R E V IE W E S S A Y Patrick O’Flaherty, The Rock Observed (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979)- x>246. $15.00 Are Newfoundlanders, as many of them like to believe, a “race apart” in the same sense in which this claim has been made for such other geographical and cultural outlanders as the Hebrideans, the Orcadians, and the Faroese? Are they the spiritual heirs of a precariously self-sufficient, obstinately inde pendent and narrowly tradition-bound way of life which, even if it has almost entirely ceased to exist as a social actuality, endures as a deeplyrooted disposition of mind and sensibility? Do they in fact still retain, in however latent or vestigal a form, something like a distinctive cultural con sciousness, a self-defining and a self-sustaining ethos which has steadily developed along its own obscure yet tenacious lines within the long historical twilight of over three hundred years of isolation, neglect, casual exploitation, and unremitting physical adversity? Given the assumption that such a distinctive cultural consciousness exists, to what extent has it succeeded in articulating itself, in finding authentic and definitive expression in the work of native-born poets, story tellers, and artists? Does it conform, at its deepest and most spontaneous levels of imaginative activity, to certain ancient pat terns of thought, feeling, and perception which, according to Claude LéviStrauss , were fundamental to the sophisticated and popular mind of Western Europe before the rise of scientific rationalism and its transformation into a predominantly bourgeois, urban, and industrial society? Is the popular Newfoundland imagination, as the later poetry of E. J. Pratt suggests, essen tially mythic, heroic, fantastical, and hyperbolic in its response to the chal lenge of elemental reality, the product of an impulse that had already found its classic expression, in the century of Cabot and Cartier and Magel lan, in the epic extravaganzas of Boiardo, Ariosto, Rabelais, and Camoens? If this is the case, can it be accounted for by the fact of Newfoundland’s protracted social, moral, and cultural isolation from the rest of the world since the period of its colonization and earliest settlement by Devonian E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , v iii, 3, September 1982 adventurers, sailors, fishermen, and peasants who were the contemporaries of Drayton, Marlowe, and Shakespeare? Is the legendary Newfoundlander of popular song and story, with his histrionic rant and his heroic roar, his macho recklessness and his salty humour, his extravagant guff and his un quenchable gusto, but a mask for mummers, a cabaret turn for the benefit of mainland trippers, or is he the spontaneous imaginative projection of a kind of self-delighting and self-mocking Elizabethan sprezzatura, of a myth which, like all myths, is the dramatic expression of the accumulated experi ence of the race? And if we penetrate to the core of this myth, do we not find there something like a Nietzschean gaya scienza, the conviction that life, when experienced in all its blind enmity, its naked, unrelenting, and terrible hardness, can only be endured if it is exuberantly affirmed — that courage, humour, and imagination, in the case of men who are daily obliged to come to terms with the elemental realities of existence, are the indispensable means of physical and spiritual survival? Although Patrick O’Flaherty’s The Rock Observed is concerned only inci dentally with such large questions, one of the many merits of his book is that it raises or provokes them within the soberly factual context of a historical survey of Newfoundland life and letters that extends from Cabot’s discovery of the island in the late fifteenth century • — that is to say, at a period when the mother country itself was undergoing an extraordinary quickening of national and cultural self-awareness — to its rediscovery in the twentieth century by native-born writers and artists. Indeed, The Rock Observed, which is as readable as it is informative, is a valuable contribution in its own right to contemporary Newfoundland literature. Though Professor O’Fla herty has some hard things to say of the work of G. W. Prowse, Newfound...
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Sep 1, 2005
Alison Nelson + 1
Open Access