Postmodern Canadian Fiction and the Rhetoric of Authority by Glenn Deer (review)

218 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 to be feared than its closest rival, 'America.' In Davey's book, written from the heart of that centre (an argument against geographic determinism ), it sometimes seems that it is vanquished for ever, sometimes that it is still too powerful. Moreover, it is often hard to judge Davey's attitude to the forces massed.against it. Most of the time, Canadian nationalism is scorned as a manifestation of the power of the centre; occasionally it is admitted that this is not always the case. That Canadian literature now means a multiplicity of different voices based on identities other than white straight male Ontarian is warmly welcomed, but it is too easily assumed that the clamour for 'regional' interests is necessarily a progressive gesture. I would argue that if the struggle against sexism, racism, and homophobia in Canada is best fought 'transregionally,' and that regionalism has served the interests here called 'the centre' by making class solidarity impossible. Davey notes the increase in allegiances which construct 'transnational' identities based on gender, sexuality, or ethnicity. At times he seems to welcome this, at others to recognize any weakening of national identity in the name of difference as, ironically, increasing vulnerability to the forces of global uniformity. (JULIE BEDOOES) Glenn Deer. Postmodern Canadian Fiction and the Rhetoric of Authority McGill-Queen's University Press. viii, 145. $39.95 cloth Glenn Deer closes his study of power and rhetoric in six contemporary Canadian novels with the hope that the reader will 'have been enabled in arguing your own case as you have been reading.' This is a study that invites and celebrates resistant readings, readings that go against the grain of what Deer perceives as an unduly compliant Canadian critical establishment, where works often receive 'a submissive and praising mode of reading' in classrooms as well as in scholarly journals. The critical reception of one of the novels under study, Sheila Watson's The Double Hook, largely bears out Deer's contention; critics of the novel have been, for the most part, reverential, contenting themselves with tracing various mythological and archetypal patterns. Few have contested the novel's assumptions as pointedly as Deer does in Postmodern Canadian Fiction and the Rhetoric ofAuthority, finding in its labyrinthine turnings a mystification and 'irrationalization of power.' As Deer explains, his main objective is to examine 'the connection between the rhetorical form - i.e., addresser-addressee forms - and the novel's positions concerning authority.' And his theoretical debts are impressively wide-ranging, from Roger Fowler's social discourse theory to George Dillon's socialized rhetoric, to Wayne Booth's notion of implied authorship. There is also a touch of Eagletonian contradiction-hunting, of the sort that energizes his Marxist analyses of individual novels in HUMANITIES 219 Criticism and Ideology and Exiles and Emigres. As Deer notes, the theorists who have influenced his study'end up with different and contradictory assumptions about the nature of rhetorical"authorship'" and, at times, Deer's own work exhibits the inconsistencies of an otherwise admirable theoretical hybridity. At times, Deer makes explicitly evaluative comments about the mystifications and complexities of the six novels he studies; at others, he claims that he is describing rather than evaluating, as though the two activities, in his own theoretical terms, could ever be mutually exclusive. As he writes of his analysis of The Handmaid's Tale, 'This is not a negative judgment of the novel but simply an unveiling of its rhetoric's origins and intentions.' Here Deer rather uncharacteristically makes the type of claim that he critiques in George Bowering's Burning Water or Robert Kroetsch's Badlands: that an intellectual activity can be a seemingly objective 'unveiling,' a disinterested revelation or accumulation . Indeed, I would speculate, Deer makes this claim, one that sorts so oddly with the theoretical tenor of his book, in reference to his reading of The Handmaid's Tale precisely because that analysis is ideologically fraught. Deer argues that Offred's skills as a rhetorician implicate her in the power politics of Gileadan authority, at the same time that they are her means of articulating her resistance to that regime. The novet like its narrator, becomes both...