To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

explicitly (although inconspicuously)
claims his father's stories as a main ingredient
in his own cripplingly creative neurosis.
The biographical and the autobiographical
are rapidly interleaved within the frame
story, the "self-begetting novel" of Hellman
in the asylum, putting himself together by
means of this journal-like series (dated
from March 10 to May 31,1980) of "letters
to his father." Parody, pastiche and cliché:
Hellman is "trapped in the [Oedipal] Jewish
joke" of the third, or Portnoy, generation.
The "scene of writing" is everywhere,
although it must be furtively concealed
from the prying eyes of Antoine, the
Gothically (or Nabokovianly) sinister asylum
attendant (is he friend or foe?), and
thus from the eyes of David's psychiatrist.
Dr. Caulfield (like Portnoy's Dr. Spielvogel)
is a blackly comic stand-in for those other
ambiguously benevolent torturers of Jewish
youth from the Old Testament through
Portnoy, the hero's parents, as well as a
grotesque figure whose mission of "extracting
confessions," resonantly echoes, in
Hellman's mind, the interrogators of the
concentration camps. His name metamorphoses
in every episode. It may be "really"
Caulfield, but soon becomes "Crackfile,"
"Coldfeel" or "Clayfeet," and another
twenty-one phonetic yet significant variations
pile up into a comically cumulative
liturgy towards the end of the story.
While Hellman resists, by way of the
Scrapbook, the psychiatric attempt to box
him into a fixed identity, when he needs a
running, jumping, dodging, fluid, and
polymorphous one, Majzels does not stint
us of plot. There are such satisfying set pieces
as a World-of-Wonders-like episode in one
of the seamier carnival corners of the 1967
World's Fair, where our adolescent hero,
playing the picaro, runs into "real [low]
life" head-on. Here he meets Annie, a walking,
yet three-dimensional, cliché of the
Older Woman with a Heart of Gold who
introduces our hero to love and, inevitably,
to his own capacity for haplessly betraying
her. David's experiences as a (bilingual)
factory worker introduce his political commitments;
his encounters with Oscar the
Frathouse hippie, a joyous specimen of the
bizarre, eccentric, doomed and drugsoaked
loner as Québécois—albeit anglophone—literary
type, provide the heart of
the book's blackest (and funniest) comedy.
A fourth textual element, further reifying
the "scrapbook" image, is made up of clippings
from current Montreal newspapers,
which Hellman tapes over the texts of his
stories to conceal them. These antitexts,
printed as if on darker paper, obscure most,
but not all, of the underlying texts, from us
as well as from Antoine and Crackfill; we
try (maddeningly, in vain) to make sense
out of the more interesting narratives
underneath. The main stories are de facto
fragmented by them; yet these rather anodyne,
allegedly random news items are full
of palimpsestically antiphonal implications
for Hellman's text, of which they are (of
course) an integral part. This becomes particularly
clear towards the end, where the
major antitext, moving slowly into the
frame, introduces David's Philippine
adventures, the climax of his autobiography,
and perhaps the weakest segment of
the book. David's account of being on the
politically correct side of the people's war
in that vividly steamy corner of the third
world is interrupted by a recasting (corresponding
to the newspaper intertexts of the
earlier sections), from historical journal
accounts (Magellan's and others, shaped
into a sort of Lord Jim plot), of the early
exploration and conquest of the
Philippines. This, the longest antitext, is the
only one detachable into a narrative of its
own. The sources of all the anti-texts are
given at the end, both out of obligation and
courtesy (real-world) and mock-accuracy
(text-world). This interesting, if peripheral,
device is at least unsentimental, while the
"magic" (that is the Magic Realism), of
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