To Join, to Fit, and to Make: The Creative Craft of Margaret Atwood's Fiction by Christina Ljungberg (review)

554 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 solidarity among those who perform the demanding physical labour which is at the root of certain vanishing communal values and identity. Putting into parallel the Gaelic clans in the Highlands and in Cape Breton, David Williams attempts to demonstrate that MacLeod dipped into oral traditions to produce his novel. But he rests his somewhat unstructured argument on the weight of a single authority, namely on Walter Ong=s Orality and Literacy, rather mechanically trying to apply Ong=s remarks on oral cultures in general to MacLeod in particular. Ironically, he pays little attention to the writing itself, with its systematic recourse to parallel structure, alliteration verging on tautophony, anaphora, epanalepsis, and polysyndeton B all traditional devices of oral literatures B by which the text achieves a haunting incantatory quality. Karl Jirgens, who studies the recurrent leitmotifs in MacLeod=s oeuvre, does explore the hybrid forms and imagery rooted in a neo-Kantian stance on perception, memory, and imagination. Finally, Colin Nicholson=s excellent article focuses on MacLeod=s exploration of Gaelic myths of origin and their transmutation in a contemporary, metropolitan Canada in which ontology becomes identified through topography. Grounding his analysis in Derridean and Aristotelian concepts, Nicholson points out the slippage between storied memory and myth in acts of prefiguration and configuration producing fluid, metaleptically transferable time and space. (MARTA DVORAK) Christina Ljungberg. To Join, to Fit, and to Make: The Creative Craft of Margaret Atwood=s Fiction Peter Lang 1999. 202. The title of this monograph is perhaps its least useful or informative feature. Although its subtitle refers to Margaret Atwood=s fiction, in fact the book focuses primarily on three novels, Cat=s Eye, Lady Oracle, and The Robber Bride, and on one short story, >Isis in Darkness.= Moreover, the term >creative craft= is a problematic indicator of the book=s approach to Atwood. Although the introduction and conclusion focus on Atwood=s creative craft (as incorporating the ideas Atwood expounds about craftsperson, craftiness, and witchcraft), the central portion of the book is a more wide-ranging exploration of literary antecedents and motifs, structural devices such as biography and autobiography, and themes such as storytelling or myth. Indeed, how does one discuss a writer=s craft? We might expect a formalist analysis, perhaps a stylistic analysis, akin to Robert Cluett=s syntactic study of Surfacing. But this book does not take that path (although there is an interesting graphic depiction of the framing structure and tales within tales that comprise The Robber Bride). Instead, it takes a more familiar path, drawing from earlier studies such as those of Sherrill Grace, Kathryn VanSpanckeren, and Sharon R. Wilson to analyse several of Atwood=s humanities 555 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 works from the standpoint of thematic and mythic criticism. In these areas the book is a useful discussion of the Isis, Demeter-Persephone, Hermes, fairy tale, and trickster motifs and themes. In each case, Ljungberg returns to her organizing focus on storyteller as crafter and trickster, certainly a central theme of Atwood=s oeuvre. The most interesting and original contributions of this book to the study of Atwood are the source studies or the examination of parallels with earlier literature. Ljungberg refers to Atwood=s use of Robert Graves=s The White Goddess. She draws interesting parallels between Zenia in The Robber Bride and Captain Ahab in Herman Melville=s Moby-Dick. In a more extended discussion she compares Lady Oracle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge=s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, pointing to the narrators= desires to find captive audiences for their compulsive storytelling. A longer section details the relationship between The Robber Bride, E.T.A. Hoffmann=s stories, and Jacques Offenbach=s opera The Tales of Hoffmann. In this informative discussion Ljungberg analyses themes (such as the loss of the shadow) and strategies (such as the framing devices and narrated tales) of the two authors. I have two small quibbles with the book production, one with the index and one with the proofreading. The index would be far more helpful if it subdivided...