Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

as Frye and others have tried to do. A few
of these essays are devoted to determining
the difference between, and the relative
sizes of, themes and motifs, but unsurprisingly
no agreement emerges. The futility of
this quest is evident when Theodor
Wolpers says that "a motif [a word which is
sometimes synonymous with theme and
sometimes not] appears to be an operating
unit (usually of'medium size') mediating
between the larger dimensions of plot and
theme and the mass of smaller details."
This inability to determine a fundamental
unit for analysis, a function performed by
the cell in biology and the sentence in
structural linguistics, is the same failure
that ultimately undermined structuralism
and formalism. The result of the failure is
what Holger Klein calls a "combination of
rigidity and fudging" in the effort to make
"thematology" systematic.
Perkins (again) points us in the right
direction when he says that thematic comparisons
"enrich our experience in reading"
as they help us "see further implications in
the work at hand." In other words, they add
to our literary sophistication. Thus, while
thematics is a poor candidate for making
literary study a discipline and is even less
impressive theoretically than earlier efforts,
the sharpening of perception that results
from comparison and the fact that one
must read a lot in order to compare are
healthy consequences of the approach. In
his brief study of the (new-to-me) topos of
description of fading colors, Francesco
Orlando cites passages from fifteen novels
in four languages (English, French, German
and Russian). It is little wonder that multilingual
Europeans have tended to understand
themes as repeated elements across
national literatures, while New Criticism (a
largely American phenomenon) emphasized
the thematic patterns within literary
works in English.
But I let George Steiner, whose brief
lament for the decline of literary culture,
"Ronceveaux," is the final piece in the volume,
have the (almost) last and saddest
words here too:
Thematic presences are, as in music, the
instrument of economy. They 'shorthand'
the wealth and depth of adduced meaning.
A number of highly touted American
novels in 1991 exceed one thousand
pages. They are in essence empty. In an
almost macabre vein, we are now given
variations without a theme.
One may either join Steiner in his lamentation
or welcome the decline of an elitist literary
culture, but it doesn't suggest great
confidence when a book announcing the
return of thematic criticism concludes with
a eulogy for the literary culture that sustained
it.
For Marx and Derrida
Purists
Murray G. Smith
Invisible Leviathan: The Marxist Critique of
Market Despotism Beyond Postmodernism. U
Toronto Ρ $55.οο/$24.95
Rodolphe Gasché
Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida.
Harvard UP US$22.95
Reviewed by David Thomson
Attracted by the subtitle, those interested in
the debate between Marxism and postmodernism—however
one chooses to define
those unwieldy words—might be tempted
to pick up Invisible Leviathan hoping to
find a new perspective. Unfortunately, this
collection of essays in no way takes one
"beyond postmodernism": it is solidly
grounded in a philosophical and political
outlook entirely informed by an orthodox
and inflexible Marxism. Its real focus is the
controversy within economic circles over
the concept of "value," a concept Smith,
following Marx, argues is inseparable from
its concrete representation as human
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