Green Water, Green Sky: Gallant's Discourse on Dislocation

The author points out that the dislocation of the speaking subject in Mavis Gallant's Green Water, Green Sky is achieved by Gallant's manipulation of point of view, time, and language; the narrative enacts in form, as well as suggests in content, a Lacanian perspective on reality. Gallant's late modernist text takes modern concerns with representation and combines them with more contemporary social concerns. In other words, the author points out, Flor and the decentralized speaker stand in opposition to what is reductively ordered and patriarchal, in life and language respectively. The author argues that since Gallant's novel is an example of a kind of (feminine) writing which is voiced by a decentralized speaker, a peripheral figure who is linguistically removed from traditional (masculine) authorial subjectivity, just as Flor is psychically removed from patriarchal domination, Gallant’s text demonstrates a different discourse -- it is a matriarchal discourse of dislocation.

Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature Canadienne

Vol. 14

no. 1

73-84

Winter 1989

en