“The Family Romance” by Eli Mandel

In 1966 Eli Mandel issued a challenge: “criticism must risk the excesses of subjectivity and sentimentality …. Beyond system, this is where criticism finally must go: to the paradoxical speech of poetry …. ” Now, 20 years later, Mandel concludes that criticism on the whole has gone there. Contemporary critical writing, he writes in his preface to The Family Romance, a collection of essays issued recently by Turnstone Press, “distrusts system and structure, the logic of development” and encourages subjectivity. Whatever has happened in the broad spectrum, taken together Mandel’s comments fairly describe the perambulations of his own criticism.

Certainly we find Mandel’s delight in paradox and the play of ideas throughout The Family Romance, but in spite of his determination to explore the subjective territory beyond system (if there is such a place), Mandel continues to be drawn to system-making and the logic of development. Because Mandel is drawn both ways, The Family Romance is a cultural marker, an index to our critical discontents and preoccupations.

The book is in three parts: “Origins,” “Writers” and “Writing.” As a culture critic, Mandel is interested in everything, a draw on enthusiasm that only an auctioneer can meet. Many of the essays are occasional: speculative, theoretical pieces, genre-busting and flashes of close reading are laid side by side. Most of the book is on belles-lettres, fiction and poetry. We expect him to be most perceptive when writing about poetry (and he is), yet Mandel’s breadth of sympathies is very broad.

He makes very trenchant analyses of George Grant’s bullying Protestant blindness (Grant speaks of Christianity as the finest flower of western civilization, as if fascism had never existed), notes sharply—and perhaps with a hint of dismay—the limitations of Northrop Frye’s The Great Code. In an essay on painting, Mandel sketches the limits of modernism, what it is and is not. He writes on academic and popular writing, on history and literature, on the American west and Canadian regionalism, on the “strange loop” by which criticism serves as an analysis of society. (Surprisingly, one of Mandel’s finest essays on the family romance, his Introduction to the New Canadian Library edition of John Marlyn’s novel, Under the Ribs of Death, is not included here.)

Despite this diversity, the title invites us to think in terms of a single, though paradoxical, notion. The dilemma is one that Mandel notes in his essay, “The Death of the Long Poem”: how to acknowledge change, process, fragmentation, discontinuity and, at the same time, give structure to the work. The major problem with many of the essays, and the book too if we treat it as a unit, is that Mandel’s own voice is often drowned out by a flood of allusions.

Consider the title. The notion of the family romance, as revised by Mandel following Harold Bloom’s revision of Freud, is that a writer makes himself or herself by re-writing a great forerunner; in this way the writer creates an identity and a tradition. Mandel sums it up this way: “Each of us at some early stage dreams the waking dream that his/her parents are not the real parents but substitute foster-parents for the genuine king and queen from whom he/she descends in reality.” A leap (a strange leap) is required to connect the family romance with literary history. Mandel says the collection offers “an account of tradition in Canadian writing.” The collection “seeks primal scenes, scenes of nomination, identification, origins.” He invites us to read the collection as “an account of some of the more important resentments in Canadian writing and some of the consequences. It is also a story of misreading and rewriting, of how strong writers misread and rewrite their precursors.”

The language here is overloaded with Bloom and Freud (and Bloom’s misreading of Freud): “primal scenes,” “scenes of nomination,” “strong writers.” All of these beg questions, and the questions create static, interference.

An example is in order. In an essay on novelist Hugh MacLennan, Mandel presents two themes:

MacLennan’s rewriting of tradition I call, following Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, “The Family Romance.” The second question, following the reading of Freud and literature in Lionel Trilling, Bloom and D.M. Thomas, I call, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.”

Jamming titles and names together is like mixing metaphors: it creates clutter and a lack of focus. He might have said he was discussing repetition in MacLennan (for the essay does get to some interesting connections) and gone on from there. More than any other piece in the collection, “Hugh MacLennan and the Tradition of Canadian Fiction” betrays its occasional character.

Mandel is more at home when he deals with poetry. The “Writers” section includes short pieces on Irving Layton, Gary Geddes, P.K. Page and Doug Jones; and longer essays on Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Christopher Dewdney and Jon Whyte. Among these, Mandel’s comments on Cohen and the cultural phenomenon of Death of a Lady’s Man is very perceptive. Essays on Christopher Dewdney and Jon Whyte illustrate a sensitive and careful reading of contemporary poets; the Jon Whyte essay, the only extended criticism we have of Whyte’s poetry and poetics, is a very important contribution. These are all cast in conventional essay form which takes a single theme and explores its ramifications.

Two brilliant pieces are his lead article in the “Origins” section and one in the section on “Writing.” These pieces give the book its special character. “Auschwitz and Poetry,” a meditative search for origins, takes the form of a personal essay; “The Long Poem” piece has the fragmentary, open-ended quality of the search itself. Writing, as it happens.

The Auschwitz essay poses some of Mandel’s most moving questions. Here we see the genuine power of his imagination; the essay indeed is both system-challenging and personal, the account of “an unsayable poem.” (A quibble: the essay and the book would be richer had the poem, “On the 25th Anniversary of Auschwitz,” been included.)

“The Long Poem: Journal and Origin,” another inquiry into personal and cultural discontents, complements both “Poetry and Auschwitz” and a very good essay on “The Death of the Long Poem” (Mandel in his modernist turn). The “Journal and Origin” consists of the poet’s notes, made essentially during a 1985 trip to the Soviet Union, and then circles back to an earlier trip to Dachau and the unspeakable horror there: always the quest for the father, for origins. This is Mandel at his most compelling. His discontent is idiopathic and genuine in the strange and delightful leaps and moving reflections of the poet searching for the father who must, always and inevitably, elude him. This is the essence of the family romance. Criticism here indeed is poetic.

A Family Romance is both disappointing and highly stimulating. The “resentment” between generations of writers is certainly a motive force in writing, but as literary history or tradition, the result is thin and misleading. Tradition also involves matters of production and publication, audience and reception, technology and class and economics. What Mandel gives us is more subjective and often more engaging. With all its tensions, the book is important and will become more important as we read and write the future the present is now making.

A final recognition. This review, it is worth underlining, also enacts the family romance. Without attempting to assign myself the role of strong writer (that’s the readers’ determination) I recognize that I also misread and rewrite Mandel. My writing reveals my wish that he had written differently. This is true whether I identify with him and offer only praise, or attempt to deny him and complain, moan and natter. If I did not wish him and the tradition and the book to be different, then I need not write at all. Loops and leaps. ♦

Birk Sproxton, who lives in Red Deer, Alberta, is the editor of Trace and author of Headframe. He contributed a story to Volume 6, Number 3.