Post-National Arguments: The Politics of the Anglophone-Canadian Novel since 1967 by Frank Davey (review)

196 LETTERS IN CANADA 1992 terns which produced their nightmares in the first place. Judith Rudakoff /s 'Under the Goddess's Cloak: Calling the Wild, enGendering the Power' attempts to reclaim 'matriarchal' versions of the Artemis and DemeterI Persephone myths, though it also ends in destructive reinscription for the female protagonists. On Rudakoff's admission, Pony in White Biting Dog and Blanche in Connie Gault's Sky are 'destined to spiral ever inwards towards a physical, emotional, psychic and spiritual death' because they are unable 'to find an archetype within the patriarchal framework.' Rudakoffs contention that Hannah/Zombie in Sally Clark's Lost Souls and Missing Persons succeeds in reclaiming a death-embracing female Iwildness' is also suspect. My final grouping includes articles in which the gender politics are concerned with the obstacles female playwrights face in establishing careers in a male-dominated profession. Mary Vingoe's profile, 'Janis Spence: A Playwright Who Lives and Works in Newfoundland,' describes a playwright who is finally getting some well-deserved recognition. Although Spence refuses to position herself beyond speaking the 'truth,' she creates female characters who learn to take responsibility for their own lives. While Spence manages to direct her own works without serious conflict, Judith Thompson finds it a devastating experience. In 'Why Should a Playwright Direct Her Own Play?' she views directing as a male activity pitted against the 'female force' of the words. Sharon Pollock's 'Reflections of a Female Artistic Director' supports Thompson's conviction that theatre is part of a 'deeply patriarchal society' when she catalogues the difficulties women encounter not only in finding positions but also in implementing a collective, experimental approach. Pollock's final irony, that women are needed more than ever today to fight for artistic integrity rather than box-office receipts, leaves me believing that Iwomen's theatre' may not be compatible with an entrenched male institution. Women on the Canadian Stage: The Legacy of Hrotvsvit finds us at many different stages of resistance, still on the margins, and now caught somewhere between radicalism and professionalism. We need many similar but more inClusive collections to foster the self-reflexive growth of our theatrical heritage. (ROSALIND KERR) Frank Davey. Post-National Argumenls: The Politics of tlze Anglophone-Canadian Novel since 1967 University of Toronto Press..277. $45.00, $17.95 paper 'Post-national' or not, the arguments provided in this volume are founded upon sixteen lucidly detailed and gracefully persuasive r.eadings of canonical contemporary novels (by Laurence, Wiebe, Armstrong; HUMANITIES 197 Richards, Bowering, Kagawa, Findley, Richler, Ondaatje, Davies, Van Herk, Swan, Marlatt, Scott, Atwood, and Kroetsch). Between these individual readings and the theoretical thesis of the book there is a productive tension, one which both undercuts its occasionally reductive polemic and strengthens its critical dialectic. Davey's thesis is that while 'specific [post-centennial Canadian] novels may argue for a humanist Canada, a more feminist Canada, a more sophisticated and worldly Canada, an individualist Canada, a Canada more responsive to the values of its aboriginal citizens, ... collectively they suggest a world and a nation in which social structures no longer link regions or communities, political process is doubted, and individual alienation has become normal.' Canada, however explicitly or hnplicitly evoked in each novel as a social-historical ground for its narrative, beCOInes trivialized in its projection - subordinate to the depoliticized, alienated viewpoint of its narrati:ve closure. Thus, while Margaret Laurence's The Diviners projects a troubled mosaic of oppressed, marginalized, and silenced existences in which, as a Canadian heroine, Morag must find the coherence of an identity and a home, its narrative closes upon the heroine reifying this at last in a mystified, aestheticized 'nature' which 'transcends' the very social contradictions it voices, denying 'conflict' in favour of 'complacency.' The same pattern of a Canadian-politicized narrative closing upon a reified transcendence is evinced by Davey in novels remote, or superficially remote, from Laurence's liberal-humanist aesthetic; so that any vision of a politically engagable Canada becomes mediated by the discourse of an antithetical individualistic or transnational ideal. Only in Jeanette Armstrong's Slash does he allow such antitheses to produce dialectic rather than closure. The strength of Davey's polemic...