Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
former suggestive, the latter as much as
anyone will probably need.
While thematic statements are inseparable
from the serious discussion of literary
works, the study of recurrent themes as a
formal academic enterprise is primarily a
comparativist and European phenomenon.
Menachem Brinker nicely captures the
function of the former: "[A theme] unifies
a large or conspicuous or important portion
of these components [of a literary
work] relative to a specific descriptive
interpretation of the work's 'world' and
language"; in other words this use of
themes is clearly heuristic, a quick way to
refer to "topics a text is built to make us
care about." If I say that one of the main
themes of naturalist fiction is the impotence
of the individual will, I have used
"theme" in this well-understood and widely
used sense. However, The Return of
Thematic Criticism is not concerned with
this garden-variety meaning, but more
recondite issues.
Thematics is based on the fact that literature
exhibits, or perhaps is even constituted
by, repetition and variation. Writers tell
their tales as variations of common stories
and they build their works from various
sorts of elements smaller than plots. One
thus finds essays here on stories that are
retold (Parzifal), character types (the bachelor),
and topoi ("autumn poems" and "the
metamorphosis of colors"). One can do
many things with this intertextual repetition
( znrratextual repetition is the basis of,
inter alia, New Criticism, thus its primary
focus on poetry), but a dominant pattern
emerges. One isolates the recurring element,
and then asks for the implications of
the similarity or the differences. The
emphasis on similarity leads to efforts such
as Northrop Frye's to create a universal thematic
typology, and a number of essays
here pursue that line, not very helpfully in
my view. The emphasis on difference leads
one to ask: what are the implications of
telling it this way rather than that? There
are many sorts of answers depending on
whether one's interests are psychological,
sociological, cultural, artistic, etc., and
these inquiries are usually more illuminating
than the more theoretical studies. Lynn
Wardley's account of the social implications
of the bachelor figure in late nineteenth-century
fiction and Theodore
Ziolkowski's discussion of Wagner's libretto
for Parsifal are good examples of the genre.
The title of the collection, which suggests
an unjust exile, indicates its agenda. It is
meant to signal a turn away from a concern
with form and structure in favour of, to put
it crudely, content. Thus, in a brief section
called "Short Takes," the editor extracts a
passage from Leslie Fiedler's Love and
Death in the American Novel that begins: "I
have never had any doubt that all literature
is about something." Despite this passage
and similar testimonials in other essays,
thematics or thematology or Stoffgeschichte
(the German term of art for the historical
version of the enterprise), there are only
sporadic explications of what works say
about what they are about. The works are
taken as objects of study not sources of
insight, in just the way that all efforts at
systematic literary study do.
The most illuminating theoretical essay is
David Perkins' critique of thematics as a
basis for literary history or a literary science,
which it is the aim of many of these
essays to adumbrate. In thematic literary
history, Perkins notes, the "hero is a theme
rather than a genre, period, national
'mind,' and so on," but
There is no possibility of explaining all
thematic recurrence by one theory unless
there can be agreement as to what can
count as a "theme" and what cannot.
This fertile conceptual chaos, in which
anyone can call anything a "theme," also
makes quixotic the various attempts that
have been made ... to define a canon of
themes.
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