The Rising Village by Oliver Goldsmith, and: The Emigrant by Standish O'Grady (review)

152 LEITERS IN CANADA 1990 I find the Derridean concept of binaries rigid and even melodramatic since one person's centre is often another's margin. For most creators and readers, the centre will always be the work itself. For many, including myself, the critic will most often fill the role of an, not the, interpreter of the author's text. In addition, the argument for the obliteration of hierarchies by a product of the French academic system strikes me as a contradiction, for, unless one is a saint, it is human nature to substitute one hierarchy for another whatever one's theoretical position might be. Scobie himself is aware of all these issues. What we gain from both him and Keith is a renewed awareness of how attention to language is so central to a reading of literature. Readers and critics will always be consciously or unconsciously predisposed to one approach or another and there will always be controversy - and heated controversy - over the ways in which we read. There is, however, ample room in the criticism of Canadian literature for many approaches; in playing off each other and in their contradictions of each other, they become complementary. In time, other perspectives come into play. All criticism is written from a lack, from a need to respond, and all criticism is provisional. We are constantly selecting, rejecting, reconsidering , rearranging, discussing. Every critical act, every theory, every 'canon' is, in a sense, always already a deferral to the next in an endless reenactment of an important characteristic of all creative play - process . OOHN LENNOX) Oliver Goldsmith. The Rising Village. Edited by Gerald Lynch Canadian Poetry Press Editions of Early Canadian Long Poems Canadian Poetry Press 1989. xxx, 57. $6.50 paper Standish O'Grady. The Emigrant. Edited by Brian Trehearne Canadian Poetry Press Editions of Early Canadian Long Poems Canadian Poetry Press 1989. lxii, 191. paper One of the most exciting recent developments in the field of Canadian literature has been the sudden - though long overdue - proliferation of scholarly editions. Carleton University Press, for example, has set a new standard for the bibliography of early Canadian fiction, and the Canadian Poetry Press, run out of the UniverSity of Western Ontario under the direction of David Bentley, is doing the same for early Canadian long poems. Many of these poems, including Standish O'Grady's The Emigrant, have never before been available in a popular edition. Others, such as Oliver Goldsmith's The Rising Village, were no longer accessible (in this case, Michael Gnarowski's 1968 Delta edition being out of print) or inadequate (the version printed in Nineteellth-Century Narrative Poetnj by Frank Tierney and Glenn Clever in 1988 updates David Sinclair's 1972 HUMANITIES 153 anthology by adding line numbers, but provides no notes). So these nicely produced, affordable books are most welcome. Of the two recent productions, Brian Trehearne's scrupulous edition of The Emigrant is by far the more impressive piece of work. Trehearne had to startfrom scratch, there having beenalmost no information available about either the poet or the poem, and he has come up with a new and persuasive identity for the former, and a reading of the latter which is sympathetic without being indulgent. Indeed, Trehearne's introduction and notes may be found by some to be not only exhaustive but exhausting - how much do we really want to know about an admittedly minor and inarguably bad writer? (A question perhaps not to be asked, given the importance for literary history of whatever early material we can get our hands on, but a question one finds oneself asking nonetheless, by the thousandth clumsy couplet.) Still, try reading the poem without benefit of Trehearne's guidance through the thickets of Irish politics and economics, and it becomes almost impenetrable. Of all the works published in the Early Canadian Long Poems series, The Emigrant is by far the most topical and ephemeral. It may also be the least 'Canadian: the writer's true subject being the injustices at home that motivated his emigration. His failed settlement at Sorel and the indignities of Canadian weather, landscape, and customs are presented mainly as the logical culmination of the...