Bpnichol What History Teaches

ACHAPTER THREE What History Teaches This page intentionally left blank bpNichol What History Teaches by Stephen Scobie Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches. GERTRUDE STEIN Talon books • Vancouver • 1984 Copyright © 1984 Stephen Scobie Published with assistance from the Canada Council Talonbooks 278 East 1st AvenueCopyright © 19 84 Stephen Scobie VancouverPublished with assistance from the Canada Council British Columbia V5T 1A6 Canada TALONBOOKS 2.011019 East Cordova talonbooks.com Vancouver British Columbia v6A IMS Print edition designed and typesetCanad aat The Coach House Press, Toronto Designed and typeset at The Coach House Press, Toronto Printed in PrinteCanadad in by Canad Hignella by PrintingHignell Printin Limitedg Limited First printing: 1984First printing: August 1984 EbookCANADIA by TalonbooksN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA 2014 Scobie, Stephen, 1943 - CATALOGUING DATA AVAILABLEBPNichol FROM LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA(The New Canadian criticism series) Includes index. ISBN 978–0-88922–879–5 ISBN 0-8892.2-2.2.0-7 1. Nichol, B.P., 1944- —Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series. PS 852.7.135 z881984 c8n'.54 c84-o9i45i-i PR9I99.3.N53Z88 1984 Contents ONE Exits and Entrances 9 TWO Visual Poetry 30 THREE Sound Poetry 55 FOUR Fiction 77 FIVE The Martyrology 106 Notes 135 Selected Bibliography 146 Index 152, This page intentionally left blank CHAPTER ONE Exits and Entrances We are words and our meanings change BP NICHOL bpNichol's work stands at a profound crossroads of modern culture, part of the nature of which may be suggested by the epigraph to this chapter. To say that "we are words" is to insist on a deeply humanist identification between ourselves and the language which is our medium; but to say that "our meanings change" is immediately to throw into doubt any certainty or assurance which we might have felt. On the one hand, Nichol is the inheritor of the modernism of the early years of the century, which found its fullest expression in cubist painting, and which offers the possibility of the "new humanism" Nichol celebrated in his 1966 manifesto.1 On the other hand, pre- cisely because that modernism and humanism focussed on the medium of language itself, they have become subject to the "decon- structionist" criticism of recent postmodernism and poststructural- ism. So NichoPs work is increasingly open to a reading (and a writing) which put into question the values it began by affirming. It is the purpose of this opening chapter to try to situate Nichol within the play of these opposing yet intimately connected forces. The connection lies, as I have already suggested, in the common con- cern for language, whether it is regarded as a stable entity — a tool, a raw material — or as a completely unstable one — an endlessly shifting play of difference. A major reference point for this discussion will be another writer who occupies a similarly ambivalent position, Ger- trude Stein. bpNichol's interest in and admiration for Stein are so pervasive, and so well-known, that they need little documentation: a few exam- ples will suffice. His major work, The Martyrology, opens with a quotation from "St. Em."1 Early in his career, he "started writing a book on Gertrude Stein's theories of personality as revealed in her 9 i o What History Teaches early opus The Making of Americans"; more recently, he has published a detailed study of the opening pages of her novel Ida.3 One of his early, semi-concrete poems is entitled "Stein Song": rows red rows red rose rows roads of red rose rows rode down rows of red rose roads4 The allusion in this poem is of course to Stein's famous dictum that "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," of which she herself said that "I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun."5 For Stein, then, the "noun" became a physical object, which could be "caressed," though that caressing could only take place in language, with another word. Stein's sentence is an exemplary point in the history of modern writing: it shows how language becomes self-reflexive, how the movement of words is directed back at the nature of language itself as much as it is directed outwards, in a conventionally referential way, towards the objects and ideas of a supposedly external world. "A rose is a rose" is mere tautology, but it has to do with real roses; "a rose is a rose is a rose" has to do with language about roses, and the gaps it opens up between word and object are profound and disconcerting. Such gaps were always present within modernism, though they were usually tempered by a humanist confidence in the artist's control over her material; eventually, however, theorists like Jacques Derrida were to elevate such gaps into a whole theory of language as "differance," which would threaten to undermine the assumptions of modernism. The self-reflexive movement is characteristic of all modern art; it constitutes a fundamental putting-into-question of the nature of artistic expression. The medium is the message, not simply in the sense that form determines content, but in the sense that the message is a questioning of the medium. In 1917, the Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky outlined the notion of "foregrounding" the means of expression in our experience of a work of art. "As perception becomes habitual," he wrote, "it becomes automatic": we cease to notice the words we are using, they fade into the background, they become entirely transparent to the concepts behind them. Such habi- tualisation "devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war.... Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it Exits and Entrances 11 exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony." A stone is a stone is a precious stone. "The technique of art," Shklovsky argues further, "is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged." In this way the means of expression are "foregrounded," forced to the centre of our attention. Words are no longer transparent to concepts; the language of poetry becomes "a difficult, roughened, impeded language."6 It should be clear that many of the tactics employed by Stein and Nichol constitute just such "foregrounding." It was in painting that modern art's examination of its own means of existence most clearly began, and that the artistic "language" first became "impeded." Twenty years before Shklovsky, the French painter and critic Maurice Denis had declared: "We must remember that a painting, before it is a warhorse or a nude or any kind of anecdote, is a flat surface covered by colours arranged in a certain order."7 This statement was later adopted as a slogan for abstract art, but, strictly speaking, it refers not to total abstraction but to a balance between representation and self-reflexiveness. The painting is not yet only surface and colours: these things may come before the nude or the anecdote, but they do not displace them. The paintings of Cezanne, and of cubism in its purest form, are never abstract; indeed, the theory of cubism, as enunciated in its most dogmatic form by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, is violently hostile to abstraction. This is important to our discussion, because cubism offers the closest analogy in painting to the work of Gertrude Stein.8 Histori- cally, cubism became — despite its own theory — a stepping-stone on the path towards abstraction. The great cubist painters — Braque, Gris, Picasso — never painted any non-representational canvases; but other artists, like Delauny and Kupka, or Malevich and Mondrian, passed through cubism to the purified realms of, respectively, colour and form. Similarly, Stein's writing remains, obstinately, within the representational field of language. Given the inherent referentiality of words, the drive towards abstraction was much more difficult in language than it was in painting: this difficulty lies at the root of sound poetry in the Dada experiments of Hugo Ball.9 In Cezanne, Stein saw clearly the paradox of a work that was at one and the same time completely representational and completely autonomous. Cezanne's apples were like Stein's roses or like Shklovsky's stones: "they were so entirely [apples]," she wrote, "that they were not an oil 12. What History Teaches painting and yet that is just what the Cezannes were they were an oil painting.... This then was a great relief to me and I began my writing."10 Stein's writing - opaque, dense, obscure, forbiddingly private - is in one sense the true starting-point of modern writing; yet it is also, paradoxically, a starting-point which led nowhere (and is now here). It was the less radical but more accessible explorations of Ezra Pound and James Joyce (whom Picasso, according to Stein, called one of "the incomprehensibles whom anybody can understand")11 which opened up the mainstream of modernist writing. Only in the post- modernist period, when the impulses generated by Pound and Joyce seem to have run their course, have writers like bpNichol returned to the seminal decade of modernism, to the literary equivalent of what Apollinaire called "the heroic age" of cubism. And waiting for them there was Gertrude Stein. It was not a question of imitating Stein, for copying the superficial mannerisms of her various idiosyncratic styles leads only to parody, but rather of absorbing the fundamentals of her attitude towards language, and of finding ways to apply them in the contemporary situation.

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