Review of Temerity & Gall, by John Metcalf

As readers of this journal will know, the premise of Ghostbusters 2 is that the negative affects of the city of New York have manifested in the sewer system as a river of slime that threatens to wash away the goodwill and good citizens of Manhattan.John Metcalf 's latest book, Temerity & Gall, engages in a similar kind of projection: a veritable curmudgeonomicon wherein all of Metcalf 's bad feelings threaten to ooze from the page.The cover is a sketch of Don Quixote with Metcalf as white knight striking down critical fallacies, bad writing, and limp verse.Metcalf has been lashing out at illusory windmills and sounding the same note of complaint since his first critical forays in the 1970s.His thesis then remains his thesis now: Canadian literature is formally and aesthetically incompetent and is thin gruel when compared to the great works of Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Ezra Pound.Given that Metcalf 's criticism has struck this single, droning note for upwards of forty years, need he play it again?Temerity & Gall is nominally structured as a travelogue of the remaining Montreal Storytellers: Ray Smith, Clark Blaise, and Metcalf himself.Yet this structure is largely superficial as Metcalf 's dissociative narration quickly loses the plot.Compelling anecdotes give way to rambling excoriations, sneering dismissals of Canadian authors, generalizations about the foppishness of the Canadian culture industry, and praise of antiquarian booksellers.This would be more entertaining were so much of it not recycled from Metcalf 's previous works, including Kicking against the Pricks (1982), Freedom from Culture (1994), and An Aesthetic Underground (2003).Metcalf loves lengthy, nested quotations and takes great liberties to quote his own past work; there are so many quotations that one wonders about the need for this book at all.In the original sections Metcalf is in his usual Palpitinian form, lashing out at Canadian authors and critics who fail to align with his vision of the literary.Michael Ondaatje's "writing has ripened into arteriosclerosis, dangerously florid, possibly suffering from ischemic incidents manifesting themselves in overwrought, incomprehensible metaphors and similes" (21); this is Metcalf 's idea of comedy.Jane Urquhart is the "author of a string of potboilers, a Canadian Maeve Binchy, resolutely middle-brow" (21).Sam Solecki's dismissal of the short story is an "ill-educated tantrum" (381), and Ronald Sutherland's claims about Canadian literature are "straightjacket material" (382).Metcalf insists that "Literature is not . . . the ludicrous twaddle of . . .Bliss Bloody Carman" (145) and asks, "How 'quick to the touch' do we now find the writings of

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.