Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 1999
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 19, No. 3, Summer 1999, pp. 213-15.
Abstract
I approached this book with the hope that my past interest in reading, teaching, and writing about Margaret Laurence, coupled with my current interests in rhetoric and composition, would enable me to respond to new critical perspectives. The "Introduction" to the volume encouraged this hope by profiling articles with familiar themes embedded in a postmodern context of open-minded pluralism.
Yet in explaining the volume's purpose, editor Christian Riegel tends to over-emphasize novelty at the expense of continuity, describing essays that go beyond revisionist readings to "stake out critical territory, charting critical space never before traced" (xvii). Much of his claim rests on the volume's inclusion of essays that deal with Laurence's early political writing and her African fictionsmaterial that has received scant critical attention. Yet of the collection's twelve articles, only five address this work while the remaining seven deal with the Manawaka fiction, thereby creating an imbalance that reinscribes our sense that the Canadian-based fiction dominates the oeuvre.
Elsewhere, Riegel affiliates the volume with a spirit of postmodernist pluralism and provisionalism, reminding us that these essays offer "ways of mapping the terrirory that do not necessarily invalidate other ways of charting the conceptual space"(xvii) and that "we must tread carefully in our attempts at finding explanations for the things we encounter in the world" (xvi). Yet his overview of the individual articles features "modernist" judgements, such as when, for example, he suggests that Beckman-Long's article offers a way for The Stone Angel "to be fully understood" (xviii) or comments that Foster Stovel "shows that these texts should not be read separately, as they often are" (xx). Despite protest to the contrary, the territory he describes is still one where full understanding can be achieved and shared, and where some readings are better than others.
Within the individual articles, references to previous Laurence criticism are frequently relegated to endnotes, a presentational strategy supporting Riegel's claim that the volume is staking new ground. Yet in cases where writers rely excessively on endnoted citation and commentary, it is not always clear how their text connects to earlier critical work. For example, in Angelika Maeser Lemieux's "The Scots Presbyterian Legacy," the text is punctuated by a number of notes that cite and summarize sources dealing with Laurence and religion, yet how the arguments in the current article are grounded in or corrective of earlier critical work often remains unexamined.
Maeser Lemieux's essay does survey the history of Calvinist thought in detail and, like other good articles in the collection, builds a strong reading by working with sources beyond the canon of Laurence criticism. In "The Stone Angel as Feminine Confessional Novel," Brenda Beckman-Long makes a powerful case for understanding the novel's confessional structure by building from both genre criticism and Gerard Genette's narrative theory. The final paragraphs that attempt to describe the feminine character of confessional are somewhat disappointing, however, culminating as they do in the debatable assertion that Hagar achieves "self-acceptance as an autonomous woman" (64). Later in the volume, Nora Foster Stovel draws a more convincing conclusion connecting Laurence's protagonists with love rather than independence, noting that the "emphasis is, as always, on the importance of love in the sense of compassion, as each of her solipsistic protagonists develops from claustrophobia to community" (120).
Comments
Copyright 1999 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln