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A Purer Taste: The Writing and Reading of Fiction in English in Nineteenth-Century Canada by Carole Gerson (review)
- University of Toronto Quarterly
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 60, Number 1, Fall 1990
- pp. 148-150
- Review
- Additional Information
148 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 let alone the ambivalence about Jewish traditions, institutions, and loyalties, is conspicuous also in their work. Only instead of Winnipeg or Montreal we are in Manhattan, Chicago, or Newark. Thus the very Canadianness he claims for his writers in the title is essentially neglected as an issue in Greenstein's emphasis on their Jewishness. And their Jewishness, especially when put through the deconstructionist mill (though he incurs some ambiguity with the occasional incongruous reference to transcendence or eternity), comes out looking and sounding very much like a compendium of modernist complaints, challenges, and opportunities. Modern writing, including modernJewish writing, lends itselfeasily to deconstructionist analysis (perhaps because it is part of the same phylogeny, to use a formulation common in the book), and Greenstein exerts himself ingeniously, sometimes at the risk of tedium (he makes Jack Ludwig's novels sound barely readable) and too often with the dubious aid of bad puns and cute or strained allusions, to demonstrate how the texts suit this approach. Butdeconstruction holds that its interest in textual fissures, traces, suspension, deferral, and such is appropriate to all texts. As a result, there is something predictable and unnecessarily ostentatious - a tone of QED - in all this specialized display of energy and critical intelligence. I think that Greenstein's impressive learning and abilities might have been used even more effectively in giving us consistently coherent and lucid accounts of the texts he analyses. These too often emerge somewhat cramped and blurred, with those features emphasized that serve the overriding purpose of demonstrating the fit between the theoretical precepts ofDerrida and company and the poetic and narrative practice of Klein and company. With such an emphasis, it is not surprising that there are few evaluative gestures, but even if somewhat furtive- not to say marginal - these make me wish for more, confirming the interest and respect that Greenstein at his best and overall inspires. (HENRY AUSTER)·Carole Gerson. A Purer Taste: The Writing and Reading ofFiction in English in Nineteenth-Century Canada University of Toronto Press. 210. $35.00; $16.95 paper Carole Gerson's outstandingnew study deserves a place ofhonour on the small shelf of books which expand our understanding of Canada's cultural past. Gerson'ssubtitle defines her subject. Drawing onan extensive familiarity with existing scholarship but also presenting much original and painstakingresearch ofher own, she provides a comprehensive picture of the audience for fiction in Canada in the nineteenth century. Gerson HUMANITIES 149 argues, very persuasively, that reviewers and editors, who were almost universally conservative in both their literary tastes and their broader social ideas, imposed their expectations firmly upon Canadian writing. Those who spoke for the Canadian public insisted that fiction should be, in Gerson's summary, 'informative, harmless, morally elevating, nationalistic , idealistic.' Such strict demands inevitably produced mediocre artistic results. Gerson presents the evidence for this triumph of conventionality over creativity with admirable fair-mindedness. There are no villains in her book; the pervasive atmosphere of genteel Philistinism is not seen as the product of one individual or group. Gerson's aim, as stated in the introduction, is to 'illuminate that history [of a "conservative colonial culture"] by presenting it on its own terms.' She reports extensively what reviewers said about the cultural situation in which they found themselves ; even more usefully, she analyses with penetration the difficult and often contradictory choices which those who saw themselves as guardians of literary virtue set up for themselves. Ifliterature was to deal with 'reality,' and to be moral, and yet to present idealized characters and a cheerful vision of life, how were the critics to respond to George Eliot, whose work had the former characteristics but not the latter? IfCanadian settings were to be encouraged, wasJohn Richardson to be applauded for patriotism or censured for sensationalism? Gerson also shows, with discernment and sympathy, that novelists had to create within, and sometimes capitulate to, the restricted formal possibilities offered to them by the critics' expectations. Gerson examines the traces of a colonial culture as it reveals itself in a wide variety of ways: the poverty of library holdings; the old-fashioned tastes of the literary elite; the widespread distrust of fiction; the...