Ernest Buckler: Rediscovery and Reassessment

Chapter 6. Arcadia and Death

Arcadia and Death In the preceding chapter, I attempted to define Buckler's elaboration of an aesthetic philosophy based not only on ontological considerations but also on an ethical vision committed to transmitting ultimate truth and a perception of the divine order. In this chapter, I shall show the dynamics of his aesthetics at work in the central topoi that dominate his texts— Arcadia and death. A topos, a non-physical space offering common ground for agreement (Hunter), is a privileged place for the writer to strive for the noumenon or absolute supersensuous Unity, as well as to elaborate the didactic strategy I examined in the preceding chapter, allowing Buckler to instruct as he delights. In Under Eastern Eyes, Janice Kulyk Keefer has demonstrated that Arcadia is a topos of Maritime literature in general (16), and in "The Pastoral Vision of Ernest Bucklerin TheMountain and the Valley/' Alan Young has studied Buckler's first novel within the framework of Arcadia and the pastoral tradition. It is Notes for chapter 6 are on pp. 245-47. 6 153 154 Ernest Buckler: Rediscovery and Reassessment \ this very topic that made Knopf editor Angus Cameron agree to publish Ox Bells and Fireflies with such enthusiasm, calling it "the most evocative book of that lost world"1 of a pastoral paradise, and, as I pointed out in chapter 2, caused Scribner's to reject the same manuscript for its nostalgic representation verging on the kitsch, even on "solid creme de marrons."2 In his portrayals of a vanished idyllicagrarian community, Buckler nonetheless makes a point of protesting that "Nova Scotia is no Shangri-La" (Window 111). If, as he assured the Canada Council, Ox Bells is not just another wispily elegiacexcursion into "the happy valley of childhood,"3 it is through the pervasive presence of death, which for Buckler is a part of the fabric of life, a conundrum that knows all the conundrums yet never unriddles itself (Ox Bells 131). Consequently, after exploring the dynamics of the myth of Arcadia, I shall study the commonplace of death and, more precisely, the iconographical motif of Et in Arcadia ego in Buckler's heuristic prose. Finally, I shall end the chapter by examining some earlier fiction, focusing especially on an unpublished and undated piece that the young Buckler called a study in the misunderstood quiescence of the very old. I shall examine the transformations that this meditation on mortality underwent in the variants of the story, later to be incorporated into Ox Bells and Fireflies and Window on the Sea, and which reveal a shifting aesthetic and philosophical stance. Arcadia: Time, Myth, and Form Arcadia, in arid, rocky central Greece, has come to represent a Golden Age of plenty, innocence, and bliss for those who believe in a gentle primitivism. The Arcadians lived in the domain of Pan, and were renowned for their musical talents. They were also famed for their moral sobriety, their illustrious lineage, and their rustic hospitality. But today we tend to forget that they were also notorious—we have only to read Juvenal, Philostratus, or Ovid—for their ignorance and poverty not only of body but of mind, and for a way of life resembling that of wild beasts, a life in which the arts played no part. Samuel Butler's little poem places him in a long line of poets that have satirized this nation that allegedly existed before the birth ofJupiter and the creation of the moon: Arcadia and Death 155 The old Arcadians that could trace Their pedigree from race to race Before the moon, were once reputed Of all the Grecians the most stupid. (281) But Virgil idealized the Arcadians. He emphasized their virtues, adding traits to Arcadia that it had never had: luxurious vegetation, eternal spring, endless leisure for voluptuousness and love. The Arcadia in his Eclogues to which he transposed the Idylls of Theocritus was a fictive place, and, as Erwin Panofsky points out, it is Virgil's imagination that gave birth to the concept of Arcadia as it is familiar to us today: a place of felicity, a Utopia, not in Thomas More's sense ofoutopia or "no place," but in the later sense of eu-topia or "good place." During the Renaissance, Arcadia became a Utopia distant not so much in space as in time—a haven from an imperfect reality, from the present. Soon the nostalgic yearning for the inviolate...