Time, Literature and the Arts: Essays in Honor of Samuel L. Macey ed. by Thomas R. Cleary

Abstract

is unexcelled, and does not diminish. But it is only a vision” (361). I’d not have said “only.” Finally, there is a useful Appendix about Aristotle’s world, which delineates the main differences between it and the two that have followed: the medieval one (the product of a divine plan) and the modern one (the field of unpredictable and open-ended change). Taking Life Seriously has to be one of the most maturely thought, well written, and, for all serious readers of Aristotle, fundamentally useful intel­ lectual products so far published by the University of Toronto Press. alvin a . lee / McMaster University Thomas R. Cleary, ed., Time, Literature and the Arts: Essays in Honor of Samuel L. Macey (Victoria: ELS Monograph Series, 1994). 216. $10.50 paper. It is rare and refreshing to have published in a literary studies series a collec­ tion of scholarly essays on subjects as various as music, painting, pregnancy, time, Italian literature, and menopause. The editor of this volume reports that Samuel Macey, the founding editor of the English Literary Studies se­ ries, of which Time, Literature and the Arts is the 61st publication, is no narrow academic but a scholar professionally much interested in a broad range of subjects. A Macey bibliography is given. “Shakespeare in German,” “Clocks and Chronology in the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” “Hogarth and the Iconography of Time,” “The Persona in A Modest Proposal,” “Time: A Bibliographic Guide” are five titles, chosen at random, of works by Macey published between 1968 and 1994. Clearly, Macey is not a dilettante. This volume has the virtue of variety. Defoe, Thackeray, Tennyson, Dante, Austen, Petrarch, Wollstonecraft, Boswell and Johnson, Hogarth, Reynolds, Purcell, Newton, Sterne are given more than cursory glances. At the same time, the volume as a whole is, unfortunately, neither as interesting nor as useful as it might be. That is because too many of its authors do not write persuasively. There are twelve separate pieces here, one of them the editor’s salute to Macey. A generous reader will find that only three of the twelve are crisp, lively, bright, readable: by any definition, interesting. This subject of “interesting” with reference to academic criticism is a contentious one. Some literary critics, desirous of being thought of as whitesmocked , make a conscious effort to be monotone and humourless. “If it’s boring, it’s bad” is for them an unacceptable dictum. Teaching, learning, and research are by their very nature, they feel, unrelieved hard-slogging; and already on their way toward beatification because of their willingness to toil, as opposed to work, some scholars see no need to try, even, to be 345 attractive. Thus we have sentences like the following (by Robert James Merrett in his essay on pictorialism in eighteenth-century fiction): Since tensions between imitation and displacement inescapably belong to pictorial allusiveness, reflexivity in the works of Hogarth and Reynolds must have trained viewers both to relate spatial and temporal meaning in paintings and to sense the juncture of pictorial and narrative mediation. The book opens unhappily with the editor’s “Perspective” on Samuel Macey: “Golden indeed is an opportunity to honor . . . ” he begins; and toward the end he lowers into position the inevitable cliché: “Sam really did not retire in 1987. He merely changed gears — upward, I would suggest.” He goes on to report, predictably, that editing this book “has been a pleasure and a privilege.” Lewis Rowell’s “Eighteenth-Century Musical Openings” (“the beginnings of musical works have something in common with the be­ ginnings of literary works . . . ” : a promising subject) is deadened, after a few pages, by its author’s ponderous prose: Diacritic tactics in the music of the baroque appear in the form of simulta­ neous oppositions, including oppositions of range (high/low), instruments, motion, rhythm, actorial roles, and many other things. In music of the classical era, diacritic opening tactics involve successive oppositions in a number of musical domains, of which some result injuxtapositions (of the­ matic character, of harmony, of orchestration) that would have violated the prevailing homogeneity of ... Moreover, Rowell in fact gives literary works very little of his attention. But any book, consensus has it, is to be judged on...