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

BOOKS IN REVIEWery, directed toward the characters, thereader, and the work itself. What thesefictional personages have in common isthat each is an outcast, a révolté, a seekerof the unknown, and an incarnation ofthe anguish of the human condition."Mal du siècle, mal de vivre. Mal detous les siècles."Empiècements, as its title suggests, ispoetry based on the verbal decompositionand reconstruction of reality. A modernUlysses, Daniel Guénette sets off on aquest for unknown meaning. One way ofaccomplishing his mission is in the lovingexchange with another person: "un flanccontre le mien / se dévoilant fit sourdrele monde / langages se liant découvrantau-delà." The poet, however, often has afeeling of discouraged isolation, anawareness of the impossibility of communicationand comprehension. He ishaunted by a sense of sterility: "je demeure,celui qui ne sait et n'arrive àrien, / seul." The poet's Odyssey ends infailure and frustration: "ne pouvantpresque tracer une ligne droite de paroles/ trancher en deux quelque objetdu monde / en lire quoi que ce soit /cause sans effet." He can at best give apiecemeal suggestion, miraculous butfragmentary, of truth and being: "Tels,ces mots / placés un peu de travers / enretenant d'autres qu'ils taisent / sous unphrasé coulant de roches."While in the three works already discussed,language is explored as a possiblemeans of giving voice to the poet's worldview,in Des Fleurs pour Harlequin itbecomes the poet's major preoccupation.Forest's poems, though beautiful in themselvesas verbal structures, constitute atthe same time a meta-linguistic artpoétique. Forest makes clear repeatedlythat the language of poetry is notthe rational instrument of expressionemployed, for example, by literarycritics, politicians, and other "preachers."The poet thus rejects any conceptionof a poésie engagée which would befor him a contradiction in terms. Hisonly fatherland or motherland is languageand the realm beyond to which itpoints: "POÉSIE quand on ne reconnaîtplus le pays / les modulations de laMère / et qu'on avance seul, en unecontrée de mots, / hérissé, tendu versAUTRE CHOSE." He also distinguishespoetry from imaginative literature, likenovels and movies. For him, poetry is amystical evocation of an essential realitywhich lies just beyond the reach of humanlanguage: "Le poème récite l'insistancede ce qui sous les fracas des fanfarestente de rejoindre Dieu. Il aspire àl'impossible silence, jamais accordé. Toutest encore à dire." Rimbaud is Forest'sideal of the poet, who is an inspiredprophet, a visionary. The poet attemptsto distil into fragmentary verbal formshis contact with the infinite. The poembecomes a deconstruction of reality andwords in order to liberate true being:"Le sujet ne s'articule jamais que depuisles décombres dont il naît, et qui sur luis'entassent." Poetry is for Forest a totalexperience which takes hold of both themind and body of the poet and his readers:"Que le sens de l'écriture réside /dans sa chair / elle-même / Que lire estun acte de chair à chair / à prendre aumot à mot." The acts of writing andreading constitute breaks in the surfaceof visible reality and create an openinginto the transcendent.LOYALISTSJAMES P. GILROYJOHN & MONICA LADELL, Inheritance: Ontario'sCentury Farms Past and Present.Dundurn Press, $16.95.NEIL MACKINNON, This Unfriendly Soil: TheLoyalist Experience in Nova Scotia 1783-1791. McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, $27.50.THELADELL HUSBAND AND WIFE teampresent a tribute to Ontario's farming261