Writing a Politics of Perception: Memory, Holography, and Women Writers in Canada

Patricia Whitney, former coordinator of the Women’s Studies Program at
the University of Prince Edward Island, is the Bank of Montreal Visiting
Scholar in Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa.

Dawn Thompson has attempted an ambitious work of literary theory.
Inspired in part by Quebec’s great poet, novelist, and theorist Nicole
Brossard, Thompson embraces the idea of the hologram and exploits its
refraction of the idea, definition(s), and construction of memory. To
this thought she adds poststructuralist theorists’ notions of time and
memory, challenging these terms and rethinking their functions.

Thompson also looks to semioticians of film such as Teresa de Lauretis
and feminist philosophers such as Judith Butler, and to physicist David
Bohm’s theory of holographic quantum reality. In a book a short as
this one, treatment of so broad a range of theories precludes anything
but a rather superficial exploration of each; either this study needed
to be much longer or the author had to be more selective.

Thompson evinces a certain nervousness around contemporary academic
issues, one being identity politics. She takes great care to skilfully
deconstruct identity politics, even as she elucidates the limitations of
deconstruction as a theoretical position. Yet, the heavy hand of this
oppressive force rests on this study. Nicole Brossard and Margaret
Atwood are female, Canadian, and feminist certainly, but among this
country’s greatest writers. On the other hand, the remaining authors
seem included by reason of identity. Marlene Nourbese Philip is a
Caribbean-Canadian writer known for polemical poetry and essays;
Beatrice Culleton is an aboriginal woman respected for the honesty of
her fictional autobiography In Search of April Raintree, and Regine
Robin writes from the perspective of a Parisian Ashkenaze Jew
immigrating to Quebec.

In the end, this work is crushed beneath its elaborate theoretical
ambitions on the one hand and the burden of academic politics on the
other. That’s a shame because, at times, Thompson shows herself to be
a clear thinker.