by Holt, Jason
At this point, you may be feeling the need for a more sophisticated argument concerning the idea that there is one interpretation of a novel that can be defended as the best one. One argument that still holds its own was given in 1968 by Anthony Savile to the distinguished Aristotelian Society in London, England. Savile presents in that paper an account of best explanation in aesthetics. The search for the best interpretation is another way to describe my project. T.S. Eliot called it “the common pursuit of true judgement.” Savile argues that the correct reading of a work of art is the one that accounts for the greatest number of relevant features of the work, while being as simple and unitary and appropriate as any competing readings. This is what my reading of Beautiful Losers aspires to do.
A Sexual Reading
My Political Reading is not the only one left standing. There are other contenders to deal with. Since sex and religion go so closely together, let me introduce a sexual reading by offering a religious reading. You can see a resurrection story in Beautiful Losers. All the main characters die in Books One and Two. In Book Three those losers all reappear, transformed. Cohen himself called the book “a liturgy . . . a great mad confessional prayer” (as quoted by Ondaatje in Leonard Cohen, p. 44). Douglas Barbour outlines this reading in his penetrating essay, “Down with History.” He discusses the metaphysics of time, showing the contrast between the Historian’s sense of time and F.’s—who defies the limits imposed by history by trying to live wholly in the present. And he finds deliberate confusion in the chronology of the novel which reflects this religious dimension.
Another aspect of this reading is the way systematic thinking is attacked. The Historian is trying desperately to be rational. F., in contrast, tries to teach him to “connect nothing” (p. 16). Religions often insist that direct experience and faith are to be preferred over reason. In a telling symbol, the System Theatre is a movie theatre in Montréal where several scenes take place. But the “Sy” letters are broken, so that the neon sign says “stem Theatre” (p. 221). Stephen Scobie makes insightful remarks about this rejection of rigid, systematic thinking in favor of the organic pattern of a stem. And F. proclaims in his letter: “God is alive. Magic is afoot” (p. 157). But let me move on to sex.
William Blake suggests the following connection between religion and sexuality: “Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds / And binding with briars my joys and desires” (“The Garden of Love”). This is what happens to Catherine Tekakwitha when she meets the Jesuits. I see the sexual metaphor that dominates the novel this way. European colonizers convince Catherine to embrace the briars, and she chooses virginity and self-flagellation. The Historian also has trouble having sex with his wife, Edith. He is usually too preoccupied with his research to respond to her love. And in a wonderful scene at a Separatist political rally, he is excited by a woman who presses into him in the crowd, but is distraught in the end: “I didn’t come. I failed again” (p. 123). And Edith, in turn, is deeply frustrated.
Their friend F. tries to help them. He has sex with both Edith and the Historian, and with almost everything else that moves. He embodies liberation from the hang-ups of his friends, and, in contrast to Catherine, seeks sainthood through self-indulgence rather than self-denial. The climax of this story, if you will pardon the word, is a great orgy scene in which F. introduces a tireless Danish Vibrator in his attempt to bring Edith to orgasm (pp. 164–83). But he, too, ultimately fails. Edith commits suicide in order to teach her husband that the living are more important than the dead. Yet her husband remains a constipated and dirty-minded old man. The unexpected liberation comes at last in Book Three, to which I shall return.
The Religious Reading and Sexual Reading of the novel are mostly symbolic. It is not a pornographic novel; the point of all the sex is to serve as a metaphor for a more general liberation or salvation. So we must ask the question, who are the people to be liberated? And this brings me back to my Political Reading—for the four main characters represent Canada.
When I try to remember what I loved about this novel when I first read it, I realize that I thought of it as a kind of Lament for a Nation. The Canada that I had grown up in, that had been the territory of my political imagination, was being deconstructed. However, while Grant was lamenting the loss of something he treasured, Cohen is dreaming of a radical transformation of the country.
There are commentators who vigorously disagree with my reading. Scobie is one example:
It is certainly possible to read the whole of Beautiful Losers as a political work, and to argue that the personal victimization of the central characters can be read as an allegory of Canadian society. But I am not sure that the tone of the book allows this interpretation to be primary; the tone is obsessively personal, and politics are absorbed into private vision. (Leonard Cohen, p. 113)
To this I reply: however private the vision, it is still Cohen’s vision of Canadian society, its main founding peoples, its persistent character, its problems, and their potential resolution. These are the subject matter around which the nightmares of self-destruction and the pornographic allegory of desperately striving for orgasm are woven. So I maintain that this interpretation, although it may not be the first one you’d think of, is a fundamental one. It is the necessary framework for a “best reading” of the book.
The Future of Canada
The novel ends with a short third section. This is a test case for my account. What sense can we make of Book Three, a short epilogue written in the third person? The constipated and filthy Anglophone Historian from Book One has been living in a tree hut through the winter. The other founding people are dead, and there is not much left of him. Then “Spring comes from the West.” He stands by a road, trying to hitch a ride into Montréal. In what seems to me a key image, a blonde young woman in an Oldsmobile stops to pick him up (p. 234). Remember, he was trying to save Catherine Tekakwitha from the Jesuits. He wanted to make her not just a dead virgin saint, but a living object of passion. Well, it seems to me that the blonde may be Catherine updated, or Catherine’s successor. She is wearing moccasins. And the old Historian can see how far up they are laced. She drops him off at the System Theatre (p. 235), where he blinks in time with the frames of the film, so that both the film and he become invisible.
I read the beautiful, uninhibited, sexually demanding woman in the Oldsmobile as Joni Mitchell, but that’s my fantasy. Spring, new life, has arrived. She says “ισισ εγω,” which means “I am Isis.” Isis is an Ancient Egyptian goddess of fertility. Isis has a great many other attributes, as well, but virginity and self-punishment are not among them. She is Catherine transformed, she is the spring, she is the future. She is not self-denying, not virginal, not “hung-up.” She eagerly demands an orgasm from her passenger. Canada after Expo 67 will be a different place. Montréal will be a different city. And those who live on will be very different people. They will not be candidates for martyrdom or sainthood. They will not be trapped by their own history and their inhibitions. Catherine will be completely transformed. Perhaps that will be the final miracle, her sainthood achieved.
The old man now goes into The Main Shooting and Game Alley (the bottom of Montréal’s desire apparatus, as Cohen puts it). A mob forms to attack the old man. And what does he do? First he turns into a combination of F. (“the Terrorist Leader that escaped tonight”) and the Historian (“the pervert they showed on TV they’re combing the country for”) (p. 239). And then he dematerializes. For the first time in his life he relaxes totally. And he simply disappears. Mobs of ordinary Montréalers assemble. They are seeking a revolution, a second chance, a new future. Cohen does not tell us what will happen next. Perhaps the old man rematerializes as the lens of a movie projector and shows a vision of what may come. But we know that the old Canada is past. The future will be for people who are not inhibited by History, whose bodies are not tortured but liberated, and whose minds are not bound by the mythologies of the past.
Those of us who have liv
ed into the Harper era (Stephen Harper became Canada’s Prime Minister in 2006) may fret that we’ve now reverted to the Canada of Cohen’s Historian. But for Cohen, in 1966, the future is an open promise. Catherine Tekakwitha is long dead, and Cohen pleads for the sanctification of a transformed Catherine. There are three other Beautiful Losers: They, too, are all dead. One Aboriginal, one French, one English; one crushed by the machinery of the modern world, one shriveled by the madness of his lively passions and ambitions, and a confused and constipated one who finally relaxed and just disappeared. The novel is Leonard Cohen’s assessment of the state of his country, and his dream of its future.1
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1 I first wrote about Beautiful Losers for a lecture series I gave to Canadian Studies and Philosophy students at the University of Vienna in 2006. I am especially grateful to those students, who loved Leonard Cohen and taught me many things about him and this novel.
13
Writing Poetry after Auschwitz
PAWEŁ DOBROSIELSKI AND MARCIN NAPIÓRKOWSKI
The debate about the role of the Holocaust as a model for modern ethical understanding of memory was reflected in a proverbial way by philosopher and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno, when he claimed, “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz” (the actual line from p. 162 of “Cultural Criticism and Society” translates as “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”). Modern Western culture is characterized by a particular obsession with the past as an object of moral concern. The Holocaust plays a crucial role in this artistic, literary, and philosophical trend. Many philosophers have written on the topic of the Holocaust, which has been dubbed a defining event for Western culture.
The Holocaust clearly plays this vital role in Leonard Cohen’s Flowers for Hitler. Actually, the book can even be interpreted as a literary embodiment of the ongoing philosophical debate. What Cohen does is to prove Adorno wrong. What does it mean to write poetry that self-consciously highlights the fact that it’s written after the supposed end of all poetry?
Images and Dreams
Let’s start by asking a very basic, even naive question: What is the poet’s world made of? What are the basic elements that Leonard Cohen uses to create his poetry? The cover of the first edition of Flowers suggests an answer. The cover contains a number of odd symbols which, despite the date of publication (1964), resemble weird icons on a computer desktop: flowers, food, a castle, a plane decorated with hearts, an arrow-pierced heart, a parachutist, two naked women, a dog, and finally the eponymous Adolf Hitler himself.
Even a cursory glance inside the book reveals the importance of such symbols. The repertoire of images used in this relatively big collection (over 120 pages) seems disturbingly repetitive. There are relatively few recurrent motifs that reappear in almost all the poems, as if the poet had used a pile of cards, shuffled and dealt them out over and over again. What’s even more intriguing than the very limited number of motifs is their apparent incoherency. Some of them come from Cohen’s spiritual repertoire, while others can be easily assigned to the common 1960s fascination with drugs and altered states of consciousness. There are also many historical and geographical references. But there are also some very unremarkable items that reappear again and again: telephone, radio, green grass, and, of course, flowers. Together they are like an annoyingly infectious song we hear in the morning and can’t get out of our heads throughout the whole day—a good enough way to start a horror.
Some of the most strikingly recurrent images and symbols, grouped in basic categories in a random order, are as follows:
•(Astronomy) planet, star, moon, sky
•(Drugs) opium/poppies, junkie, (alcohol) to be drunk
•Burning (a body, oneself, books)
•Concentration camp
•Ashes
•Oven and smoke
•Telephone and radio
•The Nazis: Hitler, Goering, Eichmann
•(Hydrogen) bomb, mushroom (cloud)
•(Family) father, grandmother, mother, sister (also:) house, room
•(Geography) Ganges, Canada (Montreal), Cuba, Poland, Russia, America, Japan (and more . . . )
•(Religions) Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, rabbi, priest, Zen-master, Jesus
•Flowers, grass
•Suit
•Hair/naked body
•History, museum
•City Hall
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, whose theory of dreams influenced deeply both modern philosophical debate on memory and Cohen’s more surrealistic poetry, claims that an analyst should distinguish between the “material” of dreams and their meaning. “What are dreams made of?” then, is a basic question, preceding any possible attempt to explain them. In dreams it isn’t the images themselves that are significant (we may call them the vocabulary of dreams), but rather the relations between them, the grammar of dreams. Let’s consider, then, possible relations among the symbols Cohen uses.
We could reorganize the list, randomly combining elements, and that is actually what Cohen does throughout the whole volume. At least one of the above images appears in almost every single poem. Many of the poems are so saturated with recurring motifs, that they seem entirely built from some prefabricated building-blocks, or “poetry bricks.” Think of creating a do-it-yourself Flowers for Hitler generator that would produce an unlimited series of new poems by randomly juxtaposing these motifs (like: “Naked Goering enters a City Hall full of ovens, where he receives a phone call from Jesus,” and so on). Although it may seem odd to a devoted fan of the Canadian bard, this is exactly what the structure of the collection suggests. And it would not be, in any case, diminishing the value of Cohen’s poetry! Just the opposite: we should rather admire the book as an open collection. To be honest, it seems that no single poem taken separately is a true masterpiece, but taken as a whole, the volume makes a “system” capable of expressing a lot.
Just think of Flowers as if it were not a collection of poems, but a kind of machine programmed to produce them. (We don’t think the poet himself would take offense.)
Repression
We know already what Cohen’s poetic world is made from. Let’s try now to enter it. First of all, the world Cohen invites us into is normal. Despite being gravely influenced by surrealism, the landscape of Flowers is furnished with surprisingly typical items in more or less trivial configurations. And this is exactly where the horror begins! The world is awkwardly normal, given what has recently happened. It had been just two decades since the Holocaust, and yet everything looks as if all the atrocities of the two world wars had never taken place.
More than anything else, perhaps, it’s the apparent normality of everyday life that seems to horrify Cohen (or rather, that Cohen uses to horrify us): “It never happened / There was no murder,” repeats the voice of the poetic narrator in a frantic search for any evidence that will overturn this assumption. But the grass is not red—as we read in “The First Murder”—it’s just green, as it should be. The fact that the world goes on, that the grass is green, that people continue to be born, married, and buried in peace, makes all the atrocities of the past seem highly “improbable.”
But what happened, happened. There are ashes under the surface of the green field. Continuing the rhetoric of this horror, we may say that the dead are not fully dead. “I can’t get their nude and loving bodies out of my mind” reads “A Migrating Dialogue,” while “The Music Crept by Us” provides us with a Titanic-like picture of life as a party where “the band is composed / of former SS monsters.” “For My Old Layton” presents a similar picture of people living close to “the breathless / in the ground.” The image culminates in “The Invisible Trouble,” where we see a man covering up numbers on his wrist that appeared there as a hallucination, a side effect of watching too many Holocaust movies. There are no numbers on our forearms, yet there is a burden—as we may interpret this metaphor. An author analyzing the image of the Holocaust in Flowers for Hitler, Sandra
Wynands, accurately writes about “the inability to reconcile normality with the knowledge of horror” which is at the same time “the inability to imagine such horror in the presence of normality” (p. 206).
It all “just happened” suggests the title of one of Cohen’s poems (“How It Happened in the Middle of the Day”), causing no change in the way the world turns. Life still goes on, and people pass by the mass graves not even noticing their existence. There’s no difference, “not a single alien tremor / in the voices crying: tomatoes, onions, bread”—notes a disbelieving Cohen, unconsciously(?) paraphrasing a famous verse by Polish poet and Nobel prize winner Czesław Miłosz whose poem “Campo di Fiori” (1943) juxtaposes the burning ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto with the execution of Giordano Bruno burned at the stake in 1600. Even before the flames had died, observes Miłosz two decades before the publication of Flowers, life went back to normal, and merchants were selling such ordinary things as lemons and olives at the very same square the horror had taken place.
“How come the buses still run? / How come they’re still making movies?”—asks “A Migrating Dialogue.” The fact that the life goes on despite all the atrocities seems somehow more horrifying than the atrocities themselves. At the surface there are flowers, and grass, and music—people eat, drink, play, they even make love. But all this normality is founded on a kind of dark lie which, since Freud, we call repression—the lie we tell ourselves not to have to face the truth that will be too terrifying to bear.
The Discovery of Guilt
The Western world “rediscovered” the Holocaust only in the 1960s, more than fifteen years after the ovens in Auschwitz went out. Until then the postwar boom was in full swing. In the 1950s rapid economic development, mass production of goods and babies, as well as the emergence of new lifestyles seemed much more important than facing the recent horror. The memory of the Holocaust was repressed in various ways. Survivors’ narratives were not particularly welcomed and often misunderstood. Western societies decided to turn their backs on the past and look hopefully towards the future.