Formal Coherence Research Articles

Trusting the Quintuplet Senses: Time and Form in The Temptations of Big Bear

T R U S T I N G T H E Q U I N T U P L E T S E N S E S : T I M E A N D F O R M I N T H E T E M P T A T I O N S O F B I G B E A R RO BERT L E C K E R M cGill University L n The Temptations of Big Bear we feel the tremendous impact made on Rudy Wiebe by confronting a historical culture at odds with contemporary life. His passionate attempt to recreate the meaning of another time merges with his overpowering desire to recreate the essence of another place. Wiebe’s method of finding history is frequently to use documentation which possesses the flavour of the moment. By reproducing actual transcripts, reports, letters, and diary entries he creates, in part, a “found novel” which is often episto­ lary in form. However, Wiebe only uses the documentary mode as a struc­ tural device in connection with the White Men who stand opposed to the Crees in this novel about a vanishing native lifestyle. The Indians’ point of view, on the other hand, is conveyed through an emphasis on timeless mythi­ cal structures and images of transcendental awareness. It is because the vision of eternal time with which the Indians are identified collapses that Big Bear is a tragedy, and Wiebe’s method of rendering that tragedy provides the novel with its formal coherence. To understand the conflict of temporal viewpoints which leads to Big Bear’s downfall we first have to examine Wiebe’s approach to the idea of recording history. He believes that historical fiction involves more than an objective faithfulness to the events and facts of time past. For Wiebe, tem­ poral awareness calls for vivified facts as well as vision, and his novel stands as the strongest expression of his sense that the telling of history can never be simply an impartial recounting, but must be a blend of documentary pre­ sentation and subjective creation as well. It is not surprising that given his intensely Christian upbringing Wiebe should refer to Teilhard de Chardin’s words about the difficulty of creating historical fiction: “We are continually inclined to isolate ourselves from the things and events which surround us . . . as though we were spectators, not elements, in what goes on.” 1 These are among the first lines Wiebe quotes in a story significantly entitled “ Where Is the Voice Coming From?” In that story, the narrator attempts to uncover objectively the facts connected with an Indian legend in much the E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , v iii, 3, September 1982 same way as Wiebe relentlessly pursued the historical documents connected with Big Bear’s life. Ultimately the narrator finds that despite the most rigid application of impersonal investigation, the elements of the story have now run me aground. If ever I could, I can no longer pretend to objective, omnipotent disinterestedness. I am no longer spectator of what has happened or what may happen: I am become element in what is happening at this very moment.2 Like this narrator, Wiebe moves away from a single rendition of any story: he becomes subjectively involved in the multi-faceted possibilities offered by the storytelling process. Wiebe’s own view of time, then, is in­ formed by two basic impulses: on the one hand, he is drawn toward empiri­ cal verification of the facts which are so vividly incorporated into his fiction; on the other hand, the same facts lead him into an imagined realm of spiritual history in which the rendering of time past becomes a function of the way Wiebe comes to participate subjectively in the story which emerges from the data he has collected. In “ On the Trail of Big Bear” — a docu­ ment which deals particularly with the historical research involved in creat­ ing Big Bear — Wiebe describes how, as a storyteller, he felt the need to explore history through the senses as well as through scientific forms of enquiry. He...

Regal Hunting: Dryden's Influence on Windsor-Forest

JVINDSOR-FOREST has long been recognized as Pope's youthful attempt at Virgilian georgic as adapted by Denham and the topographical tradition. Johnson first generally noted the poem's debt to Cooper's Hill, and Earl Wasserman, in his detailed analysis of the political manifestations of locodescriptive poetry, has examined the poem's structural as well as verbal parallels to its seventeenth-century model.' Other critics, most notably E. Audra and Aubrey Williams, Reuben Brower, and John Chalker, emphasize the direct georgic influence on WindsorForest, particularly in Pope's praise of country retirement, the deification of Anne, the panegyric catalogues of kings and poets, and the Augustan prophecy of a second Golden Age. 2 In addition, David Morris has argued that WindsorForest not only relies on the georgic for formal coherence, but actually embodies the Virgilian spirit in recognizing the fragility of national grandeur and civilization. 3 Pope himself seems to have invited such generic studies by echoing in the last line of WindsorForest the first line of his Spring Pastoral just as Virgil echoed in the last line of the fourth Georgic the first line of his Eclogues. But if WindsorForest assimilates the general structure and motifs of the georgic, it is also a poem firmly rooted in and shaped by a specific

Strindberg’s Historical Imagination: Erik XIV

At the end of the nineteenth century to study history still to believe that the historian's highest commitment to Truth, and that invariably the right historical method would disclose the formal coherence of man's life in time. To be sure, by the 1890's methods of attaining truth and discovering universal principles of order were anything but uniform. Positivists like Ranke, Comte, Marx, and Mill argued that history merely another branch of natural science and that the past should be studied from a sound basis of experimentally verifiable laws. For Idealists like Hegel, Croce, and Dilthey, on the other hand, history a human not a mathematical science, and thus the historian had to get inside the past, to write history in Leopold von Ranke's term it actually was by reliving or rethinking what happened and why. Still, no matter what differences in methodology or philosophy existed, nineteenth-century European historical thought represented an effort to constitute history as the ground for a 'realistic' science of man, society, and culture;! almost without exception men accepted that history proceeding in a more-or-less coherent direction toward some teleology, and that historical events could be made to yield their ultimate meaning. Strindberg's position at century's end made it possible for him to know all the important developments of nineteenth-century historiography. Indeed, he remarkably well read in history, an interest he maintained right up to his final years.2 Early in his life Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization in England had made a profound impression upon Strindberg

The Genesis, Composition, and Structure of The Confidence-Man

Research Article| March 01 1973 The Genesis, Composition, and Structure of The Confidence-Man Watson G. Branch Watson G. Branch Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1973) 27 (4): 424–448. https://doi.org/10.2307/2933518 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Watson G. Branch; The Genesis, Composition, and Structure of The Confidence-Man. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 1 March 1973; 27 (4): 424–448. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2933518 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1973 By The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Remarks on the psychology of art

The author presents some demonstrations of the deforming and constructive nature of the artistic figurative process and of the knowledge about this process held by artists and non artists; she shows further the effects, in works of art, of different framings destined to accentuate the dynamic values and to produce the formal coherence wanted by the artists.