Despite its cautionary themes, O'Hagan's Tay John represents the exhilarating moment in which literary text interrogates the cultural and literary values of the Western tradition and departs from them to reconstruct a new myth that is specific to Alberta, Canada, in the postmodernist era. The old myths dismantled are the Christian division of spirit and flesh, the egocentric self, the use of language and story as means of subduing nature, the process of knowing through intellectual dominance, the myth of the world-dominating male, the centralist and imperialist concepts of culture, and ideology as teleos. The new myth is of the soul as an integration of mind and body; of the self as fluid, reactive, mercurial; of fiction as mysterious; of knowing as a matter "feeling with" rather than solely "thinking about"; of a revaluation of the feminine and how it may rebalance patriarchal culture; of a cultural pluralism in Canada; and of life as shifting and contrapuntal, silencing all of our Great Truths in its own protean continuance.
