by André Alexis
Este, que ves, engaño colorido
que del arte ostentando los primores,
con falso silogismos de colores
es cauteloso engaño del sentido;
or in the translations of Beulah Limosneros
This painted semblance you so admire,
of an art flaunting its mastery
with false syllogisms of colour,
that smoothly mocks the eye;
or translated by “real” translators.26 Her poems are sifted to give up their secrets. But Sor Juana’s poetry is also a kind of bedrock from which the novel springs. In this, Hunger’s Brides calls to mind (to my mind, at least) Vladimir Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin. Yes, Nabokov’s Onegin is a different kind of beast: a literal translation of Pushkin’s long poem. But in his copious volumes of footnotes, Nabokov tries to restore to the Russian words their context, their sonic and psychological implications, their playfulness. Nabokov’s real accomplishment and originality was in trying to translate (to bring into the English language) what lay behind Pushkin’s Russian words, to have in the foreground things that usually get lost altogether in translation.
So it is, too, with Hunger’s Brides. In bringing the Baroque to life in the text, in restoring some of the historical drama of Sor Juana’s time, in devising a reading of Sor Juana’s work that is grounded in the poetry as well as in the foreignness of the poetry, Anderson has gone some way to pointing to the things in orbit around the poetry itself, worlds usually lost in translation: words, of course, words and sounds and ideas that have directly influenced the world. Hunger’s Brides seems to me to be about the worlds that Sor Juana’s work has called into being, about poetry’s deep, subterranean influence or, to echo Shelley: it’s about the kind of legislation poets (unacknowledged) carry out.
4. Russell Smith’s Muriella Pent
For me, Muriella Pent is the best novel of Toronto written by a contemporary of mine. It is flawed, certainly. It is sometimes flat in its social satire — for instance, in its repeated skewering of “political correctness” (which is, at the end of the day, a rather large, unmoving target). But if I were asked to name the novel that best captured something essential about the Toronto I’ve known, I could think of no serious competition. The book is squirm-inducing, partisan, amusing, complex, and original. I almost understand why it won no major book award.27 Muriella Pent is such an acid portrait of Toronto it’s difficult to know just how to deal with the book or where to put it. It doesn’t fit beside Cat’s Eye or In the Skin of a Lion, still less beside Fugitive Pieces or the university-centred fantasies of Robertson Davies. It’s a work clearly influenced by Amis père and Evelyn Waugh, but also by unexpected countercurrents. Muriella Pent is satirical, sure, but beneath the satire there’s a surrealist mechanism at work, one that is, perhaps, missed by reviewers who tend to focus on the targets of the work’s satire and on how well (or poorly) the novel hits them.
Of course, the novel invites such a focus because its surface is so provocative: a Caribbean poet named Marcus Royston is invited to be part of a cultural exchange program in Toronto. Though he is a writer of some reputation, he is chosen less for his talent than for the fact he is from a “third world” country: the island of St Andrew’s. The selection committee, dominated by its politically sensitive but self-righteous members, hopes that his presence in Toronto will teach Toronto’s arts communities about “real” suffering. Royston is put up in the home of a wealthy, white bluestocking named Muriella Pent, a woman for whom the committee members feel disdain because of her wealth and social standing. Confusion, both sexual and political, ensues and comes to a head at a party thrown chez Mrs. Pent.
The meetings of the “Arts Action Committee,” the group charged with choosing the writer who will come to Toronto, are particularly well done. The depictions are cruel and funny. In the first of the committee meetings we attend, the intestinal distress of eating too many chickpeas is nicely rendered. It begins like this:
“I want to propose,” said Deepak, “that we end the blind business.”
There was a silence filled with sticky chewing. Brian got up to get some more food. He hesitated between the chickpea roti and the chickpea salad.
Jasminka, at the head of the table, and Iris Warshavsky seemed to be struggling with their rotis. The ends of the wrapped bread had grown ragged and were leaking chickpeas in gravy. The conference table was speckled with errant chickpeas. Mrs. Pent was using her plastic fork to pick at a salad on the plate before her. She said, “Do we do things with the blind?”
All of the novel’s characters are articulate, expressive, self-absorbed, and, most of them, well intentioned. Marcus Royston, the “third world” poet, is melancholy, somewhat depraved, disillusioned, sarcastic, and emotionally complex. Muriella is not as complicated. She is a widow recently freed from her husband’s stifling presence, and she is beginning to explore her creative side. She is sympathetically drawn, however, and her struggle to get out of the straitjacket in which her husband (and her children) have confined her is, at times, moving.
The existential crises of both Marcus and Muriella are nicely dovetailed, played against each other. At the beginning of the novel, we jump from the island of St. Andrew’s to the island of “Stilwoode Park,” a private enclave in the heart of Toronto, so that, in narrative terms, Marcus and Muriella are a couple — not for nothing do the names begin with M — even before they consummate their relationship.
But before I get to the “surrealist” element in the novel . . . Marcus Royston is a black man depicted, from the first, as sexually rapacious. We meet him through his poetry,28 through a poem (“Island Eclogues XII”) in which his desire to possess a girl is spoken of along with mention of the rapes perpetrated by Jupiter or Apollo. Moreover, when we first meet the man, he is at a bar contemplating the seduction of a Canadian woman who may be useful to him. In effect, then, Russell is, or could be accused of, reducing the black poet to his sexuality. Politically, however, this is a very tricky book. As with Walcott, the use of Greco-Roman myths immediately shows Marcus Royston to be hybrid, one with a foot in at least two worlds. More: the woman he contemplates seducing may be useful to his island, to St. Andrew’s, as well as to himself. So, there is an element here of his sexual self being put at the service of others. His sexuality isn’t used to limit his character or degrade him. It is part of what makes him complex.
Besides, it’s the sex in the novel that points to the element that runs like an unexpected stratum through it. Now, in some reviews, the sex in Muriella Pent was described as a kind of decadence, as if it were an outré part of Russell’s social critique. It isn’t, though, or at least I don’t think so. The first hint that something strange is up is in the opening poem in which Marcus compares his sexual desire to the desire of Jupiter or Apollo. Royston aspires to the highest being through the carnal. This is the first linking of Russell’s sensibility to the alchemical. In fact, the symbolism in the book is, sometimes conspicuously, alchemical. Aside from Royston’s aspiration to a higher being (and all the characters aspire to higher states as, in alchemy, all baser metals aspire to the state of gold), the book constantly mentions the sun (or sunlight) and in one passage (in which the narrator describes SkyDome as a bowl or alembic) explicitly speaks of light as gold:
The roof was peeling back and uncovering a sky vaster, it seemed, than it had been when they were outside. Humid air filled the stadium. There were still clouds blowing quickly across the opened bowl, and the sky between them was a dark blue. One half of the stadium, their half, was flooded with dewy golden light. There was a great majesty to the place, the sheer hugeness of it.
There are other moments of pure alchemy, and one could have a field day with this kind of speculation, pointing out the occurrences of fire, dross, and alembics in the novel. But my purpose isn’t to prove anything — it may be that Russell himself is entirely unaware of these correspo
ndences — so much as it is to point out that Muriella Pent’s story, when looked at from an alchemical angle, is strikingly coherent. A man (Marcus Royston) is introduced to a community of aspirants to culture. He stays in Stilwoode Park — another of the novel’s bowls/alembics — where, in the end, he combines (sexually) with a number of people, including Muriella, and the result is that those he has touched (no pun intended) are more aware, better (or “higher”) despite their baser elements. As is also appropriate, Marcus Royston, who is the novel’s philosopher’s stone, is relatively untouched at novel’s end. He writes a poem — “In a Cold Climate, Fire” — that is not very different from the poems he has written in the past.
Muriella Pent is at once a social critique (in the tradition of Waugh or Amis) and a version of a pure, alchemical experiment. The book’s originality is in the sheer coherence of its own hybridity: a surrealist use of alchemical symbolism existing side by side with Anglo-satire. Russell’s two influences easily coexist.
There is much, much more to talk about when it comes to Muriella Pent — for instance, its strikingly beautiful depictions of Toronto or its humour. The book will have, I’d guess, a life after us. But whether that’s true or not, it’s still the only novel written by a contemporary of mine — or near contemporary, for that matter — which I truly wish I’d written, in part because I share so much of the culture — Caribbean and French, in particular — at the root of the work, and in part because I envy the subtlety with which that culture is put at the service of a narrative vision.
5. Don Hannah’s The Woodcutter
I wish there were more attention given to play scripts. I understand that a “theatrical event” is much more than the words of the playwright. But “theatre” gets reviewed. Reviewers talk about the actors, the set, the lighting, the direction, while plays themselves, the playwright’s words, are very seldom considered on their own merit unless, of course, the play is written by Shakespeare or Beckett or whoever happens to be lustrously dead. This is a common complaint for playwrights, of course, but there’s some justice to it. In Martin Amis’s autobiography, Experience, Amis sheds the snide opinion that it is ironic that Shakespeare, a playwright, should be the greatest writer of English, when, as we all know, very few playwrights have ever mattered. Amis then challenges the reader of his book to name any playwright whose work has lasted beyond a hundred years. Amis’s assumption is that few of his readers will be able to name many playwrights after Shakespeare. And, though I hate to admit it, I think he’s almost irrefutably right. The average reader is unlikely to know ten great — or even indifferent — playwrights, especially if you take Shakespeare away from them.29 A sad state of affairs.
Don’s script is as yet unpublished and unperformed. It can only be treated as a piece of writing. But it is a piece of writing whose “integrity” is momentary. I am one of the few who will read this draft, and I’m reading it because I was asked for my opinion. When the play is produced, the cast, the director, and Don himself will suggest or make changes to the script. So, my comments here are a commentary on a cloud. The Woodcutter will become fully itself only after production and publication.
Still, here are my impressions. The play begins . . .
Dusk. A small opening in the woods with conifers — pine, spruce, fir, larch — thick all around and above it. Brief snatches of sky through branches. On the ground, brown evergreen needles, sticks, small rocks, forest debris. The end of a grey day late in October. Crows cawing, sounding both angry and annoying.
We hear Ted before he enters.
(Off ) Are ya there yet?
Are ya there yet?
Could be just goin’ round in circles anyway, ya stupid shit!
Ya stupid circlin’ shit!
Two things are given to us at once: the woods and a voice that speaks with a Canadian accent. My first thought, on reading the beginning, was of the Brothers Grimm rendered by an eastern Canadian. To be specific, I thought of Rumpelstiltskin. It’s in the way Ted, the only character in this monologue, is described (short, thin, wiry, bantam . . . not a dwarf per se, but along the lines), and in the violent comedy of his entrance. He is lost in the forest, he stumbles, he swears at sticks and at the ground. In the first quarter of the play, it’s possible to laugh at Ted in a way that, by the second half, becomes unthinkable. At the beginning of the play, his anger and frustration don’t yet have a context, so it’s possible to find Ted amusing.
Storytelling, the providing of “context,” is partly (at times, entirely) what the play is about. Ted is fascinated by the parents of Hansel and Gretel. He recounts some of the variations he’s heard, variations in which the stepmother dies and the father is left to live happily ever after with his kids. He identifies with Hansel and Gretel’s father, a woodcutter who can’t feed his children. He also speculates, in his way, about the inexorable endings of stories: the end will come, the end must come, but first comes the wolf, or the witch, or the terrifying things that live in the forest. Terror and desolation are the fate of those trapped in tales. And, to some extent, Ted is trapped in the worst of “tales”: the one about the poor having the same chances as the wealthy, the one about honest labour leading to social progress and happiness. In the world in which he finds himself, Ted can no longer believe in happy endings. The pain he has lived through and can’t escape is the pain he fears his children will live through.
In a curious aside, Ted mentions the rabbits that “Tubby Thompson,” a childhood enemy, had when they were kids:
Tubby Thompson with those pens a his out the back; cute, ya think. But when they had babies, ya can’t go near’m, ’cause the does’d panic sometimes, kill the litter. Eat them even. Strange. Animals, I mean, at times. No better’n people.
And that’s it. A first hint about the connection between animals and humans: quick mention of the way a doe will eat her young to protect them from humans. With this soft knell, the relentless end of the story approaches. We are put in loco parvuli, in the place of the child, listening to what is, finally, an unnerving story of anger and murder. Ted, we discover at the very end of the play, has slaughtered his children to protect them from the monsters in the world, to keep them from feeling the pain he feels all the time. He has fled into the forest to await his fate.
As with all the work that fascinates me, The Woodcutter isn’t reducible to one message or idea. It’s “about” storytelling, sure, in its way, but it is also political. It’s at least as political as Muriella Pent, but in a very different key. It focuses on the lot of the underclass. Ted is the product of group homes and welfare. He can’t keep a job. He is dissociative, never really experiencing specific emotion but rather a haze of emotional pain. (His first moment of “being there” comes with the birth of his son.) His growing concern for his children begins with wanting a better life for them. His deepest despair, and his episode of unforgivable violence, comes the moment he is no longer able to imagine a better life for himself or for his children or for anyone.
Maybe the most fascinating aspect of The Woodcutter, for me, is its language. And that aspect of the play was made more fascinating still when I spoke to Don about it. Here’s another moment from the monologue:
Her mother, she’s somethin’ else, that damn thing. The mouth on her. And a real hard lookin’ ticket, too. Face like a . . .
Well, scare ya, she would.
The moustache on her!
Used ta call her Geraldo.
This is amusing, and it uses the word “ticket” in a way I’ve never heard, though “hard lookin’ ticket” makes perfect — and rather beautiful — sense. But the rhythm here is almost ineluctable. It pulls you along. It’s entirely eastern Canadian. And, while reading the play, I imagined the play could only be performed with the accent in which it was written.
Perhaps because I’m someone interested in “the Canadian,” in things that are purely or inevitably “Canadian,” it struck me
that Don’s language is as specific to our country as any I’ve ever read. While reading the play, I almost felt like I was from New Brunswick myself. But when I spoke to Don about the play’s language, I was surprised at how little the accent mattered to him.
First of all, for Don, the play is written in a voice and accent that is not specific to any one place in eastern Canada. It’s written in an accent and rhythm that he hears when he hears eastern voices, but it’s somewhat exaggerated or particular. It’s the playful “eastern” accent he and Ken Garnhum — a playwright from P.E.I. — use when they’re fooling around and talking about “home.” It isn’t, in his terms, “real,” in part because he hasn’t lived in Shediac for decades and the Shediac of his upbringing no longer exists. So, the language he hears when he writes is “impossible.”30
Second, when his work is done by actors who are not from the east, it’s far from certain they will manage to recreate the accent Don has in mind. When doing his plays, the actors so often produce strange, unlocatable accents that Don would rather they didn’t try to reproduce the one he hears. Besides, there’s nothing so annoying as an actor doing accents poorly. As far as Don is concerned, better it be done in any accent that doesn’t sound false. And monologue being the most artificial of theatrical creations, it’s best you have few distractions — like strange accents — to deal with.
