`To Disinter and Re-present the World'

Eric Ormsby has again proven his reliability as a critic. I finally ordered a copy of his prose collection, Facsimiles of Time: Essays on Poetry and Translation. Included is a review of Bedrock (1993), by David Solway, a fellow Canadian poet. In a throwaway sentence, Ormsby mentions “Solway’s prose masterpiece The Anatomy of Arcadia.” The prose of poets always interests me, and Ormsby’s judgments never fail me, so I ordered the book through inter-library loan at my university library. I placed the order Monday and the book arrived Thursday – from Washington State University, in Pullman, Wash. An obscure volume traveled half a continent in three days so I could read it – a triumph of technology, intellectual freedom and good will.

Solway is a lover of Greece, ancient and modern, and has lived there for much of his life, a fact I already knew from having read his most recent volume, The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity. In it, Solway recalls how he learned of the Sept. 11 attacks from a television report in a café in Greece. The Anatomy of Arcadia (1992) describes the year (1983) he and his family lived on Paxos, an island in the Ionian Sea near Corfu. On one level, it’s a travel book, but a very self-conscious travel book that anatomizes the notions of travel and tourism. In the preface, referring to Daniel Boorstin’s The Image, Solway writes:

“Boorstin notes that the word `travel’ is related to `travail’ (`work’ in French and `torment’ in English) and derives from the Latin `trepalium,’ a three-staked instrument of torture. Thus the traveller is active, he takes risks, endures discomfort, is ready to improvise, anticipates shock and disappointment but is also capable of genuine exaltation. The word `tourism’ comes from the Latin `torus,’ which itself derives from a Greek word for a tool describing a circle. Accordingly, the tourist is passive, he expects interesting things to happen to him without a risk or effort, and remains comfortably ensconced in his privileged circle of prefabricated, Bowdlerized event.”

Already you can see Solway’s book is infinitely bigger and more elastic than, say, a Fodor’s travel guide. Solway stuffs into its brief discursive sections anything that catches his broad-minded fancy – Greek folkways, birds, poetry, etymology, family life, you name it. A paragraph that starts like this:

“It is no longer possible to let oneself go in an orgy of aesthetic admiration, in exaltations of tourist rapture.”

and after a pleasant digression into the ornithological abundance on Paxos, concludes like this:

“Rhapsody is cheap and sentimental, the privilege of the lunatic, the lover and the tourist. If death is the mother of beauty, as Wallace Stevens writes, it is also the sister of recollection and the wife of a belated realism.”

The title suggests Solway’s subject and his manner of addressing it. His theme is the persistence of Arcadia in the Western mind, as refuge and memento mori. We all know the cautionary reminder Et in Arcadia ego – a theme broad and rich enough to let Solway follow the example set by Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Solway is no less scholarly, playful and linguistically gifted than his 17th-century precursor. In this digression, Solway gives it all away:

“The great writer is the one who can bring off the swindle without his reader feeling cheated or abused. But to reproduce the world in its approximate shape, allowing for the inevitable warp of subjectivity, to disinter and re-present the world we have buried under our congenial and explanatory fictions, is also a plenary act of the imagination, which is to say, an act of motiveless love. One has to assume, at any rate, that the world is at least as interesting as oneself, and this is, perhaps, the supreme achievement of the imagination.”

Ormsby was not exaggerating. Solway has created a sadly overlooked and hugely enjoyable masterpiece. The paperback shipped to me from Washington was published by Véhicule Press of Montreal.