SOURCE: "'LOOK! LISTEN! MARK MY WORDS!': Paying Attention to Timothy Findley's Fictions," in Canadian Literature, No. 91, Winter, 1981, pp. 22-47.

In the following essay, Hulcoop provides a stylisticc discussion of Findley's work, examining how Findley uses textual and sensual markers in his early fiction as a means of drawing the reader into the text.

"It's all an attempt not to say what you don't want to say. You've achieved art when you cannot be misconstrued.

              (Timothy Findley, in Conversations with Graeme Gibson)

In an age of structuralist and deconstructive criticism it may be salutary for the critic to begin by reminding himself of the dangers of misconstruction—despite that cunning cartographer Harold Bloom (author of A Map of Misreading) who insists [in The Anxiety of Influence] that "[t]here are no interpretations but only misinterpretations." Susan Sontag, in a famous essay [in Against Interpretation and Other Essays], inveighs...