ESC: English Studies in Canada

REVIEWS Simone Vauthier, Reverberations: Explorations in the Canadian Short Story (Concord, Ont.: Anansi, 1993). xiv, 208. $26.95. Simone Vauthier’s Reverberations: Explorations in the Canadian Short Story is a collection of eight essays, seven on individual stories by Leon Rooke, Audrey Thomas, John Metcalf, Clark Blaise, Rudy Wiebe, Hugh Hood, and Mavis Gallant, and one on Carol Shields’s story collection, Various Miracles. These are preceded by Vauthier’s Introduction and a Foreword by Robert Kroetsch. The Introduction addresses some questions readers might have about the book and its orientation (chiefly reader-response, with Genette, Todorov, and Barthes looming large in the background). Reverberations is an important contribution to Canadian criticism. The essays combine intel­ lectual rigour with a sensitivity to the nuances of the genre, and Vauthier’s keen critical insights are permeated with a strong sense of her delight in the fictions. “Pen and Pencil, Scissors and Paste: John Metcalf’s ‘The Teeth of My Fa­ ther’ ” is one of the longer essays in the collection (they range from sixteen to thirty-three pages). The first section of the article, “Elegy and Apprentice Story,” analyzes two of the story’s principal narrative strands (the long es­ says are all conveniently divided into titled sections). Especially noteworthy in this section is her consideration of the protagonist’s mother. Vauthier does not minimize the importance of the mother as “anti-model” (67), but she points out as well the mother’s association not only with the Law and castration anxiety, but specifically with language and with knives, bringing these last two together in a reading of the mother’s role, which, if ambiva­ lent, remains somewhat recuperative. With the father as Logos and his pen the source of the flow of words, the mother and her metonymic knives figure forth for Vauthier not so much the white space of the text as the creative force that carves it out: “Generally speaking, only with the cut, the caesura, can the flow of words . . . begin to signify. And more particularly, in the case of ‘Teeth,’ which is a skilful collage of texts and fragments of texts, the storytelling rests on a good deal of cutting and montage” (69). 4 7 i The final section, “Collages,” returns to the issue of intertextuality and the function of the embedded stories (to which Vauthier, after Genette, refers as “metastories” ). Here Vauthier examines the tension in “The Teeth of My Father” between metafiction and mimesis, concluding ultimately that you can have it both ways: “On the whole, the technique of collage and montage . . . enables the story to reap some of the benefits of the fragmented form, which has been more and more exploited in postmodernist writing, without completely relinquishing the advantages of the ‘modernist’ narration” (81). In the Introduction to Reverberations, Vauthier alludes to her paradoxical attitude as reader toward the text: “While fully sensitive to the fact that ‘characters’ are only ‘paper beings’ and narrators sets of narrative proce­ dures, I am also willing to entertain the illusion that they are people. It is a question of knowing and not knowing at the same time” (8). It is through this willingness to exploit multiple reading positions that Vauthier opens out the many and complex dimensions of “The Teeth of My Father.” Vauthier begins “Rubbing Out Icons: Audrey Thomas’s ‘Crossing the Rubicon’ ” (at sixteen pages the shortest essay in the collection) by point­ ing out, as other critics have done, that although Thomas’s “novels and stories embody themes and narrative techniques that are centred to femi­ nist writing,” Thomas does not “define herself as a feminist” (43). And in the Introduction to Reverberations, Vauthier calls her own gender as reader “that all-important factor” (4), but she too avoids the f-word. For many readers, the writer’s characterization of her views has little bearing on the construction and circulation of the texts that carry her name. Nonetheless, the interaction of these two woman-centred but self-avowedly not-feminist texts produces a curious and provocative reading of author, narrator, and story. The essay begins with an exploration of the story’s inquiry into power relations between the sexes. Vauthier shows how the...