Learning to Look: A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant’s Fiction by Lesley D. Clement

REVIEWS Lesley D. Clement. Learning to Look: A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant’s Fiction. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000. 304. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. Lesley D. Clement’s Learning to Look: A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant’s Fiction is an impressive undertaking, and read­ ers o f Gallant will learn much about her story-writing tech­ niques. Clement takes us through Gallant’s work from her ear­ liest stories in the late 1940s published in Preview through to her most recent work in the New Yorker. For the most part Clement concentrates on Gallant’s visual portrayals of charac­ ters who are caught up in history in ways that make it difficult for them to be authentically part of the world they inhabit. As Clement’s title indicates, one of the main challenges in Gallant’s fiction is “learning to look” — which means to see the past in the present; that is, to see through what appears to be the ob­ vious surfaces to the socially and mentally constructed forms of self and society — a process that the stories demand of both the characters and the reader. In order to bring out the growing sophistication of Gallant’s depiction of our world, Clement turns to the language and con­ cepts of painting. Over the years many critics have commented on Gallant’s masterly use of imagery and painterly techniques. Clement takes this insight one step further in that she demon­ strates how Gallant’s stories mount “a challenge to the bound­ aries erected between the sister arts by embracing both spatial and temporal elements in her fiction” (x). The stories, she sug­ gests, portray characters inhabiting both time, in a sequence of events that march inescapably forward, and space, appre­ hended in a single moment. Clement suggests that Gallant’s early work draws on perspective and different narrative “lines” to develop her insights. The emphasis on line then turns, in the stories of the 1960s and early 1970s, into a rendering of framing and proportion. Later still, Gallant turns to the modulations of light and colour. In her most recent stories she employs the techniques of parody in which various narrative and conceptual planes are simultaneously set in motion. When she turns to the stories themselves, Clement begins naturally enough with early stories such as “Up North” and “Thank You for the Lovely Tea” ; she argues that Gallant em­ 313 ESC 28, 2002 ploys not only a fixed perspective for characters “paralysed through cowardice and inertia into inaction and non-being,” but also secondary perspectives that encourage the reader, if not the characters, to “break the frames enclosing them” (21). In the novel Green Water, Green Sky (1959), composed of connecting short stories, Clement shows how Gallant learned to dissolve the narrative frame by breaking down the difference between fore­ ground and background. Whereas the earlier stories portrayed characters who stood out against their historical background in heightened relief, in Green Water, Green Sky the characters find themselves floating in a world in which the horizon disappears through the merging of background and foreground. As Gallant’s story-telling techniques continued to mature, Clement shows how Gallant finds ever more subtle ways of de­ picting individuals caught in a world that denies them a fixed perspective. She argues persuasively that Gallant’s stories in the 1960s and early 1970s make “visible the consequences of the in­ visibility of symbolic power” (77). These stories lead the reader to penetrate the everyday surfaces through what Clement calls “gaps” and “vacancies” in the story line in order to find the un­ seen forces at work on the characters. This sense of the unseen becoming manifest for the reader, if not the characters, can best be seen in Gallant’s German stories such as “Ernst in Civilian Clothes,” “W illi,” and “The Alien Flower,” although curiously enough Clement has little to say about one of her strongest stories, the novella “The Pegnitz Junction.” Clement is partic­ ularly effective in her treatment of the ways in which Gallant represents the inner displacements of people within a world of damaged landscapes in order to represent modern civilization as...

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