Margin/Alias: Language and Colonization in Canadian and Québécois Fiction

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French studies at the University
of Guelph.

Margin/Alias is certainly a difficult book. To write a short review of
it is equally difficult.

The book studies the rapport between two critical discourses central to
Canadian literary theory: postcolonialism as a political paradigm and
postmodernism as a literary practice. A reader of Deleuze, Guattari,
Lotman, Uspenskij, and Derrida, Sцderlind studies the novels of Leonard
Cohen, Hubert Aquin, David Godfrey, André Langevin, and Robert
Kroetsch, and distinguishes between texts of true marginality and those
that use marginality as an alias.

Her analysis is always thorough and should be most useful to the
academic reader—that is, serious (graduate) students and (academic)
critics of Canadian and Québécois fiction. But it is when Sylvia
Sцderlind questions the critic’s relationship to the literary text
and its author that the book becomes most interesting, even to the
reader who is less well versed in literary theory. Sцderlind claims
that “criticism may well reveal more about the critic’s desire than
about its presumed object.” How does a critic arrive at his or her
metaphors, how does s/he select a corpus? To explain her relationship to
her chosen texts, Sцderlind uses Aquin’s metaphor, describing the
relation between reader and writer as a “danse de séduction” that
may well turn into rape. The writer as master, the critic as cruel
judge. . . . It is significant here that Sцderlind, a female critic,
has studied texts by male authors only. Reading from the margin, outside
the territory of writing, reading authors considered as belonging to the
margin (the “colony”), she raises important questions concerning
esthetic pleasure, critical methodology, and the place of Canadian
literature in postcolonialism and postmodernism.