Ernest Buckler: Rediscovery and Reassessment

Conclusion

Conclusion Writers such as Margaret Atwood and Margaret Laurence have acclaimed Ernest Buckler to be an innovator , calling him "one of the pathbreakers for the modern Canadian novel" and "a genuine pioneer in Canadian writing."1 Why should a large number of Canadian writers, critics, and readers consider that Buckler has "broken ground" (Primrose 8)in the world of Canadian letters, that he has created a distinctive literature ? The themes on which the author writes are certainly not new—they have preoccupied artists and thinkers since antiquity. Buckler's writing is a crossroads characterized by simultaneous tension and fusion between the old and the new, one that propulses nineteenth-century cultural stances into twentiethcentury modernism. The writer's oeuvre is grounded in platonic, Renaissance, and Romantic currents of thought, yet the aesthetic philosophy that he elaborates not only connects Canadian literature to international modernist tendencies, but anticipates and even paves the way for certain postmodern concerns. Note is on p. 248. 229 230 Ernest Buckler: Rediscovery and Reassessment \ His writing is grounded in phenomenological and ontological concerns that canbe traced back beyond Emersonian transcendentalism and the European Romanticmovement to idealists who in turn owe an immense debt to Renaissance and medieval thinkers and, ultimately, to Aristotle and Plato. Buckler's work essentially stages a confrontationof ontological and linguistic antitheses. Both the linguistic and the philosophical dimensions of his texts are placed under the sign of paradox and aporia. The reader is constantly confronted with a cohesive yet irreconcilable tension between the Multiple and the neoplatonic prototype of the One: the dynamics of his writing involve creating simultaneously a web of ramifications that generate an expanding cross-network of analogies and a corresponding but inverse movement from the Many to the One. The entire textual production with its rhetorical and metaphorical networks strains toward a metaphysical unifying system, transmitting the perception of a world de/ciphered and re/ordered through logos, and exploring the interspace where subject and object are joined by language. Whether we consider the metaphorical nature of Buckler's metaphysics or the metaphysical nature of his metaphors, we are in the presence of one single movement that carries words and things somewhere beyond, or meta (Ricoeur366).Yeteven the ontological idealism contains an underlying current of materialism that can be considered problematic. The materialist currents of thought that undermine in an endless dialectic the writer's idealist stance not only echo other modernist writers seeking the essence behind thing and thought, but eventually inflect Canadian postmodernism with a materiality not to be found in that of the United States. Buckler's oeuvre is rooted in an organicist view of the universe that the Romanticstransmitted to the modernists—a view in which the grand is contained in the small, the abstract in the concrete, and the universal in the particular. However, the Romantic, idealist quest for the noumenon that is apprehendable through the power of the imagination is tempered by the modernist conception of ambivalence, even liminality derivative of a philosophical stance: the impossibility in front of the fertile flux of the universe of perceiving—let alone articulating —the essence of reality. Buckler's rhetorical and discursive practices, which enclose and include while opening out, reflect an aesthetic theory founded simultaneously on chaos and system, and on the fluctuating manner in Conclusion 231 which they have been perceived throughout history. On the one hand, we find a Schlegelian celebration of infinite abundance and diversity, a ramifying web branching outward through strategies of disorder, displacement , disarticulation, accumulation, and amplification. These strategies of chaos are confronted yet never reconciled with the conjunctive dynamics straining toward synthetic resolution or unity. On the other hand, the writer's aesthetic philosophy is anchored in the world view constructed by scholasticism, which persisted throughout the Renaissance and beyond, positing that beauty emanates from the supernatural connections that exist between the object and a perfectly regular, admirably designed cosmos. Such an aesthetic philosophy is by definition rooted in an ethical vision positing the interconnectedness of beauty and utility, and in turn implying a didactic dimension. Buckler does share with modernist writers their fascination with the mechanisms of language, and their quest for surprising, unusual, or curious ideas, figures, and words. His formalistic, often outrageously baroque innovations, like theirs, serve to stretch or bend language to create new concepts, or to acknowledge concepts that langue as system can only express periphrastically. His stylistic acrobatics,like theirs...