The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

ground, and will no doubt re-offend all
sorts of Canadianists, but another essay
devoted to his native country, "Levels of
Cultural Identity," should be required reading
for all literate Canadians.
No critic in our time has gained such a
hold on our imaginations or been the
object of so many accolades. Yet Frye's
range of interests and protean sympathies,
everywhere apparent in this volume, also
made him a target for critics throughout
his life. A liberal humanist with a deep
affinity for tory radicals, a protestant minister
with a haunting sense of an imaginative
world that exists beyond time, a
seminal theoretical critic who became
increasingly uninterested in theory, a brilliant
practical critic who wandered freely in
every area adjacent to literature and then
some—such a figure loomed so large that
nearly everyone felt the urge to take a crack
at Frye at some point, as the history of the
response to his work shows. No matter: the
large edifices, built with a careful attention
to detail, tend to last.
Bold Omissions
Trinh T. Minh-ha
When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation,
Gender and Cultural Politics. Routledge $56.50
cloth, $18.95 paper
Framer Framed. Routledge $59.95 cloth, $19.95
paper
Reviewed by Jennifer Lawn
When the Moon Waxes Red and Framer
Framed gather Trinh's work from 1980 to
1990, essays and conference papers in the
former, film scripts and interviews in the
latter, which also adds a selected bibliography
of film reviews and analyses.
Consistent throughout Trinh's writing of
the past decade is her insistence upon the
deconstructive third term, the constantly
shifting ground beyond binary thinking
and calcified representations. In the past,
Trinh's resolute resistance to categories has
confused not only film festival jurors, but
also the thirty-three publishing houses
which rejected her earlier work, Woman
Native Other (1989). These two more recent
texts clarify Trinh's motivations in contesting
the practices of Western realism. Having
"trained herself" to answer questions lucidly
in defence of her work, Trinh expounds her
puzzling and controversial film techniques
with professorial patience in interviews. In
her essay collection Trinh most clearly
announces her aesthetic principles in papers
first intended for oral presentation. "A
Minute Too Long" states her interest in
"makingfilms that further engage filmmaking."
She creates to raise consciousness, not
to "[tell] people what they don't know" but
to "[awaken] their reflective and critical
ability." Trinh prefers allusion over explication,
however, and the later essays in When
the Moon Waxes Red show a dense accumulation
of ideas, not the logical pursuance of
a thesis so much as a series of thoughtful
detours, punctuated with quotations from
an eclectic range of sources.
Admirers of Woman Native Other will
find the specificities of third-world women's
experience featuring less centrally in
these two books. Instead Trinh emphasises
a non-illusionistic aesthetic claimed for
feminist and anti-racist projects on the
premise that "the function of any ideology
in power is to represent the world positively
unified." Trinh distinguishes "making political
films" from her own practice of "making
films politically." Viewers who
interrogate Trinh's films according to criteria
such as utility or political commitment
against Third World poverty merely reinvoke
"devices set up by the Master's liberals
to correct his own mistakes." Trinh here
enacts the rhetorical equivalent of a preemptive
strike: to challenge her adherence
to post-structuralist articles of faith is to
remain "in ideology" by asking the wrong