Major Canadian Authors: A Critical Introduction by David Stouck (review)

162Book Reviews ter, a study of roundness of the Poetics ofSpace (1957), he does not relate it to the works of his contemporaries, such as Poulet whose Metamorphosis of the Circle traces the pattern in authors from the earliest times to the twentieth century. Their interest bespeaks a respect for the integrity of a lived experience , irrespective of its relation to the "objective" spatio-temporal world. With its capacity for suggesting self-completeness, wholeness, and unity, the circle or sphere helps us in "experiencing being in its immediacy" (The Poetics ofSpace [Boston: Beacon Press, 1969] 234). Smith seems to be too hesitant to accept both the philosophic tradition of Jaspers, Kierkegaard, Husserl, DiIthey , and Scheler as well as the literary world of Paul Claudel, Rilke, Balzac, and many others who also sought "centers of cosmicity" (The Poetics ofSpace 232) which should bring the contradictions of the cosmos together within its unity as Bachelard's work tried to describe. What lends this book its most perceptive tone is Smith's firm beliefthat he is able to communicate Bachelard's two cultures, both his epistemology of science and his works on the imagination. The diachronic presentation of Bachelard's complete works suffers, however, due to a lack of coherence, neither coherently relating to the merging of consciousness between reader and author and text, nor to a philosophic tradition of scientific revolutions in a thorough way. The book is an attempt to give an exact insight into Bachelard's works to those who are perhaps not conversant with both the mathematical apparatus of theoretical physics of relativity and its relationship to phenomenology . The trend of Smith's exposition is difficult to follow, and misses the complex and challenging texture of Bachelard's work, a texture not only of scientific knowledge and the scope of the poetic imagination, but also solidly grounded in both literature and philosophy of the Western world. MARLIES KRONEGGER Michigan State University DAVID STOUCK. Major Canadian Authors: A Critical Introduction . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. 308 p. David Stouck's "Preface" to Major Canadian Authors points out both its virtues and its defects. Intended for a "wide audience" (ix) and having "no one thesis underlyingthis book as a whole" (ix), Stouck includes those writers who pass his two-part litmus test: a writer must have produced a work of "consistently high quality" (x) or have written "at least one major piece regarded as an indisputable classic in the canon of Canadian literature" (x). Quick. Make your own list of ten or twelve major Canadian authors. If you put Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Robert Kroetsch, Morley CaIlaghan , Timothy Findley, Phyllis Webb, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Leon Rooke, Michel Tremblay, Alistair MacLeod, W. P. Kinsella, or Audrey Thomas on your list, don't look here for a study of that writer. Stouck's rationale for excluding some of these recognizably contemporary names (and including some of them in an appendix "Guide to Other Canadian Writers") is that Ondaatje and Atwood, for instance, "are in mid-career and perhaps have not yet published their most significant and lasting works" (x). What, then, of Surfacing'! Of The Collected Works ofBilly The Kid"! Of The Wars or The Lost Book Reviews163 Salt Gift of Blood! Or, another writer not on the list, Marian Engel's controversial Bear"! But let's not quibble about comparative lists and individual choices. A critic should not be faulted only because his list is not your list. A critic should be faulted if, once having chosen his list, he does Httle to add to yours, or to suggest names you had not thought of, or to support his own choices. This is where Stouck can be faulted. Instead of providing enlightening essays about each of the seventeen writers he has chosen, he gives us a twenty-minute read for each one. And each twenty-minute read is stupefyingly repetitious in its approach: a brief paragraph or two that is a biographical overview, plot summaries or superficial poetry explications, a few critical phrases. Any key or original observations soon are discovered to be in the footnotes as somebody else's idea. The first chapter, on Thomas Haliburton, provides a sample of what...