Director's Cut (review)

There have been a number of books recently by some of the self-perceived losers of the canon disputes of the 1970s and 1980s, including ones by Robin Mathews, John Moss, John Metcalf, and here, David Solway. All are books in which their authors make yet one more attempt to save long-lost positions. Solway's is a half-hearted effort, consisting mostly of journalism he's done in the past decade for Books in Canada,Canadian Notes and Queries, the National Post, the Montreal Gazette, and the Montreal Review of Books. He's made little attempt to rewrite these pieces to avoid repetition or substantiate their arguments. The strongest essay is the concluding and sole newly written one, 'The Great Disconnect,' which operates as an appendix, fleshing out arguments made in the short articles, and offering some of the textual analyses they lacked.

From the opening, Solway characterizes himself as an angry dissenter ('a hometown Savonarola, committing most of contemporary Canadian literature to the bonfire of the inanities'), who casts doubt on the value of the work of most well-known contemporary Canadian authors, and eagerly insults them - calling Margaret Atwood 'a drone,' Erin Mouré a 'feministika,' and Nicole Brossard a 'weathered infanta.' His specific focus is Canadian poetry. Throughout Director's Cut he calls for 'structure,' careful wording, 'memorable language,' and 'substance' in poetry - a call with which most poets and readers would agree. But Solway claims to see none of these characteristics in places many readers do - in the poetry of Atwood, Wah, Kroetsch, Purdy, Ondaatje, and nearly any other Canadian poet one can name.

The difficulty here - which Solway does not acknowledge - is in agreeing what constitutes structure, careful wording, memorability, or substance. How many readers would have to be able to recall spontaneously entire poems by Atwood or Kroetsch - as I happen to be able to do - to establish their work as 'memorable'? Or is memorability of this kind more a function of how often one has read a poem than it is of the poem's quality? Solway avoids such questions; instead he regards structure, memorability, and substance as self-evident, and argues that if these are not evident to him they should be invisible to all.

Solway usually resorts to figurative language to explain how these self-evident features are evidenced. In trying to establish the value of Peter Van Toorn's poetry, he tells us that it constitutes 'a towering poetic range,' that it has 'feisty and lupercalian language,' that it is 'impeccable and footloose' and 'explosive in its poetic impact.' In arguing that Michael Harris and Eric Ormsby are better poets than Anne Carson, he describes Harris's poems as showing 'the voice of a true poet,' 'opulence ... of language,' and 'no cheating,' and Ormsby's as providing 'an eclectic fusion of precision and prodigality, of discipline and flamboyance.' Often his belief in self-evident poetic value leads him to believe that he need only quote a passage of poetry to make its value evident.

Literary value has been a much-contested concept of late. Solway seems unaware that assertions of universal literary criteria - even if he were able to demonstrate them denotatively - require at the very least some grounding in metaphysics and epistemology. He seems especially unaware - or perhaps contemptuously avoiding - of arguments that literary value is culturally constructed, whether philosophical ones such as Barthes's, sociological ones such as Bourdieu's, or historical ones such as Graff's or Guillory's. This is odd, because it is precisely this phenomenon - the cultural construction of literary value - that is the implicit target of his wrath. Much of Solway's book can be read as a lament, not that certain writers have been socially constructed in Canada as important while others have not, but that social constructions of value have occurred.

As for the grounds of Solway's own literary values, a reader is left to infer them. Many of the poets he prefers are - like himself - long-time white male anglophone residents of Montreal. His...