Ernest Buckler: Rediscovery and Reassessment

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Despite Marta Dvorak’s statement in her last paragraph that Ernest
Buckler was considered “old-fashioned” by the 1970s, my own memory
records that The Mountain and the Valley was still regarded as a major
work within the English Departments of Canadian universities. Certainly
it ranked seventh in the once-notorious ballot at the 1978 Calgary novel
conference. Since then, however, except perhaps in the Maritimes, it
appears to have sunk out of sight. Since Buckler was a writer with style
(however one may assess that style), this seems a pity, and I was
therefore prepared to welcome Dvorak’s ambitious work of
“Rediscovery and Reassessment.”

Her devotion and exhaustive scholarship are not in question, her
familiarity with Buckler’s unpublished writings is impressive, and her
chapter on the publishing history and reception of his work should prove
invaluable for future researchers. But critical commentary demands other
qualities, and I am bound to say that I found the rest of the book
decidedly disappointing.

It is true that Buckler held an M.A. degree in philosophy and was
indisputably interested in ideas, but I fail to see the point of
translating his intellectual attitudes back into abstract philosophic
concepts when Buckler has taken such pains to ground them in material
objects and everyday experience. Similarly, though Dvorak complains that
“little attention has been paid to Buckler’s intense preoccupation
with language,” her response to this challenge consists merely of
docketing his verbal effects within the nomenclature of classical
rhetoric. There is no discussion of his writing as a developing and
cumulative process, no consideration of the all-important movement and
rhythm of his prose.

This is a book for the theorist and the aesthetician rather than for
the enthusiastic reader or the genuinely literary critic. It is written,
for the most part, in that abstract, jargon-constipated prose that is so
distressingly prevalent nowadays. A sensitive, thorough, and (yes)
firmly evaluative account of Buckler’s work and its significance
within Canadian literature is still urgently needed.