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HUMANITIES 137 complexities of Butor's work. The context of critical approaches and methodological preoccupations invoked by Spencer, as well as the fastidious attention to details of structure and presentation, make this a specialist's vademecum, one which proposes an intelligent introduction to three essential features of Butor's typographic, structural, and thematic landscape whose dominant elements still yield no easy answers to either critic or reader. (JOHN A. FLEMING) Eli Mandel. The Family Romance Turnstone Press. 259. $12.95 paper As I write this, an academic is describing a paperback reprint series he runs as a venture 'which represents Canada's cultural heritage' ('Publisher tries new approach to classics,' Globe and Mail, 20 April 1988, C5). The Family Romance is a collection of critical essays by a man who knows it isn't that easy. What culture? Whose heritage? The multiplicity of Canadas, the isometric nature of a culture in which laments become anthems and keeping involves losing, underlies Mandel's sensibility, shaping his every insight. Like a McLuhanesque surfer, he rides the headlong combers of postmodemism with aplomb. Heavily indebted - as the author acknowledges - to Harold Bloom's The AnxietyofInfluence, the collection surveys Canadian fiction and poetry in its postmodem phase. At ease with unease, gifted at spotting likenesses among diverse works, Mandel asks no more ofliterature at this time than that it reflect our jumbled selves. This strikes me as a very modernist stance, a sympathetic perception of today's writers by a figure whose deepest allegiances lie with another critical order. Hyperion as critic. His concluding essay shows this. 'Modernism and Impossibility' first appeared as 'Van Gogh and Impossibility.' While the sleight-of-hand that equates so easily the one with the other is unsettling, the essay's rueful conclusion - 'The revolution eats its children' - suits our time the wayan egg fits the palm of your hand. As the catcher of a mood, Mandel can rise to the eloquence of his brief, 1984 'Note' on post-structuralism in Canadian poetry: 'This is a troublesome, difficult time. The foundations on which more than half a century of writing have been built are crumbling. Fathers are being replaced by sons. All we can do is remember Yeats, that fierce virgin and her star, other apocalypses. And wait' (84). Orthodox postmodernists leave Yeats alone. The collection's virtues entail its faults, both generic and specific. A gathering of fugitive pieces allows its audience to catch the play of a critic's imagination over a wealth of diverse topics. Yet the different audiences and purposes the pieces have addressed make for unevenness 138 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 and repetition. A strong editor would have produced a better book. A writer whose Preface notes that the text 'suffers from randomness and incoherence' disarms his readers. He worries them, however, when he then justifies this looseness by opining that '[m]odern critical theory ... distrusts system and structure, the logic of development' (x). Do I really want to read someone as confused as I? . The other price a reader (willingly) pays springs from Mandel's encyclopaedic allusiveness: 'In the "Preface" to the translation ofJacques Derrida's OfGrammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak cites Jean Hippolite 's essay on the "Preface" to Hegel's Phenomenology ofMind to the effect that no preface should be taken seriously' (135). As a parody of Borges, the sentence is unbeatable. To speak more seriously, consider an essay as illuminating on the subject of recent (read 'trendy') Canadian criticism as 'Strange Loops.' The reader's delight at the breadth of allusion and insight declines into impatience. Could the writer please light, pause upon a single piece, show us the all that lies in each? Avoid opera houses if it is basketball that you want to watch. Mandel's critical vigour lies in his power to sense the wider implications of a cultural gesture. Would he not scorn the close analysis of a particular text as outmoded, humanist, New-Critical? He quotes more than once Charles Olson's aphorism on Poe vs Melville: 'Soine men ride on American space, others have to fasten themselves like a tent stake to survive. As I see it Poe dug in and Melville mounted.' In choosing...

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