The Serpent's Part: Narrating the Self in Canadian Literature by David Lucking (review)

Abstract

MLR, ioi.i, 2006 239 The Serpent's Part: Narrating the Self in Canadian Literature. By David Lucking. Bern, Berlin, and Brussels: Peter Lang. 2003. 211 pp. ?26. ISBN 3-03910Q39 -4David Lucking is concerned with 'the manner in which selfhood is constituted through language, through the forgingof names and the weaving ofnarratives' attesting to the importance of both in Canadian literature, 'as an existential strategy [. . .] and as an explicitly thematized concern' (p. 14). He assembles a range of readings of canonical texts from Moodie to Findley, including an initial exploration of Ondaatje, Kogawa, and Michaels. In all, he observes a common labour in the deployment of historian figures, striving to 'recuperate a past that has been lost to view, and to pro? vide a channel through which voices that have been silenced can once again be heard' (p. 38). Lucking overlooks the problems associated with this project of retrieval and the power dynamics involved, and fails to question the conditions under which such a project is initiated. Lucking offerssome detailed and focused readings of his chosen texts, but they are often immured in their own fascination with the minutiae of an intertextuality that makes forunexciting reading, as in the sections on O'Hagan's Tayjohn or Hodgins's The Invention of the World. This tendency is accompanied by an inattention to the moment of production, so the discussion can seem ungrounded and enclosed. The discussion of Bowering's Burning Water amounts to little more than a list of identified allusions. This may be useful ifcompiling a critical edition with the aim of orienting the reader, but otherwise is exemplary of an over-reliance on loosely aligned readings of intertextual connections and possible effects.Lucking does not really demonstrate how Bowering's text does what he says it does. Arguing that the litany of borrowings results in the casting of language 'adrift from its moorings in a stable historical and literary framework' because 'linguistic and literary conventions [are] dislodged from the contexts that give them their appearance of transparent meaning', thus rendering them 'opaque, transformed into objects of scrutiny in their own right, divested of any status they may lay claim to as the notation of a reality external to themselves', Lucking still fails to explain how Bowering's text achieves the kind of transformation he claims for it. His claim is also based on the idea of a universal reader with a ho? mogeneous set of reading practices. Such generalizations are not unusual. Discussing 'role-playing' in Robertson Davies's Deptford Trilogy, he surmises that 'the concept of role-playing is [. . .] so deeply embedded in ordinary discourse [. . .] that those who employ it are rarely conscious of its theatrical provenance' (p. 134). Hardly. Though the conundrums of naming and identity delineated are not new, Lucking succeeds in restating them in a manner that renders them banal. The conclusions reached for are less than surprising: the 'ultimate implication' of the trawl through Bowering's text 'being that no form of historiography can make any claim to greater objectivity' (p. 124), a claim explicit in earlier critical readings. The reading assembled on Moodie's Roughing it in the Bush ignores more recent critical interventions: not a crime in itself, but it contributes to the insular mood. Its dialogue with a series of 'master archetypes' and 'mythic allusions' is uninformed by Helen Buss's energetic account of the ambivalences mobilized by virtue of the narrative mode of (journal) writing adopted by Moodie and explored in Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women's Autobiography (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen's University Press, [1993]). Manchester Metropolitan University Julie Mullaney ...