Symbols in Life and Art ed. by James A. Leith (review)

HUMANITIES 101 stronger ground, and Barnes on weaker, it seems to me, regarding the apparent unity of opposites, with regard to which Barnes charges Heraclitus with having committed a logical fallacy. Robinson rightly interprets the common 'account' (logos) as applying both to the physical nature of things and to human conduct, but his interest in the Stoic interpretation of Heraclitus's physical theory distracts him from giving full consideration to the moral (ethical) doctrine in the fragments. It could be argued that the moral philosophy embodied in the fragments deserves a place of primacy in relation to the physical and metaphysical doctrines. This is evident even in fragments 1 and 2. The theme is how people should live their lives, seeking the divine common perspective ofwisdom amid changing perceptions, emotions, and circumstances. To live that kind of life, as Bias of Priene did, is to be of 'more account' (pleon logos) than the rest (fragment 39). The play on words in this fragment means more than that logoi are uttered about him as Robinson says (106); it means that he lived according to the common (xunos) logos, not his own private understanding (fragment 2). Robinson's translation and commentary deserves to be ranked among the finest scholarly works on Heraclitus in recent years. (WILLIAM GRAHAM) James A. Leith, editor. Symbols in Life and Art. The Royal Society of Canada Symposium in Memory of George Whalley/Les Symboles dans la vie et dans l'art. La Society royale du Canada: Colloque la memoire de George Whalley McGill...Queen's University Press. x, 153. $35.00 Picking up this attractive white volume with its long bilingual title in red, any likely reader is sure to be struck at once by the range of its contents and the eminence of its contributors. Because of that range, not every such reader will recognize all the contributors, who are nowhere identified except by institution. An effort has been made, happily successful, to give coherence to what might have been a mere miscellany or memorial volume - a cataloguer's nightmare, the despair of information retrieval. Two of the nine contributions are in French, and the contributors include a literary theorist and polymath, an anthropologist, a poet and literary critic, an art historian, a sociologist, a theologian, a historian of the French Revolution, an authority on the French Renaissance, and the editor of Gerard Manley Hopkins. They meet amicably under their tentlike topic. The sources of unity are several. First, it is a good tent. Northrop Frye sets it in place in the opening essay. Under the heading of 'Symbolism' many facets of knowledge and lines of thought may legitimately converge. The French infinitive delabyrinther, used by Abraham Moles, 102 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 might apply as well to the activities of any of his fellows - deZabyrinther in the sense of getting out of the runnels of the labyrinth onto higher ground where its intricacies may be seen in overview. Again, the book is drawn together by the fact that the writers pay attention to one another, and by this I do not mean that they simply drop one another's names. Moles sees the analogy between Jung's mandala and the architecture of the French Revolution as explored (for the first time) by James Leith, and, stimulated by Douglas Jones's weighty and polished 'Steel Syntax: The Railroad as Symbol in Canadian Poetry,' Moles speculates cogently and adventurously on the 'dynamic spatial myth of the West.' Eva Kushner in discussing the regulation of the symbol in the French Renaissance finds useful the observations of Wilfred Cantwell Smith on the life and death and resurrection of symbols in a Biblical context. She and Anthony Starr independently praise and use the writings of Susanne Langer, so germane to the general topic. Another unplanned and happy convergence: Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov quotes a letter of Van Gogh to his brother Theo: 'Perhaps death is not the hardest thing in a painter's life ... the stars always make me dream ... Why I ask myself shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to...