ESC: English Studies in Canada

of “ psychogeography.” Paradoxically, although the critic may recognize its importance, there is a critical problem in how to approach the poem. Exactly what makes it important? Labrie maintains that the poem has “thematic unity,” incorporating such themes as “ the Cain/Abel motif, the symbol of the funnel house, and the figure of Ulysses.” On the formal level, Labrie views the work as a mixture of lyric and epic. Of course, his com­ mentary goes much further than these simple statements. Yet this reader wonders how far traditional techniques can take us in appreciating the poem — whether, in fact, a main purpose of the poem is to undermine such tech­ niques. Is the predominantly fragmentary style counter-thematic, does the “ broken” language challenge lyrical impact (do many people really “enjoy” reading the poem?), do the snippets of historical record mixed up with personal “dream language” detract from rather than promote epic form? Labrie’s closing comment in the chapter on Merton as poet may give the clue to the poem’s importance: Merton “had finally come to feel that the poet and contemplative in him were one.” Language and silence come together in a strange union in which the modem suffocation of the spirit is both expressed and dispelled; the poem in this sense is a sort of prologomena to a new viewpoint or vision for Western man. It is noteworthy that Merton finished the work, as we have it, before his Asian — and final — journey. e r n e s t g r if f in / York University Stanley S. Atherton, Alan Sillitoe: A Critical Assessment (London: W. H. Allen, 1979). 215. £7.50 This is a peculiar book about a peculiar author. The author, Alan Sillitoe, is peculiar because he has survived his own historical moment. Sillitoe’s first two books, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959), were fresh and convincing depictions of working-class life in Nottingham. They contributed to the redirection of British literature in the fifties — an impact magnified by the excellent “Angry” films made of each (Sillitoe himself, by the way, wrote the screen­ play for both films). Since that date, however, Sillitoe has fallen into obscurity; unlike, say, David Storey, he has not continued to produce striking work that keeps him at the centre of the British literary scene. His is not the obscurity of near-silence (like William Golding), nor the obscurity brought on by recantation (Kingsley Amis), nor that of self-repetition (Iris Murdoch). Sillitoe has produced a bookshelf of increasingly ambitious books: travel books, books of poetry and short stories, but especially novels. All of 388 them depart from Nottingham and realism for politics and rhetoric; all are virtually unread, and just about as unreadable. Atherton’s study, published by Sillitoe’s own publisher, W. H. Allen, is also peculiar. He decides, wisely, to concentrate on the early fiction that made Sillitoe famous. But he chooses, more strangely, not to study the novels in themselves, but to approach these texts from a variety of contexts. There is thus a chapter devoted to the literary revolution of the fifties, one on Sillioe’s biography, another on Sillitoe’s views on the novel and its function (views summarized as “ simplistic” ), a chapter on the physical conditions of working-class life and another on the attitudes engendered by that life, a chapter on the reviewers’ response to the early fiction, and finally, two chap­ ters summarizing Sillitoe’s work since his early phase. Atherton employs this method because he takes the novels as read: their realism gives the novels their authenticity, and this authenticity is used as a vehicle of social protest. The novels themselves are thus discussed only in bits and pieces and as information: there is no critical assessment, as the title promises, of them as organized and complex works of art, no attempt to account for their struc­ ture or symbolism, not even any admission that the novels both present and ironically qualify the protagonist’s rebellious activism. Arthur Seaton of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, for instance, though he does not cease from mental fight, ends up abjectly defeated by “ Sunday...