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148 LETTERS IN CANADA 1990 models of intelligent and sensitive reading, but also much-needed championingofan excellent writerstill underrated by the Canadianliterary establishment. Rooke argues her case cogently and convincingly. Detailed studies of a Gallant short story and a Page poem belong in the same category. Unfortunately, the essays are not presented to best advantage. The individual items give the impression ofhaving been thrown together; there seems to have been no attempt to mould the material into a coherent book. The opening title-essay gives the impression, because it was originally written for a feminist publication, that this book will also concentrate on women writers; Ondaatje and Metcalf therefore appear with something of a jolt. No one has bothered to standardize the layout. Some essays have 'Notes,' others Works Cited' (and one gets mixed between the two). Most give page references, but the Gallant essay (because it first appeared in a book that reprinted the text) does not. The two essays on The Stone Angel even cite different editions. These are minor matters, but someone should have attended to them. 1 wish Rooke had written even a brief preface to bring some kind of unity to the whole. But her criticism is the main thing, and when Rooke throws caution and fashion to the winds the book takes flight. She has the capacity that she recommends for a reading of Coming Through Slaughter, to 'enter the book, travel in a visceral way through the images.' Moreover (praise be), she is not afraid to acknowledge that she 'loves' a book. In presenting a decidedly off-beat interpretationofThe Handmaid's Tale (which fascinated me without totally convincing me) she asserts: 'I offer it here simply because it interests me.' We hear that tone too seldom in modern criticism - more's the pity, since, in Rooke's case, it is precisely because it interests her that it interests us. (w.j. KEIrn) W.j. Keith. A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art ofFiction in English-Speaking Canada ECW Press 1<)89. $26.00; $16.00 paper Stephen Scobie. Signature Event Cantext: Essays by Stephen Scobie The Writer as Critic Series. NeWest Press 1989. $22·95; $12·95 paper One would be hard-pressed to imagine two more ostenSibly different treatments of Canadian writing. W.J. Keith provides a traditional close textual reading of Canadian fiction in English by ten well-known writers, while Stephen Scobie undertakes a Derridean examination of Canadian fiction, poetry, and autobiography by English-Canadian writers, some of HUMANITIES 149 whom are established figures and others of whom are known primarily to specialized academic audiences. Each book has its own strengths. Keith's attention to the individual author and work 'focuses on the experience of reading, the imaginative challengeinvolved in thoughtful and discriminating reading.' He quotes T.5. Eliot to corroborate his interestin 'the common pursuitof true judgement' and, presumably, in an investigation oftradition and the individual talent. By placing an emphasis on style as 'a writer's mode ofexpression considered in regard to clearness,effectiveness, beauty, and the like: he wants to show how the 'emphasis on the personal voice' creates narratives that display artifice and plausibility. Keith identifies the importance of the personal voice and of orality in Canadian fiction, but beyond that, each chapter is a discrete treatment of a range of writers from O'Hagan to Hodgins, all of them familiar to most readers of our fiction. Keith shows a confident sense of who he thinks are the major writers and ofthe need to create 'an informed, experienced, and discriminating reading public - the kind of "clerisy" that Davies called for at the opening of A Voice from the Attic.' . If Keith keeps company with 'traditionalists' like T.5. Eliot and F.R. Leavis, Stephen Scobie works out of a more recent revolution, the poststructuralist approach of Jacques Derrida, whose 1971 lecture, 'Signature Event Context: provides the inspiration for Scobie's title. Scobie wants to use Derrida's infinitely processual 'always already' in order to stand tradition on its head, to dissolve notions of margin, centre, and hierarchy in favour of an idealized open field. Acknowledging that he has chosen 'widely disparate material,' Scobie eschews the 'always already'as origin in order to identify it as a 'heuristic device' for the purposes of his study. Rather than connect the work under study with the world of the writer (although he does so in places), Scobie intends to concentrate on 'that moment where the writing twists back on itself, arrives at a sourceor origin which turns out to be derived from writing itself: the differing and deferring which constitute differance. In comparing these two books, the battle-lines seem clearly drawn. As a liberal humanist, Keith speaks for the adequacy oflanguage to conveymeaning and to move readers emotionally, for verisimilitude, authenticity, and moral vision, and against what he calls 'post-modern cynicism: the deconstructive view of language as the undermining of language, and the contemporary 'extreme emphasis on artifice, or story for story's sake' that 'can lead to pointlessness.' Against this position, Scobie shares in quesiioning 'the humanist assumption that the individual is fully self-present, that we can hear and understand ourselves when we speak.' For him, questions related to the notions of 'origin' - God, self, beauty, history - are all part of a sense of 'a privileged spot' which Derrida has shown to be questionable. However, no more than Keith does Scobie want to be seen as a disciple of any school; rather he intends 'to cite Derrida as an intertext for Canadian literature, to place 150 LEITERS IN CANADA 1990 certain Canadian texts in juxtaposition with Derridean ideas, and to see what interaction takes place.' Given their differences, the critics are not as dissimilar in their technique as one might suppose. Both write from clearly articulated positions (although Scobie's seems more apparently systematic than Keith's) and both are interested in illumination of the issues and texts under discussion. Both make their positions early and consistently known in their books" and both are aware of approaches different from their own. While Keith may appear to be more personally attached to his method and Scobie more playful (using Derrida as a 'heuristic' strategy), both are fully and seriously engaged in examining the ramifications of their critical position in the works they deal with.And whatever their critical position mightbe, Keith's and Scobie's choice of texts are the products of taste, judgment, and the time in which their criticism is written. In addition, each critic is seeking to reach a 'discriminating reading public,' although the size ofthat public may vary considerably. A Sense of Style deals with established writers who belong to the Canadian literary 'canon' which may be defined in terms of one or more of the following: academic and non-academic readership, critical attention, class curricula, publisher. The power of critical discussion in canonformation is brought home in Keith's choice of Howard O'Hagan, whose Tay John has been recently rediscovered and published in the New Canadian Library series, and is increasingly included on courses and in critical discussion. In each of his chapters, Keith deals cogently with those aspects of style that seem most pertinent to the writer and work under consideration. He traces O'Hagan'sand Ethel Wilson's preoccupation with the relation between omniscience and first-person narration, Robertson Davies's use of drama, Mavis Gallant's emphasis on 'the supreme importance of language in the difficult art of living,' the use of the past in Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood's didacticism, and Jack Hodgins'S predilection for allegory. In all his chapters Keith addresses the issue of how the writers incorporate the colloquial or idiomatkvoice in their fiction. As a close reader of texts, he is perceptive and persuasive. Particularly memorable are his discussions of O'Hagan, Wilson, Gallant, Davies, Hugh Hood, and Margaret Atwood. In his examination of the work of Margaret Laurence, he identifies the liabilitiesof the structure of her fiction.He is less successful in his study of the spoken qualities of her novels. In describing Stacey's 'vigorous idiom ... derived from the journalese of newspaper and TV ...[as] an inadequate instrumentfor recording the complex emotions that she undoubtedly feels,' Keith makes me aware of how readers can hear the language of fiction differently. For me, Stacey's speech and her humour (there is not much of a discussion of the latter as an element of style) are both eloquent and adequate.They tell most readers, I think, more than they can bear to know. Similarly, the speaking and trivializing voice of HUMANmES 151 institutional erudition in the 'Historical Notes' section of The Handmaid's Tale has far more of a disturbing effect on the reader than Keith indicates. In the Derridean obliteration of binaries, of which centre vs margin and major vs minor are but two, Scobie has chosen to look at writers most of whom do not enjoy the popular success and reputation of Atwood, Laurence, or Munro, but who are nevertheless not by any means outside the 'canon': inter alia bpNichol, Sara Jeannette Duncan, Sheila Watson, Marian Engel. Leonard Cohen, John Glassco, and Frederick Philip Grove. Questioning 'the system of ideas which informs and determines' a text, Scobie shows the effects in Canadian literature of Western culture's wrongheaded privileging of fact over fiction and of speech over writing. For example, Memoirs of Montparnasse cannot be read in the context of a fact/fiction binary, but as an endless process of differing and deferring in which Glassco deflects 'the mythic source away from the claims of voice to the priority of ecriture.' The notion of marginality and the different ways of manifesting its presence in English-Canadian writing are central to Scobie's study. The first text to be examined is a short story by Sara Jeannette Duncan, 'A Mother in India: which is shown to call into question and reverse the usual valuing of speech over writing, and nature over culture. The Lacanian association of lack and desire is explored in the poetry ofSharon Thesen,in Sheila Watson's TheDoubleHook, and in Marian Engel's Bear. The concept of 'supplement' informs Scobie's treatment of poems by Leonard Cohen and Erin Moure. The metaphor of the parergon or frame that is both part of and in contradiction to text is used in the discussion of John Glassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse and underlines the interplay of truth, context, and self in that work. Scobie examines signature as an 'affirmation of identity: even, or espeCially, when that signature is forged, fictionalised, or displaced through "another" signature: as is the case with the documentary poem, which 'invokes the authority offact only to consign it to a systematic blurring of limits; it appeals to the historical character's signature only in order to forge it.' While Scobie's discussion is influenced by a single theoretical approach, his explanations of its concepts are on the whole elastic and clear. He offers different ways of looking at the work of writers like Glassco, Grove, O'Hagan, and Cohen (although they do not always provide new insights), and he is very adept in explicating Derridean aspects of the poetry of bpNichol, Erin Moure, and Lola Lemire Tostevin. The celebration of bpNichol is particularly memorable. As reader and critic, my methods and predispositions are much closer to Keith's than to Scobie's, although I am inconsistent enough to be uneasy with terms like 'clerisy.' Scobie locates a democratizing impulse in deconstruction that would seem to contradict Keith's sense of 'us' and 'them.' This apparent contrast is complicated by the accessibility of Keith's language and concepts to a much wider company of readers than Scobie's. 152 LEITERS IN CANADA 1990 I find the Derridean concept of binaries rigid and even melodramatic since one person's centre is often another's margin. For most creators and readers, the centre will always be the work itself. For many, including myself, the critic will most often fill the role of an, not the, interpreter of the author's text. In addition, the argument for the obliteration of hierarchies by a product of the French academic system strikes me as a contradiction, for, unless one is a saint, it is human nature to substitute one hierarchy for another whatever one's theoretical position might be. Scobie himself is aware of all these issues. What we gain from both him and Keith is a renewed awareness of how attention to language is so central to a reading of literature. Readers and critics will always be consciously or unconsciously predisposed to one approach or another and there will always be controversy - and heated controversy - over the ways in which we read. There is, however, ample room in the criticism of Canadian literature for many approaches; in playing off each other and in their contradictions of each other, they become complementary. In time, other perspectives come into play. All criticism is written from a lack, from a need to respond, and all criticism is provisional. We are constantly selecting, rejecting, reconsidering , rearranging, discussing. Every critical act, every theory, every 'canon' is, in a sense, always already a deferral to the next in an endless reenactment of an important characteristic of all creative play - process . OOHN LENNOX) Oliver Goldsmith. The Rising Village. Edited by Gerald Lynch Canadian Poetry Press Editions of Early Canadian Long Poems Canadian Poetry Press 1989. xxx, 57. $6.50 paper Standish O'Grady. The Emigrant. Edited by Brian Trehearne Canadian Poetry Press Editions of Early Canadian Long Poems Canadian Poetry Press 1989. lxii, 191. paper One of the most exciting recent developments in the field of Canadian literature has been the sudden - though long overdue - proliferation of scholarly editions. Carleton University Press, for example, has set a new standard for the bibliography of early Canadian fiction, and the Canadian Poetry Press, run out of the UniverSity of Western Ontario under the direction of David Bentley, is doing the same for early Canadian long poems. Many of these poems, including Standish O'Grady's The Emigrant, have never before been available in a popular edition. Others, such as Oliver Goldsmith's The Rising Village, were no longer accessible (in this case, Michael Gnarowski's 1968 Delta edition being out of print) or inadequate (the version printed in Nineteellth-Century Narrative Poetnj by Frank Tierney and Glenn Clever in 1988 updates David Sinclair's 1972 ...

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