A Darkness That Murmured: Essays on Malcolm Lowry and the Twentieth Century ed. by Frederick Asals, Paul Tiessen (review)

336 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 Lonergan=s own study of Aquinas, however, was motivated by the conviction that only a >theory of the history of theological speculation= B that is, an a priori, generic conceptual scheme inductively drawn from the history of speculative theology but justified >solely from a [reflexive] consideration of the nature of human speculation= B would enable the interpreter of Aquinas to circumvent the notorious three-hundred-year impasse, maintained since the acrimonious sixteenth-century debates between the Molinists and Banezians, about the import for human freedom of the Thomistic doctrine of grace. Avoiding this long-standing theological impasse may seem of small interest to most secular philosophers. But this would be a mistake: theorems about the supernatural order can only be constructed by analogy with the natural order. Since >causation is the common feature of both operation and cooperation,= philosophers, in fact, will find Lonergan=s penetrating analysis of operative grace eminently worthy of their attention. Lonergan makes every effort to eliminate those >sixteenth-century problems= that still block our understanding of Aquinas=s >compatibilism= or how grace and human freedom can be reconciled by a God who transcends time. Nonetheless, contemporary philosophers can still ponder and perhaps deconstruct B Lonergan=s acute explanations notwithstanding B what might just remain antinomous arguments in a speculative theology that combines the natural premotion of the will (a given in Aristotelian or hierarchical cosmology) with the supernatural premotion of operative grace for human choices. In Aquinas=s universe of necessary natural and supernatural causation, the first cause, God, operates not only externally in the movements of the heavens but inwardly in the hearts of men B that is, in the free operations of the human will. (DENIS J.M. BRADLEY) Frederick Asals and Paul Tiessen, editors. A Darkness That Murmured: Essays on Malcolm Lowry and the Twentieth Century University of Toronto Press. x, 278. $45.00 The cultural landscape of the first half of the twentieth century has been charted B more or less; the peaks and valleys mapped and evaluated; a fair consensus exists, one might say. But not so the latter half of the century. Here we stand on less stable terrain; with the never ending seismic shocks of >postmodernist= deconstruction pulling the ground from under our feet even as we attempt to chart it. A few certainties, or near-certainties, obtain. The work of the English-Canadian writer Malcolm Lowry would appear to be one of them. Two decades ago, Alfred Kazin remarked of Lowry=s Under the Volcano (1947) that it was >the last clear instance of a modern masterpiece.= The encomium seems acute and just. Lowry 1909B57, does seem to bring the period we call High Modernism to some meaningful closure; though how he does so, to say nothing of the significance of such HUMANITIES 337 colourful statements, has yet to be fully clarified. One comes then to this new collection of essays with high hopes B especially since it subtitles itself >Essays on Malcolm Lowry and the Twentieth Century= and purports to be >an essential addition to Lowry studies.= The collection >reflects the change= in Lowry criticism at the end of the century; its authors >share[ing] in questions stimulated by the concerns of post-modernism.= Part 1 gives us >an array of autobiographical and biographical pieces from five parts of Lowry=s life= (including three recently discovered Lowry letters and a selection from the memoris of his first wife, Jan Gabrial, published this past year; part 2 deals with Volcano, Lowry=s masterpiece; part 3 with some of the minor works; part 4 with Lowry and others (Joyce, DeLillo); and part 5 with a psychoanalytical reading of Lowry=s life. Most of the essays originated as papers at the Lowry Symposium at the University of Toronto in 1997. All of the essays are insightful and add to our understanding of Lowry and his work. But some seem weightier and more fecund than others B because their focus is wider and deeper; and they address the larger Lowry, who, arguably, merits a significant place in the canon of late modern literature. The essays on Volcano are of particular interest. Greig Henderson traces the...