English and American Surrealist Poetry by Edward B. Germain (review)

68ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW he seems to find them useful in describing critical movements: he places his work "between the monological rock and the deconstructive whirlpool" (13). This metaphor may imply moderation and reasonability, in avoiding "extremes" so that the uncontrolled freeplay of Derrida's criticism is modified to a dialogical tension in a work, usually between a single center of value or judgment and eccentric deviations from the norm (for example Trollope's narrative persona versus the aliented, near-mad Crawley in The Last Chronicle of Barset). The area Garrett stakes out for himself, however , between Sheldon Sacks and Derrida is an imaginary field, located perhaps somewhere between Chicago and Yale. To seize such a "middle ground" (15) gives Garrett only a rhetorical advantage. He supports his argument better when he turns to the texts and tries to describe how cause and effect, stability of identity, and the "authoritative" speaker, are opposed and subverted in specific cases. In his "Conclusion" Garrett explores briefly the possibility that the dialogical structure of Victorian novels might be seen as a consequence of biographical or cultural conditions. For example, we know that Thackeray had a lonely childhood. Does his fiction set up a tension between an omniscient narrator confronted with multiple, diverse fictional worlds so as to play out the unresolved conflict in his mind between his desire for "confident and inclusive grasp" of his world and the sympathy for the eccentric values of the outsiders and misfits who see things differently? In the general culture ofVictoria's reign, too, traditional centers ofauthority (like religion) seemed to weaken, to threaten to dissolve into diverse opinions. The confusion of meanings and views in the multiplot novel might be an imaginary projection of such conflicts so that the multiple narrative enacts "different possibilities of collective vision" (224). Garrett rejects these psychological and historical hypotheses as reductive. He prefers description to explanation, hoping that bolder readers may follow his work. TODD K. BENDER, University of Wisconnn, Madison Edward B. Germain, ed. English and American Surrealist Poetry. Middlesex : Penguin Books Ltd., 1978. 348 p. Edward B. Germain's book is a remarkable panoply of texts selected by an editor well-acquainted with the surrealist program and its advances in literature and language. Organized into two parts (From the Twenties to the Second World War and The Second World War to the Present), this heavily freighted pocketbook anthology suggests that surrealist poetry is a phoenix shaking from its wings the residual waves of existentialist nausea and absurdist reductionism contained in many post-Industrial Age works. The avant-garde spirit is evident throughout this Penguin Poets classic in its subliminal appeal to the connoisseur of poetry and in the emblem on the cover, a blue-faced hermaphroditic Valentine: ceramic butterflies close the eyelids, winged beings shutter the mouth, a gold wreath of thorns BOOK REVIEWS69 broken by a dry rosebud drapes the chest, and cloisonné birds hide from the caramel-colored sky and seem to peck and coo at the hairline — as do the poems themselves. The Introduction deals with belief in the unconscious and experiments with language. The section on "The Surrealist Tradition" stresses nineteenth-century England's preoccupation with "the psychopathology of the artist's mind" (p. 25). "Surealism in America" points up the predilection of Breton and his disciples for the destructively creative antics of Keaton, Chaplin, and the Marx Brothers and for silent films, which resemble "conscious dream" (p. 42); moreover, in America is "the need to connect daily life with deep mythic roots" (p. 43). Finally, "Surrealism as International Modernism" is "strategy of the mind" to attack conventional systems , integrate irrational desire, and invent "a veritable science of morality" (p. 45). The texture of the first group of poems is richly variegated, the pace of the second rather fast. Highlights include the marvelous chain poems; Gascoyne's translations of Arp, Breton, DaIi, Peret, Picasso, and Unik (no Apollinaire, though); and Bly's of Neruda, Vallejo, and Tranströmer. The poets are all indexed, their dates given (except Kuroda's, p. 185; possibly a printing error). Several poems fail to sustain the momentum of, say, Loving , Roditi, Scarfe, Barker, Penrose, Patchen, Del Renzio, O'Hara, Hays...