\s mYevtew ELECTRONIC ADDITION - University of British Columbia

OPINIONS AND NOTEStures), and Robert Wren's /. P. Clark (mostinteresting as an American's reaction toClark's America, Their America). StephenGray's Douglas Blackburn shows what happensin a good Twayne book: it is a reinvestigationof the world of a writer who fabricated hisown biographical data (cf. Grove), and asolid survey of the romances, operettas, pamphlets,columns, history, reviews, socialistcauses, secret service work, and the satiricSarel Erasmus trilogy, all of which shaped andexpressed Blackburn's career. Gray thus rescuesBlackburn from obscurity of several kinds,literary and political; more importantly, hewrites extremely well. Crisp and clear, hemakes literature sound interesting. As it sometimesis.Political myths, moreover, often take onvisual images, acquire populist form, affectboth literature and criticism. "We have a fictionthat we live by," writes Vincent O'Sullivanin The Rose Ballroom and other poems(John Mclndoe, $7.95) ; "it is the river ..."— "At every window, fiction / Love at eachdoor." For the satiric New Zealand playwrightGreg McFee, the image is less flattering; hissociety's infatuation with rugby and the rhetoricof hero-worship is summed up in hisantiheroic title: Foreskin's Lament (Price Milburn,$5.50). The play itself — direct, comic,pathetic, male — unfortunately does not travelwell.Laurie Hergenhan's Unnatural Lives (Univ.of Queensland, $19.95) probes a parallel Australianimage. He less traces the runningtheme of convicts in Australian literature(Tucker to White), however, than he effectivelyprobes the literary implications of theidea, the cultural fact. By contrast, JohnDocker's In a Critical Condition (Penguin,$9.95) takes on the power structure, fasteningon critical method. Self-defensive in stance(perhaps too much so), the book constitutes aplea for "whole" criticism, by means of anattack on what Docker claims to be criticalhegemonies: a Leavisite and then a similarlyexclusive poststructuralist bias which permeatesthe Australian academy. Canadian criticsmight reflect on its provocative remarks.Directly anthropological, Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Naked Man (Harper, $12.50,a paperback translation of the 1971 Frenchversion), comments on North American Indiancultures, again seeking images of organization.He classifies myths, rituals, and socialstructures according to what he determinesare the binary distinctions of human life atlarge. But one wonders also within contexthow exclusive the observations are, wonders atthe degree to which binary expectations encodethe subsequent analysis before it eventakes place. Douglas Gifford's Warriors Godsand Spirits from Central and South AmericanMythology (Douglas & Mclntyre, $15.95) * sa book of yet another kind, a book of talesaimed at an adolescent market (John Sibbick'sillustrations range from awkward drawingsto imaginative — animistic ? — designs offigures in nature), one which implictly challengesconventional Eurocentrism. One extraordinaryInca tale (Christian, we are advised,but the label is deceptive) shows the embroideryof a mixed culture: it tells of awoman with a snake sister, who aids her toward off the devil husband who was about tocarry her off. It is a tale with various overtones.But the stated moral is perhaps unexpected:Never marry a stranger.In yet another context, the myths of roleand relationship affect the subject and structureof fiction itself. The ten 194.0's stories ofthe Maori writer Jacqueline Sturm, collectedas The House of the Talking Cat (Brick Row,$6.50), seem rather dated now. But the bestreads somewhat like a Joyce Marshall story.Called "Jerusalem, Jerusalem," it tells of ayoung woman's discovery of a previous generation'sdifficult choices about sex, love, andsatisfaction. Such choice is a recurrent subject.Catherine Helen Spence's Handfasted, for example(Penguin, $7.95), though a muchearlier book, seems oddly more up to datethan Sturm's. An Australian novel submittedto a literary contest in 1879, it was rejected atthe time for its immorality, and was not publisheduntil now. Reading it is an educationin both fashion and social bias. The "immorality"ostensibly was to be found in thepractice referred to in the title — "handfasting"is explained as a "trial marriage" of ayear and a day — but in retrospect one getsthe feeling that the novel was deemed evenless acceptable in 1879 because the practiceof handfasting in the story was the prerogativeof women to demand. The story tells of ayoung Australian who travels abroad and discoversa lost Scots colony somewhere southeastof San Francisco. Having lost the Bible andthe habit and art of reading and writing, themembers of the colony acquire (instead) theskills of humanity and egalitarian government.The young man is attracted to the virtues ofsuch a life and to a young woman in thecolony. Handfasting follows. But one of theparadoxes of the book involves its ultimatesurrender: of vision, to convention. Spence207