Subject to Criticism: Essays

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

This volume of 14 “essays and reviews, letters and interviews”
written between 1984 and 1993 can be read almost as an autobiographical
novel, charting the evolution of the author/protagonist’s attempt to
live out her literary vocation. In one characteristic passage Tostevin
writes, “I don’t know what I want to achieve when writing.... It is
not enough to simply displace the Law of the Father with the Law of the
Mother. ... [As] bp Nichol taught me, I trust the words to take me to
what place I don’t know.” Here we see some of the book’s most
engaging features: an openness and honesty, a rejection of rote feminist
responses, a declaration of community with other writers, a courage and
humility in approaching the act of artistic creation.

Committed to theory, Tostevin manages to write about it with a clarity
that escapes most of its devotees. Her extended epistolary conversation
with Smaro Kamboureli and her dialogues with Fred Wah and Christopher
Dewdney provide an intriguing and helpful counterpoint to the more
conventionally academic reviews and essays. A complex, nuanced portrait
of the writing life gradually emerges.

But like many other writers who claim to have been liberated by theory,
Tostevin appears to have been possessed by it. Thus in a review she
praises a poem by Diana Hartog because it “captures so succinctly
Lacan’s dream theory” and praises Hartog’s book because it can be
read in Lacanian terms (“Through the influx of the Imaginary, the
Symbolic is transgressed ...”). What appears to be a powerfully erotic
poem of her own is, of course, really something more cerebral: “The
‘I’ of the text is a being of language calling on itself to
represent itself in an Eden of language.” And she discusses her
teaching of creative writing not in terms of the development of her
students’ literary imaginations or their mastery of craft, but rather
in terms of the “new theories of reading and writing” to which she
introduces them.

Such examples suggest a curiously reductive view of literary art—a
view that would also seem to run counter to her own bp Nichol–inspired
prescription to “trust the words,” as opposed, one would suggest, to
the theories about the words.