The Art and Genius of Anne Hébert: Essays on her Works. Night and the Day are One ed. by Janis L. Pallister

Abstract

MLR, 98.2, 2003 471 of understanding Quebec cinema. The work is essential reading for all those who wish to understand more about Quebec national cinema, and who want to engage in an open debate about it. University of Reading Tony Simons The Art and Genius ofAnne Hebert: Essays on her Works.Night and theDay are One. Ed. by Janis L. Pallister. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 2001. ISBN 0-8386-3913-5. Janet Pallister's anthology brings together a wide range of critical approaches to Anne Hebert's ceuvre. Moreover, as Pallister acknowledges in her dedication to the author, the collection is a tribute both to the author and to her literary legacy. One of the most significant aspects of this legacy, clearly reflected in Pallister's choice of essays, is Hebert's role in exploring, shaping, and defming Quebecois cultural identity. For Neil Bishop, Hebert's firstpublished work of fiction, the novella 'Le Torrent', marked a turning point in Quebec's intellectual and political life, heralding the transformation ofthe 'Canadien francais' into the 'Quebecois'. Bishop revisits Quebec's escape from its repressive history in his account of ia problematique de la liberation' (p. 54) in Les Enfants du sabbat. It is the tension between confinement and freedom, 'la reussite ou 1'echec, la liberation ou l'alienation de Julie' (p. 54), he argues, that shapes and motivates the narrative. The driving force of Le Premier jfardin, argues Lori Saint-Martin, is Flora Fontange 's ultimately hopeless nostalgia for the pre-Oedipal bond between mother and daughter: the forever unattainable 'first garden'. Describing the text in terms of its 'maternal structure', Saint-Martin asserts that on the level of theme, of narrative, and even of syntax the work is organized by the successive mother-daughter rela? tions it depicts. Flora's excavation of her own personal history is interwoven with her dramatization of the feminine condition in Quebec's colonial past, a theme which Pallister herself explores in her account ofthe relationship between fictionand history in Hebert's work for theatre, La Cage. Where Saint-Martin's 'maternal structure' is bound up with a rewriting, redemption , and reordering of the past, for Barbara Godard Hebert's mother-daughter re? lations are associated with chaotic proliferation and multiplication. Her comparison of split feminine subjectivities in Kamouraska and Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle draws on Simone de Beauvoir's rejection of patriarchal binary logic as well as Iri? garay's conception of mother-daughter relations in terms of refracting mirrors. In each novel, Godard suggests, the protagonist's split narrative viewpoints not only give rise to an excess of subjects and plots, but also instigate a process of textual 'birthing' through which she is able to bring forthgrotesque and monstrous selves. A recurrent theme in the collection is that of conflict over cultural as well as geopolitical space. Ellen W. Munley's analysis of cultural perspectives in Un habit de lumiere examines the position of the migrant Almevida family 'on the margins or interstices of two or more antagonistic national cultures' (p. 126) and postulates the existence of a 'third space' in which the young Miguel Almevida might have escaped destruction. For Amy Reid, cultural space or its absence is integral to Hebert's work. Reid's essay focuses in particular on the relationship between textual space and a specifically feminine Quebec identity,a relationship that she considers to be a driving force behind Hebert's fiction. In both Le Premier Jardin and Kamouraska, she sug? gests, Quebec feminine identity is textualized, performed, and memorialized through acts of writing and speech. This anthology bears out Hebert's own vital role in the textualization of Quebecois 472 Reviews identity. As both an overview of and a tribute to her work, it will be of considerable value both to Hebertian scholars and to those new to her writing. Cambridge Heather Williams Elder Victor Segalen and theAesthetics ofDiversity: Journeys betweenCultures. By Charles Forsdick. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2000. 242 pp. $74. ISBN 0-19816014 -3. This is the firstextensive study of Segalen's work to appear in English, and is inaugural in more senses than one: Charles Forsdick has produced an indispensable guide to...