Varieties of Exile: The Canadian Experience by Hallvard Dahlie (review)

HUMANITIES I 5I artist's economic disenfranchisement in Western society. This theme is taken up by Douglas Gibson, Michael Macklem, and W.J. Keith, in their autobiographical essays on the relationships between Canadian writing, the financial problems peculiar to Canadian publishing, and government patronage. Among the remaining essays, George Woodcock and Martin Kevan take the Canada Council seriously to task. Woodcock's distrust of government interference in the arts is balanced by Kevan's point that very little Canada Council money 'goes directly to artists for the creation of new work: The essays of Brian Fawcett and Alan Weiss stand out in their condemnation of the futility of publishing poetry in a society that hardly reads it, and the inane anti-intellectualism of debunking the role of the university in Canadian writing. Norman Snider's nay-saying essay on Robertson Davies's fiction, and Morton Ross and Lawrence Mathews's excoriating critiques ofCanadian literary criticism instantiate W.J. Keith's well-balanced argument that there is too much nationalistic and profitminded puffery in the canonization of 'Canadian classics: B.W. Powe's discourse, 'Never Hunt Anything Small: a dialogue between the critic and his soul, penetrates to the heart of The Bumper BooKs purpose: 'The real fight must be for readership, books, the word, and against postliteracy : Keith Garebian's condemnation of contemporary Canadian theatre, 'Seasons of Discontent,' is so brilliant, witty, and down-and-dirty that it alone justifies the reader's investment. The editor, too, is to be commended for his restraint in not overshadowing The Bumper Book with his own personality. Metcalf confines his opinions to a brief Introduction and concluding 'Update: which define the book's secondary theme, the dubious benefitof government patronage to Canadian writers. Sam Solecki's thoughtful assessment of Metcalfs 'ambitious revisionism' in Canadian fiction and literary history serves to underscore the issues raised. The Bumper Bookis a sequel to Metcalf's largely autobiographical Kicking against the Pricks (1982) - 'known internally as Pricks Two: as his publisher tells us on the back jacket. Its combination of negative criticism, literary historical reminiscence, and humour is designed to encourage Canadians to read Canadian literature more often and more competently. The obvious contradiction in the book's construction - light-hearted antics applied to serious social issues - only emphasizes the lengths to which our writers must go in order to cultivate a significant audience. (A.R. KlZUK) Hallvard Oahlie. Varieties of Exile: The Canadian Experience University of British Columbia Press. 216. $22.50 Since Varieties of Exile is a thematic book, it focuses on questions of meaning rather than the conditions of meaning and concentrates on the 152 LETTERS IN CANADA 1986 readerly aspects of the texts it examines rather than their writerly qualities . Dahlie's starting point is Ovid's banishment by Augustus to Tomis on the shores of the Black Sea, which he sees as establishing the pattern of the exile writer as outcast and subversive that continues to this day. In his conclusion, however, he notes that on the whole the writers he has examined reject the 'Ovidian vision of exile' and find their immersion in new worlds enriching. This is not so surprising given that many of those writers are not strictly exile writers to begin with. He defines his subject as 'those who have moved to or from Canada, as long as they have communicated a substantial imaginative or artistic perception of the realities andlor myths about Canada' (p 6), but excludes from this group poets and, with the exception of Skvore~ky, those who write in languages other than English. Within the territory so mapped, he distinguishes among exiles, expatriates, and emigres. In other words, he is not writing about the theme of exile alone but about a more diffuse group of themes related to the fact that writers frequently don't spend all of their lives in one country. Some of the conclusions he reaches are that, over time, exile as a condition of place tends to be superseded by exile as a state of mind; and that, as would be expected, it becomes more complex and pragmatic 'with its negative and punitive characteristics increasingly disappearing' (p 3). In the...