so many books - canadian literature

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So Many BooksSusan Fisher

I often fear that books are taking over my life, as ifreading were becoming the greater part of living. Here in the CL office, asimilar impression prevails—books are winning out. Review copies crowd theshelves, pile up on the floor, annex desk tops, and fill our briefcases. Weship books out regularly, but the total quantity of books in our precinctsnever diminishes. We have brought this fate upon ourselves, for we orderreview copies of all titles that seem pertinent to the study of Canadian liter-ature. The problem is the ever-increasing number of books that fall intothis category.

As Laurie Ricou points out in "Last Pages" in this issue, it's hard to saywhat might be useful to our readers. If you reflect for a moment on the inter-ests of the English department in your neighbourhood, you will soon con-clude (as we have done) that just about anything from oral history tonatural history, medicine to folklore, geography to genetics could, in someway, bear on the study of Canadian literature.

Of course, our first interest remains Canadian literature and literarycriticism, but for most Canadianists, affiliations based on gender or post-coloniality or period can be just as important as strictly national concerns.A book of interest to a scholar working on Rohinton Mistry is unlikelyto attract the eye of the Agnes Maule Machar specialist (though he or shemay also be interested in Machar's near-contemporary, Sara JeannetteDuncan, and so the Indian material pertinent to Mistry may be useful afterall). Nonetheless, our aim must be to serve all our colleagues.

Canadian Literature 1801 Spring 2004

We review literary criticism, novels, short stories, poetry, drama, travelwriting, children's books, essays, autobiographies, reference works, art andfilm criticism, histories, diaries, local histories, cultural studies, and soforth. (We have even reviewed a few cookbooks.) Moreover, we try to dothis in both official languages.

The relentless expansion of literary studies into neighbouring zones isnot the only reason our reviews section keeps burgeoning. The number ofbooks being published is steadily increasing. (One observer claims thatsomewhere in the world, a book is published every thirty seconds; in theface of this, even speed readers must admit defeat.) In Canada the pace issomewhat more leisurely—about one every forty minutes (based on thefigures for 1999, the most recent year for which Statistics Canada suppliesdata). Many of these are not titles we would review; still, in our areas ofinterest as in other sectors of the market, a lot of books are being published.Between 1992 and 1999, the number of books published in English inCanada rose from 6,556 to 10,757. The growth in publishing in French wasnot so marked—from 3,155 to 3,682. (What is remarkable about French-language publishing is its size relative to the francophone population:about one-fifth of Canadians are francophone, but a quarter of all bookspublished in this country are in French.)

If one judges only by the Statistics Canada picture of the 1990s, Canadianpublishing is on a path of sustained growth. But the past three years havebrought problems, most notably the bankruptcy of General Publishing andits allied distribution service in 2002. As Marc Côté pointed out in a recentissue of Canadian Literature (CL #177), the losses occasioned by the GeneralPublishing debacle forced many small publishers to cut back their lists.

But a great many books are still being published in this country. In anarticle first posted in September of 2003 at www.dooneyscafe.com, Torontowriter Gordon Lockheed asserts that Canada simply "produces too manybooks." Consequently, like any over-produced commodity, the book is los-ing its value, both in the marketplace and in the cultural life of the country.Lockheed goes on to decry the state of reviewing in this country, pointingout the steadily diminishing amount of space given to books in the nation'snewspapers. He also takes a swipe at journals like CL: "Canada's universityjournals have completely descended into jargon-mustering or have becomeglossy display cases for artifactual materials." We try not to muster jargonbut rather to minimize it. (Lockheed, for his part, is mustering some prettyarcane words of his own: what, I wonder, are "artifactual materials"?) And if


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newspapers and magazines are retreating from the domain of the seriousreview, then Canadian Literature has an even greater responsibility to pro vide the coverage not being provided elsewhere.

What is our duty to Canadian publishers, writers, readers, and scholars—and to the many Canadianists outside this country who read Whatshould our reviews accomplish? Laurie Ricou, writing in this space eighteenyears ago (CL#109), described the reviewer's job as a "rear view" or a "turn ing around to look again"; he compared reviewing to walking through aJapanese garden, in which the "perspective going back the way you have justcome is entirely different." Jan Zwicky, in the Fall 2003 issue of MalahatReview (a special issue on the topic of reviewing), asks that the reviewerbecome "a kind of literary naturalist, someone with sharp ears and a goodmemory." One of CI's associate editors, Kevin McNeilly, also writing in theMalahat Review special issue, describes a review as "a speaking part thatalso attends to the voice or voices of another. It is a verbally proactive formof listening." In the October 2003 Journal of Scholarly Publishing, Ronald W.Tobin likens reviewers to "guests at a banquet prepared by an author."(Those among us with long experience of reviewing may instinctively feelthat if food analogies are to be used, survival rations, fast food, and steamtray leftovers should find a place alongside the haute cuisine, but this is cav illing.) The reviewer, like the guest at a banquet, has certain responsibilities,chief among them "to be critical but civil." This is a fine injunction and onethat we all should remember. But David Henige in the October 2001 issue ofJournal of Scholarly Publishing worries that shrinking word limits are forc ing even conscientious and civil reviewers to resort to formulaic reviews (aspredictable, he claims, as the average Love Boat episode): "a few sentencesset the stage, followed by a brief description, and perhaps an analysis of thebook's contents. Then, for balance, a few nits are picked, to be succeeded bya 'despite these, this is a useful contribution to knowledge' conclusion." Theresult is that reviews become only "ritual objects" instead of the "contribu tions to colloquy" that they ought to be.

Henige's fears do not seem unfounded. In 500 words, it is hard to do justiceto a book that represents many months or years of a writer's time. But I amconstantly impressed by how much information and analysis our reviewersmanage to fit into the small space they are allotted, without resorting to theformulaic approach condemned by Henige. I am afraid that we are about totest their skills even further. We have decided to initiate an experiment atCL: for some new works (certainly not all), we will ask for a notice of only


200 words, somewhat like the "In Brief" section of the Times LiterarySupplement or "Briefly Noted" in the New Yorker. This will be hard on ourreviewers, and it may shortchange some writers (and their publishers). Butonly by reducing some reviews can we hope to continue to accommodatethe many new titles we receive. We hope that a short notice will give ourreaders enough information to decide whether the book in question is onethey want to acquire.

We also hope that, despite the limitations of space and the inevitable delays,our reviews will continue to serve as "contributions to colloquy." Whileediting the reviews section, I frequently stop to note the titles that I want tofollow up on; I have also on occasion stopped to laugh out loud and evento wipe away tears. The scholarship, wit, breadth, care, and civility of ourreviewers continue to impress me. I hope that other readers of CL also findthe reviews pages a useful (and even entertaining and affecting) source of infor-mation about our field which, like the universe, seems destined to expand.

We are delighted to welcome two new associate editors to Canadian Literature.Laura Moss, Assisant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia,

joins us as Associate Editor (Book Reviews). Laura is the editor of a criticaledition of Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague (2001) and of therecent collection Is Canada Postcolonial? Essays on Canadian Literature andPostcolonial Theory (2003).

Our new Associate Editor (Francophone) is Réjean Beaudoin, Professor ofFrench at UBC. He is the author o/Naissance d'une littérature. Essai sur lemessianisme et les débuts de la littérature canadienne-française (1989), Leroman québécois (1991) et Une étude des Poésies d'Emile Nelligan (1997).Réjean will play a central role not only in the hook review section but in all thefrancophone elements of Canadian Literature/Littérature canadienne.

We are very fortunate that Laura and Réjean have joined the CL team; welook forward to presenting their work in future issues.

Canadian Literature 180 I Spring 2004

P a d d y M c C a

Empire

The great society of the alleyhas found its way homecarrying ample treasuresone by oneofferings, sustenance, a littlesomething tucked awayfor the children

it goes on all dayeach morsel truckedbelow the dusty lane.

I watched one bloody seedof raspberry elevatea culture, a single bladeof grass unfold newtestaments of earththe progress vulnerableto heat, the plow, the greatwheel's scorn

and went inconverted warehouse tubingtending down, each faceaverted, not a crumbout of place. I pulledmy weight as goodas anyone afraidof the rumble upstairsthe 4X4S and boot-crunch

1 0 Canadian Literature 1801 Spring 2004

the fenceposts cutting inand putting no littlestrain upon the retro-fittedbuttresses

pushing backto preserve the familyhoards of fuel forthe slave-trade, the newexpansion, dreamsof a way through a solid-looking edifice of cloudmountains, tribalgods beyond numberdigging infinite portals.

11 Canadian Literature 1801 Spring 2004

L a u r a R o b i n s o n

Bosom FriendsLesbian Desire in L.M. Montgomery'sAnne Books

"Oh Diana," said Anne at last, clasping her hands and speakingalmost in a whisper, "do you think—oh, do you think you canlike me a little—enough to be my bosom friend?"(Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables 87)

When their work was done and Gilbert was out of the way,they gave themselves over to shameless orgies of lovemakingand ecstasies of adoration.(Montgomery, Anne's House of Dreams 208)

I am not a Lesbian," fifty-eight-year-old L.M.Montgomery wrote in her journal in response to an increasingly problem-atic relationship with Isobel,1 a female schoolteacher in her late twenties(Selected Journals 8 Feb 1932). One might think that Montgomery proteststoo much, especially since she also, intriguingly, claims to understand the"horrible craving" of the lesbian "much better than [Isobel] understands itherself" (Selected Journals 24 June 1932). Yet Montgomery convincingly rep-resents Isobel's relentless pursuit as pathological. The younger womanthreatened suicide and professed undying love for the novelist: "I'll diewithout you. You've always shone like a golden star in my life ..." (SelectedJournals 8 Feb 1932). Montgomery was disturbed yet fascinated by Isobel'sinterest in her, labelling Isobel an "unconscious" lesbian (10 June 1932).

In Anne of Windy Poplars (1936), a novel published four years after theseentries, Montgomery depicts a relationship that seems to draw on herown experience with Isobel. As I will discuss in detail later, Anne pursuesa friendship with an unhappy spinster schoolteacher, Katherine Brooke.Katherine voices feelings for Anne that echo Isobel's for Montgomery:"I acknowledged to myself that you might just have come from somefar-off star" (150). Similarly, Anne's frustration with Katherine mirrorsMontgomery's exasperation with Isobel. While Anne exclaims, "Katherine


Brooke, whether you know it or not, what you want is a good spanking"(144), Montgomery wrote, "I would dearly have loved to have taken MissIsobel across my knee and administered a sound and salutary spanking byway of giving her a lesson in elementary good manners, common sense andordinary decency" (20 August 1932). Certainly, intense female friendshipsappeared frequently in novels for and by women at the time. Montgomerywas patently aware that these friendships could suggest other possibilities,such as same-sex desire. Nevertheless, even after reading about lesbianismin a psychoanalytic study2 and undergoing this troubling experience withIsobel, Montgomery maintained a focus on Anne's love for girls and womenin Anne of Windy Poplars and Anne oflngleside. Thus, lesbian desire inMontgomery's works is not an anachronistic issue, reflecting only our latetwenty-first-century attitudes towards same-sex relationships; on the con-trary, it arises directly from Montgomery's fiction and journals.3

Anne's friendship with Katherine is only one of many same-sex relation-ships that form the basis of the eight books in Montgomery's Anne of GreenGables series. From Diana, Marilla, and Miss Stacy to Miss Lavendar, Susan,and Rebecca Dew (to mention only a few examples), girls and women dom-inate the narratives. Anne's relationships with girls and women are centralto every book. Yet Montgomery faced a generic and social imperative tomarry the female characters off. By constructing a world where women'slove for each other is a source of power and fulfilment, and then emphasiz-ing the inevitability of marriage, Montgomery's novels underscore the factthat, at the turn of the twentieth century, heterosexuality was compulsory.At the same time, by exposing the operations of compulsory heterosexual-ity, Montgomery's Anne books subtly challenge the patriarchal traditionsthat intervene in women's relationships with each other.

Contesting Patriarchy: Scholarly ConsensusMontgomery scholarship has largely proceeded on the assumption thatAnne is "naturally" heterosexual, an assumption that allows for feministinterpretations which highlight the heroine's empowerment. Critics such asMary Rubio, Elizabeth Epperly, and Shirley Foster and Judy Simons agreethat Montgomery criticizes or challenges her society, particularly its patri-archal structure. However, her challenge is couched in conventional terms.Rubio argues that Montgomery "embed[s] a countertext of rebellion" in hernovels which nevertheless seem to "reinforce all the prevailing ideologies"(8). Montgomery manages this, in part, Rubio claims, through the lowbrow


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literary form of domestic romance, through humour, and through narrativemethod and characterization. Similarly, Foster and Simons emphasize thatthrough literary allusions and humour, Montgomery "challenge[s] codifiedestablished values" (154). Epperly emphasizes the subversive irony in Anneof Green Gables that is not carried through the rest of the series.

These critics acknowledge that, while Montgomery subtly challengespatriarchy in her fiction, she also follows generic conventions, such as thosestipulating "that female heroines should be sexless, refined 'ladies'... whoconformed to society's expectations;.. . [and] that the ideal closure for a'good' young girl's story must be marriage" (Rubio 13). Thus, "Anne's onlysensible choice is to embrace her destiny, realize her love for Gilbert, and getmarried" (Epperly 69). T.D. MacLulich agrees that Montgomery's heroines"meekly agree to marry the mate that Montgomery has created specificallyfor them" (466) because she "could not imagine an alternate way of endinga story" (471). Anne's inevitable marriage may also yield a reading that isless empowering for the heroine if readers do not assume that she is hetero-sexual. For if the reader concludes that Anne's love for women remainsunfulfilled because she lives under a generic and social imperative to be het-erosexual, then Anne capitulates to patriarchal pressures in return foracceptance by her community.

Some critics have pointed out that heterosexual love carries discomfort orambiguity in Montgomery's novels by comparing them to Kevin Sullivan's1985 television movie, Anne of Green Gables. Sullivan's version oï Anneemphasizes the budding heterosexual romance between Anne and Gilbert;his handling of their relationship highlights the extent to whichMontgomery does not emphasize romance. Susan Drain suggests thatMontgomery is "uncomfortable in handling romance" in contrast toSullivan because Montgomery does not dwell on the supposedly blossominglove between Anne and Gilbert (Drain, "Too Much" 71). Temma Berg, inresponse to Sullivan's movie version, notes that in the novel Anne seeks afriend, not a romantic partner, in Gilbert ("A Girl's Reading" 127).

The conclusion that Montgomery's novels subtly question heterosexualityis not new, although little has so far been published on the topic. In her arti-cle "My Secret Garden," Irene Gammel argues that the "eroticized" and"passionate girl-girl friendships" in Montgomery's Emily books provide thecharacters with transgressive power (42). These relationships, combinedwith nature and auto-eroticism as sources of energy and power, construct afemale eros focused on health and well-being. However, Gammel shies away

I4 Canadian Literature 1801 Spring 2004

from the conclusion that the friendships might be lesbian, even while shediscusses the "female-centred eros" (59). While arguing that Montgomeryadvocates a "subversive eros," her article in fact demonstrates the opposite:Emily's acceptance into her community rests, in part, on her rejection of hersame-sex desires in favour of heterosexual behaviour (53). Moreover, bysuggesting that the Emily books expand the friendship motif established inAnne of Green Gables, Gammel seems to dismiss the potentially transgres-sive power of the expressions of same-sex love in the Anne books: it is merefriendship.

Marah Gubar argues that Montgomery's novels indicate that she isaware of the lack of choice in the ending: marriage is, in fact, compulsory.Focusing on the Anne series, Gubar argues persuasively that Montgomerypostpones heterosexual marriages in her Anne books in order to "makeroom for passionate relationships between women that prove far moreromantic than traditional marriages" (47). Like Gammel, Gubar does notaddress same-sex eroticism directly, but her point is clear: Montgomery'sAnne novels focus on women's relationships with each other to a degreethat displaces and disrupts heterosexual conventions. The Anne booksconvey the message that "only a misguided fool would dismiss a potentialprince simply because he's a girl" (Gubar 65). However, as Gubar alsonotes, Montgomery can only postpone heterosexuality; she cannot evade italtogether.

Other scholars have made more direct connections between Anne and les-bian desire. Karen Dubinsky, a historian at Queen's University, places Anneof Green Gables in the context of Boston marriages ("platonic" live-in rela-tionships between women in nineteenth-century America).4 Linda Grant dePauw, also a historian, invokes Anne of Green Gables when she defines les-bianism: "Some lesbians prefer sexual activity that is nongenital, the kind ofkissing, hugging, holding hands, and sharing a bed once considered totallyinnocent and celebrated in such books as Anne of Green Gables, in which theheroine unselfconsciously seeks out a 'bosom buddy'" (8). In a paper enti-tled "Is Anne of Green Gables a lesbian?" presented to a children's literatureconference in Nashville, Steven Bruhm concludes that indeed she is. In thememoir No Previous Experience, Elspeth Cameron describes the e-mail con-versation she and her female best friend and lover had about Anne andDiana's relationship, in which they pose the question "Do you think L.M.M.had any idea how erotic [Anne and Diana's conversation] sounds?" (73).Whether Montgomery knew the erotic power of her language or not, the

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relationships Anne has with girls and women in the eight novels are, at thevery least, ambiguous in their treatment of passion.

In my own teaching and lecturing on the topic, audiences, readers, andstudents have responded with engaged interest to such arguments. But whenI presented an early draft of this paper at Congress 2000 in Edmonton, thesuggestion that the Anne books might contain expressions of lesbian desireprompted a public outcry and a media storm.5 The two-and-a-half weeks ofsustained media interest in this research led to articles by two scholars,Cecily Devereux and Gavin White, responding to my initial draft argument.Devereux's article is concerned primarily with a historical analysis of whatshe terms "The 'Bosom Friends' Affair," concluding that the resultantdebate over Anne's sexuality reveals what Canadian culture holds dear.White's article acknowledges that the friendships in the Anne books areextremely important but focuses almost exclusively on defending Anne (andMontgomery) against the charge of lesbianism. The anxiety my research hascaused could be considered evidence of the very same compulsory hetero-sexuality that I argue is at work in these novels. The suggestion that Anne'sdesires might not be heterosexual is deeply troubling to many readers.

Lesbian Desires: Historical ContextMontgomery's novels span a crucial period in the history of sexuality, fromthe end of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Historians such asCarroll Smith-Rosenberg and Lillian Faderman have examined the lovethat flourished between women in the nineteenth century, both in Britainand the United States.6 Women in "romantic friendships" were devoted toeach other in ways that would now be regarded as erotically charged: theywrote love letters to each other; they pledged undying love; they spent theirlifetimes "in love" with each other, even when they married men; they slepttogether and caressed and fondled; some women even lived together theirwhole lives. According to these historians, middle-class society at the timedid not consider this intensely homosocial behaviour problematic.However, in the 1920s, for various reasons, including the new work of sexol-ogists and women's emancipatory movements, mainstream culture beganto view the love between women as threatening, pathological, and unac-ceptable. Smith-Rosenberg suggests that, prior to this time, in order tomaintain separate spheres for males and females, middle-class families haddiscouraged young women's interest in men and, by extension, encouragedwomen's "homosocial ties" (74). Rosemary Auchmuty finds evidence of this

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change in attitudes in Elsie J. Oxenham's girls' stories. She finds that "a veryconscious love for women which in 1923 was fine and after 1928 becameabnormal and unhealthy, represent [ed] a level of intimacy which was toothreatening to be allowed to continue" (140). Faderman asserts that after 1920,British middle-class society perceived that "love between women, coupledwith their emerging freedom, might conceivably bring about the overthrowof heterosexuality—which has meant not only sex between men and womenbut patriarchal culture, male dominance, and female subservience" (411).

Lisa L. Moore disputes Faderman's and Smith-Rosenberg's findings bypointing out that there was occasional disapprobation of close femalefriendships in the nineteenth century (8). Looking at the oppositional con-structs of "the sapphist" and "the romantic friend," Moore shows that,from the eighteenth century onwards, women's intimacy with one another,whether in friendship or otherwise, has not been unproblematic. Accordingto Moore, women's relationships with each other elicited a range of responses,from alarm to indifference. Rather than being encouraged (as Smith-Rosenbergargues), "intimacy between women formed a much more flexible category,one that could be recruited in the service of arguments from across thepolitical spectrum" (Moore 145). Through her study of literature, Mooreeffectively shows that even before the 1920s, British middle-class societyoften did find women's love for women threatening. Similarly, Sheila Jeffreyscites evidence from Faderman's The Scotch Verdict that girls in Britishboarding schools in 1811 were gossiping, often maliciously, about lesbianism(27). While no one has conducted a full and detailed historical study ofwomen's friendships in the Canadian context, it seems safe to assume thatsimilarly complex attitudes prevailed in Canada.

Ultimately, as these studies underscore, the distinction between femalefriendship and lesbianism is exceedingly difficult to make. Surely the divi-sion between the "sapphist" and the "romantic friend" is an insignificantand socially constructed one, as Sheila Jeffreys points out in her article onlesbians in history, "Does It Matter If They Did It?" It is extremely difficultfor modern scholars to determine whether women of the past who consid-ered themselves romantic friends were in fact lesbians: the women could orwould not document other dimensions to their relationships, or familiessuppressed or destroyed evidence (Lesbian History Group). In any case, theline between mere friendship and lesbian love is blurry at best. Regardless ofthe extent to which one might argue that genital contact is a defining fea-ture of lesbianism, women can be in love with women for their entire lives

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without experiencing sexual contact. Refraining from sexual contact withother women does not necessarily make a woman heterosexual. Similarly,women can have sexual encounters with women without defining them-selves as lesbian. Nevertheless, there appears to be (at least in our own time)a need to label sexuality, perhaps as a response to sustained threats to patri-archal domination. As Jonathan Katz explains, "At this [the twentieth] cen-tury's end hetero and homo have settled into two fixed, concrete objects ofeveryday postmodern life" (170).

Through her framework of the "lesbian continuum," Adrienne Richbelieves that feminist analysis should expose compulsory heterosexuality, orthe extent to which heterosexuality is a rigidly enforced ideology ratherthan a sexual preference or choice. Rich suggests that all women occupypositions on a lesbian continuum which expresses "a range—through eachwoman's life and throughout history—of women-identified experience, notsimply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexualexperience with another woman" (239). Rich's continuum disrupts the sim-plistic binary opposition between gay and straight. Identifying Anne'sdesires for her female friends as lesbian highlights the extent to which Anneis assimilated into patriarchal culture when she gets engaged to and marriesGilbert. More importantly, reading for Anne's lesbian desires exposes thepossibilities for same-sex desire and the workings of compulsory heterosex-uality in Montgomery's fiction.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis's analysis of conventions of the nineteenth-centurydomestic novel helps explain the generic constraints Montgomery faced—constraints that were, in a sense, enforcement mechanisms for compulsoryheterosexuality. DuPlessis suggests that a "dialectic between love and quest"creates tension in nineteenth-century women's novels, a tension usuallyresolved in favour of love. In DuPlessis's view, narrative structure operatesto transmit ideology: "As a narrative pattern, the romance plot muffles themain female character, represses quest, valorizes heterosexual as opposed tohomosexual ties, incorporates individuals within couples as a sign of theirpersonal and narrative success" (5). In order to be successful—to survivesocially and generically—a character needs to embrace heterosexuality. Annecannot marry Diana. Acceptance comes at a cost, DuPlessis would pointout, as Anne's fulfillment is relinquished for her narrative survival: "Onceupon a time, the end, the rightful end, of women in novels was social—suc-cessful courtship, marriage—or judgemental of her sexual and social fail-ure—death" (1). Anne survives and achieves acceptance by submitting to

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compulsory heterosexuality. Yet, even though Anne and her friends ulti-mately do embrace heterosexuality, Montgomery's novels establish women'sintense homosocial relationships as the central concern. Anne manages toachieve acceptance by doing her duty as a heterosexual woman, yet she alsosucceeds in creating intensely passionate relationships with her femalefriends. These friendships present a quiet challenge to traditional patriarchy.

Montgomery's Alternatives to Compulsory HeterosexualityDiscussing Anne's desires in the context of Rich's lesbian continuumemphasizes the social construction of both heterosexuality and lesbianism.Calling Anne's sexuality into question, as some readers might phrase it,destablizes the naturalness of heterosexuality. Heterosexuality is perceivedas biologically derived and natural in order to justify the gender roles thatperpetuate patriarchy. While Montgomery's novels seem to maintain patri-archal conventions, they also reveal the pressures of compulsory heterosex-uality. Her Anne novels present an array of creative alternatives to traditional,patriarchal family relationships. First, they establish from the outset that aheterosexual family is not the only option. Why are Marilla and Matthewsiblings? The story would not have changed had the two been a married,childless couple. By having siblings rather than a married couple adopt achild, Anne of Green Gables makes clear that any grouping of individualsmay constitute a family and that sexuality need not be the defining feature.

Women living on their own present another alternative to heterosexual-ity. As Gubar rather optimistically suggests, "the Anne series dramatizes thepleasures of single life . . . by rewriting and even eroticizing the figure of theold maid" (50). The eight Anne books begin and end with the stories ofmaiden mothers, Marilla and Rilla: these two maternal virgins "frame andextend the story of the redhead destined for Gilbert and submerged in thegenteel marriage demanded by plot conventions" (Huse 137). Marilla andRilla manage to have a complete life without heterosexual coupling—although, in Rilla's case, this lasts only for a time. While a "maiden" motheris not necessarily lesbian, neither is she necessarily heterosexual. Montgomery'snovels suggest that a woman does not have to be heterosexually active toraise a child. Many of Anne's friends and cherished role models are singlewomen, living fulfilling lives outside of heterosexual pairings: for example,Miss Stacy, Miss Josephine Barry, Miss Cornelia, Miss Katherine Brooke, andRebecca Dew. Marilla and Rachel Lynde live together after Rachel's hus-band's death. This arrangement, which allows Anne to further her university

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education, suggests the empowering possibilities that arise when womenbond together. Moreover, the later Anne novels abound with horrific storiesof marital abuse and domestic violence, indicating not only that heterosex-ual marriage produces a different reality from that promised by the roman-tic ideal but also that perhaps it is best avoided.7 Needless to say, this motifof abuse undermines the matchmaking, courtship, and wedding plots thatstructure the novels.

Not only can women live without heterosexual romance in Montgomery'sAnne books; they can also turn to each other for love and support, asMarilla and Rachel do. Critics have often noted that women dominate theworld of Avonlea, and they have used terms such as "female utopia" todescribe this world (as, for example, Eve Kornfeld and Susan Jackson do).In this respect, the Anne novels resemble other types of "girls' stories":"in contrast to the domestic and heterosexual tenor of the times, they [theschool girls] inhabited a female world. All authority figures as well as col-leagues and comrades were women" (Auchmuty 126). From Marilla andMrs. Lynde to Mrs. Allan and Miss Stacy, female characters provide muchof the strength in the Anne books: "in many ways, the town of Avonleaseems to be a town of Amazons" (Berg, "A Girl's Reading" 127). Moreover,Berg argues that Montgomery successfully represses her personal misgivingsabout female friendships in Anne of Green Gableshy presenting a "perfectfriendship" between Anne and Diana (Berg, "Sisterhood" 39).

Nonetheless, in certain ways the Anne books still insist that the alternativesto heterosexual romance are not particularly attractive. The single life, whilean option, is simply not appealing. Marilla is a dry old maid. Wealthy MissBarry laments her loneliness when Diana and Anne leave. Miss Brooke isdevastatingly lonely. Others, such as Susan and Rebecca Dew, are servants andthe objects of affectionate derision. Montgomery postpones Anne's weddinguntil book five, but, ultimately, Anne must marry or become a laughableold maid. By, on the one hand, affirming the power and fulfilment derivedfrom women's love for each other, and then, on the other, emphasizing theinevitability of marriage, Montgomery's novels underscore the fact that, atthe turn of the twentieth century, heterosexuality was indeed compulsory.

Anne and Her FriendsArguably, Anne's most intense female friendships are with Diana Barry,Katherine Brooke, and Leslie Moore. While Anne's love for Diana begins inadolescence, her relationships with the other two women occur when all are

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adults. Anne is twenty-one when she meets Katherine and twenty-fourwhen she first sees Leslie. Her love for girls and women cannot be dismissedas just a passing phase of childhood. Moreover, in depicting these friend-ships, Montgomery's texts follow a repeated formula, as if to emphasize theheteronormative script and the apparent impossibility of straying from it.First, Anne displays an unbearable longing or desire for her friend. Then,some obstacle obscures the path of their love. The obstacle is finally over-come, only to have compulsory heterosexuality intervene.

Marrying DianaThe idyllic adolescent love shared by Anne and Diana and sustainedthrough their adulthood highlights how inescapable heterosexuality isbecause, despite their love, they cannot ultimately be together. Anne canonly express her intense love for Diana through the heterosexual paradigmof marriage. After the girls are forced to part company, they exchange loveletters that borrow heavily from the discourse of courtship and marriage.Diana writes, "I love you as much as ever," and confesses that she tells "allher secrets" to Anne. Anne responds in kind and signs off with "Yours untildeath us do part," adding "I shall sleep with your letter under my pillowtonight" as a postscript (135). The marriage vow recurs when Diana givesAnne a card with the following inscription:

If you love me as I love youNothing but death can part us two. (146)

Of course, none of this language is inherently heterosexual, but it is the lan-guage that readers associate with adult romantic love rather than girlhoodaffections. The discourse of heterosexual romantic love permeates the texteven while it represents homosexual desire. After Anne, mistakenly offeringDiana red currant wine instead of raspberry cordial, gets her friend drunk,Diana's mother refuses to let her daughter associate with Anne. Anne bidsfarewell to Diana in a highly romantic manner: "Will you promise faithfullynever to forget me, the friend of your youth, no matter what dearer friendsmay caress thee?" (131). She takes a lock of Diana's hair as a keepsake.Moreover, Anne claims to love Diana with "an inextinguishable love" (137;italics in original) and weeps with bitterness over the thought that Dianawill marry someday, as she explains to Marilla: "I love Diana so, Marilla, Icannot live without her. But I know very well when we grow up that Dianawill get married and go away and leave me" (119). That she tells her grief to


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Marilla, a spinster living with her silent brother, highlights Anne's possiblelonely future without Diana. The homoeroticism emerges again whenDiana betrays jealousy of Anne's friend at Queen's: "Josie said you wereinfatuated with her" (290; italics in original). To reassure Diana, Anne says,"I feel as if it were joy enough to sit here and look at you" (290). The sensu-ous language of courtship establishes Anne as suitor to Diana.

The obstacles to their love are varied but fairly minor. The separationoccasioned by the red currant wine incident foreshadows their repeatedlater separations and creates an urgency to their vows of love. Anne andDiana's repeated partings provide the occasions for their romantic exchanges,as if the fact of their being unable to connect physically allows them topledge their eternal love for one another. Their love is postponed until it isfinally redirected to acceptable heterosexuality. Diana pairs up with the bor-ing Fred Wright, and Anne finally consents to marry Gilbert whom she hadearlier rejected because she did not love him (Anne of the Island 143).However, almost every Anne book begins with Diana: Anne of the Islandbegins with both girls regretting the impending change as Anne prepares toleave for university; Anne's House of Dreams begins with Diana helpingAnne get married; Anne oflngleside begins with Anne and Diana, now older,reminiscing about their childhood love. They regret the passing of timebecause it reveals their intimate love, "their old unforgotten love burning intheir hearts," which has necessarily been neglected for their domestic duties(Anne oflngleside 13). When in Ingleside Anne mentions how lovely theirfriendship has been, Diana can hardly express herself: " Yes . . . and we'vealways . . . I mean . . . I never could say things like you, Anne . . . but wehave kept our old 'solemn vow and promise,' haven't we?" (Anne oflngleside12). The nostalgic longing that colours the women's adult relationshipexposes how sad they are about losing intimacy.

Spanking KatherineWhile narrative and social conventions prevent Montgomery from allowingAnne to maintain a primary love relationship with Diana, she developsanother same-sex relationship in its place. Katherine Brooke succeedsDiana in Anne of Windy Poplars. By donning an old pair of Diana's snowshoes when she visits Green Gables, Katherine literally and metaphoricallyfills Diana's shoes, as Diana is now side-tracked by domestic, wifely, andmotherly concerns: "Katherine was with [Anne] in place of Diana" (160).Described as having "almost a man's voice," Katherine, the single school


marm in Summerside, is the embodiment of the anti-feminine ideal (29).Not only does she have an unattractive personality, but her looks are "darkand swarthy," and she is not well-dressed (29). In a letter to Gilbert, Annestill manages to compliment the unhappy woman, noting the shape of herhands, ears, eyes, and mouth. It is noteworthy that Katherine's physicalitywarrants such attention from Anne. Moreover, Anne and Katherine's rela-tionship is informed by a sado-masochism. Katherine is hostile and unpre-dictable toward Anne. Anne writes to Gilbert: "Every time I pass her on thestairs I feel that she is thinking horrid things about me" (29). However,Anne wins the tyrant over, although one must wonder why she continues totry in the face of Katherine's hostility. After proposing that Katherine cometo Green Gables for Christmas and receiving an offensive response, Anneloses her temper: "Katherine Brooke, whether you know it or not, what youwant is a good spanking" (144). Katherine's hostility and anger ultimatelydissipate when Anne refuses to play the masochist and, instead, threatens toadopt a sadistic role. Patricia Smith's concept of lesbian panic might help toexplain the violence, hatred, and fear that characterize the relationshipbetween these two women:

In terms of narrative, lesbian panic is, quite simply, the disruptive action or reactionthat occurs when a character... is either unable or unwilling to confront or revealher own lesbianism or lesbian desire. Typically, a female character, fearing discoveryof her covert or unarticulated lesbian desires—whether by the object of her desires,by other characters, or even by herself— .. . lashes out directly or indirectly atanother woman, resulting in emotional or physical harm to herself or others. (2)8

If this is what motivates Katherine's hostility and Anne's outburst, it abatesafter Katherine confesses to hating Anne. She concludes by admitting that"In spite of my hatred there were times when I acknowledged to myself thatyou might just have come from some far-off star" (150). Katherine's hostilitycloaks a rather traditionally romantic view of Anne as celestial being.

After Anne breaks through to Katherine, a love affair blooms that leavesGilbert in the shadows. Anne and Katherine visit Green Gables for Christmas,and the narrative focuses on their growing friendship. One might think thatAnne would visit with her fiancé since she has spent so much time awayfrom him, yet the narrative hardly mentions Gilbert. Instead, Anne andKatherine spend all their time together. While they snow-shoe, they remainsilent so as not to spoil "something beautiful. But Anne had never felt sonear Katherine Brooke before. By some magic of its own the winter mighthave brought them together .. . almost together but not quite" (148; italics

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in original). It is not quite clear what the narrator means here by "almosttogether," but one must suppose that some intangible emotion stands in theway of their connection as Kindred Spirits, or that a deeper connection ofanother kind is out of the question. Moreover, after Katherine confesses atlength to having hated Anne in the past because, in Katherine's mispercep-tions, Anne's life was easy, they have a more comfortable bond: "Anne nolonger felt afraid of her" (149).

With Anne's encouragement, Katherine quits teaching, which she hates;she goes to Redmond College and then becomes a secretary to a member ofParliament, thereby fulfilling her dream of travelling. This new position,however, does not fulfill all of her dreams, for Katherine, who claims to "hatemen" (149), now finds herself subservient to a man. "I wish I could tell youwhat you've brought into my life," she writes to Anne (255), indicatingsomething that remains unspoken or unspeakable. Much of their friendshipremains outside of language, in a realm "where souls communed with eachother in some medium that needed nothing so crude as words" (148). Refer-ences to the unspoken and unwritten indicate that more is going on than thenarrative can convey. However, Katherine and Anne's love does not progress:Katherine leaves to work for a man, and Anne finally marries Gilbert.

Desiring Leslie9

Anne's passion for Leslie Moore indicates clearly that compulsory hetero-sexuality might not be an overwhelming obstacle to homosexual love.Twenty-four pages into Anne's House of Dreams, the newly married Anne ison her way to her new house and her wedding night. Before even reachingthe house and consummating her marriage, Anne sees the love of her life onthe road, and it is not Gilbert or Diana or Katherine. Leslie Moore, aboveeveryone else, is the object of Anne's desire:

I am your friend and you are mine, for always.. .. Such a friend as I never hadbefore. I have had many dear and beloved friends—but there is something inyou, Leslie, that I never found in anyone else. You have more to offer me in thatrich nature of yours, and I have more to give you than I had in my careless girl-hood. We are both women—and friends forever. (129)

Leslie's beauty makes Anne "gasp" and her eyes "ache" (24,149). Uponmeeting Leslie, who speaks to Anne with an "odd passion" (66), Anne issurprised to discover she is married, as "there seemed nothing of the wifeabout her" (64), a comment that remains unexplained. Leslie is a barelycontrolled and inviting erotic being: at a small get-together with neighbours,


she dances with "wild, sweet abandon" as if the music has "entered into andpossessed her" (100). Furthermore, "all the innate richness and colour andcharm of her nature seemed to have broken loose and overflowed in crim-son cheek and glowing eye and grace of motion" (100). After witnessing thissensual overflow, Anne confesses her feelings to Captain Jim: "I don't knowwhy I can't get closer to her.... I like her so much—I admire her so much—I want to take her right into my heart and creep right into hers. But I cannever get across the barrier" (103). Leslie Moore dominates Anne's House ofDreams. The story is hers, not even Anne's and certainly not Gilbert's.Gilbert, as usual, recedes quietly into the background.

Anne desires Leslie, yet, like Katherine, Leslie provides her own obstacleto this love. From the first moment she lays eyes on Anne, Leslie displays a"veiled hint of hostility" (24). Like Katherine, Leslie eventually admits thatthe barrier was her hatred of Anne. She admits to hating Anne one minuteand craving her friendship the next: "then you came dancing along the covelike a glad, light-hearted child. I—I hated you more than I've ever donesince. And yet I craved your friendship" (126). She explains her jealousy:

I used to watch you from my window—I could see you and your husbandstrolling about your garden in the evening.... And it hurt me. And yet in anotherway I wanted to go over. . . . I could have liked you and found in you what I'venever had before in my life—an intimate, real friend of my own age. (125)

Leslie's jealousy is ostensibly because of her unhappy marriage, and yet itcould also be read as jealousy because of her desire for Anne. A tragic figure,Leslie has been trapped into a marriage with an insensible invalid who wasonce an abusive husband. But the marriage is ultimately revealed to be acase of mistaken identity: Leslie discovers that she has been tending herdead husband's cousin, so she is suddenly a single woman again. Shortlyafter this discovery, the two women admire Anne's new-born child together.In this passage, not only is the child not directly mentioned, but the lan-guage is also erotically suggestive: "When their work was done and Gilbertwas out of the way, they gave themselves over to shameless orgies of love-making and ecstasies of adoration" (208; emphasis added). In 1922, thesewords might not have borne the sexual connotations they do today, but itdoes seem telling that the patriarch, Gilbert, needs to be removed for thelovemaking to occur. When Owen Ford, the writer in love with Leslie, returnsto claim her now that she is single, he literally interrupts the lovemakingof Anne and Leslie. Once again, women's love is overcome by patriarchalintervention, for the novel concludes with Leslie's marriage.


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In the case of Anne's relationships with Diana, Katherine, and Leslie, loveis delayed or complicated, suggesting that their feelings are not quite asstraightforward as "romantic friendships." Marriage displaces the lovebetween Diana and Anne because the married Diana has no time for Anne.Marriage displaces the love between Katherine and Anne because Annemarries and Katherine serves as a travelling secretary for a man. Marriagedisplaces the love between Anne and Leslie because Leslie marries OwenFord. Yet throughout, Anne consistently establishes intense relationshipswith women. Thus, even as she achieves acceptance in her community bymarrying and ultimately producing children, Anne manages, in matters ofsexuality as in everything else, to disturb complacent attitudes.

For my father, Karl Alexander Robinson (1933-2002).I would like to give special thanks to Lorraine Janzen and Lara Campbell for excellent feedback.My gratitude also extends to Janice Fiamengo for her support and encouragement.

1 Isobel is identified only by her first name in the journals, presumably in order to protecther privacy and that of her family. The editors of the journals offer only this explanation:"For legal reasons, we have excised one surname" (xxix). This decision to hide Isobel'sidentity ultimately accepts and reinscribes the fear of homosexuality. In a recent inter-view about the forthcoming fifth volume of Montgomery's journals, co-editor MaryRubio said that "any concerns that she or the heirs have held back on or covered up sala-cious details in the Montgomery story will be resoundingly allayed" with the fifth vol-ume and Rubio's biography of Montgomery. Isobel's real name will finally be releasedbecause she died in the past five years. When asked if Montgomery became a lesbian inthe final years of her life, Rubio responded adamantly "absolutely not" (Adams Ri).

2 Montgomery claims to have read "André Thedon's" Psychoanalysis and Love, particularlythe chapter on "Unconscious Homo-sexualism," from which she diagnoses Isobel asLesbian (Selected Journals 2 July 1932). The author is actually André Tridon—Montgomery made an error in her journal—and the book was published in 1922.

3 Of course, Montgomery's account of her fractious relationship with Isobel exposes herattitudes towards overt homosexuality. But the journals also reveal that Montgomery'sdominant emotional relationships were with women, the most significant being FredeCampbell. While a more thorough examination of Montgomery's relationships withwomen is beyond the scope of this article, her account of Isobel's infatuation and of herown devotion to Frede suggest that a discussion of lesbian desire in Montgomery's fic-tion is not misplaced.

4 This discussion occurs in Dubinsky's class on gender and North American history.Similarly, Professor Maggie Berg, who teaches Anne in her course on myths of femininityat Queen's University, argues for a lesbian reading of the novel.

5 Among the news stories that appeared were the following: "Does lesbianism underlieAnne of Green Gables?" Globe and Mail (31 May/2000): Ai, A5; "'Outrageously sexual'Anne was a lesbian, scholar insists" Ottawa Citizen (25 May/2000): A3; "Anne a lesbian?

2,6 Canadian Literature lSo I Spring 2004

'Poppycock!'" Ottawa Citizen (26 May/2000): Aj; "Did our Anne of Green Gables nur-ture gay fantasies?" Edmonton Journal (26 May/2000): A3; "Lesbian of Green Gables?Professor says heroine had longings for women" National Post (31 May/2000): B4. Articlesalso appeared on many websites, such as CBC and CNN, as well as in American publica-tions, such as the Boston Globe. Japanese media contacted me, and the story appeared ona Swedish website, so this unexpected phenomenon had an international scope. A moredetailed examination of the response to my research is beyond the compass of this paper.

6 Both Faderman and Smith-Rosenberg have been criticized for their examinations ofwomen's friendships. See Moore (8-10) for a discussion of both historians; see alsoJeffreys for a discussion of Faderman's book.

7 For example, Anne oflngleside, with its focus on the marital discord between Anne andGilbert, has an undercurrent of stories of abusive husbands, such as the tyrannical PeterKirk (220). Similarly, Miss Cornelia oí Anne's House of Dreams offers a litany of men whoabuse their wives: Fred Procter (44), Jennie Dean's husband (48), Billy Booth (113), andeven Horace Baxter (91), to name some examples.

8 Smith's argument might be seen to suggest that anger and abuse result from desire.Taken further, this reading might justify male violence against women as derived fromunacknowledged or repressed love. I do not agree with this position. My argument hereis rather that Katherine's and Leslie's conflicted responses to Anne—their anger andtheir fascination—suggest feelings more complicated than friendship. The conflict com-municates to the reader that more is going on than is readily apparent.

9 I have chosen to discuss the books as they tell Anne's story rather than in the order inwhich they were written. It is perhaps telling that the most intensely erotic relation-ship—that with Leslie—was written in 1922, whereas the more conflicted one—withKatherine—appears in 1936.

WORKS CITED

Adams, James. "The Full Lucy." Globe and Mail 17 Jan. 2004: Ri.Auchmuty, Rosemary. "You're a Dyke, Angela! Elsie J. Oxenham and the Rise and Fall

of the Schoolgirl Story." Not a Passing Phase: Reclaiming Lesbians in History1840-1985. Ed. The Lesbian History Group. London: Women's P, 1989:119-40.

Berg, Temma. uAnne of Green Gables: A Girl's Reading." Children's LiteratureAssociation Quarterly 13.3 (1988): 124-28.

—. "Sisterhood is Fearful: Female Friendship in Montgomery." Harvesting Thistles:The Textual Garden ofL.M. Montgomery. Ed. Mary Henley Rubio. Guelph, ON:Canadian Children's P, 1994: 36-49.

Bruhm, Steven. "Is Anne of Green Gables a Lesbian?" Second Biennial Conference onModern Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Nashville, TN, 1998.

Cameron, Elspeth. No Previous Experience. Toronto: Penguin, 1997.De Pauw, Linda Grant. Battle Cries and Lullabies: Woman in Warfrom Prehistory to

the Present. Oklahoma City: U of Oklahoma P, 1998.Devereux, Cecily. "Anatomy of a National Icon: Anne of Green Gables and the 'Bosom

Friends' Affair." Making Avonlea. Ed. Irene Gammel. Toronto: U of Toronto P,2002: 32-42.

Drain, Susan. "Too Much Love-Making: Anne of Green Gables on Television." The Lionand The Unicorn 11.2 (1987): 63-72.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.


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Epperly, Elizabeth Rollins. The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass: L.M. Montgomery's Heroinesand the Pursuit of Romance. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992.

Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love betweenWomen from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: Morrow, 1981.

Foster, Shirley and Judy Simons. What Katy Read: Feminist Re-Readings of ClassicStories for Girls. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1995.

Gammel, Irene. '"My Secret Garden': Dis/Pleasure in L.M. Montgomery and F.P.Grove." English Studies in Canada 25 (March 1999): 39-65.

Gubar, Marah. "'Where is the Boy?': The Pleasures of Postponement in the Anne ofGreen Gables Series." The Lion and the Unicorn 25.1 (2001): 47-69.

Huse, Nancy. "Journeys of the Mother in the World of Green Gables." Such a SimpleLittle Tale: Critical Responses to L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. Ed.Mavis Reimer. Metuchen, NJ: The Children's Literature Association andScarecrow P, 1992:131-38.

Jeffreys, Sheila. "Does It Matter If They Did It?" Not a Passing Phase: ReclaimingLesbiansin History 1840-1985. Ed. Lesbian History Group. London: Women's P, 1989:19-28.

Katz, Jonathan Ned. The Invention of Heterosexuality. New York: Dutton, 1995.Kornfeld, Eve and Susan Jackson. "The Female Bildungsroman in Nineteenth-Century

America: Parameters of a Vision." Journal of American Culture 10.4 (Winter 1987):69-75.

Lesbian History Group. Introduction. Not a Passing Phase: ReclaimingLesbians inHistory 1840-1985. London: Women's P, 1989:1-18.

MacLulich, T.D. "L.M. Montgomery's Portraits of the Artist: Realism, Idealism, andthe Domestic Imagination." English Studies in Canada 11.4 (1985): 459-73.

Montgomery, L.M. Anne of Avonlea. 1909. Toronto: Seal, 1984.—. Anne of Green Gables. 1908. Toronto: Seal, nd.—. Anne's House of Dreams. 1922. Toronto: Seal, 1983.—. Anne oflngleside. 1939. Toronto: Seal, 1983.—. Anne of the Island. 1915. Toronto: Seal, 1981.—. Anne of Windy Poplars. 1936. Toronto: Seal, 1983.—. The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery. Vol 4:1929-1935. Ed. Mary Rubio and

Elizabeth Waterson. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1998.Moore, Lisa L. Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel.

Durham: Duke UP, 1997.Rich, Adrienne. "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." The Lesbian and

Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, David M. Halperin.New York: Routledge, 1993: 227-54.

Rubio, Mary. "Subverting the Trite: L.M. Montgomery's 'room of her own'."Canadian Children's Literature 65 (1992): 6-39.

Smith, Patricia Juliana. Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women'sFiction. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.

Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America.New York: Knopf, 1985.

Sullivan, Kevin. Executive Producer. Anne of Green Gables. Anne of Green GablesProductions, 1985.

White, Gavin. "Falling out of the Haystack: L.M. Montgomery and Lesbian Desire."Canadian Children's Literature 27.2: 43-59.


E l a n a W o l f f

Tulips

Loosely leaning down, around—a lemon carousel.

The nearest one is peering through a lonetriangular eye at me.

(Does foxglove bloom for the bee?)

Through the manzanilla glass of my own green eyesthese twenty-two yellows are light; this close-up cup,a flood.

The miracle, not only spring—somany things beginning.But sexlessness

and rest.

Blue vase, bent stems; petals, pale and evasive.Not a scent.


S u s a n A n d r e w s G r a c e

from Flesh, A N aked D ress

Oh, don't worry,she is a lakeblue and weak and he is

a mountain of heaven. He can take itas he shelters his eyes with his forearmto watch her. He is treading, holdinghis mirror, herperfect conduct. And she

makes her tent in the space a lake takesclouts anchored to something fiery.

A tiger wilts with hunger at the forest threshold.A stumbly father may soon come overthe delicious embankment.

She can see the tiger.

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First I Must Tell aboutSeeing55

(De)monstrations of Visuality andthe Dynamics of Metaphor in AnneCarson's Autobiography of Red

It is in fact upon the world of things needing to be uncovered thatthe world of merely visible things keeps exerting its pressure.(Simonides fr. 598, trans. Carson, Economy 60)

1. A Metaphor of MetaphorAnne Carson excavates and resurrects Geryon, the red monster with wings,in her "novel in verse," Autobiography of Red. Her portrait of a monster whomakes photographic portraits offers a dense meditation on two relatedterms—vision and revision—that are key to Carson's implicit, yet consistenttheorization of the relationships between language and images.

Carson claims she was a painter before she was a creative writer. Recallingthe "rhapsodic" moment in an art class that she took as a child in which shewas allowed to write a "kind of legend" on one of her images, she hasexplained that her first book of poetry, Short Talks, was originally intendedto be a set of drawings with lengthy titles: "Nobody liked the drawings so Iexpanded the titles into the talks" (Interview). Despite the fact that hermovement into poetry appears to have been initiated by the erasure of herwork as a visual artist, traces of her interest in art appear throughout herwritings. To read the body of her work is to be immersed in an exquisitefrenzy of the visible in which inscription, painting, photography, film, andtelevision collide in one textual space. Yet it would be a mistake to think thatCarson's engagement with the visual reflects her simple assent to a notionwith some currency in contemporary cultural studies, namely that culturalhistory has led to a dominance of visual media over verbal activities ofspeech, writing, textuality, and reading, and that this dominance comes at

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the expense of other sensory modalities (Mitchell, Picture 16). Reviving such"tactics of imagination" (Eros 69) as monstrous structures and languagewhile she bounces between antiquity and the contemporary moment, inAutobiography Carson pictures a monster's pictures in order to lead us awayfrom the world of merely visible things and into "the counterworld behindthe facts and inside perceived appearances" (Economy 60). It would also bea mistake to confuse Carson's interest in the visual with the disengaged, dis-embodied vision Norman Bryson associates with the aoristic mode that hasdominated Western painting and philosophy. Carson's archaeological exca-vation and resurrection of the monster Geryon recovers a subordinate his-tory of deictic practices within philosophy and art from antiquity to thepresent day, which "create and refer to their own perspective" (Bryson 88).In this revisionary "counterworld," signification is playfully carnal.Fascinated with their own genesis and development, the alternative forms ofcultural practice Carson uncovers inscribe the spatiality and the temporalityof both the producer and the receiver. So, although it might look likeCarson sets her sights on the graphic, especially the photographic and cine-matographic, her focus is wider, on "the act that Simonides calls X,oyoç[logos] and defines as 'a picture of things' for it contains visibles and invisi-bles side by side, strangeness by strangeness" (Carson, Economy 68).

At the heart of Carson's investigation into logos lies metaphor, one of thechief "subterfuges" by which the visual domain may be introduced into theverbal arts (Bal 3). As Umberto Eco puts it, metaphor conflates two images:two things become different from themselves and yet remain recognizable(96). Metaphor is not merely ornamental. It is also a cognitive instrument:

And thus the metaphor posits ('posits' in a philosophical sense, but also in aphysical sense, as 'in putting before the eyes/ ô(i|iaxa)vr|oieïv a proportionthat, wherever it may have been deposited, was not before the eyes; or it wasbefore the eyes and the eyes did not see it, as with Poe's purloined letter. To pointout, or teach how to see, then. (102)

What does metaphor point out or teach us how to see? asks Eco. Not thereal itself, but rather a knowledge of the "dynamics of the real" (102). Thebest metaphors, he suggests, are those that point out the cultural process ofsemiosis (102).

Carson's red-winged photographer is one of these best metaphors. As afigure uniting strangeness with strangeness, her monster is an icon of thethings that lie just beyond our physical vision (past the edge of our maps,on the other side of our waking state). Her monster is also a symbolic tool

32 Canadian Literature 1801 Spring2004

which she probes the secrets of perception, temporality, and language.Because Carson's monster refers to nothing phenomenally real, because heis a purely figurative sign, he can be understood as a metaphor of metaphoritself (Williams 12). That Carson develops the metaphor of the monster as ametaphor of metaphor in order to demonstrate language's power of "mak-ing and begetting" is no small thing, since, as the philosophers have longinsisted, "metaphor seems to involve the usage of philosophical language inits entirety" (Derrida, "White" 209).

Carson has written extensively about the workings of metaphor. Beforefocusing on the way her metaphor of monstrosity is both visionary andrevisionary, it is useful to turn to one of her poems, "Essay on What I ThinkAbout Most," where she claims that "From the true mistakes of metaphor alesson can be learned. // Not only that things are other than they seem, /and so we mistake them, / but that such mistakenness is valuable. / Holdonto it, Aristotle says, / there is much to be seen and felt here" (Men 31).Referring to Aristotle's discussion of metaphor in the Rhetoric, Carson arguesthat the trope demonstrates novel and valuable ways of feeling as well as ofseeing. Her injunction via Aristotle to "hold" onto mistakenness and "feel"it is made possible because of the operations of metaphor, of course, butwhat is important about this particular metaphor is its emphasis on the sen-sory. As she sheds light on both the participatory and embodied dimensionsof our thinking made possible by metaphor, Carson issues a challenge to thedifficult legacy of Cartesian dualism.

2. Monstrous GenresTechnically, Autobiography of Red is not an autobiography, nor really, as thesubtitle suggests, is it "A Novel in Verse." Working with the fragments of alyric poem about the monster Geryon from the sixth century B.C.E. poetStesichoros of Himnera called the Geryoneis, Carson locates the work in alarger literary history and explicates its importance, translates it intoEnglish, and finally adapts its core elements to create an extended novelisticnarrative. The central portions of the Autobiography, then, take the form ofa Künstlerroman, but one that doubles an earlier telling of the same "crosssection of scenes, both proud and pitiful" (6) of a monster struggling withhuman things like family and fate. To this mirrored image of mythic narra-tive materials, Carson adds a framing apparatus of prefaces and appendicesthat, through citation, also repeat earlier commentary on the Geryon matter(6). Generically, the text refuses to blend its constituent parts. Juxtaposing

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the scholarly and the lyrical, the narrative and the journalistic, this is ahybrid text, what Judith Halberstam describes as a "stitched body of dis-torted textuality" (33).

That Carson refuses to blend the different genres into a more coherentstructure recalls a debate in classical aesthetics in which the ideal text wasfigured through a visual metaphor as a healthy, intact, symmetrical, beauti-ful, static body, while writing that failed to live up to the ideal was figured asa monstrous body. Writers like Longinus and Horace imply that there issomething devastatingly counterproductive, even self-annihilating, about atext that, "like a sick man's dreams," risks monstrous combinations (Horace128). When contemporary reviewers have on occasion complained thatCarson's combinations of the poetic with the scholarly are "unproductive"and give it a "stale air of pedantry and puzzle" (Kirsch), they seem to beblind to the fact that Carson's mission in this text—to resurrect a monsterand demonstrate the powers of revision—hinges on her deliberate matingof disparate things. Form, content, and purpose could not be less at oddsthan they are here.

3. Revisioning GeryonJust as Autobiography of Red is an assemblage of disparate genres, Carson'smonster Geryon is a composite pieced together from fragments which orig-inate elsewhere. To understand what Geryon demonstrates in Carson'swork, it is important to trace the origins and history of the various ele-ments which combine to form him.

Though Carson never mentions this incarnation of Geryon explicitly, it isnot difficult to uncover the fact that Geryon was a significant, though mar-ginal, figure in Canto XVII (the half-way point) of Dante's Inferno. Many ofCarson's interests in the relationship between vision and visuality andpoetic language reflect and refract Dante's. Described as a vile monsterwhose stench fills the world, Dante's Geryon carries Virgil and Dante on hisback down to Malebolge, the eighth level of hell where the sin of Fraud ispunished. Dante's Geryon is depicted as a figure of duplicity, "fraud's foulemblem" {"imagine difroda") (XVII 6). His sight fills the poet with terrorbut also with a sense of liberation, because, as the vehicle permitting thecontinuation of the poet's journey, the monster represents the very instru-ments of deceitfulness and lying that the poet must use. When Danterecounts that Geryon's back and breasts and both sides are "painted withdesigns of knots and circlets" more coloured in field and figure than any

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cloth ever woven by a Tartar or Turk or the nets loomed by Arachne (XVII13-15), it is clear that the monster is to be perceived as an emblem of an aes-thetic fraud, an "image" (imagine) of the kind of lying performed by thepictorial art of poetry (XVII 6). Compared to a boat, a beaver, an eel, a fal-con, and an arrow, Dante's Geryon is connected with motion, and this tooallies him with the poet's tools. Du Marsais's definition of metaphor (whichis indebted to Aristotle's definition) as "a figure by means of which the proper,literal meaning of a word is transported" facilitates an understanding of theanalogy between monster and metaphor conveyed with Geryon's flight(Derrida, "White" 234). A consideration of Geryon's mobility—his ability to"transport," both literally and figuratively—leads to a consideration ofanother kind of mobility in Dante's text that is important to Carson: themobility of the gaze of the viewer. In his depiction of Geryon, Dante makesa distinction between appearances and essences, between parts and wholes.His Geryon is an "image" of fraud, but in this image, appended to the trunkof a serpent and the paws of an animal, is the face of a just man, outwardlykind ( "Lafaccia sua erafaccia d'uom giusto, I tanto benigna avea difuor lapelle'') (XVII10-11). In order not to be deceived by the contradictory partsof the image, the beholder (the poet and also the reader) of such a hybridcomposite must learn a way of seeing that is mobile enough to apprehendthe whole, and powerful enough to penetrate the surface. Like Dante,Carson is interested in the ethics and aesthetics of fraud, and so when shetransports Dante's Geryon into contemporary narrative, the monster alsobrings with him Dante's concerns about the poetic lie that can transport us,and about ways of seeing that can carry us past the surface of appearances.

Carson's Geryon initially knows nothing about lies, but notices quicklythat words dissemble and dis-assemble: divorced from their literal mean-ings, words keep coming apart or cracking in half (26, 62). Herakles' rhetoricis particularly treacherous for Geryon. His promises are slippery, movingfor instance from statements about intimacy—"we'll always be friends"(62)—to distancing—"we're true friends you know that's why I want you tobe free" (74). Geryon begins his autobiography trying to put together thepieces of this fractured world of language, first with glue (34), then by addinga corrective in the form of a happier ending to a story he has written (38),but he soon abandons these palliative measures and makes the very paradoxof the power and fragility of language the subject of his photographs.

If Geryon's connection to Dante's monster foregrounds a theory of poeticlying, Carson further develops this theory in the highly convoluted syllogistic

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exercise she offers as "Appendix C" to the main body of the narrative ofAutobiography. Here she suggests that as an integral part of stories, lies setthings into motion. (Elsewhere, Carson suggests that lies make possible thecontinuation of story: "everytime you see I would have to tell the wholestory all over again or else lie so I lie I just lie who are they who are the sto-rytellers who can put an end to stories" [Plainwater 25-26].) Trespassing theboundaries between reality and the imagination (something monsters instories also do), lies operate logical reversals, and in each reversal is the pos-sibility of a return. The imagery Carson develops around her discourse onlies is dynamic: we are "in reverse"; we will "go along without incident"; wewill "meet Stesichoros on our way back"; we will "be taken downtown bythe police for questioning" (Autobiography 19-20). Her argument, if onecan be stitched together, is that while we are thus transported by the lie (orby its kin, metaphor), we can either be eyewitnesses to a landscape that,because of the lie, looks inside out, or we can be blinded. In effect, both ofthese propositions mean the same thing: we learn to see in ways that exceedthe merely visible world (19-20). The monster Geryon thus offers Carson apoint of entry into an argument about the ethical, cognitive, and perceptualpossibilities unleashed by language.

The scene in Dante's Inferno in which the monster Geryon appears is oneof the text's most dramatic because of the sense of narrative visualizationenabled by Geryon's flight. Robert Hollander remarks on the cinematicquality of Dante's prose in Canto XVII, all the more notable since it wouldbe several centuries before the technologies of the cinema would be invented:

In his innovative description of flight, Dante offers a cinematic succession ofimages designed to establish a "perspective vision" for the architectural complexof the eighth circle where, as we shall see, the variation in Dante's original topog-raphy with its "pouches," "ridges" and "bridges" requires—in modern terms—aclarity and precision of camera angles, depth of field, lighting and dimension.From Dante's timid aerial look down from Geryon's back into the pit below tonumerous and even risky positionings on the little bridges to catch sight of a par-ticular sinner, the narrator becomes even more insistent in his techniques of the"zoom to close-up," . . . the "wide pan" . . . and the "aerial shot" . . . making thereader at times even conscious of the "stage directions" of this visualization.

In Carson's hands, this proto-cinematic inheritance of "perspective vision"makes its appearance in her translation of Stesichoros's fragments whichoffers, as she puts it,

a tantalizing cross section of scenes, both proud and pitiful, from Geryon's ownexperience. We see his red boy's life and his little dog. A scene of wild appeal

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from his mother, which breaks off. Interspersed shots of Herakles approachingover the sea. A flash of the gods in heaven pointing to Geryon's doom. The battleitself. The moment when everything goes suddenly slow and Herakles' arrowdivides Geryon's skull. We see Herakles kill the little dog with His famous club.(Autobiography 6)

Observe the language demarcating scenes, fade outs, zooms, crane shots,and slow motion. Carson sees in Stesichoros's fragments, just as she alsosees in Dante's scene of flight, a juxtaposition of different points of view inquick succession. She further develops this inheritance of (proto-)cinematicstrategies with the disjunctions and collisions (Sergei Eisenstein would say"conflicts") that generate the motion oí Autobiography. Zooming in onemotionally laden moments, as well as slowing down the motion and jump-ing between scenes, Carson's montage techniques celebrate all forms of jux-taposition. She sets up conflicts between genres such as between thenarrative and the appendices; between events and their duration (Eisenstein39), such as when Geryon contemplates the ascent of the rapist up the stairsas slow as lava (Carson 48); between matter and viewpoint (Eisenstein 54),such as when Geryon's contemplation of philosophic problems leads himto write,"I will never know how you see red and you will never know howI see it" (Carson 105); and between the frame of the shot and the subject(Eisenstein 40), such as when Geryon takes "a number / of careful photo-graphs but these showed only the shoes and socks of each person" (72).Carson's insight is to construct a genealogy of the origins of a way of think-ing in two separate time frames at once, modern and ancient. Cinematicmontage sets two images side by side so that the things become differentfrom themselves and yet remain recognizable. So too does metaphor.Through Dante, then, Carson's monster Geryon puts before our eyes thehistory of the apparatus (that is, the mental machinery) of a visual languageupon which both literary and cinematic practices rely.

Dante, however, is not the only poet to write about Geryon, the monsterwith wings. Carson is explicit about the more ancient sources she and Dantedraw upon. In traditional Greek mythology, Geryon, "most powerful of allmen mortal," is a minor character who figures in Herakles' tenth labour.As traditionally narrated in such texts as Apollodorus's The Library (2.10),Hesiod's Theogony (979-83), and Pausanias's Description of Greece (1.35.7and 4.36.3), the story is full of slaughter and bloodshed, "framed as athrilling account of the victory of culture over monstrosity" (Carson 6). Asan alternative to this rather excessive story of masculine power, Carsonresurrects the version told in the fragments of Stesichoros's lyric Geryoneis.


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According to Carson, Stesichoros's revision of the myth reverses the roles ofprotagonist and antagonist and thus shifts the point of view. Because we seethings through his eyes, the monster becomes the character with whom wesympathize, and so the hero's qualities of masculine courage and zeal beginto appear monstrous. Instead of controlling and containing the monstroussign, Stesichoros sets it loose.

4. FragmentsFragmentation and recombination are the key principles in the composi-tion and arrangement of Carson's monstrous text. The composition of thesections of Autobiography as a whole, their stark juxtapositions and seem-ingly random ordering, mimics the material decomposition of the principalinterior text, Stesichoros's papyrae, over time. Carson explains:

the fragments of the Geryoneis itself read as if Stesichoros had composed a sub-stantial narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and buried the pieces in a boxwith some song lyrics and lecture notes and scraps of meat. The fragment num-bers tell you roughly how the pieces fell out of the box. You can of course keepshaking the box. (6-7)

The textual fragments in Stesichoros's (and Carson's) box are ripped andtorn, and, as if Carson wishes to underline that these are proper to mon-sters, they are shaken around with "meat." The image is striking. Just whatis going on with all this red meat? If red is a "matter of the body," red meatis even more so (Derrida, Secret 100). Red meat is the very stuff we are madeof, where we feel our pleasures and our pains. It is what feeds us, and whatwe are turned into when we die. This complex ambiguity is what Carson, inher commitment to a material, embodied deictic practice which has thepotential to topple Cartesian abstraction, wishes to address when she invitesus to manipulate the box and pull out and examine the fragments: "'Believeme for meat and for myself,' as Gertrude Stein says. Here. Shake" (7).

5. "What Difference Did Stesichoros Make?"The association of monsters with language is, according to David Williams,"a profound, longstanding one that simultaneously reveals something ofour historical conception of monstrosity as well as an ambivalence towardlanguage itself" (61). His argument that the language of the monstrous isparasitic, feeding at the margins and limits of conventional languages "so asto gain the power to transcend these analytic discourses," helps explain thework of Carson's monster. Williams explains that "true to its etymology


(monstrare: to show)" monstrous language "points to utterances that liebeyond logic" (10). The title of Carson's first chapter—"Red Meat: WhatDifference Did Stesichoros Make?"—poses a question that follows from astatement in which neither the logical nor the syntactic relationshipbetween these two parts is visible. Carson thus directs us to a place justbeyond our range of experiences, perceptions, and modalities of under-standing, where the juxtaposition of discrepant things lets us see and feelwhat was not before our eyes or what we could not already see.

What difference did Stesichoros make? Carson singles out two major "dif-ferences" that Stesichoros has made to literary history. Stesichoros's firstcontribution is tropic. According to Carson, Stesichoros unleashed theadjective from the fixity of the Homeric epithet, and thus "released being"(5). Homeric epithets tend to be straightforward: "In the epic world, beingis stable and particularity is set fast in tradition. When Homer mentionsblood, blood is black. [...] Death is bad. Cowards' livers are white" (4).Then Stesichoros came along, and "suddenly there was nothing to interferewith horses being hollow hooved. Or a river being root silver. Or a childbruiseless. [...] Or killings cream black" (5). Where in epic, adjectives areused to put things in their place and keep them there, in the lyric world thatStesichoros unleashes, adjectives are used to bring to things spectacular depthsand dazzling ambiguities. To move from the "black" of "blood" to the "creamblack" of "killings," for instance, is to leave behind the métonymie—a logicwhere connections are based on association—and to enter a realm ofmetaphor—a logic in which connections are limited only by the imagination.This new metaphoric logic is dynamic; in it, dramatic reversals and returnsare possible. It also invites a complex and carnal sensory engagement, andthis is how it connects with the first part of the proposition "red meat."

Stesichoros's adjectives are synaesthetic. His poetic language joins togethertwo images in terms that belong to one or more differing perceptual modesor senses. The connotations and meanings of the images change, dependingon which senses the reader considers. The seemingly simple image of killingsas "cream black," for instance, juxtaposes the tactile with the visual—thetexture with the colour of blood—just as it invokes the sense of taste, contrast-ing an image of richness and sustenance with an image of rot and putres-cence. One "difference" Stesichoros makes is thus to find a way of usinglanguage that invites us to perceive with all of our bodily senses—to makeus feel. Another "difference" has to do with how his use of language relatesto the way we think. Just as the image formed by Stesichoros's adjectives


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invokes specific sensory experiences, so too does it let us picture theprocesses of cognition and perception themselves. The rhetorical trope usedhere, the oxymoron, puts together two contradictory qualities that risk can-celling each other out. "Cream black" qualifies the noun "killing" throughthis type of cancellation, in effect performing a sort of "killing" on the levelof language itself. Carson's writings frequently return to what she calls"iconic grammar" (Economy 52), that is, to statements that do what theysay. Such use of language as a "synthetic and tensional" unit that "reenactsthe reality of which it speaks," she says, requires "a different kind of atten-tion than we normally pay to verbal surfaces" (52). The differenceStesichoros makes, then, is to expand the communicability of language. Helets us see that words say but that they also show, that they make us think,but they also make us feel.

According to Carson, Stesichoros's second contribution to literary historyis narrative. Just as he unleashed words from the weight of the past, so toodid he unleash story, completely altering the assessment of importantmythological figures. In addition to the poet's revision of the "GeryonMatter" in the Geryoneis, Stesichoros turned his attentions to the origins ofthe Trojan War. After writing a poem about Helen of Troy that replicatedthe tradition of whoredom "already old by the time Homer used it,"Stesichoros went blind (Carson, Autobiography 5). According to theTestimonia of Plato, Isokrates, and Suidas, his blindness occurred becauseHelen herself was furious at the slander. To regain his sight, Stesichoroswrote his famed palinode, or "counter-song," which recanted the poem hehad just written: "No it is not the true story. / No you never went on thebenched ships. / No you never came to the towers of Troy" (Carson,Autobiography 17). There is a perfect symmetry to the story; the palinodelets the heroine off, and she, in turn, lets the poet off. The story can thus beread as an allegory, with obvious appeal to a writer like Carson, about thepower words have to transform the real.

If Stesichoros's contribution to literary history is to "undo the latches" (5)on the level of syntax, unleashing the adjective from its fixity in epic dictionand, on the level of narrative, abandoning the oppressive sets of traditionalassumptions about characters such as Helen of Troy and Herakles andGeryon, exactly what "difference" does Anne Carson's writing make? LikeStesichoros, Carson works to "release being," but against the directionalimage she uses to explain Stesichoros's work, in which all the substances inthe world go "floating up"(5), Carson posits a bi-directional image to

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explain her own work—bouncing (3). "Words bounce," Carson explains,and (echoing Gertrude Stein) she elaborates: "Words, if you let them, willdo what they want to do and what they have to do" (3). This is a playfulmetaphor, but it involves a very serious kind of engagement. Words bouncewhen they connect with other words and with the people who use them.When a speaker picks up a word, she alters its velocity and trajectory for-ever. When a speaker catches a word, he holds history itself in his hands foran instant, and when he redirects that word, he lets go a different future. Adual movement in which time is dismembered and remembered thusinfuses all of Carson's work. On one hand, Carson shows us ways to breakfree from the constraints of the past; on the other hand, she asks us to con-nect with it. Her image of words bouncing and connecting offers a brilliantcorollary to her proposition of monstrous fragmentation and rupture.Resuscitative and vital, this image linking past and present recalls Carson'sdiscussion elsewhere of two ancient practices: the symbolon, the concretetoken of a gift, which "carries the history of the giver into the life of thereceiver and continues it there" (Economy 18), and the monument, whichhas the purpose of "insert[ing] a dead and vanished past into a living pre-sent" (73). Re-presentation is thus posited as the point of connection thatreunites the subject with the other, the object world, and history.

6. Picturing EscapeDespite the prevalence of narrative traditions which seek to suppress mon-strous otherness, monsters can "evoke potent escapist fantasies; the linkingof monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appeal-ing as a temporary egress from constraint" (Jeffrey Cohen 17). Carson'sAutobiography celebrates all forms of egress and escape. In the five prefatoryparts of the text and the concluding interview, Carson allies her work withthat of writers who have shown how to break free from the ideologicalrestraints of traditions, and who have revealed how linguistic and syntacti-cal experiments can widen the possibilities for thought and expression. Inthe main body of the narrative, her own transformations of the Geryonmatter further frame activities of revision in terms of freedom. The centraldifference between Carson's and other versions of Geryon's story has to dowith the ending. The slaughter and bloodshed are gone, and in its place isthe agony of passion and longing drawn out over time. Traditionally a figureintimately associated with death and the dead, Carson's Geryon lives wellpast forty (36, 60).


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A comparison can better show the nature and the extent of Carson's revi-sions. We can begin hors texte with one of Stesichoros's fragments, trans-lated by David Campbell, telling of how Herakles slaughters Geryon:

in silence he thrust it cunningly into his brow, and it cut through the flesh andbones by divine dispensation; and the arrow held straight on the crown of hishead, and it stained with gushing blood his breastplate and gory limbs; andGeryon drooped his neck to one side, like a poppy which spoiling its tenderbeauty suddenly sheds its petals. (77)

When Carson translates this fragment in the prefatory part ofAutobiography of Red, she reveals a greater sensitivity to the poetic quality ofthe adjectives. Though more dense than Campbell's translation, theseimages remain tragic:

XIV. Herakles' ArrowArrow means kill It parted Geryon's skull like a comb MadeThe boy neck lean At an odd slow angle sideways as when aPoppy shames itself in a whip of Nude breeze. (13)

What in Campbell's translation suggests passivivity—"drooping" his neck,"shedding" its petals—becomes, in Carson's translation, active and eroti-cally charged—"sham [ing]" itself in a "whip of Nude breeze." Carson pre-pares us here to envision Geryon's strength rather than his weakness.

In the actual "Romance" section oí Autobiography of Red, Carson pre-sents the most radical changes to the fragment. The core metaphors andimagery remain, but the context has shifted. Red, the dominant colour, isnow explicitly linked with eros (and I think the implicit punning on arrowsis intentional) rather than thanatos, sex rather than slaughter:

The smell of the leather jacket nearhis face [...]sent a wave of longing as strong as a colour through Geryon.It exploded at the bottom of his belly.Then the blanket shifted. He felt Herakles' hand move on his thigh and Geryon'shead went back like a poppy in a breeze (118-9)

Having separated the mythic cause ("arrow") from its effect (the boy "necklean"), Carson overlays a more carnal logic in which the phallus (which pre-sumably is like an arrow) provokes sexual ecstasy (Geryon's head, back "likea poppy in a breeze").

Carson also transforms the weapon, which in the traditional versions ofhis story cuts Geryon's life short, into a metaphor for time and continuity.

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Geryon's favourite question, one to which he returns again and again, con-cerns the substance of time: what is time made of? Different answers presentthemselves: "Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction / Just a mean-ing that we / impose upon motion" (90); "Much truer / is the time thatstrays into photographs and stops" (93). In a discussion about this topic oftime, so obviously relevant to a character marked from birth by a powerfulfate, we find the arrow, transmuted into a harpoon:

Fear of time came at him. [...]he felt its indifference roar overhis brain box. An idea glazed along the edge of the box and whipped backdown into the canal behind the wingsand it was gone. A man moves through time. It means nothing except that,like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive. (81)

The simile retains a classical, quasi-tragic fatalism; a man moves inevitablytowards his future just as a harpoon moves to its target. Notice, however,that in this version, there is no mention of what precisely his fate is. Thetransposition is subtle, but highly relevant. Instead of being represented asthe victim of an arrow, Geryon is now figured as that arrow, movingthrough time towards a future that, though frightening, remains open.

Rather than wrap the story up and impose an ending of any sort, the nar-rative leaves us in medias res, with Geryon and his antagonists, Herakles andAncash, pausing to ponder the beauty of fire. Time itself might be rushing,but the protagonist, reconciled with his enemies, is now immune to it: "Weare amazing beings / Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire. / Andnow time is rushing towards them / where they stand side by side with armstouching, immortality on their faces, / night at their back" (146). With thisinconclusive conclusion, Carson has linked Geryon back to his beginningsas the "mighty son of immortal Khrysaor and Kallirhoe" (Campbell 67).And this is what Carson's bewildering syllogistic exercise in "Appendix C"prophesies for all who dare to step into the labyrinth with monsters, re-visioning storytelling and lies: "we are now in reverse and by continuing toreason this way are likely to arrive back at the beginning" (19). The wayCarson leads us to this picture of immortality is noteworthy. Rather thanseeking to transcend time or erase the traces of its passing, Carson's archae-ological method, by excavating layer upon layer of past meanings, explicitlyforegrounds the temporal. She encourages us to disinter the genesis andmetamorphosis of each monstrous image she puts before our eyes, and inso doing, invites us to renew its life.


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7. Geryon's PhotographyCarson's portrait of the monster Geryon casts him as a photographer whospecializes in portraits. The medium of photography provides an answer tohis perennial question regarding the nature of time: "Much truer / is thetime that strays into photographs and stops" (93). Geryon's musings ontime and photography begin when he sees a photograph of a volcanic erup-tion taken by Herakles' grandmother, entitled "Red Patience," which "hascompressed / on its motionless surface / fifteen different moments of time,nine hundred seconds of bombs moving up / and ash moving down / andpines in the kill process" (51), and when he hears the story of Lava Man, theonly survivor of the volcano, who was a prisoner in the local jail. As a crea-ture of reversals destined to go back to the beginning and revise his ownending, it is only natural that Geryon is compelled by the paradox of theform (it introduces motion into stasis and yet compresses the movement oftime into an instant) as well as by the themes of this picture and the storythat frames it: "identity memory eternity" (149).

Geryon's insights into the medium develop from these conceptual ori-gins. He realizes that "Photography is disturbing [ . . . ] / Photography is away of playing with perceptual relationships" and brings this realizationinto his practice (65). Many of Geryon's autobiographical photographs aretechnically impossible; framed by evocative titles and descriptions, theyappear to picture things that cannot be seen with the eyes. Often, they aresynaesthetic, linking what are usually discrete sensory phenomena: "thispage has a photograph of some red rabbit giggle tied with a white ribbon. /He has titled it 'Jealous of My Little Sensations'" (62). Occasionally, theirobject is unreal, belonging somewhere between dreamspace and prehistory:"He had dreamed of [...] creatures that looked like young dinosaurs [...][that] went crashing / through underbush and tore / their hides which fellbehind them in long red strips. He would call / the photograph 'HumanValentines'" (131). In both of these instances, Geryon's photographs manageto capture and make permanent the fleeting and transient, repeating "whatcould never be repeated existentially" (Barthes 4).

Additionally, Geryon's photographs involve complex intertextual negotia-tions of abstractions. In seventh grade, we are told, Geryon "began to won-der about the noise that colors make":

Roses cameroaring across the garden at him.He lay on his bed at night listening to the silver light of stars crashing against


the window screen. Mostof those he interviewed for the science project had to admit they did not hearthe cries of the rosesbeing burned alive in the noonday sun. Like horses, Geryon would say helpfully,like horses in war. No, they shook their heads. [...]The last page of his projectwas a photograph of his mother's rosebush under the kitchen window.Four of the roses were on fire.They stood up straight and pure on the stalk, gripping the dark like prophetsand howling colossal intimaciesFrom the back of their fused throats. (84)

Geryon's acute perceptions of the noises of colour belong to a commonplaceof the Künstlerroman, highlighting the qualities that will make the protago-nist into a real artist. His attention to this particular form of synaesthesia,moreover, allies Geryon closely with artists such as Wassily Kandinsky andperhaps foreshadows Geryon's gradual turning from the representational tothe abstract. (Kandinsky claimed he heard sound whenever he saw colours,and suggested that abstraction most effectively reveals the "inner sounds" ofa picture [273].)

The most rhapsodic part of the "photograph" lies in the development ofits legend. The density of the different moments compressed in the explana-tory frame in which Geryon attempts to translate the meaning of his imagethrough an analogy—"like horses in war" (84)—is characteristic of Carson'svast intertextual reaching. Carson's Geryon returns to his origins when hedraws this image of horses in war from the very papyrus fragments Carsondraws from to tell his story. Horses appear twice in Stesichorus's Geryoneis,and in both instances they are linked to chilling images of suffering. In frag-ment S22, horses are connected to sounds and the limits of the speakable:"(things speakable) and things unspeakable [...] untiring and un- [.. .]painful strife [. ..] battles and slaughterings of men [...] piercing (cries?);[...] of horses [ . . . ]" (Campbell 81). Fragment S50 sets horses within animage of tearing—" [. ..] (all?) [...] horse(s) [...] was torn," while the nextvery brief fragment, S53, seems to announce the location of the scene oftearing: "war" (85).

Geryon's explanation of the photo connects to other histories as well.Within the frame of modern art, the phrase "horses in war" conjures PabloPicasso's painting of the agony of the Spanish Civil War, Guernica (1937),just as the dramatic movements of silver crashing against the screen evokethe swirling motions in Van Gogh's Starry Night (1889). Likewise, withinthe frame of contemporary theory, Geryon's impossible photograph with its

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explanatory legend conjures the origins of structuralist linguistics. Geryonoffers a verbal explanation in the form of a Saussurean punning for thosewho are not able to "hear" the noises compressed in these paintings. In theCours de linguistique générale, Ferdinand de Saussure refers to the horse todemonstrate that language is arbitrary, that nothing but a social agreementlinks concepts (represented in the body of his text as pictures) to sound pat-terns. An understanding of Saussurean linguistics sheds light on the pri-mary logical connection that leads Geryon from "roses" to "horses," namelya transposition of sounds rather than any translation of concepts. Geryon'sconnections between two seemingly visual images, the rose and the horse,demonstrate the invisible workings of language.

In Geryon's enigmatic photograph, the roses are on fire; distances shift asCarson brings additional images together to reveal their kinship. The con-tours of Moses' burning bush from the book of Exodus—a sign of Godmade visible—are apparent in Geryon's rose bush, especially since the flow-ers themselves grip the "dark like prophets." Geryon's photo also recalls theimage of "fire and roses" in "Little Gidding," the fourth of T.S. Eliot's FourQuartets (223). In this poem about revisiting a "familiar compound ghost"(217), Eliot's burning roses are ambiguous emblems of time's passing andare used to conjure both endings—"Dust [from the ashes of a burnt rose]in the air suspended / Marks the place where a story ended" (216)—andbeginnings—"All manner of things shall be well / when [. . .]/ the fire andthe rose are one" (223). For both Eliot and the book of Exodus, burning islinked to continuity rather than destruction; Moses' bush is miraculouslyuntouched by the fire, while in Eliot's poem, the fire prompts renewal. Thusconnoting endurance and eternity, the burning roses offer a fitting correc-tive to the devastation connoted by the image of horses in war. It should beapparent that the complex metaphorical framing provided by Geryon's"helpful" explanations is essential to the meaning of the untitled piece.Whether or not their sources are located intertextually in words or pictures,what is at stake in the analogies Geryon lays out as part of the frame is aperspective on those constant themes "identity memory eternity" (149).

Situated just past the limits of the visible, Geryon's photographs refuse toshow merely what has been seen. Instead, they "show seeing" itself(Mitchell). This seeing, however, is planted firmly on the side of logos-, andis firmly committed to the revisionary. Through Geryon, Carson shows see-ing inflected through an implicit critique of violence. Presenting reversals—like photo negatives—of the usual tropes of violence, the portraits of


Autobiography revise the way we look at heroism and victimhood. This see-ing is also inflected through a critique of disembodied vision. The portraits'synaesthetic qualities and the ways their meaning emerges from a mediationof word and image guarantee that their meaning climbs up inside andvibrates through the whole body. Finally, this seeing is inflected through acommitment to a dialectic of flux and duration. Carson believes that theimage produced by a single phrase can compress an infinity of moments oftime on its surface, and that an archaeological excavation of the past cananimate what has been buried and even bring new things to life.

8. Reaching to KnowThrough the deft strategies of revision and reversal made possible byGeryon's impossible photographic portraits, Carson's Autobiographybringsus to "one of those moments / that is the opposite of blindness" in whichnothing less than "the world" passes back and forth between our eyes(Autobiography 39). Clearly, in this image of an epiphany shared by twoobservers, she wishes to conjure more than mere physical sight, whichextends "only to the surface of bodies" (Economy 50). Carson's interests arein the red meat, in what lies unseen underneath surfaces and appearances.

In her other more properly scholarly writings, Carson has explicitlydeveloped a theory that remains only implicit in Autobiography about thehazards of understanding seeing as something we.do only with our eyes. InEconomy of the Unlost, she recalls Simonides' famous fragment in which hesays "the word is a picture of things" (Economy 47). Against a reading of thephrase as a commitment to put words to the service of the visible world,Carson argues that Simonides means to conjure words' power to "pointbeyond themselves toward something no eye can see and no painter canpaint" (51). From her analysis of Simonides' fragment, Carson makes it pos-sible to arrive at an understanding that reality is twofold (19): visible andinvisible worlds rest side by side (45). "The way to know" this dual reality,she echoes elsewhere in a poem, "is not by staring hard" (Men 11). Theinvisible world, simply put, is not accessible to the eyes or to the arts thatrestrict their gaze to the surface of things. Instead, using an image that bringstogether body and mind, she stipulates that to know, one must "reach— /mind empty / towards that thing you should know // until you get it" (11).

Reaching is what Carson does when she dips into the materials of a deadand vanished past and inserts it into the living present (Economy 73) andwhat she does when she mates disparate things in the body of her text. It is


C a r s o n

what Carson asks her readers to do as they try to locate the connective tis-sues lhat bridge the spaces between the different segments she has posi-tioned side by side. More important, as she demonstrates in the poeticlegends to the portraits in Geryon's autobiography, reaching is all aroundus: it is the work of metaphoric language. Buried here beneath Carson'sinvitation to reach is a reference to Aristotle, who, in On Metaphor, writesthat "All men by their nature reach out to know" (Eros 70). How canmetaphor activate the kind of knowing that is conveyed in this image ofreaching? Why is such reaching necessary in the first place?

In Eros the Bittersweet, Carson takes us to a moment in cultural historywhen our perceptual abilities were re-oriented away from the audio-tactileand towards the visual—the moment of alphabetization:

As the audio-tactile world of the oral culture is transformed into a world of wordson paper where vision is the principal conveyor of information, a reorientation ofperceptual abilities begins to take place within the individual. (43)

One consequence of the new demands placed on vision, Carson suggests, isa global desensorialization of word and reader, and the introduction of dis-tancing in the communication act:

Literacy desensorializes words and reader. A reader must disconnect himselffrom the influx of sense impressions transmitted by nose, ear, tongue and skin ifhe is to concentrate upon his reading. A written text separates words from oneanother, separates words from the environment, separates words from thereader (or writer) and separates the reader (or writer) from his environment.Separation is painful. (50)

Metaphor and other virtuoso "tactics of imagination" (69) which "shift dis-tances" from far to near (73) work against this separation.

Metaphor connects words to each other, to their environment, and to thereader or writer. Metaphor also connects reader and writer to each other.(Ted Cohen explores this notion when he argues that metaphor cultivatesintimacy and community [6].) Metaphoric thinking is cognitive and imagi-native, but it also is sensory and conveys powerful feeling (Ricoeur 154). It isdynamic, introducing motion into stasis and duration into flux, just as it frag-ments experiences and then reconnects them in new ways. And even moreimportant, metaphor is liberating. As David Williams puts it, metaphor "jarsthe mind by disordering our expectations. . . . At the same time, we enjoy it. . . because while it disturbs, metaphor also frees the mind from its habitualcourse" (41). As a monstrous (that is hybrid, disorderly, and powerful) practice,metaphor demonstrates "what is proper to man" (Derrida, "White" 246).


Long ago, Carson argues in Autobiography, a poet named Stesichorosbroke free from a restrictive cultural logic where connections were based oncontiguity and association and entered into the realm of metaphor, whereconnections were limitless. In so doing, he undid "the latches" and "releasedbeing" (Autobiography 5). This connective gesture, one that Geryon repeatswith every metaphor-driven image in his "autobiography," one that Carsonrepeats as she re-envisions this story about the things a monster candemonstrate, is one we can repeat every time we allow words and theirdeferral, which is "beautiful," "foiled," and "endless" (Eros 29), to take us tothe edge. Outside things are mortal, Carson shows us in Autobiography ofRed, but the realm of metaphoric language connects us back to time andthus to duration. Outside things can only be known through their surfaces,but the realm of metaphoric language lets us get to their meat and in sodoing, can restore our own embodied pleasures. In response to a questionabout "a sort of concealment drama going on in [his] work" in the"Interview" staged with Stesichoros at the end oí Autobiography, Stesichorosoffers to tackle the question of "blindness" (147). "First," he insists, "I musttell about seeing" (147). And this is the point Carson's study of metaphorintends to make: until we understand that telling sets seeing into motion,we will remain blind to the world of things needing to be uncovered. Poetictelling invites us to bridge the gaps between the disparate things we see andlets us reach beyond "outside" things to connect with immortality itself.

WORKS CITED

Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno of Dante. Trans. Robert Pinsky. New York: Farrar, 1994.Apollodorus. The Library. Trans. Sir James George Frazer. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library.

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1921.Bal, Mieke. The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually. Trans. Anna-Louise Milne.

Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard.

New York: Hill, 1981.Bryson, Norman. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.Campbell, David A., ed. and trans. Greek Lyric III: Stesichorus, Ibycus, Simonides, and

Others. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1998.—. Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse. New York: Vintage, 1998.—. Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides ofKeos with Paul Celan. Princeton:

Princeton UP, 1999.—. Interview with Shelly Pomerance. All in a Weekend. 21 Jul. 2002. CBC Montreal,

Radio One. 12 Nov. 2002 <http://www.montreal.cbc.ca/allinaweekend/>.


C a r s o n

—. Men in the Off Hours. New York: Knopf, 2000.—. Plainwater: Essays and Poetry. Toronto: Vintage, 2000.Cohen, Jeffrey. Monster Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.Cohen, Ted. "Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy." Sacks 1-10.Derrida, Jacques. "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy." Margins of

Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 207-71.Derrida, Jacques and Paule Thévenin. The Secret Art ofAntonin Artaud. Trans. Mary Ann

Caws. Cambridge: MIT, 1998.Eco, Umberto. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form and Film Sense. Ed. and trans. Jay Leyda. Cleveland:

Meridian, 1967.Eliot, T. S. "Little Gidding." Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber, 1974. 214-23.Ferrucci, Franco. The Poetics of Disguise: The Autobiography of the Work in Homer,

Dante, and Shakespeare. Trans. Ann Dunnigan. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980.Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham:

Duke UP, 1995.Hesiod. The Homeric Hymns and Homérica. Trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Loeb

Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.Hollander, Robert. "Dante's Virgil: A Light that Failed." Lectura Dantis 4 (Spring 1989).

12 Nov. 2002 <http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/LD/num-bers/o4/hollander.html>.

Horace. "The Art of Poetry." Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden. Ed. Allan H. Gilbert.Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1967.128-43.

Kandinsky, Wassily. "From 'The Problem of Form."' Modernism: An Anthology of Sourcesand Documents. Ed. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou.Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. 270-75.

Kirsch, Adam. Rev. of Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. New Republic 18 May 1998:37-41-

Longinus. "On Literary Excellence." Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden. Ed. Allan H.Gilbert. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1967.146-98.

Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.—. "Showing Seeing: a Critique of Visual Culture." Journal of Visual Culture 1.2 (2002):

165-81.Pausanias. Description of Greece. Trans. W.H.S. Jones and H.A. Ormerod. 4 vols. Loeb

Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1918-35.Ricoeur, Paul. "The Metaphoric Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling." Sacks

141-58.Sacks, Sheldon, ed. On Metaphor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979.Saussure, Ferdinand de. "Nature of the Linguistic Sign." Modern Criticism and Theory.

Ed. David Lodge. London: Longman, 1988.10-15.Williams, David. Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought

and Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1999.


R o g e r N a s h

Summer Solstice

i

On this longest day, sunlight can even be heard.At noon, it's the hiss of hot whetstones.By afternoon, gongs announce messengers.We wait, but only more light arrives.

Light arrives all at once.Like a girl in a starched cotton dress,knees brown as walnuts. Like sorrow,as much as love, at first sight.

The painter, Turner, said as he died:"The sun is God." Breasts formingon the trees shine with young apples.Light prays entirely by itself.

II

Light says to the exile, "I'm your country."It stamps the blue passport of the sea,to travel anywhere. Waves hold upsuitcases that bulge with sea-weed and hope.

Today, the unceasing light makescracked bells ring in tumbledfoundries, all on their own. It's the trueresurrection: of bells and orange blossom.

5I Canadian Literature 1801 Spring 2004

P o e m

III

On this longest day, even stalactitesin caves can flicker: endless darktwirls of café au lait and tobacco.

Villages spin around their glittering weather-vanes.East is west. To leave is to stay.To travel is to arrive before your mind got started.

IV

Everything that happened today, has happened.What did not happen, did that equallyvisibly, too. On this one day,the unconceived work equal shifts.

The sun is a decisive butterfly. It won't leavethe orange tree. Smoke from the bakerywon't leave the chimney. Scissors won't renouncethe shape of a cross. Hearts won't renouncethe shape of their love. If it cuts us, it cuts.


L a u r i e K r u k

M Voices Belong to Me"An Interview with Neil Bissoondath

IM eil Bissoondath, born in Trinidad in 1955, emigratedto Canada when he was eighteen. Since his arrival, he has built a distin-guished career as a fiction writer and essayist. His first volume of short sto-ries, Digging Up the Mountains, appeared in 1985; a novel set in theCaribbean, A Casual Brutality, was published in 1988. In these works, as wellas in his second story collection, On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows (1990),Bissoondath explored lives of dislocation, oppression, and uncertainty.Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (1994) attractedmuch attention, both positive and negative, and illustrated his interest inpolitical debate. He has gone on to write three more novels: The Innocenceof Age (1992), The Worlds Within Her (1998), and Doing the Heart Good(2002). Bissoondath also teaches at Université Laval in Quebec City.

I met Neil Bissoondath in Quebec in May 2001, just a month after thecontroversial summit on the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas(FTAA). Bissoondath's fascination with border crossing made him athoughtful observer of the move towards globalization and freer trade. Aftersome conversation on the benefits and risks of this trend, we turned toexplicitly literary matters.

LK I've tried to organize my questions around my main interest, which isshort stories and the concept of "voice," used literally, as well as invokinglarger, metaphorical meanings. I'm using the term "voice" here to sug-gest everything that we present ourselves as being, and our current wis-dom is that we partly construct our voice, and we partly inherit it too.

53 Canadian Literature 1801 Sprmg 2004

B i s s o o n d a t h

Alistair MacLeod, for instance, is more on the "inheritance" side andTimothy Findley more on the "constructed" side. So I'm interested inwhere writers place themselves. All the writers I've met have resistedbeing pigeonholed—this is the way it should be. But they are all awareof having multiple and even contradictory identifications or affilia-tions—perhaps like Canada itself. Different markers of voice are impor-tant to different people. The main ones include gender difference,especially for the women . . . . But men are gendered, too, aren't they?

NB In Selling Illusions, I quote Nadine Gordimer on that, and I think she'sright: essentially all novelists are androgynous. I've written stories, I'vewritten a novel [ The Worlds Within Her] in female voices, and I'vealways been attracted to female voices. It never seemed to me to besomething that had to be considered; it simply happened in the tellingof the story.

With Digging Up the Mountains, it was my editor who mentioned it tome: "You seem to know the voices." And it got me thinking, if that's so,why? And it may be linked to the fact that I grew up surrounded by lotsof women, lots of strong, imposing, intelligent women. For instance, mygrandmother Naipaul, who was to all appearances a traditional Hinduwoman, wearing her ohrni [a thin head veil], dressing very conserva-tively and going to her temple every week, yet at the same time was themanager of a quarry! And every day she put a hardhat on top of herohrni and gave orders to the 250-pound men, telling them where toplace their dynamite and where to drive their tractors, and it's one ofthose astonishing images. And I was surrounded by aunts who were uni-versity professors, teachers, widely read, widely travelled. They were justpart of my world.

LK Would you include your mother as another example?NB Absolutely—she was a teacher and the most widely read person I've ever

known, actually.My attitude towards writing stories or novels is that all voices belong

to me: if there is a voice that tells a story, that voice is simply part of me.And whether that voice is masculine or feminine, young or old, white,black, yellow, brown, or green has nothing to do with me. What inter-ests me is the world and the experience of that voice, what it's helping metry to see, and understand.

LK I certainly notice in your second collection of stories, On the Eve ofUncertain Tomorrows, that you're ranging more widely with different


world views, different nationalities, ages. It becomes more cosmopolitanthan Digging.

NB My own life, my own experience, has gone beyond the Caribbean. Aswith character, place: all places belong to me. I don't feel that I'm repre-sentative in my writing of any kind of label. I tend to follow my interests,and my interests vary. My favourite body of literature is nineteenth-century Russian writing. I love Japanese writing as well. None of theseare choices. These are simply things that appeal to me, that speak to mein ways that I couldn't necessarily articulate.

My favourite country in the world is Spain. My favourite poet isGarcia Lorca; I fell in love with his poetry. And many years later, 1984,when I got my first cheque for Digging, I bought a ticket to Spainbecause I had friends living in Barcelona. And I remember getting offthe plane and suddenly feeling at home. There was this strange electric-ity at the airport that told me, "This is another place where you some-how belong."

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I grew up in Trinidadwanting to leave. And so it seemed to me from the very beginning thatthe world was mine to discover. And that's the way I've essentially goneabout living my life.

LK I'm interested also in the idea that you fell in love with Spain partlythrough reading Spanish poetry. The writer's voice drew you in, creatinga world for you to enter. In an interview, you said: "Sometimes I hear myfather's voice in myself. I don't like it, but I know where it comes from."1

So how does that voice inform your writing?NB When I start writing a short story, or a novel, like many writers, I have

no idea what it's about or where it's going. It usually starts with a voice, ascene, a character taking me into a world that I'm not aware is in myhead. And as I write, these things emerge naturally—I don't go in searchof them—and it's at the end of the writing process that I can then stepback and look at what I've written more consciously. I can begin to rec-ognize things. And I can recognize that when I was ten, this particularthing happened, or when I was fifteen, somebody said this. I can hearmy father in what I've written, and sometimes, of course, when I'mspeaking—these voices emerge.

So all of that baggage is there—nothing is consciously sought, butnothing is consciously locked out either. And I try to allow my imagina-tion to simply take all that, to meld things, spin things, and create a story.

5 5 Canadian Literature 180 / Spring 2004


LK You don't say, "I'd like this to be about"—NB No, then I'd write an essay. Which is why I wrote Selling Illusions. The

book was my publisher's idea, but then I thought it was a good idea andI knew what it was going to be about. With my fiction, I have no thesis.There is a thesis there, but I recognize it only at the end.

One of the tricks to writing for me is to in fact wait until the momentwhen I know in my gut that the right voice is there. There comes amoment when I know it's going to be first person or third person, pre-sent tense or past tense. And who the character is. But I don't go insearch of those details; there comes a moment when they're there, and Iknow that's how the story is going to be writing itself.

There is a more conscious process which comes with the second draft.I'm writing a novel now2—I won't tell you what it's about—but theprocess is very much like that. I wasn't planning on writing this novel; Iwas planning on writing a book about Spain. And two, three monthsago, I found myself getting agitated, saw myself going quiet at home. Ididn't quite know what was happening. And then I realized that therewas a character who was trying to emerge, who I'm still trying to get toknow. .. from a world I've never been to, but I've read about, and Ithink has constructed itself because I've read enough about it. It got tothe point where I simply had to start writing.

But for some reason this novel insists on being written by hand inpencil. And it's simply emerging that it's something to do with therhythm, something to do with the pace at which the character is tellingme about what's happening. My job as a writer is to find the words to befaithful to what they're showing me.

LK I'd like to quote from a critic: "Whether or not they are immigrants toCanada, Bissoondath's characters rename and reinvent themselves."3 Is ityour view that all identity is a construction?

NB I recognize that I've been lucky in the life that I've had. I recognize thatthere are people who don't have the freedom to construct themselves orremake themselves, but I do think it's possible to say that I will not beconstrained by certain things that don't speak to me as an individualhuman being, and that I will reject certain things because I don't thinkthat they are right, and I will acquire other values. That's a kind of free-dom, and I've been lucky enough to have that freedom.

I came here as an immigrant of my own free will. And I think that'sthe primary freedom that can then allow me to move on. But if I had


been obliged to come here, fleeing a war, or some kind of economicdeprivation, it would be different.

LK There are people who will say to you, "What about racial injustice, whatabout economic injustice, what about sexual discrimination—all thesecategories of oppression, means of holding people back?"

NB Yes, but I think that there's also a certain truth to this: if you accept thechains that others will put on you, then you become their victim. I thinkone can make a choice, as an individual, to simply not be constrained.Those injustices exist, and they have to be fought, and fought at every levelwe have, democratically. But at the same time, individuals have choice.

LK "The rhetoric of victimization"—that's another term that came up inSelling Illusions. At a certain point, you're right: it can become passivityand even apathy, because when do you escape from that group identity?You can make a hierarchy of injustices, but after a while, if that's all it is,it starts to seem like a waste of time.

NB It does. I think we are particularly lucky in Canada in that we do live in aliberal, open, democratic society, one that has made many efforts to pro-tect the rights of its citizens. Look at Trudeau's Charter of Rights andFreedoms; here in Quebec, we have the same thing. We live in a societythat's ruled by law.

Too often I will hear people condemn Canadian society as being racistor Quebec society as being fascist. Those are blanket statements thatreduce to a kind of stereotype the society you're speaking about. We haveto recognize not just the complexities of ourselves, but also of the soci-eties in which we live. And if you run into a racist tomorrow, there willbe a hundred other people who are not racist.

LK Another Trinidad-born Canadian writer, Claire Harris, has said some-thing interesting about origins: "I don't think it matters where you wereborn—I think it matters to whom you were born. [In] Third Worldcountries, it is the difference between life and death."4 Do you agree?

NB I think it's probably right about most Third World countries, but it'salso true of anywhere: the life that you lead depends a great deal on towhom you were born, the parents you had, the family you grew up in,the influences they bring to bear. If I am a writer today, and if I lovebooks and reading, it's because of the family into which I was born. If Ilove travel, it's because of my family.

LK Yet there has to be a certain financial basis of support.NB Yes, there has to be a certain financial basis, but it doesn't have to be huge.



LK Coming back to what you feel you left behind in Trinidad, you've alsosaid you feel it was a very "macho" society. In what ways?

NB I was the only one of my generation who enjoyed reading. Everybody elsewanted to go fishing, hunting, or was interested in cars—those "macho"subjects. Traditional "boy" activities. And there was very little room forsomeone like myself. I had to fight to make that space for myself. But Idon't believe that the book, or reading, are facing imminent death. I alsothink there's a critical mass of readers which we'll always have.

LK Another topic I'm interested in is family fictions—family not necessarilyas the nuclear unit, but communities as well, found families, chosengroupings. A comment by you about family which intrigued me was"Leaving Trinidad at eighteen, I never really got to meet my parents asan adult. My mother died before any of that could be done."5 She diedwhen you were still quite young?

NB No, she died when I was twenty-nine, in 1984. But you've got to remem-ber I left Trinidad at eighteen—and I saw my parents, maybe, threetimes? I went back twice and then we met in New York one time. Andmy dream was as an adult with Digging, published on my thirtieth birth-day, that there I would have an opportunity to reconnect with them asan adult.

LK And it's often tricky, isn't it, sharing your writing with family, for, in rec-ognizing incidents you've drawn on from your childhood, or your life,family members may often feel that the writing is a kind of exposure,even betrayal.

NB Yet I knew that in Digging there was none—no autobiography. No onewould recognize themselves.

There was a writer who once published a novel that was very wellreceived and said, "Oh I couldn't have published it while my mother wasstill alive." That was not a problem for me. I'm intrigued by other peo-ple's lives, I'm intrigued by trying to understand them, what they'velived through and how they've been shaped.

LK I'm thinking of Alistair Ramgoolam, who appears first in "Insecurity" inDigging, and then again in "Security," in On the Eve of UncertainTomorrows. There he appears in Canada, but ironically, he feels far lesssecure now. It's a very poignant story, and it goes deeper into Alistair, hisloss of identity, authority and control, and seems to end with him losingconsciousness. In "Security," the second story dealing with AlistairRamgoolam, you've said you were dealing a bit with your father.


NB Yes, but I saw that afterwards . . . it was my father, but it was also myuncles, people I knew who were living in an unstable society, people whowere doing whatever they could to secure a future, because they wereafraid, certain that one day everything would fall apart, and they wouldhave to run.

The picture of Mr. Ramgoolam is not at all my father, in fact. It wassimply the idea of living with that insecurity. I think the first story"Insecurity" is very much about a man trying to find some control,somewhere, and then, in the end, losing it. In fact, he ends up living thekind of life that he was preparing for—except that that life means a totalloss of control.

LK You obviously reflect, fictionally, being part of a Caribbean "family" orcommunity in your stories, where the narrator or protagonist is oftenbeing brought along, somewhat reluctantly, in order to be introduced toa larger group, connected by that shared origin and experience of emi-gration. You skewer the idea of sticking together for only that reason,satirically, in several stories of people who are very unpleasant or preten-tious, so that ideal of cultural community shatters.

NB Exactly. And I realized eventually that, personally, I wasn't interested inthat kind of life—being part of a community where people would gettogether and bemoan the fact that there were no sandy beaches outside.

LK It's a kind of victimization, again?NB I think it's a kind of radioactive nostalgia. It's poisonous. The number of

times that I heard the comment, "Well, Canada's like that—Canada'sracist, Canada's this or that," from people who arrived in Toronto, set-tled in an apartment, went to work in a neighbourhood, returned to thatapartment and encountered Canada at work and then through televi-sion, but decided that they knew what Canada was about and that theyfelt that they could justifiably condemn Canada.... But returning tofamily, I treasure my family; I enjoy family life a great deal.

LK Have you kept ties with your other relatives—uncles, aunts, cousins?NB No, the extended family holds little appeal for me. I had the freedom to

pick and choose. There are two aunts that I'm in touch with and anuncle. There are these aunts and my uncle V. S. Naipaul, who lives inLondon. We're in touch.

LK I see in A Casual Brutality the island custom that any relative can drop inat any time—

NB Which is precisely why I decided to pick and choose.



LK But it is the cultural norm, isn't it? Your relatives are physically close,and then they come into your space—

NB Absolutely. And they would come and suck all the air from around you.It was extremely claustrophobic. It was the kind of society where privacywas not valued at all. Before the demands of family and friendship, yourown individual, personal life did not matter.

I'm not a joiner, I've never been a joiner. And that's part of it as well. Iwould never belong to a political party, and in the same way, I don'twant to belong to any large extended family which will put demands onyou.

LK Yet when you have children of your own, this is part of the motivationfor sustaining these family ties. You'll tell your daughter about yourmother, and you will create her voice, again. And maybe you havealready brought her voice, perhaps with others, into your writingalready—like the passage you read last night from The Worlds WithinHer.6 The older woman speaker, Shakti.

NB It comes from the voices of all those women I grew up with. Thatstrength, that humour, that no-nonsense attitude. That's my mother,that's my Aunt Savi in Trinidad, my Aunt Mira who lives in Florida, myAunt Nalla in London. It's a Naipaul voice.

LK So, what do you want your daughter to carry with her in terms of familyheritage?

NB A sense that she's a very complex little girl. That she is shaped by twovery different histories, two very different families. She knows the storiesof my family, she knows about leaving India a century ago, and thestruggles of those early generations. She knows that her grandfathersNaipaul and Bissoondath both started life in great poverty, working inthe sugar cane plantations, and each of them, through their own efforts,changed the lives of their families dramatically. The sense I want to giveher is that she belongs everywhere.

LK Let's talk a bit about the short story now. I'm obviously interested inwhat makes a short story different from a novel. It's a vexing question,because in some ways impossible to answer! Yet I think there's a closerassociation of story with voice, character voice, because there's oftenonly one.

NB I have the same ambitions for the short story as I have for the novel.When a reader has finished a short story of mine, I want them to havethe sense that they've entered a world, and they've encountered lives,


and they've come away with a sense of fullness. Not just that they've seena snapshot, or a short documentary film, but that they've seen a movie.

I am no more or less attracted to the short story than to the novel.And that goes back to my writing process. When a character comes tome, I know in my gut whether this is going to be a short story or a novel.I sense the length of it. Even not knowing the details, there is somethingthat tells me this is a short story as opposed to a novel. I also tend towrite fairly long short stories. My short story manuscripts tend to bebetween thirty and thirty-five pages each, which is longer than thenorm, I'm told.

LK Yes, you can compare a novel to a film, or a story to a snapshot, whichsounds much more static and limited. I mean, look at Munro's short sto-ries or Mavis Gallant's. It's fascinating what can be done in a short spaceof time or limited amount of words and usually with a single narratingvoice, because in a novel, it's more do-able to have many voices. Thereader's prepared for that, whereas to shift speakers in a short story—itseems there isn't enough time.

NB No, there isn't enough time in a short story to shift voice, althoughthere's no technical reason why it couldn't be done.

LK I don't recall noting such a shift in your short stories, for instance.NB No, but maybe I'll try it now. [laughs]LK To go back to your first collection, Digging, I was most deeply affected by

"Counting the Wind."NB It's one of my favourite stories. I wrote it in two weeks. I remember it as

a wonderful experience because my editor said, "I think we need onemore story to round out the collection," and I said to her, "Well, I think Ihave something in my head."

LK And you also switched perspectives, with the same character focus, fromfirst person to third person, without any explanation. That was differentfor you.

NB Oh, was that ever strange! Because the story wrote itself—I wrote thefirst section in one person, and then it came to an end. And then theother section came to me—in a different person. And I tried fighting it. Itried saying, "No, I'm going to continue as I began." But it wouldn'twork. The story would not advance. And so I said, "Okay, I've got to getit done, because my editor is waiting for it. So I'm just going to do it,and at the end, I'll go back, look and see which person I should use. I'lldecide later." Except that the story wrote itself as moving back and forth,

6 l Canadian Literature 1801 Spring 2004


and in the end, I decided, there was no way I could change it, and so Igave it to her, and she thought it worked.

LK I found it gave an inside/outside shift, or a double perspective.Obviously, first person is more intense and intimate. You can do a lot tocreate voice that way, and you've used first-person speakers in theCaribbean island dialect—that expressive, non-standard English used in"Dancing" [Digging] and "Cracks and Keyholes" [On the Eve], whichreflects a whole different mindset.

NB Yes, in "Dancing," the character would have spoken that way—that'show I heard her voice. So I did what I could to capture the rhythm.

Each story has got its own position, in which it places me, in order forme to write it. And I have to find that position, defining that position interms of which narrative perspective, or person, or which tense. And Idon't have a preference.

LK Shifting from first-person voice to third-person in "Counting the Wind"gives the reader both the feeling of being inside and then the moredetached view from outside. It is jarring, of course, the schizophrenicnarration, but it could be related to the whole dehumanization of thesituation the man is in.

NB I think that's how it works, and I think that's why it works. The schizo-phrenia you mention, I think that's exactly it. He's got this personal situ-ation with his wife and baby, and then he's got this other world, thisother life, which is important in itself.

LK And the one invades the other. So you've never made the "mistake"where you started writing a short story, and it became a novel? Or theother way?

NB No, that hasn't happened. What has happened with Doing the HeartGood—that started as one short story. And then I found, as with Mr.Ramgoolam, the voice came back. What happened was that this onestory was here, a fairly long story. And over a period of time, I foundthat the same character was telling more stories. And so I wrote them.And then he added something. These stories were written over a longperiod of time. He kept adding to his life. I didn't intend to write a col-lection or anything like that. And then, as I learned more about him, Iunderstood where he was.

Essentially what this book has turned out to be is the same character,relating his life in a series of stories but also linking them all by means ofa present tense that gives a kind of unity to the entire thing. So I think of


it as a novel, but its form is a blend of the short story and the novel.The structure is as follows: one evening, Christmas Eve, and we start

with him there, and end with him having dinner, just three or fourhours in the present time. That's the present frame. And then, scatteredthroughout it, are these stories that he's written.

LK Your protagonist is a writer?NB No, he's not a writer. He's a teacher, and he's written these stories

because he's afraid that he's going to die and will be forgotten. And thisis a desperate attempt to survive his death.

LK Did you publish any of these original stories separately?NB No. I just put them aside, as I was working on other things. This hap-

pens to me once in a while. For instance, while working on The WorldsWithin Her—the novel would be there, but suddenly there would be astory to write. And I would put it aside, and work on the story when Ihad the time. Other times, the urge would be strong enough that Iwould work on the story alone, which usually takes me four to six weeks.And then go back to the novel.

So I just kept these stories in a file folder, where they kept piling up,and I realized it was the same character, coming back.

LK Are there any obvious influences, or people you admire, especially in theshort story—in Canada, or elsewhere?

NB The problem with a question like that is there are so many people Iadmire! I will tell you about a writer I've just discovered; she's wellknown in the United States and less well known here: Jhumpa Lahiri.She's a New Yorker and she won all these prizes, and she publishes in theNew Yorker. And she's a wonderful short story writer. Not easy to find,for some reason, but she won the Pulitzer Prize.

Caryl Phillips is another example, an English novelist from theCaribbean who's been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His book,Crossing the River, is one of the most moving I've ever read.

LK Of course, people have made much of the family connection with youruncle V. S. Naipaul.

NB Yes, they've tried, [laughs] It doesn't affect me one way or the other.LK Except that you've had his example, his model. . . .NB Yes, he's always been an example or a model, not as a writer but as a cer-

tain kind of lifestyle and approach to life. I mean, I'm a writer because ofhim; I grew up surrounded by his books on my mother's bookshelf. Andthat told me, "I could do that." And when I left Trinidad, he sent me a



letter, saying how wonderful the world was [and that I should] discoverit. And he was encouraging with Digging. But I never felt intimidated bybeing related to V. S. Naipaul or anything like that. I never felt that Ishould be following in his footsteps. I think I was always aware thatevery writer makes his own path. The truth is, I write for myself. Iwouldn't know how to categorize my work.

LK One thing you did say on this topic: "I like a page to look like a page."7

What does that mean for you?NB Well, I'm not a great fan of experimental writing. I like paragraphs, I

like periods, I like commas, and I think they have important roles toplay in the shaping of a story and the shaping of a page. I think not onlyof the rhythm of the words but also the way writing appeals to the eye. Ithink writing has to appeal to the eye as well—the shape of the page.

So often these experiments strike me as attempts to be clever. If you'regoing to be telling a story—I have a very traditional approach. I think it'spartly why the nineteenth-century Russians appeal to me. In the end,you can be as clever as you want to be, but if what you are writing doesnot speak to the human heart and does not speak to the absolute realityof people's lives, then you're sort of doodling around with the page. Thisis a totally personal judgement and has nothing to do with anythingexcept that this is what does, or does not, appeal to me. I become veryimpatient when I get a sense that a writer is trying to be clever. Cleverfor the sake of being clever.

LK Do you read your work aloud? Is that important to you?NB To myself, yes. And I enjoy doing readings. The ear tells you a lot, but

also the way it looks. You know, there are certain writers that I simplycan't bother to read. Julio Cortázar, for example, with his pages of textwith no break, no paragraphs. It doesn't please my eye. It tires my eye,and I don't think in that way. I don't think in huge blocks of text. So Isuppose in the area of form, I'm a traditional writer.

LK Also, you've been very clear in saying that "Literature is literature; it'snot politics."8 Obviously, some writers would vehemently disagree withthat. I guess maybe it comes down to how we define "politics," doesn'tit? Some of your character studies, such as "The Revolutionary," "A Visitto a Failed Artist," "Kira and Anya," "Smoke," appear satiric in theSwiftian vein. The satirist's eye seems to be a political eye, in many ways.

NB Well, one of the themes that drives my writing—and I'm very interestedpersonally in politics because it's one of those areas in which you see


human personality and the human being in its clearest form—is theeffect of politics on people's lives. I believe strongly that the individualmust have as much freedom as possible within a society to create his orher own life, yet politics will influence our lives in many ways, every day.And I'm interested in that dynamic. So politics, politicians have comeinto my writing.

But I don't have any ideology to sell, and if I did, I don't think theplace to sell it would be in fiction. I've been called, in print, fascist, com-munist, a feminist because of the story "The Cage." Because of the por-trait of the main character's wife in A Casual Brutality, I've been called amisogynist because she wasn't a very pretty woman. It was M. NourbeSePhilip who accused me, in an essay, of attacking Canadian womanhoodbecause the portrait wasn't a very attractive one. But she wasn't anattractive woman. So I'm not trying to sell anything here—each charac-ter has to stand on his or her merits. Don't try to identify what NeilBissoondath believes politically by reading his fiction. Selling Illusions isa different matter.

LK I appreciate your honesty. The "appropriation of voice" controversywhich you wrote about in Selling Illusions is, I think, over now.

NB Yes, I think it was a period that was lived through, but the inherentabsurdities were so clear.

LK But I guess the other side ofthat debate is to make sure that all peoplehave opportunities to be heard, to be published, right?

NB Absolutely. I remember being at a writers' festival, and there were twoNative women writers on this panel, and, quite frankly, I had read theirwork, and they were not good writers. But they did such a wonderful jobof crying and complaining that the audience dared not object. Theirpoint was "I should be published because I am a Native person who istrying to give voice to my people." And my point is that, one, you weren'telected, and two, you're not a very good writer. Those are not grounds fordemanding that you be published! I think the writing has to be, in thefirst place, good writing. And then you can have it play any role you like.You know, my uncle [V. S. Naipaul] always said he's not a literary doctor.He's not there to cure ills; we have people who are there to do that.

I think a novel can succeed in teaching, but I don't think that shouldbe the initial aim of the novelist as he sits down to try to write. If peopleread your book and they simply get a good cry, great; if they feel theyhave learned something, terrific. If they feel that they have not wasted

65 Canadian Literature 180 / Spring 2004


their time, great; if they feel that some of these characters have informedtheir lives in some kind of small way, that's wonderful. If they've beensimply entertained, that's fine too. In fact I find it interesting that youmentioned "Kira and Anya" as being a satirical story because it's notmeant as such.

LK I saw the juxtaposition of these women's opposed political positions asin some way a mockery of extremes.

NB But I think that's how extremes are. In fact, the man himself, Seepersad[the former politician being interviewed by Kira and Anya] is someonethat I don't particularly like. And I don't like Mr. Ramgoolam. But thereis something about both of them that I find very touching at the sametime. I don't mean to skewer any of them.

"The Revolutionary" is a whole other thing, however. It is an attemptto write a satirical piece.

LK And there, you presumably want people to come away with somethingthey've learned?

NB I'd like them to have a good laugh.LK And to see what they're laughing at?NB Sure. I fear ideology; I fear ideology of any kind, whether left-wing ide-

ology as in "The Revolutionary," or nationalist ideology as in Yasmin'sfather [in The Worlds Within Her], or any kind of ideology. Religiousideology. Any system of beliefs that claims to have all of the answers goescounter to the true nature of human personality, which is one of contra-diction.

LK I want to comment now on your last statement, at the end of SellingIllusions, which, as you have said, is in many ways a very personal book.Some political science reviewers have criticized it for not being theo-rized enough in that area; on the other hand, you have drawn fromsources in the public domain, so it has a popular appeal. You werespeaking as a writer, not as a member of a political party.

NB Nor as a specialist of any kind. But I wanted to do a book that was notby a specialist, a book that would speak to people who were living thisevery day, who weren't studying it, who were seeing themselves livingday by day with this Multiculturalism Policy.

What's special about Selling Illusions is that it's nothing new; I'm notthe only one to have these feelings about multiculturalism. There arehundreds of thousands of people across this country who have thesefeelings, except that they haven't put them together in a book. And when

66 Canadian Literature 1801 Spring2004

I did that, it brought out the most diverse—ethnically, racially—set ofpeople. And that's what was gratifying about it, and that's why I didn'twant to do an academic book. I didn't want to be quoting too manythings from sociological studies. I wanted to say, "Let's take a look at theeveryday level—newspaper articles, films, the popular media." I wantedit at that level. And that's what was able to speak to people, I think.

LK At the end of it you said, and this sounds to me now like your credo as awriter: "I will continue to pursue, to the best of my ability, the démystifi-cation of the Other." I was thinking, is it possible ever to demystify theOther, entirely?

NB Ah, no—happily. That can never, ever be done entirely; human beingsare much too complex for that. But that's part of the fun, and one of ourroles as human beings: to try to understand others who are so different,in the full knowledge that I may think I understand now, but, God,tomorrow, something's going to happen and change that person in waysI can't anticipate, and I have to try and understand that too. That's whatI enjoy doing as a novelist.

That's why I say you can't find the autobiography of Neil Bissoondathin his fiction. For instance, I try to put myself into the skin of Joaquin, in"On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows," and to try to sense what his real-ity, daily reality, is like. To try to demystify for myself a life that is notmine, an experience that is not mine.

LK And you do this in part by reading, by researching, what it was like to bea victim of political torture, escaped to a new country? And partly imag-ining?

NB By imagining, yes. Reading everything from newspapers, to officialreports . . . meeting people. That will kick off fiction. These are all per-sonal interests; I'm interested in what people go through in politicaloppression. But for me to enter that world, it will take, usually, some-thing that I've seen that doesn't strike me at the time.

Remember the man's hands in "On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows,"the description of his hands? A few years ago, in Toronto, there was asmall coffee house on the Danforth, and there was a group of Chileanexiles who used to play there every evening. They were popular for awhile. And I remember the drummer had no thumbs. They'd beenremoved by the secret police. And that stayed with me: the damage thatcould be done to hands.

LK That's an example of an encounter with "otherness." But you have also



said elsewhere that "every country is racist, unless it is a country that hasonly one race living in it."9 In other words, this is almost inevitable.

NB Racism is part of the human experience.LK We're always looking for otherness, then?NB Well, there's difference, and so long as there's difference, there's fear.

And that will manifest itself in various ways. We're most at ease with thefamiliar; it's a normal human reaction. How far you take that reaction,how you deal with that unease, is the question. I think it's essential forwriters to approach difference—if you don't, what are you going towrite about?

LK But also the otherness in the self-—we change, as well.NB Absolutely.LK So, where do "self" and "other" overlap? There's often an otherness we

personally own but don't want to acknowledge.NB I think you have to acknowledge it. Unless you do that, you can't begin

to approach the other who is external to yourself.LK Exploring characters that you don't especially like, as well?NB Oh, that I particularly enjoy. When I start off and I don't like a charac-

ter, the challenge is to understand enough about his life to begin to feelfor him. That's when I know a story is working.

All my characters are part of me, but I don't love everything aboutmyself, so I don't love all my characters. Often, they say or do things thatI don't like, that I disagree with—but that's who they are.

LK Does it appear that we often need to invent difference or othernesswhere it doesn't exist, then?

NB Let's face it: discovering someone else—making those connections,demystifying—takes an effort. It's easier to say, "Well, he's different." Or"They're different." And not necessarily in a vicious kind of way, justthat you don't bother to make the effort to get through the real differ-ences as well as the apparent differences to find out that this is a humanbeing who has the same feelings, fears, desires, as you do. And that'swhere emphasizing difference works counter to what I see as the trueadventure in life, in fact: discovering.

Quebec City,May 2001


1 Penny van Toorn, "Building on Common Ground: An Interview with Neil Bissoondath,"Canadian Literature 147 (Winter 1995): 132.

2 Neil Bissoondath, Doing the Heart Good (Toronto: Cormorant, 2002). It will be publishedlater in the US.

3 Penny van Toorn, "Positioning Neil Bissoondath: Post-Colonial, Multicultural andNational Formations," New Literatures Review 27 (Summer 1994): 88.

4 Leslie Sander and Arun Mukherjee, "A Sense of Responsibility: An Interview with ClaireHarris,' West Coast Line 22.1 (Spring/Summer 1997): 26.

5 Van Toorn, "Building on Common Ground," 128.6 A reading at the annual conference of the Association of Canadian College and

University Teachers of English, held May 23-27, 2001 at Université Laval, whereBissoondath teaches.

7 Van Toorn, "Building on Common Ground," 132.8 Interview with Aruna Srivastava, Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions, ed.

Linda Hutcheon and Marion Richmond (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1990) 320.9 Srivastava, 314.


M e r e d i t h Q u a r t e r - m a i n

For Robin Blaser

So what is this After after?

Beginning.

Man or nobody was before

a miracle

a mirror and terrible

Who are you?

The actor possibleonly as speakercannot will her disclosureher demon of a shadowuniverseon her shoulder.Speak in the war.You will disclose nothing

mere talkmere propagandalip service.

We arein oracles

parrots as signs

not things

being in betweenbeing webbing

puppetsof invisible hands.

JO Canadian Literature 1801 Spring 2004

. V. S k e n e

Adrift in the XubaizhaiGallery(The Hong Kong Museum of Art, Kowloon, 2001)

The Eccentrics

Shadowsstep solidlyout of the dark

catch fire,burnin the absence

of memory,of that line, delicateas a scar,between yesterdayand today.

Here, a weathered stone,splitby growing grasses

and a road twist and turnsitself back to hill,

tree,the water below—

a road to someplace realand not realwhere light has more texture, coloura soft sheenthat seems to come from within.


P o e m

Skiesare sure of birdsong. Clear

and invisible—flickering

wingscross a sun—there

and not-thereand dynastiesfallthrough a language I'll never know-aliveonly a sparrow ago.


C a r t e r F . H a n s o

Still Here, But Still EnglishR. E. W. Goodridge and the Performanceof Nationality in English CanadianEmigrant Writings

For middle-class English gentlemen who emigrated toManitoba and the Northwest from 1880 to 1900, performing one's national-ity became central to the emigrant's masculinity in a way that it had not forprevious generations.1 Prior to Confederation, class-conscious emigrantsfrom England's middle ranks had sought to reassure themselves of theirsocial superiority by invoking education and gentility, as opposed to nation-ality. Consider these two statements by Catharine Parr Traill in TheBackwoods of Canada (1836):

It is education and manners that must distinguish the gentleman in thiscountry.... It is the mind that forms the distinction between the classes in[Canada]. Knowledge is power!' (62)

[A]s a British officer must needs be a gentleman and his wife a lady, perhaps werepose quietly on that uncontestable proof of our gentility. (195)

During the 1880s, however, several influences converged to make the classdistinctions crucial to Traill secondary to nationality in the minds of emi-grants to Manitoba. In this decade, Canadian-born Manitobans developedstronger forms of regional and national identity that put English emigrantson the defensive. Manitoba's transformation from a Métis settlement into aBritish-Ontarian society and its disputes with the federal government overboundaries and railroads solidified a distinct sense of provincial identity. Atthe same time, a wider Canadian nationalism emerged and brought with ita heightened consciousness about the Canadian character. Most varieties ofCanadian nationalism in the 1880s held that the culture of Manitoba shouldbe firmly British and not French (Berger 78-108; Morton 234-250); certainly


G o o d r i d g e

nativist suspicion was stronger toward Mennonite and Icelandic settlersthan British Protestants, yet genteel English settlers were still a visibleminority (under percent of the population) that attracted considerablescorn (Friesen 202, 482). Edward ffolkes, an English gentleman who emi grated to Manitoba in 1880, wrote in his letters home that there is "a greatprejudice against English gentlemen [here]—they are generally lazy andproud, and do little work" (74).2 Such condescension toward Englishmennaturally pricked many English settlers' nationalistic pride.

The emigrant preoccupation with nationality was never merely a reactionto Canadian nationalism, but also a sentiment fueled by developments inEngland. To be sure, emigrating to Canada had always been tricky forVictorian gentlemen. In Catharine Parr Traill's generation, the economicbenefits of emigration were offset by the stigma of class failure and the fearof losing one's gentility through manual labour. These anxieties still existedin the 1880s and were discussed endlessly in the press, but with the democ ratization of the gentlemanly ideal, gentility gradually became seen less asan individual distinction of class and breeding, and more as a masculineicon of nationality, a signature of Englishness itself.3 Robin Gilmour hasargued that the Victorian middle classes so successfully wrested the gentle manly ideal from the aristocracy and remade it in their own image that bythe 1870s any male with a public school education could claim gentlemanlystatus (Gilmour 5 10). Once he was entrenched in Victorian culture as theembodiment of manliness, the gentleman became inseparable from Englishconceptions of empire as a civilizing enterprise; as Graham Dawson argues,the "dominant conception of masculine identity—the true 'Englishman'—was both required and underpinned by the dominant version of Britishnational identity in such a way that each reinforced the other" (2).

Emigration posed problems for this model of national and masculineidentity, however. In the 1870s, economic depression and a saturated profes sional job market meant that for many young gentlemen, emigration wasthe only option. By the 1880s, the steady drain of England's male populationoverseas fed into fears about a national "crisis of masculinity" that was lead ing to racial "degeneracy."4 Though emigration was frequently representedin the public schools as a manly way for a gentleman to serve the empire,Anne Windholz demonstrates that popular British magazines expressedconflicting views of emigration that reveal fears that emigration threatenedthe gentleman's masculinity, and by extension, England's imperial power(633). If, on the one hand, a gentleman emigrant failed to adapt to condi


tions in Manitoba and confirmed the popular belief observed by ffolkes thatEnglishmen were lazy and inept, his failure signified a weakening of Englishmasculinity and imperial resolve. On the other hand, if the emigrant suc-ceeded as a prairie settler, his very success suggested he had lost his gentilityand become a vulgar colonist, sacrificing his titles of gentleman andEnglishman. These anxieties over nationality and masculinity contributedto the gentleman emigrant's tendency to assert his Englishness and resistassimilation into Canadian culture.

Like the Victorian periodicals discussed by Windholz, autobiographicalwritings of Canadian immigrants also provide a site for reading conflicts ofnational identity and genteel manliness. The writings of one English gentle-man emigrant, Richard E. W. Goodridge, who settled in Manitoba in 1880,reveal a long struggle over national identity (as well as the narrative strategiesGoodridge used to perform his nationality). Goodridge was a retired artillerycaptain from Devonshire who had served in India; he came to Manitoba notto settle himself, but to establish his three sons. Goodridge purchased afarm near Headingley, just west of Winnipeg, and while he suffered setbacksalong the way, his residence in Canada was, overall, pleasant and prosper-ous. Goodridge recorded his experiences as an emigrant, his opinions aboutManitoba, and his advice for would-be settlers in two books, A Year inManitoba: Being the Experiences of a Retired Officer in Settling his Sons (1882)and The Colonist At Home Again; or, Emigration Not Expatriation (1889).Initially, Goodridge disliked Manitoba's egalitarianism and ethnic diversity,and he rejected any hybrid sense of nationality or home. Subsequently,however, Goodridge developed a strong affinity for Manitoba, and hisenjoyment of the province caused him to view his sojourn in Canada as arenunciation of his Englishness and his masculinity as a gentleman. As aresult, Goodridge's later text, The Colonist At Home Again (1889), becomesan attempt to prove his Englishness, an attempt that unwittingly revealsGoodridge's complex and indeterminate subjectivity as a Canadian settler.

Richard Goodridge's first book, A Year in Manitoba, published in Londonin 1882, has much in common with other settlers' guides written byVictorian emigrants. While it is autobiographical, its author is not the cen-tral focus of the text. Goodridge's intent in A Year in Manitoba is not to"write the self," but to convey information and impressions about an exter-nal object, Manitoba. Goodridge clearly recognized the market that existedin England for reliable accounts of colonial life, and his book is written withprospective emigrants in mind. If A Year in Manitoba does not really func-


G o o d r i d g e

tion as autobiography because of its subject matter, in other respects it doesbelong to the genre, inasmuch as Goodridge speaks confidently in the firstperson. Goodridge embodies the authoritative "Western man" that GeorgesGusdorf theorizes first produced the conditions for autobiographical writing.Autobiography takes hold under circumstances where "man knows himselfa responsible agent: gatherer of men, of lands, of power, maker of kingdomsand empires" (31). In his preface, Goodridge quickly establishes the mascu-line ethos of a gentleman by claiming that his "age, antecedents, and associ-ations" give him "authority" to offer his judgments on Manitoba (v). It wasto secure for his sons the same self-assured brand of manhood that RichardGoodridge emigrated to Manitoba. Goodridge acknowledges the problemof middle-class masculinity in his preface: "the question of a suitable settle-ment for the sons of naval and military officers, clergymen, professionalmen, &c, has long been an anxious one; the system of competitive exami-nations having practically excluded all but the talented and studious fromthe prizes in the civil and military services, and professional life generally"(v). Perhaps one or more of Goodridge's sons had failed the military exami-nations and now faced unemployment. Given the bleak outlook in England,Goodridge comments that "Colonial Life seems the only 'refuge for the des-titute' that in most cases offers itself" (v).

Goodridge's decision to seek "refuge" in Manitoba was popular at the time,1877 to 1882 being the era of "Manitoba fever" that drew thousands of immi-grants from Ontario, Britain, and Europe. Consecutive bumper harvestsproving Manitoba's excellence as a wheat-growing province, the arrival ofthe railroad in 1878, and aggressive promotion overseas convinced emi-grants like Goodridge that Manitoba had a bright future (Morton 176-98).Goodridge notes that "glowing accounts [of Manitoba] have been . . .broadcast over the United Kingdom, determining many hesitating emi-grants to decide in its favour" (vi). Thus, having his three sons to settle,Goodridge writes that he

determined to take a small farm . . . and there have my boys thoroughlyschooled in every detail of husbandry, so as to be fitted for the work of emigrantfarmers.. .. Seeing an advertisement... of a 'Farm and Cottage' to be let in theneighbourhood of the capital of Manitoba (Winnipeg), I . . . decided to take it as abase of future operations; there after, along with my wife and daughter, accom-panying my three sons to the remote west, in order to see the boys fairly started,and then return home, (vi)

Fully intending to return to Devonshire when his sons were established,Goodridge did not consider himself an emigrant in 1880, but rather an


Englishman in temporary residence. It becomes apparent only when read-ing The Colonist At Home Again, written eight years later, to what extentGoodridge's plans altered and how his longer-than-anticipated stay inManitoba provoked in him a crisis of national identity.

It is not necessary to recount in detail the events narrated in A Year inManitoba. Like most other emigrants who wrote settlers' guides, Goodridgespends considerable time describing the sea and overland journeys thatlanded his family in Winnipeg on June 4,1880. Once there, the Goodridgesfound their "Farm and Cottage" along the Assiniboine River to be in farworse condition than advertised. But with the labour of his sons and somehired help, Goodridge reports that "the seeds planted soon after arrival weredeveloping wonderfully" (44). Based on his account, it is clear thatGoodridge was an adept colonist: hard-working, a quick learner, and noteasily discouraged. When the family's rented home was destroyed by fire,Goodridge built their new home's interior himself. Agriculturally,Goodridge's first year in Manitoba was a success, and this, along with a firmbelief in his superiority as an English gentleman, emboldened Goodridge tocriticize Canadian institutions and customs.

Some of what Goodridge says is no different from the complaints of ear-lier genteel emigrants like Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie, or ofhis contemporaries such as James Seton Cockburn. Like Cockburn, whodisparaged the "'free country' rubbish that is talked here" (37), Goodridge isput off by the familiar tone of Canadian society and objects to the "insuffer-able roughness" of many Canadians who "assume the most perfect equality"(70). More important than this commonplace observation is Goodridge'scriticism of Dominion government apathy in improving Canada's infra-structure, for here he reveals his resistance to cultural diversity and thehybrid identities it produces. Speaking on what he feels is the slow develop-ment of Manitoba's roads and railways, Goodridge writes:

Unfortunately, in my observation of Canadians, they take a long time to make astart—they have impressed me as a people more of talk than of action; and henceas peculiarly unsuited, in a pioneer country like this, for the form of governmentthey now enjoy—self-government.... Among such a number of mixed races—Canadians, Americans, English, Scotch, Irish, French, Mennonites, Icelanders,French and British half-breeds, and these last the most numerous—how can therebe any sufficient unity of purpose!?]... It is impossible that the natives can forone moment assent to be taxed for improvements which, while indispensable tomen accustomed to the conveniences of civilization, can have but slight attrac-tions for those whose associations are still clinging to the wild Indian and the buf-falo. With such an incongruity in the elements, how could vigorous action be


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expected? The only hope seems in the future, when the country shall havebecome sufficiently settled to make the present majority a helpless minority.(59-60)

Goodridge's perception that the Métis comprised an obsolete "majority" in1881 is telling. Gerald Friesen argues that by the early 1880s, through thefraudulent abuse of Métis land grants, Manitoba had already "ceased to be aMétis community," and by 1886 only 7 percent of the province's populationwas Métis (201). Given his exaggeration of the Métis influence, it seems thepresence of any Métis in Manitoba was unsettling to Goodridge, especiallywhen combined with the influx of other ethnic groups. The Métis embodyGoodridge's fear, perhaps then unconscious, of the mutability ofEnglishness—the fear that, in Canada, Englishness may be corrupted byforeign landscape and foreign race. Goodridge's interpretation ofManitoba's landscape and inhabitants is grounded in the desire for owner-ship and control, which W.H. New identifies as primary European tropesfor reading Canadian lands (86-87). For Goodridge, civilization inManitoba depends on a gradual homogenization into a more English, or atleast British, province, along with the taxation of owned property and thedisenfranchisement of the nomadic Métis.

In A Year in Manitoba, Goodridge displays his confidence that he pos-sesses an uncompromised Englishness. Besides labeling Canadians as slowstarters, Goodridge also asserts that Canadians owe their wealth to unfairtariff protection. To "prove" his argument about the folly of tariffs,Goodridge includes an editorial written in favour of protection by ananonymous "British Subject" and the text of his own rebuttal (signed"Another British Subject"), both published in a Winnipeg journal. Besidescalling himself a "British Subject," Goodridge also lodges his protest "in thename of an Englishman [and] a staunch Conservative at home," and sur-mises that his adversary, "though 'a British Subject,' I should conceive, byhis ignorance of facts, can never have been outside the American continent"(78). Whereas English law decreed that any persons living in colonies ordominions were British subjects, Goodridge asserts the more exclusive andplace-bound identity of Englishman, the implication being that Englishnesstrumps Britishness. In 1881, Goodridge's position as an English gentlemanseems secure, despite the troubling presence of the Métis. Writing only fif-teen months removed from the home-place of Englishness, Goodridge eas-ily sees Canadians as other: they are talkers, not doers; they don't deserveresponsible government; they cheat at commerce. Goodridge also does not


expect his feelings about Canada to change: while he tells his readers thatCanada offers a "better prospect of success than any other country" (100),he adds that "for my wife and myself, we should indeed be very sorry werewe compelled to live here always. It is a pioneer country—everything rough,and . . . terribly uncivilised" (97).

Goodridge's hope of soon leaving Canada, however, did not materialize,and by the time his second book was published, he was unable to performthe identity of English gentleman so effortlessly. Prolonged residence inManitoba altered Goodridge's feelings about home and self, and morespecifically, challenged his belief that his Englishness was indelible. As post-colonial critics have observed, England's far-flung empire has confusedattempts to locate a pure, undifferentiated form of Englishness. Ian Baucomargues that in the confusion engendered by England's imperial history andthe corresponding desire of the English to establish a concrete identity,Englishness, for the past 150 years, "has consistently been defined throughappeals to the identity-endowing properties of place" (4). As opposed to theglobal diversity of Britishness, Englishness has been felt to reside within lit-eral and imagined places, such as the country house or cricket field, thatconfer Englishness on their occupants. Goodridge's extended absence fromEngland and its privileged sites of identity formation undermined hisEnglishness; the very principle by which Goodridge had asserted his author-ity over the editorial-writing "British Subject" in 1881—the fact that he livedin England—by 1889 was calling it into question. Moreover, Goodridge'sskilful assimilation to colonial life cast doubt on his gentlemanliness. Thefact that Goodridge adapted readily to pioneer life in the province hetermed "terribly uncivilised" hinted at his own descent into vulgarity. Thus,in 1889, to overcome the anxiety caused by his unstable sense of nationaland masculine identity, Goodridge used his second book to atone for hisresidence in Canada, to provide narrative proof of his nationality, and tojustify his status as an English gentleman.

The Colonist At Home Again; or, Emigration Not Expatriation (1889) is avery curious book, one that bears little resemblance to other books byEnglish emigrants in Canada, or to the large number of Canadian promo-tional books and pamphlets written about Manitoba, such as E. HeppleHall's Lands of Plenty in the New North-West (1880) or Clarke Cliffe'sManitoba and the Canadian North-West (1884). One thing that makes TheColonist At Home Again singular is that it is very difficult for the reader todecipher what the book is about. Historians W. L. Morton and Patrick

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Dunae have looked to Goodridge's text for its commentary on Manitoba.The majority of the book, however, has nothing directly to do with Canadaat all. Most guidebooks written by emigrants or visitors to Manitoba andthe Northwest, like Robert Christy's Manitoba Described (1885) or the lettersof Herbert and Richard Church, entitled Making a Start in Canada (1889),presented themselves in a straightforward fashion. Readers could expect tofind observations on geography and climate, the work of a farm, social con-ditions, and tips on pioneer life. That The Colonist At Home Again does notfollow this formula causes no confusion in itself; rather, the reader's puzzle-ment occurs because Goodridge gives a clear précis stating that he willaddress conditions in Manitoba, but then veers off course and writes a travelbook about England. The English/Canadian duality of the book is perhapspartly due to the fact that, like many emigrant texts, it was published inEngland and Canada, indicating two distinct audiences, the Canadian onepresumably interested in learning about England. Eva-Marie Kröller'sCanadian Travellers in Europe, 1851-1900 demonstrates the wide popularityof Canadian travel books on England in Europe in Goodridge's day.Goodridge himself is thoroughly inconsistent with regards to audience; hefrequently switches between addressing his readers as English, Canadian,or both simultaneously, and it becomes difficult, when Goodridge refersto "here" or "this part of the world," to tell which side of the Atlantic hemeans. However, Goodridge assumes his readers are English often enoughto suggest he had other motives for writing about England than simply toentertain Canadian readers.

The text's undecidability—is it a book about Canada or about England?—is suggested by its title. The "colonist" of the main title is an inhabitant ofCanada, but his "home" is England. At the same time, however, "colonist"also implies membership—one who is a member of a colony. In A Year inManitoba, for instance, Goodridge never refers to himself as a colonist oremigrant, terms he would have considered misnomers. He was, properly, an"Englishman in Canada." But by 1889, after his extended residency, the term"colonist" seems undeniable. The subtitle, "Emigration Not Expatriation,"provides the best clue as to what Goodridge really wanted his book to beabout, but he only discusses the idea of expatriation in one paragraph in thebook. If the subtitle was an afterthought, it nevertheless gives the readersome insight and the book a semblance of coherence. Essentially, the book'smain title is meant to prove the validity of the subtitle; the fact the "colonist"has gone "home again" demonstrates that "emigration" and "expatriation"


are not synonymous. To be an emigrant in Canada does not require therenunciation of one's Englishness.

Like the book's main title, "Emigration Not Expatriation" also has exclu-sive and inclusive connotations. In one possible reading, the emigrant whois merely an inhabitant remains thoroughly English; in another, the emi-grant who becomes a colonist experiences a convergence of nationalitiesand feels "at home" in both parent and adopted nation. A more disturbingpossibility, which Goodridge seeks to foreclose, is that the emigrant findsthat England no longer feels like home, even though no conscious expatria-tion has occurred. In her book on Canadian Prairie literature, Making itHome, Deborah Keahey writes that "it is entirely possible (and often actual-ized) to be not 'at home' at home. That is, there is often a strong disjunctionbetween an actual experienced home and the abstract idealized home" (11).It is the tension between the possible meanings of home that Goodridgeattempts to negotiate in his book. While the book's title suggests home isEngland, the narrative proper renders home ambivalent. Because Goodridge'sdefacto home is in Manitoba and because he has come to feel "at home" inManitoba, it becomes necessary for him to clarify his use of the term. Forinstance, in a discussion of Irish self-rule, when Goodridge writes, "whenone looks at the present state of things both at home (England) and abroad"(123), the parenthetical is required to avoid the assumption that "home"really means Manitoba. So while it becomes evident in the text that Goodridgeis a colonist who has in fact experienced a convergence of nationalities, thebook functions as his attempt to deny that transformation and to insist onthe purity of his Englishness.

Understandably, Goodridge begins The Colonist At Home Again by tryingto account for the fact that he is still in Canada. Goodridge explains that"from the outset" he had planned "to remain three years" (11) in Manitobaestablishing his sons, but that after three years, "Something always . . .occurred to postpone" the "return home" (41). What occurred, Goodridgeexplains, was the crash of the Winnipeg Land Boom, a sixteen-monthfrenzy of real estate speculation that began in 1881 after the CPR syndicateagreed to run its main line through Winnipeg. In 1882, Goodridge bought asecond farm in the Qu'Appelle district and had planned to sell his first, butthe Boom's collapse rendered the original farm nearly valueless andGoodridge was forced to sell the second at a loss. Goodridge writes that itwould have been "unfair to leave the boys to combat alone a condition ofthings brought about by no fault of their own"; this situation "necessitated

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my remaining on so long a time in Manitoba, and has practically constitutedme,—though I disclaim it as a fact, clinging still to my native country—aCanadian settler" (13; my emphasis). Goodridge, then, accounts for his con-tinued residency in Canada by saying it is a matter of parental necessity,never mentioning that he himself began a second career as a cashier andbookkeeper in Winnipeg.5 The reader is led to believe that had there beenno economic collapse, Goodridge would have gladly returned to England.Goodridge acknowledges that his long stay has "practically constituted"him a "Canadian settler," though he asserts this status is of a conditionalnature, not one of "fact" because he clings still to his "native country."While this disclaimer is crucial to Goodridge as a means of insisting on hisEnglishness, his disavowal of his settler identity as situational and undesir-able is contradicted by his obvious attachment to life in Canada and hisrespect for Manitoba's progress.

After explaining his presence in Manitoba, Goodridge offers a rationalefor his second book. "It has often been suggested to me," he writes, "'Whydon't you write another book on Manitoba, re-casting the first, andembodying the changes, local, social and political, that have taken place inthe interval?'" (13). For a short while, Goodridge sticks to this purpose, andwhile he does, he gives Manitoba such a glowing report that his claim ofstaying solely out of necessity becomes highly suspect. The "terriblyuncivilised" province of 1880 has by 1889 undergone a dramatic transforma-tion, and aspects of Manitoban society that Goodridge disparaged in hisfirst book are now praiseworthy. Goodridge writes that "in short, the pioneercharacter of the entire country is rapidly disappearing; and, so far as . . .Winnipeg itself, in the city may be obtained today every luxury that moneycan procure, as in any city of the Old World" (14). Whereas Goodridgedecried the deficiencies of Canadian railroads at length in A Year in Manitoba,in The Colonist At Home Again he praises the CPR train cars as completelyequal to English cars and even includes a CPR dining car menu to demon-strate Canada's high level of sophistication. Goodridge also recommendsManitoba for its economic vitality and invigorating climate. Moreover, hemakes no mention of the "insufferable roughness" of Canadian settlers thatannoyed him early on. Beyond attesting to Manitoba's cultural maturity inorder to attract emigrants, Goodridge's account validates his gentility andhence his masculinity as a gentleman. Had Manitoba remained uncivilized,as doubtless many English readers imagined it to be, Goodridge's increas-ingly permanent status as a "Canadian settler" would have compromised

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his gentility. As with Baucom's argument that Englishness was felt to residewithin particular locales, gentlemanliness was also produced at specificsites—the public schools—and nurtured by institutions like the church andthe gentleman's club. Long-term absence from such institutions, combinedwith the manual labour of farming, threatened an emigrant's good breed-ing. Thus, unlike Catharine Parr Traill, Goodridge does not "repose" on the"uncontestable proof" of his gentility (Traill 62); through his description ofrailcar refinement or praise of Manitoba's abundance of good schools,Goodridge earnestly offers proof that Manitoba is a gentility-producing,gentility-preserving locale. Goodridge's testimony also demonstrates that hewas fully acclimatized to life in Manitoba, that he felt an attachment to theprovince, and that his desire to leave it had weakened, all of which causedhim considerable unease.

Only when Goodridge had no other choice did he actually return toEngland in the summer of 1887, just at the time of Queen Victoria's GoldenJubilee. After discussing Manitoba for less than a third of the book,Goodridge writes that "finally, we were left no option—business mattersthere [England] . . . made it imperative that . . . we must return at once"(41). From this point on, the book consists of Goodridge's narration of hissightseeing in England and briefly in France. Only in the final chapter, whenGoodridge returns (home?) to Manitoba, does the book come fully back tothe subject of Canada. Given the title The Colonist At Home Again, it is per-haps not surprising that Goodridge describes his trip to England, but it isnevertheless perplexing because he provides no rationale for the shift fromCanada to England. Unlike the travel books examined by KröUer, Goodridge'swork never announces itself as a travel narrative. England, in short, seemsto be almost randomly included in the text. The reader could surmise thatGoodridge intends to use the chapters on "home" to continue his compar-isons between England and Canada, and while Goodridge does make a fewsuch comparisons, they form no cohesive thread through the narrative.In fact, the book's ending seems to elide England altogether; in his finalsentence, Goodridge writes as if he had not even mentioned England: "Toimpress facts; and more, the actual possibilities of the future here [Mani-toba] has been the object I have had in view" (160). Goodridge's book wasundoubtedly poorly conceived, but assuming he was not simply a terriblewriter, which his first book seems to disprove, the question remains ofwhat to make of the large part of The Colonist At Home Again that is not setin Canada.

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Near the end of the book, Goodridge suggests the rhetorical purpose of hisEnglish travelogue and relates his return "home" to the idea of expatriation:

The impediments to emigration are no doubt very largely connected with theimagination. There is a natural repugnance in most minds to expatriation, thefinal—as supposed—severance of all direct association with persons and places,with which, perhaps, our very earliest days have been identified. The idea is thateverything is distant, foreign, unhomelike; and therefore out of sympathy. But,when people are made to see with their own eyes a fac simile of things existentin all respects much as at home . . . that aversion becomes removed, and it isthe very object of this little volume to accentuate this, and to show that Coloniallife is . . . not essentially different from Home life. (143)

Goodridge's defence of emigration begins to reveal how his conceptions ofemigration and national identity are linked. Goodridge asserts that"Colonial life" in Canada is essentially no different from "Home life" inEngland, a view he definitely did not hold when he wrote A Year inManitoba. Nor was Goodridge alone in making such statements. J.G.Moore, for example, told prospective emigrants in Fifteen Months RoundAbout Manitoba (1883) that in Manitoba "Above your head still will float theUnion Jack of England, the same old language will meet your ear [and]English hands will grasp yours" (28). Even though Manitoba was known forits British character, as Morton has shown, Goodridge's and Moore's claimsare nevertheless exaggerations (177, 245). For Goodridge, however, theseclaims are not just attempts to promote emigration but a crucial assertionof his Englishness. Goodridge's ability to declare himself English dependson a reading of emigration that does not require expatriation. StephenSlemon has pointed out that Second-World settler identity is characterizedby the subject's ambivalent and "internalized" sense of self and otherness,and it is this ambiguous form of identity that Goodridge feels compelled toresist (30-41). Since Goodridge insists in both his books that he is anEnglishman and plans to return "home" to England (which, in fact, he didnot do until after 1900), emigration is only acceptable if he can remainEnglish while living in Canada.6 Emigration becomes a threat to Goodridge-as-Englishman if his cultural preferences and sense of home shift in favourof Canada, which, as his text exhibits, was precisely what was occurring.

Walker Connor's distinction between the terms "state" and "nation" isuseful for delineating Goodridge's uncertain Englishness. Praising Canadaas a political entity, as an emerging industrialized state is not the source ofGoodridge's anxiety. Goodridge could safely approve of Canada as a statebecause as a firm believer in the Empire, he, like Imperial Federationists of


the Canada First movement, considered Canada part of a larger Britishimperial state (Berger 49-77). Goodridge's anxiety about hybridity hingesrather on the cultural sense of national belonging. Nation, Connor notes, isnotoriously hard to define, but its essence is a self-defined "psychologicalbond that joins a people and differentiates it, in the subconscious convic-tion of its members, from all other people in a most vital way" (36). TheColonist At Home Again shows that Goodridge's "subconscious conviction"of his own Englishness has been disturbed; he is consciously doubtingwhether he is still a "member" of the English nation, an anxiety which helpsexplain his motive for writing to English readers about their own country.In order to feel secure in his nationality, Goodridge needs to have it vali-dated according to English standards; in other words, by English readers liv-ing on English ground. Thus, in all its confusion, the travelogue serves asGoodridge's attempt to prove to himself and to his audience that hisEnglishness had not become hybrid.

In his narrative, Goodridge describes numerous exhibits of the Queen'sJubilee, and his family's visits to the countryside and to France, but he alsoaddresses social issues like poverty and Imperial Federation. Much of whatGoodridge writes seems, at first glance, to be aimed at satisfying Victorianinterests in travel and exhibitions, and not at the construction of any partic-ular self-image. The text, like many travelogues, has a loose, meanderingfeel that resists topical organization. Goodridge proves a close observer ofmilitary processions and public gatherings, but he also foregoes any attemptat objectivity. Goodridge plays the role of reviewer more than recorder,passing judgment on spectacles and social ills. While Goodridge bases hisauthority on the claim of having no party loyalties that would taint hisobjectivity, his viewpoints are nevertheless crafted to appeal to a conserva-tive English readership. I am not maintaining that Goodridge's opinions areinsincere, but rather that he takes every opportunity to display them, toshow that he thinks as an English gentleman should think.

Goodridge uses two methods of self-representation to enact hisEnglishness, either devoting entire chapters to various social questions ordigressing from his travelogue to give opinions on matters relevant to hislocation. In London, for example, at the heart of the Empire, Goodridgeespouses imperial, non-democratic government as the best "that humannature can devise" (82). Kröller points out that for many Canadian trav-ellers, especially imperial loyalists like Robert Shields, visiting London wasan act of patriotic duty.7 Travellers expecting to find London the epitome of


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civilization, however, were often disappointed at the poverty and socialinequality they witnessed and came away affirming Canada's egalitarianism(Kröller 93). Goodridge, though, echoing his first book, maintains againthat colonial self-government is inefficient and more liable to corruptionthan oligarchical rule: "it will be a woeful day for . . . the British Empire—when its destinies are controlled by a pure democracy" (124).

A bit later, in Somersetshire, Goodridge argues that large country estates,and by implication, the gentry class who inhabit them, should be permanentfeatures of the English landscape:

To how many hundreds year by year does the noble ancestral estate ministerthe highest enjoyment; where excursionists and picnickers . .. wander freelyaround... . There is nothing anywhere comparable with them [historic estates],and may their shadows never diminish in my day. Very certain I am that none ofthe children of Great Britain, our Colonies . . . would desire anything but theirperpetuance. (90)

Goodridge's need to negotiate his settler and native identities is revealed inthis passage where he attempts to represent his colonial experience whilestill speaking as an Englishman. Goodridge declares all British coloniesand colonists (like himself) are loyal to the landed gentry, but tries to erasehis own status as a colonist by speaking of "our Colonies" from the Englishperspective of paternal ownership—the colonies are "our children."Interestingly, the country estate itself, which Goodridge uses to express hisEnglishness while suppressing a wider imperial identity, embodies the veryidentity conflation he finds so problematic. The country estate has longbeen an icon of Englishness, redolent of noble lineage and well-orderedtradition. But as Edward Said argues of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park inCulture and Imperialism, the sustenance of country estates, like Sir ThomasBertram's, were often "supplied by the wealth derived from a West Indianplantation" (92). The estate as signifier of nationality, then, becomesambiguous; the supposed singular Englishness of the estate is underwrittenby a larger colonial Britishness and history of exploitation. It is preciselythis emergent Britishness as a Canadian settler that Goodridge attemptsto contain.

Occasionally, Goodridge puts aside his travelogue altogether to discusssocial questions of the day. In one chapter, Goodridge addresses Irish HomeRule, the state church, and the alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy.Moving from topic to topic without transitions and seemingly without rea-son, this chapter seems designed to prove that Goodridge was conversant


with contemporary Victorian debates. Claiming to be perfectly unbiased,Goodridge declares the Irish unfit for self-government because "have theynot given all reasonable evidence that their régime would be one of themost degrading despotisms ever known to the civilized world?" (123).Goodridge also displays his patriotism in another chapter by denouncing"socialists and other malcontents" that he observes speaking out against theQueen in London's parks, saying that he "immediately checked their dis-loyal ebullitions of seditious language" (76-77). While Goodridge is highlyself-congratulatory in this section, his statements are not intended to differ-entiate him from his assumed middle-class reading audience. Rather, hisdefence of Victoria is a request for inclusion; it is offered so that otherEnglish gentlemen may affirm that Goodridge, like Joseph Conrad's Jim, is"one of us" (391).

I have described The Colonist At Home Again as a bewildering text withno apparent centre. It is a text ostensibly about place, and is loosely orga-nized thus, going from Canada, to England, to France, to England, and backto Canada, but where the text returns continually is to its author, Richard E.W. Goodridge. This is not necessarily all that surprising. Since Said'sOrientalism-, scholars of postcolonial theory have generally agreed that writ-ing the "other" is an act of self-revelation (Said 1-12). A text (such as travelnarrative) that seeks to represent some external "object" inevitably revealsmore about its "subject." While Goodridge's text can certainly be classifiedas travel writing that contains this sort of self-revelation, its particular valuelies in the way it reveals the anxiety of gentlemen emigrants. Whereas travelwriting generally constructs its object as "other," in this case it is Goodridgehimself who fears that he has become the "other" by adopting a hybridEnglish Canadian subjectivity. Thus, Goodridge represents England not inorder to write the "other," but in order to write his way back to a unified self.In other words, he writes in order to be able to say, "I am an Englishman."

1 Based on figures from the U.K. Board of Trade, Brinley Thomas estimates that approxi-mately 45,000 British gentlemen emigrated to Canada from 1876 to 1900. See Migrationand Economic Growth, 59-62.

2 Similarly to ffolkes, Mrs. Cecil Hall writes in A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba (1884)that "the last servant [my brother] had in this house was the son of a colonel in theEnglish Army, who was described as 'a nice boy but very lazy'" (27).


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3 On the conflation of gentility with national identity, see Julian Wolfrey's analysis ofTrollope's The Prime Minister (1876) in Being English (1994). Of the character AbelWharton, Wolfreys writes, "for Wharton, a 'gentleman' and an 'Englishman' are one andthe same, the questions of breeding, heredity, and national identity being linked inextri-cably" (169).

4 Numerous authors have written on imperial degeneracy and the crisis of masculinity.See, for instance, Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and theOrigins of the Boy Scout Movement, 131-160; Robert Macdonald, Sons of the Empire,16-17; Misao Dean, "The Construction of Masculinity in Martin Allerdale Grainger'sWoodsmen of the West" 76.

5 With his sons remaining on the 340-acre farm in Headingley, Goodridge and his wifeAdelaide bought a smaller farm east of Winnipeg in 1882, and he began working in thecity. In Henderson's Gazetteer and Directory of Manitoba and Northwest Territories,Goodridge is listed in the Winnipeg Business Directory as chief cashier for H.B. Co.general stores in 1884 and then as bookkeeper for Dick Banning and Co. in 1890.

6 Goodridge remained in Manitoba probably until 1893 a n d then moved to Chicago, livingthere at least until 1900. He is listed as a bookkeeper in The Lakeside Annual Directory ofthe City of Chicago in 1900 (743), but does not appear in the 1905 directory. AlthoughGoodridge left Manitoba, electors rolls from the Rural Municipality of Springfield showthat he kept his farm in the village of Sunnyside (Section 28, township 11, range 5E) untilat least 1916. In 1909 his residence is listed as Lupton and in 1916 as Coleraine, which aresmall towns in Michigan and Minnesota, respectively. Records from the Itasca CountyRecorder in Minnesota show that Goodridge bought land in Coleraine in 1909 and soldit in 1923.

7 In My Travels: Visits to Lands Far and Near (1900), Shields asserts his "loyalty as a Britishsubject" by marking his "arrival on English soil" with "a journey to Windsor Castle.Why should a loyal and patriotic Canadian not do so?" (15,12).

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Moore. Stratford-upon-Avon: G. Boyden, 1883.Morton, W.L. Manitoba: A History. 2nd ed. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1967.New, W.H. Land Sliding: Imagining Space, Presence, and Power in Canadian Writing.

Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997.Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993.—. Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.Shields, Robert. My Travels: Visits to Lands Far and Near. Toronto: Hunter, Rose, 1900.Slemon, Stephen. "Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World."

World Literature Written in English 30 (1990): 30-41.Thomas, Brinley. Migration and Economic Growth. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1954.Traill, Catharine Parr. The Backwoods of Canada. 1836. Ed. Michael A. Peterman. Ottawa:

Carleton UP, 1997.Windholz, Anne. "An Emigrant and a Gentleman: Imperial Masculinity, British

Magazines, and The Colony That Got Away." Victorian Studies 42 (1999/2000):631-58.

Wolfreys, Julian. Being English: Narratives, Idioms, and Performances of National Identityfrom Coleridge to Trollope. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 1994.


J o h n R e i b e t a n z

She Goes Like

It's character assassination timenext to Captain Video, at Mr. Game'sarcade. Cool neon surf breaks over them,

green and purple rippling the metal O'son lip or lobe. They breathe out a clear gasof words to warm themselves. Ashley's exposed

navel shivers when they start in on Mr.Spinelli's homeroom or his history classes.Her mind fast-forwards You should've seen the bastard

this morning, stops, rewinds her eyes catchinghis in World Civ sliding down her cleavage.No, too gross: eject. Instead: "His clothes,

they're like so Yesterday." Safe choice, that placehalf underground, walls papered with dead names,the living room of all the guys' parents.

There, Ashley wears the name Anton and Evafit her into when she was only a dream,in the Budapest whose air their dreams still breathe.

"Elektra." Imagine. Years of getting called"Lightbulb" or "Hydro" in elementary schoolsent her off to Central Tech as Ashley.

She broke it to them slowly. They have a thingabout new things—whatever some Hungarianfossil didn't invent or eat. Anton's


instrument hatelist targets electric shavers,digital watches, Japanese violins."And Eva goes like Peanuts butter isn't

a launch. Cheese isn't cheese unless it reeks.Forget about sushi." She cringes when they talk,their tongues caught up on consonants sticky

with foreign memories. Yet tonight, past one,Ashley won't fall asleep till they come home(the tables stacked, the door's sign switched to CLOSED)

and whisper the old world into her ear,their breath threading with hers in endearmentslike nothing spoken by her yesterday.


B o o k s

Forthcoming book reviews are available at the CanadianLiterature web site: http://www.canlit.ca

Context of ControversyArturo Arias, ed.The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy. U ofMinnesota P us $19.95Reviewed by Laurie McNeill

I, Rigoberta Menchú, the testimonio of theNobel laureate and Guatemalan activist,has incited debate and often bitter contro-versy since its publication in 1983. In 1998,controversy erupted anew on the front pageof the New York Times in Larry Rohter'sinvestigative report "Tarnished Laureate."Rohter, inspired by David Stoll's forthcom-ing Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of AllPoor Guatemalans (1999), continued Stoll'squestioning of many of the biographicalfacts in Menchu's narrative, but he wentbeyond Stoll's conclusion to label her a liar.Such an accusation in turn ignited battlesbetween Rigoberta supporters anddenouncers around the world, includingthe many factions in Guatemala and right -and left-wing academics in North America.Stoll was praised or pilloried by these vari-ous camps. Menchú herself, and moreimportantly the political organizations shehad come to represent, also suffered fromthe doubt cast on her credibility. Coming ata crucial time in Guatemala's embattledhistory, during the first stages of the peacetreaty, this controversy had the potential todisrupt that fragile process. Latin Americanstudies scholar Arturo Arias has, in TheRigoberta Menchú Controversy, assembledthe newspaper articles, including Rohter's,

that sparked off and reacted to this latestcontroversy, along with academic essaysthat discuss its context and consequences.

Arias's book opens with two comprehen-sive essays that provide essential back-ground information. The first, by Arias,addresses the political and cultural historyof Guatemala, from its sixteenth-centuryconquest by Spain to the present day, givinga clear sense of the racist and politicallydivided nature of this country. Arias alsointroduces Rigoberta, giving a thumbnailbiography of her life and her transforma-tion into political symbol and "lay saint";his essay also recounts the contentiousstory of the interview process and publica-tion of /, Rigoberta Menchú. Mary LouisePratt's " j , Rigoberta Menchú and the 'CultureWars'" is a similarly useful overview, look-ing at the Stoll controversy from a NorthAmerican academic context and situatinghis text within the "Battle of the Books"that took place in the United States duringthe 1980s. By outlining what was happeningin North American universities and thepolitics that allowed the Menchú contro-versy to become so polarizing, Pratt showsthe relevance of the debate to Americanacademia. She also provides a summary ofStoll's most contentious points (the first ofmany such summaries to appear in this col-lection). Briefly, these points concern thedegree of indigenous support for the guer-rilla movement (Stoll argues it was not uni-versally supported, as Rigoberta suggests);the nature of the conflict over land owner-ship (Stoll contends that it was not a con-


test between Ladino landlords and "nobleIndians" but a battle between peasants);and the status of the "new truth," a truthbased, in Menchu's account, on eyewitnessaccounts and community narratives insteadof on "objective" facts that can be verifiedby traditional means.

With this context in place, Arias thengives readers the original newspaper arti-cles, many of which appear in English forthe first time, before concluding with theacademic essays debating the implicationsof these documents. These essays comefrom a range of disciplines, including LatinAmerican studies (Arias, John Beverley,Duncan Earle, Claudia Ferman), literature(Allen Carey-Webb), history (ChristopherH. Lutz), and anthropology (Carol A. Smith,Stoll); both Stoll critics and supporters arerepresented. The range of issues they exam-ine is equally broad, with discussion of thedefinition of truth; narrative (and acade-mic) authority; the multiple natures andconsequent frequent misunderstandings ofthe testimonio genre; the Guatemalan civilwar and its contexts; and the variety ofpedagogical approaches to incorporatingtestimonio into the classroom.

Arias does his best to make the collectionaccessible, including concise introductionsto each section that add further context andinterpretive framework.

Postcolonial FuturesBill AshcroftPost-Colonial Transformation. Routledge $26.95Ralph PordzikThe Quest for Postcolonial Utopia: A ComparativeIntroduction to the Utopian Novel in the NewEnglish Literatures. Peter Lang $56.95Reviewed by Guy Beauregard

Bill Ashcroft's Post-Colonial Transformationis a clear and powerful intervention indebates in contemporary postcolonialstudies, while Ralph Pordzik's The Quest

for Postcolonial Utopia offers what he calls"a comparative introduction to the Utopiannovel in the new English literatures." Instrikingly different ways, these books inves-tigate the question of postcolonial futures:Ashcroft, in a forceful attempt to link post-colonial studies to current debates overglobalization, insists that "the transforma-tive energy of post-colonial societies tells usabout the present because it is overwhelm-ingly concerned with the future," whilePordzik, in his analysis of Utopian novelsand related genres, investigates how "theymake available perceptual alternatives tothe poor future prospects of many post-colonial societies and cultures today."

Post-Colonial Transformation focuses onwhat Ashcroft calls "the resilience, adapt-ability and inventiveness of post-colonialsocieties." For Ashcroft, his title identifiesthe various ways postcolonial subjects haveengaged with and ultimately transformedimperial culture. Ashcroft writes:

The Western control over time and space,the dominance of language and the tech-nologies of writing for perpetuating themodes of this dominance, through geog-raphy, history, literature and, indeed,through the whole range of cultural pro-duction, have meant that post-colonialengagements with imperial power havebeen exceptionally wide-ranging. Theone thing which characterizes all theseengagements, the capacity shared bymany forms of colonial experience, is aremarkable facility to use the modes ofthe dominant discourse against itself andtransform it in ways that have been bothprofound and lasting.

Ashcroft elaborates this thesis throughchapters on resistance, interpolation, lan-guage, history, allegory, place, habitation,horizon, and globalization, each of whichtakes up a specific mode of postcolonialtransformation. In each instance, Ashcroftengages energetically with fundamentaland deeply challenging topics in contempo-rary cultural criticism.

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B o o k s i n R e v i e w

These chapters provide highly readable essay-length overviews of particular "keywords"in postcolonial studies, thereby makingPost-Colonial Transformation, in Shao-PinLuo's astute observation, a valuable "com-panion piece" to Ashcroft, Griffiths, andTiffin's classic pocket handbook KeyConcepts in Post-Colonial Studies (1998).

Post-Colonial Transformations principalcontribution to contemporary scholarshipis its insistence on the relevance of post-colonial studies to our understanding ofglobal culture. In doing so, it respondsindirectly to numerous portrayals of post-colonial studies as a field informed by adeluded nostalgia for earlier historicalforms of subjugation and resistance thatare presumably irrelevant to our under-standing of contemporary geopolitical rela-tions of power. Ashcroft's response to suchdismissive portrayals of postcolonial stud-ies is welcome and deserves careful consid-eration from a wide, multidisciplinaryaudience. In attempting to connect imperi-alism and globalization—and therebyassert the continued relevance of postcolo-nial studies—Ashcroft insists on theimportance of understanding "the struc-ture of global power relationships" as "aneconomic, cultural, and political legacy ofWestern imperialism"; postcolonial studies,therefore, remain valuable as a means for"understanding how local communitiesachieve agency under the pressure of globalhegemony." I sense, however, that this cru-cial point in Ashcroft's argument rests onwhat may be an overly neat parallelbetween the transformation of colonial dis-course and the appropriation of global cul-ture. Ashcroft writes that "[t]he message oflocal responses to global culture is the samemessage delivered by colonial experience:no matter how oppressive the system, orhow ubiquitous its effects, it is not immuneto appropriation and adaptation by localcommunities for their own benefit"; like-wise, for Ashcroft, "the diffuse and interac-

tive process of identity formation proceedsin global terms in much the same way as ithas done in post-colonial societies."

In this way, Post-Colonial Transformationunderlines similarities at the expense ofpotentially messy shifts, ruptures, and dis-continuities. As a consequence, readerswho were dissatisfied with the openingclaims of Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin'sfoundational The Empire Writes Back (1989)(where the authors argue for the inclusion,in a postcolonial frame, of "all the cultureaffected by the imperial process from themoment of colonization to the presentday") are unlikely to be satisfied with thenotion of transformation put forward byAshcroft to account for what he readilyacknowledges are highly diverse experi-ences of—and responses to—colonizationand globalization.

As an aside, readers of CanadianLiterature will note that Ashcroft's brief ref-erences to Canadian literary production arelimited to essays by Robert Kroetsch andDennis Lee (both published in 1974) andNorthrop Frye's The Great Code (1982).Readers of this journal may wonderwhether Ashcroft would have allowed hisnotions of postcolonial transformation ifhe had to account for some of the dramaticchanges in Canadian literary productionover the past three decades. I make thisfrankly speculative observation not becauseCanadian materials are central to Ashcroft'sargument—they clearly are not—butbecause focusing on a particular historicalmoment in the materials from Canada(that is, the 1970s and early 1980s) wouldinevitably raise questions about Ashcroft'sbroader conclusions. Would analysis ofother historical moments have led to otherconclusions? What sorts of argumentsmight have emerged through explicit atten-tion to historical turns in literary and otherforms of cultural production? Wouldexamining interactions between colonialdiscourse and global culture help us


account for shifting or plural or discontin-uous forms of transformation?

Pordzik's The Quest for PostcolonialUtopia argues that "more than any otherliterary genre the Utopian novel has a par-ticular interest in coming to terms with theproblems created by the disenchantmentwith cultural nationalism and decoloniza-tion on the one hand and the disillusion-ment with Marxism and Utopian idealismthat followed the end of the socialist world[sic] on the other." Pordzik's insistence onthe importance of "the Utopian novel andits related literary forms" in the process of"remembering the future" is marked by anencyclopaedic drive (some thirty-two nov-els are named in the first two pages of thebook), long paragraphs (often more thantwo pages), frequent use of the passive voice,and (in stark contrast to Post-ColonialTransformation) unclear signposting at thelevel of a larger argument. While Pordzikmay be correct in emphasizing the poten-tial significance of the Utopian novel in ourunderstanding of literary representations ofpostcolonial futures, it is difficult to imag-ine many readers searching out his elusiveargument amidst the relentless and largelyunstructured series of close readings thatconstitutes The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia.

Seeing SpaceAriella AzoulayDeath's Showcase: The Power of Image inContemporary Democracy. MIT P $19.95Scott MacDonaldThe Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide toIndependent Films about Place. U of California P$35.00Reviewed by Ben Packer

Ariella Azoulay's Death's Showcase is ablend of museum studies, Middle East poli-tics, photographic theory, and philosophy.Steeped in the critical thinking of writerslike Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Lyotard, this

study examines "the public display ofdeath" by focusing on both planned andaccidental images of violence and conflictin Israel in the twentieth century. Azoulay'sthesis develops like an unfolding of the epi-graph she repeats from Heidegger: "Thefundamental event of the modern age is theconquest of the world as picture." For apostmodernist, familiar with Frenchthought after Foucault, this should be anengaging book.

There is no need to be a postmodernist toread with engagement Scott MacDonald'sThe Garden in the Machine. It providesconcise, descriptive readings of a wideselection of films by American independentfilmmakers working almost exclusively in16mm. Though focused on the ways naturaland developed landscapes are depicted,MacDonald's readings also show how con-temporary American concerns with race,gender, and spirituality become part of thecinematic discourse on environment. Hisstated "mission" is to promote these mar-ginalized films as pedagogical tools forboth artistic and social studies by encour-aging their distribution and exhibition. Hemakes us regret the neglect of these films,and his book left me eager to see them.

One measure of the difference betweenthese books is reflected in the kinds ofnotes their critical reading inspires.Azoulay is demanding and dense, andrequires many re-reads, queries, and puz-zled glosses. MacDonald, on the otherhand, is swift and accessible, requiring self-imposed halts so that notes of some kindwill get made at all. This could be a func-tion of translation. The Garden in theMachine is an original English text. Death'sShowcase is a gathering of essays previouslypublished in Hebrew that have been revisedfor this edition.

Superficially, both books are about filmand the way spaces are photographicallyframed and portrayed. Azoulay concen-trates mainly on stills, MacDonald on



movies. There are occasional overlaps intheme and topic; both authors discuss, forexample, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (orClaude Lantzman's Holocaust—dependingon which author one is reading). Both booksalso look closely at the different ways citiesare represented: as whole and self-containedobjects, as loci of diverse and sometimesconflicting confluences, or as collections ofnon-intersecting overlays—Jerusalem as acultural and political heterotopia inAzoulay, New York and San Francisco ashuman and non-human landscapes inMacDonald.

Beyond such resemblances, however, thesetexts diverge considerably. Death's Showcaseis, among other things, a postmodernanalysis of how the camera critiques theimage it creates. The Garden in the Machineis strictly a non-specialist survey of experi-mental filmmaking in the United States.Death's Showcase handles a great number ofideas, from economics to aesthetics, whichappear at first to be unrelated; it attemptsto demonstrate not only their relation, buttheir theoretical confederacy. The Garden inthe Machine spends very little time onabstract thought or current theory, thoughit does discuss theories of art history, par-ticularly with respect to the relationshipbetween nineteenth-century Americanlandscape painting and twentieth-centuryfilms of urban and rural spaces.

Both authors speak authoritatively andknowledgeably on their subjects, conveyingthe intellectual excitement of their fields.MacDonald tends to rely on a limited set ofadjectives like "stunning" to convey thevisual impact of widely different filmimagery. Occasionally the selected figuresare too small to illustrate the qualitiesMacDonald describes. There are also somecurious omissions. In the sections that dealwith filming the New York cityscape no ref-erence is made to Woody Allen, thoughelsewhere MacDonald analyzes other big-name filmmakers. Nor does he discuss, or

even refer to, animation. Finally, theabsence of a glossary leaves one searchingin vain for definitions of obscure terms.

There are omissions in Azoulay too. Inthe chapter on Hiroshima, despite somediscussion of "censorship during theAmerican occupation" and the repressionof memorialization, there is no reference toJohn Hersey. Likewise, in the chapter onthe assassination of Rabin and its captureon amateur video, there is only passing ref-erence to Kennedy and an allusion to theZapruder clip. There is no mention of thefilm of Sadat's assassination nor of thehighly publicized execution by GeneralLoan of a Viet Cong prisoner. All threefilms would seem to be discursively richreferences for Azoulay's analysis. The writ-ing regularly suffers from syntactical lapsesthat slow a reader down: "Lantzman,Renais, and Duras are actually speakingabout an economy predicated on resistanceto memory as sanctifier, a productive resis-tance that leaves its traces out of andaround which more and more resistanceactivity can be strung together." One par-ticular term Azoulay, or her translator (it isnot easy to tell if these are translationissues) frequently relies on is "interpellate."It is used as if it were a hybrid of "interpo-late," "interpret," "intercalate," and "inter-pose." On no occasion is it used in thedictionary sense (to require a member of alegislative body to explain an act or policy),nor does it seem to be used in the currentpostcolonial sense (to call into being a par-ticular form of subjectivity). There is also aquirky unevenness to parenthetical expla-nations. At one point Azoulay refers to"Eva Braun (Adolf Hitler's beloved)," whichis like writing "Adolf Hitler (Nazi dictator)."On another occasion the Baader-Meinhofgang is explained with a gloss, but in thesame paragraph Kochava Levy is left unex-plained except by vague historical allusion.

Except in the case of "interpellate," theseconcerns do not seriously interfere with the


impression that Death's Showcase is a valu-able contribution to critical debate on thegaze, the subject, and the representation ofspace. A word about its physical makeup—this edition is hardbound with heavy,glossy pages that cause it to lie open like acoffee table book. The paper sticks to thefingers if held too long, forcing the reader,appropriately, to lean over the text as ifstudying photographs.

Pursued by MonstersDeirdre Barrett, ed.Trauma and Dreams. Harvard UP $18.95Kristjana GunnarsZero Hour. Red Deer College P $19.95Reviewed by Marlene Briggs

"Monster dreams may occur at any age,"writes Kathleen Nader in her contributionto Trauma and Dreams. The monster is astaple of the nightmare. Deriving fromboth monstrum (divine portent) and mon-ere (to warn), the word monster recalls theancient belief that dreams could functionas omens of future disaster. Moreover, themonster eludes location or definition: anamalgam of supernatural, human, and ani-mal, the monster may possess no dis-cernible ancestor or point of origin. AsNader notes, monster dreams are "a formof condensation in which assailants andtheir perceived overwhelming animalisticnature are combined into one being."Certainly, this collection of essays by psy-chologists, psychiatrists, and analysts dis-cusses a diverse array of monsters, conjuredand recollected, subject to varying degreesof mediation by dreamwork: SaddamHussein pursues Kuwaiti child survivors ofthe Iraqi invasion; faceless men loom in theshadows of rape victims; fire reawakens toexact revenge on the California survivorsinexplicably spared in a natural disaster;the Death Squads hound refugees fromCentral America in competition with

relentless immigration officials; and a dis-figured being christened Scarman lures atransplant patient back into the purgatorialrealm of the dead. These examples illustratethat, across divides of age, gender, culture,ethnicity, and Wellness, "dreams constitutea unique window on trauma and itseffects," as editor and contributor DeirdreBarrett concludes.

Like the monster, the nightmare hasbecome a resonant trope in relation toextreme events. James Joyce famouslydescribed twentieth-century history as a"nightmare"; specific instances ofAmerican historical trauma such as theVietnam war are frequently likened to a"national nightmare." Yet, it is not quiteclear how a nightmare functions in thecomplex processing of trauma. Perhaps it isfor this reason that the gothic etiology ofthe nightmare, wherein the demon,hunched astride a sleeping form, exploitsthe immobility and blind thralldom of thedreamer, continues to compel contempo-rary fascination. In spite of the fact thatnightmares and recurring dreams have longbeen defining symptoms of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), trauma thera-pists and sleep researchers, for the mostpart, remain divided by disciplinary andpragmatic impediments from pursuing acollaborative framework of exploration.Thus, as Barrett declares, "This book's pur-pose is to disseminate to dream analysts,trauma therapists, and other readers thework that exists at this interface."Nightmares may play a greater role in ther-apy; meanwhile, dream theorists wouldbenefit from an enhanced understanding ofthe manner in which nightmares repeatand rework aspects of traumatic experi-ence. But beyond the prospects of increasedcooperation between dream specialists andcounselling practitioners, Trauma andDreams should suggest an importantagenda of inquiry for scholars in the socialsciences as well as the humanities.



Fundamental questions about the interac-tion between body, mind, and culturemotivate this volume. Well-known contrib-utors include Robert Jay Lifton and OliverSacks; the work of both Sigmund Freudand Carl Jung remains central to many ofthese present-day researchers.

According to Patricia Garfield, "The deadlive on in our dreams long after they die."After the death of her father from cancer,Kristjana Gunnars tracks the painful disap-pearance of a world in Zero Hour, shewrites of the plight of the "alien" who hasbecome monstrous, without a perceivedpoint of origin, unrecognizable to self or toothers. The format and design of her booksignal its displacement from familiar intel-ligible worlds: Zero Hour is genericallyunstable, a mode of self-conscious self-writing that incorporates autobiography,biography, literary criticism, and travel-ogue: "You are left with a story that is not astory. A novel that is not a novel, a poemno longer a poem." In this way, Gunnarsconveys the multiple modes of absence thather writing must circle, both as elegy and astestimony. The text is without chapterbreaks or indentation; instead word clustersare grouped together; dominated by shortsentences and comprised of fragments, thework is paratactic. Zero Hour is a work thatbears witness to the staggering labour andcomplexity of mourning: the author isattentive to the manner in which lossesoverlap and complicate bereavement.Accordingly, Zero Hour echoes the title ofRoland Barthes's first book, Writing DegreeZero. Gunnars focuses more loosely on"ground zero writing," which she defines aswriting "enacted exactly where the bombfell." Metaphors of nuclear destructioninflect her meditations on the potentiallycatastrophic import of attachment loss in"the century of the countdown."

When her terminally ill father determinesto forego further medical interventions, theanticipated moment of his death is troped

and retroped as "zero hour": "There is nozero on the clock. To get to zero, you haveto step outside of time." "Zero hour" is thusa contradiction in terms; the encounterwith death demands that one's coordinatesin time and space be reconceptualized.Appropriately, then, careful observation ofthe West and its landscapes, ranging fromManitoba to Oregon, demonstrateGunnars's preoccupation with place. Givenits extremes of geology, weather, and insectlife, the West serves as an analogue for thelocation of the writer who feels she occu-pies a "landscape without language. Beforelanguage." After a childhood visit to a vol-canic lake in Iceland with her father,Gunnars describes terrifying dreams thatevoke a similarly haunting landscape: "Ihad nightmares of falling in: of fallingdown and sinking in the water forever."Zero Hour is an allegory of descent into thatvolcanic lake, a realm outside recognizedconventions of time and space, exploredwith insight and sensitivity. Her writingsummons and pursues the monstrous figu-rations of grief: in this sense, she may trulybe commended for dreaming well.

Crises identitairesAlain Baudot et Christine Dumitriu-VanSaanen, dir.Mondialisation et Identité. Éditions du Gref n.p.Régine RobinLa Québécoite. XYZ 14,95$Comptes rendus par Melanie E. Collado

Mondialisation et Identité est un recueil detextes commémoratifs de la GrandeRéunion d'écrivains francophones duCanada et d'autres pays. Cet ouvrageregroupe les contributions de quarante-cinq auteurs ayant accepté d'« écrire untexte de 500 mots (au plus) traitant de latension (croissante) entre la mondialisation(inévitable) et la résurgence (nécessaire)des particularismes ». Les écrits retenus par


les éditeurs constituent un mélange hybrideoù se côtoient une majorité d'essais, decontes, de nouvelles, de légendes, depoèmes et quelques chansons. Dans sonensemble, le recueil évoque une tribuneoù chacun exprime ses certitudes, sesrêves et ses angoisses. Dans la nouvelled'Abdelkader Djemaï, par exemple, lestournesols de Van Gogh deviennent« livides, amorphes, sans suc et sans beauté »,après avoir été contaminés par des formulesd'organismes génétiquement modifiés.

Quel que soit le genre littéraire choisi, lethème central d'un grand nombre de textesest la mondialisation économique et lerisque d'uniformisation dont le libre-marché,l'internet, les médias, l'anglais et les plantestransgéniques sont les supports les plussouvent incriminés. Face à cette conceptioncontemporaine de la mondialisation,quelques écrivains proposent de réfléchirsur la confusion terminologique entremondialisation, impérialisme, américanisa-tion, globalisation et universalisme. Ils rap-pellent que la mondialisation est unphénomène ancien, permettant la circula-tion des idées, des cultures et la reconnais-sance de la diversité universelle. Plusieurstextes soulignent que tout déplacement endehors de son propre microcosme peut êtreinterprété comme un pas vers la mondiali-sation, avec ses risques, ses excès et sesviolences, mais aussi ses bénéfices. Perçuecomme inévitable, la mondialisation n'en-traîne pas forcément la disparition de l'undans la masse. Dans cette optique, MireilleDesjarlais nous invite à imaginer un uni-versalisme où « le multiple et l'un [che-mineraient] main dans la main ».

Mondialisation et Identité contient debeaux textes et d'autres moins marquants;c'est, dans l'ensemble, un ouvrage hétéro-clite. Vu le sujet traité, l'hétérogénéité nesaurait être un défaut, au contraire. Onpeut cependant regretter que le pluralismede ce recueil ne soit pas servi par la mise enpage adoptée: la succession de messages

officiels et de photos encadrant les récitsleur donne un cachet institutionnel quitranche un peu avec leur contenu.

La Québécoite de Régine Robin toucheégalement au thème de la mondialisation etde la résistance identitaire, mais ici, c'est dumouvement des personnes et de l'expres-sion de la parole immigrante dont il estquestion. Publié pour la première fois en1983, et réédité en 1993 avec une postface oùl'auteure aborde le sujet du pluralisme cul-turel au Québec, ce roman a fait l'objet deplusieurs analyses qui en soulignent lavaleur littéraire et l'originalité.

La Québécoite est l'histoire d'une vie quise fait et se refait. Le récit premier se com-pose de trois parties, portant chacune lenom d'un quartier de Montréal où la nar-ratrice fait temporairement résider son per-sonnage féminin de « juive ukrainienne deParis provisoirement installée à Montréal ».Snowdon, Outremont et Jean-Talon sont deslieux d'ancrage transitoires que la narratricene cesse d'abandonner pour reconstruireson intrigue ailleurs. Elle (le personnage n'apas de nom) reste « insituable ». Où qu'ellesoit, Elle vit entre plusieurs mondes:l'Europe et l'Amérique; Paris et Montréal;Snowdon et Outremont; Snowdon et Jean-Talon. Son histoire personnelle et celle deson peuple ne l'enracinent pas en un lieu,mais au contraire la déploient dans le tempset dans l'espace. Comme la narratrice et lesautres immigrants du roman, Elle va etvient entre le passé et le présent, tirailléeentre la nostalgie d'un lieu à soi et l'errance.Elle est désireuse de se trouver un lieu, maisincapable de n'être que dans un seul lieu.

Dès les premières lignes, le texte s'an-nonce comme un projet d'écriture: « Pasd'ordre. Ni chronologique, ni logique, nilogis. Rien qu'un désir d'écriture et cetteprolifération d'existences ». Dans LaQuébécoite, chaque personnage en engen-dre plusieurs autres et chaque récit s'ouvresur un autre. Le roman éclaté qui émergede ce projet d'écriture est composé d'his-



toires inachevées, entrecoupées de lecturesdiverses et de multiples enumerations.Citons à titre indicatif les bribes de conver-sations entendues dans le métro, les sloganspolitiques, et publicitaires, les listes de sta-tions de métro, les noms de rues, lesenseignes, les menus; les résultats sportifs,les plaques minéralogiques. Ces mots lusou entendus, récoltés au hasard de sesdéplacements dans les lieux publics de Parisou de Montréal, sont des fragments dequotidien que la narratrice collectionnecomme d'autres collectionnent des photos.Ces mots ramassés dans la rue deviennentpour elle des trésors à préserver pour seconstituer un monde à soi: « Tout emma-gasiner, comme si tu devais te retrouver telRobinson sur son île et ne plus rencontrerMontréal que par traces, signes, symboles,fragments sans signification, morceaux,débris, tessons hors d'usage ».

Récit de l'errance et de la parole immi-grante, La Québécoite est un texte-carrefouroù se télescopent lieux, discours, histoires,cultures et existences fictives ou réelles. Parl'adoption des techniques du collage auniveau de la forme et du contenu, le romande Régine Robin se présente comme untexte en mouvement qui ne cesse dedéplacer son lecteur à travers l'espace, letemps et le langage.

Vingt ans après sa parution, dans le con-texte d'une mondialisation qui soulève desquestions sur l'identité nationale et l'appar-tenance à un monde sans frontières, LaQuébécoite est plus que jamais d'actualité.

Blue Diamond BurialMichelle BerryWhat We All Want. Random House $32.95Reviewed by Susan Wasserman

Sorting through the fragile aftermath of amother's death from cancer and its impacton her three adult children, MichelleBerry's first novel, What We All Want, roots

itself in the redoubtable family-relationstradition. Its main chords are familiar:domestic conflict, disillusionment, guilt,the promise of regeneration. Berry's char-acters echo those of Barbara Gowdy andCarol Shields in their isolation, vulnerabil-ity, and endearing loopiness. And hints ofA Jest of God ripple through the novel:Margaret Laurence's Rachel Cameron andBerry's Hilary Mount have much in com-mon, especially their oppressive ties to theirmothers. But Berry tells her own story—ofa pivotal week in the lives of siblings Hilary,Thomas, and Billy as they grapple withtheir loss, and with each other.

Opening with the removal of the moth-er's yellow corpse from her home and end-ing with her unconventional burial, thenovel is preoccupied with death, from theminutiae of embalming to the crucial ques-tion of where to bury Rebecca. UnlikeWilliam Faulkner's Addie Bundren,Rebecca, as she lay dying, failed to issue aclear request for a final resting place.Addie's family at least knows its course,whereas Rebecca's lack of direction gener-ates confusion and conflict among the sur-viving Mounts. But she abdicated thematernal role long before her death. Twodecades earlier, when her husband walkedout of the marriage, she dove into a crip-pling depression. Teenage Hilary had toleave school and take over the household.When Rebecca developed liver cancer,Hilary became her nurse. Fittingly, Hilarydecides in the end what should be donewith her mother's body.

Responsibility naturally devolves on theoddly distracted, unkempt Hilary. Thomas,the oldest, a successful architect, struggleswith guilt over neglecting his mother andworries about his sister's eccentricities, buthe lives a five-hour plane ride away. Theutterly self-consumed, alcoholic Billydespairs over his failing marriage, his nasty,pregnant fifteen-year-old daughter, and hislost jobs. He wants only to bury his mother


and sell the house so he can get his cut.Hilary desperately wants to stay where sheis. With her mother gone she feels aban-doned: "The sudden knowledge that noone will touch her again makes Hilary's skinfeel burned and raw." Scratching her faceincessantly, trying to erase the imaginedstain of her mother's final breath that shebelieves permeated her skin, she may bepunishing herself. Mysterious bruises markthe corpse's neck; perhaps Hilary's saintlycaring reached saturation near the end.

Over time, the Mount house has degener-ated into a rotting mess: basement wallscovered in black mold, dishes unwashed forweeks. The claustrophobic surreality atteststo the years that Hilary and her mothersequestered themselves away from the restof the world, filling their days watching TV,assembling puzzles, and obsessively puttingup preserves. Even the linen cupboardsbulge with chutneys and jellies. The livingroom floor, a peril to all but Hilary, is cov-ered in small rocks. She explains, "Mothernever went anywhere . . . I put rocks thereso she could feel as if she had travelled dis-tances." Hilary and Rebecca's doll collectionadds to the Alice-in-Wonderland effect. ForThomas, "It's like hundreds of little chil-dren looking straight into his soul. Silentwatchers."

The offbeat tenor keeps the novel fromsinking into bathos, despite the characters'disappointments and frustrations. Andwith Rebecca's death come change and cau-tious hope: Hilary emerges from her soli-tude, Thomas introduces his long-time gaypartner to the family, and Billy vows to quitdrinking. In an almost slapstick ritual atthe backyard burial (a nosy neighbourforces them to pretend to be barbecuinghotdogs instead of conducting a funeral),all three place objects in the casket, omensof acceptance. This coming together isreflected in the odd-couple bondingbetween Hilary, the skinny thirty-nine-year-old virgin, and Dick, the fleshy, ami-

able funeral director who prepares Rebecca'sbody. Once high school sweethearts, theyshyly awaken old feelings in each other.Dick's courting gift to Hilary is the luxury"Blue Diamond" casket for her mother.

Though mostly a quick, enjoyable read,the novel nevertheless seems at times repet-itive and heavy-handed. Having writtentwo short-story collections, Berry may herehave stretched a story or novella into anovel. We are told too often that Billy needsa drink, and characters occasionally repeatwhat has already been established by thenarrator. Still, what remains is an imagina-tive, gentle story, sympathetically told, withno over-wrought drama, no grotesqueskeletons squirming in closets, no incest,no revelations designed to shatter protec-tive illusions, no villains. (Not that all isentirely well at the end: Hilary seems des-tined to stay in this house of little horrors.)The characters fumble in their lonelinessand inadequacies but ultimately find, moreor less, what they all want: affection, for-giveness, dignity.

Writing: Verb or Noun?Michelle Berry and Natalie Caple, eds.The Notebooks: Interviews and New Fiction fromContemporary Writers. Anchor Canada $25.95Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane, eds.Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast.Greystone Books $22.95Eric Henderson and Madeline Sonik, eds.Entering the Landscape. Oberon P $15.95Reviewed by Stuart Sillars

The concept of writing as a personal andsocial activity, and its corrosive effects bindthese books. The Notebooks document indi-vidual practices, approaches, and experi-ences; Addicted provides evidence of thesufferings that this process may engender;and Entering the Landscape presents theproduct of the writer's work, in relation tothe landscape and to the state. In total, all



reveal much about writing and writers incontemporary Canada.

The Notebooks uses the Paris Review for-mula of combining fiction with interviews.It is a large volume and will doubtless findmany readers among those eager to hear thenewer voices in Canadian fiction. It addressesthe question of what makes writing Cana-dian, but it also asks about the identity andsocial status of the writer. The book tellsstories about identity construction. Theaccounts of how people write are fascinat-ing for both their differences and reso-nances. But there is a great opportunity losthere, since the stories of the writers are notpresented as alternative narratives. Certainly,we learn that Catherine Bush needs "home-opathic coffee" to get started, and that thescreenplay has become a formal influencefor Michael Turner, but the larger struc-tural parallels remain undiscovered.

That is not to say that the book is withoutits pleasures. The stories themselves are inmany cases taut and forceful, and the vol-ume as a whole stands as a test-bore of con-temporary writing, although the themesare often restricted to maturation, mar-riage, betrayal in small-town Canada. EstaSpalding's "Big Trash Day," an experimentalpiece which mixes poetry with story, is justthat. The experiment works in places, buta lot of it covers familiar territory. MichaelWinter uses some of the conventions of ascreenplay, but in a manner that empha-sizes the familiarity of his material ratherthan revealing something new.

Nowhere in Addicted is the parallel drawnbetween substance dependency and thebusiness of writing, despite the similaritiesbetween some of the symptoms. The shortpieces of personal experience that consti-tute this collection could and should befrightening, but they are not, because theyare too self-consciously writerly. Thesememoirs are often present-tense closeobservations of working-class childhoodand unwise marriage, described in brand-

name, street-map detail. They generallybegin with an appalling incident and thendrop into flashback—"how did I come tothis?"—before moving towards what inpsychobabblelitcrit is termed "closure."They are neither genuine self-examinationsnor explications of the link between theurge to write and the urge to abuse. True,there are moments that disturb, chiefamong them Patrick Lane vomiting bloodon the opening pages. But here is the prob-lem: the sort of syntactic twist that main-lines the addiction into the writing, and thewriting into the addiction, is absent. Thecover blurb calls the book "a potent con-coction that will have readers hooked fromthe very first page." But even if literaryjudgement is having a day off, and moralresponsibility is out collecting the laundry,it doesn't seem too much to hope thatintellectual curiosity might have wanderedinto the office.

For the most part, the stories in Enteringthe Landscape are the material that Addictedparodies. There are explications of land-scape in all its forms, a peculiar and insis-tent closeness that will not be overthrown,but it is an intensely literary perceptionthat is being dealt with here, the focus byimplication always on the gaze rather thanthe gazed upon. The best pieces are thosethat break clear of the urban-oppressed-female matrix: Mark Anthony Jarman's"Flat-out Earth Moving" opposes contain-ment and displacement in its prison-wilderness setting, Bill Gaston's "TheNorthern Cod" uneasily parallels a womanscientist's observations of fish breedingwith her own bleak coupling. Others areless secure, but hopeful. Kelly Cooper's"They secretly hope for rain" stops justshort of self-parody in eroticizing the linkwith the land, and Joan Clark's "Latitudesof Melt," a child-from-the sea tale, vergeson the fey but is determinedly unsentimen-tal at its end.

All three books have worthy purposes but

1 0 2 Canadian Literature ¡So I Spring 2004

they do not answer the questions theyimplicitly pose. The question of how writ-ing works, and what its corrosive effects aremust either be addressed or subsumed intoprocess: self-absorption can too easilybecome self-satisfaction.

Many and OtherE. D. BlodgettFive Part Invention: A History of Literary Historyin Canada. U of Toronto P $65.00An Ark ofKoans. U of Alberta P $19.95Reviewed by Kevin McNeilly

Five Part Invention is a major undertaking,an impressive and sweeping history—orhistories—of the practice of national liter-ary history in Canada. Its scholarship isthick and persuasive, as Blodgett interro-gates significant forays into national liter-ary history in English and French Canada,from Edward Hartley Dewart and EdmondLareau to W. H. New, Penny Pétrone, andDiane Boudreau. As metahistory, Blodgett'swork simultaneously adopts and disman-tles narrative form. The first six chaptersfollow a piecemeal chronology from 1874 tothe present, while subsequent sectionsrevisit in counterpoint the same periodsfrom the perspectives of outsiders and oth-ers. Blodgett argues that the "nationalimpulse" in both traditions—from earlymodernist histories such as ArchibaldMacMehan's Headwaters of CanadianLiterature (1924) to more recent produc-tions like W. J. Keith's Canadian Literaturein English (1985)—to discover a "commen-surate" or "coterminous" relation betweenliterature and nation is a discursive produc-tion that is inherently limited, often to thedetriment of inclusive or accurate render-ings of cultures, an enterprise of empower-ment that remains the principal task ofsuch historians. But Canada, as a historicalconstruct both mimicked in and shaped byits literatures, is not for Blodgett a fabrica-

tion of two conflicted solitudes; instead,it is an assemblage of five distinct parts—anglophone, francophone, aboriginal,Inuit, and immigrant cultures—even ifsuch elegantly reductive schémas as thisone begin to unknit the moment they'reoffered as definitive.

English Canadian literary history, he sug-gests pace Frye, takes comedy as its genre:a movement toward the discovery and dis-closure of the terms of community andnational coherence. But these literary histo-ries inevitably concern themselves witha rather well-trodden "argument ofCanadian distinctiveness," uneasily layingclaim to national traits as emergent histori-cal topoi. French-speaking Canada, bycontrast, takes up the tragic as its mode,but, for Blodgett, histories such as SamuelBaillargeon's Littérature canadienne-française (1957) manage to make "culture . . .synonymous with crisis" and so maintain anationalism shaped by its own troubling.Whatever its literary mode, the history thatcontrives narrative coherence also (and thismarks the essential brilliance of Blodgett'sthought) introduces a structural alteritythat challenges this very coherence.Baillargeon tends to defeat his own neces-sary fiction of national organism becausehis work "is a history of alterity that, ratherthan just growing in some unpredictable,yet organic fashion, is founded upon theshock of loss." Blodgett wants to tease out,particularly from the substantial historiesof the two founding languages, an essentialalterity that refuses historical closure, andthus also refuses to limit its cultural possi-bilities, instead aspiring "to place ourthinking of Canadian culture outside thelimits of all cultural exclusivity."

Such a challenge, however, is primarilyarticulated from the margins of the domi-nant cultures, or from its inner outsides,the other three of his five parts: "The chal-lenge of alterity is constructed as marginal[in literary histories], that is, on the outside

103 Canadian Literature 1801 Spnng 2004


of the culture that has the status of beingCanadian. The true challenge, which arguesimplicitly that 'Canada' is not ontologicallygrounded, is not problematized in anglo-phone or francophone histories," at leastnot to the extent that Blodgett would wish.While histories of the remaining three cul-tural divisions—the aboriginal, the Inuit,and the immigrant—almost as a matter ofcourse in the drive for agency trouble thefabricated ontologies of the other two dom-inant cultures, that troubling also defines,sometimes despite their nationalist nostal-gias, any project of a Canadian literary his-tory, because, as Blodgett persuasivelyargues, Canada is always beside itself, itsfoundations constituted by at least one(and no doubt more than one) unfixablefracture, as the nation emerges amid a mul-tiplicity of historical narratives that will notresolve but rather "open [Canada] to itsseveral selves." Blodgett's point is to over-come the self-betraying nationalist essen-tialisms that underlie most versions ofCanadian Studies. Pushing the limits ofwhatever national unity a literary historycan contrive, Blodgett's project seeks a tra-jectory from alterity, the recognition ofOtherness (or what one chapter headingcalls "The Acquisition of Difference") towardplurality, the articulation of multiple, con-flicted positions: the orchestration (to bor-row from his frequent musical tropes) ofvoices that simply cannot be made to agree.

Such a project, for him, is fundamentallybetter, inasmuch as it emerges as an ethics,a critical mindfulness that shifts forwardfrom responsiveness to responsibility forwhat it cannot comprehend, its outside.Blodgett's method, as he composes a his-tory of literary histories, is contrapuntal, ashe works to subvert the language of histori-cal autonomy and to effect as many open-ings as he can in the approximately seventyliterary histories he constellates and ana-lyzes. But while he attends closely to therhetoric of these narratives, he can only

hint at a plural poetics of history, at theforms such a history might ultimately take,to bespeak the Other as "at once beginningand origin," a cracked and creativelyprovocative founding. So we may still needto ask in what specific ways Blodgett'splural history may already have been writ-ten, ghosted, in the poetry those literaryhistories appropriate, narrativize, and regu-late. How can we be critically mindful, inthe process of writing, of those differencesand limits, or at least pay sufficient atten-tion to draw them into the open?

Blodgett's own poetic practice may bearout this alterity, and find a means of mov-ing toward a pluralized writing. In An ArkofKoans he assembles, Noah-like, about ahundred cross-rhymed trimeter quatrains,each of which captures a moment of transitof a given animal, some actual and someimaginary, but all of whom represent atranscendent alterity, moving images ofunassimilable otherness—which has a the-ological character, signals of a divinitybeyond the clutches of human language orconception: "Dogs come always out / ofnowhere, before you know / if they havecome, a shout / goes up and there they go."The best turns of Blodgett's accomplishedvoice, and this quatrain bears out suchpraise, subtly mix careful formal concisionwith colloquial offhandedness to drawfrom common speech a brilliantly unre-markable miracle, a deft shivering of mean-ing into slight tensions and counterpointsthat are easily missed, but which, onceheard, open words and lines temporarily,micrologically, to the pluralized ontologiesthat Five Part Invention seeks out on amuch grander scale.

The poems can also be lyrically dense,vivid with phase-shifted syntax and surrealcollisions of images: "A firefly is air / alivewith minor keys / of moons. Breathe withcare—/ tides turn on your knees." Blodgett'sear is closely attuned to the quiet plastics ofrhythm, of bent time, as the gently dilating


syllables of the first line above suggest.There are many moments of such genius inthis work, enacting the mindfulness Blodgettcalls for, but there are also troubling fail-ures to realize this task. His diction oftenslips into loose phenomenology—"theyare," "they seem"—or insubstantial theol-ogy—"they are the guides to God"—to averabstractions these small poems can't sus-tain; in such cases, the poems become dilet-tantish, a brand of armchair philosophythat belies Blodgett's erudition and craft. Iappreciate the echoes of William Blake andRobert Frost—"lambs leap / so high"—butfind the occasional lapses into JayMacPherson-like preciousness grating. Adescription of eagles, who "sit enthroned /upon the highest peaks / of stars, worldsdisowned / and bare beneath their beaks"illustrates for me the best and the worsttendencies of Blodgett's poetry, as thearresting sonic and semantic pull of the lastline-and-a-half is grafted to redundancy(when you're enthroned you must be sit-ting) and cliché ("highest peaks") thatnearly deflate the poem: it is a testament toBlodgett's ability that he can recuperate itsverbal energies, although I still wish thetext had been rewritten.

Similarly, a poem depicting how "Dolphinsseem to raise / aloft the waters of / theworld: flesh is praise / enough, its leapinglove" hovers between bathos and virtuosity.And perhaps, in the end, this is Blodgett'sstrength, that he can rescue from a staticand stale language—those overworked fig-ures of God and Being—an immediacy ofpoetic shape-shifting and, by moments,startling word music that reanimatesthought and that calls up active, mindfulrelations to an other, pointing to the trans-gression of the limits of a language thatremains vitally just out of reach.

Chroniques de TremblayAndré BrochuRêver la lune. Hurtubise HMH 26,95$Michel TremblayLe passé antérieur. Leméac/Actes Sud 11,95$Michel TremblayLinda Gaboriau, trad. Impromptu on Nun'sIsland. Talonbooks 16,95$Comptes rendus par Alain-Michel Rocheleau

L'œuvre de Michel Tremblay occupe uneplace considérable dans le paysage culturelquébécois et bien au-delà de ses frontières.Il faut dire que peu d'écrivains ont réussicomme lui une telle symbiose entre ledispositif imaginaire que ses récits mettenten branle et la richesse carnavalesquedes couches sociales qu'ils représentent.Les ouvrages qui font l'objet de ce compterendu critique témoignent d'ailleurspleinement de ce fait.

Dans Rêver la lune, André Brochu procèdeà une lecture éclairante et rigoureuse desChroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal. Touten laissant volontairement de « côté lesproblématiques qui font appel à des savoirsextérieurs à la littérature, comme la psy-chanalyse ou la sociologie », l'auteur arecours à des outils méthodologiqueséprouvés—de portée narratologique(Genette), psychocritique (Mauron) etstructuraliste (Greimas)—dans le butd'identifier les principaux « réseaux d'ob-sessions significatives » qui charpentent lesrécits et l'écriture de Tremblay.

A l'intérieur des deux premières sectionsdu livre, Brochu procède à une mise en pers-pective des Chroniques tout en examinanttrès sommairement les œuvres narrativesqui les précèdent, comme Contes pourbuveurs attardés (1966), puis considère lapoétique—celle de la chronique notam-ment—qui leur est sous-jacente. Dans lestrois chapitres qui suivent, intitulés « Lesconstructions du Rêve », auteur examinecertains réseaux thématiques des Chroniques



axés sur le symbole de la lune, tout en s'in-téressant à trois figures masculines « induc-trices de la symbolique lunaire »: Joséphat,Edouard et Marcel. Cet examen critiquepermet de mieux saisir l'importance, chezTremblay, de la figure maternelle et de sesreprésentations multiples. Brochu poursuitd'ailleurs sur cette lancée en faisant état,dans le sixième chapitre de son livre, de laprégnance du féminin qui se manifeste aussibien dans La grosse femme d'à côté estenceinte que dans Thérèse et Pierrette à l'é-cole des Saints-Anges. Ce qui est dit du per-sonnage de Victoire est d'ailleurs original etbien illustré. L'analyse de quelques motifsimportants—liés à la coupure et la peur,notamment, et qui s'inscrivent en filigranedans ces deux romans—complète fort bienl'étude du critique.

Dans cet ouvrage, André Brochu réussitglobalement à démontrer l'importance quedétient le symbolisme lunaire dans l'imagi-naire tremblayen et à illustrer, plus spéci-fiquement, de quelle manière lesprotagonistes qui le composent s'efforcentde se libérer d'un réel qui les aliène, en seréfugiant sous les jupes d'une figureapaisante que la pleine lune symbolisemieux que tout. Bien que très pertinentes ethabilement menées, les observations deBrochu se limitent toutefois beaucoup tropaux deux premiers tomes des Chroniquesde Tremblay et—chose surprenante—n'ac-cordent qu'une place décevante au PremierQuartier de la lune (1989). Par ailleurs, ilaurait été souhaitable que l'auteur tiennecompte—plus qu'il ne le fait—des étudessur les Chroniques qui ont devancé—par-fois même de plusieurs années—la publica-tion de son ouvrage. On s'étonne, parexemple, que des articles fort connus,comme ceux d'Eva-Marie Kröller (publiédans Voix et Images, en 1992) et deDominique Lafon (publié, la même année,dans Le roman contemporain du Québec(1960-1985) de François Gallays et al), aientéchappé à l'attention du critique.

L'une des figures les plus importantes desChroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal est sansconteste Albertine, qui sera d'ailleurs,quelques années après la publication de Lagrosse femme d'à côté est enceinte (1978), lesujet privilégié d'une des meilleures piècesde l'auteur, Albertine, en cinq temps (1984).Dans la nouvelle pièce de Tremblay, inti-tulée Le passé antérieur, Albertine apparaîtcomme un être volontaire, semblable encela à sa mère Victoire, mais encore plusbuté qu'elle.

L'action de cette pièce en un acte sedéroule en 1930, dans le salon d'uneconciergerie du Vieux-Montréal. Albertine,qui a alors vingt ans, voit son futur anéantilorsque son amoureux, Alex, décide de laquitter pour fréquenter sa sœur, Madeleine,de deux ans sa cadette. Dans un ultimeessai de le reconquérir, Albertine revêt unerobe nouvellement achetée par sa rivale etsouhaite faire résonner un dernier crid'amour pour celui qu'elle croyait êtrel'homme de sa vie. Cette stratégie du dé-sespoir ne trompe toutefois personne: niVictoire, ni Madeleine, ni même son frèreEdouard, qui l'invite à faire preuve de bonsens. Tout en ressentant les effets d'unepeine d'amour qui a déclenché en elle,quelques mois plus tôt, une grave dépres-sion nerveuse, Albertine, fière et têtue, ren-contrera malgré tout son opposant etn'aura alors qu'une seule question à luiposer: « Pourquoi vous m'avez sacrée làcomme ça[.. .]? » Poussé à bout, Alex luirépondra ceci: «[ . . . ] quand on se rendcompte qu'on peut pus respirer, [...] qu'ona pus de liberté [...], y'est trop tard pourreculer! Pis non seulement vous avez toutenvahi [. ..] mais en plus [...] vous vouspréparez [. ..] à nous empêcher de respirerjusqu'à la fin de nos jours! Pis vous avezle front d'appeler ça de l'amour! » Rejetéede la sorte, Albertine saura-t-elle trouverla force nécessaire pour résoudre le dramequi secoue son existence? Son avenir dejeune femme se limitera-t-il désormais à


travailler à Y American SpéghattP.Ce que le lecteur soupçonne, c'est qu' elle

risque de plonger pour le reste de ses joursdans une rage infinie, où elle noiera toutespoir de voir enfin l'amour illuminer savie. La conclusion de son entretien avecAlex tend d'ailleurs à confirmer cette inter-prétation: « Quand vous allez être parti[lui dit-elle], y'aura pus d'espoir pantoute![...] Chaque jour de ma vie va être unesouffrance, un reproche, un malheur! »Madeleine épousera Alex—leur vie de cou-ple nous est rapportée dans Le Vrai monde?(1987) de Tremblay—et, pour vivre avec lui,devra se réfugier dans le silence, moyen parexcellence d'éviter d'aborder les infidélitésde son mari. Albertine, elle, comprendrapeu à peu, à la façon des personnages deBeckett dans Fin départie, que son existenceest irrémédiablement placée sous le signede la fatalité et que « [t]out est fini avant decommencer ».

L'histoire contenue dans Impromptu onNun's Island, version anglaise de L'état deslieux, est d'une toute autre nature et nousraconte les faits suivants. Rentrée précipi-tamment à Montréal, la cantatrice PatriciaPasquetti—de son vrai nom PatriciaPaquette—voit sa carrière s'écrouler à lasuite d'une fausse note d'une incroyabledissonance et émise avec puissance dans lascène finale de Salomé de Richard Strauss.Tous les mélomanes rassemblés pour l'oc-casion à l'Opéra Bastille ont été témoins dece couac retentissant. Depuis, la diva estboudée par ses pairs et ignorée par les jour-nalistes.

Par l'entremise de Richard, pianiste accom-pagnateur et témoin impuissant de la chutede son idole, les démêlés de la cantatrice àParis, puis les raisons de son retranchementdans un appartement de l'île des Sœurs,nous sont expliqués. Une fois chez elle,Patricia s'en prend ouvertement à sa filleMichèle, une actrice encore méconnue quiprivilégie le théâtre de création, et luireproche de manquer d'envergure. Surgit

alors sa mère, Estelle, qui modifie ladynamique cruellement instaurée. Actricedans la soixantaine, elle sait ce qu'est ledéclin d'une artiste réputée et ne se privepas de dire à Patricia ses quatre vérités.

La traduction de Linda Gaboriau cor-respond à un travail consciencieuxd'adéquation à l'œuvre originale. On peutmême dire qu'en général, Impromptu onNuns Island suit assez fidèlement l'économieverbale du texte de départ, dont la traductionse distingue néanmoins par le retranchementde plusieurs bouts de phrases et par lamodification de notes didascaliques. Parexemple, « T'es ben toi, hein? T'assistes àun bon show! » devient « You enjoying theshow? », alors que « Empruntant l'accentfrançais » devient « in a phoney accent ».

Aux niveaux onomastique et toponymique,la traduction a retenu le nom des per-sonnages (Estelle Champoux s'appelletoutefois Estelle Bergeron dans le textetraduit) et de l'endroit où se déroule l'ac-tion dramatique. On remarque aussi queplusieurs adaptations ont été faites dans lebut de faciliter la réception du texte deTremblay dans un contexte d'accueil autreque québécois. Ainsi, par exemple, la villede Dolbeau (Lac-Saint-Jean)—lieu denaissance de Patricia—a été remplacée parMontréal. Par ailleurs, étant donné queL'État des lieux a été écrit dans une languerenfermant de nombreux idiomesrégionaux, la version traduite les reproduitpar des élisions empruntées à une languebeaucoup plus normative. Ainsi, l'expres-sion « Ouagne » devient « Was I? », alorsque « Ah, pis qu'y mangent donc toutes dela marde, gang de law, law » se lit comme« Let them all go to hell, pathetic bunch ofnobodies ». Dans quelques passages,Gaboriau semble animée par l'intentiond'expliquer le message de certainesrépliques et n'hésite pas à traduire, avecpertinence, « le Centre culturel canadien »par « the Centre culturel at the CanadianEmbassy ». Par contre, d'autres choix de



traduction semblent moins justifiables,comme « Mêle-toi donc de tes affaires, toi! »qu'elle traduit par « Easy for you to say! ».

En somme, les lecteurs de MichelTremblay sauront apprécier l'ouvraged'André Brochu, la traduction de LindaGaboriau, et éprouveront un grand bon-heur à lire l'une des dernières pièces del'auteur: Le passé antérieur.

A Store of FragmentsSuzanne L. Bunkers, éd.Diaries of Girls and Women: A MidwesternAmerican Sampler. U of Wisconsin P $24.95Allan G. BogueThe Farm on the North TalbotRoad. U ofNebraska P $19.95Reviewed by Michael Fralic

Both of these books fall easily into thebroad category of life-writing, and both uselargely anecdotal modes of telling todescribe the lives of quite "ordinary" peo-ple. Both also make connections betweenthese lives and the broader cultures andhistories in which they participate.

Although Bunkers's Diaries may offer amore satisfying literary experience thanBogue's Farm, Bunkers warns of the restric-tions that reading for "literariness" placeson readings of diaries. She also draws thereader's attention to the tactics of tellingutilized by women diarists in order to com-pensate for restrictions placed upon theirfreedom of expression—tactics such asomission, euphemism, and repetition. Inher introduction, Bunkers warns readers tobe prepared to read with patience throughthe repetitive structures and with deepattention to the unspoken.

Sections of the book are highly engaging,especially sections on the religious andromantic struggles of Ada L. James, thegrowing social activism of MarthaFerguson Nash, or the joy of livingexpressed in the shared diary of Lucinda

and Edward Holton. Sometimes the read-ing rewards are more sedate, as we exploredaily activities under the keen eye of atwelve-year-old Iowa farm girl, whosesnapshot writing throws us into the worldshe describes—"Go to school, kill 2 snakes,a beggar was here..."—or as we bear witnessto Eliza Hamilton's deliberations on herpublic support of the antislavery movement.

There are tiresome passages in which thequotidian repetition seems habitual anddevoid of rich subtext. Perhaps I am toomuch in need of literary seduction, but"Not very cold today" followed by extendedweather reports fails to hold my attention.Despite this, I accept Bunkers's assertionsof the importance of repetition in thediaries, for the mundane offers a glimpseinto the daily rhythms of ordinary lives.

Diaries of Girls and Women covers a broadrange of styles and perspectives, thoughlimited by geography to Minnesota,Wisconsin, and Iowa. Bunkers crosses vari-ous racial and class boundaries, and I thinkthe book would be strengthened by eitherthe inclusion of Native diarists or somebrief discussion of their absence.

Bogue's memoir The Farm on the NorthTalbot Road explores the lives of aDepression-era Ontario farming family.When offering astute observations onsocial divisions, farming practices, andways of relating to both place and past,Bogue manages to be, if not riveting, atleast interesting. As he describes the emo-tional drama and comic moments of life onthe family farm, he sometimes gets lost inhis own reminiscences. One may bereminded of the fragmentary quality thatBunkers emphasizes in her introduction tothe Diaries—in these moments of drift, thestory is about the author's process ofremembrance as much as it is about theevents remembered.

In Bogue's book, these fragments of per-sonal drama contrast with the more confi-dent and coherent observations he makes


offarm life in general, and of the social andeconomic dynamics of Depression-erafarms and villages. Through these observa-tions, we move away from the story ofBogue as the youngest son and brother inhis family, and toward Bogue as a manreflecting on a regional past. We learnabout the purposes of the various rings onthe party-line telephone; about technologi-cal changes, varieties of farms, and supple-mentary economic practices; about thedivisions between "men's" and "women's"work, and the places where those linescould be crossed; about rural politics asthey played out in his particular commu-nity. In short, we get a thorough, balancedpicture of Depression-era Ontario farm lifefrom a personal point of view.

The flatness of Bogue's presentation isrelieved when he describes the tensionbetween his parents. Their strained rela-tionship is presented through a combina-tion of anecdote and a thin skeleton oftentative gender and economic analysis.

As Bunkers does with her diarists, Bogueplaces considerable emphasis on theimportance of location. He suggests that asense of a particular place can exist amongindividuals arising from that place, regard-less of their differences; but he also empha-sizes that no person who grew up on a farmin a given area can, on deeper levels, havethe same sense of the place as any other.This is perhaps part of what Bogue attemptsto explain via his inclusion of episodes offamily drama, and even of slight differencesin soil, farming priorities, and economicstatus from one farm to the next.

Bunkers's Diaries and Bogue's Farm bothstraddle the literary and the historical, asBunkers notes in her introduction. Theyought to have interest for the scholar orenthusiast of life-writing, and for historiansinterested in the crucial historical detailsand stories now being broadly recovered byhistorians exploring experience outside ofdominant political histories.

Contemporary Short StoriesCatherine Bush, Marc Glassman, andHal Niedzviecki, eds.The Journey Prize Anthology 2000. McClelland &Stewart $18.95Joy Gugeler, ed.Write Turns: New Direction in Canadian Fiction.Raincoast $24.95Keith Harrison, ed.Islands West: Stories from the Coast. Oolichan$22.95

Reviewed by Charles E. May

Each one of the fifty-seven stories in thesethree collections is a separate entity thatshould be read and commented on individ-ually, but fifty-seven separate reviews, ofcourse, would be unmanageable. Isolatingcurrent trends and social issues, and char-acterizing what is particularly Canadianabout them would be controllable, butgood stories are seldom trendy, timely, orlimited by local culture. The Journey PrizeAnthology contains twelve stories submittedby Canadian literary journals and short-listed by a three-panel jury to compete forthe $10,000 annual prize. The fifteen storiesin Write Turns are by authors who receivedMFAs from the University of BritishColumbia between 1990 and 2000. IslandsWest features stories by thirty West coastwriters, beginning with one of UBC's mostfamous graduates, Jack Hodgins, and con-cluding with a story by the best livingshort-story writer in the world, AliceMunro.

Most authors who take the short storyseriously know that it is a difficult form tomaster, for to succeed the writer must cre-ate a polished prose fiction that is as tightlystructured, as thematically complex, and asmeaningfully mysterious as a poem. Basedon these criteria, I suggest that while thereare many competent short stories in thesethree collections, relatively few are reallygood. The difference is most obvious in the



Islands West collection, in which JackHodgins's "After the Season," AudreyThomas's "The Man with Clam Eyes," andespecially Alice Munro's "Cortes Island"stand out as belonging to a different realmof artistic reality.

Several of the stories in Islands West arelittle more than the sum of their subjectmatter. Shani Mootoo's "A Garden of HerOwn" is just an ordinary treatment of alonely immigrant woman seeking intimacyand a sense of belonging. Murray Logan's"The King of Siam" is one more account ofa teenage boy discovering that his father isnot such a nice guy. Just because LizaPotvin's "After Hours, After Years" is aboutthe complex subject of interracial relation-ships does not mean it is a complex story.And just because Evelyn Lau's "Fresh Girls"deals with the shocking phenomenon ofdrug/prostitute life does not necessarilymean it is a shocking experience for thereader.

Some stories in this collection are justcommonplace transcriptions, with a bit ofindulgent exposition thrown in, such asJohn Harris's "Report on the NanaimoLabour School." Other stories read as ifthey were excerpts from loosely writtennovels. For example, in "Traplines" by EdenRobinson, a young boy talks on and onabout how terrible his family was, how hewas beaten, and how the schoolteacher wasnice. And then there is Ron Smith's "TheLast Time We Talked," in which inconse-quential dialogue rambles on loosely as ifthere were all the time in the world.

Suddenly in the midst of all this ordinari-ness, there is a compelling story likeCynthia Flood's "Bodies of Water," about adivorced father who takes his son to hisweekly soccer game and gets a catharsisabout clashes. And then one discovers"Fishing Veronica Lake" about the com-monplace event of a father teaching his fif-teen-year-old son how to fly fish, whichStephen Guppy makes over into the magi-

cal. Or one runs across "Silent Cruise" byTimothy Taylor, who marvelously connectsthe stock market with the racetrack, andthe random with the calculated, transform-ing it all into the mysteriously complex.

Most of the fifteen stories in Write Turnsare tighter than those in Islands West, butmany of them seem too well made and pre-dictable. For example, "Black" by AnnabelLyon shifts back and forth in time in thesixties experimental mode of RobertCoover. "Pet the Spider" by Kelli Deeth isa "well-made" initiation story of youthencountering age and being afraid. Themannered style of Eden Robinson's "Dogsin Winter" could have been taught to herby Joyce Carol Oates. Madeleine Thien's"Dispatch" self-consciously combinesfantasy and reality. And Nancy Lee's"Associated Press" uses a self-consciousnarrative gimmick to identify characters.Although most of the stories in Write Turnsare competently written, many are pre-dictably patterned.

The Journey Prize Anthology is the best ofthe three. With an unprecedented three sto-ries short-listed, Timothy Taylor is the starof the collection. His "Doves of Townsend,"which won the prize, is a delicate, complexstory about an antique dealer's discoveryof a magical gift cleverly given to her by anadmirer. "Pope's Own," another Taylorstory, is about a woman who tries to buy aspecial cheese farm and gets caught in acomplex war between two brothers. Thestructured complexity of "Silent Cruise"has already been mentioned.

It is not subject matter but style thatmakes Taylor's stories memorable. It is thesame for others here. By all rights, AndrewGray's "The Heart of the Land," about adoctor who falls in love with a comatosewoman and can "hear" her speak to himshould not work, but Gray makes us believeit. J. A. McCormack's "Hearsay" justifies itslong, rambling nature by the creation of theabsolutely believable voice of the woman

no Canadian Literature 1801 Spring 2004

who tells the story of sexual misconductand legal manoeuvres. Who would thinkthat a story about a woman who becomes ayak and sells Amway products could tran-scend the silly? But Jessica Johnson makes itwork in "We Move Slowly." And AndrewSmith's "Sightseeing," about two womenwho see a boy jump off a railing intoNiagara Falls, is a complex little dialoguedance, and not just because one of thewomen is a transsexual.

Whereas one might forgive the loose,ordinary writing of many of these pieces ifthey were parts of a novel, the short storyhas to be complexly and mysteriously com-pact. It's a marvelous transformation whena writer can manage it, and it's not some-thing one can be taught in an MFA pro-gram. One might be able to learn to writeshort stories by reading a writer like JoyceCarol Oates, who knows all the tricks butseldom transcends them. But one cannotlearn to write short stories by readingAlice Munro, who dazzles readers with themysterious complexity of what it means tobe human.

On ReturnsJodey CastricanoCryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida'sGhost Writing. McGill-Queens UP $19.95Ian Angus, ed.Anarcho-Modernism: Toward a New CriticalTheory. Talonbooks $24.95Reviewed by Charles Barbour

The biggest challenge facing deconstruc-tion, one which has in many ways defined itsince its inception, is how to remain chal-lenging—how to avoid becoming one morecritical methodology, or consumed by theacademy it seeks to delimit. JodeyCastricano's Cryptomimesis: The Gothic andJacques Derrida's Ghost Writing, or ratherthe style of Castricano's text, provides ananswer to this challenge. According to

Castricano, "the term cryptomimesis drawsattention to a writing predicated onencryption: the play of revelation and con-cealment lodged within parts of individualwords." It is a question of turning languageinside out, or of exhuming the remains ofmeanings buried within particular words.At this level, writing is not the transparentcommunication of intentions but a pixi-lated collection of fragments—a deferredpromise of meaning. Castricano's aim is notmerely to describe this "cryptomimetic"conception of writing but also to performit. Thus her writing quite deliberately givesthe uncanny impression that it is hauntedby innumerable potential interpretations,or that the writer is always preparing forher own death and the emergence of count-less readers (whose work is, as Derrida likesto say, a "work of mourning").

To the extent that we can claim it is"about" anything, Cryptomimesis is a read-ing of American gothic literature andDerrida. Rather, it uses a collection of topoitaken from gothic literature as tools forreading Derrida. The text is composed (ordecomposed) as an assemblage of citationswoven together by a diffuse narrative thatattempts, like the use of citation itself, tobreak down distinctions between insideand outside, self and other, life and death.The suggestion is that meaning is some-thing that returns at the moment of cita-tion, but what returns in the citation isnever what the author (the one who citesher) intended. What returns is alwayssomething uncanny and spectral—a dia-bolical image of what was expected. Thusall reading has the character of a haunting.The most successful articulation of thistheme in Cryptomimesis is found in anastonishing interpretation of Steven King'sPet Sematary. Castricano provides not somuch a Derridean reading of King as aKingian reading of Derrida. "In King'snovel," Castricano argues, "the dead returnnot only because they were not properly

i l l Canadian Literature 180 / Spring 2004


buried but also because they represent, inDerridean terms, a certain remainder." Likethe remains of the dead, writing is theremainder or supplement that both condi-tions and troubles our sense of identity,and of the difference between life anddeath. The fact that, in King, the spectrestransgress boundaries—between life anddeath, and between human and animal,uprooting our assumptions about the kindsof ghosts we expect to find in a gothic nar-rative—only serves to reinforceCastricano's point. It is, in this text, alwaysa question of "the crossing of certain linesor borders which constitute a threat toidentity."

Not surprisingly, some of the most capti-vating material is found in the longer foot-notes, which are more like protocols for aseries of alternative readings of Castricano'stext—or, perhaps, alternative research pro-jects. There is more than a little at stakewhen, for example, Castricano asks

What returns to haunt? . . . do the tropesand topoi of the Gothic show us that,rather than being unique to the Gothic,haunting, mourning, and revenance areintegral components of subjectivity, lan-guage, and thought, thus comprisingsocial and cultural reality?

Is being haunted not part of what it meansto be alive? It is an old question, one thatneither Castricano nor Derrida, nor evenHeidegger or Freud, was first to articulate.And it is a question that is bound repeat-edly to return, though differently andunexpectedly, each time. The crypt, asHeidegger reminded us, is what makes eachrepetition, each Dasein, something singularand discrete. Death individuates, even as itsteals that individual in the process. But itis the living dead who return to troubleevery individual or every "authentic" being.Castricano knows the phenomenon, itwould seem, intimately.

As evidenced by Castricano's book, thecurrent trend in deconstructive criticism

seems to tend away from the explicitlypolitical and ethical themes that dominatedthe last decade, towards more aestheticquestions. Not that the latter won't con-tinue to have political implications, butthey will have to be articulated otherwise.

From a very different, in many waysopposed, perspective, Anarcho-Modernism:Toward a New Critical Theory, a collectionof nearly forty essays in honor of the SimonFraser University professor Jerry Zaslove,also attempts a new articulation of thepolitical and the aesthetic. Indeed, with theexception of a number of very moving andinspiring reflections on personal relation-ships with Zaslove, the book is more or lessevenly divided between essays dealing withliterary or aesthetic issues (including thefascinating "An Excursion into the AmatureGrotesque" by Martha Langford, whichdeals with incidental photographs from thebeginning of the twentieth century) andones that focus on political topics (and par-ticularly on the politics of pedagogy).Generally we find an anarchist critique ofwhat the Frankfurt School first dubbed"the culture industry." And overall theessays hold up well, even in the wake ofpostmodernism, which tended to deny cri-tique its privileged position of exteriority.

Probably the central theoretical essay—amanifesto, really—is Wolf-Dieter Narr andMartin Blobel's "Anarchism Today." WhileNarr and Blobel admit that anarchism is"not a constitutive, but a regulative princi-ple," or that it is, in the Kantian termsinvoked here, a regulative ideal, they alsoinsist that "there is no history withoutanarchism." That is to say, human cultureswill always be conditioned by a longing foremancipation from the institutional struc-tures that nonetheless comprise those cul-tures—a world in which each is "fullyself-conscious" of herself as a "concretehuman being." But there are some theoreti-cal problems here—not incidental over-sights, but issues that go to the heart of


anarchism itself. Mixing contexts quitecarelessly, even after having informed usthat such a conflation of discrete situationsis the gravest of errors, Narr and Blobelconclude that "if one can learn anythingout of the KZ's, the Gulags and 'identitypolitics,' which exemplify the pressure andthe longing toward identification, then it isto understand that one should never iden-tify oneself with anything; not even withoneself." This attack on collective identity isformulated as an ethical, we might even saycategorical, imperative. And it is the ethicalclaim at the core of anarchist thought thatneeds to be interrogated most rigorously. Isit not curious to realize that ethical coer-cion emerges most powerfully there at thelimits of politics, or among those whodream of abolishing political institutionsand replacing them with the spontaneousself-administration of the social?

That said, one cannot deny the generosityof spirit which permeates this text—areflection, one suspects, of the character ofthe man to whom it is dedicated. In KathCurran's contribution "Forever Mud:Zaslove as Teacher," it is recalled that, in theearly seventies, Zaslove's nickname amongstudents was "Old Muddy," and that he wasknown to be "clearly opposed" to what hehimself called "premature clarity." This isprobably a marker of the kind of influencethat continental philosophy—Hegel,Husserl, and Heidegger, as the conventionalgrouping has it—had on people ofZaslove's generation, a crash course inmetaphysics which generally went hand inhand with what was then called "existen-tialism." While the two thinkers are verydifferent, a great deal of what is happeningin Derrida's thought relies on a knowledgeof the same texts, so much so that it is diffi-cult to imagine reading Derrida without(and I am sure he would despise the formu-lation) a grounding in the tradition. Thefact that thinkers like Derrida or Zasloveare difficult, even serious, and that they

demand a great deal of their readers, meansthat they will repeatedly return, and thateach return promises something new.

Humming with GouldRichard CavellMcLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography. U ofToronto P $65.00Reviewed by Christoph Irmscher

The jacket of Richard Cavell's handsomelyproduced book shows a landscape, seenperhaps through the windshield of a car:basically flat, with a house and a few barns,some trees, a short, sandy stretch of a roadthat soon vanishes into the grass. Archingacross everything is the vast, picture-book-blue sky, dotted with many clouds, whitelike the sheep in a child's dream. Artist IainBaxter's photograph, with its suggestion ofunbounded freedom, of worlds other thanthe one in which people drive cars or readbooks, will linger in the reader's mindthroughout Cavell's discussion of MarshallMcLuhan's ideas. But so will the title of thephotograph, "Urban Landscape," printedon the jacket's inside flap. It disrupts thevisual immediacy of the image and requiresus to think about it as an artifact, ulti-mately making us doubt all the moreromantic associations mentioned above.The photograph becomes a picture post-card, the fantasy of a viewer who doesn'tlive here and who only dreams about arefuge in the country that might not existanywhere but in an urbanite's muddledmind. Rather than about the photographitself, we have started to think about theconcept behind it, and about the ways inwhich we construct images to meet ourneeds. McLuhan would have been pleased.

In the new Norton Anthology of LiteraryTheory, Marshall McLuhan is representedonly by one explanatory footnote, whichidentifies him, rather quaintly, as a"Canadian media critic." But as Richard



Cavell demonstrates in this brilliant book,he was so much more, despite the fact thatliterary critics have shown less interest inhis work than conceptualist artists likeBaxter, concrete poets like bpNichol, andmusicians like Glenn Gould and John Cage.An exception is Northrop Frye, and thepages detailing the complicated relation-ship between the two are perhaps amongthe most important in Cavell's book. In hisconclusion to the Literary History ofCanada, Frye evoked the spectre of a "post-Canadian world," in which everything "hasthe same kind of immediacy." Cavell, how-ever, argues that Canada is of centralimportance in McLuhan's work. In absorb-ing and then dispensing with the influencesof modernist artists such as MarcelDuchamp, McLuhan also displaced Europeas a cultural centre, endorsing Canada asthe example of a new dynamic, cosmopoli-tan community.

Cavell successfully disputes the prevalentnotion of McLuhan as "vulgarizer" ofHarold Innis: McLuhan broke away fromhis predecessor when arguing that spaceand time are categories that can never beunderstood separately, that the objects wesurround ourselves with are process as wellas product. Nevertheless, he shared Innis'ssense that any "re-organization of our per-ceptual lives" must have an ethical dimen-sion, and that the point of becoming awareof the environments we have created is toalter them, to turn them into, as McLuhanwould call them, "counter-environ-ments"—expressions of our heightenedawareness that who we are can never bedistinguished from where we are.Canadians have been much maligned fortheir alleged lack of a national identity, butfor McLuhan such absence was an opportu-nity. Canada, he thought, needs more, notfewer, cultures. Here dialogue will takeplace not between the established "centresof civilization," but in a decolonized, openspace inhabited by equal, yet always differ-

ent, partners in communication. Therefore,McLuhan had little patience for "NorrieFrye's" hankering after classical decorumand timeless mythic meaning, arguinginstead that the interests of literature arenot well served by shunning its media-agecompetitors. As McLuhan saw it, the newelectronic media have rendered the tradi-tional goal of artistic self-expression andtherefore also the distinction between"highbrow" and "lowbrow" art meaningless.Cavell spends much time on McLuhan'sprotracted love affair with advertising,which to him was the most powerful exam-ple of a new, public form of art, allowingconsumers, now liberated from the tyrannyof the "private point of view," to breathe acollective sigh of relief: "Advertisementsfunction paradigmatically as Happenings:they are anonymous, inclusive, often inter-medial, and require audience interaction."

One of the seemingly most elite Canadianartists of the twentieth century, GlennGould, had a similar goal in mind. Hisidiosyncratic preference for the acousticspace of the recording studio, celebrated inMcLuhan's Counterblast (1969), was not aretreat into the ivory tower but in fact astep forward into the modern media worldwhere the barriers between composer andperformer, performer and audience havebecome obsolete. In the recordings,Gould's humming, so irritating to musicalpurists, besides demonstrating his totalinvolvement with the music, also serves as areminder of the performer's own status as alistener: a dialogic practice meant to ques-tion the monologic principle of the concerthall performance, where hundreds of lis-teners, having paid the steep admissionprice, squirm in uncomfortable seats towitness, on a faraway stage, a pianist'slonely brilliance.

Cavell's lucid exposition of McLuhan'swork and its links with Canadian culture iswithout a doubt the best treatment of thesubject to date. It might seem ironical that


the author has chosen the form of a tradi-tional academic monograph, complete withover seventy pages of densely printed end-notes, to document the impact of a thinkerwho devoted his life to attacking the hege-mony of the printed word and who, in hisown publications, would come to prefermore unorthodox formats, as he did inThrough the Vanishing Point (1968), pro-duced in collaboration with Harley Parker,a collection of "exhibits" supposedlyengaged in a "spatial dialogue" with eachother. Some readers might wonder, too, ifMcLuhan's unabashedly anthropocentrictheories, in which the only possible protec-tion against technology is technology itself,are helpful now that humans are busilyturning the global village into a universalwasteland. (I can't help remembering thescientist at a recent conference who saidthat, from the perspective of geologicaltime, human civilization, with all its gad-gets, will eventually just end up as anothertrash-filled layer on the planet's surface.) Itis true that McLuhan emerges from thepages of Cavell's groundbreaking book notas the media-happy proponent of con-sumerist compliance with whatever will be,but as a fierce critic of artistic snobbery anda staunch advocate of egalitarian politics.One of McLuhan's more unlikely heroeswas the Reverend Mr. Dodgson, betterknown as Lewis Carroll. Dodgson's Aliceexpected the space behind the looking glassto be full of "beautiful things." However, aswe follow her through the mirror, into theweird, non-Euclidean, multi-perspectivaluniverse of McLuhan's dreams, we discovera world where everyone needs to run as fastas they can just to stay in the same place,where the smoke coming from a train engine,like each word of a language, is worth "athousand pounds a puff," and where peo-ple, who will get punished for crimes theyhaven't yet committed, even think "in cho-rus." It is hard not to notice Alice's growingfrustration and loneliness.

Oublis et ObsessionsDaniel ChartierL'Émergence des classiques. Fides 35,95$

Chantal BouchardLa Langue et le nombril. Fides 24,95$

Comptes rendus par Dominique Perron

Deux ouvrages remarquables nous arriventde chez Fides qui ont le mérite de réexa-miner chacun à leur manière les aléas del'histoire ayant présidé, à des degrés dif-férents, à la formation d'un discours cri-tique sur une période littéraire cruciale auQuébec comme à l'élaboration d'un dis-cours social sur la question linguistiqueremontant pour sa part aux débuts de laConquête. Ces deux travaux jettent unéclairage nouveau et nuancé sur les ques-tions de la réception littéraire comme sur laproblématique des questions relatives à laperception historique de la langue québécoisepar les Québécois eux-mêmes et par lesAnglo-Canadiens. Ces deux livres sont lerésultat d'un travail de recherche exhaustifd'une qualité telle qu'ils doivent à mon sensfaire dorénavant partie de toute bibliothèqued'un chercheur qui s'intéresse de près ou deloin au champ des études québécoises.

Le grand mérite de Daniel Chartier estd'avoir conçu et d'avoir mené à bien, d'unefaçon très convaincante, l'examen minu-tieux des phénomènes de réception critiquequi ont présidé soit à assurer la pérennitéd'une œuvre littéraire québécoise en l'ins-crivant dans le registre de ce que l'on peutappeler un classique, soit à sa mise à l'écartpar l'institution littéraire de sa saisiecomme texte signifiant au sein de l'époque,et dès lors, le condamnant à l'oubliindépendamment des ses intrinsèquesqualités littéraires.

Ainsi sont examinés les processus qui ontinscrit dans l'histoire littéraire des romanspubliés entre 1933 et 1939, tels Un homme etson péché, Menaud, maître-draveur, LesDemi-Civilisés et Trente arpents alors que



des œuvres écrites par des femmes, LaChair décevante de Jovette-Alice Bernier,Dans les ombres d'Eva Sénécal, et Cocktailde Yvette Ollivier Mercier-Gouin ont étérefoulées avec efficacité dans les limbes del'amnésie institutionnelle assurée. Cetteségrégation quasi-systématique est d'autantplus choquante lorsque Chartier démontel'appareil de diffusion qui a permis à l'u-nique roman de Claude-Henri Grignond'occuper la place dominante que l'on con-naît, reconduite indéfiniment par des sous-produits tels que des pièces de théâtre, desséries radiophoniques et plus tardtélévisées, et dont le succès critique et po-pulaire en était grandement redevable à laposition même de commentateur tonitru-ant et redouté qu'occupait Valdombre dansl'appareil de diffusion critique de l'époque.Le consécration du livre de Mgr Savardsemble pour sa part s'expliquer dans unegrande mesure par la réponse esthétique etidéologique qu'il constituait à la publica-tion de Maria Chapdelaine, vingt ansauparavant, rassurant un milieu de littéra-teurs qui avaient été littéralement trauma-tisés, c'est là expression de Chartier, parl'immense succès d'un livre parlant duCanada français sous la plume même d'unétranger. Les Demi-Civilisés de Jean-Charles Harvey va profiter d'une tapageusepublicité de scandale conférée par inadver-tance grâce à une interdiction del'Archevêque de Québec attirant par ressacl'attention sur une œuvre dont les qualitésstrictement littéraires ne justifiaient certespas la consécration durable que auteur enretira. Pour sa part, le roman de Ringuet,de calibre différent il est vrai, bénéficiad'emblée des retombées positives assuréespar sa publication en France et d'une con-fusion intéressante de la critique sur laposition qu'il paraissait occuper au sein dumouvement régionaliste tel qu'il se dessi-nait en ces années trente. Par comparaison,les œuvres de Sénécal, Bernier, et Mercier-Gouin reçurent un traitement critique qui

reflétait l'assignation périphérique dontla littérature écrite par des femmes étaitl'objet, marginalisation, puis mise au ban àlaquelle les jugements moraux et éthiquesportés, particulièrement sur les romans,(le théâtre était encore considéré commeun genre trop frivole pour être l'objet d'undiscours critique sérieux) ne contribuèrentpas pour peu, alors que les œuvres desauteurs masculins parurent exemptées d'unetelle évaluation de l'œuvre à l'aune de lavertu bigote. Daniel Chartier, grâce aussi àune recherche remarquable sur les publica-tions critiques de l'époque, fait la preuvemagistrale de l'opacité de la réception lit-téraire et de son caractère éminemmentcirconstancié, comme de l'autonomisationrapide et circonscrite du texte critiquemême qui décida du sort d'une œuvre. Untravail à consulter régulièrement pour finirde dissiper les mythes (s'il en reste ) del'ontologie littéraire.

C'est à un autre réexamen du processushistorique de formation des discours sur lesquestions linguistiques au Québec etsurtout sur les effets que ces mêmes dis-cours eurent sur l'élaboration d'une iden-tité collective des Québécois que ChantaiBouchard nous convie dans La langue et lenombril. Si on peut considérer cetterecherche comme un ajout à la liste sans findes travaux et essais polémiques sur laquestion explosive de la langue au Québec,le travail de Bouchard a l'immense méritede s'aider d'une démarche sociolinguistiqueau sens large du terme pour démontrer cequ'une certaine idéologie nationaliste, plusou moins réalisée par le politique à partirdes années soixante, doit à une intériorisa-tion graduelle dans la psyché collectived'un sentiment d'insuffisance lancinantequant à la qualité du français écrit et parlépar les Québécois. Bouchard procède doncà l'historique fort bien documenté de cettereconnaissance progressive d'une languematernelle vécue comme une défaillance etde son association, par une série de prises

116 Canadian Literature 1801 Spnng2OO4

de conscience radicales autour de laRévolution tranquille, à des causes socio-économiques qui ne pouvaient trouver desolution que dans l'action politique, per-mettant de passer de la dévalorisation iden-titaire du joualisant à la revalorisationculturelle du Québec à partir des annéessoixante. A cet égard, Bouchard attribue àla question linguistique, paradigme majeurde l'identitaire québécois contemporain, lerôle de vecteur fondamental d'une réappro-priation de soi-même par le collectif quiconduira au désir de séparation politiqued'avec le Canada, tant il fut possible pour lesQuébécois d'établir un lien direct et incon-testable entre leur aliénation linguistique etla condition de « nègres blancs d'Amérique ».Un travail fouillé et une lecture passionnantequi change des habituels et larmoyantsessais sur la question, dont seule la sociétédistincte a le secret du pullulement.

In Living ColourChinosoleAfrican Diaspora and Autobiographies: Skeins ofSeifand Skin. Peter Lang $19.95Cheryl Robson, ed.Black and Asian Plays Anthology. Aurora Metro P$19-95Reviewed by George Elliott Clarke

African Canada is absent from two currentconsiderations of African Diasporic litera-ture. Chinosole, an associate professor ofWomen Studies at San Francisco StateUniversity, scrutinizes autobiographies byseveral African, American, and Caribbeanwriters, but none by Canadians. CherylRobson, offering the England-based AuroraMetro Press compilation of five contempo-rary Black and Asian dramas, writes "we . . .considered plays from Africa, America,Britain, India, and the Caribbean." But,Canada? Nadal

Despite African Canada's invisibility inthe purviews of a scholar (Chinosole) and a

writer (Robson), their precepts may still beuseful for African Canadian writers andtheir critics. Nevertheless, of these twobooks, it is Chinosole's that shines mostilluminatingly, while the plays selectedunder Robson's auspices are only three-fifths brilliant.

Chinosole examines nine "Black" autobi-ographical narratives to identify thevagaries of the status of "the autobiograph-ical self" during felt oppressions, but alsoto interrogate the literary shape of Blackself-styling. Her nine writers range fromthe Enlightenment's Olaudah Equiano toour common era's Audre Lorde. Chinosolecites convincingly the merits and faultsof their texts, but she never explains heromission of celebrated works like TheAutobiography of Malcolm X. All one is toldis that her chosen texts were those that edu-cated her "most about Black world views,aesthetics, and gnosis."

So what? Chinosole wants to contest "thewave of de-politicization overtaking Blackautobiographical writing" by determinedlyreading her subjects' works against the con-text of their crafting, their apparent stancetoward their intended audiences, and theireffectiveness in countering nasty social atti-tudes and practices. Rejecting faddishnotions of the death of the author,Chinosole measures her writers against theexacting moral standards of her AfricanAmerican radical feminism.

Treating Equiano, Chinosole admires his"shuttling ironic humor" that skewersEuropean racist imperialism, while she regretsthe "mental colonization [that] was the price[he] paid for the privileged socio-economicposition that permitted him to write andpublish an autobiography" during slavery.Chinosole notes that such "two-toned"voicings mirror a "bifurcated" world, oneblack and white. In addition, "Dual alle-giances . . . generate multiple textual selves."

Examining the mid-twentieth-centuryAmerican writer and "maverick Marxist"



Richard Wright, Chinosole spies a painfuldivide in his portrayal of individual andcollective selves. Because Wright privileged"individualism, the possibility of one per-son rising above his lot," only his singularself escapes, allegedly, "total social condi-tioning of his consciousness." In sorry con-trast, the black community becomes theabyss of abjection, the domain of dejection.In a word, Wright's "consciousness is soadvanced that his community seems bru-tal." Chinosole's insight is both essentialand universal. Indeed, her reading may alsobe applied domestically—and disturbingly—to Dionne Brand's new essay cum auto-biography, A Map to the Door of No Return:Notes to Belonging.

The only author to meet Chinosole'svaunted standards for progressive, engagésocio-political observation is Lorde, the USVirgin Islands-born lesbian poet, essayist,and memoirist. In her autobiography,Lorde limns, Chinosole thinks, a poetics of"matrilineal diaspora" both "explicitly col-lective and functionally revolutionary,"while combining "history and myth, proseand poetry." Yet Chinosole's study of Lordedissolves into hagiography. She maintainsno sustained critique.

Still, Chinosole must be commended forher nicely anti-essentialist, essentializinginsight that "people of African andEuropean descent share the same languagesand frames of reference but employ themdifferently." In one sentence, a central quar-rel in African Diasporic literary study issatisfyingly resolved. Bravo!

Black and Asian Plays Anthology is laud-able for its internationalist multicultural-ism—and because three of the five plays arefine. In her foreword, Robson states, "Wewanted the plays we selected to reflect thediverse and many layered societies we livein today as well as publishing texts we feltwere to some extent, universal." For playdirector Ana Nkrumah, in her introduc-tion, the need is to foster adequate minor-

ity drama production to end continuous"complaining about and scrabbling aroundfor good Black and Asian writers" and thesidelining of "our immigrant experiencesand their impact on British society."

Of the five plays, Harvest is by an Indianwoman, Manjula Padmanabhan; Made inBritain is by an Indo-British man, ParvBancil; Calcutta Kosher is by an Indo-Anglo-Jewish woman, Shelley Silas; andBrother to Brother and Under TheirInfluence are by male Black Brits MichaelMcMillan and Wayne Buchanan respec-tively. Padmanabhan is the only non-British contributor; Bancil and McMillanare British-born children of immigrants,while Silas is a newcomer from India andBuchanan a newcomer from Jamaica. Thisquintet defines the poco, pomo moment.

Padmanabhan's Harvest stages a literallyvisceral clash between Occidental-globalist,technological, capitalist liberalism andIndian "family values." To enrich his family,a man sells his vital organs to a US firm;consequently, it intrudes—robotically—into his home and promotes the dissolu-tion of relationships. The play revisitsAldous Huxley's Brave New World. Thus, itdemands recuperation of Canuck philoso-pher George Grant as a poco critic: hisanatomy of modernity is mandatory here.

Bancil's Made in England enacts identityconfusions in the era of consumerism: aBritish-born, "Indian" punk rocker onlyscores when he records ironic, self-mockingsongs about being Indo-British. His successsummons charges that he has sold out hisculture along with his music. Grant isapplicable to this text too.

McMillan's Brother to Brother is a poetic,Black British male revision of AfricanAmerican playwright Ntozake Shange's clas-sic feminist drama, for colored girls who haveconsidered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf.Men named as colours—Red, Blue, Purple—discuss their frustrations and yearnings.

Calcutta Kosher reassembles a dispersed


Anglo-Jewish family in its native Calcutta.Silas's concept is important and intriguing,her execution prosaic and dull.

Under Their Influence is a Grand Guignoltreatment of a drug-addled and racism-splintered psychology. McMillan is ambitious,but can one integrate Othello and Macbeth7.

The anthology ends with a bibliographycompiled by Susan Croft of Black andAsian playwrights in print, listing onlyworks published or produced in Britain.Thus, African Canadian writer M.NourbeSe Philip appears with her Coupsand Calypsoes, staged in London in 1999.But I suspect other Black Canadians aremissing in action.

Atlantic MythsLesley Choyce, ed.Atlántica: Stories from the Maritimes andNewfoundland. Goose Lane $19.95Irene Guilford, ed.Alistair MacLeod: Essays on His Work. Guernica $10Reviewed by Lawrence Mathews

Lesley Choyce begins his introduction toAtlántica by advancing the proposition thatthe four Atlantic provinces constitute "a lit-erary nation unto itself." Nonsense. Forstarters, Newfoundland is so different fromthe other three as to make such a claimuntenable on its face. Beyond that, doesn'tthe notion of "a literary nation" itself seemoutdated? Someone writing in Halifaxmay produce work with stronger affinitiesto fiction from Poland or Peru or NewZealand than to that of Ernest Buckler orThomas Raddall.

Choyce is annoyingly vague about whyhis twenty contributors—and not others—are represented. It would be unacceptablypretentious, he says, to call them "our 'best'writers." It would also, in many cases, bewildly inaccurate. Most "might be describedas 'mid-career.'" I'll say: only one was bornafter 1958. Nine are identified as based in

Nova Scotia (as is Choyce himself), withonly three from New Brunswick. There areexcerpts from four well-known novels—byWayne Johnston, Donna Morrissey, DavidAdams Richards, and John Steffler—thatanyone interested in purchasing an anthol-ogy of fiction will probably already haveread. Gender balance has been meticulouslyobserved, but there are no contributionsfrom Afro-Canadian or First Nations writ-ers. Choyce doesn't explain any of thesedecisions.

Of the sixteen stories, about half read asthough, to judge by their form and tech-nique, they could have been written around1930. A narrative unfolds with dull compe-tence to articulate a single central "point"about character and theme. Fortunately,the others are considerably better. In par-ticular, I like the strong contributions fromJoan Clark and David Helwig (who, afterdecades of being a "Kingston writer," hasnow become a "Prince Edward Islandwriter"—and thus eligible, in Choyce'sview, to participate in the rich traditionepitomized by Lucy Maud Montgomery).Lynn Coady's "Batter My Heart" is espe-cially impressive, with its verbal energy andquick pacing.

And, inevitably, there's Alistair MacLeod,whose recent story "Clearances" leads offthe collection, occupying as usual the noman's land where realism slides into para-ble and where intense scrutiny of a particu-lar time and place leads the reader to reflecton issues that used to be called "universal."By the second sentence, the reader is wellinto familiar MacLeod territory: "The blan-ket was now a sort of yellow-beige althoughat one time, he thought, it must have beenwhite." We follow the nameless protagonistthrough a series of experiences and remi-niscences that culminate in a poignant,sure-to-be-futile gesture of rebellionagainst fate. The vision that informs thenarrative is clear and uncompromising, therhetoric unobtrusively effective.



"Clearances" is a fair representation ofMacLeod's work—intense, understated,and immensely sure of itself, though nevertesting the boundaries of the relatively nar-row range of thought and feeling that itexplores. It seems almost irreverent tomake that last point, obvious though it is.No one ever says anything about MacLeod'swork that could be construed as evenmildly negative. Quite the opposite.Despite the slightness of his output (onenovel, sixteen stories) and despite thereluctance of academic critics to examine itclosely, he has been allotted a secure nichein the Canadian pantheon. Even before thepublication of No Great Mischief, his namecould be uttered in the same breath asAtwood, Munro, or Ondaatje. This puzzlesme. Strong as it is, MacLeod's work is notmanifestly stronger than that of a numberof worthy writers who seem doomed toperpetual semi-obscurity. (A longish listavailable on request.) Is it a regional thing?A Scots-ethnicity thing? Beats me, anyway.

In this context, the publication of AlistairMacLeod: Essays on His Works is a welcomeevent, as it does begin to fill in the nearlyblank space normally occupied by acade-mic criticism on a writer of MacLeod's rep-utation. It comprises seven contributions:five essays, a transcript of an interview withShelagh Rogers, and an account of the pre-publication history of No Great Mischief byDouglas Gibson, MacLeod's editor.

Irene Guilford sets the enthusiastic tonein her introduction to this collection whenshe refers to "the hold on the heart that isAlistair MacLeod's writing." Jane Urquharttells us that the stories "seem to moveeffortlessly from the author's heart to thepage and then to leap back from the pageinto the heart of the reader." The univer-sity-connected contributors don't invokethe heart metaphor but seem equallyenthusiastic. Janice Kulyk Keefer concludesthat "No Great Mischief is a work thatspeaks across cultural and social borders,"

while David Williams says that the novel"could nearly pass for a long-lost map ofthe peaceable kingdom." And so forth.

I confess that I'm somewhat suspicious ofthis hasty beatification of No GreatMischief. Yes, it did win a major interna-tional award, but we're not still so provin-cial as to regard that as conclusive evidenceof anything (are we?). What's missing fromthis volume is an essay explaining in detailwhy the novel should be accorded the highvaluation currently attached to it.

The academic essays ignore this issue.The topics are standard fare, the sort ofthing associated with works that have longbeen comfortably canonized: the novel'srelation to oral narrative, its handling ofthe theme of "the profound dignity andheroism of traditional labour," the "post-modern pattern" of its narrative structure.There's a significant gap between the con-tent of such essays and the personal testi-monies about how one's heart has beenaffected by the fiction.

It would also be interesting—though Irecognize that it would violate the conven-tions of such collections—to see a devil'sadvocate sort of contribution, a thoughtful,dispassionate gesture of dissent. Its absencepoints to a common denominator of thetwo books under review here. Both areattempts to promote a fervently held belief:that Atlantic Canada constitutes "a literarynation," and that Alistair MacLeod is amajor writer. The first seems absurd; as forthe second, time, and only time, will tell.


Asian American/CanadianKandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa, eds.Orientations: Mapping Studies in the AsianDiaspora. Duke UP us $19.95Susanne HilfWriting the Hyphen: The Articulation ofInterculturalism in Contemporary Chinese-Canadian Literature. Peter Lang us $35.95Reviewed by Jennifer W. Jay

Orientations: Mapping Studies in the AsianDiaspora is the latest of a number of excit-ing studies to identify current themes andto consolidate three decades of academicscholarship and discourse in AsianAmerican studies. The tremendous growthin cultural, literary, and performative pro-duction involving Asian Americans in thelast two decades makes this volume atimely project, as it crosses boundaries ofacademic disciplines and maps out theparameters of Asian diasporic studies.The fifteen essays derive from a conferenceat the University of Washington in 1996;there is much talent and versatility in theresearch of the mostly Asian Americanauthors, who range from new scholars toestablished academics and who hail fromvarious academic disciplines, including his-tory, English, law, anthropology, ethnicstudies, comparative literature, theatre,dance, and Asian American studies.

A strong introduction by the two editorsprovides a conceptual framework to thevolume, which is organized under fourthemes: "Investments and Interventions,""Translating Knowledge," "Para-sites, orContinuing Borders," and "Asian/AmericanEpistemology." The essays collectively pre-sent a broad critical study of the Asian dias-pora (from Chinese, Japanese, Filipino,Korean, and South Asian, to interracialgroups) through intersecting themes ofracialization, globalization, transnational-ism, postcolonialism, hybridity, and theEast/Other and West/Self dichotomy.

Common to the authors is an activist andpoliticized position of advocacy for the fur-ther development and inter-disciplinarypursuit of Asian American studies, wherethey seek to recognize and expand the"multiple meanings of Asianness." Withone exception, the authors are AsianAmericans who have lived through theAsian American experience and are articu-lating their experience as the productionof knowledge, some in literary and artisticproductions, and others in critical dis-course. Grounded in one or more disci-plines, all the authors wander between, andcross boundaries of, other disciplinesthrough personal and academic knowledge,thereby expanding the horizons of bothAsian and Asian American studies. Forexample, David Palumbo-Liu—originallytrained in medieval Chinese poetry andwhose Asian/American: Historical Crossingsof a Racial Frontier (Stanford, 1999) consid-ers a number of topics similar to this vol-ume—presents here an essay aboutJapanese Americans.

Asian Canadian studies, especially byreclaiming the history of Asians in main-stream Canadian history and by producingaward-winning literary works, has in thepast two decades been much influenced bythe activism and spirit of Asian Americanstudies, which currently has programs atabout fifty American campuses. WhileAsian Canadian cultural and literary pro-ductions have been featured in theCanadian media, the Asian Canada pres-ence in academia is mostly felt in Englishand Sociology departments. AsianCanadian studies has yet to establish anindependent program at Canadian univer-sities beyond the modest beginnings atSimon Fraser University; as a discipline ithas not yet founded disciplinary journalssuch as Amerasia and Journal of AsianAmerican Studies, where Asian Canadianacademic discourse could challenge orreconfigure the parameters and directions



of the discipline—the primary concern ofOrientations: Mapping Studies in the AsianDiaspora.

Despite its title, the aim of Hilf 's book ismerely to examine one component of theAsian diaspora—Chinese Canadian writingin English from the 1970s to the present.The study is flawed from the beginning, asonly the authors who identify themselves asChinese Canadian are included, a schemethat excludes Evelyn Lau, whose literaryproduction is indeed very much related tothe author's ethnicity, family background,and in particular the interculturalism thatHilf herself defines. Unsubstantiated gener-alizations such as claims that "ChineseCanadian writing . . . is, after all, a litera-ture of exile and migration" and weakanalysis combine to render the volumeinferior to Lien Chao's more competentsurvey, Beyond Silence: Chinese CanadianLiterature in English (1997).

Ordure and OrnamentLynn CoadySaints of Big Harbour. Doubleday Canada $34.95Thomas WhartonSalamander. McClelland & Stewart $34.99Reviewed by Allan Hepburn

Saints of Big Harbour and Salamander definetwo poles of contemporary Canadian fiction.Coady writes about teenagers in small-town Nova Scotia in 1982-83. Her charac-ters speak a raw, colloquial English. Theyare small-minded, brawling, sentimental,banal, alcoholic. They live by rumour andmanipulation. In stark contrast, ThomasWharton uses a textured, ornamental lan-guage to describe wondrous experiences inthe eighteenth century. His characterstravel the globe. They are secretive, robotic,complex, piratical, long-suffering,amphibious. They live by ideas and ideals.

Coady's writing dwells on disjection andexcrement. Shit signifies the messes in

which her characters live their tawdry lives.All boys are "shit-disturbers." Hugh Gillis'sparents give him "apocalyptic shit" forbeing charged with assault. Guy Bouchercalls philosophical inquiry an "unendingocean of bullshit." Hugh tenders the opin-ion that "getting the shit kicked out of youtogether" bonds you with friends for therest of your life. "Did Jesus pool" wondersCorinne during a religious phase of herchildhood. Everything, including language,relates to faeces: "a fat red mail box" swal-lows down letters in Nova Scotia "andshit[s] them out in America."

But, shit is only one of the excreta thatfascinate Coady's characters. They bleed;they puke; they fart; they piss; they cry.Corinne Fortune, a prevaricating teenager,feels a "surge of mucus" in her throat whiletalking about men who allegedly stalk her.Alison Mason vomits into an orange saladbowl. While laid up with a bad back,Isadore pees into a jug that he sets besidethe teapot. Bodily filth sustains metaphorstoo. Corinne rubs her temples in order tomassage a voice from her mind, "like ablackhead from a pore." For Isadore, talk-ing about his experiences in Toronto was"like picking a sore until it bled." Story-telling resembles "picking an unripenedscab."

Saints of Big Harbourbelongs to a genre Icall "addiction realism," which hasantecedents in the naturalist fiction ofEmile Zola, Theodore Dreiser, and FrankNorris. In this bleak genre, characters com-mit acts of gratuitous violence. For this rea-son, in a Canadian context, addictionrealism includes scenes at hockey rinkswhere men duke it out on the ice to the gleeof howling spectators. Violence, we aregiven to understand, relieves the pressuresof poverty and is therefore implicated inclass oppression. In addiction realism, theidea of "family" is sentimentally adheredto, even when family members destroyproperty, steal, harm each other physically,


or insult one another verbally. IsadoreAucoin pretends to help his family; in truthhe bullies and belittles them. Charactersthrive on hatred. Isadore hates television,trendy lighting at the bar, disco music,homosexuals, and himself. In addictionrealism, events repeat themselves as pat-terns. From generation to generation, peo-ple inhabit family homes. They binge drinkand detoxify in cycles. Characters believetheir own lies; Corinne hallucinates malesuitors into being. The community, abidingby tribal ideas of justice and belonging, col-ludes with her delusions. The locals believethat women are sluts or victims, whereasmen are aggressors or deadbeats. Gender,like class, is fixed and categorical.Moreover, addiction realism takes place insmall towns, which are supposed to be"decent, normal" places, but are in facthives of vigilante justice and untruth. Inthis genre, someone invariably lives in atrailer. (In Saints of Big Harbour, Ronaldmight "retire to his trailer in the woods.")Characters define themselves in terms ofcatastrophe, whether falling sixty feet froma building as Isadore supposedly does, orgetting beaten to a pulp as Guy Boucher istwice. Lastly, in addiction realism, which isunremittingly grim while pretending to befunny, characters drink. They drink untilthey toss and pass out. They drink to forgettheir bodies, which disgust them. Whenthey are not drinking, they think aboutbooze. In Saints of Big Harbour, teenagersdrink outside school doors. Adult men sipfrom hip-flasks during hockey games. Asa tavern owner says about the people inBig Harbour, "everybody has a drinkingproblem."

Coady's characters are oblivious to whathappens around them. On three separateoccasions, Guy gets attacked from behind:by a hockey mom, by an irate brother, andby his uncle. Within the limited range ofconsciousness that her characters possess,Coady handles point of view deftly.

Chapters narrated in the first personoccupy the voice and swampy psychologyof one character at a time. The diction ofSaints of Big Harbour hardly rises above themonosyllabic. The plot resembles that of atelevision show about teenage angst. Thehistorical moment at which the novel is set,1982-83, supplies references to Rocky,AC/DC, Flowers for Algernon, Happy Days,and David Bowie. These references, allexternal to Nova Scotia, strangely demon-strate the imperviousness of provincial cul-ture to foreign influences. Big Harbourremains a tiresome, small place.

Coady's novel resembles Salamander inone regard only: both works deal withfreaks. Whereas Coady's characters use theterm "freak" to describe their differencefrom others, Wharton's characters partici-pate in an eighteenth-century world ofcuriosities and wonders—freaks who haveoddities of the body. After the death of hisson Ludwig on the battlefield, CountOstrov hires a metallurgist to create anautomaton as a replacement. Ludwig liveson in porcelain, if not in spirit. Other char-acters in Salamander have robotic or freak-ish tendencies. Irena, who nearly diesduring a childhood illness, wears a "corsetof steel bands, hammered into a poised,properly feminine shape." A six-fingeredservant named Djinn works as a composi-tor because of his dexterity. A story circu-lates about a tribe of men whose bodieshave been tattooed with verse epics andancient tales. In China, porcelain messen-gers roam remote roads to deliver emper-ors' edicts.

Salamander meditates on the relation ofstories to bodies, bodies to labour, andlabour to art. Count Ostrov tries to elimi-nate all servants from his castle by creatingmachines that perform menial tasks.Consequently, the castle becomes a largegadget with moving parts. Objects andinhabitants exist in a web of relationsdefined mechanistically. By extension of



this gadget mentality, the earth is a "clock-work toy," filled with ingenious puzzles andsurprises.

Like the castle, language itself has hiddenworkings. The word "salamander," forexample, designates the animal that,according to myth, survives fire, yet theword also contains the letters "alam," whichis both a Hebrew letter and a Sri Lankanword for father-in-law. Similarly, "Ostrov"means "island" in Czech, and CountOstrov—like other characters in thisnovel—lives on an island. Such words arepuzzles; each unfolds into a cabinet ofcuriosities. Words have materiality, evenbaroque bizarreness, yet they can also rep-resent things that do not exist. They areornamental yet vital to human intercourse.

Exquisitely written, Salamander takescues from the stories of ítalo Calvino andJorge Luis Borges. In his acknowledgments,Wharton thanks Borges for "the novel thathe never wrote." Salamander concerns thenature of books and the process of reading,including the interpretation of never-writ-ten books. Ostrov commissions NicholasFlood, ingenious craftsman and printer, tomake an "infinite book." This pursuit moti-vates the plot and provokes speculationabout material culture. Is a book a physicalor a metaphysical object? Are books theresult of technology or a form of technol-ogy? Are books sources of, or repositoriesfor, wonder? Do books order or disorderconsciousness? Do they tell us what weknow or what we do not know? Does read-ing occur linearly or haphazardly? Abbé deSaint-Foix spends his childhood in a libraryscanning blank pages in books, believingthat all reading is an interpolation intoblankness. So it may be.

Wharton posits brain-teasing paradoxesabout libraries, lists, puzzles, coincidence,automata, velocity, time, islands, and col-lections. A magical book, Salamandereschews dreary realism in favour of an aes-thetic of enchantment.

Modes and DiscourseDiana CraneFashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, andIdentity in Clothing. U of Chicago P $20.00Jonathan Ned KatzLove Stories: Sex Between Men BeforeHomosexuality. U of Chicago P $20.00Reviewed by Stephen Guy-Bray

Diana Crane's main theme in her book onfashion is "how a person constructs socialidentity in contemporary society." Shelooks at the US, France, and the UK overthe last two centuries; at men and atwomen; at leisure clothes, at work clothes,and at high fashion. For the earlier periodscovered by her study, Crane uses a numberof old studies, including Frédéric LePlay'sfascinating and, as she points out, insuffi-ciently studied investigation of the workingclasses in nineteenth-century France. Forlater periods she uses articles from the pop-ular press and interviews, including somedone with American women of variousages on their response to fashion advertise-ments in glossy magazines.

It should be clear from this descriptionthat there is rather too much going on inthis book. Almost any one of the topicsCrane discusses could have made a book initself. This is especially true of her investi-gation of Parisian haute couture and ofwomen's responses to fashion advertise-ments (an area of her book that is not wellconnected to the other areas). As well,Crane could easily have written a wholebook just about LePlay's studies. Her deter-mination to cover as much of her largetopic as possible means that at times thebook has too much information and notenough detail and even degenerates into aseries of lists, although many of the statis-tics she cites are very interesting.

Crane's main contention is that whatpeople wear in the three countries she stud-ies reflects a shift from a class culture to a


segmented culture. In other words, whereasonce people's clothing showed their class,as many of the fascinating photographs shereproduces demonstrate, now what we wearis more likely to show a different kind ofaffiliation: to a sexual preference (includingheterosexuality, although Crane does notappear to consider this), to a political belief,even to a favourite leisure activity. Craneshows that Georg Simmel's now classic viewthat fashion is diffused downwards fromsocial elites can no longer be universallyapplied: fashion is now just as likely to bediffused from marginal or oppressed groups.

The theoretical part of this book is one ofits strengths. Crane is good with theory andwith economics, but not so good with cul-ture and with historical context. At times,her scene-setting is humorous (uninten-tionally so, I presume): "By the end of the1950s, television was a fixture in manyAmerican homes, along with a new form ofpopular music, rock'n'roll, aimed specifi-cally at adolescents." While Crane does pro-vide a convincing analysis of how fashiontypically provides a recombination of exist-ing elements rather than novelty, she doesnot see that what she calls "postmodern"fashion—and, indeed, the sort of fashionthat spreads upwards from marginalgroups—is still just recombination. Look,for instance, at the recrudescence of ele-phant pants. Although in some ways wehave moved from a class culture to a seg-mented one, there is still no escaping eitherfrom the class system or from the tyrannyof fashion.

Jonathan Ned Katz's new book is simi-larly lacking in unity, but that is a necessaryconsequence of the kind of book it is. As hesays near the beginning, "my project is . . .to rediscover men's native forms of ardor."What this means is that he cites a wide rangeof writings from the nineteenth century inorder to arrive at some sense of how mendescribed their romantic love and lust forother men. As anyone would expect, the main

figure is Whitman. Katz deals to some extentwith the poetry, but his primary emphasisis on the letters and the reported conversa-tion. I suspect most people will end the bookfeeling some exasperation for Whitman'srhetorical strategies of display and conceal-ment, but it is a fascinating case study.

The book begins with Abraham Lincoln,however, and this is sure to be the mostcontroversial section south of the border.Throughout, Katz tries to balance both thefamous and the obscure, and the particularand the general. He draws on letters, diaries,news reports, novels, and stories. The pas-sages he cites are often very moving; Ifound poor Albert Dodd's diary of hisemotional entanglements and his strugglesto find the right words heart-rending.

Vocabulary is one of Katz's main con-cerns in Love Stories. He is resolved to usethe words the men themselves use and todocument shifts in vocabulary over thenineteenth century, with particular refer-ence, of course, to the introduction of theword "homosexual" and the emergence of amedical discourse of sexuality. This is astory that has often been told, but it isrewarding to get some sense of how themen to whom those words were appliedthought of them and how they categorizedthemselves. Katz is determined not to bethe one doing the categorizing, and heinsists that we cannot use contemporarysexual taxonomies to talk about the past. Ifelt he leaned on this point rather too hard,especially since it is no longer particularlycontroversial.

Katz proceeds by paraphrasing and quot-ing liberally from sources and then com-menting on them. Sometimes the effect isbathetic, as when he ends an account ofone man's heartbreak by asserting that his"emotions were certainly intense." Moreoften, however, his comments are diverting,as when he says that "America's ManifestDestiny included men lying with men,women, and children, and men and women



lying with animals." This is certainly the mostpleasant news ever received about ManifestDestiny. American jingoism will also get aboost from the news that fellatio appearsfirst to have become popular in the US.

In a note just after the title page, Katz saysthat his research is ongoing. This bookappears to be ongoing as well: not muchhas been done to shape it, and there aremoments of repetition. Some readers maysee the untidiness of Love Stories as a fault,but surely everyone will be fascinated bythe stories themselves.

The Taste of the PastHasia R. DinerLower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place inAmerica. Princeton UP $37.50David E. SuttonRemembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Foodand Memory. Berg $23.00Reviewed by Norman Rawin

In Lower East Side Memories, Hasia Dinerexamines the iconic—some might even saysacred—blocks of Manhattan bounded inthe north by Fourteenth Street, in the southby Fulton, in the west by Broadway, and inthe east by the East River. The unique statusof the Lower East Side, she argues, is itsability to "stand for Jewish authenticity inAmerica, for a moment in time when undi-luted eastern European Jewish culturethrobbed in America." By examining thephotographs of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine,the music of Mickey Katz, the novels ofHenry Roth and Abraham Cahan, she con-veys the contrast between Manhattan's his-torical downtown and the mythical"epicenter of American Jewish memory"that this area has become. For historicalaccuracy, Diner reminds us of the impor-tance of Jewish immigration to other cen-tres, such as Chicago and Philadelphia, andof the less documented Jewish enclaves inNew York City, such as Brownsville and

early Harlem. She reminds us, too, ofastounding data connected with immigra-tion patterns of the last 125 years: between1885 and 1899, 471,010 Jews disembarked atNew York City; while by 1910, over 500,000Jews lived in the area we now think of asthe Lower East Side. (In these early yearsthe neighbourhood was simply calleddowntown, or the ghetto, or the east side.)

Diner argues that it was partly the weightof numbers that lent the Lower East Side itscentrality in modern Jewish identity. Butshe points to other interesting factors aswell. These include the sheer concentrationof these numbers that created a blurring ofpublic and private space, an antic streetscene and public activity that "forced mento deal with each other." With this cameuncommon institutional diversity, and aplethora of journalistic and literary venues,including the Yiddish press and theatre.

Diner is most interested in postwar devel-opments that were at least as important asthe actual cultural ferment of the LowerEast Side's heyday. With Europe's Jewishworld largely destroyed, the Lower EastSide came to be seen by American Jews as aremaining source of authentic Jewish expe-rience. Not only could those who had leftfor the suburbs return, usually for dinner,to "consume authenticity," but they couldalso more easily consume "the texts ofLower East Side memory" in their subur-ban living rooms. Mickey Katz on DelanceyStreet, Roth's recovered novel of a down-town childhood: these became the artifactsof what Diner suggests has become

a sacred narrative—the Lower East Sideas an all-Jewish neighborhood, a whollyeastern European one, as a poor and iso-lated neighborhood where the sensesoperated at a sharper level than else-where where other Jews lived and wherethe Lower East Side's residents latermoved.

Some Canadian readers may find the iconicquality of this narrative familiar. The idea


of New York as a "Jewish City" has beenechoed, though less stridently, in Montrealand Winnipeg. In the case of the former,the old Jewish "ghetto" has even passed itsmoniker to the less culturally boundedMcGill student ghetto.

But the most peculiar aspect of Canadianexperience regarding the iconic quality ofurban Jewish space is the relative amnesiasurrounding what was once Toronto'sJewish downtown, centred on SpadinaAvenue. There, just before World War II,I.B. Singer found a recreated eastEuropean-style precinct, so reminiscent ofWarsaw it made him uncomfortable:

I was told that Spadina Avenue was thecenter of Yiddishism in Toronto, andthere we went. I again strolled onKrochmalna Street—the same shabbybuildings, the same pushcarts and ven-dors of half-rotten fruit, the familiarsmells of the sewer, soup kitchens,freshly baked bagels, smoke from thechimneys.

Encountering Singer's portrait of Spadinais startling, because of how little of what itportrays has survived, as Diner puts it, as a"landscape of memory."

Hasia Diner's Lower East Side Memoriesfocuses on textual memories—in book,photographic and filmic form—withoutcommenting on the intersection betweenfood and memory. It is the latter relation-ship that is examined in David Sutton'sRemembrance of Repasts: An Anthropologyof Food and Memory. Sutton's ethnographicstudy draws a portrait of the Greek islandof Kalymnos, where, he argues, memory offood has contributed greatly to local iden-tity. One of the issues he aims to explore isthe way "the flux of new foods provide athreat to certain types of memories rootedin local knowledge." The Kalymnian diet,like the rest of the world's, has been influ-enced since World War II by Americanfood, along with a standardization of foodsthrough global markets. The impact of

these changes, according to the KalymniansSutton interviews, is the introduction offood "unable to produce memories andidentities." One of Sutton's intervieweescalls such food "insipid," in a translation ofthe Greek used to describe it.

Sutton acknowledges a lack of theoreticalwork on the relationship between foodand memory, especially in the Americancontext. He makes use of Greek literatureto expand his frame of reference, and ifRemembrance of Repasts has a key theoreti-cal influence, it is Mary Douglas's work onfood and ritual. A somewhat undevelopedtheme is the relationship between food andtraumatic memory, which Sutton acknowl-edges has been explored in studies of theGerman concentration camps of WorldWar II. For Kalymnians, trauma means thelong Italian occupation of the Dodecanese,ending in 1942. But Sutton does not exam-ine in detail the way hunger, loss, and a cer-tain nostalgia for prewar innocence affectpeople's attention to such Kalymnian con-cerns as meals, hospitality, shopping, andfood preparation.

Food memories on Kalymnos, like theProustian madeleine, open a conduit to thepast and its sensations. Sutton acknowl-edges that in forgetting there is freedom,but his book means to make us considerthe cost of such freedom.

Things Made BeautifulMarilyn Dumontgreen girl dreams Mountains. Oolichan $14.95Heather HarrisRainbow Dancer. Caitlin $14.95Reviewed by Renée Huían

These two collections, one by a criticallyacclaimed poet and the other by a relativelynew voice in contemporary poetry, offerpoetry that is passionate and provocative.Marilyn Dumont's new collection green girldreams Mountains, which won the 2002



Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetryfrom the Writer's Guild of Alberta, is hersecond book and follows on the success ofher first collection, A Really Good BrownGirl, which won the Gerald LampertMemorial Award from the League ofCanadian Poets in 1997. Rainbow Dancer isthe first book of poetry by Heather Harris,a professor of Native Studies and anthro-pologist at the University of NorthernBritish Columbia.

In his introduction, Ward Churchilldescribes Rainbow Dancer US "first of all anhonouring song—a testimony to and aprayer for ancestors whose struggles againstthe predatory madness of an invading cul-ture have been carried from generation togeneration over five centuries." Throughoutthe collection, the common struggles ofeach generation are expressed thematicallyby uniting images of past and present. In"Warriors with Briefcases," the ancestorswho fought at battles such as Batoche areunited with those who fight today "againstthe unlimited resources / coercive forces /of industry, finance and state." In this poem,as in others, Harris confronts the socialstructures that support the continued colo-nization of modern indigenous people.These structures provide common groundfor the many peoples depicted in placesranging from Edmonton to Inuvik, Alaskato Hawaii. The pattern found in "FamiliarCoyote," which unites Cree, Métis, andGitxsan ancestors in a personal reflection onhistory and culture, can be found in otherpoems as well. The placing of the personalwithin collective experience enriches thepoetic voice while short, rhythmic phrasesand fragmentary syntax give the poems awarm, conversational tone. Many of thepoems also assert symbolic land claims:"Deh Cho" renames the river using theoriginal Dene; "Tahltan" celebrates life onthe land; "Squatters on Their Own Land"denounces the situation of the landless. Inother poems, cultural difference is a theme.

The speaker sometimes addresses a particu-lar interlocutor or a character created torepresent ignorance or prejudice by voicingviews that stand in the way of reconcilia-tion and justice. In such poems, Harrisseems to address the so-called white reader,to "talk out" to cultural outsiders by dis-pelling misconceptions and stereotypes.For example, in the poem "Indian Humour,"differences between what "white people" and"Indians" find funny dismantles the imageof the stolid Native. Perhaps written beforehumour became the topic of discussion it isthese days, "Indian Humour" exemplifiesthe rhetorical tone that ranges from ironicto sarcastic, critical to enraged, illustrativeto didactic. This tendency towards explana-tion, even instruction, performs a variationon Harris's description of "Indian Art" as"useful things made beautiful," for eachpoem serves a useful purpose. While theopposition between "white" and "Indian"risks reproducing racial stereotypes, it rep-resents the discourse that has defined bothidentities and recognizes the pervasivenessof structures that continue to shape cross-cultural relations. Given the difficult issuesHarris addresses in Rainbow Dancer, it isinteresting that the last poem in the collectionleaves the reader with the image of a womanwho amazes all by dancing on hot coals.

The poems in Marilyn Dumont's greengirl dreams Mountains are beautiful andmoving. Intelligent and witty rather thanmerely clever, Dumont's poetry is a wel-come relief from the performativity ofmuch contemporary poetry. Dumont'spoetics embraces image, sound, and figure.The first section, "Homeground," literallygrounds the collection in intense experi-ences. Memory and loss are at the heart ofthese poems in which the speaker revisitschildhood and family relationships withparent figures playing the central role.Some search for the father; others elegizethe mother who has recently died and whois a creative force behind the poems. In


"kindling," the mother's handwriting leavesthe speaker "broken twigs on the page / askindling / for me"; in "yellow bird," herbody ". . . diffused her limbs, leaving / a pileof twigs to start a fire." These hard edgedimages are typical of the precision ofD umont's figurative language. In fact,many of the poetic features of A ReallyGood Brown Girl are sharpened: the alliter ative, enjambed lines and prose rhythmpatterns, the strong, assured poetic voice,the artfully crafted figurative language, andthe tough, clear images. In "Oak," as a cou ple spreads the tablecloth for the eveningmeal, holding a corner of the clothbecomes a way of touching. Like the beau tiful old hands described in "Wild Berries,"from A Really Good Brown Girl, the handsexpress intimacy and comfort as the coupleprepare to share their meal.

"Oak" is found in "City View," the secondsection of the collection. Each poem takesas its title the name of a street in downtownVancouver. The poems in this section aretaut with the tension of life in a city wherethe distance between rich and poor isimmense. Each street is described throughthick imagery: "stick figures hunt / morerock, powder, or dust" ("Powell"), "workersare dragging home to supper and the cafesare empty" ("N apier"), "the city hums andsirens and farts on religiously" ("Hastings").Yet, no facile solutions or glib pronounce ments undermine the poems' power, andthe speaker does not cultivate the role ofvoyeur or tourist. Instead, the speaker ismost often a witness who is also caught upin the life of the city until, in the final poem,the "I " and the city have become one.

Urban scenes are surrounded by rural,prairie, or mountain landscapes in the sec tions called "Gazing G round" and "MineFields." The prairie landscape painted inthese poems is some of the most beautifulanywhere. Perhaps the tenderness withwhich it is treated reflects the green timethat the prairie represents, a time of youth,

innocence, and energy in the speaker'smemory; a more experienced voiceaddresses grown up lovers with sensuallyrics. As memory pulls the speakertowards the prairie, an interior landscapeinhabited by past selves, family, and friendsemerges. In the title poem, "green girldreams mountains," the young girl dreamsdreams that are "verdant / monumental"that push towards the coastal mountainsevoked in many of the other poems. Thelast section, "Among the Word Animals,"addresses, among other things, the socialsignificance of language, a theme exploredin Really Good Brown Girl. Language andpower are figured in the English teacherbreaking the language of Cree, Sioux, andSaulteaux students like wild horses in "StrawBoss" and in "the green eyed / verbs andauburn adjectives" and "the tight assed /suffixes" in "blond syllables." These hard hitting poems add an edge to those thatconsider the poet's craft, such as "up/ write,"and those that explore the shape and soundsof language, such as "sound shard." A motiflinking the human voice to the sound ofwind instruments and bird and animalsongs shapes the final section's poetics andseems to comment on as it concludes thecollection. The final poem in the collection,"throatsong for the four leggeds," beginswith the sounds of creatures calling to oneanother as the speaker gives thanks andcelebrates by reconnecting poetic form tobreath, to life, and to all living things.

Lovely Damn ThingsEkbert Faas, with M aria TrombaccoRobert Creeley: A Biography. McGill UP $49.95.

Reviewed by Christoph Irmscher

Any biography of a living author thatbegins with the thinly veiled suggestionthat the subject has been less than coopera tive and then goes on to celebrate one of hisformer wives is bound to make the most



trusting reader suspicious. Ann MacKinnondivorced Robert Creeley in 1956, and not soamicably, as Faas tells us. Nevertheless, thelast one hundred pages of Robert Creeleyconsist of extracts from MacKinnon's 1944diary and her work-in-progress memoir, ano-holds-barred look at the poet and her-self—from their first encounter aroundChristmas at Harvard, when Creeley stoodnext to her, caroling with his "thin dismalhesitant voice," to the mess that their mar-riage became as the growing family moved,in frantic pursuit of a congenial as well ascheap writing environment for Creeley,from Cape Cod and New Hampshire tosouthern France to Mallorca.

Faas's biography, which concentrates onthe first forty years of Creeley's life andbreaks off rather abruptly with the failureof his second marriage to Bobbie LouiseHall, comes to us highly recommended as a"new kind of life-writing." Here, as Faasexplains in his preface, the biographerturns into the biographee, "impersonatingvoices, senses of humour, ironies, sarcasms,hypocrisies." The result is remarkable, andone easily forgets that Faas's intense book isin fact based on a rather simple and famil-iar premise—namely that, at least in thecase of the poet, a wild life generates betterworks. Le style est l'homme même, and thenicer the man the duller the poetry. ForFaas, the philandering, boozing, drug-abusing and wife-beating Creeley, whilepersonally none too appealing, was a moreinteresting writer than the older, wiser butalso wearier sage mumbling "post middle-age" platitudes about life and death. Theone more recent photograph of Creeley inthe book shows the bespectacled, grey-bearded writer in a sensible sweater,proudly cradling his new baby, his face, likethat of his (third) wife, turned upward as ifwaiting for inspiration from above—a farcry from the youthful rebel Faas prefers.Ironically, since Faas has so much to sayabout Creeley's life (the fights, the insults

and brawls, the shattered glass and brokenhopes), he has no time left to persuade thereader that he is right about the poet's work.

A good example of the strengths andweaknesses of Faas's approach is perhapshis recreation of Creeley's encounter withPicasso in Aix on 14 July 1952. Walking pasta café, Creeley noticed a short man with hisyoung wife and small children, who wasstaring back at him. Only later did he realizethat he had seen Picasso. His eyes had beensuch "lovely damn things," Creeley toldCharles Olson, in a letter cited by Faas, thathe would never forget him: "It was damnwell worth all the christly hell of the pastyear, etc." A biographer less constrained byhis method and agenda would havedemonstrated why the seventy-year-oldPicasso, the virile father of several childrenand lover of many women who neverthelessfelt that his primary responsibility in lifewas to his art, would have seemed so attrac-tive to Creeley. Perhaps he would havecommented on the continuing importanceof Picasso in Creeley's poetry, so obvious,for example, in the playfully titled recentpoem "PP" (1997), where Picasso, his "baldball" of a head solid as a rock, appears asthe poet's "beau idéal": "He painted pictures /of a dislocatedness, lived in its fiction, / hadno art apart from the distraction." But Faasis not really interested in continuities; in hiswriting he wants to evoke the moment inits full concreteness and complexity. And sohe puts the reader right there with Creeleywalking along the dusty Cour Mirabeau inAix, during a heat wave, at a time whenMacKinnon, bowed by previous miscar-riages, was worrying about the imminentbirth of their third child while the poethimself fretted that "nothing at all" seemedto be happening in his creative life. Withminimal intervention on Faas's part, thereader realizes how important, how trulyepiphanic this fleeting vision of the painterhad been for Creeley.

On rare occasions, Faas takes a deep


breath and steps back from his tale to offermore general insights, but then his editori-alizing on Creeley's character deficienciesseems supererogatory, as do his specula-tions on the role of "destiny" in Creeley'slife. Faas's writing works best when it iscumulative rather than interpretive. In thechapter about Creeley's unhappy teachingstint in Vancouver, for example, he lets theinvectives, freely quoted or paraphrasedfrom the poet's letters, pile up: GeorgeBowering is "a sort of malevolent UriahHeep," Al Purdy "a nervous animal caughtin a small trap," and Phyllis Webb "a bitch."By the time the reader has reached the oneimportant exception on the dismal list,Irving Layton ("impossible not to like"),she already knows that the Canadian par-adise has soured for Creeley. For most ofFaas's book, in an astonishing act of verbalmimicry, the biographer's voice blends withthat of his subject, in an extended exampleof free indirect style: "Was it safe?"; "Washe suffering from cancer?"; "Would theyhave anything left to say to each other?"Faas doesn't just surmise, on the basis ofthe documents he has gathered and theinterviews he has conducted, what Creeleycould have thought and felt in any givensituation but tells us what the very wordswere that the poet did use then, consciouslyor not. Such ventriloquizing is not limitedto the book's protagonist; Faas easily slipsinto the minds, or holds the pens, ofCreeley's friends and disciples ("Howwould a man whose writing could causesuch turmoil in your brain affect you inperson?") and troubled wives ("Would shehave to give him shots?").

Truth be told, this procedure is not quiteso innovative as the book's jacket wouldhave us believe. Richard Ellmann, too,wanted us to experience the "movementswithin [Joyce's] mind," and Paul Mariani,in his 1981 biography of William CarlosWilliams, liberally sprinkled his narrativewith the quaint expletives also relished by

Faas, such as "goddamn," "what the hell"and "by God," to give us an authentic pieceof Williams's mind and, as it were, morethan a piece of his speech. But if Faas'sbook does not really differ from previousbiographies in kind, it certainly trumpsthem in degree. On this reader at least,Faas's insistent masking as Creeley had amesmerizing effect. I enjoyed this book, asI would a well-written novel, realizing atthe same time that Robert Creeley, inmethod and intent, takes us back to theolden days, when anxious biographersstayed clear of any discussions of their sub-ject's works while literary critics, as WalterJackson Bate once lamented, shrank from"the rich and embarrassing complexities ofwhat it meant to be a living person." Butperhaps this biography is also a kind oflast-ditch effort to assert, in its fullest form,a genre that, in the age of cell phones, e-mail, and instant messaging, will soon haveto change considerably or else die out. Atone point, Faas mentions Creeley's acquisi-tion, in 1962, of not one but two telephones,which "consigned to oblivion" much ofwhat had previously appeared in the letters.An unhappy development for the biogra-pher, to be sure, but perhaps not so terriblefor a poet who claims that he has alwayswanted to let the words of his poetry speakfor themselves.

Varied VoicesMark FrutkinIron Mountain. Beach Holme $12.95Tammy ArmstrongBogman's Music. Anvil $13.95Karen ConnellyGrace and Poison. Turnstone $18.95Reviewed by Brook Houglum

Silence is a critical element in MarkFrutkin's work; his succinct poems areinfused with images of echo and the whitespace of the page, both acting as invitations



for meditation on the lines. Drawing fromTaoist and Buddhist poetic discourse,Frutkin emphasizes the transience andcyclical experience of a "traveler unknown"through deceptively simple constructions.He employs repetition throughout the col-lection in audible oral layers, rhymingopposing concepts of emptiness and pres-ence, and continually re-inscribing thereader's path with tools for the journey,such as in a sequence that details travels toIron Mountain through a labyrinth of vari-ous mountains and clouds in search of thegoddess of compassion. Frutkin composesprimarily in the rhythm of complete sen-tences. He develops images of naturethroughout the poems with the precision ofetchings on glass, while resisting inventivesyntax or sound play. Several poems rely onphrases verging on the redundant, such as"deep with meaning" or "deep as themoon." Ultimately, Iron Mountain reads asa guide for rumination, a companion textfor stations of pilgrimage, and presents thereader with probing observations of "a pre-sent so fleeting / a bull so alive / it hardlyexists at all." Frutkin's poems are strongestwhen they employ such subtle directivesand clarity of line.

Tammy Armstrong's first collection ofpoems establishes a strong lyrical (predom-inantly first-person) voice that transformsbiography through illumination of thecracks, crags, and roughness of humanrelationships and experience. Mornings of"sky hyacinth" are juxtaposed with depic-tions of strained family and romantic rela-tionships and an undercurrent of violence.Part one of Bogmans Music recalls a tensechildhood in a series of memory poems;the narrator of these lines constructs arural working-class household throughvignettes such as a Sunday morning ritualof killing fowl for dinner, demonstratingtension, terror, and tough grace. The adultspeaker in parts two and three sustains thistense tone and incisive scrutiny of the land-

scape of human relationships. Armstrong'sfacility with the languages of several geo-graphies is clear as she guides us from Baliwhere the "sea slid into a recurringthought" to Vancouver, a "sin city beneathwind cripple." A language of "aphid-bittenhonesty" attains its greatest level of suc-cinctness in poems that stretch the lyricnarrative form. "Asleep in Palm Desert," aprose poem, portrays a desert geographywhere babies' cries pierce the "bird call airlike shredded silver." The longer poems"Rhume-Lines" and "Fragmentation of aMoment: Buck Shot" depict loss with stun-ning, chilling specificity. Armstrong's bookcloses with a line of tribute to her mother,who "would only love small things now," aphrase that could serve as a manifesto forthe poet's detailed handling of language inthe well-sculpted poems of her solid debut.

Karen Connelly's Grace and Poison com-bines The Small Words in My Body (1990)and The Disorder of Love (1997). Connelly'sopening essay constructs a helpful trajectoryof her journeys, including leaving home atage fifteen, studying in Thailand at age sev-enteen, and travelling later to Europe, trav-els which delineated and became thelanguage of her poetics. It is clear thatSmall Words, written during Connelly'steens, marks the poetry of a young artist asit gestures with stark honesty toward themore precise fusion of images found inDisorder. Lines like "we love sadly, wild, /like a long storm that will not break" andtight descriptions of mornings that "offerthirsty roaches on the facecloth" are tem-pered in the earlier book by identity ques-tions aware of their own nascence such as"I am confused, still the child / stretching athin arm up the wall, / unable to reach thelight." Small Words is useful as a measure ofthe poet's growth, an entrance answered bythe mature, precise language of Disorder.

Poems in this second book radiate withenergy and facility of expression. Connelly'sfluidity of line reinvigorates the concept of


"free verse," and the confluence of tangibleand surreal images infuses the stanzas withthe varied intonation of a musical score. In"Ephemeroptera," a poem regarding theaftermath of a relationship, mayfliesbecome fantastical "miniature dragons"brought to earth in exacting imagery ofemotional carnage as the speaker's "nakedfeet crushed thousands on the roads."Connelly's poems in Disorder are sustainedby metaphors that excavate old grounduntil it reveals new truths, finely tuned as"light, who writes her own chant in pass-ing, / the way brilliance deepens as it fades."She writes with pleasure and precision.

Baroness ElsaIrene GammelBaroness Elsa. Gender, Dada and EverydayModernity. A Cultural Biography. MIT Pus $21.95

Reviewed by Rosmarin Heidenreich

With her shaved and lacquered head,tomato-can brassieres, teaspoon earringsand coal scuttle hats, Baroness Elsa vonFreytag-Loringhofen made an indelibleimpression when she burst upon the artscene in New York's Greenwich Village.That she was a powerful influence on theAmerican modernist avant-garde of theearly twentieth century is well documented:she was promoted by Margaret Andersonand Jane Heap, editors of the Little Review,who published Elsa's sexually explicit andesoterically encoded poems in spite ofopposition. Other supporters were writersas diverse as Djuna Barnes and ErnestHemingway. Berenice Abbott and Man Rayproduced photographic portraits of Elsa inher stunning costumes; Ezra Pound praised"Elsa Kassandra, 'the baroness / von Freytag,'"in his Cantos, and William Carlos Williamssaid he drank "pure water from her spirit."Thanks to Irene Gammel's splendid "cul-tural biography," the role of the extraordi-

nary baroness in exploding the variousboundaries that defined art, writing, andgender at the beginning of the twentiethcentury can now be clearly understood andfully appreciated.

Although she is often designated as "themother of dada" in America, the Baroness'sdada inventions actually preceded the firstdada performances in Zurich's CaféVoltaire. Gammel makes a strong case thatwith her aggressive sexuality and playful,witty sculptures, assemblages, and poetrythe Baroness was actually subverting theconventions of high modernism upon theproponents of which she exerted such apowerful influence. With the androgynoussexual identity she exhibited in her "perfor-mances," in her use of found objects, and inher cryptic, cross-cultural allusiveness,Gammel sees the Baroness rather as a pre-cursor of postmodernism, transgressing theestablished borders of gender and genre,life and art.

In Canadian studies, "Baroness Elsa"became known in the 1970s when DouglasO. Spettigue identified her as the one-timewife of the Canadian novelist FrederickPhilip Grove, who, in his former identity asthe German writer and translator Felix PaulGrève, had written two romans à clefdescribing the extraordinary life of the for-mer Else Plötz. As Gammel recounts it,Else's life was as remarkable as her ground-breaking art.

Born in the Baltic coastal town ofSwinemünde, Else escaped her problematicfamily by running away to Berlin, whereshe lived a colourful bohemian life as amodel and chorus girl before entering theartistic circle around art nouveau artistMelchior Lechter.

Grève first met Else in a Munich salon,when she was married to the art nouveauarchitect August Endell, a marriage whichsoon ended due to Greve's and Else's pas-sionate affair. Despairing of ever being ableto escape crushing debts and grinding



poverty, Grève faked a suicide in 1909 andwent to America, where Else joined him ayear later. Little was known about the cou-ple's life together in the new world untilKlaus Martens's recent biographicalresearch on Grève alias Grove unearthed awealth of new material that sheds somelight on this period. We know that in 1911Greve/Grove abandoned Else (whom hehad married while they were still inGermany) in Kentucky, while he himselfturned up in Manitoba. A year later, Elsesettled in New York.

Intimately connected with the avant-garde circles of Munich and Berlin, exposedto the major contemporary literary move-ments of all of Europe through her liaisonwith Greve/Grove, Else, who had begunwriting herself, would seem to have beenwell equipped to make her way in NewYork's literary world. But she had dauntinghandicaps: "I spoke no English, had noworking skills, was arrogant, and was con-sidered crazy," she says in marginal notesmade on one of her sheets of poetry.Abandoned and destitute, she married theGerman Baron von Freytag-Loringhofen,who soon returned to Germany to serve asan officer in World War I, committing sui-cide after the war.

In spite of his title, the Baron had beendestitute, and "the Baroness," as she wasnow known, subsisted on the meagre feesshe earned from modelling in art studiosand on hand-outs from artists and sup-porters. The originality and intensity of herown art may have won her a prominentplace in the memoirs of many famousartists and writers as well as the undisputedtitle of New York dada queen, but it did notearn her any money. When many of herAmerican benefactors established them-selves in Europe, her poverty became des-perate. A campaign for donations fromartists and writers enabled her to return toEurope. She went first to Berlin and then toParis, where she died in her apartment of

gas asphyxiation, possibly a suicide.Gammers meticulously researched and

eloquently written book not only chroni-cles the vie mouvementée of the Baronessherself, but also defines and interconnectsthe diverse art movements on both sides ofthe Atlantic that gave rise to contemporarypostmodernism. For Canadian readers,given Elsa's one-time relationship withFrederick Philip Grove, the book offers theadded bonus of illuminating the life andEuropean milieu of one of Canada's mostfamous and mysterious novelists.

Worlds of DifferenceDilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ed.Alternative Modernities. Duke UP us $21.95Lynda Jessup, ed.Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policingthe Boundaries of Modernity. U of Toronto P$29.95Reviewed by John Xiros Cooper

Studies of artistic modernism, culturalmodernity, ideas of the modern, and, mostinterestingly, resistance to these are prolif-erating quickly now that the materialprocesses of modernization have becomenothing less than global destiny. As DilipParameshwar Gaonkar notes in his intro-duction to Alternative Modernities, "Bornin and of the West some centuries ago,modernity is now everywhere." CocksureWestern journalists like Thomas Friedmanin the New York Times or Marcus Gee inToronto's Globe and Mail might holler intriumph "Amen to that!" but all twenty-seven essays in these two books quietly begto differ.

Gaonkar's collection considers modernityin terms of the dialectic of accommodationand resistance which the phrase "alterna-tive modernities" implies. The contributorsto Antimodernism and Artistic Experience,edited by Lynda Jessup, examine varieties ofresistance to the "onslaught of the modern


world," an antimodernism described by thehistorian T. F. Jackson Lears as "the recoilfrom an 'overcivilised' modern existence tomore intense forms of physical and spiri-tual existence." Both of these books offervaluable contributions to the study ofmodernity and its discontents in specificnational or cultural sites.

Gaonkar's introduction is especially goodin sketching some of the theories anddebates about modernism and modernitythat have animated the topic for more thana century. The essays discuss the notion of"alternative modernities" both within andagainst the dominant Western "tradition ofreflection" that runs from Marx and Weber,Baudelaire and Benjamin, to Habermas andFoucault. He identifies Arjun Appaduraiand Paul Gilroy as key contemporary schol-ars who have contributed significantly tothe development of an "alternative moder-nities" perspective.

To them one can now add the dozen or soscholars assembled by Goankar. Most of theessays examine modernity from specificnational and cultural sites and most workfrom the same premise. We learn, onceagain, that modernity always eludes univer-salist definition. It is, instead, composed bythe endless pluralism of differing culturalexperiences. These differences form a kindof invisible planet that exerts gravitationalinfluence, but the planet itself cannot bespotted. All the instruments agree it isthere, but no one has ever seen it whole.

The modernization process, on the otherhand, is flagrantly visible. The techno-economic juggernaut may affect differentsocieties and cultures in different ways andthe alert scholar must think his or herway through to those differences, but, likethe eighteen-wheeler hurtling down thehighway, modernization pursues a logic allits own.

We are taken to many places aroundthe globe: settler-dominated Australia,nineteenth-century Russia, Shanghai in the

1930s, Calcutta, Zanzibar, Trinidad, Mexico,and so on. But for all the talk about cul-tural difference, we always seem to findthe same unsettling fallout everywhere:modernity, that is the experience of mod-ern times, is inevitably swathed in paradox,ambivalence, anxiety, shifting perspectives,and nostalgia. Meanwhile we all seem toget run over anyway. Despite this dismay-ing perception, the essays are very good,with plenty of new information and pene-trating analysis. Dipesh Chakrabarty on thetradition of adda in Calcutta (a kind of pre-industrial chat room) is richly detailed andcogently presented. Leo Ou-fan Lee's studyof Shanghai (the "Paris of Asia") in the1930s makes excellent use of Benjamin'swork on Baudelaire and the Arcades pro-ject. Claudio Lomntiz on the social con-struction of "citizenship" in Mexico is alsoworthy of note. In fact, it is unfair to singleout three essays without saying that all ofthem are worth reading. Gaonkar has ren-dered valuable service in bringing thesescholars together in a single volume. Asmost of them are based in Chicago, either atthe University of Chicago or Northwestern,one might even speak of the book as defin-ing a Chicago School of "alternativemodernities" studies.

Antimodernism and Artistic Experienceprimarily features the work of Canadian-based scholars whose studies in alternativemodernities go under the name of anti-modernism. This refers to a (what else?)paradoxical "structure of feeling" (Jessupcites Raymond Williams in this connec-tion): a pervasive sense of loss of traditionalculture combined with an antitheticalenthusiasm for material progress and mod-ernization. As ambivalent and Janus-facedas antimodernism is said to be (no surprisehere), the essays grapple mainly with loss as"a critique of the modern." Jessup sees thisas "a perceived lack in the present manifest-ing itself not only in a sense of alienation, butalso in a longing for the types of physical or



spiritual experience embodied in Utopianfutures and imagined pasts." As a result, theantimodernist artist attempts to recover theauthentic immediacies of folk, primitive, ortraditional pre-industrial cultures. The all-too-predictable failure to connect withthem hardly needs any emphasis.

Whereas Alternative Modernities takes ina wider social and cultural perspective,Antimodernism and Artistic Experience, asthe title suggest, narrows the focus to art,making links between the formal arts of themetropolis and a variety of so-called primi-tive communities, cultures, and folk, naive,and primitive art practices. Inevitably thatstandard artist-intruder Paul Gauguin inthe South Pacific comes in for extendedattention. But so do many other artists andartistic communities, including many inCanada. These latter essays are particularlyvaluable because so much of the materialthey deal with will be new to the generalreader interested in modernism. Specialistsin anthropology, folk culture, or art historymay disagree, but I found them very useful.Ruth Phillips on the performatives ofnative-icity alone is worth the price ofadmission. Gerta Moray on Emily Carr's"traffic" in native images and Ian McKay'sstudy of the "handicrafts" phenomenon inNova Scotia add considerably to the empir-ical data available to researchers.

There is a great deal of social, cultural,and historical material in both books thatmakes them important additions to schol-arship, but I must confess that, at the endof the day, I was left a little confused aboutcertain larger issues. For example, the con-tributors to the Jessup book do not seem tome to theorize the concept of a folk culturewith sufficient clarity. When do the day-to-day routines and rituals of a people becomea "folk culture"? We need to be told moreforcefully that the idea of a "folk culture"only comes into being with modernity andthat modernity precedes, as it were, thearrival of the folk idea. Ditto for notions of

the primitive. The longing for authenticityand immediacy through the imaginaryrecuperation of a primordial moment ofbeing and/in culture, then, must becomethe fruitless (or perhaps compensatory)pursuit of a mirage. How then does onedistinguish, more than by simple assertion,the delicate recuperative strategies of thecosmopolitan artist-intruder from theimplacable logic of modernization's charg-ing lorry?

This is certainly a point that needs to befront and centre when discussing the workof European artists in contact with nativetraditions, Paul Gauguin or Emily Carr. Buta certain residue ofthat longing and nostal-gia from a hundred years ago persists evenamong the scholars who are trying tofathom the phenomenon today. The out-break of political sentimentality in a num-ber of places in both books, like, say, at theend of Gerta Moray's piece on Carr orThomas McCarthy's politely well-meaningbut ineffectual attempt to reconcile what hecalls cosmopolitan unity (is there any morediverse and fractured site on earth than themodern cosmopolis?) and national diver-sity, are cases in point.

The problem in dealing with alternativemodernities or antimodernism is that old-fashioned modernity and modernism werethemselves historically constituted as alter-natives, as counter-cultural strategies rightfrom the start. Were they forms of resistanceagainst the taking off of modernization inthe nineteenth and early twentieth cen-turies, or were they, perhaps unwittingly,the decorative side of the very material andcommercial progress they appeared tooppose? Gaonkar seems conscious of this inhis introduction, although it is a dilemmathat needs more extensive scrutiny than hegives it. Is Shazia Sikander's reworking ofimages from one of the great artistic tradi-tions of the world, classical Indo-Persianminiature painting, an "alternative"modernity, or is her supposed "go [ing]

136 Canadian Literature 1S01 Spring 2004

beyond" the astonishing refinement of, say,the sixteenth-century Mughal master, Abu'lHasan, just one more hood ornament togive the Mack truck an indigenousmakeover? As Sikander notes about hermotivations in the interview with HomiBhabha included in Gaonkar's book, "Thedistinctions do get confused." Indeed.

Queer and NowTerry Goldie, ed.In a Queer Country: Gay and Lesbian Studies inthe Canadian Context. Arsenal Pulp P $23.95Reviewed by Stephen Guy-Bray

This book comes out of the "Queer Nation?"conference held at York University in 1996.The essays here, still recognizable as confer-ence papers, represent a range of topics incontemporary Canadian culture. An obvi-ous effort has been made to produce a rep-resentative sample of Canadian queerscholarship, and the book is thus likely toappeal to scholars in a number of disci-plines. In a Queer Country could, in fact,serve as a course textbook.

Goldie claims that these are "extended andupdated versions" of the conference papers,but in several cases a good deal more exten-sion was required. This is particularly thecase with Gary Kinsman's "ChallengingCanadian and Queer Nationalisms."Kinsman really needs a whole book todevelop his sophisticated and persuasivearguments; as he only takes twenty pages(not counting notes and bibliography), theresult is rather exhausting, especially forthose not used to the rather freneticapproach to citation favoured in the socialsciences. Similarly, Wesley Crichlow'sanalysis in his "Buller Men and BattyBwoys: Hidden Men in Toronto and HalifaxBlack Communities" would also have bene-fited from a good deal more space. On theother hand, both Andrew Lesk (on JohnGlassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse) and

Gordon Brent Ingram (on Wreck Beach)get amazing amounts done in very littlespace. Ingram's article—personal, political,geographical, sophisticated, and illus-trated—is the strongest in the book: I couldhave read it all day.

One of the unifying factors in the book isa concern, observable in almost all of thearticles, with questions of what makes anation or a community. Many of the writ-ers here make valuable contributions todebates on both personal and civic identity.Of course, these issues are of especialimportance to queers, who are as a rule stillbrought up to be heterosexual and who willhave other possible identities as well. Theresulting tension is most perceptively con-fronted by Pauline Greenhill, who discussesfestivals in Winnipeg, by Zoe Newman,who tackles bisexuality, by bj wray, wholooks at this conflict on the national level inher discussion of Shawna Dempsey andLorri Millan's "The Lesbian National ParkRangers," and by Crichlow.

A less pleasing unifying factor in the bookis a rather cavalier attitude toward history.Although none of these essays is historicalin the purist sense, almost all deal with his-tory in some sense—usually a superficialone. This is particularly true of ElainePigeon's essay on Hosanna, which beginswith a breathless characterization of theplay's historical context. Similarly cursoryuses of history can be found in most of theessays, however. The contributors shouldhave been encouraged (or forced) to developthis aspect of their arguments when theyextended their conference papers.

The "Queer Nation?" conference wasorganized by Goldie, who tells us in hisintroduction that he "wanted to do some-thing new, to assemble a national meetingof those who wished to find the queer sideof Canadian studies." Judging by this vol-ume, Canadian studies—at least in itsqueer form—is overwhelmingly sociologi-cal, more interested in film than in litera-



ture and in the city rather than the country,primarily concerned with the last twenty orthirty years, and dominated by Goldie, whocontributes an introduction, the first article(really a second introduction), and aninterview with Lynn Fernie. I point to thesethings not primarily to criticize the book,but in the hope that other scholars will seekto discuss different queer Canadas—a hopethat would surely be shared by the editorand the contributors.

Fantasy's TricksterHiromi GotoThe Kappa Child. Red Deer P $18.95Reviewed by Marilyn Iwama

The Kappa Child is a beautiful book.Recognized for its design by the BookPublishers Association of Alberta, the coverfeatures the elusive image of a kappa shim-mering among green and gold blades ofrice. The novel also received the JamesTiptree Prize for having expanded genderroles in science fiction and fantasy. Expectthe "unreal" then—a book that opens yetwider the door to a room of "spoken andunspoken tales" that Hiromi Goto exploredin her earlier novel, A Chorus of Mushrooms.In many respects, Goto's approach to storyin The Kappa Child remains constant: chal-lenge stereotypical notions of race and gen-der, invoke myth, emphasize the impossibilityof translation, and suggest worlds thatalternate between the "real" and "fantastic."

Until recently, fiction by CanadianNikkei, or those of Japanese descent, haslargely concerned itself with constructingtextual identities against "mainstream"ideas of what constitutes a JapaneseCanadian. The Kappa Child makes a liter-ary u-turn. Without surrendering thestruggle with these familiar generalizations,Goto also engages with stereotypes that herNikkei literary forebears constructed, inparticular renaming the haven of home and

family, and the "good wife, wise mother"model of Japanese and Nikkei womanhood.

She tells several stories to enact thisrenaming. The anonymous narrator's abu-sive father moves his family from the coastof British Columbia to fulfill his dream ofgrowing rice on the Alberta prairie. Inscenes reminiscent of the beet fields in JoyKogawa's Obasan, the child narrator tries tomake meaning of and endure this folly bysearching out parallels in Laura IngallsWilder's idyllic Little House on the Prairie.The narrator's mother, Emiko, is so unableto protect her daughters or herself thatabduction by aliens is her only escape. Gotoreverses the idea of the impure, unsafe soto(outside) and the safety and purity of uchi(inside). Home is a defiled, dangerousplace; the best Emiko's children can sayabout it is that it is "not outside."

Interspersed with the family narrative is achronicle of the narrator's adult adven-tures. The character is a complete inversionof the highly (hetero)sexed exotic Asianfemale figure. Her job is corralling waywardshopping carts in an old Palm dairy van,clad always in the pyjamas and housecoatthat best accommodate her square form,with its "big-boned arms and daikon legs."Cruising the Calgary urban range, unableto proclaim her feelings for any woman, thenarrator finds release and, ultimately, her-self in the arms of her own alien "stranger."

Although the novel invokes variousmythological creatures, the kappa is thecentral one. Kappa are green, child-sizedtrickster creatures, whose heads are toppedwith a bowl-shaped hollow filled withwater. Kappa feed on cucumbers and blood(often via the anus of their prey). They arecapable of raping women and may chal-lenge humans to sumo matches. Politenessis the kappa's ultimate undoing: trick thekappa into bowing, thus spilling its water,and its powers are lost.

Goto introduces just enough of the kappamyth for readers to appreciate the kappa-


esque pregnancy of her narrator. Minus anymedical confirmation or remembered sex-ual encounter, the narrator's craving forJapanese cucumbers and movement withinher body convince her that she is pregnant.

Goto offers a series of denouements.Emiko finds love with Janice, her swagger-ing, cursing, nisei neighbour. The father,after severe correction by the narrator, atleast manages a life of solitude. Even themost damaged of the sisters emerges as ahappy, successful adult. To the narratorfalls the task of embodying and enablingeach of these resolutions. While she neverdelivers a baby, the narrator nonethelessgives birth to an actualized self. The sun-bonneted kappa/Laura child, the cart han-dler with a make-over, the daughter whodares to challenge her father, the honestlover—all finally meet in an economicalmultiparous event as the narrator emerges,a person she "never imagined."

Transformation in The Kappa Childoccurs through a series of confrontations,rejections, and réintégrations, much likethe experiences of immigrants in the "new"land. As a writer without familial roots inprewar Canadian society, Goto engageswith a national discourse that no longerspeaks in terms of "the yellow peril." She is,therefore, "free" to engage with a moresophisticated racialization than Kogawa orTakashima or Kitagawa (via Miki) did inthe 1970s and 1980s.

Goto's acknowledgement of earlier Nikkeiwriters and themes is obvious in The KappaChild. Still, I am disappointed that shedecided on such a heavy-handed approach.The extremity of oppositional discourse inThe Kappa Child burdens it at times withexcessive repetition and caricature, evenbeyond the typology of myth. Goto seemsunconvinced that readers will connect herstory with the irreverent, scatologicalaspects of Japanese mythology, or recognizeits departure from both the establishedNikkei lyric and heroic tales. This concern

is unfortunate and warranted. In a nationonly recently able to acknowledge them asloyal citizens, Canadian Nikkei—and theirstories—may not yet be quite enough "likeus" to enjoy freely the liberty of fantasy.

Loss and LongingDavid HelwigThe Time of Her Life. Goose Lane $22.95Michael RedhillMartin Sloane. Doubleday Canada $29.95Carol BruneauPurple for Sky. Cormorant $29.95Reviewed by Eric Henderson

Women are central in these three novels,each of which focuses on the theme of loss.David Helwig's The Time of Her Lifeapproaches loss as an existential humancondition; Michael Redhill's Martin Sloaneprobes the psychological scarring andrecovery from loss; of the three novels,however, Carol Bruneau's Purple for Skymost clearly embraces the liberating possi-bility of restitution and reconnection.

On the surface, The Time of Her Life,Helwig's sixteenth work of fiction, is themost conventional and least ambitious. Thenarrative relates the story of Jean, whogrows up in Belleville, Ontario, during theprohibition era, travels to the United Statesto pursue an acting career, marries a Frenchcount and, after the devastation of WorldWar II, returns to Canada, where she diesalone and unknown. One of the novel'scharacters is a photographer, and Jeanspends much of her professional life infront of the camera lens. Characteristically,Helwig's technique is to present a sequenceof jarringly disconnected scenes that unfoldchronologically. The sharply drawn butunstable images of place and time serve tocontextualize the main character, to defineher selfhood at a given moment. ThoughHelwig's refusal to move beyond "the timeof her life" into an exploration of Jean's



psychological complexity is inevitable, per-haps, given his reliance on the scenic andthe literal, it is not without risks: there areonly so many times we need to know that"Jean did what was necessary" or "Jean didas she was told" before we come to see heras a woman defined by her disengagement.

Yet by remaining consistently true topoint of view and technique, Helwig allowsa portrait of a heroine to finally emerge. AsJean deals with successive losses, shebecomes defined less and less by time andplace and more by her capacity to registerpain and suffering and to persevere in spiteof life's inevitable erasure. With this capac-ity, Jean assumes a larger and paradoxicallyenduring presence in our minds; herdiminishing becomes Helwig's resolute cel-ebration of her having lived. Helwig'saccomplishment is the way he compels usto admire and mourn a woman whoseinner depths are seldom revealed—indeed,for much of the novel, scarcely even enter-tained.

Poet-playwright Michael Redhill's firstnovel is a work as finely and complexlywrought as the "bereft little worlds" ofMartin Sloane, the creator of miniatureglass boxes containing found objects tanta-lizingly arranged to embody the artist's past(Sloane's art is based on the works ofAmerican collagist Joseph Cornell). UpstateNew York student Jolene Iolas accidentallydiscovers one of Martin's enigmatic boxeson display at a Toronto gallery during aclass field trip, becomes obsessed by thework, then by the Irish-Canadian artisthimself, luring him to her college andbecoming his lover. Martin, twenty-fiveyears Jolene's senior, continues to live inToronto, visiting Jolene on weekends forthree years before his mysterious disap-pearance. Not surprisingly, Jolene is leftwith an enormous gap in her life, whicheventually ends her career as a collegeteacher and her friendship with her room-mate Molly, who refuses to return Jolene's

desperate phone calls. But ten years later,with her life partly restored and living inToronto, Jolene is beckoned to Ireland byMolly, who has discovered Martin's boxesin a Dublin gallery. The "trail" leads themto a Dublin house of two reclusive sisters(one of whom is Martin's abandonedelderly wife). Retracing Martin's steps as aboy when his family moved to Galway,Jolene meets Martin's father, also estrangedfrom Martin (though the father, in thiscase, has done the abandoning) and pathet-ically attempting to forge a tenuous con-nection by clumsily reproducing his son'sart for sale in Dublin.

Martin Sloane is a disquieting novel ofpsychological dependency, focusing on thecomplex, though not always convincing,love triangle involving the narrator, herartist-lover, and Molly, whom Martin andJolene entertain the day Martin vanishes.Molly's determination to seek redemptionfor a brief flirtation with Martin (which shebelieves was responsible for the latter'sdeparture) in light of the many betrayals—conscious and unconscious—in the bookseems implausible. But the novel is reallyless about relationships than about thecapacity for relationships to turn intodestructive repositories of guilt and obses-sion that erode lives even as they are dis-torted by time and, sometimes, by art.Martin Sloane continually challenges ourconception of the source of art and thepower of memory, and the dependency ofboth on illusion and fabrication.

Throughout, the astonishing seamless-ness of Redhill's design creates a multi-lay-ered novel that incorporates perspectiveson the past and present and prohibits clo-sure. Obsessed with Martin's past, as if thisknowledge could provide clues to his disap-pearance, Jolene slowly undergoes theprocess of self-recovery: as Jolene reassem-bles fragments of Martin's past (becoming akind of miniaturist herself) she increas-ingly confronts her own past. At such


points of convergence as Jolene's memoryof her visit to her family home, itself a siteof absence and paternal abandonment,Redhill's prose eloquently negotiates thedelicate balance between raw memory andthe power to synthesize and transformexperience.

Purple for Sky, Bruneau's engaging firstnovel, chronicles the lives of three genera tions of women over the span of more thana century. The narratives are complexlyinterwoven, like the threads of the crazyquilt created by the first of these women,Euphemia, who is thirteen years old whenher large family immigrates to Nova Scotia.Effie marries Silas Lewis, whose parents runthe village store and whose mother's reli gious and domestic fervor introduces Effieto a new life, but one which threatens tostifle her spirit, until the appearance of achildhood love recalls sexual desire. Effie'snarrative takes the form of journal entriesto her dead sister Fanny. The journal andits confessions are discovered by Effie'solder child, Ruby, but it is Lucinda, theabandoned daughter of Ruby's younger sis ter, who has the potential to realize thekind of resolve expressed at the end ofEffie's narrative : "Things to look forwardto in my next life: 1) No feeding. No roasts,absolutely no pies. No cracked hands frompeeling potatoes. 2) No washing. N o dishes,no soap scum or wet cuffs. 3) N o clothes tohang out. 4) No clothes to bring in. 5) Noironing. 6) No sewing, no m en din g. . . Noregrets." One of the novel's weaknesses isthat Effie's voice here does not really ringtrue as that of a feminist prototype; it ismost authentic when it speaks from thedepths of repression and regret, rather thanwhen it openly challenges conventionalgender roles.

Born after the much earlier death of a son(the childbirth scene is one of the mostmemorable in the novel), Ruby embodiesand lives out the negative potential that, forEffie, marks the life of service and subordi

nation. But, in her own way, Ruby, thoughstifled, is an admirable character. Sheendures a marriage of betrayal, adoptingLucinda, her younger sister's child, andrunning the family store prudently beforesuccumbing to Alzheimer's disease and thediscovery, on reading her mother's journal,of her illegitimacy. It is Ruby, victim ofboth the past and future, who destroys thequilt. Although it is the symbol of Effie'srepressed individuality and creativity, thequilt's destruction does not signal the tri umph of the rigid past, for Lucinda is ableto redeem the quilt's symbolic qualities, totransmute feminine artistry into femininelife. Lucinda has some of her aunt Ruby'ssense of duty, but more of her grandmoth er's potential for sexual expression, andher narrative reveals her awakening, in hermid fifties, to her sexual identity. UnlikeRuby, Lucinda is not prepared to acceptonly what she is given; comically honestwith herself and her desires, she hesitatesbut, in the end, affirms the necessity ofstepping outside family and material oblig ation to probe her limits for vital, trulyhuman relationships.

Seams of LanguageGerald HillThe Man from Saskatchewan. Coteau $12.95

Elizabeth Philips Blue with Blood in It. Coteau $12.95

Russell ThorntonThe Fifth Window. Thistledown $12.95

Reviewed by Bert Almon

A poetry collection entitled The Man fromSaskatchewan sets up expectations: thereader assumes that the poetry will be stud ded with the word "prairie" and thatimages of sun and wind will abound. Theexpectations are increased by CourtneyMilne's striking cover photograph of a verylong human shadow cast over a texture ofdried and cracked mud, a picture from his



W. 0. Mitchell Country. But the photo ispart of the postmodern subtlety of thebook, for the shadow is clearly the photog-rapher's, which literally creates a reflexivestance, a portrait of an artist creating art,and the visual mosaic of the cracked sur-face is more interesting for its compositionthan for its prairie subject matter. Hill'sbook has the predictable prairie poems,concentrated in the last two sequences, buthe goes beyond recording prairie life. Onesequence is a tribute to Robert Kroetsch'sStone Hammer Poems and the other (thetitle sequence) has the obligatory poemsabout hockey and prairie baseball games.But like Kroetsch, Hill is concerned withthe structure and point of view and often"bares the device" in a Russian Formalistway, letting us know that he is not merelyan observer of landscape. Rather, he is thecontrolling figure in the setting, which hecreates as he observes it. The first poem inthe book, "A Poetic," undercuts the notionthat it is enough to reflect reality uncriti-cally: he begins with a prose paragraph:"Much is said about place or voice or storyas if a poem were a town on the Trans-CanadaHighway or a simple man shouting from atree or a continuous passage of words...."The succeeding sections, "Town," "Man"and "Word" demolish this idea. The "Town"is a place where poetry walks the side streets;the "Man" utters an empty parenthesis; and"Word" presents an ordinary rhubarb plantin a set of witty images. The rhubarb plant,we are told, grows next to the home "Grace"next door, whose name is probed for itssweetness, and the poet concludes, "I leavelife in a small town, / the webbed hands ofrhubarb / dishing out the sun." A rhubarbplant is, in John Bunyan's phrase, graceabounding.

The best work in the book is "Life as aVisual Man," a sequence about a painter,which carries out a sophisticated inquiryinto the nature of representation. Thepainter himself becomes a "painted man"

quite literally when he tries to paint him-self. Hill probes at the relationship betweenpainted image and the word, which paintsimages in a different way. He also has somefine love poems, anti-love poems in a way,in his "No Way to Talk of Love." He misfiresoccasionally, as in his poems about the ter-ribly limited life of a very ordinary charac-ter called Spike: the pathos aimed at neverquite comes off. His set of poems abouteyes—false eyes, snake eyes, wanderingeyes—picks at the seams of representationin a way that, without seeming derivative,evokes Kroetsch. Hill has waited sixteenyears to publish his second book (Heartwoodappeared in 1985). He is now writing at amuch higher level. We should hope that thethird book appears with less delay.

Elizabeth Philips calls Andrew Marvell tomind: the great English poet used gardensas a symbolic locale in several of his finestpoems. The garden is an interface of thereal and the mythical, of nature and order,of immediacy and memory. Some of thegardens she describes seem literal, plantedwith seeds out of some of those seed cata-logues which Robert Kroetsch made us allso aware of as a Canadian institution. Atother times she creates a bush garden, aplace where the blueberries are wild, notcultivated (usually the Qu'Appelle Valley),and the gentians have "a blue with blood init." In one of the best poems, "The Clearing,"a pregnant pioneer woman pauses in herhousework to watch a bear grazing onberries, a spot of time where the sight ofanother creature "eats her loneliness."

Philips also brings the garden of Edeninto her work, but transformed in subtleways. In "The Garden, Remembered," theEve and Adam figures are not quite theBiblical ones: the poet describes a male fig-ure "discoursing" on hybrids, as if namingthe Creation were an academic lecture. HerEve is not concerned with theology butwith gardening and regrets that she did notbring any seed heads along. In "A Woman


Walking," the Eve character has a baby onher hip and a load of firewood on her headand the Adam is preoccupied with hiswalking stick; her "elegant gait" is dis-turbed by the thought that the staff willgive rise to terrible inventions. It mightseem that the old story of lost Eden hadbeen worked out, but Philips can revive it.Her book has other subjects: she writes afine monologue by a soldier who survivedD-Day, and her elegy for GwendolynMacEwen ("In This Country") is a rich anddisturbing work. The diversity and inter-textual qualities of this outstanding collec-tion are hard to suggest in a review.

Russell Thornton's book, The Fifth Window,suffers from prolixity. He almost alwayssays too much, and says it with adjectives,not often vivid ones. Sometimes the prolix-ity arises from a desire to write long, sinu-ous sentences drawn out of many lines, theMiltonic strategy, but too often the effect islost. He does have some good scenes ofGreece in the second part of his book, buteven in those the poems need compression.The best poems in his book are the unrhymedsonnets, "Lazarus's Songs to MaryMagdalene." The fourteen-line restrictionkeeps his point of view focused, and he hassome rich imaginings of the post-deathexperience of the man brought back to lifeby Jesus. And he is able to exploit the com-plex legend of Mary Magdalene at the sametime: the symbol of contemplation, thereformed prostitute endlessly weeping, theeyewitness of Christ's resurrection. Thepacing of his utterances is controlled by thefour, four, three, three stanza pattern: hehas important choices open to him aboutmaking each unit open or closed to the oneafter it. After so many centuries, the sonnetstill offers fine structural possibilities andThornton uses them well. Perhaps formalverse is a direction he should pursue.Hill and Philips make good use of formalfreedom, inventing patterns suitable foreach work.

Lyric DistancesMavis JonesHer Festival Clothes. McGill-Queen's UP $14.95Linda RogersRehearsing the Miracle. Poppy P n.p.Kathleen McCrackenA Geography of Souls. Thistledown P $14.95Reviewed by Susan Holbrook

In his Lyric/'Anti-lyric, Doug Barbour iden-tifies a "genial eclecticism" at play in con-temporary Canadian poetry. Agreeing withMarjorie Perloff that two discrepant aes-thetics emerged out of Modernism—onebuilding on the Symbolists and one arisingout of an experimental "poetics of indeter-minacy"—Barbour suggests we in Canadaembrace both. In my own writing andreading practices I think I'm fairly eclecticand also genial, but in the interests of chal-lenging the objective tenor with which wehabitually deliver the wildly subjectivegenre of the literary review, I admit to apreference for "indeterminacy," the dis-junctive or innovative. I want to orient myresponse to three books of poetry exempli-fying Perloff's other category, featuringwhat's come to be recognized as contempo-rary lyric, each poem adhering to all ormost of an inherited set of givens: anexpressive ego, brevity (usually one page),left-justified short lines, figurative lan-guage, a cadential epiphany. What interestsme are ways these lyric givens prove vari-ously productive and restrictive in theirmediation of thematic concerns commonto all three poets: distance and differenceboth within and between cultures.

The dust jacket of Mavis Jones's HerFestival Clothes promises "the secret knowl-edge of those who see but remain unseen."Thankfully the book doesn't deliver on thispromise, one that would be presumptuousgiven that much of Her Festival Clothes iscomposed in the mode of travel writing,with particular focus on colonial and post-



colonial India. In "Patiala," for instance, asecond-person voice positions the reader asa privileged visitor to a mansion in the titu-lar city, where "you" are unconscious of amanservant until the final lines, when "you"belatedly determine that the "pile of rags /on the floor is only the old servant, / rub-bing polish into the dark wood." While theindicting second person is an interestingstrategy, the ending rings trite. Perhaps theimposition of sentimentality comes intoplay because of the firm cadential endingassociated with the contemporary lyric. Thisrhythmic closure is not always a liability,however. Jones can deploy it with greatfinesse, as she does in "On the Antalya Road,"where the subject at the edge of action isthe speaker herself. She positions herself asa Western tourist in Turkey, observing hersurroundings, listening to another language,and concluding that here is "so much life /that is not mine." These lines are at oncemelancholic and celebratory and, thanks tothe lyric cadence, they continue to resonateas I proceed through the text.

Simile and metaphor appear to be derigueur figures of the contemporary lyric; agood trope is (figuratively speaking) thetriple Salchow of the poetic performance. Iwouldn't agree to a moratorium on similesand metaphors—I love a good Salchow—but they can prove distracting if overusedor sloppily executed. Jones's deployment offigures is uneven, unsurprising in a firstbook. She gets the ball rolling in the firstpoem with a simile for the perennialfavourite object of tropical language,"breasts," but at least she compares them tothe surprising "moths." By the time I got to"Shalimar Hotel," a third of the way throughthe book, I found myself elated to read "Itwas not falling water, / those notes from thegrand / piano [...]." It was not fallingwater! My relief indicated I'd read a few toomany ornamental figures. Unfortunately,"Shalimar Hotel" goes on to portray "Younggirls like orchids [...] their butterfly limbs

/ kneeling, as thin as stems." Remember myintroductory caveat; a reader with differentaesthetic proclivities might be disappointedthe notes aren't water and relieved the girlsare like orchids. What I find exciting inJones's book are her deviations from stan-dard lyric form. She experiments with anumber of different modes, voices, andcompositional strategies. "Shallal," forinstance, gives us startlingly fresh lines,unusual syntax. The poem is a form of ses-tina: the final word of each line has beenselected from a pool of six possibilities("seashells," "cedar," "berries," "breath,""night," "shallal"), so that each of the sevensix-line stanzas performs a shuffled versionof the first stanza's right hand margin. Thispoem illustrates the generative engine ofcompositional limits beyond the defaultlimits of the lyric. Testing these new limitsis half the pleasure, as Jones shifts "seashells" from noun to verb and substitutes"berries" with the homonymie "bury."

Linda Rogers, author of close to twodozen books, is practised at incorporatingfigurative language fluently. She'll usuallyforego "like" or "as" in favour of the moreslick "the way"; a daughter can find herfather "the way lambs in pastures find theirmothers." It's this kind of interpersonalexcursion and return that concerns Rogersin Rehearsing the Miracle. The distancesengaged here are those between friends,members of a family, the living and thedead, the conscious and unconscious self.Rogers's tracking of these spaces isexpressed in her signature voice, one thatblends the vernacular and the whimsical.This voice is particularly effective in hermore elegiac lyrics, introducing a sense ofjoy to meditations upon loss. The drawbackof this voice is that it ultimately produces ahomogeneity of tone, style, diction, so thatthis book lacks the sparkle and jazz ofJones's more ambitious, if uneven, collec-tion. Worth mentioning is the physicalbeauty of Rogers's book; Victoria's Poppy


Press has printed the illustrated Rehearsingthe Miracle by offset and letterpress, andincluded an original linocut signed byVilém Tefr. I would not write in the mar-gins of this book.

Kathleen McCracken's figurative languageis neither ornamental nor slickly intro-duced. A Geography of Souls exhibits anuncommon fusion of poetic, colloquial,incantatory, private and public languages,achieving a resonance marking the best ofwhat a lyric can do. Here we have evidenceofthat ineffable lifeblood of the lyric:music. McCracken's poems remind me ofGarcía Lorca's Poema del Cante Jondo intheir passion and precision, and in the waythat, by returning to certain touchstones,they refuse what Robert Kroetsch has calledthe lyric's "ferocious principles of closure."The word "distance," for instance, appearsin almost every poem of Part II, the termaccruing meaning with each new turn.McCracken explores distance and differ-ence, both personal and cultural, in anopen and respectful spirit. Other voices areintroduced into her poems, and her stanceas engaged witness is clear in lines such as"I listen to Mary Crow Dog / It's hard beingan Indian woman 11 listen to John Trudell /Duck Valley my Wounded Twopoems from the beginning of the book,"Skushno" and "Saudade," are inspired bythese untranslatable words (Russian andPortuguese, respectively), demonstratingMcCracken's keen awareness of the limits ofher own language. "Sky D aughter" is apoem in six parts chronicling a birth andcelebrating the cultural wisdom that sus tains the mother, who remembers,"Midwives, totems, shepherds and kings /out of a wilderness of affirmations / theyentered my bloodstream, there to see youthrough." These lines ring true in a bookthat manifests throughout McCracken'scommitment to honouring the myths, lan guages, and histories of the various culturesshe sounds.

Memory, Family, PoliticsTheresa KishkanSisters of Grass. Goose Lane $18.95

Elizabeth HaynesSpeak Mandarin Not Dialect. Thistledown $15.95

M.A.C. FarrantGirls around the House. Polestar $18.95

Maggie HelwigGravity Lets You Down. Oberon $14.95

Reviewed by Deborah Torkko

British Columbia's Theresa Kishkan haswritten six poetry collections, a book ofessays, and a novella prior to Sisters ofGrass, her first novel. The story is told fromthe point of view of Anna, a museum cura tor, whose task it is to catalogue "a packetof photographs;.. . letters bound withfaded rose coloured ribbon; a program fora concert; newspaper clippings; a copy ofCamera Work, dated Autumn, 1906; [and] alength of thin, hollow bone," items that oncebelonged to Margaret Stuart, a half Indianyoung woman who lived until the earlytwentieth century. As the novel unfolds,Anna works to construct Margaret's "lifefrom the small scraps of ephemera."

The problem for the museum curator isto make the invisible visible, to select fromthe homely objects the information thatdetermines the life of her subject and tohelp museum visitors "understand some thing about a community in a particulartime and place." As she works to delineateMargaret's life, Anna must also come toterms with her own questions: "H ow do Ibalance the composition of what might beexpected of a young woman of her timeand place with what might be remarkable?What have I learned from dreaming hershape into my life, and how can I knowwhat is memory and what is desire?"

In the process of reconstructingMargaret's life, Anna imagines howMargaret shuttles back and forth between



the two worlds bequeathed her by a Nativemother and Scottish-American father, afamily background that requires reconcilia-tion as she matures. Margaret wearstrousers, rides horses, and herds cattle onthe family ranch. She carries within her"the pungent smell of damp rocks and sage,the flowering buckwheat, the blackbird'sshrill whistle, the warmth of the sun." Sheknows "where to find lilies, where to findwild potatoes to bring back to her grand-mother's cabin." She is also instructed inthe ways of womanly propriety. Her father'ssister and mother, Aunt Elizabeth andGrandmother Stuart, frown uponMargaret's tomboyishness and teach herhow to cross-stitch, to stitch "a verse onfine linen with borders or bluebells andpurple English violets." The novel is asmuch about Anna's recollection of her past,however, as it is about Margaret Stuart'shistory. Anna's thoughts move back andforth between her girlhood summers in theNicola Valley and her present occupation asmuseum curator, "between the life of thebody and what remains."

Lac Le Jeune, Kamloops, the CanadianRockies, Mexico, China, India, andBudapest provide some of the geographicalsettings for the stories in Elizabeth Haynes'sSpeak Mandarin Not Dialect. This collec-tion explores the pretexts of memorythrough family relationships, travel, andlanguage, and the stories remind readersthat although we may think we are finishedwith the past, the past is never finishedwith us.

"Krishna saw the universe in his mother'sfather's mouth," "African SleepingSickness," "Harry's Orphan's," and "TheWeek She Was Zsuzsi" are stories that con-cern father-daughter relationships and aretold from the daughter's point of view.These relationships are often unfulfilled,bereft of heartfelt love and connection. In"The Week She Was Zsuzsi," Zsuzsi remem-bers her childhood and how her father

would stand out in the river and wait forher to swim towards him, how "[h]e'dstand out, way out it seemed, farther thanany of the other mothers or fathers, didn'topen his arms like them."

The title story, "Speak Mandarin notDialect," foregrounds how times and placesintersect in a kind of isobar of the emo-tional and physical present. Elly, the pro-tagonist, is travelling alone in China. Whileriding on a bus, Elly dozes off, and whenshe suddenly awakes, she has momentarilylost her bearings: "Where is she? On a road,trees, where? On a bus, WHERE? Home?Vancouver?... No. Singapore." Elly doesn'tneed to be half-awake to feel dislocated,however. When fully aware that she isswimming laps in her hotel's empty pool,she thinks she could be swimming else-where: "She's swimming, swimming LakeOntario, the English Channel, the SouthChina sea." For Elly, as for many ofHaynes's characters, present experiencesinvoke the past so acutely that space is suc-cessive—she moves from one geographicalviewpoint to another while remainingphysically stationary—and time is simulta-neous—for her the past and the presentflow together in successive moments.

Translated into English, "Pido la Palabra"means "seize the word," a title that remindsreaders of this story that "[w]hat is impor-tant in a culture is reflected in the lan-guage." The nameless protagonist "studyingSpanish at the Instituto Cultural inOaxaca" experiences first-hand that the"small, necessary words, survival words" oflanguage study fail to convey the nuances ofmeaning and context implicitly understoodby members of a cultural group. Robberyand rape and the manner in which thesecrimes are received by her Mexican friendsand Mexican authorities show the protago-nist that she needs to understand thebeliefs, assumptions, and perceptions ofMexicans from the standpoint of their cul-tural logic and not her own.


The problems of language that Haynes'sstories explore are not confined to cul-tural differences, however. The husbandin "Synapsing: Diary of Barbara EvelynDeChesnay" is unable to talk or write.The story is structured as a series of diaryentries that chronicle two weeks in Barbara'slife, beginning the day her husband suffersa stroke. The story is a meditation on lan-guage, on words and thought and theirconnections to the workings of memory:"Words without thought. Thought withoutwords. If the words don't come, are theythere? If we don't think in words, how dowe think? If there are no words, whatmakes memory?"

The protagonist in M.A.C. Farrant's Girlsaround the House is a writer whose wordsentertain by making the mundane memo-rable. This collection of linked short storiesis set in Sydney, a community on VancouverIsland. Farrant's stories are funny, oftenironically funny, and they entertain thereader with anecdotes of ordinary middle-aged parents and their ordinary adolescentchildren. Farrant renders comic the every-day banalities of family life. Nothing spectac-ular happens, and one doesn't need to livein Sydney to appreciate these stories.

Marion, the protagonist from whose pointof view these stories are told, is a writer,wife, mother, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law, neighbour, and family chauffeur whostruggles "to separate the writing self fromthe domestic self." "Holistic Ball of Wax"is a very funny tongue-in-cheek rejectionof the tenets of New Age Spiritualism.Serenity, wholeness, and nirvana are notfor Marion; she really likes "all this lovely,real-life neuroticism." Marion juggles thebewilderment and confusion of domesticlife with the impossible demands of writingand has reconciled herself to accept "thissplit because, somehow, each side nour-ishes the other."

In "Panellist School" Marion is on a two-month book tour in Australia where she is

also writer-in-residence at MacquarieUniversity. Despite the exotic location, aca-demic life in Australia is alarmingly famil-iar. She soon realizes that she didn't need totravel all the way "to the Southern Hemi-sphere . . . for the privilege of experiencingbewilderment, despair, confusion, hopeless-ness, dread and existential angst." Familylife in Sydney provided her all ofthat.

Mothers who live with adolescent daugh-ters will appreciate the ironic humour in"The Princess, the Queen & the WitheredKing: A Tale from Wit's End," a story thatuses fairy-tale narrative to examine theoften painful rivalry between mothers andadolescent daughters. The wicked queen ofthis story, driven to her wit's end, wouldput her self-absorbed, self-righteousPrincess to sleep in order to preserve for-ever her childhood sweetness. The princessin this story appears "beautiful and gor-geous," but at best, the Queen remindsmothers, the princess is only "wonderful intraining."

"Ritardando," the closing story, describesthe family celebration of Nana's eighty-sec-ond birthday. A musical term, ritardandomeans "becoming gradually slower," butMarion thinks of it as "a way of being pre-sent in the midst of things, a way of bothparticipating in and absorbing the scenebefore [her]." As both participant andobserver, Marion reconciles her writerlyself with her domestic self in a halcyonmoment of sacred ritual. Nana's birthdayparty is as much a tribute to her eighty-sec-ond year as it is an affirmation and celebra-tion of family solidarity.

Maggie Helwig's Gravity Lets You Downcollects vignettes, anecdotes, reportage,reviews, and stories about the gritty politi-cal realities that exist outside the safe shel-ter of family connectedness and belonging.Not one to shy away from dangeroustruths, Helwig invites readers into the dark-ness to see what it is like when we fall. Theauthor's political underpinnings are made



dear by the book's dedication "to thedemonstrators at the Santa Cruz cemetery,Dili, East Timor, 12 November 1991." Bleakand painful in their stark truthfulness,these narratives examine the imbricationsof political events and personal culpability.The narrator of "Transmissions" acknowl-edges that "even if I never knew anythingabout East Timor in my life, this twelve-year-old girl who was raped in prison isalso part of my life."

The collection deals with potentiallyexplosive issues ranging from religiousfaith, brutal political regimes and abuses ofpower, to events of civil protest. TheMorgenthaler Clinic bombings, the G-7Economic summit in Toronto, East Timor'sbrutal campaign against the indigenousTimorese, nuclear missile and chemicalweapons built in North America for war inthe Middle East—all are targets forHelwig's incisive narratives.

"Canadian Movies" is a series of vignettesloosely connected by the ruminations oftheir nameless narrator. A circus story, aGlobe and Mail excerpt about Canadianfilm-maker Claude Jutra, a brief blurbabout the physiology of Alzheimer's dis-ease, " [a] word about crazy people" com-prise this story. The story beginsrecounting a macabre story about a manwho eats the memory and motor centres ofhis brain and is carried away by two menwho shock each other with cattle prods.The complications of this story, and of allthe stories in this collection, are neverresolved because we can't "resolve things onpaper any more, because that is a lie."

Helwig's narratives rage against acts ofinhumanity, but the possibility of grace andredemption, however slight, lingers. "InByzantium" is a story for the city:"Toronto, New York, Rome and Byzantiumand Toronto." The narrative juxtaposes theByzantium idyll with Toronto street life.The biblical Mary is incarnated in Toronto'sMary the bag lady, combining divine

audacity and grace, reminding readers thatin cities everywhere the extraordinary pre-vails in the here and now.

Flattening Us UpRolf Lauter, ed.Jeff Wall: Figures & Places: Selected Works from1978-2000 Prestel $45.50Reviewed by Roger Seamon

Vancouver and Canada are more or lessimmune to the appeal of Jeff Wall, although(because?) his work is unabashedly high artand the most successful effort yet to makeserious photographs whose natural artisticcompanions are the canonical paintings ofwestern art history. That is quite anachievement whether you value the pic-tures or not, and, in the opening essay ofJeff Wall: Figures and Places, Jean-Christophe Amman, the curator of theexhibition for which this is the catalogue,does not hesitate to compare his discoveryof Wall to Vasari's story, in his canon- andlegend-making Lives of the Artists, ofCimabue's encounter with the youngGiotto. Only time will tell if that is preten-tious or prescient, but for now Wall has tobe reckoned with.

The exhibition was held at the FrankfurtMuseum für Moderne Kunst in 2001-2002.The reproductions are ample and good.Many works not in the show but discussedin the various texts are included, and so thevolume is, in effect, a miniaturized retro-spective. Textually, Figures and Places con-sists of a long essay by the editor, RolfLauter, a story by ítalo Calvino called "TheAdventure of a Photographer," whose rela-tionship to Wall's work is left to the readerto decide (it is about a man who scornsphotography only to become obsessed byit), essays by various hands on various top-ics, and some interviews with Wall. Thevolume ends with "A Brief Biography,"which is really a short list of where Wall


studied and worked, a list of works in thecatalogue, a list of exhibitions, and a"Selected Critical Writings and Interviews."The main weakness of the texts is that thereis a lot of murkiness, nonsense, and banal-ity. One early sentence can illustrate allthree: Wall's pictures "address the conceptof place in its manifold meanings as relat-ing to nature or society, and as one of theelements in that process of engenderingmemory which provides human beings andthe objects in their everyday lifeworld witha system of coordinates and contextualorganization." One needs to sift. Whatremains constitutes a good guide to themany uncertainties that surround Wall'swork. The main one concerns the attitudesexpressed in the pictures.

There is a consensus that Wall's picturesare "x-rays of the malaises [sic] of contem-porary civilization" in its capitalist form,and Wall himself has encouraged that view,as when he says that his purpose is "to liftthe veil a little on the objective misery ofsociety and the catastrophic operation of itslaw of value." But in the interviewsreprinted here he repeatedly takes that halfback. Jean-François Chevrier, looking foran interpretation of Insomnia, a picture inwhich a man lies sleepless beneath a tablein a meticulously recreated 1950s greenkitchen, quotes Maurice Blanchot on "Thehallucinatory heaviness of a sleeplessnight." But Wall doesn't buy it, and says,"the state of wakefulness, even of sleepless-ness, isn't necessarily negative," and "theman in Insomnia is at home, and he has ahome. He is comfortable enough in thehouse to wind up on the kitchen floor, andmaybe he'll fall asleep there." Do Wall'swords change how we see the picture? Youhave to look for yourself.

Lauter says of Citizen, a black and whitepicture of a man lying in a nondescriptstretch of grass in a park, that it shows the"dream-linked isolation of the individual,"and Chevrier sees it as an ironic comment,

because a citizen is an active entity. Wall,however, tells us, surprisingly, that"Sleeping in public without fear of your fel-low-citizens is a gesture about those fel-lows, and your relationship with them." Isthat disingenuous, or a clue to the mutedaffect in Wall's work? Wall chooses subjectsthat would, taken as documentary images,normally elicit reflexive indignation in hisliberal-left audience. But Wall would blockthat response and force reflection. "Therhetorical multi-culti propaganda is wayless interesting than the creóle of bad andnot-bad attitudes reflecting off each otherin actual American-type life." This satisfiesneither the triumphalist celebrator of capi-talist culture nor his radical opposition. Iam not sure Wall brings off this balancingact. The resulting flatness of affect is proba-bly not for most tastes, but it results fromthe deep ambivalence of the intelligentsiatoward our civilization that Wall attemptsto express, an ambivalence that is real andconsequential. Wall addresses the unhappi-ness of the witness, but he does not wantsimply to reinforce that unhappiness withmore documentary evidence: "We changeour relation to those afflictions in contem-plating them, making them objects of con-templation or dramatization, turning theminto pictures." The light boxes, the scale,the cinematic emphasis, and the digitizingare all part of Wall's worthy effort to makewhat are normally rhetorical documentsinto pictures, into art that forces unhappythought. For some that is anathema; forothers, myself included, it is a fact of life.



Screening the CensorsLeonard J. Leff and Jerold L. SimmonsThe Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship,and the Production Code. Rev. ed. UP of Kentuckyus $19.00Mark CohenCensorship in Canadian Literature. McGill-Queen's UP $55.00Reviewed by Paul Stuewe

Censorship issues are often debated at ethe-really high levels of abstraction, and sostudies that take a more nuts-and-boltsapproach to the censorship process arealways welcome. The Dame in the Kimonofocuses on the implementation of theProduction Code, Hollywood's 1930response to protests against the racy sexual-ity of films such as Black Paradise (whosestar revealed "all of her legs and 82 percentof everything else") and Paris (whereinsemi-nude chorus girls fled a theatre fire).Seeking to regulate themselves before pub-lic pressure forced government interven-tion, Hollywood's studio moguls created aProduction Code Administration thatattempted to balance the offended sensibili-ties of conservative religious and politicalgroups with the sex-sells-seats mentality ofavaricious film producers.

The Dame in the Kimono tells this story fromthe point of view of the Production CodeAdministration's day-to-day operations, andthis constitutes both its strength and its weak-ness. The negotiations between the PCAand filmmakers could be as dramatic as themovies that the process eventually sanc-tioned; Clark Gable's memorable "Frankly,my dear, I don't give a damn" in Gone withthe Wind, for example, was at one pointbowdlerized into "Frankly, I don't care"before the producers made other conces-sions that permitted its restoration. For allthe light that is cast on the PCA's activities,however, Dame's only perfunctory atten-tion to social context tends to reduce its

narrative to a clash of egos between censorsand censored. One also expects a certainamount of analysis and interpretation ofevidence in an academic-press title, andthis too is largely lacking in a volume thatwill certainly interest cinema buffs, but islikely to disappoint anyone looking for amore scholarly treatment of film censorship.

Censorship in Canadian Literature is anambitious attempt to combine close textualreading with a re-examination of conven-tional thinking about censorship, and theresults are decidedly mixed. Cohen definescensorship as "the exclusion of some dis-course as the result of a judgement by anauthoritative agent based on some ideolog-ical predisposition." Reconceptualizing cen-sorship as a form of judgement will,according to Cohen, downplay censorship'spejorative connotations, help us to recognizethat such judgements are an inescapablepart of our lives, and encourage us to con-centrate on how we can make "moreappropriate and constructive judgements."

This Enlightenment vision of competingideas settling their differences on the playingfields of rationality is certainly appealing,but unfortunately seems largely irrelevantto much of the discourse on censorshipissues. "Ideological predisposition," forexample, seems a rather tame descriptionof the passions expressed by pro- and anti-abortionists, or by conflicts over classroommaterial that offends some students andparents. In suggesting that such stronglyheld beliefs can readily be transmuted intophilosophical debating points, Cohenappears to be simplifying rather thanenriching our thinking about censorship, ashe articulates a position that would reducecomplex contextual backgrounds intoschematic outlines of adversarial argument.

Censorship in Canadian Literature'semphasis on making more satisfactoryjudgements also turns out to be involvedwith the problematic notion of essentialisttruth claims, as demonstrated in references


to "the errors of judgement in given casesof censorship," and the assertion that"some truths can be deemed stable enoughto be judged." Although Cohen's desire tomake better censorship decisions is laud-able, it is by no means clear that the wayforward lies in the direction of seekingtruth as the outcome of superior judge-ment. The thrust of much contemporaryliterary theory, in which abstract conceptssuch as truth are interrogated and destabi-lized from the point of view of their statusas social and linguistic constructs, suggeststhat there are other possibilities for a morenuanced treatment of censorship; regret-tably, such considerations do not informCohen's quest for the "'best' decisions to bemade in censorship conflicts."

Censorship in Canadian Literature alsopresents well-researched close readings oftexts by Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood,and Margaret Laurence that either have beensubject to censorial attack or respond to suchattacks. These three chapters explore theinterfaces between published text, authorialintention, and public reception from unusual,and largely productive, points of view thatwill make them essential reading for schol-ars specializing in these authors. TheFindley and Laurence chapters are rich withinsights into the background of The Warsand The Diviners, often based on archivalmaterial that will be unfamiliar to mostreaders. The chapter on Margaret Atwoodis largely devoted to abstracting her 1980-85views on censorship from work publishedduring that period, and is thus of somewhatlesser interest; in addition, it is burdened bythe assumption that Atwood's personalopinions can readily be inferred from thestatements of her fictional characters.

The following chapter, "The Inevitabilityof Censorship: Beatrice Culleton andMarlene NourbeSe Philip," has useful thingsto say about the ways in which gatekeeperstend to impose dominant cultural stan-dards on what are stigmatized as marginal

discourses, but it is marred by a major fac-tual oversight. As evidence of the "socio-cultural censorship" imposed on non-whitewriters Cohen cites Dionne Brand's indict-ment of "white supremacy" after failing towin the 1992 Governor General's Award forPoetry, but he neglects to mention thatBrand went on to win the GG in 1997. Amore nuanced treatment of gatekeepingwould note that the number of GGs won bynon-white writers, which from 1985 to 1998(a reasonable end-date for a work pub-lished in 2001) would include Fred Wah,Heather Spears, Rohinton Mistry, MichaelOndaatje, and Djanet Sears, suggests thatthere has been significant (but not neces-sarily sufficient) change in Canadian soci-ety's response to multicultural realities.

The concluding chapter reiterates thephilosophical speculations that precedeCohen's studies of particular authors, butdoes very little to tie argument and analysistogether. The disparity between the book'srarefied intellectual context and its fre-quently incisive discussions of specific casesof literary censorship compels this gate-keeper to pronounce the following judge-ment: Censorship in Canadian Literaturehas very little to contribute to general soci-etal discourse on censorship in Canada, butdoes provide much stimulating and oftengroundbreaking commentary as to howindividual Canadian authors have dealtwith efforts to censor their work.

On Brevity and BathingAlexandra LeggatPull Gently, Tear Here. Insomniac $19.95Gerald Lynch and Angela ArnoldRobbeson, eds.Dominant Impressions: Essays on the CanadianShort Story. U of Ottawa P $22.00Reviewed by Claire Wilkshire

Alexandra Leggat's Pull Gently, Tear Herepossesses a rare vitality: here is a collection

Canadian Literature 180 / Spring 2004


of bright new ideas. How well they worktogether is a matter for debate, but theinnovation makes itself felt.

Leggat's first work of fiction drawstogether thirty-four stories, many of themfewer than four pages long. Like many col-lections of short-shorts, it presents two sig-nificant problems. The first is the impressionof superficiality created when new subjectskeep popping up, only to disappear after afew minutes' reading. Stories appear slight;they leave the reader wanting more sub-stance. The second problem, repetition (oftheme, plot, style, character, technique),may not arise in a dozen stories but growsirksome in three times that many. There isnothing wrong with showing a series ofsnapshots, but the snapshots must differone from another. The stories in Pull fea-ture too many bars, cigarettes, ex-boyfriends, and lonely narrators. Theycontain too many short, bland sentences:"It's a cold November morning. The bus isalready ten minutes late on account of theweather." Stripped-down in this contextdoes not mean spare; it means dull.

Every now and then a story reveals itspromise, though, as when a narratorobserves a woman weeping: "I had to loveher when I saw her insides slide down hercheeks at dawn." The word "insides" isarresting; it challenges dullness in the waythe collection as a whole challenges genre.

As a group these stories feel unpolished,not quite fully formed. Perhaps the ques-tion reviewers should ask themselves is not"Are these stories entirely successful?" but"What will Leggat's writing look like in fiveyears?" The answer to that question mightprove very interesting.

Dominant Impressions: Essays on the Can-adian Short Story belongs to the Reappraisalsseries, critical anthologies collecting thework presented at the University of Ottawaduring annual symposia on Canadian liter-ature. This volume includes a fine intro-duction, which highlights key issues in

short story theory and provides in additionan excellent compact history of short fic-tion in English Canada. The aim of thisbook, the editors explain, is to counter thenotion that the story in Canada began inthe 1960s by "addressing the question:What are some of the literary and culturalantecedents of the Canadian short story?"Eleven scholarly articles respond to thisquestion, bookended by short essays byBonnie Burnard and Alistair MacLeod.

The articles collected here convey animpression of due diligence, of earnestslogging with a view to the creation of abroad socio-literary backdrop for the morerecent Canadian short story. They are rela-tively brief, and the topics often seemslight. As with Pull Gently, one keeps hop-ing for more substantial and as a (possible)result more engaging pieces. At times onefeels sorry for the critic who has had toread the source material. Jean Stringam'sstudy, "The Canadian Young Adult ShortStory of the Nineteenth Century," exploreshow contemporary attitudes about, forexample, gender and race are underlined orundermined in the fiction under considera-tion. Stringam tactfully points out some ofthe weaknesses of the stories she examines("Unfortunately Saunders is never subtle";"Mrs. Groser's story may never need to seethe light of day again.. ."). Quotations fromthe primary texts, too, make the storiessound unspeakably dull. The reader is tornbetween respect for Stringam's sense ofduty and wonder that anyone would wantto write on such a topic. Similar sentimentsmay be provoked by James Doyle's "'JustAbove the Breadline': Social(ist) Realism inCanadian Short Stories of the 1930s" andAlan Weiss's "Rediscovering the PopularCanadian Short Story."

Perhaps it is inexcusable to think of criti-cism in these terms. Some would argue thatit is the reader's responsibility to bringinterest to the text, that dullness is in theeye of the beholder, and maybe they are


right. This beholder, though, having longheld brevity in high regard, finds herselflonging, after these two books, for length,breadth and depth—not the splash of wateron the face but the long hot bath.

Academic DiscontentsShirley Geok lin Lim andM aria Herrera Sobek, eds.Power, Race and Gender in Academe: Strangers inthe Tower? Modern Language Association $37.50

Marjorie GarberAcademic Instincts. Princeton UP $14.95

Reviewed by G raham G ood

Strangers in the Tower : the subtitle strikesthe keynote for this collection of essaysabout the experiences of new faculty from"non traditional" backgrounds (i.e womenand racial or sexual preference minorities)in the American academy in the 1990s. Thefocus is not so much on hiring as on theyears immediately afterwards: the difficul ties with students and colleagues, the work load, and the struggle for tenure andpromotion. More than the statistical andbureaucratic material, the anecdotes of thewriters' personal experiences as junior teach ers form the main interest of the volume.

There is a wide range of complaints.Robyn Wiegman's "On Being Married to theInstitution" has the widest. It takes off froman inept speech at her tenure celebrationparty by a dean who offered a toast to thenewly promoted and their "marriage to theinstitution." To Wiegman this merely cappedthe years of subjection to "the oppressiveatmosphere of heterosexual marriage" inthe academy: among the objectionable"hetero familial" manifestations are e mailannouncements of births, marriages, anddeaths among the faculty and their families(is even death hetero familial?), discussionsof "kids'" activities at departmental recep tions, and photographs of children promi nently displayed on a dean's desk. Once,

Wiegman only narrowly escaped having tolisten to a brief piano recital by a facultyoffspring. Even in feminist circles she founddisagreeably familial talk of "sisterhood," aswell as the consideration of child careduties as a major factor in scheduling meet ings and events. It is hard to see how theseobjections could be met, short of banningfrom academe any reference to the faculty'sspouses or children, or any use of metaphorsderived from family relations. This courseof action would end up with the "construc tion" of a nonrelational, autonomous selfakin to that of the male bourgeois individ ualism so often decried by some feminists.

Many of the difficulties stem from theidea that minority faculty "represent" thedemographic group they come from. Thisleads, for example, to students who are alsofrom that group expecting special help andunderstanding. It also leads to an expecta tion that minority faculty will teach the lit erature produced by their particularminority. Thus Sheila Minn Hwang com plains, justifiably, that her specialization ineighteenth century British literature is con sidered anomalous, and that she is "type cast" by the assumption that she will be inwomen's studies or Asian American studies.Yet this assumption of "representativeness"seems to follow naturally from the idea thata particular group is "underrepresented."

The individual's identification with thegroup can be both asserted and denied atvarious times, producing a classic doublebind. If treated as an individual, the "non traditional" faculty member may complainthat her group identity (say, as a woman ofcolour) is being effaced. Carrie TiradoBramen calls this "individualizing thepolitical" in an unacceptable way. Yet beingidentified with one's group may be equallyresented as limiting and typecasting.Sandra G umming makes the complaintthat members of visible minorities are"repeatedly put into the impossible posi tion of becoming group representatives."



This may lead to an assertion of indepen-dence from the group, which is at othertimes seen as an ideologically suspect "indi-vidualizing."

To the question, "Do groups have com-mon characteristics?" the answer is some-times yes, sometimes no, with the choicegoverned mainly by strategic considera-tions. It may be advantageous at sometimes to claim that women are more nur-turing than men, or at other times todenounce the idea as an exploitive stereo-type. The same shifting evaluations areapplied to same-sex gatherings. Men areseen as isolated individualists, but whenthey get together they are guilty of exclu-sionary male bonding. However, if thesame-sex gatherings are female, they showwomen's superior relationship skills andwillingness to cooperate. Many of the writ-ers treat white males in much the same wayas they complain of being treated them-selves. Their view is homogenizing, stereo-typing, and uniformly negative. In thatsense, it is dehumanizing. No inkling ofwhat life on campus is like for white malefaculty members appears in this book.Hwang attributes "natural authority" towhite male professors, oblivious to thetrepidation with which many approachtheir colleagues and students, anxiouslytrying to do the right thing and fearful ofoffending.

Annette Kolodny's contribution, the onlyone from a senior academic, observes howwomen faculty "appear to be more cooper-ative and flexible in accepting courseassignments, while men declare themselveslimited to their specialty." She finds thatwomen and minority faculty do much morementoring than white males. They also havethe problem of "burdensome invitations"to represent their race or gender, thoughpresumably being uninvited would beexclusionary. Where two assistant profes-sors are married and have young children,usually it is the woman's book that gets left

unwritten, says Kolodny. And women areusually asked to take minutes at meetings.Kolodny describes how as a "feminist dean"she struggled to modify the tenure and pro-motion process to take account of thesefactors in ensuring equity for women andminorities, and these procedures are repro-duced in full in an appendix.

The new faculty members' problems arenot confined to colleagues, however. Theanti-authoritarian pedagogy of the "raced-gendered" classroom also has its problemswith students. Hwang puts it this way:"Though challenging 'natural' authoritycan lead to student empowerment, it canalso lead to a lack of respect for instruc-tors." The solution: "we must play a gameof claiming respect and refusing authorityat the same time." Of course, many stu-dents will fail to appreciate the distinctionand will be accused of disrespect when theythought they were challenging authority.But complaints about the new-styleinstructors in this collection are oftenturned back on the students, as reflectingthe students' inadequacies and elite classbackground.

Marjorie Garber's Academic Instinctsdeals more with issues of critical writingstyle and audience than with academicpower struggles. Her book is a collection ofthree essays in defence of academic profes-sionalism, interdisciplinarity, and special-ized terminology, yet paradoxically hertone is light, witty, and even "amateur" intone. The text reads like a set of public lec-tures, though no reference to such an ori-gin is made. She has no difficulty breakingdown the amateur/professional distinctionby showing how often "amateur" and "pro-fessional" critics have changed places.Many "public intellectuals" have gone intothe academy, and many academic stars havegone into journalism, in each case as areward of success. The second chapter con-cerns how mutual envy can grow betweenone discipline and its neighbours.


Interdisciplinarity can be accused (some-times by the same person) of lacking theprofessional standards fostered by the disci-plines, but also of adopting a barbarous,over-professionalized, and incomprehensi-ble writing style rather than the accessibleprose of the amateur critic. In the thirdchapter, Garber delves into changes ofmeaning in some of the key words in thedebate: she reminds us that "jargon" (a fre-quent reproach nowadays, but one with along history) originally was used of themeaningless chatter of birds.

Garber positions herself somewhat abovethe culture wars, commenting ironicallyabout how often the two sides echo eachother. This gives a serene, tranquil, andgood-humoured outlook on the binariesshe discusses, a kind of "I'm OK, you'reOK" approach very different from Power,Race and Gender in Academe. Garber rarelytouches on these contentious issues. The"hermeneutic of suspicion" would nodoubt attribute her sunny mood to herposition as William R. Kenan, Jr. Professorof English at Harvard University, but I forone appreciated her friendly tone and read-able prose style.

Mixed Bag for KidsAlison LohansIllus. Marilyn Mets and Peter LedwonWaiting for the Sun. Northern Lights $18.95Thelma SharpIllus. Georgia GrahamThe Saturday Appaloosa. Northern Lights $18.95Maggee Spicer and Richard ThompsonIllus. Kim LaFaveWe'll All Go Sailing. Fitzhenry and Whiteside $19.95Julie JohnstonIn Spite of Killer Bees. Tundra $17.95Reviewed by Lynn Wytenbroek

Picture books vary tremendously in quality.Of the four books under review, three arepicture books and they range from very

good to quite poor. Waiting for the Sun is avery nice book indeed. The text itself isfairly simple: a curious child impatientlywaits for the birth of a sibling. The girlwanders around the family farm, thinkingof all the things she wants to show the newbaby. It is aimed at quite young children,acquainting them with animals and land-scapes they may not have seen before, aswell as showing all the preparations andexcitement around the birth of a new fam-ily member. However, the illustrations inthis book are outstanding. Mets andLedwon have provided illustrations that areso realistic they look like photographstaken with a special lens that slightly blursparts of the picture, leaving the rest sharplyfocussed. In fact, there is no way to tellwhether or not the illustrations are pho-tographs, except for some of the back-grounds, which are obviously painted. Theillustrations are warm, full of rich coloursand meticulous detail. Faces are alive andthe child's curiosity and excitement arevividly portrayed.

Lafave's art in We'll All Go Sailing is, incontrast, cartoonish, but more like the oldsketchy cartoons of the sixties than hisusual fairly detailed style. Simple line draw-ings delineate bodies and facial expressionsfor the children or the sea creatures illus-trated. The children's eyes are nothing butopen circles with no indication of eyeballs,while mouths, noses, and ears are simplyslashes or semi-circles. The colours aredeep and intense, often in large blocks. Thesea is a different colour on almost everypage, with brightly coloured sea creatureswithin it. The colours assigned the sea crea-tures have no relation to their real colours.This is a great book to teach very youngchildren about colours, as that seems to bethe focus of the pictures and the simplerhyming text written by the husband-and-wife team of Spicer and Thompson.However, beyond use as a teaching tool forcolours, this book has little to recommend



it. While the book is fun, it offers nothingto really intrigue the young audience atwhich it is aimed.

The Saturday Appaloosa is a mixed bag.The story is simple, with lots of repetitionthat will engage a very young reader.However, the text is jerky and poorly writ-ten in places, with too many short sen-tences in a row, making it sound brusqueand fragmented. The story, about a girlwho always visits the horses next door withher grandmother, and who helps herfavourite horse, the Appaloosa, when it iscaught in barbed wire, is engaging enough,but the writing is uneven and dull inplaces. The art is also uneven. Some of thescenes are beautifully drawn; in particular,the wild flowers that border one side ofeach double page are exquisite. However,the horses are often drawn out of propor-tion, while the size of the horses is incon-sistent. The child's face changes throughoutthe story so that sometimes she looks asthough she is about four years old, andat other times, eight or nine. This bookhas promise, but neither art nor text isconsistently strong enough to fulfil thatpromise.

The one novel of this selection, Johnston'sIn Spite of Killer Bees, unfortunately has fewif any redeeming features. Written primar-ily from the point of view of fourteen-year-old Aggie Quade, the plot traces theexperiences of Aggie and her two sisters,seventeen-year-old Jeannie, and twenty-two-year-old Helen, as they come to termswith their inheritance from the grandfatherthey never met—a ramshackle old houseand a dotty great aunt in a ratherunfriendly small town. They must also dealwith the fact that there is no money and thediscovery that people are reluctant to hirethe older girls as their father was a con-victed thief. Furthermore, there is theunexpected and unannounced visit fromthe mother who deserted the family sixyears previously.

The constantly bickering sisters rapidlybecome boring as they fall into obviousstereotypes. Aggie, in many ways the leastinteresting of the three, is obsessed withvintage clothes and movies of any age. Shefrequently compares her life to a movie.Used more subtly and sparingly, this motifcould have been quite interesting, but itrapidly grows thin. The sisters' hatred foreach other, the town's suspicions about thethree, and the predictable story line aroundthe returning mother (who is really aftertheir inheritance and who leaves soon aftershe discovers there is absolutely nothingexcept the old and worthless house) rapidlybecome tedious because the first twothemes are worked to death and the last isso obvious. As Johnston has won awardsfor other books, this one is something of adisappointment.

Words for ContortionistDaniel Maclvor and Daniel BrooksMonster. Scirocco Drama $12.95Morwyn BrebnerMusic for Contortionist. Scirocco Drama $12.95Molly ThornThe Bush Ladies: In Their Own Words. SciroccoDrama $12.95Reviewed by Len Falkenstein

Monologue, self-exploration, and perfor-mance are central to each of these new,attractively designed titles from SciroccoDrama. All three of these plays present uswith the inherently dramatic and risky sce-nario of the lone artist engaged in high-stakes acts of unveiling and revelation. Soloacts have become increasingly common inCanadian theatre of late (for reasons thathave as much to do with theatre compa-nies' shrinking budgets as with any narcis-sistic proclivities of our theatre artists), andhere are three of the most notable recententries in the genre, all of them plays that,through a combination of imaginative for-


mal experimentation and accomplishedwriting, stretch and redefine the bound-aries of monologue performance.

Of the three, the only truly one-personplay is Monster, first performed in 1998, thelast installment in a trilogy of solo works(together with House and Here Lies Henry)conceived by the creative duo. (Maclvor isprimary author and performer whileBrooks is dramaturge and director.)Maclvor conjures numerous characters ofvarious ages, sexes, and walks of life overthe course of Monster, all without the aid ofprops or costumes and while remainingfixed at centre stage for virtually the entireplay. While in performance this economicalstaging showcased Maclvor's renowned vir-tuosity as a performer, it is also function-ally and metaphorically perfectly suited tothe Russian doll-like structure of the play,in which new stories and characters contin-ually explode from within other narratives,forcing the audience member/reader toconstantly reevaluate what within the playis fictional and what is "real."

At the core of the onion that is the play isthe story of a suburban teenager who tor-tures and murders his father over thecourse of a weekend, dismembering himpiece by piece with a hacksaw. Other char-acters whose stories are interwoven withthis one include the boy who lived nextdoor, who becomes dangerously obsessedwith the murder; a reformed alcoholic who,in one moment of visionary clarity, scriptsa film that includes a scenario very muchlike the murder, only to fall into disreputewhen accused of plagiarizing his plot fromthe unfinished work of a hack auteur, andthe original filmmaker himself, whorecounts how he refused to complete hisfilm upon being stricken by a crisis of con-science, the fear that "perhaps the evil thatexists in the world today has to do withmen like me making films like that." As theplay closes, he exhorts the audience to"turn your attention away from the dark-

ness and toward the good things." In itsquestioning of where responsibility forincomprehensibly evil acts lies and whetherart passively mirrors or actively influenceslife, Monster validates this simplistic moraldirective, but simultaneously questions ourability to adopt it by giving the final wordto Adam, the sinister m.c./narrator/guide,who revels in his self-defined role as a sym-bol of the urge toward violence that lurksin each of our dark hearts. The wit, power,and sheer theatrical inventiveness ofMonsters exploration of this shadowy psy-chological terrain confirm Brooks andMaclvor's reputation as one of the mostbrilliant creative teams in contemporaryCanadian theatre.

Music for Contortionist, first produced inJanuary 2000 and subsequently nominatedfor a pair of Dora Mavor Moore Awards,ventures into similar territory, albeitthrough more abstract means and with lesseasily definable motives and results. Themonologuist in this case is Valeska Gert, areal-life Weimar-era German cabaret artistwho served as Brebner's inspiration for theplay (at the suggestion of director EdaHolmes), but whose life and character areentirely fictionalized in the work. Valeska'sperformance consists of an unconventionalmonologue that comprises a disjointedstring of anecdotes and observations—alternately startling, disturbing, and darklyhumourous—interspersed with song,movement, and the bizarre reveriesequences she calls "trances." These trancesare Valeska's singular talent and horror,self-induced yet resisted. During them sheis joined on stage by a second actor, a con-tortionist whose movements harmonizewith her trance-dances as (quoting fromUrjo Kareda's introduction to the play) "atheatrical complement, a visual representa-tion of her own double-jointed imagina-tion." It is difficult for a reader to imaginehow this device would work on stage, butreviews of the production suggest that it



was greeted with some confusion.Notably, several seemingly puzzled

reviewers seized on the frequently malignedgenre of "performance art" to describe thework—more fittingly, perhaps, than theyrealized, for an exploration of the psycho-logical complexities that underscore the artof performance is a central preoccupationof the play. Valeska's monologue is drivenby that neurotic cocktail familiar to somany actors: the exhibitionistic urge tounveil and disclose all (an extreme case, shefrequently expresses a desire to be vivi-sected on stage) mated to an equally pow-erful disgust with the voyeuristic gaze ofthe audience. Valeska commands our atten-tion as a seductive and compelling pres-ence, and many of her reveries arebrilliantly and wildly imagined. It is equallyapparent, however, that beneath them liessome fairly pedestrian outrage regarding anumber of tried and true targets: the waygirls are socialized, perceptions of beautyand body image within our media culture,the place of the artist within a conformistsociety. Even if there is little novelty in hermessage, however, the originality ofBrebner's theatrical vision is worth theprice of admission.

Molly Thorn's The Bush Ladies: In TheirOwn Words, first produced in October 1998and subsequently revised and revived, ismonologue theatre crafted from journalentries, letters, and other writings of fourearly Canadian pioneer women: famoussisters Susanna Moodie (1803-1885) andCatharine Parr Traill (1802-1899), and thelesser-known Ann Langton (1804-1893) andAnna Brownell Jameson (1794-1860), eachof whom settled in or travelled throughcentral Canada in the 1830s. As her titlesuggests, Thorn did not write the play somuch as assemble it: all of the dialogue istaken verbatim from the women's extensivewritings, selected, edited, and arrangedthrough a process Thorn refers to as a dra-maturgical version of "cut-and-paste." The

result is a narrative that charts the women'sparallel, complementary, and sometimescontradictory experiences, from their ini-tial excitement and fears about Canadathrough the deprivations and tribulationsthey experience on arriving (observationsfrequently tinged with bitterness, loneli-ness, and homesickness) to their eventualresignation to life in Canada, culminatingin passionate protestations of love for theirnew home. Performed by four actors whoeach play one of the women and occasion-ally other Canucks, Yankees, and immigrants,the play is primarily an interweaving ofseparate and disconnected (albeit intrigu-ingly overlapping) monologue voices.Through some inventive editing and staging,Thorn also creates a number of charmingand dramatically well-realized interactivescenes that bring the women together,almost—but not entirely—in "conversa-tion" with one another. These scenes occa-sionally seem a trifle contrived, the seamsof the stitching used in a somewhat forcedattempt to create drama out of some rela-tively non-dramatic material showing a bitobviously. The style of the play also mightpotentially wear on the audience after awhile. But the delight and strength of thework lies in the engaging voices of the fourwomen and the fascinating insights—byturns funny, repellent, moving, and oftenstartlingly modern—they reveal aboutthemselves, the immigrant experience, andthe fraught process of becoming Canadian.


Picture BooksMaria Elena MaggiGloria Calderón, illus. Elisa Amado, trans.The Great Canoe: A Karina Legend. Douglas &Mclntyre, $15.95Adwoa BadoeBaba Wague Diakite, illus.The Pot of Wisdom: Ananse Stories. Douglas &Mclntyre, $19.95Celia Barker LottridgeJoanne Fitzgerald, illus.The Little Rooster and the Diamond Button.Douglas & Mclntyre, $16.95Ainslie MansonMary Jane Gerber, illus.House Calls: The True Story of a Pioneer Doctor.Douglas & Mclntyre, $15.95Reviewed by Lynn Wytenbroek

Stories from many different cultures havebecome something of a hallmark ofCanadian children's literature over the lastfew years, particularly picture books. Acurrent selection of children's picturebooks bears out the fact that Canada sup-ports a diverse population contributing arich mosaic of stories from different landsand their cultures.

The Great Canoe: A Karina Legend retoldby Maria Elena Maggi is a perfect example.The book has a minimal text which retellsthe story of the great flood, not the Noah'sArk version but a very similar version toldby the Karina Natives (known to theSpaniards and therefore to history as theCarib Indians). It is the story of Kaputano,the Sky Dweller, who warns his children ofa great flood coming. He is believed by onlyfour couples who build a large boat underhis direction, putting two of every animalspecies on the boat, as well as seeds fromevery plant. After the devastation of theflood that wipes all life from the land,Kaputano recreates the rich land his peopleonce enjoyed and they and the animalsthey have saved repopulate the region. The

similarity to the biblical tale of Noah isastounding, and bears out Sir James Frazer'sreport of similar Deluge myths all over theworld.

The text is simply yet beautifully written,particularly in the way it reveals the emotionsof both the people who disbelieve Kaputano'swords and those who survive the flood. Theillustrations by Gloria Calderón are boldand evocative of both place and people.They depict and expand the text, making ita rich book for readers young and old toenjoy. The afterword in the book explains alittle of the history of the Karina people, ofinterest to older readers.

The Pot of Wisdom: Ananse Stones is abook of stories from Ghana about Ananse,the spider. Like Native American coyotestories, these tales depict both the wisdomand the foolishness of the African tricksterfigure, Ananse (who inspired the name ofthe House of Anansi). This collection oftenstories include many twists and turns asAnanse craftily changes the rules by whichthings work, or as he is caught and letdown by his own "cleverness." These talesare accompanied by Baba Wague Diakite'samazing pictures, many of which are pho-tographs of his painted and glazed earthen-ware tiles or bowls. These pictures arebright in colour and bold in shape, withouta lot of detail. Each one- to three-page storyis accompanied by one coloured picture,which often depicts several parts of thestory in one amalgamated whole. Thebrightness of the colours is attractive whilethe boldness and lack of detail give a dis-tinctly African "look" and atmosphere tothe book. This picture book is a wonderfulintroduction to characters from a folkloretradition that will be unfamiliar to manyreaders, yet is reminiscent of stories oftricksters from all over the world. This isagain a book that will delight both childrenand adult readers.

A folktale that is a little closer to home formany readers is The Little Rooster and the



Diamond Button, retold by master folktalestory-maker Celia Barker Lottridge. Thisfolktale comes from Hungary, although ithas variants as far away as India. It tells thestory of a diamond button found by arooster belonging to a very poor woman, abutton then taken by the greedy andincredibly wealthy sultan. The rooster fol-lows the sultan back to his palace to reclaimthe button and, through his persistence andcleverness, as well as his ability to swallowhuge quantities of things like water, bees,and diamond buttons, does in fact get notonly the button but other riches as well, sothat he and the old woman can live the restof their lives in comfort. The theme is afamiliar one in European folktales, but isparticularly endearing in this tale as it is therooster himself who outwits the sultan forthe sake of his mistress, whom he loves.The animal/human bond is explored herein a fresh way.

The illustrations by Joanne Fitzgerald arein keeping with the tale. The sultan isshown to be not only greedy and wealthybut dissipated in the illustrations while hisservants are distinctly down at heel, addingto the reader's desire to see the rooster bestthis unpleasant character. The illustrationstherefore add immensely to the atmosphereof the story, as well as being bright andcolourful watercolour depictions of impor-tant parts of the story itself. Again, as is thecase with most folktales with good illustra-tions, this book will appeal to both childreaders and adult lovers of folktales.

The last book is not a folktale of any kind,but is rather a vignette of history from thePeterborough area in Ontario. House Calls:The True Story of a Pioneer Doctor is told byAinslie Manson from the point of view of agirl who lives next door to the doctor andhis family. She begins as the doctor'spatient but ends up as his assistant. So thestory is warmly and lovingly told throughthe memories of a child, memories ofsomeone she loved, admired and respected.

It is more an illustrated book than a picturebook, having a lot of text and much histori-cal detail, although Manson keeps thatdetail interesting and pertinent. Mary JaneGerber 's brown and white illustrations havea "folk art" look to them, entirely appropri-ate for the story but not appealing to a veryyoung reader, who would not be interestedin the detailed story anyway. This is a bookdefinitely aimed at six- to ten-year-oldreaders and is a wonderful way to introducechildren to an intimate portrait of a smallpiece of Canadian history that was repeated,with variations, again and again in pioneercommunities throughout our country.

Every one of these stories, from the sim-ply told The Great Canoe to the richlydetailed and more complex House Calls,engages the reader through both story andart, offering a wonderful world of newperspectives through folktale or forgottenpeople of our own past.

CompositionsKevin MajorIllus. Alan DanielEh? To Zed: A Canadian Abecedarium. Red Deer$18.95

Michèle LemieuxStormy Night. Kids Can. n.p.Antonio SkármetaIllus. Alfonso RuanoThe Composition. Groundwood n.p.Reviewed by Mavis Reimer

Eh? To Zed, an alphabet book by award-winning author Kevin Major, explicitlyplaces the question of identity in nationalterms. As the press release accompanyingthe book explains, Major set himself thechallenge of "finding four very Canadianwords for each letter of the alphabet" and,further, of setting these words into rhymingcouplets: "Arctic, apple, aurora,Anik/Bonhomme, Bluenose, beaver, ban-nock." The paintings Alan Daniel creates to


accompany the text repeat Major's verbalgames in visual terms. Each is a montage ofart styles and forms that are said to "havehelped build our country and shape ourhistory": for example, a black and whitephotograph of a nineteenth-centurydrilling operation illustrates "oil," an intri-cate paper cutting of a runner followed by afox illustrates "Fox," and a puzzle version ofTom Thomson's The Jack Pine illustrates"jack pine." The many illustrations depict-ing toys and games—the wooden horse-drawn cart on which Bonhomme rides, awhirligig Mountie, marionette habitants, aflip-book featuring Graham Greene, LomeGreene, and Nancy Greene, a corn dollholding a lacrosse racquet, among others—point to play and craft as the organizingmetaphors of this book.

Such playfulness is a feature of manyrecent alphabet books. While the most con-ventional examples of the genre continue topresent commonly recognized, isolatedobjects floating on solid backgrounds tostand unironically for letters and sounds,more complex books acknowledge the arbi-trary nature of language by making therelations among things, words, and soundspuzzles to be solved by readers. As PerryNodelman has pointed out in a recent arti-cle about alphabet books, the pleasure ofsuch puzzles "depends on the use of a lot of[contextual] information to discover a smallbit of [linguistic] information." In Majorand Daniel's book, a reader requires a vastbody of knowledge about Canadian politi-cal history, physical geography, and culturalhistory and geography to guess what wordsare illustrated by objects and, therefore,what the "right" connections are. Becausethey appear on the "K" page, for example, areader can deduce that the flying bird heredoes not illustrate "B" and the wooden sleddoes not illustrate "S," but which is thekomatik and which the kittiwake?

What qualifies and does not qualify as aright answer in this book is troubling. There

are many traditional images and words fromAboriginal cultures, but little evidence ofan Aboriginal presence in contemporaryCanada. When actor Graham Greene isdepicted, he is costumed in feathered head-dress and leather leggings. A turbanedMountie and a Zamboni driver with car-tooned Orientalized features allude to theputative complexity of the Canadian mosaic,to be achieved in "the years ahead" (accord-ing to the book's explanatory appendix).This is a Canada defined by its dominantsettler heritages, as the intertextual refer-ences to Robert Service, L.M. Montgomery,and Margaret Laurence confirm.

The provenance of the other three Canadianbooks for children under review complicatesany simple notion of a distinctly Canadianidentity. Michèle Lemieux's Stormy Night isa translation of a book by (Karl) WilhelmOsterwald (1820-1887) first published inGermany under the title Gewitternacht.Lemieux's book hovers indecisively betweenthe conventions of the wordless picturebook and the graphic novel, an emerginggenre built on such cartoon conventions asline drawings and surreal imagery. The nar-rative is simple: a young girl goes to bed ona stormy night and, unable to sleep, driftsinto a reverie about such existential ques-tions as "Who am I?" and "Will the worldcome to an end someday?" The storm ends,the girl sleeps, and a new day dawns. Thespare lines of the pen-and-ink drawings ona white ground work nicely to imply thecontinuity between the world of the girl'sbedroom and the fantastic worlds of herimaginings. On the other hand, Lemieuxregularly depicts the outside world of thestorm as far more fully real than any ofthese inside worlds: these are typically two-page spreads filled to the edges with cross-hatched fields and inky clouds. The graphicnovel generally exploits the panel format ofcartoons, a format that revels in often vio-lent action. Lemieux, however, uses the pic-ture book convention of one illustration



per opening and returns frequently to thedepiction of the young girl in bed withoutany accompanying text. These choices slowthe pace of the narrative, often bringing itliterally to a standstill. The effect overall isone of redundancy, rather than of free-floating anxiety or desire. In fact, the linksbetween the progress of the storm and thenature of the questions asked by the girl—when a lightening strike plunges the houseinto darkness, for example, she confesses toher fears of robbers, monsters, and aban-donment—show the child's inner life to berigidly determined by external frames. "I'dlike to invent things that don't yet exist!"she exclaims at one point, but, in the worldof this text, this reads as the merest whimsy.

First published in Venezuela in Spanish asLa composición, The Composition, like Eh?To Zed, explores the terms of its own mak-ing through the metaphors of games andplay. But in Antonio Skármeta's story, thesemetaphors take on a dark and dangerouscast. As the story opens, Pedro, the centralchild character, is content to play soccerwith his friends despite the political tur-moil surrounding him in an unnamedSouth American country. After his friend'sfather is taken away by military police, thegame of childhood—the goal of which hismother defines as "to go to school, studyhard, play and be good to [one's] par-ents"—no longer seems a simple one. Itsoon becomes impossible to follow all ofthe rules of the game. When his class isrequired to write compositions detailingwhat their families do at night, Pedro canchoose either to work hard at his schoolassignments, which would involve tellingabout his parents' listening to clandestineradio broadcasts, or to be good to his par-ents. Pedro solves his dilemma by resortingto metaphor: his parents, he reports, regu-larly play chess until he goes to bed.

In his illustrations for Skármeta's story,Alfonso Ruano deftly uses the conventionsof framing and line to register Pedro's shift-

ing emotions, which are not explicitly dis-cussed in the narrative. Circular openingscommunicate his sense of comfort at theopening and close of the story, a two-pagespread of the neighbourhood game sug-gests the expansive mastery he briefly feels,while the illustrations of the police and theschoolroom are filled with vertical lines,frames within frames, overlapping objects,and bodies oddly cut-off by straight linesand frames. The final illustration of thechess game, with its squares and lines,echoes these earlier illustrations but alsorevises them by the oblique angle at whichthe board is set. Both in its verbal and itsvisual texts, then, The Composition conveysto readers an understanding of the implica-tions of composition that are far moreunsettling than any articulated by the otherbooks under review here. As Skármeta andRuano clearly know, composing identitiescan be a deadly serious game.

National CinemaKatherine MonkWeird Sex and Snowshoes and Other CanadianFilm and Phenomena. Raincoast $26.95Lance PettittScreening Ireland: Film and TelevisionRepresentation. Manchester UP $29.95Esther C M . Yau, ed.At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a BorderlessWorld. U of Minnesota P $19.95Reviewed by Peter Urquhart

Three more or less "hot," and in any casecertainly fascinating, national cinemasreceive three totally different treatments,illustrating at least as much about currentsin contemporary criticism as they do abouttheir subjects. Here we have one monographby a film scholar (Pettitt) who adopts a cul-tural studies approach to representations ofIreland in film and television; one wide-ranging volume (Yau) on Hong Kong cin-ema with contributors who generally take


various approaches; and one badly flawedthematic reading of the Canadian cinema bya journalist/critic (Monk). It is not the con-trast between the erudite film scholars andthe breezy reporter which is so glaring—especially evident when Monk's work isheld up beside the thorough-going accountof national culture and the idea of"national images" provided by Pettitt andby Yau and her contributors—so much asthe evident failure of outmoded, mono-lithic critical positions such as thoseadopted by Monk.

Weird Sex and Snowshoes is not entirelywithout value, however. The book doesprovide some useful profiles; it containsinterviews with prominent Canadian film-makers as well as some lively readings ofcanonical Canadian films. And Monk'snationalistic boosterism—clearly and self-admittedly the book's raison d'être—whileprimarily responsible for the book's glaringcritical blind spots, does at least help pro-vide some of the zip and forward momen-tum of this unwieldy work. As well, Monkusefully provides something of a recapitu-lation of the previously existing nationalis-tic thematic account of what constitutes aCanadian national cinema, trotting outAtwood on survival, the imagined persis-tence of a "Griersonian documentary tradi-tion," and the old saw that "we makechallenging, cerebral, ambiguous, anddecidedly offbeat films."

Obviously, accounts such as these(including broad claims that Canadian filmsare all filled with "weird sex" and have strongfemale characters) obscure much more thanthey reveal, since it is no longer reasonableto promote such a totalizing view in light ofthe incredible heterogeneity of Canadianfilm production, a fact which Monk neitheracknowledges nor explains. Canada pro-duces many commercially calculated filmsin the popular idiom, and Canadiansattend Hollywood movies in huge num-bers, not entirely because we're suckers or

because Hollywood owns our conscious-ness; at least part of the reason has to bebecause some of us some of the time enjoycommercial filmmaking. To claim, as Monkdoes, that the Canadian cinema consistssolely of the contra-Hollywood aestheticsand ideology of experimental, documen-tary, and art filmmakers such as GuyMaddin reproduces a defunct circular argu-ment: The Care Bears Movie and Meatballs(both Canadian productions) don't countas Canadian because they don't fit themodel, and the model cannot account forThe Care Bears Movie and Meatballs.Canadian cinema is more than just an artcinema. In her one hundred capsulereviews of Canadian films that conclude thebook, Monk herself seems to recognize herargument's fatal flaw when she notes thatBob Clark's notorious teen sex comedyPorky's (the highest grossing. Canadian filmof all time) is "a genre film made for themass market, so there aren't any realCanadianisms" in it. Countless other com-mercially calculated Canadian films also donot rate, simply because they do not meetMonk's thematic standard of "Canadianness,"which is a clearly useless starting positionfor discussing any national cinema.

As if this glaring flaw weren't enough,Monk even confuses some important facts,claiming, for example, that one of the for-mative moments in the nation's cinema, theestablishment of the National Film Board,occurred in both 1939 and 1949. One hopesthat this is merely a typesetter's mistake,but in light of some of the other claimsfound in the book (recounting Guy Maddin'shilariously fanciful and self-mythologizingtale of riding piggyback on Bing Crosbyas if it were true, for example, or that theMassey Commission reported in 1949),one has to wonder.

Pettitt's Screening Ireland, on the otherhand, provides an excellent model for whata book on national images can be. He firmlysituates his textual analyses in a context



that takes precise account of historical andsocial conditions (including policy and aes-thetic fashions), of migration, and of localand global audiences' tastes. But the book'strue value becomes evident as Pettitt takesconsistent account of the transnational flowof national images, incorporating discussionsof numerous Anglo-American productionsabout Ireland or set there, and of the recep-tion of Irish-made images off the island.

While Pettitt is extremely strong at situat-ing the reader in historical and social con-texts, one might be surprised to find littlein-depth consideration in the book, beyonda lively discussion of the mid-ninetiesRiverdance sensation, of the curious explo-sion of international blarney peddling—which is seen in such diverse phenomena asthe Guinness brewery backing Irish-stylepubs all around the world, or Celtic musicgaining enormous popularity above andamong various global traditional "world"musics. The "branding" of Irishness and itslong strange history certainly seems con-textually essential to understanding suchHollywood dreck as Ron Howard's egre-gious "Irish" film Far and Away (1982).

Nevertheless, Pettitt does take a verybroad account of cultural contexts in hisreading of Irish images, for example in hissection on the content and reception of thepopular television comedy Father Ted, thevalue and/or offensiveness of which,because of its over-the-top satirical treat-ment of Catholicism and the priesthood,was hotly debated in Ireland as elsewhere,and which Pettitt ultimately claims "couldbe seen to simultaneously engage in thesatiric examination of social and culturalchanges taking place in the Republicthroughout the decade."

Yau's collection of essays on Hong Kongcinema is initially off-putting because of itsalarming subtitle, "Hong Kong cinema in aborderless world." What world is that? oneis immediately forced to ask. The world Iinhabit abounds with borders and border-

specific cultural/film policies and nationalcinemas. If it weren't, what sense would itmake to even speak of a "Hong Kong cin-ema" at all?

Happily, Yau's contributors, many ofwhom naturally invoke various notions ofglobalization, and are themselves clearlygermane to any discussion of Hong Kongcinema, do not assume the untenableproposition of a "borderless world." HongKong cinema finds itself at the intersectionof Hollywood genres, Chinese culture, andthe colonialism and postcolonialism ofsimultaneous nostalgia for a distinctly tra-ditional Asian past and celebration of apostmodern transnational future. Not sur-prisingly, many of Yau's contributors drawupon recent scholarship on the relationshipof the local to the global in their discus-sions of Hong Kong cinema.

Among the many excellent essays weencounter in Yau's text are Law Kar's con-cise and vital history, "An Overview ofHong Kong New Wave Cinema," whichperfectly serves the text as a whole by pro-viding a concrete and succinct account ofcolonialism, policy, and the trans-nationalflow of images and genres that has alwaysfueled the Hong Kong cinema. With strongessays taking a variety of currentapproaches (on star figures such as JackieChan, on feminist and queer readingsacross films, and especially the considerableattention paid to audience and receptionstudies), and with its richly specific contri-butions surveying the spectrum of the field,Yau's text is a model for books on nationalcinemas. Lance Pettitt's, though excellentfor what it is, perhaps suffers slightly for itssingular voice, while Monk's effort is amodel for what ought to be avoided whentackling the prickly problem of delineatingand discussing a national cinema.


Everything WithinTimothy F. Murphy, ed.Reader's Guide to Lesbian and Gay Studies.Fitzroy Dearborn $95.00Reviewed by Stephen Guy-Bray

In the past ten or fifteen years many bookslike this one have appeared. What distin-guishes this one, apart from its consider-able weight, is that the editor has made anattempt to cover all aspects of lesbian andgay studies. While this decision inevitablylimits the amount of detail the book canoffer, it does mean that it is very handy forstudents, for people who are not academicsand who wish to get some sense of what isgoing on in queer studies, and for special-ists who want to investigate other areas ofspecialization. The most heavily repre-sented areas are literature, history, pop cul-ture, psychology, and what I guess we couldcall social work.

The word "studies" in the title turns outto be crucial, as the emphasis is on thestudies (and mainly on studies written inthe last couple of decades) rather than onthe things studied, although most of thewriters manage to pack in a good deal ofprimary information. For instance, theentry on Ancient Egypt is concerned withrecent books and articles rather than withsketching the history of sexuality inPharaonic times. The focus on secondaryliterature lessens the possibility that thebook can be used as a cheater's guide: thisis a work of reference that is designed toencourage further reading rather than torender such reading unnecessary, and isthus to be applauded. Most of the entriesare written in a clear and accessible style(and some of them in a very lively one). Forthe most part, specialist terminology is notnecessary.

The book is helpfully arranged. At thebeginning the reader will find a list ofadvisers and contributors, an alphabetical

list of entries, and a thematic list; at theend, a list of books and articles mentionedin the entries (although this is incomplete),a general index, and a section on the advis-ers and contributors that includes a list ofwhat entries each one wrote. In thisrespect, this book is a model work of refer-ence. I also thought that the contributorswere a good mixture of established schol-ars, some of them very famous indeed, andyoung scholars.

Given the vast scope of this book, myevaluation will be highly selective, so I willconcentrate on what I know, which is liter-ary studies. The only classical writer toreceive an entry is Sappho, and there is noentry at all for Christopher Marlowe or forGeoffrey Chaucer. I have chosen these threebecause queer scholarship on classical liter-ature and on the literature of medieval andearly modern England has been a particu-larly active field in recent years, and theseare consequently serious omissions. Theentries on Greek and Latin literature areadmittedly quite good, but more detail isneeded here.

I was also taken aback by the selection oftwentieth-century authors. The bookincludes entries on May Sarton andEdmund White, both mediocre writers, butthere was apparently no room for eitherHart Crane or Virginia Woolf (she islumped in under the tired rubric of theBloomsbury Group), to name two authorswho are generally considered pretty goodand who have been absolutely central toqueer studies. And why leave out IvyCompton-Burnett or James Purdy, to nametwo superb writers who are not now per-haps as well known as they should be, whenspace was found for John Henry Mackayand Renée Vivien? While there are manygood entries on literature, the omissionsare startling. This may be a consequence ofcompiling a book with such a wide scope,although it seems to me that those editorialadvisers for the project who are literary



scholars should have spoken out at somepoint. Of course, what I am saying here isthat the entries that are on subjects outsidemy own field are the most useful to me andthe Reader's Guide to Lesbian and GayStudies remains a practical reference guide.

Kinetic CreationsSusan MusgraveWhat the Small Day Cannot Hold. Beach Holme$18.95

Marilyn BoweringHuman Bodies: New and Collected Poems1987-1999. Beach Holme $16.95Reviewed by Renate Eigenbrod

"Kinetic creations are taking on / my per-sonality" is a line from Songs of the Sea-Witch, the first re-published book in SusanMusgrave's Collected Poems 1970-1985 enti-tled What the Small Day Cannot Hold.The Songs are followed by Entrance of theCelebrant, Grave-Dirt and SelectedStrawberries, The Impstone, Becky Swan'sBook, A Man to Marry, A Man to Bury, andCocktails at the Mausoleum. There is a cer-tain irony in the fact that the "subversive,""unteachable" poetry of Susan Musgrave,acclaimed as such by Sean Virgo in hisintroduction, is collected in the CanadianClassics Series, complete with the image ofthe maple leaf. On the other hand, the con-text for the publication of her earlier workwould not likely concern Musgrave, whorecently confessed on a University ofToronto website: "The poem or novel I amworking on at the moment is what meansmost to m e . . . . Books that are published,strangely, have very little meaning to meIt's almost as if someone else had writtenit." This commentary echoes the shape-shifting theme in her poetry but also raisesthe question of accountability. By endors-ing transformations of her (human) per-sona into an animal, a plant, a stone, alover, an outlaw, or the ancestral spirit of

Native people, she uses "the other." It istherefore noteworthy that the title of thiscollection is taken from the title of a poemin which the speaker wants "to giveback"—love, the moon, the clouds, the sun.

Musgrave's desire for communion andcommunity, poetically realized in meta-morphic images of her "shamanic mode" intexts like The Impstone and KiskatinawSongs (co-written with Virgo), offsets herawareness of fragmentation, separation,and loss ("there is danger / in not under-standing loss") as shown, for example, in"Requiem for Talunkwun Island":

My eyes had seenthe rivers full of fish but now the eyeswere older and, like the rivers, empty.The salmon have gone elsewhere to findtheir origins. Like the ghosts of mypeople, they have no country.

Musgrave's oft-confessed love for the WestCoast landscape (affirmed in her compila-tion Clear-Cut Words: Writers forClayoquot) speaks to the genuineness of thepoem's tone; however, her appropriation ofHaida ancestry is problematic. I wonder if,after the experience with the KiskatinawSongs (which were only successful after theyhad been published under an Aboriginalpseudonym), Musgrave saw the need foranother Grey Owl move. Her poembecomes particularly problematic in thecontext of this publication, not onlybecause it is now a "Canadian Classic," butalso because of Sean Virgo's praise of thecomposition in his introduction as "themost eloquent threnody ever composed inCanada, both heartbreaking and cathartic."Inadvertently, maybe, he dismisses simi-larly powerful laments composed byAboriginal writers themselves, for examplein the poem "Waking Up" by Inuk authorAlootok Ipellie.

Marilyn Bowering's Human Bodies com-prises Anyone Can See I Love You,Grandfather Was A Soldier, Calling All TheWorld, Love As It Is, Autobiography, and the


new collection When I Am Dead And MyHeart Is Weighed. Each section has to be"savoured" on its own, as Dave Godfreyadvises readers in his introduction.Chronologically, this work continues whereMusgrave's ends. Both authors are con-nected by friendship and joint projects (likethe above-mentioned Clear-Cut Words towhich Marilyn Bowering contributed amodified version of a poem from CallingAll The World); both present different per-sonae in their "kinetic creations" (MarilynBowering to the extent of creating dramaticperformances), and both evoke themes ofthe other side of love—loss, regrets, futility,death. Because of her interest in historicalevents and characters and human bodies,Bowering does not follow the "shamanicmode" of connecting with nature quite asmuch as Susan Musgrave; however, she alsocelebrates ecological relations as in herpoem "The Mind's Road to Love": ". . . andI flew / to the top of the tree as a bird / Ientered into every species." In the same sec-tion of the volume, Autobiography,Bowering honours the Aboriginal poetSarain Stump, whose work she featured inMany Voices, the anthology of Aboriginalliterature she co-edited. In "She Goes Awayfor P.K. Page, and in memory of SarainStump," Bowering connects P.K. Page withStump in an adaptation of Stump'sshamanic imagery.

Throughout Bowering's collection wefind links between different human bodies,like the relations between Stump and Pageor the links among Marilyn Monroe's threehusbands in Anyone Can See I Love You, aswell as connections between dead and livingbodies. The section Love As It Is contains"Native Land," in which the dead bodies ofsoldiers create a feeling of belonging, ofbeing "native": "the dead appear / like seaanemones behind shop windows I... IThis is the picture to step in: / now we arepart of the land." The theme of war is mostevident in the long poem Grandfather Was

A Soldier. Here, living and dead, presentand past, are blended in an association ofimages that uncover history in a landscapethat has been "disguised" by the ploughand Nature. With images of images (thewar photographs in a museum), writingsabout writings (with Bowering's documen-tation in the notes at the end of the book),and a mix of imagined and "real" personae,Bowering creates a texture rather than atext compensating for the limitations oflanguage: "Language fails, as you knew itwould, lacks evidence of touch."

Bowering ends the epigraph to her firstbook of poetry Anyone Can See I Love You,in which she tells the story of picking up aseemingly grey stone which, when held upto the light "glowed like something alive,"by affirming that "It was like everything inthe world was that way, and all you had todo was pick it up, touch it." Both collectionsof poetry pick up and touch differentlyshaped bodies, making them come to life inspite of the cerebral leanings of language.

Loving and LeavingRichard OutramDove Legend. Porcupine's Quill $14.95David SolwayThe Lover's Progress. Porcupine's Quill $14.95Glen SorestadLeaving Holds Me Here: Selected Poems.Thistledown P $18.95Reviewed by Ian Rae

Richard Outram's Dove Legend is a complexassemblage of rare and invented nounswired together with speech rhythms col-lected from a variety of dialects, discourses,and periods. At its best, Outram's poetrymoves rapidly between registers and modesand creates a vertiginous effect in which the"actual is abstract" and the ordinary isornate. He fashions baroque complexitiesout of everything from philosophical mus-ings to jive talk, Miltonic invocations to sea



shanties. In the long poems "Tradecraft"and "Millefleur," for example, Outram pro-pels the narrative by continually changingthe tonal register and toying with the read-er's expectations. However, such a cornu-copia of language conceals a strange kindof poverty. Outram's poems are brimmingwith verbal virtuosity, but many are curi-ously empty of feeling. Behind the artificeis a troubling void, in which archaic speechis frequently exalted into obsolescence. Atits worst—as in the poem where Outramdescribes dancers in a Toronto pavilion as"quick knee-tremblers / that might to lewd-ness of the dance rude dodpolls lead"—Outram's syntax is as gaudy as the pinkpalm trees in the retouched cover photo-graph. On the other hand, the "flamingo-pink silk" in the title poem belongs to anensemble whose elegance is striking. To hiscredit, moreover, Outram satirizes his ownhigh rhetoric in "Island Residents," as wellas making poignant use of understatementin an elegy for Northrop Frye. Similarly, in"Barbed Wire," he demonstrates an abilityto sustain a restrained tone and develop asingle, emphatic image, if he should sochoose. By and large, however, he prefers toemploy a lofty rhetoric that sometimessoars and at other times is merely inflated.

David Solway opts for a bawdier approachto the lyric in The Lover's Progress. He mod-els his lyric sequence on William Hogarth'sfamous series of paintings, The Rake'sProgress (1733-35), a n ( l transports the rak-ish protagonist at the centre of Hogarth'snarrative into the twenty-first century.Solway makes the rake a "cruiser" of bars,women, and philosophies, as well as a dab-bler in poetry. Perpetually in motion, thelover travels from Canada to Greece andrevisits many of Solway's favourite haunts.The collection begins with a fascinatingessay in which Solway explains the ratio-nale for this globe-trotting, as well as sug-gesting continuities between the style of thepoetry and paintings. As in Solway's books

on the imaginary Greek poet laureate,Andreas Karavis, he cannot resist the temp-tation to write criticism on his own pseu-donymous poetry in the introduction toThe Lover's Progress. Solway goes to greatlengths to connect his use of the image withHogarth's use of the line, but in affiliatinghis sequence with Hogarth's celebratedwork, and in comparing the lover with DonJuan, Solway establishes expectations forhis poetry that the sequence does not meet.For example, although constrained by thelimited narrative potential of painting,Hogarth managed to sustain a strong senseof narrative continuity in his account of therake's decline. Solway has the advantage ofworking with the written word, but hisseries of poems still needs to be buttressedby an introductory essay, as well as an"Itinerary" detailing the lover's move-ments, and even then the sense of narrativeprogress in Solway's series is weaker than inHogarth's paintings. There are severalstrong poems in The Lover's Progress, buteven Solway seems anxious about theshortcomings of others. For example,Solway reaffirms his established penchantfor the sonnet in "The Penitent" and "TheBankrupt," but then decides that the formof the latter poem is "ineffective" and play-fully "rewrites it in a more accessiblemode" as "[email protected]."

A further problem with Solway's essay isthat he mistakenly follows Hogarth inasserting that the English painter inventedthe kind of pictorial sequence that is meantto be read and offer a moral. Suchsequences were a commonplace of Italianpainting in the period, and they grew outof the religious narratives recorded in thesculptures of medieval cathedrals. Hogarth,an outspoken Catholic-hater, would neverhave acknowledged this precedent, butSolway should. Fortunately, Solway doesnote the relation of Hogarth's ribaldimagery to the tableaux of morality dramasand the framework of the proscenium


stage, which establishes a sound base for hisdiscussion of Stravinsky and the operaticadaptation of Hogarth's sequence.

Glen Sorestad's Leaving Holds Me Hereoffers the reader an opportunity to surveythe development of the Saskatchewanwriter over a period of thirty years. As acollection of selected poems, Leaving HoldsMe Here foregrounds continuities in thepoet's career, as well as highlighting differ-ences. Sorestad's early "Pub Poems" usematter-of-fact descriptions of Prairie bar-rooms and plain-spoken farmers anddrinkers. His straightforward, anecdotaltechnique is the very antithesis of Outram'sflamboyant manner. Although Sorestadexperiments with a slightly more disjunc-tive style in his later poetry, for the mostpart he writes complete, unadorned sen-tences in which, for example, the placementand purpose of the line breaks is frequentlyunclear. Many of Sorestad's vignettes couldbe more effectively rendered as prosepoems. The prosaic delivery in "The Matterof Poetic Discourse" defeats the argumenton poetics that it advances. On the otherhand, Sorestad's understated tone workswell in his many elegies. He presents amoving sequence of poems detailing thedecline and death of his mother, lamentsthe passing of his brother and father, andhonours an uncle who prophesied his owndeath and was brought down on the beachesof Normandy. While Sorestad lacks hisuncle's sense of daring, his verse none theless documents the people and places mostintimate to him and conveys a sense of alife lived. Sorestad's quiet and unobtrusivemanner also suits the many fishing poemsin this collection, of which the Jan LakePoems stand apart because of their preciseknowledge of the lake and its environs.

Sore Ear, Aching HeartsMorris PanychEarshot. Talonbooks $14.95Mansel RobinsonThe Heart As It Lived. Playwrights Canada $13.95David FrenchThat Summer. Talonbooks $15.95Reviewed by Len Falkenstein

The solo act and the memory play, twofavourite genres of contemporary Canadianplaywrights, are revisited in this trio ofrecent offerings from three of Canada's bestknown dramatists. Although none of theseplays is particularly innovative in form orgenre, Morris Panych's Earshot and ManselRobinson's The Heart As It Lived take theiraudience into distinctly imaginative andprovocative dramatic terrain. DavidFrench's That Summer is a less satisfyingeffort, however—a play that, in keepingwith its motifs of lakes and swimming, sug-gests a playwright creatively and dramatur-gically treading water.

The solo act among the three plays isPanych's Earshot (first produced atToronto's Tarragon Theatre in February2001), a 75-minute monologue that drawsus into the peculiar world of Doyle, arecluse who suffers from a rather unusualhearing problem, that of "hearing toomuch." Doyle's ears are so sensitive that hecan hear everything that happens in hisapartment building, from the scraping ofrazor on stubble two apartments away tothe literal sound of a pin dropping nextdoor, and the cacophony of his neighbours'domestic routines is driving him mad. It isan insanity born of an extreme case ofinformation overload: by overhearing all,he knows all, every intimate detail of hisneighbours' lives. Tormenting him furtheris his passion for Valerie, the lonely BridgetJones-like loser who lives next door, whomhe has never had the courage to approach.Doyle concocts a grandiose and twisted

169 Canadian Literature 1791 Vfinter 2003


scheme to reveal his love for her, only tolose all (and Valerie) when everything goeshorribly wrong in a series of deliciously sadcomic twists. Panych, a writer with a defttouch for comedy and a taste for blackhumour and the absurd, mines the gagpotential of Doyle's affliction shamelessly,with the result that the play's concept endsup seeming stretched for its length. Onewishes that Panych might have explored thedark side of his premise in more depth:Doyle as an emblem of the alienation andloneliness of contemporary urban life, acasualty of an information revolution thathas left many of us better informed andconnected, yet ironically more alone, thanever before. Panych does so to great effecton occasion: particularly striking is a word-less scene in which Doyle "presses andpresses" his body against the wall of hisapartment as he listens to Valerie on theother side, comforted yet tormented by thethought that, as he puts it elsewhere, "If Iwere right beside you, I couldn't be as close.In a way, thank God for this vast chasm ofinches. This drywall, and these studs." Forthe most part, though, Earshot remainslight fare throughout.

The same certainly cannot be said ofMansel Robinson's The Heart As It Lived(first produced by Alberta Theatre Projectsin Calgary in 1997). Set in Regina in 1996,the play hearkens back sixty years to 1935,the year of the On to Ottawa Trek and theRegina Riot. The play's protagonist isAnnie, a hard-bitten septuagenarian spin-ster haunted by her memories ofthatmomentous summer, memories she isforced to relive when her home is invadedby Zak (the grandson of her sister Flo),whose presence conjures a trio of ghostswho visit Annie in flashback. Daughters ofa wealthy family, Annie and Flo find them-selves on opposite sides of the ideologicalwarfare of 1935: Flo falls in love with the"bohunk" On to Ottawa marcherZakarchuk and into sympathy with the

socialist politics he espouses, while Annie,true to the ideals of her father and herRCMP officer boyfriend, Mitchell,denounces the strikers as "the enemy."When the police move in to crush thetrekkers, Mitchell is killed in the melee, atragedy that leaves Annie embittered andscarred for life. Meanwhile, Flo, pregnantby Zakarchuk and now estranged fromAnnie, struggles through a lonely life ofhardship and disappointment, somehowremaining optimistic about the prospectsof social revolution to the very end.

Zak, her progeny, is a dissolute Gen Xslacker, a petty thief who complains of a"war against the young," and much of thedrama of the play emerges in the clash ofgenerations and values that erupts when heis taken on as hired help by the staunchlyright-wing Annie. By the end of the play,Annie, enfeebled by a stroke, has come torealize her complicity (and that of herentire class) in the death of her working-class hero, Mitchell; the beauty of the loveshared by Flo and Zakarchuk; and theinjustice of their fate. Robinson denies theeasy sentiment of allowing Annie's epipha-nies to spark any moment of rapprochementbetween the generations, however, as thegulf between Annie and the increasinglyunsympathetic Zak (now her abusive andparasitic caregiver, draining her bankaccount to buy pizza), remains asunbridgeable as ever. Robinson's is a bleakbut disturbingly telling image of a politi-cally polarized society in which idealismand optimism of the type Flo andZakarchuk embodied is nowhere on thehorizon. One wonders, though, whetherthe play might have been any different hadit been written only a year or two later,amidst the rise of the organized anti-glob-alization protests that have marked a resur-gence in left-wing politics and broughtback to the fore many of the same issues ofeconomic and social justice that galvanizedthe On to Ottawa trekkers.


Like The Heart As It Lived, David French'sThat Summer (premiered at the 1999 BlythFestival) is a memory play that centres on acoming-of-age story involving the romanticentanglements of a pair of teenage sisters,but this is where similarities between theplays end. Whereas Robinson's focus ispolitical, his style a brutal naturalism thateschews sentiment, That Summer is lightromance that somewhat inexplicably turnsinto a weepy melodrama. One of French'sstrong suits has long been the mix ofatmosphere, nostalgia, sentiment andromantic comedy that defined his hit Salt-Water Moon (1984), a recipe he returns toin That Summer. In a role that recalls Mary(Salt- Water Moon's plucky heroine), ThatSummers protagonist is Maggie Ryan, oneof a pair of budding American sisters whoend up at their cottage in southern Ontariosans parents for one memorable week in1958. Standing in for Salt-Water MoonsJacob as the charming ne'er-do-well whosweeps her off her feet is Paul Wyatt, ahandsome waiter at a local lodge. While thecourse of true love is initially rocky (Paulmust prove that he's actually a Lothariowith a heart of gold), it eventually does runsmooth, culminating in a Harlequin-wor-thy flashback to Maggie's loss of virginity inthe local graveyard. Perhaps to suggest thatin life's balance sheet such wanton plea-sures must be weighed with sorrows,Maggie becomes pregnant, while thingsend even more disastrously for her sister,who drowns attempting to escape theadvances of the local minister's son, fol-lowed in short order by the sisters' confi-dante and guardian, Mrs. Crump, whoexpires trying to rescue her. While Frenchhas prepared us for a tragic ending fromearly on, the double-whammy he deliversstill seems incongruously lugubrious giventhe candy-floss flavour of most of the play.One senses on French's part an attempt toinvest the work with meaning by framing itas a tale about the pain of guilt, suffering,

and loss, when in fact That Summer is at itsbest as a simple paean to young love, FatsDomino on the car radio, and summer atthe lake.

Désirs tumultueuxStanley PéanLe tumulte de mon sang. La courte échelle 19,95$Marc FisherLes six degrés du désir. Lanctôt 18,95$Comptes rendus par Christine St-Pierre

Voici deux œuvres narratives rempliesd'érotisme, de passions et de sensualité. Letumulte de mon sang, de l'auteur québécoisStanley Péan, raconte l'histoire d'un jeunecouple montréalais qui se promet uneescapade amoureuse loin du brouhahaquotidien. Ce couple, à la recherche d'unesemaine de tranquillité sous la chaleur destropiques, se réfugie en Haïti dans lademeure coloniale de l'oncle de Madeline.Mais dès le début, face aux gardes de sécu-rité du manoir, Madeline et son amant, lenarrateur, se rendent compte qu' « il y aquelque chose de pourri dans l'empire ».Malgré les inquiétudes et l'angoisse de sonconjoint, Madeline, journaliste acharnée,est déterminée à connaître le fin mot decette histoire cachée par son oncle, TonRodrigue. Péan soutient ainsi l'intérêt dulecteur en évoquant, de façon purementfictive, certains éléments historiques de laculture haïtienne, tels « ses tragédies, sesdémons réels et mythiques ». Ce sont leslégendes vaudou, transmises par sa grand-mère, qui animent l'imaginaire du narra-teur jusqu'au jour où toute cette magieensorcelée enflamme le sang qui coule dansles veines de ce dernier. A titre d'exemple,l'auteur consacre le chapitre quatorze auconte mythique du Général Lannuit, sortede mise en abyme qui, d'une certaine façon,renoue avec la tradition haïtienne du conteoral. Les personnages semblent être pos-sédés par les démons du folklore vaudou

171 Canadian Literature ¡8o I Spring 2004


qui, eux, menacent la relation amoureuseet erotique des amants. En outre, la fin del'histoire révèle la conclusion tragique etstupéfiante de l'origine ancestrale du narra-teur. Au fait, toute son histoire se trouvecachée dans les murs du manoir de TonRodrigue, ancien colonel de Papa Doc. Lecolonel Rodrigue Duché évoque le pouvoirdu régime totalitaire de l'époque et lescrimes commis pour accéder au pouvoircoûte que coûte.

Fantômes perfides, magie noire halluci-nante, ces éléments qui sont au cœur de laculture haïtienne n'existaient, avant le voyage,que dans l'imaginaire du narrateur-poète :« Enfant du déracinement, je n'avais jamaisosé revendiquer autre patrie que la littéra-ture », dira-t-il. Par son style d'écriture trèstravaillé, sa langue somptueuse et savoureuse,le roman de Stanley Péan rappelle la grandeépoque romantique du dix-neuvième siècle.L'auteur désire d'ailleurs rendre hommageà deux auteurs, en particulier, qui l'ont pro-fondément inspiré : Edgar Poe et JacquesStephen Alexis. La fierté des Haïtiensrepose sur une richesse culturelle et unmétissage complexe comme l'atteste la bi-bliothèque de Ton Rodrigue, où s'entassentles « œuvres complètes des classiques dumonde entier ». Conscient de son héritage,l'auteur intègre au dialogue des person-nages, le niveau populaire de leur langue etajoute, pour le lecteur non familier avec lesmots créoles, un glossaire en guise deréférence. Ainsi, le langage, la descriptionsdes lieux, les références à l'histoire et auxmythes haïtiens, les caractéristiques despersonnages, apportent une saveur culturelleet authentique au Tumulte de mon sang.

Le plaisir de la lecture des œuvres roman-tiques du dix-neuvième siècle en particulierconstitue un centre d'intérêt commun chezles protagonistes des deux romans. Les sixdegrés du désir évoque plusieurs fois lesgrands classiques (de Platon, Voltaire,Molière à Flaubert et Balzac), marquantainsi l'influence de la culture française sur

la nation québécoise. A cet héritage l'auteurn'hésite pas à ajouter des références con-temporaines à la culture nord-américaine,tout en y intégrant, à titre d'exemple, desexpressions typiquement anglaises comme« You can't always get what you want ». Leslecteurs québécois pourront aisément s'i-dentifier au langage du roman. Par ailleurs,l'existence moderne des personnages dansleur travail et leurs désirs d'amour reflèteun aspect universel.

Dans ce roman de Fisher, ce ne sont pasles démons d'un passé dévoilé qui mena-cent les relations intimes mais plutôt lesdifférences entre les désirs sexuels del'homme et ceux de la femme. L'auteurnous invite à réfléchir sur la nature desrelations amoureuses. Ici, le lieu privilégiépour l'autoréflexivité est le journalintime—forme d'écriture qui s'adapte bienau roman psychologique. Les journauxintimes de Lisa et de son père CharlesGranger permettent aux individus nonseulement un débat avec leur moi intérieuret leurs sentiments les plus profonds maisaussi un processus de découverte person-nelle. Tout en évoquant les joies et lespeines des protagonistes, le journal intimeélucide leurs désirs et leurs frustrations.Jeune fille de vingt ans, Lisa recherche legrand amour, celui qui donne des frissonset un sens à la vie. Embauchée à la mêmemaison d'édition que son père, Lisa tombeéperdument amoureuse de son patron dèsce premier jour qu'elle a cru fatidique :« J'ai tout de suite pensé que ce n'était pasun hasard, que nous soyons tous les deuxen noir. » Voilà le destin tragique de cetterelation tumultueuse entre elle et sonpatron, Jean-Jacques, homme marié qui,par son caractère et son âge, reflète l'imagedu père de la jeune fille. Tout au long duroman, Lisa attendra la promesse dudivorce de Jean-Jacques, qui ne viendra pas.En attendant, son journal lui procure unlieu thérapeutique grâce auquel elle réflé-chit sur ses choix, évalue son comporte-


ment et projette d'agir différemment. Ainsi,en écrivant, elle se transforme, prend con-science de la lâcheté de Jean-Jacques etdécide, mais trop tard, de se lier à Philippe.

Par sa taille volumineuse, le journal deLisa semble, à première vue, prépondérantcomparé à celui de Charles. Cependant,le journal de son père est aussi importantcar il représente l'antithèse de l'idéalismede sa fille, c'est-à-dire le côté réaliste, pourl'homme, des relations intimes. C'est àCharles que Fisher confie la théorie de ladégradation du désir—de la naissance dudésir à sa mort. Cette théorie qu'il développeà partir d'expériences personnelles fait échoau personnage de Jean-Jacques qui, selon safemme, ne croit pas au grand amour. Selonlui, une fois que les premiers degrés dudésir sont révolus, l'homme « ne peut vivredans la tiédeur erotique ». Ce n'est qu'enlisant le journal de Lisa qu'il questionnerasa conception de l'amour en laissantentrevoir un espoir, c'est-à-dire une sixièmepossibilité de désir : la renaissance del'amour.

Identités voléesMarie Hélène PoitrasSoudain le Minotaure. Triptyque 18,00$Pierre OuelletStill. Tirs groupés. L'instant même 24,95$Comptes rendus par Sébastien Simard

Dans son roman Soudain le Minotaure,Marie Hélène Poitras explore le thème duviol, l'exposant tour à tour du point de vuede l'agresseur et de la victime. La premièrepartie du roman est en effet une explo-ration de la psychologie de l'agresseur,nommé Mino Torres, qui, au fond de saprison, nous conduit dans les méandres deson esprit tordu, dans une prose réaliste etcrue (évoquant par moments Y AmericanPsycho de Bret Easton Ellis). Cette partie durécit nous fait suivre la vie en apparencebanale de Torres, un jeune latino, entre son

travail de marchand de fruits, sa vie de cou-ple et ses pulsions de violeur, instinctuelleset insatiables: « On peut trouver ce qu'onveut chez une fille. Si l'homme a envie devioler, elle lui donnera l'impression de n'êtrebonne qu'à ça. D'attendre ça, même. » C'estsans compter l'apparition d'Ariane, unevictime qui lui résistera—dont la résistancelui sera même objet de fascination—et quimarquera sa chute.

La deuxième moitié du roman est racon-tée par cette victime, une étudiante agresséepar Torres mais qui évitera le viol dejustesse. Cette partie, plus sensible, amèneune dimension supplémentaire au thème,puisqu'on y suit le parcours de la victime,de l'après-coup de l'agression jusqu'à unvoyage en Europe où elle tentera de retrou-ver sa confiance en l'humanité: « Seulement,j'essayais de comprendre commentquelqu'un pouvait en arriver à violer, àtuer, ou à orchestrer une guerre. J'étaisincapable de renoncer aux pourquoi quime rongeaient. » C'est lors de ce voyagequ'elle visite l'Allemagne, « pays lourdd'histoire, celui des survivants », offrant aurécit une occasion d'aller plus loin dans sesconsidérations sur le mal: Ariane tenteainsi, semble-t-il, d'exorciser son propredrame individuel en le reconsidérant à unniveau collectif et historique. C'est en visi-tant, en effet, les lieux des atrocités naziesqu'elle nous décrit la désillusion du person-nage face à l'humanité, où transparaîttoutefois la soif de vivre (notamment illus-trée par sa relation avec un jeune voyageur)et son esprit de combativité devant l'adver-sité et dans son rôle de victime.

On passera outre aux allusions peu sub-tiles au mythe du labyrinthe—plutôt malexploité—et l'on saluera l'écriture sansfaille de la jeune auteure, qui signe un pre-mier roman prometteur. Ici, la violencedépouille le personnage d'Ariane de sonidentité, la rendant vulnérable et méfiante,l'obligeant alors à retrouver le fil brisé deson existence par une recherche de soi qui



n'enlève rien au mal qu'on lui a fait, maisqui la projettera en avant dans la vie: « . . .une nouvelle force s'installe, laquelle peutamener la joie. . . . Mieux vaut être triste etfort que ravagé et faible ».

C'est de la recherche d'identité dont il estquestion dans Still. Tirs groupés de PierreOuellet. Ce roman hors normes se présentecomme une sorte de Raymond Chandlerexistentiel, à la fois ludique (puisqu'il joueavec les codes du polar) et complexe (par saportée philosophique et sa rechercheformelle). Il s'agit du récit d'un policieramnésique nommé Chester Head, quienquête sur une affaire de meurtres en série,tout en cherchant à retrouver les élémentsde sa vie disparus avec sa mémoire: « C'estdans sa tête que ça grisonne: une mémoirepoivre et sel, si vous voulez, une mémoireblanchie. » Par une prose poétique cérébrale(la tête y est d'ailleurs l'un des paradigmesprincipaux), par des phrases courtes et sac-cadées ici et de longues phrases tortueuseslà, l'auteur nous conduit à travers un NewYork de série noire cinématographiquemais dont le décor, à peine esquissé, laisseplace à l'intériorité des personnages et àleur langage torturé et tortueux.

C'est à travers l'histoire des autres queHead tentera de se reconstruire: « quand onn'a plus de mémoire, autant remonter lepassé des autres, revivre à rebours leurpetite histoire. » C'est par le biais des récitssordides de meurtres dans le milieu desfilms underground que le personnagecherche sa nature, son être, réfléchissantsur la mémoire, d'une manière qui rejointassez les préoccupations philosophiques del'auteur, parfois exposées de manièrethéorique: « Le métier de flic, pour lui, c'é-tait un genre de philosophie. Pas uneéthique, ni une esthétique. Non, ce seraittrop simple. Une poétique, comme il disait:une théorie de l'âme, une critique de ladouleur, une pathétique. » Cette quête pourretrouver la mémoire perdue (symboliséetout au long du roman par le thème de la

décapitation), est également celle de l'écri-ture, comme pourraient le laisser croire lesnoms des personnages, qui ne sont jamaislaissés au hasard: Head, Read, Wright, sansoublier les noms à résonance biblique(Adam, Eve), conférant au roman un autrede ses paradigmes primordiaux: celui del'eschatologie: « . . . les noms se tissent lesuns aux autres comme un seul Nom, cer-tains diront le nom de dieu, cet autre nomde la Vérité. » L'enquête sur la mémoire etla vérité s'avère alors être une quête spi-rituelle et religieuse.

Si le cinéma—art de l'image par excel-lence—est ici l'un des thèmes, c'est sansdoute pour créer un lien avec les œuvres deMichel Bricault qui ont inspiré à l'auteur ceroman. Le texte et les images se complètentà merveille: sur ces illustrations, on dis-cerne des silhouettes sombres d'hommessans visage dans une grisaille troublante,par le biais d'un regard flou donnant surdes non-lieux, sur des êtres qui paraissentsans mémoire, comme écrasés par le poidsde leur seule existence. La rencontre del'écriture de Ouellet et des œuvres deBricault plonge le lecteur dans une atmo-sphère envoûtante.

Par ce texte riche et complexe, cette écri-ture exploratoire, ainsi que par l'iconogra-phie qui l'accompagne, Pierre Ouellet nousoffre un livre unique en son genre, unefascinante expérience d'écriture et d'édition.

Hyphenating MinoritiesAndy QuanCalendar Boy. New Star $20.00Francisco Ibañez-CarrascoFlesh Wounds and Purple Flowers: The Cha-ChaYears. Arsenal Pulp $17.95Reviewed by Philipp Maurer

Are there minorities within minorities? Is aCanadian-born Asian gay man a queerAsian Canadian or an Asian Canadianqueer? Is there such a thing as Asian Queer


Canadian? A Latino Canadian Queer? Arethose differentiations relevant? Are theynoticeable? Are they sensible? These aresome of the questions that arise inCalendar Boy by Andy Quan and FleshWounds and Purple Flowers: The Cha ChaYears by Francisco Ibañez-Carrasco.

Andy Quan was born and raised inVancouver and now lives in Sydney,Australia. Calendar Boy is a collection ofshort stories dealing with aspects of queerand immigrant life all over the world. Someof his work has appeared in anthologiessuch as Contra/Diction, Queeries, andQueer View Mirror. When asked for anauthor's statement for Contra/Diction,Quan wrote that for him, "being includedin a collection like Contra/Diction is aboutchallenging a monolithic view of what it isto be gay or queer in Canada or the worldin the nineties. But I don't believe there is amonolithic view. Or even anything morethan a contingent cultural or communalnorm." This is exactly what, in a nutshell,Calendar Boy is about. Quan's stories chal-lenge a monolithic view not only of beingqueer, but also of being the descendant ofChinese immigrants. They deal with beingAsian in Canadian gay subculture; with"coming of age," "coming out" and "goingpublic"; with racism and self-acceptance.

Quan's debut contains sixteen storiesrevolving around these issues; their tone issometimes aggressive and threateninglysharp, sometimes ironic and subtle. All thecharacters seem to be facets of the sameperson; they are travellers in a geographicalas well as a figurative sense. Quan uses sim-ple and yet incisive metaphors in storiessuch as "How to Cook Chinese Rice,"which presents a recipe as well as an obser-vation on coming out as an Asian gay man,or in "Sleep," a story on the nature ofmonogamy and trust in a relationship. Hisstories portray "Asian-ness" against a back-drop of being queer—and vice versa, as in"Immigration," in which Quan sensitively

draws a parallel between the emotions of anearly twentieth-century Chinese immigrantand those of a Chinese Canadian gay mancoming out at the turn of the millennium.

In addition, stories like "What I ReallyHate" illustrate Quan's views on the politicsof queer minorities and pseudo-multicul-turalism: "Why do we have a separate clubnight anyways? Does that put us into thecategory of leather night, rubbermen,underwear parties? Are we a fetish or arewe a theme party?" This kind of question-ing of identity politics reappears through-out the book. Quan's stories seem to revealthat multiculturalism and the embrace ofdifference are substantially less developedin gay subculture than in Canadian main-stream culture.

Flesh Wounds and Purple Flowers alsodeals with minorities within minorities.Francisco Ibañez-Carrasco's novel is theAIDS memoir of a Chilean Canadian pro-tagonist by the name of Camilo, who, fromhis hospital bed, recalls his life, duringwhich he has often and even easily crossedall sorts of borders and boundaries betweencountries and has defied many norms andvalues. Ibañez-Carrasco was born inSantiago, Chile, and now lives in Vancouver.Flesh Wounds and Purple Flowers takesplace in various locations in the Americas:Chile, Cuba, Canada and the United States.

Camilo leaves Chile for New York, on theway stopping by chance in Vancouver,where he decides to stay. The story of hislife is an odyssey of emigration and immi-gration, of love, sex, and self-discovery. ForCamilo, his disease is both plague and reve-lation. Like Calendar Boy, Flesh Woundsand Purple Flowers deals with racism andethnic origin, and yet Ibañez-Carrasco'swriting differs considerably from Quan's.Apart from being considerably more lasciv-ious and erotic (a quality which, amongother things, confers on it a certain touchof "gay nostalgia"), his novel is virtuallyclosed against "intruders." Access is granted



selectively through the use of "Spanglish,"which emphasizes cultural differences andkeeps boundaries in place: some readers areintentionally left outside. Quan deals moredirectly with the exclusionary effect of lan-guage: in the title story "Calendar Boy," theprotagonist Gary (a Chinese Canadian) ispitied by Hong Kong Chinese people for hisinability to speak Cantonese, and is inten-tionally left out of conversations.

In the course of their skilfully craftedworks, both authors construct and at thesame time challenge and deconstruct"hyphenated minorities." As one of Quan'scharacters declares, "I'm checkerboard.Through and through, two-tone abstractart, multi-coloured swirl painting. Plaid,baby, I'm plaid, so out of fashion I'm infashion and so stylish I'm on my way out. Idon't go with anything you own."

Notez bien!Pierre Rajotte, dir.Lieux et réseaux de sociabilité littéraire au Québec.Nota Bene 19,95$Robert Dion et al, dir.Enjeux des genres dans les écritures contempo-raines. Nota Bene 23,95$Comptes rendus par Vincent Desroches

Créées en 1998, les Éditions Nota Bene con-tinuent de se développer à un rythmeétourdissant; pas moins de quatorze collec-tions se déploient et plus de cent cinquantetitres déjà ont été produits. Alerte aux bi-bliothécaires nord-américains! Il s'agitdésormais de l'éditeur le plus important dela recherche universitaire québécoise ensciences humaines et en littérature. Parmiles titres publiés en 2001, voici deux ouvragescollectifs fort bien assemblés et présentés.

Lieux et réseaux, sous la direction dePierre Rajotte, s'inspire des théories dePierre Bourdieu sur l'autonomie du champculturel et des travaux de sociologie de lalittérature d'Alain Viala, qui signe d'ailleurs

la préface. Tous les aspects des institutionslittéraires sont couverts par les sept articles.Les auteurs passent en revue les cas de lacorrespondance entre auteurs (il s'agit icide celle d'Alfred Desrochers, ce qui soulèvela question du rôle du mentor), les salonslittéraires, le rôle de l'éditeur, les revues lit-téraires (avec la Relève), les librairies, lesacadémies, et les associations d'écrivains. Àl'exception d'Isabelle Boisclair, qui signeaussi le seul article portant sur la scène lit-téraire contemporaine, tous les auteurssont affiliés à l'Université de Sherbrooke etportent leur regard sur le dix-neuvième siè-cle ou la première moitié du vingtième. Ilserait intéressant d'étendre ces observationsà la deuxième moitié du vingtième siècle,alors que plusieurs acteurs sont encorevivants. L'étude de Boisclair, portant sur lesÉditions Remue-ménage, s'appuie ainsi surcinq entretiens avec les féministes québé-coises actives dans cette maison d'édition,ce qui permet de documenter une périodefort mouvementée avant de perdre unefoule de détails. Notons que la thèse dedoctorat d'Isabelle Boisclair, provisoirementintitulée Ouvrir la voie/x et portant surl'ensemble du mouvement féministe seraégalement publiée aux Éditions Nota Bene.

Le parti-pris historique de l'ensemble n'estpourtant pas un handicap, au contraire, etpermet de documenter finement et systé-matiquement l'émergence des institutionslittéraires au Québec. Cet effort pourraitsûrement s'étendre jusqu'à inclure l'histoirede l'enseignement et de la critique littéraireuniversitaire telle qu'elles ont pu se prati-quer au Québec. Mais comme le précisePierre Rajotte dans sa présentation,d'autres types de lieux et de réseaux lit-téraires restent à examiner, dont : « lesacadémies de collège et les réseaux associésà l'enseignement, les cercles dramatiques,les théâtres, les associations de jeunessecatholiques, les cénacles, les clubs et cafés,les bibliothèques ». Saluons la vigueur de ceprojet de recherche important, qui permet


à la fois d'asseoir solidement la notion dediscours chère à la sociocritique et dedégager les conditions de production d'unepart importante de la génétique des textes.

Enjeux et genres dans les écritures contem-poraires, sous la direction de Robert Dion,Frances Fortier, et Elizabeth Haghebaert,présente quant à lui quinze articles parvingt-cinq auteurs québécois et européens(plusieurs articles sont écrits en collabora-tion). Mentionnons aussi la présence de JanetPaterson et de Claudine Potvin, du Canadaanglais, qui détonnent un peu dans cetensemble résolument orienté vers la théorielittéraire française. Ceci n'exclut pas ladiversité des approches, malgré l'accent trèssémioticien de l'introduction, qui préfèreutiliser la longue paraphrase : « la produc-tion postérieure au renouvellement de larhétorique et de la poétique (postérieure auxannées i960 et 1970, donc) » plutôt que derisquer la brûlure du mot post-structuraliste.Le livre s'ouvre sur deux études théoriquesde Pierre Zima et de Denis Saint-Jacques etentreprend ensuite des études de cas met-tant en lumière le caractère hybride desproductions littéraires contemporaines. Oùsont les frontières entre roman, poésie enprose, fictions, théâtre, description, autobi-ographie, cinéma, performance? Commentla production textuelle en rend-ellecompte? Quelles stratégies textuelles semettent en place? Comme on l'aura notédans l'énumération ci-haut, le recueil tente,avec bonheur je crois, d'étendre au maxi-mum la notion de genre jusqu'aux bornesde la littérature, comme dans le cas d'unarticle sur les installations artistiques parPaul-Émile Saulnier. Curieusement, legenre de la nouvelle, qui connaît un succèsimportant au Québec, n'est examiné quetangentiellement par une étude de RenéAudet, Patrick Guay et Richard Saint-Gelaisportant sur les écritures collectives.

Plus problématique peut-être, parce quece choix editorial n'est nulle part com-menté, est la pratique de juxtaposer sur le

même plan les articles portant sur la littéra-ture québécoise et ceux portant sur la pro-duction littéraire française, comme si lesécritures contemporaines évoquées par letitre subissaient les mêmes évolutions et lesmêmes influences en synchronie. A cetégard, l'article de Hans-Jürgen Lüsenbrinkest le seul à traiter du genre dans une pers-pective comparatiste pour l'ensemble deslittératures francophones, y comprisafricaines, ce qui modifie la perspective cri-tique considérablement, tout en indiquantpeut-être les limites de cet exercice dethéorisation. Ce recueil demeure un excel-lent outil pour apprécier l'évolution récentedes genres, l'apparition continuelle de nou-velles formes hybrides et le caractèreobsolète des catégorisations rigides. Il nes'agit pas, précise-t-on en conclusion, deliquider le genre en soi, « dont la pertinenceperdurerait au moins dans l'enseignementde la littérature et dans la littérature demasse », mais de reconsidérer notre rapportau genre, « ce qui conduit à une interroga-tion sur le bien-fondé de la littérature, sonrôle, sa fonction ». La notion de genredevient ainsi un enjeu de lecture, ludique etfluide, un clin d'oeil de connivence entrel'écrivain et son lecteur.

Sinclair Ross ReissuedSinclair RossThe Well. U of Alberta P $16.95Sinclair RossWhir of Gold. U of Alberta P $16.95Sinclair RossSawbones Memorial. U of Alberta P $16.95Reviewed by Alison Calder

If asked to name Sinclair Ross's writings,most people would come up with As ForMe and My House, Ross's widely studiedfirst novel; many would also list some of hisshort stories, particularly such frequentlyanthologized pieces as "The Lamp atNoon," "The Painted Door," "Cornet at

177 Canadian literature 180 I Spring 2004


Night," and "One's a Heifer." TheseCanadian classics have largely defined thegenre of prairie realism and have provenwidely influential in shaping readers' viewsof the Canadian prairies. As For Me and MyHouse holds the (somewhat dubious) dis-tinction of being one of the most analyzedtexts in Canadian literary history, and Rosshas been cited as an influence by manyCanadian prairie writers, such as RobertKroetsch in his important essay "On Beingan Alberta Writer." Although As For Me andMy House first appeared in 1941, it contin-ues to influence contemporary writers, asshown by the 1996 publication of A SavingGrace, Lorna Crozier's collection of poemsbased on Ross's narrator, Mrs. Bentley.

Yet relatively few people are familiar withRoss's later novels: The Well (1958), Whir ofGold (1970), and Sawbones Memorial (1974).More readers are likely to know these booksin the future, as they have been reissued inhandsome new editions by the Universityof Alberta Press. The books, each of whichincludes a generous contextual introduc-tion by another author, are beautifully pre-sented with attractive covers and illustratedthroughout with representative icons.Together, the books reveal both thestrengths and the limitations of Ross'srange. All are concerned with alienationand failed or compromised communica-tion, themes familiar to readers of As ForMe and My House, and all show the break-down of sexual relationships, often throughinfidelity. Ross's style remains consistentthroughout the novels until his last, whenthe tightly constricted single narrator'svoice of the previous works fragments intomany overlapping and competing versionsof the same story.

Although thirty-three years separateRoss's first novel from his last, he cannot besaid to have mellowed with age. Reading hisworks in succession is a profoundly bleakexperience. No one connects; love does notexist, except as a commodity bartered for

refuge, respectability, or financial gain. TheWell is a psychological thriller that tells thestory of Chris Rowe, a young gangsterforced to flee Montreal because he mayhave killed a man during a botched rob-bery. After riding the rails, he is offered ajob as hired man on the Larson farm inSaskatchewan, where he is soon embroiledin a heated affair with Sylvia, Larson'syoung and dangerous wife. Larson, mean-while, appears to see Chris as a replacementfor his dead young son. Chris soon discov-ers that the harsh streets of Montreal are farless dangerous than the confines of an iso-lated prairie farm, as the text inexorablymoves further into duplicity and ultimatelymurder. Whir of Gold (1970) preservesRoss's tightly constrained narrative style,but moves from Western Canada toMontreal to describe the declining fortunesof Sonny, a young would-be clarinet playerfrom the prairies who is trying to make itin the big city. Impoverished and unem-ployed, Sonny picks up Madeleine, a wait-ress with a heart of gold who tries to moveinto his life as quickly as she moves into hisboarding-house bed. At the same time,Sonny is being seduced into becoming acriminal by Charlie, another resident of theboarding house, who offers him a role in arobbery. Both the robbery and the relation-ship go badly, and at the end Sonny is againalone, abandoned by Charlie and sendingMadeleine away. Sawbones Memorial (1974)marks a radical departure. This short novelhas no single narrator, but is told throughthe varied voices of the residents of thesmall Saskatchewan town of Upward. Eachcharacter recalls the life and times of Dr.Hunter, the town's "Sawbones," during aparty to celebrate his retirement. The com-peting and contradictory voices of thetownspeople create a composite portrait ofa small prairie town, a portrait that revealsboth the warmth of the community and itsbigotry and hypocrisy. Although the townlooks forward to the opening of its new


hospital, the racist voices raised against thenew doctor, Nick Miller, the "Hunky" sonof Big Anna, the Ukrainian woman whotook in the town's washing, suggest that thetown's future is not as bright as the partysetting would seem to suggest. The mostsignificant secret revealed to the reader isthat Nick is actually Dr. Hunter's son, theproduct of an adulterous encounter.

Another continuity between these booksis their scapegoating of the female charac-ters. In The Well, Chris despises Sylviathroughout their affair because she deceivesher husband, although of course Chris isdeceiving Larson too, not only sleepingwith his wife but also playing the role ofson when he thinks it might be to hisadvantage. By the novel's end, the narrativethoroughly constructs Sylvia as the spidertempting Chris further into her web: sheinitiates the plan to murder Larson, thusbinding Chris to her through their sharedculpability. The last scene makes it clearthat Sylvia functions as the whore to thenear-virginal figure of Elsie Grover, theinnocent shopkeeper's daughter whomChris had earlier seduced and seems tohave abandoned. Faced with a choicebetween life with Sylvia and a jail sentencewith Elsie Grover perhaps waiting faithfullyfor him at the end, Chris phones the police,sealing Sylvia's fate. Punishing Sylvia isChris's victory and what proves his moral-ity: the novel reports that "he had leapedand made his landing." In Whir of Gold,Madeleine too is punished, after appearingas a martyr throughout her relationshipwith Sonny, as he must drive her away inorder to become an artist. The doctor whopromises to link Sonny up with anothermusician seems only interested in Sonny aslong as he represents the sexy, loose worldof jazz. After the doctor leaves Sonny'sapartment after a brief visit, Sonny iscaught in the trappings of domesticity:"there they were, my socks and her nylons:a fact, on record; and here I stood, framed

in them." In Sawbones Memorial, amongstthe vicious gossips and small minds of thetown, it is Anna who is most consistentlyabused. She is seen as little better than ananimal, even by the "hero," Doc Hunter,who carries on an affair with her but isunable to forget her "hunky" status (or isthat what attracts him?). "That's one thingabout them," he muses about Anna's preg-nancy, "just like a cow having her calf; intheir country used to working in the field Isuppose." The tragedies of Doc's life, ifthere are any, seem to be his mistaken mar-riage to a wife portrayed as passionless, andthen his status as not-father to Nick, as nei-ther Anna nor the town will allow him toinvolve himself with "the hunkies." Theonly love Doc feels is towards Nick, andthat can never be spoken.

Preoccupied SpacesDanielle SchaubMapping Canadian Cultural Space: Essays onCanadian Literature. Hebrew U Magnes P $35.00Stacy AlaimoUndomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature asFeminist Space. Cornell U P $18.95Reviewed by Meredith Criglington

"Space" and "place" are especially promi-nent in recent debates surrounding culturaland feminist identity, as evidenced by thecollection of essays in Mapping CanadianCultural Space. This collection suggeststhat one of the appeals of "spatial theory" isits adaptability to a vast range of readings,depending on how one chooses to defineand apply that very malleable term "space."The contributors figure "space" variouslyas the linguistic landscape, the space ofmemory, migratory space, the internalizedlandscape of female subjectivity, the spaceof the maternal, the space of the mother-daughter relationship, and narrative space.

Given the fluidity of the key terminologyin Mapping Canadian Cultural Space, it is



not surprising that the most effective analy-ses interrogate their own terms of referenceby considering how concepts of space havebeen culturally constructed within specificsocio-historical contexts. In this respect,the opening essay by Branko Gorjup pro-vides a useful historical overview of therelationship between the Canadian imagi-nation and its representation of spatialmodes. Gorjup notes that until the latterpart of the twentieth century, Canadiansconceived of space according to the orderly,unified Aristotelian paradigm, which privi-leges "presence over absence, substanceover accident and duration over instanta-neity." This particular phase of fictionalspatialization is linked to the colonial fateof "real" North American space, that is, theland and its indigenous inhabitants. Thesecond half of the essay focuses on thepoetry of Christopher Dewdney and AnneMichaels as emblematic of a radical recon-ceptualization of space as "a palimpsest ofmultiple traces," a model that is influencedby the notions of relativity and uncertaintyin modern physics. According to Gorjup,such disruptions in the representation ofspace reflect the increasingly pluralisticcharacter of Canadian culture.

Other essays that engage the question ofhow space is constituted include BinaToledo Freiwald's "Cartographies ofBe/longing: Dionne Brand's In AnotherPlace, Not Here" and Biljana Romic's "M.G. Vassanji's The Book of Secrets or the Artof Intricate Spatial Interplay. " Freiwaldapplies Kathleen Kirby's taxonomy of "thespace of the subject" to Brand's novel inorder to map the movement of the twoisland-born protagonists within the oppo-sitional topographies of Toronto and anunnamed Caribbean island. This sensitivereading of the novel balances Verlia's self-negating search for "the liberating anonymityof revolutionary space/time/self" inToronto against Elizete's effort to bring"herself into existence in Toronto by nam-

ing and unmasking the social relations thatconstitute the city."

Similarly, Biljana Romic develops a post-colonial conception of space and place inorder to examine the themes of homeless-ness, diaspora, and the loss of spatial mem-ory in Vassanji's The Book of Secrets. Romicexplores the novel's structure through acomplex set of opposing and intersectingspaces and their corresponding temporali-ties, including the "mythic space" of Indianmemory and the "calendrical space" of theimmigrant's experiences of the new land.Distinguishing between different kinds ofspace in this way not only enables Romicand Freiwald to explore the paradoxes andcomplexities of immigrant experiences inthese particular novels, it also provides thereader with critical frameworks that can betested against other texts.

A striking feature of Mapping CanadianCultural Space is that so many of the contrib-utors, all except one of whom are women,link spatial representations with femalesubjectivity. This association, which some-times appears to be unquestioned, is prob-lematic when one considers the misogynist,heterosexist history of defining women inrelation to space, in particular, domesticspace and the space of nature. UndomesticatedGround: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space,confronts just this issue in a timely, provoca-tive, and thoughtful manner. Alaimo con-siders the ongoing feminist struggle withthe historical legacy of "Mother Earth" andother female-gendered representations ofnature. Feminist theory's "flight fromnature," which aims to liberate womanfrom essentialism, generates the oppositeeffect, since severing nature from cultureonly further solidifies nature as the unyield-ing ground of essentialism. UndomesticatedGround explores a dazzling array of femi-nist texts that endeavour to inhabit andtransform nature as a place of feminist pos-sibility. Throughout, Alaimo remains sensi-tive to the pitfalls of any alliance between


women and nature. The texts are groupedchronologically and thematically, and eachis carefully considered in relation to itssocial and historical moment.

In Part II, Alaimo considers how femi-nists have allied themselves with nature as apolitical space. Emma Goldman and severalleftist writers of the 1930s, for example,summoned the bountiful and beneficentfigure of "Mother Earth" to condemn eco-nomic inequalities. Part III, "Feminism,Postmodernism, Environmentalism," is,"naturally," the most playful and diversesection of the book, touching on everythingfrom the queering of nature in Jane Rule'sDesert of the Heart to the 1990 Earth DayTV special and the portraits of whale-tailsused in the Whale Adoption Program. Thissection foregrounds Alaimo's indebtednessto those postmodern theorists who strate-gically blur the boundaries between natureand culture, in particular, Gilles Deleuze,Felix Guattari, Judith Butler, and DonnaHaraway. While the focus is on Americantexts and pop culture, a few Canadianworks are also considered. Alaimo's lively,compelling reading of Marian Engel's Bearas an epistemological drama is a highlight,while her assessment of the problematicaffirmation of the "natural woman" inMargaret Atwood's Surfacing offers animportant complement to DanielleSchaub's reading of that same novel inMapping Canadian Cultural Space.

Let me conclude, therefore, by callingattention to Margery Fee's comment,tucked away in a footnote to UndomesticatedGround, that many of Bears critics haveassumed that "nature and women, likenature and Canadians, have some specialaffinity." If one considers this statement inlight of the promise and perils of this affin-ity outlined by Alaimo, it would seem thatboth women and Canadians have a particu-lar interest in reconceptualizing the rela-tionship between humans and nature inmutually beneficial, non-essentializing ways.

Pas de DeuxDavid Staines, ed.Margaret Laurence: Critical Reflections. U ofOttawa P $19.95Camille R. La Bossière andLinda M. Morra, eds.Robertson Davies: A Mingling of Contrarieties. Uof Ottawa P $21.95Reviewed by Lorna Hutchison

Margaret Laurence: Critical Reflections isone of the most recent collections toemerge from the Reappraisals: CanadianWriters series, in which the "best" paperspresented at the University of Ottawa'sannual literary conference are chosen forpublication. The collection brings togethera splendid array of viewpoints from literarycritics, authors, academics, and colleaguesand friends of Laurence. The combinationof perspectives on and approaches toLaurence and her art by Helen M. Buss,Aritha Van Herk, Robert Kroetsch, JoyceMarshall, and John Lennox (to name a few)accounts for the diversity, richness, andindeed quirkiness of the collection as awhole. The penchant of the majority of theessays towards personal connections to, orbiographical aspects of, Laurence and herwork—her values and work ethic; corre-spondence and professional relationships—distinguishes the collection from the rowsof text-centred academic essay collectionsdevoted to a single writer, and from thestudy of Robertson Davies reviewed here.

A strong sense of respect and affection forLaurence permeates the collection: the crit-ics implicate themselves at a personal andengagingly emotional level that sensitizesthe reader to the complexity of Laurenceand her oeuvre. For example, in a studythat grapples with Laurence's approach tochildren's storytelling, Janet Lunn candidlycriticizes Laurence's failure to connect withher young audience, all the while revealingsome of the major strengths of Laurence's



adult fiction. Nora Foster Stovel's researchon the professional relationship betweenLaurence and Judith Jones, editor of TheDiviners, explores her own concerns aboutthe radical editing process of the novel. Inher discussion of The Diviners as fictionabout fiction she asks, "Did Laurence's edi-tors miss her metafictional aim?" And JohnLennox (who does not hide his delight at"working with exchanges of letters betweengifted correspondents") reveals the growthof a writer and the creative, motivatinginfluence of great friendships in his com-pelling analysis of Laurence's correspon-dence with Adele Wiseman and Al Purdy.The collection should be of interest toLaurence scholars and to "non-academic"readers as well.

Robertson Davies: A Mingling of Contrarietiesdeals with my favourite literary themes anddevices: binary opposition, paradox, ambiva-lence, and that elusive space connectinglanguage to cognitive processes known asthe "in-between." The collection boastsmany playful approaches to the dodgery ofDavies's writings (and to the intriguingman himself, of course, as MichaelPeterman explores in the first essay: "TheConcert of His Life: Perspectives on theMasks of Robertson Davies"). The collec-tion provides a timely, sophisticated look atthe work of one of Canada's most prolificand well-known writers.

Perhaps less known to Davies's generalreadership is the writer's involvement withthe theatre, which began, Lois Sherlow tellsus, through his work as a playwright in thethirties. Sherlow situates Davies's dramaticwritings within the movements ofCanadian theatre, arguing that "In a Daviesplay, as in a Davies novel, the authorialvoice always eventually overrides the playof difference," and thus "it is always themoralist, not the magician, who prevails."Mark Silverberg points to a similar func-tion of the doubling technique evident inWorld of Wonders, in which the great magi-

cian's attempts to dominate both text andreader (as well as his audience within thestory itself) are thwarted by a chorus ofcompetitive narrative voices. These essaysresound with a running theme in the col-lection: Davies's construction of tensionthrough contrariety in his work illuminatesthe unknown opposite, which is somehow,somewhere, just another facet of the self.

Different approaches to the theme of con-trariety include explorations of the grotesque,humour, and grotesque humour, as in K.P.Stich's entertaining study of the literarymotif of alcohol; myth and magic, formalconsiderations of self-authenticating fic-tion, and "the conjunction of reader andwriter" in narration (Andrea C. Cole). Ahighlight of the collection is its final essay, acollaborative work by Rick Davis, M.D.,and Peter Brigg. Similar to one of the finalessays in the Laurence compilation, in whichLois Wilson, a minister and long-timefriend of Laurence cites the writer's viewson vocation, grace, and justice, "'MedicalConsultation' for Murther and WalkingSpirits and The Cunning Man" is a perfor-mance piece about Davies's collaborationswith a medical doctor. It is as humorous(for its morbid medical information) as itis illuminating of the purposeful side ofDavies. A strong quality of the collection,including Camille LaBossière's introduc-tion, is its success in portraying Davies as acontroversial figure both admired and criti-cized by his literary audience.

Amour et fatalitéCarmen StranoLes jours de lumière. Triptyque 18,00$Marc MénardItinérances. Triptyque 20,00$Comptes rendus par Edouard Magessa O'Reilly

Triptyque nous propose deux premiersromans par des Montréalais où il est ques-tion d'amour et de fatalité. L'un nous parle


de l'amour inéluctable, l'autre d'un coupledésuni par la machine de la vie urbaine.

Les jours de lumière de Carmen Stranoexplorent une situation incongrue maisbien amenée : une femme tombeamoureuse d'un sans-logis. Comment unmembre de cette horde de marginaux peut-il être digne de l'amour de la narratrice,jeune professionnelle sérieuse ? Ils se ren-contrent lorsque celle-ci est bénévole à lasoupe populaire. On apprend avec elle queRaoul est artiste et qu'il se spécialise dans larestauration d'icônes ecclésiastiques. Iln'est pas un de ces démunis et inadaptésmais un « homme tendre, homme richeintérieurement » qui passe par un mauvaismoment. Ses talents non négligeables sontmalheureusement dans un domaine sous-estimé dans la société commerciale dumoment. Du moment, dis-je bien, car toutest là : selon les commérages, Raoul n'estqu'un aliéné qui prétend venir du futur.

Les deux personnages font plus ampleconnaissance, font l'amour et au bout d'unmoment décident d'un mode de vie à deux.Et lorsque la marginalité de Raoul est nonseulement rationalisée mais oubliée, sa folieparticulière se déclare. Effectivement, il secroit de l'avenir. Mais cette vérité arrivetrop tard, la narratrice n'est plus libre, elleaime. « L'amour est une fatalité, dit sonamie Rose. Une fatalité ». Le roman pulluled'exemples de fatalité dont la moindre n'estsûrement pas cette autre amie, Hélène,romancière en herbe. Après avoir fourni unesérie d'exemples d'auteurs qui « finissentpar incarner le destin de leurs personnages »,Hélène frisera la folie, tourmentée par lesbesoins opposés et également impérieux dedonner une fin à son roman et d'éviter àtout prix de fixer son propre destin.

Dans cette histoire d'amour fatal, leséglises se font souvent la scène de l'action.Pour Raoul, qui habite un temps disloqué,elles sont des îlots dans le temps. À soninstar, la narratrice y cherche des repèreslorsqu'elle ne sait plus quoi espérer. Strano

crée un réseau symbolique religieux auquelne sont pas étrangers un épisode chez unecartomancienne et le souvenir deRaspoutine. Par divers moyens, le récitmaintient le doute sur les prétentionsextratemporelles de Raoul sans sombrerdans le fantastique ni la science fiction.

Nous pouvons remarquer chez l'auteureun vrai sens de la description, don qu'ellen'a fait que gêner en optant pour la narra-tion à la première personne. Les descrip-tions captent la touche réaliste, le traitactualisant d'un décor ou d'un geste. Onpeut certes critiquer ici et là, par exemple,quelques notations qui dépassent le pointde vue homodiégétique ou un certain éro-tisme déplacé dans les descriptions de sim-ples figurants masculins. Mais le style estgénéralement très compétent et le récitintéressant.

Le roman de Marc Ménard, Itinérances, n'amalheureusement pas les mêmes qualités.Autre narration à la première personne, lerécit est cette fois pris en charge par un per-sonnage qui est, quelques éclairs mis à part,fondamentalement sans ambition. C'est un« blasé de l'existence », un gars ordinaireatteint d'« un confortable sentiment defatalité ». Conformément au personnage,malheureusement, son discours est plat,sans style, franchement banal par endroits.

Daniel raconte l'histoire du couple qu'ilforme avec Judith. À l'encontre du narra-teur, Judith fait preuve de force au début.Elle fonce « [a]vec une obstination démen-tielle et une énergie inépuisable », et cemalgré le fait qu'elle s'est « cassé la gueule àmaintes reprises ». Mais lorsque les malheursfrappent pour de vrai, lui résiste, elle s'ef-fondre. Itinérances raconte les épreuves dela vie urbaine, ses exigences et ses obstacles.Daniel se promène d'un travail à l'autredans les secteurs de la vente et de la maind'œuvre. Judith fait partie de la horde decols blancs qui se démènent pour trouverleur compte dans le monde des petites etmoyennes entreprises. Elle est brasseuse de



bien petites affaires. Mais un jour Judith serévolte contre l'incertitude des contrats àterme et démissionne brusquement de sonemploi. Ayant ainsi entamé sa propre mar-ginalisation, elle rompt après une faussecouche tous ses liens affectifs avec le mondesocial. Daniel, pour sa part, résiste à lamalchance. Mis à pied, il est effrayé par lamisère qui le menace et cette peur l'anime.Malgré les revers, il s'agrippe à un emploiet à l'espoir. Nous observons un chiasmepsychologique où le fataliste du débuts'anime tandis que l'enthousiaste s'affaisseet s'écroule.

L'histoire, qui n'est pas sans intérêt, estmal servie par le récit. Quelques motsrecherchés ici et là, mais aussi despléonasmes, des contradictions dans lestermes, beaucoup de clichés. Les expressionset tournures, tant de la narration que desdialogues, sont souvent celles de la conver-sation la plus banale. Il manque surtoutdans ce roman le don du dialogue. Mêmeun dialogue apparemment anodin doit êtreprofondément surdéterminé par le con-texte, tandis que les dialogues d1'Itinérancessont souvent réellement anodins, ne ser-vant qu'à faire passer le temps de l'histoire,sans apporter de profondeur au roman niaux personnages (lors de la soirée, chapitre2 ; dans le supermarché, chapitre 6 ; dans lebar, chapitre 7 ; chez Daniel et Judith,chapitre 14). Le chapitre 12, tout en italique,risque de paraître prétentieux. Il correspondau moment clé qui détermine Daniel àrésister aux revers mais, sur le plan narratif,le chapitre reste imprécis (peut-être le sou-venir d'une fugue faite pendant l'adolescencedu personnage) et détonne dans le contexte.

Disons pour terminer Félicitations ! àTriptyque pour l'intérêt que cette maisonporte aux jeunes romanciers. Et Bonne con-tinuation ! à ceux-ci. Carmen Strano est uneauteure prometteuse et ce premier romanmérite d'être lu. Nous pouvons espérer queLes jours de lumière seront suivis d'une autreœuvre encore meilleure.

A Cruel SeparationGuy VanderhaegheThe Last Crossing. McClelland and Stewart $37.99Reviewed by Gordon Boiling

Guy Vanderhaeghe dedicates his most recentpublication to "all those local historianswho keep the particulars of our past alive."Although not a writer of history in the aca-demic sense, Vanderhaeghe clearly feels asense of kinship to Canadian historians.The author holds an M.A. in history fromthe University of Saskatchewan, and hishistorical fiction is meticulouslyresearched. In The Last Crossing, he returnsto the American and Canadian West of the1870s, a historical period which also servedas the setting for The Englishman's Boy(1996), which focused on the Cypress HillMassacre of 1873 and its wilful distortion byHollywood's film industry. Framed bychapters set in 1896 England, The LastCrossing looks back upon an epic journeythrough Montana and the south-westernCanadian prairie.

A quarter of a century after his expeditionto the New World, the English painterCharles Gaunt receives a newspaper clip-ping informing him of the demise of hisformer guide and interpreter Jerry Potts.This piece of news takes us back to 1871when Gaunt and his older brotherAddington travel to the North AmericanWest in search of Charles's twin brotherSimon. However, Addington, a former mil-itary officer, is primarily interested in turn-ing his experiences into a book. Charles, bycontrast, is plagued by Simon's uncertainfate and in moments of despair regardshimself as the "survivor of the cruellest sep-aration," twins "who shared a womb tornfrom one another in the world." AlthoughGaunt is at the centre of The Last Crossing,other characters are equally important.Other members of the expedition, amongthem his lover Lucy Stoveall, the American

184 Canadian Literature lSo / Spring 2004

Civil War veteran Custis Straw, and Straw'scompanion Aloysius Dooley, serve as nar-rators. This multiplicity of voices is com-plemented by an omniscient narrator. Asthe reader follows the search party's routethrough the American and Canadian West,The Last Crossing gradually reveals eachcharacter's past.

One of the most complex figures in thenovel is the scout Jerry Potts, a half-breedof Scottish and Blackfoot descent. As amediator between Natives and Canadiangovernment officials, the historical JerryPotts, whose biography has fascinatedVanderhaeghe since his childhood, played adecisive, though mostly unacknowledged,role. A drifter between two worlds, he isknown to Native people as Bear Child. JerryPotts's close links to the Blackfoot and hisintimate knowledge of the geography of theCanadian West prove to be indispensable towhite society, but his multiple identitieslead to his estrangement from his Crowwife Mary and their son Mitchell.

Among the many strengths of The LastCrossing, its attention to historical detaildeserves special mention. Using extensiveresearch, Vanderhaeghe creates scenes thatwill stay with the reader for a long time.Among these are Charles Gaunt's encounterwith a Métis train of Red River carts on itsway to Fort Edmonton, Custis Straw'shaunting memories of the American CivilWar, and the account of the Battle of theWilderness in May 1864. The Last Crossinghas everything a reader could ask for.

Picturing ChildhoodsBudge WilsonIllus. Susan Tooke Fiddle for Angus. Tundra $18.99

Ian WallaceIllus. Harvey ChanThe True Story of Trapper Jack's Left Big Toe.G roundwood $18.95

Paul YeeGhost Train. G roundwood $15.95

Reviewed by Judy Brown

In a world many grown ups say is goingglobal and in a time they call post national,three recent books for children use wordsand pictures to present their readers andviewers with definitions ofthat endangeredidea known as "home."

In A Fiddle for Angus, writer BudgeWilson and illustrator Susan Tooke joinforces to tell the story of a Cape Bretonchildhood. The Angus of the title is theyoungest child of a musical family. Tooyoung, too small, too insignificant to takeon grown up tasks, he is relegated to therole of humming in accompaniment to themusic making and singing of his parentsand older siblings; feeling left out, heretreats and broods a bit. His family, alertto his unhappiness, gives him the opportu nity to choose and the responsibility tolearn an instrument. The story thenbecomes Wilson's account of a child discov ering what it means to choose. Angusattends a ceilidh and, after "watch[ing] . . .and . . . listen [ing] hard to those fiddles,"his attention focused in particular on "agirl called Natalie" (who looks for all theworld like Natalie McMaster), whose fiddlecaptures the sounds of "the wind and thewaves and every happy thing," he decideson that instrument so identified with thetraditional and contemporary music ofAtlantic Canada.

What is most pleasing about this story isthat it doesn't end with Angus' choice:

185 Canadian Literature ¡80 I Spring 2004


it goes on to show the consequences forhim as he struggles to learn—-to replace theinitial "Squawk! Screech! Eeek!" of bowacross strings with "a wild jig" when "hisfingers [have] learn[ed] to race up anddown the strings like ripples over the water."

Susan Tooke's illustrations don't just co-exist happily with Budge Wilson's text; theyintensify the links between music andplace, between a boy and his Cape Bretonvillage home. Images of the island'sseascape and sea life—the waves, thebeaches, the boats, the lobster traps, theherons, the sandpipers, the gulls—domi-nate the pages of the book as the sights andespecially the sounds of this place inspireAngus's music-making. Most memorable,though, are Tooke's renderings of Angus.He is skinny, bespectacled, all knees andshins. His various facial expressions makehim anything but a cartoon-like figure;instead, Tooke emphasizes what those wholive and work among children know.Angus's spirits plummet when he feels leftout; they skyrocket when he learns to freethe island's music from his fiddle. His facebetrays utmost intensity during his fiddlelessons with Big Murdoch MacDougall, andhe grins from ear to ear as he plays "Songfor the Mira" with his family on the beach.He becomes, as he says to his family, muchlike the character in that song, "a happyend to a sad story."

For the two boys depicted in The TrueStory of Trapper Jack's Left Big Toe, home isthe North—Dawson City, Yukon, to be pre-cise—and boyhood is lived in a communityof mischievous adults who initiate young-sters not into a life of music-making butrather into a life oftall storytelling. WhereBudge Wilson's book is an understated nar-rative voiced by a knowing adult, IanWallace's is a first-person account deliveredby a boy named Josh. In Josh's tale, comicsuspense created in the collaboration ofwords and pictures suggests a joke or apunchline around every narrative corner.

Wallace does the work of both writer andillustrator here, and the result is the storyof Gabe Kidder and Josh Yew, the latter anewcomer to the ways of the North. Thesetwo schoolmates set out to investigate thetruth of the Yukon legend of the sourtoecocktail, the principal ingredient of whichis said to be the amputated toe of a wizenedold trapper named Jack. A series of mishapsleads to the loss of the toe as it is firstsnatched out of the air by a three-leggeddog and then spirited away by a teasingraven. Or so Josh asks his readers to believe.Where Wilson's story features a boy strug-gling to learn music, Wallace's shows a boystruggling to become a convincing spinneroftall tales.

The book's verbal wit—including anynumber of bad and funny puns on toes andpulling toes, on kidding and joshing—isneatly complemented by the visual humourof Wallace's illustrations. Pictures empha-size the snows lingering into a Yukon April:there is nothing romantic or soft aboutthem. The mammoth illustration inside thebook's front cover is the most clever geo-graphical joke of all: it features road signsemphasizing how close Dawson City is tothe Arctic Circle (185 miles) and how far itis from everywhere else: Haifa, Tokyo, Lagos,and Melbourne being among the citiesmentioned. Most notable of all for Canadianreaders is the requisite anti-Toronto joke—a sign reading "Toronto Who Cares."

The third of these books for young read-ers—Paul Yee and Harvey Chan's GhostTrain—pictures childhood past, childhoodwest, childhood serious. Yee's story heretakes up the railway theme that also fea-tured in several stories in his Tales fromGold Mountain: Stories of the Chinese in theNew World. It looks at the building of theCPR not as the driving of the last spikecaught in the famous photo of DonaldSmith and company at Craigellachie, but asthe long untold accounts of the men andboys who left their villages in China,


crossed the Pacific Ocean, and lived,worked, and died alone in the new land.Ghost Train tells the story of Choon-yi, ayoung girl physically disabled but giftedwith a painter's vision and her father's love.Choon-Yi's father, like thousands of hiscountrymen, travels to the New World withdreams of making a better life for his fam-ily. But just after he has sent for his daugh-ter to join him, he loses his life in thoselegendary gold mountains; he becomes oneof many casualties produced in the treach-erous project of building the railway.

Choon-yi's quest, like the quests of somany of the young characters in Yee's sto-ries, is heroic. Her father's spirit communi-cates to her the need to paint the rail carsshe has never seen before in her life, thenecessity of evoking and riding the ghosttrain on which travel the spirits of theunnamed workers killed in the collapses,explosions and calamities of railway con-struction. He urges her then to take herrailway painting back to China, promisingher that if she burns her canvas on a certainmountaintop, the ghosts of the railroad willbe released: their "ashes [will] sail on thefour winds .. . [and their] souls will finallyfind their way home."

Harvey Chan's illustrations—paintingsdone in oils and drypoint etchings on cop-per—are complex, poignant, rich. Theysuggest the realistic and imaginativestrands of Yee's historically based folktales.They emphasize the love of father anddaughter for one another, the fear of a childalone in an indifferent if not hostile newworld, and the presence of those spiritsabsent from traditional Canadian histories,the epic railway poetry of Ned Pratt, andthe official photographs of the CPR.

Reading this trio of children's books atwhat Peter Hunt has called "picture speed"shows writers and illustrators for Canada'schildren defining home in places east,north, and west, and in times present andpast. Text and pictures together remind us

that Hunt was right when he called thereading of such books "a sophisticated act."And A Fiddle for Angus, The True Story ofTrapper Jack's Left Big Toe, and Ghost Trainsuggest that the Alice of wonderland famehad more than an incidental point to makewhen she asked, "What is the use of a bookwithout pictures or conversation?" Whatindeed.

A Legacy of ExplorationRonald WrightHendersons Spear. Knopf $34.95Barbara HodgsonHippolyte's Island. Raincoast $37.50Reviewed by Alison Rukavina

A legacy of European expansion into thesupposedly empty and unexplored reachesof the globe reverberates through to thepresent day, with global politics and poli-cies still influenced by the remnants of pastempire building. In the last forty years, thedefining principles of exploration—discov-ering the unknown reaches of the earth,and the populating and civilizing ofthem—have begun to be questioned, andmodern explorers, as well as armchairtravellers, are today confronted with theconsequences of imperialism. Henderson'sSpear and Hippolyte's Island are two novelsthat examine the impact of Europeanexploration on the descendants of thediscoverers.

Henderson's Spear opens withVancouverite Olivia Wyvern in a Tahitianjail under arrest for murder. Olivia travelsto Tahiti in search of her father, missing inaction since the Korean War, but believedto be alive and hiding somewhere in theSouth Pacific. The novel takes the form ofa letter to the daughter Olivia gave up atbirth, explaining her present predicamentand her family's history. Included with theletter are passages from the journals ofOlivia's distant relative, Frank Henderson,

187 Canadian literature 180 I Spring 2004


who, as a young British officer in the nine-teenth century, travelled to the South Season the Bacchante with Queen Victoria'sgrandsons Prince George and PrinceEdward. Henderson's journal offers clues tothe Henderson/Wyvern family secrets,including the origin of a spear that capti-vated Olivia and her father, the tragic fasci-nation various family members have hadwith Tahiti, and the ways in which thelegacy of Tahiti's colonial past shapesOlivia's past and present.

Henderson's Spear is an ambitious novelwhich alternates between the two points ofview of Frank and Olivia, and the past andpresent of colonial politics in the SouthSeas. Ronald Wright probes the history andeffects of empire, revealing that Olivia'squest to solve the mystery of her father'sdisappearance is intricately connected toFrank's journey to Tahiti a hundred yearsearlier. The novel suggests that the legacy ofcolonialism reverberates throughout thetwentieth century and is less a legacy than acontinuing actuality: depending on the eyeof the beholder, empire building continuesin the present.

The novel is made more poignant by thefact that Wright draws upon his own familyhistory in the form of Frank Henderson,who actually existed and served on theBacchante with Queen Victoria's grandsons.The Henderson passages, which seamlesslymix his actual journal entries with Wright'sfictional plot, consequently reveal the flat-ness of Olivia's character and her sectionsof the novel. While Henderson is a fascinat-ing study of a Victorian British adven-turer—and the novel is worth reading forthe Henderson passages alone—Olivia'scharacter is fitfully developed throughexcessive plot twists that hinder the overallstory rather than support it.

Hippolyte's Island also deals with thelegacy of nineteenth-century politics andexploration. The novel is about one man,Hippolyte Webb, and his desire to emulate

the early explorers and seek the unknown.However, Hippolyte is faced with the realitythat in the modern age of global position-ing systems, little is unknown or evenunmapped. He decides to look not for theunknown, but the lost: the Aurora islands,a chain of three islands thought to haveexisted off the coast of South America ahundred years ago, but since discounted asfantasy. The first part of Hodgson's noveldetails Hippolyte's preparations and even-tual voyage of re-discovery to these islands.The second part of the novel is set on theislands, as Hippolyte charts their flora andfauna, finding along the way evidence ofpast human settlement, including humanremains. The last section oí Hippolyte'sIsland is about what Hippolyte enduresin trying to get a book about his voyageready to print—not even his editor believeshis account of islands that appear anddisappear.

The mystery of Hodgson's novel is notwhether the islands exist or not, or eventhat islands could go missing in the firstplace, but whether Hippolyte will be able toconvince his skeptics and authenticate hisclaims. A lack of historical and photo-graphic evidence leaves Hippolyte's editorquestioning his discovery, and the final partof the novel is about this quest for authen-tication. The beautiful maps, charts, andpictures appended to this lively novel addto its apparent authenticity, as they repre-sent Hippolyte's physical evidence underquestion. Eventually the novel reveals thatpast explorations of these islands directlyinfluence Hippolyte's ability to authenticatehis claims: what Hippolyte wants touncover, others in the nineteenth centuryhave attempted to cover.

Henderson's Spear and Hippolyte's Islandexamine the connections between moderntravellers and their descendents, at thesame time that they raise questions aboutthe objectives of modern travel and its rela-tion to past exploration.


a n d N o t e s

L'écrivain et les honneurs:la nominationd'Herménégilde Chiassonau poste de lieutenant-gouverneur du N.-B.Raoul Boudreau

L'importante controverse suscitée par lanomination de l'écrivain et artiste acadienHerménégilde Chiasson au poste de lieu-tenant-gouverneur du Nouveau-Brunswickau mois d'août 2003 est une bonne occa-sion de réfléchir d'une manière généralesur la place de l'art et de la littérature dansla société et plus particulièrement sur laplace d'Herménégilde Chiasson dans la lit-térature acadienne.

Il est sans doute très imprudent et pour lemoins délicat de se pencher sur un débatencore chaud sans bénéficier du reculindispensable à l'analyse sereine des posi-tions exprimées. Néanmoins le recours àl'analyse de la structure et du fonction-nement de l'institution littéraire qui sedégage des travaux de Pierre Bourdieu peutfournir un cadre explicatif qui renvoie àune certaine généralité, mais qui affirmed'emblée la subjectivité de tous les agentsdont le premier rôle est d'assurer la posi-tion qu'ils occupent dans l'institution.Ainsi Herménégilde Chiasson défend saposition d'écrivain institutionnalisé, toutcomme ses opposants défendent leur posi-tion d'écrivains aspirant à la consécration,et comme moi-même, en tant que com-mentateur de la littérature acadienne con-

temporaine, je défends ma position d'inter-locuteur crédible, sinon objectif, auprès desuns et des autres avec qui les contacts et lesbonnes relations sont indispensables à lapoursuite de mon travail. C'est donc dansce contexte bien particulier où les positionsinstitutionnelles ne sont pas réduites à desparticularismes individuels, mais rap-portées à des contraintes structurellesqu'on examinera cette controverse, sansoublier que le fait de déclarer sa position nedélivre pas de l'obligation de la défendre,mais relativise tout au plus cette défense. Ilfaut aussi considérer que l'idée d'un com-mentaire «extérieur» sur la littérature estune utopie puisqu'à partir du moment oùon la commente, on s'engage dans l'institu-tion. C'est d'autant plus vrai dans uneinstitution de petite envergure où les posi-tions sont multiformes : je suis ou j'ai étépar exemple à la fois le professeur, ledirecteur de thèse, le critique et le com-mentateur, le dispensateur de prix lit-téraires et l'ami de bien des écrivainsacadiens dont je parle.

Avant d'aborder la controverse commetelle, il convient de situer HerménégildeChiasson dans la société acadienne et plusparticulièrement dans l'institution littéraireacadienne. Cette dernière fonctionnecomme toute institution littéraire, peuimporte sa dimension : « Le champ n'estpas une coexistence d'individus ou de posi-tions, c'est un lieu de forces et un lieu deconflit » (Pinto 112).: Les « positions carac-téristiques . . . se définissent toujours rela-tionnellement » (106) et celles-ci « n'ont de


O p i n i o n s & N o t e s

sens qu'envisagé [e] s de façon différentielle :un poète d'avant-garde . . . est ce que n'estpas un romancier régionaliste . . . et, demême, leurs aspirations et leurs goûts sedéfinissent par opposition » (109). C'est leprincipe de différenciation dont parleBourdieu et l'institution littéraire acadien-ne, aussi conviviale qu'on ait pu la con-sidérer, n'y échappe pas.2 Antonine Maillet aété le premier écrivain acadien institution-nalisé ou consacré et au moment où, à par-tir de Montréal, elle prend l'envol qui lamènera au prix Goncourt en 1979, l'ensem-ble des jeunes poètes nationalistes et con-testataires basés à Moncton se définissenten opposition à l'auteur de La Sagouine.Herménégilde Chiasson, qui est leur porte-parole le plus articulé, lui concède le mérited'avoir fait passer la littérature acadiennede l'oral à l'écrit, ce qui est historiquementjuste et tout à fait conforme à l'émergencedes littératures, mais lui reproche le rôle deporte-parole de l'Acadie qu'elle accepte dejouer à partir de Montréal et surtout lavision traditionnelle, mythique, passéiste,voire exotisante qu'elle donne de l'Acadie etqui n'a rien à voir avec celle de ceux qui aujour le jour luttent sur le terrain pour cons-truire un projet de société acadienne mo-derne et égalitaire, négocié avec les autresoccupants du territoire. Par opposition, lespoètes de Moncton se définissent commemodernes, la modernité étant le maître motde tous les mouvements littéraires nou-veaux qui tentent de s'imposer au détri-ment d'un mouvement déjà implanté, etcela depuis au moins la deuxième moitiédu XIXe siècle. Ils habitent Moncton et nonMontréal et font de cette donnée un choixpolitique; ils écrivent de la poésie et non duroman; ils particularisent leur langue, élé-ment indispensable à la création d'une lit-térature, en ayant recours au besoin auvernaculaire moderne, le chiac du sud-estdu Nouveau-Brunswick qui mélangel'anglais et le français, et non à l'acadientraditionnel comme le fait Antonine Maillet.

Ces poètes de Moncton sont solidaires etcomplices dans l'entreprise de créationd'un champ littéraire autonome là où iln'existait rien de comparable dans la décen-nie précédente. Comme ils sont les seuls,avec les quelques critiques qui commencentà écrire sur la poésie acadienne, à pouvoirdéterminer qui fera partie de ce champ, ilsse dédicacent à qui mieux mieux chacun deleurs textes en un chassé-croisé deréférences qui marquent l'appartenance auchamp et partant sa spécificité. Ils sontd'autant plus solidaires qu'ils sont égauxdans cette opposition à la tradition et queconformément à la phase d'émergence deslittératures, aucun écrivain-modèle neressort, en dehors du contre-modèle queconstitue Antonine Maillet. On assiste bienà cet «agencement collectif d'énonciation»dont parlent Deleuze et Guattari (29-35).3

Mais cette «convivialité» ne pouvait sur-vivre à la phase d'émergence de la littéra-ture et dès qu'un de ces poètes allait sedémarquer à titre individuel comme lepoète de la modernité, les autres devraients'en différencier pour aspirer à une recon-naissance propre. Ce poète qui fut le pre-mier à accéder au statut d'écrivainconsacré, ce fut Herménégilde Chiasson.En plus de ses talents d'écrivain, il peutrevendiquer une multidisciplinar ité (artistevisuel, cinéaste, dramaturge) éminemmentconnotée comme moderne. C'est à partirdu moment où Herménégilde Chiasson acommencé à prendre le statut d'écrivainconsacré (entre 1990 et 1999, date de laconsécration incontestable avec le prix dugouverneur général) qu'il a commencé àencourir les critiques des écrivains etartistes de la «relève» qui le considèrentdésormais comme l'avant-garde consacréeface à leur propre volonté de se constitueren avant-garde véritable et légitime.N'oublions pas que la critique et la dénon-ciation sont des signes de reconnaissancede ceux vers qui on les dirige. On s'attaqueà ceux qui représentent quelque chose


pour se construire en opposition, mais àleur hauteur. La critique est un signe de lavaleur accordée à telle position, qui ladéfinit comme un espace convoité. CommeHerménégilde Chiasson s'est opposé àAntonine Maillet, les jeunes poètes quigravitent autour de la maison d'éditionPerce-Neige et les artistes qui se regroupentau Centre culturel Aberdeen à Monctons'opposent à Herménégilde Chiassonet en lui faisant parfois les mêmesreproches, comme celui de manifester unégocentrisme exagéré qui lui fait ramenerl'ensemble de la production artistique aca-dienne à sa propre production. Ce qui estnouveau cependant et qui témoigne del'évolution de l'institution littéraire acadien-ne, c'est que l'opposition ne se fait plusentre tradition et modernité, mais entredeux formes d'avant-garde, dont l'une estjugée consacrée par ceux qui aspirent à laremplacer.

Au cours des dernières années,Herménégilde Chiasson a été noyé sousune pluie de prix et de distinctions diverses :le prix du gouverneur général, trois prixÉloizes4 pour la seule année 2000, le prixdu Centre de recherche sur la civilisationcanadienne-française, le Grand Prix de lafrancophonie canadienne, le prix Pascal-Poirier de la province du Nouveau-Brunswick, le prix quinquennal Antonine-Maillet-Acadie-Vie, récipiendaire del'Ordre du Mérite et docteur honorifiqueen littérature de l'Université de Moncton,etc. Cela n'aurait guère de sens de dire qu'ila bien mérité tous ces prix puisque c'estune évidence que si l'institution littéraire lerécompense, c'est qu'elle estime qu'ilincarne le mieux les valeurs qu'elle représente.Mais il devient par le fait même une figuredont on doit se démarquer pour accéderà la reconnaissance. La contestation dustatut d'écrivain d'Herménégilde Chiassondate de bien avant sa récente nominationau poste de lieutenant-gouverneur duNouveau-Brunswick.

Ces rivalités à l'intérieur de l'institutionlittéraire ont aussi pris la forme de posi-tions idéologiques divergentes sur quelquespoints précis qui ont servi de lieux de dif-férenciation. Le premier est la vision del'Acadie qu'on juge trop noire et pessimistechez Chiasson et que les jeunes poètes veu-lent plus festive et libérée des fantômes dupassé. Sur cette question du pessimisme dela vision de Chiasson, il ne faudrait pasperdre de vue que nous avons affaire ici àdes textes de création et non de sociologie.Du point de vue de la littérature, le senti-ment tragique qui se dégage des textes deChiasson est pour moi d'une efficacitéindiscutable, une puissante source d'émo-tion qui est une des raisons pour lesquellesses textes ont été singularisés.

Le deuxième point de divergence, c'est laposition par rapport à l'usage de l'anglais etdu chiac dans les textes de la poésie et de lalittérature acadiennes. Chiasson trouve queles jeunes poètes passent trop facilement àl'anglais et au chiac dans leurs textes, aurisque d'une perte d'identité irrévocable,alors que ces derniers trouvent qu'il exagèrela présence de ces variétés dans leurs texteset que sa position est trop puriste.

Un troisième point de divergence montrebien que le principe de différenciationfonctionne à plein et que de part et d'autreon accentue la distance avec son vis à-vispour faire reconnaître sa spécificité. Dansun article du magazine Macleans, H.Chiasson a porté un jugement sévère sur larelève artistique en Acadie, laissant enten-dre qu'elle était indigente (Demont 38).C'était bien sûr s'attaquer directement à lagénération qui tente de prendre sa place etmême si cette affirmation peut être mo-dulée pour lui donner toutes les nuances etles réserves possibles, il reste qu'elle identi-fie clairement les forces en présence.

C'est sur ce terreau qu'est arrivée la no-mination inattendue et c'est peut-être ce quiexplique en partie la virulence du débat,quoique ces questions n'aient jamais été



abordées de manière très explicite. D'unecertaine façon, on peut considérer que cesluttes de pouvoir qui émergent au grandjour sont un signe de l'évolution et de lamaturation de l'institution littéraire etartistique acadiennes. Si la positiond'écrivain reconnu suscite de telles luttes enAcadie, c'est le signe qu'il s'agit désormaisd'un statut enviable et convoité.

À partir du 15 août 2003, date de la nomi-nation d'Herménégilde Chiasson, jusqu'audébut du mois d'octobre, le journal acadienVAcadie Nouvelle a publié presque quoti-diennement des articles, des chroniques,des éditoriaux, et des lettres d'opinion dulecteur partagés entre l'approbation et ladésapprobation de cette nomination. Unegrande partie du débat a très peu de chosesà voir avec la littérature ou l'art, et labrièveté des interventions, de même quel'incapacité de certains à exprimer claire-ment leur pensée, rendent les propos par-fois très ambigus. Il en a résulté, commedans toute controverse, bon nombre demalentendus, certains involontaires etd'autres créés par la mauvaise foi.

On peut néanmoins constater que cer-tains opposants considèrent le fait de semettre au service de la reine et de lui prêterserment comme une trahison de la partd'un Acadien. Pourtant cet argument n'apas été soulevé quand deux Acadiens ontprécédemment été nommés lieutenant-gouverneur du Nouveau-Brunswick5 et s'ilfallait que tout Acadien renonce à prêterserment à la reine, il n'y aurait jamais eu nidéputés acadiens, ni juges acadiens. Une tellemarginalisation volontaire constitueraitévidemment une dégénérescence collectiveprogrammée. Si on a réagi différemmentdans le cas d'Herménégilde Chiasson, c'estsans doute parce que ses deux prédécesseursproviennent du milieu de la politique et desaffaires, alors qu'il est un artiste appartenantà la sphère restreinte de production, commeon le verra plus loin. Il semble en fait quel'opposition à la nomination d'Herménégilde

Chiasson comme lieutenant-gouverneur sesoit cristallisée autour de la question de lademande d'excuses à la reine pour laDéportation et que cette opposition ait étémenée principalement par les plus militantsdes nationalistes acadiens. HerménégildeChiasson s'est en effet déclaré contre cettedemande d'excuses et proche de la positiondu député libéral de Beauséjour, DominicLeblanc, sur la question.

Venons-en aux arguments qui touchentde plus près le domaine artistique et cul-turel qui m'intéresse particulièrement ici.Certaines des personnes favorables à cettenomination ont évoqué le fait qu'elle con-tribuerait à donner de l'importance auxarts et à la culture et le principal intéressé alui-même parlé de la volonté que son tra-vail ait un impact sur le monde culturel etde son souci d'inscrire la culture dans lasociété (Ricard 3). Certes, ce n'est pas lapremière fois qu'un artiste est nommé à unposte de pouvoir. On n'a qu'à penser, àl'échelle canadienne, à la nomination ducouple vice-royal Adrienne Clarkson etJohn Ralston Saul et à la nomination deJean Lapointe, humoriste et chanteurquébécois, et de Viola Léger, comédienneacadienne et incarnation iconique du per-sonnage de la Sagouine d'Antonine Maillet,au Sénat. À l'échelle internationale on peutciter André Malraux, Vaclav Havel ou JorgeSemprun, mais il y a une différence entre lefait de renoncer à sa liberté créatrice pourun poste de pouvoir ministériel au sein del'exécutif d'un gouvernement et y renoncerpour un poste honorifique au pouvoirlargement symbolique, comme c'est le caspour le poste de lieutenant-gouverneur.Cela dit, il faut quand même accorder unecertaine crédibilité aux arguments qui fontétat de l'impact d'une telle nomination surle rayonnement des arts dans la société. Sil'on peut être nommé lieutenant-gou-verneur sur la seule foi de son travail artis-tique, c'est une reconnaissance socialeremarquable de ce travail. L'art ne peut plus


à ce moment-là être considéré comme uneactivité marginale ayant un impact douteuxsur la société et dont le producteur est aumieux soupçonné d'une incapacité à faireun vrai travail et au pire d'une paresse con-génitale. L'art peut donc conduire à unevéritable reconnaissance sociale dans desdomaines qui sortent complètement de lasphère artistique. Une telle nominationmarque une évolution de la société dans safaçon de considérer l'art et les artistes et laréponse de celui à qui on la propose n'a pasque des conséquences individuelles. S'il yrenonce, il renonce aussi à cette reconnais-sance non seulement pour son propre tra-vail, mais pour l'art en général. Mais s'ilaccepte, il doit renoncer temporairement,pendant la durée de son mandat, à la fois àla liberté indispensable à la création artistiqueet à cette production même, du moins soussa forme publiée. (Rien ne l'empêche deproduire pour lui-même, quitte à publierplus tard.) Ainsi ce que certains interprètentcomme le fait de céder aux sirènes de lasécurité financière peut aussi être vu commeune forme de renoncement pour la causedes artistes en général.

On peut aller plus loin encore, et consi-dérer que l'artiste qui accepte une telle no-mination doit renoncer à certaines valeursqui sont associées au statut d'artiste de ce queBourdieu nomme la sphère restreinte de pro-duction et c'est là que cette situation illustreavec éclat le paradoxe, ce que DominiqueMaingueneau appelle la paratopie, del'écrivain. L'artiste qui produit dans lasphère restreinte n'a pas de récompensemonétaire justement parce qu'il touche unpublic restreint et sélect, une élite qui luiconfère un capital symbolique consi-dérable. Il s'établit ici un rapport inverse-ment proportionnel entre la qualité et laquantité. Ce qu'on perd en capital moné-taire, on le gagne en capital symbolique etinversement.

. . . l'opposition entre l'artiste et le bour-geois, l'art et l'argent, tend à se répéter

dans le champ littéraire. Ces groupesconcurrents, s'ils entendent bien, les unset les autres, obtenir une reconnaissancelittéraire, n'en diffèrent pas moins surleurs hiérarchies : qui entend excellercomme artiste pur ne peut le faire qu'audétriment de la réussite commerciale,et, inversement, la quête de la richesseet des honneurs présuppose et induit lerenoncement à la pureté esthétique. . . .Il faut choisir : on ne peut guère cumulertoutes les espèces de profit. (Pinto 112)

C'est à ce principe implicite que la nomi-nation d'H. Chiasson semble contrevenir.Certaines valeurs bien spécifiques sontassociées peu ou prou, et avec toutes lesvariations et exceptions que l'on voudra, àl'artiste pur : la modernité, voire l'avant-garde, l'originalité et l'expérimentation ence qui concerne son art. En ce qui concernesa vie ou sa position sociale, la marginalité,la critique, la liberté parfois extrême parrapport aux conventions morales, sociales,religieuses, le renoncement aux biensmatériels, la spontanéité, la franchise. Orces valeurs sont directement opposées àcelles qu'on associe à un poste comme celuide lieutenant-gouverneur entouré d'unprotocole et d'un décorum très réglementés :la réserve et la retenue, les conventions,l'artifice, la représentation, les mondanités,la tradition, la célébration. On ne peutcertes pas expliquer la virulence de l'oppo-sition à cette nomination sans invoquer lesmotifs politiques, mais il n'est pas étonnantqu'on se soit étonné de voir HerménégildeChiasson dans cette position, car il a été lecritique le plus profond, aussi bien de lasociété acadienne elle-même, que des forcesqui l'aliènent. C'est là tout le paradoxe del'écrivain qui cherche la reconnaissanced'une société dont il se met en marge, qu'ilcritique sans réserve, dont il se distancie lit-téralement et qui finit par obtenir cettereconnaissance, qui suggère une forte inté-gration à cette société dont au fond il nefait pas vraiment partie.

On peut considérer que la nomination du



15 août dernier n'est que la première étaped'une série d'événements et il faut tout aumoins réserver son jugement en attendantla suite. On jugera H. Chiasson à sesactions pendant et après son mandat delieutenant-gouverneur. S'il est devenu unécrivain reconnu, c'est parce qu'il a faitpreuve d'une grande originalité, d'unegrande diversité de moyens et deressources. Indépendamment de ce qu'onpeut penser de cette nomination, cela nechange rien à la qualité de l'œuvre déjàproduite. Cet écrivain n'a jamais eu peur dela controverse et il a su se mériter le respectde ceux-là même qu'il a critiqués. Il a pro-duit la critique la plus incisive de la sociétéacadienne et celle-ci l'a reconnu au plushaut point. Il a dénoncé de la manière laplus virulente l'hégémonie du Québec surla francophonie canadienne, mais il n'y apas beaucoup de cercles québécois qui nelui accordent la plus haute estime. Il n'estpas dit qu'il ne trouvera pas le moyen detirer son épingle du jeu dans la positionqu'il occupe présentement. Ses discourspublics lors de son assermentation et de laréception de l'Ordre du Mérite de l'Universitéde Moncton ont été des prestations remar-quables de perspicacité et de sensibilité,sans être véhémentes. Mais l'évolutionde l'Acadie en est peut-être à un stadequi commande moins la véhémence quel'ouverture et la concertation.

En 2000, H. Chiasson a obtenu le prix en littéra-ture, en arts visuels et en théâtre.Hédard Robichaud, ancien ministre fédéral despêches, lieutenant-gouverneur de 1971-1981 etGilbert Finn, ancien président directeur générald'Assomption-Vie et recteur de l'Université deMoncton, de 1987 à 1994.

OUVRAGES CITÉS

Bourdieu, Pierre. Les règles de l'art. Genèse etstructure du champ littéraire. Paris: Seuil,1992.

Deleuze, Gilles et Félix Guattari. Kafka: Pour unelittérature mineure. Paris: Seuil, 1975.

Demont, John. "Survival of the Most Spirited."Macleans 4 Mar. 2003: 34-38.

Gauvin, Lise. « Autour du concept de littératuremineure—Variations sur un thème majeur ».Littératures mineures en langue majeure:Québec/Wallonie-Bruxelles. Dir. Jean-PierreBertrand et Lise Gauvin. Montréal: P de l'Ude Montréal; Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2003.19-40.

Olscamp, Marcel. « Les poètes de la convivialité ».La création littéraire dans le contexte de l'exi-guïté. Dir. Robert Viau. Beauport QC: MNH,2000.495-507.

Pinto, Louis. Pierre Bourdieu et la théorie dumonde social. 1998. Paris: Albin Michel, 2002.

Ricard, Philippe. « Les arts: le cheval de batailledu nouveau lieutenant-gouverneur ». L'AcadieNouvelle 23 août 2003: 3.

1 Tout mon commentaire s'inspire de manièregénérale de l'ouvrage Les règles de l'art. Genèse etstructure du champ littéraire de Pierre Bourdieuet du livre de Louis Pinto.

2 Voir l'article « Les poètes de la convivialité » deMarcel Olscamp.

3 Pour un commentaire magistral de ce texte, voirLise Gauvin.

4 Les prix Éloizes sont des prix annuels décernésaux artistes acadiens dans toutes les disciplinesartistiques par l'Association acadienne desartistes professionnels du Nouveau-Brunswick.


ZigzagLaurie Ricou

It's getting more and more difficult toremember what literary studies once wereabout. And most of us gasp, or know col leagues who gasp, at the implications in thelatest conference program or journal tableof contents or academic c.v. for what mightnow pass as research on literature. In sym pathy—in both senses—the study ofCanadian literature goes off in all direc tions, and readers of these end pages willwonder how this or that title deserves men tion, or micro review, in the pages of ajournal entitled Canadian Literature.

What do books on Rudyard Kipling, Englishgardens, and the history of the tomato haveto do with Canadian literature? Individualinterests will suggest different answers ordisdainful dismissals. In my reading, I amlooking for or speculating on the possiblecontact points: I'll try to imagine why orwhen a student of Can Lit might want tozig into a book on cruising DesolationSound or zag into a history of grass.

Zigzag comes from the G erman word fortack, that nautical side to side movementcrucial to sailing—especially against thewind. This literal connection is enough of areason to start with four books about watertravel. Anne and Laurence Yeadon Jones'sDesolation Sound and The Discovery Islands(Raincoast $44.95) is a large format, glossycruising guide and a good example of abook that zigzags widely from straight

ahead Canadian literature. Yet, the book's"Selected Reading" recognizes the value ofsome literary guidance to waterways: inaddition to cookbooks and guides to shore birds, the list includes books by M. WylieBlanchet, Beth , Charles Lillard, KathrenePinkerton, plus Hilary Stewart's lyricallyopinionated On Island Time (1998). This"Dream Speaker Cruising G uide" would bea nice text in which to study maps andmapping, both verbal and visual. The hand drawn charts might be called anecdotalmapping, with opinions and folk wisdomcasually jotted here and there. The bookmight also intrigue students of place namessince the authors often add "named by us" tothe place names; the index to place nameswould extend this understanding beyondstandard dictionaries. Joanna Streetly'sPaddling Through Time: A Kayaking Journeythrough Clayoquot Sound (Raincoast $29.95)is quite a literate account of a seven dayocean kayaking trip, but its overt literarydimensions end with the book's epigraphfrom Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in theWillows: "There is nothing—absolutelynothing—half so much worth doing assimply messing about in boats." For thoseof us more apt to be messing about inbooks, the main interest here might begeneric. As the title indicates, Streetly fusesthe wondering and buoyant historical pre sent tense with a musing homage to thehistory (especially aboriginal) of place. Shethinks of the forest as "historical showcase": "Museums are hardly necessary onthis coast; all that is needed are eyes to look


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with and time for contemplation." HelenPiddington contemplates mainly her per-sonal and family history as, in discreteanecdotes of two to four pages, she remem-bers her family's twenty-six years of creatinga home in Loughborough Inlet (250 kmnorth of Vancouver). Again, the overt liter-ary dimensions of The Inlet: Memoir of aModern Pioneer (Harbour $32.95) are few,although I'm intrigued by the buried dialec-tic between Loughborough and Paris, whichincludes a return home lured by the call ofHaida art and a tribute to the friendship ofMavis Gallant. The book might be of moreinterest to the fine arts: it is generouslyillustrated with Piddington's swirls ofdomestic impressionism in charcoal andpastels. As Canadian literature, the bookwill be of evident interest in the burgeoningfield of autobiography (see CanadianLiterature #172). If I were going there, Iwould begin where Piddington ends, withthe evocative notion of the French recul, keyto this memoir, and to the life described: itis a self-reflexive art form, the aesthetic pat-terning that comes from a willed steppingback, sailing obliquely to detect patternwhere collision might have been.

Don Randall, a Canadian scholar, has pub-lished Kipling's Imperial Boy: Adolescenceand Cultural Hybridity (Palgrave np), apostcolonial reading of Kipling's adolescentmales as figures that at once "assert" and"sub-vert imperial authority." Althoughwithout explicit reference to Canadian lit-erature, Randall's scrupulous unpacking ofthe ideology of "the boy" would be usefulcontext for reading The English Patient, TheApprenticeship ofDuddy Kravitz, the genderissue in The Imperialist, and most especially,I think, the conundrum of Findley's RobertRoss. Ross is, of course, shaped by thegenre of the boy's adventure tale. The influ-ence of this genre in a host of places couldbe extended to other topics suggested byRandall's study: the constructing of nativepeople as children, and the continuing fig-

uring of Canada itself as gangling adolescent.Stephanie Foote's Regional Fictions:

Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-CenturyAmerican Literature (U of Wisconsin P, US$25.95), which incidentally also examinesthe ideology of the child figure, addresses asubject more central to Canadian Studies.Foote focuses on late nineteenth-centurylocal colour fiction and its marketing,exploring the paradox that regional fictionassimilates—and sometimes elides—signif-icant difference to articulate a representa-tive nationalism. Of course, much recentwork on Canadian regional fiction (by, forexample, Alison Calder, Lisa Chalykoff,Frank Davey, and Ursula Kelly) reads thedimensions of ethnicity and class in con-struction of region. Foote's work will pro-vide a useful extension of these studies.

In his foreword to Chris Czajkowski'sCabin at Singing River (Raincoast $21.95),Peter Gzowski gives us the lit crit contextfor a reissue of this book: Buckler, Seton,Mitchell, Mowat—maybe especiallyMowat—and configurations of a "WacoustaSyndrome" and "garrison mentality." Mostof these pieces were originally letters toGzowski's Morningside. For Czajkowski,even Salmon Arm is an oppressively insu-lated urban garrison. As an alternative tothe stifling city, she builds her own logcabin on Lonesome Lake in the Coast Rangeeast of Bella Coola, twenty-seven miles fromthe nearest road. "This is why I am here,"she writes to Canadians mythed on theNorth, "to experience one of the few placeson Earth where great wild creatures stillroam free. What a privilege it is to be a partof the primal world" (34). Readers (or lis-teners) can share the giant, wild experiencevicariously in friendly prose, teasing withdetail, packed with ecstatic modifiers. Perhapsmore epistolary intimacy is found in HerbCurtis's anecdotes than in Czajkowski's let-ters to a national radio show. Certainly hisavuncular dialect stories are more self-con-scious. Luther Corhern's Salmon Camp


Chronicles (Goose Lane $17.95) are> after all,fiction, albeit masquerading as fireside con-versations and banter—all musing on themagnetism of the Miramichi. Curtis's fic-tionalized self makes I-don't-know-what-I'm-talking-about his defining appeal tothe reader's credibility. And whether it's hisreflections on how to describe rain or histribute to Alden Nowlan, the self-deprecat-ing ego gives literary interest beyond themythic. He sends up the very study of nam-ing I emphasized above in discussing theYeadon-Jones book. Even the "form" here isan entertaining burlesque. Luther is a log-ger, a role full of muscled gusto and talltales that he understands as keeping a daily"log" of the fish caught (or not) along theMiramichi. Most of the entries make thiselement overt by ending the levity of this orthat experience with a slightly stolid logentry designed to bring any pretentiousnessback up against the banal.

Tom Allen's Rolling Home: A Cross-CanadaRailroad Memoir (Penguin/Viking $35.00)leaves the lonesome cabin for the enclosure ofthe parlour car from sea to sea. The mythol-ogy of primal worlds meets the mythologyof the transcontinental railroad: "OlderCanadians speak mistily of the train. Theytalk of its spirit, and how it defined theland." But Allen seldom embraces the senti-mentality of national essence without atwinkle of irony. Because the irony repeat-edly extends to wry reflections on the pos-sibilities and limits of its own storytelling,Allen's book entertains, delightfully andgrumpily, and adds to a form of the quizzi-cal memoir that might nicely be added tothe study of forms of autobiography. Oneof the most memorable passages muses onthe notion of "stone memory," the idea thatstone actually stores sound indefinitely,that, therefore, the Shield literally has the"oral history of Canada stored in its vaults,"and that the people who live in its smallrailroad towns are almost invariably "nat-ural story tellers." I'm going to share some

of Allen's thoughts with my students thenext time I teach Towards the Last Spike.

Students of the pastoral tradition mightbe the most obvious among literary typesto open Graham Harvey's The Forgivenessof Nature: The Story of Grass (JonathanCape $45.95). There they would find the lit-eral, biological, working basis of a venera-ble literary type. They would also find anastonishing exemplar of the scholarly zigzag.Harvey describes himself as a "farmingjournalist": he has written a diffuse envi-ronmental and cultural history that openswith Edouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe,zigs to turf technology at West Ham foot-ball club, zags to the importing into Britainof three hundred thousand tonnes of guano(for fertilizer) in the 1840s, zigs to Darwinon worms, all wrapped in epigraphs fromJohn Clare and the Book of Job. These samestudents of pastoral might turn to sociolo-gist Douglas Harper's study of the indus-trial transformation of US dairy-farming,Changing Works: Visions of a Lost Agriculture(U of Chicago P us $35), although Harper'swork would, I think, most especially inter-est students of Canadian rural writing, whomight be probing such topics as representa-tions of landscapes, gendered roles, ormaterial culture. Harper's is a scholarlyreport on an academic project, but—againit may be evidence of discipline-blur—it isalso an album of photographs, a study ofphotography, "visual anthropology" (a sub-discipline I had been unaware of), an oralhistory, and a speculative discussion of"symbolic interaction" between humans andanimals. The space available in this overviewdoes not permit me to elaborate. But it isimportant to recognize that Harper doesnot over-interpret. Frequently, he is contentto record the farmers' own stories andexchanges, to inflect the scholar's generaliz-ing conclusions with the worker's individ-ual idiosyncrasies. I learned that Buck Henryknows the only way to stop three angrybulls from destroying his cattle trailer is to

197 Canadian Literature iSo / Spring 2004

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get on the road and then "slam the brakes. . . to throw them off balance." In short, toprevent damage, "Zigzag the truck" (225).

Readers of grass, pastoral, agriculturalmethod, and the primal wild might alsoneed information about particular species.(Let's say, for example, readers of TheresaKishkan's Sisters of Grass.) Thirty-fivespecies of grass (among a total of 485) aredepicted in Rare Vascular Plants of Alberta,published by the Alberta Native PlantCouncil (U of Alberta P/Canadian ForestService $29.95). This guidebook is accessi-bly designed, with good use of pho-tographs, drawings, and two distributionmaps (Alberta and North America) foreach item. Detailed knowledge about a par-ticular species may seem to be no morethan incidental reference work and glossfor a student of literature. But recent booksin the burgeoning field describing itself asecocriticism show that an entire literature(and culture) might be found in a particu-lar species. Michael Cohen's Garden ofBristlecones: Tales of Change in the GreatBasin is, perhaps, the best exemplar. AndrewF. Smith shows what a historian will make ofa single species in The Tomato in America:Early History, Culture, and Cookery (1994;rpt U of Illinois P 2001 us $14.95). Thisscrupulously documented book focuses onthe US in the early decades of the nine-teenth century, patiently considering com-peting introduction narratives for this fruitonce considered poisonous, and demon-strating a linguist's care in contemplatingnames and their function. Canada doesappear tangentially in the story, since it wasapparently at McGill that Dr. John CookBennett first found tomatoes that could beused for medicinal purposes.

In 1992,1 took my students, as I do mostyears, to UBC's Museum of Anthropology.Bill McLennan led us that year through theexhibit of some of the results of the ImageRecovery Project. It was one of the mostmemorable visits because we were able to

see what time and patina had elided. Wewere able to watch several First Nationsartists recreating the once-hidden patternsin contemporary works. What was undererasure emerged un-erased, and doubled.Much of the 1992 exhibition and the projectof infrared photography behind it isrecorded in Bill McLennan and KarenDuffek's The Transforming Image: PaintedArts and the Northwest Coast First Nations(UBC P $65.00). The book is filled withstory, ancient and recent, of wondering,transforming; it patiently explains regionaldistinction and the distinguishing signa-tures of individual artists. Bill McLennanacknowledges the insight provided by "SusanPoint's ongoing work to revitalize thenuances of Coast Salish Style." That workspawned a major exhibit at the SpiritWrestler Gallery in Vancouver, November-December 2000 and the accompanying cat-alogue Susan Point: Coast Salish Artist(Douglas & Mclntyre/U of Washington P$39-95)- Point works in glass, stone, poly-mer, and steel—as well as carving in woodand printing on paper. Her palette—bur-gundy, blue-grey, yellow—is a constant sur-prise to the viewer expecting something"traditional." The catalogue provides valu-able commentary and starting points—often in Point's own words—to read thisastonishingly varied artist. And if the visu-als themselves are not enough, the studentof Canadian literature can pause over Point'spoem "Fragment," or contemplate herinterest in Imagism or enjoy how, for exam-ple, the work "Camouflage" is both a visualand verbal pun: frog hides lily pad insteadof using it for camouflage. Artist won't hide.

The prevailing wind in this review is theless-than-evidently-literary book. And tomake any headway, we've had to tack oneway or another in almost every paragraph.If we stay on this northwest leg for amoment more, we encounter the two mostconventionally literary texts on this sailing.Dick Hammond has retold his father's sto-


ries in two earlier volumes. A Touch ofStrange: Amazing Tales of the Coast(Harbour $32.95) is the final volume in thetrilogy. Down to earth, rough 'n ready"Father" appears in his own stories in thethird person, framed by his son's mediationand contextualizing. The stories tell ofbooming near Powell River, of monstersand canoes; they provide insider detailsabout effective axe work and growing babyarbutus trees. Despite the West Coast placenames, this storyteller provides little senseof the physical setting, but a good sense ofthe place defined by narratives of the acci dental and diffident male adventurer. Theauthor does incorporate into his telling theproblems of faulty memory, so that thebook becomes a reflexive narrative of nos talgia and recall. Another amazing tale ofthe coast is a documentary novel by G.Stewart Nash titled The Last 300 Miles(Caitlin P $18.95). I have argued that theentrepreneurial romance based on resourceextraction is a foundational narrative in fiction. Nash begins there, with the searchfor gold, but turns it, perhaps, in the direc tion of that larger Canadian myth of long distance communication. Stephen Doyleleaves his San Francisco home to survey atelegraph line planned for northern andon through Alaska to Russia. Nash modifieslazily, maps generically, and curseseuphemistically. A story of love lost andlost again shudders beneath the adventurestory, but the tornadic encounters withBukwas (Sasquatch) slam other possiblestories aside, so that the historic underpin ning and overt research are obscured byscreams and violent shaking.

Entrepreneurial romance also structuresDoreen Armitage's Burrard Inlet: A History(Harbour $32.95). A body of water rapidlyevolves from safe harbour to a port trading"$30 billion in goods with more than 90nations." But, for the most part, Armitagewrites history to record facts, and narrativeconnection is more incidental than

designed. Two of Burrard Inlet's poetsmake an appearance: Pauline Johnson (butin a footnote) and—irresistibly—MalcolmLowry, who culminates the catalogue of theInlet's squatters in a section titled long ingly, if ironically, "Alternative Lifestyles."But many of the port's most interestingwriters, Ethel Wilson or Joseph Ferrone(author oí Boom Boom), make no appear-ance. Both Armitage and Nash pay somespecific attention to place names, especiallyto ways in which half-understood aborigi-nal terms might hide and reveal differentreadings of place. This aspect of history—and an increasingly evident aspect perhapsof both Canadian writing and literarystudy—finds sprightly treatment in NamelyVancouver: A Hidden History of VancouverPlace Names (Arsenal Pulp $19.95) by TomSnyders and Jennifer O'Rourke. Much ofthe information is borrowed, of course, butit is still entertaining. And the distinct big-business-bad/politicians-usually-corruptbias here adds a bite, and some sense ofinsider's intimacy. I liked that the bookincludes the names of businesses, parks,buildings, and bridges, as well as of streets.And I did find something hidden in my ownneighbourhood (and it's as local wordscapethat such books function). Reading aboutthe farming and fishing village of Ladner,just south of Vancouver, I learned that theUBC carillon I walk under every day wasdonated by Leon Ladner and is intended tohonour pioneers. I live on Cypress Street,for which there is an entry, but no explana tion. But the entry refers one to Hamilton'sArbor, one of many intriguing sidebars andcross references in the book, and remarksapprovingly that Lauchlan AlexanderHamilton, who proposed an alphabet oftree names, chose mostly those native to : "not bad for a transplanted Ontarianwho had lived in for little more than twoyears." A glossy companion to NamelyVancouver would be Vancouver Then andNow by Chuck Davis, with photographs by


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John McQuarrie (Magic Light $45.00), onein a series that has covered or will coverOttawa, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City,Halifax and Winnipeg.

Regional cuisine, surely, is more a matterof language than of local ingredients— aswe might contemplate while preparingsome "Cowboy Quesadillas with AvocadoCream Dipping Sauce" or "Lamb Chops inRocky Mountain Mint Sauce" from CindaChavich's High Plains: The Joy of AlbertaCuisine (Fifth House $29.95). This attrac-tively designed and thoughtful book fea-tures short essays on the food industry inAlberta throughout, and a list of producerswith contact information. It's a cookbookthat's more than a cookbook, and in bothaspects likely to appeal to the growingnumber of Canadian literary scholars inter-ested in food (as evident in Essays onCanadian Writing #78 [Winter 2002],which focuses on this topic).

The term wilderness is much contestedthese days, but it's perhaps somehow com-forting to note that the equation Canadian= wilderness is still advanced unquestion-ingly in various quarters. Charles Williamswrites a long general essay in A WildernessCalled Home: Dispatches from the WildHeart of Canada (Penguin $33.00) thatbegins on board a freighter on the GreatLakes and extends from West Coast to East.The essence of wilderness for Wilkins,working etymologically, is "outlandishness"and he writes the combination of "seduc-tive and unsettling" that will connectCanadian loonscape to planetary health.Wilkins describes an intricate tattoo of therockscape and foliage of Blacks Harbour,New Brunswick on a man's back onToronto's King Street. He insists on the cru-cial importance of identifying with ani-mals, and is continually alert to the literarytexts, Ken Kesey as well as W. O. Mitchell,that shape our connection to the places inwhich we live. These essays also listen toCanadian music and look at Canadian

painting, always testing for synchronicity,both biological and linguistic. A bookworth having. Maria Coffey and DagGoering have written a journal with pho-tographs titled Visions of the Wild: A Voyageby Kayak around Vancouver Island(Harbour $36.95). But here the wild is morea matter of a concept: of setting a goal, apersonal test, and an adventure. And thereader will find the visions and the impliedidealizing more memorable: learning todigest the gyros in a pub in Port Hardy, orthe symmetry of the photo of Dag buildinga driftwood fire, or the WildsideBooksellers and Espresso Bar in Tofino.Such zigzag does have purpose and direc-tion, although the trip takes a lot longerthan the direct route. But in the zigzagyou're mostly aware of turning sharplyfrom a specific path or line of travel—andit may be enough just to enjoy the changesin direction.

2 0 0 Canadian Literature ¡801 Spring 2004