The Hunter Gracchus: And Other Papers on Literature and Art

Davenport claims in his introduction that the only ""semblance of unity"" in his third gathering of ""studies, reviews, essays and commentaries"" is in their being written on the same typewriter. The Hunter Gracchus does indeed cover a wide array of literary and artistic subjects, ranging from short stories by Kafka to those of Donald Barthelme, from Shaker furniture to Picasso's Guernica. Yet Davenport's approach is anything but varied. Every chapter is made up of a muddle of speculations about artistic influence; beginning with arcane anecdotes and ending in vague superlatives, they rarely support a new idea from the author himself. The implications of the modern utopian Charles Fourier, who appears in at least three different essays, having inspired Marx and Lenin, Le Courbusier and the author himself, are never explored. What matters to Davenport is that these intellectuals and artists have legitimized each other. Reading the book straight through is like listening to a professional musician practicing scales; though Davenport's scholarship is impressive, the overall effect is inconclusive and monotonous. A few of Davenport's abstract journal entries and longer, pensive paragraphs about anything from the Big Bang theory to Sartre's idea of literature provide some diversion but fail to redeem the book as a whole. (Dec.)