Arts and Literature in Canada:Views from Abroad, Les arts et la ...

IJCS/RIÉClandscape as in Ross' “The Walk”: there is no pronoun in the whole poem thatwould personalize its focalizing agent and thus evoke the impression of thepersona's physicality. The focalizer of this poem is a mind only, and his eye amind-eye liberated from the logic of physical movement. This freedom ofseeing, with its floating viewpoint, has a dream-like quality which correspondsto the landscape's lack of topographical concreteness: the prominent use ofplurals (sunsets, moons, crests, surfs ...) deprives the landscape of specificityand enhances the impression that the poem presents a vision rather than afaithful description of landscape. Expressions like “shadowy, ghost-likeshores” and “lands that loom like spectres” are even clearer indicators that thewinter lakes in Campbell's poem are a mindscape not “painted” from nature. Afixed perspective would mar this effect by providing an inappropriate sense ofvisual concreteness.A “destruction of the perspective scheme” (Claudio Guillén 1971: 360f.)becomes a major aesthetic effect in the modern period, in painting as well asliterature. According to Marshall McLuhan, modern art “reverses thedevelopment of perspective”:Whereas in the Renaissance it was the encounter with the newpictorial or visual space that created discomfort and dismay, thereverse is true in our time. It is the rediscovery of nonvisual,multisensuous spaces that bothers and confuses us. (McLuhan/Parker 1968: §28)Verbal art is better suited than visual art to capture this “nonvisual,multisensuous” experience and also to thematize the breakdown of establishedperceptual modes. In Canadian landscape poetry, the modern trend towardsaperspectivism 15 also has a national facet — the experience of living in acountry that seems too vast and empty to be grasped in either visual orconceptual terms.McLuhan in the quotation above contrasts modern aperspectivism with aspecific notion of perspective in the history of Western art: that of theRenaissance. It is perspective in this sense which also underlies many modernCanadian landscape poems.This is particularly obvious in Margaret Avison's “Perspective” (1940), wherea double reference to Andrea Mantegna makes it clear to which kind ofperspective the poem's title alludes. Italian painters of the 15th century“invented” a perspective scheme constructed on the grounds of projectivegeometry. 16 The picture plane is envisaged as an intersection of the visualpyramid whose point is constituted by the human eye; lines that go into thepicture's depth converge on a single vanishing point. According to thisscheme, space is fully comprehensible and constructible by the human mind.In a very literal sense, the human subject becomes the measure of the objectiveworld.18