Gabrielle Roy et Margaret Laurence: deux chemins, une recherche by Terrance Hughes, and: The Literary Achievement of Gabrielle Roy by Alison Mitcham (review)

HUMANITIES 479 comme indispensables pour quiconque s'interesse a la litterature personnelle du Quebec. Outre une synthese possible des deux bibliographies, il faut signaler l'apport theorique concis de Van Roey-Roux, et la consultation pratique du repertoire de Lamonde. VoWl des assises solides pour ce que Lamonde appelle 'l'experience collective de la subjectivite au Quebec.' Et cette experience ne se laisse pas saisir facilement. Les deux auteurs s'accordent sur plusieurs constats, mais l'explication se fait toujours attendre: pourquoi Ie journal intime fut-i!, pendant une centaine d'annees, c'est-a-dire jusque vers 1940-50, si peu personnel? Comment expliquer l'apparition recente - donc tardive - de l'autobiographie? Quelle raison donner au fait que les memoires soient si importants depuis 1970? Au delii des inh~rets acourt terme, des modes, et meme si on nous rabat les oreilles depuis deja plusieurs annees apropos de la litterature personnelle, il n'en demeure pas moins que l'itineraire du moi dans la societe quebecoise, avec ses splendeurs et ses miseres, represente un filon de connaissance determinant, que ces deux etudes auront grandement contribue amettre en lumiere. (PIERRE HEBERT) Terrance Hughes. Gabrielle Roy et Margaret Laurence:deux chemins, une recherche Collection Solei!. Editions du Ble. 19' Alison Mitcham. The Literary Achievement of Gabrielle Roy York Press. 38. $6.95 paper There is a much-praised tradition in Anglo-Canadian criticism of 'wearing one's learning lightly.' At its best, this produces amusing, lucid, highly readable books: at its worst, it results in commonplaces directed at the 'general reader: too often seemingly a high-school student in desperate need of plot summaries. Unfortunately, the books in question here fall into the second group. Of the two, Mitcham's The Literary Achievement of Gabrielle Roy is the more critically naive. OstenSibly an essay in comparative literature, the book lacks any critical framework. Mitcham's intention is 'to show that beside being a unique Canadian literary figure, Gabrielle Roy also belongs to the mainstream of twentieth-century literature' (p 7). This latter claim is substantiated by gratuitous allusions to writers and books, mostly English-language, which are thrown out in the most idiosyncratic manner: 'Elsa's total devotion to her illegitimate son Jimmy, like Hester Prynne's devotion to Pearl in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, becomes her reason for living ...' (p 16). A chapter on 'Northern Innocence' invites comparisons between Roy's concern with the creative potentials of childhood and the work of 'Henry Vaughan, William Wordsworth, and Dylan Thomas' (p 14). This leads into a chapter on 'Roy's Children.' 'The 480 LEITERS IN CANADA 1983 Montreal Novels' gives us one-liners on antecedents for Roy's quick insight in 'recording slices of life' in the work of Katherine Mansfield and Steinbeck. The only briefly sustained comparison, and the unique example with a textual connection, is the chapter devoted to 'Gabrielle Roy and Saint-Exupery: grounded in Terre des hommes: a shared title. The final chapter, 'The Novelist as Reporter: invites comparisons with Stephen Crane, Hemingway, and Solzhenitsyn. Were such observations grounded in stylistic comparisons, they might serve to illuminate Roy's technique. As it is, the focus is on plot summary, and these connections serve only as a record of Mitcham's own tangential readings. This study divorces Roy's work from a Quebec context, but provides no coherent description of what the intellectual or textual tradition of the 'twentieth century' might be. The parameters of Terrance Hughes's comparative study of Roy and Laurence are systematically delineated by place and time. Moreover, his introductory chapter sketches in the state of comparative studies in Canadian literature. Despite this careful preparation, Hughes seems to be somewhat lost in the current debate on Canadian comparatism when he claims: 'Cette etude comparative de l'oeuvre romanesque de Gabrielle Roy et de Margaret Laurence est, it notre connaissance, la premiere de son genre' (p 12). With irony we read his concluding remarks that the study 'a sans doute souleve plus de questions qu'elle n'en a resolu. Nous n'avons guere aborde les differences de style, d'ecriture, dans notre etude .. .' (p 178), an area he calls promising. Indeed, the purport...