluable witness to the imperialism of theNazis and the Red Army. However, hislifetime does not span the entire stretchfrom Das Kapital to the Gulag; theanswer to the question of whether thelatter represents the inevitable conse-quence of trying to systematize the idealsof the former remains outside Skvorecky's"life experience." His views on this sub-ject are not necessarily any more privi-leged than those of other thoughtfulobservers.

Moving past Skvorecky's dubious con-

tention that the Ethiopian dictatorship'srepression of its minorities stems from itsnominal Marxism rather than from long-standing racial animosities, one arrives atthe assertion that the Sandinistas' poli-cies regarding the Miskito Indiansamount to "something similar" to "liq-uidation." This, to put it bluntly, is dis-information. In 1981 tensions betweenNicaragua's mestizo government and itsisolated native minority (aggravated bySandinista ineptitude on one side and aU.S. propaganda blitz wooing the Mis-kitos to join the contras on the other)culminated in the Sandinistas' decisionto relocate the Miskitos away from theirhomes facing the contra front along theCoco River. Clashes between Miskitorebels and Sandinista troops during 1982resulted in the deaths of between thirtyand ninety-five Miskitos and the jailingof several hundred others. By 1985, how-ever, despite an intensification of thecontra war, the Sandinistas had financedthe Miskitos' return to the Coco River,sacked officers who had committed hu-man rights abuses and offered theMiskitos a semi-autonomous homeland— including the right to keep both theirlanguage and their guns (see John A.Booth in Current History, December1986; Scott Wallace in Newsweek, De-cember 15, 1986; and Dennis Gilbert inBlachman, LeoGrande, and Sharpe [eds.],Confronting Revolution). Rather thansome sort of ideologically inspired exter-mination campaign, the details of thecase reveal a pattern of ethnic strife andgradual reconciliation. If, as Skvoreckyimplies, Uncle Sam truly lay awake atnight fretting about the destruction ofCentral American Indian communities,he would turn his attention not to Nica-ragua, but to Guatemala, where a geno-cide is in progress. (But Skvorecky, withhis right-winger's selective indignation,never mentions Guatemala. ) Guatemala'sIndians, who comprise more than half of

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the country's population, have suffered asystematic government assault so severethat even a report sympathetic to theGuatemalan regime was forced to con-cede "a count of over 100,000 Indianchildren orphaned by the death of atleast one parent in the years 1980 to1984" (see Robert Trudeau and LarsSchoultz in Blachman, LeoGrande, andSharpe). Meanwhile, the Canadian me-dia, which Skvorecky portrays as a naïveconduit for Soviet propaganda (see his"Are Canadians Politically Naïve?" inCanadian Literature, Spring 1984), obe-diently churns out a dozen articles on thehardships of the Miskitos for every oneon the wholesale slaughter of the Quicheand the other peoples of Guatemala. Inlight of this ordering of priorities,Goldie's judgment that Skvorecky's en-gineer "perpetuates injustice and in-equality in the world," seems not far-fetched, but rather mild.

Guatemala also raises the thorny ques-tion of Skvorecky's unblinking admira-tion of Israel. The Israelis built CentralAmerica's first munitions plant in Guate-mala in 1979; the soldiers who carry outthe genocide of the Quiche are trainedby Israeli military advisers, armed withIsraeli Galil rifles, and wear Israeli uni-forms (see Trudeau and Schoultz; also"Forged in Action," Montreal Gazette,December 20, 1986). Refusing to criticizea nation responsible for the indiscrimi-nate aerial bombardment of Beirut, mas-sacres of refugees, and the subjugation ofa million and a half people in an apart-heid-like political limbo requires a selec-tive sense of indignation indeed. Skvo-recky is quick to criticize the violentretaliations of the oppressed; but he hasonly sympathy for their oppressors. Heargues that his autobiographical persona,Danny, became "pro-Jewish" because he"happened to be an eye witness of theholocaust." This equation of "pro-Jew-ish" with "pro-Israeli" is at best outdated

and at worst a tired right-wing device.However true the equation may havebeen in 1948, it can no longer be axio-matic at a time when Israel is increas-ingly dominated by non-European Jewswho do not share the democratic idealsof most of the holocaust survivors andmost Jewish North Americans. Surely,condemnation of the European holocaustdoes not preclude condemnation of thebombardment of Lebanese children andassistance to the holocaust in Guatemala?

All of which leads one irresistibly toask why Terry Goldie's review is such ananomaly. Why do Canadian critics so sel-dom challenge Skvorecky's outrageousdeclarations? It seems we still react witha cringe of inferiority to the statementsof writers hailing from more "cosmopoli-tan" climes — a tendency bolstered in thecase of Skvorecky by the current popu-larity of many of the right-wing clichéshe evokes. In such a context, the impera-tive to distinguish a writer's literarystrengths from his or her moral failingsbecomes doubly compelling. As is sooften the case, one may find good coun-sel in the works of George Orwell. Inan essay on Salvador Dali, Orwell la-mented that the critical debate over thepainter appeared to be divided betweenthose who, impressed by his art, white-washed his personal life, and others who,finding his personality repellent, insistedthat Dali's art was worthless. Why, Or-well asked, could one not recognize thatDali was both a remarkable artist and "adisgusting human being"? Substituting"political extremist" for "disgusting hu-man being," one could easily apply thisstatement to Céline, Pound, or KnutHamsun — or to Josef Skvorecky. Thatis the challenge Skvorecky poses to theCanadian milieu: to recognize the won-ders of his writing — especially of theearly novels like The Cowards, Miraclein Bohemia, and Miss Silver's Past —while casting a cold, critical eye on the

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moral implications of the alien ideologyhe would try to foist upon us. In retro-spect 1984 may be seen as the high-watermark of the right-wing fad in Canada:the year the middle class voted for BrianMulroney and the literary establishmentaccorded its highest award to The En-gineer of Human Souls. But what mat-ters more in the long run is that we learnto value the best of Skvorecky's writingwithout lumbering ourselves with theworst of his ideological baggage.

STEPHEN HENIGHAN

ON THE VERGE**** L'Essai et la prose d'idées au Québec,sous la direction de Paul Wyczynski, FrançoisGallays, and Sylvain Simard. Fides, $40.00.Following volumes entitled Mouvement litté-raire de Québec 1860, L'Ecole littéraire deMontréal, Le Roman canadien-français, LaPoésie canadienne-français, Le Théâtre cana-dien-français, the "Archives des lettres cana-diennes" have now published this 921-pagebook. Included are surveys of the history ofthe essay in Québec in the literary, sociologi-cal, political, historical, philosophical, andeducational domains, and articles on individ-ual authors ranging from Etienne Parent,Henri-Raymond Casgrain, Monsieur Bourget,and Henri Bourassa to Paul-Emile Borduas,Hubert Aquin, Jean Bouthillette, Jacques Fer-ron, and Pierre Vallières. L'Essai et la prosed'idées, a monumental scholarly achievementcomparable to the Dictionnaire des oeuvreslittéraires du Québec, bears witness to thegreat importance of the essay in Quebec'shistory. It has been closely associated withconservative indoctrination, but it has alsobeen a battleground for opposing ideologies,as well as assuming the function of a revolu-tionary manifesto at times of political andsocial upheaval; for example, the writings ofBorduas, Frère Untel, and Pierre Vallières.The contributions to this collection are inthemselves demonstrations of the genre's greatadaptability, and the editors are to be com-mended for permitting their authors freedomof form and expression while ensuring schol-arly solidity with John Hare and RobertVigneault's detailed 138-page bibliography.Some of the essays illustrate the fine line be-

tween literary essay and literary criticism bypresenting themselves as footnoted eruditearticles, as does John Hare's piece on ArthurBuies. Others, like Jacques Pelletier's acerbicessay on "Jean Le Moyne: les pièges del'idéalisme," are polemical. René Juéry pre-sents a careful exegesis of Jean Bouthillette'sLe Canadien-français et son double, whilePierre Savard's piece on Jules-Paul Tardivelis a personal testimonial to his involvementwith this author. Both as a reference workand as a sampling of contemporary essay-writing, this book is indispensable.

E.-M.K.

**** KIM STAFFORD, Having EverythingRight: Essays of Place. Confluence Press,$14.95. This may be the most evocative,delicately observed collection of essays aboutWestern places since Wallace Stegner's WolfWillow. Poet Stafford lives and teaches inPortland, Oregon, and writes mainly of thePacific Northwest, but the opening essay, ablend of dream vision and travel journalwhich sees the world from outer space, estab-lishes the primary perspective: there is onlyone Earth, and it is "our campsite only." In-spired by studies of Indian myth and language,he sees place not as property or postcard, butas "a way of happening." This approach, likeStegner's, often obliterates both internationalboundary and medicine line, particularly be-cause Stafford introduces his book with amoving meditation on Kwakiutl place names(via Franz Boas) at the north end of Van-couver Island. The boundary also disappearswhen, for example, Stafford studies intentlythe family stories of the Great Depression, orpays tribute to the "outcast eccentric" as eachsmall-town's patron saint (inevitably callingto mind Saint Sammy). "Pine, Fir, Cedar,Yew" is a highlight among the thirteenpieces: each tree tells a story and multiplestories, first in ensemble and then separately,here with poetic compression, then suddenlywith the folksy wisdom of the vernacular. Staf-ford's genre is not essay, not story, but essayaspiring to be story. As essay comments onstory, and story animates essay, the book canalso be read as a very sensitive work of lit-erary and linguistic criticism.

L.R.

** The Dalhousie Journals, Vol. 3 (1825-28), ed. Marjorie Whitelaw. Oberon, $19.95.This is the last volume of the diaries of LordDalhousie while he was Governor-General ofthe Canadas. The present section of the diaryis the least interesting, because by now Dal-

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housie has become so soured by his dealingswith Papineau and with the British ColonialOffice that he seems most of his time to beawaiting impatiently the release that will takehim to another career in India. Perhaps thevolume is most useful for its insights into oneside of the struggle for political independencein Canada a century and a half ago.

G.w.

REFERENCERecent reference books to cross the editorialdesk range from the familiar to the unusual.The most familiar are the several Gale Re-search series: Contemporary Authors, vol. 120($90.00), includes an article on and an inter-view with Antonine Maillet; the new revisionseries of Contemporary Authors, vol. 21($92.00), includes the text of 1986 interviewswith W. P. Kinsella and Kevin Major. Con-temporary Literary Criticism, vol. 42 ($90.00),includes summary entries on Davies, Faludy,Hospital, and Hyde; vol. 43 of the same series($92.00) includes commentary on Kinsella;vol. 6 of an earlier but parallel series, Lit-erature Criticism from 1400 to 1800 (n.p.),includes an extended section on the variousworks of Frances Brooke; and Something aboutthe Author, vol. 48 ($66.00), a useful guide tochildren's authors, includes bio-critical entrieson Hubert Evans, Bill Freeman, Betty JaneWylie, Frances Duncan, and Helen Forrester(who writes under the name June Bhatia).

Also published recently is an illustrated dic-tionary of natural history (Cambridge, n.p.)compiled by R. J. Lincoln and G. A. Boxshall,which lists evertyhing from loosejaw to Lorici-fera in such neutral prose that it comes as asurprise to find Monstrilloida nevertheless clas-sified as "bizarre . . . copepods." The illustra-tions are in black-and-white. Facts on File,that useful periodical publisher of contempo-rary information, has also produced a guide-book, Dictionary of Classical, Biblical, & Lit-erary Allusions (US$18.95; Cdn$27-95),which is as useful as its own perimeter. "Lit-erary" includes European, American, andRussian references — Oblomov, Snopes, RhettButler — but doesn't extend north (or south)very far, or much beyond rudimentary iden-tification. Of more direct benefit to generalresearch in Canadian literature is a new bib-liography of books and periodical publicationsin poetry, fiction, criticism, and comment.Published by ECW Press (in both quarterly

units and annual compilations) and edited byJanet Fraser and others, such a publication islong overdue. Fuller than existing periodicalguides (JCL, Canadian Periodical Index), itnonetheless still requires pairing with JCL,which also attempts to note work on Cana-dian literature published outside Canada aswell as that published within Canadian bor-ders. Inevitably, too, there is a limit to thenumber of journals indexed. Janet Fraser notesthat her list currently numbers "greater than150"; this list will continue to expand, andso must the index. It is useful and reliable;we wish it well.

Yet another Canadian reference tool —though in a less usual, if still familiar, format— is the laminated wall chart representingthe history of Canada, from Hedgerow House($19.95), written by Roger Riendeau andedited by J. M. S. Careless. It is a visuallyclear, sequential representation of events inCanadian history — demonstrating the con-currence of developments in four regions ofthe country (Atlantic, Central, West, North)set against world events. There are problemswith the presumptions here — not in the de-sign of the chart, which every school class-room will find useful, but in the design ofhistory. This remains a Eurocentric view ofCanada (start with the explorers, ignore theIndian presence; for a striking contrast, seethe brilliant designs and extensive informa-tion conveyed by Cole Harris's new HistoricalAtlas of Canada, from the Univ. of TorontoPress, or even the parallel Hedgerow chart,History of World Civilization, $19.95, whichdates back to 5000 B.c. and acknowledges in-digenous ethnography) and one with unstatednormative measures. Literary events are fewhere, but when they appear they are suspi-ciously conventional; under 1877, Kirby's TheGolden Dog is mentioned, with this com-ment: "first important English Canadiannovel." Many would take issue both with thenoun and with every adjective.

Less limited recipes for Canadian cultureappear in two genuine cookbooks: AnitaStewart's Country Inn Cookbook ("truly au-thentic Canadian.. .": Acadian jambalaya,clams steamed in beer, caribou burgers[Stoddart, n.p.]), and (to my taste more ad-venturous) the Canadian Living Cookbook(Random House, $29.95), complete withguides to regional cooking and ethnic variety.Indeed, present-day cookbooks (like thosefrom the nineteenth century) are remarkablyuseful guides to social history: they announcenot only the availability of ingredients (hence

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hint at trade patterns and economics) but alsothe slow shifts in the character of a "national"cuisine. What is now distinctive about Cana-dian taste, it seems, is the combination of eth-nic choices it takes for granted; in some waysdomestic cosmopolitanism seems to have runahead of social politics.

In literature, a concern for ethnic differen-tiation shows up in a variety of ways. Worthnoting is a new journal edited by W. A. Sha-heen, begun in 1986; in issues so far, UrduLiterature (P.O. Box 2276, Station D, Ot-tawa) concerns itself not only with fictionand poetry but also with theory of translationand the nature of the ghazal. Two books fromthe University of Manitoba Press look at themore familiar sides of Canadian ethnicitywhich for many people remain no less foreign :Paul Thistle's Indian-European Trade Rela-tions... ($17.50) extends our understandingof contact history — east from Robin Fisher'swork on the Coast, and west from BruceTrigger's work on the Hurons — to the Sas-katchewan basin. Jacqueline Peterson andJennifer Brown's The New Peoples ($30.00;pa. $15.00) is an equally scholarly but insome ways more approachable book, an an-thology by divers hands on the character ofMétis culture. Essays on religion and art bal-ance those on historical roots and culturalattitudes: this is an important extension ofour understanding of Prairie history. On adifferent front, again repairing a cultural gap,Paul Gay's La Vitalité littérature de l'Ontariofrançais (Editions du Vermillon, $11.00), inchronicle and dictionary format, provides bio-and biblio-critical information on franco-Ontarian writers from the eighteenth centuryto the present day.

The anthology, too, is a recipe book of asort, a guide to the unfamiliar — though oftenin familiar terms. Edith Fowke's 1973 PenguinBook of Canadian Folk Songs is reprinted,announcing yet again the liveliness of one ofseveral alternatives to received culture. TheOxford Book of Travel Verse, ed. KevinCrossley-Holland (Oxford, $25.95), is an Eng-lish book that also looks at alternatives — inthis case those that are represented by foreignlandscapes (Europe, America, Oceania; "here"is England, throughout). The book balancesthen with now (Thomas Deloney to NormanNicholson, Robert Hayman to Laurie Lee),the mordant with the enthusiastic, and theenquiring with the enclosed. Behind many atravel poem lies the political bias of a time("Let dusky Indians whine and kneel, / AnEnglish lad must die"). Such a transparent

rhetoric from the past may repel readers; itought also to call attention to the unconsciousrhetoric of the present. There remain formsof enclosure in the way we conceive of things.

Sometimes the forms of enclosure are dic-tated by the very form of enquiry. The survey,the dictionary, the set of conference papers:all impose a kind of order, while inevitablycalling attention to gaps and absences. PatRogers's visually splendid The Oxford Illus-trated History of English Literature ($36.95),which turns English literary history into asequence of entertaining narratives, is a modelof condensed judgment, but leaves one gasp-ing for context sometimes: fifteen pages onthe 1960's and 1970's take one through theFalkland Islands war, the EEC, liberalizedmoral legislation, five playwrights, five poets,Muriel Spark and Brian Moore, the influenceof Latin America, and what is curiouslycalled the "threat" of Commonwealth writing.Another kind of book entirely, The OxfordLiterary Guide to Australia, ed. Peter Pierce($119.95), is a wonderful, illustrated diction-ary-guide to who-was-born-where, what-hap-pened-where, and what-was-set-where through-out the country; organized by place name(down to suburban districts, such as Bris-bane's Bardon, where Alice Munro's "BardonBus" is set), the book also includes a cross-referencing list of authors mentioned in thewrite-ups. Like Pierce, the editors of Com-monwealth Literature — Mostly Canadian(Free Univ. Press of Amsterdam, DFL, 25,00),despite the definite indefiniteness of theirtitle, do not see their subject as a "threat" toold literatures so much as an extension ofalternatives of creativity and creative stan-dards. The Dutch book — which includes in-structive essays on Alibi and Kinsella — spe-cifically sees the expansion of the Dutch na-tional curriculum to take account of Com-monwealth writings as one way to resist an"unimaginable abyss of literary ignorance," anabyss to which too many traditional critics tooeasily resign themselves, almost always in thename of standards. It is an old quarrel, butnonetheless necessary to keep making, justbecause it refuses to die.

The title of Michael Wood's In Search ofthe Dark Ages (BBC, Ariel Books, £4.95 pa-perback reprint) might therefore seem anironic comment on the present, but it is,rather, a literate, popular history of post-Roman Britain : an account of the Sutton Hoo,Arthur, Alfred, Athelstan, and Eric Bloodaxe— a reconstruction of a lively historical periodthat has been too readily consigned to irrele-

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vance. The darkness lay in the absence ofenquiry more than in the absence of culture.Two recent volumes in Faber & Faber's "His-tory of World Architecture" series — LouisGrodecki's Gothic Architecture and CyrilMango's Byzantine Architecture ($29.95 ea-)— more rigorously document their subject:clear texts, probing the cultural contexts ofbuilding designs, complement a wealth of de-tailed, instructive drawings, and photographstaken from a variety of angles illustrate theway social attitudes can sometimes translateinto a visual art. Critics and historians, how-ever, sometimes work the other way around.More speculative, but also richly illustrated,is another of Wood's books, In Search of theTrojan War (BBC, £8.95), which arranges anarrative out of circumstantial evidence inorder to equate the Trojan War with an his-torical episode in the Bronze Age Mycenaeancivilization of the thirteenth century B.C.Wood does not "prove" anything. He providesa model for what-might-have-happened, whichis absorbing. For all that Dickens's Mr. Grad-grind insisted on "facts," one of the mostforceful of invitations to thoughtful alterna-tives remains "perhaps."

Farther afield, Cambridge University Presshas published R. B. Tully and J. R. Fisher'sNearby Galaxies Atlas (n.p.), the result of aproject — to map the world beyond the MilkyWay — that began in 1972. There is muchtechnical data here for the specialist; for thelayman, the stance taken by the mapmakersand commentators is instructive for other rea-sons, especially for the way a new frontierinvites responses not unfamiliar to those whohave come to appreciate how the humanimagination shaped old frontiers by conven-tional images. Here, at least, the mapmakersare up front about their difficulties: data isinsecure, they say, incomplete, uncertain, andaffected by our cartographic assumptions aboutthe representation of three-dimensional struc-tures. For this present task they had to devisediagrammatic techniques for representing notonly space, size, and distance, but also timeand speed. That said, the names they use tellanother story: one about the human will tounderstand by enclosing in speech. Remember"terra incognita" ? Here we start with the"North Galactic Pole" and "The Local Void";what we move on to, however, is "The Heartof the Local Group" and "The PegasusCloud." Still, at the heart of uncertainty,metaphor dwells.

Metaphor also lies at the heart of the mostunusual reference book being noted here:

Websters' First New Inter galactic Wickedaryof the English Language, "conjured by MaryDaly in cahoots with Jane Caputi" (Beacon,$35-95! Pa· $14-95)· I ' ' s a feminist diction-ary, which takes apart the phallogocentricpresumptions of English, and restores womento a "hopping, hoping" role in speech. Thisserious concern does not hide the compilers'humour; they delight in the "witchery," the"word-webbing," which they take as theirprivilege. They attack the "necrophilic" "re-ligion" of "patriarchy," define "dick" as oneof the "popocratic vulgar trinity" (see: NOONE), reinvest "spell-ing" with feminist crea-tive power, and generally put the languageback together in a new way. Louky Bersianikis one of the writers whom they quote forinventive examples. Neither the book nor thenew vocabulary will be to everyone's taste,and even the most devoted readers may findtheir attention wanders. But it is the processthat is important: it is a process of transform-ing the familiar so that it can come onceagain to be seen.

LAST PAGEAnthologies are both an industry and the tan-gible proof of a preoccupation. It is not thatthey are a mirror on the anthologist's soulexactly; rather, they demonstrate someone'sleap of imaginative connection. Anthologiesbring together. And in so doing, they repos-sess what they collect, for the sake of theinsights that contextual association allows.Even a journal can be read as an anthology,as does the handsome inaugural issue of theDelhi-London Poetry Quarterly (50 Peny-wern Road, London SW59SX), interweavingimage and word. But anthologies come inmany forms. On the one hand is a book likeFrank Moorhouse's choice of nineteenth-cen-tury Australian anecdotes, A Steele RuddSelection (Univ. of Queensland, A$g.g5),which inferentially demonstrates how muchMoorhouse (the 1970's fictional deconstruc-tionist) is linked after all with the traditionalpast — especially with the social deconstruc-tion in which these 1890's anecdote-writerswere not so covertly engaged. On the otherhand there is a book like Michael Cox andR. A. Gilbert's The Oxford Book of EnglishGhost Stories (Oxford, $26.95)—from SirWalter Scott and M. R. James (whose ghoststories Cox has separately edited for Oxford,in an edition illustrated by Rosalind Calde-

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cott, $25.95) to Simon Raven and T. H.White. This book not only assembles a chron-ological set of examples, but traces a traditionby means of them. Hence the introductory es-say is important to understanding the book'sfunction. It is not a random collection —absurd ghosts are out, the "fun of the shud-der" (Edith Wharton's phrase) is in — and itparticularly wants to know, though does notdirectly answer, why women were so influen-tial in the development of the art of haunting.That said, the number of women collected inthe book is not great: May Sinclair on theneed to dispose of "the seventeen pieces ofMr Greathead's body," Elizabeth Bowen on"All Mrs Varley de Grey's other Indian lug-gage," E. Nesbit on "how peacefully the mar-ble figures slept on through the ghastly hour,"and a few others.

Women are, however, the main focus ofBarbara H. Solomon's American Wives (NewAmerican Library, $6.95)—thirty Americanwriters, Louisa May Alcott to Bobbie AnnMason, on the art and drama and stereotypesof marriage — and Women in History (Allen& Unwin, NZ$24.95), ten essays on the livesof European women in New Zealand, ed. Bar-bara Brookes et al. Solomon's work has anovert social intent: to probe the character ofwomen's commitments to an institution;Brookes's work, while on the surface more en-gaged with demographic details involving edu-cation, medical history, poverty, marriage, andnationality, is perhaps even more direct in itssocial commitment. For Brookes and the othereditors, the information in the book is notsimply statistical or anecdotal or interesting,it is fundamentally revisionist, for it retrievesfrom silence the experience of women in asociety whose official histories have inferen-tially consigned such lives to irrelevance.Some of the essays address issues such as con-tagion, charitable schemes, and abortion; oth-ers take matters like school dress codes anddemonstrate the degree to which these appar-ently incidental features of life, so rapidlyconsigned to the category "fashion," are infact clear manifestations of social presump-tions about women's freedom (of movement,in society) and about their ostensibly equalstatus in a society designed by men.

Fay Zwicky's The Lyre in the Pawnshop,subtitled "Essays on Literature and Survival1974-1984" (Univ. of Western Australia,US$17.50), further pursues such issues, butsituates them in a context of resilience. Exilesand minority groups and survivors are heroverriding topic: where, she asks, does the

power to survive come from? Echoing Geof-frey Serie, a central essay — all are lucid andthoughtful — observes about the poetry ofRandolph Stow that the desert in Australiais surprisingly productive. Space is the abid-ing gift. But therein lies a paradox, for it isspace which isolates as well as space whichenfranchises; and it is the idea of space whichunderlies the definition of what is normal, whois acceptable, where the limits are, andwhether or not there is room. Trudie Mc-Naughton's anthology, Countless Signs (ReedMethuen, n.p.), samples New Zealand litera-ture (poetry, fiction, diaries, journals, etc.)for descriptions of landscape; what emerges isa contrast between the presumptive "certainty"of European men going out to measure whatthey see, and the Maori who continue to feelthe land as a moral force. Conquest and en-lightenment were contrary attractions; forsome, the duty of "civilising the landscape"equated with religious conversion, thus servingfunctionally to erase the apparent contradic-tion. For subsequent commentators, however,this implicit transformation of human beingsinto landscapes argues not civilization butconquest — the arbitrary eye of measurementtaking precedence over the aspiration fornatural good. Peggy Nightingale's edited con-ference papers, A Sense of Place in the NewLiteratures in English (Univ. of Queensland,US$22.50), reveals several critics in mid-definition of the character of space and place,many concerned with the details of setting,many others with the parameters of criticalexpectation. The South African critic StephenGray, for example, snappily, if familiarly, di-vides images of Commonwealth place into afour-part history: imperial exotica, colonialquaintness (a stage which co-opts vernacular"lashings of larrikinese" to make politicalpoints), national "greatness" (the "norms andvalues" assumed in any "flamboyant" assertionof national "literary rights"), and a fourthstage he calls "multiculturalism," which liesbeyond a "geographical condition or a clas-sificatory principle" and is something ap-proximating a metaphysics. For those withmulticulturalism around them, the meta-physics of such a translation may be moredifficult to apprehend; in some ways Gray's isas political a statement as the imperial/colonial stages he is at pains to dispute, andas marked by region and the social structuresthat define one's home.

Dimitri Tsaloumas's Contemporary Austral-ian Poetry (Univ. of Queensland, A$24-95)is instructive about Australian society, for ex-

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ample, not only by what it chooses to collectbut also by what it does with what it chooses:it translates it all into Greek. Les Murray'sThe New Oxford Book of Australian Verse(Oxford, $ . ) redefines tradition in aquite different way, by underplaying the stan dard torchbearers of Australian culture (Bren nan, Hope, McAuley) and highlighting theprevious margins: the oral literature of theseveral aboriginal tribes, the literature ofwomen, the mourning songs of aboriginalwomen (reminding the reader that there areethnic biases in revisionist feminism as wellas in male dominated conventions), and theliterature of popular culture — hence allowingthe more familiar "literary" poems to acquirea new resonance in a newly perceived context.Yet Susan Johnson and Mary Roberts, editingLatitudes (Univ. of Queensland, Α$22·5θ;pa. $8.50), assert "region" still as the reso nant sign of a way of life — in this case thetropical feel of Queensland : writers fromDavid Malouf to Janette Turner Hospital findspace here. "The vigilant eye of the writer,"say the editors, "observes the fragility of hu man relationships within an emotional andgeographic landscape." But it is political aswell, as is, broadly speaking, the anthologyitself. The act of choice is political.

For example, Berton Roueché, too, findslandscape important, as a measure of humanreach and as a sign of human adaptation; hisassorted travel essays on "people and places,"Sea to Shining Sea (Fitzhenry & Whiteside,$28.95), sample the world from Oregon toAlaska, Idaho to New Orleans, and find itvaried. But implicitly the world is Americanto Roueché's sensitive eyes and careful pen.The other world is always made to seem acurious place. And when he declares to hisArctic guide at one point, "There's no placelike home," he seems nonplussed when theguide agrees. He also seems to share in thesurprise of one of the people he quotes inLong Island, who is vaguely distressed whenothers are not delighted to welcome visitorsas saviours. At the same time, Roueché valuesisolation himself — it is a place of its ownkind, and a context from which to write ofplace, of what is passing, and of what is past.

W.N.

M. ANDERSEN teaches at the Univ. ofGuelph; Gary BOIRE at the Univ. of Auck-land; Arnold E. DAVIDSON at MichiganState; James DOYLE at Wilfrid Laurier; Den-nis ESSAR at Brock; Leslie Ann HALES atKing's College, Edmonton; Patricia KÖSTERat the Univ. of Victoria; Janice KULYKKEEFER at Univ. Ste.-Anne; Michèle LA-COMBE at Laurentian; Hugh HOOD atUniv. de Montréal ; Patricia MORLEY at Con-cordia; Irène OORE at Dalhousie; Don PRE-COSKY at the College of New Caledonia;Aron SENKPIEL at the Yukon Campus ofU.B.C.; Stephen SLEMON at the Univ. ofQueensland; Sam SOLECKI at St. Michael'sCollege, Univ. of Toronto; Michael STEIG atSimon Fraser; Eric THOMPSON at Univ. deQuébec à Chicoutimi; Lee THOMPSON atthe Univ. of Vermont; Lynn WYTENBROEKat Malaspina College; Pierre-Yves MOC-QUAIS at the Univ. of Regina; and RobertVIAU at the Univ. of Brandon. John BAG-LOW lives in Ottawa ; Laurel BOONE in Fred-ericton; Shirley BUS WELL in San Francisco;John DONLAN in London, Ont. ; Susan RudyDORSCHT in Waterloo; Gillian HARDING-RUSSELL in Surrey, B.C.; M. MACFAR-LANE in Victoria; John URQUHART inWinnipeg; and William B. ROBERTSON inSaskatoon. D. ATKINSON and Helen HOYteach at the Univ. of Lethbridge; DouglasBARBOUR, H. A. HARGREAVES, RaymondJONES, Peter KLOVAN, and Robert WIL-SON at the Univ. of Alberta; Silvia BERGER-SEN, Richard BEVIS, Anthony DAWSON,Elliott GOSE, Sandra HUTCHISON, PatMERIVALE, Jeremy MOUAT, Ann MUN-TON, Valérie RAOUL, and Peter TAYLORat U.B.C.; Neil BESNER, Diane McGIF-FORD, and Kenneth MEADWELL at theUniv. of Winnipeg; Don GUTTERIDGE,Paul JACOB, and Raija H. KOSKI at theUniv. of Western Ontario; Anthony JohnHARDING and Diana RELKE at the Univ.of Saskatchewan; Philip KOKOTAILO andLorraine YORK at McGill; A. Lynne MAG-NUSSON and Jill TOMASSON GOODWINat the Univ. of Waterloo; Dominic MANGA-NIELLO and Peter STICH at the Univ. ofOttawa; George L. PARKER and Thomas B.VINCENT at Royal Military College. SarahMUNTON and George WOODCOCK live inVancouver; Gay ALLISON, . . DON ALD,Allan EN N IST, A. F. M ORITZ, Stan RO GAL, Raymond SOU STER, and Rhea TRE GEBOV in Toronto; Mona Elaine ADILMAN,Stephen H EN IG H AN , Erin M OU RE, andJulian SAMUEL in Montreal.

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REPRINTSAVAILABLE in paperback reprints by Quinze($5-95 e a ·) a r e Marie-Claire Biais, Une Liai-son parisienne, Gratien Gélinas, Bousille et lesjustes and Tit-coq, Yves Thériault, Aaron, LaFille laide and Agaguk, Gabrielle Roy, Fra-giles lumières de la terre, Pierre Turgeon,Faire sa mort comme faire l'amour and LaPremière personne, Albert Laberge, LaScouine, Marcel Dubé, Un Simple Soldat,and Louise Leblanc's 37 '/> AA. Yves Thé-riault, Les Temps du carcajou and Le Der-nier Havre have appeared with L'Actuelle(η.p.) and Roch Carrier, Le Deux-MillièmeÉtage and Jolis Deuils ($5.95 ea.) are againavailable from Editions du Jour. Stanké hasreissued Claude-Henri Grignon, Un Hommeet son péché and Marie-Claire Biais, Une Sai-son dans la vie d'Emmanuel. In its paperbackcollection "Québec 10/10," Stanké has pub-lished the three volumes of Marie-ClaireBlais's Pauline Archange trilogy (Manuscritsde Pauline Archange, Vivre! Vivre! and LesApparences), as well as her books DavidSterne, Le Loup and Le Jour est noir suivi deL'Insoumise ($5.95 ea) . Many volumes ofGabrielle Roy's oeuvre have appeared in thesame collection: Alexandre Chenevert, RueDeschambault, La Route d'Altamont, La Mon-tagne secrète, La Petite Poule d'eau, La Ri-vière sans repos and Cet été qui chantait. Alsoavailable are André Major, Le Vent du diableand Les Rescapés, Yves Thériault, Agoak,Jacques Benoit, Patience et Firlipon, LionelGroulx, La Confédération canadienne, andClaude Jasmin, Ethel et le terroriste.

E.-M.K.

Recent reprints include Jessica Anderson'smystery, The Last Man's Head (PenguinAustralia, $9-95); David Foster's comicMoonlite (Penguin Australia, $9.95); BharatiMukherjee's fictional account of a debilitatingmarriage to America, Wife (Penguin, $8.95) ;Olga Masters's 1984 novel, with its neatly am-bivalent title, Loving Daughters (Univ. ofQueensland, $8.95) ; and several collections.Among the latter is the University of Queens-land Press "Portable" Robert D. FitzGerald,ed. Julian Croft ($12.50); a useful (if highlyselective) anthology, eds. Laurent Mailhotand Pierre Nepveu, La poésie québécoise(Hexagone, . .), which samples a range ofpoets from Lescarbot to Marie Uguay; AnnOosthuizen's Sometimes When It Rains (Pan dora/ Methuen, $9.95), a collection of works

(primarily of fiction) by thirteen South Afri can women; An Olive Schreiner Reader, sub titled "Writings on Women and South Africa,"including some of the late nineteenth centuryfeminist allegories, edited by Carol Barash(Pandora/ Methuen, $15.95) \ Hone Tuwhare'scollected poems, MIHI (Penguin, NZ$17.99) ;the third edition of An Anthology of Twen tieth Century New Zealand Poetry, selected byVincent O'Sullivan (Oxford, $25.00) ; and theselected short fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhab vala, Out of India (Irwin, $29.95), fifteenstories from various collections, with a new,autobiographical introduction.

* * * * S T E P H E N LEACOCK, Un Été à Mari-posa. Québec/Amérique, η.p. Another fa vourite, Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of aLittle Town, has been translated from the"canadien anglais" in the translation pro gramme headed by Donald Smith at Québec/Amérique. Élise de Bellefeuille and Michel St.-Germain, however, found themselves con-fronted with a recalcitrant text, and Un étéà Mariposa presents itself with explanatoryfootnotes and original words in italic. In thepreface, Leacock introduces himself as havingbeen educated "au Upper Canada College, àToronto, où je fus head boy en 1887," Mr.Smith's "Rats' Cooler" and his "girl room"proved untranslatable, and Bellefeuille andSt.-Germain decided against duplicating theonomatopoeic qualities of some of the names(Golgotha Gingham, Peter Pupkin, and theReverend Drone to mention only a few) inFrench equivalents. However, "La palpitantepassion de M. Pupkin" for "The Extraordi-nary Entanglement of Mr. Pupkin" is a strokeof genius, as are many other delectable pas-sages.

E.-M.K.