The Carpathians - University of British Columbia
The Carpathians - University of British Columbia
The Carpathians - University of British Columbia
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Centre and Periphery<br />
Louis Dudek<br />
Paradise: Essays on Myth, Art, and Reality.<br />
Véhicule Press $13.95<br />
Northrop Frye<br />
<strong>The</strong> Eternal Act <strong>of</strong> Creation: Essays, 1979-1990.<br />
Indiana <strong>University</strong> Press $25.00<br />
Reviewed by David<br />
Rampton<br />
Dudek's essays, handsomely packaged by<br />
Véhicule Press, constitute a collection <strong>of</strong><br />
earnest, eminently decent thoughts about<br />
literature and culture, but they are too <strong>of</strong>ten<br />
undistinguished and predictable. <strong>The</strong> risks<br />
<strong>of</strong> any cultural jeremiad are easy self-righteousness<br />
and querulous nostalgia, and<br />
Dudek sometimes succumbs to both. Perhaps<br />
other readers will respond more positively<br />
than I to his special brand <strong>of</strong> guarded narcissism:<br />
"I do not consider myself to be a<br />
specialist or an expert in anything, but I<br />
think—I hope—I may be qualified in substantial<br />
thinking, or in comprehensive<br />
understanding, which is a much rarer and<br />
more important goal." Maybe the swerve <strong>of</strong><br />
the co-ordinating conjunctions in the following<br />
example will create no blurred<br />
effect for the more kindly disposed: "the<br />
mind <strong>of</strong> man contemplates [the world], in<br />
order to put forth a replica, or a net <strong>of</strong><br />
meaning, or simply a song accompaniment<br />
to the whole." But I think that Ockham's<br />
razor judiciously applied to such unnecessary<br />
multiplication <strong>of</strong> categories would<br />
result in some salutary bloodletting.<br />
True, picking one's careful way through<br />
all the self-praise, the self-citation, the<br />
chunks <strong>of</strong> unabsorbed quotation that form<br />
rather wobbly arguments when strung<br />
together, the ponderous banalities ("myth<br />
is not literal truth"; "nationalism is not a<br />
rational mode <strong>of</strong> thought"), the eulogies<br />
for writers than whom, as someone once<br />
said <strong>of</strong> a long-forgotten nineteenth-century<br />
composer, no one seems to have deserved<br />
obscurity more richly, the cranky antiacademia<br />
(interpreting the Bible typologically<br />
is dismissed as "nonsense"; university<br />
pr<strong>of</strong>essors, we are told, "don't read"; a<br />
"widely researched" contemporary reading<br />
<strong>of</strong> a 1962 Nabokov novel is solemnly reproduced<br />
as if thirty years <strong>of</strong> commentary did<br />
not exist), one <strong>of</strong>ten happens upon a felicitous<br />
expression, a clever epigram, an evocative<br />
threnody for a lost cultural synthesis,<br />
or a compelling hortatory appeal for making<br />
literature studies central in a humane<br />
society. But pace the blurb, this is not vintage<br />
Dudek.<br />
He repeatedly makes a distinction<br />
between the academic arcana produced by<br />
mere literary critics and an intellectual,<br />
broadly based criticism that flows from the<br />
pens <strong>of</strong> original thinkers like himself, yet<br />
Frye's tenth book <strong>of</strong> essays shows, once<br />
again, that such a distinction is a false one,<br />
that venerable qualities like critical acumen<br />
and imaginative responsiveness are still the<br />
main criteria by which we judge a critic, no<br />
matter what sort <strong>of</strong> hat he wears. His book,<br />
admirably edited by Robert Denham, contains<br />
a dozen addresses he made during the<br />
last decade <strong>of</strong> his life. Some highlights: Frye<br />
tells a conference on Computers and the<br />
Humanities about his total lack <strong>of</strong> competence<br />
to speak on the topic, and then proceeds<br />
to be as engaging, illuminating and<br />
provocative as he is on the book <strong>of</strong> Ruth or<br />
Blake's illustrations. In "Literature as<br />
<strong>The</strong>rapy," he conducts a brief survey <strong>of</strong><br />
medical lore in Chaucer, Shakespeare,<br />
Burton and Molière, muses about catharsis,<br />
the medical metaphor at the heart <strong>of</strong><br />
Aristotle's view <strong>of</strong> tragedy, and then goes<br />
on to suggest that literature's power to<br />
evoke "controlled hallucinations" might<br />
give it a therapeutic role to play in our hallucinatory<br />
world. His thoughts on subjects<br />
as various as eighteenth-century sensibility,<br />
Henry James's novels, lyric poetry, and the<br />
work <strong>of</strong> Harold Innis prove consistently<br />
stimulating. Frye's account <strong>of</strong> the development<br />
<strong>of</strong> Canadian literature breaks no new