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From Chaos to Art Postmodernism in the Novels of Leonard Cohen

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From Chaos to Art Postmodernism in the Novels of Leonard Cohen Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy From Chaos to Art Postmodernism in the Novels of Leonard Cohen 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. 1 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. 2 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. 3 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.
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