Narrative in the Feminine: Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard by Susan Knutson

REVIEWS materials gathered here provide guidance, factual information, and a range of critical analyses. Individually, or as a group, they illuminate Pollock’s work and contribute to an understanding of the place of theatre in our culture and history. SH ER R ILL E. G R A C E / U n iversity o f B ritish Colum bia Susan Knutson. Narrative in the Feminine: Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002. 248. $59.95 cloth. Having taught and written on both Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard, I was eager to review this new critical study of their works. I was particularly interested because the author of Nar­ rative in the Feminine is Susan Knutson, a writer whose anal­ yses of poetics I have often found instructive. Her 1995 char­ acterization of Brossard’s motive as “the drive to reach the internal horizons of meaning” (“Reading” 12) is one I return to, particularly as it accommodates a poetic committed to in­ terrogating and romancing the words we have inherited. The word “internal” acknowledges the impossibility of imagining a space wholly external to the symbolic, while “horizon,” a highly invested term in Brossard’s œuvre, signifies the liminal site of productive exploration and renovation. While Knutson and oth­ ers have fostered an interesting critical discussion about how Brossard and Marlatt negotiate a language sedimented with cultural bias, here we have an original study of the ways these poets approach the horizons of the larger grammar of narrative. Knutson brings classical narratology to bear on Marlatt’s long poem How Hug a Stone (1983) and Brossard’s novel Pic­ ture Theory (1982), a tack that leads her inevitably to a con­ comitant critique of this hermeneutic and the introduction of feminist narratology. Both authors are known for the way in which their creative projects blur with and serve as theoretical works, and here Knutson is able to draw from the primary texts themselves as they address traditional narratological assump­ tions. Marlatt, for example, challenges the notion of quest as universal narrative structure; while deploying this heroic model in her account of a trip to England with her son, she overtly 319 ESC 28, 2002 thematizes the failure of such a model to address adequately the intersubjective bond between parent and child and to move out of the gendered schema: male hero/female matrix. A narratological analysis of Knutson’s own book would note the reso­ nance (or to use the narratological term, “mirroring” ) between Marlatt’s simultaneous embrace and refusal of quest narrative and Knutson’s simultaneous adherence to and critique of narratology . Readers unfamiliar with the field of narratology will not be left behind in Knutson’s discussion. She very deftly introduces the key terms and methodologies of the discipline even as she promptly embarks on their application and interrogation. The strategy of committing to a theoretical approach while under­ mining it proves a tricky balancing act. For the most part, Knut­ son’s rigorous narratological analysis proves an excellent vehicle for the elucidation of the complex narrative structures of both Brossard and Marlatt. Since the narrative innovations of their texts ultimately throw into relief the flaws of traditional narra­ tology, however, there are moments when the reader might lose interest in the meticulous structuralist mapping that Knutson has undertaken here. I am grateful, for instance, that Knut­ son has articulated Brossard’s notion of the hologram more thoroughly than any critic to date, but that articulation in­ volves several tabulations of fabula (the chronological sequence of events, or deep structure) that read like statistics. Outside of some of these empirical moments, Narrative in the Feminine is a pleasure to read for its elegant style and intimate knowledge of feminist poetics. The text is bookended by introductory and concluding chap­ ters that address questions surrounding écriture au fém inin: W hat is it? And have these poets, indeed, written in the fem­ inine? Knutson rehearses feminist debates on the topic over several decades and situates specific dialogues and conflicts in France, America, Québec, and English Canada. She also demon­ strates the important contributions Marlatt and Brossard have made to these histories. The confluence of this body...

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