EN:

Although Frank Davey's "Surviving the Paraphrase" has been canonized and appropriated by Canadian theorists as a crucial resistance narrative, critics have not focussed on the essay as a literary document that is related to the author's career, his consciousness, or his life. The fiction of Davey's life encodes his own stance as the author of the text. "Surviving the Paraphrase" can be read as a confession and redemption narrative; it traces Davey's personal sense of loss in moving east as a loss of self and voice, and his desire to redeem himself (reclaim his voice) by positing a non-centralist vision of recovery through form (which Davey equates with the authenticity of "writing as writing"). By the end of the essay, thematic criticism has been identified with power structures that need to be destroyed in order to create a milieu in which no writer is excluded. The essay's appeal lies both in the contradictions between loyalty and liberation it embodies and in the way these contradictions are presented as relevant issues to a professional community faced with questions about its own identity and future.

EN:

David Leahy historicizes Linda Hutcheon's contributions to contemporary critical studies by examining her critical analysis of Hubert Aquin's Prochain Épisode and Trou de Mémoire and Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers in Narcissistic Narrative. Hutcheon's analysis is that the novels mark radical formal shifts towards the postmodern novel; this approach and its contradictions are consistent with the transition from the Structuralist-Marxist and Freudian-Marxist tendencies of the critical journal Tel Quel to the emphasis upon textual discontinuities. Central to Hutcheon's analysis is the idea that "it is the new role of the reader that is the vehicle of . . . change"; however, unless the reader's personal, social, material conditions and ideological commitments warrant this kind of reading, the sexist and politically ambivalent discourses of Cohen and Aquin are just as likely to leave the reader ideologically confused, politically passive and/or accepting of the literature as temporary fantasy or formalistic play. In Narcissistic Narratives, Hutcheon too readily accepts the three novels' self-referential, revolutionary potential as fact, and in the process fails to take enough account of their and her own historically-bound discourses and contradictions.

EN:

Christopher Dewdney's Log Entries explores the solipsism of consciousness by parodying a traditional genre of objective documentation; the text documents consciousness perceiving reality as a side-effect of consciousness and thereby becomes such a side-effect, ultimately calling into question the whole project of objective interpretation. The text operates upon the principle that, if the senses are deceptive, then all knowledge built upon empirical evidence may be nothing more than a fragile web of illusions; it explores the implications of such neurolinguistic solipsism. The text acts as a metaphorical model of perceptual experience; the identity of the male chronicler (if he is a single person) appears to be fragmented, playing various roles interchangeably: both a performer of an experiment and a performer in an experiment. Log Entries can be read as a ciphered text that does violence to itself in order to provide misinformation for a reader who aspires to textual omniscience.

EN:

Both Ihab Hassan's Out of Egypt and Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family present problematic representations of a male emigrant's dissociation from his own cultural, racial, and familial heritage. The emigrant's sense of estrangement is intensified by socially constructed codes of masculinity: these codes align the male subject with an orientalist discourse complicit with the neo-colonial ideologies of the West. Hassan's journey "out of Egypt" to the United States exemplifies the ways in which masculine severance cooperates with the politics of neo-colonial imperialism: Hassan's blunt articulation of his desire to be severed from his Egyptian past may reinscribe the Orientalist discourse that simultaneously desires and dismisses the non-West. Running the in Family also foregrounds the male emigrant's severance from his familial and cultural past, but whereas Hassan refuses to return to the past, Ondaatje is fascinated by it. Ondaatje returns (physical and imaginatively) to Sri Lanka to formulate a new understanding of his deceased father; however, in a text fueled by the desire for knowledge of the father -- a bid for a kind of power -- Ondaatje admits failure. The two "autobiographies" articulate the contradictions and slippages that occur in the gender system when the autobiographical subject undergoes the dislocations of racial, national, and cultural identifications.

FR:

La notion d'identité et sa construction, préoccupations centrales d'Un Joualonais sa Joualonie de Marie-Claire Blais, remettent en question l'appartenance collective par rapport à l'identité individuelle d'une personne. La quête d'identité devient problématique dû à l'ambiance carnavalesque du roman qui présente la possibilité de diverses identités résultant de la nation, de la classe et du groupe, de la langue et de l'identité sexuelle. Puisque la quête d'identité se fait dans le fragmentaire et le multiple, le mobile et le changeant, le relatif et l'universel, il devient difficile pour les personnages de se bâtir une identité définitive et stable. Selon Oore, la quête d'identité est non seulement marquée par un inachevé du devenir, mais aussi par une liberté créatrice, ce qui fait qu'elle devient fluide.

EN:

In Samuel Hearne's A Journey From Prince of Wales Fort, the description of the massacre of the Inuit at Bloody Falls is a descent into the heart of darkness, a confrontation with everything that supposedly-civilized European man faced in the New World. Hearne, like other non-Native explorers, constructed the story with contrasting images of the violent, savage (male) Indian and the peaceful, sensuous (female) Eskimo/Inuit. Inuit storytellers also shaped their accounts to fit the expectations of their listeners. Copper Inuit storytellers identity two separate massacre stories: the Navarana story and another version with some similar elements. The two stories and their variants contain common elements: a fight between two disparate groups (not tribal infighting); some survivors; a specific location (which varies); a revenge motif or the threat of retaliation; the marriage between a Native woman and a stranger (either white or Indian); and the use of magic. The presence of European figures in many of the Coppermine Inuit massacre stories suggests that the massacre which Hearne claimed to have witnessed did happen at the Falls and his presence was noted by survivors.

EN:

Jennifer Lawn summarizes the divergent conceptions -- those of Gérard Genette, Brian McHale, Mieke Bal, and Ann Banfield -- of the discourse boundaries between narrator and character and proposes that Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano can be classified under Genette's second classification of narration, "internal focalization," in which the narrator says only what a given character knows. The consciousness of each focalized character infects the narrative of Under the Volcano and the terrain of free indirect discourse is limited only by the reader's ability to detect its effects. The novel provides evidence that the occurrence of non-reflective consciousness in a text need not imply a personalized narrator: in the novel, there are transgressions between the narrative levels of heterodiegetic narrator and diegetic character. It is difficult to confirm whether the third-person voice of chapters vocalized through the Consul derives from the free indirect mode of the novel or whether the Consul "thinks himself" in the third-person with the distinction between reflective and non-reflective consciousness itself collapsing, thus producing dislocations in grammatical person and tense. In Under the Volcano, the narrator plays a merely functional role, as vehicle for the subjectivity of the characters.

EN:

Numerous references to spatial constituents charge the atmosphere of the Linnet Muir stories in Mavis Gallant's Home Truths. Linnet perceives the space in which other characters move as shrunken, a concomitant of local cultural, social, and religious oppressiveness; Gallant uses spatially-loaded language to throw an ironic light on these restrictions. Linnet's childhood experiences contribute to the pervading spatial imagery of her stories; because of the difference between an adult's perception of space and a child's "deformed" memories, Linnet's visual rendering of emotions colours the narration of her past anxieties. Linnet's narration involves three layers of memory and historical time: these layers contribute to the detachment with which she can extract numerous components of Canadian culture whose spatial reflection plays an important role in delineating local limitations, particularly for women and children. In Home Truths, the spatial/achromatic isolation and displacement at the heart of Gallant's Canadian experience appears in all its oppressive and alienating reality.

EN:

Water imagery is prevalent in Jacques Poulin's seven novels. Gaston Bachelard's study of water imagery reveals that it is "un être total" and that "l'eau doit suggérer au poète une obligation nouvelle: l'unité d'élément." Poulin's writing is a search for unity, both within the self and beyond, and the omnipresent water imagery expresses that search. Water imagery is a vehicle for transforming reality; it is associated with dreams, a life-force, healer, a purifier, but also potentially threatening. All of Poulin's novels are about a protagonist's quest for the authentic inner self; all are studies of frustrated writers attempted to express themselves; all express searches for a world of peace and harmony which eludes the characters. The unity Poulin seeks for the world and for the self, the search for meaning in life and in death, the place of writing and the role of the writer, are all fundamentally and intricately linked to water imagery.

EN:

Nino Ricci talks about Lives of the Saints, the first novel in his bildungsroman trilogy and cites Robinson Davies' Fifth Business and Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women as influences. He says that "The sense of being an outsider, or on the margins, is often how the artist is portrayed" and compares the artist's situation to that of an immigrant: outsiders are necessary in fiction to test the rules of the community. He also speaks about his experience in and the value of the creative writing program at Concordia University, his involvement with PEN International, and the problems of censorship in various countries. In a follow-up interview, critical responses to In a Glass House (the second novel in the trilogy), specifically concerning its apparent lack of structure, are discussed.