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Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers and the Achievement of Innocence

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Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers and the Achievement of Innocence Nietzsche as Educator: Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers and the Achievement of Innocence Mark Migotti He stood up for Nietzsche I stood up for Christ He stood up for victory I stood up for less — Leonard Cohen, from “Irving and Me At the Hospital” 1 eaders of Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers familiar with the 1887 preface to The Gay Science encounter Friedrich Nietzsche when they encounter F., who, before he died “in a padded cell, Rhis brain rotted from too much dirty sex,” “used to say in his hopped-up fashion: We’ve got to learn to stop bravely at the surface. We’ve got to learn to love appearances” (4).2 Those who know that F.’s exhortations are taken verbatim 3 from Nietzsche are also likely to know that the philosopher was driven mad by advanced tertiary syphilis and that his first name begins with the letter F. They will suspect that something Nietzschean is afoot, and it is.4 Though critics of Beautiful Losers have duly noted F.’s propensity to wax Nietzschean,5 no one has yet registered the extent of his out- right plagiarism6 or offered a detailed, illuminating Nietzschean read- ing of the work. In this paper, I will argue that an appreciation of the Nietzschean dimension of Beautiful Losers allows us to understand the kind of thing its author perhaps had in mind when he described the work as “redemptive” (Djwa 8). In the absence of an account of what makes his text redemptive, Cohen’s claim would be a piece of unsupport- ed bravado. I aim here to provide such an account. Apart from F., the dramatis personae of Beautiful Losers is rounded out by the unnamed narrator of book one, his wife Edith, who is also F.’s lover, and Catherine (Kateri) Tekakwitha, a seventeenth-century Mohawk convert to Christianity.7 All four characters are orphans. 42 Scl/Élc While the novel offers very little biographical detail about Edith and the narrator, it is considerably more forthcoming about Catherine and F. Catherine’s life up to conversion is outlined in book one by the narrator and after conversion in book two by F.8 F., meanwhile, managed before going mad to become a captain of industry, a member of parliament, and a nationalist hero in francophone Quebec. By his own admission, F. is a “born teacher” (186), and as such poses an interpretive crux for readers. To Douglas Barbour, for example, he is an Age-of-Aquarius shaman bent on an “apocalyptic transformation of man” (136), while to Dennis Lee he is “a virtuoso at techniques of salva- tion [who] . had no idea what salvation was all about” (83). Barbour and Lee agree that Beautiful Losers is a kind of Bildungsroman, which invites readers to identify less than usual with the narrator as the subject of education, and more than usual with his educator, F.; they disagree about whether F. is a successful educator or a failed one. More recent writing on the novel tends to bypass this debate rather than resolve it. Stan Dragland sees F. as a conundrum, who arouses in readers both a desire to “believe what he says” (15) and a resistance to actually believing it in view, if nothing else, of the difficulty of establishing just what it is he wants you to believe. And Linda Hutcheon takes the book in which he figures to be a “post modern, metafiction” (Postmodern 27), focused mainly on itself as literary artifact and on “the act of creating through reading” (33). From these points of view, the calibre of F.’s philosophy is not much to the point — and I agree, but for different reasons. In my view, Beautiful Losers has more to do with how the narrator learns than with what F. teaches.9 Since it is evident that the narrator’s chronic haplessness is meant to mirror familiar bewilderments and predicaments of the modern age, and that his and F.’s preoccupation with Catherine Tekakwitha is bound up with questions about the character and purpose of Canada, it has been natural to read Cohen’s text as an allegory of “Canada’s histor- ical-political situation” (Wilkins 24). Inspired perhaps by the narrator’s announcement that he has “come to rescue [Catherine Tekakwitha] from the Jesuits” (5) and F.’s remark that “the English did to us [Québécois] what we did to the Indians, and the Americans did to the English what the English did to us” (236), allegorical-political readings of Cohen’s novel find the moral of the story to be something like this: Canada’s beautiful losers are the persecuted, proselytized native peoples, its ugly BEAUTIFUL LOSERS 43 winners the relentless, fawningly imitated American imperialists. Earthy native exuberance is invidiously opposed to effete colonial gloom, with the Jesuit capture of Catherine Tekakwitha’s heart and mind standing in for the dual conquest of the former by the latter: the lamentable material triumph of European weaponry and the lamentable spiritual triumph of Christian ideology. I do not think that Beautiful Losers has been well served by this style of interpretation, and it will be something of a side benefit of my reading that it will allow the reasons why to be brought succinctly into relief. Taking Dennis Lee’s account of Beautiful Losers as representative of the interpretive genre in question, we find it organized around the quest for enlightenment and salvation undertaken by F. and the nar- rator “against the backdrop of a myth of Canadian history [that] has a classic shape: a fall from grace, a period of exile, and a re-ascent to grace” (74). Once upon a time, the peoples of the St. Lawrence Valley, imbued with a sense of “holy energy . [that could] be tapped . in sexual celebration,” wisely refused to sunder nature from instinct from consciousness from God (Lee 64). Then the Jesuits arrived and spoiled everything with their “hatred of finite shit” (Beautiful 55). F. then initi- ated “a counter-movement,” which sought to “reverse in his friend’s person [the narrator] everything that had gone wrong in Canada since the fall” (Lee 66-67): hence the narrator’s mission to rescue Catherine Tekakwitha from her spiritual captors. In Lee’s hands, Beautiful Losers becomes a flawed fable of failed redemption, with the Platonic categories of redemption reversed. Whereas Platonism posits a primordial descent from unencumbered spirit into unruly materiality and an arduous return from the one to the other, the inverted version at the bottom of Lee’s reading of Cohen’s text replaces spiritual innocence and material contamination with erotic innocence and ascetic contamination. Catherine Tekakwitha’s genially priapic uncle, who has no time for the vision of heaven promulgated by the Black Robes once he learns that it offers no opportunities for post-mortem hunting, fighting, or feasting (Beautiful 142), epitom- izes the healthy vigour of unadulterated native life. Catherine herself, especially in respect of her excruciating experience of puberty and con- sequent taking of the Oath of Virginity (254), epitomizes Christianity’s sick revulsion toward sensuality. In converting to Christian asceticism, writes Lee, Catherine Tekakwitha “repressed the sexual energy which 44 Scl/Élc had mediated divine presence, the ‘old magic’. [Her] virginity was an act of blasphemy” (65). In fact, Cohen has laced the Catherine Tekakwitha material in his novel with ironies, anomalies, and ambiguities that conflict flagrantly with Lee’s account of the role of pre-conquest First Nations life within it. Her Algonquin mother and Iroquois father having died when she was four, Catherine Tekakwitha spent her childhood and adolescence in the care of a “kind uncle” (55) and a swarm of “cruel Aunts” (145). Eager to secure for her an “advantageous union,” the aunts settle on a “strong little man” to whom, at the age of eight, she was to be betrothed; but the bride-to-be so frightened her intended that he ran away. “Not to worry, the Aunts agreed among themselves. Soon she will be older, the juices will start to flow. We will have no trouble then” (61). Their confi- dence was quite misplaced, and when they tried again it was Catherine who fled the scene. The aunts encourage her twice-foiled bridegroom to rape her, but he cannot so much as find her. When she returns home the next morning, they pummel her enthusiastically: — Take that! And That! — Pow! Sock! . — You’re not part of the family any more, you’re just a slave! . — You’ll do what we say! Slap! (66-7). Later, the aunts spy on Catherine and her naked, dying uncle, and then “drag her to the priest” in order to declare, falsely, “Here’s a little Christian for you. Fucked her Uncle” (145). Singularly poor representa- tives of a “day-to-day ethos” of “carnal participation in unified being” (Lee 64), these vindictive harridans treat Catherine, the seventeenth- century native misfit, just as the louts who assault Edith (75-77) treat her, the twentieth-century native misfit. In book two, F. relates the testimony of le Père Cholenec concerning the whitening of the skin of Catherine Tekakwitha’s face within hours of her demise. Peter Wilkins takes this to be “a sign that [Catherine’s] saintliness stems from her willingness to be colonized” (31). But not only does F. urge us to “try to suppress our political judgements” (266), he makes a point of juxtaposing Cholenec’s tale with reports of the red- dening of St. Catherine of Bologna’s skin upon being exhumed eighteen days after burial (268). His thinking, duly scorned by Lee (89), seems clear enough: saintly “monsters of love” (122) being as strange in death BEAUTIFUL LOSERS 45 as they are in life, it would be no more out of character for an Italian one to come post-mortem to resemble a native North American than for a Mohawk to come post-mortem to resemble a Bolognesa.
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