by André Alexis
14 Better put, this sentence would read “Reviewing is, by its nature, the chronicle of a community. . . .” For the reviewer, the community is “writer, book, reader.” For the critic, the community is much broader: writer, writer’s predecessors, book, reader, reader’s predecessors.
15 Reviewing is, inevitably, an exercise in personal revelation. The extent of and importance given to personal revelation are what’s at issue. It sometimes feels as if the characteristic of our current reviewing culture is acceptance of the idea that the critical reading of a work of literature is an essentially antagonistic activity, and that “writer, reader, book” don’t form a “community” so much as they do the boundaries of a battlefield. Martin Amis, in one of his least convincing moments, complained that fiction is the only art whose critics use the same genre (prose narrative) as its creators, thus creating a competition between author and reviewer. To Amis, a review is a prose narrative. (Clive James seconded Amis’s opinion by suggesting that a person who writes a memorably witty review can demonstrate his or her literary superiority to the writer whose [unmemorable] work is being assessed.) The reason I think this unconvincing is that it is a surprising refusal to accept that a “prose narrative” is not any one single thing. Comparing the writing in a book review to the writing in a novel (even a bad novel) makes no more sense than comparing a travelling salesman joke (as much a “prose narrative” as a review) to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Their intentions, purposes, lifespan, and ground are all entirely different, so much so that to speak of a reviewer’s competition with the writer because he or she uses the same means as a writer makes no sense without so much qualification that it comes down to asserting the obvious, that the same physical means used to write a novel — pen and paper or typewriter or word processor — may be used to write a review. There are no more grounds for “competition,” here, than there are grounds for competition between nuts and bolts (on one hand) and a statue by Henry Moore (on the other) though all were fired in the same foundry. But what is interesting about Amis’s contention is the palpable anxiety it demonstrates about the book reviewer’s power and intentions. Amis is a book reviewer himself, and his ideas about the competitive relationship between a writer and a reviewer are, possibly, rooted in his own competitive feelings vis-à-vis the books (and writers) he himself judges.
16 It is, of course, rhetorical to blame any one person for attitudes that spread through a population. Metcalf is the purveyor of ideas that, at a certain time in our literary history, met with a certain approval. Most of Metcalf’s successful ideas came not from him but from Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin (see Larkin’s “The Pleasure Principle,” for instance), or the British writers he clearly admired. But it’s hard to blame Larkin or Amis for ideas disseminated by Metcalf and treated with more seriousness here, in Canada, than they were in England, where Larkin and Amis were, rightly, treated as tendentious conservative codgers as often as not.
17 There are strangely amusing aspects to this, as well. One feels as if one could gauge how well or poorly one is doing by how quickly or slowly one is able to talk to one’s editor, say, or one’s agent. It takes longer to get anyone on the phone. And the quality of silence following a work’s misfiring is as characteristic as the sound of an altar bell rung in an empty church.
18 There are many words I love, but words from Trinidad are especially consoling. Tootoolbay means distracted, confused, or bewildered by feelings of love — or just plain attraction — for someone of the opposite sex. It comes from the French tout troublé. A kunumunu is an idiot. I heard it used by a man, unhappy with his wife’s affection for another man, screaming, “Yuh t’ink I’s a fuckin’ kunumunu?” Then again, his wife was a wajank. That is: a loud, obstreperous woman. (Not to be confused with a waheen, a woman of loose morals, perhaps even an amateur prostitute.) In a sentence: “But Marlene is a real wajank, yuh heah? How de France yuh could love she?”
19 Actually, yes, a few words about Roo’s language . . . It’s easy, with a poet like Roo, to miss the playfulness of her work. The seriousness of her purpose, the fact she is associated with “ecopoets” like Tim Lilburn or Jan Zwicky, and the chasteness of her language blinds people to lines like
. . . For ague:
read the old books in which ague is still argued
or
Everything is manufactured by Mattel. If there were a hell
it would be spring, the tortures of the chrysalis . . .
or
. . . And tonight
the half-light in which paper glows —
walls, porticos, arches, palaces (who lived there?),
the print invisible, and the ocean sounding
all night long, clavicle to vena cava,
clavicle to vena cava . . .
In Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida, Roo employs internal rhyme, repetition, consonance (“. . . the world the whorls of weather . . .”), assonance, all manner of sound play that is suddenly there and then as quickly gone. It’s all the more striking because the wordplay bubbles out of a poetic language that is deliberately restrained so that it can accommodate, with little conflict, the poetry of Meng Haoran, Matsuo Basho, and Jane Munro, as well as the strong echoes of those who have influenced her,
T. S. Eliot in particular.
20 In the Oulipo Compendium, a univocalist text is described as “one written with a single vowel.” And the Compendium’s editors, Harry Mathews and Alistair Brotchie, imagine the beginning of Hamlet’s monologue as written by a univocalistically inclined Shakespeare: “Be? Never be? Perplexed quest: seek the secret!”
21 I would have included a sentence on the art of writing from Chapter U, as I did from the other chapters, but Eunoia’s only “failure” is in Chapter U’s non-inclusion of any conspicuous allusion to the art of writing.
22 Here is a poem generated by Raymond Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet, a program designed to write poetic texts based on models it has been fed. That is, the programmer feeds poetry into the program then asks the program to create poetry of its own, and the Cybernetic Poet creates poems. In this case, an imperfect haiku:
Soul
You broke my soul
the juice of eternity,
the spirit of my lips.
Or, in this next case, a rather more Robert Creeley – influenced meditation:
Wondered
today i wondered
if i mused
today i saw you
i learned
in awe and you
if i wondered
if i mused
today i had one wish
if i saw you
if i saw you
if i had one wish
i learned
in awe and you
if i wondered
if i mused
today i had one wish
if i saw you
if i saw you
if i had one wish
One of the amusing paradoxes of Christian’s love for computer-generated poetry is that, though the Cybernetic Poet program, for instance, has no “life” as we understand the word, it still produces work that has “biographical” details, confessional moments that, from a human poet, Christian would find unconvincing and unimpressive. And yet, you couldn’t exactly accuse Christian of being inconsistent. Any “confessional” aspect I see in the program’s poetry is an aspect added by me, isn’t it?
23 In one of Beulah’s notebooks, I think it is, the ornate and sometimes obscure imagery and narrative strategies of Baroque art are mirrored by the postmodern art of our time. This is another of the book’s warnings that, here, we are on a Rococo road.
24 Literall
y wary of mirrors. In a striking passage, we learn that the god Tezcatlipoca — “one of the most haunting visions of divinity ever conjured by the collective imagination” — is known as “Broken Face, He-who-causes-things-to-be-seen-in-a-mirror.” The narrator then switches registers and tells us that “for the philosophy of knowledge, a mirror’s distortions were a troublesome source of altered perceptions — calling into question, in the age of Descartes, every man’s faith in the data of his senses.”
25 I guess this is as good a place as any to have a digression on footnotes. The footnotes in Hunger’s Brides are strange. One is not always certain if the books they refer to are real, if the annotator is Donald Gregory or Beulah Limosneros or even Paul Anderson. They are part of the novel’s fictional warp and weave. Some are instructive, others maddening and arch. But all of them are suggestive of the different strata at play in the novel.
To speak of more personal matters, however . . . footnotes have always brought me solace. It is as if one can both say something and, in an instant, have it unsaid. A friend recently said of me, “Ask him the same question five minutes after he’s answered it, and you’ll get a different answer.” This is, to a great extent, true. Nothing in my world seems to stand up for long. A footnote is a means of escape. And it is one of the disappointments of my writing life that publishers (word processors too, for that matter) don’t allow footnotes in footnotes. Or footnotes in footnotes in footnotes. The idea of an infinite regress, an abyss of footnotes, brings me not angst but peace of mind. The line that separates thought from counter-thought or thought from supplementary thought is like a placid surface of a body of water.
26 If the novel has a significant flaw it is, I think, that Beulah Limos-neros’s translations are not up to Sor Juana’s work. (Beulah’s sometimes overwrought imagery — throughout the novel — is also a bit of a problem. The novel is, at times, extremely writerly.) But Beulah’s translations raise interesting questions. Paul Anderson, in creating Beulah’s translations, has created a particular translator. I mean: the style of Beulah’s translations is revealing of Beulah’s character. So, in novelistic terms, Beulah’s translations are, in fact, perfect revelations of her personality — perfect translations for the novel — while still “betraying” Sor Juana’s work. Actually, an interesting essay could be written about what her translations tell us about Beulah, the fictional character. Beulah is less retrained, less poised, les “Aristotelian” than Sor Juana. The poem I’ve quoted, one of Sor Juana’s most memorable, is one in which she speaks of the ways art can deceive. An alternative translation to Beulah’s, one more faithful to Sor Juana, might read
This, that you see, this coloured treachery,
which, by displaying all the charms of art,
with those false syllogisms of its hues
deceptively subverts the sense of sight;
(translated by Alix Ingber, 1995)
or
These lying pigments facing you,
with every charm brush can supply
set up false premises of color
to lead astray the human eye.
(translated by Alan Trueblood, 1988)
27 I do find the critical reception of Russell’s work a little odd, though. He is among our best writers of prose. (He switches registers — jumping from, say, nerd speak to university pukka — at will and convincingly.) His work is resolutely fixed on the present and so offers an interesting portrait of Toronto and its inhabitants. Just what people want, you’d think. But, aside from the Governor General’s Literary Award nomination for How Insensitive, there’s little sign that his novels are taken as seriously as those of, say, Joseph Boyden, who, as a writer of prose, is at times inept. (By which I mean: Boyden’s worst sentences telegraph their meaning or use adverbs to “heighten” moments that are already emotionally charged. It’s inefficient writing.) I was reminded of Russell’s “occlusion” by an article in the National Post written by Barbara Kay. Kay had, without reading it, trashed a novel by Lisa Moore. An indefensibly stupid thing to do, but, as I mentioned above, the Post is not a particularly relevant forum for literary discussion. Kay then wrote a second article in which she stated,
Several readers admonished me for unfairly pre-judging the novel. Coincidentally Moore’s editor sent me not only the Moore novel, but the publishing house of Anansi’s entire CanLit list of 2009 authors. Duly chastened, I packed them all up for my vacation. Five of the novels I was sent and that I read some of — by authors Gil Adamson, Rawi Hage (two), Bill Gaston, and Peter Behrens — are beautifully written, and seem to have vivid plots, but take place elsewhere (Ireland, Lebanon) and/or in the distant past. That’s one CanLit premise: Nothing happening in our present history outside the self — say, oh, I dunno, how about the real-life story of a brilliant, creative, Canada-changing newspaper baron brought low by circumstances and a tragically flawed character — seems worthy of fictional treatment to Canadian novelists.
Now, this is the kind of dishonesty that makes Kay difficult to take seriously. In her trashing of Lisa Moore, Kay complained that “CanLit” novels were short on dialogue, action, and plot. Here, finding novels that do have vivid plots, she criticizes them for being set elsewhere (you could criticize Hemingway or Henry James for the same thing: setting novels in Europe) or in the past (War and Peace is due some stick, on the same grounds). In effect, Kay defines “CanLit” as being only what she says it is (plotless, storyless, filled with sensitive women and feminized men, set in the past or in another country) and then thrashes it, administering a sound beating to her own straw man. “CanLit” (a designation that shouldn’t be used without proper definition) is more — and different (why should it not include Guy Gavriel Kay, for instance?) — than that which is crucified by Barbara Kay. The reason I mention her article at all is that Russell Smith has been, for some time, writing novels with plots, with “unfeminized” men, set in the here and now. His work is not “interior”- or “self”-focused. It is, rather, resolutely outward looking, and not particularly leftist. Granted, he hasn’t got around to writing about Lord Black of Crossharbour (and, Christ on a fucking cross, I hope it’s Russell who has to write that novel, not me), but his novels, especially Muriella Pent, are such a counter to Kay’s notion of “CanLit,” it struck me, on reading her article, that I was in the presence of a solid, easily refuted cliché. Valuable to have the cliché, because instructive to recognize it as such.
28 Marcus Royston’s poetry is a pastiche of Derek Walcott’s work, and it’s pretty unconvincing. One has to accept that it is, in the world of Muriella Pent, meant to be good poetry. It is, however, the weakest element in the novel. This may be because, being an echo of another’s writing, Royston’s poetry is the one place where Russell is not himself, a place where he gives precedence to an idea rather than to his own ear.
29 My own ten who’ve lasted beyond a century — off the top of my head: Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, Molière, Racine, Corneille, Goethe, Schiller, Georg Büchner, Carlo Goldoni. Then there are the most recent playwrights who will make a century without difficulty: Shaw, Pirandello, Chekhov, Brecht, Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Ibsen, Strindberg, Wedekind. Of course, the reason I can name them and make a case for their greatness is that I read plays constantly. My first job in Toronto was as a clerk at Theatrebooks. It’s where I picked up my play-reading habit. But as reading plays is something most people don’t do, perhaps feeling — with some justice — that the “true” play exists principally on a stage, it’s hardly surprising the average reader can’t name many playwrights.
Playwrighting and poetry: twins. Neither discipline has, in book form, great public support. (If you asked Amis’s readers to name ten poets who’ve lasted as long as Shakespeare, you’re likely to run into the same inability. I was stunned, while watching a recent BBC documentary on John Donne
, to discover that people in the streets of London, asked if they knew who John Donne had been, could not identify the man who is, I think, our language’s greatest poet.) Both are forms that require concision and consistent control of voice. I don’t suppose it’s a coincidence that a number of the playwrights I’ve mentioned began as poets (Beckett) or wrote poetry at the highest level (Goethe). And then there are playwrights like Heiner Müller or Robert Wilson whose scripts are indistinguishable from poetry: no stage directions, words disposed on the page as if in stanzas.
It strikes me as terribly sad that some of the most beautiful writing done by Canadians is largely unknown because it happens to be tucked away in scripts that go unread. So, Amis’s snide wager is, likely, a good one, but that’s a reflection on us and our reading habits. It has nothing to do with any deficiency in the literary abilities of our playwrights.
30 Most writers are “infantile” in this way, I think. We hear (and usually write) versions of the language we grew up with. Writers who attempt to imitate more recent language, by throwing in current expressions or slang, can come off as forced or ungenuine. But there are, of course, exceptions — I’m thinking in particular of William Gaddis’s great A Frolic of His Own — and, in any case, the relationship of writer to current language is subtle. There is a lovely interview with Chester Himes, in The Paris Review, I think, in which Himes talks about the language he used in the Harlem novels (For Love of Imabelle, Cotton Comes to Harlem, etc.). He expresses his bemusement at being congratulated for his fidelity to the language people actually speak in Harlem. But the Harlem novels were written in France. At the time, Himes had no connection to Harlem. He invented the language used by his characters, but his inventions were so popular even people in Harlem took them for examples of actual Harlem-speak and began to use some of his expressions. The writer’s private or inner versions of a language do catch something and reflect it back, and readers are influenced by that reflection, positively or negatively. In that sense, language is an endless game of tennis. Which is why I hate the thought that Don Hannah’s “impossible” language is not faithfully rendered.
