Let me say right away that I love the essays of David Solway. I love their adversarial quality (Solway never backs away from a fight), the audacity of their opinions and the profundity of their conclusions. I love them for their subversiveness, for their intellectual prowess, for their sublime (and sometimes not so sublime) arrogance and for their modesty in the face of the mystery of art. Mostly, I love them for the writing. For the exhilaration, when reading them, of being among words, and when the essays are really good - as they are in Random Walks - for the gratification of surrendering to the ravishments of their language.
Let me also say that my admiration is not unconditional. I am exasperated by the 'too-muchness' of the essays: their intellectual grandstanding, their verbal strut. Yet the fact remains that there are very few critics whose persuasiveness and general good sense have forced changes in my conventional perceptions of literature. Solway is one of them. (He shares shelf space with F.R. Leavis, Randall Jarrell, Seamus Heaney and Helen Vendler).
Whatever I've taken for granted, whatever I've accepted as agreeable, Solway has eventually, and with exquisite felicitousness, turned on its head.
Random Walks is no exception. Among its 15 essays Solway re-evaluates such literary luminaries as Susan Sontag, James Joyce and fellow Montrealer Erin Moure. Solway also suggests a daring interpretation of Robert Browning's My Last Duchess, provides a grim millennial assessment of contemporary poetry, and spoofs the jargon-happy writing of literary theorists by outsmarting them at their own game (in effect, he deconstructs the deconstructionists). The lit-crit industry's unintelligibility is, in fact, one of Solway's greatest peeves (three essays are devoted to it), and that anger gives the book much of its bite.
"I presume most of these 'critics' are writing from and perhaps to one another through the medium of the scholarly essay, updating a traditional form into a species of literary modem. Readers are cast unwillingly in the edgy and often baffled role of eavesdroppers. They preserve their integrity in one of two ways: by leaving or by hemming loudly."
Needless to say, Solway is one of those readers who has chosen to stay and hem loudly. Indeed, if T.S. Eliot's definition of criticism is sound - "the elucidation of art and the correction of taste" - Solway's critical approach is overwhelmingly corrective. He seems unable to write about a subject without trying to dig it out of the cliches, misjudgments and falsehoods that have calcified like sediment over it. When Solway is fully engaged by a subject (and he never pronounces unless he is), the wit and originality of his excavating are nothing short of astonishing:
"The controlled intake of certain psychotropic substances can produce exactly the effect which Sontag recommends as the primary purpose of art. So can meditation, eurythmics, relaxation techniques, tasteful pornography, Jacuzzis and moving to the country. If the most we can say for art is that it is a superior form of self-help or watered-down-version of catharsis, the aesthetic analogue of stress management, or a kind of sensory analeptic, we have, I fear, severely damaged the credibility as writers."
This seems a good time to air a couple of grievances against Random Walks: Solway's love of rare, difficult words ("analeptic" - a drug that stimulates the central nervous system - is one example). That and sentences that, in their syntactical construction, seem more interested in making an impression than conveying one. I've always accepted this about Solway's writing (the same way audiences accepted Glen Gould's eccentric and theatrical piano playing as the forgivable excesses of genius). Yet by doing it in book that tries to expose the obfuscation that congests so much critical writing, Solway risks forfeiting the immunity his own writing enjoys - and that we, as readers, depend on.
As frustrating as Solway's stylistic pageantry sometimes is (and let's be honest, how many Canadian literary critics do you know that actually have enough genuine style to parade?), Solway's commentary never loses touch with what remains the most abiding incentive to read and reread him: coherent thinking, a skeptical attitude, intellectual rigor and verbal gifts rich enough to galvanize those elements into an engaging and readable voice. Notice how Solway shoulders an idea as complex as memorability and carries it with indefatigable clarity, across the length of a sentence: "Memorability is a function of highly charged language, which can only live within the phrase but whose continuity, be it said, cannot be indefinite: language can support only so much intensity without burning up, like the seraphim who can chant 'holy' only once before being consumed by the fires of their devotion."
Sentences like these place Random Walks safely outside the superficiality that characterizes this country's literary conversation with itself and ensconces Solway as one of our most valuable thinkers. I can't suggest any other living Canadian essayist to compare with the scope of his erudition.
True, this kind of 'seraphic' criticism happens on a level that might be vertiginous to some people; Solway doesn't believe in 'dumbing down.' But, in the end, we will miss much if we refuse to accept Solway's intellect on its own terms - as a powerful, risk-taking tool for "opposing lucidity to obscurity, order to chaos, sense to senselessness."
THE END