Ernest Buckler: Rediscovery and Reassessment by Marta Dvorak (review)

humanities 523 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Marta Dvorak. Ernest Buckler: Rediscovery and Reassessment Wilfrid Laurier University Press. viii, 282. $34.95 In her introduction, Marta Dvorak quotes Margaret Atwood and Margaret Laurence both praising Ernest Buckler as one of the >pathbreakers= and >pioneers= of Canadian literature; his work is seldom read, however, and even The Mountain and the Valley is rarely taught anymore. Dvorak=s volume is the first substantial critical text ever written on Buckler, far exceeding the modest pretensions of the five little >Introductions= (including my own) that have appeared in several Cancrit series over the last three decades. Unfortunately, I doubt that this book will do much to encourage >a general readership to discover= the delights of Buckler=s works, although it may impress the >international specialized readership= that she claims is her secondary audience. Dvorak clearly states her intentions: >As a scholar living in France, home of major advances in movements such as structuralism, semiotics, deconstruction , and narratology,= she analyses Buckler=s texts B particularly those other than The Mountain and the Valley B and >confronts= them >with a variety of other texts that are not necessarily direct influences but that can serve a useful exegetic function.= In part 1 she surveys Buckler=s intellectual and cultural background and the publishing and reception history of his works B a useful if not new summary (see Claude Bissell=s Ernest Buckler Remembered) B but without any evaluation of the marked difference in artistic achievement between his first great novel and his later efforts. In part 2, chapter 3 focuses on Buckler=s ontology and transcendentalism (with correspondences to philosophers from Emerson to Merleau-Ponty) and foregrounds >the aporia in Buckler=s texts generated by the confrontation of materialist and idealist currents of thought.= Chapter 4 examines >the hermeneutic dimension in Buckler=s texts, the relationship between language and the universe= with reference to Foucault, Benveniste, and Saussure (and manages to make The Cruelest Month seem even more boring and contrived than it already is). Chapter 5 analyses Buckler=s works as >heuristic fiction= elaborating >an aesthetic philosophy= grounded in Neoplatonism (with parallels to Joyce, Emerson, and Shelley). Chapter 6 studies >the central topoi that dominate [Buckler=s] texts B Arcadia and death= in their tension between myth and reality (and distorts a couple of key passages in The Mountain and the Valley, missing the ironic meanings in the linguistic minutiae). Chapter 7 analyses (>using the concepts of> MerleauPonty and Ricœur) the >diverse rhetorical strategies of fusion that channel Buckler=s striving toward the One=: neologisms, seriation, chaotic enumeration, polysyndeton, epanalepsis, synaesthesia, anamnesis, metonymy , and metaphor. In her conclusion, Dvorak makes an admirable argument for placing 524 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Buckler at the >crossroads= between >nineteenth-century cultural stances= (Platonic, Renaissance, and Romantic >phenomenological and ontological concerns=) and >modernist= aesthetic philosophies, even anticipating >postmodern discursive techniques.= But I do not think this critical volume of philosophy and rhetoric, that never devotes more than a few pages at a time to a story or novel, and only excerpts them as illustrations of theoretical principles (often ignoring or distorting the thematic meaning of the literary texts) will send any Canadian reader back to Buckler=s works for rediscovery or reassessment. (BARBARA PELL) John Virtue. Leonard and Reva Brooks: Artists in Exile in San Miguel de Allende McGill-Queen=s University Press. xx, 396. $45.00 John Virtue=s double biography piqued my interest for its potential to examine the lives and works of an artistic couple B one a painter, the other a photographer B who have not figured in standard Canadian art-historical texts, and to evaluate their contribution, probing the possible reasons for this neglect. It could answer a number of questions, such as the extent to which it was possible for Canadian artists to attain critical and/or commercial success if they steered clear of the nationalist idiom (indigenous landscape painting) during the period covered in this book (mid-1930s to the end of the century), or chose to live abroad. It was certainly not the easy...