ESC: English Studies in Canada

“ . . . full of imaginative detail, a careful use of images, and control over varied moods and stances. Even the music is fuller, richer, more expressive” (p. 163). In spite of himself again, our loving, hopeful, partial critic has made it clear that the rebirth of the poet is not complete after all. The great quality of Stephen Scobie’s book is its optimism; it is both admiring and objective, as if he were determined to make a worthwhile thinker more accessible. Leonard Cohen makes clear, as never before, the connecting themes and continuous evolution of all of Cohen’s work. Scobie’s enthusiasm for his subject carries the reader along in a way that goes beyond reason and yet remains reasonable. Cohen’s furthest excursions into absurdity do not distract or confuse him as he translates the inversions and interprets the excesses. If Leonard Cohen is the supreme narcissist who cannot even leave the charting of his dissolution to others, then Scobie has rescued him. NOTES 1 Leonard Cohen really belongs to the Beat generation and they should know how to respond to him, but their reaction to Layton seems, in its way, to be as equivocal as that of staider critics. 2 The Energy of Slaves, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, and Death of a Ladies’ Man are dealt with in a final chapter entitled “ Postscripts and Preludes.” ju d it h c o w a n / Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières Robert M. MacLean, Narcissus and the Voyeur: Three Books and Two Films (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1979). xi, 239. $33.00 This is a complex, closely argued, often convoluted, and sometimes infuriat­ ing book, but one that probably deserves more attention than it may receive. Robert MacLean, who wrote an earlier version of this study as a doctoral thesis at McGill and is now in the communication department at the University of Ottawa, is one of the people in our profession on the frontiers of inquiry, in semiotics and film study as well as literary criticism. It takes some frontiersmanship in the reader to follow him into some of the obscurer reaches of his thought. The book is itself part of a series in Approaches to Semiotics which, the editors state, “ embraces studies in the humanities, the social and behavioural sciences, and the life sciences which deal with signification and interpreta­ tion in, or communication and interaction among and between, human be­ ings and the speechless creatures.” That’s a pretty large embrace, of which MacLean has taken full advantage. His work discusses the philosophy of John Locke in relation to Melville’s Moby-Dick and Antonioni’s The Pas­ 382 senger, the early thought of I. A. Richards in relation to James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and phases of Wittgenstein’s philosophy in relation to William Burrough’s Naked Lunch and Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville . There are considerable side excursions into the other books and films by these artists, and into the work of Poe, Hawthorne, the pragmatic philos­ ophers, and other writers and film-makers. MacLean’s central argument is that the three books and two films to which he devotes most of his space share an empirical point of view, and that they are all reports and at the same time self-reflexive comments on the nature of reporting. His method is to proceed by a largely new-critical analysis of the texts, with little reference to the historical or biographical context of the book or film. He largely eschews critical generalization, and embeds his argument in synchronic analysis. The works, then, are treated as documents in relation to prevailing ideas, with some attempt to show that the novelists and film-makers had at least some knowledge of the sources of these ideas. MacLean does not fall into the Germanic trap of the Weltaanschaung . MacLean claims that, with one exception, these works have not been sub­ jected to an analysis that explores the implications of an empirical stance. That exception is an article by R. G. Peterson, “A picture is a fact: Wittgen­ stein and The Naked Lunch.” He is therefore blazing many new trails, with­ out...