Postmodern Canadian Fiction and the Rhetoric of Authority

Lawrence Mathews is an associate professor of English at the Memorial
University of Newfoundland.

The bulk of this book comprises Glenn Deer’s discussions of six
Canadian novels published between 1959 and 1985. As is too often the
case with “a substantially revised version of a doctoral
dissertation,” its own rhetoric is modest, even self-effacing,
apparently designed to be respectful to current orthodoxies while
demonstrating its author’s skill at reading texts.

It does both of these things, but too often the former predominates.
Other people’s generalizations are affirmed. For example, Deer’s
final comment about Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, that it
“attempts to support a counter-cultural ethos” but “actually
portrays the self-destructive impulse of a decadent counter-culture,”
is a local instance of the observations by Gerald Graff and Renato
Poggioli that are summarized in the introduction. Deer criticizes The
Handmaid’s Tale on the grounds that Atwood’s “ethical
imperative” is undercut by her “commitment to an essential romance
novel genre,” a judgment that echoes the more general assertion of
Frank Davey that Atwood’s novel participates “in various commercial
formulas for capitalist book production.”

Elsewhere, unfashionable straw persons are fashionably bashed. The
chapter on The Double Hook includes an attack on unnamed “conventional
critics” of the novel, who naively ignore certain problematic aspects
of its conclusion, but one would have to go back at least 20 years to
find pure examples of such “conventional” criticism.

On the other hand, Deer’s specific interpretive comments are
carefully and clearly delivered, and what he says about his central
concern, “the interplay of ideology and authority,” tends to be
convincing if not exciting. Still, when one finds Deer characterizing
his own approach as “resistant and contestatory” with respect to the
texts, one feels the need to supplement this brave-sounding phrase with
the information that, with respect to the context of current debate,
this approach is in fact submissive and conformist.