To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Revie w
of this "vacuité de la plénitude mystique",
although other critics have found it all-tooidentifiable
with Aquin's own position.
Shouldn't Lamontagne connect this "celebration"
with the "terror" of writing so
prominent earlier, of which it is probably
another, and particularly desperate, manifestation?
Largely because the cinematic
intertext (the scenario) loses out to the
mystical one ([Nicolas'] commentary),
Lamontagne finds Neige noire the least successful
of the four novels.
These "pratiques recensées" in the four
central chapters are brought into a useful
"synthèse diachronique" in Chapter VII.
The first section, "Schémas fictionnels,"
elegantly summarizes them and suggests
links: "le discours aquinien, sous le masque
de différents narrateurs..."; the mysterious
Orpheus subtext found in each novel. The
second section returns us to the "modalités
dénonciation" found in chapter II; it summarizes
(with statistics) the narrower classifications
of Aquin's intertextual rhetoric.
Lamontagne's most adventurous and
speculative chapter, "Intertextualité et postmodernisme,"
is likely also to be the most
interesting chapter to the general reader—
i.e. the non-Aquiniste and/or the nonnarratologist.
It offers some comparative
contexts for Aquin, by making his intertextuality,
more broadly, a matter of the other
texts that he read, knew about, was influenced
by, or could, for purposes of literary
history, be usefully compared to or placed
among, rather than by the narrower categories
given in the introduction, which taxonomically
determine much of the analysis.
Lamontagne asserts, I think correctly, that
apart from Nelligan, Aquin, for intertextual
purposes, ignored Québécois literature;
conversely, though Lamontagne does not
discuss this, Québécois authors, while
admiring Aquin, have seemingly not been
much influenced by him. Other possibilities
he touches upon include Aquin and the
Nouveau Roman, Aquin, Burroughs, and
the cinematic, Aquin and Nabokov; even
the most thorough and intriguing comparison
he makes, that of Aquin and Borges,
could be looked into further. The taxonomic
trees have largely dominated the contextual
forest, but at the end we get extraordinarily
stimulating views, with suggestions for further
exploration, of that forest.
Critical? Solitude?
Caroline Bayard, ed.
100 Years of Critical Solitudes: Canadian and
Québécois Criticism from the 1S80S to the 1980s.
ECW $25.00
Reviewed by Patricia Merivale
The title of this volume, a heavily allusive
and perhaps too pessimistic formulation,
suggests the current politically correct
assumption of the non-meeting of this
country's two most long-enduring critical
solitudes. Here are sixteen dollops of separation
which none of the contributors is
even attempting to bridge. Six pairings of
approximate critical topic are made: biographical,
historical, "thematic and sociological,"
psychoanalytic, formalist-tosemiotic,
and an ever-so-capacious portmanteau
of "pistes critiques postmodernes"
(all of them), wisely left to the polymathic
critical capacities of Barbara Godard. Two
essays, André Belleau's on "sociocritique"
and Philippe Haeck's joyfully Barthesian
"amorous" reading (which, "aérienne" and
"libérant[e]," as Bayard says, spiritedly concludes
the volume), asymmetrically lack
"Anglo" partners, a point which passes
without comment and without redress. The
reader is, in good postmodern fashion, left
to his or her own devices for bridging these
critical solitudes.
But the editor may have given up too easily.
The introductory essays, while of great
merit and interest, do not attempt "comparison":
Bayard discusses the Québécois
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