Myth, Origins, Magic: A Study of Form in Eli Mandel's Writing

Barbara Yitsch is an associate at Duncan’s English Language Consulting
Ltd. in Edmonton.

ECW’s Robert Lecker describes Andrew Stubbs’s seven essays as a
“most detailed, comprehensive account of [Eli] Mandel’s challenging
myth-riddled work, from the early poems in Trio to The Family
Romance.” Mandel’s “myth-riddled” work notwithstanding, we
shouldn’t think Mandel just changes his style with the times, moving,
as it were, from the influence of Frye to that of Derrida or, as Stubbs
says, from an “essentially myth-closed to an open or experimental
style of presentation.” Not so, asserts Stubbs: Mandel’s writing
moves forward “in language,” but backward in territory. In the
chapter “Fuseli Poems: The Palace of Art,” Stubbs credits Mandel
with interweaving myth and “autobiography” to destroy the catalogues
of mythology “so as to situate these as fragments of memory in the
outer field of text.” Yet, in “Black and Secret Man,” he shows us
that Mandel writes poetry that is not at all mythic. And, in keeping
with our fin-de-siиcle frustration that we can’t progress beyond the
language systems through which we see to the pure heart of poetic
impulse, Mandel (says Stubbs) wants “to fall from language[,] ... to
arrive at the silence of space.”

This book will irritate those readers who don’t see anything
“closed” about myths. To them, myths have as much to do with the
business of deconstruction and culture as language does. Stubbs himself
never qualifies, let alone deconstructs, the idea that “[w]riting is
the capture of the one female—the female as form, idea, as symbol
only—whom the poet must ‘know.’” This close-ended concept
excludes straight women and gay men, neither of whom wants to “know”
the female. Stubbs may refer to Freud et al. purely in the context of
Mandel’s poetic imagination. Fair enough. But we can’t be sure of
that.

Citizens of Estevan, Saskatchewan, might find elements of wild
overstatement in the following: “Auschwitz can be exchanged for
Estevan at certain moments in Mandel’s mythology. ...”

Eli Mandel’s poetry has wide popular appeal. Published through public
grants, Stubbs’s dated, academic euphuism directs Myth, Origins, Magic
to a countable few.