Ian Rae. From Cohen to Carson: The Poet's Novel in Canada.

Weaver, Andy

Ian Rae. From Cohen to Carson: The Poet's Novel in Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's up, 2008. 388 pages. $85.00.

The poet's novel holds a rather liminal position in Canadian literature; in some ways, it has helped to shape the Canadian canon, as poet's novels by Michael Ondaatje, Daphne Marlatt, Leonard Cohen, and others are regularly taught in English departments across the country. These texts helped to substantiate postmodernism in CanLit, providing an alternative in Canadian fiction to the realist tradition epitomized by Hugh MacLennan and carried on by Mordecai Richler, Alice Munro, and a great many other Canadian fiction writers. On the other hand, the poet's novel has also come under considerable attack in recent years, with critics such as David Solway and Stephen Henighan attacking the poet's novel as lacking in structure, as needlessly metaphorical, and as overly fragmented. In his careful study of poet's novels in Canada, Ian Rae works to discount these attacks by arguing two intertwined points: that critics of the poet's novels have unfairly viewed the texts according to the conventions of realist fiction and that Canadian poet-novelists have crafted a distinct style of literature with its own subtle set of conventions.

At the heart of Rae's discussion is the relationship between the poets' poetry and their fiction. Rae sets the stage in the first chapter, as he examines a narrative progression from lyric poetry to serial poetry to long poems, arguing that "as the long poem attempts to novelize the traditional lyric sequence by introducing competing voices and styles, it has radically transformed concepts of narrative coherence and sequence in the Canadian novel by adapting the devices of contemporary poetry to prose fiction" (3). The resulting poet's novels therefore reject the causal connections of realist fiction, instead "modify[ing] serial strategies to create narratives out of seemingly discrete units. These units [...] are primarily connected through patterns of iteration (of diction, symbolism, and myth)" (25). Rae goes on to argue that the poet-novelists hold their narratives together through a series of devices that provide a narrative framework; these frames, however, also simultaneously point out their artificial and subjective nature, thus providing the narrative with a frame that unframes itself. Rae uses the term (un)framing throughout his study to refer to this double move of presenting while refuting.

Rae moves from this more theoretical discussion to discussing specific examples of the poet's novel in Canada. He devotes each of the following five chapters to a particular poet's novel, focusing on how each performs its act of unframing. The first poet's novel Rae examines is Leonard Cohen's The Favourite Game, which Rae convincingly shows is both heavily indebted to and also written against A.M. Klein's The Second Scroll. The chapter also goes on to provide careful exegesis of the novel, while explaining the narrative relationship between the novel and Cohen's own poetry, all the while arguing that Cohen works in his novel to (un)frame the narrative. This basic template reoccurs throughout the following chapters, as Rae looks at, in turn, Michael Ondaatje's Coming Trough Slaughter (which (un)frames the poetic series), George Bowering's A Short, Sad Book (which (un)frames the serial novel), Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic (which (un)frames the quest narrative), and Anne Carson's Autobiography in Red: A Novel in Verse (which (un)frames myth). The study ends with a discussion of Ondaatje's The English Patient and Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces, both of which Rae uses as bulwarks against the attacks on the poet's novel by several critics.

From start to finish, Rae makes sure that his arguments are both very clearly presented and extremely well researched. He offers a series of sharp exegetical readings of the texts, both poetry and fiction, with which he deals. There are times when Rae does get a bit carried away with exegesis, however, and at these times the study's overarching arguments tend to get lost in the details of the particular text. Still, the exegetical readings are insightful, and I think most readers will forgive these extended discussions because of the light they shed on the intricate and difficult workings of the poet's novels. Somewhat less successful is Rae's strictly teleological argument that the poet-novelists learned their particular brand of disjointed narrative from the disjunctive and paratactical nature of poetry; it's not that the argument that Rae makes is wrong but that it seems overly simplistic. Rae, for example, freely admits that both Bowering and Marlatt "produce[d] an early (and for them unsatisfying) realist novel before earning reputations as poets and returning to the novel with a renewed conception of it," but he generally disregards these early novels as abortive attempts that fail to provide any insight into the authors' later styles (7). Rae also fails to examine how several of his authors move back and forth between poetry and fiction; the result is that Rae argues for a strict teleological progression of early poetry shaping fiction that overlooks how the fiction might shape the later poetry and then re-shape the later fiction. In a sense, Rae's argument takes the form of post poetry ergo propter poetry, which is not necessarily incorrect, but it is a limited and limiting way of thinking of the relationship between poetry and fiction in the authors' overall careers.

A more significant shortcoming to Rae's study, however, is his inability or unwillingness to examine his own structural frameworks. In a study that takes "The Poet's Novel in Canada" as its subtitle, it seems very odd that Rae does not deal with any texts written in a language other than English. Nicole Brossard, in particular, seems to fit the narratological patterns that Rae argues for the poet's novel, but Rae refers to her only once, in passing. Likewise, with the exception of Ondaatje, Rae deals with no non-white poet-novelists, even though he mentions that both Joy Kogawa's Obassan and George Eliot Clarke's Whylah Falls as poets' novels that again seem to fit his definition. Given that one of the undercurrent arguments throughout the study is that the Canadian poet's novel develops as a "response to the complexity of living in a society where cultural frames of reference conflict, inspire, frustrate, and seduce," the equation of Canada with predominantly white anglophones is a frame that Rae should have at least explained and probably should have questioned (296).

One other frame that Rae leaves unchallenged is his choice of authors. Each of the writers he focuses on fully illustrates his argument for a distinctly Canadian tradition of poet-novelists who craft their texts through an examination and dismantling of realist traditions of causal narratives. However, Rae tends to ignore the authors who do not neatly fit into the pattern he discerns. For example, Margaret Atwood began as a poet before turning to focus on fiction, but Rae does not discuss how or why her novels are not poets' novels. The same goes for other Canadian writers who move between poetry and fiction, such as Robert Kroetsch. Presumably, neither Kroetsch nor Atwood relate to Rae's study because their fiction is rather realist in nature, but I think directly dealing with the differences between his authors and these unmentioned writers who don't fit his categorizations would have helped flesh out the study. Likewise, Rae also trusts a bit too much in the frame of nationalism itself, as he doesn't discuss how the disjunctive poet's novel in Canada compares to novels from international poets such as those by Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and others.

Even though some of its frameworks seem a bit too rigid, Rae's study offers a compelling and intelligent argument in favour of considering the poet's novel in Canada as an important and distinct sub-genre. Rae does a particularly good job of working against the detractors of the poet's novel, and he is completely correct when he states that "most Canadian criticism on the poet's novel focuses on how authors break genre conventions, and not on how they also establish them" (298). Rae's study thus does very important work by focusing on the narratological strategies that underpin these poet's novels. Moreover, the running argument that the poet-novelists in the study subtly but consistently make reference to and build upon each others' works convincingly makes a point for viewing the poet's novel in Canada as forming an important countertradition to the more accepted canon of Canadian realist fiction. Working to define and defend this countertradition, Rae's study is an engaging, intelligent, and important step toward reconfiguring the place of the poet's novel in Canadian literature.

Andy Weaver

York University