Robert Kroetsch: Essays Open Letter ed. by Frank Davey, bpNichol, and: Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch by Shirley Neuman, Robert Wilson (review)

466 LETTERS IN CANADA 1983 sources' is here brought into focus by an emphasis on the process of 'internal exploration, on self-examination: Despite Bartley's opening claim, however, that the sources are only catalysts for this process and are not of interest 'independent of their relationship to and influence upon MacEwen's writing: this book often suggests the opposite: that MacEwen's writing is of interest primarily for the way in which it leads us to a synthesis of the mythic patterns to which she alludes. In other words, an enhanced appreciation of MacEwen'S craft comes through less forcefully than does the thematic emphasis. Bartley draws attention, for example, to the confusion resulting from the odd manipulation of point of view in Julian the Magician. Important questions are raised: 'Is the Christ referred to in the diary the "alien psyche" who usurps Julian's consciousness ...?' Examination of this technique, however, is aborted when we are told that 'these questions can only be resolved if one reads the word "Christ" as a metaphor for the true self: This equation, Bartley claims, has the virtue of offering a reading which is 'in harmony with alchemy, the philosophy of Boehme, and Christian Gnosticism: Maybe so, but it has the limitation of not getting us to the heart of an understanding of MacEwen's craft. Bartley quotes MacEwen: 'this is not art, / this is not poetry: the poetry is / the breathing air embracing you, / the poetry is not here, it is elsewhere ...' To take these lines at face value would be to do a disservice to MacEwen's art; Bartley's argument wanders perilously near this trap but does not fall into it. The individual interpretations in this book are subtle and illuminating and their cumulative impact rises above the weakness in the argument and does enhance one's appreciation of MacEwen and her work. (MAGDALENE REDEKOP) Frank Davey and bpNichol, editors. Robert Kroetsch: Essays Open Letter, special issue 5:4 (Spring 1983). 122. $4.50 paper Shirley Neuman and Robert Wilson. Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch NeWest Press. xii. 246. $7.95 paper Frank Davey's introduction to this special issue of Open Letter may be a deconstruction of the deconstructive essays it frames. Davey elaborates often by parodying his own elaboration - on the features defining the fourteen 'eccentric' Kroetsch essays now collected after their original publication from '97' to '982. For Davey, these essays are 'provocations' which 'refuse to complete their implied arguments' because in Kroetsch's critical world 'the text must inevitably be "misread'''; moreover, the 'misreading' must be supplanted by new misreadings, since each 'inter- HUMANITIES 467 pretation' reinvents the 'evolving text' through a 'subjective process of reading' that 'declines system, avoids completion: insists on 'discontinuity : and spurns 'the developing argument' in favour of a 'phenomenology of literary perception' which reclaims the 'syntax of surprise' and convinces us that 'language is the idea.' In this 'major task of literary subversion and deconstruction: Kroetsch repudiates the timeless structures and thematic perspectives associated with such Canadian critics as Frye, Atwood, Jones, Ronald Sutherland, and John Moss, and draws on the thought and method of Heidegger, Derrida, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Jaspers, and Merleau-Ponty - all thinkers who emphasize their 'radical suspicion ... of traditional systematic philosophy in which all being is to be harmonized and explained.' Davey's enthusiasm is not difficult to explain: in Kroetsch he finds one of the first Canadian critics to support the experimental and post-modern stance he advocates in From There to Here and, more recently, in Surviving the Paraphrase. If Kroetsch is seen as a 'radical' influenced by 'German existentialism evolved through French phenomenology: then the essays collected here, which are frequently illogical, undeveloped, or fragmented examples of critical misreading, can be celebrated. As Davey argues, Kroetsch is not concerned with amassing critical evidence or developing a specific thesis; after all, the very notion of thesis is itself a worn-out myth to be consciously undercut. These essays, then, do not illuminate text; they illuminate Kroetsch's ideas about approaching text. We watch him perform, misread, 'deconstruct: contradict, and know that this act is the meaning. We may enjoy the exegetical acrobatics (I do...