In Search of the Split Subject: Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology and the Novels of Margaret Atwood by Sonia Mycak (review)

338 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 (as in one of its primary settings, the Royal Ontario Museum) and extinction (Lesje's fixation on dinosaurs): on how we must reimagine the future if we are to survive as a race. Howells usefully approaches Bodily Harm through the various epigraphs and titles Atwood considered for it. The Handmaid's Tale is tackled from the perspective of Helene Cixous's ecriture feminine. Finally, her discussion of Cat's Eye takes Paul de Man's comments on autobiography, in which he turns the conventional belief that the text is a representation of the life - around to suggest that art also produces the life. Certainly in Elaine Risley's paintings we s~e how she has used her art to make certain incidents and people central and iconic. As she walks around her retrospective exhibition, she begins to realize how the story (and her life) might have been different, thus undoing both the idea of astablesubjectand ofaccurate autobiographicalrepresentation. Howells concludes bystating that Atwood does not'supplicate for divine revelation but for the power to see without distortion of vision, while urging the need for clarity of mind in order to know our position in the universe.' And, I would add, for Atwood seeinginvolves not justthe eye or the mind,but the heart. 'This book has real strengths. Atwood's involvement with a wide range of intellectual issues - such as feminism, psychology, literary theory, environment, and human rights - over three decades has profoundly affected her writing, and Howells conveys this well. She also demonstrates impressive familiarity with the Atwood Papers, a resource few of her readers will be able to tap. However, she never really tackles the issue of Atwood's own well-known resistance to critical theory, which Atwood describes in Strange Things as 'language vanish[ing] up its own nether end.' And, oddly, although the bibliography contains all the important books on Atwood, it includes only five entries for articles published separately in journals. Since some of the most theoretically innovative work, especially that by young scholars, is appearing in journals, this is an oversight. Despite these quibbles, Howells has produced a good introduction that even those who have followed Atwood's career will find useful for its discussion of changes in her thinking over time. (MARGERY FEE) Sonia Mycak. In Search ofthe Split Subject: Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology and the Novels ofMargaret Atwood ECW Press. 268. $19.95 The purpose ofSonia Mycak's In Search ofthe Split Subject is well explained in the introduction: to provide a critical analysis of six of Margaret Atwood's novels, namely The Edible Woman, Lady Oracle, Life before Man, Bodily Harm, Cat's Eye, and The Robber Bride by using a Lacanian and Kristevian approach in conjW1ction with the phenomenology of Maurice HUMANITIES 339 Merleau-Ponty to explain the recurrence and complexities of Atwood's characters' divided selves. That these two corpora of theories are crucial to any understanding of Atwood's poetics has by now won agreement from critics. So far, however, such methods have not been applied to these novels; instead, they have been vested with other interests 'for a specific aim or with ideological intent': i.e. feminist, postcolonial, postmodernist. In the introduction Mycak surveys the critical literature and explains with clarity how it remains inarticulate about 'the origins, consequences, and nature' of the doubleness that pertains to Atwood's protagonists. It is Mycak's contention that the use of psychoanalytic theory allows the critic to shed new light on the importance of previously unacknowledged aspects or episodes in the novels. Such a claim is, to an extent, true. Mycak, however, does not mention those secondary materials that have made similar points. It is only in the appendix that she provides a meticulous account with reference to Surfacing and The Handmaid's Tale, two novels which deserve, the author rightly maintains, a more complex and multilayered approach, and therefore are treated in a separate section. Each of the chapters on the single novels focuses on the most appropriate thematic nucleus and segment ofpsychoanalytic theory. The discussion on The Edible Woman privileges an account on female paranoia and male violence as it is expressed through the voyeuristic gaze...