Book Reviews

Different, but Equally Useful

David Lucking (Author)
The Serpent's Part: Narrating the Self in Canadian Literature. Peter Lang Publishing Group
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Heinz Antor (Editor), John Considine (Editor), Sylvia Brown (Editor), Klaus Stierstorfer (Editor),
Refractions of Germany in Canadian Literature and Culture. De Gruyter
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Reviewed by Lothar Hönnighausen

The Serpent’s Part offers a close analysis of identity and narration in Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, O’Hagan’s Tay John, Hodgins’s The Invention of the World, Bowering’s Burning Water, Davies’ Deptford Trilogy, Atwood’s The Robber Bride, and Findley’s Famous Last Words. The essays in Refractions of Germany in Canadian Literature and Culture examine the Canadian repercussions and reflections of the displacement of fifteen million ethnic Germans from their ancestral homelands in Eastern Europe, Canadian literary responses to the Holocaust, and particular instances of the cultural and literary relationship between Canada and Germany. Although the two books could not be more different, they are equally professional and useful.

The serpent in David Lucking's title The Serpent's Part — gracing the well-designed cover in the shape of the "Aztec Ouroboros" — derives from Timothy Findley's version of the Cadmus myth in Famous Last Words "where Cadmus had been transformed into a serpent (dragon?) who was made the guardian of myth and literature . . . And it was then that I decided what my disguise might be . . . I should play the serpent's part." What emerges in this epigraph as an emblematic gestalt, the theme of existential and narrative role-playing, is preparedby the first epigraph that introduces the theme of naming in Canadian cultural history, "They go forth to make for themselves a new name and to find another country" (Susan Moodie) and by the second epigraph that relates “being” to narrating, "we haven't got an identity until somebody tells our story" (Robert Kroetsch). The interplay of these epigraphs prepares the ground for the book's subtle investigation of "the manner in which selfhood is constituted through language, through the forging of names and the weaving of narratives." From his narratological study of the Moodies' doubtful stance between Colonialism and Canadianism to his concluding analysis of the modes of fictionalizing history in Findley's Famous Last Words, Lucking reveals again and again unknown sides of these well known novels and, best of all, he makes us want to reread them in the new light he provides.

Refractions of Germany in Canadian Literature and Culture is the outcome of a fruitful cooperation between Canadian and German scholars and contains 17 essays, ranging from Robert Kroetsch's programmatic prelude ("I am a Canadian writer. I am of German descent. We live as well as write in just such middles") to Jörg Esleben's historical overview, "Goethe's Faust in Canada, 1834-1970," and from Thomas Mengel's exploration of the "Mentalité of German-speaking Catholics in Canada" to Gordon Bölling's and James Skidmore's companion pieces on German traces in Jane Urquhart's The Stone Carver. In fact, Refractions might appear as a rather mixed bag if it was not such a well-organized book. The plausible subdivision in three parts ("Diaspora and Settlement", "Jewish Experience and the Holocaust", "Literature and Cultural Exchange"), the effective thematic arrangement of the essays within this scheme, and John Considine's detailed and strategic introduction help the reader pass without any difficulty from Sylvia Brown's "Oral Histories of German Expellees in Canada" and Anna Wittmann's essay on the political fate of the Hungarian Swabians to Heinz Antor's "The Mennonite Experience in the Novels of Rudy Wiebe" and John Considine's "Jack Thiessen's Mennonite Dictionaries." Even Peter Webb's piece on the “murderer” of the famous painter Tom Thomson does not stick out like a sore thumb because, after having learned so much about ethnic stereotypes and prejudices in the first two essays, we understand well the role of anti-German bigotry in the case of "Martin Blecher: Tom Thomson's Murderer or Victim of Wartime Prejudice." The transition from the essays, in part two, by Axel Stähler on Germany and Zionism in A.M. Klein, Klaus Stierstorfer on Henry Kreisel's Betrayal, Laurenz Volkmann on Leonard Cohen's Holocaust Poetry, and Albert-Reiner Glaap on the Holocaust in contemporay Canadian plays to the essays in part three ("Literature and Cultural Exchange") is equally smooth because the essays by Annette Kern-Stähler on the "Post-war German Psyche in Mavis Gallant's Fiction" and Doris Wolf on Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Suzette Mayr's The Widows hark back to the Holocaust section. Eva-Marie Kröller's essay on the Canadian and German cultural contexts of the new embassy building in Berlin provides this multi-faceted book with an impressive ending.

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #187 (Winter 2005), Littérature francophone hors-Québec / Francophone Writing Outside Quebec. (pg. 146 - 148)

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