ESC: English Studies in Canada

“ Erosion” and “The Cachalot” are almost perfect examples of the descrip­ tive, lyric, and narrative kind. But, I would agree with Leon Edel when he suggests that the biographer is in the best position to “ discover recurrent images and recurrent modes of thought,” to determine the larger patterns which dominate the whole work, and that the contribution he makes is towards a better understanding of “the vision behind the metaphor.” 3 That is certainly Pitt’s contribution: he has shown us that Pratt’s style is Pratt. His Hardyesque themes and ironic stance, his apocalyptic visions, his hyperbolic humour were part of “ the living face behind the mask.” Rightly eschewing explication, carefully avoiding the pitfalls of psychoanalysis, and avoiding the biographical fallacy (that is, constructing biography from a reading of the poetry), Pitt has concentrated on Pratt’s vision of reality and on stitch­ ing together the (often invisible) threads which bind a work of art to the “ fashioning consciousness.” And by so doing he has led us, as Sainte Beuve thought all literary study should, to a study of the human mind. NOTES 1 Frank E. Vandiver, “Biography as an Agent of Humanism,” in James F. Veninga, ed., The Biographer’s Gift (College Station, T X : Texas A & M University Press, 1983), 42 See “The New Biography” in Granite and Rainbow (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 150-523 Literary Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), 41-44. r . Go r d o n m o y l e s / University of Alberta Linda Hutcheon, Formalism and the Freudian Aesthetic: the Example of Charles Mauron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), xv, 249. n.p. Studies of literary critics are both uncommon and, normally, inaccessible. Too much changes too swiftly: critical assumptions, objectives, terminology, both the conceptual backgrounds and the polemical foregrounds, all shift with unpredictable rapidity. Even quite major critics in their own days descend, accelerating, towards the hermetic regions of Hades. Hence a scholarly study of a literary critic must possess compelling reasons for its existence (otherwise, who could possibly care?). Some few critics, Dr. Johnson, say, or Barthes, may carry sufficient interest through the continued force of their writing, the strength and refinement of their assertions, to justify close attention long after the contexts of their criticism have become obscured. Other critics may be of interest because they belonged to literary 49i movements that have neither entirely lost their original panache nor their power to attract adherents. A very few may command reappraisal because the difficulties they experienced in writing criticism, the dilemmas that they faced, the contradictions they embraced or even the confusions they propogated , seem to reflect the larger intellectual patterns of the times in which they lived. Linda Hutcheon’s Formalism and the Freudian Aesthetic: the Example of Charles Mauron clearly locates its rationale in the third cate­ gory (Mauron’s criticism reflects his times), and to a lesser extent in the second (Bloomsbury, literary formalism and psychoanalysis), but it is a measure of its many strengths, its lucidity and its scholarship, that it moves some way toward the first category. Mauron emerges from Hutcheon’s study as an interesting figure in his own right, a critic whom it might make sense, the crowded projects of academic life notwithstanding, to read. Hutcheon consistently follows the directive implied in her title: Mauron is an example of many, if not all, twentieth-century tensions. Educated as a scientist (he was a chemical engineer), he was introduced into the circle of Bloomsbury intellectuals through a chance meeting with Roger Fry, developed an interest in art and literature, adapted Fry’s formalism to his own uses, translated English writers (especially E. M. Forster), wrote poetry, and became interested in psychoanalysis. Finally, trying always to develop an adequate basis for criticism, Mauron devised a critical model, at once psychological in assumptions and formal in methods, that promised wide, if difficult, applications: psychocritique. In giving her account of the distinct movements in Mauron’s life, Hutcheon argues that certain impor­ tant events, each characterized by contextual entailments, played decisive roles in the formation of his criticism. Thus the fact that he was educated in science rather than philosophy and literature, as would...