by André Alexis
Poetry, for Basho, is the thing that may be captured by words but that is not confined to them. As Basho has it, there is an “everlasting self that is poetry.” That “self” is both the poet and not the poet. It’s possible to speak of Basho’s “self” as being the land, for instance, so that the commentator who said of Narrow Road that “it is as if the very soul of Japan had itself written it” was getting at something crucial to Basho’s idea of poetry: neither the land nor the man speaks, but “poetry” is.
This sense of the land — an affection and respect for it — comes through in Short Journey. The various landscapes of California, Japan, Australia, China, and Canada are scrutinized by the poet. But there’s something more to all this. Roo’s Short Journey is not simply about “poetry.” It is also about death and aging and the impermanent. Here even the natural world is compared to music, that most fleeting of things. But poetry as Basho understood it is, at least potentially, a lasting thing. And in Short Journey, there is the suggestion — or is it the hope? — that poetry can contain and keep the fleeting and the gone. In Short Journey the “fleeting and the gone” includes childhood summers in California, time spent in Australia, boys and girls who have gone from one’s life, and, above all, one’s parents. The deaths of Roo’s parents is a wound, and part of the pain this wound inflicts is the anxiety that those one loves will fade. So, in Short Journey, Roo’s search for “poetry” is also a search for some “thing” which will keep safe that which she fears might vanish forever.
There is much, much more to say about Short Journey, about its language in particular, which is subtly, and at times humourously, playful,19 and about the book’s first section, “Summer Grass,” a sometimes difficult but necessary preface of sorts, in which Roo catalogues what is lost. But I want to end this brief consideration of the book by mentioning one aspect of Short Journey that hasn’t yet elicited much commentary: the oscillating, equal-space-occupying existence of seventeenth-century Japan and twenty-first-century North America in the book.
It isn’t just that Roo exists and, simultaneously, Basho exists as well, in her use of his words, his imagery, his concision, and his profound respect for nature, which she shares. It’s something more. When asked, “What makes a poet’s language distinctive?” Margaret Avison answered, “It is saying ‘I am here and not not-there.’” This is a good way not only of suggesting what makes poetic language “distinctive” but, beyond that, of nailing one of the characteristics of poetry in general and of Short Journey in particular. “Here and not not-there” is descriptive of the relationship of Roo Borson to her mentor Matsuo Basho, but it also captures the feeling of Roo’s poetry in Short Journey, a book that is thrilling in its erotics of the relational.
2. Christian Bök’s Eunoia
Just before Eunoia was published, Christian spoke to me about the process of writing the book. We were at a Russell Smith book launch, I think, and Christian described the writing of Eunoia as “disturbing,” in that it filled him with a kind of paranoia, the feeling that language was using him for its own purposes. Not in the usual way (“My characters took over from me and wrote the book themselves”), but in a way more sinister. While writing a passage containing only such words as use the vowel e
Whenever Helen sleeps, her essence enters the ether — the deep well, where she feels herself descend deeper, deeper.
it was, he said, as if he could feel the “mind” of language compelling him to say the things he said, whether he wanted to say them or not. In the case of Eunoia’s Chapter E, it felt as if he’d had no choice but to cough up a version of The Iliad, the last thing he’d set out to do.
Having just written of Basho’s “everlasting self,” it seems appropriate to ask what, exactly, was guiding Christian’s work.
Eunoia is a puzzling book whose most intriguing puzzles are hidden behind a formal apparatus that, though impressive in its execution, is actually kind of monotonous. The book is a short noem (novel/poem) or, if you like, a long povel (poem/novel) whose five chapters are exercises in univocalism.20 Along with the univocalisms, Eunoia was written with certain other constraints. Among these: all the chapters had to allude to the art of writing; all had to include a scene of banqueting, of sexual debauchery, of nautical voyaging; and each chapter had to describe a pastoral vista. As I said: intriguing, but kind of monotonous. Christian’s real innovation is that, in Eunoia, each of the vowels is given its own chapter (Chapter A, Chapter E, Chapter I, Chapter O, Chapter U), and this allows the reader to hear the character of a, the character of e, and so on. For the reader, as well as for the author, it’s as if one can sense a personality in each of the vowels, a personality that changes from chapter to chapter (vowel to vowel) and grows stronger by the juxtapositions the chapters create. Here’s a sentence from each chapter:
Awkward grammar appals a craftsman.
Enfettered, these sentences repress free speech.
Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script.
Loops on bold fonts now form lots of words for books.
Bulls plus bucks run thru buckbrush; thus dun burrs clutch fur tufts.21
On another occasion entirely — this time, at Harbourfront, I think — Christian spoke of his distaste for “personal detail” in poetry. Confessional poetry, he said, left him unimpressed, because it usually generated easy emotion or appealed to (and sometimes won) the reader’s emotional involvement by going around the aesthetic. Meaning: confessional poetry could generate emotional responses whether or not it was good poetry. It relied on biographical data, on things outside the art of poetry for its effect. A cheat, he thought. His own poetry was resolutely impersonal. If anything, his work is — like Basho’s, though very, very few people would think of Basho while reading Crystallography or Eunoia — attuned to some essential aspect of poetry. (An “essence” that is not necessarily the preserve of humans. One of Christian’s favourite books, at the time of Eunoia, was a collection of poems generated by a computer program.22)
These two things — the fact that Christian found writing Eunoia a paranoia-inducing experience and the fact that he avoids the biographical in his own work — are interesting when taken together. They suggest that Christian both courts the “purely poetic” (or pure language) and is frightened by it. But I have another question about Eunoia, a political one, that sharpens the question about Christian’s role in creating Eunoia. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter O:
Porno shows folks lots of sordor — zoom shots of Bjorn Borg’s bottom or Snoop Dogg’s crotch. Johns who don condoms for blowjobs go downtown to Soho to look for pornshops known to stock lots of lowbrow shlock — off-colour porn for old boors who long to drool onto color photos of cocks, boobs, dorks or dongs. Homos shoot photos of footlong shlongs.
Now, Christian is North American. He knows that, in North America at least, black men are commonly reduced to being “mere penises” as a way of suggesting they aren’t fully, intellectually equal to white men. So, why does he (or why does the text) point to Snoop Dogg’s crotch, reducing Snoop Dogg to his dick? Further, he knows that “homo” is an insulting epithet for “homosexual.” If you accept that this passage is racist or homophobic, to whom does the racism or homophobia belong? To Christian? Or to language itself?
I want to be absolutely clear, before we go on: I would bet my life on the fact that Christian Bök is not racist, nor have I ever known him to be homophobic. Moreover, I think the passage about “Snoop Dogg” and “homos” could be qualified as (at worst) insensitive rather than “racist” or “homophobic.” But what I’m pointing to here is a tension that runs through Eunoia like an electric current: Christian-language, language-Christian, like “zero” and “one” in computer programming. Let’s think it through a little: the only reason Snoop Dogg is in Eunoia is that his name is univocalic. “Snoop Dogg” has been reduced to letters on a page. “Bjorn Borg” is here for the same reason. Neither man is referred to
in relation to his real self. They’re simply words on a page. So, from one angle, any racism at play here is the by-product of certain rules that generated the text. Or, more emphatically put: the racism is in the reader, not the text, nor the rules that generated it, because rules can’t be racist any more than computer programs can feel longing. But how would the reader feel about the passage I quoted if the text had read (in part)
Porno shows folks lots of sordor — zoom shots of Bjorn Borg’s crotch or Snoop Dogg’s bottom.
In this form, you lose the alliteration of “Bjorn Borg’s bottom” (a lovely sound, although, as to the phenomenon itself . . . having spent some time searching for pictures of Bjorn Borg’s bottom online, I’d have to say it is not one of the man’s commonly featured features) but you also lose the allusion to Snoop Dogg’s crotch and, so, lessen (perhaps!) the possibility of a race-conscious reading. Well? Is it, politically, more acceptable to talk about “Snoop Dogg’s” butt?
Actually, my question is more specific. I mean to ask: is it more acceptable, politically, for Christian (a white man) to write about a black man’s crotch or the same black man’s arse? To accept that the passage could be other than as Christian wrote it is what I’m getting at. To admit that Christian has made important choices unconnected to the rules that generated Eunoia is to begin to question the necessity of Eunoia as we have it. It is to see Eunoia as a long series of micro-choices that, cumulatively, tell us things about Christian, not about the rules used to generate the text or about the “mind” of poetry/language. In this sense, Eunoia is a very peculiar autobiography.
Perhaps the most revealing moments in the book are in the afterwords, a section called “The New Ennui,” in which Christian talks about the procedures he used to generate Eunoia. He writes, among other things,
. . . Eunoia is directly inspired by the exploits of Oulipo (l’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) — the avant-garde coterie renowned for its literary experimentation with extreme formalistic constraints. The text makes a Sisyphean spectacle of its labour, wilfully crippling its language in order to show that, even under such improbable conditions of duress, language can still express an uncanny, if not sublime, thought.
Two curious things in this passage. First, the Oulipo began as a group of writers and mathematicians who sought not to bind and constrain literary creation, but, inspired by Bourbaki (the name of a collective of mathematicians), to find ways to combine the arts of literature and mathematics. Constraints are one aspect of some of the Oulipo’s procedures. Obligations (things that must be done within a text . . . the Baron in Calvino’s Baron in the Trees, for instance, must remain up in his trees all his life) and alterations (creation using previously existing texts) are among the others. Christian chooses to mention only one aspect of the Oulipo’s work, and he refers to it in a telling way: “extreme formalistic constraints.” I think it’s safe to say that not only does he see things this way but also that this is what he needs from the Oulipo. Even more interesting, Christian speaks of the text making a spectacle of its labour, of the text wilfully crippling its language, so that language can express an uncanny (unsettling, as if of supernatural origin or nature) or sublime thought. In Christian’s own terminology a violence has been done, but language did it to itself, with him as its — what? — servant? handmaid?
With Eunoia, we enter into a kind of dark region in which the relationship between the writer and language is a form of sadomasochism out of which “poetry” comes.
The text of Eunoia is, at times, incredibly beautiful and amusing. It’s unlike any other written in my country. Chapter E, its retelling of the myth of Helen, is stunning. And one could, as some critics have, write for days about its wordplay.
To me, though, Eunoia is surprisingly similar to Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida: both texts are overt questionings of the idea of “poetry,” the writers of both have foreign mentors (Basho, the Oulipo), and both works give the reader an inkling of the relational (Avison’s “here and not not-there”: Basho/Roo, Constraints/Christian). Eunoia is a compellingly disturbed field, where Short Journey is very still. Both works hide, on first reading, as much as they show. Short Journey hides by staying quiet. Eunoia hides by making a loud spectacle of itself.
Two versions of doubt. Fascinating books, both of them.
3. Paul Anderson’s Hunger’s Brides
Hunger’s Brides is a mystery novel, an eccentric one, with two central mysteries. The first concerns the disappearance of a brilliant graduate student named Beulah Limosneros. For this part of the novel, her lover and thesis adviser, Donald Gregory, is our “detective.” The second mystery concerns the seventeenth-century Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who, when she was at the height of her creative power, abandoned — or was forced to abandon — the writing of poetry. Our “detective,” here, is Beulah Limosneros, whose biography of Sor Juana makes up a good portion of the novel’s 1,300 pages.
Early in the first chapter, Donald Gregory warns us about the book we’re reading. He warns us by telling us about himself. He writes, “If you want to better understand the true, study the liar.” He then offers an expansion of the idea: one of the ways we might arrive at knowledge of God is by knowing all the things God is not. This is the via negativa, the “negative road” to knowledge, and Gregory tells us that he made his reputation in academia by writing essays whose thesis was that fiction is a via negativa, a lie that leads to the truth or, as pertinently, the sacred. In other words, for the novel’s narrator, the novel we’re reading is less important for what it says than for what it leaves unsaid, or for what it implies.
This is the novel’s first explicit statement of a dichotomy (truth/lie) as well as the introduction of a dynamic that courses through the novel. Hunger’s Brides is filled with couples and doubles: Donald/Beulah, Beulah/Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Juana/Amanda, Canada/Mexico, past/present, self/other, poetry/prose, postmodern/baroque.23 With so many couples and doubles, it’s almost natural that the novel is riven by an anxiety about the “true”: the true poetic image, the true translation, the true story of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the true story of Beulah’s disappearance. There is even some question about the true book since, by the end, it’s difficult to say just who the narrator of the book we’ve read actually is: Beulah Limosneros or her professor/lover Donald Gregory.
If, in Margaret Avison’s terms, poetry is relational and writes from its relationality (“here and not not-there”), Hunger’s Brides is an instance in which prose lives out its anxiety about “here or there-ness.” And a part of that anxiety is about the tools we use to see the world. For instance, Hunger’s Brides is a novel of mirrors that is wary of mirrors.24
Of course, this is not a work by Kafka or Poe. It uses its anxiety more playfully. It makes “truth” its object while parodying various genres that have “the true” as their objective: mystery stories, detective fiction, translations, literary criticism, historical research, theological disputes. It also runs the gamut of modes of expression — poetry, non-fiction, fiction, movie scripts — as if testing the ways of writing in order to find the right one for its purposes or, in keeping with Professor Gregory’s thinking, to exhaust the human ways of speaking in order to leave the divine. An interesting objective and one that requires the 1,300 pages the novel uses, if not more.
The novel is complex, ambitious, playful, strange, and instructive. There are any number of ways to talk about it, any number of facets to be considered. But the aspect of the novel that moved me most is its embrace of hybridity. The novel is a document of the cultural moment we live in. It’s a thing built out of the multiple origins of my country, of our country. The way its parts interact — influencing and counter-influencing each other — give an inkling of Canada’s (and Mexico’s) culturally hybrid nature. This is especially the case as concerns the language of Juana de la Cruz.
Reviewing the novel in The Independent, Tim Martin a
sserts that
You can tell the protagonists are Spanish because they talk in Spanish: “This single book is why, en mi opinión, the many generations of us who followed Cortes have not raised a monument to him.” Anderson is keen for his readers not to miss any of his tricks, even if that does mean diluting the effect to explain things to smaller intellects than his own.
This is shoddy and self-satisfied reviewing. The point is not that the protagonists “talk in Spanish.” They manifestly do not. This is a novel in English. The speech of the Mexican characters includes Spanish phrases. It is mixed, a hybrid. Nor is this done so that Paul Anderson can “explain things to smaller intellects than his own,” though, on the evidence, Tim Martin’s intellect needs all the help it can get. If he had bothered to read the footnotes, the reviewer might have read a pertinent passage on accent, translation, and “authenticity.” The choice to include Spanish phrases in the dialogue of the Spanish speakers was made precisely to indicate that the Spanish speakers had been translated (or, better, transplanted) into this English narrative. The Spanish words and phrases are used to heighten the foreignness of the Spanish language in the text, as well as to point to the crazed translator/interpreter of Sor Juana’s thoughts, poetry, and intellectual life: Beulah Limosneros.25
Something else about the language of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: from the start, it’s clear we are dealing with a particular version of Sor Juana. The young Sor Juana reads Herodotus and Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle. She reads all the books found in her grand-father’s library, and is traumatized about such things as the fifth-century massacre of the inhabitants of Melos by the Athenian forces. That is to say, Beulah Limosneros’s Sor Juana speaks as if she were much older. This is a somewhat conventional approach. After all, intelligence doesn’t always reveal itself quite so directly outside the realm of fiction. But then there is the poetry. In Hunger’s Brides, Sor Juana’s poetry is a kind of absolute, as close to the divine as the novel directly gets. Her poetry is given, at times, in Spanish: