From Chaos to Art Postmodernism in the Novels of Leonard Cohen

Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

Paper submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of “Master of Arts in Linguistics and Supervisor: Literature: Dutch – English” by Prof. Dr. Sandro Jung August 2011 Dries Vermeulen

I followed the course From chaos to art Desire the horse Depression the cart

LEONARD COHEN reciting “The Book of Longing”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

When I was five years old, I felt like I was the only person in the world who could not read. Being able to decipher the unlimited combinations of those twenty-six peculiar signs that filled pages upon pages, was what distinguished the grown-ups from the children. Something had to be done. My mother was my first teacher. She taught me to read, although she likes to remind me that I did it all on my own. I spent the following twelve years of my life thinking I was good at it. And yet I arrived in Ghent an illiterate. Here I learned that there is much more to literature than I imagined. I was taught new and more thorough ways of reading books. I can only hope the following pages succeed to prove that I have paid attention.

I wish to thank my supervisor, Prof. Dr. Sandro Jung, for his help, and for allowing me to write a dissertation on two novels hardly anyone in the English Department had even heard of. I know he really preferred William Beckford’s Vathek as a subject.

I also wish to thank Prof. Dr. Hilde Staels. I borrowed heavily from her course on English- Canadian literature for the first chapter of this dissertation, which she was kind enough to read and correct.

Most of all, I wish to thank my mother, without whose care and support I could never have graduated. Her work is done. I can read.

Dries Vermeulen Ghent, 12 August 2011

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 1. LITERARY CONTEXT: POSTMODERN CANADIAN FICTION 4 1.1. The postmodern paradox 4 1.2. Transgression of boundaries 5 1.2.1. The postmodern writer: trickster, traitor, priest and prophet 7 1.2.2. Irony, parody and intertextuality 10 1.3. Characterization: the split subject 12 1.3.1. Subjectivity and the linguistic turn 13 1.3.2. The double 15 1.3.3. The colonial subject 18 1.4. Narrative frames 19 1.4.1. Multiplication of narrative levels 19 1.4.2. Frame-breaking and metafiction 20 1.5. Historiographic metafiction 22 2. THE FAVOURITE GAME: A PLAY ON THE WORD MADE FLESH 25 2.1. Narrative voices 26 2.1.1. The tyranny of fact: the author in the novel 26 2.1.2. Narrative frames and frame-breaking 29 2.2. Metafiction 33 2.2.1. The creative process 34 2.2.2. The rhetoric of games 38 2.3. The word made flesh 41 3. HISTORY AND BOUNDARIES IN BEAUTIFUL LOSERS 45 3.1. Historiographic metafiction 46 3.1.1. Reading Canadian history 46 3.1.2. How it happens 49 3.2. Boundary crossing 53

3.2.1. Intertextuality and parody 53 3.2.2. The pornographic sublime 56 CONCLUSION 60 WORKS CITED 62 Primary sources 62 Secondary sources 62 Articles 62 Books 63 Websites 64

INTRODUCTION

Not often is Leonard Cohen introduced as a postmodern novelist. After his rise to fame as a singer-songwriter in the second half of the 1960s, Cohen’s music has been celebrated by thousands of people around the globe, but, remarkably, it is still a little-known fact that Leonard Cohen was once a less-than-famous poet, who tried to make a living from his writing in the Canadian city of Montreal. Before picking up the guitar in an attempt to address an “economic crisis,”1 Cohen had written and published several volumes of poetry, as well as two experimental novels: The Favourite Game, in 1963, and Beautiful Losers, in 1966. Cohen’s poetry and song lyrics are characterized by a set of recurring themes, many of which can be called postmodern: the essential loneliness of the individual, the chaos of existence, and history, religion, sexual desire, and art itself as man’s ways to fight these menaces. In all of Cohen’s writing do these themes recur, but nowhere so radically as in the novels. Fans who come to Cohen’s novels hoping to find in them the prose equivalent of his music, can be surprised to be confronted with what Cohen himself has called “the frenzied thoughts of [his] youth.”2 In this dissertation I will examine the ways in which both of Leonard Cohen’s experimental novels, The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers, represent the literary movement of their time, namely the rise of postmodernism during the Canadian literature boom of the 1960s.

One of the most important principles of postmodernism is the realization that a literary work does not exist in a vacuum. Every author is influenced by the place and the time in which he or she was born, as well as by all literature, or indeed all language, he or she ever came across. All literature engages in dialogue with its literary context. Therefore, I will dedicate a separate chapter to a theoretical analysis of the literary context in which Cohen’s novels were written, namely the Canadian literature boom of the 1960s, which

1 Leonard Cohen, “P.S.” in The Favourite Game, 2009, 2. 2 Leonard Cohen, “P.S.” in Beautiful Losers, 2009, 12.

provided a jumpstart for the rise of postmodernism in English-Canadian3 fiction. I will explain the way in which postmodernism paradoxically both sets up and converts literary conventions, discussing the relationship between that paradox and the importance of boundaries in the Canadian postmodern, as well as the several ways in which these boundaries are transgressed. In this context, I will provide a characterization of the postmodern writer as an essential boundary crosser, and a discussion of the various methods he has at hand to subvert the traditional conventions of literature, such as irony, parody, and intertextuality. Subsequently, I will elaborate on the methods of characterization in the postmodern novel, and the related concept of the split subject. I will first explain the influence of the linguistic turn on postmodern subjectivity, followed by a discussion of the concept of the double and the importance of the colonial subject in the search for a Canadian identity. I will also discuss the postmodern methods of narrativization, focusing on the multiplication of narrative levels, frame-breaking, and metafiction. Finally, I will focus on the importance of colonial and postcolonial history in postmodern Canadian fiction. In this context, I will explain the postmodern concept of historiographic metafiction, as established by Linda Hutcheon.

In the second chapter I will propose a postmodern reading of The Favourite Game, Leonard Cohen’s debut as a novelist, using the first chapter as a theoretical framework. I will discuss the novel’s intricate use of various narrative voices, focusing on the multiplication of narrative frames and the various methods of frame-breaking. In the context of its complex narration, I will examine the extent to which the postmodern intrusion of the author justifies a reading of The Favourite Game as an autobiographical novel. Subsequently, I will discuss the level of metafiction in Cohen’s debut. Although it is considered, by critics such as Linda Hutcheon, a less self-referential novel than Beautiful Losers, The Favourite Game does contain a number of aspects that are typical of postmodern metafiction. Not only does the novel have as one of its central themes the

3 From this point onwards, I will use the terms “Canadian [fiction/literature/novels…]” and “English- Canadian [fiction/literature/novels…]” interchangeably, unless otherwise indicated.

act of writing itself, it also makes extensive use of storytelling as a typically postmodern method of characterization, resulting in the incorporation of various embedded texts. I will also analyse the novel's rhetoric of games, in respect of the thematization of artistic creation as a self-referential process. Finally, I will elaborate on the motif of the human body, and the importance of sexual desire as a creative energy.

In the final chapter of this dissertation I will focus on the importance of history and boundaries in Cohen’s second novel, Beautiful Losers. I will discuss the novel’s thematization of history and historiography, as an early example of historiographic metafiction in Canadian postmodernism. I will examine how the first-person narrator’s reading of Canadian history symbolizes the role of the reader in postmodern literature, and how his troubled relationship with the character of F. reflects the postmodern relationship between reader and writer. Subsequently, I will examine the several ways in which Beautiful Losers, as a highly experimental novel, subverts literary conventions, both on the formal and the content level. I will first focus on the ways in which the novel parodies a number of artistic genres, examining, in that respect, the typically postmodern incorporation of various intertexts. Finally, I will provide a more detailed elaboration on the parodical confrontation of religious texts with an erotic content, discussing Robert Stacey’s notion of the pornographic sublime in that context.

1. LITERARY CONTEXT: POSTMODERN CANADIAN FICTION

1.1. The postmodern paradox

The 1960s are generally characterized as a golden decade of social revolution in the Western world. A period of increasing individual freedom, welfare, and economic as well as demographic growth, the sixties gave way to a generation in which minorities and formerly marginalized voices were heard. Giving rise to new movements such as feminism and the sexual revolution, those groups who were marginalized on the basis of class, gender, or race, claimed their own stake in society. Projecting an identity of their own, these new collectives turned their self-awareness into a questioning of the authority of the establishment and society as a whole, not necessarily to overthrow it, but to engage actively in it in a new way. According to Linda Hutcheon, this “general challenge of authority” in the 1960s left an important mark on the postmodernist movement that would come to full development in the following two decades.4 Whereas the self-reflexivity and the self- consciousness of art as art was already present in the modernist literature of the first half of the twentieth century, this “new engagement” of the sixties, this challenging of the establishment without destroying it, is exactly what postmodernism did to the function of art in society.5 Like modernist literature, the postmodern shows itself as literature, aware of its indebtedness to “the literary past” as well as “the social present.”6 The difference between modernism and postmodernism is that the latter, using literary devices such as irony and parody (which I will discuss in more detail further on in this chapter), also reveals the mechanics and inevitable flaws of intricate systems like society and literary history. Postmodern literature, therefore, leaves us with a paradox, as “it both sets up and subverts the powers and conventions of art.”7

4 Linda Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (Ontario: Oxford University Press, 1988), 11. 5 Ibid., 1-2. 6 Ibid., 1. 7 Ibid., 2.

In Canada, the rise of minority movements, which Hutcheon collectively labels “ex- centrics,”8 went hand in hand with nationalist politics and an outcry for an independent Canadian identity and culture. In a country that was, at the time, finally shedding off the postcolonial remains of British and American cultural dominance, the public mind seemed to be ready for a postmodernist movement in the arts. According to Hutcheon, this particular moment of Canada’s cultural history made it ripe for the above-mentioned paradox of postmodernism, which combines “those contradictory acts of establishing and then undercutting prevailing values and conventions in order to provoke a questioning, a challenging of ‘what goes without saying.’”9 For the first time, writers such as Margaret Atwood and Robert Kroetsch came to criticize openly the marginalized position of English-Canadian literature, as well as the correlated restraining influence of American neo-colonialism. A new generation of authors endeavoured to tell the story of English-speaking Canada, which brought about the “burgeoning of Canadian fiction”10 that came to be known as the literature boom of the 1960s. Moreover, the postmodern predilection for small stories, as opposed to the big ideologies of the modernist era, seemed to resonate with “the existing Canadian emphasis on regionalism.”11 In the postmodern novel, the realist concern for the local, the particular and the occasional, is translated into a general celebration of all that is considered “different.” In the multicultural mosaic that makes up Canadian society, this new perspective resulted in an appreciation of literature as a forum for “ex-centric” voices, and the success of outspoken women writers, such as Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro.

1.2. Transgression of boundaries

The above-mentioned tendency towards self-reflexivity in art is in fact part of a more general trait the postmodernists inherited from their modernist predecessors. Both

8 Linda Hutcheon, “The Canadian Postmodern: Fiction in English since 1960” in Studies in Canadian Literature. Ed. Arnold E. Davidson (New York: MLA, 1990), 24. 9 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, 3. 10 Hutcheon, 1990, 18. 11 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, 19.

movements showed a predilection for experimenting with boundaries, always searching for ways to defy them. Self-reflexive art, admitting awareness of its own artifice, emphasizes the boundary between art and reality, thereby, paradoxically, coming closer to reality. Whereas modernist art was much about asserting its own autonomy, celebrating its difference from real life with surrealist and absurdist experiments, postmodernism attempts to blur this distinction, allowing a “slippage” between life and art.12 This caused, for instance, Canadian fiction from the sixties onwards often to be “engaged fiction, dealing with issues ranging from the Canadian identity to gender politics.”13 In postmodern literature, this “engagement,” the crossing of the borderline between art and reality, is the most manifest in the frequent mixture of fiction with nonfiction, which often results in an interweaving of fantasy, historiography and (auto)biography, and the incorporation of other literary and non-literary genres, from poetry to newspaper articles. Here, the postmodern challenges the conventional boundaries between the arts and between genres, both transgressing them and, in doing so, admitting their undeniable existence. This is a clear example of the postmodern paradox, namely the simultaneous setting up and subverting of artistic traditions. Again, postmodernism in English-Canadian literature seems to echo an important aspect of the Canadian identity. In this context, Canada has often been called a “border country.” Linda Hutcheon admits that “[Canada] is a vast nation with little sense of firm geographical centre or ethnic unity […] In fact, [Canadians] might be said to have quite a firm suspicion of centralizing tendencies, be they national, political, or cultural. In literature there is a parallel suspicion of genre borders.”14 Because of Canada’s unique combination of Aboriginal – or Native Canadian – with postcolonial cultures, and of an English-speaking culture with a strong French-speaking minority, it has become a multicultural mosaic, divided on various levels by boundaries that are waiting to be transgressed. Canada can indeed be said to be a country of “ex-centrics” and of regions, with the absence of any real centralization. Moreover, the country traditionally holds a

12 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, 78. 13 Ibid., 11. 14 Ibid., 3.

marginalized position in international terms15, into which it was forced by the superiority of Great Britain and the United States. As mentioned above, writers in the 1960s became very much aware of these dominant cultures, and reacted with a revaluation of Canadian identity in literature. Therefore, Canadian identity can be said paradoxically to both acknowledge and challenge centrality, “whether that centre is seen as elsewhere (Britain, the United States) or as localized in, say, Ontario.”16 Hutcheon argues that this marginal existence makes Canada fertile ground for postmodernism, as “[t]he margin or the border is the postmodern space par excellence, the place where new possibilities exist.”17 Their national history, as well as “their split sense of identity, both regional and national,”18 provides Canadian writers with a natural feeling for the paradoxes and the boundary crossing that are typical of postmodern literature. The flowering of, for instance, women writers and feminism in Canadian literature is partly due to their challenging of the gender divide, and their dwelling on the boundaries between what is male and what is female.

1.2.1. The postmodern writer: trickster, traitor, priest and prophet

The postmodern predilection for marginalized voices, and the exploration of boundaries and transgression zones searching for new possibilities, make the postmodern writer a fundamental “ex-centric”19: he fulfils a privileged function as an observational outsider. In the following section I will discuss how, in this capacity, the postmodern storyteller has been linked to both the mythological trickster figure and the function of priest or prophet within a community. In his book Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde describes the figure of the trickster in terms of a number of characteristics reminiscent of postmodern storytelling. A trickster is a human or anthropomorphic character who, in old mythology, plays the role of guide, traveller, or messenger. He is an ambivalent character in that he often acts as a

15 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, 3. 16 Ibid., 4. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 3.

teller of devious stories, which can both enlighten and deceive the hero of the myth. Examples of travellers and messengers who function as tricksters are the classical gods Hermes and Mercury, and Coyote in Native American mythology.20 Being an ambivalent character, the trickster is an in-between figure, always on the road between heaven and earth, or between life and death.21 As such, the trickster can function both as a guide (e.g. Tiresias, the blind seer of Thebes) and as a thief (e.g. Prometheus). In his ambivalence, the trickster figure seems to embody the paradoxes and the boundary crossing of postmodern storytelling:

In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser. […] He […] attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish – right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead – and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction. […] Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.22

Whereas the mythological trickster figure defies the boundaries between our world, the world of the gods (heaven), and the underworld of the dead, postmodern storytelling, inspired as it often is by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, tends to cross the line between the conscious and the unconscious. It is, in this respect, important to note that the trickster is not only a boundary crosser, but also a boundary creator.23 As it was a trickster figure who created the “great distance between heaven and earth”24 – and therefore the concept of heaven itself – the postmodern storyteller discloses in the unconscious a treasure-trove of hidden desires, emotions, and memories. Always dwelling in twilight zones, the transgressive figure is the author of changes and new possibilities. Hyde argues that, for this reason, the trickster should be regarded as a creator and an artist, rather than a liar and a thief:

20 Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World. Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: North Point Press, 1998), 5. 21 Ibid., 6. 22 Ibid., 7. 23 Ibid., 7-8. 24 Ibid.

When Pablo Picasso says that “art is a lie that tells the truth,” we are closer to the old trickster spirit. Picasso was out to reshape and revive the world he had been born into. He took this word seriously; then he disrupted it; then he gave it a new form.25

In his study of alterity in the work of Leonard Cohen, Winfried Siemerling elaborates on another metaphor for the postmodern storyteller, originally posited by Cohen himself. In a speech about Canadian poet and novelist A.M. Klein given in Montreal in 1964, Cohen discussed the ambivalent function of the writer as an internal opposition between priest and prophet. Cohen states that A.M. Klein, as a Jewish Quebecer, attempted “to speak both as a prophet to, and as a representative for, the community.”26 Echoing the postmodern paradox, Cohen describes Klein as an engaged writer, who as a priest represents his community, but as a subversive prophet is forced, by that community, into an exiled position “in which poetic speech [is] moved from the centre to a margin that implies loneliness.”27 According to Cohen, it is in this “ex-centric” position of the prophet that the poet is most needed, and he predicted that it is also the position future writers would prefer:

They will prefer exile, the dialogue of exile, a dialogue which seems to be very one-sided, but which is still the old rich dialogue between the prophet and the priest, and the larger idea of community includes both of the parties. The nominal community will continue to dismiss its writers and award them the title of traitor.28

In this imposed position as a traitor, Cohen’s idea of the writer is highly reminiscent of that of the trickster figure: “The traitor is a crosser of boundaries who delivers a person, a value, or information from the inside to the outside.”29 Always maintaining contact with the conventional in his capacity as a priest, the writer as traitor-prophet discloses the

25 Hyde, 13. 26 Winfried Siemerling, “Hailed by Koan: Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss,” in Discoveries of the Other: Alterity in the Work of Leonard Cohen, Hubert Aquin, Michael Ondaatje, and Nicole Brossard (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 31. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 32. 29 Ibid.

outside, translating the unknown to make it understandable. The accusations of treason, then, originate in the fact that a disclosure of the unknown forces the community to question the validity of its own conventions. It is, however, in the transgression of these conventions that new possibilities are created: “The space between these two moments of understanding brings forth an emergence of the unknown that does not destroy it as unknown, and surfaces in Cohen’s text as an energy he calls ‘idea.’”30

1.2.2. Irony, parody and intertextuality

As an observational outsider who both sets up and subverts the conventional, the postmodern writer is equipped with a number of literary devices to topple genre conventions. Firstly, postmodern writing is often ironic on many levels. By means of irony (i.e. manifestly stating the opposite of what one actually means to say), the postmodern writer enables himself to subjectively distance himself from the text as an object. Moreover, creating this ironic distance between subject and object, the writer grants himself an observational position that allows him to adopt a combination of various, often opposing, perspectives. The trope of irony is therefore a crucial device in the typically postmodern concepts of fragmented subjectivity and metafiction, which I will discuss in the next two sections of this chapter. In the context of the postmodern subversion of conventions, it is important to note that, as Siemerling states, irony “challenges the certainties of a self that unconditionally relies on systems and their truths.”31 Postmodern writing gratefully makes use of literary conventions and traditions, but criticizes them at the same time, ironically implying that they are far from perfect or absolute. Often postmodern authors create this ironic distance from literary traditions by means of parody, which consists of the imitation of certain genre conventions in a new, foreign context, marking, as Linda Hutcheon puts it, the “critical difference.”32 As an example, Hutcheon mentions the importance of biblical structures in Canadian literature,

30 Siemerling, 1994, 32. 31 Ibid., 23. 32 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1987), 7.

which many postmodernists parody, “exploiting and undermining their undeniable cultural authority.”33 In this way, parody becomes a standard “mode of criticism”34 that allows the postmodern writer “to speak to her or his culture from within it but without being totally co-opted by it.”35 The ironic distance that the critical mode of parody inevitably involves, should, however, not lead us to conclude that postmodernism radically breaks away from tradition. As Siemerling puts it: “[I]rony breaks the circle of absolute knowledge and self-knowledge without necessarily resulting in ‘bitter’ freedom.”36 On the contrary, as much as it is an act of generational rebellion, postmodernism’s intertextual play with literary conventions paradoxically shows an acknowledgement of its depending on them.37 Parody is, in fact, only one instance of the various intertextual modes the postmodern applies. As Foucault already pointed out, a book has no clear-cut frontiers; it inevitably is a node within a network.38 What characterizes postmodernism is that it embraces the inevitability of this network, and endeavours to explore it. Transgressing the boundaries between texts, the postmodern makes conscious reference to other nodes in the network part of its style. Therefore, the fact that postmodern literature incorporates intertexts is at least as important as the parodical way in which it often is done. To put this seemingly disrespectful treatment of literary legacy in a more positive way, postmodernism could be said to recycle literary genres and styles. As a link in an infinite system of language and texts with no internal boundaries, the postmodern writer feels free to use old material in a different way and create something new: “[A]s there truly is no ‘hors texte’ (to speak with Derrida) in-novation in literature for the postmodernists becomes a matter of re-novation: a self-conscious exercise in the hierarchical realignment of conventions.”39 Theo D’Haen argues that, in postmodern

33 Hutcheon, 1990, 22. 34 Linda Hutcheon, “Intertextuality, parody, and the discourse of history,” in A Poetics of Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 129. 35 Hutcheon, 1990, 23. 36 Siemerling, 1994, 23. 37 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 1988, 130. 38 Ibid., 127. 39 D’Haen, 1989, 418.

fiction, many literary subgenres that “hitherto occupied peripheral positions,” such as science fiction, fantasy, the detective and the gothic novel, are granted a new life by parody and intertextual reference.40 Indeed, postmodern intertextuality, ironical though it is, is to be seen as a matter of revaluation of, rather than rupture with literary tradition.

1.3. Characterization: the split subject

I have already mentioned the distinction between the modernist belief in ideology and the postmodern preoccupation with “small stories.” Whereas the modernist artist was still looking for ways to impose order on chaos by means of, for instance, mythology, postmodernism accepted and embraced the inevitable existence of chaos. No longer trying to cover in his writing the general or universal, which he accepted to be impossible, the postmodern author focuses on the particular, the local. As to psychology and the nature of the human subject, both modernism and postmodernism were greatly influenced by Freud’s psychoanalysis and his theory of the unconscious, and ensuing reinterpretations by Jung and Lacan. Many modernists believed the individual subject to be something that could be understood and even summarized; the unconscious was the storage of repressed thoughts and emotions, disclosure of which provided the key to stability of the unified self. Postmodernists, on the other hand, accepted the fragmentation of the self; they came to terms with the impossibility of stability and control, and explored the unconscious as a treasury of secret desires and stories to be told. This view of the human subject as fragmented and unstable has important consequences for the methods of characterization in postmodernist fiction. In the following three sections I will discuss subjectivity and its fragmentation in the postmodern novel.

40 D’Haen, 1989, 408-409.

1.3.1. Subjectivity and the linguistic turn

Aleid Fokkema, in her study of characterization in postmodern fiction, states that “[t]he conventions of characterization in modernism and realism (both as a genre and as a period) are relevant to understanding the critical reception of postmodern character,” as postmodernism seems to break away radically from the two most important aspects of realist characterization: coherence and psychological motivation.41 However, after confrontation with other arguments, Fokkema concludes that, “[a]lthough it is obvious that ‘something happens’ to character in the hands of postmodern writers,”42 claiming that postmodernism single-handedly eradicated the conventions of characterization in literature would be an exaggeration. Modernism, according to Fokkema, continued the classic realist conventions of character in a more or less truthful manner. The shift from classic realist to modernist characterization mainly entailed a change in focus: “More than in realism, the modernist text concentrates on the self, the inner reality of character.”43 Modernist fiction was indeed preoccupied with the psychology of its characters. Relying on the findings of psychoanalysis, it applied techniques such as stream of consciousness to explore and learn to understand the depths of the human subject, which it admitted to be complex and even incoherent, but not disintegrated. Modernism discovered the problematic nature of identity and the boundaries between self and other, but, in retrospective comparison to postmodernism, it is important to note that the possibility of objective representation of the self was not yet questioned.44 This changed under the influence of new philosophic developments that came to be known as the linguistic turn. After the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure had pointed out that reality is only conceivable via a linguistic system, literature began to question the authority of art to represent the psychology of a character truthfully. Whereas in realist fiction characters, when first introduced, are described in detail by their

41 Aleid Fokkema, “Conventions and Innovations: a Critical Survey” in Postmodern Characters. A Study of Characterization in British and American Postmodern Fiction (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991), 57. 42 Ibid., 59. 43 Ibid., 57. 44 Ibid., 57-58.

traits, and given a coherent identity, making them more or less predictable, postmodern fiction gives up on the ideology of the self, and presents characters “that are merely constituted […] by linguistic signs.”45 Fokkema treats this linguistic determinism as a perspective that is juxtaposed to the fragmentation of the postmodern character. Arguably, it would make more sense to place the two in a causal relationship. As the subject’s entire concept of reality is laid bare as a product of language, the identity of the subject itself is also inevitably revealed as a linguistic construct. The subject therefore disintegrates into “the multiple selves and unstable, fleeting identities”46 that compose the fragmented postmodern character. The replacement of psychological summary by discourse or even stories (as a result of the narrative turn, on which I will elaborate in the next two sections of this chapter) as methods of characterization, causes postmodern fiction often to be highly metafictional. Moreover, stressing the role of language in literature, the postmodern novel revaluates the role of the reader. As the postmodern character is a fragmented one, consisting of multiple selves and a shattered identity that can only be reconstructed via language, the reader is given an authorial function, or, put otherwise, is given the opportunity to create his or her own version of the story:

[T]he idea that postmodern novels in general, and more particularly postmodern characters successfully engage the reader and leave room for his or her own fantasies, is quite persistent in the postmodern critical debate. That debate is of course heavily influenced by Barthes’ differentiation between “readerly” and “writerly” texts, a distinction which soon came to mean, for Barthes’ epigones, that the “writerly” text [simply put, texts that leave room for interpretation 47 by the reader] was the exclusive privilege of postmodern fiction.

The postmodern disintegration of the subject allows two contradictory interpretations. On the one hand, it can be seen to imply the non-existence of subjectivity: as the subject’s identity and conceptions are revealed to be nothing but linguistic constructs, its representation of reality is rendered meaningless. On the other hand, if reality itself is

45 Fokkema, 1991, 63. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 61.

only a concept created, through language, in the subject’s mind, all is subjective, and the creative mind is the highest authority. We are confronted with another paradox by the nature of language itself: “In one view, language is inimical to the free development of the self” and “characters in [postmodern] texts are ultimately grounded in language, cut off from anything that might be experienced as ‘natural’ or ‘real’ reality.” On the other hand there is the “Heideggerian view of language that enables one to expand one’s consciousness and to transcend ordinary experience.”48 Adding to that the above-mentioned paradox that postmodern fiction simultaneously sets up and subverts the traditions of, in this case, characterization in literature, Fokkema convincingly concludes that “the paradox is central to the postmodern paradigm as a whole”49 and that “in fact, the paradox as paradox may lie at the heart of postmodernism.”50 Linda Hutcheon adds: “These contradictions of postmodernism are not really meant to be resolved,” as “the postmodern partakes of a logic of ‘both/and,’ not one of ‘either/or.’”51

1.3.2. The double

The importance of contradictions and paradox as essential components of the postmodern paradigm is at the basis of another prominent stock-in-trade of postmodern characterization, derived from Freudian theory: that of the double. In his study of the double in postmodern American fiction, Gordon Sletaugh points out that, throughout the history of literature, an important role has been played by the double or Doppelgänger as the antagonist or the counterpart of the main character. Both resembling and opposing the protagonist, the double is the personification of paradox, ambivalence and dualism – think of the standard role of the “nemesis” in, for instance, the comic book: the hero and his arch-enemy often share a lot of similarities and a certain inexplicable understanding for one another, and yet they are each other’s opposites.

48 Fokkema, 1991, 67. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 69. 51 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 1988, 47, 49.

Fundamentally “constituted upon difference,”52 the double symbolizes binary oppositions such as good and bad, life and death, body and soul, male and female. Embodying all that is “other” than the protagonist, the double is often considered to represent the “bad” pole of these oppositions. Rosemary Jackson, discussing otherness and the fantastic in literature, states that all that is “other” or “different,” is usually automatically considered to be evil or demonic: “A stranger, a foreigner, an outsider, a social deviant, anyone speaking in an unfamiliar language or acting in unfamiliar ways, anyone whose origins are unknown or who has extraordinary powers, tends to be set apart as other, as evil.”53 Jackson further observes that, in nineteenth-century fantasy stories structured around dualism, the “internal origin of the other” is often revealed.54 Here, the demonic Other is no longer a supernatural embodiment of evil, but an aspect of the character’s own identity, “a manifestation of unconscious desire.”55 This dualistic concept of the evil “other” as internal to the self is particularly important for the role of the double in postmodern fiction. As Jackson already suggested, the confrontation of a character with its double can be interpreted as an outside representation of the internal Freudian conflict between the conscious and the unconscious. Freud posited that the literary double should be seen as a projection of a character’s (or even the author’s56) repressed unconscious. In Freudian theory, this external projection of repressed desires is explained as a method to maintain the psychological stability of the self. In his essay on das Unheimliche, Freud briefly touches upon the theme of the double, quoting Otto Rank: “Originally, the Doppelgänger was an insurance against the destruction of the self, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death.’”57 The confrontation of a protagonist with his or her double therefore symbolizes not only the psychological conflict between the conscious and the unconscious, but also

52 Gordon Sletaugh, “The History of the Double: Traditional and Postmodern Versions” in The Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction (Southern Illinois: UP, 1993), 8. 53 Rosemary Jackson, “The Fantastic as a Mode” in Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion (New York and London: Methuen), 1981, 52-53. 54 Ibid., 55. 55 Ibid. 56 Sletaugh, 1993, 13. 57 Sigmund Freud, Das Unheimliche: Aufsätze zur Literatur. Ed. Klaus Wagenbach (Eschwege: Poeschel und Schultz, 1963), 63. My translation.

that between eros, the life instinct, and thanatos, the death drive. As a result, the process of doubling in postmodern fiction is a “dual” as well as a “composite”58 one: the double both acts as a complement and as an opposition of the split subject. In the theory of Carl Gustav Jung the double or “shadow” represents the emotional, instinctive side of the personality, which is forced into the unconscious by the rational, socially adapted subject.59 Whereas the Freudian double particularly accounts for the physical, sexual drives, “Jung’s view addresses a broad range of personality situations – disintegration, alienation, insufficient integration, and wholeness itself – of which sexuality is but one aspect.”60 Furthermore, Jung considers the dream to be a manifestation of the double, in which all the characters are personifications of different aspects of the dreamer’s own personality. Ursula K. LeGuin paraphrases Jung as follows:

[T]he shadow stands on the threshold between the conscious and unconscious mind, and we meet it in our dreams, as sister, brother, friend, beast, monster, enemy, guide. It is all we don’t want to, can’t, admit into our conscious self, all the qualities and tendencies within us which have been repressed, denied, or not used.61

Here, Carl Jung’s “shadow,” in its capacity as a boundary crosser between the conscious and the unconscious, between reality and the world of dreams, becomes highly reminiscent of the above-mentioned trickster figure. This makes the Jungian interpretation of the double a rich source of inspiration for the psychological development of the postmodern fictional character. Moreover, Gordon Sletaugh convincingly links the concept of the double, with its paradoxical combination of resemblance and opposition, to the postmodern methods of irony and parody: “Linda Hutcheon suggests that parody, itself a double, which insists upon linking its self-reflexive discourse to social discourse, is intrinsic to postmodernism. In the postmodern transgression of convention there is a signalling of ‘ironic difference at the heart of similarity.’”62

58 Sletaugh, 1993, 14. 59 Ibid., 16. 60 Ibid., 17. 61 Ibid., 17-18. 62 Ibid., 27.

1.3.3. The colonial subject

In his study of subjectivity in postmodern literature, Simon Malpas adds to the split between the conscious and the unconscious and between rationality and desire two cultural implications that lie at the heart of the fragmentation of the postmodern subject. Firstly, there is the sexual difference as discussed by Hélène Cixous.63 She argues that, in Western culture, all oppositions are tied up with power relations, which all come to rest on the gender divide, inevitably having a crucial effect on the production of subjectivity. The second – and more political – implication Malpas mentions, however, is of greater importance to an understanding of the idiosyncrasies of the Canadian postmodern. Malpas draws on postcolonial criticism and the writings of Frantz Fanon to examine the identity of the colonial subject. According to postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha, the colonial subject is not so much split between the self and the Other as it is confronted with the “Otherness of the Self.”64 Malpas writes:

The colonial subject, caught in the oppressor’s gaze, is split, distorted, breached and disturbed, unable to reconcile her or his self-image with the images that are projected back by others. Equally, although in different ways, the coloniser’s identity is shaken by the relation with a colonised subject whose common humanity is at once denied and invoked by the politics of colonial discourse.65

In its search for a collective identity, English-Canadian literature from the 1960s onwards was deeply concerned with the country’s colonial history, and the internal heterogeneity of its population. Therefore, the strongly felt American and British cultural dominance, as well as the European settlers’ early oppression of Native Canadian peoples were important factors in the production of postmodern subjectivity. Malpas concludes:

[T]he self-centred, self-certain universal subject is impossible: subjectivity is generated through the interactions with others that take place in the realm of culture, of the Other, and if that culture is

63 Simon Malpas, “Subjectivity” in The Postmodern (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2005), 71-73. 64 Ibid., 69. 65 Ibid.

itself as disjointed as it is in the colonial and postcolonial world then identity too will necessarily be fragmentary.66

1.4. Narrative frames

Related to the split subject in postmodern fiction is the fragmentation of the narration into multiple narrative instances. As a result of the above-mentioned narrative turn, characters in the postmodern novel are typified not only by discourse, but also by the stories they tell. Using the story as a method of characterization, the fictional characters themselves become storytellers. The significance of stories and the act of storytelling are therefore frequently recurring themes in postmodern fiction, adding to the noted self- reflexivity of the genre, as well as the strong tendency of metafiction within the postmodern novel.

1.4.1. Multiplication of narrative levels

Using the model of narrative levels introduced by Gérard Genette, Ulla Musarra explains the multiplication of narrative levels in postmodern fiction in two directions. On the one hand there is the multiplication of the extradiegetic instances, and on the other hand the multiplication of the intradiegetic and hypodiegetic ones.67 The multiplication of the extradiegetic instances accounts for an “extension of the outer frame of the novel.”68 Truthful to the postmodern paradox, this extension incorporates a self-conscious return to certain pre-modernist literary conventions as well as an introduction of innovations. Most manifestly, the postmodern novel reintroduces the extradiegetic narrator, resulting in a revaluation of obsolescent frame-story genres such as the epistolary novel, or “the eighteenth-century convention of ‘le manuscript

66 Malpas, 2005, 71. 67 Ulla Musarra, “Narrative Discourse in Postmodernist Texts: The Conventions of the Novel and the Multiplication of Narrative Instances” in Exploring Postmodernism. Ed. M. Calinescu and Douwe Fokkema (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1987), 215-216. 68 Ibid., 216.

trouvé,’”69 in which the story is enclosed by a frame narrative, commenting on the text as a historical document. The innovative aspect of this use of an extradiegetic frame is that it is not always clear whether it is to be considered fictional or nonfictional. The postmodern novelist often claims the right to intrude into his own novel, resulting in a subversion of the traditional hierarchical distinction between author and (extradiegetic) narrator.70 The borderline between reality and fiction can therefore sometimes become very thin, which evidently accords with postmodernism questioning the very existence of such a line. The introduction of an extradiegetic narrator is often accompanied by a multiplication of the intra- and hypodiegetic levels, which Musarra calls “an expansion […] toward the centre of the narrative,”71 as opposed to the extradiegetic outer frame. This multiplication often results in novels not only containing an extra- or intradiegetic narrator (sometimes combined with an intruding author), but also one or more characters functioning as narrators of embedded texts on a hypodiegetic level. These embedded texts can be excerpts of letters (cf. the epistolary novel) or diaries – in which cases the same character functions as a narrator on different levels – or they can be an entirely different fictional or nonfictional genre that, at first sight, seems in no way related to the main narrative.

1.4.2. Frame-breaking and metafiction

Musarra notes that, in many cases, it is very difficult to distinguish between the various narrative levels. The postmodern novel not only experiments with the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, those “between frame and narrated story and between the story and ‘the story in the story’, are often obliterated” as well.72 Both the extension of the outer frame and the expansion of the narrative towards its centre are typically postmodern methods of self-reflection.73 Often, the embedded texts are made significant

69 Musarra, 1987, 218. 70 Ibid., 217. 71 Ibid., 222. 72 Ibid., 216. 73 Ibid., 223.

to the main narrative by symbolism and analogy, and are commented upon by an instance on a higher level. This revealing the instability of narrative frames, crossing the boundaries between them, is called “frame-breaking.”74 A typical device that is often used to achieve this sort of self-reflection is the mise en abyme. In heraldry, mise en abyme denotes “the image of a shield containing, in its centre, a miniature replica of itself.”75 Much in the same way, the postmodern novel incorporates embedded texts which it then reflects upon as metaphors for itself. Metafiction is a method similarly related to the crossing of narrative levels. It is a self-reflexive technique rather than a typically postmodern textual genre, and is therefore used as a literary device in other literature as well. According to Patricia Waugh, “metafiction is not so much a sub-genre of the novel as a tendency within the novel which operates through exaggeration of the tensions and oppositions inherent in all novels: of frame and frame-break, of technique and counter-technique, of construction and deconstruction of illusion.”76 Self-consciously drawing attention to its own existence as an artefact, metafiction examines the nature of fictional writing, narrativity, and the relationship between fiction and reality. In short, all writing that is metafictional, can be said to “explore a theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction.”77 Postmodern fiction is metafiction because the metafictional oppositions are inherent to the postmodern paradox. It adheres to the conventions of fiction in creating an illusion, but it also lays bare that illusion, ironically revealing the linguistic and literary techniques with which it is constructed. In this way, metafiction resembles intertextuality. Musarra states:

[T]he multiplication of narrative instances contributes to the self-reflexive character of most Postmodernist fiction. Every narrative instance may pronounce a metalingual comment on its own activity or on the activity of other instances. In most Postmodernist texts this procedure is

74 Musarra, 1987, 225. 75 Lucien Dällenbach, The Mirror in the Text. Transl. by J. Whiteley and E. Hughes (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 8. 76 Patricia Waugh, “What is metafiction and why are they saying such awful things about it?” in Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984), 14. 77 Ibid., 2.

extended to the relation of the text to other texts: the novel then presents itself as a network of intra- an intertextual cross-references.78

As intertextuality transgresses the boundaries between different works and genres of literature, metafiction transgresses the boundaries between narrative frames within the novel. Both metafiction and intertextuality reveal the novel’s place within a broader system, acknowledging and subverting the workings of that system at the same time.

1.5. Historiographic metafiction

I have already explained how the search for a Canadian identity caused English-Canadian literature in the 1960s to be preoccupied with the country’s colonial and postcolonial history. As history became a central literary theme, the difference between literature and historiography became less distinct. The narrative turn had revealed that history is always told in the form of a story, from a certain perspective, using the same techniques of narrativity as, for instance, literary fiction. Historians such as Hayden White argued that historiography is no less a “poetic construct” than fiction, and that the novelist and the historian share “‘emplotting’ strategies of exclusion, emphasis, and subordination of elements of a story.”79 Indeed, the postmodern historical novel critically questioned the scientifically objective authority of historiography as opposed to the subjectivity of literary fiction. According to Linda Hutcheon, this new approach to history resulted in a substantial difference between the postmodern historical novel and traditional historical fiction. Because of the “intense self-consciousness” about the way in which historical facts are dealt with, and the awareness of the subjectivity that is inevitably involved, the postmodern is to be considered an entirely new way of narrating the past, which Hutcheon names “historical metafiction.”80 Combining a critical, consciously subjective approach to history with the techniques of metafiction, the postmodern historical novel

78 Musarra 1987, 230. 79 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, 66. 80 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 1988, 113.

redefines the distinction between truth and falsity. Hutcheon writes: “Postmodern novels […] openly assert that there are only truths in the plural, and never one Truth; and there is rarely falseness per se, just others’ truths. Fiction and history are narratives distinguished by their frames, frames which historiographic metafiction first establishes and then crosses.”81 Historiographic metafiction therefore accounts for a complex combination of the typically postmodern questions and paradoxes that I have already discussed:

Postmodern novels raise a number of specific issues regarding the interaction of historiography and fiction […]: issues surrounding the nature of identity and subjectivity; the question of reference and representation; the intertextual nature of the past; and the ideological implications of writing about history. […] Historiographic metafictions appear to privilege two modes of narration, both of which problematize the entire notion of subjectivity: multiple points of view […] or an overtly controlling narrator […]. This is not a transcending of history, but a problematized inscribing of subjectivity into history.82

As to the “intertextual nature of the past,” postmodern fiction can indeed be said to use intertextuality to signal its “oblique relation to historical fact,”83 which can only be established through documents and texts. Ironically and parodically incorporating historical intertexts, the postmodern novel draws attention to its own artificiality as literature, as well as to the essentially literary nature of history itself. Moreover, these intertexts provide the novel with a hint of authenticity and verisimilitude, reminiscent of classic realism, which it then, however, ironically tackles, blurring the distinction between fact and fiction. Historiographic metafiction is a deliberately complex mixture of history and (meta)fiction, constantly reminding the reader to be critical. The metafictional self-consciousness, the awareness that reality and history are always subjectively perceived and passed through via language, involves a realization of the potential power of (written) language.84 Both the acquisition and the perception of actual, social power are always in some way related to the means of language, and, as

81 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 1988, 109-110. 82 Ibid., 117-118. 83 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, 68. 84 Ibid., 71.

Hutcheon argues, “[t]o write either history or historical fiction is equally to raise the question of power and control.”85 Aware that any interpretation of history inevitably takes a particular perspective, historiographic metafiction is always, to a certain extent, ideological fiction. As the author of a historical novel puts forward a specific view on history, and therefore directly or indirectly on present-day society, he or she has a certain power over his or her readers.86 This is why, according to Hutcheon, postmodern metafiction has such a strong “historical and political determination”87: it involves history and even politics to make us aware of the dimensions on which the power of language operates, and of “the ‘wholeness’ of the literary context.”88 It is important to note that this historiographic metafiction and the scale on which history is involved in postmodern Canadian literature represent something more than the postcolonial search for a Canadian identity with which I have opened this section. Although it is certainly true that certain nationalist sentiments have resulted in a recourse to history as a warrant of cultural independence, postmodern novels more fundamentally signal “the need to investigate the ontological nature as well as the function both of their literary products and of the processes that created them and keep them alive. The institution of literature is comprised of writers and readers, producers and receivers of texts, and also of the ‘circumstantially dense interchange’ between them, an interchange that has social, historical, and ideological dimensions.”89

85 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, 72. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., 74. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., 73.

2. THE FAVOURITE GAME: A PLAY ON THE WORD MADE FLESH

First published respectively in 1963 and 1966, Leonard Cohen’s novels The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers shortly predate the postmodern period, which is generally said to originate in the seventies and eighties. They both are, however, highly experimental novels, representing the literature boom of the 1960s, which introduced into English- Canadian fiction a number of innovations that later came to be known as postmodern. Moreover, the reception of these two daring pieces of literature was hesitant enough for them to be considered ahead of their time. Linda Hutcheon, for instance, has called Beautiful Losers both “a forerunner”90 and “an early example”91 of postmodern (historical) metafiction in the Canadian literature of the seventies and eighties. Beautiful Losers can indeed be argued to be an early postmodern novel, but so can the earlier written The Favourite Game, as both novels display many of the typical aspects of postmodern Canadian fiction discussed in the previous chapter. In the following two chapters of this dissertation I will do a close reading of Leonard Cohen’s novels, using the outline of Canadian postmodernism established in the first chapter as a theoretical framework. I will highlight in both The Favourite Game (chapter 2) and Beautiful Losers (chapter 3) some of the crucial elements of the postmodern Canadian novel that I have discussed above, as well as a few particularities of Cohen’s style that can also be considered postmodern.

The Favourite Game was Leonard Cohen’s official debut as a novelist. As it is written from the perspective of a young Jewish poet in Montreal, Lawrence Breavman, it is often considered a highly autobiographical account of Cohen’s own struggling to find recognition as a writer. It is often criticized as being more amateurish and a less mature novel than Beautiful Losers, reflecting Cohen’s coming of age rather than his real literary talent. Confronted, in an interview following the book’s first publication in 1963, with the allegation that The Favourite Game is merely a record of the troubles the young Leonard

90 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, 14. 91 Ibid., 27.

Cohen had to get off his chest, Cohen replied: “It is really a third novel disguised as a first novel, and all the reviewers, as to be expected, fell for it. […] It is very highly crafted, and very highly disciplined, and everything I want to say is there. It is not just that first, fine, careless frenzy.”92 Leaving the question of the novel’s literary quality aside, I will discuss the extent to which The Favourite Game should be read as autobiography, considering the postmodern blending of fiction and nonfiction. In relation to that issue, I will focus on the several narrative voices in the novel, examining Cohen’s use of narrative frames, frame- breaking, and embedded texts. Subsequently, I will characterize The Favourite Game as a postmodern metafiction thematizing the act of writing, and art in general as a creative process of self-representation. Finally, I will discuss the novel’s rhetoric of games, and the intricate relation between art, aesthetics, and the human body.

2.1. Narrative voices

2.1.1. The tyranny of fact: the author in the novel

The Favourite Game is often read as the young Leonard Cohen’s autobiography because of the many similarities between the author and the novel’s protagonist, Lawrence Breavman. Both Breavman and Cohen (at the time of writing the novel) are young, Jewish, and trying to make a living from their writing in the city of Montreal. It is indeed undeniable – as Cohen himself has admitted – that the hero in The Favourite Game is closely modelled after the novel’s author, and that several experiences in the author’s personal life are reflected in the story. This is, however, true for many novels, which are therefore not necessarily all autobiographical. For a book to qualify as autobiography, a number of requirements need to be met. According to Philippe Lejeune, a story is autobiographical if there is a relationship of “identity” between “author, narrator, and

92 Interview on Youth Special. Interviewed by Stuart Smith, CBC, 12 November 1963. CBC Digital Archives, http://archives.cbc.ca/programs/2361-15493/page/1/, 2011.

hero”93: all three must share the same name or “signature,” and “the text must be written in the first person.”94 The Favourite Game does evidently not measure up to this definition: Leonard Cohen writes in the third person about a fictional character that does not share his name. Moreover, the novel contains several narrative levels, and it is not clear whether the voice of the main narrative is to be considered Cohen’s, Breavman’s, or that of an unspecified omniscient narrative instance. Carmen Ellison, however, in her article “Not My Real Face,” argues that the novel contains enough factual events for it to be read as a mixture of autobiography and fiction. Studying the “complex network of pronouns”95 in The Favourite Game, Ellison refers to Lejeune’s mention of “pronoun negotiations between self and other,”96 that can sometimes characterize a text as autobiography in the third person. In the following excerpt of the novel, Cohen breaks the narrative by “the oscillation of pronouns”97:

He tore the books as his father weakened. He didn’t know why he hated the careful diagrams and coloured plates. We do. It was to scorn the world of detail, information, precision, all the false knowledge which cannot intrude on decay.98

Ellison argues that Cohen’s “we” splits the narrator’s subject between past and present selves, “to pose the past as an object to be studied.”99 Cohen’s intricate use of pronouns serves to transgress the boundaries between self and other: “Cohen writes about himself as someone else, yet the other, Breavman, is also Cohen.”100 In a similar study of narrative voices in Leonard Cohen’s writing, Susan Macfarlane, quoting from an anonymous essay, argues that the reader of The Favourite Game is set up

93 Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography. Trans. Katherine Leary. Ed. Paul John Eakin (Minneaoplis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 15. 94 Carmen Ellison, “Not My Real Face: Corporeal Grammar in The Favourite Game,” Essays On Canadian Writing 69 (1999): 64. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 10 Mar. 2011. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid. 98 Leonard Cohen, The Favourite Game (London: Blue Door, 2009), 18-19. 99 Ellison, 1999. 100 Ibid.

to enjoy a “thinly veiled autobiography,”101 but is then confused by a narrator who ironically detaches himself from his story, constantly reminding the reader that it is only fiction:

In describing Breavman’s childhood war games, the narrator adopts a childish perspective with a twist of adult irony: “The Japs and Germans were beautiful enemies. They had buck teeth or cruel monocles and commanded in crude English with much saliva” (15). And then the narrator departs completely from Breavman’s childhood mind into social commentary: “European children starved and watched their parents scheme and die. Here we grew up with toy whips. Early warning against our future leaders, the war babies.” (16).102

Here, it could be argued that both the narrator and the young Lawrence Breavman are respectively present and past selves of the same narrator, as Ellison suggested. But even then, it would make more sense to assume that narrator to be Breavman, retrospectively telling his own story, with Cohen as the uninvolved author rather than one who relates the story of his own personal life, thinly disguised under an alias. Cohen himself has said about this: “Lawrence Breavman isn’t me, but we did a lot of the same things. But we reacted differently to them and so we became different men.”103 Colouring his novel with autobiographical experiences, Cohen creates a mixture of fiction and nonfiction, telling the story of a character closely resembling but not coinciding with his own persona, with the insertion of a typically postmodern ironic distance. According to Paul Milton, the novel uses the public persona of Leonard Cohen as an intertext: “Breavman […] is a grotesque or twisted figure of Cohen, who is simultaneously absent and present in the traces that constitute that character. […] But The Favourite Game goes beyond the story of Breavman, which in turn goes beyond the autobiographical matter that may be its model.”104 The story is autobiographical as long as it dwells on the similarities between Leonard Cohen and Lawrence Breavman, but

101 Susan Macfarlane, “The Voice of Trust in Leonard Cohen,” Essays on Canadian Writing 69 (1999): 73. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 10 Mar. 2011. 102 Ibid. 103 Ira B. Nadel, Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen (New York: Pantheon, 1996), 88. 104 Paul Milton, “Beyond Agonistics: Vertiginous Games in the Fiction of Leonard Cohen,” Essays on Canadian Writing 69 (1999): 251. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 10 Mar. 2011.

“that cohesion is repeatedly challenged,” as “[the narrator] is able to range from Breavman’s childhood consciousness to a mature, broader social perspective.”105 However striking the resemblances between Cohen and Breavman may be, it will be clear that the main condition for a novel to qualify as autobiography is that the related events are acknowledged as autobiographical. In the already mentioned television interview of 1963, Cohen claimed: “The emotion is autobiographical, because the only person’s emotions I know about are my own. The incidents are not autobiographical. I apologize. I am terribly sorry. I cringe before the tyranny of fact, but it is not autobiographical. I made it up.” Although it is a truism that authors are not necessarily to be considered the most trustworthy authorities when it comes to analyzing their own work, we will have to take Cohen’s word for this. Rather than characterizing The Favourite Game as autobiography, the novel’s complex use of pronouns reveals a postmodern subverting of the traditional hierarchical distinction between author and narrator, as mentioned in the discussion of Musarra. In the following section I will analyze the intricate system of narrative frames and frame-breaking in The Favourite Game, and the related incorporation of embedded texts.

2.1.2. Narrative frames and frame-breaking

Michael Ondaatje, in his book on the writings of Leonard Cohen, subscribes to the interpretation of the narrative voice in The Favourite Game as that of Lawrence Breavman, representing himself with a certain level of irony. Ondaatje states: “The book is written in the third person, but we are always conscious that it is Breavman writing in order to discover a clearer, more objective picture of himself.”106 Paul Milton adds that, in representing himself, Breavman is certainly not unaware of the “ironic implications of some of his actions.”107 His self-depiction is often grotesque: he represents himself as a romantic youth, teaching his lover, Shell, about himself by relating his equally grotesque stories on previous relationships with other girls, such as Tamara.108 Summarizing these

105 Macfarlane, 1999. 106 Michael Ondaatje, Leonard Cohen. (Toronto: McClelland, 1970), 24. 107 Milton, 1999. 108 Ibid.

levels of narrativization, Ondaatje characterizes The Favourite Game as “Breavman writing about Breavman writing about Tamara.”109 In other words, The Favourite Game can be said to thematize the method of characterization through the means of storytelling. More specifically, characters in the novel are typified in a number of short love stories, telling the different romances they have experienced in their lives. On the highest narrative level, the entire novel is in fact the love story of the writer Lawrence Breavman and Shell, as told by Breavman himself. In that respect, The Favourite Game has not incorrectly been called a modern version of the romantic Künstlerroman, transformed by a certain irony that paves the way for postmodernism.110 The first time the reader notices there is a subjective narrative voice on the highest narrative level is in the already mentioned excerpt: “He didn’t know why he hated the careful diagrams and coloured plates. We do.” Here, the narrator subjectively comments on the narrative, through what Musarra calls a multiplication of the extradiegetic level. Whether this narrator is Breavman or Cohen, we do not know. At the beginning of the next chapter, however, a frame narrative is established in which Breavman acts as an intradiegetic narrator of all other levels: “Many years later, telling all this, Breavman interrupted himself […]”111 In a scene that is crucial to an understanding of how the novel’s various narrative levels are intricately woven into each other, Breavman tells Shell about his romantic relationship with Norma. In this story, Breavman uses the movie camera as an image for perception, symbolizing the inevitable subjectivity of storytelling: “That summer Breavman had a queer sense of time slowing down. He was in a film and the machine was whirring into slower and slower motion.”112 Further on, the same sentence returns on the intradiegetic level, when Breavman relates the story to Shell: “I was in a film and the machine was whirring into slower and slower motion.”113 Here, the boundaries between the various narrative levels are transgressed through the frame-breaking method of mise en abyme. Breavman admits to the same subjectivity, explicitly editing the truth, when he

109 Milton, 1999. 110 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, 26. 111 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 20. 112 Ibid., 80. 113 Ibid., 83.

begins his story about Norma, in which all the narrative frames are blurred into each other:

Eight years later he told Shell about it, but not everything. […] What was her name? he demanded of himself. I forget. It was a sweet, Jewish last name which meant mother-of-pearl or rose-forest. How dare you forget? Norma. What did she look like? It doesn’t matter what she looked like every day. It only matters what she looked like for that important second. That I remember and will tell you. […] I told her stories. She made up a blues called “My Golden Bourgeois Baby Sold His House For Me.” No, that’s a lie. […] The firelight grazed over her, calling out a cheek, a hand, then waving it back to the darkness. The camera takes them from faraway, moves through the forest, catches the glint of a raccoon’s eyes, examines the water, reeds, closed water-flowers, involves itself with mist and rocks. “Lie beside me,” Norma’s voice, maybe Breavman’s. Sudden close-up of her body part by part […]114

In this complex scene, Susan Macfarlane distinguishes three narrative levels: “Breavman and Norma are actors in a film – that’s one level – being selectively composed from memory by Breavman the filmmaker – another level – whose reconstruction is being commented upon and (again) selectively narrated to Shell – a third level.”115 It should be noted that, on all of these levels, Breavman acts as the subjective narrator. It is often unclear exactly which narrative voice is speaking, and the roles of Breavman as narrator, filmmaker, and actor “are delineated only to be blurred.”116 Moreover, as the passage contains no quotation marks, there is no way to distinguish between Breavman’s narration and his dialogues with Norma and Shell. In summary, “the confusion of voice happens on the narrative level between Breavman and Shell, among levels between

114 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 80-84. 115 Macfarlane, 1999. 116 Ibid.

Breavman as actor, filmmaker, and narrator, and is also part of the filmmaker’s theme: ‘”Lie beside me,” Norma’s voice, maybe Breavman’s.’”117 In the quoted sentence it becomes evident that the confusion is deliberate, and part of the message. As the subversion of the hierarchical distinction between author and narrator, as well as Breavman’s acting as a frame narrator result in a multiplication of the extradiegetic level, the intradiegetic level is multiplied by the incorporation of a number of embedded texts. Within the love story of Breavman and Tamara, which is already narrated by Breavman on the intradiegetic level, “Breavman let Tamara see some notes of a long story he was writing.”118 Fully integrated in the narrative, these “notes” make up a hypodiegetic “story within the story,” breaking the narrative frames through the method of mise en abyme: “The characters in it were named Tamara and Lawrence and it took place in a room.”119 To use Musarra’s terminology, the boundaries between the story and the “story within the story” are obliterated, in the same way as are those between frame and narrated story.120 It soon becomes clear that the hypodiegetic story is made significant to the characters on the higher narrative level by means of symbolism and analogy. Using storytelling as a method of characterization, Breavman wrote a subjective, self-reflective version of reality to teach his reader, Tamara, about himself:

Tamara read it carefully. “But I don’t talk that way,” she said softly. “Neither do I,” said Breavman. The act of writing had been completed when he handed her the manuscript. He no longer felt ownership. “But you do, Larry. You talk like both characters.” “All right, I talk like both characters.”121

To express his own subjectivity, Breavman also inserts song lyrics as intertexts, as well as more of his own writing, including an excerpt of his journal, a number of poems, and two

117 Macfarlane, 1999. 118 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 103. 119 Ibid. 120 Musarra, 1987, 216. 121 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 107.

letters to Shell. The second letter is again a “story within the story,” with Shell as a character in the second person:

Dearest Shell, It will take me a little while to tell you. It’s two in the morning. You’re sleeping between the green-striped sheets […]122

Elsewhere in the novel is mentioned that Shell also featured as a character in the letters of her previous lover, Gordon. Although she fulfils the role of reader rather than writer, Shell can therefore be said to use text as a method of self-reflection as well: “Mail became a part of Shell’s heart. She carefully chose the places to read these lengthy communications, which were far more exciting than the chapters of a novel because she was the major character in them.”123 Just like Breavman, Shell is characterized by a number of short stories throughout the novel. The first time she is really introduced to the reader, is in a description of an early sexual encounter. We notice that it is Shell herself who acts as the storyteller when the narrative is interrupted by Breavman, resulting in a frame dialogue between Breavman and Shell commenting on the story. As The Favourite Game can be regarded as an ironic adaptation of the romantic Künstlerroman, relating the coming of age of a young writer, and as both of its main characters, Breavman and Shell, use embedded texts and storytelling as means of characterization, self-reflection, and communication, language and the act of writing evidently are important themes. In the next section of this chapter I will discuss the novel’s focus on writing and art in general, and the ways in which it represents creation as a process.

2.2. Metafiction

In her study of “the early postmodernism of Leonard Cohen,” Linda Hutcheon mainly focuses on Beautiful Losers, as she does not find the same level of self-consciousness and

122 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 262. 123 Ibid., 163.

metafiction in The Favourite Game. Although she admits that Cohen’s debut, ironically investigating the role of the artist, certainly “paves the way for the postmodernism of Beautiful Losers,”124 Hutcheon is still inclined to regard it as a modernist novel. She argues: “The move from the modernism of the first novel to the postmodernism of the second is marked by a shift in the level of self-reference – from the content to the form of the work.”125 It is true that The Favourite Game is not metafictional in the sense that it is explicitly self-conscious about its own artificiality. There is, however, an undeniable level of metafiction present in the novel’s content. In The Favourite Game, Cohen examines the nature of language, the act of writing, and artistic creation, themes which I have earlier established as typical of postmodern literature. The reason why metafiction in The Favourite Game is focused on content rather than form is because the novel is primarily concerned with the process of art as self-representation, rather than the self- consciousness of the artefact itself. Jenny L.M. Kerber states: “For Breavman, the emphasis in art is placed on process rather than product.”126 In this section, I will discuss the representation of the creative process in The Favourite Game, as well as briefly analyze the novel’s rhetoric of games in that respect.

2.2.1. The creative process

Discussing the important role of boundaries in postmodern Canadian fiction, I have characterized the postmodern writer as a transgressive figure. Defying the boundaries of space and time, of artistic genres, and those between the known and the unknown, the postmodern author is a fundamental in-between figure, embodying ambivalence and transgression. As I have stated above, the crossing of boundaries can bring about change, but, paradoxically, it is by dwelling in these boundary zones that the transgressive figure becomes the creator of new possibilities. Much in the same way, the character of Lawrence Breavman assumes an ambivalent position towards change and the boundaries

124 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, 26. 125 Ibid., 27. 126 Jenny L.M. Kerber, “’There is a crack in everything’: Preservation, Fortification, and Destruction in The Favourite Game,” Essays on Canadian Writing 69 (1999): 53. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 10 Mar. 2011.

of time. Although he fears the inevitable movement of time as a destructive force resulting in eternal decay, he also celebrates movement and change as sources of artistic creation. According to Kerber, Breavman’s biggest problem is “that he cannot let go of anything.”127 Breavman reluctantly witnesses the fate of loss and decay time imposes on all that is dear to him: the illness and death of his father, his mother’s beauty disappearing with age, the vague memories of innocent playfulness in his childhood. In his several relationships with women, it becomes clear that Breavman’s desire for preservation has resulted in a fear of commitment. When he and Shell spend a night in a tourist house, Breavman hates Shell for wanting to rearrange the room and make it more comfortable. Here, Breavman is shocked by the intensity of his own desire to leave everything as it is. If you change something and make it your own, you can also lose it: “She had changed the room. They could lay their bodies in it. It was theirs, good enough for love and talk. […] He wished he could honour her home-making and hated his will to hurt her for it. But didn’t she understand that he didn’t want to disturb an ashtray, move a curtain?”128 Paradoxically, Breavman’s yearning for preservation goes hand in hand with a desire for movement and destruction. Despite his fear of time and decay, Breavman knows that “if time did not pass on there would be nothing for him to preserve.”129 He realizes that art and creation are inextricably related with destruction and fragmentation, and that it is the artist’s task to recollect stories out of the fragments. He repeatedly calls himself a “goldminer,”130 an “archaeologist,”131 and a “keeper,”132 who has learned to impose order on the chaos and fragmentation of reality:

His mind broke into postcards. […]

127 Kerber, 1999. 128 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 156. 129 Kerber, 1999. 130 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 4. 131 Ibid., 20. 132 Ibid., 79.

He had trained himself to delight in this fraction. “What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross.”133

Kerber argues: “Breavman [...] envisions himself as one who moves in after the destruction to make sense of the pieces, giving them a new artistic configuration. […] It is not so much Breavman’s concern to create the ruins as to uncover them, showing ‘all the layers like a geologist’s sample’ and then converting them into art.”134 This fits in with the characterization of the postmodern storyteller as a trickster figure and a boundary crosser, whose function is not so much to create something new, but rather to reveal what is already there, but has been forgotten or repressed. Moreover, Breavman is aware of the paradox that language, the author’s only instrument to reconstruct the fragments of reality, is itself susceptible to fragmentation and change: “I wish I could say all there was to say in one word. I hate all the things that can happen between the beginning of a sentence and the end.”135 What Breavman desires is not to annihilate the inevitable destructive power of historical time, but to transcend it. He wishes to capture the movement and transgression of the moment, in which the artist has the power to create. Various scenes in the novel illustrate Breavman’s view of creation as a process, transcending historical time while preserving energy or momentum. His first experience of creative power is when he discovers the art of hypnosis. After trying his skills on animals, he decides to hypnotize a friend, Heather. It is not made entirely clear whether or not the hypnosis actually worked, but, in any case, Breavman realizes that, by depriving a person of their sense of space and time, he can provide himself with new possibilities to make things happen: “He was dizzy with his new power. All her energy at his disposal.”136 The clearest examples of Breavman’s desire to capture the moment, to stop time without losing momentum, are the night drives with his friend Krantz.137 Reminiscent of the trickster figure, who, as a traveler, is always on the road, Breavman’s aimless nights

133 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 85, 249. 134 Kerber, 1999. 135 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 206. 136 Ibid., 58. 137 Kerber, 1999.

on the Canadian highways symbolize the creative process. Breavman imagines the car surpassing the speed of time, giving him and Krantz an eternity of dialogue to come up with new ideas: “Moving at that speed they were not bound to anything. They could sample all the possibilities.”138 During these night drives, Breavman and Krantz are accompanied by the car radio. Breavman repeatedly stresses the relation between music, speed, and writing, arguably because the rhythm adds movement to the words, again characterizing art as an on-going process rather than a finished product:

Let it go on as it is right now. Let the speed never diminish. […] Let the compounded electric guitar keep throbbing under the declaration:

When I lost my baby I almost lost my mind.

[…] Don’t let the guitars slow down like locomotive wheels. Don’t let the man at ckvl tell me what I’ve just been listening to. Sweet sounds, reject me not. Let the words go on like the landscape we’re never driving out of.

This blurring of the boundary between music and writing brings to mind Leonard Cohen’s own choice to enrich his poetry by becoming a musician. To confirm his opinion that the borderline between these two art forms is negligible, Cohen once said about his work: “There are guitars behind everything, even the novels.”139 Another artistic genre that is mentioned to characterize artistic creation as a process that transcends historical time, is painting. “Book II” of the novel opens with an account of Breavman’s fascination with the paintings of Henri Rousseau, and “the way he stops time.”140 In his description of Rousseau’s “Forest Landscape with Setting Sun,” Breavman admires the falling man, who will “never reach the ground,” and “is comfortable in his imbalance.”141 The latter is exactly what Breavman wishes to be.

138 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 110. 139 Cohen, “P.S.” in The Favourite Game, 2009, 2. 140 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 65. 141 Ibid.

Kerber argues that “Rousseau captures scenes that satisfy Breavman’s desire for the postponement of the inevitable,”142 as Breavman himself admits to be “afraid to live any place but in expectation.”143 According to Kerber, this “desire to dwell in expectation” defines Breavmans approach to art as a “process rather than a product.”144 Breavman “resists the accomplishment of a finished artistic product because once a work or structure is completed it then becomes vulnerable to decay.”145 Projecting this notion of art on his own writing, Breavman approaches writing as continuous self-representation. Michael Ondaatje writes: “Breavman, then, is studying his own portrait while making it, and the stress is on the fact that the portrait is unfinished.”146 For Breavman, the ultimate image for creation as self-representation can be found in Lisa’s favourite game, which I will discuss in the context of the novel’s rhetoric of games.

2.2.2. The rhetoric of games

In his study of the importance of games in Leonard Cohen’s fiction, Paul Milton states that “[b]oth of Cohen’s published novels use the rhetoric of games.”147 In both novels, this rhetoric is even apparent in the title: in The Favourite Game, the symbolism of the games Lawrence Breavman played as a child makes up an important theme, and Beautiful Losers contemplates the concepts of loss and victory. According to Milton, the rhetoric of games is crucial to an understanding of the metafictional symbolism in Cohen’s writing, as he uses games as a metaphor for the relationship between the author, the reader and the text.148 Moreover, the game can be considered as a system of rules and boundaries, and a way to impose order on reality. It is generally noted that Breavman’s name is derived from the word “bereavement.” The most radical losses in Breavman’s life are the death of his father, and

142 Kerber, 1999. 143 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 264. 144 Kerber, 1999. 145 Ibid. 146 Ondaatje, 1970, 24. 147 Milton, 1999. 148 Ibid.

his loss of religion, after he loudly renounces his faith as a child, supposedly causing Bertha to fall out of a tree. According to Milton, art becomes a compensation for the lack of order in Breavman’s fatherless and godless life.149 Two related motifs symbolizing Breavman’s obsession to regain control are repeated throughout the novel: the motif of games, and the motif of the body, which I will discuss in the next section of this chapter. As children, Breavman and Krantz make up their own rules by which to play games, resulting in a childish sense of freedom that Breavman will desperately try to preserve through adolescence. The first time he notices that these rules will not hold, is during the whipping game with Lisa and Krantz. When the boys change the rules at will, Lisa refuses to obey, and steps out of the game:

“Turn over,” Breavman commanded. “The rule was: only on the bum,” Lisa protested. “That was last time,” argued Krantz the legalist. […] “What’s the matter with him? I’m getting dressed.” […] Now outside of the game, she made them turn while she put on her dress.150

Kerber states that, when Lisa crosses the boundaries of the game, “all magic is quickly lost, imaginative speech ceases, and the garage in which the game is played is returned once more to its original dull state.”151 As Breavman learns that the boundaries he sets out only work “within the strict confines of a game,”152 he is left with the realization that they do not offer him any control over real life. The disillusionment of the whipping game therefore coincides with a new discovery in Breavman’s life, namely sexuality. When Lisa starts to undress by order of Krantz, Breavman is struck by the whiteness of her skin, forgetting all about the game. Breavman’s crossing of the boundary between childhood and adolescence creates a distance between him and Krantz, who refuses to listen and reacts in a childish, playful manner:

149 Milton, 1999. 150 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 15-16. 151 Kerber, 1999. 152 Ibid.

She had to take off her top, too, and the cot disappeared from under her and she floated in the autumnal gloom of the garage, two feet above the stone floor. Oh my, my, my. Breavman didn’t take his turn whipping. There were white flowers growing out of all her pores. […] “She’s perfect, Krantz, didn’t you see?” Krantz plugged his ears with his forefingers. They passed Bertha’s Tree. Krantz began to run. “She was really perfect, you have to admit it, Krantz.” Krantz was faster.153

Kerber argues that, although “the game is a beautiful construct,” it is here established that “Breavman cannot remain a child forever.”154 It is, however, indicative of Breavman’s use of games as an artificial way to impose order on his life that his discovery of sexuality does not put an end to his rhetoric of games. Instead of leaving the playfulness of his childhood behind, Breavman simply regards sexuality as another new invention in his world of games: “They grew tired of games in the field beside Bertha’s Tree. […] Better games of flesh, love, curiosity. […] Whenever they could they played their great game, the Soldier and the Whore.”155 Sexuality and romantic relationships provide Breavman with a new system of boundaries to explore, resulting in artistic creation in the form of love stories and poetry. Again, the relation between games and art is firmly established. The clearest link between Cohen’s rhetoric of games and metafiction can be found in the final scene of the novel. Breavman is sitting in a restaurant when he is suddenly struck by a memory:

Jesus! I just remembered what Lisa’s favourite game was. After a heavy snow we would go into a back yard with a few of our friends. The expanse of snow would be white and unbroken. Bertha was the spinner. You held her hands while she turned on her heels, you circled her until your feet left the ground. Then she let go and you flew over the snow. You remained still in whatever position you landed. When everyone had been flung in this fashion into the fresh snow, the beautiful part of the game began. You stood up carefully, taking great pains not to disturb the

153 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 15-16. 154 Kerber 1999. 155 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 25-27.

impression you had made. Now the comparisons. Of course you would have done your best to land in some crazy position, arms and legs sticking out. Then we walked away, leaving a lovely white field of blossom-like shapes with footprint stems.156

The object of Lisa’s favourite game is “to create an idiosyncratic representation of the body,”157 making the game a metaphor for art as self-representation. Breavman asks the waitress for a pencil to scribble down his memory on a napkin, again drawing attention to the act of writing as a means to preserve history. Here, the novel’s metafictional theme becomes the most apparent. Milton argues that, “[i]f the favourite game is a form of self- representation, then it must refer doubly: to Lisa’s spinning game and to the novel itself.”158 Entitling the novel after a metaphor for artistic self-representation, Cohen acknowledges the fact that Breavman’s writing is a process of self-reflection: “The text is The Favourite Game and the text is the favourite game. The title becomes a mark of metafiction.”159 It will be clear that, in Lisa’s favourite game, the player’s body has an important role, as it is the “instrument” with which the representation of the self is created. In the next section, I will discuss the motif of the body in The Favourite Game.

2.3. The word made flesh

The Favourite Game opens with a list of scars: the festering punctures in Shell’s earlobes, the scar on Breavman’s right temple, his father’s war wound, and his aging mother who “regarded her whole body as a scar grown over some earlier perfection.”160 Breavman concludes: “A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.”161 According to Carmen Ellison, “[b]ody and text are often related in The Favourite Game.”162 In this

156 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 274-275. 157 Milton, 1999. 158 Ibid. 159 Ibid. 160 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 3. 161 Ibid. 162 Ellison, 1999.

section I will discuss how the novel both sets up and subverts the traditional ways in which the human body and beauty are reflected in literature and art. The relationship between body and text is certainly not a new one. Just like writing has always been a method of saving historical facts from oblivion, it is one of art’s most important aims to make a lasting representation of beauty, thereby preserving it from the decay imposed by the inevitable course of time. Ellison states: “The impermanence of bodies and the permanence of texts comprise a traditional theme of love poetry, from Shakespeare to Cohen.”163 The Favourite Game does indeed appear to fit in with this tradition. Most of the included lines of Breavman’s poetry are dedicated to the celebration of the female beauty, starting from the poem that opens the book: “As the mist leaves no scar / On the dark green hill, / So my body leaves no scar / On you, nor ever will.”164 Also, in his narration Breavman continually displays his obsession with the female body. However, as much as Cohen continues the tradition of preserving beauty in literature, he also subverts it. The difference between Shakespeare and Breavman is, as Ellison has pointed out, that the latter can no longer distinguish between body and text: “Breavman is confused about the boundary between the corporeal and the textual.”165 In The Favourite Game, the traditional relationship between the impermanence of bodies and the permanence of texts is reinflected “by [Breavman’s] attempts to conflate body and text.”166 It can be argued that Cohen parodies the conventions of this tradition by paradoxically setting them up and, at the same time, ironically subverting them, marking what Linda Hutcheon calls the “critical difference.”167 In a number of scenes it becomes clear that Breavman tries to deny the inevitable decay of bodily beauty by equating the body with artistic creation. When discussing different kinds of female beauty, Breavman expresses his admiration for “women like Shell, [who] create [their beauty] as they go along.”168 In other words, Breavman regards

163 Ellison, 1999. 164 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009. 165 Ellison, 1999. 166 Ibid. 167 Hutcheon, 1987, 7. 168 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 192.

bodily beauty not just as an inspiration of art, but as a form of artistic creation in itself. Talking to Shell about the already mentioned Henri Rousseau, Breavman admires the painter’s discipline with which he “did right to the end of his life”169 by allowing his work to stand in the way of sexuality: “No real corporeal woman can give hum the pleasure of his own creations.”170 He then admits to Shell: “I guess a certain kind of creative person is like that,”171 thereby implying that he himself could never do it. In Freudian terms, Breavman can be said to have a strong sex drive. Breavman explains a lot of his motivations in life in terms of “desire,” in the first place a desire for sexuality. More importantly, as he desperately turns to art as a weapon against the decay of beauty, it is sexual desire that functions as Breavman’s primary creative energy. The relationship between sexuality and artistic creation as Breavman’s strongest incentives becomes the clearest when he decides for himself what the most important factors for happiness are:

Breavman, you’re eligible for many diverse experiences in this best of all possible worlds. There are many beautiful poems which you will write and be praised for, many desolate days when you won’t be able to lay pen to paper. There will be many lovely cunts to lie in, different colours of skin to kiss, various orgasms to encounter, and many nights you will walk out your lust, bitter and alone. […]172

If Breavman embodies Freud’s concept of eros, Shell arguably functions as his double or counterpart. Whereas Breavman considers the female body, particularly the body of Shell, the ultimate artefact173, Shell herself fails to see the beauty of it: “She didn’t like her body. It was not a princess’s body, she was sure.”174 Breavman, who has dissolved the boundary between the body and art, is obstructed in his desires by Shell, who wishes to defend the integrity of the boundary “between her as autonomous individual and her as his artistic creation.”175 Near the end of the novel, in a letter to Shell, Breavman admits

169 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 34. 170 Ibid. 171 Ibid., 172 Ibid., 111-112. 173 Kerber, 1999. 174 Ibid. 175 Ibid.

that she was right in preserving the boundary between the inner and the outer self: “I remembered your suspicion of beauty’s praise, so I praised your soul, yours being the only one I believe in. I discovered that the beauty of your eyes and flesh was just the soul’s everyday clothes.”176 It should be noted that, just like the motif of games, the motif of the body is closely related to self-representation in art. Both in Lisa’s favourite game and in Breavman’s “game” of sexuality, “[t]he body is the site of play.”177 Moreover, as for Breavman bodily beauty is the ultimate artefact, sexuality is a form of artistic self- representation. For him, “the only successful kind of sexual love” is “the love of the creator for his creation. In other words, the love of the creator for himself.”178 In this respect, Breavman’s other lover, Tamara, resembles Breavman much more than Shell does. After she and Breavman have broken up, Tamara spends all of her time painting self-portraits. Just like Breavman, she thinks that art can transcend the destructive power of time and preserve beauty and the self from decay:

Tamara was a painter now, who did only self-portraits. […] “Why do you do only yourself?” “Can you think of anyone more beautiful, charming, intelligent, sensitive, et cetera?” “You’re getting fat, Tamara.” “So I can paint my childhood.”179

In the final chapter of the novel, it is made clear that, despite his encounter with Shell, Breavman still shares Tamara’s belief that art, although it cannot stop the changing course of time, is able to save the body from its destructive power: “The streets were changing. […] But they were beautiful. They were the only beauty, the last magic. Breavman knew what he knew, that their bodies never died. Everything else was fiction.”180

176 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 264. 177 Milton, 1999. 178 Cohen, The Favourite Game, 2009, 105. 179 Ibid., 219. 180 Ibid., 272.

3. HISTORY AND BOUNDARIES IN BEAUTIFUL LOSERS

Several critics have argued The Favourite Game, in many ways, to prefigure Beautiful Losers. Further developing or even radicalizing central concepts of its forerunner, such as self-reflexivity, metafiction, and boundary transgression, Beautiful Losers is considered one of the early experimental novels to encompass the full extent of postmodernism in Canadian literature. In this chapter I will discuss how Leonard Cohen’s second novel qualifies as an early example in the tradition of historiographic metafiction in Canadian postmodernism, thematizing history and historiography to probe the relationship between writer, reader, and text. Subsequently, I will examine the several ways in which the novel crosses conventional boundaries, both on the formal and the content level. In the year 2000, when Beautiful Losers was first translated into Chinese, Leonard Cohen was asked to write a short preface to the first Chinese edition of the book. In that note to his future Chinese readers, Cohen wrote:

This is a difficult book, even in English, if it is taken too seriously. May I suggest that you skip over the parts you don’t like? Dip into it here and there. Perhaps there will be a passage, or even a page, that resonates with your curiosity. After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover. In any case, I thank you for your interest in this odd collection of jazz riffs, pop-art jokes, religious kitsch and muffled prayer, an interest which indicates, to my thinking, a rather reckless, though very touching, generosity on your part. […] Dear Reader, please forgive me if I have wasted your time.181

It will be clear that what follows is a bold defiance of Cohen’s advice. Closely scrutinizing the novel from cover to cover, I will tackle the elements of Beautiful Losers that are relevant to a postmodern reading, obviously taking the book far “too seriously.” I can only hope to eventually prove above-cited note to be a product of Leonard Cohen’s famous modesty, and this highly experimental, pioneering novel to be, although a difficult book indeed, anything but a waste of time.

181 Cohen, “P.S.” in Beautiful Losers, 2009, 12.

3.1. Historiographic metafiction

According to Linda Hutcheon, the essence of postmodern metafiction in Canadian literature, of which she calls Beautiful Losers an early example, is that it is “ironic, historical, and political fiction that is also about fiction, that contains within itself a first critical commentary on its own nature as narrative and as language.”182 It is important to realize that, in as much as it invokes the search for a Canadian identity and its recourse to national history, historiographic metafiction is not historiography, nor is it political commentary. Although historiographic metafiction is, in many cases, an ironically self- aware version of historical fiction, Beautiful Losers is not a historical novel. In this section I will discuss how the novel invokes the particular concept of Canada’s postcolonial history only to arrive at its metafictional essence: an exploration of the nature of artistic creation, subjectivity, and narrativity, symbolized by the relationship between its two nameless protagonists and narrators, I. and F.

3.1.1. Reading Canadian history

Beautiful Losers contains two first-person narrators. The first narrator, which in Cohen criticism is usually labeled “I.,” remains anonymous throughout the novel. Paul Milton states that, by using the first-person pronoun as the only “name” of the narrator, “the text turns that character into an every-subject signified by an empty sign that needs to be occupied to accrue meaning.”183 In other words, the reader of Beautiful Losers is invited to co-create the narrative by identifying with a narrative instance that lacks any real form of identity. This makes Beautiful Losers, in the Barthesian terminology mentioned in the first chapter of this dissertation, essentially a writerly text, in which the reader “must participate, even if we do not identify.”184 Moreover, the I. in the novel, although he acts as the alleged author of the narrative, in several ways fulfils the role of reader: he not only is the intended reader of the “long letter from F.,” as a scholar studying the life of a Native Canadian saint, he also symbolically acts as a reader of Canadian history.

182 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, 27. 183 Milton, 1999. 184 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, 27.

Whereas Cohen’s first novel had as a central theme the transcending of the abstract concept of historical time, Beautiful Losers, according to Frank Davey, is much more closely tied to history, “specifically located in time and place, in terms of both its writing [...] and its setting.”185 As to its historical context, Davey argues that Beautiful Losers “is very much an English-language novel of the 1960s,”186 fitting in with contemporary tendencies such as sexual mysticism. On the level of its content, the novel is explicitly set in the Montreal of the sixties: “the Montreal of rival francophone nationalist groups.”187 The character of F. is repeatedly presented as a Quebecois nationalist. He takes I. to a separatist political rally, plans to bomb a statue of Queen Victoria, and condemns all imperialist powers in the colonial history of Canada: “The English did to us what we did to the Indians, and the Americans did to the English what the English did to us. I demanded revenge for everyone.”188 Paradoxically, F. criticizes the nationalist movement’s appeal to history to justify the plea for Quebecois independence. Whereas the separatist rally explicitly maintains a historical rhetoric (“History! they shouted. Give us back our History! The English have stolen our History!”189), F. realizes that any interpretation of history is inevitably subjective:

I will confess that I never saw the Québec Revolution clearly. […] I simply refused to support the War, not because I was French, or a pacifist (which of course I’m not), but because I was tired. […] A huge jukebox played a sleepy tune. […] The tune was called History and we loved it, Nazis, Jews, everybody. We loved it because we made it up […]190

In other words, history is characterized as a narrative construct. Beautiful Losers, therefore, does not subscribe to the exploration of national history in search of a Canadian identity. On the contrary, the novel condemns what Davey calls the Quebecois

185 Frank Davey, “Beautiful Losers: Leonard Cohen’s Postcolonial Novel,” Essays on Canadian Writing 69 (1999): 12. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 10 Mar. 2011. 186 Ibid. 187 Ibid. 188 Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (London: Blue Door, 2009), 216. 189 Ibid., 139. 190 Ibid., 188.

“‘je me souviens’ appeals to history”191: the invocation of historical legacy to justify nationalist causes. Davey therefore argues that F.’s declamation against imperialism is anything but a recourse to historical facts to back up a political statement. F. symbolically opposes colonial oppression only to pursue a far more general desire to liberate the subject from all restrictions, and to “slip out of categories.”192 To eventually achieve the ultimate “vision of All Chances at Once,”193 the subject has to transcend all boundaries, including those of historical time. F. therefore teaches I. to “[c]onnect nothing.”194 As a historian, I. obsessively studies the life of Catherine Tekakwitha, in an attempt to find order in the chaos of his own existence. In his worship of this Mohawk saint, I. hopes to find guidance to lead him through the shadows of his unconscious, as symbolized by the etymology of her name:

Tekakwitha was the name she was given, but the exact meaning of the word is not known. She who puts things in order, is the interpretation of l’abbé Marcoux, the old missionary at Caughnawaga. L’abbé Cuoq, the Sulpician Indianologist: Celle qui s’avance, qui meut quelquechose [sic] devant elle. Like someone who proceeds in shadows, her arms held before her, is the elaboration of P. Lecompte. Let us say that her name was some combination of these two notions: She who, advancing, arranges the shadows neatly.195

Instead of liberating him from his “shadows,” however, I.’s intensive reading of history causes him to remain hopelessly stuck in the past, which is metaphorically represented as constipation. His attempts to impose order on the chaos by means of historiography irreversibly force him into isolation:

Why me? – The great complaint of the constipated. […] How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me? The hater of history crouched over the immaculate bowl. […] Unlock me! […] Please make me empty, if I’m empty then I can receive, if I can receive it means it comes from

191 Davey, 1999. 192 Ibid. 193 Cohen, Beautiful Losers, 2009, 281. 194 Ibid., 19. 195 Ibid., 51.

somewhere outside of me, if it comes from outside of me, I’m not alone! I cannot bear this loneliness.196

F. wishes to save I. from his obsession with historiography in order to free him from the restrictions that it imposes on him. In his letter to I., he writes: “It is my intention to relieve you of your final burden: the useless History under which you suffer in such confusion.”197 Teaching F. to transcend the boundaries of history is, however, only a small part of F.’s project. On a larger scale, it is his desire to liberate the Canadian minds by abolishing all conventions: “I want History to jump on Canada’s spine with sharp skates […] I want two hundred million to know that everything can be different, any old different. I want the State to doubt itself seriously.”198 Here, F.’s subversion of conventions meets the postmodern paradox: in order to change the system, he needs to become part of it, which explains why F., despite his wish to “slip out of categories,” is involved in politics. In the following section I will discuss how F.’s ideas of creation and subversion reflect those of the postmodern writer as characterized in the first chapter of this dissertation.

3.1.2. How it happens

As I have stated above, the central themes in Beautiful Losers are not so different from those in its forerunner. In many ways, Beautiful Losers radicalizes certain motifs that Cohen already set up in The Favourite Game. One of the typically postmodern traits the two novels share, is the focus on artistic creation as a process. In this context, a relevant piece of trivia is that Cohen first considered Show it Happening as a title for his second novel.199 According to Paul Milton, the difference between the two novels is that, whereas The Favourite Game accounted for the development of the writer, in Beautiful Losers the focus is on that of the reader. Although it is true, as discussed above, that the character of I. symbolically acts out the role of reader, the importance of the other first-

196 Cohen, Beautiful Losers, 2009, 44-45. 197 Ibid., 217. 198 Ibid., 216. 199 Cohen, “P.S.” in Beautiful Losers, 2009, 14.

person narrator, F., should not be underestimated. Rather than confining itself to the development of the reader, Beautiful Losers, elaborating I.’s troubled relationship with F., reflects the relationship between the reader and the writer of postmodern fiction. As I have already mentioned, Linda Hutcheon considers Cohen’s second novel the more metafictional one. According to Hutcheon, Beautiful Losers reaches a higher level of formal self-reference, drawing attention to the process of its own creation as literature. Moreover, the novel explicitly emphasizes the role of the reader in that process.200 When F., in his long letter to I., tells the story of the last four years of Catherine Tekakwitha’s life, he repeatedly provides his addressee – and therefore also the reader of Beautiful Losers – with instructions on how the text is supposed to be read, stressing the importance of reading as part of the creative process: “Read it with that part of your mind which you delegate to watching out for blackflies and mosquitoes. […] I haven’t got time to make this description gory. Just read it through the prism of your personal blisters, and of those blisters choose the one you got by mistake.”201 The novel’s self- reference is further complicated when I., in his own turn, interrupts the narrative with an interpolated remark addressed to the reader of the novel: “O Reader, do you know that a man is writing this? A man like you […]”202 In the closing paragraph of the novel, the first- person narrator again speaks to the reader as to an indispensable co-creator of his own self-representation: “Welcome to you who read me today. Welcome to you who put my heart down.”203 This recurrence of self-referential commentary on several narrative levels undermines the assumption that the metafictional scope of Beautiful Losers is primarily focused on the development of I. as a reader. As Milton states, I. is a split subject, disintegrated into a “composite being (a reader who is a writer / a writer who is a reader).”204 The participation of the reader as co-creator of the narrative therefore results in a mise en abyme: “I, the extratextual reader, write about my reading of I., the

200 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, 27. 201 Cohen, Beautiful Losers, 2009, 217, 224. 202 Ibid., 120. 203 Ibid., 283. 204 Milton, 1999.

intratextual reader, who writes about his reading of F.”205 As Milton points out, this pattern is reminiscent of Michael Ondaatje’s above-mentioned characterization of The Favourite Game as “Breavman writing about Breavman writing about Tamara.”206 While, in The Favourite Game, the centre of the narrative is occupied by Breavman’s love stories, it is F. who most manifestly embodies the role of storyteller in Beautiful Losers, with his letter to I. as the central embedded text; although I. appears to be the most prominent narrative voice, his narration is, as Milton’s mise en abyme suggests, merely a reading of F. The relationship between the two first-person narrators of Beautiful Losers therefore symbolizes that between the reader and the postmodern writer: F. is an ambivalent trickster who both manipulates his reader and, as Hutcheon states it, “wants to lure [him] into the act of meaning-making.”207 On the one hand, F. obsessively tries to reshape his reader into a copy of himself, teaching him to “[c]onnect nothing,”208 and to let go of the past. He is a transgressive figure who defies the boundaries of history and convention (“Out of History I come to tell you this.”209), encouraging I. to do the same: “F. often said: Think of the world without Bach. Think of the Hittites without Christ. To discover the truth in anything that is alien, first dispense with the indispensable in your own vision.”210 On the other hand, however, F. admits to his own ambivalence by revealing his dependence on the reader he manipulates. He profiles himself as a teacher and a storyteller, who requires a disciple to take over the “burden” of his knowledge: “I am a born teacher and it is not my nature to keep things to myself. […] Like many teachers, a lot of the stuff I gave away was simply a burden I couldn’t carry any longer. […] Soon I’ll have nothing left to leave around but stories.”211 That F.’s manipulative dominance paradoxically implies a wish for his reader to transcend him, is revealed by his repeatedly drawing attention to the process of his creation (“Watch the words, watch

205 Milton, 1999. 206 Ibid. 207 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, 42. 208 Cohen, Beautiful Losers, 2009, 19. 209 Ibid., 179. 210 Ibid., 99. 211 Ibid., 172-173.

how it happens.”212), as well as by his desperate plea to I.: “I pray you, dear friend, interpret me, go beyond me.”213 As mentioned above, F.’s manipulation of the reader entails, on a larger scale, a desire to abolish the conventions of Canadian society. As a trickster and a boundary crosser, F. wishes to provide the people with unknown knowledge, and disclose possibilities that they themselves cannot see: “I want two hundred million to know that everything can be different […].”214 In this capacity, he fits in with Siemerling’s characterization of the postmodern writer as a prophet and a priest. Both a member of Parliament and a subversive artist, F. speaks “both as a prophet to, and as a representative for, the community.”215 However, as Cohen predicted, the community dismisses its prophet as a traitor, defined by Siemerling as

a crosser of boundaries who delivers a person, a value, or information from the inside to the outside. In Cohen’s perspective, however, this disruptive resident alien is also a correspondent of the other who reverses the trade. He is both a marginalized member of the community and a beneficent agent who brings in the possibility of an unknown, emergent other self. He thus channels an energy from the outside that will save the community from the fossilizing power of its instituted self.216

F.’s attempts to save Canada from that fossilizing power, by making the state “doubt itself seriously,”217 cause him to be arrested as a terrorist leader, after which he is placed in a hospital for the criminally insane.218 In the next section I will further elaborate on the ways in which Beautiful Losers thematizes the crossing of boundaries both formally and in the context of F.’s creative process.

212 Cohen, Beautiful Losers, 2009, 215. 213 Ibid., 183. 214 Ibid., 216. 215 Siemerling, 1994, 31. 216 Ibid., 32. 217 Cohen, Beautiful Losers, 2009, 216. 218 Ibid., 263.

3.2. Boundary crossing

Beautiful Losers can be – and often has been – argued to lack a real storyline. In the note cited in the introduction to this chapter, Cohen himself characterizes his novel not so much as a linear story, but as a “collection of jazz riffs, pop-art jokes, religious kitsch and muffled prayer.”219 The best way to approach it is, in Cohen’s opinion, not to read it from cover to cover, but to “[d]ip into it here and there.”220 According to Susan Macfarlane, the novel’s narrative voice, structure, and form “[suffer] disjuncture to the point of collapse,”221 resulting in a drastic “breakdown of the whole system”222 of linearity and narration in literature. In fact, this high degree of fragmentation and disjuncture is part of the novel’s subversion of systems on many levels. In this final section I will discuss the most important examples of boundary transgression in Beautiful Losers. Firstly, I will focus on the formal level, examining the novel’s use of intertextuality and parody. Secondly, I will discuss Robert Stacey’s notion of the pornographic sublime, as a radicalization of sexual desire as a creative force.

3.2.1. Intertextuality and parody

As discussed above, our reading of I.’s reading of F. results in a mise en abyme that intertwines the extratextual and the intratextual levels. According to Linda Hutcheon, this “simultaneous merging of inner and outer reference” is further complicated by “at least two other referential levels of language […]: an auto-referential one (in which the text refers to itself as a text or a printed page or a work of literature) and an inter-textual one (which points to the intervention of other works or artistic conventions).”223 Hutcheon states, quoting from an interview, that intertextuality plays an important role in Cohen’s writing:

219 Cohen, “P.S.” in Beautiful Losers, 2009, 12. 220 Ibid. 221 Macfarlane, 1999. 222 Ibid. 223 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, 29.

In an interview Cohen once admitted to a conscious intertextual intent, since he said he wrote “using all the techniques of the modern novel which was the discipline in which [he] was trained – so there’s this huge prayer using the conventional techniques of pornographic suspense, of humour, of plot, of character development and conventional intrigue.”224

On the intertextual level, Beautiful Losers crosses the boundaries between textual genres, incorporating excerpts of historical documents on the life of Catherine Tekakwitha, comic books, and a Greek-English phrase book. Indicative of his experimenting with formal conventions is that, rather than integrating the intertext into the text of the novel, Cohen chooses to insert a photocopied page of the Greek-English phrase book itself, thereby reminding the reader that the novel is only a textual artefact. He then goes on to parody the phrase book by combining its formal conventions with the content of Catherine Tekakwitha’s biography:

KATERI TEKAKWITHA AT THE POST-OFFICE (hers the lovely italics) where is the Post-Office, sir? I’m a foreign here, excuse me ask that sir he knows French, German he will help you please, show me the Post-Office […]225

Furthermore, Beautiful Losers “openly plays on the intertextual conventions of the epistolary novel (in ‘A Long Letter from F.’) and the journal form (in the nameless narrator’s writing in Part I).”226 Moreover, the novel repeatedly combines the formal conventions of religious texts with an overtly erotic content. In the next section of this chapter I will further discuss Beautiful Losers as a parody of pornography. Apart from parodying formal conventions of various textual genres, Cohen’s novel also crosses the boundaries between literature and other cultural media, such as radio

224 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, 29. 225 Cohen, Beautiful Losers, 2009, 163. 226 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, 29.

and film. Like The Favourite Game, Beautiful Losers uses film as an image for perception and artistic creation. I. and F. are both frequent visitors of the System Theatre, where, again, F. develops a fascination with the creative process rather than the product: “As it floated and danced and writhed in the gloom over us, I often raised my eyes to consult the projection beam rather than the story it carried.”227 Moreover, the distinction between the newsreel and the actual film symbolically represents the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, which F. desperately wishes to cross in order to create something new:

In the midst of this heady contemplation, I am invited to formulate the question which will torment me most. I formulate the question and it begins to torment me immediately: What will happen when the newsreel escapes into the Feature? […] The newsreel lies between the street and the Feature […] I let the newsreel escape, I invited it to walk right into the plot, and they merged in aweful [sic] originality […]228

The same film imagery returns in the final scene of the novel, when the old man “reassemble[s] himself […] into a movie of Ray Charles,”229 using the artistic genre of film as a means of self-representation. Again, the reader’s attention is drawn to the creative process:

- Just sit back and enjoy it, I guess. - Thank God it’s only a movie. - Hey! cried a New Jew, laboring on the lever of the broken Strength Test. Hey. Somebody’s making it!230

Cohen further breaks down the boundaries between novel, radio, and film at the end of F.’s letter. Here, on the auto-referential level, the book reveals itself as printed text, and is then interrupted by live radio, establishing the equivalent of the newsreel escaping into the feature:

227 Cohen, Beautiful Losers, 2009, 260. 228 Ibid., 260-261. 229 Cohen, Beautiful Losers, 2009, 281-282. 230 Ibid., 282.

(DOLLY INTO CLOSE-UP OF THE RADIO ASSUMING THE FORM OF PRINT) - This is the radio speaking. Good evening. The radio easily interrupts this book to bring you a

recorded historical news flash: TERRORIST LEADER AT LARGE. Only minutes ago, an unidentified Terrorist Leader escaped from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane. […] 231 (CLOSE-UP OF RADIO EXHIBITING A MOTION PICTURE OF ITSELF)

F. desperately tries to convince his reader that radio, film, and reality actually interrupt and become the book, but, paradoxically, he can only do so by continuing to write his letter. As Siemerling states, “F. shows his readers – ‘I’ and us – how it is happening, indeed. But as he states elsewhere, that ‘is as far as I can take you. I cannot bring you into the middle of action. My hope is that I have prepared you for this pilgrimage.’”232 In other words, this is where the work of the writer ends. The trickster has guided us across all possible boundaries. It is now up to the reader to complete the process of creation.

3.2.2. The pornographic sublime

As a result of its above-mentioned overtly erotic content, Leonard Cohen’s second novel has, by several critics, been called “tasteless,” “obscene,” and “offensive in the truest sense of the word.”233 John Fisher, for instance, states that “Beautiful Losers contains no literature that even vaguely resembles art,” and that “any pretense at plot or narrative is abandoned in an orgy of filth.”234 In this final section I will argue that the novel’s obscenity – which it certainly contains – does not necessarily exclude it from the realm of literary art. Rather than a lack of literariness, I would consider the origin of the novel’s eroticism to be a radicalization of The Favourite Game’s notion of “the word made flesh.”

231 Cohen, Beautiful Losers, 2009, 263-264. 232 Siemerling, 1994, 50. 233 Robert D. Stacey, “Pornographic Sublime: Beautiful Losers and Narrative Excess,” Essays on Canadian Writing 69 (1999): 229. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 10 Mar. 2011. 234 John Fisher, “Letter” in Imagining Canadian Literature: The Selected Letters of Iack McClelland. Ed. Sam Solecki (Toronto: Key, 1998), 110-112.

In other words, the grotesque omnipresence of sexuality in Beautiful Losers is a radical manifestation of Cohen’s use of the corporeal as a motif for literary self-representation, and of his refusal of “a separation of art from the realities of bodily life.”235 If, as Milton argues, the body is “the site of play”236 of Breavman’s self-representational games, then, in Beautiful Losers, it is the laboratory of F.’s experiments to abolish conventions, as suggested by his self-image of “Dr. Frankenstein with a deadline.”237 According to Hutcheon, Beautiful Losers parodies the conventions of religious texts by confronting them with an erotic content.238 As mentioned above, the combination of religion and pornography into what Hutcheon calls “the religion of sexuality”239 makes the novel fit in with the sexual mysticism of its decade. Although this confrontation of two seemingly polar opposites can give the impression of being deliberately shocking or blasphemous, it can also be regarded as a crucial part of F.’s boundary-crossing rhetoric, considering that, as Susan Sontag suggests, “pornography and religion are among the few discourses that possess a vocabulary to represent extreme experience.”240 Like Lawrence Breavman, F. regards sexual desire as a driving force for the creation of new possibilities, and the human body repeatedly functions as the instrument of his subversive experiments. In the car scene, for instance, I. and F. engage in a masturbation session of which the climax is supposed to coincide with the moment of the car ripping through a wall of painted silk.241 Not only does this scene, just like the car scenes in The Favourite Game, use the car drive as a metaphor for the creative process, it also evidently links the sexuality of the human body to the transgression of boundaries. A similar use of sexuality as a means of boundary transgression is F.’s invention of the “Telephone Dance,”242 which can be interpreted as an exploration of hidden desires.

235 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, 31. 236 Milton, 1999. 237 Cohen, Beautiful Losers, 2009, 202. 238 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 1988, 30. 239 Ibid., 34. 240 Stacey, 1999. 241 Cohen, Beautiful Losers, 2009, 106-111. 242 Ibid., 36.

After descending into the basement of the System Theatre, arguably representing the unconscious, Edith and F. play the erotic game of the Telephone Dance, which makes them feel “delivered.”243 Evoking the concept of disclosure of the unconscious as a confrontation with the “other,” F. describes the invention of the Telephone Dance as “a need to imitate the fearful and the beautiful, yes, an imitative procedure to acquire some of the qualities of the adored awesome beast.”244 The same interrelation of sexuality and monstrosity returns in F.’s rant against the restriction of sexuality to the reproductive organs, which reintroduces his condemnation of imperialism: “Pricks and cunts have become monstrous! Down with genital imperialism! All flesh can come!”245 Also, when Edith, at the age of thirteen, is sexually abused by a group of men, the image of the shadow is associated with the concept of the “other”:

They pulled her into the shadows because each man wanted to be somewhat alone. […] They twisted her over again and pulled her deeper into the shadows because now they were ready to remove her underwear top. The shadows were so thick and deep at the corner of the quarry that they could hardly see, and this is what they wanted. […] But the men refused to cooperate with the miracle (as F. called it). They could not bear to learn that Edith was no longer Other […]246

It is this relationship between sexuality and the “other” or the “monstrous” that Robert Stacey calls “the pornographic sublime.”247 The sublime can be defined as the opposite of the beautiful: an experience that is so different from the conventional that it cannot be understood. According to Stacey, Beautiful Losers is “underwritten by an aesthetics of the sublime that has a great deal to do with its much-celebrated ‘postmodernism’ and everything to do with its much-less-celebrated pornographic elements.”248 The notion of the pornographic sublime therefore accounts for the novel’s obscenity as well as its subversion of formal conventions that I have characterized as typically postmodern:

243 Cohen, Beautiful Losers, 2009, 36. 244 Ibid. 245 Ibid., 38. 246 Ibid., 70-71. 247 Stacey, 1999. 248 Ibid.

It is in relation to this rhetorical excess, which more than anything else characterizes the novel, that we can begin to see the connections between postmodernism and the sublime […] Beyond the typological confusions enacted by Beautiful Losers, its use of the sublime suggests a radical departure from (or challenge to) the basic organizing, meaning-making, feature of the novel itself: narrative. […] Beautiful Losers violates the purity of the beautiful by “fucking up” the novelistic form, and it does so by putting so much emphasis on, well, fucking.249

In this context, the “other,” the “monstrous,” and “the sublime” are more or less synonymous terms; they all serve to name that what is disclosed when conventional boundaries are crossed. The pornographic sublime is therefore what makes Beautiful Losers a postmodern novel: it is Cohen’s attempt to give his creation “All Chances at Once,” by breaking down all literary conventions, both on the formal and the content level. It is an experiment to see what happens if literary art is reduced to chaos. Paradoxically, it becomes both. It is obscene; it is tasteless. But, above all, it is art.

249 Stacey, 1999.

CONCLUSION

In this dissertation, I have proposed a postmodern reading of the novels The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen. After providing an analysis of Canadian postmodernism as a theoretical framework, I have scrutinized both of Cohen’s novels for the typically postmodern elements of boundary transgression, characterization by means of storytelling, the intricate use of narrative frames, and the thematization of history and the artistic process. I have characterized Cohen’s debut, The Favourite Game, as a metafictional novel that has as a central theme the act of writing itself. The character of Lawrence Breavman is presented as a typically postmodern storyteller, who expresses his own subjectivity in a creative process that is also an attempt to preserve beauty from chaos, fragmentation, and the destructive power of historical time. To symbolize artistic creation as a self- representational process, the novel makes use of the rhetoric of games, and has as recurring motifs the beauty of the female body, and sexual desire as a creative energy. Beautiful Losers can, in many ways, be seen as a radicalization of The Favourite Game. In his second novel, Leonard Cohen manifestly subverts the conventions of literary art, both on the formal and the content level. A quintessential postmodern Canadian novel as well as an early example of historiographic metafiction, Beautiful Losers invokes the concepts of history and historiography to explore the essential nature of artistic creation, as well as the relationship between the reader and the writer of postmodern fiction, represented respectively by its two first-person narrators, I. and F. Furthermore, the novel explicitly draws attention to its own existence as a textual artefact, with the ambivalent character of F. as a typically postmodern storyteller. Radicalizing the boundary crossing between artistic genres that was already present in The Favourite Game, Beautiful Losers further breaks down the novelistic form using the postmodern methods of intertextuality and parody. All of the above serves to prove that Leonard Cohen, as a novelist, is to be considered one of the most prominent representatives of the rise of postmodernism in the Canadian literary fiction of the 1960s. It should, however, be added that the countless poems and songs that, together with the novels, make up Cohen’s literary oeuvre, all

allow for a similar postmodern reading. All of Leonard Cohen’s writing is characterized by the same recurrent thematization of writing itself, along with the driving forces of love and desire. He has never made it a secret that his work is a constant reinvention of his first one or two poems. Again and again, Cohen plays his favourite games of words and flesh to distil art from the chaos.

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