Regression and Apocalypse: Studies in North American Literary Expressionism by Sherrill E. Grace (review)

162 LEITERS IN CANADA 1990 pages during which, like Yvonne more briefly in Volcano, Dick wanders through New York City, a sequence at once beautifully cinematic -lights, sounds, movie titles, news flashed on the illuminated sign of the Times Building - and quite undramatic. This was to be 'a plunge into the unconscious of America itself during the 1920S (an implied criticism of Fitzgerald for neglecting this context), but it is unlikely that this extended hiatus in dramatic action - indeed the long sequence in which Dick is at bottom merely waiting for Nicole to recover from her breakdown and summon him back to her goes on for some seventy pages - would have sustained even an uncommercial film. However one assesses the precise strengths and weaknesses of the Lowrys' script (and what does it mean that Margerie's name appears as coauthor only on this work, when we know that she was involved in everything Malcolm wrote after 1939?), we can be grateful to Mota and Tiessen for making this significant piece available, even in partial form. Their editing is scrupulous, their summaries of elided material and notations of departures from Fitzgerald (spot-checked against the original) accurate, their notes on cultural allusions - film, theatre, music - full, unobtrusive, and helpful (despite the missing of a slighting allusion to Hitchcock's Spellbound, the notable Hollywood 'psychiatric' movie of the period). The one important area on which notes (and introduction) are silent is Lowry's knowledge of psychoanalysis and psychiatric practice. Thus we do not learn who 'Krapelin' is, or what the 'Psychopathology of Verbalistics' means, or 'Stekel's psychoanalytic scotoma,' much less what Lowry's accurate use of such a term as 'transference' might tell us of his awareness of Freud and psychoanalysis generally. It is a matter of some significance for Lowry's work generally, and his critics have had relatively little to say about it. Nonetheless, Mota and Tiessen have done a fine job. We may hope that someday the entire script will be made available to us so that a more substantial assessment of the Lowrys' achievement can be made and the complete script be brought together with the Noles on a Screenplay and the putative 'Preface,' now published separately elsewhere. Meanwhile, scholars may be grateful that at last they can have some sense of this important missing piece from Lowry's career without travelling to Vancouver to obtain it. (FREDERICK ASALS) Sherrill E. Grace. Regression and Apocalypse: Studies in North American LiteranJ Expressionism University of Toronto Press 1989. $45.00 In Regression and Apocalypse, Sherrill Grace presents expressionism and its artistic practices as a specific movement within modernist cultural history, HUMANITIES 163 but one that invites a reconsideration of the ways in which various impulses often regarded as marginal to the Anglo-American culture of modernism are in fact central to the dominant culture of the first half of the twentieth century. Grace begins her discussion by situating expressionist art within modernist German culture, both as a political reaction to the bourgeois respectability of the authoritarian Wilhelmine regime and as celebration ofa visionary utopianism. The formal correlative of this double vision is to be found in the typical expressionist techniques of distortion, and on the thematic level it finds expression in two distinct tendencies, or what Grace defines as the regression and apocalypse of the book's title. Regression she characterizes in one form as a return to the primitive and in another form as a joyful identification with nature, while the apocalyptic pole of the expressionist aesthetic offers purgative visions of destruction leading to regeneration that may bealigned with a corresponding tendency towards romantic abstraction in expressionist art and theatre. After establishing the specifically German intellectual and social context for expressionist art, Grace then turns to the traces of expressionism in North American culture. Although she makes the point in a number of places indirectly, her history of expressionism in North American literature is in large part an account of the ways in which expressionism is deprived of its explicitly political content and reformulated as a relentlessly psychologizing aesthetic. In parts two and three of Grace's book, she traces the presence of expressionist traits in specific texts...