Editorial: A Nineties Quiz 2 PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, VANCOUVER ARTICLES HILDA L. THOMAS Klee Wyck : The Eye of the Other 5 CANADIAN HELEN HOY "When You Admit You're a Thief, Then You Can Be Honourable" : Native/Non-Native LITERATURE Collaboration in The Book of Jessica 24 LITTERATURE CANADIENNE DANIELLE SCHAUB NUMBER 136, SPRING 1993 Structural Patterns of Alienation & Disjunction: Mavis Gallant's Firmly-Structured Stories 45 A Quarterly of Criticism JANE SELLWOOD and Review "A little acid is absolutely necessary" : EDITOR : W. H. New Narrative as Coquette in Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague 60 ASSOCIATE EDITORS : L. R. Ricou Eva-Marie TOM WAYMAN Marty and Zieroth: Nature and Family 82 Kroller BUSINESS MANAGER: Beverly NICOLA VULPE Westbrook Dudek on Frye, or, Not a Poet's Poetics 101 DOUGLAS REIMER PRINTED IN CANADA BY MORRISS Heideggerian Elements in Robert Kroetsch's PRINTING COMPANY LTD., VICTORIA Seed Catalogue 115 Publications Mail registration number POEMS 1375 G.S.T. R108161779 Publication of BY T. LANE MILLET (4), BERT ALMON ( s i, 22, 58), Canadian Literature is assisted by the FRED COGSWELL (23), PADDY MCCALLUM (39), PATRICIA YOUNG (43, I 14), DAVID SOLWAY (79, 112), University of B.C. and the S.S.H.R.C.G. FRANCIS SPARSHOTT (8l, I I4, I 28 ) , IRVING LAYTON Unsolicited manuscripts will not be (8l), W. A. SHAHEEN (99), IAN SOWTON (194) returned unless accompanied by stamped, addressed envelopes. BOOKS IN REVIEW Canadian Literature is indexed in BY JARS BALAN ( I 29) , DEBORAH BLENKHORN (130), Canadian Periodical Index and GEORGE BOWERING (13 2), NEIL CARSON (134), Canadian Magazine Index. It is LESLEY D. CLEMENT (136), MARK COCHRANE (138), available on-line in the Canadian SUSAN FISHER (14 0), MARIAN GRACIAS ( 1 4 2 ) , Business & Current Affairs Database, STEFAN HAAG ( 143 ), THOMAS HASTINGS (144, 146), JILL LEBIHAN ( 147), ADRIENNE KERTZER (148), JON and is available in microfilm from KERTZER ( 150), I. S. MACLAREN ( I 5 2), MICHELE University Microfilm International, 300 O'FLYNN ( 155 ), BARBARA PELL (157), LAURIE RICOU North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Mich. (158, I 60 ), KATHLEEN SCHERF ( l 6 l ) , DOROTHY 48106 SEATON ( I 63 ) , JOANNE TOMPKINS ( I 65 ) , JERRY For subscriptions, back issues (as WASSERMAN ( 167) , MARION WYNNE-DAVIES (169), available), and annual and cumulative LYNN WYTENBROEK ( I 70 ) , GEORGE WOODCOCK ( 1 7 2 ) , indexes, write : Circulation Manager, JOHN XIROS COOPER (174), SUSAN RUDY DORSCHT (176), L. M. FINDLAY ( I 77), LINDA HUTCHEON Canadian Literature, 2029 West Mall, (179), COLIN NICHOLSON (I 8 I) , ROGER SEAMON ( University of British Columbia, 183), REJEAN BEAUDOIN ( I 85 ), EVELYNE VOLDENG Vancouver, B.C. V6T IZ2 (l88), VIVIEN BOSLEY (189) SUBSCRIPTION $30 INDIVIDUAL; $45 INSTITUTIONAL; PLUS $5 POSTAGE OPINIONS & NOTES OUTSIDE CANADA RUTH TANOFSKY Adele Wiseman, 1928-1992 192 ISSN OO08-4360 JULIE BEDDOES Eli Mandel, 1922-1992 193 A NINETIES QUIZ FIRST, THE TEXT. TWO thirds of the way through Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the title character discovers a simple truth about some other creatures — those who have heretofore seemed a fearsome opposition. They have seemed fearsome because they have seemed able to stifle imagination, stop the flow of storytelling, usurp power in the world, and control the future. It's a combination that might have given anyone pause. But when Haroun looks closely at those who labour to curtail others' freedom of enquiry and, well, their joy of using words, he kept being struck by how ordinary they were, and how monotonous was the work they had been given. There were hundreds of them in their Zipped Lips cloaks and hoods, attending to the tanks and cranes on the deck, performing a series of mindless, routine jobs: checking dials, tightening joints, switching the tanks' stirring mecha- nisms on and off again, swabbing the decks. It was all as boring as could be; and yet — as Haroun kept having to remind himself — what these scurrying, cloaked weaselly, scrawny, snivelling clerical types were actually up to was nothing less than the destruction of the Ocean of the Streams of Story itself! 'How weird,' Haroun said to Iff, 'that the worst things of all can look so normal and, well, dull.' It's an allegory, of course, about modern life — about the way many people seem passively to accept current fashion as though it were an ethical absolute, and the way a few people seem only to thrive when they actively impose restrictions on others' dreams of possibility. Now the quiz. 1. Are language and beauty incompatible notions? 2. Is it possible for an English-language writer to use any word in the language, or are certain words restricted because they offend? If some offend, who decides what is and is not offensive, and why are such people worth listening to? Are there fashions in offensiveness, as there are fashions in enthusiasms? Does time neces sarily stale words, or make them better? Just because certain English-language words, word combinations, and sentence patterns have been around for many decades, does this mean that they are therefore ugly, restrictive, politically heinous, and evil to use? 3. Are openly political statements necessarily more beautiful, more purposeful, or more utilitarian than other statements? Is dense prose naturally more beautiful, more intellectually profound, or more politically responsible than lucid prose? Is clarity a virtue — or is "virtue" not an acceptable category of aesthetic response? Who says? 4. If a critic recognizes the artifice of literature, must it follow from this categoriza tion that literature is unrelated to the physical, emotional, and intellectual world in which, for better or worse, readers live? Do those who enthuse about, say, post modernism think that postmodernism is intrinsically better than, say, realism (or more beautiful, more virtuous, more intellectually profound)? Or do they recog nize that, like realism, postmodernism is a fashion, and that, like realism, it can be inventive, exciting, cultish, or stale? 5. Do majorities set fashion — or do minorities? If it follows that majorities are not necessarily benevolent, thoughtful, or worthy of respect, and that they can always benefit from constructive criticism, does it also follow that minorities are necessarily without blemish and cannot benefit from constructive criticism? Who, then, is the "constructive critic"? If, in an open society, it's always worth listening to the voices of those on the margins, who defines the margins? And do those on the margins necessarily have more insight into literature and society than those not on the margins? Are they somehow, a priori, more worth listening to on all subjects and for all determinations of value? 6. If "nationality" is not a literary virtue, why is "region," "margin," "gender," "class," or "race" considered to be one? 7. Why is it that so many people who (with justification) criticize the restrictive- ness of a given "convention" fallaciously assume that all orthographic and syntactic and social "conventions" must also be bad? 8. Why is it that so many people who claim not to despise others find it so easy to despise the past? 9. What happens when dullness becomes the discourse model of contemporary choice? Isn't some political agenda served? Whose? Doesn't dullness do the work of those who would circumvent the open exchange of ideas? Aren't those who would limit speech, by claiming how offensive "conventional" words are, using a technique that would silence opposition rather than liberate the imagination and society? Isn't critical safety — which joins in the attack on the current scapegoat, whatever it happens to be — as dangerous as dullness, in that it pretends that the self-serving absolutes of a received tyranny are preferable to the liberal uncertainties of having to make judgments (about aesthetics as well as social ethics) and to choose among options? W.N. NAKED CHARM T. Lane Millet Quarks should be the name elves give their pets, some small beast that likes mischief, has a curled tail, and romps. Charmed quarks would be pets lost to necromancy. But charmed quarks and strange quarks, up and down quarks belong to science, and what lovely language, what names for who knows what, bits of vacuum, little chips of lights, perhaps, with names and spin to give them meaning. They have degrees, degrees of strangeness, they have charm, they are charged with charm positive and negative, charged with color too. They spin and join and form larger bits with grander properties — two charm quarks can join and form a meson if their charm is different, but the union has no charm which is sad, like marriage sometimes. Mesons can be made from quarks with other properties — color or strangeness for example. Mixings can occur and when a charm quark mingles with a strange one their mesons exhibit naked charm — chips with naked charm ! Larger still are bottom quarks (some call them beauty quarks) whose mass looms ten times greater than the rest, and scientists have found them in excited states. Laws forbid that bottom quarks together can form mesons that have bottomness or beauty, and yet a bottom quark with charm will have bare bottom if only for a moment (some call it naked beauty) and then diffuse to smaller chips with naked charm, as we are told by those who know, the scientists who call it naked charm. KLEE WYCK The Eye of the Other Hilda L. Thomas ENOUGH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT Klee Wyck, especially the sketches entitled "Sophie," "D'Sonoqua," and "Kitwancool," to valorize what some have called Emily Carr's feminist outlook. At the conclusion of "Kitwancool" the narrator stubbornly declares, '"Perhaps it is because I am a woman that they were so good to me'" (107), and in a journal entry in 1937 Carr writes, "I am .