Tay John and the Cyclical Quest: The Shape of Art and Vision in Howard O'Hagan by Ella Tanner (review)

HUMANITIES 155 As I said, this edition of The Rising Village is a disappointment. But happily, its companion 1989 publication, The Emigrant, more than lives up to the standard one has come to expect from this commendable series from the Canadian Poetry Press. (SUSAN GLICKMAN) Ella Tanner. Toy John and the Cyclical Quest: The Shnpe ofArt and Vision in Howard O'Hagan ECW Press. 165. $25.00; $15.00 paper This ought to be a very timely book. After the confrontations at aka we should be ready to confront our distorted ways of seeing aka. Why do we have such a powerful need to essentialize Indians, and why do they conspire in that process? Women should be able to lead the way here, since we, like the native peoples, have learned the danger of climbing up on the pedestals that perpetuate real discrimination. aka dramatized a crying need for education, and I cannot think of a better place to begin than with a reading of Tay John. As O'Hagan carefully spins his yarn we see how the act ofstorytelling itself,simply by expressing our yearning for essentials, can be an act of violence. Tay John, the Indian with yellow hair, seems to escape the violence of those who try to force him into their story patterns. This may explain why the book has fascinated and influenced so many contemporary Canadian novelists. Ella Tanner's book suggests, however, that he has not escaped the clutches of the critics. Where I see irony and tragedy in the completed cycle that contains Tay John, Ella Tanner describes a religious experience. She describes Tay John as a 'novel about communication: but whenever she makes efforts to follow up on that statement, a powerful undertow pulls the book back to a repetitive celebration of myth. My copy of this book is sprinkled with question marks in the margin where Tanner fails to question her religious adjectives as they pile up: the sacred, the ineffable, the immutable, the inscrutable, the primordial, the beyond. Just when the job at hand gets really interesting,Tanner invokes the idea of 'patterns that function beyond story, the patterns of the inexpressible: The more enthusiasticallyshesings her Jungian praise of the archetype as if it were born, the more completely she turns her back on the daunting task of examining the making of the hero Tay John and of the book Tay John. Careful attention to O'Hagan'S ironic method would not, in my view, stop at Tanner's claim that O'Hagan sees the 1ndian and wilderness as embodying a timeless spiritual essence.' There is an ambivalence in the novel, to be sure. Even as O'Hagan gives expression to our yearning, he also examines the consequences of our powerful need to see the Indian that way. Tanner explains in her preface that she uses the word 'man' to designate 'mankind' and 'to refer to man and/or woman.' This rejection of feminism 156 LETTERS IN CANADA 1990 seems to be an effort to clear the ground of ideology and dogma, making way for an unimpeded celebration of myth. It's precisely a feminist approach, however, that could explore the places where O'Hagan asks us to pause in the headlong rush towards the ineffable.In defending O'Hagan against the charge of misogyny, Tanner thinks it enough to point out that Tay John is 'rich in resonances of fertillty and procreation with regard to earth.' I too would defend O'Hagan against the charge, but I would not do it by pointing to his worship of the eternal feminine; I would rather point to his ironic exposure of our need to worship the eternal feminine. Tanner sees the pattern of 'time-and-time again' in the novel as a 'spiralling circle' that supports the 'plangent poetry' of the novel as it affirms an order beyond man's thinking. When Tay John is exiled and walks in circles, when he cuts off his hand, and when he finally walks off into silence, I do not find it comforting to invoke the 'concept of the unfathomable and its endless ordered cycles.' Despite my admiration for Ella Tanner's eloquence and...