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A SCHEME IS NOT a VISION Stephen Scobie

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A SCHEME IS NOT a VISION Stephen Scobie A SCHEME IS NOT A VISION Stephen Scobie DENNIS LEE, Savage Fields: An Essay in Literature and Cosmology. Anansi, $12.95; paper $5.95. MY INITIAL, and somewhat Lee begins by setting up an image of frivolous, reaction to Dennis Lee's Savage "two fluctuating fields of force," which he Fields: An Essay in Literature and Cos- calls "world" and "earth." This dich- mology was to see it as a kind of "Son of otomy corresponds only roughly to what Survival." It has the same Anansi format, we traditionally call "civilization" and lots of short chapters with snappy titles, "nature": Lee is at great pains to insist little rows of asterisks between every sec- that "world" and "earth" are continually ond paragraph, all the trappings of pop interacting and indeed co-extensive with philosophy and an Instant Theory: just each other. The image of two overlapping add hot air and stir. fields of force allows him to escape the This flippancy is unfair, for both At- static image of two separate entities. (It wood and Lee are serious writers with is interesting to note that when a literary serious things to say: but the comparison critic these days wants a really authorita- does nevertheless point to similarities in tive image, he turns to science, especially both the strengths and the weakneses of to physics. ) the two books. Both of them make excit- The image of the fields is an attractive ing reading: they are original, contro- one, and in many ways a useful one. With versial, and thought-provoking. Taking its affinity to the Structuralist emphasis the trouble to disagree with Atwood or on relations between things rather than Lee is a more worthwhile critical activity on things themselves, it offers a possible than nodding along with the bland ban- model for the analysis of so-called "post- alities of many other critics. modernist" writing, which is an art of But Survival and Savage Fields share process rather than of product. the same faults too. Both of them present One wonders immediately, however, a Theory, or a System, which is so simul- about the exclusive nature of the image. taneously overgeneralized and oversimpli- Why only these two fields, "world" and fied that its value, even as a provisional "earth"? Couldn't the model of the fields theoretical construct, is severely compro- of force be applied in many other ways, mised. (Lee's introductory chapter at- to avoid, for instance, the heretical divi- tempts to outline a total cosmology and sion of "form" and "content" into sep- philosophical world-view in a mere nine arate categories? pages!) And both of them, despite re- And, much more seriously, why "sav- peated protestations to the contrary, twist age" fields? For Lee, the essential char- and distort their literary evidence to make acter of the interaction of these two fields it fit into the categories their theories is conflict. "The first fact of life is that have established. the beings which make up world and 53 REVIEW ARTICLES those which make up earth are engaged tive force. Thus there is no distinction, in in war against each other." " 'To be' is to Lee's system, between a man who chops be in strife." Here Lee seems to have been down a tree to build a fire to save his wife carried away by the cuteness of his own and children from freezing, a man who title. Indeed, he admits late in the book chops down a tree to make money and that "I knew the title before I knew what doesn't give a damn about what he's do- the title meant." The word "savage" ing to the environment, and a man who (which, unlike "fields," is not at all scien- chops down a tree to get wood for a violin. tific or objective) determined from the Lee's system would force us to see all start the nature of the fields that Lee three as aspects of "world," and as would see. This initial and fatal precon- "strife," "assault" against "earth." Such ception is, I believe, the fundamental mis- a conclusion is manifestly absurd. conception of the whole book. As a general philosophical theory, then, It would obviously be futile to deny Savage Fields seems to me to be simplis- that the world as we know it contains a tic, contradictory, and inadequate. But vast amount of strife, violence, destruc- one might be prepared to adjust to the tion, and agony. But to declare that such shortcomings of the system if it were to strife is the only reality, that it is the fac- provide a framework and a vocabulary tor which determines all other factors of for an accurate account of two such human experience, is an act of such seminal and difficult books as The Col- extreme pessimism that it, in effect, lected Works of Billy the Kid and Beauti- throws in the towel at the start of round ful Losers. Although Lee says that his one. No wonder Lee's vision leads only to book is "only incidentally a work of liter- "destructive madness, lobotomy, and sui- ary criticism," it is nevertheless on the cide" : his initial assumption surrenders to strength and accuracy of that criticism such nihilism without even a show of that it must ultimately stand or fall. resistance. In my view, it falls. Lee's accounts of Although the destruction which Lee Ondaatje and Cohen contain some bril- sees as the ultimate consequence of his liant insights, and many individual re- world-view ought, theoretically, to ema- marks which illuminate moments in the nate as much from "earth" as from texts —• but in each case, the general drift "world," in fact he sees it mainly in terms of the argument is, I believe, a distortion of the latter — mainly, that is, in terms of the book that is actually there in front of human consciousness. From one point of him, misreadings so fundamental that of view, Savage Fields is an attempt to their value as any kind of evidence in provide a philosophical justification for support of Lee's more general claims is the ecological movement: man is, by de- nil. finition, a polluter. In Lee, we see the Lee sees The Collected Works of Billy Puritan guilty conscience of a disillu- the Kid as a book whose "subject... is the sioned liberal run wild: not far beneath strife of world and earth," and he sees the aphoristic surface is a good old- Billy as "an instrument of murder, a citi- fashioned breast-beating hysteria. zen of world." It is certainly true that the In theory, the system of Savage Fields book is about violence, and many of Lee's is amoral : earth earths and world worlds, comments on the ways in which violence and that's all there is to it. But, as I have suffuses the most seemingly innocent suggested, the moral bias of the book in images are excellent. But his view of Billy practice is very much against "world." as the chief exponent and illustration of Human consciousness is seen as a destruc- the destructive nature of "world" leads 54 REVIEW ARTICLES him into an almost ludicrous distortion recollection of Charlie Bowdre's death, of the character Ondaatje presents. coupled to the image of the "headless At one point, Lee says of Billy, "That hen": and just two pages later we en- is why he murders so casually, almost counter the chicken in "After shooting absent-mindedly, out of the periphery of Gregory." In this latter poem Billy does, his vision." Like "savage fields," it's a fine for the one and only time in the book, try phrase; the only thing wrong is that it's to be the kind of killer Lee says he is —• not true. At no stage in the book is there and he can't do it. He "was about to walk an incident in which Billy kills in this away / when this chicken" bizarrely and way. In fact, it is almost a commonplace comically prevents him. Given the asso- of Ondaatje criticism to point out that ciation of the chicken with Billy's memory Billy throughout the book is seen as vic- of Charlie Bowdre's death, we can surely tim, not killer. All the major killings in conclude that it is a fundamental element the book — Tom O'Folliard, Charlie within Billy's own character which is pre- Bowdre, Billy himself — are perpetrated venting him from adopting "the moral of by Pat Garrett. The closest Billy comes to newspaper and gun." Lee's version of the being a cold-blooded killer is his shooting character may be true of the legendary of the cat Ferns : an act of mercy killing, Billy, the black-hearted villain of melo- performed at the request of Sally Chisum, dramatic fiction : but it bears no relation and conducted, not casually, not absent- at all to what Ondaatje's poetry says. mindedly, not out of the periphery of The second point is that, while Billy vision, but with intense awareness and does not and cannot act in this mechan- concentration. istic and cold-blooded way, he does never- Lee's argument for Billy as the per- theless understand it, and is fascinated by sonification of destructive "world" is it. He may watch "the stomach of clocks" based on the poem about "the moral of for hours, but he emerges "living." This newspapers or gun." Lee says that "Billy fascination is natural enough: Billy has kills by adopting" that ethos, and "Be- to know his enemy, and the character cause Billy embraces that ideology, he who does fulfill all the attributes which can 'walk off' nonchalantly as the bodies Lee mistakenly gives to Billy is, of course, he has shot writhe and die." This is just Pat Garrett.
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