| This piece was
written as an introduction to the 2002 re-edition of my 1982 collection
of stories: Spare Parts.1
To signal the vaguely surrealist context in which I started writing in
Montréal, the piece begins with and refers to a Dream About
Writing where ...........
I lay in bed,
the sheet folded down rather sloppily over the mattress, which was
embarrassing because I was giving a public reading about passion from
the bed — by myself. Reading looking straight ahead. And the
audience was sitting to my left in three oblique rows of chairs. Looking
not at me, on the right, but also looking straight ahead (from their
oblique angle), as I, lying in bed, read.
Montréal: Walking
down l’Esplanade-by-the-park, in the dark, it seems indiscreet spying
on the writer I was then. Light seeps from the spacious glass-brick public
washroom façade at the end of the walk. Part of a mayor’s
project for making a Marie-Antoinette hamlet out of Olmsted’s mountain.
People nod on benches. Cop car drives up. I keep, for the moment, to the
residential [referential] side. Briskly, I walk. Toward the cinema with
the best popcorn in the city. For a hit of nostalgia: old Cassavetes.
Black Orpheus. La Dolce Vita. Past the gorgeous dwellings, former embassies,
downgraded to city councilors [one, anti-vice, shot by a limping man in
a raccoon coat police called “a foreigner”], immigrant families,
artists. Trying to glimpse between the cracks in the curtains. A girl
in pillbox passes, trotting even faster. Later, spying the young woman
in the pillbox in the light of the popcorn machine, I see she’s
the daughter of the man who stuck out his tongue as I stared past his
wrought-iron fence, attaching an eschatological name to my person. I trot,
feeling [retrospectively], like a miso-coated salmon.
It is this “later” I want to talk about:
I was a journalist. “Then.” Sentencing, over the fear of being
poisoned “in relation to the mother” [as Freud said of paranoia].
Amassing outfits, bylines, accoutrements of success to stave off the threat
of a life like hers. Simultaneously executing patterns of conspiracy in
my world of small subjects, women, would-be intellectuals, working class
upstarts. Tentatively, I was practicing growing angry at what they were,
the information merchants, and who I risked becoming, her ghost. Taking
off and trying on prostheses in the cheap lights of old department stores.
I dreaded mornings “after.”
Coming into work at a local daily newspaper — my typewriter faced
that of a kindly elder court reporter. Thirteen calls this morning, he
informed me sadly. Thirteen calls furious at my taunting article on the
“McGill-Français” demo, featuring commerce students
caroling O Canada, well back on the sidewalk. Thirteen outraged members
of the English community thinking the city belonged to them. I wanted
to fuck with their aura: with that which does not strut about with a label
describing what it is. All the same, I was writing careful tight phrases,
miming information’s racket. Those basic hundred words. Censoring
the vernacular; words like class, cunt, capitalist; likewise censored:
“Some Points about the FLQ Manifesto.”2
How phrases went together in precise little syllogisms also seemed inhibitively
. . . structuring. I wanted to mock them in sentences like single grins
with lips pasted back [Lisa Robertson]. Simultaneously wanting to write
phrases that performed Mallarméan gestures.
The context — bathed in the tender backlight of “later”
— encouraged it: a first poetry reading, la Nuit de la Poésie
against the War Measures Act [the legislator had suspended all civil rights].
Impressing on fresh adolescent spirits in the dark recesses of the Eglise/Théâtre
Gésu a link, possibly indelible, between writing and subversion.
People spoke at real risk of being imprisoned. The singer Louise Forestier,
pregnant, in braids [a nice touch], stood on the stage, patting the baby
in her stomach and singing “Ferme-la et prends ta bière [Shut-up
and drink your beer]”. While round that old angel monument by the
mountain, cops’ horses scattered conga players, waterpipes, skinny
loiterers. Recently, walking into a tearoom in Montréal’s
Quartier Latin, I thought I saw those same skinny youth “again”:
apparently eating only carrots, and smoking waterpipes, conjuring in their
spareness the empathy and complicity I tendentiously conjugating with
then. [You still think you’re 30, a lover complained recently].
It is the artist’s task, Ernst Bloch states in Utopia,
to bring now-time into line or focus with like historical moments when
thought’s not emptied out, a turning point. When time has lost its
thickness. Talent may be, only, knowing how to grasp a vector when our
lives flow along it.
Dear R, who are the age I was . . . earlier: The air is empty. The
grass, where we walked, is empty. And the space across the bay where the
Twin Towers stood. Nostalgia for how things were before. Not so great
if you care to remember said Nakila at the Brooklyn Women’s Salon.
Dear R, I say, playing the older writer walking, arms folded over black
raincoat, head bent to the side, a writer must (in the sense of surely)
know what impetus causes her to write this way instead of that. Must (surely)
be aware of the risk of foregrounding her by her inscription in the system
she opposes when she chooses to write not a line but a sentence. I like
that you ask: “What is the writer’s responsibility?”
Though I want to say: “Be careful.” Or: “Risk.”
I like that you are interested in narrative as call and response, linked
to address. That for you, in your writing, address is not about the is
nor the will-be but the would, thus keeping both narrator and narrative
conditional.
“Meanwhile” [Memory being the solicitous trollop she is]:
Back in that late-70s pseudo-revolutionary Wonderland, increasingly medially
framed as Québécois spaghetti western, due to the crime
rates, “meanwhile,” in a two-story flat high on a Quartier-Latin
promontory called Terrasse Saint-Denis, two musicians [one franco, one
anglo], two writers [one franco, one anglo], one visual artist [anglo],
one guy in a navy beret from the suburbs [franco], read The Surrealist
Manifestoes and felt latent content mattered, chain-smoking and analysing
our dreams, or going round the city putting up mad broadsheets. THEY would
always win the information dream. Soundtrack: traffic; splashing behind
a small paneless window cut in the kitchen wall to ventilate the tub;
and one day A SHOT, when a man sticks an automatic out the garret window
opposite, and kills another walking down the sidewalk.
Left for the left . . .
But what impetus, exactly, gave “story” the rush of someting
new: these written ghosts of subjects, fragile substantives, compiled
from public text, experience, and facing the world obliquely? Memory can’t
resist proffering, in answer, one last dream for analysis: the [above-cited]
Dream About Writing. Which thus prodigiously deconstructed, yields
a trace of abjection [lying, sloppily, in bed], a whiff of betrayal
[three + oblique]. Precisely those elements that trope, in the
vaguely comic autobiographical conjunction of semiotics, semantics, gossip,
she now thinks of as prose: “experimental,” inasmuch as implying
failure to represent the universal, linked to class, gender, sometimes
race; but also to the pleasure of sounding out, a kin to poetry. Sometimes
she watches, regretfully, as her little tales float, textured, suggestive,
by the averted eyes of certain poets she admires. Who, along with lovers
of more conventional fiction, persist in reading “experimental”
prose for content, for “voice” alone. As if a subject redistributed
across hazardous abutments, torqued by inner syntax in dissonance with
outer, or the reverse, can be absorbed as passively as a drugstore novel.
Our group would have laughed even then at the poster a young poet, two
blocks up, has on the wall of his borrowed room. Citing a famous novelist
saying every sentence has a truth waiting at the end. Manifest truth maybe,
we’d have mouthed, red lips insulting.
Recently [plus ça change]:
Some French-language ESL students, reading these stories, smile at what
they call “the repression.” In bed with her bathing suit on???
They also smile at those incontinent raspberries blooming on the snow
[another dream, I’m afraid]. Was she New Age? Influenced by the
cinema? The mid-career writer, on her platform, tries to explain how Wild
Strawberries, seen at 17 in a repertory cinema, made her
feel so free she floated out, past trashcans, toward a future of broken
narratives. Why? they smile again. Because we wanted difference, we wanted
everything. Here the 20-year-old heads from Ville Brossard, Kenya, Hong
Kong, Stockholm and Chicoutimi nod. And because we wanted everything,
adds the writer quickly, we totaled Marxism + surrealism + new theories
about the death of the western subject into the equation. While a plethora
of identity issues screamed in the background. On streets called Rachel,
Marie-Anne, Jeanne-Mance, cafés were full of feminists discussing
language, and the eruption of the anteriority of language within it, the
latter identified with Mother [Kristeva]. We wanted to circumvent logos.
Without somehow abandoning a towering lucidity. Some of us were also seeking
to locate, semiotically, the unique sounds of a French-dominant multi-linguistic
city.
Dear R: Walking in Prospect Park, green light glinting off shiny grassblades,
the gleaming hole in the distant Manhattan skyline, which only the familiar
— I guess I mean any global citizen with access to a screen —
recognize as absence: you ask the same questions I often ask myself. Re:
relationship to reader. Re: the alleged superiority of poetry for allowing
singularity of perception, bringing focus to bear directly on words and
the sounds of them. And relations between. I love the hugeness of your
desire for reaching the highest point of expressivity in art and life
[Maiakovsky]. Do not certain conjunctures foster this kind of raw energy
required for pure invention? Skating between modes and limitations. Less
acknowledged: what I am learning from you . . .
Yet, albeit, at the same time, furthermore:
She wanted to touch Her with her statements. Notwithstanding the faint
whiff of complicity with dominance connected with speaking assertively.
Was “to sentence” a border issue? Controlling? Paranoid in
its insistence on contiguity. Twas a journalist, cigarette on lip, bad
liver, sensitive crinkled face, who’d told her: “A sentence
starting with To tell the truth is unreliable, discombobulated, corrected.”
Was not any sentence such? She wanted to turn them into lines of flight,
translating provisorily, and yes, naturally “belatedly,” the
drift of experience. Hopefully her perpetual avant-garde urge to underscore,
again and again, that contiguity between making art and life, would not
grow rigid. [Here, she gets an image of paper handcuffs and — sex.]
But we live in chaos. Is not a tendency to endlessly intrepret, to graft
“sense” onto “nonsense,” both attribual to paranoia
— and sensible? It amuses her to think that Freud’s case of
female paranoia [“Essay Running counter to the Psychoanalytic Theory
of Paranoia”] momentarily derailed his whole paranoic system. Implying,
as it did, that his female client’s fear of being poisoned appeared
to originate less in Mother than in her social context. But . . . can
a bride in a wedding not embrace the family? Answer: Only “later.”
Still she wants to write prose. Why should only Poetry [be] . . . about
the way language works (rythms and sounds and syntax — musical rather
than pictoral values) as much as it is about a given subject [Ann Lauterbach].
Me too, I wanted to create meanings at multiple sorts of intersections.
* *
*
I veer off l’Esplanade,
still in the dark, onto the walk that bifurcates the park. Toward the
public washrooms. That old angel monument’s visible in the distance.
A woman approaches, holding a black umbrella blindly before her. A homeless
man with his cart full of plastic bags bikes by, holding high a bouquet
of florist-wrapped flowers. Such instants, innocent almost, are where
stories begin, breathing in and exhaling . . . not the single breath of
a single genius, Breton’s mythic poet having been dumped, thanks
to language feminists and others, for more collective and material notions
of aleatory writing.
And this brings me again to the impetus that determines choices . . .
I find it odd that a critical field of radical poetics has grown out of
the era, spoken of above, but little in the way of an interpretative milieu
for experimental prose. It seems to me more urgent than ever to encourage
thinking that re-distributes notions of subjectivity, time, that fosters
narrative practices foregrounding the impossible-to-avoid knowing that
“telling” can only be telescoped by the present from some
fragile angle itself obviously wanting. Such stories, motivated [maybe]
by a faint paranoia linked to the porosity of the subject, are not resistant
to identity issues lurking in inner and outer syntax, do not shun the
playing off of formal investigation against the junk food of nostalgia
— notably its media version, popular culture. I want to think of
prose as a practice elided by material conditions and awareness, pressed
on by time, flight, and the rythms and compexities of multiple-language
and cultural contexts. Such material aspects expressed or framed by obvious
formal limitations, not to appear “natural” — with “natural’s”
inbred risk of sentimentality.
My commitment to the Narrativity project was
spurred by my dismay at the widespread resistence to reading new prose
denotatively, resulting in a remarkable reduction of critical possibilities,
including reduction of space for the kind of intra-genus performance that
takes place when alterity meets. I am thrilled to see that a substantial
audience is currently emerging for experimental poetry, and only hope
some of this attention will open the door to the possibility of more attentive
reading of non-transparent narrative. A sentence, after all, is a device,
like anything else.
Notes:
1
Spare Parts: Toronto: Coach House, 1982; Spare
Parts Plus Two: Coach House, 2002 A slightly longer version
of this essay plus some of the stories in the collection can be found
on the website of Coach House Press at: www.chbooks.com.
2
Following the invocation of the War Measure’s Act during Québec’s
1970 “October Crisis” (involving the kidnapping of a trade
consul and a labor minister by the Front de Libération du Québec)
Québec’s professional journalists’ association complained
that freedom of speech had been limited by the Act; in part journalists
felt it risky to link social aspects of the manifesto (such as high unemployment,
bad housing, for French-Canadians) to the crisis, though it had been usual
to do so prior to the Act.
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