i.e., The Cambridge Review

The first of i.e., The Cambridge Review gains its significance from a short story by E. Beuhling entitled In the Forested Plains. The style of this story maintains with brilliant subtlety and consistency the tone of paradox and indirection indicated by its title. That its analysis sometimes attains a frightening level of acuteness and power is hardly to be wondered at, for to the mind which views passion as the sole, incontrovertible, demoniac power, ("I reveled in the factuality of the rat") all lesser experience attains a strangely new but clear focus. Morality has long become debased to the procedure of a controlling principle, and soon even this must crumble, for its irrelevance to the absolute is perceived. If Kafka (from whom Beuhling derives much) is read as an anguished, exhausted, yet still regretful voice, In the Forested Plains speaks from a point beyond the surrender; renders the de facto account of the consciousness fulfilling its ordained self-destruction. And that the hunger principle rather than the love principle characterizes the sensuality which motivates the action is by no means accidental; for it serves to emphasize an egotism whose manifold self-probing must lead to the deceptive freedom of self-annihilation. This work (unfortunately printed in cut form) is a masterpiece of its type and its writing has undoubtedly been dearly paid for.

The longing for primitivism is expressed pathetically and obviously in the selections from Peter Sourian's novel Mavrean's Place, but with sophistication and in tones of dignified and calculated regret in Miss V. R. Lang's poem Address to the Redcoats. In the former, Sourian seems to keep a careful eye upon his intended audience, "well-dressed rich foreign dull stupid boys and girls who should all be choked" and yet who, I can't help thinking, he hopes will be shocked and delighted by the escapades of his vapid figures. Miss Lang's poem, in spite of the skill of its language (whose beauty must be assessed through its sustained tone rather than by individual lines), manipulates its whole argument in terms of the academism which it purports to attack, and sounds finally more like a whimper than a harangue.

Two critical articles, both ambitions in intent, flounder on the problem of epistemology in modern literature. Any estimate of Roger Shattuck's Retreat and Return must be to some extent unfair, for it is only a brief extract from his forthcoming book. However his broad classifications seem to bury many ramifications and nuances in the authors he discusses. That the literature of his period is "self-reflexive" is sufficiently explicit in the sources themselves. But a definition of the myriad meanings of this term would seem to be the critic's task, as well as a search for underlying motivations.

Albert Berman's The realistic Imagination embarks upon the thankless task of justifying the imagination. The following sentence appears to be on the threshold of a fascinating argument: "The Mechanistic philosophy is as much a myth as the story of Persephone." But alas, it is at the end of his article. This point is reached through a wealth of fascinating but laborious detail. Jung has discussed the myth similarly but with succinct logic. Heidegger's denial of "language as a mere sign" is a double proof for it affirms it s reasoning by the example of its won poetry. Berman, on the other hand, tries to make the point that "men are interrelated analogically." But he does so in analytic terms which are extrinsic to the experience itself and also fail to objectify it significantly.

The Foreword to i.e. is written with a brashness which is both refreshing and immature. Its assertion of the manner in which i.e. will try to "fumble toward some truth" through "the process of recognition and remembrance of sensation" must be admired for its sincerity but condemned for the inherently confused and narrow viewpoint which it entails. But that the editors have provoked a new vitality both in their writers and their audience is undeniable. ALEXANDER GELLEY