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Letters in Canada 1986 This year's 'Letters in Canada: fifty-second in an unbroken series, reflects predictable change amid continuing stability. In this issue three sections have new authors: Jerry Wasserman for Drama; Barbara Godard for Translations; Stephen G. Wilson for Religion. As annual literary, artistic, and critical production in Canada continues to increase, the challenge of evaluating and reporting that production, withih the normal dimensions of an academic journal, has dictated modest retrenchment: Les Etudes sociales, closer in focus to social science than to humanities, will no longer appear in 'Letters in Canada.' We thank Jean-Fran<;ois Leonard, who has so ably handled that section for us in recent years. (LED) Fiction 1 I MICHAEL F. N. DIXON Arbiters of taste and fashion who study cultural entrails seeking portents (such as annual omnibus reviewers of new Canadian fiction) depend upon either a sharp eye for, or an inventive delusion of, trends. Reviewers are, perforce, also readers, however dubious their motives, and what delights the pleasure-seeking reader may chagrin the portent-seeking reviewer. Such is the case with the five most impressive ofthis year's first novels and short story collections; they stubbornly refuse to yield a pattern, vector, or manifesto among themselves and resist categorization in schools or missions founded by others. Their only trend is a void of trendiness. Ifany single example can characterize a group marked by such diversity it is The Paris-Napoli Express (Oberon, 127, $23.95, $12.95 paper) by Janice Kulyk Keefer, deserving winner of the CBe prize in fiction. Oberon's dust jacket politely introduces the new author as 'from Church Point, Nova Scotia' and as having a style 'deceptively simple and direct.' For deceptive simplicity it is hard to beat this presentation of a down-East natural, an artless rural raconteur. Keefer was 'from' Ontario and 'of' Ukranian heritage before she became 'from Church Point' via London and other distant points, and although some of her scholarship includes important work on Maritimes artists, her stories range in setting from a fishing UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 1, FALL 1987 2 LETTERS IN CANADA 1986 village in Nova Scotia to a Ukrainian-language summer school in Manitoba . Keefer's fiction is neither regionalist nor ethnic. Nor post-modernist nor feminist nor neo-primitivist for that matter. Indeed, the sort of comfortable vantage pointon human perplexity promised to adherents by any 'ism' proves seductively attractive but treacherously unstable in these nine stories: a dream masking a nightmare. In this dream, [tum heavily on my side and press into the empty space against my husband's chest. Perfectly we fit together, gently we touch each other. The house, the street, the city and the earth on which they crouch, all hold us carefully. We fit so perfectly, in our sleep. This melodic, quiet coda to a literal nightmare ends 'In A Dream: the penultimate story in the collection and its most explicit, harrowing metaphor of a deceptive stability. The speaker, who is pregnant, recounts 'the most extraordinary dream' in which she awakes in alarm from sleep but decides that her alarm is false: 'I can close my eyes again and fit my swollen, softened bodyinto the emptyspace against my husband's chest.' Then, with abrupt shock, '... there are two men in dark clothes, pointinga gun at my heart: She is arrested while her husband and daughter continue to sleep, taken to prison, held incommunicado in solitary confinement indefinitely without charge, trial or sentence, beaten, starved. Her fetus refuses birth, 'she knows it is better to wait, to curl herself fiercely inward: and her daughter at home 'woke each day and clung to an unravelling safety net: In tonalities of self-deprecation she prefaces her account with the opinions of her husband and her doctor who explain or explain away the dream by attributing its source to the abnormal sensitivity of pregnant women to the 'supple, cunningly transmitted images' ofatrocity in nightly television, daily newspapers, and weekly newsmagazines.Yet 'the women whose husbands disappear, it could be me' and the children 'whose unblinking faces have been smashed by bombs, they could be mine: Their assumption that such images must be treated as dream, as fiction, not as objects of empathetic identification, is reasonable, common, and surely necessary to our sanity. The woman's dream, however, is the story: it dominates spatially and its powerful, economical images command attention . The worlds of prologue and coda, reasonable and reassuring, but outside the dream, suffer eclipse against its vitality. Narrative strategies reinforce this structural technique: in her dream the woman awakens several times, still in prison; she is afraid to go to sleep, in herdream. Thus the reader becomes entrained in the woman's consciousness, losing any clear distinction between two previously certain states. 'In my dream I wake .. .' begins the closing section of the story, ominously repeating the opening scenes of her dream, and the coda of safety, comfort, and order FICTION 3 mocks its own lullaby, transmuted by Keefer's strategy into a fanfare of terror. Like the 'perfectly' inter-fitted boxes of the coda, house within street within city within earth that 'hold ... carefully' the 'perfectly' fitted husband, wife, and fetus within yet 'crouch' in the pose of recoil, fear, submission, Keefer's dream-tellerbecomes a synecdoche, atonce intensely particular in the individuality of her voice and wholly generalizable; faceless, nameless, placeless, a surrogate for all the reasonably complacentawakened rudely into nightmare. So precisely appropriate is Keefer's 'deceptively simple' style to her vision that the strategic comma in the last sentence of the coda produces a pause between assertion and qualifier and a resulting stress that epitomizes the dynamic of the entire story: 'We fit so perfectly, in our sleep.' Other stories in the collection are less concretely emblematic, but despite their remarkable range of subject, tone, and character, each is exquisitely crafted with deft, subtle strokes to convey unobtrusively a quality of the mythic, the structure of a fugue or miniature, the resonance of aparable. 'Somewhere in Italy' is aluminous version ofa commonplace. Lovers quarrel, separate, make up on a calculatedly romantic holiday in Venice: a vignette capturing both the eternally renewing ritual and timebound fragility of love: 'holiday lovers ... a love as real, as imprecise, as some indulgently unfocused photograph.' In the title story a young Canadian takes the wrong train in Paris but finds, or seems to find, the right track for his future; in the final story, 'Mrs. Putnam at the Planetarium ,' an old woman strives to create a safe place in a world grown alien by recapturing her secret past in fragile fantasy under the projected simulation of a starry night. In 'A Dream of Eve: as the title suggests, mythiC resonance is strong. Evelyn Anderson searches in the Romanesque art of Autun for a tangible representation of herself, an image not of the Gothic Eve, pandemic Venus of fruitful nurture and forbidden fruit, but of woman never meant to marry orbearchildren: 'thatimagining ofa woman with no womb to fill or wounds to make ... Other fruit, other earth: the fashioning of unseen dreams.' IfKeefer uses such deft, precise strokes to sketch a mythic emblem, H.S. Bhabra in his absorbing first novel Gestures (Irwin, 280, $19.95) uses a thickly laden brush on large canvas to fashion an icon of moral crisis in this century. He also joins Keefer in bucking the usual trend in first fictions to transmuted autobiography, the 'coming-of-age-in-Sudbury' mode favoured understandably by young writers trying to find the meaning of their own past because it is a subject, perhaps the only subject, for which both insight and interest provide sufficient fuel to sustain the kindled muse. Jeremy Burnham, Bhabra's narrator, by no means young and feeling at ease with his past, sets out to compose 'The Memoirs of an Ordinary 4 LETTERS IN CANADA 1986 Man,' to outline for his grandson a life of success as a British diplomat and family man in a modestly flattering 'marginal note to the gossip which is history' and record of stirring times: 'I have heard great argument and walked among famous men.' Ambushed by the 'inadequate treason which is memory,' however, Burnham finds the flow of recollection taking an unintended course, eddyingaround one not-famous man; Antony Manet, and stagnating in only two small nodes of time past: Venice in 1923, corrupted by Mussolini's fascist power ascending, and Amsterdam in 1945, ruined by Hitler's fascist power collapsing. Manet is the product and custodian of 'the dream of a Europe without borders' fostered by liberal humanists largely, like Manet, Jewish, learned, multilingual, functionally stateless; living and studying where they choose, sharing information freely, and providing mutual hospitality. 'We believed it was possible to be human, simply human, without the atavistic necessity to belong.' Burnham is a more complex man than he admits, or perhaps realizes, and to his frustration, a better artist. Unimaginative but sensitive , decent, compassionate, but a loyal servant of his class and of British foreign policy, he does not even understand the 'strange apocryphal vision' of the man who comes to dominate and determine the shape of his memoir, 'whose troubles were none of mine, and from whom, 1believe, 1 learnt nothing, nothing at all, nothing of any use.' Bhabra conveys the lessons his narrator cannot learn, or will not admit to learning, through a small cast of vivid characters caught in a complex matrix of international intrigue, conspiracy, and murder against settings exotically remote yet densely realized in historical detail and emotive atmosphere. If this sounds a bit like Forsyth and Ludlum, it is, a bit, but the devices ofbest-sellersuspense, without the hyperventilationcommon to this lucrative sub-genre, here serve the purposes ofa novel of ideas and a conception of historical causality as the product of individual choice. What links indissolubly two such diverse men as Burnham and Manet is their mutual complicity in a betrayal of humane principles for political and personal expediency. Reasons of policy and prudence in fascist Italy dictate that the death of their friend Jane Carlyle in Venice must be officially suicide, not murder, just as, a quarter-century later in the war-devastated rubble of Amsterdam, economics require an industrialist to be, at any cost, a patriot not an exploiter of slave labour in collaboration with the Nazis. A ruined city and brutalized civilization become both the stage and a symbolic, reflecting macrocosm for a reuniting of Burnham and Manet and the catastrophic resolution of their moral failure. Thus the intrusive memory of Manet catalyses Burnham's memoir to confession, and Gestures informs not a 'marginal note to' but an icon of history, evoking the ancient dilemma of honestas and utilitas, of principle and expediency, to take the measure of a century where extraordinary people betray their humanist birthright to the 'ics' and 'ism' of the state, while the FICTION 5 'Ordinary Man' who 'has stood apart from the desire or duty to decide or establish or judge' works out the bureaucratic details. Inadequate as these remarks are to represent the exceptional maturity and craft of Keefer and Bhabra, they are generous in the proportion of . available reviewing space they monopolize, and force even more penurious treatment on three other newcomers of substantial if not quite so uncommon worth. Diane Schoemperlen, in the seven entries comprising Frogs and Other Stories (Quarry Press, 115, $10.95 paper), also deals with 'the ordinary' and, like Keefer, with fragility and transience, but her focus is severely restricted to relatively young women, or perhaps, given the indistinguishability of consciousness between stories, to one woman struggling with the sort of uncertainties frequently seen in women's magazines under such interrogatives as 'Are Meaningful Interpersonal Relationships Possible in the 80S?' and 'Is Traditional Marriage Obsolete?' Schoemperlen captures the obsessive cadence of protagonists who live the stock situations , cliches and male stereotypes of this pop sociology and have only its banal idiom to express their authentic pain and insecurity. With unstudied , unguarded fluency they 'talk things out,' telling their stories not through the standard conventions of narration or even those of 'stream of consciousness: but through a variety of stylized derivatives from the rhetorical strategies of the 'girl talk' marketplace: ('And confessions are meant to be reciprocated - otherwise what possible good can they be'). Repetitive, circular, self-justifying, dealing uncritically in superficialities, their stories have only the vestigial 'plot' of anecdote: 'ordinary' experience seldom forms a line of directed complication leading to closure. The banal is always risky territory for a writer, and sometimes in the collection an easy cynicism or rambling imperception serve only the ends oftedium. At their best, however, Schoemperlen's risks generate witty, provocative insights into the sexual comedy, and great potential lies in her perception that plot and character are arbitrary functions of narrative method. Her experiments in voice and perspective challenge the conventions ofform as her idiom tests the dimensions of cliche; through both, Schoemperlen probes for the truth within truism. In marked contrast to Frogs and Other Stories, there is nothing experimental in the narrative technique of Gary Geddes and Jake MacDonald; they simply exploit effectively the timeless lure of a good tale well spun. Several of the entries in Geddes's The Unsettling of the West (Oberon, 94, $23.95, $12ยท95 paper) might have beguiled the time around a thousand campfires or across a million mugs ofdraft. His title storyinvolves a classic struggle of underdog against authority, in this case between the narrator, O'Rourke, an easy-going, unintrepid constable in the North West Mounted Police and his superior, Sergeant Dickens, a demented martinet. Their long-standing but controlled enmity, stemming on O'Rourke's part from 6 LETTERS IN CANADA 1986 the natural wariness of the non-believer towards the fanatic and on Dickens's part from the natural clistaste of the English for the Irish, reaches an irruptive crisis under the strain of a long mission together on horseback across the wastes of Alberta (with Dickens surreptitiously packing his golf clubs) to bring five prisoners from Calgary to Fort Edmonton. To reveal the climactic moment is to rob the storytellerand his audience of their spell, but the effect is pure black comedy, and in its aftermath Geddes implies a cautionary moral: the humane O'Rourke leaves the Force amid scandal as unfit, to find a better life with his Calgary flame, Foothill Annie, while the pathological, golfing Sergeant Dickens makes Captain. 'The Pickling of Guingin' develops lighter comedy from the samefundamentals, this time favouring the underdog, when a shrewd representative of Indian workers in a fish cannery parlays the death of their Chief, Guingin, at the height of the canning season, into contract concessions despite the frenzied efforts of the Scottish plant manager to delay the traditional two-week funeral ceremony until slower times by use of the convenient method suggested in the title. 'Campfire' style places a premium on incident and plot. narrowly defined, sharply distinguished characters, and a crisp delivery. It is not a suitable conduit to the root complexities of character or social inequity, and Geddes strikes strong emotional chords but leaves a frustrating sense of superficiality and stereotyping in 'The Accounting: where the underdogs are Canaclians of Japanese descent interned and dispossessed in 1942. He drops his usual underdog/authority format for 'The Tan: however, using a doppelganger motif to project a subtle insight on issues of race and colour. If Geddes is not a social analyst, he is a compelling storyteller when he cuts his cloth to suit his style. Jake MacDonald, in The Bridge out ofTown (Oberon, 176, $23.95, $12.95 paper) does find room within the conventions of tale-spinning to explore the complexities of human motivation byoverlappingcharacters from one story to the next, like a proto-novel, and isolating them in the claustrophobic environment of Keewuttunnee, a place of marginal existence in the outback of Ontario whose name translates as both 'good luck is corning' and 'dead end.' For the ill-assorted inhabitants only the second meaning seems valid. Indians from the reserve, teachers and management from Inclian Affairs, policemen, tourists, railway workers, and bartenders move against the bleak, minimal setting that none acknowledges to be home. Isolationand proximity provide bothgratingcontactbetween these aliens and the possibility that estrangement might be bridged. The stimulus works, but most bridges are too tentative or their spans too long to bear the weight of accumulated cultural baggage. In 'Two Yellow Pails' a young agent from the south, near the end of his stintat the reserve, falls in love with an Indian woman who killed her husband when he attacked their child in an alcoholic rage, but his courtship falters when he cannot imagine a future undetermined by their divergent origins: FICTION 7 Could he picture Rose moving with him to the city? Amongst Indian-hating landlords, Me-generation males, women fond of discussing orgasm and the layered look? And could he picture himself, child of affluence, settling in here for an eternity of dirty diapers, brutal poverty ...? AI Chaput, a policeman, appears in several tales, and with each appearance moves farther along the road from self-absorbed indifference towards compassion and understanding. In 'Reuben: he finds himself drawn to an Indian boy, wild, rebellious, and angry, whom, by the protocols of his official identity, Chaput should slot into the pigeonhole labelled 'antagonist .' This potential bridge also falls, calamitously undermined by the boy Reuben's conclitioning when he looks at Chaput to see only a symbol of oppressive authority. The mood of these eleven stories ranges widely from the bleakness of 'Reuben' through poignancy to comic whimsy as MacDonald chronicles with understanding perception the rich diversity of small triumphs, follies, and disasters of his characters struggling for their human dignity in the myopia of cultural conditioning and selfdeception , an affliction hardly limited to the inhabitants of Keewuttunnee . Every bridge out of town leads only to Keewuttunnee. There is no discernible trend in this sampleof newcomers, at leaslto this arbiter's eye, because each has found an individual voice; they are all voices worth hearing. 2 I MARK LEVENE 'One of our favorite writers,' declares one of the new literary stars of New York. 'One of the great short story writers: intones a Canadian socialite. These designer judgments about Alice Munro do not, of course, mean that The Progress of Love (A Douglas Gibson BooMlilcCleliand and Stewart, 309, $22.95), the book that has broadened her international reputation, has anything to do with denim or a pri2ed banquette. Whatever its tone, the praise is fully warranted: this collection of eleven intricately narrated stories is close to a masterpiece, close because a few of the pieces repeat patterns with a loosening grip, a sudden loss of attention. Nevertheless, at least three - 'The Progress of Love: 'Miles City, Montana: and 'Circle of Prayer' - belong among the best in the language. Munro's is a realm of beSieged families and warring feelings far removed from the phantom sorrows of the Holocaust and from 'the green places of the world .. . swarming with strongarm philosophers and armed prophets.' A world of memories, small towns, and rooms where 'the window blinds were down to the sills' and 'the air had a weight and thickness, as if it were cut into a block that exactly filled the room: it is equally removed from urban nightmares, the exultations of a freefloating intelligence, and dense subversions of narrative process. But ...

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