Patterns of Isolation by John Moss, and: Vertical Man/Horizontal World by Laurence Ricou

Abstract

124 on the general acting style of Booth and refers to a recording of Booth's address to the senate in Othello; and The Shakespeare Promptbooks (Urbana and London 1965); A.C. Sprague and J.C. Trewin's Shakespeare'sPlays Today (Columbia, South Carolina 19 71); and the various volumes of The London Stage (Carbondale, 111. 1960-68). 19 Louis Marder, His Exits and His Entrances (Philadelphia 1963), p 63. 20 R.C. Bald, "Shakespeare on the Stage in Restoration Dublin," p m l a 56 (1941), 369-78. 21 Elsewhere, for example, Matteo makes no use of the material to be found in the surviving prompt books of Henry Irving, Tommaso Salvini, Edwin Booth, and Ellen Terry. alan r . young / Acadia University John Moss, Patterns of Isolation (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1974). 256. $4.95 Laurence Ricou, Vertical Man/Horizontal World (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 1973). xii, 15 1. $4.50 paper, $8.00 cloth Metaphors of space, latent in “ patterns,'' obtrusive in "vertical" and "horizon­ tal," mark the emphasis on a sense of place in two works by young Canadian critics, Laurence Ricou and John Moss. Moss and Ricou have been thoroughly reviewed in Canadian learned journals and in the public press. My intention here is to view them as part of a new and important direction of thought observable in disciplines other than literary criticism. Zoologists, such as Conrad Lorenz, have told us that territoriality is a drive in animals at least as powerful as a sexual urge; Heidegger has placed "Environmentality" in a central position in Being and Time: psychologists such as Piaget have explored the child's conception of space. Sociologists, predictably, have jargonized the anthropology of space as "proximics." From Buckminster Fuller, Howard Mumford, and others have come studies in spatiality and behaviour. Influential critics have begun a similar exploration of the use of space in literature: Bachelard expounds on the spatial qualities of words, the "poetics of space"; Eliade enumerates the geographical elements, the sacred and profane spaces, of myth. Considering this massive movement of modern thought, we should examine with interest Laurence Ricou's Vertical Man/Horizontal World, and John Moss's Patterns of Isolation. Ricou presents analysis of the way a sense of prairie space has affected our western writers, from Stead, Grove, and Ross, to Wiebe and Laurence. Moss presents a more general view of Canadian writing, categorized according to the placement of the individual in social space, as a member of a garrison, as an exile on the frontier, as a colonial, or as an immigrant. Under these headings, Moss analyses Emily Montague, Wacousta, 125 The Imperialist, The Sacrifice, and builds to a broad range of other Canadian novels. These two books of criticism, then, study the use made by creative writers of a common fact: the sense of isolation stirred in consciousness by the physical and cultural landscape of Canada. Moss discriminates three ways in which novelists have used the fact of isolation. First is the social effect of exile, of inhabiting a garrison, literal or figurative. This sets emphasis on social space, distance from native society and from wilderness. The essence of exile is the sense of being set apart socially both from "home" and from the native experience. A second group of writers focuses on psychological space. These novelists analyse the impact on the psyche of Canadian climate and land forms. The "geophysical imagination," Moss says, reflects and filters and ultimately controls and recreates the physical region. Third, novelists may concentrate on aesthetic distance: on the space between the author and his creation. Ironically, Moss says, many a Canadian author has exploited the gap between his own consciousness and that of his protagonist. This creation of aesthetic space represents a third way of using the isolate. From each of the three sections of Moss's book, there emerges a recurring stereotype. From studies of exile comes the image of the Indian lover, a paradoxical link between garrison and threatening wilderness. From psychological studies of human creativity and love in face of an immense and aggressive landscape comes the ubiquitous figure of the bastard, "correlative of geophysical and human isolation in moral conjunction." Finally, in books...