Ernest Buckler: Rediscovery and Reassessment

Chapter 3. Buckler's Ontological Commitment

Buckler's Ontological Commitment The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me and I to them.1 —R.W. Emerson, Nature Like many North American artists and writers in the first half of the twentieth century, Buckler was undoubtedly originally influenced by Emerson and his transcendentalist movement, which in turn was influenced by and interacted with the European Romantics. Emerson maintained a privileged relationship with Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle, who also believed in the reality of a supersensuous realm of being, and who shifted the term "sublime," used in the eighteenth century to designate objects of Notes for chapter 3 are on pp. 240-42. 63^ D 64 Ernest Buckler: Rediscovery and Reassessment overwhelming vastness or power, to connote that state of mind arising in contact with the transcendent and infinite. For as Emerson admits in his essay "The Transcendentalist," his alleged "new views" are not new, but "the very oldest of thought cast into the mould of these new times," and "what is popularly called Transcendentalism...is Idealism" (Complete Essays, 87). Because ontological idealism such as Kant's defines the universe in terms of phenomena, and posits that existence is relative to the mind's perception, its inherent logic tends toward an ultimate and total fusion of subject and object, perception and percept, mind and universe, that Buckler finds attractive.It refuses any distinction between the external and the internal, between mind and matter, thought and thing. Shelley, who was read religiously in the Englishspeaking world in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century,2 remarked in his manifesto A Defence of Poetry, that "All things exist as they are perceived; at least in relation to the percipient" (1085). In the final chapter of The Mountain and the Valley, the protagonist David seems to melt into nature, to attain such fusion: (in the reverse of what happens when you stare at a pattern of lines until suddenly the pattern moves off the page and cleaves to your retina), as he looked at the frozen landscape it was as if the outline of the frozen landscape became his consciousness : that inside and outside were not two things but one. (281) The debate between materialism or objectivity and idealism or subjectivity is a central preoccupation of many of Buckler's contemporaries . In an interview with Don Cameron, W.O. Mitchell explains that he too as a young man was interested mainly in philosophy. Having been told by his instructors that he had to choose between materialist empiricism and idealism, "between the world of passion, appetite, the many, and the world of one," Mitchell thought ofhimself for a long time as "a Platonist, with Presbyterian overtones," but as would be the case with Buckler, later realized that "there could be no closed systems in art" (Cameron, "W.O. Mitchell," 52). His enduring aesthetic philosophy nevertheless contains distinct, even insistent, Emersonian overtones. Mitchell affirms that "the only justification for art is that this particular narrative, these particular people, shall articulate some transcending Buckler's Ontological Commitment 65 truth that transcends region and transcends a given time, and that it shall have meaning and significance that transcends the actual in the world of the many" (51, emphases mine). Significantly enough, E.M. Forster is explicitly brought to our attention by Buckler in The Mountain and the Valley, when David discovers Forster's writing to be "more rapturously adventurous than any odyssey of action," and is uplifted by the recognition of "the absolute truth" of Forster's perceptions (244). In the opening passage of Forster's TheLongest Journey, first published in England in 1907, but not until 1922 in the United States, some university students debate the existence of a reality beyond the consciousness by focusing on a cow: "The cow is there," said Ansell, lighting a match and holding it out over the carpet. No one spoke. He waited till the end of the match fell off. Then he said again, "She is there, the cow. There, now." "You have not proved it," said a voice. "I have proved it to myself." "I have proved it to myself that she isn't," said the voice. "The cow is not there." Ansell frowned and lit another match. "She's there for me...