The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

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