Trusting the Tale by Hugh Hood (review)

464 LEITERS IN CANADA 1983 Need one say more? Only that such language does not, as the editors claim, 'open the system out.' While the collection is marred by this kind of tripletalk, it also presents criticism that, like Hutcheon's, is engaging, productive, and decipherable. In his enlarged - and charged - version ofan essay originally published in the Malahat Review, Eli Mandel is brilliant in analysing the many ways in which Atwood's poetic politics inform her various works. And because he treats poetics and politics as metaphors in themselves, Mandel is able to layer observation on observation until the whole piece resonates with insight and suggestion. George Woodcock - always one of Atwood's most perceptive critics - provides a forceful analysis of the notion of metamorphosis in the poetry. From this essay we can learn. But the best essay in the collection - and certainly one of the strangest - is Robert Cluett's computer analysis of style in Surfacing, a startlingand innovative piece of research that lays to rest any question about Atwood's uniqueness . One wishes that more of the contributors to this volume had respected this uniqueness by aiming for that 'elegant simplicity' the editors praise as the hallmark of Atwood's so-called system. (ROBERT lECKER) Hugh Hood. Trusting the Tale ECW Press. '40. $8.95 paper 'Never trust the artist, trust the tale: Lawrence warns us in a sentence that is almost a truism of modern criticism. Discussing it in the final essay of his collection, Hugh Hood ignores the aphorism's self-critical and self-referential aspects and emphasizes two other meanings. The first, which he hints has little or no relevance to his work, relates to the element of 'unconscious self-revelation' in a writer's work; the second, much closer to horne, 'implies that [the writer] has been chosen as a vehicle of inspiration: The latter is a view of the writer rooted in about equal parts in Wordsworth and the New Testament, and the eleven elegant, wideranging , and often autobiographical essays gathered in Trusting the Tale take their cues from it. The best of them, pieces like 'Before the Flood' (on Hood's childhood reading) and 'Trusting the Tale' (on public readings) are witty, genial, and essential guides to the world of Hood's fiction in which the author shows himself to be the 'teller' who knows most about the 'tale' (and therefore, casually, qualifies or contradicts his collection's title). I can't imagine any of Hood's present or future critics offering a better - that is, a more informed, sensitive, and authoritative - reading of emblems and symbols in his fiction than he does in 'Before the Flood: or being more sensitive to the play and texture of rhythms and sounds in his style than he is in 'Faces in the Mirror.' Similarly the definitive account of allusion, reference, and influence in The New AgelLe Nouveau Siecle is in the process of being written, essay by essay, by Hood himself. All those who have argued, for example, that the work's twelve-part roman fleuve structure is indebted to Proust or Anthony Powell will now have to attend, as Hood points out, to Arthur Ransome's books about 'Swallows and Amazons.' Hood's 'Afterword: What Is Going On' informs us that his 'more recent essays have grown progressively more delicately balanced between witness and invention,' an observation that surely could also be made about the stories and novels of the past decade. With one or two exceptions, most of the pieces gathered here can as easily be imagined as parts of the 'invented' New Age as of the 'witnessed' and therefore more autobiographical non-fiction. 'Before the Flood,' the lovingly nuanced and closely organized opening essay, seems almost an excerpt from or companion to The Swing in the Garden; 'Past Christmas Presents' can be read as an episode from the married life of Matthew and Edie Goderich; and even 'Scoring: Seymour Segal's Art of Hockey,' the occasionally Barthian essay on hockey as sex and sex as hockey, seems to look forward to a still-to-be-written volume dealing with sport. I suppose what I'm really getting at is the...