SOURCE: Clement, Lesley D. “Towards an Illumination of Gallant's Late Fiction.” In Learning to Look: A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant's Fiction, pp. 230-48. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Clement traces Gallant's development as a short story writer, focusing on the stylistic aspects and thematic concerns of her later work.

Speaking generally of “the metaphysic that informs Gallant's vision of reality,” Janice Keefer concludes that “Gallant's way of seeing is at the furthest possible remove from that of the visionary”; nowhere, Keefer contends, are there “the consolations of form, the artist's role as priest of the imagination, and the proposition that art can somehow order and make meaningful the chaos of experience.”¹ Gallant's canon provides few examples of vision and illumination in the conventional sense: an artist's revelation of the unseen or elucidation of the opaque by infusing the raw material of art with a...