Living On: The Mosaic Interviews

Edited by Dawne McCance

Among the interviews included in this varied and compelling collection is one in which John P Leavey Jr, a professor and expert on Jacques Derrida, addresses questions of translation and citation in the writing and lectures of the influential French philosopher. In the course of the conversation, the interview itself comes up as a subject of inquiry, and Leavey speculates about the form: “Does it exist only at the moment it occurs?” and “Does it represent something else as a transcription?” Leavey poses the doubled question, and the 16 interviews and one roundtable conducted by Dawne McCance in The Mosaic Interviews provide the answer. The interviews speak to the engagement of their happening and they additionally translate into texts for study and interpretation. Framed as philosophy, we hear them ontologically and we read them epistemologically.

Professor McCance recently stepped down as editor of Mosaic (she held the position from 1999 to 2017, and for 16 of those years, beginning in 2001, she conducted a series of interviews called “Crossings” with scholars visiting the University of Manitoba; on other occasions she travelled in Canada and to the United States, Europe and Australia for interviews that were included in special issues of the journal). Mosaic calls itself “an interdisciplinary critical journal,” and the interviews collected in this 368-page book reflect the breadth and challenge of that selfdescription. Among the subjects are five philosophers, seven professors of English and Comparative Literature, one theatre director, one poet/ translator, one novelist, an architect and a medical doctor. (Of the 16 interviews, 3 were co-conducted with graduate students, and for one she was joined by the poet and novelist Robert Kroetsch, but otherwise this book belongs to McCance.)

Any single interview will tell you something about the interviewer, whether they intend it or not, and a gathering of them tells you a good deal more. On the evidence of The Mosaic Interviews, this is what Dawne McCance reveals: she is astonishingly well-read; she does prodigious preparation in advance of the interview and then modestly disguises it during; she is inquisitive; she has an admirably mobile imagination; and she pays extremely close attention to what is being said.

There is an early example of this careful listening in the roundtable that took place at the University of Queensland in 2001 on the treacherous topic of Interdisciplinarity. McCance was the moderator, and she began with the observation that all the plenary sessions at the conference approached the topic “by way of a discussion of disease”—from Kafka’s tumour, to the presence of syphilis and cholera in opera, and the appearance of mad cow and foot and mouth disease. Her simple question, “What’s going on?” generates a fascinating discussion about “the mutability of the body and the inevitability of death.” For her, listening is learning, and it both informs and shapes her questions in every interview. She is never at a loss for a question, and her questions are always apposite; straightforward when information is needed and layered when the subject demands a more complicated response. (It is worth noting that because the majority of the participants in the book are academics, two things happen: the conversation often shifts towards the role of the university and the practice of teaching as a way of investigating philosophical, aesthetic and social issues; and the answer to a question will often go on for a number of pages with no intervention from the interviewer. Professors profess and there is ample evidence in The Mosaic Interviews of their dedication to that calling.)

In a review it would be impossible to do justice to the quality and number of ideas contained in these interviews. Every one brims with observations that make us reconsider what we think we are reading (without question, the figure who haunts so much of this book is Derrida and his persistent and productive interrogations). So Mallarmé’s “supercharged eroticism” is the reason why Mary Ann Caws, a professor of comparative literature in the Graduate School of the City University of New York and an expert on surrealism, considers the French poet “the most 21st century of the 19th-century people I can imagine.” Poetry, too, gives shape to the practice of Álvaro Siza, the foundational Portuguese architect who calls poets “those highly competent architects of register and of dream, the inhabitants of solitude.” In her 2002 collection of poetry, Erin Mouré argues for “a notion of leaky borders,” and Aritha van Herk recognizes as she speaks that she is “doubtless confessing to an element of pugilism within most of my writing.” When Peggy Kamuf, a member of the editorial board of the Oxford Literary Review and preeminent Derrida translator, talks about the legal and literary implications of the phrase “telling the truth,” she could not have imagined how thoroughly that idea would seep into the entire collection of interviews.

Near the end of an interview conducted in Winnipeg in 2005, the philosopher, playwright and fiction writer David Farrell Krell talks about his attempts to hear the voices of the people he most loves, and they turn out to be women. This interview, among the most engaging in the book, is the one that comes closest to a conversation, in which we hear two fine minds speak to the intersections of autobiography and criticism, life and art. In attesting to the difficulties he encountered in capturing the female voice and the special advantage that writing can provide for hearing the success of that articulation, Krell says, “I think that the writer, whether man or woman, has the wonderful chance and the magnificent freedom to listen and take dictation from the other.” While we read The Mosaic Interviews, we are well-advised to take Krell at his word. Open up your ears and get out your pens. The freedom begins. ❚

The Mosaic Interviews, conducted and introduced by Dawne McCance, Mosaic, Vol. 50, No. 1, March 2017, 368 pages, $29.95.

Robert Enright is a professor in the Graduate Program of the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph. He specializes in the interview as a form of discourse.