The Solitary Outlaw by B.W. Powe (review)

HUMANITIES 145 publishers of'general interest' scholarlybooks that footnotes characterize the pedant and should be kept to a minimum; such a (largely economic?) decision constrains authors' generosity in acknowledgments and assumes readers uninterested in tracing precisely the sources of a writer's thought or the full range of scholarship behind it. Space-saving notes to the effect that 'I am indebted ... for several of my ideas ... to ...' (196) do not tell us which' ideas and are a kind of scholarly appropriation. In Canadian scholarship, many essays, like Howells's feminist in ideology and thematic in methodology, have been published on Laurence, Atwood, and Munro. But Howells's acknowledged sources are to books or to essays in feminist magazines and in World Literature Written in English and not to essays published in Canadian Literature and Journal of Canadian Studies (no references appear to either of these) or in Canadian Fiction Magazine and Essays on Canadian Writing (one reference to each). Gothic fiction surfaces repeatedly as a genre of Canadian women's fiction and Howells's discussion, resting on her own earlier book on the subject (Love, Mystery and Misery, Athlone, 1978), is a richly suggestive one. Butit completely ignores Margot Northey's The Haunted Wilderness (University of Toronto Press 1976) with its chapter on Hebert's Kamouraska, even though that novel has 'identifiably Canadian' (172) themes and is therefore suited to a discussion of the relationship between gender and nationality in a way thatHowells's choise of an Heberttext, Heloise, is not. This is all the more regrettable since Howells negotiates her own position as a non-Canadian discussing the 'identity' of Ca~adian writing with grace and forthrightness and since one could wish that the first book on Canadian women writers to have such wide distribution and a book with such genuinely helpful readings of individual novels would fully acknowledge rather than partially occlude its critical forebears. (SHIRLEY NEUMAN) B.W. Powe. The Solitary Outlaw Lester and Orpen Dennys. 192. $12.95 B.W. Powe has made a gallery of profiles in a genre, intellectual journalism, rarely practised in Canada. The Solitary Outlaw is too uneven and fragmented to add up precisely to a book. However, it is not exactly a collection of articles either, since all the chapters are joined at the trunk by·a broad thesis. In a pathetic inflection of Marshall McLuhan's concept of the decay of book culture, Powe argues that the enclosing horizon of the . modern intellectual is post-literacy and that this horizon puts the writer at the margins, making an outlaw of her or him. This phenomenon mayor may not be real butits socio-politicalimportance has certainly been blown . up. When was the book ever really the centre of power, except in the Edenic past imagined by intellectuals who are forever drawing them- 146 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 selves margills to inhabit? Powe does not say, yet the lingering death of 'the book world' is for him at once personal and political, and therein lies the pervasive romance of The Solitary Outlaw and its essentially emotional energy and sense. In lieu of analysis, Powe channels a personal passion into a rhetoric masquerading as a politics. He seeks to equip himself with the critical persona of The Reader (the upper case is his) enthralled, shaped, and reformed by the books he reads and the authors he encounters. Yet repeatedly, Powe claims his sensibility, indeed his individuality, has been undermined by what he calls, after Wyndham Lewis, the 'musical' character of post-literate modernity. Undefined, this global musicality seems to be the same as the mediascape chartedby McLuhan. At once the subjects of his writing, Lewis and McLuhan (and Elias Canetti), are also rebel angels who subject Powe through their writing to a diagnosis of what ails him as a late-modern young man. So, posing as the sick man of luckless late literacy, Powe less portrays these intellectuals than convenes them as consulting physicians to stand overhis sensibilityand probe it for post-literate symptoms. So, for example, he interrupts a chapter on Lewis to confess, \Moreover, the education system that I myself went through virtually discouraged books. I grew up out of balance...