A Barfield Sampler: Poetry and Fiction by Owen Barfield (review)

HUMANITIES 209 serviceable prose that enables him to blend parts of the King James version and his own narrative into a seamless web. Tonally, Jezebel runs the gamut from stark horror to light-hearted (almost postmodern) verbal fun - who but Davies would insert within so traditionally solemn a form a lyric-pastiche containing the line 'Sing whatever is Hebrew for derrydown -derry'? And for all the 'ancient manner,' Davies is not afraid to include modern allusions. His presentation of 'the Great Market of Phantoms ... ruled wholly by Baal' had immediate meaning for an audience containing a notable sprinkling of stockbrokers and corporate businessmen in the midst of a recession. This 'Golden Tale' is, in the words of the Chorus, 'Told, yea and finely told'; Davies's experiment in a new mode is typical of the versatility and creative energy that made him unforecastable and inimitable. (W.J. KEITH) Owen Barfield. A Barfield Sampler: Poetry and Fiction. Edited by Jeanne Clayton Hunter and Thomas Kranidas State University of New York Press. x, 181. us $12.95 Born in 1898, Owen Barfield is the noblest ,of living English thinkers, now (one writes with all tentativeness) approaching his hundredth birthday, serenely untroubled by the neglect that has been his burden. His earliest books were History in English Words (1926) and Poetic Diction (1928). Among the stories reprinted in A Barfield Sampler is one, 'Dope,' which made its last (and first) appearance in 1923, in the illustrious pages of T.S. Eliot's Criterion. 'Dope' is a fine story, indelibly fixed in the 19208, and in the wake of Ulysses, 'by the use of advertising and newspaper hoardings as content of perception, and as motivator of the flow of thought. The word 'revusical' - now oddly desuetudinous - is to be found in this story, to challenge the OED's earliest cited usage of 1931. There is an attentiveness to idiom and accentuation - 'Footbaw ree-sults!' - such as one might find in Henry Green, but hardly anywhere else. That kind of echo gives rise to regret that circumstances compelled Barfield to give up his ambition to be a full-time writer, and instead to take over his father's legal practice. 'Instead' it sadly was, for Barfield's third book was published only in 1944, and the greater quantity of his writing has appeared since his retirement in 1959. As a thinker Barfield's overriding thesis has been that human consciousness evolves, and that the most readable traces of that evolution are to be found in the histories of words. Poetic Diction deserved the degree of fame and contentiousness directed at Empson's Seven Types ofAmbiguity, which appeared two years later. Even Empson's later and far more sophisticated work, The Structure of Complex Words (1953), now to be reckoned one of 210 LEITERS IN CANADA 1992 the very few significant modern British contributions to literary theory, does not take the analysis of semantic constitution and value as far as Barfield. The difference between Empson and Barfield in these two books is of course to be traced to the question of the evolution of consciousness. Empson takes consciousness to be fixed, and semantic variation to result from historical and creative accident. Barfield takes semantic variation as witness of evolution, and as all of another consciousness (mentalite) that we can know. His most magisterial essay, 'The Root Meaning of IJLiteral ,'" undoes with the most elegant precision the accepted view of language as normatively literal, from which metaphors are to be seen as tropes or deviations. For Barfield a word cannot be free of metaphor, even, or especially, in its origins; and a word only achieves the literal when we have forgotten its metaphorical past. This was once known as catachresis, but not in modern English, where, in the service of empiricism and positivism, catachresis must be defined as an 'improper use of words.' This may be the most improper definition in the OED. Barfield's theory is not to be confused with the Emersonian idea that all nouns for abstract entities begin as nouns for material things. Barfield specifically rejects that view, pointing out how it assumes that there are, in the beginning, words for things, from...