The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay by Graham Good

Abstract

ing. The animal tale may well point to the difference between man and animal, but Adams seems quite enchanted by his fantasy about fulfilled does and heroic rabbits. Similarly Gose seems enchanted by Adams and occasionally overstates the obvious, e.g., that Adams meant to write a modern epic or that his “imagi­ nation was obviously fully engaged by this episode.” In his conclusion Gose cites the theme of integration, the connection be­ tween self-realization and social harmony. Reviewing the books he has examined in relation to this theme as well as themes of appetite and darkness, he acknowledges that Dorothy does not have quite the same story and explains this as “the disparity between [Baum’s] imagination and that of Kipling, Hoban, Adams, and Tolkien.” To “the reader” Dorothy’s situation is not “particularly threatening” and therefore not as compelling as the other tales. Gose concludes with a comparison of the hero and heroine that demands fur­ ther cultural analysis. If “the hero who opens himself to the destructive ex­ perience that the dragon represents gains more than the heroine who mainly depends on her helpful animal,” shouldn’t we ask both why the heroine is denied the experience of nothingness and why we continue to insist that the male pattern is the ultimate literary pattern? To conclude that these “fictional tales . . . embody psychic truths” is to assume that the psyche is male, an assumption that this mere creature very much questions. adrienne kertzer / University of Calgary Graham Good, The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1988). xv, 208. $67.00 cloth; $17.95 PaPer Graham Good’s aims in The Observing Self are clearly set out in his book’s subtitle and preface and are reiterated throughout his volume’s ten chapters. Good contributes to “Rediscovering the Essay” by offering his readers “a study of the essay as a literary form, first through an ‘historico-philosophical’ intro­ duction, and second, through a set of eight chapters devoted to individual essayists” (vii). He underscores his indebtedness to Georg Lukács and Theo­ dor Adorno, two of this century’s foremost theorists of the essay, and sets as his goal “to renew interest in the essay as a form” (ix). He further seeks to discover the ways a wide range of essayists — Bacon, Johnson, Hazlitt, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and George Orwell — “realize the different potentials of the form of writing first tried, or ‘essayed,’ by Mon­ taigne” (viii). He insists he is not seeking “to create a ‘great tradition’ of essayists” and readily admits that his choices derive “partly from interest. . . 356 [and] partly from a sense that they represent a range of uses as well as historical phases of the form . . (ix). What Good neglects to suggest in the preface but what his text certainly invites is a reading in any of a number of ways. The Observing Self, for the most part, can be approached as a long essay, as a set of short, interconnected essays, or as ten individual essays. It serves readers with primary interests as varied as literary history, theory, genre studies, stylistic analysis, and, obviously, any of the eight essayists specifically discussed.1 The book is most welcome to those who share Good’s convictions that the essay for too long has “remained the ‘invisible’ genre in literature, commonly used but rarely analyzed in itself” ; and that essays erroneously have been “seen somehow as adjuncts to ‘major’ genres or ideas, not as works in them­ selves” (ix, vii). Throughout, Good remains adamant about the “need to study essays in their own terms” (90). Not surprisingly, Good’s work shares many affinities with those writers whom he chooses to discuss. He calls the works of Adorno and Lukács, for example, “meta-essays” because these writers can be described as “demon­ strating or enacting the form while commenting on it” (24). The Observing Self accomplishes no less. He cites Woolf for recognizing and rescuing “[n]eglected figures and neglected genres” (125) and admires Orwell’s persistent “desire to point out things that everyone else seems to be ignoring” (173) and joins in both of these endeavours. He...