Proquest Dissertations
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY
He'll: Parody in the Canadian Poetic Novel
by
Nathan Russel Dueck
A THESIS
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE
DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
CALGARY, ALBERTA
NOVEMBER, 2009
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•+• Canada Abstract
This dissertation considers literary parody as reading in performance. If we accept
that parody reads its source texts, we also acknowledge the potential for a performative reading of these sources. Literary parody is not only citation, but a process of recitation
as well. If so, parodic fiction that recites poetry embodies the structure, style, and tone of its source texts. I will attempt to examine the poetics of this performance trope through a particular form of parody. By parodying the cadences and intonations of poetic language, the "poetic novel" invites readers to enact the gestures of its textual performance.
If literary parody reads its sources, I propose that any subsequent act of reading constitutes rereading. Rereading a poetic novel requires that we must interpret the discursive ambiguity, even ambivalence, of poetry. In effect, poetic novels operate through apostrophe both to source texts and to readers. Such a rhetorical address relies on our identification with the pathos provoked by the self-referential qualities of poetic language. Supposing that parody is an occasion for reading in performance, the poetry within specific prose narratives affords a performative opportunity.
As its title suggests, this dissertation will relate the implications of parody to narratives by particular poet-novelists in Canada that cite and recite poetry. I will consider how parody manipulates literary conventions by looking at theories by Linda
Hutcheon, Margaret Rose, and Robert Phiddian. I will perform a close reading of poetic novels by Leonard Cohen and Michael Ondaatje; Margaret Atwood, Jane Urquhart, and
Anne Michaels; Robert Kroetsch; and finally, Malcolm Lowry.
ii "He'll" strives to embrace the ironies of parody that alternately asserts or subverts literary conventions, while simultaneously encouraging disjunctive readings of several poetic novels.
in Acknowledgments
It seems significant that the last words I will write for this dissertation are the first
words you will read. I would not have reached the end - or the beginning, depending on
how you look at it - of this project without the care and consideration of many people.
The number of you who supported my research, writing, and rewriting surpasses my
count. I count on so many of you.
My parents, Harold and Beverly Dueck, demonstrate daily how patience differs
from indulgence, and confidence differs from self-righteousness. You have taught me
that what I do for a living matters less than how I do it. Similarly, my brothers, Steven
and Clinton, have reminded me why I should do what I do. Although you are both
younger than I am, I often look to you for guidance. You have proven how a good
education, or an education in goodness, does not require a degree. Without the
encouragement of my supervisor, Aritha van Herk, I would not know what it means to read "assiduously." Thanks for putting your red pen to my work - and for pushing the pen through a page or two - to show me when my assumptions were getting in the way of
communicating my ideas. I am indebted to Harry Vandervlist and to Pamela McCallum
for serving on my dissertation committee. Your constant patience, and your occasional provocation, has led me to this point. I am also grateful that Linda Hutcheon served as the external examiner on my defense. Thank you for the opportunity to prove my ideas to you (because your writing inspired so many of them).
iv Sometimes it seems to me that David Foster and I share one mind. If so, you have put your faculties to better use than I do. Your knowledge and, more importantly, your generosity, exceed my descriptive abilities. Thanks.
And, as for Sharon Seabrook: you tune my heart through all my grey
"intellectual" static.
v For Sharon
vi Table of Contents
Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Dedication vi
Table of Contents vii
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER TWO: "Death Style" of Parody: On Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers alongside Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient 45
CHAPTER THREE: Parody in Historical Fiction: On Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace,
Jane Urquhart's The Whirlpool, and Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces 96
CHAPTER FOUR: Robert Kroetsch's Verbal Parody 152
CHAPTER FIVE: Malcolm Lowry's Churrigueresque Parody 195
CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION 247
WORKS CITED 257
WORKS CONSULTED 274
vn 1
INTRODUCTION
Rereading Parody in the Poetic Novel
Connect nothing:
Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers
Any attempt to read those two words involves teasing out their contradiction, A
sense of self-conscious playfulness underlies their act of writing, a sense of insecurity undermines their reference to 'canonical' works, and a sense of uncertainty compromises their ability to signify anything other than language itself. By choosing to indulge these two words, by giving in to critical fallacy, a reader gets a feel for their textual performance, their allusive locution. In rereading "Connect nothing," I will try to articulate a poetics of literary parody as process, a scripted performance space, a discursive practice that engages source texts in a dialogue.1 The success of this performance depends upon the willingness of readers to participate in this dialogue, to play along with the performance. Casting readers within speaking roles, as in drama, implies a rhetorical appeal for our contributions to the text, as in dramatis personae. And we are drawn in.
Supposing that literary parody constitutes a performance of reading, it might also contain the potential for a. performative reading. If so, parody is not only citation, but recitation. Fiction that recites the cadences and intonations of poetry bespeaks its
Turning to Eco's first footnote in The Open Work will clarify my use of "performance." Eco distinguishes the "practical intervention of a performer" from "an interpreter in the sense of a consumer" {Work 251). He then aligns "both cases ... as different manifestations of the same attitude" (ibid). In other words, reading "represents a tacit or private form of 'performance'" (ibid). I will go on to consider any reading or interpretation as performance: each of us "perform" the text in the course of reading. And, just as no performances are the same, neither are any two readings of a text identical. 2 performative capacity. The self-referential qualities of poetic language generate meaning, but meaning is not absolute; it changes continually as the relationship between the writing and the reader is renegotiated. Whereas poetry requires readers to interpret metaphors by way of their expressive possibility, prose narrative, taken as another mode of expression, involves readers in a comparable process of determining what a story means.2 Literary parody provides a structure for understanding how the novel as a narrative form incorporates non-narrative expressions. Poetry operates within narrative as an aesthetic strategy for calling attention to the development of language in a text, to the moments when language contradicts itself, to the absences within a text, all of which result in an excess of meaning.
With this dissertation, I will try to delineate how literary parody operates in several poetic novels by contemporary Canadian writers. I will pursue the possibility that certain English-Canadian writers fluent in the languages of poetry and prose incorporate the structure, style, and tone of their poems into their narratives. I will attempt to show how these poet-novelists parody their own texts. These are the three premises of my argument: first, parody is a performance of reading; second, any subsequent reading of parody as performance constitutes rereading; and third, prose narratives that parody poetic language encourage multiple interpretations. A subsequent concern for this dissertation is to evaluate how a poetic novel evokes pathos, or provokes readers to
2 My use of "poetic language" comes from Richards (who argued that "emotive" language is the result of self-conscious literature), Jakobson (who argued that the "emotive" or "expressive" function of language focuses attention upon the addressor), and from Iser (who argued the relationship between the text and reader depends on an engagement with the "poetic quality" of a text). Iser, drawing on Ingarden, shapes my understanding of potential that an "original emotion" results from an "aesthetic experience" with a text (Iser 174). 3 emote. I strive to argue that we must rehearse the language of a poetic novel to stage our own textual performances. In this sense, "emote" means a simultaneously emotional and intellectual engagement. Readers are drawn into the text through language that is self- referential and ambiguous. My reason for recommending the performative possibilities of reading is the impressions they allow texts to make on us: we enact texts not simply by browsing language but by actually making language a part of ourselves.
My reading of literary parody suggests that it is, in rhetorical terms, apostrophe both to source texts and to readers.3 Parody exercises the trope of "apostrophe," i.e., a digression that addresses a person, or a personification of an abstract entity, in absentia as though either were present. Considering the way parodic fiction engages source texts is central to recognizing how it lets readers "in on the act." A generation of poststructuralist critics and theorists take the performativity in fiction as a given. Prominent theorists now assume that what an expression says, or refuses to say, matters as much as how it is said.
They also presume that contemporary fiction is aware of its artifice. Ironically, this self- conscious fiction is designed to preempt and negate the critical function. Parody emerges as a method of self-assertion and, at the same time, a form of self-preservation: references to source texts situate contemporary fiction within the literary 'canon'; references to the reading act seemingly inoculate contemporary fiction against criticism. Post hoc text
3 In terms of literary history, "apostrophe" derives from the stage direction in Ancient Greek theatre. Strophe (i.e., the chorus turns from right to left) and antistrophe (the chorus returns) eerily recalls the earliest known use of "parody" (the performance of an ode that imitates tragedies, the exalted "goat" songs). Whereas the parodist cites another text, the apostrophizing poet cites his or her audience. Both "poets" anxiously embrace their Mr-texts before retreating from them. Interestingly, this language from the ancient Greek theatre provides the metaphors and tropes for articulating poetics and analyzing expression in terms of textual performance, either on the page or on the stage. 4
itself becomes a reference; ergo propter hoc the reader becomes another "textual" reference. As a result, literary parody turns source texts and readers into figures of
speech. This introduction will proceed to consider "apostrophe" and "pathos" after a word on parody in order to clarify how these terms apply to the present argument.
On Parody
Literary parody applies to the fictional mode of citing words or utterances while gesturing toward the artificiality of this citation. In this way, parody recites - even resuscitates - previous works of fiction in order to revive their formal and thematic codes and conventions. Only, it does not quote by rote. Parodic fiction has the paradoxical effect of alternatively asserting and subverting the discourse that it incorporates.
"Connect nothing," for instance, aches for an ironic connection. These two words contradict themselves while referring to E.M. Forster's Howards End- "Only Connect..
." (21) - and to T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" - "I can connect nothing / with nothing"
(58). The two words in question here also collapse the processes of writing and reading.
They illustrate how parodic fiction imitates source texts to direct readers away from that discursive duplicity. There is no one metaphor, or single turn of phrase, which captures the way this formal play, this parasitical form of literature, this fictional paranoia pro forma, acts upon readers. Its sleight of hand turns the practice of reading fiction backward and inward at once.
The colon that comes after "Connect nothing:" allows these two words to address readers directly. Such punctuation nudges us to connect this quotation with the text it 5 comes from along with the author who wrote it (and perhaps the text that follows).
Making either connection would cause us to question the author's 'intention.' However, after the death of the 'author,' contemporary writing has become increasingly wary of any interpretation that would theoretically reincarnate the "author function" (Foucault
"Author" 383). At the same time, readers have grown wary of ascribing stylistic tics to a writer. As a result, writers risk being "written out" of their own work and being replaced by scriptors (Barthes "Death" 147). And writers with the gall to turn the act of writing into the subject of their fiction risk writing themselves into their texts.4
The resulting tnetafiction inflicts "a theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction" (Waugh 2). This particular strain of contemporary fiction draws attention to the processes of its own construction. Whereas other modes of fiction ask readers to look up from the book in order to perceive fictional 'reality' in another light, metafiction asks us to look again at what we have already read. Furthermore, metafiction acknowledges its artificiality (as a text and as a set of literary conventions) by positing an internal reader and proceeding to read itself. The meaning, if any, of such fiction becomes inseparable from an act of interpretation. Akin to metafiction, parodic fiction assumes or usurps the distanced stance of its most suspicious reader. Reading a work of parody depends on an ability to elucidate and make use of its source texts. Parody is a
4 Here, I draw from Barthes's argument that writing attempts "to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs,' and not 'me'" ("Death" 143). Similarly, Foucault argues that "today's writing has freed itself from the theme of expression" which results in "an interplay of signs arranged less according to its signified content than according to the very nature of the signifier" ("Author" 377-378). Following Barthes et Foucault, the 'author' is someone whose intentions supply his or her text with meaning, i.e., we read an author like a character in a book. A writer, then, is someone whose actions are responsible for providing a text with character. A writer's character no longer matters. 6 variation of metafiction that interprets its sources for readers. Reading, then, is reading again.
Any persuasive theory of literary parody appends the prefix "re-" to its reading praxis. Rereading, or reading in retrospect, implies that some aspect of metafiction is inherent within all literature. A rereader presumes that all contemporary fiction is suspicious of the literary 'tradition' that it would displace. A line from an essay by the novelist Jonathan Lethem expresses his apprehension about reading novels that he read in his youth, "because they have become inscribed on the interior surface of the eyes through which I read others" (140). This confession comes close to the subjective reading lens prescribed herein. While the inflection of a past work bends the text read to the present, the text read most recently distorts any reflection upon works read in the past.
Lethem's bifocals glance" at the influence each text exerts upon the 'canon' that it succeeds. If literature has infamously worn out existent narrative techniques, it serves that readers have also "feverously read and reread" to that point (ibid). Reading "the used- upness of certain forms and exhaustion of certain possibilities" within contemporary fiction is "by no means necessarily a cause for despair" to literary critic and novelist John
Barth (29). He contends that literature written in the twentieth fin de siecle often chafes against its inheritance of authoritative narration, the vicissitudes of character development, and the mechanics of a well-made plot. This writing is both a version from and revision of the scheme of articulation that produced the possibility of objective
'reality.' 7
"The writings of modernism and those arts that have followed on from it," novelist Malcolm Bradbury writes, are "troubled by silences and absences, a
consciousness of lost meanings and lost coherences, feelings of absurdity and nothingness" ("Parody" 48). Bradbury borrows a term from John Barth, both a novelist and a critic, to say that literature in our time is marked by "exhaustion." If so, contemporary fiction already reads itself before readers take it from the shelf. This leaves us to reread such writing, even if for the first time. This rereading cataract may spread to writing that we read afterward. It may also condemn readers to that apathetic tautology.
Rereading the words "Connect nothing" may not imply parody per se. It remains possible that nothing connects these two words to each other, to their own source text, or to their readers. This particular quotation could suture as easily between lines of a poem as it could between long lines of prose. Indeed, the same quotation connecting readers with parodic fiction, connecting that fiction with the works it parodies, or connecting those works cited with other readers, also disconnects their intertext. In other words, by referring to another writer or written corpus, such a quotation refers to its own tenuous textuality. Parody establishes an opposition, not to the fact that language communicates, but to the possibility that 'reality' is communicable through language and literature.5
Used this way, reality is a term from metaphysics. As in epistemology (the study of structures that constitute knowledge and how we come to it) and ontology (the study of structures that constitute phenomena and how we acknowledge them), any discussion of
5 Here we encounter the Lacanian difference between "reality" and the "Real": the former is the social reality of the actual people involved in an interaction, and in a productive process; while the latter is the inexorable abstract spectral logic which determines what goes on in social reality. 8
reality necessitates abstraction. In fact, implicit in all literary realism is an ideological
position. Rather than represent reality, metafiction tries to reveal how realism is an effect
of literary conventions that produce the illusion of mimesis. Conventions imply a
formula, or a set of limitations, and therefore no work of parody can ever rise to the
heights of its influences, supposedly free of formulas and templates. Parodic fiction sets
itself apart by questioning the texts it takes for a subject. This recalls the prior suggestion
about whether parody addresses its readers. While parody offers past works another
"present," in a sense we offer those works another, albeit ephemeral, "presence."
Hutcheon on Parody
"This ironic playing with multiple conventions, this extended repetition with
critical distance" is how literary critic and theorist Linda Hutcheon determines "modern parody" {Parody 7). She parses this term, calling it an "imitation, but imitation characterized by ironic inversion, not always at the expense of the parodied text"
(Hutcheon Parody 6). (Notice how Hutcheon engages her subject on its own terms by repeating the word "imitation.") This insistence on irony distinguishes Hutcheon's definition in Theory of Parody from other definitions of parody. Indeed, Hutcheon's theoretical parodist is an ironist, not a humorist. "The prefix para" not only means
"beside," but "'counter' or 'against'" as well (Hutcheon Parody 32). Hutcheon observes how parody is spoken about in common conversation almost as often as it surfaces in critical discussion. The term is most often taken for a pejorative. And it is seldom used 9
the same way twice. Which would make sense considering "there are probably no
transhistorical definitions of parody possible" (Hutcheon Parody 10). This caution,
almost in spite of itself, has a more theoretical than practical application. It suggests that
literary parody is only known when it is seen. But, by what means is parody seen? Any
experience of parody would prove difficult to describe without resorting to subjective
qualifiers - e.g., "emotional," "indulgent," or "personal" - written in a subjunctive voice.
By that rhetoric, parody manipulates its doubtful audience, as well as the works it directs them toward. The resulting fiction cannot act upon those who are unfamiliar with the texts being parodied, so it must do more than tell of its own artifice. (It remains unclear whether parody, under its breath, reads its reader.)
For parody to have an effect, a reader must be willing to pry between its discursive lines and across its historical lineage. Hutcheon is concerned with the interplay of semiotic codes and the process of decoding that readers engage. She refers to "the contextualized production and reception of texts" within literary parody with the term enonciation {Parody 55). She goes on to consider how the "rhetorical trope" of performance applies to the processes of literary parody.6 The irony of Hutcheon's theory is her confidence in an "inferred intentionality and semiotic experience,"7 in a preferred reading of parodic fiction. Hutcheon's notion of a parodist encodes fiction with
6 Aristotle would have grounds for argument about what ethos, logos, and pathos have come to mean here. In terms of rhetoric, playing on our sense of decency or propriety constitutes an ethical appeal; playing up the plausibility or the sensibility of reasoning constitutes a logical appeal; playing to our emotions constitutes a pathetic appeal.
7 It is worth noting the difference between inference and implication. Although readers must infer that parody is at play in the texts, this inference does not equate to intention. This thesis emphasizes the reader's role in parody as an aesthetic process. 10
alternately ethical and pathetic appeals: "By ethos I mean the ruling intended response
achieved by a literary text [... and by] pathos, that emotion with which the encoding
speaker seeks to invest [in] the decoding listener" (ibid). Hutcheon's theory asks readers to work at inferring an authoritative meaning; her determination of an "encoding speaker"
implicates a "decoding listener" who must be aware of the parody at play. As a result, her theory of parody relies on dramatic irony. While parodic fiction applauds those who recognize its references, it also plays on the empathy of readers "in the know."
Hutcheon's theory informs my approach to the rhetorical effects of literary parody. At first, "ethos" appears apt. "Pathos," though, connotes pity and suffering, an empathetic engagement rather than a sympathetic - almost sycophantic - textual relationship. A reading based on pity, sadness, or tenderness draws upon the self- reflexivity inherent within parody, thereby making connections beyond any perceived
'intention' on the part of the parodist or parodied author. Sensing the anomalous nature of the 'author' and authorial intention, most poststructuralist critics have resolved not to speak of it. Although Hutcheon's theory of parody relies on subverting the previous author's intentions for his or her work, I will strive to cast aside the residue of intention in favour of the doubled-consciousnesses of and the self-referentiality of performance.
This description of an empathetic reader purposefully conflicts with Wimsatt Jr. and Beardsley's notion of "intentional fallacy." The reader commits an act of intentional fallacy by rereading a work in an attempt to ascertain the meaning its author intended. It does not matter to Wimsatt Jr. and Beardsley what an author means; it only matters what the text says. Alternately, the reader commits an act of "affective fallacy" by rereading a work in an attempt to judge its emotional effect. 11
Other Definitions of Parody
Most other definitions of parody since the eighteenth century maintain that it must ridicule its source texts. Margaret Rose's theory of postmodern parody is no exception. In
Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-modern, Rose considers parody in terms of a
"comedic refunctioning" of source texts. She traces an etymology of the term "comic" to refute the "more recent 'late-modern' writers on parody" who have "denied the importance of its comic effect or structure altogether" (Rose 28). Her theory of parody demands that readers "comprehend the parodistic intention of the author or the objective parodic relationship between the two (or more) texts" (Rose 42). Her theoretical parodist ridicules the intention of the author being parodied. However, Rose's use of the term
"parodistic" to modify "intention" remains unclear. She seems to imply that the parodist is a literary parasite. For Rose, an "ideal" interpretation of parodic fiction recognizes the presence of parody "and enjoys the recognition of the hidden irony" (ibid). She makes it clear that a "sympathetic" reader must take this "hidden irony" for ridicule or scorn. Rose suggests that parody speaks to this sympathetic reader while speaking down to its sources. (Then again, she does not consider the possibility of empathy within literary parody.) Rose's conception of postmodern parody is a form of appropriation that qualifies it as a distinctly postmodern genre, complete with its own set of expectations. In effect, parody deserves its own Dewey decimal.
Few other literary theorists are willing to disabuse parody of intention and ridicule. In fact, it has become standard for critics to develop definitions of parody that 12 parody previous definitions. An essay by Elizabeth Deeds Ermath, "Finger Exercises," provides an example worth quoting at length:
paratactic relations run (as the term suggests) beside the syntactic and productive
sequence, remaining within sight of, but heterogeneous to it. In postmodern
narrative, the classical genre or trope (Greek: parodos; Latin: parodid) expands
out of all recognition into anthematic development that multiplies many times the
doubling gesture of parody. (226)
Ermath's definition turns on a prefix. She argues that parody is a particularly postmodern practice of questioning the validity of source texts. (Jean-Francois Lyotard's over simplified definition of postmodernity - "incredulity towards metanarratives" (xxiv) - comes immediately to mind. Indeed, postmodern fiction and poststructuralist criticism necessitate an interrogative position.)
Fred Householder's essay, "IIAPQIAIA," provides one such source of metanarrative. He offers a philological perspective on Aristotle's sole reference to the original parodist, Hegemon of Thasos (2). Householder then defines parody in opposition to "burlesque," concluding that both apply (with reference to Homeric style, or mock epic). For him, literary parody encompasses adaptation, paraphrase, or quotation. The term also applies to wordplay. Alternately, J.G. Riewald's rejoinder aligns parody with ridicule, a trend that even the Oxford English Dictionary ignores. "To be effective," or read as such, "a parody must be a willful distortion of the entire form and spirit of the writer, captured at his [or her] most typical moment" (Riewald 127). "True parody," according to Riewald, "is neither mere simian imitation nor uncontrolled modulation. It is 13 a form of humorous yet controlled exaggeration." He repeats that word "controlled" to emphasize that parody is a didactic and an evaluative practice. For Riewald, not every book in the library stacks is worthy of being parodied.
The Death of the Parodist?
The definitions of parody preferred by most literary critics or theorists affirm the centrality of the 'author.' To understand literary parody, we must compare the parodist's inferred intentionality against the intentions of the author(s) being parodied. If text fulfills the function that the posthumous 'author' used to realize, then the study of rhetorical appeals may provide a useful practice for reading the fictional construction of subjectivity within parody. If so, the parodist, like the author, is theoretically absent. In the 'death' of the parodist and the parodied author, speakers and narrative expressions themselves provide the grounds for analysis. As literary parody apostrophizes its readers along with its source texts, the figure of apostrophe asks us to consider what happens to the reader in the author's wake. Whereas literary parody speaks for its readers via apostrophe, it also responds for its reader in terms of prosopopoeia, i.e., a figure of speech by which a person, or the personification of an abstract entity, in absentia speaks. Literary parody represents a performance that either antagonizes readers or prompts us to agonize over its self-referential effect. It seems important at this point to consider the implications of parody as reading in performance.
A significant body of research in literary criticism has developed from poststructuralist theories that imagine each reader is also a writer. For instance, the 14
Barthesian et Foucauldian aesthetic movement cannot account for the desire of each
reader for what occurs on the page. Despite the impossibility of a pure reader position,
this 'death' aesthetic provides readers a way to resist literary conventions and closure of
meaning. Readers are implicated by textual performance only because they recognize
their subjection to a textual order. The performance within a text continues, but it does so
in a climate of heightened anxiety that readers cannot succeed in replacing the 'author' as
the centre of authority. Perhaps this is one reason why the relentless search for an
authorial intention or an ideality of meaning results in a sense of uneasiness.9
The possibility that anxiety is generated within textual performance justifies the
complicity of memory and loss associated with a reading experience. At the same time as
a narrator or a speaker is implicated in a narrative, its 'authoritative' voice and control over storytelling apparatus establish it as a writer of the stories. This, in turn, calls into question the fictional status of a writer within a text and hence that of the text itself. And, by a turn peculiar to performance, readers somehow manage to empathize with this writer. It is as though we are reading over someone's shoulder, or listening to our voices reading aloud. Of course, that self-consciousness or conscientiousness is imaginary, a pathetic indulgence, and that sense of pathos allows us to engage in any encounter in literature that might alter our subjective perceptions. Rereading is all about pathos that presents: 1) a state of perception, by no means rare in human experience, in which an
9 This idea draws from Bloom's description of the "anxiety of influence": "[a]s poetry has become more subjective, the shadow cast by the precursors has become more dominant" (11). He asserts that writers in the twentieth century experience this anxiety when considering how previous writers have said what they want to say. Novelist Michael Chabon addresses this "anxiety of influence" which he says, "has always rung so hollow to me" (57). He expresses how a writer remains a reader. "All novels are sequels," he adds; "influence is bliss" (ibid). 15 alternative 'reality' vies with the possibility of overtaking our sense of 'reality'; and, 2) the range of emotions brought on by that perception. The further lacuna of the Barthesian et Foucauldian aesthetic is its inability to consider a motivation for an empathetic response. A purely empathetic reader is no longer a reader at all. Such a reader intends to make his or her own meaning. In effect, rereading is similar to Barthes's lisible act of reading. Any movement that leads to a writerly reading practice discourages readers from pursuing an ideology implicit within literary realism. This ideology attempts to play on readers to promote the dual notion that there is an authorial intention in each text, and that each reader must strive to understand that meaning. This ideology results in an aesthetic that would strive to inject the same response into each reader. Without the necessary empathy for that production, a writerly text could not exist even as a possibility, nor could there flourish more narrowly defined notions such as performativity.10
Bakhtin on Parody
Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of discourse will inform my reading of parody as a performative form of literature. Generally, Bakhtin is more interested in looking at novels side by side to compare their use of language than in looking at the influence a text exerts on subsequent texts. For Bakhtin, languages emerge as the product of a heterogeneous society. These languages vie for privilege by questioning one another's validity. Bakhtin
10 Hutcheon's "decoding listener," is closely related to Barthes's "writerly reader," i.e., the reader who is "no longer a consumer, but a producer of a text" (S/Z 4). 16
establishes a theory of discourse in which cultural meanings and values are realized in
historically specific languages. Ambivalence within language is the underlying theme of
his criticism, and he considers how readers are accustomed to think of fiction. Literary
language, at the same time, provides a way of escaping the oppression or repression that
history represents. Early in his career, Bakhtin describes the possibilities of escaping that bondage through the principles of carnivalesque fiction. He discusses carnival festivities, parodic fiction, and the language of the marketplace with reference to the comic novelist
Francois Rabelais in Rabelais and His World. The unauthorized forms of culture subvert any notion of an author through the ambivalence of carnival laughter and parody. And, according to Bakhtin, literature deploys parody to disturb conventional reading and writing patterns.
In his later works, Bakhtin turns his attention from carnivalesque discourse to literary genres. His theory is most useful in understanding texts that turn the transmission of style into their subject. In a way, the style of narration could be said to "upstage" the subject being narrated. For Bakhtin, such self-reflexivity is only possible in the novel, where "[f]orm and content in discourse are one" (259). Bakhtin ultimately draws attention to a peculiar form of narrative discourse. When "a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even a diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices" are
"artistically organized," they take the novel form (Bakhtin 262). The tensions built up during that competition are bound within the "dialogic" potential of the novel. The dialogism of language, in Bakhtin's mind, involves a struggle "between the word and its object, between the word and the speaking subject" (276), or a recognition that narrative 17 develops as a dialogic relationship between multiple speakers and ways of speaking. This is the recognition of what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia, which refers to the emergence of multiple discourses where previously there appeared only one.
In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin expands on the opposition of the
"monologic" and the dialogic forms of discourse. The initial division between the monologism of poetry and the dialogism of a novel is necessary to understand how dialogic fiction incorporates its monologic alternative. Rather than just eliminating the
"high art" of poetry, the "low" novel narrows the differences between styles of locution.
Bakhtin's consideration of parody operates under the pretension that it opposes the monologism of "epic poetry." Rather than constitute "poetic phenomena" with a single, predetermined interpretation, parody is a "stylistic category" of rhetorical construction
(274). When Bakhtin uses the phrase "poetic style," he implies monologism, which is "by convention suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse, any illusion to alien discourse" (285). Bakhtin sees parody as a classification of irony, "and not as a poetic phenomena" (274). It is akin to mockery or scorn, "played with (in the form of anything from an exact replication to a poetic ridiculing and exaggeration of gestures and intonations)" (Bakhtin 341). Poetic style, like its epic counterpart, resists dialogism
"without transposing it into a prosaic key and in the process turning the poet into a writer of prose" (Bakhtin 285). Ultimately, dialogism does not represent, for Bakhtin, destructive confusion. But that is only because it represents an extreme form of dialogue. 18
Performance in literature relies on a process Bakhtin calls dialogism and Julia
Kristeva calls intertextuality. Kristeva translates Bakhtin to say "any text is constructed
as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another" (66).
She further argues that Bakhtin's "poetic word" lacquers over discourse until it is "at
least double.'" Unlike its epic counterpart, this opaque (or, more accurately, baroque) poetic word "also has a double, even a multiple, meaning . . . requiring a precise feeling
for the two meanings contained in it" (Bakhtin 327). Following Bakhtin, Kristeva reads the ambiguity of poetry in the language of the novel as expressing parodic ambition. In addition, Hutcheon's theory of parody applies such duplication "- through rhetoric or through the power of language and of the vision it can create" - to simultaneously underwrite and undermine textual certainty {Postmodern 73). Hence, she takes issue with the formalist notion that literary parody offers "a way to new forms" of writing
(Hutcheon Parody 28). Hutcheon builds upon from Bakhtin's notion of the carnival to argue that parody's "ambivalence stems from the dual drives of conservative and revolutionary forces that are inherent in its nature as authorized transgression" (Hutcheon
Parody 26). This performance, this proto-performativity, is where Bakhtinian theory seems to end. The novel is a living, thriving entity for Bakhtin. It is never simply prosaic.
The novel, still a gestating genre, "exposes the conventionality of [previous] forms and their language; it squeezes out some genres and incorporates others into its own peculiar structure, reformulating and re-accentuating them" (Bakhtin 5). Bakhtin's determination that "[t]he novel parodies other genres (precisely in their role as genres)" 19 will set the stage and rehearse the rhetorical figures for my theoretical position. The novel contains the potential to enact the dialogue that it conducts within its pages.
On Performativity
According to Hutcheon, literary parody has "become - ironically - a model of the prevailing norm" {Parody 28). This irony is why she initially hesitates to declare parody
"postmodern." What is strange is how readers in response have willed an 'author' back into being. An erroneous logic is at play here. Any expression that would contradict itself only to turn around and reconcile with itself seems to serve a didactic purpose. To resist the prevailing norm, a reader is forced to look away from the parody's reading of itself. It follows that literary parody is suffered by the reader who derives meaning from its wordplay and the indeterminate play within its language. In effect, parody is a form of speech act, a performance of aesthetic iteration. The key, as in a sacred cantata, is repetition with variation. Jacques Derrida posits that citations and grafts of language make it possible for texts to become performative.11 Literary parody, with its doubled structure, exemplifies the "double gesture, a double science, a double writing" that would deconstruct "the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system" (Derrida
"Context" 21) through a performative process.
111 have taken this passage from Bass's translation of "Signature Event Context" (321). Weber and Mehlman translated this version of the essay that Derrida revised for collection in Limited Inc. In that translation, Derrida points out the crux of "Austin's procedure" in How to Do Things with Words: "the teleological jurisdiction of an entire field whose organizing center remains intention" ("Context" 15). I will not dismiss out of hand the intentionality of Austin's "performativity." Qua Derrida, I will emphasize performativity as an act of interpretation. 20
Judith Butler defines the performativity I refer to here as the "stylized repetition of acts" ("Performative" 270; Trouble 179; Bodies 244). Her syntax stresses the word
"stylized"; were Butler simply to say "repetition of acts" she would be writing about performance, which means "to play" somebody, rather than performativity, which means
"to be" somebody. In Butler's Bodies that Matter, "the body" becomes a theatre where the rhetoric of "'performing' and that theatrical sense of performance" are put on (237).
According to Butler, performance is an imposition upon a body, and "style" is how a body expresses itself. For Butler, the "acting out" of theatrical performance provides a conceit for discussing the power of language. "Performativity is thus not a singular 'act'," sound, or characteristic style, "for it is always a reiteration of a norm or a set of norms"
(Butler Bodies 12). Butler refers to J.L. Austin and Derrida in order to describe how repetitive acts and performances operate within symbolic systems of signification.
In How to Do Things with Words, Austin considers how speech acts, or how
"ordinary language" effect change. To do so, Austin divides language into two types of utterances: "constantive," or true and false statements; and "performative," statements that are "a part of... the doing of an action" (Words 5). To qualify as performative, an action must happen the moment a particular word is said in a specific context. Austin finds such a performance to be "parasitic." An actor takes language and makes it unreal, fictive (Words 22). According to Austin's speech act theory, language sounds "in a peculiar way hollow or void" when it is spoken or performed "by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy." This performance is fictive, not performative. Consequently, fiction becomes "parasitic upon [language's] normal use" 21
(ibid). Austin repeats that his "doctrine of illocution" is never as straightforward as "an
act of saying something" to get the said thing done; a performative utterance is not just
"an act in saying something" (Words 99). Austin does not write of stage actors, but of
speech-actors who use words to make "things" happen.12
In his essay, "Signature Event Context," Derrida derides Austin's criterion for
analyzing whether words do what they say. Austen applies principles of performativity to
spoken rather than written or scripted communication. Alternately, "literal meaning [sens propre]" is performative (Derrida "Context" 2), because the possibility of another meaning makes it difficult for a statement to enact anything in particular. For Austin, language "used not seriously" or used figuratively, has the abnormal, "parasitic" effect of quoting everyday use (qtd. in Derrida "Context" 16). Figurative language, then, is an invalid method of communication. Then again, Derrida observes that Austin
would not assert, as one may be tempted to do, that semio-linguistic
communication acquired its title more metaphorico, by analogy with "physical"
or "real" communication, inasmuch as it also serves as a passage, transporting and
transmitting something, rendering it accessible. (Derrida "Context" 2)
He describes "the current concept of context" (Derrida "Context" 3) with the processes of grafting discourse. With the following analysis, I will seek to examine the performativity of narrative involvement as it impinges on parody. I will also investigate how the poetics of parody open space within novels for poetry to breathe.
12 "Literature itself is a speech context," according to Pratt (86). Language, either spoken or written, is an act of speech. A speaker plays the "role of the artist" by using rhetorical devices "metrics, rhythm, syllabification, metaphor, rhyme, and parallelism of every kind" (Pratt 5). Pratt simplifies Austin's doctrine of illocution to equate a literary speaker with a locutor. 22
On Apostrophe
I am not the only one to consider literary parody as a practice of reading. Nor am I the first to suggest that generations of literature have attempted to speak with generations
of readers. Literary critic and theorist Barbara Johnson calls apostrophe "a form of ventriloquism through which the speaker throws voice, life, and human form into the addressee, turning its silence into mute responsiveness" (30). The implications of this ventriloquism metaphor are telling. Johnson points out the irony of addressing readers with a thrown voice. She argues that apostrophe is an expression with semantic and rhetorical application. Understanding why it is a rhetorical accomplishment, and why that is both semantically important and potentially performative, requires a more detailed examination of this ventriloquist act. Which invites several other questions. Who provides the ventriloquist's voice? What remains of an 'author'? How is a reader expected to fill in for the absent 'author'?
Johnson associates voice with the "present, animate, and anthropomorphic" implications of apostrophe (30). Smaro Kamboureli identifies Ondaatje's use of apostrophe in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid as an illustration of the poet-novelist's continuing use of this figure of speech. "Apostrophe," Kamboureli asserts, "is indeed the primary rhetorical trope of the poem's self-referentiality, for it establishes the priority of discourse over narrative" (188). While apostrophe speaks directly to readers, it also hands to readers a responsibility. A large part of any apostrophe is rhetorical and depends on our responses. It is least successful when we are irritated or we simply do not care for the 23
1 'X role written for us. It is most effective when we experience catharsis by placing ourselves in the way. Central to this Aristotelian inquiry into literary aesthetics is the idea that the refinement of feeling plays a role in our imaginary engagement. This engagement implies a recognition that mirrors a spectator who experiences catharsis at the end of a play. If apostrophe interpolates the reader the way tragedy means to, it simultaneously responds to other texts the way literary parody does. If so, we take that apostrophe seriously while remaining mindful that performance only takes effect with the participation of readers.
Of course, there is no single definition of apostrophe. Literary critic Jonathan
Culler traces an etymology of the word to Quintilian's instructions about oratory.
Quintilian defines apostrophe as "a diversion of our speech . . . that [at] some point may seem of greater importance to the judges" (163). Culler, who has advanced the most applicable definition of apostrophe, suggests that in poetry apostrophe works as an
"intensifier," by which he means it is simultaneously "a figure spontaneously adopted by passion, and it signifies, metonymically, the passion that caused it" (138). He determines that apostrophe is a self-conscious expression. In other words, it is a figure that necessarily refers to the speaker who uses it: "Thus, invocation is a figure of vocation"
13 Although the etymology of this term is uncertain, its application is not. Aristotle uses it to describe "purgation," i.e., "[tjragedy through pity and fear effects a purgation of such emotions" (95). Of course, Aristotle finds catharsis in tragedy, not parody. This contradiction does not prevent literary parody from appropriating the emotionally affecting tendencies in tragedy. If tragedy evokes any other emotions, they presumably escape this catharsis, which is why the generally accepted use of the term does not apply here. Ransom contends that these other emotions produce "uncritical" interpretations because they are "subjective," i.e., "moving, exciting, entertaining, pitiful; great, if I am not mistaken, and admirable, on a slightly different ground; and, in strictness, beautiful itself (343). These "uncritical" effects are of interest here. 24
(Culler 142). This metaphysical aspect of apostrophe is
the pure embodiment of poetic pretension: of the subject's claim that in his [or
her] verse he [or she] is not merely an empirical poet, a writer of verse, but the
embodiment of a poetic tradition and the spirit of poesy. (Culler 143)
Culler relates apostrophe to a notion of performance, for the apostrophizing poet tries to embody what he or she writes. Most interestingly, that performance could be said to result in a shared experience.
Johnson does not account for the emotional effects of apostrophe. She is more interested in the turns implied by this turn of phrase. She refers to the root of apostrophe in order to describe "the notion of turning aside, of digressing from straight speech"
(Johnson 30). She also suspects that this is a movement shared with lyrical poetry, because apostrophe is "almost synonymous with the lyric voice" (Johnson 29). And indeed, it is conceivable that a poet accompanied by a lyre would sing about his lost love or about some time in the irretrievable past. She agrees with the opposition that Culler establishes between apostrophe and narrative structure. Whereas apostrophe evokes a
"timeless present," narrative attempts to suggest the irreversible passage of time (Culler
149). This winds the tension between non-temporal and temporal presentation that provides the force for much lyrical poetry.
The work by these literary critics and theorists emphasizes two principle characteristics that define apostrophe. One is the self-reflexive or "meta-" outcome of its performance. More important, though, are the ironies that operate upon readers.
Apostrophe either seduces us (in an imperative mood) or presumes to know what each 25 reader is thinking (in a subjunctive mood). Readers who obey or who go along with that imposition become a part of the apostrophe. Those who cannot be bothered simply move on to the next line of the poem or the next poem in the book.
An Example of Rereading
Take, for example, Leonard Cohen's poetic novel, Beautiful Losers. The speaker cited at the beginning of this chapter instructs readers to "[p]lace things side by side on your arborite table, if you must," while immediately contradicting himself, "but connect nothing" (Cohen Losers 18). Here, the novel's first-person narrator is rereading the letter left by a friend known only by an initial. "F." delights in paradoxes, he gathers them, devours them, as when he repeats, "connect nothing." He speaks these two words directly to "I," and to Beautiful Losers''s implied reader; he also speaks indirectly to the conditions of his own construction. In an imperative mood, he calls attention to himself while he recalls Cohen's literary predecessors (including Cohen's own work).14 In a fugue state, F. illustrates how parodic fiction incorporates a source text while also obfuscating its meaning. Then again, this act of defamiliarization serves more than a parodic function. Still, a reader taking F. at his word would not look for any poetic connection. In this way, Beautiful Losers illustrates how parody lies dormant in metafiction that encourages us to draw upon a prior literary tradition to render possible meanings.
14 Making Cohen synonymous with his character thus echoes Hutcheon's cautions about Barthes's inscription of "subjectivity" {Poetics 106). Hutcheon notes how F. subjects readers to his contradiction that they might see "identity as textuality." 26
"You're pathetic," F. says on the page opposite his indictment; "you must not try to connect anything, your connection would be pathetic. The Jews didn't let young men study the Cabala. Connections should be forbidden citizens under seventy" (Cohen
Losers 19). He damns readers who ingratiate themselves by poring over his letter as well as other readers who refuse to spend time with it. He presumably warns the narrator against holding onto memories of their friendship. Only, "I" cannot help himself. In mourning, he recites lines of their dialogue:
Sometimes after I have come or just before I fall asleep, my mind seems to go out
on a path the width of a thread and of endless length, a thread that is the same
color as the night... . driven by curiosity ... like a feathered hook ... It sews
skin onto the skeleton and lipstick on a lip ... it goes though everything like a
relentless bloodstream. (Cohen Losers 17)
What the belle lettre seems to suggest here is that poetry is like a needle sewing up corpses, or, more curiously, like a dirty syringe plunging into the open veins of interpretation. It is hard not to read Beautiful Losers without suffering along with its narrator, "for as long as this I, this book, or an eternal eye remembers" (ibid). With these words, "I" incorporates another figure, or figure of speech, F., into his narrative. The reader moved by this style shares in this pathos and the empathy required by this identification will prove necessary for my understanding of the performative potential within literary parody.
"All the disparates of the world, the different wings of the paradox, coin-faces of problem, petal-pulling questions, scissors-shaped conscience, all the polarities" drift 27 between the sentences, between the capital words and periods, that make up Beautiful
Losers (Cohen 18). Hutcheon relates "all the polarities" from Cohen's novel to her criticism of postmodern English-Canadian novels. Although she wrote her theory of modern parody four years before publishing criticism about novels by Cohen's compatriots (including Margaret Atwood, George Bowering, and Robert Kroetsch), her poetics of postmodernism further investigates the implications of ironic play. Hutcheon considers Cohen's "early postmodernism" in the second chapter of The Canadian
Postmodern:
I should think that any decision on this point would have to take into account the
very modernist irony that transforms the romanticism and paves the way for the
postmodernism of Beautiful Losers, a novel that is, if anything, even more
ironically and self-consciously aware of the artist as persona in relation to the
process of creation. (26-27)
Beautiful Losers exemplifies what she "would call postmodern metafiction: 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" (Hutcheon
Postmodern 27). Hutcheon's determination of parody as genre includes, but is not limited to, those political features of postmodern fiction. Thus, the prefix "post-" applies to
15 Hutcheon's much earlier essay, "Beautiful Losers: All the Polarities," considers how the novel relates to us: "It is as if he is deliberately trying to prevent the reader from creating a system of interpretation," which leaves readers "caught between unresolved dualities: the serious [and] the con" (331). Her subsequent bio- criticism of Cohen as a poet reconsiders the "references the reader learns not to invert" (Hutcheon "Cohen; Poetry" 40). Moreover, her theory of modern parody elaborates upon the last word of that quotation, "invert." Here, Cohen parodies John Donne, "a poet of polarities, of ironic reversals of convention" (ibid). 28 literature "after" and "against" modernism (Hutcheon Postmodern 10). Roughly, the reading act is interchangeable with the writing act, because "readers of the postmodern novel (like the modernist one) must participate, even if we do not identify'''' (Hutcheon
Postmodern 27). Hutcheon interprets "all the polarities" within Beautiful Losers to describe Cohen's anarchic personae. She returns to these polarities in order to describe how language constitutes Cohen, the poet-novelist, as it invents him. Generally, his protagonists turn the tables on us by playing a confidence game with an 'author.' Cohen writes about writers who suffer as their conceptions of themselves fragment.1
Another Canadian Postmodern
Literary critic Northrop Frye's often cited - frequently out of context - conclusion to the Literary History of Canada states, "[a] striking fact about Canadian poetry is the number of poets who have turned to narrative forms (including closet drama) rather than lyrical ones" (842-843). Hutcheon cites this passage in her essay "The Poet as Novelist," before going on to suggest, "much of our poetry that is lyrical in form is not at all lyrical in spirit" (6). Canadian poets Margaret Atwood and Leonard Cohen try to reconcile narrative's "natural affinities with ironic tones and themes" with the imagery and symbolism of poetry to show rather than tell the reader. Hutcheon names Cohen as a
16 Cohen spoke of this in a radio interview about Beautiful Losers with Eli Mandel. "I was writing a liturgy," Cohen says, "a great mad confessional prayer, but using all the techniques of the modern novel which was the discipline in which I was trained" (qtd. in Ondaatje 44-45). Reading his novel, thus, means we must recognize "the conventional techniques of pornographic suspense, of humour, of plot, of character development and conventional intrigue" (qtd. in Ondaatje 45). While Cohen is apt to point out the biographical implications of his work, I eschew his biography in favour of concentrating on his style, technique, and tone. 29 writer who places "a matter of trust" in his readers "to relate directly to the image."
Hutcheon resists Frye's distinction between poetry and prose, but insists that novels by poets collapse generic conventions.17 Reading in vitro through panes of their layered novels requires the care we afford poetry. Hutcheon returns her attention to novels by poets in The Canadian Postmodern to find that "[t]he postmodern Canadian novel has developed in a manner parallel to that of the Canadian documentary long poem" (13).
Putting aside Hutcheon's earlier preoccupation with "mythopoeic" themes allows us to read a selection of contemporary novels by Canadian poets that make "parodic use of narrative conditions" (ibid), as well as parodic use of poetic conventions.
This emphasis on conventionality, the formulaic nature of fictional genre, does not interest Atwood. She suspects the reason so many novelists in Canada also write poetry is more hands on. In the late 60s, Canadians who wanted to publish had to write poetry. That is one of many answers to the question that occasions her paper, "Why
Poetry?" Atwood frames her response with reference to her experience of trying to publish her writing in Canada. "Poetry was top dog" in this country because of the difficulty at the time in circulating prose (Atwood "Poetry?" 7). She observes how several poets "who later wrote novels" (the same ones who "may have been writing them all along") were exposed to the reading public "through poetry." Rather than poets or novelists, this country produced writers conversant in both literary modes. Atwood
17 Throughout Frye's critical corpus he draws a line between prose, "the arrangement of words ... dominated by the syntactical relations of subject and predicate," and verse, the arrangement by "some form of regular recurrence, whether meter, accent, vowel quality, rhyme, alliteration, parallelism, or any combination of these" (Critic 21). In her essay "Between Verse and Prose," Perloff rewrites Frye in terms of line breaks, or what she calls lineation. speculates there was also an ideology at play. She suspects her fellow writers would apologize for poetry with "a batch of statements about the condensed and honed uses of language, or about the articulate uses of the individual and human voice" (Atwood
"Poetry?" 8). This "voice" was an important metaphor at the time, and writers were charged with the responsibility of "condensing and honing . . . language in a uniquely
Canadian way." Atwood knows enough about how we talk about our country and our literature to avoid addressing the "Canadian way."
Accepting such an analysis sounds simpleminded, yet it is an analysis that I, and both those who read and claim to understand Canadiana, make every time we speak about Canadian literature. The fact that writers in Canada are publishing at all matters more to Atwood than whether they are writing novels or poems. It does not matter to her whether they write about 'Canada. Canadian writers now freely make their way back and forth across certain borders. Tensions reside there, in the thick black line on the map, between longing and language, aspiration and apparition, serious and playful fiction. And it is from confrontation with those tensions that Canadian literature draws its force.
As it emerges within English-Canadian fiction toward the end of the twentieth century, postmodernism stages a play of indeterminacy in which the roles of writer and reader are crossed. Poststructuralist critics and theorists in the late 1960s and 1970s were attuned to the ideological function of fictional realism. They identified the risk in fiction's ability to involve readers without letting readers know about this involvement.
They tend to argue that the meaning of any text is unstable. Generally, Canadian writers responded to poststructuralist thought with self-referential texts that reveal how 31 signification itself is unstable. We can read early use of these tactics in the Cohen of
Beautiful Losers, the Kroetsch of The Studhorse Man, and in Atwood, whose '70s poetry collection The Journals of Susanna Moodie takes for its subject an English settler who became a pioneer "Canadian" writer. In the early 90s, Atwood returned to Moodie's writing for a novel, Alias Grace, part of an important movement within contemporary
Canadian literature. Historiographic metafiction by writers such as Atwood, Urquhart, and Michaels provides voices for those who have been silenced in the past. And Linda
Hutcheon set the terms for discussing this sort of historical fiction. She suspects that "the
Canadian postmodern" conceptually rewrites previous writing, contributing to a mentality that de-centers certainties and truths. Hutcheon supports this claim with reference to writers who have extended the arguments of their poems and novels with essays arguing against any accepted notions of 'authority,' 'history,' and even of 'reality.'
A Poetics
The project of this dissertation will be to essay novels that perform poetry, narratives acting out poetic aspirations. Because this dissertation cannot examine every possible inclusion under the rubric of performance - again, seen in parody as apostrophe to source texts and to readers -1 have settled here on the examination of specific novels by English-Canadian writers Leonard Cohen, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, Jane
Urquhart, Anne Michaels, Robert Kroetsch, and, in an attempt to test my thesis, Malcolm
Lowry. Most of these writers published novels employing poetic language toward the end of the twentieth century. Hutcheon deems such writing "parodic" since it refers to itself 32 while at the same time referring outside of itself. This writing is also apostrophic because it refers to us. It becomes "postmodern" by presenting itself "as investigating the relationship between art (and language) and what we choose to call 'reality,'" in order to alter that 'reality' (Hutcheon Postmodern 10). As a result, parody "is an unavoidably ideological act." Attempting to forego the political implications of that ideological position will allow us to concentrate on the influence of contemporary developments in
Canadian literature (since the mid 1960s) by isolating literary parody. It is somewhat disingenuous that I will concentrate solely upon contemporary fiction, for parody has been practiced since the embryonic stages that led to modernity. Such an approach to parody calls for a commitment to performativity, which is not a touchy-feely emotional affirmation but participation with a textual performance.
With that in mind, I will posit a methodological approach to literary parody in terms of textual performance. My reading of literary parody will pursue the possibility that the poetic ambiguity, even ambivalence, underlying a poetic novel invites performative readings. Poetry in prose narratives invokes actual or perceived absences, and we as readers fit our interpretations into the openings created by these absences.18 In other words, we attempt to "Connect nothing." This study will attempt to reread novels by particular poet-novelists through their poetry in order to evaluate the narrative performativity of specific Canadian poetic novels. This analysis pursues a reading
1 8 The term absence, here, derives from Iser instead of Genette. Genette argues a "gap" is the difference between what a poet writes and what a poet thinks. This "gap" has a form and is called a figure. Iser, alternately, suggests that each text has "gaps" that readers fill in. Readers enter a text by interpreting these spaces or absences. Whether the author means to leave these aesthetic gaps matters more to Iser than it does here. 33 practice that engages the emotional component of a text, demonstrating that rereading will apprehend in part the performativity of reading parody.
A Poetic Novel
The term "poetic novel" derives from literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov's "poetic reading" strategy ("Novel" 59). He argues throughout Genres in Discourse that formal aspects of narrative serve as a valid basis for interpreting fiction. He opens the chapter,
"A Poetic Novel," by establishing a dichotomy of historical and poetic(al) forms of narrative.19 He begins by distinguishing "heroic" characters from their "poetic" counterparts. "Poet" types lead an all but storyless existence in which meaning, motivation, and resolution have no place. (It becomes immediately apparent that the term poet is about as useful a generalization for analyzing narrative as "character" or "story.")
Todorov insists that story matters less than characters within a poetic novel. He insists that what most characterizes the poetic novel is not the setting of the action - i.e., deprivation, desolation, and death within Novalis's Henry von Oftendingen - but rather, the persistence with which its protagonist apprehends the world. Todorov observes how the emergence of poetry in narrative has far-reaching aesthetic consequences. Whereas prose serves a narrative function within the novel form, poetry thwarts story. For
Todorov, prose is functional, but poetic language threatens this function. He argues that poetry works against the story within those novels, implying the poet's 'reality' is marred
19 A poetic novel incorporates non-narrative "devices": a) "Nature of the actions" described; b) the "Embeddings" of "songs or abstract reflections"; c) the "Parallelism" or "resemblance of identification"; and d) the "Allegorism" that impels "a reader to look for a second meaning" (Todorov 53-58). Todorov does not mention irony's influence on any of those listed elements. 34 with the dreams and visions that would oppose traditional realism. A poetic novel, in other words, invents a way to tell stories about the construction of stories by using digression, indirection, and an overly self-reflexive narration.
Although Todorov cannot quite capture the grand dialectic of poetry and prose, he has a feel for its mood swings. Aspects of his theory intimate that the poetic novel is a further involution of the relations between literature and readers following postmodernist thought. Any notion of'reality' within poetic novels becomes a consideration of the realities of writing itself. A poetic novel uses the received mythos of authority and an author as a world in which to imagine fictions about 'real' characters. Not only are these novels presented as real, but also their having been written of, and subsequently read, is known to their poet characters. These 'poets' are not only aware of their status as subject, they often resent their lot; and wish they were characters in some impossibly sweeping melodrama.
Todorov's discussion of the poetic novel applies to prose narratives by Canadians that "sustain the 'poetic' atmosphere throughout the novel" ("Novel" 53) as a performance of poetic intertexts. We will reread novels by these "poets as proseurs" that effectively parody their previous poetry. For example, Atwood opens Alias Grace with poems of dark humour and worrisome tone. Comparatively, the Poland of the holocaust is a pockmarked backdrop to Michaels's Fugitive Pieces; to annihilate the world with prose, Michaels must simultaneously write it into being. Even an act of
20 Porter turned this phrase into the title for his review in The Globe and Mail of two collections of essays by two Canadian poets, Di Brandt and Robyn Sarah (D2). 35 destruction as extreme as hers - the densely foliated sentences of the novel, teeming with allusion and inhabited by unusual descriptors - are burned away in chapters and scenes broken down into fragments. The realms of desire that Atwood and Michaels depict emphasize absences that communicate a sense of desire. In general, poetic novels use prose to distinguish 'reality' from its 'unreal' opposite in poetry. Todorov's argument extends to metafiction that divides aspirations (as rendered through an exterior realm of longing) from apparitions (an interior realm of language).
Depictions of apparition in poetic novels mark a contrast to aspiration, whereby an excess of meaning bursts forth. In these novels, lush prose counterbalances an arid setting: digression and indirection have not yet ceded the narrative to the dictates of literary realism. Jane Urquhart's The Whirlpool exemplifies this difference between realms of aspiration and apparition. The drab realm in which the protagonist Maude lives and the alternate realm where her unnamed son lives (incidentally, once he meets a poet) become almost as conspicuous as Todorov's distinctions. The unnamed son, whose thoughts remain unknown to us, verges asymptotically near to being the novel's narrator.
Each utterance he blurts out becomes "poetry." Urquhart confesses in an interview with
Herb Wylie that she writes without regard to genre. She says The Whirlpool "was not something I consciously believed was a novel," because "I had been writing poetry, and I had been writing a little bit of short fiction" (80). Urquhart had learned from her study of poetry a way to suspend narrative, though she ultimately writes a poetic novel with a different tone than Todorov implies. 36
A poetic novel anticipates our experience of reading insofar as it reveals where we might direct our desire. By presenting us with an alternate to what we see, the realm
of apparition vastly different from our day-to-day 'reality,' a poetic novel creates a
situation where the distorting power of our apparition becomes visible to us. Our very
investment in the apparition that such a novel offers reveals our expressive capability: we experience 'reality' in what is completely 'unreal.' The separation between realms of aspiration and apparition becomes more pronounced as poetry resembles prose (e.g., prose poetry). It is far less visible in Kroetsch's The Words of My Roaring or Atwood's
Alias Grace than in Cohen's Beautiful Losers, Kroetsch's The Studhorse Man and Gone
Indian, or Michaels's Fugitive Pieces. Looking at those novels formally, we can see the poetic aspect of these novels changing in the way writers contrast realms, but the contrast itself endures. Each of the interpretations that follow stresses how one example of a poetic novel extends and qualifies the insights of another.
Because poetic novels tend to oppose the realm of apparition and the realm of aspiration, they have the ability to immerse us in pathos. A novel that would separate these realms allow us to remain removed from their 'reality.' It preserves a degree of desire in their depiction of a resolution, and this permits us to resist our wholly committing ourselves to them. That 'realistic' type of novel may engage the reader's empathy; only, it fails to engage the reader in the play of meaning. We never see completely the ramifications of a 'reality' itself, its affects, its effects, etc. A poetic novel compensates for that absence in other narrative forms by providing us with an 37 overwhelming experience of language. Failing to appeal to our sense of empathy would close down that theatre.
On Pathos
The performance of literary parody marks an opportunity for what I call, for the purposes of the present argument, a pathetic appeal. The language of a poetic novel refers to itself in order to provoke emotional responses, ranging from sentiment to an anxious sensation. This emotional effect suggests that we read what a text says along with what it does or might do. That makes clear the need for a poetics to account for the conventions upon which the emotional effects of reading depend. The point of recognizing these conventions helps us evaluate our interests and purposes for reading. It would seem important to know what knowledge we deploy in responding the way we do to a textual performance. As mentioned, apostrophe either engages or alienates us, depending on our willingness to take on its responsibility. That appeal to a sense of self, to the capacity within each reader for empathy, provokes a sense of pathos, a visceral, emotional response.
Northrop Frye offers a way to read pathos in Anatomy of Criticism. He formulates the conceptual space that he believes literature occupies in "the cultural imagination," and produces a way of reading that derives an archetypal or mythic meaning from the underlying structural devices within a work. Here, Frye differentiates between the
This ambivalence deepens with an exchange of performer and spectator, as in Bakhtinian carnival. semantic content of the texts he examines and their syntactical construction. He posits that the form a text takes is central to its ability to communicate meaning. Frye focuses on the synchronic or transhistorical modes of literature to compare texts from across historical periods in order to draw our attention to prominent themes. Thus, he prefers the term "mode" to the historically contingent term "genre." He considers several modes that make "appeals to our sympathy" (Anatomy 38). A successful appeal produces "pathos" as an effect with "a close relationship to the sensational reflex of tears." Frye suspects that certain narrative conditions will move readers: "the central figure of pathos is often a woman or 'child'." He pursues the tendency within literature that makes readers empathize with a character or the character of the narrative itself. Pathos is also drawn from readers "by the inarticulateness of the victim" (Frye Anatomy 39). Those readers who take the work seriously empathize with the victim or the source of victimization.22
And, to end this psychological drama, readers who have become involved are moved to respond in kind. "Pathos," Frye summarizes, "is a queer ghoulish emotion, and some failure of expression, real or simulated, seems to be peculiar to it" (ibid). For Frye, texts communicate emotions, but they also require readers to interpret these emotional effects.
This is true, perhaps, because performances so often carry within them the pathos of playing along. In this sense, poetic language is more likely to provoke emotion through an engagement with the play of meaning.
Although Atwood has famously written about the theme of victimization in Canadian literature, she does not consider the appeal of pathos. The crux of understanding how pathos operates withm fiction is to recognize that a fixed and unified interpretation of literature exists only as a convenient fiction. This crux, in other words, is to understand how self-reflexive fiction addresses its readers with a performance of reading itself. Poetic language is an indicator of pathos in a self- referential work of literature in the sense that a writer conveys that he or she is suffering for art. In this sense, the term "self-referential" itself is linked to the emotive qualities of poetic language. The resulting metafiction is often about the obstacles to writing. These books play on the word suffer: they dramatize the frustration of the creative process and ask readers to feel their self-dramatizing indulgence. It is as though readers must endure what the writer had to experience to produce the work.
Another Example of Rereading
But why must you hear, hear and not know the storm, Seeing it only under the door, Visible in synecdoches of wheels
Malcolm Lowry, "Thirty-Five Mescals in Cuautla"
Over the town, in the dark tempestuous night, backwards re volved the luminous wheel.
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Look again at these quotations from Malcolm Lowry. The first is from the poem
"Thirty-Five Mescals in Cuautla," where the speaker repeats the importance of readers who "hear" (Lowry 35). This speaker instructs us to read between these lines of poetry, the way we would peer between the door and the floor. Lowry asks us to reread this quotation at the end of the first chapter of his novel Under the Volcano. The blur of a
ferris wheel in motion rhymes with the wheel imagery of the earlier poem. Lowry returns
throughout his oeuvre to the counter-clockwise revolution of this "synecdoche." In this way, we may identify Lowry in his characters or narrators just as we may empathize with
either speaker. Even if we may make out Lowry's reflection in his works, the limitations of the written page mean that he, his narrator or his novel, never see us reading. Then again, any one of these voices can address us. Perhaps this is why the lines of the poem quoted above end with voices "[r]isen to bring us madness none too soon" (Lowry
"Mescals" Selected 36). The voices speak to Lowry and to his readers with the same breath. Reading "Lowry" means we involve ourselves in the spectacle of poetry within prose narrative.
From his first poem through his finest novel, Lowry presents a challenge to commonplace reading practice. The greatest achievement of Lowry's writing lies in its ability to engage us. Rather than permitting the imaginary involvement that hides the conventions at work in literary realism, Lowry's fictions implicate the reader in their very structure, a structure which alters the narrative situation and deprives us of the underlining sense of remaining apart from what happens in the book. For example, the apostrophe in Under the Volcano makes us aware of how the novel itself takes into account our desire. Extrapolating from Lowry's style, techniques, and tones, a poetic novel confronts us with portions of narrative that reveal our involvement in what we read and how we perceive. For the central issue in many poetic novels, reiterated with inexhaustible inventiveness, is ultimately the fragility of 'reality,' of all the structures that 41
we have erected to defend ourselves from the constant nagging suspicion that underlying
everything is brutal and unreasoning chaos.
If the primary appeal of a poetic novel is pathetic, a narrator or a speaker is cast as
an authority - in an authoritative sense, not an authoritarian one - in order to appeal to us.
These speakers are able to make comparisons without simple "like" or "as" constructions,
to end each line at the breaking point of tension, and to punctuate each thought with
appropriate conviction. If these conventions and convictions have no effect on a reader,
which is possible, the force of a book is rendered inert. It is catastrophic for a book when
a reader either turns ahead or turns away altogether without meaning to return to work
through it. Apathetic readers refuse to blur the obvious discontinuities, misalliances, and
ruptures, or, more desperately, attempt to exaggerate the difficulties of reading.
Alternately, rereaders involve themselves in the production of text. Some element of
pathos is at play and continues to involve the reader in the performance on the page, or
else the reader would simply close the book. The self-referential language of poetry
challenges the readers's expectations for fiction just as it engages readers's emotions. The
relevant emotions for this study are a healthy antipathy for both conventional authority
and received convention.
Parody in the Canadian Poetic Novel
The first chapter of this dissertation will establish the parameters for analysis of the contemporary Canadian poetic novel with reference to the poetics of Leonard
Cohen's prose narratives, reading his Beautiful Losers through two of his poetry 42 collections, Flowers for Hitler and Parasites of Heaven. After Cohen, for argument's sake, several Canadian poet-novelists challenge the same formal and generic classification. Paul Ricoeur's notion of tropology applies to an understanding of
Genette's poetics of "style" and "trope" to determine the effects poetry may have on narrative. Marjorie Perloff s description of "lineation" will further challenge my delineation of poetry in narrative prose. Also, this section of my study will illustrate the diversity of the poetic novel's aesthetic by reading Michael Ondaatje's Secular Love through In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient.
The second chapter of this dissertation will further consider the strategy of evoking a sense of history with the poetic novel form. Robert Phiddian's determination of
Derrida's "erasure as a metaphor for imagining both authorization and method in" literary parody {Parody 13) will'contrast with Fredric Jameson's pastiche (the practice of "blank parody" that opposes texts without commentary) and Margaret Rose's postmodern parody ("comedic" refunctioning of a previous text through ridicule). In theory, a poetic novel places its sources sous rature. It deconstructs the formal practice of parody while paradoxically preserving the very language it would erase. This chapter will conclude with a comparison of Derrida's play of textual absences and Ludwig Wittgenstein's
"game" of textual presences. I will analyze the parodic relationships between pairs of text by the same poet-novelist, reading Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie through Alias Grace, reading Jane Urquhart's False Shuffles through The Whirlpool, and reading Anne Michaels's Miner's Pond through Fugitive Pieces. 43
The third chapter of this dissertation will attempt to problematize its previous theoretical stance, discussing ways in which the poetics of Robert Kroetsch's first three novels, The Words of My Roaring, The Studhorse Man, and Gone Indian, prefigure his published long poems (e.g., Seed Catalogue). Kroetsch's criticism of Bakhtin's
"carnival" will articulate the performative effect of Kroetsch's writing. The final chapter will read Malcolm Lowry's poetry into Under the Volcano and October Ferry to
Gabriola in order to question the part played by the writer in both poetic novels. We will question whether parody must emphasize both ironic intertextuality and the subtextuality that a diachronic reading practice brings to parodic fiction.
It takes the effort of a rereader to realize any part of a text's performative potential. The rereading that follows, though, cannot make up for the indeterminacy within language. The implications of the apostrophe of the title of this dissertation extend past a simple abbreviation of "he will." Taken as wordplay, this title suggests parody's ability to "heal" rifts between past texts and present intertexts. It also evokes the ineffable
"hell" illustrated by the epistemological inferences and ontological instabilities of self- conscious irony. Interrogating specific prose works that try to create rhetorical structures or fictions that recollect poetic forms will encourage us to recall our knowledge of literary 'tradition' while struggling to make meaning of the resulting texts. I will seek to provide another perspective on both novels in Canada that have been reread and read well. For example, Martin Kuester's Framing Truths adapts Hutcheon's notion of postmodernism to argue that in Canada parody expresses "historical consciousness in a historically conditioned situation" (27). Although parodic fiction offers its source texts 44 another presence, it cannot function wholly in retrospect, as Kuester argues. Hutcheon's postmodernism complicates parody's "complicity" and "separation" from the very text it incorporates {Postmodern 12). Rather than reading literary parody as the mobius strip of historiography, my approach will try to illustrate parody as an a-historical literary practice that rewrites authorship. I will attempt to pose the possibility that the unbroken lines of contemporary Canadian poetic novels incite parody by reciting poetry. 45
CHAPTER TWO
"Death Style" of Parody: On Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers
alongside Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient
"Death Style"
More than forty years after the publication of Beautiful Losers, literary critics and lay readers alike seem compelled to explain the novel's effects. They either marvel or shake their heads, as if the narrative told by an anonymous historian and his long-dead friend, named F., constitutes a system, like Morse code or ASCII, which ought to have been superseded long ago. Such explanations argue, with varying success, either for the relationship between the unnamed narrator and F., or for the evocative quality of the writing itself. Inherent in many of these explanations is a conviction that the verbal style of Beautiful Losers somehow evokes the character of its author. That is to say, Leonard
Cohen's droning voice seems to saturate each figure of speech, rhetorical device, or word choice in this notorious novel. The confessional tone of Cohen's writing has led certain critics to dub him a "Black Romantic." This sort of speculation attempts to bind Cohen to the body of his work; but, as I will try to demonstrate, he will not be bound to anything he has written. His voice calls our attention to the relationship between a text and its author, as though Cohen cowers between the lines of his poetry and his novels, encouraging audiences not to mistake his writing for the embodiment of his, admittedly
23 Djwa places Cohen in the "Black Romantic" tradition (104). She contends that every act of creation in Cohen's work is also "destruction" (97). According to Djwa, Cohen attempts to "find a new answer to the human predicament by going down instead of up." Scobie reads this notion of "black romanticism" as one of the "poses" about which Cohen pretends he is not aware (Cohen 5). When Twigg confronts Cohen about his persona, Cohen replies: "I don't even know what that means" (58). 46
conflicted, consciousness. In other words, Cohen writes to ensure his corpus will survive his death and tell of his characteristically ironic style.
Michael Ondaatje was among Cohen's early admirers. The two poet-novelists
contrast a romantic poet's habit of admiring himself in a tarnished mirror with a postmodernist writer's habit of concentrating on a flaw in the frame. When it comes to their lyrical poetry, both Cohen and Ondaatje aspire to a similar scale, temperament, and tone. Additionally, both broke away from the lyric, as they found the marriage of metre and mood too restrictive. Despite their methodological proximity, both poets use different means to write novels with a distinctly poetic pitch. Cohen achieves his characteristic style through a cacophony of shrill, almost hysterical voices. Ondaatje, on the other hand, presents elegant voices, lithe yet withdrawn. Whereas Cohen's Beautiful Losers features hyper-articulate men struggling for clarity (the women in his novels never take up the quill), Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient contain inarticulate men
(and women) groping at the meaning of their own words. Cohen and Ondaatje show us beauty that we are both repelled and riveted by. The distance between both writers is greatest when it comes to their perception of events that official histories have rendered imperceptible. In this way, their poetic novels test the limits of subjectivity. Cohen approaches these historical apparitions armed with a spectacle of abstractions that lead to semantic confusion. Alternately, Ondaatje prefers to suggest chaos, using few descriptors, summoning apparitions with simple constructions and recurring theme.
In the earliest book-length reading of Cohen's works, Ondaatje identifies a flaw in
Beautiful Losers. Doubt about the emotional impact of this novel has been present from 47 its first reading, and Ondaatje suspects the fault lies squarely with Cohen. Although
Ondaatje does not put it in these terms, he intimates that reading Beautiful Losers is like studying kabbalah, the body of Jewish mystical teachings that seem only to inspire uncertainty. Ondaatje's Leonard Cohen repeats the well-known truth that Cohen is the dour troubadour of death, war, and love. Sexual education, deception and disguise, imposture, repressed shame, disfigured victims, la petite mort: these are motifs familiar to Cohen's readers. More specifically, Ondaatje names "death" as the "central theme" throughout Cohen's work {Cohen 17). Cohen "plays dead" in that his poetry "has given death style." With these words, Ondaatje proposes that Beautiful Losers is Cohen's attempt to beatify himself. That is, the cumulative effect of the narrators in the novel lends weight to Cohen's performance of suffering for his art. This paradoxical conceit seems to validate the concept of authorship while making any notion of an author unnecessary. Thus, according to Ondaatje, Beautiful Losers is part of a larger performance by a masked man, or, more specifically, a confidence artist before a roomful of marks. Ondaatje reads 'death' in Cohen's attempt to feign no style at all.
With two words, "death style," Ondaatje comments on the narrative procedure of
Beautiful Losers. He notes that no single narrator in the novel is able to write coherently about the people he has lost. The narrator of Beautiful Losers'% first narrative section or
"book" tries to record memories of his recently deceased wife and their mutual friend.
That friend, F., addresses a letter to the narrator that makes up the second "book." These narrators are not successful readers or writers, but confounded, irrational characters.
According to these men, death is not final, and history has not passed, because the past 48 haunts he who aspires to write about it. Beautiful Losers is made up of three interrelated
"books": an anonymous historian's narrative, F.'s epistle, and an epilogue attributed to no one. These books make up a canon that is largely about the failure to write. Cohen succeeds in showing how these losers fail beautifully.
While Ondaatje was plotting Cohen's 'death,' his own writing was affected by a similar drive. The extent of Cohen's effect on Ondaatje becomes apparent by placing their novels side by side and reading across the lines of their poetry and poetics. Whereas
Cohen demonstrates his characteristic style with novels that seem to write themselves,
Ondaatje writes novels that seem to read themselves as well. Despite this narrative difference, death occasions their novels. A posthumous letter that F. left the narrator inspires Cohen's Beautiful Losers. The death of Alice Gull, lover of Patrick Lewis and mother to Hana, precedes Patrick's telling of In the Skin of a Lion. In addition, Patrick's death precedes the events Hana writes about in a letter at the end of The English Patient.
Comparing novels by Cohen and Ondaatje reveals how these novels reiterate the lyrical inflection, the lilt of their poetry; a mastery of poetic language is more important than narrative refinement.
It is the project of this chapter to read two of Cohen's poetry collections, Flowers for Hitler and Parasites of Heaven, through Beautiful Losers. I will then attempt to prove
Cohen's impact on Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, with reference to Ondaatje's poetry collection, Secular Love. If the poetic quality of these novels challenges the limits of narrative, articulating that quality requires an approach that turns away from narrative and toward poetry by means of literary parody. Such an approach might be called a troparodic process. Provided that trope is a metaphorical deviation from received meanings of words or phrases, "troparody" contributes semantic ambivalence to a recited word or phrase. Inspired by literary theorist Paul Ricoeur, troparody follows his "tropology," which is the study of how Aristotelian consideration of rhetoric (the study of persuasion) was eventually succeeded by poetics (the study of performance). Ricoeur's consideration follows Gerard Genette's notion of rhetoric via
"mode" and "mood." In order to articulate the potential of Ricoeur's concept of tropes within narrative, I will draw on several theories that lead to an understanding of the poetic novel, particularly Marjorie Perloff s "Between Verse and Prose" and Tzvetan
Todorov's "A Poetic Novel." I will try to establish that Cohen articulates a particular style in his lyrical poetry that influences his novels, and that this style affects Ondaatje's novels as well. Both poet-novelists offer particular examples of how troparody may interrogate ways in which prose narrative functions in a poetic mode through a formal reorientation that marks their novels as poetic. I will propose that Ondaatje does not parody any one of Cohen's works so much as he parodies Cohen's style. Ondaatje is no less a stylist, under his own definition of death style, than Cohen.
On "Style"
The pairing of Cohen with his lyrical speaker plays out in "Style," a poem which mirrors the ironic duality and duplicity of Cohen's style. "Lyrical" is a term with many meanings for Cohen's career. At first glance, his poems are lyrics that typically appear to reveal the feelings and thoughts of a single speaker in a personal fashion. Indeed, many of his lyrical poems concern the activities of a male speaker humbled by the wisdom of his teacher, by machinating lovers, or by men who vow to keep their affections locked
away. (Reproachful specters of spurned women can only be glimpsed in the words of a
speaker who knows how to keep secrets.) "Cohen is a master," novelist Tom Robbins observes, "of the 'illogical' line that speaks so directly to the unconscious that surface ambiguity is transformed into ultimate, if fleeting, comprehension" (79). Robbins insists that speakers within Cohen's lyrics ventriloquize other voices, inviting us to press our ears against the radio in order to make out the muffled lyrics of a pop song.
"Style" is a lyric by a speaker repeating, "I will forget my style /1 will have no style" (Cohen 27). This poem is a monologue, like a radio broadcast in mono, signaling to readers through "a thousand miles of hungry static." The speaker of the poem provides more than enough interference to confuse our understanding of the lyric itself; any act of reading this poem as conventional lyric is in vain. This speaker even plays on the word
"speaker" by comparing his voice to the disembodied voices the radio broadcasts. "I don't believe the radio stations," he confesses at the beginning of the poem, "but I like the music" (ibid). That is to say, he appreciates the lyrics on the radio while remaining cynical about their method of communication. The speaker warns against believing the radio because it is impossible to make out a clear signal. Consider this line break: "in the midst of my slavery I / do not believe" (ibid). Here, Cohen separates the subject "I" from the verb "do," causing us to reread the line: "do not believe /1 am a man sitting in a house / on a treeless Argolic island." Without that personal pronoun "I," the line turns into a command to doubt the speaker's honour. 51
At the same time, the poem's speaker attempts to endear himself to us. He tries to throw his voice - "Beyond the numbered band / a silence develops for every style . .. like the space / between insects in a swarm" (Cohen "Style" 28) - to prove he is just as overwhelmed by the radio babble as we are. It seems he is attempting to take readers into his confidence. But, that rhetorical ploy is the first move in a confidence game that he
"aimed at us" (ibid). The speaker challenges his listeners to stay on his wavelength, because he wants us to feel for him. Then again, the poem's speaker only contributes to the white noise of a radio speaker intoning, "electric unremembering" (ibid). By the end of the poem, the speaker bemoans his failure to embody the "style" on which he has
"laboured." With these words, he is speaking out of both sides of his mouth, insisting that he has "no style" while simultaneously claiming that he "laboured on" his style. Given that contradiction in the term style, it is difficult to attribute any particular characteristics to the speaker. The poem "Style" depicts a process of perception, but not a single state of mind or lyrical consciousness. The stylish posturing, the tour-de-force posing, within the poem conceals the fact that Cohen is quoting himself.
Notice that Cohen has left off the quotation marks. The lyricism of "Style" resonates within the narration of Beautiful Losers. Cohen parodies himself in the novel, which postdates the poem. "Book II" of Beautiful Losers, entitled "A Long Letter from
F.," opens with the words, "I imagine you have already appropriated my style. I wonder where my style has led you" (Cohen 153). F.'s reference may leave readers to wonder just who is leading us on. Either the speaker in "Style" quotes a character from Beautiful
Losers, or the novel is quoting the lyric. The fact that Cohen recites his own poem is 52 apropos, because F. has digested Cohen's lyrical "I." Following the speaker of "Style," F. transforms the readers sitting outside of Beautiful Losers into figures of speech within it.
"My dear friend," F. implores, "go beyond my style" (Cohen Losers 158). This apostrophe represents an important paradox in Cohen's work: the fear that F. will be recognized in his work is only surpassed by the dread that he will be forgotten. Cohen, like F., contends that his readers must recognize him as the artist of his confidence game.
It seems his appetite for the "con" of having no style is insatiable.
The National Film Board documentary, Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Mr. Leonard
Cohen, portrays a man "deeply concerned with the style of his soul." Director Donald
Brittain trains his cameras on Cohen during a tour in promotion of Flowers for Hitler.
"At the completion of shooting the film," Brittain narrates at the film's end, "Cohen was invited to the screening room to take a look at himself." The documentary ends with
Cohen watching himself on screen, stuttering, "I'm a different style," a different "style of a man," than "I thought I was. I have a very, very mistaken conception of myself." With this confession, Cohen demonstrates his characteristic style. Although Ondaatje argues that Cohen takes on many personae, others read that style differently. Stephen Scobie suggests Cohen's "pose of having no style is itself a style" {Cohen 45). Scobie later revises his observation to say, "the speaking voice of 'Leonard Cohen' assumes too many contradictory positions ever to be assimilated back into any coherent picture of a unified self ("Forgiveness" 14). In other words, the voice of Cohen's writing makes it hard to know just how he sounds. Still, his ironic "no style" sounds like false modesty or faux honesty. Either way, Cohen writes from several personae, poses, and positions in an 53 attempt to distract readers. What all these personalities have in common is their self- reflexive style.
On an Untitled Poem ("We. Were. Talking ")
The principle behind that act or con, which interferes with readers who would look for convincing evidence of Cohen in his writing, is to awaken us to the wealth of rhetorical devices and tropes within Cohen's writing itself. Ondaatje writes characters who struggle to articulate their feelings and opinions. He writes primarily about men who cannot find words to tell their stories, and every so often the stories these men manage to tell feature others telling their stories - often about characters or events they have only heard of- as a double helix structure of stories-within-stories. Typically, Ondaatje writes about men coming to terms with losing love, or love lost, or simply, as in his lyrical poems, a strange and inexplicable incident between lovers. In "Rock Bottom," a poem sequence in Secular Love, the lyrical speaker prefers not to speak of himself, so he makes up a character about which he can write. By comparison, Ondaatje's novels proceed in fits and starts. His characters engage with others in a larger narrative, which is left for another character, a listener outside the story, to put together. This listening character in turn produces a secondary story that recounts how the primary storyteller lost his love through a series of odd occurrences.
But that is not all. A character telling about his lost love is typically not the last of the tellings and retellings that Ondaatje manages to compact within the frame narrative of his novels: often, there remains an account by a third person that places the storytelling speaker in another context. A third-person narrator is able to see where the protagonist belongs in capitalized - always capitalized - History. We then find ourselves back in the same position as the listener within the frame narrative. Of course, writers have been nesting their narratives for centuries, in an effort to approximate the networks of stories that complicate our experience of everyday 'reality.' It is up to writers like Ondaatje to show us the characters and events we would not normally see. He, like Cohen, ensures that the parts of each frame are fully engaged with those it contains and were in turn contained by. Both writers invent a way to tell stories about the construction of narrative through digression, indirection, and self-reflexive techniques. These stylistic tendencies provide the poetry that either overwhelms or undermines their prose narratives.
An untitled poem from the "Rock Bottom" portion of Secular Love urges readers to voice the sensations thai Ondaatje's speaker cannot. Each word of this lyric is capitalized and followed by a period, yet the poem (literally a period piece) never comes to a full stop. Instead, this ubiquitous punctuation produces the staccato effect of a speaker at a loss for words. An anonymous speaker, named "I.," refuses to come clean within the lyric. Because each word in the poem is abbreviated, "I.," "F.," and "S." maintain their anonymity. The poem begins by describing a dramatic scenario - "We.
Were. Talking. About. The. Aenead." - which goes into motion when the speaker volunteers an opinion - "I. Said. It. Was. A. Terrible. Book. / That. I. Hated. Aeneas."
(Ondaatje "Rock" 58). "F." replies to the speaker's provocation with agreement: "Yeah.
He. Keeps. All. His. / Troubles. To. Himself." "S.," though, takes exception and proceeds to turn on the speaker: "I. Don't. Know. Why. You. Should. / Dislike. Him. Then." Their 55
halting dialogue reveals much about the poem's subtext: "S." eagerly insinuates that "I."
is stubbornly uncommunicative. He seems to invites this scorn by ridiculing The Aenead.
Besides, the speaker is a parody of Virgil's hero, which is to say he is a parody of Virgil's parody of Odysseus.24 If the poem fails as a lyric, it is because its speaker is scarcely
expressive. Ondaatje's lyrics typically ask speakers and their listeners to switch places.
Often his lyrical "I" relates what he has seen, as though he wants us to explain what has happened in the past. For Ondaatje, the lyrical "I" often operates as a play on "eye." By airing this book-club opinion of The Aenead in the poem, the speaker invites "F.'s" opinion. Then again, by airing his opinion with this lyric, the speaker conceals himself with ironic ambivalence. Who does this F. character think he is?
Also, why does "F." sound familiar? This initial must strike a chord with readers familiar with Beautiful Losers. Ondaatje may be quoting the rhetorical ambivalence of
Cohen's death style. After all, "I." is a frustrated speaker, and "F." strives to shape his reading of The Aenead. It is worth noting that Ondaatje only gives "F." one line. If that reference constitutes an echo of Beautiful Losers, the poem opens up another realm of semantic ambiguity. Ondaatje's parody encourages us to imitate a triangle between the poem's speakers. Accordingly, reading Ondaatje's lyric alongside Cohen's novel provides the untitled poem with narrative implications.
There is a comparable progression in Secular Love from lyrical poetry to long poetry narrated in the third person. Ondaatje has overcome his characteristic reticence to
24 Ondaatje writes both Aeneas and Odysseus into a passage of The English Patient. The eponymous character speaks of a past rival, Madox, calling him "Odysseus" in parting. The comment gets under the skin of the patient, who "was never that fond of Odysseus, less fond of Aeneas" (Ondaatje Patient 241). 56
say as much. "You know," he tells interviewer Sam Solecki, "I wanted to call my new
book of poems, Secular Love, 'a novel'" (324). Ondaatje goes on to say the "structure
and plot" of this particular poetry collection "are novelistic. Each section deals with a
specific time period but the people in them are interrelated." This comment recalls R.P.
Bilan's review of the "cinematic narrative technique" in Ondaatje's first novel, Coming
through Slaughter (294). Bilan reads "Ondaatje's poetic ability to represent scenes and
visual images" through language that is "sharply and distinctively seen.'''' Any "emotional
impact" of Ondaatje's poetry comes from its visual orientation. Bilan reserves his
criticism for "Ondaatje's handling of the narrative aspect of the novel" (ibid). It is worth
noting how Bilan's opinion of Coming through Slaughter applies to Secular Love as well.
Thus, Ondaatje follows Cohen's attempt to marry poetry and prose narrative in order to produce poetic novels.
But if the contemporary urge to overturn authority and signification is crucial to the technique of Ondaatje's writing, what can we say, then, about the function and effect of his writing, which I suspect reinforces Cohen's death style? The speakers in
Ondaatje's poetry and the characters in his novels are, as they insist on being called, listeners. Their function is not to reinforce or validate their influences but to transcend them, abandon them, if only for the space of a printed page.
Before delving into Ondaatje's poetic novels, we will need another word on his lyrical poems. Many of Ondaatje's lyrics illustrate the limitations of visual perception.
His emphasis on the eye contrasts to Cohen's emphasis on the ear. Indeed, Ondaatje says his characters were "drawn" to Secular Love "by a lyric," and they were "perceived by a 57 lyric eye" (324). Ondaatje's response sounds strange because he adopts a reader's perspective to answer his interviewer. It is as though he must follow where curiosity takes him.25 He assures readers that Secular Love makes sense along "thematic" lines
(ibid). He does not recommend that readers iron out the verbal contradictions within his
"novel." He also warns us that what we see in his writing may not align with what we hear. Like Cohen, Ondaatje is most interested in turning the act of writing on itself; he approaches death style by handing off part of the responsibility for writing to his readers.
Furthermore, Ondaatje casts himself in the role of the reader, attempting to order narrative chaos. Ondaatje tells Solecki that Secular Love functions by bringing the way
"one composes a book" to the foreground (323). He believes this poetry collection becomes a novel "with the placing of a scene in one place and not in another." Ondaatje nears death style of his own by deferring the responsibility of entwining a narrative from the lines of his lyrics. If Cohen's many narrative personae speak in their author's monotone, Ondaatje's speak with their author.
A familiar lament of fiction in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, a lament given its fullest expression in the pages of Ondaatje's novels In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, is an increasing sense of "[t]he chaos and tumble of events"
(Skin 146). In both novels, Ondaatje's narrators are wont to interrupt the story they tell in order to speak with us directly. In this way, they resemble the narrators of Cohen's poetic novel. And, like Ondaatje's lyrical speakers, his narrators do not let us know much of
25 As Ondaatje points out in his introduction to The Long Poem Anthology, he engages books as a reader: "I decided to be governed by curiosity" (11). He selected poems that stress the "step" or "process" of writing (Ondaatje "Introduction" 12). I suspect that "sense of discovery" informs his own poetics. 58
themselves. The narrator of In the Skin of a Lion stops the plot to let us peer into "a
wondrous night web - all of these fragments of a human order" (Ondaatje 145). This
narrator leaves Patrick, the protagonist, to search for himself in a library in order to tell us
that he "would never see the great photographs of Hine, as he would never read the letters
of Joseph Conrad." "Official histories, news stories surround us daily," the narrator proposes, "but the events of art reach us too late . .. like messages in a bottle" (Ondaatje
Skin 146). With these words, the appeal of the inclusive pronoun "us" places the narrator among his readers within and outside of his text. The narrator assumes this empathetic
stance by quoting two lines from photographer Judith Mara Gutman's Lewis W. Hine and
the American Social Conscience: "'Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and the order it will become" (ibid). Those italicized words serve as anachronistic evidence for the narrator's argument because Gutman published them in 1967. (And they reach us well after Gutman wrote them.) This quotation both reflects the chaos of In the Skin of a Lion, and reminds us to provide order to its narrative. Furthermore, the narrator would rather comment about order than correct his own disorder.
Both of Ondaatje's poetic novels are built by laying the groundwork for their own destruction. By packing multiple stories into a tight narrative frame, Ondaatje moves to find a way to locate his readers within his novels, to depict a place beyond narrative, where we flourish. In Ondaatje's novels, the burden of narrative is borne by characters telling stories. Many of these intradiegetic storytellers must wrestle with language to pin down the meaning of history. Repeatedly, persistently, as a matter of urgency, these 59
"writers" try to relate what they have seen and how they feel about it. In this way, they disrupt any straightforward narrative development. Thus, the stories within the narrative do not matter as much as the attitudes of the characters who tell them. For instance, the narrator of The English Patient pleads with readers for empathy. As the protagonist,
Hana, searches the remains of a library in a bombed Italian monastery, the narrator reminds us that "[m]any books open with an author's assurance of order" (Ondaatje
Patient 93). Comparatively, In the Skin of a Lion suggests that "the first line of every novel should be: 'Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human'" (Ondaatje 146). In this way, both novels attempt to coax us into the common
"present," which is a communal "presence," through that sort of apostrophe. Both those who appreciate his novels and those who dismiss them as metafictional acrobatics too easily overlook the effect of these passages. Cohen and Ondaatje phrase their rhetorical appeals to us in similar terms. Ondaatje follows Cohen's pursuit of death style by coaxing us into forgetting any idea of an author. They leave us to read into or to interpret the poetic cant or argot that underlies their narratives.
But to eliminate or annihilate an authoritative subjectivity in prose means we must simultaneously write it into being. Even an act of stylistic denial as extreme as Cohen's - the densely foliated sentences overgrown with allusions and inhabited by writers - begs our attention. If so, Beautiful Losers thematizes the discursive confusion following the death of the author. After tracing the etymology of "apocalypse" to a combination of the
Greek prefix Apo ("derived from") and the cognate Kaluptein ("to cover"), the narrator decides the term apokalupsis "describes that which is revealed when the woman's veil is lifted" (Cohen Losers 102-103). The first-person narrator then turns to address a
seventeenth century "Mohawk" saint to ask: "What have I done, what have I not done, to
lift your veil, to get under your blanket, Kateri Tekakwitha?" (Cohen Losers 103). By
comparing Tekakwitha with a word in another language, the narrator turns her into a
metaphor for death. "Tekakwitha" also becomes a trope for a style of narration within
Beautiful Losers that appears to suffer.
The possibility of language overcoming death animates this exchange from In the
Skin of a Lion. Patrick Lewis and Alice Gull have just returned home from the show she performed with an avowedly communist troupe:
- ... Patrick. We're in a thunderstorm.
- Is that a line from one of your tracts?
- No, it's a metaphor. You reach people through metaphor. It's what I reached
you with earlier tonight in the performance. (Ondaatje Skin 123)
Alice goes on to proselytize about her daughter Hana having to mature too quickly: "I feel she's loaned to me. We're veiled in flesh. That's all" (Ondaatje Skin 125). Here, the word "loaned" and the phrase "veiled in flesh" bloom in the mind before Ondaatje crushes them, and the weight of death's metaphor lies heavy in the novel.
Ondaatje is correct to note that a contradiction innate within death style - which establishes the style it denies - is evident throughout Beautiful Losers, In the Skin of a
Lion, and The English Patient. The characters in these novels lead an all but story-free existence in which meaning, motivation, and resolution have no place. Of course, the only way Cohen and Ondaatje lay this tragic state before us is through a layered, loosely 61
constructed narrative that undermines the very conventions it would appear to construct.
In this paradox, both writers use poetic language to encourage readers's emotional
engagement. Both writers appeal to readers with metaphor in order to evoke a sense of
suffering and loss. The following section will compare several theorists and aesthetic
theories that relate poetry to parody.
On Troparody
If troparody is the process through which poetic narrative comes into being, how might this process manifest itself? How does troparody make itself known? Perloff s
essay "Between Verse and Prose" concludes with reference to "the familiar distinction
Aristotle made between poema (the poem) and poiesis (the process of making a poetic construct)" in order to "point the way toward an understanding of what poetry is becoming in our time" (152). Todorov draws upon the same hauntingly formalist arguments to insist, "the initial postulate is always the same. The poetic function is the one that focuses on the 'message' itself ("Notion" 5). Along the same lines, Todorov's
"poetic novel" offers ways of thinking about aspects of narrative in relation to poetry.
Todorov devotes a chapter of Genres in Discourse to novels that strive to make an unusual "impression" on readers (52). He suggests that "the qualifier 'poetic' also comes to mind" while reading these novels. What are the narrative implications of 'the qualifier
"poetic"'? Do these novels cause us to reconsider narrative convention? Before considering these questions, we will turn to two other theorists who determine how poetry may influence prose. The fact that Genette and Ricoeur rely on associations 62 between poetics and poetry to articulate their theories suggests the potential for these approaches to be useful in developing or understanding how poetic novels and the process of troparody might work as a departure from literary convention.
Genette plays on the words mood and mode within Narrative Discourse Revisited in order to describe how the "state" of language acts upon an audience. He uses "the
[French] word ['mode']" to signify "mood" as well (Revisited 42). "Mode," however, does not distinguish "the contrast between narrative's purely narrative (diegesis) and, with dialogue, its dramatic aspects (mimesis in the Platonic sense)." He prefers mode to the term genre although the latter better describes "the truly insurmountable opposition between dramatic representation and narrative." In other words, Genette recasts any perceived opposition within literature from generic considerations to poetic conditions.
Thus, poetry constitutes a-mode comparable to narrative discourse. Narrative discourse
"does not 'represent' a (real or fictive) story, it recounts it," but poetic discourse presents the dramatic potential of "the already verbal elements of the story (dialogues, monologues)" (Genette Revisited 43). Poetry in narrative represents discursive structures that disrupt the formation of the story (e.g., fragmentary narrative discourse, historical distortions). Voice is partly to blame for that disruption by portraying instances of subjectivity that contribute to the fragmenting of the narrative discourse. Genette indicates that the kind of voice a narrator uses indicates a relationship with the narratee.
A poetic mode of narrative, therefore, favours connotative suggestion over denotative description. In this way, the figures that make up a poetic novel could be said to affect readers interested in the play of meaning. 63
Ricoeur's hermeneutics builds upon the structuralist discipline that Todorov
called narratology. Generally, Ricoeur argues that "poetics" covers the consideration of
style, and "poetry" covers trope. Narrative contains elements of story (what happens on
the page) and discourse (the act of relating the events on the page) with the goal of
reducing deviation in figurative language, "where metaphor is defined ... as a deviation
in relation to the norm of the 'standard' meaning of words" (Ricoeur Metaphor 136).
Ricoeur relates Genette's opposition of implied and literal meanings to "the opposition of
figurative and non-figurative [language] and that the evidence for the reference of one to
the other is the self-awareness of the speaker or the listener" {Metaphor 138). This sort of
deviation is not only limited to the connotative slant on denotative meanings, but
"between what the poet thought and what he [or she] wrote, between meaning and letter"
(Ricoeur Metaphor 139). Deviation from 'intention' is ultimately the guiding feature of
Ricoeur's tropology. His "theory of the figure" {Metaphor 141) aligns with Genette's poetics of translation to elucidate the non-reductive, the "non-translatability of poetic
language" {Metaphor 139). According to Ricoeur, what Genette "says about translation can be said of literal interpretation" because any figure "brings about 'visibility in transparency, like a filigree or a palimpsest, beneath its apparent text'" {Metaphor 141).
In addition, Ricoeur sides with Frye to assert, "the structure of a poem articulates a
'mood,' an affective value" {Metaphor 148). Mood represents the emotive qualities of poetic language. It is more evocative than connotative meaning, and "much more than a subjective emotion" (ibid). Ricoeur's conception of tropology brings this apparatus of 64 poetic ambivalence into a narrative context. "Metaphor is the process," for Ricoeur,
through which the speaker reduces the deviation by changing the meaning of one
of the words. As the rhetorical tradition established, metaphor is truly a trope, that
is, a change of the meaning of words; but the change of meaning is the answer of
discourse to the threat of destruction represented by semantic impertinence.
{Metaphor 152)
Metaphor deals in semantics by limiting deviation from standard meanings. It also potentially sparks connotative meanings by imaginatively overturning denotation.
Although versed in Ricoeur's method, troparody is a converse process. Tropology limits deviant meanings, but troparody duplicates meanings without limitation. Whereas tropology balances deviant references and referents, troparody affords weight to the poetic elements in order to refer back to the text. Moreover, troparody engages how metaphor signals the potentially altered or changed meanings of trope via incorporation of another text. The reader, then, is encouraged to enter the text and participate in the process of making meaning from poetic language. Emotions come in to play in this aesthetic. The risk of parody is that readers may not make out its transmission through the static of story and discourse. The result is a different channeling of style, one that emphasizes poetic language and subjective emotion. For example, Cohen's death style deviates from accepted narrative discourse as each element takes on poetic qualities and attributes different from their function in forming prose narrative. Discourse is no longer strictly in the service of narrative, no longer tied to the conventions of a prose form.
Thus, style, freed from the need to narrate, becomes a matter of poetic technique as a 65 form of enonciation for its own sake. Indeed, narrative itself recedes, becoming obscured and increasingly more difficult to reconstruct. This recession deepens as elements of story and discourse move closer to a non-narrative mode. In short, troparody is a method for understanding poetry within prose, a process that turns narrative toward a poetic mode.
Beyond this emphasis on subjectivity, concerns of reflexivity, narrative, and metaphor are central to an understanding of non-narrative prose. A poetic mode of narrative (which seems at first a contradiction) depends on a reflexive emphasis on form and style. This reflexivity stresses subjective points of view within a narrative along with other subjectivities outside narrative that are involved in organizing and interpreting these stylistic procedures. This alternative means of organization might be described as metaphoric. As Ricoeur puts it, metaphor is a hermeneutic process that involves conceiving 'reality' by seeing an aspect of it in terms of another (212). This "seeing as" is an act of enunciation that creates resemblances in both a sense of similarity and dissimilarity, the self-referential tension between "is" and "is not" (Ricoeur Metaphor
248). In other words, the metaphoric quality of poetic discourse replaces narrative organization with alternate strategies. Thus, in general, poetic prose might be summed up as a discursive mode that deploys various permutations and negotiations of subjectivities, inflected by reflexive or transtextual gestures and organized by counter-narrative procedures and the metaphoric "seeing as" that proceeds along lines of correspondence and irony. 66
An Example of Troparody
This tension between narrative prose and poetry within troparody is important to my argument about the paradox implied by death style. In Leonard Cohen, for example,
Ondaatje considers the poetic "style and technique" of Beautiful Losers in terms of discourse: "The Narrator is always being defeated by Art, History, Language" (46).
Ondaatje notes that Beautiful Losers is filled with teasing initials, pseudonyms, and half- censored dates to give the impression that his novel was drawn from some historical record, but not without harming the innocent, embarrassing the guilty or defaming the dead. Ondaatje's narrators and speakers are also frustrated by those capitalized discourses. Cohen's stroke of innovation was to find a new way to play "the oldest trick in the book," to revise the original pretense of all liars and storytellers: every word we read is true. Ondaatje pushes this trick further because his characters somehow seem to know that they will be left out of history. That kind of obscurity frees these characters to say whatever they want in any way they will. Both Cohen's and Ondaatje's decision to pull this particular metafictional ploy - to write about writers in order to obscure the boundaries between fact and fiction - has certain discursive consequences. Cohen and
Ondaatje both curry our favour by including within their novels readers with whom we might identify. Both write surrogate readers into their novels through a common reference to the warming of King David's deathbed in the second verse of the first chapter of 1 Kings.
The first "book" of Beautiful Losers fleshes out Tekakwitha's character with a reference to the biblical canon. "I want thirteen-year-olds in my life," the narrator 67
seethes; "Bible King David had one to warm his dying bed" (Cohen Losers 59). Of
course, the narrator conveniently leaves out the fact that he took Edith for "heat," just as
David presumably "knew" Abishag the Shunammite maiden. Edith was the last member of an unnamed tribe, and the petulant narrator declares himself the "leading Canadian authority of [her] A—s" (ibid). He asserts this authority by telling a story about
Tekakwitha when she was about Abishag's age. Legend has it that a miracle occurred while Tekakwitha forgave the men who raped her, but the narrator is unsure how her story ended. The narrator also cannot tell whether Tekakwitha or his wife performed the miracle (because both were assaulted when children). It is telling that the narrator has confused three women: Abishag, Edith, and Tekakwitha. We later read how F. calls Edith
"my little Abishag" in the same breath as he pleads with his friend to remember
"everything happening" (Cohen Losers 172). With these words, the narrator demonstrates how his story is written and rewritten. It is as though he has lost authority over his own narrative.
There is a troparodic suggestion of King David's maiden within both In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient. While her patient sleeps, Hana picks up a copy of
Herodotus's The Histories that he "had somehow managed to carry with him out of the fire" and proceeds to read the "thin paper from a Bible, torn out and glued into the text"
(Ondaatje Patient 94). The narrative breaks off while she reads I Kings 1.2; Ondaatje refuses to show us what Hana makes of that onionskin. Abishag is never mentioned by
26 There is another parallel here between Beautiful Losers and The English Patient. Two pages into Beautiful Losers, the narrator provides a "brief history" of Tekakwitha's and Edith's people "characterized 68
name within In the Skin of a Lion, yet Hana, then an adolescent, ministers to Patrick in a
hint of the novel's conclusion at its beginning. Patrick, "silent, lying on his back in a dark
room" speaks openly on the phone with Clara (Ondaatje Skin 217); Hana "saved my life,"
he admits (Ondaatje Skin 218). With those words, he tries to alleviate Clara's suspicions
about the young woman who answered the phone, saying she is his sixteen-year-old
"friend." Patrick ends the conversation by clarifying, "I am her father" (ibid). He
resolves, "I'll bring her with me. She'll keep me awake" on the trip to pick up Clara in
Marmora, Ontario. "The kind of woman you always wanted," Clara responds. With these words, there is an ironic allusion to Abishag in the adolescent Hana. Furthermore, Hana, the audience to the narrative within In the Skin of a Lion, becomes a storyteller in The
English Patient.
When Hana reads the Abishag scripture to her patient, he insists that she "[w]atch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses" (Ondaatje
Patient 94). The moment she stops reading - after the words, "the king knew her not" -
The English Patient also falls silent. It would seem that Ondaatje's narrative becomes quiet unless someone is speaking. In an essay offering its own "Reading Lesson," Scobie fills in this discursive silence:
Often ... a critical response to Ondaatje's novels will have to adopt the
techniques of talking about poetry as much as, if not more than, the techniques of by incessant defeat. The very name of the tribe, A—, is the word for corpse in the language of all the neighbouring tribes" (Cohen 5). A nameless " tribe that had saved the burning pilot," enters The English Patient in the section after Hana reads a page of scripture within her patient's copy of Histories (Ondaatje 95). This Bedouin tribe's unwritten name recalls the name of Tekakwitha's people, because both names live wholly on the tongue. Whereas the " tribe" might conceal themselves with language, the "A—s" are revealed in the mockery of their rivals. talking about fiction. An examination of patterns of image, symbol, and metaphor
will lead the reader into the book as readily as a more conventional investigation
of characterization or plot. (92)
Scobie acknowledges how these formal experiments may wear on the patience of The
English Patient's readers. Then again, Ondaatje is less interested in linguistic acrobatics than characteristic voices. In an interview with Eleanor Wachtel, Ondaatje slips into the passive voice to explain how "[e]ach scene" of The English Patient "tends to be written from the point of view of that private, poetic voice" (256). Hana puts together Patrick's story after his death, for instance, by writing a letter in his voice. Whereas the first narrator of Beautiful Losers becomes an audience to the story he tells, Hana, the audience within In the Skin of a Lion, becomes a storyteller in The English Patient. We will return to this role reversal after considering a theory that outlines the potential implications of poetic language within prose narrative.
On Lineation
In The Dance of the Intellect, Marjorie Perloff determines that ambivalence is a result of "the denial of the unitary, authoritative ego" (x). She draws her notion of
"lineation" from Frye's determination of the "associative rhythm" of prose. Specifically, associative rhythm "represents [for Frye] the process of bringing ideas into articulation, in contrast to prose or verse, which normally represent the finished product" (qtd. in
Perloff Intellect 143). In other words, unavailable to Frye, "associative rhythm" represents the self-reflexivity of enonciation. Frye puts it this way: associative rhythm is 70
"dominated by the short and irregular phrase" from "primary verbal rhythms" {Critic 55).
Although the "verse rhythm" is repetitious (tending to patterns), "prose rhythm" is rhetorical (tending to "subject-predicate relation[s]"). Repetition, according to Perloff, provides prose with the evocative rhythm of poetry. She applies this theory with reference to Samuel Beckett's /// Seen III Said. For Perloff, Beckett's novel "sweeps up references, allusions, short sharp phrases, neologisms, and contorted elliptical clauses into an associative monologue" {Intellect 143). It seems readers are expected to attribute that monologue to a particular speaker. By assuming that some consciousness is at work, we are free to work out its meaning.
In The Well-Tempered Critic, Frye elaborates on the associative rhythm of poetry.
Although Perloff consults his essay, "Manual of Style," she does not consider the extent to which euphuism inforrris his poetics. "Euphuism" is Frye's term for "a form of prose in which all the rhetorical devices of verse, rhythm, alliteration, assonance, and half- metrical balancing of phrases and clauses are employed" {Critic 63). It is a rhetorical device - if we take rhetoric for "the social aspect of the use of language" (Frye Critic 39)
- which derives from early modern sermons for the masses. Specifically, euphuism is a
"heightened" expression pitched over ordinary language. It arouses "a certain sense of paradox" because it "is easy to parody, but in euphuism itself there is a curious quality that is really a kind of self-parody" (Frye Critic 64). This humour makes readers conscious of having their own wits about them. For Frye, euphuism "represents the ornamenting of a prose rhythm with as many of the features of verse as possible" (ibid).
This style approaches associative rhythm as it reveals "the poetic process itself (Frye 71
Critic 66). Any conflation of poetry and self-parody is important to my understanding of
the poetic novel. The resulting poetry, freed from rhyme, is not lyric since the
associations it makes are not evidence of any particular subjectivity. Thus, figurative
language is not restricted to expectations for prose narrative or poetry.
In "Postmodernism and the Impasse of Lyric," a chapter of Dance of the Intellect,
Perloff posits a mode of poetry in which concerns of subjectivity lose their primacy, or, at the very least, share the spotlight with poetic patterns of operation. The readjustment of the interaction of elements in lineation, "involves a departure from the lyric voice"
(Perloff Intellect 182). The recasting of poetic language occurs through various stylistic procedures and strategies that Perloff finds modern. She manipulates Ezra Pound's concept of logopoeia into a poetics of contemporary poetry. The prevailing mode of
Pound's poetry "is that of collage, the setting side by side or juxtaposition of disparate materials without commitment to explicit syntactical relations between elements" (Perloff
Intellect 183). She points to the self-consciousness of Stendhal's and Flaubert's prose as influences on Pound's use of "literary pastiches and borrowings" (ibid) from
"documentary prose, song, Imagist lyric, pictogram, and free-verse autobiography"
(Perloff Intellect 186). Perloff segues into postmodern prose with reference to Stephen
Fredman's Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse. In Fredman's words, he proposes that the "most talented poets .. . have turned to prose as a form somehow more consonant with a creative figuration of our time" (1). Fredman pursues "a fascination with language
(through puns, rhyme, repetition, elision, disjunction, excessive troping, and subtle foregrounding of diction) that interferes with the progression of story or idea." Perloff 72
builds on Fredman's analysis by distinguishing a poet's prose from the nineteenth-
century lyrical form of prose poetry. For Perloff, prose by poets represents a non-
narrative deployment that causes the breakdown of story connections or dependencies, producing narrative structures identifiable by deviations that disrupt rhyme and metre, as
well as subject position and reception.
On Non-Narrative Prose
In "A Poetic Novel," Todorov relates the "impression" he gets from
"nonnovelistic prose" (52). In general, he argues that the poetic novel disrupts conventional narrative forms. Todorov draws upon Novalis's Henry von Ofterdingen, a
"novel-not-quite-like-other-novels," in order to contrast "heroic" and "poetic" narratives.
Conflict erupts between "heroic" and "poetic" characters within the story.27 This opposition affects the style of telling a heroic or poetic story. Heroes are able to pass
"from one thing to another by deduction," but poets have an "intuitive grasp of each thing taken separately then compared" (Todorov "Novel" 51). Heroism is related through
"striking and memorable events," but poetic "existence" is "reduced to utmost simplicity" in telling. The first-person narrator of Beautiful Losers illustrates this point with apostrophe. "O Reader," he opines, "do you know that a man is writing this? A man like you who longed for a hero's heart" (Cohen Losers 106), but a man who had to settle for a poet's.
27 Todorov's description relates to Genette's description of "the totality of the narrated events" {Revisited 13). 73
"Poetic" style is manifested through digressions "suspending the initial story"
(Todorov "Novel" 52). Todorov finds that descriptions of "[mjemories and dreams" serve to "displace the narrative onto another level." The resulting "secondary narrative" is made up of rhetorical "devices that sustain the 'poetic' atmosphere" and threaten, or
"weaken[,] the reality, even the fictional reality of the actions described" (Todorov
"Novel" 53). Henry von Ofterdingen provides Todorov with examples of four poetic modes: "the nature of the actions; the narrative embeddings, or the second-degree narratives; the parallelisms; the use of allegory." These modes produce a "nonnovelistic effect"28 when narrative "actions" are "perceptible" at least in part (Todorov "Novel" 54).
However, few "striking and memorable events" befall Henry von Ofterdingen. Todorov attributes that narrative inactivity to the "poetic" qualities of that novel.
Todorov's first mode of "nonnovelistic" narrative, "[ri\ature of the actions" concerns the transmission of story by way of style. His use of the neologism
"nonnovelistic" is deliberate. Todorov advocates reading constitutive "actions" of a narrative along with "the way in which they are strung together" ("Novel" 55). Reading a poetic novel requires "'remembering' or 'reflecting' or 'thinking'" along with poet- characters (Todorov "Novel" 54). An author, poet, speaker, or character figures into this approach to non-narrative prose. Between the "internal actions" of characters given to reflection, and "abstract actions" of characters in conversation, "moments of action in the strong sense are 'rare'" (Todorov "Novel" 55). Such interruptions disturb the causal
This term roughly equates to Genette's suggestion that poetry is "antiprose." 74
coherence of a novel ("one event leads to another") in favour of coincidence ("the new action contributes to the discovery of hidden truth"). Todorov identifies other
"psychological" events of narrative causality, "in which all the events contribute to the composition of a character," as well as "ideological" effects "where all the actions are generated by an abstract law" (ibid). "Embeddings," Todorov's second mode, provides another method for overturning narrative ("Novel" 56). Often, "the embedded material consists of songs or abstract reflections" removed from the "primary narrative." Thus, embedded poetry digresses from narrative. Todorov details that embedded poetry is "only sporadically narrative" in order to "introduce a supplementary distance between [the text] and the reader." Rather than consider the effects of this distance, Todorov moves onto a third mode, "[p]arallelism."
Suffice it to say, "embeddings" are "less compelling to read" than "reported events" ("Novel" 56). Todorov dismisses readers who are compelled to make sense of narrative embeddings by rereading them. External references, even self-references, unbalance narrative movement. A distance yawns between Todorov's poetic novel and its readers, and another opens between the poetic novel and other texts. The poetic novel that criticizes its "embeddings," that invites its readers to criticize as well, constitutes literary parody. "The tendency to resemblance or identification," or "{parallelism" in Todorov's terms, binds the poetic novel to its antecedents. An "abyss narrative" opens "[w]hen an embedded narrative resembles the embedding narrative" (Todorov "Novel" 57). The resulting mise en abime weakens the narrative integrity of the poetic novel. Reading such a text undercuts any claim to 'realism,' because we are less interested in "the real world" 75 than "the way the characters perceive the world around them." "Repetition is primary" for those characters whose "lives are full of presentiments" (Todorov "Novel" 57). Just as these novels parallel certain poetic effects, certain figures parallel expressions. In this way, language itself becomes the primary subject of the poetic novel.
Readers with that feeling "look for a second meaning," the fourth effect of
Todorov's reading: "Allegorism" ("Novel" 58). The rhetorical "devices of embedding and parallelism" are not limited to poetic novels. Todorov attributes "two common denominators" of non-narrative effect, a certain "order of'correspondences'," and other uncertain "representations" ("Novel" 59). The latter "is situated at the level of the reading contract that binds the reader to the text." While the "most novelistic or narrative" works, contain these devices, "the difference is situated on the level of the reading contract," for poetry does not "imply the construction of an imaginary universe" (ibid). Todorov, in other words, reasons a way to read stories about the experience of reading through digression and poetic language. Similarly, Paul de Man expands upon the problem of reading "allegorical narratives" because they "tell the story of the failure to read" (205).
While de Man posits the futility of reading allegory, he also frees readers to take what we can from these texts. Just as there is no "final word" on the poetic novel, there is also no
"correct" reading.
Todorov's poetic novel roughly parallels Frye's associative rhythm, which is certainly apparent in Perloff s lineation. Such rhythm, so to speak, associates "some form of regular recurrence, whether meter, accent, or vowel quality, rhyme alliteration, parallelism, or any combination of these" (Frye Critic 55). Lineation emphasizes those 76 associations that disrupt the formation of narrative, though by no means breaking links in prose. That dissonance suggests an estrangement of style from story. Todorov's poetic novel opposes "the unbroken chain of events" he attributes to narrative ("Novel" 59). A poetic novel anticipates lineation this way: "(a) through parallelisms"; "(b) through the way actions are linked"; "(c) through digressions introduced by embedding" (ibid).
Again, literary parody is one form of "embedding." Further, embedding must signal itself through poetic ambivalence. Todorov's "poetic," however, retains the pungency of lyricism. He attributes non-narrative effects to an author, or speaker, or character, writing poetry.
Todorov's poetic novel is effectively made up of moments, situations, or relationships informed by a subjective expression. In Beautiful Losers, for instance, F. implores his friend, "Do not follow. Go beyond my style. I am nothing but a rotten hero"
(Cohen 171). Although each of Todorov's non-narrative elements is useful for considering the structure of poetic novels by Cohen and Ondaatje, allegorism, embeddings, and parallelism will prove imperative. We will turn to an examination of poetry within Cohen's Beautiful Losers, and then consider similar techniques in
Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient. 77
On Beautiful Losers
So you're the kind of vegetarian that only eats roses Is that what you mean with your Beautiful Losers
Leonard Cohen, "So You're the Kind of Vegetarian"
Cohen's fourth poetry collection, Parasites of Heaven, opens with these four
lines. Still, the poem does not introduce the others that follow. The poem's speaker
appears interested in playing on the title of Cohen's prior publication, Beautiful Losers.
The strained rhyme of "roses" at the end of the second line with "Losers" at the end of
the poem would suggest sub rosa another interpretation, that the poem is less of a preface
than an afterward for the novel that came before. Besides, "So You're the Kind of
Vegetarian" reads more like prose with a poetic inclination than an inelegant poem. It
would seem to describe a reader's response to Cohen after putting down Beautiful Losers.
The adversarial tone of this hypothetical response brings to mind the narrator's reply to
F.'s letter. The speaker's take on "Cohen" rhymes with the narrator's opinion of his
friend. In this way, the poem consummates at least one narrative conceit in Beautiful
Losers. If so, "So You're the Kind of Vegetarian" apostrophizes both Cohen and his readers. That style of self-reflexivity, almost self-parody, echoes the unassuming "who, me?" stance of Cohen's death style.
George Woodcock, an early critic, finds Cohen's "rhythms and repetitions" in
Beautiful Losers "those of poetry rather than prose" (108). "There are indeed short passages as hauntingly near to poetry as prose can be," he rhymes (in spite of himself), 78
"and there are other passages which are actually concealed verse." The "internal rhymes and assonances" within each line of Beautiful Losers resound well past the right margin.
In his essay, "The Song of the Sirens," Woodcock argues that the novel is structured as more of a linear narrative than it would appear at first. The narrator of the first "book" aspires to write history straight, only he becomes the subject of his story. Through his meditation on history and narrative itself, the narrator loses any perspective on his subject. The narrator tries to render his subject (Tekakwitha) beautiful through an exchange of her for his wife, Edith, the last scion of the A tribe. He also conflates his friend, F., and himself. Gradually the indecisive narrative voice overwhelms the narrative and the story for a while is solely voice. At its worst, the first "book" exchanges
Tekakwitha's story for Edith's, and at its best, it resembles F.'s style of writing in the second "book." Woodcodk also notes that on the novel's last page, the third-person narrator of the third "book" is revealed as the first narrator.29 He concludes by suggesting that he hears Cohen's voice in each of the first-person, second-person, and third-person narrators of Beautiful Losers. That is to say, Cohen displays the remarkable command that qualifies him as a great master of subjective points of view, which is the ultimate subject of any lyrical poem and, of course, much of contemporary literature itself. Instead of taking up Woodcock's argument that Beautiful Losers speaks on Cohen's behalf, I will argue in the following section that F. is a word-for-word reproduction of Cohen's narrators in Beautiful Losers and several of Cohen's speakers in Flowers for Hitler.
29 Barbour and Scobie determine the third narrator is a conflation of "I" and "F." or "IF." Subsequent Cohenists have taken this conditional conjunction for the standard notation of the third-person narrator who speaks at the end of Beautiful Losers. Cohen's "Note to the Chinese Reader" seems to reinforce Woodcock's conclusion
that Beautiful Losers speaks on its author's behalf. There is a hint of "So You're the Kind
of Vegetarian" in Cohen's strained gratitude "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" (196).
Cohen confesses that his novel was composed while a "blazing hot summer" radiated
from the Aegean Sea. To either emulate humiliation, or simulate humility, Cohen notes:
"I never covered my head. What you have in your hands is more of a sunstroke than a book." Despite its self-deprecation, this personal appeal to his reader is more caveat
emptor than mea culpa. We are not meant to buy into that apology for poesy. Beautiful
Losers is reconciled with being "a difficult book, even in English, if it is taken too
seriously" (ibid). Ondaatje speaks in similar terms about Beautiful Losers. He reads "a kaopectate of formal history, of poetic art, of the strict rules of courtly love" in Cohen's novel {Cohen 47). Ondaatje goes on to suggest that a different narrator represents each of these discourses.
Whereas other novelists fear narratives that do not move, Cohen bravely makes failure a part of his art. Cohen's narrators are confused and occasionally constipated. For example, the narrator of the first "book" is an eponymous loser, having lost his wife and friend. However, after he found Edith and F. in flagrante, the narrator prefers his own company. He has grown testy. Moreover, the narrator's personal history offers an allegory for the history he tries to write. As he writes about Tekakwitha's oppression by her own elders and by Christ's missionaries, the narrator expresses his grief over his 80 wife's suicide. He plays the victim even while his writing victimizes "Tekakwitha": "Is it
surprising that I've tunneled through libraries after news about victims? Fictional victims! All the victims we ourselves do not murder or imprison are fictional victims"
(Cohen Losers 7). With these words, the "old scholar" also implores readers to understand that he is the victim of his own devotion to the events of his past. He is distracted from Tekakwitha's history by wondering if "his body is going to work," and whether he will be able to write about the past. "Saints and friends," he begs later, "help me out of History and Constipation" (Cohen Losers 116). With these words, the narrator takes his constipation as a trope for writing about history.
Scobie considers "history as a system" in Beautiful Losers {Cohen 113). Cohen's narrator does not know what to do with F.'s "gifts," "the soap collection, the phrase books," because he "can't inherit... memories, too" (Cohen Losers 130). Scobie observes that "F. provides his own account of the Fs [the narrator's] subject, Catherine
Tekakwitha" {Cohen 114). Scobie finds the first book "confused, meandering, constipated," and the second book "lucid, direct, flowing." If the narrator embodies his story, F. offers the antidote for his friend's impacted anecdotes. In other words, the narrator cannot get history out of his system. Although Scobie does not cite Friedrich
Nietzsche, his reading of F.'s letter brings to mind this passage from "On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History of Life":
for from ourselves we moderns have nothing at all; only by filling and overfilling
ourselves with alien ages, customs, arts, philosophies, religions and knowledge do
we become something worthy of notice, namely walking encyclopedias. (24) 81
The present, Nietzsche argues, contains signs of the past. That is to say, although they write about the past, historians only point toward the present. This is not to deny
"objective" history, but rather, to suggest that history is an interpretation of the past from a present point of view. Nietzsche seems to suggest this "historical" stance makes the past subjective. Scobie thinks of history as an intertext for Beautiful Losers, but he neglects to consider the status of writing itself as an historical artifact.
At the same time as the first-person narrator of Beautiful Loser is implicating himself with the story - telling us what he has seen for himself and what parts of history he has only heard second or third-hand - his "authoritative" voice and control over the materials establish him as the writer of the story. The narrator is involved in the lives of the characters he describes because he is "cut from the same cloth." This authority reveals a fundamental operation in self-reflexive narratives and a stance implicit within historiography: that all histories are 'true' stories.
We read "Book II: A Long Letter from F." with the narrator of "Book I: The
History of Them All." The narrator of the first book rereads F.'s hysterical style of narration. Whereas the first book undermines the narrative structures of historiography, the style of "Book II: A Long Letter from F." is overwhelmed by the possibilities of poetic language. If style is a rhetorical effect in the first "book," a corruption of conventional historiography, style in the second "book" is a trope, a deviation from conventional understanding. Style is strangely rationalized in "book two" of Beautiful
Losers, irresistible but systemic. F. leaves his style for the narrator with the metaphor of the "Telephone Dance" (Cohen Losers 130). The narrator, however, does not understand 82 the performative implications of this trope. He assumes that he knows what it means when F. writes that he has "heard the inside of Edith" (ibid). The narrator, instantly petulant, pleads: "What about us who poke in dead tissue? What about us Historians who have to read the dirty parts?" Cohen's readers immediately recognize how F.'s account of the telephone dance parallels the narrator's story of Edith's infidelity with Jesuit missionaries. Consider how these men command the A tribe: "Take your fingers out of your ears" (Cohen Losers 84). Then again, the narrator forgets his own history of "the glory of an old man's cure" whereby young women of the tribe pleasure their infirmed elderly men. The "ordinary eternal machinery" of the telephone dance segues from the prosaic tendency of the first book to the poetry of the second. Overall, the multiple implications of ordinary eternal machinery undermine the narrative coherence of
Beautiful Losers.
This departure from narrative conventions could be interpreted as an instance of narrative allegorism, indicative of other instances in Beautiful Losers where poetry disrupts narrative progression. F.'s epistle returns to the telephone dance as though he has his friend on the line: "Out of history I come to tell you this" (Cohen Losers 162). The goings-on in the lobby of the System theatre stop the narrative of the first book. F.
"became a telephone" (Cohen Losers 34) performing "aural" sex: Edith "stuck her fingers in my ears and I stuck my fingers in her ears and we kissed" (Cohen Losers 29). Cohen reiterates the style of ordinary eternal machinery trope in an untitled poem from Parasites of Heaven: "The sky does not care for this trait or that affection, it wants the whole man lost in his story, abandoning the mechanics of action, touching his fellows, leaving them, 83 leaving them, hunting the steps, dancing the old circles" ("Harbour" 45). The circular movement and simultaneous stillness of that dance disrupts narrative progression.
The poetry embedded directly into F.'s letter illustrates another poetic passage in
Beautiful Losers. While the narrator was satisfied to say that "[a] 11 parts of the body are erotogenic" (Cohen Losers 34), F. "extend[s] the erogenous zone over the whole fleshy envelope" in an attempt to "popularize the Telephone Dance" (Cohen Losers 175).
Besides, F.'s instruction turns performative: "You see, I have shown you how it happens, from style to style, from kiss to kiss" (Cohen Losers 190). This instruction breaks diegetic boundaries, appealing to Edith along with his readers: "Watch the words, watch how it happens'" (Cohen Losers 194). Here, this pseudo-psychopomp reveals to the narrator how he has cut himself off from friends and companions. F. insists the narrator must try to make a restorative sexual connection by textual means.
All of this sounds like textbook postmodernism. Indeed, Cohen, at once careful and cavalier, includes the full apparatus of scholarly research (footnotes, learned quotations from a Greek phrasebook, references to obscure Catholic tracts) in order to fulfill a quota of self-reflexive techniques. F. illustrates that point by embedding two poems within his letter. "F'S INVOCATION TO HISTORY IN THE OLD STYLE," an
Elizabethan sonnet of anarchy in governing bodies and in individual bodies, is followed by this verse:
History is a Scabbie Point For putting Cash to sleep Shooting up the Peanut Shit Of all we need to keep (Cohen Losers 197) 84
Although he does not write the footnotes for F.'s second invocation, the narrator is the implied author. Hutcheon correctly notices that the "erudite footnotes" to "F.'s
Invocation" are as much the narrator's as F.'s ("Cohen; Poetry" 22). After all, the narrator is the only character living by the book's (end and its) beginning. Consulting sub-footnote c, we read that "constipated" comes from "Con-stipatum, Latin past participle of stipare - to pack, press, stuff, cram. Cognate with the Greek Gtupeog
(stiphos) - 'a heap firmly pressed together'" (Cohen Losers 198). The footnote is a discernable parody of Cohen's poem "Style": "I don't believe opium or money / though they're hard to get / and punished with long sentences" (27). It seems that narrative under the influence of opiates relates history through long lines.
Douglas Barbour's essay, "Down with History," takes both of F.'s "Invocations" for an illustration of "History, our concern with passing, linear Time, our self-defeating obsession with the past and with the present seen only in terms of the future" (138). "In
Cohen's novel," according to Barbour, "the characters bypass History ... because once you achieve sainthood[,] you are awake in the eternal Now" (141). Despite that insight,
Barbour fails to note that to F., history is a teleological process that will seemingly make sense in the end. He will "set you straight on everything" (Cohen Losers 169). Early
Cohen critic Desmond Pacey argues "that History is merely an opiate" in Cohen's
"political poems" (85). He recognizes "F.'s Invocation" in Cohen's poem from Flowers for Hitler, "On Hearing a Name Long Spoken": 85
History is a needle
For putting men asleep
Anointed with the poison
Of all they want to keep (25)
However, Pacey appears to confuse Cohen with his "F." character. Put simply, if the former is a performer, the latter is a performance that reading makes performative.
But, while specific instances of troparody are apparent through the play with narrative order in Beautiful Losers, the novel does not exhibit the dream patterning that
Todorov says distinguishes the poetic novel from its "heroic" counterpart. These competing discourses, a la Bakhtin, ensure their readers lose their grasp on any single authority. "Book II: A Long Letter from F." describes the style of transcendence that
"Book III: Beautiful Losers" and its third-person narrative demonstrate. "F. never shut up," the narrator whines; "His voice has got into my ear like a trapped fly, incessantly buzzing. His style is colonizing me" (Cohen Losers 42). Readers are also subject to a synthesis of the dialectical style and "death style" in the apotheosis of Beautiful Losers.
If the narrator's story is authentic, if F.'s oration is synthetic, and if the anonymous third person's musings are empathetic, then that third-person narrator is a reader surrogate, applying meaning to narrative fragments. By the third "book," the historian, an "old man" has "commenced his remarkable performance (which I do not intend to describe)" (Cohen Losers 253). Note how the third-person narrator's "I" is revealed between those parentheses. The narrative returns readers to the lobby in "front of the System Theatre" where F. and Edith danced the "telephone" (Cohen Losers 247). 86
As the "old man" recalls that dance in the light projected onto the halo of the screen, the
third book of the novel depicts its characters as spectres haunting the System Theatre.
The third-person narrative harmonizes the contradictions in Beautiful Losers between presentation and representation, composition and decomposition, and prose and poetry.
This third-person narrator draws us into the novel on the condition that we reconsider what the open ending might mean. The last "book" in Beautiful Losers is able to feign unself-consciousness that the previous "books" could not attain. Then again, the final narrator's use of the first-person pronoun demonstrates the dangers of solipsism that are involved with his nonchalant style. And this nonchalance results in non-narrative prose.
On In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient
In the Skin of a Lion is, in many ways, the prototypical Ondaatje novel. Patrick
Lewis stumbles upon certain events and inadvertently makes an impact on history. Only, because Patrick cannot find the words to communicate his thoughts, no record of his influence on the past remains. By the end of the novel, Patrick overcomes his incommunicative nature to teach Hana about her dead mother. Of course, Patrick is hardly a hero. His eager curiosity and occasional incredulity make him the central character of Ondaatje's poetic novel. Reviewer George Packer declares the novel
"poetic" because "some of it just about scans," at the expense of narrative coherence
(422). When, as inevitably he must, Patrick relates his story to Hana, he calls up a series of episodic fragments: fires, bombs, near explosions, and a struggle to transcend class.
Ondaatje allows his narrative to fragment by removing conjunctions and other connective 87 phrases from sentences, leaving phrases crowded with nouns. What Cohen conceives as semantic confusion, Ondaatje recasts as chaos that he invites readers to give order.
Ondaatje's poetic novels never originate in stagey atmospherics, or with the creaky, dubious avowals of narratorial sanity so beloved of Cohen. Again, storytelling becomes a vehicle for Patrick's life within In the Skin of a Lion, and for his death within The English
Patient. These deviations from received meaning lead into an interpretation of both novels where characters yearn to tell their stories in order to overcome the threat of death.
In the Skin of a Lion is also typical Ondaatje because there is something about his narrative style, perhaps its rigour and physicality, which evokes the forbodding of death.
Ondaatje assures readers that history is mutable so long as characters are able to change it. On the first page of In the Skin of a Lion, "a young girl," named Hana, "gathers" the story told by a "man," her adoptive father. By the last page of In the Skin of a Lion,
Patrick breaks his silence and tells his daughter about her mother, an act that occasions both of Ondaatje's novels. Four, maybe five, years later, a wartime nurse in The English
Patient, she listens to an anonymous patient who speaks continually in order to remember his story. Hana mourns Patrick's death while gathering another story, this one told by the novel's eponymous character, "her eternally dying man" (Ondaatje 115). While Hana listens to her patient, she takes his charred remains for the father she has lost to the war, and reprises a familiar role by gathering his story. For readers familiar with In the Skin of a Lion, the burned patient evokes Hana's father, even though she could not witness his death by immolation. Had Hana been near Patrick, she "could have nursed him," "a burned man" (Ondaatje Patient 296). Instead, she divulges her guilt about being absent at 88 his death with a letter to Clara. Patrick, "the most unverbal of men" died "alone, without lover or kin" (ibid). Hana writes that no one performed his last rites. Although Patrick is only spoken of within The English Patient, he rhymes with the patient Hana nurses.
As Hana reads to her patient - "A novel is a mirror walking down a road" - she remembers "her father ... stopping his car under one specific bridge in Toronto north of
Pottery Road at midnight and telling her that this was where the starlings and the pigeons uncomfortably and not too happily shared the rafters during the night" (Ondaatje Patient
91). While this passage calls to mind the waterworks that Patrick tried to destroy at the conclusion of In the Skin of a Lion, Ondaatje does not let readers know whether Hana knows of Patrick's failure. When Patrick speaks here of birds nesting, he is also speaking of the class division between the bridge engineers and construction workers. The allegorical meaning of Patrick's parable implies that the common "pigeons" unsettled the
"starlings." Although Hana could not possibly have witnessed scenes from the stories that she inherits, Hana is a character and a narrative characteristic of both In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient.
Readers familiar with In the Skin of a Lion are likely to recall the parable and read between those lines. If the "pigeon" is a troparody of Patrick himself, then Hana's account of his death could be read as euphemism. She wants to say that he died peacefully in a bird sanctuary, only she has grave doubts that her father was "nursed by a stranger," or if he lay "the way the English patient reposes grandly on his cot" (Ondaatje
Patient 90). Still, she writes a letter to Clara, her "mother's best friend," which makes it seem as though Patrick passed on peacefully (Ondaatje Lion 244). "Patrick died in a 89 dove-cot in France" she relates, "a sacred place .. . a comforting place. Patrick died in a comforting place" (Ondaatje Patient 293). With these words, she delivers her father the comfort in death that he lacked in life. She nostalgically recalls her father's inability to be
"fully comfortable in the world," taking on his taciturn tongue by dropping "syllables" out of sensitivity, not "out of shyness" (Ondaatje Patient 90). Therefore, rereading In the
Skin of a Lion through The English Patient, tension emerges between past and present tense. As the narrative doubles back on itself here, readers must place two books in order.
This self-consciousness aligns style with discourse and turns narrative performative.
Responding to an interview question about "the relationship between history and writing," Ondaatje asserts: "I'm always more fascinated by the minor characters in history, people who don't usually get written about" ("Wachtel" 257). Ondaatje suggests that his readers represent a fictional presence within the "great darkness" of events
"[o]utside the plot" (Ondaatje Skin 143). Ondaatje expands upon his process to novelist
Catherine Bush: "I want to get as close to a kind of sensory emotion as I can and communicate that in all its complexity. What happens in a novel is that we are in symbolic time" (246). Ondaatje wants this "sensory emotion" to provoke readers to connect with "every action or thought" of a character by "leap[ing] back to what a character was and leap[ing] forward to what he or she might become." This style displaces story and narrative discourse to evoke an emotional response. Ondaatje tells
Bush that the form of language, the poetics, concerns him as much as the content: "I suspect we are too skillful at it, too precious. So what we suddenly desire is the blend of emotion and language and form. Heart and skills" (248). These comments recall the 90 metaphorical rhetoric from Secular Love. Ondaatje's speakers boast of their skills in order to play upon audiences. An untitled lyrical poem from the "Rock Bottom" sequence of the collection considers whether the speaker is able "to make anything of this / who are these words for" (Ondaatje 71). The secret power of Ondaatje's poem lies in its steadfast refusal to explain fully, in the end, the mechanisms that have brought about its emotional impact. Time and again, he leaves readers utterly convinced that such a connection is possible. The poem makes us sense a style at play, though we cannot explain or understand this style.
Within "Rock Bottom," the elements of lyrical poetry - intimately expressing the feelings and thoughts of a single speaker - all hang together seamlessly in our imagination. Yet, in the end, we do not know any more than the speaker does. "I write about you / as if I own ytiu / which I do not," he concedes; "As you can say of nothing / this is mine" (Ondaatje "Rock" 72). In other words, the speaker writes of his aspiration to write, leaving him to repeat himself. He assumes Cohen's death style stance by insisting that he cannot write. Ondaatje prolongs his relationship with his readership by writing about its end:
Whether we pass
through each other
like pure arrows
or fade into rumour
I write down now
a fiction of your arm (ibid) 91
For the central story within Ondaatje's writing, reiterated with inexhaustible inventiveness, is ultimately the fragility of 'reality,' of all the fictional structures that we have erected to defend ourselves from any suspicion that underlying everything is chaos.
Ondaatje volunteers in an interview that he writes books "where nothing much happens, just someone sitting by a dry fountain, waiting for the water to come down" ("Wachtel"
257). In those moments of poetry, Ondaatje's novels achieve Todorov's poetic state. His characters represent the discursive chaos that threatens history and narrative.
The "nothing much" that Ondaatje mentions is suggestive, opening possibilities for poetry within prose. Consider how Patrick's voice resounds around the margins of
The English Patient. "He spoke out his name," while sitting on a bench within In the Skin of a Lion, "and it struggled up in a hollow echo and was lost in the high air of Union
Station. No one turned. They were in the belly of a whale" (Ondaatje 54). Patrick's name resounds and returns to him but he remains unknown to anyone else. The English Patient evokes that "noise crackling crazily down the canyon walls. 'For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.'' A man thought to be sullen and mad had written that sentence down in an English hospital" (Ondaatje 21). The narrator proceeds to tell us of the Bedouin tribe that resurrected the "English" patient from a plane crash. Later in the narrative, but earlier in the story, the narrator repeats himself. The patient grieves by
"yelling out" the name of the one he lost "into the rocks. For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places" (Ondaatje Patient 250). Here, Ondaatje is quoting his own act of quotation nearly verbatim, without quotation marks. Of course, the patient's voice will not return to him, nor will his lover Katherine. Both have entered history, a place from which they cannot return. That said, they are not subject to capitalized
History; they embody a figurative a-history. Hana "entered the story," for example, "her
body full of sentences and moments, as if awakening from sleep with a heaviness caused
by unremembered dreams" (Ondaatje Patient 12). The narrative trails off after that
description, leaving readers to make our own connections through her dreams.
We readers, like Hana herself, make connections from these fragments. In effect,
Hana is a reader piecing together her story. These acts of reading are an unbalanced process in Ondaatje's novels. For example, Hana reads aloud to her patient
"[un]concerned about the Englishman as far as the gaps in plot were concerned"
(Ondaatje Patient 8). The nurse "gave no summary of the missing chapters. She simply brought out the book and said 'page ninety-six' or 'page one hundred and eleven.' That was their only locator." The English Patient's narrator comments upon this act: "novels commenced with hesitation or chaos. Readers were never fully in balance" (Ondaatje 93).
Interestingly, apathetic critics and commentators prove unwilling to look for their place as well. Reviewer O.W. Pollman finds The English Patient "pock-marked ... with flaws, scenic and temporal inconsistencies, and possibilities" (149). Barbour counters such criticism in the last chapter of Michael Ondaatje by suggesting that the novel constitutes a "carefully casual bricolage of disassociated movements [which] never quite denies us the traditional pleasures of narrative movement" (209). Pollman does not consider those formal implications of Hana's haphazard reading that Barbour draws our attention to.
Again, these "temporal inconstancies," "disassociated movements," and narrative abstractions signal the presence of parody. Hana's reading practice makes poetry from 93 another narrative. She, mothlike, chews text into poetic lace. Her reading also turns us back to her sources in order to fill in these "flaws." This troparody requires our participation to overcome narrative dissonance. The English Patient not only rereads itself, it cites In the Skin of a Lion, and somewhat obliquely, recites Secular Love. In the moments where we align with readers and listeners in these texts, they turn performative.
The "Gift"
Just as Leonard Cohen juxtaposes the losers with their past beauty in Beautiful
Losers, F. "cure[s] the Narrator of his physical and mental constipation" by removing the
"barrier that separates reality and imagination, the past and the present," according to
Michael Ondaatje {Cohen 51). F. ends his letter by offering the "complete gift" that
Ondaatje mentions. "I always intended to tell you everything," F. writes: "Play with me old friend" (Cohen Losers 156). F. leaves his peculiar style for the narrator. The narrator inherits a vulgar litany that he must put into order. Telling is F.'s gift. It is a gift F. is
(literally) dying to give. Ondaatje parodies this trope within The English Patient. As
Hana looks up from the letter "that told of the death of her father" (Ondaatje 41), she perceives "some gift from the past that had to be accepted" (Ondaatje 40). She sees a
"white lion" against "the white marble" surrounding the hospital at which she works.
Writing to Clara about Patrick's death, Hana establishes a similar connection with her own reader. She imposes an order on the chaos of her father's narrative. 94
Hana speaks on behalf of the man who once spoke for her. Although Hana signs her name at the letter's end, she does not have the final word. As if he is channeling F., the patient overwhelms the narrative:
We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed,
bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we
have climbed as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to
be marked on my body when I am dead... . We are communal histories,
communal books. (Ondaatje Patient 261)
This passage recalls Ondaatje's final word on Beautiful Losers: it is simultaneously fascinating and irritating to see "a mind working towards completion, to see the basic process which moves from being just 'a smudge of your character' into the story" {Cohen
56). Ondaatje provides no reference for the words between those scare quotation marks, yet they speak to the necessity of rereading his novels. Lacking the authority to write history, his characters blur its print. They break up the sentences written by their predecessors and interrupt the progression of history and narrative. Accordingly, both
Patrick and the English patient must die to cause this disruption.
Ondaatje seems to deliberately parody some of the narrative confusion that Cohen relies on to move the plot of Beautiful Losers forward. In loosening the bonds of Cohen's narrative confusion, Ondaatje suggests there might be some performative advantage in embracing chaos. In Cohen's novel, the "gift" that F. leaves the narrator stands in the way of the rational process. Alternately, this gift also removes the narrator from consideration.
The gift is death in the sense that it renders previous discourse unnecessary. It is an 95 opportunity for readers to attend over the death of an author's persona(e), a poem's speaker(s), or a novel's narrator(s). Both Cohen and Ondaatje encourage readers to make connections throughout their work. Their novels attempt to engage the potential expressed within In the Skin of a Lion: "If only it were possible that in the instance something was written down - idea or emotion or musical phrase - it became known to others of the era" (Ondaatje 133). At this moment of empathy, any act of interpretation is automatically citation, and any act of reception is recitation. 96
CHAPTER THREE
Parody in Historical Fiction: On Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace,
Jane Urquhart's The Whirlpool, and Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces
Consider those diarists, journalists, and memoirists who influenced the recent generation of historical fiction written in Canada. The literary shelters these historical figures built to insulate themselves from a hostile land also isolated them from then- neighbours. Over time, though, other writers have taken up residence in their works. This chapter will compare examples of historical fiction from the last thirty years by three
English-Canadian writers. Margaret Atwood, Jane Urquhart, and Anne Michaels incorporate source texts, or wr-texts, into their historical fiction. These writers are comparable because they manipulate real-life diaries, journals, and memoirs from the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth. Although Atwood, Urquhart, and Michaels stray from their historical sources to varying degrees, each grounds her fiction in verifiable fact. These writers are distinctive because they complicate our understanding of literary parody. Each of them published a poetry collection in the "voice" of a historical figure, and each proceeded to parody the style of her own poetry with a prose narrative.
Juxtaposing their poems to their novels will demonstrate that all historical fiction comes to reside in the present.
Like a house built upon an unmarked grave, historical fiction is haunted. While this form of fiction provides its source texts with another life, it cannot contain the presences of those intertexts; that is, ur-texts haunt historical fiction. Atwood, Urquhart, and Michaels communicate this sense of haunting by quoting lines from their chosen 97 historical sources alongside lines of poems they previously published. Their poems and novels offer particular examples of how literary parody interrogates the ways that historical fiction operates through a formal reorientation. Considering examples of historical novels in terms of parody will provide a critical perspective beyond repetition as a method for transforming historical sources into fiction (and perhaps the opposite as well). More specifically, Atwood, Urquhart, and Michaels write historical novels that lack the "energy of a narrative" (Michaels Pieces 204). Their novels fragment into several narratives that sound more like poetry than prose.30 Furthermore, the lines of poetry between the lines of prose in their novels promote a performative reading of their historical sources.
Historical fiction by Atwood, Urquhart, and Michaels turns and returns to the question of what becomes of those who write diaries, journals, and memoirs. Their writing has several troparodic features in common: each text refers to diaries, journals, and memoirs, and to some extent, the reception accorded these early publications.
Atwood, Urquhart, and Michaels represent this tension between writing and its reception with a contrast of historical and poetic intertext. They communicate this instability of citation and enonciation primarily through metaphors of bodies decomposing (even though some of their fictional victims remain alive). Uncertain ur-texts are revealed in these contemporary re-writings as apparitions lurking under every word a character
(based upon a historical figure) sets down. In other words, Atwood, Urquhart, and
30 White indicates that history wants the last words. Historiography, however, is subject to the same "rhetorical flourishes" of narrative discourse (White x). The "poetic effects" (ibid) of a figure of speech or turn of phrase open up the possibility of "unhistorical" interpretations (White 47). (He offers up historical allegory, "a poetic troping of the 'facts,'" as a possible solution [ibid].) 98
Michaels relate how their characters - two are immigrants, and two are women - are either threatened by some 'universal Truth' that will not remain buried, or by a dangerous lie that is mistaken for truth. I will attempt to prove that these contemporary writers provide context for the threatening 'truth.' I will further contend that poetry haunts prose narratives by Atwood, Urquhart, and Michaels.
A few procedural issues in this chapter need clarification. Because literary parody is the subject of my study, rather than summarize the mass of criticism about historiography, I will concentrate on one theorist in particular. Linda Hutcheon has written extensively about both literary parody and historical fiction, often with successive refinements and amendments to her theoretical position. In particular, her work on historical fiction considers those writers who thematize the processes of writing and reading history along the lines of "historiographic metafiction." At first, the term
"historical fiction" would seem a contradiction, and "historiographic metafiction" a cumbersome play on words. However, historiographic metafiction aptly describes a postmodern variation of historical fiction that comments on the difficulties writers face when attempting to impose narrative coherence upon the past. According to Hutcheon,
The intertextual parody of historiographic metafiction enacts the views of certain
contemporary historiographers: it offers a sense of the presence of the past, but a
past that can be known only from its texts, its traces - be they literary or
historical. (Poetics 125)
The following discussion of literary parody relies on the anachronistic, or synchronic, nature of Hutcheon's notion of historiography. She identifies a tension between writing 99 history and writing fiction that informs my understanding of the performativity of poetry within historical novels. Furthermore, this performative effect enhances the parodic outcome.
Hutcheon suggests that the kind of fiction we have come to call "modernist" reacts against the mores of Victorian literature that, typically, require that a complex plot is narrated by an omniscient authorial force. Modern fiction, Hutcheon summarizes, sought to represent the word as experienced in the individual conscious or unconscious, using limited viewpoints, or unreliable narrators, and frequent time shifts to disrupt the temporal logic of cause and effect. For Hutcheon, both modernist and postmodernist aesthetics value literary parody as a mode of communication. The writers of most interest to Hutcheon no longer use the words "fact" or "event" interchangeably. Because those writers take any claim to 'truth' as implicitly false (or contingent), they reevaluate the function of historiography. Hutcheon suggests that for historical fiction, rhetorical impact matters more than any claim to represent 'reality.' If perception of'reality' or 'history' is the result of literary construction, historical or realist literature must reveal the structures of that construction. She implies that historiographic metafiction depicts the process of writing history. Hutcheon calls for readers to consider the possibility that historical fiction may reveal a variety of truths about the past rather than attempt to faithfully represent the past. This possibility underscores how historiographic metafiction places historical sources under questioning, or possibly under erasure; attempts to rewrite historical events and figures necessitate fictional intervention and invention. This chapter will suggest that any consideration of historical novels by contemporary Canadian writers must account for the possibility that poetry contributes to the "fictional" element of Hutcheon's "historiographic metafiction." What Atwood,
Urquhart, and Michaels have in common is their use of poetic language to illustrate the ways in which historical fiction questions the earliest accounts of past events. The poetry within their historical novels evokes the haunting presences, or apparitions, of the past; it also parodies prior explication. Ghosts - or the lack thereof - seem necessary in the development of this country's historiography. If conveying those apparitions requires the use of poetic rhetoric, structure, and tone, then historical novels may also incorporate poetry, resulting in poetic novels in service to parody.32 Indeed poetry may be the unobtrusive strength of these examples of Canadian historical fiction.
Atwood incorporates passages from Susanna Moodie's memoir, Life in the
Clearings, into several poems from her collection, The Journals of Susanna Moodie.
Passages from Life in the Clearings appear in a poem where Atwood's "Moodie" recounts a conversation with imprisoned murderess Grace Marks. (Whether Moodie meant to write history does not preclude her value as Marks's first historian.) Atwood then incorporates passages of Moodie's memoir alongside lines from her own poetry into
31 Birney has observed, in a line from a poem that seems to recapitulate the ideological quandary these novels confront: "it's only by our lack of ghosts / we're haunted" (58). His poem, "Can. Lit," concludes by bemoaning the fact there is no Canadian "Whitman." Although Birney does not distinguish between "lack" and "ghosts," the terms are not synonyms. A ghost is a presence or apparition, not an abyss. Whereas the abyss represents silence for Birney, it signifies white noise for the purposes of this chapter.
32 Todorov does not consider the possibility of a simultaneously poetic and historic novel. In fact, "A Poetic Novel" establishes an opposition between poetic(al) and historical narratives. Following Todorov, the poetic language within historical fiction results in another form of poetic novel that questions any implicit monologism. 101 her novel, Alias Grace. Atwood's narrative account of Marks's imprisonment attempts to provide another perspective on Canadian close-mindedness; a "space," as in The Journals of Susanna Moodie, that "cannot hear" (Atwood 11). Atwood also comments upon the
Victorian garb that Moodie's memoir drapes over Marks. By combining those separate intertextual layers - Moodie's memoir, the poetry Atwood bases on Moodie's memoir, and the novel Atwood bases on Moodie's memoir - Atwood offers an example of how fiction enters historiography.
This trend toward fiction in Canadian historiography that Hutcheon brings to our attention is central to my rereading of these poems and prose narratives. Atwood,
Urquhart, and Michaels reinterpret conventional methods of writing history by weaving source texts into narrative skeins that use poetry for rhetorical effect. With this in mind, the burden of the present argument is dual: certain novels by contemporary Canadian writers allow us to reread their historical source texts at the same time as we reread their own poetic intertexts. There are already broken lands in these poems and novels. There are broken bodies, in fact, reminding us of the difficulties for contemporary works that refer to turn-of-the-century Canada.
The "Eyes" within The Journals of Susanna Moodie
Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie opens with an unidentified speaker defacing "this picture of myself': and with my sewing scissors cut out the face.
Now it is more accurate:
where my eyes were, every thing appears (7)
These words preface the poems that Atwood vocalizes in Susanna Moodie's name, only
Atwood's "Moodie" claims that she cannot make herself out of her own depiction. She proceeds to disfigure the portrait because it fails to capture her likeness. "Moodie" also implies that the English language spoken by the woman in this picture is too proper to evoke the difficulties she endured while immigrating to Upper Canada. Accordingly, she yearns to explain how "every- / thing" eludes her ability to write. It is significant that
"Moodie" excises the "eyes" because they do not see what she expects them to see. She feels as though some "thing appears" to have replaced the Englishwoman who posed for that portrait. In this way, "Moodie" addresses her journals to herself, her "I," in absentia.
The Journals of Susanna Moodie underlines the extent to which this "thing" is a parody of Moodie, as we are reading about a historical figure more figurative than historical.
The three "journals" of The Journals of Susanna Moodie are loosely patterned after Susanna Moodie's memoirs from 1852 to 1853. Each poem is a fragment from
"Moodie's" recollections about arriving in Quebec, clearing land from (what will become) Ontario, and settling north of (what is not yet) Peterborough. With "First
Neighbours," a poem from the first journal, Atwood establishes the primary conceit for the collection. "Moodie" immigrates expecting to "breathe" like Canadians, only to discover "the air, / speaking a twisted dialect to my differently- / shaped ears" (Atwood
"Neighbours" 14). By turning a possessive adjective ("their") into the noun phrase ("the air"), Atwood illustrates how "Moodie" attempts to come to terms with a place she cannot understand. Her resistance to the "knowing of the language" (15) in Canada effects her own alienation. That is to say, she distances herself from the landscape and its undifferentiated inhabitants. "Moodie" recedes into the English language she left in order to cling to her Victorian identity. Convinced she was "damaged" crossing the Atlantic,
"Moodie" attempts to rewrite her identity. Ironically, her journals document a complete separation from her past in England.
In her afterword to The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Atwood cites Moodie's memoirs as the source of that friction between "Moodie's" past and present selves.
Atwood channels "Mrs. Moodie's books," with her poetry, "though it was not her conscious voice but the other voice running like a counterpoint through her work," that became the primary source (63). Atwood's afterword suggests that both of these voices belong to Moodie, but they could belong to the speakers she writes about. This observation about conscious and unconscious voices applies to Moodie's account of her visit with Marks in a Toronto penitentiary. Life in the Clearings relates how Marks cannot rest because she feels the eyes of those she butchered - her master, Thomas
Kinnear, and his mistress, Nancy Montgomery - haunting her. Atwood rewrites this story in The Journals of Susanna Moodie as the fictional "Moodie" accounts for her visit with
Marks in a "lunatic asylum" (50). Atwood rewrites this story again in Alias Grace as the fictional Marks responds to her representation within Moodie's memoir. To do so, Atwood incorporates lines from Life in the Clearings alongside The Journals of Susanna
Moodie within Alias Grace as I will show. Atwood's novel provides another account of
the apparitions following Marks. However, Alias Grace does not clarify whether Marks's
visions are the result of madness, or if they are the cause of her madness. Atwood's
Marks freely admits that she has lost the ability to distinguish the real bodies she perceives from her apparitions.
Atwood plays with the "eye" / "I" homophone throughout The Journals of
Susanna Moodie and Alias Grace. In The Journals of Susanna Moodie, "Moodie" speaks
with more than the "[t]wo voices" that she believes "took turns using my eyes" (Atwood
"Voice" 42). In Alias Grace, Marks disassociates herself from her visions or her
encounters with apparitions through the stories she tells and retells. Marks's voice is
simple and colloquial, in contrast to the distanced retrospective that characterizes the remainder of Alias Grace. Atwood's novel turns performative by acting out the contradiction between intertextual voices and representations of those voices.
Several of Atwood's contemporaries employ a similar mode of parody. The play within historiographic metafiction - the way novels by Atwood, Urquhart, and Michaels pulse between the generic conventions of poetry and historical fiction - is, as Hutcheon suggests, itself a working-out of the stories that contribute to Canadian history. Jane
Urquhart's The Whirlpool also considers the question of what becomes of those historical figures whose work is rewritten. 105
The "Floaters" within False Shuffles
Jane Urquhart attributes a series of poems within False Shuffles to her grandmother (by marriage). Her "Undertaker's Bride" concerns the living her real-life husband's grandmother, properly named Adeline, made as an undertaker in Niagara Falls around the turn of the century. The poems tell of how the speaker's "grandmother kept an intricate / account of/ death by water" (Urquhart 20). The titular undertaker's bride leaves her granddaughter "a small brown book" that describes the "remaining physical / characteristics" (Urquhart "Bride" 21) of each "floater" who "slipped / over the falls / one way or another" (Urquhart "Bride" 20). The notebook contains grey, objective details about "sixty floaters a summer" with narrative. The granddaughter speaks of the bloated corpses in terms of "their tiny possessions" because
it looks as if it couldn't be helped
it looks as if somebody had to write it (Urquhart "Bride" 21)
These conditional ("as if) phrases are enough justification for the "grandmother" to accept the occupation she inherited. Besides, if she were to refuse, the floaters would simply wash away without any record of their passing. "Grandmother," in turn, passes on her notebook as though someone must read the notes that memorialize the floaters. This use of the subjunctive voice in "Undertaker's Bride" aligns the experience of writing with that of reading. Indeed, it is as though Urquhart passes down her grandmother's notebook to a character who reprises the undertaker's role in False Shuffles within The Whirlpool. In this novel, a widow named Maud Grady also takes up her dead husband's profession:
"Maud was paid fifteen dollars per body by the city, in return for disposing quickly and quietly of these unpleasant embarrassments to the mighty tourist industry" (Urquhart
Whirlpool 164). This way, the floater, a primary trope in "Undertaker's Bride," makes its way into the pages of Maud's journal within The Whirlpool.
Urquhart's novel refers simultaneously to her grandmother's notebook and the poetry she wrote about the notebook. However, the floater is a different part of speech in
Urquhart's poetry and prose: where it is an object in "Undertaker's Bride," it becomes a subject in The Whirlpool. As Maud prepares "[t]he flesh" of corpses for burial, she determines "to remember that the thing before her, packed, in ice, had been human"
(Urquhart Whirlpool 164). Even as she takes notes, a "personality would develop behind the words, a life would take shape." Resuscitation thus applies to Urquhart's reiteration of her poetry in her novel. Like Atwood's Alias Grace, Urquhart's The Whirlpool parodies historical sources along with her own poetic intertext. By comparison, Anne
Michaels's Fugitive Pieces complicates the function of poetry in historical writing: her poetic novel does not refer to any historical source. Instead, the second "book" of her novel parodies the fictional, ox faux, memoir that makes up the first "book."
The "Skin" within Miner's Pond
Michaels, like Atwood and Urquhart, uses the corporeal metaphor of skin to describe loss. The poem "Flowers" in Miner's Pond speaks of the difficulty of covering an intimate experience of pain. Memory is exposed in this passage, for example: There's another skin inside my skin
that gathers to your touch, a lake to the light;
that looses its memory, its lost language
into your tongue,
erasing me into newness. (Michaels "Flowers" 31)
The "tongue" here struggles to break through the "skin" of language. As Michaels
suggests in her essay, "Cleopatra's Love," poetry can express how "[m]emory is the
skeleton under the lyric skin" (180); she develops this theme within her novel, Fugitive
Pieces. Michaels divides her novel into "books" from the point of view of characters patterned after historical sources. The first "book" consists of Jakob Beer's memoir about
surviving the Holocaust. Beer's memoir remains incomplete because late in life he turned his attention from writing to his young wife, Michaela. In the second "book" of Fugitive
Pieces, a young academic simply named Ben attempts to complete Beer's memoir through apostrophe to Beer: "Your words and your life no longer separate, after decades of biding in your skin" (Michaels Pieces 267). While sifting through the detritus of the poet's library, Ben rewrites those words from an unpublished broadsheet titled "What
Have You Done to Time." Ben follows Beer's life from a collapsed city in Poland to the
Greek island of Zakynthos, and finally to Toronto, Canada. While reading Beer's fascination with the "circular language of Michaela's arms," Ben writes that he feels imbued with "[a]n energy of intention I'd never experienced before" (Michaels Pieces
269). Ben also chooses to believe there is no difference between the poet and his poetry; poetry seems to emerge like layers of Beer's skin. In other words, Ben makes Beer the persona of his own poetry.
Taken together, three figures of speech - Atwood's excised "eyes," Urquhart's buoyant "floater," and Michaels's lucid "skin" - represent the presences haunting these respective works of historical fiction. These apparitions differ, however, in the effort they require of empathetic readers who must make out what the novels are saying. In addition, if these examples of historical fiction challenge conventional methods of writing history, it is because they articulate in prose the illusion, or elusion, of verbal expression. In turn, these examples of troparody also threaten to erode narrative coherence. Poetic novels by
Atwood, Urquhart, and Michaels depict a recognizably troparodic movement from a more or less verbatim repetition of their historical sources to a reiteration of their poems.
More specifically, they explore the implications of Derridean erasure with their prose narratives. Reading historiographic metafiction through erasure removes the ideological implications of Hutcheon's theory. Focusing on historical fiction as parody emphasizes the rhetorical effects of narrative over any historical aspects.
Examining the rhetorical effects of poetry within these works of historical fiction by contemporary Canadian poet-novelists builds on my theory of troparody. Margaret
Rose's assessment of postmodern parody, Fredric Jameson's formulation of pastiche, and
Robert Phiddian's re-interpretation of deconstruction will apply to the limits of parody within these examples of historical fiction. On Postmodern Parody and Pastiche
The reason Jacques Derrida gives for coining the term "erasure" and for signifying it by striking out other indeterminate terms is that the strangeness of the term and its application (e.g., term) serves as a reminder that it is seldom clear what events are
"sous rature." Specifically, Derrida warns against making philosophical abstractions
("postmodernism") stand in for a real-world practice (literary parody). Robert Phiddian's deconstructive approach to literary parody would imply that even the term "postmodern" and its signature practice, parody, are vulnerable to questioning. Phiddian's view of parody is not necessarily "post-modern" in the way Margaret Rose uses the term. Her theory, expounded in Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-modern, differs from a poststructuralist application of "'indeterminacy' or 'relativity' of meaning" with a more
"prescriptive" approach (Rose 206). She intervenes with a description worth quoting at length:
In becoming 'post-modern' through the rejection and revision of the modern
reduction of parody to either meta-fiction or comedy, and in favour of an
understanding of parody as a much more complex combination and development
of both the meta-fictional and the comic and their related forms, the parody
'regained' in the post-modern depictions of it... might even be said to have
'double-coded' the modern with the ancient. (273)
Rose maintains that parody constitutes "critique" and ridicule before 1970, but "post modern" parody constitutes "critique and innovation" after 1970. From this perspective, it becomes important to ask which literary traditions and specific works are ironically 110
subverted by parodic fiction. Further, audiences may consider that specific modes of
transformation undermine source texts for the work of parody. Phiddian, alternately,
suspects that deconstruction is not performed upon a text; rather, the text itself
deconstructs. His determination of literary parody appeals to that deconstructive
imperative. Phiddian's view of parody exposes the underlying conflicts between a source
or "host" text and the subsequent "parasite" text.
Whether ancient Greek tragedians staged the first parody, or whether the practice
is attributable to the quills of eighteenth-century English wags, literary parody endures.
"Parody," Phiddian quips, "if it cannot logically be traced back to the first text, must have
started at least with the second or third" ("Secretly" 679). In his essay, "Are Parody and
Deconstruction Secretly the Same Thing," Phiddian applies deconstructive theory to
Jonathan Swift's works in order to explain how parody operates. He points to Derrida's use of the Sanskrit term iter from Signature Event Context to delineate the effect of
"[repetition, alteration, iterability" on Derrida's understanding of performativity (qtd. in
"Secretly" 673). Phiddian finds:
Derridean deconstruction is not just a (serious) theory couched in a parodic mode
(that it is a parodic theory of language), but also that it treats language and
questions of truth and reference as if they were already in a play of parody (that it
is a theory of parodic language). ("Secretly" 673)
In the latter postulate, texts are always, already deconstructing. Besides, "play" does not equate to ridicule. Put simply, oversimplifying, deconstruction criticizes texts from within. Some recent efforts to determine a more rigorous definition of parody as both an Ill imitative and a critical practice have a theoretical application. What has characterized discussion about parody for more than a century (note the distinction by historic age, rather than aesthetic period) is the destructive possibility of ridicule.
Phiddian applies that understanding of Derridean theory to the criticism or ridicule often attributed to literary parody. "[T]he secret sharer of deconstruction is parody," he insists; "[t]o use deconstruction with parodies is to commit deconstruction with consenting texts rather than against victim texts" (Phiddian "Secretly" 679). A central tenet of Phiddian's argument is that deconstruction and parody are nearly identical critical practices. His use of "deconstructive" as a participial, like "parodic," suggests that a self-reflexive text results in a form of performativity. With reference to Swift's Tale of a Tub, Phiddian links deconstruction and parody in three significant ways. First,
"[p]arodies deconstruct the discourses they invade; they do not blankly destroy the discourses on which, parasitically and critically, they live" (Phiddian "Secretly" 682).
Parody subverts conventions from within these conventions. Second, "[p]arody is crooked, reflexive writing, with the instability of irony inscribed deep in its structure"
(Phiddian "Secretly" 683). Again, the reader is responsible for distinguishing between both texts; if the reader takes either deconstruction or parodic fiction "straight," he or she
"misunderstand\s\ it." This deconstructive approach is not to promote a single reading of any parodic fiction. "Parody," Phiddian maintains, "never claims to represent a full presence; like deconstruction, it is always a play of language before it is a play of meaning" ("Secretly" 684). Regarded positively as defamiliarization by Russian 112
Formalists, and negatively as deformation by their New Critical counterparts, literary parody has sought respectability by aligning with de rigueur hermeneutic criticism.
Phiddian's essay draws two metaphors for parody from Derrida's Of
Grammatology and Writing and Difference: "(1) Parody is a play of differance" (684);
and "(2) Parody [is] '. .. that dangerous supplement'" (687). Parodic citation, or para- citation, differs from and defers to - is a part of, while remaining apart from - its sources.
The relationship of the host text and its "parasite" is lateral rather than strictly linear. This theoretical tendency applies anachronistically to literary parody from the past, because it relies upon readers for its very existence. The twist in Phiddian's argument is that, unlike much literary parody, deconstruction resists the temptation to ridicule its targets. He determines parody as that "genre" which "has already seen its way out of the deconstructive impasse that treats language as an endless and odourless play of differences" ("Secretly" 691). Phiddian offers this distinction about the self-reflexivity within language itself: "Parody knows that reference occurs, despite language." Despite the ambiguity implied by this personification -1 still wonder what 'Parody' knows? -
Phiddian insists he knows what differentiates contemporary writers from parodists. The answer is obvious for him: the social implications of literary parody are less important than the poetic process.
In order to understand literary parody, it becomes necessary to maintain some sort of distinction between source text and parody. Rose's solution is to look for signals of parody in action. The application of Phiddian's solution, placing source texts under erasure, constitutes such a signal. A number of other strategies are possible, from silently 113 incorporating passages of source text without acknowledgment (as in plagiarism) to altering the source text that comments upon ironic manipulation of narrative elements (as in a form of germination). The latter, according to Linda Hutcheon, is central to the task of elevating parody culturally through a comparison of the original with the derivative text. In order to be taken as equal to the influence, the less-esteemed form must demonstrate that it offers a reading similar to or divergent from that of its source.
Although subtle quotation may not be taken at once for parody, or mistaken for digression, an over-aestheticized literary parody may alienate audiences more concerned with story than form.
Whereas Rose directs our attention to signals within parody, others have rephrased the discussion to stress form rather than content. Jameson, for instance, dismisses signals altogether. Rather than looking at the problem through the bifocal lens of metafictional dialogism - with one eye trained on quotation, and another eye trained on criticism - he approaches the self-reflexivity that is commonly associated with parody as "a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter" (17). Pastiche emerges, for
Jameson, as
blank parody, a statute with blind eyeballs: it is to parody what that other
interesting and historically original modern thing, the practice of a kind of blank
irony, is to what Wayne Booth calls the 'stable ironies' of the eighteenth century,
(ibid) 114
Jameson argues that it is important to ask which generic works are invoked by the source and which are appropriated by the assemblage, montage, or (another French term for) collage. Furthermore, readers are consumers of a text and so they must consider specific modes of textual production and reproduction that include "the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language"
(ibid). Then again, there is no longer any homogenous "norm" to parody; instead,
Jameson perceives a "field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity." Following Jameson, works of pastiche are not judged according to how well they interrogate sources, but are simply readied for mass consumption. Such an argument calls for an approach to artistic production that emphasizes the responsibility of the consumer in assembling order and constructing meaning from fragments. Jameson's argument effectively eliminates the role of the author in two ways: as the parodist neither 'intends' to ridicule anyone, nor any particular text. The loss of intention would seem the most appealing result of Jameson's writing about pastiche.
Phiddian's deconstructive parody will align with Jameson's pastiche in this reading of historical fiction by Atwood, Urquhart, and Michaels. These poet-novelists employ either an obvious parody, akin to repetition, or a more subtle parody, likened unto reiteration. Either repetition or reiteration is their method for overlapping historical sources alongside their own poetry. The following examination strives to intervene along the lines of the form, content, and impact of troparody in these historical novels. 115
On Alias Grace
How shall I put it? Mrs. Moodie is subject to influences.
Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
With these words from Alias Grace, Reverend Verringer makes it known that his constitution is stronger than "Mrs. Moodie's" will. In his opinion, Life in the Clearings is mere fiction. The Reverend is convinced that Moodie simply made up details from her visit to the penitentiary, his parish, and that she fabricated her account of Grace Marks, his parishioner. He believes that he already knows Marks's story because he has heard her confession. And he is certain that she wears "the mark of Cain." He reads Life in the
Clearings as Moodie's attempt to turn Marks into a character living between quotation marks. Marks's murderous act is thus questioned. Verringer scorns Moodie's weakness for overwrought sentimentality; he notes that her description of Nancy Montgomery's
"bloodshot eyes" derives from "a similar pair of eyes in [Oliver Twist] also belonging to a dead female called Nancy" (Atwood Alias 190). He is concerned that Moodie's use of
Dickensian rhetoric might persuade unsuspecting readers to pity Marks. Verringer refuses to sympathize thus: he would rather ridicule the influence exerted upon Moodie by the
Victorians. Her poem, "The Maniac," Verringer argues, "contains all the requirements - a cliff, a moon, a raging sea, a betrayed maiden ... I believe she ends by leaping off the picturesque cliff so thoughtfully provided for her" (Atwood Alias 191). In this way, a character within A lias Grace comments upon the novel's intertext. Such repetition and ridicule enact textbook parody. 116
Accordingly, readers of Alias Grace are invited to spot other influences. Atwood provides several historical and literary contexts to remind us that she is manipulating her sources and commenting on her own writing process. Alias Grace is at first a quasi-
Gothic ghost story that employs the same thematic cliches that Verringer exposes. The
Reverend knows by heart the poem he despises; he recites Moodie's work by "closing his eyes, and beating time with his right hand" (Atwood Alias 191). Dr. Simon Jordan, a colleague at the penitentiary, replies to the Reverend's ecstatic reverie by saying, "[y]ou must have an extraordinary memory." "Mrs. Moodie is a literary lady," Verringer reminds the doctor,
"and like all such, and indeed like the sex in general, she is inclined to -"
"Embroider," says Simon, (ibid)
With that interruption, Dr. Jordan calls the metaphorical vehicle of Atwood's novel by name.
Alias Grace takes embroidery as a metaphor for the process of stitching stories into its narrative. Excerpts from Moodie's memoirs, newspapers from the late nineteenth century, and Victorian poems open each section of the novel, lending their accumulated authority to Atwood's historical exploration. Although these intertexts do not cohere into a history, they provide Alias Grace with certain plausibility. Atwood draws on those various histories and their respective writers for the plot and the characters of her novel.
Atwood relates how she rewrote specific passages of Life in the Clearings while relegating them to the margins of Alias Grace. In this way, her version of Marks's story proves no more objective than Moodie's memoirs. In the novel, Marks cannot rely on her 117 memories, so she decides to make up details about her past. For example, awakening in her cell after a vivid dream of "white peonies glowing red in the fading light," she muses:
When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion;
... It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are
telling it, to yourself or to someone else. (Atwood Alias 298)
With these words, Marks suspects that she is a victim of her own ongoing confessing.
But, because Atwood's Marks withholds as much as she tells, confessions become a method for avoidance. Such commentary serves to underscore the concept that rewriting historical sources requires a fictional intervention. Alias Grace illustrates this divergence between history and historical fiction written well after the fact.
In her essay, "In Search of Alias Grace" Atwood discusses her approach to reading about Canadian history and writing historical fiction. She admits to fictionalizing certain historical events in order to remind her readers of the effects that passing time has on these events and their figures. Atwood, loath to alter well-known facts, wonders how those facts became well known. She states that in Canadian literature the "digging up of buried things began perhaps in poetry" ("Search" 1509). She takes EJ. Pratt's narrative poems, Gwendolyn MacEwan's verse play, and even her own poetry collection for examples. For her part, Atwood admits that at first she hardly questioned Moodie's account of Marks within The Journals of Susanna Moodie. "Time passed," however, allowing her to reconsider that position (Atwood "Search" 1513). Upon rereading Life in the Clearings, she found that Marks's testimony threatened to unmoor Marks's portion of 118 the book. "Moodie portrays Grace Marks as the driving engine of the affair - a scowling, sullen teenage temptress" - as though she reserves a "pious hope that perhaps the poor girl was deranged all along, which would explain her shocking behavior and also afford her forgiveness in the Afterlife" (Atwood "Search" 1512-1513). More specifically, the bloodied spectres stalking Marks within Life in the Clearings supply visions of death, violence, and slow despair in Atwood's rewriting. Ultimately, Atwood argues that her novel is not about history so much as it is about historiography.
The disjunctive histories within Alias Grace allow Atwood to parody her own poetry. She models the character of Moodie in her novel after the voice attributed to
Moodie in The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Within a poem from the collection, Moodie strains to hear voices that have receded into the air of a Toronto penitentiary (Atwood
"Visit" 51). She ascends the stairs to the third floor where, "at eye level / three faces appeared in an oblong space" pleading for release. Her journal compares "their" ward to a sanctuary "with boulders, trees, no houses" (Atwood "Visit" 50). While she walks among "the flowers / deep red and feathered, shot from among / the dry stones" (Atwood
"Visit" 51), "Moodie" allows us to consider whether the asylum protects the desperate woman inside, or spares outsiders from these women. This poem ends with "Moodie" expecting that "the air / was about to tell me / all kinds of answers." Furthermore, the flowers in that "different kind of room" (Atwood "Visit" 50) gain an unlikely significance in light of Marks's imprisonment within Alias Grace. Marks's unbroken series of dreams, confessions, and disagreements are evoked by Atwood in the closing chapters of her novel. The confusion within Alias Grace eliminates expectation that this 119
narrative, like The Journals of Susanna Moodie, will delineate Marks's conscious and
unconscious voices.
Readers who are familiar with The Journals of Susanna Moodie may not believe
much of what Marks says within A lias Grace. Marks's accounts of "eyes" relate the homonymic nature of language to parody in several versions of the same story. For example, Marks admits to Dr. Jordan that before her master and his mistress were murdered, she had dreamed about "a place I had never been before" where
there were peonies growing. They came up with just the buds on them, small and
hard like unripe apples, and then they opened, and there were huge dark-red
flowers with glossy petals, like satin; and then they burst in the wind and fell to
the ground. {Atwood Alias 313)
Marks goes on to say that her victim, Nancy Montgomery, was picking ornamental
"peonies in the front garden" before she died (ibid). Marks cannot recall what follows, but that she can remember seeing "Nancy, on her knees, with her hair fallen over and the blood running down into her eyes" and pouring onto the flowers, dying them red. She chooses those words carefully in order to refute the version of her testimony within Life in the Clearings. Marks claims that Moodie mistakenly heard "red eyes" for "peonies."
She implores her doctor to understand:
I did not say eyes, Sir; I said peonies . .. And I suppose it's more the usual thing,
to have eyes following you around .... And I guess that was why Mr. MacKenzie
misheard it, and why Mrs. Moodie wrote it down ... But they were peonies, all
the same. Red ones. There is no mistake possible. {Atwood Alias 359) With that, Marks argues that Moodie was wrong to write about "red eyes" directing her to the bodies of her master and his mistress. Atwood hides an implicit criticism of Life in the Clearings in those words: it is possible that Moodie tailored Marks's testimony in order to appeal to Victorian sensibilities. Moodie's memoir ensures that Marks's apparitions pursue her into Atwood's novel.
Marks mentions her memory of peonies toward the end of an interview with Dr.
Jordan. In the next section of the novel, Dr. Jordan confronts Kenneth MacKenzie, the lawyer who represented Marks, about the confusion that arose from the description of
"bloodshot eyes" within Life in the Clearings (Atwood Alias 376). Mackenzie replies with a suggestion that Moodie does exhibit a "tendency to exaggerate" within her memoir: "As for the eyes, what is strongly anticipated by the mind is often supplied by it." Moodie heard either what she wanted to, or what she expected to hear. The language of that explanation recalls an image from a poem within The Journals of Susanna
Moodie, where "Moodie" sees buds of red flowers growing against the yellow walls of the asylum. Within "A Visit to Toronto, With Companions," "Moodie" focuses on those flowers in order to avoid eye contact with the inmates of that asylum. Atwood's parody of that poem within Alias Grace serves at least three significant purposes. First, Atwood places the historical Moodie's authority in question. Second, Atwood encourages our skepticism about historiography through the open-ended structure of poetry. Third,
Atwood reorients the primary tension of her poetry around interpretive subjectivity rather than historical objectivity. It is important to note the degree to which the first and second effects provoke fears about historicity within the literary 'tradition,' as both tend to open the discursive possibilities of the text.
Marks's inability to clear the air within Alias Grace evokes the frustrations that
"Moodie" endures within The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Shortly after landing in
Quebec, "Moodie" comes to realize: "I am a word / in a foreign language" (Atwood
"Disembarking" 11). Here, either the personal pronoun no longer refers to herself, or the word no longer refers to the woman she was while living in England. She feels that the
(not-yet) Canadians, like their (not-yet) Canadian "rocks," "ignore" her (ibid). Then again, "Moodie" cannot distinguish her neighbours from their nation. She confides in her journal that "[t]he people I live among" begrudge "the way I breathe their / property"
(Atwood "Neighbours" 14). "Moodie" escapes these neighbours in another poem,
"Dream I: The Bush Garden," from the second "journal" in Atwood's collection. In a dream, "Moodie" returns to the garden near the home she left in England to find that it has "gone to seed" (34). She recalls that she "bent / to pick" some strawberries "surging, huge / and shining," but her "hands / came away red and wet." She ends the entry in her journal by reinscribing her regret:
In the dream I said
I should have known
anything planted here
would come up blood (ibid)
The phrase "anything planted here" may mean either her English garden, or her Canadian one, but it may also refer to her nostalgic impressions of England. The Journals of Susanna Moodie conveys a general sense that life was better for "Moodie" in the past,
before she was damaged by crossing the ocean, landing in Canada, and settling a
homestead. In fact, her immigration to Canada has gone so poorly that even her language
fragments. "Moodie's" transplant has not taken. She also fears that her present
experiences are supplanting her memories of England. "Moodie" resolves to record those
memories before they fade into dreams the moment before sleep. Thus, she keeps a journal to record how her conception of herself is also breaking apart.
That difference between the writer, "Moodie" in The Journals of Susanna
Moodie, and the speaker, "Marks" in Alias Grace, is key to the distinction between voices within Atwood's poems and her novel. Alias Grace could be considered the logical progression of Atwood's interest in developing a fictional aesthetic by repeating her sources. If it is possible to charge Atwood's novel with sacrificing the requirements of rigorous historiography in order to incorporate imagery from her poems, it is also necessary to acknowledge that her narrative contains many historical and poetic sources.
That reliance on multiple source texts places Alias Grace in the centre of contemporary practices, which tend to emphasize several narrative strands within strictly demarcated formal conventions. Troparody operates within Alias Grace as layers of story rather than narrative disruption.
From here, it is possible to compare Atwood's poetic novel to Urquhart's.
Whereas Atwood's parody of The Journals of Susanna Moodie in Alias Grace simultaneously questions Marks's testimony and Moodie's treatment of it within Life in the Clearings, Urquhart's parody of "Undertaker's Bride" in her novel The Whirlpool questions how historical fiction is constructed from poetic source texts. Both Atwood and
Urquhart turn from poetry to prose narrative in order to find an interior point of intersection between their writing of history and fiction.
On The Whirlpool
D. does not believe that even when I am unable to hear the whirlpool because of wind and rain, I can still feel its music in the atmosphere.
Jane Urquhart, The Whirlpool
Within The Whirlpool, a character named Fleda McDougal defies her husband
David by writing these words about him in her diary. She relates how '£>.' "thinks I am dangerously infatuated with the strange passions of Mr. Browning" (Urquhart Whirlpool
34). To spite him, Fleda gives herself over to the "cosmic music" emanating from a whirlpool beneath the Niagara Falls (Urquhart Whirlpool 35). The language of her diary echoes the poems in the collections she reads on the cliff overlooking the whirlpool:
Browning's The Ring and the Book, Patmore's Angel in the House, and Swinburne's
Poems and Ballads. She also documents how David insists she has grown flighty under the influence of Romanticism, neglecting her household duties. But, despite what Fleda says, she cannot move her husband to sympathy. Fleda confides to her diary that her husband "claims I have become deranged by reading too much of Mr. Browning and [he also] quotes some nonsense about angels beating their wings at the edge of the whirlpool in vain" (ibid). David believes reading Browning has weakened his wife's resolve to make proper use of her time. Besides, Fleda's constitution pales in comparison to his preoccupation with the famous nurse, Laura Secord. She quietly corrects her
condescending husband: "It is Shelley's beating wings he is thinking of, not Browning's"
(ibid). She writes these words she cannot say aloud: "I sincerely hope that D. 's ability as an historian is of a higher quality than his ability as a critic.'1'' Whereas David's ridicule of Browning results in parody by the book, Fleda's response is parodic in kind.
Like Atwood, Urquhart foregrounds the processes she uses to write historical fiction. In addition, the novel enacts its reading practice with its characters also playing the reader's role. In other words, readers of The Whirlpool are subject to the same influences as Fleda. Such rereading encourages criticism of Romantic poets along with their weak (or willfully 'romantic') readers. Then again, an irony attends David's disdain for Shelley. Urquhart divides her narrative to suggest that while Fleda writes about the whirlpool in her journal, Browning composes his final poem on the other side of the world. A frame narrative about the Victorian poet's death in 1889 encloses the novel proper's narrative about bodies floating over the Niagara Falls earlier in the summer of that year.
The Whirlpool opens with a poetic description of Browning working restlessly on his last poem while wrestling with his memories of Shelley's poetry. (Of course, Fleda's husband could not tell the difference between the two poets.) As Urquhart's "Browning" struggles to compose his final poem, he cannot recall the line that follows "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair" in "Ozymandias" (qtd. in Urquhart Whirlpool 14). He
33 It is worth noting that the primary source for Fleda's diary is the real-life journal of Julia Cruikshank. Her observations of Niagara Falls were published as Whirlpool Heights. She copies the last line of Brown's poem "Preparation" in that diary: "we 'with heavenly music float'" (89). The floaters within The Whirlpool will prove much less divine. resigns himself to making up "a much more fitting ending to the poem" because he
decides that "the last three lines were either unsuitable or completely unimportant."
Although "Browning" expects to ease into the cultural pantheon of Venice, he finds
himself plagued by his literary forebear. And indeed, the rhythms and repetitions of
Shelley's poem follow him to the grave. Consumed by his predecessor, betrayed by his
own memory,
Browning realized he was seeing his beloved city through Shelley's eyes and
immediately his inner voice began again: Sepulchers where human forms I Like
pollution nourished worms I To the corpse of greatness cling I Murdered and now
mouldering. (Urquhart Whirlpool 15-16)
"Browning" fears that his final poem will not compare with these lines from Shelley. The
very moment he accepts that he cannot out-do "Ozymandias," he finds that "his mind was now capable of reciting it to him, word by word, with appropriate emotional inflections"
(Urquhart Whirlpool 16). Those words of defeat point to the principle conceit within The
Whirlpool: "word by word" recitation. In this way, as Urquhart's characters become involved in repeating a dramatic incident of this type, they often move - while drawing our attention to the movement - into a more poetic style of speaking.
In a way, Browning is the first corpse identified within the novel. Of course,
"R.B.'s" impending death means little to others half a rotation of the world away.
Nevertheless, a whirlpool of Victorian (or rather, Romantic) poetry overwhelms the several characters within the narrative sweep of the novel's Niagara Falls setting. The principle storyline follows a widow who became an undertaker in her husband's wake. Every day, Maud Grady returns home from the mortuary to greet her school-aged son
(who remains unnamed in the novel). Only he does not return her greeting, for he has never spoken a word. When her child chooses to speak, well out of his mother's earshot, he utters the word "Floater" (Urquhart Whirlpool 110). We soon learn that he has picked up that word from a poet named Patrick who encourages these sorts of "words, disconnected from their sources" (Urquhart Whirlpool 111). The child's word-for-word repetition of such "uttered nonsense was a revelation" to the poet, "not unlike the intoxicating leaps he had known himself to take, only once or twice, in the manipulation of language."34 Patrick strives to make sense of the child's utterances, encouraging
"ridiculous yet poetic associations." The relationship between both "poets" constitutes one of the novel's storylines. Another line of narrative concerns Fleda's diary. The overlapping recollections by Maud, Patrick, and Fleda structure the narrative of The
Whirlpool.
Urquhart, in an interview, reveals how this structure arose:
My first novel, The Whirlpool, was not something I consciously believed was a
novel. I had been writing poetry, and I had been writing a little bit of short fiction,
very short stories in sequence that had to do with my husband's family's past....
Part of what led me into his past was the discovery of a little book that his
grandmother kept, a book in which the various bodies that were taken out of the
34 Urquhart mentions in an interview that Patrick is "based very loosely upon the Confederation poet Archibald Lampman" (61). In fact, an image from Lampman's poetry appears in Fleda's diary. Her entry on "19 August 1889" contains this line: "A common grayness silvers everything" (Urquhart Whirlpool 197). Note that choice of the verb "silvers." Lampman's poem "Personality" contains a figure drowning in "soft murmurous" waters "silvered by the familiar moon" (87). 127
Niagara River were described, and the book itself, a little notebook, was such a
powerful object. (80)
The poems she mentions are collected in False Shuffles. She writes several poems from a section of that book, entitled "Undertaker's Bride," in the voice of her grandmother-in law. In this way, Adeline surfaces and resurfaces through the notebook acquired by her granddaughter-in-law. This notebook also serves as the basis for Maud's journal:
"Description of Bodies Found in the Niagara River, Whirlpool, etc., 1887 —, (Urquhart
Whirlpool 48). The tension produced by the living serving the dead is central to an understanding of narrative in this instance. Why does Urquhart rewrite Adeline's notebook? What occurs when she transforms her poetry about this notebook into a novel?
What impact does that transformation have on subsequent readings of the "floater" metaphor?
The Whirlpool assumes a position somewhere between historiography and straight fiction in terms of both its narrative trajectory and its tone. If Adeline's notebook is the primary intertext for Urquhart's historical fiction, it is possible to trace a genealogy for the floater from the mouth of an afflicted child in The Whirlpool back to the notebook that "grandmother" kept within "Undertaker's Bride." Both "grandmother's" and Maud's versions of Adeline's notebook record the identifiable characteristics of the corpses which float to shore. Urquhart's "Keeping Score" relates the experience of reading
Adeline's notebook. The speaker of that poem identifies "the pen in the inkwell / on the walnut desk" that "lifts / in grandmother's fingers" to note indelible tattoos permanent labels
hair and teeth and weight
the contents of a pocket the value of a tie-pin (27)
The notebook within this poem contains the evidence that "grandmother" tried to write
"the essence / of a definition / the answer to a question" (Urquhart "Score" 28). The notebook also anticipates Maud's attempts to understand "a frail network of history around each death" (Urquhart Whirlpool 165). She exhumes "private legends" from corpses that she "stored verbally in her notebook and concretely in her cupboard at the end of the hall." Maud keeps a journal to make "some sense of the chaos of the deaths around her." Her notes range from "making a record of her tattooed arm" on her table to her thoughts about "the sound of the child's voice traveling through the garden." Thus,
Maud's journal combines evidence of the past with present experiences in an attempt to create a coherent story.
While Urquhart's poetry reconsiders the past that would have been lost without writing, her novel further considers speech that cannot be written. Whereas diaries provide a palimpsest of historical contents for the novel, the words from the unnamed boy's mouth introduce an element of apostrophe that threatens narrative cohesion. While
Patrick teaches the boy to speak "disembodied nouns" (Urquhart Whirlpool 155) or
"verbal nouns" (Urquhart Whirlpool 187), the child literally comes to terms when saying
"Nothing" (Urquhart Whirlpool 109). Because he "enunciates both syllables" of the word, the boy emphasizes the present participle: "Noth-ing." He also stresses the first syllable of "Be-reavement," which divides the noun ("bereavement") into an imperative
command ("be") (Urquhart Whirlpool 110). Patrick hears poetry in the boy's non-
sequiturs. The boy's unconventional speech allows a non-narrative element to intrude
into the narrative. Her writing also comments upon the necessity within conventional
historiography to make meaning from fragments. The Whirlpool treats descendents,
literal or not, as performative corpses floating along its narrative. Moreover, Urquhart
reiterates the mood from "grandmother's" notebook as well as the fragmentary language
of "Undertaker's Bride," but increases the intensity of that fragmentation through an
episodic narrative captured in several diaries.
Like her factual and fictional predecessors, Maud keeps records of the corpses washing down the river. While transcribing her son's speech, she realizes:
only in her absence could miraculous transformations occur; only while she slept
or lapsed into forgetfulness. Then the river released its dead, the child spoke, her
garden blossomed, the season changed. But never under her direct gaze. (Urquhart
Whirlpool 155)
With these words, Maud realizes the limits of her influence. She merely observes. She also considers how fragments that shadow her vision act like floaters. Although the events she sees are not contingent upon her, Maud writes to ensure that future generations know what happened. Her notebook also serves as a conceit for the cumulative narratives of The Whirlpool. Urquhart's prose reduces the child's influence by the novel's end to a series of non-narrative utterances. She attempts to store those verbal conflicts alongside her observations in a notebook. 130
Urquhart's reiteration of the "floater" metaphor is influenced by another poetic
source. Two lines from Margaret Avison's "The Swimmer's Moment" serve as the
epigraph for The Whirlpool: "For everyone I The swimmer's moment at the whirlpool
comes" (qtd. in Urquhart 19). Avison's poem goes on to say that those who decide not to
swim
. . . are saved
From the black pit, and also from contesting
The deadly rapids, and emerging in
The mysterious, more ample, further waters (Avison 15)
This passage suggests there is no denying the whirlpool. The poem focuses on the
"bland-blank faces" who refuse the waters; those who do not dive are left to "turn and turn / forever on the rim bf suction." In The Whirlpool, Maud strikes the same "bland- blank" ("bla-bla," or blase) tone of those "faces" overwhelmed by the decision to dive into the whirlpool. There are no swimmers within Urquhart's novel, but there are floaters.
While characters who refuse to swim are saved from the falls, others who dive into the
Niagara drown and only their remains emerge.
Many characters in The Whirlpool are critical of the poet and of poetry in general.
Patrick decides to break through those "[boundaries, borderlines, territories" of critical hostility by going for a "swim" (Urquhart Whirlpool 221). He decides that diving into the river "would be a journey into another country, a journey he would choose to make in full knowledge that he had not maps, that he hardly spoke the language." At his "swimmer's moment," Patrick takes the plunge. In contrast to other corpses that float into the pages of 131
Maud's journal, Patrick careens nearly out of control into the falls. The contrast between
Patrick's wide-eyed manic presence and Maud's outraged rootedness cements the inevitable contretemps that follows. Patrick's suicide consolidates the novel's
(occasionally misguided) critique of cliched Romanticism. Without the undertaker's record, the poet would have slipped into the water without a ripple. His poetry submerges under her fragmented narrative. With the poet's death, Urquhart's novel offers a more profound insight into morbidity than her poems do. The Whirlpool culminates several narratives with the history of death at the Niagara Falls.
Urquhart demonstrates her parody most clearly through Patrick's death. He is drawn to the water, feeling his "whole life had been a departure from certain dramas which should have been his destiny. A dance in which the partners turn away" (Urquhart
Whirlpool 220). Similarly, at the end of the novel, Maud turns away while preparing his floater for burial. (Indeed, she cannot take up Matthew Arnold's challenge to see the object as it really is.) She empathizes with Patrick by comparing the features of the corpse's face with her son's: "He was like a dead child" (Urquhart Whirlpool 232). The floater wears "a thin, hardly noticeable film across his eyes" that "reminded her of the caul which had partially covered her child's face at birth." Maud's mother taught her that the pale membrane "was a preservative against drowning." While peering under this shroud, Maud sees a vision of Patrick in the corner of her eye. She looks up at the poet but sees her son "transfixed, his face pale and shining" (Urquhart Whirlpool 233).
Ironically, her perception of the "caul" conflates Patrick's corpse and her son's birth. This floater at the end of The Whirlpool produces a more fatalistic finale than any listed in "Undertaker's Bride."
The caul in Urquhart's novel reverses an image from her poetry. "Undertaker's
Bride" speaks of darkened apparitions that float out from the unconscious like film negatives. The speaker in the final section of False Shuffles, "Takes I'm Not Likely to
Tell," begins with an uncertain evocation of nighttime visitors: "At night they clutter up my dreams / gazing out to me" (Urquhart 91). These dreams manifest in the daytime as imagined "fragments" of "this one's hair / that one's death" and they remain that way
until they come to be just this characters I'm unable to give shape to tales I'm not likely to tell loose bits of paper carried by the wind (ibid)
While the speaker tells this tale, she also tells on herself. Some "figure" or "dark episode of each tale will presumably remain untold despite her notebook record. By telling what she will not do, Urquhart's roundabout phrasing, or periphrasis, becomes a whirlpool of poetic language.
Whereas Atwood's Alias Grace reveals how ur-texts fragment within narrative, and Urquhart's The Whirlpool attempts to construct a coherent narrative from several sources, Michaels's Fugitive Pieces splits its narrative into a single story and a commentary on that story. Michaels restricts the number of writers in her poetic novel to a poet writing his memoir and his most empathetic critic. In Fugitive Pieces, both the poet and his critic read and write subjective accounts of the past in order to supplement and possibly supplant well-known facts. On Fugitive Pieces
Shortly before his death, Beer had begun to write his memoirs. "A man's experience of war," he once wrote, "never ends with the war. A man's work, like his life, is never completed."
Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
These words open Fugitive Pieces, reminding us that narratives themselves are mortal. This introduction prepares us to read about how the Second World War claimed
stories along with lives. This prefatory note ends with the above quotation taken from
fictional poet Jakob Beer. Fugitive Pieces tells how Beer survived a pogrom in Poland to write about his own losses and to translate the stories of his fellow survivors. The novel contains two "books" that maintain this "real-life" pretense. Both sections culminate in a
somber and restrained consideration of displacement from land and language. Fugitive
Pieces addresses this displacement through several styles: the narrative alternates between the poet's reflections and the academic's observations (and it occasionally fuses both perspectives). That dual structure of the novel results in metafiction that is worth examining in detail. With this narrative retrospection and interpretation, Michaels manipulates certain expectations about historiography, namely objective description. In addition, she repeats certain figures of speech from the lyrics she published within
Miner's Pond in order to engage her readers the way her poems do. Michaels not only parodies the poetry from Miner's Pond within Fugitive Pieces, but the second "book" of her novel also parodies the poetic language within the first. Furthermore, the narrative contains its own commentary, crossing lines of scholarship and sycophancy. Ben prefers to read Beer's biography rather than interpret his poetry. Michaels quotes her own poetry, opening an ironic distance for parody to operate within her novel.
Ben's commentary on Beer's memoir provides Fugitive Pieces its self-reflexive quality. Ben assumes Beer's pose from the seat where he wrote - or from where Ben imagines he wrote - and addresses his comments to Beer himself. In other words, the academic apostrophizes the poet. Ben assumes that writing history is wholly subjective; therefore, reading about history (or reading texts written in the past) requires that he know and feel what his subject did. Ben knows that he cannot write with Beer's voice, so he tries to empathize with the poet. At the same time, though, Ben would rather not acknowledge that he aspires to rewrite "Beer." Ben attempts to experience what his mentor wrote about human nature. To do so, Ben frequently makes claim for an unseen possibility against the seen 'reality.' Whereas Ben's book turns the epistemological fiction of Beer's memoir into a sort of ontological fact, Michaels's novel turns performative with that critical reiteration. The corpus of Beer's works takes on a life of its own via Ben's parasitism.
In Fugitive Pieces, Michaels employs a variety of formal styles to clarify different perspectives on the same historical events. She incorporates clippings, journal pages, and poems in the novel to introduce background information, yet the central story is told in a narrative style that relies on the use of retrospection, reiteration, and translation as the basis of communicative grammar. Fugitive Pieces folds and refolds stories like a frayed map with overlapping lines. With each line, extending to each paragraph, Beer's memoir is unified by memories of his lost family - he occasionally speaks with his deceased 135 sister Bella along with the unborn child he hopes for - with occasional interjections of lyricism. His childhood, an unbroken series of arguments between erstwhile academics, is rendered by Michaels with pathos, humor, and poignancy in light of what we already know about Beer's experience of war. Athos Roussos, a semi-"renaissance man," takes him from occupied Poland to an island in Greece where he learns to write poetry. Beer's memoir begins with an apprenticeship in the English language.
Beer reveals childhood wounds with a moving description of his flight with Athos from the war. Although Beer cannot tell just "how long we traveled this way," he remembers: "Once, I woke and saw signs in a fluid script that from a distance looked like
Hebrew" (Michaels Pieces 14). Jakob, then a "seven-year-old refugee," associates this deliverance with familiar yet unintelligible words. The mere appearance of print, signifiers without specific signifieds, triggers his memory of displacement. The misunderstanding relates to another scene he recalls from his youth. Athos reveals to his friend Daphne that "Jakob writes poems," and she chides the boy: "Then you have the power to make people marry" (Michaels Pieces 58). Beer's childhood belief that poetry contains the potential to cause change carries over into his adulthood. "I already knew the power of language to destroy, to omit, to obliterate," he recalls. "But poetry, the power of language to restore: that is what both Athos and [his colleague] Kostas were trying to teach me" (Michaels Pieces 79). The language in this passage is self-reflexive to the point of drawing awareness to the potential power of writing, the restorative performativity of poetry in particular. Jakob aspires to restore himself by writing poetry in his adopted language. English, although foreign to Jakob, disconnects him from his past and connects him to the present.
Beer recollects that he began to write "hoping that in my sonnets the secret of
English would crack open under my scrutiny" (Michaels Pieces 100). Fugitive Pieces thrusts the process of writing into the narrative foreground in passages such as this.
Moreover, this passage takes the English language as a representation of English culture.
Beer uses that comparison frequently as a kind of shorthand for his opinions of Canada.
He also attempts to rewrite his childhood with his memoir. Indeed, rewriting is the method he uses to compose his early poems: "I copied out well-known poems, leaving space between each line where I wrote my own version or response" (ibid). Young Jakob parodies his influences: "And later," he remembers, "when I began to write down the events of my childhood in a language foreign to their happening, it was a revelation"
(Michaels Pieces 101). Perhaps Beer wishes for his memoirs to protect him, just as he once believed "English could protect [him]" from suffering. Furthermore, his adopted language provides him "an alphabet without memory." English allows Beer to cover himself with another, thicker layer of skin.
With her novel, Michaels elaborates on the connections between language and memory that she explores in her poetry. Miner's Pond demonstrates the overlapping of past and present, of writing and reading, of lovers, with the skin conceit. Specific poems within the collection show how memory provides a way to traverse time through the presence that language affords. Memory allows the past to colour every perception and 137 each attempt to apprehend phenomena. Specifically, the tone of Beer's memoir echoes that of Michaels's poem, "Miner's Pond," wherein:
Memory is cumulative selection.
It's an undersea cable connecting one continent
to another,
electric in the black brine of distance. (Michaels 9)
This "undersea cable" delineates the forward progression of time and space. The speaker lifts her head and finds further evidence of memories:
Overhead the geese are a line,
a moving scar. Wavering
like a strand of pollen on the surface of a pond.
Like them, we carry each year in our bodies.
Our blood is time, (ibid)
This "scar" is evidence that "our bodies" carry years of memories; the very appearance of this scar moves witnesses to empathy. Michaels manipulates that image of a cable or a scar with a "black wire / of words" that, like a poem, connects "the first line and the last"
("Sublimation" 14). This "black wire" conveys the metaphor of marred skin within
"Sublimation" as "[fjlesh moves to become spirit." Michaels repeats this alternately fleshly and ghastly connection throughout Miner's Pond as well as Fugitive Pieces.
Taking the past for a referent before or beyond signification, Michaels describes memories that efface any predetermined interpretation of historical fiction. Miner's Pond is generally concerned with preserving memories as they fade into vague impressions. The poems in the collection are thematically and structurally about the play of absence and presence through sheer rhetoric. Michaels's poetry is painterly, almost opaque,
stressing the gesture of a writing act. Although her poems fragment without conveying any specific historical context, her novel provides narrative as a context to fragments of memories. Meaning is a burning filament within both the memoir and commentary that make up Fugitive Pieces. In this way, Michaels encourages readers to look for meaning as though they are peering through a blindfold made of torn stockings.
The second "book" of Fugitive Pieces illustrates that it takes a scholar to make sense of the poetry in the first "book." Ben reads Beer's memoir along with every reader of Fugitive Pieces. Then again, Michaels does not introduce Ben until the novel's second
"book." While Ben interprets passages from Beer's memoir through digressions and aleatoric passages, Michaels emphasizes the subjectivity involved with reading history.
Ben's methods for writing history are questionable. He is perfectly willing to apostrophize Beer thus: "you bring your life entire to another" (Michaels Pieces 267). He impugns Beer's intentions, saying "[y]our poems" appear like "poems of a man who feels, for the first time, a future." Ben gladly takes Beer's poems for confession, convinced, given their personal acquaintance, that assumption is authorized. Ben feels closest to the poet when leafing through his unpublished pages, and other "evidence of a life so achingly simple" (Michaels Pieces 266). Ironically, this nearness only distances
Michaels's readers. Ben reminds us that we are not only reading, but also rereading; or, as Ben puts it, "[rjeading alone; reading aloud" (ibid). Those words, "alone" and "aloud," resound as Ben reads out loud to himself. Thus, each poem Ben reads and rewrites becomes his own, and this repetition and reiteration is one stage in his process of
emerging through Beer's skin.
Ben's interpretation of one poem in particular says more about himself than it
says about Beer. He cannot separate his interpretation of "Night Garden" from his
experience of reading the poem from the terrace overlooking a "wild garden with its
sleep-inducing fragrances" where Beer wrote it (Michaels Pieces 267). Ben's
commentary amounts to no more than a comparison of what he reads against what he
sees in Beer's garden. He suggests that Beer is a man "like photosensitive paper" who is
hardly comfortable in his own skin (Michaels Pieces 268). Reading Beer, he argues, is
akin to "writing a man who no longer wishes to be found." However, the speaker in
Beer's poem realizes that he has exposed himself to the woman who is revealing herself.
Like an overexposed negative, Beer reveals himself in order to destroy himself. By
contrast, Ben wants to reveal himself with his commentary about Beer. "If I could draw,'
he argues, "I'd hold a square of paper up to this view from your window and let the
landscape burn into it" (ibid). With the word, "draw," he names the conceit for the
narrative progression of Fugitive Pieces.
The next, highly impressionistic passage of Fugitive Pieces describes how Ben
came across the ending of Beer's memoir. As Ben shows his lover Petra around Beer's
garden and through his house, they disrupt what "had become a shrine" in the bedroom
(Michaels Pieces 278). As the lovers "pull the heavy bedcover" from the bed Jakob and
Michaela shared, they uncover a note with "[t]wo lines of blue ink. If she s a girl: Bella If he's a boy: Bela (Michaels Pieces 278-279)
These two lines indicate to Ben that Beer would have named the child he desired after his
sister. And, although Ben and Petra proceed to have sex, they take measures to ensure the bed remains barren. Ben relates that as he climaxed: "I clenched my jaw and poured myself onto her belly, into the air" (Michaels Pieces 279). Ben's criticism offers only a poetic solution, not a narrative one, to the pain that Ben expresses. In a way, "Ben"
(Hebrew: "son") stands in for the child Beer wanted but never had.
At the conclusion of Fugitive Pieces, Michaels repeats the "birth" conceit from her poem, "What the Light Teaches," resolving an apparent contradiction between birth and death in her poems and novel. The poem also seems to speak on behalf of another:
When there are no places left for us,
we'll still talk in order to make things true:
not only the years before we were born,
not only the names of our dead,
but also this life. (Michaels 60)
It is a crucial passage, in which, as so often in the poetry collection, the speaker uses plural pronouns to involve readers ("we'll still talk") and implicate us in the process of writing ("in order to make things true") to give solemnity and weight to the sentiments expressed. Perhaps, the apathetic reader may think, this rhetorical appeal disguises a lack of philosophical foundations. After all, it seems "we" all know that the time leading up to birth is akin to the time following death. The poem indicates that, like the "dead," the unborn have shaped no memories; so, "memory is only skin that cannot cover a dead relative nor an unborn child. In light of this poem, Ben pulls out and away from Petra to eliminate the possibility of children, and to provide his book with an ending. Ben's commentary provides a plausible way to complete Beer's memoir and to speak in the poet's voice. Whereas the poems collected in Miner's Pond culminate in a loose montage, Fugitive Pieces accumulates those fragments in its disjointed narration.
Ben inserts himself into Beer's poetry the very way he draws upon his own memories for his criticism. Ben is unable to distinguish between Beer's words and his own. With her essay, "Empathetic Identification in Fugitive Pieces: Masculinity and
Poetry after Auschwitz," prominent feminist critic Susan Gubar argues in favour of writing which indulges "empathetic identification." She takes Fugitive Pieces for
"[ljyrical fiction" that illustrates how
the fugitive pieces of a subjectivity based on empathic identification can only be
fleetingly experienced, and if the intangible, the invisible, the unseen of grievous
suffering remains a primary responsibility for the living imagination, then the
sounds of intimate voices that stop and start in fragmentary bits and parts may be
best suited for such an undertaking. (272)
The tension between identification and subjectivity is crucial to understanding parody in this novel. Why does Michaels render that sensation with aphoristic, fragmented, and pensive utterances? What occurs when her fiction requires its reader to tease meaning out of an apparent lack? What impact does the interpretation within the second part of the novel have upon readers? 142
Gubar suggests readers approach Fugitive Pieces from a position of identification
and emotional investment. She derives her understanding of empathy from Dominick
LaCapra's notion of "empathic unsettlement" which "involves a kind of virtual
experience through which one puts oneself in the other's position while recognizing the
difference of the position and hence not taking the other's place" (qtd. in Gubar 253). In
other words, reading implies an attempt to enter the fictional world of a novel. For Gubar,
Michaels places readers in the uncomfortable position of a Holocaust survivor with the use of several formal techniques. Gubar notes that Fugitive Pieces contains
[t]he discontinuities and stutters of repetition, the cutting of connectives found in
ordinary prose, the blank spaces between stanzalike chapters, the recurrence of
mystic maxims, the clustering of rhythmic image patterns, the elaboration on
extended metaphors. (272)
(Add to that list of poetic tics a reliance on misleading gerunds, associative similes, and time-bending ellipses.) Those techniques are meant to evoke a sense of otherness;
Michaels breaks the conventions of prose narrative so that we experience her characters' uncertainty.
An interesting aspect of Gubar's approach to Fugitive Pieces is its reliance upon personification. Gubar considers how "Language" itself becomes a character in
Michaels's historical fiction. Michaels writes about writers who send out words and await their return. Gubar argues that Beer is absent from the second "book" of Fugitive Pieces because he has completed his transformation into language and literature; we are encouraged to read Beer as language personified. Gubar implies that personification may 143 fail to communicate an aesthetic that "paradoxically links the urgency of changing the
'figure' of'Man himself to a defense of poetry after Auschwitz" (251). Thus, an appropriate response to the trauma portrayed in the novel must agree with the poet's restorative intentions. That potential resolution leads to an innate contradiction within
Gubar's thesis: although Michaels manipulates lyrical conventions to provoke our identification with Beer, the lyric is traditionally an idiosyncratic expression. Beer suggests another way to read and write from the "Hebrew tradition" whereby "forefathers are referred to as 'we,' not 'they'" which he believes "encourages empathy and a responsibility to the past but, more important, it collapses time" (Michaels Pieces 159).
An alternate resolution to Gubar's thesis emphasizes the importance of Beer's lover,
Michaela, who survives him and speaks on his behalf. She inspires Ben to pursue his interest in Beer's corpus. Her voice also recalls the poetic voice from Michaels's Miner's
Pond. (It is worth mentioning in passing that Michaela's name is almost Michaels's own.)
In her essay, "That Place Beyond Language," Michaels describes the effect she strives for with her historical fiction. She suggests "[l]anguage, memory, one's own body" are all that remain "[w]hen people have been dispossessed" (Michaels "Place").
She offers Fugitive Pieces as an example of fiction that preserves those qualities common throughout "humanity." "I have immense respect for language," Michaels divulges, "that has been forged out of the deepest despair of language, out of urgency and impotence - the failure of words to effect change." For Michaels, words are ineffective when they are uttered without an audience. She implores readers to allow fiction to "change" them. Michaels claims that Fugitive Pieces not only illustrates how characters must change to
survive trauma, her novel "matters" to people who are willing to "believe in books, [or] believe in language" (ibid). She relates how she received a letter from someone who read
Miner's Pond while receiving dialysis and another letter from a widow who read Fugitive
Pieces to her husband before she died. Despite the grandiosity of these claims, however,
Michaels does not take credit. Instead, she lauds the power of language. "A word is an action," she insists; "once something is spoken it carries consequences" (ibid).
Ultimately, Michaels reveals that she writes about the past to provide readers in the present a way to speak about their "place in the world."
Both the poem and prose versions of Michaels's aesthetic convert the past into fiction. First, in Fugitive Pieces, it allows for the accumulation of layers that bridge past absences, enabling Beer to reveal himself through his memoir, while allowing Ben to speak directly to his subject. Second, it ties the novel to the tradition of "historiographic metafiction" in Canada, given its dual construction as text and commentary. Finally, by inscribing Ben as a central character in the novel's second part - and by setting the novel so firmly within a Canadian literary fiction - Michaels makes an argument about certain fallacies innate within criticism. Ben, the critic, aspires to reproduce the environment that he feels influenced the poet's composition of his memoir. With his commentary, Ben tries to fully realize Beer's intentions for his final work. While Michaels turns certain phrases from Miner's Pond into Fugitive Pieces, she has, through her commentary on historiography, heightened her reader's awareness of the strategies of textual production. The second "book" of Fugitive Pieces, with its subjective tone and its use of
memory, reinforces the sense that history condenses rhythms and images of memory into
a narrative. Having abandoned verisimilitude as a strategy for representation, Michaels
rejects any realist aesthetic of historical fiction, and consequently, it is possible to argue
that Fugitive Pieces is the most innovative of the three poetic novels under consideration
in this chapter. Fugitive Pieces is the most formally adventurous, attempting to
fictionalize historical circumstances in order to generate an emotional resonance. In some
respects, these three novels call into question preconceptions about the relationship between historiography and narrative discourse. Fugitive Pieces points to the significant ways in which the process of parodying poetry about history simultaneously heightens
and diminishes significant tensions and resonances in its source material. Michaels's novel illustrates the difficulty of generalizing about poetry-to-prose transitions, even within the narrow body of her work. She demonstrates forcefully the difficulty of interpreting and inventing history as a narrative. In this way, Fugitive Pieces does not
simply describe historical events, but presents or depicts its own process of writing fiction.
Perhaps the best way to discuss the friction between fact and historical fiction is to outline the way commentary works within literary parody. We will turn to a somewhat non-standard description of literary parody by Robert Phiddian to describe Derridean methods and terminology in an attempt to eschew the usual description of intention and ridicule that most critics see as central to literary parody. On Erasure
Distinguishing how dependant a "parasite" text is upon its source or "host" text is central to Phiddian's understanding of literary parody. Returning to the deconstructive metaphors that he applies to parody - both "a play of differance" and "that dangerous supplement" - provides another perspective on the process. Phiddian develops Derrida's notion of deconstruction in a larger argument about parody:
Parody is the parasitic genre that can attach to an other, supplementing it
dangerously, living off its mimetic, expressive, or rhetorical energy, and
reminding it and us that we are facing words rather than things, rhetoric rather
than pure ideas, language rather than phenomena. ("Secretly" 689)
Phiddian's determination of parody as a literary "genre" applies to my interest in the rhetorical effect of literature that would appear to read itself, or seemingly anticipate its reader's response. Within Swift's Parody, Phiddian draws upon another "potent metaphor" and visual analogue from deconstruction, "[fjhe idea of parody under erasure"
(13), to illustrate the second-order implications of books that read themselves.
Disseminated primarily through Derrida's consideration of Heidegger's destruktion, the notion of erasure became linked, not so much with typographical or stylistic representation, but with the rhetorical figuration of "the presence of a transcendental signified . .. while still remaining legible" (Grammatology 23). Qua Derrida, Phiddian extends the implications of deconstruction to approach parody in terms of textual
"absence (most notably ideas of textuality, erasure, and traces)." Read from beginning to end, Phiddian argues, Jonathan Swift's oeuvre places various narrative conventions under erasure. In the course of the mounting tensions between past and present tense, literary parody requires ur-texts be read again and again, ad infinitum. In Swift's Parody,
Phiddian considers Derridean erasure in relation to Swift's earliest works.
Phiddian's argument in Swift's Parody is oriented among three theories of quotation. He draws upon Roland Barthes's emphasis on writerly texts in order to develop his notion of parody's effect on readers. Host text "appears under erasure" within literary parody, "as a distinct trace, neither entirely present nor entirely absent" (Phiddian
Parody 13). By criticizing accepted truths through metaphor, Swift resists "the final writing of an epoch" that Derrida places under erasure {Grammatology 20). Phiddian contends that since literary parody already reads itself critically, its readers (or rereaders), are also targets for Swift's amusement. From this perspective, parodic fiction is not judged according to the criteria of authorial intention, but is regarded as evidence of more-or-less neutral aesthetic within an ongoing discursive structure. In this way, Swift seemingly anticipates any reading offered by hermeneutic accoutrement. With reference to Rose, Phiddian "suggests that parody and its pre-texts belong in the realm of the literary, and half suggests that pre-texts being refunctioned will be in some degree canonical" {Parody 19). He suspects that Swift employs parody as a way to honour host texts, as though the parasite feeds its host.
This deconstructive approach to literary parody is also concerned with the performativity of parody. That consideration extends to the text's effect upon readers.
Phiddian proposes erasure as a method for determining that doubled rhetoric. I propose that the key to the question of literary parody lies in its performative processes. Parody with the greatest degree of self-reflexivity effectively performs its own textual criticism
(like deconstruction). The resulting performativity asks why we bother re-presenting
another text in the first place. In order to produce something that influences audiences, it becomes necessary to blur any distinction between a host text and its parasite. Perhaps
the parasite takes over the host organism. A number of strategies are possible, from presenting the parody in the form of a diary, journal, or memoir, as in the examples
examined above. This sort of enonciation derives its force from thematizing the processes of writing and reading, which appears to enact source texts.
With the chapter "What Did Derrida Want of Austin?" within his book
Philosophical Passages, Stanley Cavell offers another insight into Derrida's notion of performativity. Cavell compares Derrida's understanding of written communication with
Wittgenstein's. Cavell turns to Wittgenstein's philosophy of ordinary language in order to eliminate any vestiges of "presence, writing, voice, word, sign, language, context, intention, force, communication, concept, performance, signature, not to mention, of course, consequent ideas of philosophy" in J.L. Austin's speech-act philosophy (47).
Cavell's argument hinges on the notion that "Austin's analysis of the performative may be seen to be motivated precisely as an attack on what deconstruction attacks under the name logocentrism" (49). Derrida's suspicion of "presence" innate within speech and
"absence" in writing applies to the conditions for Austin's performative utterance.
Performative utterances in speech or writing prove unstable because they rely on a receptive, felicitous audience. This audience constitutes another text that validates assumptions and propositions. Roughly, Austin argues that "the business of a 'statement'" does more than
simply "'describe' some state of affairs, or to 'state some fact'" (qtd. in Cavell 49). That
is to say, language is representative, but it also presents itself. Austin, according to
Cavell, designs his theory "precisely to retain 'the value of truth'" of words that do what
they say (qtd. in Cavell 51). However, this effect is the consequence not from the "force'''
of "a concept of truth" but "felicity" instead. Cavell intervenes in this debate to suggest
that "Derrida takes the role of 'felicity' and 'infelicity' to be one of determining failures
of language as external to language rather than as conditions of language's possibility"
(52). Simply put, whereas Austin "considers performatives as actions," Derrida
"considers them as utterances." This differentiation means Austin's is a "theory of
excuses," a theory of "pretending or imitation" (Cavell 57). Derrida constructs his theory with elements that Austin discarded - "etiolation, parasitism, and in general the realm of the 'non-serious'" (ibid) - which describe everyday language usage. Comparatively, literary parody deals in this "non-serious" language. It is a form of repetition that draws its performative force from the influence of another text. This approach to parody eschews any straight representation of 'reality' in favour of crooked presentation of a previous text. In this way, literary parody must be seen as a strategy to accumulate rhetorical weight. Although historical fiction may not concern itself with strict factuality, it has an effect upon readers. Moreover, parody functions within historiography as an aesthetic process as well as a performative end. Three Ends
While strategies of absence and omission are present in most examples of historiographic metafiction, Anne Michaels's and Jane Urquhart's choices are particularly telling. Michaels divides her novel between two perspectives that encompass the same life, although not at the same time. The second "book" of Fugitive Pieces figuratively performs the first, with Ben acting out the events of Beer's memoir.
Characters within The Whirlpool also emulate real-life poets and diarists through a similar epistemological twist into an ontological fiction. Both Fugitive Pieces and The
Whirlpool contain poetry and depart from conventional third-person narrative; they also deviate from first-person subjectivity. Unlike Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, however, both these novels place the notion of lyrical poetry and the persona of the poet under erasure, encouraging our emotional engagement apart from history. Instead, Atwood's novel asks us to read it as straightforward historical fiction. Alias Grace represents history as retrospection that promotes a sense of time as a serial progression. Although
Urquhart and Michaels employ similar historiographic techniques, they also partially erase historical events and figures. Alias Grace figures into that sort of performativity, if we consider the novel an enactment of various accounts of Grace Marks. Generally, all three of these poetic novels evoke a folded accordion sense of time as a parallel compression.
The similarities in subjective, quasi-lyric voices that characterize Urquhart's The
Whirlpool and Michaels's Fugitive Pieces are central to each novel's claims to significance. These novels clarify the narrative point of view by locating their stories 151 historically. These decisions by both poet-novelists ultimately serve three ends. First, their narratives invite identification with the characters pursued by apparitions. Second, they reorient the primary tension in their novels around textual representation. Third, the poetic language embedded and integrated between the lines of their prose narratives refers to the rhetoric and semantic impact of their own poetry. The resulting poetic novels contain characters writing to escape the difficulties of life in Canada at the turn of the century, although they cannot completely rewrite the past or its texts. 152
CHAPTER FOUR
Robert Kroetsch's Verbal Parody
On Verbal Parody
Robert Kroetsch writes to emulate speech. The presence of repetitions,
interruptions, and digressions in his writing indicates that reading these expressions aloud
would perhaps realize their performative potential. Still, such an act of reading comes with its own risks. Readers who "perform" thus are likely to become conscious of the way they sound. They are, paradoxically, "speakers" who are also "listeners." These readers who listen to themselves speak "read by ear."
Recognizing the implications of this repetition is necessary to understanding what
I call Kroetsch's "verbal parody." With this chapter, I will draw upon theories of literary parody to discuss how the performance that occurs within Kroetsch's writing extends from the stories he tells to the ways he tells stories. Generally, he would prefer this storytelling to remain verbal. Here, the term verbal applies to written language that
"sounds" like spoken language. Then again, "verbal" is an adjective that cannot stand on its own. Even its synonyms "vocal" or "oral" only serve to qualify modes of expression that is written. Because these terms describe the qualities of sounds that cannot be written, their function within literature must be figurative. When Kroetsch approaches this metaphorical range of expression, his style becomes verbal.35 His fiction exemplifies those conditions of verbal expression as it calls attention to itself by describing its
35 In terms of grammar, "verbal" or verbid means that form of verb neither limited by subject nor inflected by considerations of gender, mood, or tense. It means a word formed by a verb that often results in a gerund or present participle. That is to say, "vocal" or "voicing" is a verbal for voice. 153 compositional process. And indeed, his criticism, mostly produced after his fiction, further explores the imaginative possibilities of "the writing" rather than "the written." At the same time, each of Kroetsch's gestures toward metafiction makes it seem as though his writing is somehow reading itself. That repetition - i.e., writing that is simultaneously reading - recalls the self-conscious act of reading aloud - speaking that is simultaneously listening. In this way, Kroetsch's writing voice relies upon a layered form of literary parody. Although Kroetsch does not quote any particular historical source with his fiction, he evokes the techniques of oral storytellers. More specifically, his approach to narrative in his first three novels echoes oral traditions, and, further, several of the long poems he wrote later parody the literary conventions of his own novels. The expressive qualities of these acts of troparody become a defining characteristic of Kroetsch's writing voice. If the narrators who provide that voice sound apprehensive, it is because they cannot help but listen to themselves speaking.
Anxiety is Kroetsch's subject and sentence. Kroetsch not only writes about the anxieties of speech, his writing shows how these anxieties incarnate. Narrators throughout his early novels are nervous about the way they come across when speaking to characters within their stories or writing for readers outside their narratives. These speakers tend to worry about their delivery. The sense of nervousness rises even from speakers who boast about their rhetorical prowess. They play with the expectations of their readers to direct us away from their tense, uneasy, and worried undertones. Reading by ear, then, demonstrates a way to understand the speakers in Kroetsch's fiction who tell stories in which they are also characters. These speaker-characters tend to repeat what 154 they have said to explain what they failed to say at the time. The narrators in Kroetsch's first three novels often "mouth off' and immediately try to take back what they have said.
These men (the speakers are always men in the examples I will look at) have no problem speaking their minds, but their minds also change once they put their thoughts into words.
Because they do not think before they speak, they appear apprehensive when they repeat their stories for readers. In turn, this apprehension threatens the narrative coherence of the stories they tell, which is a reason they are loathe to tell their stories straight.
The most significant difference between Kroetsch's storytellers and "poet" speakers is their tone. Whereas the first three novels Kroetsch published sound like monologues by outspoken men, the long poems that he published later sound more like dialogues between loudmouths trying to drown each other out. The storytellers within
Kroetsch's prose narratives are anxious to voice a subject, be it a politician's scowl, the studhorse man's glare, or a graduate student's sigh. Alternately, the speakers within
Kroetsch's long poems attempt to retreat from their anxiety into comforting memories.
Placing the novels of Kroetsch's '"Out West' triptych"36 alongside examples of his long poems will reveal how he developed a distinctly verbal style. The voice of the man himself seems merely a decorative interest in a study of parody in Kroetsch's works, but I will try to give him his human due by referring to his criticism. Kroetsch, a prolific critic
36 Ball coined this phrase in an influential essay on three novels Kroetsch published between 1966 and 1973. Ball pursues an investigation of carnival scenes within Kroetsch's fiction, arguing that the monologic narrative of The Words of My Roaring is more duplicitous than the dialogic narratives of The Studhorse Man and Gone Indian. He then links the novel's form of telling, i.e., "the duality of book," with what it tells, "the duality of story" (3). Then again, despite many insights, Ball neglects to consider the impact of the figure of the reader upon Kroetsch's first three novels. Ball implies, although he does not make this implication explicit, that two of these narrators, Jeremy Sadness and Demeter Proudfoot, are also readers who stand in for Kroetsch's readers. 155 and an occasional polemicist, will set the terms for this analysis of his work as verbal parody. Placing The Words of My Roaring beside "Stone Hammer Poem," The Studhorse
Man beside Seed Catalogue, and Gone Indian beside The Sad Phoenician will reveal how
Kroetsch's "poet" speakers parody the nervous voices of his storytellers. That is to say, his long poems speak with the anxious expressions that he developed in his prose narratives.
It is worth noting how verbal expressions function as poetic lineation within
Kroetsch's "Out West" triptych. Perloff gives a general description of lineation within
Poetry On & Off the Page. She surveys several literary forms to understand what makes prose poetic. While lineation distinguishes prose from poetry, this distinction is not limited to verse. Take the narrative underlying Pound's poetry, for instance. His modernist verse threatens to undermine "Bakhtin's famous distinction between lyric poetry as monologic and prose fiction as potentially dialogic" (Perloff Poetry 117).
Countering Bakhtin, Perloff cites Heidegger's influence on poetics in the late twentieth century in her essay, "Lucent and Inescapable Rhythms." According to Heidegger,
[t]he more poetic a poet is - the freer (that is more open and ready for the
unforeseen) his [sic] saying - the greater is the purity with which he submits what
he says to an ever more painstaking listening, and the further what he says is from
the mere propositional statement that is dealt with solely in regard to its
correctness or incorrectness. (216)
Perloff suspects the influence of Heidegger's phenomenology on poststructuralist theory renders poetry as a "species of writing that foregrounds the materiality of the signifier, 156 the coincidence between enunciation and enounced" {Poetry 133). Therefore, rather than reconsider "the lyric, the language of tropes, metered language, and so on," poststructuralist theorists consider "meter and lineation ... as irrelevancies." Again,
"poetic" is an adjective applied across generic lines. In lieu of typographical arrangement, or rhythmic stresses, the poetic line emphasizes single words, tropes, or styles of language regardless of historicity. Perloff turns her back on Mikhail Bakhtin's diachrony and turns toward his polyphony. We will see how Kroetsch's novels illustrate this dialogue by the way he explores verbal interplay in poetry.
The Caveat within Seed Catalogue
Consider how speakers in Kroetsch's fiction implicate themselves in the stories they tell. By listening to themselves, these speakers illustrate a contradiction between
"speaking" and "listening" that associates the former with noise and the latter with silence. Jacques Derrida describes this repetition as a "system of 'hearing
(understanding)-oneself speak'" (Grammatology 7). In other words, speaking that is simultaneously listening exemplifies Derrida's determination of how phonocentrism allows language to "present itself." He argues that writers attempt to produce the sense of assurance that would normally come with "listening" to themselves "speak." Generally, if it is possible to generalize here, Derrida maintains that speech cannot communicate meaning any more effectively than writing. Both forms of communication require an act of interpretation. Kroetsch, however, tries to disrupt the theoretical privilege of speech; he attempts to avoid phonocentrism by emphasizing the process by which speakers come to an understanding with their audiences. Derrida's take on performative theory, despite this anachronistic application here, offers another critical language for addressing the implications of self-conscious writing. In The Post Card, Derrida offers apostrophe as a written figure of speech that evokes the self-consciousness of "hearing (understanding)- oneself speak." Just as "the man of discourse or writing interrupts the continuous development of the sequence, abruptly turns toward someone, that is, something, addresses himself to you," he is also speaking to himself (Post 4). Derrida goes on to argue that digressions function as performative utterances insofar as audiences feel they are influencing the speaker.
Seed Catalogue exemplifies how Kroetsch evokes the self-consciousness of speech within writing. The speaker in this long poem insists that "We silence words / by writing them down" (Kroetsch Catalogue 42). The implication between these lines is that writing cannot express the sounds that speaking releases with ease. Even then, it remains unclear who is included in the pronoun "We" whose predicate is "silence" and whose object is "words." The poem's speaker seems to indicate that his readers are just as culpable as he is. Perhaps we are complicit in subjecting words to silence by reading quietly to ourselves. Including readers within that pronoun indicates how the reading act inflects his writing process. Seed Catalogue argues that, just as anyone speaking aloud must face their listeners, writers must address their readers. In this way, the poem places the onus on "us" to "sound" words by reading them aloud. Kroetsch implies that words are naturally noisy, yet they cannot express themselves. Thus, the speaker is a "poet" who 158 is anxious that his writing cannot capture the sonority of speech. Ironically, this anxiety results from an inability to hear himself think.
It is possible, of course, that the previous paragraph reads too much into a single quotation from Seed Catalogue. Still, Kroetsch's caveat about silencing words by writing them down is worth looking at closely. He attempts to indulge what Bakhtin terms the carnivalesque possibilities of fiction. Bakhtin understands that a text is not a neutral collection of signs but a descendent of social struggle and contradiction. In addition, the novel is the descendent of a carnival tradition that would overturn societal authorities.
Bakhtin describes how the medieval carnival allowed vulgar commoners to assume the throne temporarily. Social superiors and their inferiors exchanged roles during the time of a feast. Kroetsch stages these "carnivals" within his fiction at the same time as he challenges readers to participate in imaginary dialogues with his speakers. He understands that a literary application of that carnival doubles the roles of "speaker" and
"listener." The anxious speakers within his fiction demonstrate how engaging in this fictional carnival allows writers and readers to change places. This chapter will reconsider this application of Bakhtin's interpretation of the medieval carnival in
Kroetsch's "Out West" triptych and his elaboration of carnivalesque discourse in his subsequent long poems. The carnival scenes in Kroetsch's first published novels - The
Words of My Roaring's rodeo, The Studhorse Man's wedding feast, and Gone Indian's winter festival - and the carnivalesque discourse in three of the long poems he published later will allow us to experience vicariously the anxieties of speaking out loud. In this way, the words that his "poet" speakers parody from the storytellers in his novels acquire a familiar air, as if scrawled on yellowing paper by an uncertain hand, decipherable only by readers aware of the customs and peculiarities of barroom arguments in the land "Out
West."
The next section of this chapter concerns how each storyteller in Kroetsch's "Out
West" triptych depends upon verbal expressions to structure his narrative. Comparing these novels will establish a basis for comparison with the speakers in Kroetsch's long poems. This intervention will then discuss how these storytellers justify their actions to their readers (inside and outside their narrative frames) and even to themselves by their verbal force. This rhetoric reveals Kroetsch's interest in verbal expression developed throughout his long poems.
Repetition, Repetition, and the Great God Tit
Each line of the first novel Kroetsch published, The Words of My Roaring, gags its narrator. Although Johnnie Backstrom admits that it "cost me a great effort to speak"
(Kroetsch Roaring 29), he cannot stop speaking. At first, he appears a reasonable fellow who is unable to put his thoughts into words. However, his outspoken narrative illustrates how he speaks before thinking. "I should have remained silent," he writes; "[c]riticism of the sort I just proffered is a great stimulus to unnecessary repetition" (ibid). Ironically,
"unnecessary repetition" characterizes the way that Backstrom narrates. Because
Backstrom is the central character in his story, he must repeat what he has said or done.
More specifically, he recalls what he said and then tells readers what he meant to say.
Here, for instance, Backstrom mentions how he should not have aired his criticism about 160 his wife directly to her. He makes certain that readers understand that his wife picked the fight by stating the obvious about his political potential. The comfortable living his career as undertaker has provided them is at stake while he runs as a Social Credit candidate in the Alberta provincial election. Backstrom relates that he proceeded to counter his wife's objections by insisting he must speak for his dustbowl-era constituents. His narrative explains that he should not have said anything even though the sound of his wife's nagging overwhelmed John George Applecart's radio broadcast. A politician's constant need for affirmation underlies Backstrom's duplicitous speechifying. This double-talk exemplifies the repetition that provides his narrative with nervous tension.
Backstrom knows he cannot deliver on his first campaign promise, but he also cannot talk himself out of this commitment. His narrative, however, affords him an opportunity to clarify his intentions to readers. The Words of My Roaring begins with the words that threaten to end his political career: "Mister, how would you like some rain?"
(Kroetsch 10). Backstrom provides this diatribe at the beginning of the novel to remind his audience that the events he speaks of have already happened. He also reminds us that his story follows an emotional trajectory rather than chronology. His use of apostrophe allows story and discourse to cross. This structural chiasmus connects the beginning and ending of Backstrom's narrative. In this way, his narrative is a quest for the origin of his own discourse, a discourse informed by speaking without thinking, which requires that he begin to listen to himself speaking. He tells readers that he will justify his past actions: "I did not intend to promise anything. But we are so often mistaken; we confuse beginnings, endings. They are alike so often. Especially when it comes to politics. Politics, or, I might 161 add, love" (ibid). Although Backstrom knows where his story will lead before he tells it, he allows himself to get carried away in an attempt to persuade himself and his readers that he knew what he was doing all along.
Furthermore, each narrator in Kroetsch's first three novels tends to repeat himself.
Narrator after narrator stresses the importance of repetition so that he may understand what he has already said. "The very process of recurrence is what enables us to learn, to improve, to correct past errors, to understand the present, to guide the generations that are to come," Demeter Proudfoot, a man wrongly named after a Greek goddess, narrates in
The Studhorse Man (Kroetsch 138). Demeter goes on to write: "It is only by mastery of the process of repetition (you will note the repeated 'e,' and 't' and the 'i,' and the 'tit' standing out boldly in the middle) that we can learn to endure." Dr. Mark Madham, character-bound narrator of Kroetsch's Gone Indian, elaborates upon those concerns about repetition and the "tit." Madham's narrative ends with a description of his lover's
repeated concern for 'the great god Tit.' That particular god to whom [a particular
graduate student on the lam] attributed the bestowing of all grants, fellowships,
assistantships, six-hour teaching loads and lecherous female office mates - that
god is obviously, as Carol remarks, a goddess. And that goddess is the lost
mother. (Kroetsch Gone 163)
In a word, "repetition" itself provides each narrator in Kroetsch's "Out West" triptych an opportunity to justify his previous actions.
To a man, Johnnie Backstrom, Demeter Proudfoot, and Dr. Mark Madham boast their oratorical abilities. Their puffed-chests would seem convincing were another character to corroborate their stories, but these storytellers must "crow" about their own
prowess to listeners within their stories along with those of us who read what they
narrate. Whereas Backstrom speaks with the conviction of an undertaker leading a
funeral march, Demeter speaks under his breath like a drunken man at a wedding dance,
and Madham speaks like a condescending academic whiling away his office hours.
Despite his Sturm und Drang, Backstrom first repeats himself in order to appease his
voters, the most fickle of listeners, before using repetition to convince his readers and
himself. His voice reigns. Demeter, on the other hand, writes to repeat what Hazard
Lepage tells him. Demeter slowly drives himself mad by trying to repeat Hazard's feats
so that he can replace the studhorse man as the subject of his narrative. "Many, I suspect, are tempted to despair," Demeter offers, "[b]ut I have sought other solutions and, I might add, with no little success". The path that would appear to lead to madness is surely the highroad" (Kroetsch Studhorse 138). He tries to reign in Hazard's voice. In contrast,
Madham writes to transcribe the tapes that his graduate student, Jeremy Sadness, mails to him. He shapes Jeremy's story into narrative. Madham observes that his student "cannot hear [anyone else speaking] mostly because of his preoccupation with the sound of his own voice" (Kroetsch Gone 164). Once Jeremy disappears, Madham cannot prevent his narration from overtaking Jeremy's story. Madham, like Demeter, must listen to himself speaking, and like Backstrom, uses repetition to convince himself that he was right to behave the way he did. 163
The Creatio ex Materia within Seed Catalogue
The "poet" speaker in Seed Catalogue parodies the repetitive tendencies of the three aforementioned narrators. Kroetsch's long poem differs from his novels (where story overlaps with discourse) because its countless layers of ironic, involuted imagery challenge readers to interpret a story for ourselves. Seed Catalogue tells the harrowing story of pastoral Alberta from the dual perspective of a worrisome boy unable to break his father's land. The enfeebled, nearly effete boy grows into a worried poet who attempts to come to terms with "the home place" (Kroetsch Catalogue 30). Assuming that this stance allows Kroetsch's "poet" to parody the devices his storytellers use (fragments, refrains, set phrases) while allowing us to create our own narratives, he asks us to make order out of chaos. In this way, our reading involves creatio ex materia.
Seed Catalogue asks, alternately, "How do you grow a gardener?" (31), "how do you grow a lover?" (32, 34), and "How do you grow a prairie town?" (36). Rhetorical questions, posted to no one in particular, become a refrain throughout the long poem. The poet muses about those questions as a way to build toward asking the real question on his mind: "But how do you grow a poet?"37 By the poem's end, he breaks that line and separates "How do you grow" from "a poet?" (Kroetsch Catalogue 40). The speaker thus puts the question to us, because he cannot answer for himself. "You've got to understand this," he insists, "I was sitting on the horse. / The horse was standing still. /1 fell off
(Kroetsch Catalogue 29). This digression is met with laughter from a voice
37 The speaker poses this question five times (Kroetsch Catalogue 37, 38, 39,40). It appears most prominently in the sixth section of the poem before the speaker invokes "his muse," namely "memory" (Kroetsch Catalogue 37). 164
within the poem. "The hired man" expresses the incredulity of Kroetsch's readers:
... how
in hell did you manage to
fall off a horse that was
standing still? (ibid)
The speaker replies by telling us that falling off the horse was necessary to spur him
toward writing.
It is worth considering what compels this poet to speak, or, more specifically, why he is so eager to embarrass himself. Take his description of love (or its fumbling
alternative), for example. He recalls an attempt to woo an unnamed "Lady" seated "at the
end of the bar" with another story of catastrophe (Kroetsch Catalogue 42). "Pete Knight,"
the poet recollects, "the King of All / Cowboys" was "killed - by a horse. / He fell off."
With this expository rush, the poet vindicates his childhood fall by playing on "the
lady's" sympathies. However, she does not fall for it. Instead, she voices our concern
"- You some kind of nut / or something?" (ibid). Her response only serves to provide the poet with another opportunity to get back in the saddle. While drawing attention to his failure, he deflects criticism by putting himself down. Playing at having confidence (or, having false confidence) leads him to think he can master, or grasp, his expressive potential. So long as the poet tells us about what he is saying while he is saying it, we might separate ourselves from the pathos of that experience. This way, he can align himself with his listeners and wonder about the "strange planting" (Kroetsch Catalogue
43) of words on the page. The final section of Seed Catalogue provides an opportunity for that "dialogue" between speaker and reader. The long poem ends by splitting into columns that simulate the call and response of a Catholic mass or a country and western duet. The left-hand column relates how "the city/falls" at the same time as "the rider/falls" (Kroetsch
Catalogue 45). The right column responds with two lines of prayer: "Poet, teach us I to love our dying." This split structure, combined with the "falling" motif and the typographical slashes within a line that would indicate its break (to an academic reader), reinforces the central trope of the growth of a boy into a poet within Seed Catalogue.
Growth is represented throughout the poem by the boy's maturation, which is initiated by falling or being broken down. Being mortified with embarrassment is the very sort of dying that seems necessary to clear the way for the development of "voice." And, as in the above example of "The palimpsest of prairie" (ibid), these voices are speaking over each other. While one column expresses how an urban speaker becomes urbane, the opposite column is the expression of a speaker at a loss for words. Although the sentiment between the columns remains unclear, the self-consciousness in this portion of the poem sounds verbal.
Kroetsch repeats those concerns about verbal expression in an essay entitled "On
Being an Alberta Writer: Or, I Wanted to Tell Our Story." He argues that Seed Catalogue dramatizes his reading of "a shared book in our society" ("Writer" 8). Self-consciousness is a result of revealing that his writing process is also a process of reading. Both processes engage readers in "the writing" of the poem. "The writing the writing the writing" matters more to him than its alternative, "the having written" (ibid). Because of this repetition, "the writing" seems to take at least three stages: writing the poem, "the writing" implied by reading the poem, and "the writing" in response to the poem. Every subsequent commentary, essay, or review of "the writing" engages Kroetsch in dialogue.
It is imperative that each variation on "the writing" opens interpretive possibilities that
"the having written" would close. That is to say, Kroetsch renounces any silence imposed by the passive voice. And, the verbal quality of expression that "the writing" implies refers to a specific kind of irony where an expression and its reception combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter, a quality that is definable ostensively (we know it when we hear it). In this way, Seed Catalogue falls along various points of the continuum of verbal expression.
Kroetsch aligns "the writing," etc., with Foucault's notion of an "archaeological method." This form of afchaeology would treat history as a practice that forms the object of which it speaks. At the same time, archaeology provides a method of excavating impersonal knowledge structures. The archaeological method offers one way to speak of the past and of the shifts in episteme (as Foucault puts it) as a discourse that allows us to organize historical events while referencing the artificiality of writing itself. Kroetsch approaches those itinerant elaborations on archaeology as a discursive deposit that operates like a collection of narratives. The seed catalogue that he disinterred from the
Glenbow Archives in Calgary is one such site for verbal parody. "I wanted to write a poetic equivalent to the 'speech' of a seed catalogue," he recalls, or "[t]he way we read the page and hear its implications" (Kroetsch "Writer" 8). From this "explosive seed" springs a poem that germinates "the oral tradition and the dream of origins" (Kroetsch "Writer" 7). By "origins," Kroetsch refers to the unknown source of an artifact. That is,
Kroetsch demonstrates how his poem becomes verbal by inviting readers to participate in his process of "the writing."
The following section turns to Kroetsch's criticism for his opinions of the role that verbal expression plays within Canadian literature and his theoretical notions of how to overturn "[t]he tyranny of narrative" (Kroetsch "Writer" 11). We will go on to consider how Kroetsch's reading of poststructuralist theory informs his use of parody.
Who Is Listening Thus?
Even before Kroetsch sat down at his typewriter with a seed catalogue from 1917 in hand, poststructuralist critics were asking either "Who is speaking thus?"38 or "What difference does it make who is speaking?"39 Although these questions are rhetorical, they also question rhetoric itself. Kroetsch explores the possibility of writing speech throughout his criticism and fiction. Then again, it is difficult to separate his criticism from his fiction, because he uses both forms to comment upon the conventions of storytelling. The speakers within his fiction address several audiences with the same breath: they speak to the audience within their texts and the readers who are audience to their texts. The voice he develops in criticism behaves similarly. Kroetsch tries to ensure
38 Barthes poses this question early in an argument about Balzac's Sarrasine ("Death" 142). He introduces a passage from that novel with speculation about "writing" as "that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away." He suggests that language "knows a 'subject,' not a person" speaking (ibid). The reader, he proposes, is no longer subject to an author or any other single person as the source of meaning.
39 Foucault repeats this question late in an argument on the function of an author. He introduces the essay with a quotation from Beckett that he returns to in conclusion (Foucault "Author" 391). He turns to this question when speculating about "authenticity or originality" in discourses. 168 that his stories (and his commentary on storytelling) simulate a forum for readers to respond. Just as his "speakers" claim they are only repeating what they heard, he would have us repeat what we read. Rather than question who is speaking, Kroetsch would ask,
"Who is listening thus?"
In "Beyond Nationalism: A Prologue" Kroetsch strives to convince readers that there is no preferred "narrative mode" (Kroetsch "Prologue" 70) for telling stories within
Canada. Kroetsch roughly divides "Can lit" (an abbreviation that has been losing its clout since about 1967) into Victorian fiction that maintains the illusion of traditional 'realism' and postmodern fiction which addresses its reader. Kroetsch stands here on theoretical ground that was broken long ago, but his eyes are trained on another field entirely. He suggests the "self-mockery and self-parody" that characterizes postmodern fiction published in Canada is an attempt at "self-protection" ("Prologue" 68-69). In other words, Kroetsch contends that contemporary Canadian literature calls attention to itself in order to neutralize further criticism. He argues in favour of literature in Canada that deploys parody in order to anticipate the reader's response. "Parody becomes a way into an ending," Kroetsch writes, and this form of "ending" appears to tell a story in many ways at once ("Prologue" 70). He suspects that Canada is a nation divided, so narratives about Canada must be conflicted as well.
Kroetsch defined the legacy of his criticism about "Can lit" with one statement from his introduction to "A Canadian Issue" of boundary 2: "Canadian literature evolved directly from Victorian into Postmodern" (1). This alignment of "Victorian" with
"Postmodern" is telling, especially for a writer with an interest in parody. If this statement (made in 1974) is any indication, Kroetsch's interpretation of Victorian aestheticism leaves much to be desired. The principal concerns of art in the Victorian period dealt with the effects of the industrial revolution, the impact of the theory of evolution, and the influence of psychoanalytic theory. Briefly, aesthetes strove to structure a society around the pleasure of superficiality rather than moral sentimentality.
Unless Kroetsch refers here to the Aesthetic movement - roughly described as "Vart pour
I'art" after Kant's notion of an object that "pleases for its own sake" (87) - Victorian art barely leads to with postmodern literature. Kroetsch's "Postmodern" paradigm calls into question any notion of sufficient 'truth' as the basis for belief and the form for prudent behaviour. Then again, the conventions of aestheticism serve as straw for an argument that Kroetsch makes without references between La Belle Epoque through mai 68. No matter how passe, an aesthete's convictions provide fuel for Kroetsch's purposefully inflammatory comments. Whereas Kroetsch's fiction is built upon the shifting ground between rejected totalities, universal values, and grand narratives, his criticism further describes that position.
According to Kroetsch, "[t]he country that invented Marshall McLuhan and
Northrop Frye did so by not ever being Modern" ("Issue" 1). He goes on to hyperbolically declare that Canadian literature omits modernist developments in art.
Kroetsch's sure-footedness implies that both Frye and McLuhan form an ill-defined and inchoate Kanata into a global village. Frye, alternately, establishes the 'tradition' of
Canadian literature to which Kroetsch does violence. Deriving from Foucault's elaboration of the possibilities of a historical "archaeology," and from Bakhtin's 170 enunciation of the medieval carnival in literature, Kroetsch urges his readers to "uninvent the word" (ibid), and by extension, the world. Bakhtin left us a model for literature wherein death, or more dramatically, catastrophe, is necessary for life or re-production.
Kroetsch writes novels that operate along these lines. His characters, his societies "Out
West" proliferate in spite of hardship. In fact, his narrators choose to spite hardship.
In Labyrinths of Voice, a published conversation with Shirley Neuman and Robert
Wilson, Kroetsch elaborates upon his theoretical position within his novels. "I started off working at the parody level," he acknowledges, "which is where you want to tell a story but you can't believe that there is only one assertable meaning in that story" {Voice 166).
This divergence between "a story" and the "meanings" it contains implies that readers are
"left taking parody very seriously." Earlier in the same conversation, he responds to a question about carnival's subversive potential with reference to The Words of My
Roaring:
The great example in our culture is the rodeo clown who often does a parody of
what the cowboy is doing out there, the clown risking life and limb to parody the
cowboy, who is risking life and limb. (Kroetsch Voice 36)
Kroetsch implies that the "sense of complicity in carnival" from the rodeo in his illustration is thematically linked to literary parody. The intertextuality that is necessary for parody requires that texts collect in a carnival with "a sense of total complicity which protects each [narrative] by giving [it] a kind of anonymity" (ibid). Kroetsch proposes that The Words of My Roaring contains that carnival sense of "complicity." He suggests that Backstrom repeats himself to ease his anxieties about being understood. Neither 171
Backstrom's narration nor Kroetsch's use of language conveys a single, unified meaning.
Backstrom tries to rectify his involvement with narrative the same way Kroetsch resolves his entanglement with Logos. He can ease the tension in his story by reveling in his failures.
Through talking to Neuman and Wilson, Kroetsch comes to an euphoric, unironic conclusion about the repetition implied by his understanding of parody. Regarding certain influences upon Gone Indian, Kroetsch suggests:
one of the delights of narrative is that you can read it right up front as narrative.
But there is a bonus in the crudest sense for the reader who can hear dancing bears
in the background there. . . . And I want the ultimate reader to have that
obligation, to sense that weight. But narrative should also be available at a
primary level. The other thing is, I think that finally what makes a book resonate
is what a reader knows even though he [or she] isn't quite aware of it. (Kroetsch
Voice 38; emphasis added)
The line in question here - "I felt like a bear that was learning to dance"40 - simultaneously refers to the dancing bear in Theodore Roethke's "Four for Sir John
Davies" and the Himalayan bear in Earle Birney's poem "Bear on a Delhi Road." The well-versed reader Kroetsch speaks of remains open to multiple levels of interpretation.
An unconscious resonance echoes within a book that speaks to the "ultimate reader." This type of reader delights in the influence wielded by previous generations of writers and
40 This line is from Gone Indian (Kroetsch 87). Sadness recalls: "Bea the bear. The white old she-bear, her dugs deep-buried in fur, lovely as sin" before he is beaten by some men who mistake him for an "Indian" (Kroetsch Gone 95). 172 readers. Kroetsch's criticism often returns to question whether a literary work is an end in itself or whether it is imbued with cultural "value." And, just as no Victorian would call himself or herself an English subject without passing acquaintance with the value of literature, no one would declare himself or herself a student of English literature in
Canada without making acquaintance with Kroetsch, dubbed "Mr Canadian Postmodern" by Linda Hutcheon.
In "Carnival and Violence: A Meditation," Kroetsch insists postmodern fiction is not subject to any particular historical imperative or sociological influences. He finds that contemporary English-Canadian literature in general neither asserts nor denies what it seeks to express. Kroetsch applies Bakhtin's argument about the ambivalence in medieval carnival culture to the self-reflexivity in postmodern literature. He refers to Bakhtin's later writing in Rabelais and his World in order to support his point: "one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order" (qtd. in Kroetsch "Meditation" 95). Kroetsch maintains that just as a medieval court returns to "normal" the moment after a carnival feast concludes, readers may turn away from the carnival by closing their books. Kroetsch draws upon the theories of Julia Kristeva, "one of the most important interpreters of Bakhtin," in order to propose that the carnival "is a drama located in language" ("Meditation" 99). Kristeva's interpretation of carnivalesque discourse avoids the reversal of cultural expectations that
Bakhtin speaks of through "a turning upside-down, a turning inside-out, of our elaborations of order." She contends that the narratological "laws of a language censored by grammar and semantics" typify an imposition of the polis (qtd. in Kroetsch 173
"Meditation" 102). Following Kristeva, Kroetsch elaborates upon the postmodern possibilities of disrupting these "laws of a language" and literature by revealing its conventions. Undermining narrative order, for instance, requires that readers attempt to enact the carnivalesque discourse within a text.
Taking these theoretical assertions for an introduction, Kroetsch goes on to argue that postmodern literature as he defines it is neither superior nor subordinate to established conventions. In conversation with Neuman and Wilson, Kroetsch speaks to the carnivalesque implications of his fiction:
I certainly wanted to go into the whole notion of that kind of narrative occasion of
carnival where things are both happening and being talked about. That whole kind
of conjunction of two forces: the wildness of action which is shaped by ceremony
or festival. And the doubled language that goes with it: a ritualized language and
an abandoned language. (37)
For Kroetsch, the "wildness" of the festival is primarily "verbal," eliminating the practical differences between speaker and listener. For Kristeva, alternately, "the carnival introduces the split speech actor: the actor and the crowd are each in turn simultaneously subject and addressee of discourse," and narrative potentially removes that distinction with a sort of "bridge between the two split occurrences as well as the place where each of the terms is acknowledged: the author (actor + spectator)" (Kristeva 46). Kroetsch, making postmodern claims for the novel in general, determines that listening and reading (especially misreading) are better metaphors than Kristeva's 'author.' Thus, the
implications of writerly reading open up the possibility for multiple interpretations of a
single text. In fact, for Kroetsch, carnivalesque discourse is part of an ongoing process of textual manipulation. To distinguish that process from previous reading practices,
Kroetsch pursues the dialogism of Bakhtin and the intertextuality of Kristeva. In this way, his notion of fiction is comparable to Gerard Genette's transtextual possibilities.
Interestingly, Kroetsch's discussion of dialogism applies loosely to Genette's category of hypertextuality, which implies the existence of "hypotexts" upon which
"hypertexts" are based. Kroetsch obliquely refers to Kristeva to describe the ambivalence within language itself. "On the omnified stage of carnival," she writes, "language parodies and relativizes itself, repudiating its role in representation; in so doing, it provokes laughter but refnains incapable of detaching itself from representation" (79).
The ambivalence of language that only performs itself would cross epistemological implications of dialogism with ontological consequence. Within Kristeva's formulation of Bakhtin's carnival, the performative effect of laughter that is provoked by words resonates within the world. Ultimately, Kroetsch surges past Kristeva to pursue a new reading practice that dethrones the traditional emphasis on literature (promoting the existing 'canon' of texts that holds up to critical scrutiny) and replaces it with "the writing," or the subjunctive study of ways texts have been, might be, and should be read.
41 In A Likely Story, Kroetsch warns his readers: "I'm renowned for my ability to misread the question - even my own - and for my ability to answer the question by indirection, misdirection, deferral, delay, rhetorical dodges, postmodern artifice, sexual innuendo, and just plain outright lies" (73; emphasis added). This italicized term derives from Bloom's Poetry and Repression: "This memory is a misprision, or creative misreading, but no matter how strong a misprision, it cannot achieve an autonomy of meaning, or a meaning fully present, that is, free from all literary context" (4). 175
Rroetsch sets the foundation of his notion of carnivalesque discourse with another essay, "The Exploding Porcupine" (1980), which suggests a dialogical approach to fiction in which deconstruction and violence overlap. He begins with an obligatory attack on a precursor to deconstruction - Heideggerian destruktion, which he does not mention by name - as a violent imposition "prior to, more primitive than, deconstruction.
Deconstruction implies, for all its attraction to disorder, a recovery of order, control; not so much the moment as the moment after" (Kroetsch "Porcupine" 109). Rroetsch conflates narrative and story in order to elaborate upon the "more primitive" implications of deconstruction. "Story is a mode of thinking," he suspects, which "must do immediate violence to its own conventions" within an inherently moralistic (or nationalistic) enterprise whose purported essentialism is ultimately debilitating (ibid).
Literary critic Dianne Tiefensee suspects that Kroetsch mistakes deconstruction with those negative hermeneutics. She introduces her book-length study of Kroetsch's criticism with this accusation:
The only way we can possibly resist traditional modes of thought is to consider
Derridean undecidability seriously, which means that we cannot pretend that
Derrida and Foucault or Kristeva or Bloom are all "doing the same thing." (4)
Kroetsch's criticism, she argues, relies on Hegel's insistence on synthesis. Like several other recent literary theorists, Tiefensee senses that the "use of parody and paradox" within postmodern fiction may not counteract the "Hegelian 'completion of the Self," or the self-actualization of the world within the word (106). She offers a cautious view of
Kroetsch's contribution to Canadian criticism and his alleged theoretical advances. While 176
Tiefensee acknowledges Kroetsch's insistence on "the oral tradition and the quest," she
suspects that he reasserts the logocentric requirement for presence in voice as evidence of
"transcendental signified" (ibid). Moreover, she seems to balance her reading of the poststructuralist tendencies in Kroetsch's criticism with his appreciation for verisimilar recreations of the past in his fiction, in order to argue that both postmodern intertextuality
(the depthless play of references) and referentiality (the play of meanings) are important to engage readers. She suggests that Kroetsch's criticism is as expansive as possible without submitting to a poststructuralist infinitude of interpretations.
Tienfensee's evaluation of Kroetsch attempts to remove the restraints from his theoretical practice regarding the influence of literary 'tradition.' She dismisses
Kroetsch's attempts to adapt the deconstructionist project as a postmodern aesthetic for his fiction. In Tienfensee's view, his criticism and fiction are most deconstructive when discovering or uncovering what literary conventions have hidden. Darren Wershler-
Henry extends this argument by indicating how Kroetsch's criticism emphasizes the moment that a pre-existing 'truth' is revealed. Wershler-Henry describes how Kroetsch's attempts to write the sounds of a speaking voice produce an absence within his writing.
Kroetsch, then, searches for the origin of this absence.
It is important to counter the criticism of Tiefensee and Wershler-Henry by looking closely at his use of literary parody. Kroetsch's writing is not simply faithful or unfaithful to literary conventions. He identifies these conventions and draws our attention to the hermeneutic reading practice in his fiction as well as in his criticism. Again,
Kroetsch's parody can comment upon intertexts (as in Hutcheon's theory) and translate them into different times and places that alter their meanings and effects. Kroetsch suggests to Neuman and Wilson that he has "recovered a sense of how to get intertextuality into the novel again" through self-conscious repetition akin to reflexivity
(25). He goes into detail:
One way has been for me to dare to move away from the conventions of fiction
toward autobiography. . . . I'm still much interested in duplicity but the duplicity
can now extend to the notion of autobiography, to the radically different,
marvellously different conventions of autobiography.
Tiefensee takes Kroetsch's fiction to task about this reliance on autobiography as a reassertion of the presence of a speaking subject, an ego fortified against death. She is correct to point out that if Kroetsch identifies himself as a source text, his autobiography harbours an automatic and unconsidered privilege and that influence needs rethinking.
Pace Tiefensee, Kroetsch's insistence on autobiography results in a self-conscious tone that is conducive to parody. Even if Kroetsch writes himself, or at least a reading of his own process, into his work, he does not present himself or his persona as a unified subject
(following contemporary theoretical interventions; e.g., Lacan's concern about the centered, consistent psyche, or Bakhtin's concern about the stability of an author or character). The commentary within his fiction is an attempt to follow poststructuralist insistence to de-centre the subject in language. Thus, Kroetsch demonstrates that only subjectivities remain by subjecting us to "the writing," or the rereading.
I will further explore the implications of parody in the next section, comparing
Kroetsch's "Out West" triptych with three of his long poems, where the anxious storytellers within Kroetsch's novels inflect the voices of the speakers within his poetry.
The Words of My Roaring, The Studhorse Man, and Gone Indian all contain examples of
the storytelling conventions that Kroetsch attempts to parody within "Stone Hammer
Poem," Seed Catalogue, and The Sad Phoenician.
On The Words of My Roaring and "Stone Hammer Poem"
The only voice in The Words of My Roaring belongs to Johnnie Backstrom. While there are other characters in the story he tells, he is the only speaker. His narrative is an
account of events on the campaign trail leading to his election. Backstrom, a politician, is proud of his outspokenness. He narrates with the same tone that he uses to address the voters on the campaign trail. If Backstrom is compelled to tell us his story, it is because he feels certain that readers are holding him to his word. He takes us along with him to hear his confession and admire his "style; style is something a politician must have"
(Kroetsch Roaring 73). Although his manner of speaking seems to take "listeners" into his confidence, it is simply a ploy to appeal to readers. He does not have to make any promises or say much at all just as long as we believe that he has our best interests in mind. This way, Backstrom exemplifies the anxiety that underlies the act of narrating in
Kroetsch's earliest novels.
Take Backstrom's spiel at a rodeo, for instance. After a rodeo clown is gored, he turns to the other spectators and says: "[w]e are afflicted" (Kroetsch Roaring 92).
Encouraged by the crowd's response, Backstrom repeats himself: 179
Afflicted and plagued, my friends. But remember. Let me repeat remember. If you
feel - if you feel in your heart and bowels that the heat cannot be endured ...
maybe then you should vote, my dear friends - you should vote for the clown.
(ibid; emphasis added)
Backstrom repeats "remember" in order to cause his "friends" to "feel." He attempts to convince the crowd that he is one of them and that they all suffer along with the gored clown. Later, cowboys and farmhands approach him to slap his back and shake his hand about what they called his "hind-tit speech" (Kroetsch Roaring 93). Backstrom would have readers believe that we are also suckling the "hind-tit." In this way, Backstrom not only speaks to readers, he makes it seem as though he speaks for us. His use of the modal conjunction ("if) written with a modal verb ("you should vote") exemplifies the ambivalence of Kroetsch's writing voice; his use of the subjunctive mood leads us to a style of reading that is akin to listening.
A farm auction later in the novel provides another example of a carnival. Standing before impoverished farmers, Backstrom winds up and spouts on about "[t]he old dualities" (Kroetsch Roaring 77). He decries how the depression has overturned his own sense of "mind and body, right and wrong" so that he cannot rely on knowing "good and evil, black and white, up and down, damnation -" (Kroetsch Roaring 78). He breaks from his narration to consider how using "old" this way indicates stress on the word that follows, "dualities." There is a discernable pitch in his voice when he says the word old, calling attention to the possibility that dualities exist in excess of themselves. His use of the term dualities prompts readers to evaluate whether any statement in the novel is 180
"good" or "evil." Backstrom, of course, means to deconstruct those binaries, only
"deconstruct" is not the right word. Instead, he tries to overturn societal structures by the accumulated force of roaring words.
Backstrom directs our attention from his commentary back to the estate sale when a stout man darkened with grease and grit foretells that "[t]he sinner shall suffer for his sins" (Kroetsch Roaring 66). With this squeaky voice ringing in his ears, Backstrom ensures the gathered voters that he suffers along with them. He would also have them believe that he remains steadfast in the chaos of the Great Depression. But, the prophet's prediction about the end of the world has no more weight than Backstrom's promise of rain. In a land blown to dust by unending winds - either prevailing Westerlies, or politicians pulling down their bowler hats - the words spoken "in dead earnest"
(Kroetsch Roaring 69) by either a politician or a prophet have similar effect (or none at all). He reminds readers that because those voters will hold him to his promise, he has turned himself into a lightening rod with his back to the storm. By making this prediction, he has become a sort of doppelgdnger prophet without hope for redemption. And, like the prophet, Backstrom holds to his promise, even though it causes him anxiety.
This separation between a promise and its actualization speaks to a larger movement within Kroetsch's fiction. With "Stone Hammer Poem," for instance, Kroetsch repeats or reiterates the force of drought-wrought voices within The Words of My
Roaring. In this way, "Stone Hammer Poem" serves as Kroetsch's parody of his narrative voice. The "poet" speaker writes about "this stone maul" (Kroetsch "Hammer" 3) his father struck upon while ploughing the family farm. The (as yet) undiscovered history 181
weighs upon the poet, just as the hammer is a paperweight on the poet's desk. Although he quotes his father - "This stone maul / stopped a plough / long enough for one / Gott im
Himmel" (Kroetsch "Hammer" 5) - the poem itself is not a quotation of any single text.
Rather, it reiterates the tendencies of oral storytellers as demonstrated in The Words of
My Roaring. Furthermore, when the poet sells his grandfather's farm, he repeats the phrase to illustrate the "50 bucks an acre" he receives for leveling "all the trees" and collecting "all the stones" (Kroetsch "Hammer" 6). "The poem / is the stone" that has become an artifact of sorts. That is to say, the poet is unsure whether the stone or his poem conveys any particular meaning.
Within The Words of My Roaring, Backstrom wants his story to withstand history.
He responds to the old man's prophesy about the time being at hand by saying: "God is merciful" (Kroetsch 68). "Remember," the prophet responds, "[a]nd he that sat on the cloud thrust in his sickle on the earth; and the earth was reaped." Rereading this scene of the auction within The Words of My Roaring against the scene of the maul's discovery within "Stone Hammer Poem," Backstrom's voice becomes a form of artifact. In other words, the politician's promise is comparable to a farmer's German curse ("Gott im
Himmel"). Kroetsch illustrates the potential of language as these words resonate within the poem. These speakers, however, cannot be held accountable for these actions, because their words do not have expected results. 182
On The Studhorse Man and Seed Catalogue
Kroetsch provides another example of carnival with the wedding feast for
Demeter's uncle Tiberius Proudfoot in The Studhorse Man. Like the rodeo in The Words of My Roaring, this reception affords an opportunity for some big talking. Unlike
Backstrom facing down the rodeo crowd at the rodeo, though, the narrator in The
Studhorse Man does not address his fellow revelers. Instead, he returns home to write about the reverie he just witnessed, which establishes him as the only "speaker" in the novel. While the other wedding guests bow their heads in prayer, the narrator, Demeter
Proudfoot, looks upon Hazard Lepage for the first time. Until the wedding reception,
Demeter had only ever heard about Hazard from his cousin (and Hazard's longtime fiancee) Martha Proudfoot. "Little did I realize," Demeter says, "staring greedily as I did at the bearded figure with curly black hair and thick shoulders and great hatchet nose (not unlike my own), that I was looking at the subject of many years' study" (Kroetsch
Studhorse 110). Although Demeter points to the subject of his story, his own preoccupation with storytelling often gets in the way: he sizes Hazard up and sees himself in the studhorse man. In other words, he figures that writing about Hazard will provide an excuse to talk about himself. Consider this description of the first time he meets Hazard:
I borrowed paper and a pencil.... I made no secret of the fact that I had just
recently - it happened a day or two after Tiberius Proudfoot's wedding -
conceived the notion that I would write a few years hence a novel. (Kroetsch
Studhorse 136) A few pages hence he settles on a title: "If I ever complete my herculean study of that lonely man I shall call it not simply Hazard Lepage; the Biography of a Modern Martyr,
His Mortal Life and Immortal Accomplishments, but rather . . . The Stinting of Martha
Proudfoof (Kroetsch Studhorse 154). Notice that Demeter uses the conditional conjunction ("If) as though he cannot say whether he will complete his task. The book that he proposes here provides an excuse to write the words he cannot say directly to
Hazard.
Demeter's method of storytelling recalls Backstrom's, since both talk about themselves to overcome their unease about what they said before. This anxiety is due to
Demeter's tendency to treat words as if they were actions. Even silence may set Demeter off. He cannot bring himself to speak to Hazard because he believes the studhorse man ignores him. Demeter does not want the same treatment from his readers. So, he turns on us with this apostrophe:
You who stare blankly in your musty basement flats, in your rented upstairs
apartments, in your so-called "living" rooms full of TV and offspring. . . [,] all of
you who think you do not live in a madhouse - do not smirk at Hazard's inability
to recognize and to do what is best. (Kroetsch Studhorse 154; emphasis added)
Demeter lashes out because he fears his readers will not grant him the respect due a storyteller. The nervous tone in the words provides evidence that he worries his tale about
Hazard will not measure up to the studhorse man himself. Notice how the above statement turns on the verb "think." Demeter would have readers believe that he is 184
thinking for us. Moreover, the narrative presumes that we are complicit with that
imposition of meaning. If so, as we are reading Demeter, he is reading us.
The Studhorse Man encourages readers to create a narrative from short chapters
that represent the note cards Demeter keeps. In a gesture toward metafiction, Demeter
believes that his note cards "suggests] an order that was not necessarily present in
Hazard's rambling conversation" (Kroetsch Studhorse 46). Demeter does not put the
cards in order, as he is certain "the three-by-fives speak for themselves." He further
describes his idiosyncratic approach to narrative structure:
I too get dressed up - by taking off my clothes. Sometimes of a morning I fold a
three-by-five card into a little triangular hat and set it square on my perky fellow's
noggin and pirates we sail here together in my bathtub, our cargo the leather-
bound books and the yellowing scribblers, the crumbling newspaper clippings and
the envelopes with their canceled stamps and the packs of notecards that make up
the booty of our darling. (Kroetsch Studhorse 45)
The frantic sound of these note cards evokes Demeter's state of mind. "Yes, dear reader," he confesses, "I am by profession quite out of my mind" (Kroetsch Studhorse 68). This
"posture of madness," however, does not make up for Demeter's anxiety about narrative.
He would rather not be held responsible for what he says. He begins his book by quoting
Hazard: '"Whoever thought,' he went on, fumbling a button into its hole, 'that screwing would go out of style? But it did, it is ...'" (Kroetsch Studhorse 13). With these words,
Hazard names the central tension of his story. Whereas Hazard fears that his way of life has ended, Demeter is nervous that readers will not accept his story or the way he tells it. 185
"Perhaps I need elaborate," Demeter writes: "Hazard feared especially death at
sea. A woman had prophesied that fate for him; an old woman on the battlefields of
France during the Great War" (Kroetsch Studhorse 14). The French woman foretells:
'"La mer sera votre meurtriere.'' The sea shall be your murderess." This word-for- wordplay continues throughout The Studhorse Man. It hearkens back to the first line of the novel, "Hazard had to get hold of a mare" (Kroetsch Studhorse 9). Later, when he is
"struck in the face by the hoof of a drowned pig," Hazard remembers these words
(Kroetsch Studhorse 105). Note that the narrative conflates both kinds of "mares," horses and women, with a pun. The story ends with Hazard's steed Poseidon, aroused by
Martha's five fine mares, trampling his master. And, in this moment, Demeter and
Hazard exchange places. Hazard becomes a storyteller himself as he releases "the exquisitely piercing mortal cry, the cry half horse, half man, the horse-man cry of pain or delight or eternal celebration at what is and what must be" (Kroetsch Studhorse 185).
Demeter, alternately, believes that he is becoming the studhorse man in Hazard's stead.
As Poseidon circles "the figure of a man" on the floor, Demeter cries out in empathy with
Hazard (ibid). Although he dutifully records that Hazard releases a "cry," it seems as though that indescribable sound mixes with his own. Only, in this case, cry is a word as wanting as a referent can get. The sound triggers an involuntary response that Demeter cannot possibly write down.
In Seed Catalogue, Kroetsch manipulates this typically poststructuralist conflict between sounds and words. The "poet" speaker begins the sixth section of the long poem invoking "His muse is / his muse/if [sic] I memory is" (Kroetsch Catalogue 37). He 186 repeats memories to prevent forgetting them. Without the muse that those memories represent, he has "no song" and "no meditation" to write about (ibid). Each of these memories, however, contains the sounds of voices speaking that he cannot record in writing. He tries to simply transcribe his memories - "Once upon a time in the village of
Heisler -" but, before he gets too far, he interrupts himself "- Hey, wait a minute. /
That's a story" (Kroetsch Catalogue 38). This interruption and subsequent digression relates a frustration with straightforward storytelling that has built up since his childhood.
"This road is a poem," but the speaker cannot straighten out his memories with a few broken lines (Kroetsch Catalogue 39). That said, he expects readers to follow along somehow. This poet challenges us to "trace" his "coming / or going" across a "scarred / page, a spoor of wording / a reduction to mere black" (ibid). Just as Demeter writes himself into his narrative; the speaker from Seed Catalogue anticipates his readers' response to his poem. However, whereas Demeter is eager to bear the burden of narrative, the poet begs off that responsibility. This speaker serves as troparody of an element of Demeter's nervous voice in that both speakers attempt to control the way their words sound.
On Gone Indian and The Sad Phoenician
There are at least two voices in Gone Indian. Jeremy Sadness provides one voice as he tells of fleeing to the Winter Festival in Notikeewin to get away from his dissertation and its director. Dr. Mark Madham provides another voice as he culls a narrative from the tapes that his student sends him. In Labyrinths of Voice, Kroetsch 187 provides his own context for the saying: 'To go Indian [is] an ambiguous phrase: to become released or wild in the carnival sense" (36). Jeremy's account of the winter
festival in Gone Indian provides an example of "the carnival sense" that Kroetsch is
speaking about. Jeremy is part of a crowd that gathers at the bottom of a ski hill around a cowboy who failed to land a jump. "Flying is easy," Jeremy reports: "the whole, the absolute mastery resides in knowing how to fall. And by Jesus, I'm a living specialist"
(Kroetsch Gone 82). As in Seed Catalogue, falling is the catalyst for verbal expression in
Gone Indian. In addition, Jeremy's line echoes Backstrom before the election and Hazard before offering up his studhorse to the mares. Jeremy braces himself for a fall by telling a story about it. Both of these speakers fall into narrative.
Gone Indian, like Seed Catalogue, disregards linear narrative development in favour of a series of digressions. Kroetsch unites these anecdotes with an antic mood.
With his commentary on Jeremy's many stories, Madham accounts for the events that led to his graduate student's curious disappearance. Both the graduate student and his professor reveal how their common story began with a fraught relationship. Jeremy opens his narrative by relating how he could not begin his dissertation project, and his professor responds by explaining that Jeremy began several times but he could not complete so much as a sentence. Jeremy, for example, looks for consolation from his professor by telling about the drafts that it took just to write his acknowledgements. "I wish to thank
Professor R. Mark Madham," he remembers penciling in, "for directing my attention ... to my own continuing failure" (Kroetsch Gone 64). Here, Jeremy's indecisiveness exemplifies another source of ambivalence within Jeremy's narrative. This ambivalence 188 may induce the subjunctive (e.g., I wish that I were ...) and cast his authority into doubt.
This verbal mood applies to Jeremy's speaking; he listens too closely to himself. Jeremy proceeds to record his voice in an attempt to overcome his anxiety about writing the thesis. He exchanges his pencil and writing tablet for a microphone and "lights out for the territory" to record how Grey Owl "died into a new life" (ibid). He takes up another topic and chooses to research how "Archie Belaney became Grey Owl." In this way, Jeremy attempts to impress his academic advisor by pointing out his own failings before his professor can. Madham's commentary, alternately, indicates that he suspects his student is leading him on.
Later, having only read about snowshoes in a notebook by Grey Owl - a
"snowshoe lifts in front only, hanging by toe bridle" (Kroetsch Gone 86) - Jeremy enters a snowshoe contest. During the race, he begins to feel disconnected, his eyes operating apart from his feet as he negotiates an overwhelming solitude. It is notable that he does not hear himself speak, but his ears pick up a voice that he does not recognize as his own.
"You cannot get there," he hears a "voice" say behind him (Kroetsch Gone 93). He turns to see a magpie perched where the voice came from. Jeremy tells Madham about the act of ventriloquism with an apostrophe: "I had left the mere earth, you understand" (ibid).
He pauses the narrative to comment upon what the experience has come to mean, but he does not dwell on the possible significance of the magpie's voice. He simply dismisses that mythical companion as an apparition "in my head" (ibid). The voice of the magpie suggests a way in which Jeremy's tapes are ambiguous. Although Jeremy attempts to dominate his narrative with his own voice, the magpie breaks through the monologue. 189
Jeremy also emerges in Madham's narration to speak to readers. After he wins the snowshoe contest, Jeremy decides he must try to "[cjonnect" with his competitors
(Kroetsch Gone 95). Of the many "sweaty faces" that stare at him, one snarls: "You part
Indian or ain't you?" (Kroetsch Gone 96). Jeremy admits to Madham that he could not reply: "For if I had tried, it would have been [in] a tongue I did not understand" (Kroetsch
Gone 98). Jeremy wonders if the men would have understood him if he had managed to speak. (Perhaps he would have made a sound like Hazard trampled under Poseidon's hooves.) Jeremy relates how he could not reason with the men to whom those voices belong, and tells how those men beat him because they decide he looks "like an Indian"
(ibid). With these words, Jeremy "goes Indian" in a carnivalesque reversal. As he tells
Madham, Jeremy realizes that he has experienced firsthand the 'truth' of Grey Owl's deception.
While he curls up in the snow to protect himself from the blows, Jeremy hallucinates about the experience that led him to become "Indian." He passes out and dreams of playing "cowboy and Indian" as a child (Kroetsch Gone 99). Of course, he recalls that he was the "Indian." He relates an episode from his childhood where boys
"threw broken bricks and they tied me up and stuck lit matches into the seams of my shoes, and one time they dropped a condom full of water from a rooftop and hit my head and nearly broke my neck" (ibid). Jeremy then drifts through his childhood to the time he received the "books of Grey Owl" as gifts. Even as a boy he can remember sharing
Archie Belaney's "dream of the European boy who became .. . pathfinder ... borderman
... the truest Indian of all" (ibid). Jeremy reads them repeatedly through his delirious eyes, going over the same paragraphs, the same sentences to learn what the "truest Indian
of all" looked like. He awakens from his stupor and realizes the contradiction in those terms. Madham intrudes at this point to confirm that his student has gone AWOL. And, because he has the only copy of Jeremy's tapes, Madham can say "that the tape recorder
itself, and not what was recorded on its tape, tells the whole story" (Kroetsch Gone 159).
Madham, like Backstrom and Demeter, has the final word from the beginning of his narrative. Narrating Jeremy's story, then, is his excuse to assert his opinions. He ends his commentary by insisting that Jeremy's disappearance is no mystery. Madham declares
Jeremy dead with the same breath that he declares his student has indeed "gone Indian."
Gone Indian is in this regard an eloquent reply to concerns about the monologues that provide the vehicle for narratives in The Words of My Roaring and The Studhorse
Man. Jeremy transfers his anxiety about storytelling to the recordings he sends to his professor. Madham, on the other hand, attempts to eliminate that uncertainty with his narration by repeating what Jeremy says and by repeating himself as well. Madham makes it clear that Jeremy isolates himself because of his indecisiveness. These competing narratives do not result in monologues between Jeremy and Madham or a dialogue between both characters. Here readers get a sense of the verbal tone that permeates Kroetsch's "Out West" triptych as we listen (even if the other characters cannot) to braggarts attempting to justify themselves. In this instance, Gone Indian is comic and pathetic at precisely the same time. When Jeremy becomes especially morose or filled with self-pity, Kroetsch invariably adds a comic moment to undercut the pathos.
Even at the end of the novel, for instance, before Madham narrates how Jeremy died, he 191 listens to his student's last tape. Although Madham knows he is listening to Jeremy's final words, he cannot resist undercutting his student. Madham narrates that there was a phone ringing in the background as "Jeremy is raving on about how he is going to stay in bed forever," and he notes that Jeremy ignores the phone "mostly because of his preoccupation with the sound of his own voice" (Kroetsch Gone 164). Ironically,
Madham does not listen to what Jeremy's saying because the professor suffers from the same ailment. In this way, Gone Indian concludes with the "fiction" of Jeremy's death
(Kroetsch 165). This concluding scene has less to do with Jeremy than whatever character Madham writes for him.
The "sad" speaker in Kroetsch's The Sad Phoenician repeats the sense of isolation that Jeremy Sadness experiences in Gone Indian. The speaker of this long poem identifies himself as a "poet" with a peculiar interest in manipulating the rhythms of everyday speech. Accordingly, he combines sentence fragments with two conjunctions: "and" or
"but." The history of language and its uses and productive misuses weighs upon this
"poet" speaker. He tries to write speech just as he attempts to become one of the
"Phoenicians" he studies. He means to express himself and exceed the constraints of proper grammar and syntax. So, he spends his time parsing the statements that he overhears others saying. "I do have feelings," he writes, for "poets are human; I am, you / might say, a kind of Phoenician, with reference, that is, / to my trading in language"
(Kroetsch "Sad" 52). The poet proves his academic credentials by tracing the etymology of his fellow "Phoenicians" to those pre-Greeks who "gave us the whole works." Then- language works, he notes, but others take credit for the innovation of the phonetic alphabet. He proceeds to compare his work to a particular part of speech: "o to be mere
gerund; no past, / no future; what do you do in life: I ing" (Kroetsch "Sad" 53). With this
turn of phrase, his personal pronoun turns into a verbal noun. Thus, he is a result of
writing. The poem, like the "poet," draws attention to its "artifice," as a performance that
is "not to be confused / with deception" (Kroetsch "Sad" 54). Only, "the poem must resist
the poet," resist his intentions, or the interpretations he attempts to promote. This
troparody reveals the anxiety of the voice speaking in The Sad Phoenician. The poet is
aware that he has translated himself into a figure of speech. That is to say, the poem tells
on him.
Vox Populi
We readers "overhear" these poems telling on their "poet" speakers. The appeal
of reading Robert Kroetsch's fiction involves this sort of eavesdropping. Make no
mistake, we are dependent on the acknowledgement of the speaker, but the speaker also
relies on our imaginary engagement. The more direct our experience seems, the more
direct our dependence grows. This is where Kroetsch's insistence on self-conscious repetition becomes a mode of parody. His first three novels and subsequent long poems demonstrate an ability to emulate verbal expression. Like the "poet" speaker in Seed
Catalogue, readers who dare to read aloud also fall into "the writing."
If we keep in mind the manipulation we readers endure at the hands of these storytellers, it is easier to understand why Kroetsch involves us in "the writing." In
Labyrinths of Voice, Kroetsch makes a revealing statement about the "long work" of poetry in response to a question about "[t]he non-verbal context in which oral literature
achieves its success" (165). He mentions how "we come again to narrative" in order to
convey "[t]he body, gesture, the grimace of the face, the twists of nose and ear." He goes
on to suggest storytelling is an act of writing narrative that plays with the conventions of
reading. His writing includes "devices like rhyme and stanza and formulaic expressions"
that allow a reader to become a "speaker." By manipulating those conventions, Kroetsch
brings to his writing a pseudo "oral" sensibility. By giving voice to the words he writes,
readers demonstrate how his writing has an aural bent. His writing is, like an
eavesdropper on a barstool, repetitive to a solipsistic extent. This is where Kroetsch's
insistence on self-conscious repetition becomes a mode of parody. The interruptions,
digressions, and repetitions of his narratives, which he parodies in his poetry, require us to read by ear. Ultimately, those "verbal" expressions contain the potential to distance readers. Part of that distance comes from the fact that Kroetsch's writing possesses a capacity for critical detachment. The commentary within his metafiction demonstrates the
same curiosity or ferocity as his criticism. The paradoxical outspoken inwardness of his criticism and fiction commands our attention.
As Kroetsch repeats in his many essays and interviews, the oral tradition of storytelling has exerted profound influence on English-Canadian literature in recent decades. Voxpopuli. Many of the books published in Canada since Kroetsch's declaration have only broadened and confirmed the sense of cultural crisis that Kroetsch was registering. The locus of that crisis - the ascendancy of television, the electric conformity of public discourse - is found nowhere in his fiction. Communication "Out 194
West" means books, letters, and word of mouth. It did not crackle along antennae; it was passed around in the low light of a barroom. Throughout the "Out West" triptych,
Kroetsch shapes the Canadian west as both foreign and familiar. He writes of rustic beer parlors, not of caustic television sets. The speakers in his long poems also repeat traces of what they have overheard. Their voices slur like Bakhtin's carnival goers, encouraging us readers to raise our voices as well.
Ondaatje says as much. His introduction to The Long Poem Anthology asserts: "Kroetsch hangs around bars picking up stories like Polonius behind the curtain" (13). CHAPTER FIVE
Malcolm Lowry's Churrigueresque Parody
Writing metafiction - taking the process of writing as a point of departure -
Malcolm Lowry portrays desire by stressing the emptiness, hollowness, and loneliness of the creative act. The subject of Lowry's fiction is writing itself, or, more specifically, the difficulty of communication within a set of conventions or norms. Lowry develops themes of artistic splendours and spoils in his narrative through central characters who struggle to articulate their aspirations. Their own attempts to reconcile with their past experiences illustrate an unspoken belief in Lowry's fiction that suffering is necessary to produce art. Lowry not only relentlessly and self-consciously presents themes of self- destruction, he implores readers to enact and maybe even embody the most harmful of these themes. And Lowry, who knows readers are intrigued by destruction, also knows that suffering is not compelling if we cannot identify with characters who suffer. Without affinity, there is no empathy, which implies suffering as much as it does indulgence. A typical work of literary realism does not require readers to engage with imagery and semantic ambiguity the way that poetry does. Whereas fiction versed in the conventions of 'realism' expects readers to read poetic elements like dreams, memories, and visions as digressions from narrative, Lowry provides an unsettling insight into literary norms through the apparitions his characters perceive. These apparitions are timeless, elusive, and imaginary. They illustrate differences between the 'real' world Lowry's characters perceive and the alternate, 'unreal' realms they conceive. Often, his characters live in both realms of perception simultaneously. To read Under the Volcano, we must read into apparitions made of poetry, and in this way interpret the pathos of Lowry's metafiction, which is expressed in the Consul's "grotesquely pathetic situation" (9). This dual structure is why Lowry's novels are poetic; it is also why they are so affecting.
In order to examine how Lowry operates in these different realms of perception, this chapter will look at several poems he wrote while revising and rewriting his greatest work. Lowry turned from Under the Volcano to write the poems that make up his collection "The Lighthouse Invites the Storm" before he returned to concentrate on prose.
This digression was integral to the development of Lowry's aesthetic. Although he never published a poem in his lifetime, his poetry serves as an unconscious commentary on his prose, emphasizing the process of pouring poetry into fictional forms. In Lowry's poetry, the etiology of self-destruction is revealed for us. Reading these poems allows us to imagine how suffering looks, as though his speakers will reveal the void around which the characters in his novels revolve. However, these images only show a trace of the turmoil that is evident throughout Lowry's corpus. I will suggest that several of Lowry's poems share the creative urgency behind his magnum opus, Under the Volcano (1947), and his unfinished follow-up novel, October Ferry to Gabriola (published 1970). The poetic quality of these novels demonstrates Lowry's treatment of the artist's metier. That is to say, both of these poetic novels share Lowry's metafictional urge to write in several discursive modes.
The semantic excess and heightened presence of the image that we associate with poetry erupt in Lowry's apparitions. Both Under the Volcano and October Ferry to
Gabriola involve characters pursued by their apparitions, thus breaking down the 197 distance between worlds of 'reality' (with its constitutive desire) and 'unreality.'
Generally, these separate realms bombard readers with displays of absence. Additionally,
Lowry's tendency to describe apparitions with poetry threatens 'realistic' narrative progression. The dreams, memories, or visions that this metafiction performs for us are not simply a nice diversion; these apparitions encourage us to empathize with the characters who see them. Readers want to see what we cannot bear to watch. This is an insight that we cannot arrive at simply by denouncing Lowry's depiction of apparitions; we must let his poetry move us. Lowry lures in those readers who attempt to connect with the characters in his novels, but any attempt to make a connection results in a sense of emptiness. The empathy required for this connection might be termed suffering.
However, rather than suffering these absences, we readers find indications of presence everywhere, either in a character like Yvonne entering a cantina to find her husband drunk in Under the Volcano, or in the lush setting we see when Ethan and Jacqueline
Llewellyn first step onto a Greyhound bus in October Ferry to Gabriola. In Under the
Volcano, the Consul strives for reconciliation with his estranged wife. In October Ferry to Gabriola, Ethan Llewellyn remembers the death of his school chum, Cordwainer. Both of these men grieve for their past - they are stuck with the dissatisfaction and lack that feed their apparitions - but even more, we as readers experience a peculiar sense of lack when confronted with images that are largely void.
The separation between worlds is far more pronounced in Under the Volcano than in October Ferry to Gabriola. Looking at these novels from a chronological perspective, we will see Lowry constantly changing the way he creates opposing realms of perceived aspiration and apparition. We will not see a straight line of progress but a path of aesthetic exploration that begins with the poetic novel and results in a more prosaic mold.
This examination will eschew reading 'realism' in Lowry's novels in favour of interpreting the pathos of the apparitions he portrays with poetry. The ornate style, the ornamented structure, of late baroque architecture featured within the town of
Quauhnahuac, Mexico in Under the Volcano, contributes to the narrative mise-en-scene.
The following analysis will begin with Under the Volcano in order to examine the influence of Lowry's poetry on his prose and will conclude with October Ferry to
Gabriola in order to stress how the latter novel extends and qualifies the poetics of the former. If the poetic language with in these novels challenges the limits of narrative, articulating that quality requires an approach that turns away from narrative and toward poetry by means of literary parody. In this way, Lowry parodies his own poetry with the contemporaneous novels he wrote.
A Churrigueresque Structure
This separation between realms makes clear the way in which apparitions serve as compensation for what 'reality' does not provide. Defending the manuscript that became
Under the Volcano to his publisher Jonathan Cape, Lowry provides an interesting metaphor for reading his novel. He pleads with Cape (who had requested extensive rewrites) to pore over the novel the way he would poetry, for "poems have to be read several times before their full meaning will reveal itself, explode in the mind" (Lowry
"Cape" 389). Lowry argues that his novel will please those readers who strive for a 199
"poetical conception of the whole''' (Lowry "Cape" 388-389). He describes his
"overloaded style" with reference to a style of architecture named after Spanish architect
Jose Benito de Churriguera.43 He elaborates on this point with an arresting image for reading his novel: "I hope [Under the Volcano] may begin soon to loom out of the fog for you like Borda's horrible-beautiful cathedral in Taxco" (Lowry "Cape" 391). As in
Lowry's unpublished poems and prose, the structure of Under the Volcano separates into disparate worlds of every day routine and the escape from an oppressive day-to-day
'reality.'
Lowry urges readers to contemplate "the whole churrigueresque structure," which becomes most transparent when he separates the realms of perceived aspiration and apparition, a separation as disconcerting as it is revealing. In his essay, "Poetic Language,
Poetics of Language," Gerard Genette addresses "[t]he question, so embarrassing for us today, of poetic language" (76). He decides to interrogate several texts that have earned that italicized descriptor rather than its perceived "prosaic" opposite. Prose is, presumably, burdened by the weight of narrative. Genette divides narrative discourse into three elements: recit, or the order of events, histoire, or the sequence in which events of the story occur, and narration, the act of narrating itself. Discursive style, for Genette, took prominence the moment literary criticism declared itself "New," and "the presence or absence of meter constituted a decisive and unequivocal criterion" for distinguishing
43 The Consul himself encounters the term "churrigueresque" in Chapter X of Under the Volcano. The adjective appears with a gloss in a pamphlet that boasts the "churrigueresque (overloaded) style" of a San Francisco Convent in the city of Tlaxcala (Lowry 310). The tourist pamphlet describes "the Convent's altars .. . decorated with paintings ... by the most celebrated Artists." The Satuario Ocotlan in Tlaxcala makes "an imposing and majestic impression." 200
prose from verse (ibid). Poetry, and its spurious synonym, verse, remained constrained by
stanzas, stress, and syllables. That opposition of prose and poetry depends on
versification. Poetry emerged from the nineteenth century "freed of metrical constraints
and yet distinct from prose" (ibid). Despite this evolution from verse, poetic language
still represents a deviation from everyday language.
Thus, looking back, Genette observes generic brackets shifting. He refers to Jean
Cohen's "essential thesis," that poetry "violates and transgresses" prose: "poetry is
antiprose" ("Poetics" 78). Moreover, poetry "constantly moves in the direction of an
ever-increasing poeticity." Genette tests poetry from several periods and discovers that it barely evolves at all. Instead, language "carries out its poetic function only insofar as it is the instrument of a change of meaning" ("Poetics" 83).44 Poetry is language rendered
"reducible" which "necessarily implies a change of meaning, and more specifically a
shift from the 'denotative' (read, intellectual) meaning to the 'connotative' (read,
affective) meaning." The resulting emotive language does not obscure meaning. Its style performs meaning in discourse qua discourse. Genette aligns Stephane Mallarme's argument that poetry illustrates "the diversity of idioms" and alleges, "if languages were perfect, verse would not exist, because all speech would be poetry and, therefore, there would be no poetry" (Genette "Poetics" 91). Genette posits: "poetry finds its place and its function where language falls short, in precisely those shortcomings that constitute it"
("Poetics" 90). The presumption at play here is that poetry pries open differences between denotative and connotative meanings.
44 Genette's description roughly equates to Ricoeur's "trope," concerning deviation from the norm. 201
Then again, Genette's poetics are not simply the effect of "shortcomings." He
suspects that "language in the poetic state, or the poetic state of language" widens the gap in language between the signifier and the signified (Genette "Poetic" 96). Any poetic or prosaic articulation widens "the oratio soluta, disjointed speech, language itself as gap and disjunction between signifiers and signifieds, signifier and signified." For Genette,
"style" presents "a certain effect of difference and eccentricity," and poetry "withdraws from common language from the inside.'" He concludes by allowing for the possibility that the "poetic" may break though prose. In his essay, "Figures," Genette reconsiders the gap "between real language (that of the poet) and a virtual language (that which would have been used by 'simple common expression')" (47). A figure, either a figure of speech or the figure of a speaker, "contains a particular mode of eloquence or poetry." Genette advocates for a poetic language that represents a departure from the norm by appearing to abolish the space of a figure, or "the visible body of Literature" (ibid). Genette's pun on the "figure" embodied and his or her body of work provides another mode inpotentia or in poetica.
With "the whole churrigueresque structure," Lowry does not so much refute this notion of a "figure" as add a degree of nuance. For Lowry, "the poetic state of language" is a response to the Consul's dissatisfaction, but the prose breaks apart when Yvonne is present. Throughout the novel, we see the Consul drinking alone, chasing bottles of tequila with shots of mescal (another sort of tequila, distilled from the piha, the heart of the agave maguey cactus). These drunken experiences contrast with brief moments of ecstasy that occur when he remembers the wife who has left him and the life he has lost. 202
In Genette's terms, the Consul represents a figure in the gap where his perceptions of the past conflict with his present self-destruction. With Geoffrey's unsent letter to Yvonne,
Lowry describes this separation in order to reveal the relationship between his self-
destruction and the dissolving of his love story. Consider Lowry's explanation of this
frame narrative for his publisher:
[Chapter XII] is the easterly tower, Chapter I being the westerly, at each end of
my churrigueresque Mexican cathedral, and all the gargoyles of the latter are
repeated with interest in this. While the doleful bells of one echo the doleful bells
of the other, just as the hopeless letters of Yvonne the Consul finally finds here
answer the hopeless letter of the Consul M. Laurelle reads precisely a year later in
Chapter I. ("Cape" 422)
As this statement makes Clear, the novel's narrative is a form that depends on a poetic structure as expressed through apparitions. The west "tower" of the novel stands in for perceived 'reality' and its alternate stands in for apparition. The letters that structure these
"towers" support this reading of the novel as metafiction. Ironically, the same failure that leads to the Consul's destruction propels the poetic state of language within this narrative.
When the Consul recalls his estranged wife, the mechanisms of narrative seem to decompose. The implication here is that a "corpse" cannot express itself.
Lowry writes years later in similar terms about October Ferry to Gabriola. "I think of practically nothing else but poetry," he admits in a letter to Ralph Gustafson
(Lowry 512). Lowry elaborates on this impulse to describe "a huge and sad novel about
Burrard Inlet called October Ferry to Gabriola that I sometimes feel could have been 203 better stated in about ten short poems - or even lines - instead." This letter describes the
subjective equipment of Lowry's fiction. Subjectivity in his metafiction does not rely so much on how subversive or radical it is, but the perspective it offers on his writing process.
In a way, this subjective aspect of Lowry's novels reveals his kinship to autobiography. His lyrical poems would appear to give readers direct access to his immediate thoughts and intimate concerns. George Woodcock argues this point. His introduction to the first collection of essays on Lowry's work concludes: "[fjhere is a sense - a visionary sense - in which Lowry, even when he wrote in prose, was entirely a poet" (xi). For Woodcock, Lowry was more of a poet than a novelist because of the way his fiction layers images. I will further this contention about Lowry as poet and examine his "ambitious poetic fictions" (ibid) in terms of his novels as poetry. I will attempt to intervene by avoiding any comparison between Lowry's life and his writing. Rather, by drawing upon poetry that he did not publish (which appeared after his death) to elucidate his prose narrative, I will emphasize the subjectivity of the experience of suffering within his metafiction.
A Frustrated Poet in Everyman
Malcolm Lowry conceived of Under the Volcano in 1937 while living in
Cueraavaca, Morelos, Mexico. He completed a draft of the short story while sitting at a splintered desk in the corner of the ramshackle apartment he shared with his first wife,
Jan Gabrial. This story grew into a novel during the ten years it took Lowry to write and 204
rewrite it. (Commentators and critics are apt to remind us that he also relocated, divorced
and remarried, salvaged the manuscript of his novel from a fire, and relapsed into
alcoholism during that decade.) He completed a draft of the novel in 1940 while sitting at
a scrounged table across from his second wife, Margerie Bonner, in a driftwood shack
outside Dollarton, British Columbia, Canada. Not only does the location of Lowry's
fiction stand out: its gestation was not constant. He turned away from the novel after publishers rejected the 1940 draft.
He also turned from writing prose to poetry. He collected a manuscript of poems written from 1934 to 1939, entitled "The Lighthouse Invites the Storm," which was repeatedly rejected for publication. Although Under the Volcano emerged fully formed in
1947 - at least, when compared to Lowry's previous novel, Ultramarine, published in
1933 - he produced nothing after. Once he died, however, Margerie Lowry brought several of his unpublished prose works to light. Canadian literary critic and poet Earle
Birney produced a volume of Lowry's poems as well. Because of their editorial efforts, we can compare Lowry's novels to the writing he could not publish. Whereas the primary characters in Under the Volcano and October Ferry to Gabriola are compelled to move on physically and spiritually, the speakers in "Lighthouse Invites the Storm" remain in place until they grow stagnant. The Consul in Under the Volcano drinks to still the shakes, but the unnamed speaker of Lowry's poem "Thirty Five Mescals in Cuautla" drinks to shake himself out of stillness. Moreover, Lowry was a habitual rewriter, almost to the point of paralysis; he often picked the corpses of his own unpublished material.
And, his obsessive rewriting leads us to read his work in terms of self-parody. 205
Under the Volcano plumbs the depths of a "drunk," an English Imperialist in
Mexico torn between two world wars, to such an extent that the novel never seems to leave behind the cigarette butts and spilled tequila on a barroom floor. The land outside extends from dark cantinas and dankfarolitos in Mexico to a mountain stream in Canada.
The Consul's own Faustian hell contrasts with his vision of the marital paradise he knew in the past. If there has been one sustained criticism of Lowry's work, it has followed these lines: he cannot escape his own head. He only writes about his own self-loathing or self-pity. (We are also reminded that these writings illustrate the ebbs and flows of
Lowry's own struggles with writing after the publication of Under the Volcano. It is common knowledge that he considered himself as infirm as Geoffrey Firmin.)
On one hand, Lowry is accused of writing autobiography, concerned only with his suffering and devoted to a sense of 'realism' to his audience, even if that experience of
'reality' is perceived as stream of consciousness fuelled by alcohol. Of course, there is some literal truth to that criticism. On the other hand, Lowry's fictional exploration of his own psyche tends to remain on that entropic level, leaving the link between him and his novel vague. Furthermore, Under the Volcano is a difficult novel to engage, requiring readers to interpret its central character above any narrative concerns. Of course, it is possible that Lowry's fiction is simply incoherent and resists simple interpretation.
Perhaps Lowry challenges readers to make connections between characters despite his fragmented plots.
Lowry demonstrates explicitly the link between a defrocked British Consul's internal conflict and his failure to express himself to Yvonne. Just as Yvonne failed 206
Geoffrey by cheating on him, he fails her by neglecting to write her; or so she thinks. The opening chapter of Under the Volcano contains the only example of the Consul's writing, a letter addressed to Yvonne he never sent. He sets out to express his belief that there is
"[a] frustrated poet in every man" (Lowry Volcano 41). Whether or not Lowry is a frustrated poet, his Consul is a frustrated "everyman."
Rather than being a veil that hides the process of narrative, the various apparitions in Under the Volcano expose the Consul's destruction through a poetry that threatens narrative development. Geoffrey's attempts to find le mot juste for Yvonne only speed his destruction. Those attempts also accelerate the destruction of the narrative, because the
Consul's experiences tear at narrative coherence. Accordingly, by showing fragments of his visions through the poetry resulting from the whole churrigueresque structure, the novel challenges traditional ideas about narrative construction. For most narratological theory, the story dimension of prose is the most vulnerable aspect of narrative. In fact, according to these theories, poetry emerges as a discursive mode that attempts to disrupt story while foregrounding the role that emotive language plays in the construction of a subjective experience. The poetry within Under the Volcano reveals the subject as a frustrated "writer" coming to terms with loss, and the narrative as metafiction about the loneliness of suffering for expression.
The Consul's complete immersion in his visions reveals the cause of his suffering, even as poetic imagery obscures that suffering. Lowry writes dreams, memories, and visions that initially seduce us with a series of metaphors, and eventually reveal his own writing process. Under the Volcano enacts this dynamic between the Consul and the reader on the level of narrative form. Just as the Consul becomes aware of his destructive tendencies, Lowry makes a connection to his process of writing through the Consul's apparitions; the reader becomes aware of this writing process through the poetic vision that is the novel itself. Lowry thus uses the poetry of apparitions in Under the Volcano to allow readers to empathize with the character who is at a loss for words. Ironically,
Lowry's characters express their losses as verbal excess. They try to ground themselves in the present through the peculiar logorrhea that a churrigueresque structure demands.
Channeling Bakhtin, Emile Benveniste locates this problem in the privileging of story at the expense of discourse. He notes that the latter constitutes "language appropriated by the individual as a practice."45 Building on the analysis of Benveniste and other structuralists, Genette questions these theoretical assumptions about the narrative mode. His interest in prose stems from his own readings of various nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels. He develops a theory of literary language that differentiates between "real language (that of the poet) and a virtual language (that which would have been used by 'simple, common expression')" whereby writers appropriate language to practice their trade (Genette "Figures" 47). Genette further suggests that discourse includes the language attributed by poets or narrators to their characters. Any difference between subjective and objective discourse is defined by "a strictly linguistic order" where "'subjective' discourse" requires the presence of self-reflexivity (Genette
"Frontiers" 138). Self-referential, or self-reflexive, fiction is a performance of discourse
Kristeva makes this connection in "Word, Dialogue, and Novel" (68). that is potentially performative. Generally, while reading the typical 'realistic' novel, we
invest in an overlap of story and discourse through a series of metaphors that take pains
to obscure the writing process, obliterating any traces of enunciation, and eliding the
labour of production. All doctrine and pronouncement aside, Lowry barely affords us
easement across a cultural void, an aspect of narrative to grab onto. The dream, memory,
or vision, at least in its traditional manifestation in literary realism, supplements a
superficially deceptive ideology. This ideology depends on hiding the laborious process
of writing in order to facilitate the illusion of apparition in linear time. Self-reflexivity,
then, becomes self-destructive.
In Under the Volcano, Lowry challenges this traditional conception of'realism'
as an ideological supplement. Visions (that are evoked by the letter Geoffrey never sent) become the means through which the Consul destroys himself for the sake of narrative.
Those apparitions operate by exposing the mechanisms of narrative, while at the same time they appear to make visible the genesis of writing, the moment of the Consul's
insertion into the literary 'tradition' that marked late nineteenth-century modernism.
Every apparition is in some sense a vision of origins. The Consul's visions provide the novel an opportunity to explicate Lowry's process and the origin of his writing.
Searching for an origin would open a gap within any explanation of a perception in particular: we can only explain the emergence of certain discursive structures relatively, in terms of their result, which means that we lack the proper terminology to grasp
'reality' or even 'realism.' In short, any attempt to explain 'reality' results in ideology that is unable to explain much at all. The question of origin becomes a gap within ideology, a moment of contingency within the ideological field of necessity. Any attempt to explain an origin runs into the problem that Kant diagnoses in The Critique of Pure
Reason, where he considers whether the world itself had a beginning. Kant finds that no explanation of origin can ever be definitive because we always seek the origin of this supposed origin. The search for an origin leads to an infinite regression. Just as reason cannot locate the origin of the world, an ideology cannot locate the origin of narrative order. After Kant, Derrida asserts that there is no origin without a subsequent event that affirms its originality. But apparitions, because they disrupt story and straightforward narrative explanation, can fill the gap in origin and offer us a way of understanding subjectivity and the writing subject as expressed in Lowry's poetic novels.
Again, that is not to suggest that Lowry's biography serves as the "origin" of his fiction. "Language is key to Lowry," Sherrill Grace notes in her introduction to a collection of essays on his works (14). "He was obsessed with words," she continues,
"with the anxieties of verbal influence from other writers." Grace argues that this sensitivity to language and its failures places his writing within a poststructuralist literary
'tradition.' Lowry also writes against his influences. Although Grace mentions the influence of many genres of verbal expression on Lowry's writing, she neglects to mention the effects Under the Volcano has on Lowry's readers. She also does not consider the influence of the writing he never released on the works he subsequently published. In her essay, "Recuperating Authority: Plagiarism as Pastiche?" Cynthia
Sugars further examines external influences upon Lowry's work. She posits that Lowry 210 both plagiarized his sources and appropriated his own words before asking "[h]ow original is he in his lack of originality" (Sugars 140). She suggests that critics either take
"Lowry as a postmodern master of parody and intertextuality," or simply trace "his frequent textual allusions ... or outlinings of his readings and researchings [.wc]." Both approaches turn Lowry's writing back toward an origin, tracing the allusions within his writing to source texts, or tracing his writing back to himself. Perhaps, as demonstrated here, these orientations toward an origin allow readers to play a part in opening a gap in ideology. Lowry attempts to make this gap visible; he shows us a philosophical aporia we would otherwise be unable to see. That is to say, as readers, we must construct the narrative that is self-destructed, making it nearly impossible to isolate the moment of self- destruction itself. Under the Volcano demands that the Consul gives up what he does not have, and this elaboration of nothing, an act of metafictional suffering, constitutes the character as such.
The following interpretation will require some further theoretical equipment: I owe a debt to Jonathan Culler's determination of apostrophe as a trope for writing a listener into the story as audience. Again, apostrophe addresses an absence. It is a concept of communication by digression that emphasizes the act of communication itself rather than what it attempts to communicate. A metafictional approach to Lowry's writing leads to a parodic understanding of textual production in which an author and his characters both formulate an aesthetic that Culler terms apostrophe. Whereas Lowry apostrophizes writing itself, his characters experience apparitions as a form of apostrophe for those they cannot address. 211
The problem with Lowry's or the Consul's attempt at apostrophe is this tacit assumption: both the author and his character imagine that an audience can attain a pure reading position. Culler's aesthetic provides a way for the audience to experience how the speaker implicates readers in what occurs on the page. Even though absence is inherent in this reading situation, no reader can remain completely absent, even from a poetic novel. 6 Some element of fascination remains in play and continues to involve readers in the events on the page, or else we would simply close the book. Apostrophe's potency in art relies on the audience as backdrop, context, and referent: a definable realm for the powerful, dual-functioning second-person pronoun both to belong to and to transcend. In other words, apostrophe has to fail to some extent in order to draw readers into the narrative. The successfully absent reader is no longer a reader. The absence also refers to the writer's role in metafiction. We do not have to attribute the writing to Lowry himself because he produces "writerly" novels. In this sense, he absents himself from his metafiction.
The rhetorical relation between a speaker and an absent audience captures the metafictional function of Under the Volcano and October Ferry to Gabriola. The poetic state of language in Lowry's fiction demonstrates the possibilities of poetry-as- apostrophe rather than poetry esse. Poetry in Lowry's fiction presents itself as apostrophe: its dual identity as both mouth and ear, speaking both to and for its audience, is a significant part of the authority it claims in every "you." Apostrophe is a form of
46 Kroetsch draws on Culler to articulate the tenuous relationship between "a lyric strategy and the narrative desire" within Lowry's short story collection Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place ("Orpheus" 163). Lowry himself not only called his novels "poetic," but he developed within the text a reworking of narrative form. Kroetsch investigates these solipsistic tendencies in Lowry's fiction (ibid). 212 address that is eligible for the conceptual absorption, containment, and representation of absence. But Lowry does not create an absence in the way we might suspect, by deconstructing the binary opposition between apparition and 'reality,' between fiction and the outside world. Deconstruction does not hold sway with Lowry's novels, unlike novels by other avant-garde writers. Rather than complicate or even undo binary oppositions, Lowry revels in them. He pushes these contrasts in his work to the limit. In his novels, we see stark contrasts in character, in discourse, and in narrative structure.
This is apparent, for example, in the separation of realms in Under the Volcano: the drunken emptiness of the Consul's everyday drudgery contrasts absolutely with the hope
- "with a capital H" (Lowry "Cape" 416) - he experiences with his apparitions. The baroque structure of the Consul's visions calls attention to this difference. These contrasts carry over to October Ferry to Gabriola, contributing to the poetic quality of the style, tone, and technique in both novels.
On Under the Volcano
Jonathan Cape's letter to Lowry phrases the differences between these worlds in terms of "objectivity" and "subjectivity." The "subject" of the latter term does not imply that Lowry himself is at the centre of Under the Volcano. Treading carefully, Cape hesitates to call the novel an autobiography per se. In his words,
the main defect of Under the Volcano, from which the others spring, comes from
something irredeemable. It is that the author's equipment, such as it is, is 213
subjective rather than objective, a better equipment, in short, for a certain kind of
poet than a novelist, (qtd. in Lowry "Cape" 388)
Years later, Lowry addresses the tenor of Cape's criticism with his preface to the French translation of Under the Volcano in 1949. He suggests: "the mental baggage of the book is subjective rather than objective; it would better suit a poet -1 do not say a good poet - than a novelist" (Lowry "Preface" 6). Lowry strikes a self-depreciating tone by asking readers to indulge him by carrying the difficult burden of this "baggage." In this sense, the burden is the subjective experience of reading and writing poetry.
"Besides," Lowry adds, "poems often call for several readings before their meaning is revealed - is exposed in the mind as I believe Hopkins said" (Lowry
"Preface" 6). This reference to Gerard Manley Hopkins is particularly telling. With these words, Lowry is referring to the notes that Robert Bridges wrote for a 1918 collection of
Hopkins's poetry. Bridges declares, "the grammar [of a poem] should expose and enforce the meaning, not have to be determined by the meaning" (5). This note applies to the way
Lowry encourages us to read Under the Volcano. Such an approach to the novel leads us to read each personal pronoun twice: in one sense, the Consul says "I" as a self- designation; in another sense, the "I" stands for the reader sharing the Consul's loss through the excesses of poetry. The "you" of his apostrophe collapses into the "I" of our shared subjectivity. Either way, Under the Volcano requires readers to project ourselves onto the Consul in order to make sense of his apparitions.
Lowry's apparitions would appear to reveal where we direct our empathy. By presenting readers with an alternate realm vastly different from the Consul's perception 214
of 'reality,' Lowry creates a situation where the distorting power of desire becomes visible to us. Our engagement with the apparitions that Under the Volcano allows us to
experience a poetic state of language that is completely unfamiliar. Lowry's critics generally grapple with the poetic qualities of Lowry's language in order to determine whether his writing is modern or postmodern. Novelist Anthony Burgess exemplifies a modernist apologist for Lowry's fiction. In an article chastising English "provincialism," he claims that Lowry is a writer who saw that "the novel-form's only hope of survival lay in its being taken over by poets" (Burgess 74). Stephen Spender's introduction to Under the Volcano argues with other modernists about the "modern breakdown of values" within the novel (x). However, he implies that Lowry has written a symbolic narrative that represents passing time with conflicting images. Burgess finds that Lowry's view of life is individualistic in a' way that the views of his contemporary writers are not. He concludes that in Lowry's work, the author himself tends to merge solipsistically into his protagonist. Malcolm Bradbury returns Lowry to the company of "leading modernists"
(79). Although Bradbury calls Lowry "a romantic autodidact," his argument would lead to a poststructuralist reading of Lowry's fiction. Put simply, the postmodern approach to
Lowry's fiction emphasizes his use of intertextuality and concludes that he was primarily interested in depicting the process of writing and the failure of expression.47 His use of his own poetry within his novels lends credence to poststructuralist interpretations.
47 It is a secondary concern in this chapter to come to terms with the incongruity of Lowry's position within contemporary Canadian fiction and the aesthetic that Lowry develops in his novels. Lowry's work has occasioned some important works of recent criticism. Interestingly, these collections are generally unconcerned with Lowry's nationality. Grace, a prominent Lowry critic, edited a collection of essays titled Swinging the Maelstrom. She argues that since Lowry was "a meticulous, obsessive reviser," he must be 215
On "The Lighthouse Invites the Storm"
Under the Volcano begins with the direct link between the Consul's loss of
Yvonne and his realization of the self-destruction that will lead to his death. The opening is elegiac: a physician, Arturo Diaz Vigil, and the Consul's childhood friend, Jacques
Laurelle, mourn him on the Day of the Dead exactly one year after he died. Both men eulogize their soul-sick friend who endured "such continuous tragedies" (Lowry Volcano
5). M. Laurelle relates the time he and Geoffrey lived as houseguests of the English poet
Abraham Taskerson. He recalls how Taskerson shared this particular trait with the
Consul: "the drunker they became, the more sober they should appear" (Lowry Volcano
19). The pariah dog crossing his path reminds M. Laurelle of the Consul's exile in
Mexico. Lowry then turns to an image of M. Laurelle reading the letter Geoffrey wrote to
Yvonne but never mailed. (There is further implication that M. Laurelle is overwhelmed with guilt about his affair with her.) The Consul's letter falls out of the book of
Elizabethan plays that M. Laurelle borrowed from his friend. Within the pages of this letter, Geoffrey implores Yvonne not "to sink down to oblivion in this dingy fashion -"
(Lowry Volcano 42). He interrupts that thought to cite the one-hundred-twenty-first
Psalm, which also foreshadows the Consul's last words: "'Christ,' he remarked, puzzled,
'this is a dingy way to die'" (Lowry Volcano 389). The Consul's letter ends with a plea for Yvonne's return. Still, the beginning of the novel implies that when Yvonne comes considered "in interdisciplinary, interartistic, and syncretic terms" (3). Asals and Tiessen edited and introduced another collection of essays, A Darkness that Murmured. They argue that Lowry's fiction illustrates the poststructuralist view of language fragmenting. back to find the Consul drunk in a cantina, he cannot tell if she is real or merely a vision.
Lowry establishes early that these bright memories of Yvonne (despite her betrayal)
contrast with the loneliness of a Mexican cantina.
Through the insertion of this letter within the funereal introduction to Under the
Volcano, the novel emphasizes the link between Yvonne's departure and return. "Do you remember the Strauss song we used to sing?" the Consul writes to Yvonne: "Once a year the dead live for one day. Oh come to me again as once in May" (Lowry Volcano 41).
With these words, the Consul simultaneously refers to Strauss's "Allerseelen," the eighth and final song of his Opus 10 cycle, citing words by Hermann von Gilm. The rhyme in his letter refers to an untitled poem from "The Comedian" section of Lowry's "The
Lighthouse Invites the Storm." The poem begins by debasing its drunken speaker and ends with a plea from the semi-zombie:
Until you live again what dies unread:
Then remember what the Strauss song said:
Just once a year the dead live for one day . . .
- Oh, come to me again as once in May. (Lowry "XIII" 78; punctuation as in
original)
This speaker addresses his poem to an anonymous second person. The poem opens incredulously, questioning how "you" search "a ravaged heart for anguish" only to find
"dead grief (ibid). The allusion in the novel refers to both this poem and the song by
Strauss. Although that dual reference would point to Lowry the writer as a determinate subject, the anguish of loss and the grief of drunken loneliness deserve most of our attention. In order to become a subject, the Consul must lose his sense of integrity. That
is, he must learn that suffering does not make him authentic or original. Genette suggests
that the object of poetics is not text itself, but its "transtextuality," which is the metaphorical relationship between texts as an aesthetic practice. His determination of transtextuality suggests that literature operates through intertextual references that do not result from direct imitation or mimicry.
Genette's description of transtextuality from Palimpsests: Literature in the
Second Degree applies to the importance of Geoffrey's letter to the remainder of Under
the Volcano. According to Genette, "the subject of poetics is transtextuality, or the textual transcendence of the text, which I have already defined roughly as 'all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts'" {Palimpsests
1). Whereas parody, travesty, and transposition result from textual transformation, pastiche, caricature, and plagiarism are all products of imitation. Genette favours a synchronic mode of comparison over a diachronic approach to the evolution of presentation. Broadly, he is interested in "types of discourse, modes of enunciation, literary genres" within a single text (ibid). The text turns toward another text because of its own experience of lack. Allusion leads to a partial destruction of previous text, along with those texts it potentially influences. Following Genette's notion of "open structuralism," Lowry's poem is a hypotext onto which the narrative hypertext grafts itself. Geoffrey's letter is an additional hypertext that postdates the remaining text. Under the Volcano thus demonstrates what Genette calls literature in the second degree. 218
Because Geoffrey's letter prophesizes Yvonne's return as well as his own end, he
effectively writes her end along with his own destruction, which partly explains the
ambivalence of his feelings for her. Immediately after the Consul implores Yvonne to
return, he turns self-conscious: "I am being completely maudlin certainly" (Lowry
Volcano 41). He recalls the gardens through which they walked, and the metaphorical
"Eden" out of which they were cast. On one hand, the Consul remembers their
relationship and desires the life she offered him (the life he lacks). On the other hand, the
Consul envies her freedom. Both the doting husband and the abusive lover are in one
sense a response to his initial loss, and in another sense a response to ongoing self-
destruction. This self-destruction is his subject and the reason for each sentence he writes.
His letter constitutes the same sort of apostrophe that Lowry's untitled poem of lament contains.
Geoffrey's letter initiates the performance of transtextuality in the novel. The first chapter of Under the Volcano ends with M. Laurelle burning the Consul's unsent letter.
The smoldering letter allows us to see the role that the Consul's self-destruction plays in the writing process. This loss reveals a world awash in alcohol. But this desire is not, as
Heidegger would put it, our initial mode of being-in-the-world. As readers, we constitute another realm of desire through a vicarious experience of the Consul's anguish. Though we can only access his suffering through the vehicle of narrative, an understanding of it is crucial for our ability to follow the relationship between Lowry's depiction of his writing process and the destruction of Geoffrey Firmin. 219
On "For Under the Volcano"
Chapter II of Under the Volcano begins with an anonymous voice insisting, "A corpse will be transported by express I" (Lowry 45). The narrative transports us to a year before the events of the first chapter. Yvonne hears this phrase recited by a "tireless resilient voice" as she nears a farolito euphemistically called "The Bella Vista." From a nearby cantina, the Consul also hears another disembodied voice reply, "[w]hy shouldn't a corpse be transported by express?" (The reason is that the Mexican National Railways does not want bodies decomposing en route to their grave.) With these voices attributed to no one, Lowry draws attention to the structure of his novel.48 The Consul's imminent self-destruction urges the narrative forward. Under the Volcano will bury him. We read much of the novel's second chapter through Yvonne's eyes, and we watch with her as the
Consul slowly drowns himself at the cantina bar. She whispers, "Geoffrey," and stops herself, "wondering if she seemed pathetic" (Lowry Volcano 50). Although we read how
Yvonne's return elicits an anxious look from her husband, we do not read what Geoffrey sees. Lowry expresses this absence through fragmented narrative form, or through the absence of the expected form, the reverse image of the Consul's perception.
Lowry's poem titled "For Under the Volcano" provides a comparable mise-en- scene that also stresses absence rather than presence. The poem takes a third-person approach to describing a seafood restaurant in Mexico City from a distance. Typically,
48 An earlier version of the novel, submitted for publication in 1940, tosses off this line. In fact, Lowry's narrator points to the meaninglessness of the expression. As Yvonne - here the Consul's daughter - nears her father, he mutters: "A corpse will be transported by express" (Lowery Volcano; 1940 68). Although the Consul says it "to no one in particular," the phrase speaks for itself. The verb "will" would indicate to readers that the Consul cannot survive the day (of the dead). 220
Lowry breaks lengthy noun phrases into lines that begin with an article or a conjunction.
This draws out the implied delirium of the poem, punctuated by a sense of apprehension that "[t]here will be no morrow, tomorrow is over" (Lowry "Volcano" Selected 23). This ominous tone even informs the way the poem has been categorized. Bibliographers argue whether Lowry completed the poem and titled it "For Under the Volcano" before the publication of the novel. The last lines of the poem suggest as much:
Death so far away from home and wife I fear. And prayed for my sick life -
"A corpse should be transported by express," said the Consul Mysteriously, waking up suddenly. (Lowry "Volcano" Selected 24)49
Here, Lowry's characteristic technique of accumulating modifiers suggests that the poem is a fragment of his novel-in-process. The mood of the poem anticipates the novel's opening, with "the rain on the train outside creeping, creeping, / only emptiness now"
(Lowry "Volcano" Selected 23-24). Ironically, the poem evokes a sense of emptiness despite its ornate language. It ends with a single speaker mourning lost love (along with a sense of himself). Then again, this poem's relationship to the novel remains somewhat tenuous. It is irrelevant whether this voice is speaking for the Consul within Under the
An earlier version of the poem, written and rewritten sometime between 1937 and 1938, ends differently. Birney, Lowry's editor, has reworked these last lines: Death so far away from home and wife He feared and prayed for his sick life - So far from home and lane He feared while his standing by 'A course should be transported by express,' said the Consul mysteriously waking up suddenly. (Lowry "Volcano" Collected 103) It is worth noting that Lowry does not break the last line. The last line of the poem is purely prose. He cut the end of the last line (beginning "mysteriously") from an earlier draft. Lowry casts this long version in the third person, as though he is distancing his character from the Consul's own words. As a result, the revised poem reads more like a suicide note than a story. 221
Volcano. Whereas the speaker in the poem makes a suggestion in the subjunctive mood
("should be transported"), the unattributed voice in the novel phrases the suggestion in
the imperative ("will be transported"). Just as the speaker in "For Under the Volcano"
presages his counterpart's experience of loneliness, the poem appears to parody the
language and tone of the novel.
The poem describes the vacuum that Yvonne causes within Under the Volcano.
Lowry continually stalls the narrative development of the novel to describe Geoffrey's visions of the moment she left. Apparitions, therefore, must carry much of the novel's
emotional weight. And, the past is most often expressed through poetic imagery. As Chris
Ackerley notes, "[m]uch of the novel is in fact composed in units that might reasonably be called prose poems, and a compositional method of the poetry will explain much about that of the novel" (230). (Ackerley is a prominent Lowry critic who provides the explanatory notes for Lowry's collected poems with frequent references to his finest novel.) He goes on to call Under the Volcano "Lowry's finest poem" (Ackerley 229).
Much of the sense of absence or emptiness the novel elicits stems from the poetry contained within its churrigueresque structure. We can never read a scene and experience the presence we are used to when reading a novel. Those gaps in the present time create a realm that entices aspirations by emphasizing what cannot be seen or known.
In Under the Volcano, the present moves slowly, structured around a circuitous path to the object of desire. The delay becomes most evident in the final chapter when the
Consul enters the farolito. He reads a letter from Yvonne that he neglected to open. The
Consul tears at the envelope '"- Do you remember to-morrow?' he read. No, he thought; the words sank like stones in his mind. - It was a fact that he was losing touch with his situation" (Lowry Volcano 358). He rereads the passage and absorbs the grief she wrote of: "Do you remember to-morrow? It is our wedding anniversary ... I have not had one word from you since I left. God, it is this silence that frightens me" (Lowry Volcano
359). There is no sense of tomorrow in either the poem or the novel that share the same name. The Consul aggravates the fragmentation of his reading with mescal. Lowry moves us to endure a similar fragmentation; we are to "read this sentence over and over again, the same sentence, the same letter" (ibid). In and of itself, this is hardly unusual. What is distinctive is how much time passes between his reading and rereading. The typical
'realistic' novel would compress the time it takes him to read the letter because readers are already familiar with it; instead, Lowry elongates it. This time stretch implies we must endure the very "subjectivity" that Jonathan Cape criticized in the novel. Such an experience of reading signifies the temporal absence within the novel's narrative structure. In Under the Volcano, desire revolves around absence and depends on the continual failure of its object to become present. The Consul rereads the letter and hopes to engage Yvonne from a distance. Then again, he never replies to her. He resigns himself to his own pain rather than hers. When Yvonne finds him at the farolito, he is too far gone to return to her.
More on "The Lighthouse Invites the Storm"
We will return to Under the Volcano after summarizing the publication history of
"The Lighthouse Invites the Storm" in order to analyze the influence of his novel on his poetry. This poetry collection does not exist, at least not in the terms (themselves subject to revision) in which Lowry conceived it. It was to have been a poetry collection in several movements - named, "Cantina," "The Comedian," and "The Roar of the Sea and the Darkness" - built around apostrophe. Lowry wrote a cycle of sea shanties and drinking songs within other poems that describe what occurs in watering holes. The collection was more a coil, a mise en abime of images, which finally unwound. It was made up of poems Lowry revised, though not to his satisfaction, poems he rewrote in a furor, poems that were lost in a fire, and poems that were incomplete. Of course, he did not live to see a single poem published. "The self-drowned poet" left the manuscript behind for Birney, his friend and fellow writer, to edit for publication (10). Selected
Poems of Malcolm Lowry bore Birney's heavy editorial hand. He cut lines and rewrote others. Merely by the fact of its existence, though, this posthumous poetry collection would seem to betray Under the Volcano. With his novel, Lowry rewrote, borrowed from, and parodied several of his own poems.
If Lowry's novels split into realms of perceived 'reality' and apparition, his
Selected Poems represents a worthwhile diversion about how we might consider the dynamics of this division. Birney's introduction radicalizes this split with a bold insinuation. He insists that Lowry desired only to write about the excesses and ecstasies of drinking. Lowry's poetry creates a 'reality' that lacks coherence and thus displays emphatically the role that perceptions play in rendering his own experiences meaningful.
Apparitions in his Selected Poems lack even a sense of temporality. Events occur in the poems in a random order, without any logical progression. That said, Lowry's biography supplies a narrative arc for Birney. He puts it this way: "The words are the man" (7).
Birney pushes his rhetoric further to say Lowry "wrote or re-wrote several hundred poems, in which he set down, without disguise, himself (8). There is no chronology within his poems because aspiration does not move speakers forward. Instead, these poems circle around desire, in this case, the possibility for a speaker to describe his apparitions. Typically, Lowry's poems move according to compulsion rather than according to the dictates of time. His speakers recover the past and rediscover the people they have lost.
In contrast, Lowry's novels tend to proceed according to a standard temporal logic disrupted by poetic interlude. Events occur in a chronological order and follow the laws of causality. This is precisely the opposite of what we might expect from literary realism: we are accustomed to thinking of poetry as an imaginative flight that allows us to violate the various exigencies - including, perhaps especially, that of temporality - that constrain our reading of perceptions and apparitions. Lowry's novels reveal the role that apparitions play in threatening our sense of temporality. By providing a narrative and temporal structure through characters, plot, and story, Lowry delivers us from simple repetition with his depiction of desire. Ironically, Birney's introduction reverses the autobiographical explanation of Lowry's poetry. It is possible that Birney claims the speakers in Lowry's poetry serve as nothing more than a metonym for self-reference; the speakers themselves become the referents in the meaning-layered lines. That this reversal seems circular is a fact about semantics, not about ambition and the creativity of a writer who strips his writing of all objective contexts. It is worth noting, though, that Under the Volcano parodies these poems just as they parody the novel. In other words, the poems in
"The Lighthouse Invites the Storm" appear in the words by Lowry's characters within
Under the Volcano and October Ferry to Gabriola.
On "In the Oaxaca Jail"
We will reenter Under the Volcano with another reference to Lowry's letter to
Cape. Lowry insists that his editor revisit the "most important theme in the book" in the section where the Consul reads a warning in Spanish on a sign over the entrance to a garden ("Cape" 407).50 "The Consul slightly mistranslates this sign," Lowry notes, but
"the real translation can be in a certain sense even more horrifying." The Consul departs from 'reality' as he longs for the past. The more alone the Consul feels, the more he aspires to regain what he has lost, even if this means that he grasps at apparitions.
Under the Volcano inflicts this sense of loneliness on its readers. Reading the novel, we must endure the empty memories and visions of the Consul's desperation.
Loneliness pushes us, as it does the Consul, into the position of the desiring subject: like him, we experience ourselves in the middle of a land that does not make sense, and we desire to reach into the past and gain access to its mysteries. If we experience this desire at all, it is because meaning seems to lurk everywhere in language but is just out of reach.
More specifically, Lowry refers in the Cape letter to a passage of the novel wherein the
Consul drinks to the "hair of the dog." He relates the events of sobriety to an unrelenting
50 Indeed, in an earlier draft, the Consul gazes at the sign before his eyes close in death (Lowry Volcano; 1940 376). storm as "an inconceivable anguish of horripilating hangover thunderclapping about his skull" (Lowry Volcano 132). Appropriately, his thoughts scatter as he sips "the therapeutic drink" while sitting beside the three-legged pariah dog (Lowry Volcano 133).
Furthermore, he surveys "his garden. Oddly enough, it did not strike him as being nearly so 'ruined' as it had earlier appeared" (Lowry Volcano 134). He observes a sign:
(-.Le gusta este jardin? it asked . . .
£LE GUSTA ESTE JARDIN?
<,QUE ES SUYO?
jEVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!
The Consul stared back at the black words on the sign without moving. (Lowry
Volcano 134-135)
These words speak to the" Consul as he feels relegated to the margins, outside human subjectivity.
However, the Consul's translation of the sign casts him out of this garden. This figurative eviction indicates a loss of life, but not necessarily a death. He remains unmoved by these "[sjimple words, simple and terrible words" that recall for him the sensation of "an agony chill" that accompanied the "iced mescal [he] drunk in the Hotel
Canada on the morning of Yvonne's departure" (Lowry Volcano 135). Another anonymous voice from behind the Consul reads the sign, which leads him to doubt the translation: "Perhaps the sign didn't mean quite that - for alcohol sometimes affected the
Consul's Spanish adversely (or perhaps the sign itself, inscribed by some Aztec, was wrong) - but it was near enough." He replies with apostrophe offered to no one in particular: "Ah the frightful cleft, the eternal horror of opposites!" (Lowry Volcano 137).
Just as Adam was forced out of Eden for gaining knowledge of good and evil, the Consul
learns that he will languish in desire without Yvonne. He proceeds to ponder the possibility that Adam had simply grown bored with paradise: "What if his punishment really consisted ... in his having to go on living there, alone, of course - suffering, unseen, cut off from God" (Lowry Volcano 140). Moreover, the scorched earth of
Mexico connotes that "Eden" is located elsewhere, in the years past.
Apparitions cause the Consul to turn away from his present concerns. He longs for a woman who remains absent or at least concealed, but he does not even know enough about her to understand what caused her to leave. He also does not realize that the
Union Militar has taken him for an "English spy, or 'espider'" (Lowry "Cape" 403).
Lowry himself describes the Consul in terms of mistaken aspirations:
he is indeed being followed throughout the book, it is as if the Consul himself is
not aware of this and is afraid of something quite different: for lack of an object
[sic] therefore it was the writer's reasonable hope that this first sense of being
followed might settle on the reader and haunt him instead, (ibid)
In the second chapter of the novel, the Consul's desire does not have the coordinates that might point him toward Yvonne. It is in this sense that apparitions cause him to suffer: his desire has no particular direction. Richard Cross suggests Lowry's "commitment to a complex symbolic mode" throughout Under the Volcano does "not exclude, but rather deepen[s] a capacity for the realistic rendering of both psyche and circumstance" (90-91).
Cross accuses Lowry of pursuing modernist poetics. Lowry represents the conflict between perceived 'reality' and symbolic apparition through the Consul's consciousness.
Furthermore, the speaker from an untitled poem within "The Lighthouse Invites the
Storm" suffers from a similarly conflicted consciousness.
The garden image of Under the Volcano is found in a poem Birney titled "In the
Oaxaca Jail" for Selected Poems. The poem begins with confession - "I have known a city of dreadful night" - and proceeds to evoke a sense of loss - "The noises of the night are cries for help / From the town and from the garden which evicts those who destroy!"
(Lowry "Jail" 28). The stilted nature of conversation between the poem's speaker, an
"alcoholic child," and "a murderer" reveals the suffering that happens every day at this bar. Neither of these figures displays any life in the scene, which is what makes the poem difficult to read. They all live in exile. Under the Volcano depicts a realm of self- destruction. The Consul exists here as a dissatisfied, desiring subject. But, because the dissatisfaction exists in the very structure of the novel itself- in the narrative mise-en- scene, in the worlds within the novel - it becomes evident that the Consul simply cannot rouse himself: the dissatisfaction has a constitutive status for him and, the novel implies, for the subject as such. The Consul necessarily exists in a realm of aspiration where his only satisfaction is in visions of a past to which he cannot return.
On "The Lighthouse Invites the Storm"
Despite what we might think, the Consul's drunken frustration does not lead directly to visions. Toward the end of Under the Volcano, the Consul endures his loneliness without recourse to comforting apparitions. A narrative interruption follows this eruption to Yvonne about her infidelity: "I can never forgive you deeply enough'
(Lowry Volcano 207). Lowry strikes upon a metaphor for this suffering as the Consul
retreats to M. Laurelle's room in the Bella Vista:
Suddenly he felt something never felt before with such shocking certainty. It was
that he was in hell himself. At the same time he became possessed of a curious
calm. The inner ferment within him, the squalls and eddies of nervousness, were
held again in check ... Parian - the Farolito? He said to himself. The Lighthouse,
the lighthouse that invites the storm, and lights it! (Lowry Volcano 209)
Convinced he has lost Yvonne again, the Consul sits alone with little to do but drink
himself into an abyss. Lowry suggests here that the Consul can endure her absence as
long as some sort of figurative "lighthouse" remains visible to him. Ironically, this
lighthouse causes him to acknowledge an intense sense of lack, and he searches for
apparitions only at the moment when he considers that he cannot restore his life to order.
In other words, the farolito in Parian warmly beckons the Consul to his death.
Lowry's novel articulates the Consul's perceptions and apparitions of emptiness
in the same terms as his poem, "The lighthouse invites the storm." At first, it appears this poem has little in common, apart from its title and its opening line, with Under the
Volcano. Lowry describes a "tempest" pushing along a "tall freighter" whose captain
cannot distinguish the lighthouse warning from uninterrupted flashes of lightening
(Lowry "Lighthouse" 18). The image of the waves that conceal rocks binds Lowry's poem to the theme of suffering and self-destruction in his novel. An earlier draft of the poem, written and revised from 1934-1936, ends differently: "And what shall we, what
shall we not, tolerate / Today from chaos, what?" (Lowry "XII" 91). The speaker of the
earlier poem elaborates upon the "chaos" of an "unshot albatross and Icarus' circus
plunge." This earlier version of the poem ends with a comparison of two infamous falls:
the Ancient Mariner who is cursed by a dead albatross, and a master artisan's son who
flew on manufactured wings too close to the sun. Both of these downfalls forge a
thematic connection to the Consul as all the fallen men welcome their end. They all walk
a tight wire, fire a cannon, or grasp at the light that burns them. These apparitions reveal
the depth of loss and loneliness at the end of Under the Volcano that Lowry expresses
with poetic language in a narrative system.
On "Thunder Beyond Popocatepetl"
In this sense at "The Bella Vista," the Consul nearly comes to forgive Yvonne.
His inability to extend forgiveness exposes a characteristic frustration with expression. In terms of narrative, this textual frustration is not a literal event but a metaphorical inability to communicate a particular meaning. As Todorov contends in his essay "Poetics and
Criticism," "[t]he literary work does not have a form and a content but a structure of
significations whose relations must be apprehended" (41). Lowry's language in Under the Volcano operates on Todorov's principles of poetic narrative: embeddings, parallelism, and allegorism. Reading the novel means we must comprehend the total of these symbolic effects, rather than separately consider plot, character, or theme. As
Lowry writes to Jonathan Cape, "I intended somehow the feeling of hope per se to 231 transcend even one's interest in the characters" (416). In other words, he strives to convey "hope" through allegorical means. The Consul's aspirations mean less to the novel than the catharsis portrayed through the poetic language within his visions. Just as we see the smoke from the Consul's burning letter fill his room in Chapter 1, he sees white birds fly in Chapter VII.
With the pariah dog following him, the Consul grows concerned that he has been thrown from "the animal kingdom" as well (Lowry Volcano 239). He feels claustrophobia as visions of insects, beasts, and "people without ideas" encircle. The
Consul whispers - "Dispense usted, por Dios" (You give, by God) - before repeating a phrase that he remembers from childhood:
"For God sees how timid and beautiful you really are, and the thoughts of hope
that go with you like little white birds -"
The Consul stood up and suddenly declaimed to the dog:
"Yet this day, pichicho, shalt thou be with me in -" But the dog hopped
away in terror on three legs and slunk under the door, (ibid)
The source of the Consul's hope is not, as we might expect from this cliched phrase, simply a reference to Christ's crucifixion. Instead, he simultaneously refers to Yeats's poem, "The White Birds," and Chekhov's play, The Seagull.51 Yeats's and Chekhov's
51 The speaker of Yeats's poem "would we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea!" (37). He proposes birds are forgotten by "Time" and freed of "Sorrow." He does not wish that they would become celestial beings, but simply that they would flee "numberless islands." His wish for metamorphosis is more modest than heavenly transcendence. Similarly, at the conclusion of Chekhov's play, Treplyov, a scornful playwright, places a seagull at the feet of an actor in his play. Nina, the actor insists, "I'm a gull," before reversing her opinion: "[fjhat's wrong. I'm an actress. Ah, yes!" (Chekhov 801). She cannot separate 232
ironic use of this image prevents us from reading their work straight. Lowry employs a
similar irony. The link between the dog and the Consul derives from a desire for
acknowledgment. As Barthes puts it in Pleasure of the Text, literature is no longer seen as
an object of desire, but becomes inseparable from the writing subject. "Text means
tissue," Barthes reminds us (64). The text emerges at the point where the speaking subject
opens to question. In Under the Volcano, Lowry pulls a carpet of quotations from under the Consul. Geoffrey's difficulty in revealing his desire for Yvonne has become an effect of language in the novel.
If the Consul's vision of white birds symbolizes hope, the apparition is false. It narrates or temporalizes an experience of loss that has no temporal existence. The Consul is a figure of loss who learns to revel in his loneliness; to narrate this loss is to imagine him returning to the time before Yvonne left. In doing so, the vision of circling birds creates a sense of paranoia in the Consul: rather than seeing a way out of suffering, he sees what is responsible for it (his subdued fury in response to Yvonne's infidelity).
Clearly, the Consul lived in a desolate world even before Yvonne cheated on him. In one sense, the Consul's apparitions represent the passing of their relationship. In another sense, these visions provide him with a unique glance at what Yvonne took from him.
This vision is a metaphorical vehicle that provides an insight about subjectivity in Under the Volcano.
herself from the final role she has chosen to play. Just as Treplyov shot the seagull to express his discontent, he shoots himself to end his suffering. The insight of the Consul's vision derives from the relationship that occurs in writing and the process of narrative itself. In addition, Lowry further explores this
apparition in his poem, "Thunder Beyond Popocatepetl." Lowry makes clear the
connection between the speaker's loss and his aspiration to know more than he can see.
The poem opens with the speaker observing "Black thunderclouds mass up against the wind, / High-piled beyond Popocatepetl" (Lowry "Popocatepetl" 22). It is significant that the Consul circles a volcano by that name throughout Lowry's novel. Only, no one in
Under the Volcano sees Popocatepetl's peak through the mass of clouds that perpetually obscure it. In the poem, Lowry evokes a sense of confusion and danger with the image of the volcano threatening to erupt while surrounded by smoke-like clouds. The poem concludes with apostrophe:
Reason remains although your mind forsakes
It; and white birds higher fly against the thunder
Than ever flew yours, where Chekhov said was peace,
When the heart changes and the thunder breaks, (ibid)
Here, the speaker tells of the breaking storm with white birds that relieve his disquieted mind. He expresses a calm that follows his grief. Resulting from this sequence of events, the poem connects the speaker's perceptions to his readers. Despite their seeming distance, Lowry's poem emphasizes here the interconnection of the speaker and the reader.
As Lowry indicates with these white birds, apparitions provide a way out of hopelessness. Visions in Under the Volcano have a radical potential because they can render visible the Consul's desperation. They also serve to undermine character, plot, and
ultimately narrative coherence. This disruption occurs because the Consul believes he is
imagining doves, or perhaps, pigeons. He experiences a vague sense of lack, but never
grasps exactly what bars his access to hope. In this realm, Yvonne is simply absent. But,
in the realm of the Consul's apparitions, she becomes present and seemingly accessible.
The illusion of her accessibility allows the Consul to see what he could previously only
sense. The vision provided by this experience enables him to struggle against the self-
destruction upon which his narrative is based.
On "Thirty-Five Mescals in Cuautla"
Although the Consul suffers before the farolito, an encounter at the bar forces him to consummate his self-destruction. The unavoidable dissatisfaction of his existence under the volcano gives way to an image of violent reverie and thus presents a turn from the past to the present, from absence to presence. Awash in alcohol, "swimming" after a prostitute, the Consul nears his end in a humid backroom of the farolito. "Mescal" is the first word of Chapter XII (Lowry Volcano 351). The Consul feels it necessary to shout this order over "the ticking of his watch, his heart, his conscious, a clock somewhere."
This "ticking" undermines the Consul's attempt to regain a sober composure. It is a premonition that winds up the tension at the end of the novel. Lowry describes the
Consul's calm with a comparison to the "remote sound" that he suspects comes "from far below" like the sound "of rushing water, of subterranean collapse" (ibid). The sound of a stream beneath the surface bleeds into Popocatepetl seething nearby. The Consul 235 proceeds to stare outside at that volcano through the distorting lens of a bottleneck.
Indeed, he feels certain that he has more in common with the embalmed worm inside the bottle than anyone outside of it. Lowry illustrates this connection with reference to the novel's title the moment the Consul realizes he is caught "[u]nder the volcano!" (Lowry
Volcano 353). The Consul, like Dr. Faustus, turns to "a clock pointing to six" and wonders whether his time has expired (Lowry Volcano 354).52 The Consul now peers into the empty spaces and absences of his world, a perspective that changes the way he desires
Yvonne. His desire has little to do with anxiety. Instead of longing for her as a presence, he comes to desire her absence. The Consul wants to cast her out of his mind.
One of Lowry's poems expresses the desire that the Consul cannot put into words.
"Thirty Five Mescals in Cuautla" is a eulogy spoken by the deceased himself. The poem begins with a line similar to the conclusion of Under the Volcano: "This ticking is most terrible of all - / You hear the sound I mean on ships and trains, / You hear it everywhere, for it is doom" (Lowry "Cuautla" 35). The ticking recalls the sound that Yvonne hears early in Under the Volcano when a train departs. It also represents the time remaining for the burial of a dead body. In other words, this ticking is the sound of a corpse being transported by express. In the poem, though, the sound is "[t]he tick of real death, not the tick of time" (ibid). It is the tick of a heart failing as well. The "whirring" (ibid) of a cantina fridge drowns out this death rattle. The poem goes on to apostrophize a dying man groping along the barroom floor. Lowry shifts to the second person to tell how
52 In an earlier draft of the novel, the Consul is annoyed by the ticking that emanates from his wristwatch. He interprets this noise as "help - help - help" from the watch face that reads "seventeen minutes past two" (Lowry Volcano; 1940 223). "you" crawl on the street where thunder scrapes along "the Gothic mountains." Then,
from outside the cantina, you lash out violently against loneliness. You look into the
"bar" through the same lens that you see in a bottle's bottom.
The violence associated with loneliness becomes most apparent at the end of
"Thirty-Five Mescals in Cuautla." While the poem's speaker watches as a barmaid
"pours a glass of death," he reasons that "if that death's in her," it would follow that "it's
here in me" (Lowry "Cuautla" 36). Once he has resigned himself to their shared fate, the
speaker turns to face "the pictured calendar" that is "set to the future" he will never live
to see. The image on the calendar is of "two reindeer" that "battle to death" alongside a
man who "thrusts his canoe into a moon" which is reflecting in the stream. The speaker
envisions his escape down white water, but he is left to drown in a brown bottle. He
orders another drink because he cannot attain the release he desires. After this vision, however, the poem's tone darkens. The final line indicates that the speaker has suffered a
"madness" associated with the fully exposed "moon" (ibid). His mescal-fuelled hell
grows hotter in comparison with his notion of padding through an imaginary paradise. At the end of the line containing the moon, Lowry adds this note: "Soma was mystically
identified with the moon, who controls vegetation, and whose cup is ever filling and
emptying, as he waxes and wanes" (ibid). This author's note reveals the symbolic link between mescal and the encroaching "madness." (Soma is the Sanskrit term for a ritual drink that is pressed from the stalks of an unidentified mountain plant.) The speaker drinks soma insomuch as he drinks continually without slaking his thirst. Forces beyond his control also command his everyday 'reality.' Desire, then, is the product of frustration.
The calendar from "Thirty-Five Mescals in Cuautla" hangs in the dank farolito within Under the Volcano. In the novel, the Consul, suddenly impotent, rolls off a prostitute and glimpses a calendar portrait of Canada:
Under a brilliant full moon a stag stood by a river down which a man and a
woman were paddling a birch bark canoe. This calendar was set to the future, for
the next month, December: where would he be then? (Lowry Volcano 366)
The Consul compares himself to the man steering his canoe. It is a picture of robust masculinity freed from past concerns. The irony of the Consul's "hope" comes from his recognition that his vision of Canada is unattainable. He takes spiritual refuge in an unreal paradise. His spirit undertakes a pilgrimage that he cannot follow. This conclusion grants that image more semantic weight than it can carry within Under the Volcano.
(Canada is a mirage made up of certain images that will come into play in the novel that
Lowry writes next.)
Looking away at this pristine picture - an act signifying the Consul's final acceptance of his death at the conclusion of the novel - has two related effects, and both indicate an attempt to engage readers. The most obvious effect is the Consul's death. As he lies bleeding outside of the farolito, the Consul feels "surrounded in delirium by these phantoms of himself and he wonders which "did not each correspond, in a way he couldn't understand yet obscurely recognized, to some faction of his being?" (Lowry
Volcano 377). His vision has shown him the part he will play in Mexico among 238
"indifferent tufts of grass he had half-heartedly clutched at or stones loosed on his
downward flight, which were still showering on him from above." A second effect is
metaphorical: the Consul's death releases what he could not express. If his death is
solipsistic, it is because he has not previously expressed himself.53 In Lowry's words to
Cape, the end of his novel demonstrates how its narrative makes up "aspects of the same
man, or of the human spirit" (389).
By detailing the Consul's violent destruction, Lowry begins to elaborate the
solipsism that results from his engagement with desire. That the Consul perceives his
death as one final apparition does not necessarily lessen its horror. Nonetheless, the novel
depicts death as a hopeful triumph. Lowry's point here is not that we must die to alleviate
emptiness or loneliness. It is rather that his aspirations are the result of violence. In the
act of expressing himself,"the Consul destroys some barrier to expression that his visions
offer him. Under the Volcano implicates the reader directly in the Consul's act of
destruction because we are able to see the Consul's visions. We are able to realize what he cannot admit to himself. Under the Volcano remains ambivalent about this realization.
As Lowry depicts the Consul's 'reality' as alone and empty, he emphasizes the
destructiveness of the Consul's dreams, memories, and visions. Lowry appears to endorse the Consul's act as a gesture that unleashes the expression he has sacrificed for narrative
Interestingly, Lowry's next novel contains a similar sounding passage. The protagonist of October Ferry to Gabriola sits in a barren beer parlour, looks at its yellow walls and ponders if "this place were suddenly the exact outward representation of his inner state of mind" (Lowry 145). Ackerley notes that this realization frees its subject from external restrictions (of Time, for instance) and makes it possible for him to experience the direct contact with memories he has avoided to this point in the narrative. 239 production. Although the novel conceives of poetry as an alternate mode to a discursive form of narrative, this 'unreal' conception does not come without a caveat.
On "After the Publication of Under the Volcano"
After the publication of Under the Volcano, Lowry wrote a poem to bemoan his newfound celebrity. He structures both stanzas of "After the Publication of Under the
Volcano" around strained similes. The poem opens with an awkward composition:
"Success is like some horrible disaster / Worse than your house burning" (Lowry "After"
78). The second simile of the poem repeats the first - "Fame like a drunkard consumes the house of the soul / Exposing that you have worked for only this -" before the speaker interrupts himself- "Ah, that I had never suffered this treacherous kiss / And had been left in darkness forever to founder and fail." The implication here is that each enthusiastic reader and favorable review plants Judas-kisses on his work. This clearly overwrought poem reveals that Under the Volcano was a difficult novel. It suggests that Lowry is both dissatisfied with the suffering he endured for the novel, and that he insists readers must know his sacrifices. Lowry thus compels us to witness our complicity in the writing and publishing process. The Consul similarly attempts to escape his suffering, but he cannot do so without the destruction of the inverted world itself.
It is tempting to read "After the Publication of Under the Volcano" as an afterward to Lowry's novel. Biographers suggest that Lowry feared his next novel would fail to match the success of his last. October Ferry to Gabriola shares this weight of increased expectations. (Douglas Day explains that although Lowry did not publish 240
another book after Under the Volcano, he continued to write compulsively.) This fear
constitutes a barrier that few, even the most empathetic readers, are able to understand.
Our emotional investment in the Consul's world derives from the unstable narrative that
Lowry provides. Genette points out that language is always metalanguage, a discourse
formed as the result of a previous discourse, which works in the gap between a word and
its interpretation. An author does not inhabit this gap; still, it is a fictional space to which
an author can always appeal. Under the Volcano offers readers an opportunity to sound
the depths of their dissatisfaction with that distance between characters and themselves.
By portraying the Consul's self-destruction, Lowry demands that we confront another barrier to empathy, the distance from the narrative structure that subjective reading would
collapse.
Ethan Llewellyn's memories instill poetry into the narrative of October Ferry to
Gabriola, just as Geoffrey Firmin's visions serve Under the Volcano. The novel begins with an emphasis on the nostalgia the Llewellyns experience on their return to their
Eridanus shack among fellow squatters. They travel in October of 1949 on a Greyhound bus to the ferry that will take them from Nanaimo across the Strait of Georgia to Gabriola
Island. As Ethan travels with his wife, he recalls their experiences since their first meeting in the foyer of a Toronto cinema in 1938 and relives the many disasters that have led them both to this point. Through this narrative frame, the novel demonstrates Ethan's resistance to certain memories. His resistance is so strenuous that the narrative often fails to provide the necessary details for readers to follow. (The fact that Lowry never revised the novel to his satisfaction - he never completed a publishable revision - has caused 241 many critics to ignore it.) Lowry begins the novel by opposing the present 'reality' with the past in order to locate Ethan's memories beyond the field of representation. The intersection of those memories works both within the novel and in the novel's relation to readers. We readers experience the impossibility and prohibition of mournful memories just as Ethan and the other characters in the novel do. By stressing the impossibility of remembrance on both levels, Lowry makes us piece together the memories that structure
Ethan's perceptions of 'reality.'
Under the Volcano ends the way that October Ferry to Gabriola ends: the protagonist expresses himself in writing about his memories. Ethan exorcises his memories when his ferry departs for Gabriola Island. The ferry never makes its destination, though, for it turns at the last moment to return another patron to the
Nanaimo hospital. Ethan proceeds to speculate about his belief in a spirit that leads men around the physical world. While he struggles to describe his aspiration to negotiate with this spirit, Ethan reads a newspaper headline about a reprieve for the squatters cast out of
Eridanus on the mainland. The mainland, then, is less a place than a metaphorical stage or a phase of a pilgrimage, and the island is a space for spiritual renewal. The conclusion of
October Ferry to Gabriola, like the conclusion of Under the Volcano, is not as tragic as we would expect. Since we learn on the novel's first page about the Consul's self- destruction and death, his dying nearly attains a hopeful resonance. M. Laurelle, the prostitute, and even the country of Mexico seem to serve as pallbearers for this funeral.
The Consul manages to embrace his visions of Yvonne, and we see their embrace bathed in a rhetorical flourish of light that eliminates the approaching darkness. 242
The difference between the conclusion of Under the Volcano and October Ferry
to Gabriola lies in the consequences of apparitions. The conclusion of October Ferry to
Gabriola recalls this vision shared by Ethan and Jacquelyn at the beginning of the novel:
"the fallen leaves in the forest seemed to make even the ground glow and burn with light"
(Lowry 3). A tree burning with "the glow of a fire with red sparks ascending like a fiery
fountain" haunts the Llewellyns on the novel's last page (Lowry Gabriola 333). Ethan's apparitions have the power to ease the discord that the narrative has previously explored.
But, the novel refuses to show us the cost of this reliance on apparition as escape. The
stakes are lower because Ethan does not destroy himself. This lacuna locates October
Ferry to Gabriola in the same poetic strata as Under the Volcano. Thus, the achievements of Under the Volcano, because of its churrigueresque parody, would seem to overshadow the prose narrative claims'of October Ferry to Gabriola. The resolution disperses the poetic effect on the desire of the characters involved, and on the structure of the narrative itself. In this sense, although Lowry's lesser-known novel employs apparitions akin to those in his masterpiece, it holds these recollections at a distance. It evinces a full commitment to the present in its denouement, and this full commitment exposes both the liberating possibilities and the shortcomings of memory.
On October Ferry to Gabriola
The turn from Under the Volcano to October Ferry to Gabriola is a turn from a poetic novel to a more prosaic novel. But Lowry's fundamental concerns as a novelist nonetheless remain constant; October Ferry to Gabriola develops the distinction that Under the Volcano draws between the realms of aspiration and apparition. In October
Ferry to Gabriola, apparitions lose the ethereal quality that they have in Under the
Volcano and threaten to become another mode of reality' itself. October Ferry to
Gabriola also depicts an alternate perception of 'reality,' but its narrative relies more on aspiration than on apparition. In the same way as Under the Volcano, October Ferry to
Gabriola uses this division of aspiration and apparition in order to reveal what results when one returns to the past in order to search for meaning in the present. Whereas
Under the Volcano shows how the realization of a vision necessitates an act of violent self-destruction, October Ferry to Gabriola reveals the effect that violence has on those who survive. In this sense, both Lowry's central characters and his readers are able to exorcise memories, but this exorcism comes at considerable cost. The Consul indulges in memories at the risk of completing his destruction. Ethan retains his sense of self by a sustaining distance from remembered events.
When Lowry describes the ferry ride to Gabriola Island through the Llewellyns' eyes, we enter a realm where memories overtake the present. October Ferry to Gabriola opens with Ethan's perspective as a way to situate the narrative through his memories. A past that Ethan would rather forget haunts his journey to and from Gabriola Island. In a chapter titled "The Wandering Jew," Ethan recalls viewing the movie by that title on "the screen of his mind" (Lowry Gabriola 146) while they lived in Niagara-on-the-Lake. He goes on to compare that "mental image" with an "[i]mage or state of being that finally appeared to imply, represent, an unreality, a desolation, disorder, falsity that was beyond evil." His memory associates his burning hopelessness with "Satan" as a "figure in the human psyche." Therefore, the poetic connection of his apparitions with memory is an effect of "psyche" or subjective experience. With this depiction of subjectivity, October
Ferry to Gabriola follows the pilgrimage to Canada that Lowry began with Under the
Volcano.
The notion of correspondence extends to another of Lowry's poems. "The
Pilgrim" is his most successful attempt at the sonnet from, although it obeys Elizabethan sonnet conventions of rhyme, but not rhythm. In the first quatrain, a pilgrim learns to live as "strange huntsmen" do (Lowry "Pilgrim" 70). In the second quatrain, he scales cliffs and scan seas. In the third quatrain, the pilgrim can no longer believe "The sea was hope" or "the rumour bright" for "[t]he town is just a lie, twitching with lies" (ibid). Either his pilgrimage has lost its spiritual significance, or the pilgrim has chosen to live in the 'real' world. In the final quatrain, he speaks about the correspondence between metaphysical and physical 'realities.' The pilgrim has lost his faith and his way; he wanders among
"fjords of chance / Winding through my abyssal ignorance" (ibid). The turn from the one realm to another is the turn from desire to visionary knowledge. By chronicling this turn to the realm he envisions, the poem forces us to recognize the consequences that accompany those apparitions.
On the level of narrative, descriptions in October Ferry to Gabriola follow Under the Volcano in that objective phenomena often have subjective impetus. Lowry refers in both novels to a "correspondence" between the worlds of perceived 'reality' and
54 In his essay, "Canada in Lowry's Fiction," MacDonald suspects that Lowry could have set the novel anywhere because the events play out in Ethan's mind. MacDonald writes: "Canada (or any other nation) would become no more than a convenient reflector of Lowry's subjective and cosmic concerns" (37). apparition. Ethan's memories, for instance, represent the apparitions that the Consul
experiences. And, poetry results from Lowry's attempts to articulate the images
associated with those dreams, memories, or visions. This realm of apparition brings
together characters and experiences in time and space through metaphors of perception.
Early in Under the Volcano, M. Laurelle's thoughts about the Consul illustrate the link between memory and poetic language. M. Laurelle senses a certain synchronicity while paging through The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus in the book he borrowed from the
Consul. "What had produced the illusion," he questions, "coupled with the dim, though now less dim, electric light, or some correspondence, maybe, as Geoff liked to put it, between the subnormal world and the abnormally suspicious [one]?" (Lowry Volcano
36). M. Laurelle recalls exactly how "Geoff liked to put it," for at the end of the novel
Geoffrey puts it exactly that way. Later, when the Consul confronts the Union Militar, he suspects "some correspondence between the subnormal world itself and the abnormally
suspicious delirious one within him the truth had sprung - sprung like a shadow" (Lowry
Volcano 369). It is as though the veil between worlds falls, when the "soldiers" kill the man they believe is a spy, but the impossibility of their correspondence remains. When we sit down to read a novel like Under the Volcano, we are, to a certain extent, prepared for the confusion that the Consul experiences. However, by thwarting our encounter with the Consul and by surrounding him with an aura of impossibility, Lowry suggests that
Geoffrey Firmin will transcend whatever expectations we might have. Malcolm Lowry writes metafiction that demands we readers reevaluate our relationship to fiction. Lowry neither aspires to 'realism' - other than in his depiction of the writing act itself-nor does he attempt to construct a plausible 'reality' with his writing. Instead, he depicts another perception of reality, a refraction that inverts the
'truth' of realism. Although this adherence to 'reality' may leave Lowry's novels bleak, imagine his prose without its churrigueresque structure, without the poetic state of language that emerges through his apparitions. The risk of this form of parody is that readers may not make out its transmission through the "static" of poetry. The fact that we perceive these apparitions alongside characters who fight themselves in order to articulate their desires allows us to read Lowry's modernist fiction as metafiction. Under the
Volcano brings the Consul too close and demands that we endure his hopelessness. We can view him empathetically because empathy always implies the idea of nearness or suffering. According to the logic of Under the Volcano, what readers have in common is destruction, a seed of desire that prevents us from accepting 'reality.' The Consul's self- destruction, like Ethan's enduring confusion, is the objective correlative of our reading act, and insofar as we see ourselves in its narrative arc, we become the readers Lowry pleads for. CONCLUSION
Performativity in the Poetic Novel
If literary parody, as I have suggested, reads previous texts, every reader of parody is a rereader. And, if parody constitutes reading in performance, every subsequent reading of parody represents another stage of this textual performance. In the theatre of literary parody, readers must react to a text that simultaneously reads its source texts and itself. Parodic fiction dramatizes both of these reading processes to make us conscious of the roles that we play in interpretation. Such fiction does so not only with citation, but also with the self-consciousness and with the recitation that is peculiar to metafiction.
Whereas reading parodic fiction means we must trace (re)citations back to source texts, certain forms of parody require more effort. Parody that incorporates poetry entices us to perform another act. Reading a novel that is reading (itself reading) its poetic sources indicates the rhetorical force of this locution. Rereading, in the performative sense of this term, affords us the opportunity to enact the performance within literary parody. A poetic novel asks us to give ourselves over to the text - we must allow ourselves to identify with characters and even vicariously to experience certain events - in order to interpret the poetic rhetoric, structure, or tone within narrative. Each of the works by Canadian poet-novelists that I examined earlier challenges us to resist the lure of metaphor. I will attempt to illustrate the appeal of a poetic novel with three digressions into narrative that draw on the notion of troparody from previous chapters. I hope these italicized passages will indicate how poetic novels encourage readers to participate in the construction of meaning. 248
You are reading a book that is mostly about the way it is told. You turn the page to begin a story about a performer trying to dupe a roomful of marks. The host, an old man with a stoop so pronounced it looks as though he is about to bow, commands a man he calls an "artist" to open his bag of tricks. The artist wears the blouse of a trapeze swinger, the odour of a collegiate wrestler, and the sneer of a ventriloquist. He removes his cuff links and flicks his left wrist upward to draw attention to his shirtsleeve. He directs the guests lounging on the chesterfield suite to keep an eye on his white-gloved hands. The index finger of his left hand points at you as his right pointer motions toward his quivering lips. He deadpans, "are you reading me? " And, although you are reading comfortably in your recliner, with this book open on your lap, it seems the con artist in the narrative is trying to lock eyes with you.
I discussed earlier that Linda Hutcheon considers how postmodern fiction reveals the act of enonciation, an interaction of textual production and reception, of writing and reading. She contends that parody, in particular, demonstrates how the processes of reading and writing are linked through its use and abuse of literary conventions. The previous paragraph attempts to illustrate this linkage by emphasizing "your" complicity in the text. Of course, not every poetic novel fits into the interpretive scheme of literary parody. Since novels written by poets in Canada have gained prominence over the last forty years, this area of research has become germane to many critics. Although
Hutcheon, via Bakhtin, provides the theoretical basis for my approach to the Canadian poetic novel, Ian Rae provides an alternative perspective in From Cohen to Carson: The Poet's Novel in Canada. In his book, Rae calls "the poet's novel" - what I call the poetic novel - a distinctly Canadian genre. He outlines the careers of several Canadian poets who moved from writing lyrical poetry to long poetry, and then moved to writing novels.
Rae traces this "serial" progression as a means of examining how narrative structure in the poet's novel differs from the framework of a conventionally realistic novel. His examination of passages in specific novels that resemble poetry does not describe how poetic language may engage readers.
Although Rae proposes "a new frame of reference for the interpretation of the poet's novel" (8), he cannot account for the effect of these novels on readers. He focuses his argument around the prominent "themes and patterns" in texts that "reconfigure previous stories and narrative techniques" while "undermining" the sources of "their own media" (25-26). Following this thematic approach leads Rae to read the poet's novel as metafiction. He notes that characters often undergo a metamorphosis that "is mirrored on the formal level by the process through which the novel's poetic fragments cohere into a narrative" (ibid). Thus, narrative cohesion remains the poet's principle concern for his or her novel. Rae provides a plausible way to read the poet's novel by concentrating on narrative rather than poetry.
Because of the fact that many readings flourish in the poet's novels, they have become pervasive in Canadian literature. Rae's analysis extends from the poet's novel to criticism of the genre. He aims to respond to a few Canadian literary critics who have recently censured poets who write novels in Canada. He mentions how, in the last decade, Stephen Henighan, Philip Marchand, and David Solway have each tried to reify 250 age-old oppositions between poetry and prose. These three critics in particular accuse poets of writing incoherent narratives because of loose characterization and sloppy plotting. Their polemics argue that the poet's novel, by definition, makes no rational sense. These critics describe how all the voices in novels by award-winning poets tend to sound alike.55 Rae responds to these charges with reference to Michael Ondaatje's The
English Patient and Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces. He begins by identifying characters who stand in for their authors in both novels. The poet demonstrates his or her skill in the ability to emulate several literary discourses. (Although Rae does not put it this way, the subject of his phrase "the poet's novel" could be either a writer or a character.) Michaels, for example, structures her novel with a contrast of "literary and musical allusions, facts, and fictions" (Rae 283). On one hand, these allusions function as structural ploys meant to deviate from narrative; but on the other hand, each allusion serves as an analogy to a work of literature, song cycle, or historical source.
In addition, Rae proposes that the poet's novel is not only a genre, but a "new medium" as well (40). He draws upon Marshal McLuhan's theories to describe how this emerging medium "translates the non-narrative techniques of poetry, in particular the serial [or the long] poem, into the novel." Rae's choice of verb in this quotation is particularly telling; "translates" recalls the last sentence on the first page of his book,
55 Here is a sampling of such cantankerous criticism: Marchand accuses readers of indulging in "the lyrical, pretty prose" by writers like Urquhart and Ondaatje (27); Henighan calls out Ondaatje and Michaels for writing "self-consciously 'artistic' [prose] without posing the challenges of authentic art" (155); Solway suggests "the great disconnect" between writers and readers results from poets writing for other poets (143). Rae responds to these criticisms by accusing these writers of relying on abstractions to criticize poetic abstractions in novels by poets. Poetic novels differ from "poet's novels" in that they emphasize self- reflexive language rather than referring primarily to the poet writing the novel. 251 where he contends that long poetry "has radically transformed concepts of narrative coherence and sequence in the Canadian novel by adapting the devices of contemporary poetry and prose fiction" (Rae 3; emphasis added). This adaptation, for Rae, does not imply the performance of interest here. Instead, he considers how "recurring phrases or images," "poetic modes of association," and circulating "plotlines in rapid succession" structure narrative (Rae 40). Again, despite Rae's interest in the non-narrative implications of the poet's novel, his analysis returns to the importance of narrative cohesion. He declares the medium "postmodern" because it "destabilizes the unity of the self (Rae 34) while reestablishing the unity of the narrative. The poetic elements within these novels only serve to supplement the development of character, story, and setting. Of course, following the logic of the supplement, this poetic "repertoire of rhetorical devices" continually threatens to overtake and "shape their novels" (Rae 7). According to
Rae, narrative concerns overwhelm the poetry within these novels.
Overall, Rae's analysis is fine, inspired even, but he downplays the role of aesthetics in the poet's novel. Of course, neither Rae nor I may claim to produce a definitive reading of novels by Canadian poets. Rae published his criticism while I was revising my study, and if I were to begin again, I would further consider the implications of his conclusions about narrative frames. His interest in narrative coherence, however, diverges from my concern for the aesthetic involvement within these novels. If the genre, or the medium, he studies remains elusive, it is not only because of the poetry within these novels, but also because of the choices these novels present readers. 252
Again, the poetic novel manifests itself to the reader, at least to this one, as a potentially performative experience. Poetry within these narratives opens the possibility of multiple, unconventional interpretations. By consciously departing from the conventions of narrative discourse, poetic novels reside inside and outside of inherited conditions. This interrogation of literary traditions situates poetic novels in the present; at the same time, these novels require readers to participate in the same sort of textual performance they portray. If these novels have a performative effect upon readers, they both construct and deconstruct the normative values of interpretation. Poetic novels play on our expectations and enable us to see how an insistent devotion to 'reality' or
'realism' leads us to follow literary conventions, or chicanery.
aAt this point, as your host narrates, the audience for the evening's performance shifts in their seats. Some try in vain to peer around the artist in order to find the source of the voice repeating, "are you reading me? are you reading . . ." Some guests check their handbags or pockets to ensure their purses or wallets are still where they belong. A few others survey the room to see what their well-heeled peers are up to. One woman in particular admires the oily reflection of her earrings in a lacquered armrest. The performer lowers his arms to pull a wooden folding chair toward him, and he beckons toward each member of the audience to exchange seats with him. No one obliges.
"Now, " a disembodied voice interrupts, "stop me if you 've heard this one before. " The artist shakes an accusatory finger at each guest around the room before he appears to face you. The voice snarls — you imagine that the speaker is grinding his teeth like a 253
street musician hunched over a barrel organ - "you are . . ." The performer tips back the
chair, which folds up to reveal a tape recorder strapped under the seat by a leather belt
straining at its last hole. Two words are branded into the pale buckle: "Connect no
thing: "
We will return to Rae once more in order to reconsider the importance of
nationality for poets who write novels. Whereas this dissertation stresses the performative
effect of poetry within specific novels by Canadian writers, Rae stresses the prominence
of the poet's novel in Canada. The difference relates to the cultural efficacy of an
aesthetic movement. Rae concludes From Cohen to Carson by describing how
Ondaatje's The English Patient reflects larger concerns in Canadian literature:
"Ultimately," Rae argues, "Hana realizes that the English patient is not the noble figure
she wants him to be, and Patrick's circle is not interchangeable with the group forming around the English patient's bed" (265). This "circle" serves Rae's argument as a quasi-
Petri dish in which we see "European patterns of social cohesion are being tested against
Canadian ones." For Rae, Ondaatje writes metafiction to address the 'canon' of Canadian literature on its own terms. The strength of Rae's defense, asserting that the poet's novel turns our attention toward other texts, is also an interesting weakness. At the same time as
Canadian poets attempt to "disrupt linear chronologies" with narratives that "insert gaps in the causal succession of events, and shun[ning] sequential character development," they also rely on "linear teleology" for structure (Rae 287). Rae suggests that the poet's novel allows Canadian writers to impose a narrative order on their country's past. This political imperative separates Rae's notion of the poet's novel from my formulation of the poetic novel. Whereas both discursive literary modes incorporate poetic language, the latter reveals its writing processes in order to draw readers in (by way of apostrophe). Narrative structure supports the poetry within the poet's novel, but poetry must carry its own semantic weight in the poetic novel. For instance, whereas Rae insists The English Patient relates how an individual like Hana "becomes the seeker, the empathetic figure who draws most of the characters in the novel together" (264), he neglects to consider how Hana demonstrates the act of reading as well. Just as the speakers in Ondaatje's poetry allow language to fragment, the characters in his novels attempt to speak through these fragments. The stories that Hana strains to piece together provide as much pathos as we can bear. For instance, she cannot articulate the pain of losing her father or her patient. The difficulty of articulation in The English Patient encourages us to share this tongue-tied experience. Although Ondaatje's poetic novel reads itself, it does not rely upon conventional methods of interpretation; trouble arises when readers expect a coherent connection between poetic elements in these novels. We, then, must also interpret the discursive ambiguity of the novel. Then again, The English
Patient does not resist us. Rather than convey a singular point or concept, it encourages disjunctive readings.
The interpretive variability at play here prevents any one critic from providing the authoritative reading of The English Patient. No single reader may upstage another in this act of recitation. I have tried to advance the notion of performativity with an exegesis of empathy generated by the self-referential language in poetic novels. Ondaatje's novel 255 illustrates how the performance of reading in parody is closely related but not identical to performativity. We observe one and emote with the other. While poetic novels often show how writing is a solitary process, they also remind readers that we do not read alone. According to this line of thought, rereading these novels allows us to avoid worrying about whether we are reading correctly; this poetic parody allows us to grasp the limitations that govern any act of interpretation so that we might work our way through our limitations. By immersing ourselves in empathy, we act out, as it were, the troparody of a poetic novel.
Your patience for this reading has run out. As you move to close the book on this so-called "con artist" — it seems he only conned you out of the time it has taken you to read about him — you pause and flip ahead to a page where the phrase "you are reading
. . ." begins a paragraph. Even before you reply ("not anymore, buckaroo "), the words give you pause. You glance up from the book to see what's buzzing against the screen of your open window. A horse fly flutters like an eyelash. The fluorescent ceiling light flickers in syncopated rhythm. Con spi-ri-to. Then it occurs to you: the phrase has turned.
The trick - if that is what you'd call it - is the inversion of the words "are you . . ." to
"you are." You don't think your memory is wrong. You think the book is wrong. You didn't feel alone until you were spirited away from reading this narrative. Although the curtain on this performance has already descended, you consider returning to the place you left, turning back to the page your forefinger is still marking. Perhaps the con artist will explain himself. He 11 tell you that voice on the tape recorder belonged to someone 256 who has since died. He '11 place a slight hand on top of yours and guide your finger to press PLAY. He '11 read you.
The poetic novel is a privileged theatre for experiencing pathos because its very form involves readers in its recitation. As in the paragraph above, it is seldom obvious who performs this peculiar legerdemain for readers. We could say the poet-novelists of interest here are masters of pathos. Reading their novels, though, requires that readers are just as capable of an emotional engagement with a text. The present study has tried to interrogate the limits and powers of poetic novels by investigating the potential of literary parody. The narrative that incorporates poetry plays off the tension between a predominantly objective mode and its notoriously subjective opposite. The poetic novel, then, is less a genre than a literary mode sui generis. The apostrophe in the title of this dissertation marks a connection between poetry and prose as well as a union of writers and readers. "He'll" not only indicates an omission, but also hints at our ability to make sense of absences. Thus, to realize the poetics of the Canadian poetic novel, we must challenge the very practice of reading itself. WORKS CITED
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