The Buried Astrolabe: Canadian Dramatic Imagination and Western Tradition (review)

Reviews233 chapter or in the next one, and a recapitulation at the end of what has been covered, along with a preview of the next chapter. Secondary school students and lower-level undergraduates will recognize the method, and will receive instruction in how to do the kind of research Humphrey recommends. Because that research takes him to the REED collections and various city records offices and archives, it is doubtful whether the U.K. undergraduate students who seem to be his targeted readers would be able to follow his lead in any great numbers. Naomi Conn Liebler Montclair State University CraigStewartWalker. TheBuriedAstrolabe: Canadian Dramatic Imagination and Western Tradition.Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 467. $27.95 paperbound. This deeply conservative book provides a close reading of the thematic preoccupations and dramaturgic conventions ofsix ofour better-known dramatists: James Reaney,Michael Cook,Sharon Pollock,MichelTremblay,George F.Walker, and Judith Thompson. Walker is not theoretically inclined. His approach does not emerge from any particular"isms" nor is he willing to engage in very much debate about the various "isms" that have hitherto been applied to these playwrights and the cultural contexts in which they have worked. As an eclectic liberal humanist, he prefers to go his own independent way, writing in compellingly lucid and muscular prose a long bookbut one which doesn't seem long, for it is so intelligent that it is a pleasure to read from beginning to end in a couple of sittings. Walker has choosen these particular playwrights because they have produced "a substantial body ofwork" and because they are "among the very best and important Canada has produced" (viii). This position neatly avoids debates about the canon. Such a debate would be welcome, however, particularly in the introductory chapter,"DesperateWilderness."This chapter almost stands on its own. To a certain extent, the book could have been written without it, for the ideas that it raises are not systematically treated in the rest ofthe book, nor in the conclusion—for there isn't one; instead, the book ends, rather abruptly, with the chapter on Judith Thompson. 234Comparative Drama The introductory chapter seeks to identify why, how, and to what ends Canadian playwrights"needed to transform their external experience ofCanada into a personal imaginative cosmos that could then be explored dramatically" (15). The astrolabe becomes the literal device and the metaphorical means by which playwrights, like early explorers, have sought to find out where they are, each achieving a different way of answering Northrop Frye's famous question, "Where is here?" It is the European cultural tradition, still embedded within Canadian culture, that forms one ofWalker's main lines ofinquiry. He becomes preoccupied with the ways in which nineteenth-century writers "attempted] to discover an indigenous romantic sublime"which "disrupts the control ofthe status quo" and which "invoke[d] a transcendent experience [that] should be regarded as an essential strategy ofpoetic creation" (12). The sublime—at least according to Walker—is a paradoxical means of articulating, containing, domesticating , transgressing, and mythologizing the immensity and terror ofthe natural world. Walker suggests that in French Canada the emphasis was on revolution: hence the prevalence in nineteenth-century drama of heroic figures such as TheYoung Latour, Louis-Joseph Papineau, and Louis Riel. This led to a preoccupation not only with the sublime but with the "romantic revolutionary [who] may properlybe considered an explicitly politicized counterpart to the romantic sublime" (14). Walker wisely refuses to treat the "sublime" reductively: in Herman Voaden's experiments with"symphonic expressionism," Walker argues that "the sublime provides the essential source of discontinuity with tradition and the introduction of a new authority." This "new authority" can be internalized and allows playwrights access to the "noumenal forces latent in nature" (17); taken this way, the sublime has empowered Canadian playwrights to claim here as here and to do so, in part, through the "transumption of European conventions," as long as those conventions—once "transumed"— led (and indeed still lead) to a "revolt within the Canadian imagination" (19). The difficulty ofthis introductory chapter is that while its argument about challenges to conventions and the opening up ofindigenous imaginative space is germane, many ofits...