шш in review DISCOURSE OF THE OTHER - University of British ...

BOOKS IN REVIEWage yield the comic situations and reparteewhich we associate with summertheatre in Quebec, there is genuine humourof language and some poetry inDaigle's writing. Albert is a world-wisebachelor who enjoys verbal parry andthrust. He is impatient with the engagementritual — he would prefer to "tastethe wedding cake" before marriage. Inwrathful reaction to the precipitous departureof a faithless companion, Evangeline,a friend of the two fiancées, decidesto reconstruct the French language— "j'utiliserai plus jamais un mot masculin"— and she proceeds to feminizeall masculine words : "Faites-moi la plaisirde retourner dans la jardin, je veuxpas vous voir la bout de la nez seulement"(my italics).There is a good possibility that thesuccess of Michel Tremblay's Les bellessoeurs in 1968, with its scandalous use ofjoual had an impact on the dramaticcareer of the young Jean Daigle. To hiscredit, it should be noted that Daigledid not jump on the bandwagon to tryto capitalize on Tremblay's success.Daigle's characters in fact bring popularlanguage to the stage also, but it is clearlyand realistically based on the spokenFrench of a small provincial town, havinglittle or no connection with the popularlanguage of Montreal or with theliterary and theatrical modishness of"joual" in the late 1960's. Jean Daigleis a craftsman of the theatre who hasbeen working slowly and deliberately fornearly twenty years producing theatrewhich may be viewed and re-viewed withincreasing respect for the human statementthat it makes.CARROL F. COATESTELLINGSROBERT CURRIE, Learning on the Job. Oberon,$11.95.JANE MUNRO, The Trees Just Moved Into aSeason of Other Shapes, Quarry, $8.95.KEN NORRis, In the Spirit of the Times. TheMuses' Company, $6.95.STEVE NOYÉS, Backing Into Heaven. Turnstone,$7.95.LOVING AND WRITING have often been thesubjects of poetry as poets ask not onlywhat it is to love but also what it is towrite "I love." This relation betweenwhat French psychoanalyst Julia Kristevamight call desire and language hasbeen worried over recently in Canadianpoetics. Theorist, novelist, poet RobertKroetsch articulates his awareness of theproblem in a 1981 interview with ShirleyNeuman :I realize that I fall in love by saying I fallin love. But I also know that I then havefallen in love. You know, I have an upsetstomach and can't sleep at night, I writelove letters . . . and all the crazy things alover does.More recently, in her latest book ofpoems, Jane Munro also acknowledgesthe uneasy relation between the wordswe have to speak about love and ourexperience of it when she writes of twolovers who "haven't learned enough yetabout the many kinds of telling, in love."As different as Jane Munro's book isfrom recent books by Robert Currie, KenNorris, and Steve Noyes, at some pointthey each struggle with or in the relationbetween language and loving, whethertheir poems speak of a love for others,for words, or for the ways that our wordsgive us access to our "others." Somepoems tell us of the many kinds of love;others that, as Kristeva writes, "love isspoken, and that is all it is."The poems in Robert Currie's Learningon the Job speak, with humour andinsight, of the different kinds of love a257