Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics ed. by Jerome Rothenberg and Diane Rothenberg (review)

252 Western American Literature only in passing and such women SF writers as Ursula Le Guin are ignored. Tucker’s devotion to the positive values of frontiers — “To have no frontier at all would be a consummate tragedy” (p. 56) — may lead him to see fron­ tiers where there aren’t any, or to accept as a frontier whatever someone (anyone?) calls a frontier. One is reminded of Robin Winks’s comparative studies of frontiers and his suggestion that some countries seem to have appro­ priated the frontier myth because they needed it. Possibly Webb (in The Great Frontier, 1951) was too restrictive when he limited the frontier to a geographic area of land in excess of the population; but at least his approach prompted a careful consideration of what truly constitutes a frontier, or in what ways frontiers differ from each other. Tucker’s concluding paragraph contains this admonition: “Be of good cheer about the menaces to individuality. In this regard, remember, things have been turning out well enough in the literature and the media: the hero of the Old Western type still rides off into the sunset, or blasts off into the cosmos, with freedom unimpaired and wanderlust unweakened” (p. 325). Some of us may not find these words entirely cheerful or encouraging. BARBARA HOWARD MELDRUM University of Idaho Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics. Jerome Rothenberg and Diane Rothenberg, editors. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. xviii + 508 pages, $25.00.) “Ethnopoetics” is a term both fashionable and useful, and certainly its particular thrust is signal in the history of post-war American poetry and poetics. The designation itself— like “postmodern,” for example, or “deep image” — seems to elude exact definition in favor of a kind of accretion that at any one instance isfar too vague to be ofmuch value but whose sum of parts offers a coherent naming: “A reviewing of ‘primitive’ ideas of the ‘sacred’ represents an attempt,” write the editors Rothenberg in their “pre-face,” “to preserve and enhance primary human values against a mindless mechani­ zation that has run past any uses it may once have had”;“what we’re involved with here is a complex redefinition of cultural and intellectual values: a new reading of the poetic past and present which Robert Duncan speaks of as ‘a symposium of the whole,’” and includes “the female, the proletariat, the foreign; the animal and vegetative; the unconscious and the unknown; the criminal and failure”; “a dream,” finally, “of a total art. ... If the recovery of the oral is crucial to the present work, it goes hand in hand with a simul­ taneous expansion of the idea of writing and the text, wherever and when­ ever found.” Jerome Rothenberg himself introduced the tag “ethnopoetics” in the late 1960s, and as editor of Alcheringa and such anthologies as Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin, and America a Prophecy has devoted most Reviews 253 of his seemingly inexhaustible energies to explorations of this terrain. He and his co-editor, an anthropologist and author of a study of Seneca-Quaker relations, are certainly suited to assemble an anthology of this nature, which attempts to both “highlight” aspects of the two-decade discourse on the question of enthnopoetics, and to demonstrate “how ethnographic revelations can change our ideas of poetic form and function.” The collection is a small gem of source material which, while at times frustratingly abbreviated, at every turn at least clears paths for more intensive study. The first of its five sections, “Preliminary Moves,” according to the editors, “sets out the leading issuesand proposes a representative (by no means complete) chronology of ethnopoetic predecessors”; a few of the 22 writers represented here are Vico, Blake, Marx, Rimbaud, Fenollosa, Frobenius, LéviStrauss , Eliade, Olson, and Snyder. Section two, “Workings” (with selections by Malinowski, Norman, Barthes, and others), “deals principally with opera­ tional descriptions of poetic and related linguistic forms,” while three (“Mean­ ings”: Jung, Pagels, Eliade, and others) shifts “attention to conceptual ques­ tions of world view and symbolic process.” With pieces ranging from Artaud’s “On the Balinese Theater” to Gershom Scholem’s“Kabbalistic Ritual and the Bride of God...