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170 LEITERS IN CANADA 1989 Robert Lecker. An Other I: The Fictions of Clark Blaise ECW Press 1988. 247. $28.oo; $16.00 paper Robert Lecker sends us into the self-reflexive vortex of the mise en abyme (to read Lecker reading Lecker reading Blaise reading Blaise) with the panache of a poststructuralist novelist. His goal is to discover why Clark Blaise's often 'narcissistic and egocentric' writing should be taken seriously. My goal is to decide why a critic as good as Lecker deliberately flings himself into a theoretical vortex. Althusser, Barthes, and Foucault have made us aware that the concept of an 'individual' subject is an ideological construct, however much we may still feel, read, and write like individuals. In asserting that his is 'a radically conservative book,' Lecker acknowledges contemporary theories ofthe subject and then quickly turns away to examine the threat these theories pose to the (constructed) sense of identity. Blaise's problems with identity are Lecker's problems are our problems, he implies. Blaise's fiction, he feels, is formed out of the terror at the heart of the theory: the terror that 'I' have been constructed, dreamed up, and that there really is 'no subject, no other, no text.' Because Blaise is both attracted and repelled by this terror, Lecker says 'He is all that I want the Author to be, and he is all I know the author can never be. He is my.(critical) dilemma and the story I will read and write. An other 1.' Lecker (citing James Olney) suggests that one of the functions of autobiographical fictions like Blaise's is to form the identity of writer and reader both. But Blaise is inexplicably immune from the negative features of the individualist ideology as read by Althusser, Barthes, and Foucault, not to mention Teresa de Lauretis, Barbara Godard, orAndreas Huyssen. What might be condemned as wilful self-delusion is seen by Lecker as a heroic grappling with the 'large issues' facing the self deprived by late capitalism of 'community, continuity and history ... existential purpose and expression.' But the attempt at recuperation is impossible, even quixotic, since those features of selfhood belong to a dream of an originary golden age that exists only as the retrospective construction of nostalgia. Lecker sees two possibilities: either one has a self (implicitly that of the white male middle-class intellectual) or one lapses into the void. Self-reflexivity is the only way to prevent this: the I attracts an other I and they swear a pact to keep each other from disappearing. This textbrotherhood leaves out a lot: history, society, ideology, power, minorities . In fact, it omits what is needed to understand the subject as multiple and contradictory, rather than homogeneous or non-existent. To avoid the reduction of subjectivityto a thing that vanishes orappears atourwill, criticism has moved from Other to others, otherness and even othering. What makes this book so valuable, if frustrating, to read is that Lecker HUMANITIES 171 knows this. Blaise creates narrators, he notes, who frantically attempt to purge all trace of a (usually feminine) otherness in order to assert their identity. In Lusts, Durgin's writer-wife Rachel commits suicide. Lecker comments: 'Rachel is the other who is eliminated, yet she remains present through Durgin's memoirs and is the raison d'etre of the work. In Richard's hands she is brought to life by dying.' Throughout, Lecker gives a fascinating account of how the other is exploited by a powerhungry self. He concludes that 'Blaise's fiction has always been fuelled by the paradoxical drive to know himselfand not to know himself, for so long as he remains the mysterious object of his quest, the art that defines himĀ· can survive and thrive. The stated object of the quest is self-knowledge and redemption; the actual object of the quest is bafflement and damnation.' What Lecker fails to examine is why he and his other prefer bafflement and damnation to adding to our admittedly always incomplete understanding of subjectivity. I suspect they prefer the trap of a dualism that is more Self/Self than Self/Other (or selves/others) because they can't face the threat...

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