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Mad Translation in Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers and Douglas Mad Translation in Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers and Douglas Glover’s Elle Robert David Stacey University of Ottawa The lunatic, the lover and the poet. Are of imagination all compact. William Shakespeare his essay discusses Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers and Doug- Tlas Glover’s Elle, two postmodern Canadian novels whose subversions and parodies of conventional realism, still the dominant mode of histori- cal fiction in Canada and elsewhere, are intimately connected with their exploration of the foundations and limits of modern historical conscious- ness. More specifically, my argument arises out of what I perceive to be some crucial similarities between the two texts. Both address the early stages of the European colonization of North America and the concomi- tant mutual exposure to the other of radically alien cosmologies: one oral, polytheistic, and tribal; the other literate, monotheistic, and nationalist. Both feature protagonists whose attempts to understand this otherness in its own terms—or to inhabit the reality of the other—leads to a radical destabilization of personal and cultural identity, resulting in a state akin to ESC 40.2–3 (June/September 2014): 173–197 divine madness, an ecstatic breakthrough that is nevertheless profoundly isolating and destructive for the individual subject. Crucially, both novels approach this paradox of breakdown and break- Robert David Stacey through in terms of translation, which functions as a master trope for any is Associate Professor manner of inter-experiential relations that have a transformative effect on of Canadian Literature the subject and his or her way of being-in-the-world. Indeed, it is precisely at the University of at the point where translation in the ordinary sense, derived from the Latin Ottawa. He is the “to carry across,” meets translation in the more archaic and specialized editor of re: Reading usages of both “transport” (as in enraptured flight) and “metamorphosis” The Postmodern: (as in transmogrification) that these novels situate themselves, featuring, Canadian Literature as they do, characters who engage in acts of linguistic translation, get car- and Criticism After ried away, and undergo extreme transformations as a consequence.1 In the Modernism (University pyrotechnical conclusion to Beautiful Losers, the folklorist narrator of the of Ottawa Press 2010) novel’s first section and F., the signatory of the novel’s epistolary second and author of numerous section, meld and famously turn into a movie of Ray Charles projected essays on modern against the Montreal skyline. In Elle, the eponymous heroine, based on and contemporary the historical personage of Marguerite de Roberval, who was abandoned Canadian writing. His on an island in the Gulf of St Lawrence by her punitive uncle, “the Gen- current research project eral,” le Sieur de Roberval for acts of insubordination and sexual depravity, is entitled Worker’s absorbs and is absorbed by the shamanistic rituals of her Aboriginal hosts Playground: Labour and and finds that she has turned into a bear. the Ludic in Twentieth- My goal, first, is to try to make sense of the apparent connection Century Canadian between magic, madness, otherness, and translation posited by these Poetry. novels. Secondly, I want to consider how translation, in turn, operates as a trope in the novels’ assault on the psycho-social logic of modernity, the emergence of which they locate historically in the period of colonial contact. To this end I have been greatly assisted by the writings of R. D. Laing, whom Glover has cited as an important influence (Notes Home 165–66; Dorsel 111; “Interview” np). Laing’s work on schizophrenia in the 1960s led him to explore the social and familial contexts of mental illness, resulting in the development, in works like The Self and Others (1961) and The Politics of Experience (1967), of a constructivist theory of ideology as a shared “social phantasy.” Laing is perhaps best known today as an early 1 The oed provides fourteen distinct usages of the term, most of which share the basic idea expressed in def. i 1a of movement across states or transferences be- tween persons and/or objects, that is, “removal or conveyance from one person, place, or condition to another.” But we note also some significant variants, as in def. ii 3a which defines translation as “Transformation, alteration, change,” in common use from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth, as well as the term’s specialized use in Early Modern rhetoric as a term synonymous with metaphor (def. ii 4). 174 | Stacey advocate of the anti-psychiatry movement. I am well aware that Laing’s radical politics and unorthodox treatments of mental illness, including the experimental use of psychotropic drugs on both patient and doctor, have earned him his current reputation as a bit of a crackpot. While this has discouraged the use of his work in more serious academic contexts, he, nevertheless, was serious and was tirelessly committed to exploring the connections between madness and society, and without question his writings helped transform the popular imagination with respect to the meaningfulness and, indeed, oppositionality, of mad speech. Fundamentally, for Laing, there is no reality as such but only construc- tions of reality, wholly dependent on history, language, culture, and the relations of power. “Our perception of reality,” he writes, “is the perfectly achieved accomplishment of our civilization” (The Self and Others 44). As a consequence, there is no such thing either as madness, only unlawful- ness—that is to say, invalid or invalidated modes of experience or what we might call illegitimate realities. Such logic would seem to anticipate the now popular theories of Jacques Rancière, who writes in the “The Paradoxes of Political Art” that There is no “real world.” [...] The real always is a matter of construction, a matter of “fiction”[…]. What characterizes the mainstream fiction of the police order is that it passes itself off as the real, that it feigns to draw a clear-cut line between what belongs to the self-evidence of the real and what belongs to the field of appearances, representations, opinions and uto- pias. Consensus means precisely that the sensory is given as univocal. (148–49) Laing, who like Rancière stresses the affective and sensory connotations of “common sense,” similarly argues that modern Western civilization’s generalized intolerance of “different fundamental structures of experi- ence”—whether these be of the psychotic or the native (he cites Franz Fanon as authority in relation to the latter)—shows that “we seem to need to share a communal meaning to human existence, to give with others a common sense to the world, to maintain a consensus” (65). But as Laing increasingly came to view that consensus, the “normal” quotidian world, as desperately repressed and the individual person as “torn, body, mind and spirit, by inner contradictions, pulled in different directions […] cut off from his own mind, cut off equally from his own body—a half-crazed creature in a mad world” (The Politics of Experience 47), his radical proposal was that schizophrenia could be regarded—at least Mad Translation | 175 in some instances—not as a delusional, unreal state, a failure to come to grips but, rather, as “a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo-social realities” (The Politics of Experience 57). Translated into Rancière’s terms, schizophrenia constitutes a moment of “dissensus” in the otherwise smooth functioning of the social order, the manifestation of an alternative “sensorium” disruptive of the “univocality” of the “police order.” Viewed in this light, madness represents a psychological breakthrough, of sorts, and an act, however desperate, of political defiance—provided there are those willing to read it as such. Thus even in his fairly conservative first book, The Divided Self (1960), Laing could write: “the cracked mind of a schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter the intact minds of many sane people whose minds are closed” (27). Laing begins as a psychoanalyst but ends as a philosopher of expe- rience much indebted to existentialism, particularly Sartre. His project of integrating Freudian metapsychology with existentialism constitutes perhaps the most consistent and significant attempt to date to understand madness from the inside, to focus not on psychotic behaviour but on psy- chotic experience. I want to stress experience, which for Laing signifies the particular texture—simultaneously psychic and somatic and governed by a set a rules or operative assumptions about the world—of a person’s very existence.2 I do so because it seems to me that experience marks transla- tion’s ultimate horizon. Barbara Godard speaks of “the intertextual rich- ness and everyday resonance of ‘natural’ languages which in their unique ways of organizing and interpreting the world transmit cultural values in excess of the rational” (95). These are the “thick” relations of culture that bespeak unique “lifeworlds” (96). Similarly, George Steiner speaks of the 2 Based on his The Politics of Experience, we can isolate two principles that define experience in Laing’s thought. First, experience is evidential, yet only indirectly accessible to the other: “I cannot experience your experience. You cannot ex- perience my experience. We are both invisible men.” Yet, despite its “invis- ibility,” experience is not private: “I do not experience your experience. But I experience you as experiencing. I experience myself as experienced by you. And I experience you as experiencing yourself as experienced by me. And so on” (16). Experience, therefore, should not be understood as merely subjective or as the property of an individual. Thus, Laing’s second argument concerns the location or site of experience: “[E]xperience is not ‘subjective’ rather than ‘objective,’ not ‘inner’ rather than ‘outer,’ not ‘process’ rather than ‘praxis,’ not ‘input’ rather than ‘output,’ not ‘psychic’ rather than ‘somatic,’ not some doubt- ful data dredged up from introspection rather than extrospection.
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