Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations 9781442696907

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AVANT-GARDE CANADIAN LITERATURE The Early Manifestations

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GREGORY BETTS

Avant-Garde Canadian Literature The Early Manifestations

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2013 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada isbn 978-1-4426-4377-2

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Betts, Gregory, 1975– Avant-garde Canadian literature : the early manifestations / Gregory Betts. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-4426-4377-2 1. Literature, Experimental – Canada – History and criticism. ps8061.b43 2013

c810.9'11

1. Title.

c2012-901845-7

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents

Introduction

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1 Theory of the Avant-Gardes in Canada 26 2 The Cosmic Canadians 86 3 Canadian Surrealism: The Automatists 139 4 Canadian Vorticism 191 L’Envoi: The Future of the Avant Notes

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Works Cited 271 Acknowledgments Index

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Illustrations follow page 154

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AVANT-GARDE CANADIAN LITERATURE The Early Manifestations

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Introduction

As the cutting edge of Modern, the avant-garde establishes the point at which Modern must enter its new phase in order to keep up with itself. The avant-garde points toward the future, and as soon as it is absorbed into the present, it ceases to be itself and becomes part of Modernism. It is, in fact, always contingent, in danger, endangering itself. The weapons of the avant-garde as it helps to redefine the main body of Modernism are designed to play on the fears and hostility of those who accept only a culture of the familiar. Avant-garde, however, is, more frequently than not, a new type of order. Frederick R. Karl, Modern and Modernism

In 1927, Europe and America’s avant-garde arrived in Toronto for a month-long exhibition of the strangest, most disturbing, most bizarre, and most exciting visual art being made anywhere in the Western world. The show included hundreds of works by 106 active, contemporary artists from twenty-three different countries, including work by cubists such as Pablo Picasso, Alexander Archipenko, Georges Braque, and Fernand Léger; Futurists like Wassily Kandinsky, Umberto Boccioni, and Joseph Stella; Dadaists like Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, and Francis Picabia; Surrealists like Max Ernst, Hans Arp, and Joan Miró; and other avant-garde experimentalists like Joseph Albers, Paul Klee, and Piet Mondrian.1 Canadian painter Lawren Harris, the principal Canadian advocate of the International Exhibition of Modern Art (hereafter the IEMA), had participated in the exhibition in New York in 1926 and wrote to the Exhibition Committee of the Art Gallery of Toronto on the hopes of bringing the show to Toronto: ‘I believe it to be the most

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representative, most stimulating and the best exhibition of advanced art so far shown on this continent. There is nothing in it of an offensive nature, that is, decadent in a moral sense’ (Letter, 84). Harris hoped the show would not only help legitimize avant-garde work underway in this country, but would further accelerate and inspire active experimental artists to discover and test new channels. His letter to the committee concluded with a veiled threat: ‘I have written Miss Dreier informing her that should the gallery here find it necessary to refuse the exhibition and providing the expense is not too great, that I will endeavour to have the exhibition come here and hold it somewhere else.’ Katherine Dreier was the New York artist and patron who, with Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, founded the Société Anonyme, the group that organized the avant-garde exhibition. Toronto’s gallery rose to Harris’s challenge and accepted the exhibition. To support the show, the gallery published a catalogue with two introductions and organized a series of related events including lectures and musical performances. Significantly, Dreier delivered an interpretive lecture and defence of modernism on 2 April 1927 before an audience of 346 people (Pfaff, 81). It was to be Canada’s Armory Show, and acclaimed historian Ramsay Cook has declared that it fulfilled that role (Cook, ‘Nothing,’ 11). Pinpointing the particular significance of that moment in Canadian art history, the painter Charles Comfort wrote of the event, ‘Such of my friends as Bertram Brooker, Edna Tacon, Gordon Webber and Lawren Harris were, of course, aware and interested in the directions in which the exhibition pointed. Personally, I believe that the beginning of abstract painting in Canada, certainly in Toronto, can be dated from that period’ (qtd. in Gray, Rand, and Steen, 18). In all, 10,630 people attended the IEMA during its monthlong stay (four times as many people as usual, according to Pfaff), making it one of the Toronto Art Gallery’s most successful and important exhibits (Bohan, 84). The avant-garde, it seemed, had arrived in Canada. While comparing Canada’s IEMA to New York’s 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as the Armory Show, is useful for illustrating the intentions and ambitions of the organizers, the differences between the two events could very easily overwhelm the similarities. Despite debate over the extent of the transformation it caused, it is fair to say that the New York Armory Show ‘sparked wide-spread interest in avant-garde painting and sculpture throughout the United States’ and marked the beginning of the end of America’s cultural isolation and provincialism (L. McCarthy, 2). Some scholars such as Frank Anderson Trapp question the depth of the impact of the show, but there is little

Introduction

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doubt that the Armory Show drew an enormous amount of attention to the aesthetic questions raised by radically experimental works. During the 1927 IEMA in Canada, Lawren Harris engaged in a one-time public debate with the former member of the Group of Seven Franz Johnston in the pages of the Canadian Forum expressing their respective opinions of the aesthetic merits of the art in the show. The paintings were nothing more than ‘abortions in paint’ to Johnston (241), but in contrast, Harris encouraged people to consider the novelty of the work through the logic of the spirit in which they were created: I doubt if any exhibition we have had ever displayed such a wealth of ideas, or so much real adventuring, or so large a proportion of stimulating and profound works … most of the pictures required of the spectator a new way of seeing … the most convincing pictures, were directly created from an inner seeing and conveyed a sense of order in a purged, pervading vitality that was positively spiritual … they were achieved by a precision and concentration of feeling so fine that on the emotional gamut they parallel the calculations of higher mathematics. But, they remain emotional, living works, and were therefore capable of inspiring lofty experiences; one almost saw spiritual ideas, crystal clear, powerful and poised. (‘An Appreciation,’ 240)

For the sake of concerned Canadians worried by the apparent freakishness of abstract art, Harris stressed the moral benefit: ‘There were a few works so purged of all smallness, vagueness, and sentimentality, so pure and elevated, that they acted on some individuals as saints do on the grossminded’ (241). The purity of the abstract art obviously spoke to Harris’s religious sensibilities, and within seven years of the exhibition he himself gave up landscape painting for transcendental abstractionism. He was, it should be noted, the exhibition’s principal financer as well as Canada’s only member of the New York–based avant-garde collective Société Anonyme. Out of modesty and discretion, or perhaps (given his similar reticence to speak on behalf of Brooker’s abstractions as discussed below) out of reticence in light of the predictable negativism the show would attract, he did not exhibit in the Toronto event even though one of his paintings was included in the two other IEMA exhibitions in Brooklyn and Buffalo. Positive reviews of the show were also written by Fred Jacob in The Mail and Empire and Lawrence Mason in The Toronto Globe.2 Despite this enthusiastic beginning to the public discourse, and in contrast to the lasting influence of the Armory Show in New York (especially on collectors like Katherine Dreier, the principal organizer of the 1927

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IEMA), negative reviews began accumulating.3 Meanwhile, the public debates surrounding Toronto’s 1927 avant-garde exhibition descended quickly into paroxysms surrounding the scandal caused by Alexander Archipenko’s ‘Woman’ and an unnamed nude by Max Weber,4 both of which were purported to be rather conventional figurative nudes in an exhibition dominated by abstract and non-representational art. As it turned out, the Ontario police physically removed the paintings from the gallery walls. Months later, a similar event took place with even more fanfare in the 1927 summer exhibition at the Canadian National Exhibition. In the latter exhibition, the removal of Canadian John Russell’s ‘A Modern Fantasy’ and British George Drinkwater’s ‘Paolo and Francesca’ from gallery walls was thoroughly applauded by editorials in The Toronto Daily Star (‘Box Office’) and in The Toronto Globe (Editorial 1927). The Canadian painter, writer, and essayist Bertram Brooker was infuriated by the treatment accorded to artists here. After witnessing a series of similar moments of public censorship over the ensuing years, including the censorship of his own cubist nudes, he wrote and published an excoriating essay called ‘Nudes and Prudes’ in 1931. In the essay, he blames Canada’s media and education system for teaching fear and disdain for the human body. He tells the story of a visiting French artist in Toronto, two years after the IEMA, en route to a figure drawing workshop in the city. Brooker quotes the artist sardonically drawling, ‘In Paris, I would show a woman, but in Toronto I show a ’orse’ (93). Brooker was one among numerous other local and international artists to be censored by the police and, perhaps even more nefariously, by Canadian gallery directors as well. Even though the IEMA was a success in terms of bringing avant-garde art to Canada, in terms of bringing Canadians to avantgarde art, and in terms of connecting contemporary Canadian artists to the international avant-garde community, the debate surrounding nudity overshadowed its achievements. Brooker reacted against Canadian prudery as directly and thoughtfully as he could: It is time that artists in Canada raised their voices publicly against this sort of thing … To withhold knowledge of the human form and its functions, and to discourage appreciation of its beauty at an early age, is to bring up a child with a sneaking curiosity in respect to that unity which of all unities is perhaps the most mysterious and the most important for men and women. It is to implant in [a child’s] mind the feeling that natural admiration for bodily beauty is sheer animalism, and something to be ashamed of … He who says so blasphemes not merely against the special God he has been

Introduction

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brought up to worship, but against any conceivable scheme of the unity of life that it is possible for men to hold. The vileness associated with sex is purely a man-made matter. (‘Nudes and Prudes,’ 98, 104–5)

Prudery and philistinism were shared concerns for all North American avant-garde artists and aficionados. Katherine Dreier too fought against entrenched conservative aesthetics, but she was able to conduct her campaign in a public forum without interference by the law (Herbert, Apter, and Kenney, 20). Despite the shared contextual conservatism, there is something far more nefarious about the Canadian experience of censorship and the ensuing silence. Brooker and others, most notably William Arthur Deacon, fought the censorship of visual art and literature in Canada. It is telling, though, that while in prudish America artists fought for privilege and general acceptance, in prudish Canada artists had first to fight for basic legal rights of self-expression and access to public space. I begin this discourse on avant-gardism in Canada with this rather embarrassing national portrait to highlight the relationship between the people I will be discussing in this book (including Bertram Brooker, Lawren Harris, and William Deacon in chapter two) and their contextual environment. While this opening story concerns the visual arts specifically, the primary focus of this book will be the literary arts. Arts communities, however, and especially avant-garde arts communities, are not discrete or closed communities. The conditions affecting the visual artists, in other words, were the same as those affecting the writers. But before we begin to dissect the terms of this project and enumerate its principal figures, before we engage with the remarkable and sophisticated achievements of outré artists here, it is essential, I believe, to recognize that until very recently Canada has not been a good or encouraging setting for avant-gardism. Prudery is different from other conservatisms in that it responds to what it deems outrages by attempting to silence and repress them from collective memory. Sigmund Freud connects such social regulations to the ability of civilizations to survive, which develop primarily from the ‘renunciation of instinct’ and the repression of desires (Civilization, 52). This includes the constant repression of violent urges. The censorship of art parallels the repression of instinct as the necessary cost of holding society in place. There develops from this faith in social restraint a syllogism that art’s potential to excite repressed feelings threatens the entire social contract. For some, Freud argues, this amounts to a neurotic, overly burdensome sacrifice of pleasure: ‘what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and [many feel] that we

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should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions’ (38). For most, however, and for Canada in general (especially in the early half of the twentieth century), suppressing or plain forgetting contentious art was a sacrifice suitably justified by the protection of the social contract. The IEMA example is also important for drawing attention to three too often unacknowledged facts: first, that the avant-garde had a presence in Canada long before any literary history5 of Canada recognizes them; second, that within Canada there were individuals committed to the idea of avant-garde art; and third, that the radical terms of engagement presented and embodied by avant-garde art have consistently been sabotaged by the most pedestrian and prudish terms of engagement by the Canadian media, public, and state apparatus. This book will focus on a fourth fact suggested but not included in the story of the IEMA exhibition: the fact that Canadians were also themselves producing avant-garde art. Of the body of avant-garde art produced in Canada, this book will be primarily concerned with literature of all kinds: prose fiction, prose nonfiction, poetry, drama, and the ongoing melange of literary categories that inevitably happens in experimental writing. This book makes no claim to being a complete history of avant-garde activity or even avantgarde literary activity; it is perhaps wiser to think of it as a position paper offering developed examples of a kind of writing rarely collectively acknowledged in the Canadian context prior to the 1960s. Unfortunately, as a result of the combination of the four facts outlined above in the lived experience of Canadian art making, and a testament to the power of fact three, the history of Canadian experimentalism has been supplanted by a history of art that survived the crucible of an extremely conservative aesthetic. In the 1920s, the novelist Morley Callaghan recognized the challenges facing Canada’s aesthetic innovators as ones that encouraged compromise, what he called ‘the mellowing effect of the soil’ (Letter, 1). As a result of suppression, repression, censorship, and the even more tenacious habit of marginalization, twentieth-century Canadians with avant-garde ambitions have had few if any acknowledged (let alone celebrated) local models of eruptive art or artists despite the many efforts that preceded them. Such a habitual amnesia not only discourages young writers from attempting or publishing their more eccentric ideas, given the abyss into which such writers languish in this country, but it has also resulted in a distorted memory of Canadian literature ironically perpetuated by avant-garde authors who have themselves been misled. Avantgarde writing here proves that CanLit is not and has not always been a

Introduction

9

static aesthetic bounded by the lyric and realist prose styles. The situation has changed in recent times, with the publication of studies such as Christian Bök’s Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science, which directly connects the writing of Christopher Dewdney, Steve McCaffery, and bpNichol with Europe’s most acclaimed avant-gardes, Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy’s Writing in Our Time: Canada’s Radical Poetries in English (1957–2003), which presents a selective lineage of two generations of experimental writing primarily in western Canada, and Dean Irvine’s The Canadian Modernists Meet, which collects a scattershot array of essays by leading scholars on topics ranging from James Joyce’s influence in Canada to Surrealism in Canada. It is possible that conditions have changed enough that a veiled line of radical experimentalism here extending back three, four, and more generations might be ready to reveal itself. The ambition of this book is to encourage such an unveiling of a tradition of avant-garde literature in Canada, including both theoretical and practical texts. This book, in turn, begins by offering an entrance into the vocabulary of the ongoing and primarily international debate surrounding the idea of avant-gardism, and by doing so offers a functional vocabulary for remembering, reading, and discussing some of the most hermetic and yet energetic literature ever produced in this country. Connecting Canada’s avant-gardes with their European counterparts helps to contextualize the discussion of colonialism (and postcolonialism) that flavours the analysis of avant-garde writing throughout this book, and it also provides the useful contrast of establishing the normative models of avant-gardism in order to understand the Canadian difference. In this book, the subsequent chapters will address three different nodes of avant-garde literary activity and their approximate periods of peak activity: including the Cosmic Canadians from the 1910s to the 1930s; Surrealism especially in the form of Automatism in Canada from the 1920s to the 1960s; and Canadian Vorticism from the 1920s to the 1970s. It does so by considering these three early literary avant-garde nodes – almost veritable movements in the established sense of canonical avantgardism – as challenges to the way Canadians thought about art and about themselves. The principal figures in these nodes, such as Flora MacDonald Denison, Wilson MacDonald, Lawren Harris, and Bertram Brooker of the Cosmic Canadians, Thérèse Renaud, Claude Gauvreau, Paul-Émile Borduas, and Françoise Sullivan of the Automatists, and Marshall McLuhan, Sheila Watson, Wilfred Watson, and John Reid of the Canadian Vorticists (to single out but a few of the figures addressed in this book), consciously sought to revolutionize the very meaning of

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reality. Indeed, at their utopian extreme, these proponents envisioned a reoriented consciousness emerging from their art movement that would reconfigure conventional ideas and experience of social reality. The terms might be unfamiliar to some, and for that reason alone deserving of at least a terse initial gloss to establish a context for the present study. The idea of a movement called ‘Cosmic Canadians’ in fact collects a broad and diverse network of mystical modernists from across Canada who worked from the evolutionary model of consciousness proposed by Dr Richard Maurice Bucke in his book Cosmic Consciousness. They became avant-garde as their revolutionary mysticism became increasingly manifest in their art. Surrealism in Canada collects a range of artists from across the country (though primarily in Quebec) who took up the aesthetic initiatives pioneered by the avant-garde movement from France with the same name. Automatism is the name of a specific group of Canadian artists influenced by the Surrealist movement. In particular, this aesthetic initiative was shaped by a commitment to explore the irrational dimensions of the mind, if only to combat the over-rationalism of Western society that had led to the extreme violence of the First World War. Ever since their appearance in 1924, numerous Canadian writers have been inspired by the Surrealists’ manifestos, essays, poems, novels, and visual art and have sought to incorporate their radical propositions into art here. The Canadian Vorticist group was smaller than the other two groups but was more tightly aligned and lasted for a longer period. Vorticism, a short-lived English avant-garde movement that lasted just a couple of years ending with the First World War, is predicated on a notoriously difficult concept to pin down. In terms of literary themes and aesthetics, the movement can be unified in their collective striving for a writing built of raw, violent energy (the vortex itself is presented as the precise point of maximal energy). In terms of literary history, and of more specific significance to how the Canadian Vorticists were conceived, the movement can be equated with the influence of the members of the Vorticist movement, especially by the sort-of Canadian Wyndham Lewis and the early work of Ezra Pound. There are many other topics in the broad, emerging field of Canadian avant-gardism, including individual artists working outside of collectivities as well as various other movements, that will also be touched on or suggested in the following pages, but it is worth repeating that the goal of this project is not to be encyclopedic. It is an inevitable impulse for the first holistic consideration of a topic to attempt to encapsulate the boundaries of the field, but instead this book offers a series of entrance points into the grounds and, therein, a vocabulary by which to

Introduction

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recognize the unique accomplishments and features of the early Canadian literary avant-garde. As it is, the boundaries of early Canadian avant-garde literature are actively expanding as new works steadily emerge from the archives and marginal publications are reconsidered. The first chapter in the book explores the theoretical implications and limitations of avant-gardism, as well as documents the changing function of the category ‘avant-garde’ in Canada from its first usage at the beginning of the eighteenth century through to its demise as a relevant literary category at the end of twentieth century. The next three chapters highlight three very specific nodes of early twentieth-century avant-garde literary activity in Canada, which are identified here under the monikers ‘Cosmic,’ ‘Automatist,’ and ‘Vorticist’ respectively. These chapters present a survey of literary and related activity associated with each avant-garde node, tracking the ideological and aesthetical ambitions and accomplishments of each. Specific exemplary texts are explored at length in each chapter so as to demonstrate tangibly the specific literary innovations and ambitions of each avant-garde node. Though the avant-garde has a history that extends back centuries from the present, a lineage that meanders through such contradictory embodiments as European military imperialists, Parisian dandies, South American socialistic revolutionaries, and American free-jazz musicians, it has retained its highly valued and privileged social position in late-capitalist societies. Ironically, avant-gardism now seems oddly commensurate with the explosive and dangerous capitalist vision that insists upon innovation, individualism, and future vision (at the expense of tradition, multiplicity, and environment). A study into avant-gardism must begin with a recognition of its persistent value, indeed its problematic value, and yet also recognize how its value participates in and reacts against broader social networks. More than anything, avant-gardism represents an extreme paradox – for the avant-garde is, at one and the same time, both radically outside and actively opposed to the social contract and yet also inside and actively fulfilling the desires of its contextual society to remake and improve itself. What, then, is the avant-garde? It is easily imagined and romanticized as a metaphorical place out in front of society occupied by artists who discover or invent a new conceptual or aesthetical space into which a society will eventually spill and settle. The term, however, developed from the French military to refer to the soldiers at the head of the army who took the greatest risks and tended to suffer the highest casualties. They served the state through their military sacrifice. Because of this etymo-

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logical history, it is especially important to map out the relationship between avant-garde artists and their contextual society. For instance, the rhetoric surrounding avant-garde practice can echo in disconcerting ways the discourse and rhetoric of imperial exploration and colonialism. However, the comparison to historical explorers and settlers/colonialists provides a useful point of juxtaposition to help clarify the distinct sociopolitical ambitions of avant-garde artists. There are, to be clear, important points of contiguity between these very different groups: explorers and avant-garde artists both, for instance, experience an enormous separation from their contextual society, whether caused by mapping new geographies, ideologies, or aesthetics, that leads them into confrontation with a radically dissimilar (perhaps imaginary) society. A primary difference between geographical explorers and avant-garde artists, however, is that, in confronting the possibility of radically different social configurations and ideologies, historical explorers documented the means by which those differences could be harnessed and exploited in the service of their homeland. Upon encountering the ‘Canadians’ of the new world, Jacques Cartier, for instance, wrote in his journal, ‘We perceived that they are people who would be easy to convert’ (22). His description of them and their belongings highlighted the ease with which they could be impressed and dominated: ‘This people may well be called savage; for they are the sorriest folk there can be in the world, and the whole lot of them had not anything above the value of five sou, their canoes and fishing-nets excepted’ (24). This description noticeably ignores the differences between the two populations, and attempts to situate the aboriginal population in the terms of the European economy. Avant-garde artists, in contrast, are more likely to become propagandists and advocates for the new. They seek to overthrow the values of their contextual society, provoking a rebellion focused first and foremost against the art institutions of their society. The appeal to a creative violence directed against the existing social order is especially commonplace in early avant-garde texts. In the founding Vorticist manifesto, for instance, Richard Aldington, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and the rest declared themselves the ‘Primitive Mercenaries in the Modern World’ whose ambition was to ‘Stir up Civil War among peaceful apes’ (Aldington et al., ‘Manifesto,’ 30–1). Their sense of the relative value of art versus English society was left unfiltered: ‘IF YOU DESTROY A GREAT WORK OF ART you are destroying a greater soul than if you annihilated a whole district of London’ (Lewis, ‘To the Suffragettes,’ 152). Albeit with a less violent vocabulary, Canadian avant-gardists, from Lawren Harris to Claude Gauvreau to

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Marshall McLuhan, have all written about the possibility of ending the stale, existing social contract and the possibility of a new order arising. It is ironic that avant-gardism borrows its vocabulary from the military, exploration narratives, and scientific discourse, three central pillars of state ideology, in order to express dissatisfaction with society. Though the power of this language is intended to be reversed against the power structures that concocted it, the shared discourse hints at an avant-garde complicity with capitalist society’s constant (and violent) desire to improve itself. Indeed, despite a half-millennium unbroken string of attempted aesthetic revolutions, the rhetoric of sociopolitical progress and a vocabulary of economists haunt and even warp the ambitions of the avant-garde. An aesthetic revolution, of course, extends beyond the inevitable mandate all writers face to create original forms or new means of expression. Aesthetic revolution, in the particular sense relevant to the avant-garde, refers specifically to the participation of artists in or their contribution to sociopolitical revolution. Hannah Arendt explains revolutions as uniquely modern phenomena in their aim not just to replace or reform power structures of a historical civilization but to restart history with the violent provocation of a new civilization.6 In this way, aesthetic revolutions participate in the destruction of the foundational values of a contextual civilization with the explicit purpose of creating space for the new beginning. As American avant-garde theorist Rachel Blau DuPlessis intones, ‘Destroy worship and worshippers. Let the fragments roar’ (53). The avant-garde invests in the liberational potential of the new civilization by dedicating art practice to the service of the new ideological order. Within avant-garde circles, a central debate has surrounded the role of art in relation to the revolution. Is art a source of liberation or a means by which to create the conditions that will enable liberated consciousnesses? If a liberated consciousness is not possible within a pre-revolutionary culture, as Lenin argued, then avant-garde art practice should be limited to changing society and creating the new liberated culture, lest it be irrelevant or worse misleading: ‘Revolution alone can “abolish” the bourgeois state’ (Lenin, 274). Lenin’s insistence on violent revolution being a necessary start to the proletarian civilization corroborates and informs the avant-garde tendency to expostulate ecstatically on the redemptive possibility of violence. Contemporary postmodern artists and theorists, apprehensive of the rhetoric of desire and the veiled teleologies of capitalism, have grown increasingly resistant to the revolutionary and violent language of avantgardism. On the one hand, wave after wave of avant-garde movements – from Symbolism to Zaum to Futurism to Dada and beyond – failed to

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alter the physical violence associated with capitalist exploitation, to alter the cultural violence associated with neoliberal globalization, or to overcome the spiritual and ethical abyss of pluralistic relativism. On the other hand, the discourse of innovation that informs avant-gardism seems altogether complicit and in comfortable accordance with the cultural institutions and ideologies it portends to revolutionize. Blau DuPlessis, for instance, notes the tendency of formally radical authors to rely upon ‘the familiarity of gender limits’ in order to make their experimental works ‘relatively accessible – readable’ (42). So, while avant-gardism failed to fulfil its radical promises, it has also and too often remained within the ideological strata of the society it presumed to be outside of and tried to remake. Thus, ironically, avant-garde art and aesthetics functionally participate in and inevitably contribute to the sustenance of values they purport to oppose. The distinction between avant and au courant (or perhaps, la même chose) blurs remarkably fast. For instance, whereas modernist author Ezra Pound’s dictum to ‘make it new’ was once regarded as a radical aesthetic proposition that threatened the foundation of art history, in the present moment multinational corporations, unconcerned by grammar, now routinely invite contemporary consumers to ‘think different’ without any anxiety that those different thoughts will preclude their own late-capitalist model of consumption. Like the Mounties and the banks waiting in advance in the Canadian west for settlers to arrive, more often than not the system expands into new territories without fundamentally changing. In the specific use of the term that I develop in this book neither Pound’s imagist aesthetic nor Apple Inc. (the owners of the ‘think different’ campaign who now describe their latest consumer product as ‘revolutionary’) fulfils its denotations despite the significant influence and innovation of both. The model I use develops from the theorization of avant-gardism that begins with the pioneering work of Renato Poggioli, Peter Bürger, Charles Russell, John Weightman, Julia Kristeva, and Marjorie Perloff. While there are numerous points of debate both minute and essential between these and the many other thinkers I lean upon in this study, my approach follows Richard Kostelanetz’s belief that the avant-garde is a remarkably rare phenomenon in art history for having measurable characteristics. Though my sense of those characteristics differs from what Kostelanetz proposes, we agree that avant-gardism is most distinctly an art of the future – not necessarily the technological future of society (as in science fiction), nor defined by the formalist techniques of future art practices,7 but the revolutionary art that attempts to provoke

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an experience of the consciousness of a future, potential social order within an audience of the present. This work does not escape the present, but at the least it attempts to reconstitute the ideologies that prescribe and determine significance in the present. For, as Giorgio Agamben writes in his discussion of the films of Guy Debord, the very act of creation fundamentally involves resisting and even undoing the conditions, the facts, of the world: ‘Every act of creation is also an act of thought, and an act of thought is a creative act, because it is defined above all by its capacity to de-create the world’ (318). Avant-garde art constitutes a creative de-creation specifically designed to spread like a virus:8 it aims to infect its contextual society and spread until the world has been remade. It is also like a rhizome that spreads across ideological landscapes, transfiguring what it means to be alive in the present moment. It is worth pointing out at this point that acknowledging a text as avantgarde should not be equated with a value judgement of the art so-defined. Avant-garde art is not synonymous with innovative art nor does it automatically imply great art. Both such designations, and the various configurations of similar evaluations, are relativistic valuations determined by social practice and ideology. Avant-garde art, in contrast, attempts to escape all existing social practice and ideology – and is thus inevitably bad art when judged by the criteria of current aesthetics. As a non-evaluative term, then, avant-gardism becomes an enormously useful descriptor of a strain of Canadian literature that proposes and imagines a rupture from contemporary life, and advocates or serves the propagation of that rupture. I believe that the idea of avant-gardism, with its uniquely revolutionary and sociopolitical orientation, is particularly, indeed singularly, relevant in identifying the constituents of a para-tradition within the broader scope of Canadian and Western literature. I have come to think of the avant-garde’s relationship to Canadian modernisms, postmodernisms, realisms, and all other vaguely canonized Canadian writings as being similar in kind to the a-parallel evolution of two symbiotic entities mapped out by Deleuze and Guattari in which the one morphs into the other in a circulation of intensities (10). I use the avant-garde, then, as a portal into an obscure but potent field of writing submerged beneath or beside (and sometimes above and beyond, often in the middle of) the familiar canon of writing in Canada. A few of the authors I discuss, such as Lawren Harris, Marshall McLuhan, and Sheila Watson, will be familiar to many, though likely not as familiar in the manner in which I discuss them here; other figures, such as John Reid and Bertram Brooker, have been rescued from the archives for this study, or else, as in the case of the

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Automatist authors, translated from their familiar abode in French Canadian literary histories into a new context in which they are rarely acknowledged. My ambition is not to invent, exaggerate, or solve early avant-garde literary activity in Canada, nor to declare that the aesthetical and ideological ambitions of the disparate authors involved were unified. The ambition of this book is to begin the process of reading a series of scattered nodes of strange and difficult early Canadian avant-garde writings in relation to a shared revolutionary animus. Postmodern scholars have long reminded critics to be aware of the implications of the questions they ask: to consider who gets excluded and why as a result of the way they have staged their studies. The questions prompting this book reveal an alternative literary history of Canada. Almost none of the authors I consider have been canonized within the dominant tradition, or if they have, only their most traditional and recognizable work has been acknowledged. Still, this project does not begin in a void: it must be clear from the outset that this project builds from an already existing and voluminous amount of scholarship on each node of avant-garde activity by attempting to set them in dialogue with one another. Thus, my project aims to connect the remarkable parallels between work by Ann Davis, John Lennox, Gillian McCann, Sherrill Grace, Michèle Lacombe, Birk Sproxton, Dennis Reid, L.R. Pfaff, Roald Nasgaard, and Glenn Willmott on the Cosmic Canadians; work by Ray Ellenwood, Andre Bourassa, Christopher Butterfield, Caroline Bayard, Dennis Reid, Roald Nasgaard, and François-Marc Gagnon on the Automatists; work by Brian Henderson, Christian Bök, Stephen Scobie, Jack David, and Johanna Drucker on Canadian concrete (visual) poetry and sound poetry; work by Richard Cavell, Paul Tiessen, Paul Hjartarson, Glenn Willmott, Toby Foshay, Sheila Watson, F.T. Flahiff, Robert Stacey, and Catherine M. Mastin on Vorticism in Canada; work by Barbara Godard, Nicole Brossard, Judy Rebick, and Marie J. Carrière on radical feminism in Canada; and work by Frank Davey, Linda Hutcheon, Marjorie Perloff, Jeff Derksen, and Christian Bök on postmodernism in Canada, among many others who are already involved in the discussion in various ways. My work, if anything, floats on theirs, dependent on their updraft. Despite the abundant work already done on each of these nodes, studies of avant-gardism in Canada have consistently been predicated on a model of exclusivity that highlights both the novelty and the difference of each node or particular experimental author from the imagined (conservative) aesthetics of Canadian literature. It is, unfortunately and ironically, a rhetorical model that has only facilitated the ongoing exclusion

Introduction

17

of avant-gardism in Canada and one that has thus far resisted considering the links and connections between the diverse experimental aesthetic communities. This book proposes a link between them through contemporary theories of avant-gardism – even while recognizing avant-gardism as a polyvalent phenomenon. To write a book-length consideration of this para-tradition in Canadian letters, then, is in many ways to offer one answer to the question of who has already been excluded. By presenting an entrance point to its alterity, the consistent marginalization of Canadian avant-gardism can at the least be recognized and at the best begin to be undone. By offering enough evidence to conceive of a para-tradition of literary activity in this country, this book will hopefully generate future endeavours. The first task, in working towards such a goal, must be to address the mutating and diverse use of the two words ‘avant’ and ‘garde’ – two words that can be literally translated from the French into English as ‘before’ and ‘guard,’ respectively. Combined, though, over the past 400 years, the denotation of these two words has spun an intricate web of connotations to variously describe the military elite force of a government, seditious anti-establishment members of a society, open-form jazz musicians, and even artists whose decadence fulfils bourgeois taste. In addressing this contradictory diversity, let us start with a brief survey and history of the term as it has been used in both international and Canadian contexts. Avant-gardism invariably begins with an assumption of the inadequacy of current tastes and the belief that society can be remade and history restarted. Like the idea of revolution, which began synonymously with the idea of a restoration of previous order, there is a sense in which avantgardism proposes a return to the beginning and the creation of a fresh start for a new civilization. It is through the enormous ambition of correcting the debased tastes of the bourgeoisie that the myth of a selfconscious and heroic avant-garde class of artists emerges, built of those eager and willing to wage battle with philistines over the future of art and society. While, as Richard Kostelanetz points out, avant-gardism always refers to new and influential means and modes of art making (‘ABC,’ 6), the revolutionary social and political ambitions of avant-garde art are useful in distinguishing the substantial differences between the various models and theories. All models of avant-gardism (excluding, of course, the contemporary post-avant school discussed below) begin with the assumption of a revolutionary art – an art that participates in or serves the liberation of culture and ideology. The desire for newness and regeneration, however, dangerously echoes the rhetoric of progress – or what

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Wyndham Lewis disdainfully described as the ‘pathological straining after something which boasts of a spectacular aheadofness’ (The Demon, 64). Staying ahead of the game, as Lewis’s criticism implies, can become a fashionable obsession – or rather an obsession with fashion – that threatens the total co-option of avant-garde revolutionary art within existing social paradigms and practices. Constantly struggling to stay up to date is very different from being in advance of a future unalienated state. The pattern of this constant, pressing need for artistic innovation establishes a process that Martin Puchner, in surveying the patterns of historical movements of Western art, characterizes as the ‘avant-garde history of succession and rupture’ (71). While avant-gardism, unlike other forms of experimental or innovative art, intertwines aesthetic novelty with sociopolitical revolution, previous conceptions of the liberated state are discarded by each subsequent wave of the avant-garde, undermining the revolutionary vision each previous wave had proposed. As a result, over the course of the twentieth century, there developed a gradual resistance to or boredom with the discourse of sociopolitical progress and militant revolution associated with avant-garde movements. This dynamic relationship between avant-garde art and revolution, however, coupled with changing attitudes to progress, provides a useful means of distinguishing four distinct faces of the avant-garde. These categories are not meant to be exclusive or reductive, particularly because artists move around or between categories rather freely, especially over the course of their careers. They are meant to be useful in recognizing the central points of ongoing debates in avant-garde circles about the nature and function of their art vis-à-vis society and the revolution. European Surrealism, for instance, was torn apart over the distinction here described as ‘aesthetic’ versus ‘radical’ avant-gardism – a fissure that ultimately guided the decision by Canada’s Automatists to dissociate themselves from the continental movement. Many principal figures in the French Surrealist movement began with Dada, but grew impatient with its ‘decadence’ in the sense described below. The faces of avant-gardism, and related debates, will be particularly instructive in the discussion of Canadian nodes of avantgarde activity, but can be briefly summarized in the following ways: The Radical Avant-Garde is distinguished by the use of art in support of a sociopolitical revolution. Radical avant-gardists believe that the desired revolution will alter consciousness, restart history, and create the conditions for a liberated consciousness. Only upon the creation of these conditions can a truly liberated art emerge. In the meantime, art provides a propagandistic function in the service of the sociopolitical cause. Radical

Introduction

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avant-gardism is most immediately and easily connected to the numerous Marxist and socialist movements that formed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If we take radical avant-gardism more generally, however, as indicative of an aesthetic that used art in the service of a political cause more abstractly committed to liberation, we can use it in the context of discussions of art that appeared by groups like the English Suffragettes, North American feminists, and in Canada, Québécois separatists. The Aesthetic Avant-Garde, by far the most familiar category of avantgardism and the primary focus of this book, can be distinguished by the belief that art has the power to change and shape society. In its mildest form, as Lisa Robertson suggests, such work describes or represents ‘what change might be, the physics of change’ (C. Stewart, 136). The rupture provoked by the new ideological model, however, invites dramatic and indeed revolutionary possibilities. The desired sociopolitical revolution begins with an altered consciousness that can be evidenced, demonstrated, or provoked by the new ideas embedded in revolutionary art. Consequently, the art object is given revolutionary status and is judged by the purity of its commitment to the revolutionary consciousness. Any compromise for popular taste or propagandistic purposes diminishes the avant-gardeness of the art. The pure, liberated art has the potential to spread a revolutionary consciousness around the globe, which will in turn bring about dramatic changes to the sociopolitical world. Unlike radical avant-gardism, however, the liberated art comes before the sociopolitical revolution and can create the conditions for a permanent and widespread shift in consciousness. The three nodes of literary activity charted in this book were all aesthetic avant-gardes and were all drawn into conflict with radical avant-gardes over the question of art’s relation to revolution. The three nodes, each in the terms suitable to its respective node, echo the French Surrealist Louis Aragon’s rejection of radical revolutionaries who are ‘carried along by fashion and belief in the strength of a doctrine’ – he calls these political idealists ‘shamefaced’ realists and dismisses the epistemology motivating their politics and their aesthetics: ‘Nothing will make such people understand the true nature of the real: that it is a relation like any other, that the essence of things is in no way tied to their reality, that there are relations other than the real that the mind is capable of grasping, and that are also primary, like chance, illusion, the fantastic, the dream’ (‘A Wave of Dreams’). Decadence and Postmodern Decadence, while usually used in reference to a particular historical movement (or in Italy, to refer to modernism in toto), can be distinguished by the use of art to expose and deconstruct

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(or destruct) the paradigms and practices of the dominant ideology. Rather than advocating or evidencing a particular revolutionary consciousness, decadent art focuses on falling away from, liberating, or merely disrupting failed or compromised aesthetic models and ideologies. If at all, the possibility of revolution (and the point at which decadence intersects with avant-gardism) is implied through a negative dialectic. Historically, and as will be explained in more detail below, Dada can be thought of as a decadent rather than avant-garde movement. The transition from Dada to Dadaism, however, signals an increasingly avantgarde nature of the movement’s ambitions in the future of their society. Tzara’s 1918 manifesto already contains hints of this revolutionary creative de-creation: ‘Let every man shout: there is a great destructive, negative work to be accomplished. Sweeping, cleaning … After the carnage we still have the hope of a purified humanity’ (‘Dada Manifesto,’ 300, 302). The Post-Avant refers to experimental modes of art making that challenge the various hegemonies of neoliberalism and modernity, but without much tangible faith in progress or revolution. As some of these hegemonies take the form of masculinism and militarism, the rhetoric of avant-gardism has been broadly called into question for its complicity with intolerant ideology. Theorist Perry Anderson outlines the problem: ‘Since the seventies, the very idea of an avant-garde, or of individual genius, has fallen under suspicion. Combative, collective movements of innovation have become steadily fewer, and the badge of a novel, selfconscious “ism” ever rarer. For the universe of the postmodern is not one of delimitation but intermixture – celebrating the cross-over, the hybrid, the pot-pourri’ (93). Yet, despite the widely proclaimed ‘death of the avant-garde,’ post-avant artists continue to experiment in a manner that is at least analogous to previous avant-gardes, even though the embrace of revolution, progress, and militant rhetoric has disappeared. Furthermore, post-avant critics have begun to recognize a nefarious complicity in the avant-garde commitment to innovation and newness with capitalism’s constant manufactured desire for the same. As Puchner observes, with their instant commodification, all would-be avant-gardes today seem to be ‘speaking for multinational capitalism’ (243). Indeed, for almost 200 years the status quo in the Western world has been shaped by a capitalism that is predicated on a similar embrace of invention and the disruption of convention. Anticipating this post-avant criticism, Wyndham Lewis pointed out in The Art of Being Ruled (1926) that the accrued discourse of constant change has become commonplace and even central

Introduction

21

to capitalist culture since the industrial revolution: ‘It is because our lives are so attached to and involved with the evolution of our machines that we have grown to see and feel everything in revolutionary terms, just as once the natural mood was conservative. We instinctively repose on the future rather than the past’ (11). The toll of this Futurism is precisely a replication of the alienation that avant-garde movements were attempting to overcome through their experimental art: ‘Science makes us strangers to ourselves’ (13). Despite Lewis’s criticism and many other exceptions, the post-avant generally refers to artists and critics from the contemporary era who create their work in aesthetic modes associated with postmodernism or those that come after postmodernism. This criticism of the avant-garde as an unwitting participant in the very social values it attempts to undo provides a useful clue as to why the avantgardes were unsuccessful in their respective revolutionary initiatives. In the words of Charles Jencks, ‘the avant-garde which drives Modernism forward directly reflects the dynamism of capitalism, its new waves of destruction and construction’ (222). Ironically, despite the romance of rebellion associated with the avant-garde, such criticism highlights the complicity of avant-garde art with the existing ideology of its time. Furthermore, and to build from Jencks, each of the four faces of avantgardism outlined above can be understood in relation to the oscillation of destructive and constructive tendencies: for while aesthetic and radical avant-gardes construct idealistic visions and revolutionary phantasies, decadent movements (such as Dada, for instance) destroy the illusions upon which ideology is constructed. As the final phase in the process, and arguably the least politically ambitious phase, the post-avant does its best to avoid sustaining the system while drawing the system’s contradictions and costs into greater consciousness. Despite giving up on the possibility of achieving a revolutionary remaking of society, the post-avant creates art that is simultaneously both a-political and a self-conscious manifestation of the avant-garde spirit. In favouring nuance over resolution, however, post-avant critics have also struggled with or resisted articulating its complex relationship to the existing sociopolitical world. Butling and Rudy characterize the broad field as ‘a wide-ranging, historiographic project to reconfigure existing domains, reterritorialize colonized spaces, and recuperate suppressed histories … literary radicality in the second half of the twentieth century is best characterized as multiple “nodes in an alternative poetics network,” rather than as a single line with one group out in front’ (19). Such a reconfiguration (which helped to shape my own project’s nodal model)

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recognizes ongoing efforts and experimentation without relying upon linear or teleological conceptions of history – and, significantly, without reverting to the revolutionary language and promises of avant-gardes past. If the century and a half of ecstatic avant-garde projections and prophecies has proved anything, it is that history is not going to be resolved anytime soon but rather spills messily into the future without design. However, if the concept of avant-gardism now holds little relevance to contemporary art making, this distance only serves to make it easier and necessary to reflect on its remarkable influence on and relevance to previous generations. The differences between the four faces of avant-gardism, including one orientated against the categories of art and artist and another that explicitly rejects the historical conceptualization of avant-gardism, give some indication of the complexity and difficulty of studying avant-garde art and writing in the twenty-first century – the denotative field of the term has accrued both extremely multifaceted and contradictory applications as well as extremely broad and ultimately bland implications. How the term is defined has significant impact on who gets included within the category, which is still and surprisingly presumed to be a privileged community. Various debates have developed in the theorization of the concept, particularly in determining the relationship between avant-gardism and history, creating a dialogue that can be read in relation to the four faces introduced above. For instance, Poggioli was the first to make the key distinction between what I have termed the aesthetic versus the radical avant-garde (his terms were artistic versus radical), theorizing a ‘divorce of the two avant-gardes’ following the Paris Commune uprising in 1870 (12). Following the divorce, politics for the artistic avant-garde ‘functioned almost solely as rhetoric.’ Peter Bürger, one of the most influential critics in postmodern decadent circles, rejected Poggioli’s a-political rendering of the artistic avant-garde. For Bürger, the avant-garde criticism of art as an institution was a fundamentally political act: ‘The avant-garde turns against both – the distribution apparatus on which the work of art depends, and the status of art in bourgeois society as defined by the concept of autonomy’ (22). The aim of the avant-garde ‘is to reintegrate art into the praxis of life’ and would amount to a fundamental remodelling of bourgeois society. Bürger arrives at his theory of the avant-garde through a Marxist notion that builds from Habermas, who argued that art in bourgeois society serves as a sanctuary for the fulfilment of unmet needs in that society. Bürger extends this focus to consider the avantgarde’s revolution of the content of art within that sanctuary to include self-criticism (25). The singular focus on the general impotence of the

Introduction

23

avant-garde to change the world, however, threatens to overwrite or else undermine the significance of the distinctive nature of their sociopolitical and aesthetical ambitions. While it is true, as Seamus Heaney suggests, that ‘in one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil – no lyric has ever stopped a tank,’ it is also true that very few poets outside the avant-garde have ever attempted or desired to wrestle control of a tank through their poetry: indeed, one could equate the desire to control a tank with a poem as an almost exclusively avant-garde ambition (though, certainly, not all gardes would share such a desire). Discussing avant-garde artists through their motivations and ambitions, rather than through their sociopolitical impact, addresses them as subjects within history rather than subjects to history. The post-avant phase of avant-gardism, however, marks a general retreat by artists and critics from militaristic commitments to revolutionary politics. Kostelanetz, for instance, defines avant-gardism through three aesthetic criteria that exclude any relation to sociopolitical revolution. His criteria include work that evidences aesthetic innovation, that is initially unacceptable, and that has its maximum audience in the future (see ‘ABC,’ 6). Such a model positions avant-garde art entirely within its contextual social contract, whereas the avant-garde ‘hope for a liberated humanity’ is predicated on a contest between the unemancipated polis and the liberating vision of the emancipating artist. The shift away from the commitment to creating a new order or a new consciousness can be seen in post-avant critics Butling and Rudy’s response to Kostelanetz, where they criticize his model of avant-gardism for not being inclusive enough. His canon of ‘overwhelmingly white and male’ authors (Butling and Rudy, 20), they argue, distorts the pool of avant-garde authors by ignoring innovations in implied subject positions within texts. Their critique focuses on the importance of experimental women’s and minority literatures without recognizing the already depoliticized nature of Kostelanetz’s criteria – for it is only when avant-gardism becomes depoliticized, derevolutionized, that it becomes hypocritical to exclude the so-called schools of identity writings. Avant-gardism, as I’ve outlined it thus far, however, is a different phenomenon from identity writing to the extent that the ambition of much identity writing is to secure recognition and participation within the existing social contract. Acknowledging the rights of all citizens to be equal participants within society does not entail a radical reconfiguration of the society, but rather seeks to reform the people with access to its power (a bank is still a bank regardless of the gender or colour or sexual orientation of its CEO). Feminist and identity writing, however, becomes avant-garde proper when the goal of inclusion

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or recognition is supplemented by the desire to completely dismantle the dominant social contract and remake it in revolutionary form. Barbara Godard, for instance, outlines the ‘revolutionary’ nature of radical feminist authors’ attempts to de-create patriarchal grammar and create a language that does not exclude women – and from such a liberated language follows a liberated consciousness. Writers with a similar kind of revolutionary impulse include many from Langston Hughes to David Antin, or in Canada, from Roy Miki and Fred Wah to Marlene NourbeSe Philip, who not only demand to be identified as legitimate participants within their society, but have also advocated for an entirely new constitution of that society. Given the contestations and the rich, diverse history of the term, this book will not attempt to present a new, singular definition. Instead, I will be primarily focused on using the historically and philosophically different positions, including the four faces of avant-gardism outlined above, to illuminate the particular aesthetic project of the three nodes of early Canadian avant-garde writing that this book addresses: the Cosmic Canadians, the Automatists, and the Canadian Vorticists. As much as possible, this book will resist the temptation to present a unified theory of avantgardism: its diversity, predicated on the more elusive requirement of experimental innovation, is left open to allow multiple entrances and exits to the para-tradition of Canadian experimental literature. In the case of each node of activity, however, the connections and contradictions between the writing and various theories of avant-gardism will be directly explored – as will the group’s own sense of how and why they relate to canonical avant-gardes, respectively Expressionism, Surrealism, and English Vorticism. The nuances and intermingling of the theories of avant-gardism, what we can call, to borrow bpNichol’s term, the borderblur between them, will be addressed in the subsequent chapters that address the particular manifestations of avant-garde activity in Canada. Two dimensions of this study require clarification right from the outset. First of all, though this study is primarily focused on literary avant-garde activity, the authors and the avant-garde nodes addressed were not themselves limited to literary orientations. Consequently, occasionally and where appropriate, examples from other disciplines (including, in particular, visual arts, theatre, and dance) will be included in my discussions. These are specifically intended to connect the literary activity to contemporaneous work in other mediums, and thereby corroborate specific avant-garde ambitions of the particular node under discussion. Brooker, for instance, who appears variously throughout this book, won Canada’s

Introduction

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first Governor General’s Award for literature and wrote experimental plays and poetry, but was also Canada’s first abstract painter, a musician, a sculptor, and an actor. Lawren Harris, Brooker’s peer, is famous in Canada for his visual art, but appears in this book primarily as a writer of poetry, manifestos, and criticism. Part of Brooker and Harris’s avantgardism, as with the Automatists and the Vorticists, is tied up in this commitment to multidisciplinarity. The other issue that needs to be clarified is my use of non-English sources which have been translated into English in the text of this book. Given the emergence of avant-gardism as a concept from the French military and subsequently from French art history, it is inconceivable to consider ignoring French antecedents or the remarkable avant-garde activity in French Canada. As this book is intended for an English audience, however, it does not serve its audience well to leave passages in their original language. Translations, where available, or paraphrases have thus been used throughout; the original French has been recorded in the endnotes where relevant. The politics and implications of translating French Canadian authors into English for a study of literary avant-gardism in Canada appear in the relevant chapters. The politics and implications of translation, as a potential metaphor for avant-garde ambitions in toto, is explored throughout this book but particularly in the conclusion. In Automatist playwright and poet Claude Gauvreau’s first play, ‘The Good Life,’ discussed in chapter three, he begins with a rather enigmatic but distinctly resonant line: ‘Hands in the abyss making leaves: that’s a wedding.’ In this book, I have attempted to wed the avant-gardes to one another in a marriage defined less by the singularity of their ambitions and aesthetics and more by their shared commitment to making the ‘leaves’ of their books, pamphlets, and manifestos out of shared rejection of the values of their contextual society. The abyss is a familiar metaphor for the unknown, but with the avant-garde the abyss becomes also an allegorical site in which the bonds of ideology are lifted. In the abyss, the artist experiences a fleeting liberation from society. It is here that avantgardists discover the paradoxical power and potential of creative decreation. Those that write in the abyss, that keep their hands in the abyss, write outside of the world that yet possesses their bodies. Bertram Brooker’s poem ‘The Destroyer’ makes use of a very similar allegorical geography when he writes: ‘I have been / where there are no selves … no evil … no laws … no sin … no good … no god … I am come back only to destroy’ (30–2).

Chapter One

Theory of the Avant-Gardes in Canada

No doubt all successful … revolutionaries must always be driven by enthusiasm and irrational hope, since they would otherwise make the common-sense judgement that the risks and costs of revolution outweigh the possible benefits. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution 1917–1932

The history of the term ‘avant-garde’ in Europe has been thoroughly documented by various continental scholars with no substantial disagreements about the early development and uses of the term.1 The idea of an avant-garde was first coined in fifteenth-century France to describe the military unit at the fore of the army – the avant-garde was the group that defended the country and all it represented, and that, upon successful defence, pushed forth into new territory. The avant-garde used violence to protect and enlarge a nation’s territorial holdings. From this militaristic and nationalistic root, the term avant-garde transitioned from a literal implication to a metaphoric implication in the years leading up to the 1848 French Revolution. In this new phase, art, in writings by radicals such as Gabriel-Désiré Laverdant and Henri de Saint-Simon, was said to serve a similar function in advancing the cause of the revolution as the soldiers who advanced the territory of the nation did. The goal of art, as Laverdant suggests, was to ‘lay bare with a brutal brush all the brutalities, all the filth, which are at the base of our society’ (qtd. in Poggioli, 9). Avant-garde art was seen as a tool to hasten political change. In this new metaphoric use, avant-garde service to the existing nation was replaced by service to the projected, post-revolutionary nation: ‘to know whether art worthily fulfills its proper mission as initiator, whether the artist is truly of the avant-garde, one must know where Humanity is going, know what the destiny of the human race is’ (ibid.).

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The early uses of the term, which have been dated back as far as the second half of the sixteenth century,2 have little relevance to the present study of literary artists who embraced the term for its positive implications with regards to social charge. Similar to the term revolution, which Hannah Arendt shows began with surprisingly conservative implications, the term avant-garde also only gradually developed its unique and radical implications. There is, for instance, an important distinction between the descriptive militaristic metaphor in the very early usages and the selfconscious metaphor used by agonistic writers in the nineteenth century. As Matei Ca˘linescu explains, ‘Although it is encountered in the language of warfare, the modern notion of “avant-garde” has a lot more to do with the language, theory, and practice of a comparatively recent kind of warfare, the revolutionary civil war. In this sense, it is safe to say that the actual career of the term avant-garde was started in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when it acquired undisputed political overtones’ (100–1). Revolutionary avant-gardism relies upon an artist or group of artists recognizing themselves as agents both within a specific historical moment (time) and within a particular geography (space). It is worth adding a small caveat here: both time and space can be understood as ideological borders and, working from Althusser’s use of the term ideology, as the imagined composition of reality. I add this caveat because many avant-garde movements, including the Cosmic Canadians, advocate perceptions of reality that are not shaped by time or space or both. Acting against their contemporary milieu then, avant-garde artists from the midnineteenth century subsequently positioned themselves within a projective and progressive trajectory of history that they believed would lead to a turn in their society, a revolution, which would open up the possibility of a liberated social contract in the future, starting history anew. Thus, Rimbaud’s call for ‘a derangement of all the senses’ (Letter to George, 365) was an attempt to make of the poet ‘a seer’: ‘The Poet … exhausts every possible poison so that only essence remains. He undergoes unspeakable tortures that require complete faith and superhuman strength, rendering him the ultimate invalid among men, the master criminal, the first among the damned – and the supreme Savant! For he arrives at the unknown! For, unlike everyone, he has developed an already rich soul! … It doesn’t matter if these leaps into the unknown kill him: other awful workers will follow him; they’ll start at the horizons where the other has fallen!’ (Letter to Paul, 367–8). Eventually, the metaphor of the poet leading society bored Rimbaud, but in the passage above, taken from his famous and very influential letter to Paul Demeny, the disruption of the present alienated social order was

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justified by the possibility of an unalienated consciousness. By rejecting the world’s structures and morals, such rebel artists in the degraded, decadent present self-consciously and intentionally create the ground in which the fertile future will grow. When Nietzsche wrote of the coming order of the Superman (Ubermensch), he too mapped out a model of avant-gardism predicated on self-sacrifice: ‘I love him who liveth in order to know, and seeketh to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live. Thus seeketh he his own down-going’ (Thus, 5). Avant-garde artists in this configuration no longer serve their present society, but produce art in advance of a potential society that will emerge from a looming future: they are the prophetic predecessors of projected, unalienated subjectivities. Blaise Cendrars’s manifesto of 1921 captures the sense of an inherent predictability to the future that energizes the avant-garde agenda in the present: ‘Renewal! Renewal! Eternal Revolution. The latest advancements of the precise sciences, world war, the concept of relativity, political convulsions, everything foretells that we are on our way toward a new synthesis of the human spirit, toward a new humanity and that a new race of new men is going to appear’ (154). Such a perspective requires a meta-historical consciousness that human history changes over time, and that individual subjects can fundamentally alter the social contract from within. The possibility of transcendence glimmers as a distinct, teleological possibility. The first avant-garde artists in France, including the Jacobins and the Saint-Simonians, embraced their art as a battle front in the political and military struggle leading up to the 1848 French Revolution. There were, however, antecedents for their views on art. As Ca˘linescu points out, ‘The myth of the poet as a prophet had been revived and developed since the early days of romanticism … suffice to say that almost all the progressiveminded romantics upheld the belief in the avant-garde role of poetry, even if they did not use the term “avant-garde” and even if they did not embrace a didactic-utilitarian philosophy of art’ (105). Though it might have had roots in romanticism, it is precisely this didactic and utilitarian aesthetic that distinguishes the Saint-Simonian belief in harnessing the imagination for the benefit of society. In the lead-up to the second French Revolution, various liberal factions rallied together around such causes as universal suffrage, including both the disenfranchised working class and the petite bourgeoisie (though ‘universal’ did not include women nor others not recognized as constituting the polis), and a new national policy based on the right to work to counter issues of unemployment. While the unity between the working class and the small business owners

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dissolved rather rapidly and the revolution was clearly a failure (as evidenced by the election of Napoleon in December of the same year, leading to his dictatorship just three years later), the association between avant-garde art and distinctly leftist, revolutionary politics lasted into the late twentieth century. Beyond the division between the petite bourgeoisie and the working class, the failure of the 1848 Revolution caused another significant split: in this case, among leading, innovative artists. According to the poet Charles Baudelaire, who was one of the first to satirize the pretensions of the revolutionary artists, while these most serious militarist writers did indeed all ‘wear moustaches,’ it is also true that they did so ‘because of their discipline’3 (‘Journaux,’ 691). Baudelaire rebelled and railed against the utilitarian art of the revolution. He, of course, like Théophile Gautier before him, was to emerge as a literary pioneer at the dawn of the autotelic movement. Having lost faith in causes, in final objective truths, and in systems to explain or redeem the world, and more pointedly after a half century of failed and tragic revolutions in France, Baudelaire and a wave of artists also lost faith in progress and rejected the ambitions of the avant-garde to lead society to salvation. Their art turned inward, away from the cause of liberation – but towards the liberated art work. From this school of aestheticism, which properly dates from Charles Fourier’s idea of ‘universal harmonies’ – an idea that resurfaces in Baudelaire’s belief in ‘correspondences,’ which became the theoretical basis of Symbolism – there developed the core beliefs of the Decadent movement:4 for, if the universe was already unified, human affairs paled in comparison to the eternal relevance of such correspondences. In the hands of artists like Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Valéry, and Laforge, universal correspondences between colours and sounds developed into the Symbolist stream that hastened the divide between political action and aesthetic production. For Mallarmé, the role of the poet was ‘to purify the words of the tribe’ more than it was to lead society forward: the poet’s role was to, at the least, rekindle a faith in the ‘rose in the darkness’ behind and beyond the reach of language, ever beckoning (‘Risen,’ 109). The historical Decadents took Symbolist autotelism to an extreme. They developed the loss of faith in progress and social action into a thoroughly eruptive and disruptive and thereby almost avant-garde aesthetic. While their concerns with the separate world of art were distinctly different from the ‘in-theworld’ interests of the aesthetic and radical avant-garde factions, it was precisely their near-religious and devotional faith in art – what Northrop Frye describes as a belief in the poet as ‘a priest of mystery; he turns his

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back on his hearers, and invokes, chanting in a hieratic tongue, the real presence of the Word which reveals the mystery’ (‘Three,’ 14) – that inspired future generations of avant-garde artists. They invoked a world of imaginary solutions that threatened to supersede the empiricist solutions of science. Indeed, the Decadent rejection of the mundane world taken to its extreme became a destructive force functionally equivalent to the creative/de-creative violence of revolutionary avant-gardism. The Aesthetic Avant-Garde The aesthetic avant-garde emerged in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, inspired by the decadent rejection of a politically determined art. But whereas the historical Decadent authors used language, in Frye’s terms, ‘not to point to something in the spiritual world, for that would still make it representational, but to awaken other words to suggest or evoke something in the spiritual world’ (‘Three,’ 14), the aesthetic avant-garde sought to use language or the other tools of art to realize some perfect synthesis of art and life in the world. This distinction is also instructive in understanding the relationship between avant-gardism and modernism, for while avant-gardism has often been used synonymously with modernism, it is this faith and commitment to the social praxis of art making that distinguishes them from the modernist retreat from agonistic potential of contemporary culture. Thus, modernist T.S. Eliot’s devoted meditations on ‘not only the pastness of the past, but of its presence’ (‘Tradition,’ 55) and a literary elite that writes from and of the literary inheritance of Europe can be sharply contrasted with the Nowist writer Pierre Albert-Birot’s ‘law’ that declares: ‘Down with rust / Down with mold / Down with ruins / DOWN WITH THE OLD’ (149). The avant-garde rejection of the existing social order was often supplemented with a deeply felt fascination for so-called primitive cultures. This is similar to the earliest connotations of the word ‘revolution’ which was used to mark the cyclical return to a previous, more natural state. Avant-gardists sought out alternative models, including looking to the dawn of civilization for a kind of purity and liberation that had since been lost or corrupted. For instance, the Merz artist Kurt Schwitters’s famous sound poem ‘Ursonate’ (roughly translated as ‘First Song’ or ‘Primeval Music’) built an entire symphony out of morphemes, bringing culture back to a freedom that existed before language had acquired systemic and limiting signification. This is not a romanticization or nostalgia for a previous time, but a concerted effort to undo the ill effects of a civilization gone

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awry in the hopes of enabling a new civilization. Such creative de-creations led Charles Russell to propose his definition of the avant-garde as ‘a tradition of writers who believed themselves to be participating in the creation of a new world and art … [who] believed themselves and their art to be in advance of a qualitatively different future culture’ (x, xi). Through misgivings about the current social contract and through a rejection of the past that has led to the degraded present, avant-gardism is predicated on a revolutionary break in the present that will enable a revitalized future. Both modernism and avant-gardism began simultaneously after the Romantic period, in a shared shift away from the moral and political idealism of the Enlightenment to the more economic and materialist focus of the nineteenth century. Recognizing their inevitable participation in the culture against which they rebelled, both modern and avantgarde authors call into question the literary culture they inherited. Russell makes the poignant distinction between modernism and avantgardism in their different responses to the failings of their contextual society, and in the implications of their desire to make art new. Whereas modernists, he argues, ‘despair of finding in secular, social history a significant ethical, spiritual, or aesthetic dimension,’ the avant-garde, in poignant contrast, attempt ‘to sustain a belief in the progressive union of a writer and society acting within history.’ Although the latter seems to suggest a Romantic faith in transcendence, like modernism it is conditioned by a sense of the failing of the culture of the modern age and of the huge gulf that exists between themselves, as activist authors, and their immediate audience. In turning against both the distribution apparatus of art and the status of art in the degraded present, avant-garde authors write, as it were, for and of an audience in the future. As Wyndham Lewis explained of Vorticism, ‘It was after all, a new civilization that I – and a few other people – were making the blueprint for’ (qtd. in S. Watson, Wyndham, 10). In this shared turn away from contemporary life and history, Peter Bürger discovers a limited link between the autotelic impulse of modernism and the anti-institutional impulse of avant-gardism (22). Still, he too distinguishes avant-gardism from early modern aestheticism precisely because the latter ‘detached itself from the praxis of life’ whereas the aim of the former ‘is to reintegrate art into the praxis of life.’ The distinction between modernism and avant-gardism seems almost outrageously pedantic when such a question is asked of specific artists like James Joyce or Gertrude Stein. Who would dare argue that neither of them is sufficiently avant-garde? Despite the apparent audacity, both Russell and

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Ca˘linescu do make a poignant distinction between the innovative, experimental works of modernism and the innovative, experimental works of the avant-garde. The distinction lies in Bürger’s notion of reintegration, or what Russell describes as the avant-garde desire to gain control of history and the future by the imagination and ‘direct its own evolutionary development’ (27). It is this evolutionary, revolutionary, and futurist mandate that is particular to the avant-garde; a mandate that demands that art not only reveal or trouble the institutions and ideologies of its contextual civilization, but also that art alter the artist’s, the audience’s, and eventually the civilization’s perception, behaviour, and even structures of its social life. The extent to which semiotically radical texts like Ulysses or Finnegans Wake or Tender Buttons fulfil this task is not the focus of this study, although there remains more to be said of them. It does, however, draw a rather clear line between Eliot’s praise of texts that embody ‘the futility of history’ from works that revel in and reveal the possibility of a projective post-revolutionary history beginning in the near future. Though postmodernists tend to contest the naivety of the logic, in the early twentieth century avant-garde teleological thinking was not uncommon. Indeed, a revolutionary conception of history is apparent in the rampant idealism in Surrealist André Breton’s foundational statement: ‘I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.’ (‘Manifesto,’ 14), as in Marinetti’s ecstatic ejaculation that ‘We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! … Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed’ (‘The Founding,’ 47). Even amongst the Dadaists, who – as an extreme decadent movement – wrote against more than for anything, one could recall Hugo Ball’s sacerdotal experience while reading his Verse ohne worte ‘like a magical bishop’ (67) or Tristan Tzara’s proclamation: ‘Here is a tottering world fleeing, future spouse of the bells of the infernal scale, and here on the other side: new men’ (297). These early avant-gardes, what might be termed the historical avant-garde for the way that the Futurist, Surrealist, and Dadaist movements have come to define the category, developed from a faith in the possibility of revolutionary progress achieved through aesthetic activities – revolution, because a serious turn away from current cultural practices towards something else was necessary, but progressive in the sense that the future sustained the

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potential for liberation despite the degraded present and despite the failings of history. Radical Avant-Gardism As has been discussed above, avant-gardism began as a military concept that changed into a political idea and, only later, developed distinctly, some would say exclusively, artistic significance. Throughout each stage of this progression, however, the revolutionary mandate of avant-gardism has inevitably involved politics. The nature of the relationship between art and politics differs dramatically in the various faces of the avant-garde: whereas the revolutionary projections and politics of the aesthetic avantgarde artists are first realized in the work of art and later contribute to political change, radical avant-garde artists use their work to advance the cause of an already existing political revolutionary movement. The latter demands a propagandistic functionalism from the work of art that the former strongly rejects. Indeed, many of the fiercest battles in avant-garde communities can be attributed to the different demands made of art by aesthetic versus radical avant-garde artists. The difference ultimately hinges on two incompatible perspectives on the responsibility of the artist in relation to their contextual society: aesthetic avant-gardists believe in their freedom as liberated individuals and insist upon their right to explore art uninhibited; radical avant-gardists believe that individuals cannot be liberated until the entire society has been revolutionized and set free. Thus, for the radical avant-gardist, the primary duty of serious minded avant-garde artists is to create the necessary conditions for an eventually unalienated art. The word ‘radical’ stems from the Latin word for ‘having roots’ (a shared etymology with the lowly radish). Over centuries, it developed into a metaphor for individuals seeking to change or reform a system right down to its very roots: thus, William James’s 1897 proposal of a ‘radical empiricism’ that would reposition the roots of Western religion, especially monism, as ‘hypotheses liable to modification’ (vii). From earlier in the nineteenth century, many British parliamentarians called the need for a ‘radical reform’ of the existent political system – most particularly (and poignantly considering the 1848 French Revolution) for the cause of extending suffrage to all men regardless of class or property. As in the case of James’s controversial musings on religion, the term developed from referencing the metaphoric roots of a system to metonymically

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referring to the fringe political figures who called for substantial reform of the ‘roots’ of their society. The leftist and distinctly political implications of the term led artists to embrace the label ‘radical’ to refer to the artistic expressions of their politically revolutionary beliefs. It is within the radical literary tradition that we rediscover the likes of the original avant-garde artists who participated in the 1848 Revolution. Canada witnessed its share of early political radicalism. In his book Radical Politics and Canadian Labour, Martin Robin defines radicalism with specific reference to the socialist movements, particularly labourism, syndicalism, and partyism, that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in Canada. These leftist radicals believed themselves to be ‘in advance of the army of thinkers’ (34), a belief in their avant-gardism similar to beliefs amongst Europe’s leftist radicals. It was during this period in France, however, that the general concept of the avant-garde shifted from radical politics to revolutionary aesthetics. Poggioli locates the rapid semantic transition of the metaphor of the avant-garde from a sociopolitical to a generally cultural connotation in the 1870s when the ambitions of innovative and experimental artists appeared to unite with the ambitions of sociopolitical radicals. As a poignant symbol of this unity, one can think of the legend of Rimbaud’s participation in the Paris Commune, literally fighting the army as they advanced to crush the proletariat uprising. His account of the incident is somewhat more ambiguous however: ‘I will be a worker: it’s this idea that keeps me alive, when my mad fury would have me leap into the midst of Paris’ battles’ (Letter to George, 365). His politics are here said to prevent his participation in the battle, which are given to serve no specific political end but a kind of externalization of the ‘mad fury’ within his mind. The illusion of unity between the political and cultural factions quickly dissipated, and barely lasted a decade. The resultant ‘divorce’ of the avant-gardes led to a flip in the meaning of the term avant-garde, which quickly became synonymous with exclusively artistic and cultural practice. Though aesthetic avant-gardism has had poignant moments of intersection with the political struggles of the radical avant-garde (the intense, if ultimately disastrous, relationship between Surrealism and communism serves as but one example; the relationship between Vorticism and fascism/Nazism serves as another), the separation of these two avant-gardes has dominated the history and historicization of avant-gardism. Despite the critical attention, while the political ambitions of the aesthetic avant-garde are considered significant, rarely are the aesthetic ambitions of radical avant-gardes valued or even acknowledged. Regardless of its lowly ranks and its generally

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conservative aesthetics, the tradition of radical art and literature presents a poignant alternative model for the role of art within the conceptual field of avant-gardism. In the antagonism between the political and the aesthetic avant-gardes, there is a nuanced moment of origin in the work of Henri de SaintSimon, the acknowledged predecessor of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Marx, 55). Saint-Simon was a French aristocrat who joined in the American revolutionary war, and developed in its aftermath a complex theory of a New Christianity that has been likened to a mystical socialism. As part of the broad social reorganization proposed in his theories, especially in his latter works, Saint-Simon argued for the special social role of artists because of the spiritual and rational stimulation caused by great works: artists, as a result, ‘were best fitted to move mankind to progress’ (qtd. in Egbert, 342). He proposed an almost clerical but decidedly heroic role for artists that deeply influenced thinkers and writers such as Auguste Comte, Honoré de Balzac, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and Victor Hugo.5 Saint-Simon’s was a rather Romantic conception of society functioning as an organic unity within which art worked together with architecture, science, and technology to bring about the forthcoming good society. He used the term ‘avant-garde’ to refer to this harmonized view of all aspects of society working together for the common good, gradually replacing governments and class-structured society with the rising influence of unified artists and scientists. Such an art, however, was by necessity functional, didactic, utilitarian, and thoroughly comprehensible. With such an onerous prerequisite, Saint-Simon’s unified avant-garde dissolved quickly into the factions outlined above, a division most famously announced in the autotelic aesthetics outlined in the preface to Théophile Gautier’s 1835 novel Mademoiselle de Maupin. This text includes the first use of the phrase ‘l’art pour l’art,’ or art for art’s sake, which is a mark of difference from Saint-Simon’s avant-gardism. This phrase would become the motto of the Symbolist and Decadent movements and was elaborated in Anglo-American modernism with Archibald MacLeish’s influential instruction that ‘art should not mean but be’ (126). Radical avant-gardism could not be more different on this point. The enduring influence of Saint-Simon, especially after his death, led directly to the development of a social realist tradition that aesthetic avant-gardists, even artists who were also extremely politically active like Oscar Wilde and Pablo Picasso, strongly rejected. Aesthetic avant-gardists insisted that artists and the work of art remain free of social utilitarianism because the power of art emerged only through the freedom of unfettered imaginations.

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Aesthetic avant-garde artists believed their post-alienated works already served radical political causes better than accessible, digestible, and naturalist works. Regardless, it is the Simonian sense of the term that led to publications such as the 1848 newspaper of radical politics L’Avant-garde and to similar publications in the 1880s and 1890s throughout Europe and even in Canada. His projections of a New Christianity also resurface in modified form in the work of the Canadian Christian radical Salem Bland, discussed in the next chapter. Though critics of the art associated with Simonians or radical avant-gardism dismiss it as propaganda, the aesthetics of this branch were finely tuned and articulated in manifestos, magazines, pamphlets, and other publications whose styles and templates were ultimately borrowed and mimicked by the aesthetic avant-garde. Even Poggioli, who distinctly prefers the hermetic work of the aesthetic avantgarde, acknowledges ‘the avant-garde character’ of the radical literary tradition (11). Sociopolitical and economic progress, in this book, thus means much the same as in the revolutionary progress outlined above. Radical progress differs in accepting the primacy of social and political revolution over the imaginative freedom of the artist. Decadence and Postmodern Decadence The association between leftist political causes and aesthetic avantgardism has waxed and waned in the post-Romantic history of experimental art. I have characterized two branches of avant-gardism as being either aesthetic or radical, but this distinction only makes sense in consideration of the literal avant-garde: those artists whose work consciously attempts to embody or create the future fulfilment of society, artists for whom progress may yet be harnessed and history yet redeemed. The example of Charles Baudelaire, however, suggests another option for considering work that is experimental, innovative, and mutinous from the banality of bourgeois taste, but that avoids the difficult choice between the Scylla and Charybdis of radical and aesthetic explorations of revolutionary progress. In particular, in Baudelaire’s praise for the fading role of the dandy, the vainglorious aristocratic vagabond, he makes of nostalgia almost a religion and most certainly a third way of approaching experimental art. In this nostalgia, he discovers an aesthetic that would become central to the poetics of movements such as Decadence, Aestheticism, Symbolism, and modernism: ‘Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy’ (‘The Painter,’ 421–2). The rise of democracy with its economy of equiva-

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lence (all things being reducible to the most banal similitude of currency) and the decline of the religious basis of social hierarchies had left France, in particular, and European aristocracy, in general, in a state of decline. The Enlightenment notion of progress had failed, but so too had the great idealist promises of a half-century of revolutions: progress itself seemed to have failed. In its place, Baudelaire discovered modernity (the constant present) with its myriad, intoxicating fashions to be the transitory embodiment of ‘eternal and invariable’ elements that make beauty both rational and historical (‘The Painter,’ 392). He rejected nature as nothing more than a threat of the collapse of civilization into abomination, and praised artifice as the source of all that is good in the world: ‘nature can do nothing but counsel crime … Virtue, on the other hand, is artificial, supernatural, since in every age and nation gods and prophets have been necessary to teach it to bestialized humanity, and since man by himself would have been powerless to discover it’ (‘The Painter,’ 425). Humans are drawn to artifice, including such things as make-up and the transitory fashions of each contemporary period, as a chance to affect an eternal ideal not present in the degraded natural world. As the example of ever-changing fashion also demonstrates, the achievement of an absolute, static beauty is not possible in the ever-changing world. Similarly, a static social order implied by the teleology of progress fails in light of the infinite flux of the constant present. Art, to have any vitality, must therefore be both perfectly of its time and yet, by embracing the demands of artifice and transitory fashion, simultaneously of and from the eternal, which is to say entirely outside of time. It is of course a paradox, but one that presents the artist with a melancholic means of escaping the empty hopes of politics and the unreality of human reason–based knowledge by disappearing into the present; it is ‘an ego athirst for the non-ego, and reflecting it at every moment in energies more vivid than life itself, always inconstant and fleeting’ (‘The Painter,’ 400). The nostalgia and the melancholy that has come to characterize Symbolist and especially Decadent writing stems from recognizing this constant and inevitable gap between idealism and transitory experience. Decadence, then, not in the sense of waste or indulgence, not in the sense of the tired and the stale and the repetitious – decadent in the sense that all avant-garde or progressive ambitions fall away, disappear in recognition of the perpetual deferral of beauty’s idealism hinted at but never captured in the ever-changing experience of the present. It is the permanent condition of human experience. Decadence, embraced as metaphysics and an aesthetic style, thus presents a perfect, melancholic

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antithesis to the progress-dependent idealism of both avant-gardism and capitalism. Matei Ca˘linescu connects the rapid emergence of this sort of nineteenth-century Baudelarian aesthetics to ‘a metaphysical concept of decadence’ with strong roots in Plato’s theory of ideas, which similarly maps the relationship between the perfect, unchanging model of things to their mere shadows in the world of perceived objects (151–2). Etymologically, the word stems from the Latin decadentia and decadere, both of which translate into falling away or falling apart that was used to metaphorically express distance from established standards of excellence. The Canadian modernist scholar Brian Trehearne defines decadence as the ‘libertinism, pessimism, and sense of spiritual exhaustion’ of the nineteenth century Symbolist-Decadent movement from Baudelaire through Mallarmé to Wilde and Beardsley in which art embodied the idea of ‘de-cadere,’ a falling away or falling apart from established standards of excellence (Aestheticism, 313). Ideologically interwoven with the period’s decline of the French empire and a growing disdain for violence attached to empire and the state, historical Decadence signalled a loss of faith in a revolution that could either restart civilization or even renew present conditions. Free to revel in decentred subjectivities, art turned, in Baudelaire’s prophetic terms, to the ‘demon nation’ that ‘riots in our brains’ (‘To the Reader,’ 5). Though Baudelaire rejected ‘decadence’ as ‘a word for the lazy … for ignorant pedagogues’ (qtd. in R. Gilman, 179), and remained decidedly cold to the specific term,6 ‘decadence’ was applied to a current of Symbolist authors who followed Baudelaire’s Aestheticism to more radical extremes. In 1876, Paul Bourget summarized the turn in the implications of the term: ‘We accept … this terrible word decadence … It is decadence, but vigorous; with less accomplishment in its works, decadence is superior to organic periods because of the intensity of its geniuses. Its uneven, violent creations reveal more daring artists, and audacity is a virtue which despite ourselves elicits our sympathy’ (qtd. in Ca˘linescu, 169). Bourget developed his theory of decadence in an article on Baudelaire called ‘Théorie de la decadence’ by linking decadence to the breakdown of hierarchies within a society and to an increase in anarchic individualism. This emerging sense of an individual free of their responsibility to a society in decline, free even from reason and the residual reign of the Enlightenment, receives famous expression in the opening line of Paul Marie Verlaine’s sonnet ‘Langueurs’: ‘I am the Empire in its decadence’ (192; my translation).7 The Decadent style is characterized by deviance in order to achieve, in Rimbaud’s terms, a complete derangement. His poetry, especially in Poems for the Damned,

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deliberately, provocatively, and controversially turns the values of the existing social contract on their head – not advocating for anything so much as, paradoxically, advocating against. Traditionally, the idea of decadent aesthetics has been used to denigrate works in which the content and the form do not match, and especially to critique those art works that rely upon already established standards without being innovative. Both of these traditional critiques of decadence imply a kind of moral weakness in artists whose works have failed to achieve even a basic vitality or harmony. The American scholar Richard Drake, however, draws attention to a distinction made in Italian literary studies between la decadenza and il decadentismo (72), which separates, respectively, the moral failings traditionally associated with decadence from a more radical aesthetic decadence. The former, which he suggests is the proper concern of moral philosophers alone, locates decadence as the final stage in the cyclical development and collapse of civilizations. The latter, however, ‘gleefully’ inverts bourgeois values and upsets the soulless materialism of a failing civilization: the moral bankruptcy associated with the term is thus cast back upon the contextual society in which such decadent works appear. From the Germans (such as Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche) to the French (such as Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Rimbaud) and later to the English (such as Wilde, Wilkie Collins, and John Davidson), il decadentismo embodies ‘a culture of manifestoes, protest, exceptions, negation, alienation, and – above all – experimentation’ that reacts against all forms of naturalism and representationalism (Drake, 73). It signals a break from the world, an irreparable rupture between art and external realities. Less a moral sickness, as suggested by Antonio Gramsci’s musings on aesthetic decadence, this decadence marks ‘the beginning of the modern cultural idiom, stressing pure musicality as the supreme good in art as opposed to the more traditional didactic and entertaining functions of art’ (86). Drake adds that it can be characterized by a historical pessimism that negates, through art, engagements with the ‘depressing realities in [the artist’s] social and cultural environments.’ It is in this turning away from the institutions of the world, turning away from the world, that we begin to encounter the negative capability that Keats once spoke of – an art built of ‘uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’ (‘Letter,’ 43). Keats insisted that the uncertainties in texts were the very measure of their achievement, something comparable to what later authors would describe as an aesthetic of rupture. Both negative capability and rupture

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embody the spirit of decadence, of turning away from order and resolution. On the material level, this transhistorical spirit of decadence evokes a recurring anti-institutionalism in art and literary history that forcefully rejects conventions that impose closure and rationalism on a text. It connects a huge swath of deliberately disjunctive artistic techniques and movements that insist legitimate art remain irrelevant to any tangible political solutions, to the malaise of society. Redemption is yet encoded in these texts, but veiled from the eyes of realists: it is hidden and occult. From Keats through Baudelaire to Mallarmé and beyond, transhistorical decadence proposes a radical displacement of intention and subjectivity. From the historical avant-garde, this radical displacement was most forcefully met in the extreme art of Dada. In a 1959 interview, Richard Huelsenbeck makes a poignant distinction between Dada and Dadaism, recognizing in the latter an intentionalism, an aesthetic program, that is wholly absent in the former. The difference helps to contextualize Dada and Dadaism within the history of avantgardism and decadence: ‘Dada came … by the element of chance, which plays such an important role in, if I may call it, the theory of Dadaism. Which is itself paradoxical because Dada has no theory. We were later on very proud of the fact that Dada has no theory … There is a development from Dada to Dadaism. Dadaism already has a certain attempt to explain attitudes by theories, though we frowned very much on any theoretical attitude’ (Huelsenbeck). In the context of this survey, the difference between Dada and Dadaism might best be expressed as symptomatic of the essential difference between decadence and aesthetic avant-gardism: Dada is shaped by both a disruptive lack of direction that works against art and art institutions, a falling away, whereas Dadaism is shaped by a model and mode of art making, an aesthetic shaped by creative decreation that would prove hugely influential throughout the twentieth century. Of the three Canadian nodes of activity discussed in this book, Vorticism is the most tangentially analogous to this usage of the term decadence. Beyond the purview of this study of early literary avant-gardes, however, sound and concrete poetry in Canada is by far the avant-garde node most intimately related to the historical Decadent movement. Symbolism and decadence are not perfectly synonymous, but it is useful to think of this spirit of transhistorical decadence as erupting from within the extreme manifestation of the autotelic tendencies of Symbolism. Northrop Frye observes the influence of Symbolism on a generation of modernists, whose turn away from the world and from

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progress mirrored the same by Baudelaire. Frye connects Yeats, Eliot, and Pound to Baudelaire, Valéry, and Mallarmé through a shared aristocratic aesthetic that recoils from the repugnant, democratic world: ‘in the modern world, poets have to form an intimate, almost conspiratorial group, courtiers of an invisible court’ (‘Three,’ 15). But there was no conspiratorial hiding of the claim: Eliot openly asserted the poet’s role of sustaining and preserving a Gnostic tradition, in part by resisting the degrading influence of the transitory world and, especially, of the masses. Similar to Baudelaire’s idea of an eternal beauty that lurks both within and outside transitory experience, the modernist devotees turn to the poetic image as the portal between objects in the world and the broader unity of poetic experience. Eliot referred to such iconic images as ‘objective correlatives’ between the text and poetic experience. Building from Eliot’s religious imagination, Frye notes that what the modernists and the Symbolists turned to was more hieratic than intellectual: ‘Poetry leads us from the material thing through the verbal symbol as sign, into the verbal symbol as image, and thence into an apprehension of the Word, the unity of poetic experience. It follows that the relation of the material thing to the spiritual mystery of the Word is a kind of sacramental relation. Thus symbolisme, like the Courtly Love convention before it, resolves into an elaborate analogy of religion. The poet’s attitude to his public is not democratic but catholic’ (‘Three,’ 14). Pushing further into the topic than we need go in this context, Leon Surette notes that Pound, Eliot, and Yeats studied mystical and religious orders and vast occult ‘universal histories’ through which they constructed their art (see Surette, 37–51). What we do need to address, however, is the fact that for modernist poets the unity of poetic experience was imagined as constant and eternal. Consequently, there was little interest in progress – redemption was already available to those with the ambition and wherewithal to find it: these ‘become the elite group that carrie[d] on the sacred and secret tradition’ (Surette, 51). Pound, on the other hand, did become increasingly political, going so far as to embrace fascism as a means of overcoming the degrading influence of democracy and bourgeois culture. Fascism offered Pound a political model with the necessary strength to sustain and protect the aristocratic gnosis (or what he called ‘kulchur,’ after the German mystics). His fascism is not decadent (except perhaps in the moral sense) but could be argued to be a transition from the decadence of modernism into a radical avantgardism. This question receives some attention in the chapter on Canadian

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Vorticism, especially in relation to Pound’s and Lewis’s influence on Canadian writers, but the specific question of Pound’s avant-gardism (or Lewis’s), ultimately, is a subject best left for other forums. James Joyce, as might be expected, provides a unique case in the negotiation between modernism, avant-gardism, and transhistorical decadence that extends even further beyond the purview of the present study. Though one could hardly do him any justice in a parenthetical comment of any sort, his looming presence over the literature of the twentieth century – including in Canada – merits at least some acknowledgment. From his political disengagement, from his acknowledged interest in the Symbolists, and from his eruptive and unconventional writing in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, it would seem natural to connect his work to the spirit of decadence that we have outlined above. Indeed, his character Stephen Dedalus from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man turns away from direct political engagement and rejects his contemporary’s political activism and identifications: ‘You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile and cunning.’ (218). Dedalus, motivated by a loss of faith, turns away from the politics of church and state for the liberated realm of art. As this passage indicates, Dedalus becomes an aesthetic artist in the Symbolist tradition. Julia Kristeva marvels, however, that the original French Symbolist authors did not develop their disruption into vast novelistic or epic accounts of alternative thetic modes, preferring the lyric instead: ‘they set aside their representative “content” (their bedeutung) for representing the mechanism of rejection itself’ (Revolution, 188). Joyce, in epic contradistinction from the Decadent/Symbolist tradition, and much like Alfred Jarry before him, constructed huge rococo monuments of language that revel in the mechanism of the discursive nature of reality. Language, in such works as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (as in Jarry’s César-Antechrist), subsumes, overwhelms, and indeed alters reality – moving beyond a decadent spirit of rupture to what Kristeva might call textual practice. Marshall McLuhan argues that Joyce has been profoundly influential on how we in the West think about communication in the twentieth century, and even how we experience our own senses. He argues that Joyce’s texts rely upon both the eye and the ear equally in order to make sense, and in relying so, disorient the visual bias of the modern individual. Hugh Kenner

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claims that Joyce penned the first book technologically responsive to the difference of contemporary print culture: ‘the text of Ulysses is not organised in memory and unfolded in time, but both organised and unfolded in what we may call technological space: on printed pages for which it was designed from the beginning’ (The Stoic, 35). Hardly decadent, from this perspective, Joyce appears to anticipate and indeed write from future phases of consciousness that we are just now catching up to with the benefit of the technological spaces of modern computers and the Internet. Though he (like his character Dedalus) eschewed sociopolitical activism and direct engagement, this accomplishment raises the possibility that Joyce was the only truly successful avant-gardist from the twentieth century. The debate on the topic is already well underway, and like the debate on Pound, the matter will have to be resolved in another discussion in another forum. If we accept, as Frye argues, that Aestheticism and Symbolism were the natural predecessors to (enablers of) modernism, the more radical and deliberately disruptive Decadent phase provides a poignant early model for developments from and reactions to the autotelic current of modernism. Jumping forward in the ongoing history of twentieth century art practice, the most striking feature of what has been reductively and problematically labelled postmodern is the rise in prominence of theorists working alongside – if not in advance of – leading artists. Ironically, many of these leading postmodern theorists have led artists back to work produced in the historical Decadent period. Postmodern authors and theorists, and not just Canadians, have widely returned to the historical Decadent writers. Marjorie Perloff attributes this in part to the historical Decadents’ astonishingly contemporary sense of individual consciousness as being determined, shaped, or at least limited by the language they inherit (Wittgenstein’s, 72–3). Thus, she notes that Rimbaud’s enigmatic ‘Je est un autre’ (I is another) resurfaces in Terry Eagleton’s inelegant and less mysterious phrase ‘when I look into my most secret feelings, I identify what I do only because I have at my disposal a language which belonged to my society before it ever belonged to me’ (Eagleton, Wittgenstein, 10). Wittgenstein’s Meaning and Understanding addresses this problem of being outside language directly through his idea of the language game – that meaning and understanding and even identities are less attached to an individual’s consciousness than they are to the rules of the linguistic system. He compares, for instance, the ability to use the word ‘yellow’ in the proper context to the ability to use the king piece in chess properly. Rules determine what we say and, furthermore, what is even

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thinkable. We operate (i.e., play) within the parameters of the rules, the grammar, of the system without recognizing the social and discursive nature of such a ‘language-game.’ Wittgenstein’s idea would prove to have a profound influence over the sound and visual poetries of bpNichol and Steve McCaffery who sought to play literary games that revealed the systematic otherness of language. Their prospective language revolution sought to overcome the divide between human subjectivity and language, or at least open up the subject to itself outside language. The postmodern author Ocatvio Paz, for his part, found in Mallarmé a ‘conception of writing as the double of the cosmos’ (Paz, 273), a model of language that erases the boundaries of art and life by allowing language to create propositional or imaginary realities. Paz’s observations recall Mallarmé’s mysterious conceptualization of his art, of all art, and of the world’s relationship to art in Mallarmé’s essay ‘Le livre, instrument spiritual’: ‘tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre’ (all the world succeeds [in the sense of both progression and fulfilment] within a book) (‘Le livre,’ 378). The Spanish author Jorge Luis Borges explores a similar idea in ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941), which, by the power of randomness, contains every possible utterance available in all human languages including perfect (and imperfect) predictions of the future: all of human experience, all that is possible and conceivable, is already represented in Borges’s ‘Library.’ The avant-gardism Paz discovers in Mallarmé and Joyce did not lead him to a revolutionary or radical avant-garde orientation, but, through a transhistorical conception of decadence, to a postmodern version of avant-gardism. The postmodern crisis of the art object precipitated by Dadaism, he writes, ‘is little more than a (negative) manifestation of the end of time; what is undergoing crisis is not art but time, our idea of time.’ Whereas earlier avant-gardes were characterized by their relation to linear, progressive history, the new postmodern variant of avantgardism falls away from Western conventional notions of time: ‘We are living the end of linear time, the time of succession: history, progress, modernity’ (Paz, 269). Given this increasingly common turn away from linear history in the latter half of the twentieth century, and the close association between negative ontology/negative theology and postmodernism, the proposition of a postmodern avant-gardism presents an oxymoron that is semantically impossible to reconcile. A postmodern decadence, on the other hand, addresses the analogous revolutionary spirit of postmodernism to earlier avant-gardisms while signalling the fundamentally different conceptions of time and history of such a revolution. The consistency with which leading postmodern theorists have

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returned to authors from the historical Decadent movement, and Mallarmé in particular, corroborates the association. In order to make sense of a transhistorical decadence, the denotative field of the term needs to be extended to include an aesthetic that invokes libidinal intensities as a means of both revealing and undermining the arbitrariness of civilization and all its repressive conventions. Most importantly, through this conceptualization of decadence, literature and language lose their ability to approximate reality but gain the ability to create reality. Such concerns echo the established interests of postmodern theories, and indeed, various studies by Ca˘linescu, Russell, and German scholar Jürgen Habermas have begun to characterize the art that would be called avant-garde in the postmodern era as (lower-case d) ‘decadent.’ Postmodern or transhistorical decadence is different from its historical or colloquial sense. Habermas, for instance, uses the term decadence to refer to a coupling of ‘the barbaric, the wild and the primitive’ with ‘the anarchistic intention of blowing up the continuum of history’ (10). As in Alfred Jarry’s pataphysical ruminations, imagination does not supplement reality but replaces the context of reality entirely: in his terms, ‘the sign alone exists’ (Jarry, 292; my translation).8 Such revolutionary implications of decadence led Julia Kristeva to rely heavily on Mallarmé’s negative/decadent dialectics in her articulation of a socially activist, postmodern, psychoanalytic semiotics in Revolution in Poetic Language. She argues that poetic language in avant-garde texts, with their deliberate grammatical errors, attacks both the very possibility of meaning and, thereby, of the enunciating subject – creating a kind of writing that undermines the subjectivity of its speaker (57–8). This ‘destruction of the old’ falls away from established experience with language in order to insinuate the formation of a new signifying system (59). By violating the system of language, poetic language insists on the possibility of new or different kinds of articulations – even without necessarily creating a complete alternative. Appropriately, she turns to Mallarmé’s ‘Le Mystère dans les lettres’ where he discusses a ‘semiotic rhythm within language’ that is anterior to sign and syntax and therefore prefigures the role of the subject in language (Kristeva, Revolution, 29). While Mallarmé proposes that this rhythm creates a lacuna between language and the world that raises the spectre of an essential unintelligibility, Kristeva uses his proposed gap to argue that linguistic rupture decentres ‘the transcendental ego, cutting through it, and opening it up to a dialectic in which its syntactic and categorical understanding is merely the liminary moment of the process’ (30). As Leon S. Roudiez explains in his introduction to

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Revolution, Kristeva’s idea of poetic language refers to language use that liberates the subject through ‘an anarchic revolt’ that enables ‘an affirmation of freedom’ in spite of ‘a society that extols material goods and profit’ (2–3). Accordingly, she finds in Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Joyce, and Artaud a ‘shattering’ of linguistic codes that reveals the formation of subject and ideological orders (16). Their literature, in particular, is ‘the essential element of a practice involving the sum of unconscious, subjective, and social relations in gestures of confrontation and appropriation, destruction and construction – productive violence, in short,’ thereby bringing about in the mind of the subject precisely the same thing political revolutions introduce into society (17). Productive violence, as a revolutionary negation, evokes a postmodern decadence by falling away, falling apart in a manner similar to the historical Decadent authors. By developing this essential rejection of Western ideology and linguistic practice, Kristeva’s analysis evokes or discovers an implied but unstated and utterly unrealizable revolutionary alternative in the Decadents that gets extrapolated by postmodern authors. Appropriately for the anarchic and individualistic orientation of this transhistorical decadence, this revolution occurs not on the streets but in the mind. Even before Kristeva, Theodor Adorno (while working through the implications of a negative dialectic in 1966) also recognized revolutionary potential in a postmodern decadence: ‘In this world of violence and oppressive life, this decadence is the refuge of a better potentiality by virtue of the fact that it refuses obedience to this life, its culture … That which stands against the decline of the West is not the surviving culture but the Utopian that is silently embodied in the image of decline’ (209). Adorno thus reverses and rejects the traditional Marxist associations of decadence as moral failing, and begins to consider the revolutionary and ontological implications of letting go, of falling away from the trajectory of Western ideology. This return to the historical Decadents becomes instructive in articulating the difference between modernism and postmodernism. Notably, and in accord with the postmodern dismissal of linearity, Jean-François Lyotard rejects that modernism necessarily precedes ‘post’ modernism. Instead, the two are presented as coexisting transhistorical phenomena: ‘A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant’ (79). Lyotard explains the aesthetic implications of postmodernism, isolating this aspect of the critical narrative from its cultural, social, political, and economic implications, as a denial of form, taste, and nostalgia – what has been

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called here a transhistorical decadence: it ‘searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable’ (81). Such an agenda seeks not to replace systems, but to momentarily displace or subvert the existing social order. It is for this lack of proposing a radical alternative that Terry Eagleton critiques postmodernism as a ‘Dadaist form of politics, wedded to the dissident gesture, the iconoclastic refusal, the inexplicable happening’ (The Illusions, 8) – such a decadent politics ‘could only hope that its own values would never come to power’ (3). Indeed, Lyotard frames postmodernism as the disruption and the precondition rather than the correction and the replacement of the discursive systems upon which modernity and meaning (and truth) depend. Rather than chronology or succession, Lyotard’s ‘post’ reflects an outsidedness or an otherness to the implied order that enables the modernist sense of and desire for closure and signification. This redefines the avant-garde sense of ‘rupture’ from enabling a revolutionary, potential future to disrupting meaning and thereby opening a self-reflective moment that reveals the discursive nature of meaning and closure inherent to such a totalized network. The revolutionary implications of negation suggest a possible terminal point in the development and history of avant-gardism. Though postmodern decadence bends the metaphor of an avant-garde class of artists to the point of incoherence, decadence can be understood as an awkward and semantically contradictory phase in the self-conceptualization of innovative and experimental authors with revolutionary ambitions. Surveying the history of the idea of decadence over the past 2000 years, Ca˘linescu acknowledges the emergence of a new category of decadence in the last two centuries that extends Baudelaire’s aversion for nature into a cult of artificiality. This model of decadence, he argues, is predicated on a ‘theoretically unbounded, anarchic individualism … [and is] a style that has done away with traditional authoritarian requirements such as unity, hierarchy, objectivity’ (171). As mentioned before, such a revolutionary falling away and falling apart contradicts both the sense of progressive time and the projective unity of the future society in traditional conceptions of avant-gardism. It is not surprising, then, that postmodern theorists and writers began questioning the relevance of the available avant-garde models to their work. As Susan Suleiman wrote in 1990, ‘the dream of the avant-garde was a delusion’ (xiv). Though (as Adorno suggests) there is still revolutionary idealism buried within postmodern decadence, the idea of avant-gardism, with its roots in militarism, in individualism, and in Western liberal humanism, failed to match the

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explosive metaphysical implications of a postmodernism that draws all or parts of these into question. Some of the most relevant postmodern reactions against the avant-garde will be discussed in relation to the postavant, where artists and theorists attempt to develop alternative models to avant-garde revolutionary progress. One other signification of decadence is also worth mentioning: namely, the idea of hedonistic indulgence. While hedonism might seem to be only a superficial link to the transhistorical decadence in this discussion, many postmodern authors did indeed turn to the body and to sensualism as a means of escaping (or turning away from) the simultaneous dilemmas of the over-rational West. Abandoning the rational constructs of this civilization awakens the possibility of something after – an ‘after’ about which many writers in the 1950s and 1960s became suddenly and deliriously optimistic. Decadence has come under attack by avant-garde theorists and artists. The term, of course, in its colloquial sense carries unduly negative connotations, and consequently few artists want their work to be described by a common synonym for excess or self-indulgence. Kostelanetz, for instance, uses decadence in his theory of avant-gardism to refer to art that ‘is created in expectation of an immediate sale … essentially opportunistic, desiring immediate profit, even at the cost of likely disappearance in the near future from the corpus of art that survives by being remembered’ (‘ABC,’ 6). Such a theory invokes the moral failings and the traditional associations of decadence. Historical Decadent authors like Mallarmé and Bourget, however, made use of the negative connotations of the term to reflect the extreme nature of their disillusionment with their contemporary milieu. Thus, all the negativity associated with the term, including its fleetingness, was cast back upon the society in which such art was being made. The negation represents an aesthetic response to a degenerate milieu – similar in kind and intensity to the dramatic disillusionment of 1960s artists with their inherited culture, including its wars, prudishness, and oppressive transglobal capitalism. In light of the parallels between historical Decadence and the great body of literature that emanates from disillusionment, a general theory of decadence develops Baudelaire’s aversion for nature into a cult of artificiality; decadent authors react against the decadence (read: moral failing) of his or her contextual milieu, not by attempting to redeem that milieu but by rejecting their responsibility to it. Building from this to a more general conception, decadence is useful in recognizing a kind of poetics that negates or calls into question values

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of any and all sorts. Something similar happens in deconstruction that reveals ideological patterns in a work and in a society without replacing them by any new or alternative practice. In this way, and as a transhistorical poetics, decadence implies a falling away, a letting go, an opposition to existing conditions by revealing and thereby negating them. Whenever collage, appropriative writings, parody, and travesty are used for distinctly solecistic purposes, and in turn, whenever solecism is used to break or expose a writing practice or ideological trace, there is evidence of transhistorical decadence. Whenever authors use this destructive textual practice to open up negative potentials, to provoke a creative decreation, there is evidence of postmodern decadence. Decadence does not go anywhere, but through literature disrupts the progressive formation of time as well as the detached self-containment of individualism. John Weightman explains how these types of literary disruptions can accrue into an alternative, potential cosmology: ‘The normal comprehension of any sentence is, necessarily, an act of time, so that if you can halt comprehension, the words become, or may appear to become, ultimate fragments of the universe, producing a semblance of eternity’ (35). The Avant-Gardes in Canada Thus far, this discussion has tracked and responded to continental models and theories of avant-gardism. It makes sense to start with the continental orientation of these theories because Canadian engagement with the term and concept has generally, and with few exceptions, followed continental patterns. The earliest appearance I have been able to uncover occurred in 1704 when Louis Lahontan describes the coureurs de bois (French Canadian fur traders, often of French and aboriginal descent) forming an ‘avant-garde’ with a band of natives (‘des Sauvages’), while the French troops and ‘les Milices’ lingered behind. As both the coureurs de bois and the First Nations warriors were much lower on the social hierarchy, it can be surmised that, in this earliest appearance in Canada, the avant-garde was valued by the affordability of their sacrifice and loss to the nation state. In the contemporary post-avant world the literature of the avant-garde has been critiqued for its racial exclusivity and its aesthetic elitism – or as Jeff Derksen characterizes the various contemporary labels and their dismissive connotations, ‘“experimental” (i.e. most often leading to failure), “avant-gardist” (i.e. elitist and asocial) or “nonrepresentational” (i.e. meaningless)’ (298). Such critical and effete characterizations contradict the harsh racial and class realities of Canada’s

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first avant-garde. The distinctly military associations of the word, in reference to the expendable soldiers at the fore of an army, or even the ‘brave’ soldiers at the fore, continued throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, appearing in articles, reports, novels, and even in parliament in this form. The military usage was slow to transmute into aesthetic or even radical terms. Between the military and the aesthetic, Canada had its own transitional avant-gardists. Indeed, reading Canadian writing through the lens of avant-garde theory raises useful and even provocative questions about Canadian figures who are rarely considered relevant to literature in this country. The Métis leader Louis Riel, for instance, is typically acknowledged in the Canadian literary canon only through secondary avenues, such as in the poems of E. Pauline Johnson and Isabella Valancy Crawford or the various historical fictions that touch upon his life. Riel, however, fits the template for radical avant-gardism – not as a Marxist or even a leftist, but for his earnest endeavour to radically reorganize life in Canada. Riel is most acclaimed for inciting two rebellions (in 1869 and 1885) against the Canadian government in the twin causes of Métis recognition and provincial status for Manitoba. Riel has become a martyr at the hands of the Canadian nation state and ironically a Father of Confederation as a result of the successful battle for both of these now entrenched facets of Canadian culture (ironic, of course, because he was hung as a traitor against Canada). In the time since the rebellions, and especially since his public execution in 1885, Riel has been embraced as a champion by an extremely diverse constellation of contradictory movements, from First Nations advocacy groups to Western alienation and separatist groups, from the far left to the far right.9 His diverse admirers respond, invariably, to the somewhat ambiguous but decidedly revolutionary nature of his ambitions. To be clear, the battle for increased recognition of the Métis people and Manitoba falls outside of avant-garde or revolutionary ambitions for not attempting a complete overhaul of the existing social contract. Seeking accommodation within Canada represents an important and deeply significant revision of the social contract but yet differs from what Hannah Arendt calls ‘the beginning of a new story’ nature of revolutionary, radical change (37) precisely because it allows for the continuation of the existing ideological structures. In fact, however, the goals of Riel’s political activism had a revolutionary undercurrent in his endeavour to transform Winnipeg into ‘a new Rome’ that would serve as the Vatican of a Catholic theocracy in Canada (Bumstead, 284). There have been many enigmatic and charismatic religious leaders in this country,

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but Riel stands alone among them for leading multiple military insurrections in hopes of provoking a total rupture in Canada’s social contract. We can discuss him in the context of avant-gardism for his sociopolitical ambitions, for his martial attempt to overthrow the government, and for his attempt to document his vision in poetry: Was he human? A deity? He radiated such beauty, This tall, entirely perfect man! All of you, listen. Mark my word. I am your President Riel. A prophet comes. He must be heard. He bears the words of Ezekiel

(The Selected Poetry, 75–7)

As a French Canadian, an aboriginal, and a military figure, Riel also provides an intriguing historical echo of Canada’s earliest avant-garde mentioned above. The further one gets from the etymological and even the increasingly conventional senses of the term avant-garde, however, into the more metaphorical and especially aesthetical senses of the term, the weaker Riel’s case becomes. It is true that he was a poet, but it is equally true that his poetry rarely reached beyond propagandistic functions – the disposition of his particular revolution was not embodied in the formal characteristics of his works. In other words, and consistent with radical avant-gardism, for Riel a truly liberated art could only come after the sociopolitical revolution; until then, the poetic object remains focused on expressing ideas of the revolution rather than presenting new, revolutionary kinds of expression. On the flip side of nineteenth century Canadian nationalism, Riel can be compared to another Father of Confederation, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, who also produced propagandistic poetry as part of a fundamental reimagining of Canada’s existing social contract in the service of a future postcolonial society. While most examples of Canadian avant-gardisms roughly align themselves with previously established continental patterns, an interesting deviation arises in the example of the French Canadian newspaper L’Avant-Garde: Journal politique quotidien that began publication in 1896. This Basse-Ville, Quebec, publication used the term avant-garde to refer to their quotidian – that is, daily – defence of their conservative, Catholic community: ‘L’Avant-Garde is the daily morning newspaper, and serves to become an auxiliary to the valiant, zealous French conservative

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newspapers that publish in the afternoon in our town … We will fight to the best of our abilities for the cause of conservatism’ (L’Avant-Garde, 1; my translation).10 The newspaper was committed to the protection of Canada’s francophone Catholic communities, but extended its conservative vision to include various causes from fighting Liberal policies of free trade to reporting on and celebrating community activities. The metaphoric use of the term avant-garde in this case is decidedly reactive: rather than expanding or revolutionizing, this avant-garde newspaper set itself up as the first line of defence of the status quo. Here, among the rightwing conservative factions, the avant-garde’s complicity to the existing order becomes explicit, leaving no illusion about its participation in the ideology of its time and place. A 1920s newspaper also named L’AvantGarde from Victoriaville, Quebec, expanded this unlikely sense of the term in a publication devoted to the routine affairs of the town. While they did contest our outrageous imperialism (notre impérialisme outrancier, a reference to Canada’s involvement in the First World War) and lamented the deception of hopes (espoirs déçus, caused by the draft in the war), such complaints were reflective of dominant anti-conscription attitudes in Quebec and were neither politically anti-English nor antifederalist. Various articles in the newspaper, for instance, celebrate Ontario and Manitoba’s robust economies. Avant-gardism here, then, means little more than a synonym for ‘news’ that is relevant to the people of Victoriaville. The association between avant-gardism and the protection of francophone culture in North America, however, resurfaced in the 1960s journal/newsletter L’Avant Garde, an unofficial publication of the paramilitary group Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ). Though similar to its nineteenth century eponymous predecessor, this socialist and separatist publication has more in common with the idealism of nineteenth century continental French revolutionaries. They published no aesthetic content whatsoever, although the journal is filled with imaginative portraits of life after the revolution. While the term ‘avant-garde’ has also enjoyed currency for approximately 150 years outside militaristic, political, and even aesthetic discourse, such as in the 1884 description of the French philosopher d’Argens by Canadian author Edmond Lareau as one of the most poetic members of the ‘philosophical avant-garde’ (354; my translation),11 the first Canadian manifestation of activity that bears passing resemblance to the continental, historical avant-gardes arrives with the founding of Canada’s first modernist little magazine in 1918, Le Nigog. Founded by the architect Fernand Préfontaine, writer Robert de Roquebrune, and

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musician Léo-Pol Morin, the editorial board collected the work of a diverse coalition of neo-decadent poets, proto-surrealists, McGill professors, and general activists together. The editorial mantra of the publication was based on their modernist premise that ‘art must innovate,’ an agenda that included a rather vague definition of the artist as one who ‘vivifies beauty’ (Montpetit, 41). The aesthetic ambition of the magazine, however, was more concerned with contesting the burdensome influence of Quebec regionalism and reconnecting French Canada to the advances in Parisian modern art. As was declared in the first issue, ‘Art is the sole goal of our efforts and it is the sole criteria of our criticism’ (‘Signification,’ 3). They advocated for a modernist aesthetic of universalism and aestheticism, placing them, if anywhere, as an offshoot of the Decadent movement. One author who has been anachronistically associated with the magazine did in fact take a great deal of direct influence from Symbolism and Decadence. Émile Nelligan published his first and only book of poems in 1903 – a book that appeared after he had suffered a complete mental breakdown from which he did not recover. Nelligan’s translator Fred Cogswell, who declared Nelligan ‘the finest poet writing in Canada in the nineteenth century and … the first modern Canadian poet’ (xvii), notes the poet’s close affinity for Baudelaire (xxiii). Indeed, Nelligan’s poem ‘Charles Baudelaire’ includes the lines ‘Master of great verse, poet without equal … Verlaine and Mallarmé have taken your trail. / Master, though dead, you will be living still’ (84). As Nelligan’s mind deteriorated, his poems became increasingly experimental and unfixed. The poets associated with Le Nigog, however, were not extreme in their experimentation and thus their avant-garde rhetoric reflects more a desire to appropriate the vocabulary of European factions than a devout interest in radical inventions. The magazine lasted for only one year. It was, in fact, the far-left and the radical Canadian authors who were the first to identify themselves through a metaphorical avant-garde. Their endeavour to lead a social revolution similar in kind to the class conflicts that motivated both the French and the Russian revolutions offered art a privileged position in their campaign. These groups spawned a complex network of magazines, newspapers, social organizations, and even political parties that self-identified through the concept of the avantgarde. Magazines and newspapers such as The New Democracy, Masses, New Frontier, and National Progress all echo the radical mantra that placed political revolution above aesthetic freedom. Poetry and fiction appear in all of the far-left publications, but only in a supplementary role to the primary focus on the possibility of a sociopolitical revolution. Indeed, in

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those heady days, especially following the First World War, revolution seemed both inevitable and imminent. In the words of the first editorial of The New Democracy, which launched in Hamilton in 1919, ‘We are standing to-day upon the threshold of a new age, on the threshold of a new democracy’ (‘Salutatory No. One,’ 2). This sentiment was more firmly expressed on the first page of the first issue by guest contributor Horace Traubel, Walt Whitman’s great friend and executor, and a noteworthy ‘cosmic’ enthusiast (a designation that will be discussed at more length in the next chapter), who wrote: ‘The conventional world is to-day living in the shadow of a dazzling revolution. It will duly learn that every shadow, even the blackest and least definable, leads to, as it is caused by, a sunbeam. Revolution is the root substance of all dynamic circumstance … We must get the complete revolution’ (Traubel, 1). The gusto behind such revolutionary zeal attracted a response from a much more conservative nation, especially after The New Democracy got caught up in the controversy surrounding the radical Methodist minister Dr Salem Bland. Bland, an idealistic firebrand, helped to convince the Hamilton branch of his church to adopt a resolution to work towards the end of profittaking by all corporations in Canada. When the controversy began to tip into scandal, he rejected claims by moderate Methodists that he had tricked his peers: ‘They understood that they were committing themselves to industrial revolution. Those were the words before them, and they adopted them’ (qtd. in ‘An Unfinished Revolution,’ 2). The New Democracy added an explanation of Bland’s position: ‘Dr. Bland affirmed that the vast majority of the Canadian people are prepared for the industrial revolution and would welcome it – a revolution which would do away entirely with the existing competitive system, based on profit, and would establish in its place a co-operative system based on service.’ The unsigned editorial concluded with a declaration of their support of his revolutionary endeavour: ‘Dr. Bland, hold fast.’ The extent of the controversy, and the power of the reaction against the revolutionary spirit, can be registered by the rather quick and total repackaging of the newspaper in August of 1923 as The Canadian Labor World in direct response to being ‘constantly under the surveillance of the police’ (‘Re-Christened,’ 1). The newspaper also added two new mastheads to reiterate their newfound moderation: ‘Absolutely Opposed to Communism’ and ‘Opposed to Revolution by Force!’ Returning to the issue of the diminished view of artistic liberties and experimentation, the writing of Canada’s radical avant-gardes have in general been caught by, to borrow E.K. Brown’s phrase from 1943, ‘the

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curse of flatness which has blighted so much proletarian verse’ (84). The literature of radical progress in Canada has indeed consistently relied upon excessively unnuanced language and populist forms to present revolutionary propaganda well into the second decade of the twentieth century. Just over a decade after Brown’s book was published, Frank Watt produced a survey of Canada’s radical literary tradition that highlights the odd ‘facetious piece of doggerel’ (133) written in the nineteenth century Canada, admitting that, in terms of quality, proletarian literature ‘rarely rose above the level of the crude, naïve, sentimental, or melodramatic’ (138). In the decades that followed the turn of the century, however, there developed a more nuanced understanding of how the literature of protest finely articulated various challenges to capitalism, bourgeois life, and the aristocratic hierarchy of Canada’s social classes. Watt also draws attention to mainstream writers like D.C. Scott, Peter McArthur, and Stephen Leacock who despite their popularity rejected ‘the main movement of society’ (140). Underneath the soft voice of protest from Canada’s established writers, a breed of little magazines such as Regina’s Labour’s Realm, Nanaimo and Vancouver’s The Western Clarion, Vancouver’s The Red Flag, and Toronto’s The Lance – which used the motto ‘not Reform but Revolution’ (Watt, 211) – sprung up to advocate open revolution and class war. These magazines created forums for new proletarian writers such as Alfred Budden and Wilfred Gribble to emerge. The mood was not limited to the fringe of Canadian letters, for as James Doyle’s 2002 study on socialist writing in Canada in Progressive Heritage: The Evolution of a Politically Radical Literary Tradition in Canada highlights, there are important intersections between canonized writers such as Archibald Lampman and F.R. Scott and socialist themes suggestive of a more widespread revolutionary current.12 This current accelerates after the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917 with the creation of the Progressive Arts Clubs (PACs) in 193213 whose commitment to the Communist revolution was expressed by their propagation of revolutionary art. As the PACs spread across the country by the tutelage of far-leftist artists, in Winnipeg, Montreal, Vancouver, Halifax, and London the next year (Arnason, Introduction, 13) there emerged an explicitly radical avant-garde magazine, Masses. Though its cause was sharply focused by its primary commitment to sociopolitical revolution, it presented a rather sophisticated and developed forum for literature in Canada, and the magazine published a remarkably high number of literary works. The twelve issues averaged just twelve pages each, but of those pages, roughly four-fifths were devoted to art

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criticism, short fiction, and original poetry; the other fifth was given to political issues and community news. Each issue averaged seven poems. Though modest overall, the magazine compares well to the dominant forum of the period, The Canadian Forum, which averaged five poems per issue during the same period and to another little magazine, The Sunset of Bon Echo Review, which averaged roughly four poems per issue. As these numbers indicate, Masses was a fairly substantial outlet for creative literary production in Canada between the wars. In total, twenty-four different writers published original poems in the journal, including some of the period’s finest such as Dorothy Livesay, Langston Hughes, Oscar Ryan, and Bertram Chambers. With more than 100 PACs quickly established in Canada, this Toronto-based literary little magazine had unprecedented total control of their own creation, production, and distribution – all focused around a specific and guiding poetics. Thus, in their very literal way, the PACs responded to the material realities of literary production. The writing was specifically oriented around a revolutionary hermeneutics that evaluated work for its contribution to the Communist Party and their attendant class struggle. Though Dean Irvine characterizes the endeavour as ultimately ‘unsuccessful’ (‘Among,’ 183), Masses can be recognized as an important publication in the history of Canadian radical avant-gardism for its intermingling of politics and art and for its commitment to revolutionary idealism. In 1936, the writers from the defunct Masses reappeared in a joint venture that expanded the exclusively communist focus to a general consensus leftism that was more specifically attuned to anti-fascism with the creation of New Frontier. Colin Hill provides a compelling case for the leftist writers by making a firm connection between the distinctly Canadian strain of modern realism with the social realism called for in Masses and in its successor New Frontier. Hill explains that these magazines ‘deserve recognition as the founding periodicals of the leftist literary tradition in Canada. But another aspect of Masses and New Frontier has been entirely overlooked: their loud and polemical pages abound with comments on the importance of realism in modern writing … these magazines are of crucial significance to the modern-realist movement’ in Canada (‘The Modern,’ 218–19). I agree with Hill’s assessment of the interconnecting aesthetics of Canadian modernism and leftist radical writing, and would add that leftist radical writing combines modernist realist aesthetics with radical avant-garde idealism. One need only consider the various manifestos produced by radical Canadian authors to

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recognize the spirit of defiance, self-confidence, and rejection of the establishment that is consistently used to characterize avant-gardism. It is also worth acknowledging the aesthetic parallels between the radical left and the now widely acknowledged Canadian modernisms, as both were committed to developing better modes of realist writing with stronger connections to genuine Canadian experience. Thus, W.W.E. Ross, an early Canadian modernist acknowledged by such scholars as Dudek, Norris, Rudy, and Butling, sought to be ‘more “Canadian” / than most / of what has been put down in verse / in Canada’ and hoped that his poems would ‘seemingly contain … something of / the sharper tang of Canada’ (Foreword, 10). From the radical left, L.F. Edwards argued that the goal of authentic literature was ‘to transfer realistic life to the written page’ (‘Authorship & Canadiana,’ 9). The inaugural Masses editorial, too, sets the journal’s goal as the promotion of writing produced ‘from the life of Canada’s factories, farms, – and breadlines’ (‘Our Credentials,’ 3). Such parallels in poetics draw the radical leftist and modernist movements in Canada into surprisingly close proximity. This connection highlights other shared characteristics of the modernist aesthetic collectives and the non-aesthetic leftist movements. For example, we have in Masses a fairly standard prototype of the avant-garde collective. The group fashioned a specific (radical) poetic, drafted numerous manifestos in its defence, and set to work fulfilling the aesthetic vision they had created. Also in typical modernist fashion, their literary activities focused on little magazines, in opposition to the mainstream populist press, and their theatre was fundamentally experimental – as likely to happen off the stage as on it. The realist orientation of the modernist radicals was not absolute, however, as various individuals in the Canadian leftist camp openly advocated for the connection between European surrealist art and political social realism (see, in particular, T. Richardson’s ‘A Defense of Pure Art’ in Masses). As will be discussed later, radical modernist writers from between the wars were already exploring and experimenting with realism and surrealism. As I have written elsewhere (see Betts, ‘Before Our Time’), the radical leftist community not only provided an organizational model for aesthetic avant-garde movements but they also had a direct and significant impact on the entire literary industry in Canada. Their influence on the formation of the Canada Council alone merits their inclusion in any literary history of Canada (especially considering the privileged position Butling and Rudy give the Canada Council in their history of Canada’s

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‘radical poetries’). The radical faction within Canadian modernist circles developed templates for fiction, poetry, children’s literature, theatre, and music all in relation to class revolution that, as Candida Rifkind notes, also involved ‘a theatrical encounter between modernism and socialism’ (‘Modernism’s,’ 181). For Rifkind, ‘modernism’s red stage is an aesthetic and a general descriptor, a periodizing and a political category.’ It is a stage in Canada’s literature in which art and politics briefly wed, and that witnessed, to a great extent, the attempted fusion of the radical and aesthetic avant-gardes. A text like Irene Baird’s 1939 novel Waste Heritage, for instance, combines modernism’s requisite ‘sustained artistic achievement that incorporates a remarkable economy of style, unity of effect, and psychological depth’ with the radical tradition’s ‘turbulent class and labour politics’ (Hill, ‘Critical Introduction,’ ix). While far leftist writings in Canada are rarely thought of as examples of avant-garde literature, all of the elements of avant-gardism can be found in the revolutionary ambition, aesthetic experimentation, and their shared mandate. In Rifkind’s words, ‘to create an experiential and an experimental space, in which everyday life is denaturalized and estranged to reveal the structural historical forces that shape it’ (‘Modernism’s,’ 182). As will be documented in the next chapter, while the far left fought against the aesthetic direction of the ‘Cosmic Canadians,’ by the time that the more moderate magazine New Frontier began publishing from the ashes of the collapsed Masses, there was a functional fusion of the far left and the aesthetic avant-garde. D.M.R. Bentley claims that the connection between Canada’s Confederation-era poets Bliss Carman and Charles G.D. Roberts and the expatriate English poet Robert Le Gallienne created a kind of avantgarde in their celebration of ‘the pleasures and mysteries of erotic love and the open road’ (14), but most scholars begin the official history of Canadian modernism, and by extension what I would characterize as the beginning of prototypical avant-gardism, with the rise of the small press in Montreal. The common narrative is that little magazines and small presses in Canada – the superficial hallmarks of modernist culture and activity – began fleetingly between the world wars with the appearance of the McGill Fortnightly Review in 1925, an undergraduate student publication with only a side interest in art. Even Ken Norris, however, who privileges this marginal publication in his own historical narrative of Canadian modernism, acknowledges that it was ‘in no strict sense, a “little magazine”; it was very much a student publication’ (‘The Beginnings,’ 57). For Norris, and for most scholars, the significance of this journal, and the

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others that followed, lies in the poet’s involved public engagement with the characteristic aesthetics, genres, and publication venues of modernism – free verse, manifestos, and little magazines, for instance. However, Norris might have begun his survey with other Canadian publications from the same period or before that were already more advanced in their exploration of these same models. The LAMPS (1910), The Sunset of Bon Echo (1916), The Rebel (1919), The Canadian Bookman (1919), and The Canadian Forum (1920), for instance, all also highlighted Canadian free verse and published aesthetic and literary manifestos relevant to modernism. These magazines were intimately connected, though not exclusively, to the Cosmic Canadians discussed in chapter two. These magazines also highlight a poignant point of intersection between Canada’s most committed even revolutionary mystics and the rise of modernist culture in Canada. Though individually all different from continental avant-garde models, it will be argued that collectively they amount to a rich avantgarde current in early Canadian writing. As noted above, Masses and New Frontier were also both significant literary publishing venues in Toronto, explicitly attuned to modernist aesthetics. Canadian scholarship on modernism has occasionally made use of avant-garde vocabulary to describe modernist activity in the country. The activity they typically refer to, however, the canonized Canadian modernism if you will, has little to do with the avant-garde currents under consideration in this book. For instance, Dudek and Gnarowski afford substantial attention in their narrative of Canadian modernism to publications like New Provinces (1936) and Other Canadians (1947) as well as ‘the ferment of little magazines’ in the 1940s including Contemporary Verse (1941), Preview (1942), First Statement (1942), and Direction (1943). Essays in these publications did frequently embrace the manifesto style of the avant-garde in advocating for modernist writing in Canada. In one of the more militant of these essays, A.J.M. Smith provides a useful example of the orientation of the general revolt: ‘To the serious Canadian writer this is a vital question, for to him the confusion between commerce and art presents itself in the light of a temptation to effect a compromise. If he chooses to work out his own salvation along lines which cannot be in keeping with the prevailing spirit of pep and optimism he finds himself without an audience, or at least without an audience that will support him … So far, it is true, literature as an art has fought a losing battle with commerce, but the campaign as a whole has barely begun. Reinforcements are on the way … First, and foremost, as a sort of preliminary spade-work, the Canadian writer must put up a fight for freedom in the choice and

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treatment of his subject’ (‘Wanted: Canadian Criticism,’ 600–1). Though the metaphors are militant, the ‘battle’ was not inspired by prophetic or even revolutionary idealism but by Canadian parochialism and prudery. Smith wanted to hasten the diversity of critical and aesthetical models available to Canadian writers, but poignantly he wanted Canadian writing to be free of the ‘compromise’ (601) caused by participation in the Canadian social contract. The historical avant-gardes were not characteristically mercantile in the manner of Smith’s criticisms of Canadian writing, but their movements were predicated on an ambition to connect art and life in a way that is fundamentally different from his position. The spirit and ambition of Smith’s attack addresses his desire to see Canadian writing modernized and released from its compromising dependency on restrictive marketplace pressures. Such a retreat from the sociopolitical world, which reinforces Smith’s autotelic aesthetic, has already been described as a foundational tenet of modernism as developed from Decadent, Symbolist, and Aestheticist precursors, and offers a significant point of distinction from the sociopolitical mandate of avant-gardism. Decadence, to revisit the issue, only becomes akin to avant-gardism when autotelism is taken to such an extreme that the pursuit of the purity of the aesthetic object threatens to undo the reality of consensual experience in the world. The Canadian modernists were much more modest in their ambitions, though Brian Trehearne in his groundbreaking book on Canadian modernism, Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists, convincingly demonstrated the dominant influence of nineteenth-century European Aestheticism on ‘an entire Canadian literary generation’ of modernists in the early years of the twentieth century (308). We can build from his work to recognize that the rise of the Canadian little magazine and modernist small press was yet shaped by a characteristically modernist aesthetic and thus can be distinguished from the revolutionary characteristics of the avant-garde. Furthermore, to try and speak of the first phase of small press activity in Canada as avant-garde is to introduce a complex of paradoxes that are difficult to overcome or ignore. Dean Irvine, for instance, has noted that early Canadian modernism activity had little to do with ‘the aggressive, avant-garde, anti-commercial, and typically masculinist character of the little magazine’ (Editing, 5). Canadian little magazines, in contrast, he characterizes as benefitting from ‘major contributions’ by female editors and authors, including such influential luminaries as Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, P.K. Page, and Flora MacDonald Denison (4). Though

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Irvine still finds connections between the Canadian modernisms he addresses and the avant-garde, his analysis of women’s contribution to Canadian modernism foregrounds their difference from the masculinist rhetoric of little-magazine and avant-garde culture. This is a similar argument and point of distinction that scholars such as Susan Suleiman, Pauline Butling, and Susan Rudy use to distinguish contemporary experimental writing by women from historical models of avant-gardism, as will be discussed in relation to the post-avant below. The Canadian little magazines were much less likely to advocate violence or revolution than similar publications in Europe or America, even while the rhetoric sometimes deployed militant vocabularies. Violence is not necessarily characteristic of avant-gardism, but the violent disavowal of the contextual society followed by a concerted attempt to remake that society is a distinguishing feature. Critics of Canadian Literature have had a difficult time assessing or accepting the importance of Canada’s modernist (or pre-modernist) literature. Revealing some of the general potency – the literary power, to borrow Davey’s phrase – that still resides around the term avant-garde, Irvine softens his point of distinction by reminding readers that Canada’s female modernist editors should not ‘be considered merely belated followers of the international scene, since the character of their littlemagazine cultures is not just imitative but innovative’ (Editing, 6). Trehearne, on the other hand, is more ambivalent about the extent of the innovation of Canadian writing during this period. In fact, from the Canadian modernist little-magazine culture(s) and the Confederationera poets before them, he proposes a theory of a habitual ‘colonial lag’ in this country of approximately forty years (Aestheticism, 308). This ‘lag’ had been previously embraced by Northrop Frye, who famously claimed that unless Canadian writing is distinguished from the standards of international literature, criticism of Canadian literature would amount to nothing more than ‘a debunking project’ (The Bush, 215). Frank Davey, tacitly endorsing Frye’s dictum, suggested further that critics accept the behind-the-curve nature of Canadian writing, for ‘a colonial, imitative modernist movement is not to be deplored or rationalized into something other. It is itself an intrinsically interesting literary phenomenon’ (‘Surviving,’ 8). Regardless, the late arrival of little-magazine culture in Canada amounts to, at best, a semantically incoherent behind-the-curve avant-gardism. The participants themselves were aware of the problem: as Smith confessed in 1938, ‘we were of course only following in the path of the more significant poets in England and the United States’ (‘A

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Rejected Preface,’ 40). More than a decade later, Dudek would add, ‘we are capable of writing modern poetry of a rudimentary kind in various forms and schools. ‘But in Canada we have not written the perfectly original thing, nor even the perfectly finished imitation in any one kind’ (‘Où sont les jeunes,’ 142–3). There might yet be a way, by considering the impetus to achieve a postcolonial agency, to connect Canada’s most famous modernists (even the ones responsible for this behind-the-curve moment of Canadian small-press and little-magazine activity) to credible avant-garde activity. Canada’s modernists, men and women, were indeed advocates for a significant renegotiation of the implications of the category of art in this country and turned to European aesthetic models as weapons in making their case. But whereas Europe’s avant-garde was committed to destroying or radically reconfiguring the existing art institutions, these pioneering Canadians were working to create the basic institutions and conditions, including establishing a culture of literary criticism informed by and aware of modernist developments, that would enable cuttingedge art to be made here in the first place. Part of the frenetic, energized spirit of the times was related to the remarkable realization that this generation was creating the basic framework for a possible Canadian literature. Critical activity blossomed, producing a diverse array of publications during the period, such as W.E. Collins’s White Savannahs (1936), E.K. Brown’s On Canadian Poetry (1943), and A.J.M. Smith’s landmark anthology The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943), that sought to both acknowledge and foster the emergence of a legitimate national literature. But these works are also marked by a central paradox of their own in that their qualification of a national literature was defined by a rejection of, in Smith’s estimation, the national in favour of the cosmopolitan: ‘They are Canadian poets because they are importing something very much needed in their homeland’ (Introduction, 31). Collins, too, laments Archibald Lampman’s excessive time in Canada – ‘we feel that he was cheated out of life’ (‘From Natural,’ 60) – and Brown praises the poet who is most ‘a citizen of the world’ (38). They champion a national literature, then, that is praiseworthy in the extent to which it escaped the confines of this particular country. The back-handed commendations for the emergence of acceptable writing here were specifically laden with barbs aimed at the jingoistic writing promoted by the Canadian Authors Association. The appeal towards a universal, non-local literature was not the only aesthetic to gain traction during this period. John Sutherland, one of the new little-

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magazine editors, took exception to the generally anti-local implications of the charge. Sutherland calls into question Smith’s insistence that ‘“cosmopolitanism” is the only [legitimate] tradition of Canadian poetry; that it is the direction in which the future is tending as well as the established fact of the past’ (‘New,’ 50). Sutherland rejects Smith’s sense of a binary between the cosmopolitan and the native, in part because the Canadian critic ‘must accept the primary fact that there is no tradition of Canadian poetry; that, however, in this century and the last traditions of English poetry have been transplanted to Canada, which are native only in the sense of being smaller and more cramped than the home plant’ (54). Sutherland was one of the first in this country to reflect on the implications of Ezra Pound’s insistence that writing reflect the contemporary cadences of the modern world, and saw in the Canadian poets directly influenced by Pound, Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman, and the imagist movement (such as Louis Dudek, Irving Layton, and Raymond Souster) the emergence of a literature that was directly connected to the lived experience of Canada. While Sutherland recognized that this might be considered yet another vestige of colonial mimicry, contesting that ‘the movement of the forties does not alter the colonial basis of our poetry’ (‘Mr. Smith,’ 57), this new school of modernist poets offered ‘hope that the dividing wall between the author and the people is gradually being broken down, and that our poetry is coming into contact with the Canadian environment’ (60). This is not Romanticism, nor even nationalism, but a kind of postcolonial realism that no longer accepts foreign templates for writing local experience. Is this revolutionary enough to make it avant-garde? Not in the usual way that avant-garde movements sought to recondition the general category of reality and restart history, but perhaps it can be considered avant-garde in Canada’s colonial context for how it sought to recondition the experience of reality in Canada and to envision the start of a truly Canadian literary history. Part of the excitement surrounding this prospect lay in the possibility of Canada entering into the league of nations as a credible member as demonstrated and substantiated by the existence of a legitimate national literature. This nationalist endeavour is part of a similar struggle for recognition and participation in the existing international ideological strata – and consequently must be distinguished from a call for an avantgarde literature, except within the limited context of Canadian society. Sutherland was certainly conscious and aware of the fact that his publishing and critical activities had the potential to shape the future course of Canadian literature, and his ambitions extended beyond the confines of

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literature to touch his entire society. Miriam Waddington describes Sutherland’s spirit as he launched the little magazine First Statement ‘in a burst of hope and glory, and even – as he put it in one of his editorials – in a religious spirit, and as a ritual gesture’ (8). Waddington was herself swept up in the period’s lively and open spirit of sudden awakening: ‘while it lasted, our frenzied letters flew across ten provinces. We exchanged lavish praise, gossip, ambitions, hopes and disappointments. We were young, passionate, thoughtless and unrancorous, and the whole of our history and tradition lay there waiting for us to define it, revolt against it, or bring it to life’ (12). Though it could be argued that this development in Canadian letters merely shifted the colonial dependency from Britain to America, it is also true that the American models encouraged and facilitated direct engagement with local culture and geography: what Pound called ‘sites of intermingled temporalities’ and later ‘visionary locations’ (qtd. in Davis and Jenkins, 7), ideas of place that were echoed by William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson. A similar spirit can be found in Alan Crawley, Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, Doris Ferne, and Floris Clarke McLaren’s Contemporary Verse (1939), F.R. Scott, Margaret Day, Bruce Ruddick, Neufville Shaw, Patrick Anderson, P.K. Page and A.M. Klein’s Preview (1941), Catherine Harmon’s Here and Now (1947), and Sutherland’s own North Review (1945), little magazines that were ‘published in the interests of Canadian culture’ (Notice, Here & Now, 4). The magazines were committed to employing ‘only strict standards of criticism’ and to emphasizing ‘the importance of developing native sensibility in Canada’ (Sutherland, ‘Origin,’ 70). This native sensibility can be understood as a non-imitative representation of Canadian experience shaped by Canadian rather than foreign eyes. Catherine Harmon, in the lead editorial to the first issue of Here & Now, explains the case in more detail and with great relevance to this present study: ‘That Canada has played a relatively small part in [the little-magazines] movement is the result less of its being a “young country” than of a preconceived notion that Canada does not possess enough avant-garde writers and artists to warrant such publications … We sincerely hope that our readers will see in these pages another testimonial of the wealth of this country – a wealth that is not in this instance to be computed in dollars, but which is, nevertheless, of the greatest importance to our national well-being’ (Harmon, 6). The battle, different from the metaphor in A.J.M. Smith’s editorial, was in this case against the colonial hankering that demeaned work coming from Canada. In order to position her magazine as avantgarde, editors like Harmon relied upon the rhetoric of commercialism

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and nationalism, of the value of Canadian culture to the national project. This manifestation of avant-gardism appears rather oddly as an act of nation-building in sharp contradistinction from the deliberately inflammatory, disjunctive, and revolutionary nature of aesthetic avant-gardism in Europe. It must be remembered, however, that in the local context, these writers and editors were rejecting the dominant ideologies shaped by colonialism and cosmopolitanism, and were aspiring to create or provoke a new society through a literature liberated from the colonial imagination. As a postcolonial project, then, it connects to the liberational impulse for a greater aesthetic freedom and to the revolutionary mandate of the aesthetic avant-garde. The 1940s call for a postcolonial, locally grounded but yet still national literature anticipates the arrival of the TISH movement in Vancouver in 1961 – a literary movement that managed to culminate and fulfil this modernist desire for an unfettered writing from contemporary Canada. It was an avant-garde movement despite the fact that TISH was greeted upon its founding with vitriolic charges of colonialism and imitation. In fact, the well-mythologized geographic politics and literary pugilism surrounding the TISH movement’s inauspicious beginnings often outweigh critical assessments of the magazine’s contribution to Canadian letters. The TISH poets’ public parading of foreign influence, regional posturing, and evaluative disdain of prominent writers from Ontario and Quebec have led critics to variously use TISH as evidence of a regional divide, of a distinctly Canadian literary colonialism, and of the birth of contemporary Canadian writing. The much embroidered contestation arose from the fact that the BC movement was both heavily steeped in the language, rhetoric, and poetics of many American writers and yet was also proudly west coast. When asked in 1979 whether she identified as a Canadian or British Columbian writer, former TISH editor Daphne Marlatt replied, ‘First of all I’m a local writer, I’m a west coast writer’ (G. Bowering, ‘Given this Body,’ 32). Much earlier, George Bowering drew a sharp line in the sand between TISH and the prominent eastern Canadian poet Milton Acorn by claiming that ‘he is sadly tone deaf’ (Davey, TISH, 76). Ontario’s Al Purdy soundly renounced the review in a letter graciously published in the subsequent issue of TISH: ‘In a word, it’s simply – hogwash’ (Davey, TISH, 92). The myth of this contestation, however, has been greatly overestimated. As Purdy predicted, whatever trace of conflict between the TISH group and the eastern Canadian writers there may have been quickly dissolved and was demonstrably erased by 1968 in the spirit of a common avant-garde. In 1965, after he had

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already left Vancouver for California, Frank Davey’s article ‘Black Days on Black Mountain’ aligned the aesthetics of TISH – whether ‘Canada like[d] it or not’ – with the modernism of, by name, Louis Dudek, Irving Layton, Raymond Souster, Eli Mandel, Phyllis Webb, F.R. Scott, W.W.E. Ross, Daryl Hine, Milton Acorn, Alden Nowland, Leonard Cohen, D.G. Jones, Alfred Purdy, David Solway, and Gwendolyn MacEwan (119). By explicitly naming these eastern Canadian writers for their commonality with his own writing and the TISH project, Davey, editor of TISH throughout its first editorial period (1961–3), effectively closed the divide and positioned himself and his little magazine within the Canadian modernist tradition. In 1968, Bowering left Vancouver for Montreal, where he penned a book-length appreciation of the apparently not tone-deaf Purdy (published in 1970). There was more to gain by banding together with the emerging generation of spirited, committed experimentalists across the country. Western alienation from the Canadian literary tradition similarly rapidly dissolved. By 1971, having returned to Canada, Davey described his former little magazine as an extension of a specifically Canadian ‘universist’ tradition that he traced back to Bliss Carman and Archibald Lampman (Introduction, 10). Regional disputation evaporated in the more pressing push of writing place; of pulling Canada and its smaller locales out of a neglected, colonial, and conservative literary past into a successful, postcolonial, and experimental literary present: avant-garde in all but name. Unlike its literary precursors in Canada’s first modernisms, however, TISH’s embrace of Canadian ‘universism’ did not require an erasure of particular geographies. Place was a central feature of TISH poetics, inspired in part by their regional anxieties and early sense of marginalization from eastern Canada. As Davey commented in a rather famous interview (with all of the first era TISH editors), ‘very important for TISH was the sense that most of us had of being marginalized … Marginalized in terms by being Canadian in North America; marginalized by being west coast and British Columbian in the Canadian context’ (Niechoda, 93). They were also notably isolated from the concurrent literary communities in Montreal and Toronto (though Bowering was making important connections in eastern Canada from the start). Despite the parallels with similar aesthetic communities across the country, the TISH writers instead embraced the American Black Mountain group of poets and thinkers for inspiration, headed by Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley, who were advancing their own Ezra Pound–influenced

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poetics concerning the poet within a landscape. These geographic politics surrounding TISH, amid other late modernist concerns, had a significant influence on the nature of their aesthetic avant-gardism. Their aesthetic response to geography, their geopoetics, adapted the Black Mountain ideal of using language to unveil the unique energy of a particular place. The fact that they wrote from the unique milieu of Vancouver distinguished them (whenever they managed to fulfil their aesthetic mandate) from the writing of any other place. Thus, while the TISH poets embraced a foreign aesthetic, the geopoetic orientation of those poetics demanded that they respond to their locality and to question in verse the relationship between place and language. The functional and guiding assumption was that the poet was essentially embroiled in a geographic dilemma, shaped by the contingencies of a particular place at a particular historical moment – Vancouver, 1961. This did not mean they had to uncover a local literary tradition; indeed, in effect, it freed them from the burden of responding to any such inheritance. Their focus was on their own experience in the present. Concordant with the poetics outlined in Olson’s essay ‘Proprioceptive Verse,’ the transformative imperative of their geopoetics shifted the causal implications of literary language from the poet’s subjective will to the poet’s objective physical and environmental predicament. Unlike Olson’s more successful application of poetic theory into poetic object, however, the poetry in the first era of the magazine could but struggle to fulfil the aesthetic demands of this ideal: only a few approximate the ambitious literary goals mapped out by their editorial comments. These moments, however, coupled with the more significant literary achievements of the writers after their time at TISH, suggest that their poetic excited an ironically American-inspired postcolonial avant-gardism for Vancouver and indeed Canadian writers of the time. They were not the first writers to attempt to authentically write from and of the particular energy of the Canadian place, nor were they the first to propose an advanced and sophisticated geopoetics. They did, however, propose a uniquely postcolonial avant-garde poetics that both explained the need to write the contemporary Canadian place and inspired writing that attempted and managed to do so. TISH remains influential today, not for the apprentice-stage writing published in the magazine, but for its presentation of a theoretically infused confrontation with the contemporary Canadian locus. Though essentially modernist in its orientation, and distinctly behind the curve internationally, within the Canadian milieu the

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inadvertent effect of its poetics was this arrival at a fundamentally postcolonial avant-gardism within and of the nation. Vancouver during the 1960s also witnessed a dynamic collaboration of energies between the radical and aesthetic avant-gardes. Despite his animosity for their academic and bourgeois world, for instance, and despite having been scorned by Bowering in print, Milton Acorn, Canada’s socialist ‘people’s poet’ and icon of radical avant-gardism, valued the TISH collective for creating ‘a “counter-culture” of dissent’ (Lemm, 139). In a poignant moment of intersection between Canada’s aesthetic and radical avant-gardes, sound and concrete poet bill bissett met Acorn by chance in 1963 in the appropriately named Vanguard Books, a left-wing bookstore on Hastings Street. The two became literary allies. Acorn, though new to the city, organized poetry readings in the Marxist store and invited bissett to participate. These were to be, in fact, bissett’s first poetry readings (Gudgeon, 120). Acorn’s writing appeared in the second issue of Blew Ointment, bissett’s experimental literary magazine, which also began publishing in 1963. The two collaborated on a book together, I Want to Tell You Love, that remains unpublished. While bissett remains a cornerstone of experimental writing in the country, Acorn’s death in 1986 precipitated a substantial decline in his literary reputation. Davey interprets this reshuffling of reputation and standing to the increasing division between the aesthetic and radical avant-garde communities since the 1980s: ‘Acorn’s insistence on the importance of his polemic verse had undoubtedly impaired the appreciation of his poetry’ (Davey, From There to Here, 28). For them, however, they recognized a parallel in Acorn’s radical politics and bissett’s radical formal experiments. Prior to the divorce, the sense of common purpose, the marriage if you will, of Canada’s two avant-gardes lasted for nearly two decades. Despite their criticism of the category of avant-gardism, Butling and Rudy, in fact, construct a surprisingly pastoral image of ‘a unified avant-garde in English-speaking Canada’ that lasted until 1979 (23), a friendly narrative of radical activity first introduced and conceptualized by Frank Davey as a period of ‘cultural homogeneity’ in his article ‘The Power to Bend Spoons’ (15). Butling, Rudy, and Davey cite the arrival of identity politics, cynical government funding ploys, and the rise of neoconservatism as contributing to the divorce in the 1980s. As another manifestation of the divorce between the avant-gardes in Canada, one could also think of the division in the Kootenay School of Writing in the same decade between the radical ‘worker’ aesthetics and the postmodern deconstructive antineoliberal aesthetics.

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Postmodern Decadence and Radical Feminism The publication of TISH signals a shift from the ‘early’ or ‘modern’ to the ‘contemporary’ phase of Canadian literature, and as such this section and the remainder of the discussion in this chapter push briefly beyond the natural purview of this book. I offer these truncated glimpses into contemporary ‘avant-gardism’ to highlight some of the effects of studying Canadian literature through avant-garde theory. The contemporary period is categorically different from the period it follows for the emergence of a vibrant, unabashed literary culture across Canada. At the least, the first issues of TISH closed the colonial lag of Canada’s behind-thecurve avant-gardism to a remarkably narrow period of dispersal that was barely a half-generation out of date. The explosion of experimental writing across Canada in the 1960s, however, rendered the colonial lag model proposed by Trehearne and Frye extraneous to the advances made by the various nodes and participants in this generation’s avant-gardes. To be clear and precise on the issue, the problem of Trehearne’s model of ‘fundamental or canonical influences’ (Aestheticism, 311) stems from its reliance on a model of an avant-garde of literature claiming new ground that followers, who are always presumed to be Canadian authors, will stop by to plough and harvest. But postmodern authors and those that come after have widely attacked the linear progressive model of literary development as an archaic and problematic teleological narrativization of history. Butling and Rudy, for instance, reject the idea of avantgardism for implying a singular projective line into the future, as well as for being too simpatico with dominant capitalist models of innovation (18) – a ‘poetics 2.0 (slightly smarter – to the max!)’ model of contemporary aesthetics that Christian Bök also questions (Betts, ‘Welcome,’ 58). Postmodern (and postcolonial) writing aimed to disrupt any sense of singularity, origin, or possession of language, opening texts forward and backward in time rather than working towards closures or teleologies. Unidirectional influences dissolve under the gaze of a postmodern perspective into multifaceted intertextuality, just as established canons, too, disintegrate into ideological readings of literary history. Connected to the polyphonic articulation of postmodernism is the emergence of a sense that the liberating potential of the avant-garde has exhausted itself, has fallen away or indeed fallen apart. Ironically, this moment arrived in Canada in the hedonistic 1960s, in the decidedly decadent (read: sensually indulgent) phase of our twentieth-century literature, at the very moment when Canadian writers had finally caught up

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with leading international literary movements. An array of Canadian poets, in fact and in particular, appeared to be out in front just as the idea of being out in front lost its currency. Some of Canada’s 1960s poets gained international notoriety for pioneering new and influential methods of exploring sound poetry, the literary practice of isolating the physical pleasures (in Barthes’s sense of ‘jouir’ – bliss in the disfiguration of the language [37]) of the aural properties of language, and of exploring visual poetry, the literary practice of isolating the physical pleasures of the visual properties of language. While conventional spoken language always involves sounds, and conventional written language always involves visual stimulation, sound and visual poetries frequently explore language games to reveal latent properties and principles of conventional language use. As Johanna Drucker points out, Canadian sound and visual poetries were distinct from other concurrent manifestations in other national literatures precisely because of the self-conscious use of theoretical and philosophical implications within radical aesthetics (128–9). Experimental writers such as bpNichol, Steve McCaffery, Judith Copithorne, and bill bissett, and sound poetry groups like The Four Horsemen, Owen Sound, and Re:Sounding used their creative work as the embodiment of radical manifestos for emerging postmodern tropes like deconstruction and post-structuralism. Their art was indeed a decadent explosion of the barbaric yawp, the wild grunt, and primitive howl – proprioceptive intensities amplified by an anarchistic transhistoricism. As Nichol wrote, ‘i break letters for you like bread … this is the divine experience. that i have found my words useless to reach you’ (Nichol, Gifts). Though language is said to fail in this passage, its sacrifice is a devotional offering to Nichol’s invented, neologistic gods that releases an unexpressed, always out-of-reach ‘divine’ fulfilment: an imaginary order emerging through the disorder of broken letters. Postmodernism in Canada begins with this kind of revolutionary fervour, paradoxically marked with playful, self-conscious irony. The spirit of decadere, of falling away from established norms of language use without falling towards anything – a systematic derangement of the senses – represents an embrace of the end of order, the end of stability. It also represents one of the last, coherent vestiges of avant-gardism before the category fades in relevance and coherence. In the meantime, though, Nichol, in lines such as these, remains optimistic about the experience of instability, of being beyond or outside language and the language game, and of the creative possibilities of de-creation. It is a variety of decadence informed by literary theories that will become in time characterized as postmodern.

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The first participants in what I identify as Canadian postmodern decadence, then, advocated for a liberating turn away from convention, order, and Western traditions to the hopeful embrace of so-called primitive cultural traditions such as chanting, dancing, and oral awakenings, appropriating and deploying a distorted version of First Nations cultural forms and practices. A poetics of rupture emerged that gleefully cast aside meaning, closure, and denotative signification. Working in Vancouver in the 1960s, bill bissett, Roy Kiyooka, Judith Copithorne, and many others began experimenting with deliberately disruptive literary and performance techniques designed to explore and expose the limits of an overly conventionalized language. A sense of possible redemption or even revolution, never quite formulated or realized, lurks behind a great deal of this experimental activity. Bissett led the way in opening up new corridors for investigation. His ‘Awake in th red desert’ (1968), for instance, which has appeared as both a sound poem and a visual poem, provides an example of the redemptive possibilities of increased linguistic consciousness. As a performance piece, the poem features chanting, singing, and a recursive narrative of a visionary desert experience that provokes an awakening to life, death, and sex. In this visual poem, bissett uses the frequently repeated paragram ‘a wake awake’ to similarly draw attention to the slight linguistic space between death and consciousness. The realization and awareness of this link, through language, leads to the poem’s orgiastic conclusion: ‘it is love is flesh / nd blood flashing is all / together naked nd / immaterial / 2.’ Though the poem on the page reads left to right and top to bottom as by convention, it is framed by an ambiguous mandible or mandala pattern that suggests bissett’s circulatory, improvisational destruction and construction of the root text in his live performances of the piece. The piece as eruptive, ever-changing sound poetry, then, rescues the textual poem from the hungry jaws that encircle it in print. While ostensibly building from Dadaist typographic and performative precedents (and building from a pun reminiscent of Joyce’s multiconsciousness work Finnegans Wake), this multidisciplinary aesthetic shares with the Surrealist revolt a faith in the irrational, in the body, and the belief that a surrational materialist aesthetic could revive literature by accelerating or admitting its decline. Published in Toronto around the same time, bpNichol’s chapbook ABC: The Aleph Beth Book (1971) presents a manifesto of contemporary poetics accompanied by a sequence of visual poems. Like the enigmatic riddles in bissett’s sound and visual piece, Nichol announces ‘poetry is dead’ but that ‘the poem will live again’ when there are no ‘boundaries

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between ourselves & the poem.’ The twenty-six images that accompany his manifesto depict copies of each letter of the Phoenician alphabet superimposed upon itself in elaborate and defamiliarizing patterns. Like cubist works, these visual poems seem to animate the image of the letter by including the trace of its path in time and space. The result is a series of images recognizably built out of the alphabet, but that has distinctly broken the familiar use and experience of the icons. Brian Henderson describes Nichol’s creative destruction process as a ‘via negativa’ – a process in which the act of cancelling an already empty sign creates an iconicity that allows it to ‘overflow with its own being’ (1). The repetitive structure of chanting, furthermore, in the Buddhist tradition and in Canadian sound poetry, offers a similar ‘emptying [of language] as a process of transformation’ (19). This transformation carries with it the same appeal to liberational potentials that is implicit in the negative dialectics of postmodern theory. Canadian postmodern decadent authors seized on the formal possibilities of this negative revolution – that is, a revolution through dissolution. While writing specifically on bissett’s libidinal creative de-creation of form in joyous rebellion, McCaffery imagines ‘an anti-reading of an anti-text’ through which the human self can be liberated by a disintegrative linguistic practice (‘Bill Bissett,’ 93). In his decidedly optimistic, indeed revolutionary, 1970 manifesto ‘for a poetry of blood,’ McCaffery pronounced an ‘utter faith’ in sound poetry’s capacity to disrupt the shroud of linguistic convention and thereby awaken a link to ‘the true cosmic organism. the true cosmic orgasm’ (275). Exploding language, exploding conventions and traditions, left the human body as the sole but necessary continuum in whatever the next, post-revolutionary phase might contain. Indeed, the various denotations of decadence seem to coagulate in the rebellious and revolutionary optimism of the late 1960s. For many postmodern Canadian decadent authors, the turn to the body represented a redemptive turn away from an over-rational, Apollonian social contract. As Québécois sound poet Raoul Duguay said, ‘I am serious when I fuck up your system of communication’ for ‘the pathway between one and the other … is the experience and presence of the body’ (‘On the Vibrant Body,’ 32, 29). Duguay’s sound poetry, like bissett’s, involved extensive chanting and a mystical (his preferred term was ‘esoteric’) attempt to de-authorize language. Though his sound work is deliberately solecistic, it was, he explains, part of a conscious attempt to connect his voice to the ‘vibratory energy’ of his body and the physical world (29). The ambition was to use an unhinged language to reprogram

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both his own and his audience’s brains by disrupting the accustomed vibratory patterns of words and communication: ‘I’m not laughing at people, I’m trying to use magic to make this illusionary culture of yours disappear’ (32). Chanting, or mantric music, involves a gradual mutation of a motif – be it a phrase or melody – that turns in upon itself by breaking apart the constituent elements of word or harmony. In doing so, sound poetry turns away from expression and becomes a sublimation of the body and all notions of individuality and authorship into a collective unity between the author, the audience, language, and the world. In an interview with Nichol, Duguay explained that disintegrative language can help an author and an audience transcend the limits of individual consciousness, for ‘the body is the sanctuary of sound’ and ‘letters explain your perception of the universe’ (Duguay, ‘Interview,’ 70, 72). Despite Canada’s arrival at the cutting edge with the emergence of this postmodern decadent writing and its avant-garde spirit of creative destruction and revolutionary potential, the authors involved rather quickly lost all faith in literature’s liberational potential. While early Canadian visual and sound poetry retained an avant-garde sense of history, a revolutionary if vague sense of life in Canada being potentially fulfilled in the future, an increasingly decadent turn away from sociopolitical ambitions suggests a rather disillusioned sense of history and of progress. As Paul Chamberland, a radical sound and visual poet intimately associated with both the 1960s Québécois independence movement and the Quiet Revolution, wrote in 1974, ‘The idea of revolution has gone mad – it is now applied to detergents … Fully aware of what is entailed, I decline the title of revolutionary … I won’t give in to naivetés’ (5, 6). Art in Canada’s experimental, formerly revolutionary, formerly avant-garde community shifted with the general disillusionment. In an article on McLuhan, McCaffery came to argue that ‘art’s authentic purpose’ lies in ‘making visible those environments that operate upon us by the power of their invisibility’ (‘McLuhan,’ 84). This definition evokes Peter Bürger’s sense that the primary effect of the avant-garde has been revelatory, revealing the institution of art, rather than revolutionary (19), even if the rhetoric and the primary ambition of the avant-garde was distinctly revolutionary. For McCaffery, as for Lyotard, as for Frye, art in the postmodern era becomes increasingly focused on ‘chopping holes in the rhetorical facade’ (Frye, The Modern, 71), accelerating the modernist retreat from teleology in favour of an art that ‘is not going anywhere’ (72). While 1960s Canadian visual and sound poetry began with an amorphous belief in the revolutionary potential of decadence and the possi-

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bility of radical reform, the idealism fell quickly into a postmodern disillusionment – a broad calling into question of the linguistic and ideological order. In a recent interview, McCaffery discussed his experience of the transition directly: ‘Well, that utopian belief in a language revolution is long gone but at the time it was instrumental … Both bp and me felt that in 1968 we could change language and also … [t]his utopian belief that linguistic change is the necessary prelude to social-political change led me into conceiving my poetics as a critique of language under capitalism. That belief and optimism is now gone’ (Cox). In book 4 of The Martyrology, Nichol directly compares his long poem to McCaffery’s Carnival and links them for enacting a similar process of ‘dissolution’ and ‘disillusionment.’ In turn, the second panel of Carnival, a visual explosion of textual and semantic order, is dedicated to bpNichol. Disillusionment, it is worth noting, means to break free from illusions; the negation, while not actively revolutionary, sustains the possibility of something else – avoiding the compromise of prescription by remaining deliberately indeterminate. It approaches the point of creative de-creation, where decadence becomes indistinguishable from the avant-garde for its total rejection, but yet does not commit to the liberational potential of the world after the dissolution. What is missing in this phase of Canadian postmodern decadence that would make it truly avant-garde is the faith in the possibility of constituting a new, revolutionary order. In the words of Hannah Arendt, ‘the end of rebellion is liberation, while the end of revolution is the foundation of freedom’ (133). These poets halted their rebellion at the stage of personal liberation (which, of course, is no small achievement in itself). Despite the rampant disillusionment, the idea of avant-gardism survived the postmodern turn in Canadian letters albeit with some major reconfigurations. Women working in the field that has become identified as ‘radical feminism,’ in fact, sought to develop and constitute truly revolutionary alternatives to the existing patriarchal order in conjunction with postmodern theories. The revolt begins with the recognition of a linguistic concern, or as Nicole Brossard explained, the linguistic erasure of femininity: ‘Invisible: Where there is Man, there are no women. The moment a woman transcends what it thought to be her nature, that is to say, when she is at her best, she, it is said, becomes like a man. This is gender erasure’ (The Aerial, 140). One alternative to erasing gender is embracing gender; celebrating the distinctive or essential femaleness of women. The sociopolitical perspective established by radical feminist writers involves a radical rethinking of patriarchal discourse and social

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norms. Kimberly Verwaayen explains that radical feminists desire ‘a feminist utopia, positing women desiring themselves, embracing other women, a choice, an alter/native, rather than the dream of the same’ (‘Region/ Body,’ 15). It is here, in the desire for a radical reimagining of social, cultural, and political practice and the desire to found a legitimate alternative model that radical feminism becomes truly revolutionary. The avant-garde art of radical feminism develops out of the rejection of the naturalness of men’s domination over women, and begins to imagine what the contours of a liberated space for women might look like, sound like, and speak like. In Mauve Desert, Brossard’s character Melanie awakens to the possibility of just such a liberated literature: ‘reality was in writing, open work … Humanity would be unable to repeat itself … I would exist alert in the questioning’ (36–8). These passages bear witness to all of the hallmarks of the revolutionary impulse: to undo consensual determinants of reality and replace them with radical alternatives, to end the cycle of civilization with the founding of a new order, and to awaken the self-consciousness of liberated individuals – women – to radically different modes of living. American feminist theorist Adrienne Rich influentially proposed a theory that biological determinism (the belief that the body determines behaviour) and phallocentrism (the belief in the supremacy of the male over the female) both conspired to achieve a compulsory heterosexuality that circumscribed the possible experiences of women. In response, radical feminist thinkers developed a countervailing notion of gynocentrism that proposed a discourse centred on women, and that actively sought to disrupt compulsory heterosexuality and other vestiges of biological determinism. Postmodern critics have traced the roots of the suppression of women back to language, offering a theory of ‘phallogocentrism’ that highlights the systemic, ideological, and discursive nature of patriarchy (Weir, 23). While it was important for generations of feminist authors to investigate the deep roots of the problems of patriarchy, the postmodern, poststructural, and feminist theorist Barbara Godard developed a unique model of avant-gardism specifically to highlight work by Canada’s experimental women writers such as Nicole Brossard, Audrey Thomas, Gail Scott, and Anne Hébert, who were attempting to fashion a liberated language and a gynocentric consciousness: ‘The more forcefully they have asserted their feminism, the more disruptive their literary productions have been. Ex-centriques, thus avant-garde’ (‘Ex-centriques,’ 58). Rather than temporally constituted or being ‘in advance of’ anything in

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particular, Godard’s definition of avant-gardism presents a specific, aesthetic model that is notably transhistorical: ‘Ex-centricity implies many things – bizarre, fantastic, unconventional, incomprehensible, other – all subsumed by the concept of difference … It is in this interest in the hitherto unsaid that we find the key to both feminist concerns and the avantgarde, and central to both is the issue of intransigent language which has become detached from reality’ (58, 60–1). Godard’s model developed from the poetics of écriture féminine as proposed by Hélène Cixous (with whom Godard worked in Paris in the 1960s [Godard, Canadian Literature, 23]) in her essay-cum-manifesto ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ as well as work by other theorists from feminist and post-structuralist camps. This avant-garde work rebels against the established linguistic and ideological order but also attempts to found a new order predicated on women’s freedom. The generative belief was that female writers in Canada were writing a new language into existence, raising the possibility of not reproducing the same phallocentric/phallogocentric history. And while Godard and Cixous’s proposed new model of avant-gardism referred to women’s writing in general for the ‘chasms between sign and experience, as they discover that language bears no relationship to their reality’ (Godard, ‘Ex-centriques,’ 63), radical feminist writing, in exploring that chasm, developed its revolutionary impulse. Daphne Marlatt, for instance, recreated English syntax, morphology, and semantics in texts such as ‘Musing with Mothertongue’ and ‘Writing Our Way through the Labyrinth,’ avoiding phallogocentrism and working towards a gynocentric alternative. Consistent with postmodern conceptions of time, she disrupts the ‘linear authority’ (‘Musing,’ 225) of language and transforms the possession of knowledge (to ‘know’) to a mystical participation in Gnostic revelations by spelling ‘know’ as ‘gno’ (‘Writing,’ 44). Godard connects the linguistic implications of this revolutionary spirit to the Surrealist influence, but it is the social praxis and the foundational motivation animating the endeavour that makes it truly avant-garde. In the decades that have followed, the influence of postmodernism and what Jameson refers to as ‘the totality of capitalism’ have collaborated to undermine the characteristically avant-garde faith in art’s contribution to sociopolitical revolution. Hal Foster summarizes the shift and the need for a new and ongoing critical discourse responsive to the changing nature of avant-gardism: ‘By now the problems of the avant-garde are familiar: the ideology of progress, the presumption of originality, the elitist hermeticism, the historical exclusivity, the appropriation by the culture industry, and so on. Yet it remains a crucial coarticulation of artistic and

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political forms. And it is this coarticulation of the artistic and the political that a posthistorical account of the neo-avant-garde, as well as an eclectic notion of the postmodern, serve to undo. Thus the need for new genealogies of the avant-garde that complicate its past and support its future’ (5). The general theoretical parameters of this book remain limited to the specifically avant-garde, yet it is useful to imagine a post-avant (or what Foster calls the neo-avantgarde), if only to more firmly establish the boundaries of a semantically coherent if multiplicitous notion of avant-gardism. The final section of this introduction, then, is offered in recognition of the avant-garde’s radical conceptual shift in the post-avant moment. Post-Avant (Or, The End of the Avant-Garde) Disillusionment came fast and hard for the avant-garde and from multiple directions. Already in 1967, in the so-called summer of love, Northrop Frye had begun to argue against the oftentimes exuberant optimism of the era, with particular reference to Marxist notions of alienation and the rise of consumer dependency on new technologies. Frye noted that the rate of technological progress had accelerated to the point of constant paradigm change such that change and disaccommodation had become the dominant features of our civilization. He added that with no stability no new order was coming. If the success of revolutions is measured by the founding and constituting of new presumably liberated orders that function as stable societies, the contemporary, end-ofmodernism era is, in contrast, conditioned by the failure of anything to last any meaningful amount of time. The contemporary period, despite the experience of constant change, can be labelled post-revolutionary in the sense that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas and experiences of revolution are no longer relevant (which is different from but related to Arendt’s claim that revolutions ‘have outlived all their ideological justifications’ [1]). The teleological faith in arriving at an end point, a new, stable society, has dissipated in the constant rush of technological change; as Frye writes, ‘We are constantly learning from the alienation of progress that merely trying to clarify one’s mind is useless and selfish’ (The Modern, 74). Hardly utopian, idealistic, or revolutionary, the future from this perspective is decidedly bleak: ‘In our day, [the fear of Hell] is attached, not to another world following this one, but to the future of our own world’ (41). Arthur Kroker points out in his book Technology and the Canadian Mind that for all those who offered their ‘sometimes poetic, always tragic,

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reflection on the price to be paid for the consumer comforts of technological society’ (13) (he singles out not Frye, but George Grant, Alice Munro, and Eli Mandel, among others, to represent the category) there were others, those he called technological humanists, caught up in the drive ‘to renew technique from within by releasing the creative possibilities inherent in the technological experience’ (14) (he highlights McLuhan, Atwood, Trudeau, and, poignantly, Frye to represent this category). Kroker’s theory of the ‘cosmic’ optimism of the technological humanists highlights a general avant-garde spirit in the period, a spirit that manifests in part in the Canadian Vorticist avant-garde movement discussed in the final chapter of this book. But as the analysis by Frye discussed above makes clear, and as Atwood’s own dystopian speculative fiction novels would later envision, for all the (revolutionary) optimism of this branch of Canadian thought, it was permeated with a dawning realization of the cost of technological progress. Frye’s anti-utopian, anti-progressive, antiavant-garde, constant flux model helps to clarify the simultaneous postmodern turn away from the rhetoric and vocabulary of avant-gardism. Postmodernism arrived in Canada during the Vietnam War, a war which thinkers as diverse as Frye and bissett recognized as an event that demanded a loss of faith in America (and subsequently in Canada for supplying American troops with horrifying weapons, including napalm and Agent Orange) and, by extension, a loss of faith in the idea of empire that recalls Baudelaire’s own experience of disillusionment. In Frye’s words, in ‘the lemming-march horror of Vietnam [Nuremberg] was forgotten and the same excuses and defiances reappeared’ (The Modern, 45). More succinctly, bissett advised, ‘never trust a president’ – ‘the fukan pigs … can have ther / culture’ (Stardust, 124). The creative/de-creative idealism animating the first wave of postmodern decadence in Canada dissolved into the disruptive energy of a growing recognition of failure and limitation: of a need to fall away and fall apart. Robert Kroetsch turned the general sentiment into a famous riddle, ‘to fail is to fail, to succeed is to fail’ (1). Like Paul Chamberland’s rejection of the term ‘revolution’ by reason of its co-opted signification in the contemporary world, critics, poets, and artists of all stripes turned away from identifying themselves or their preferred aesthetics as avant-garde. In the words of music critic Chris Cutler, in the present period the label avant-garde ‘has been colonised, flattened and neutralised’ into a corpse ‘in the mouths of the bourgeoisie.’ Hal Foster’s statement above expresses the contradictory desires of contemporary writers to break with the implications of avant-gardism but yet to

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retain its value as a privileged site of literary production: to assume the cultural cachet of being the most interesting and innovative writers of a period without the commitment to sociopolitical revolution. His embrace of a neo-avant-garde, a new avant-garde, insists upon the ongoing relevance of the basic function of the term, even while its significance has shifted dramatically. There is a similar shift in Barbara Godard’s theories of Canadian women’s writing as automatically avant-garde by reason of their estrangement from phallocentric language: rather than a historical (and masculinist) eruption emanating from Europe with revolutionary intent, avant-gardism becomes a kind of genre of literature defined by its particular relationship to language and sociopolitical norms. The term has become steadily dislodged from its French etymology and its basic metaphorical implications; echoes and outright redefinitions of the term circulate freely and widely with somewhat random and personal meanings dependent on the user. In the words of Daphne Marlatt, for instance, ‘avant-garde is simply writing as close as you can to what you’re actually experiencing at any given point. That’s where the new forms arise’ (G. Bowering, ‘Given this Body,’ 33). The sociopolitical mandate of avantgardism is erased in Godard’s and Marlatt’s configurations in favour of specific aesthetics or writing practices. There is a deeper problem with the avant-garde’s sociopolitical revolutionary mandate that makes it incompatible with contemporary aesthetic sensibilities. Revolutions, as Marx observed, necessitate a violent break from the existing ideological structures in order to establish a new social contract. This embrace of violence was taken up by avant-garde artists especially in the rhetorical defence of their practice. Sue Suleiman has pointed out, however, the militant spirit of the historical avant-garde undermines their relevance for contemporary practice, especially given ‘the eroticization and aestheticization of violence, including violence against the female body’ (40). This does not undermine the possibility of a genuine renewal in either sociopolitics or art practice, but it does insist on a recalibration of the tools by which the change gets built. Suleiman, for her part, acknowledges the ‘obvious formal allegiance’ between the historical avant-garde and contemporary experimental women’s writing (162), but insists that the concept of avant-gardism needs to be entirely reworked in order to extricate its patriarchal implications. Contemporary experimental writing is marked by this conflicting continuity with and difference from avant-gardes of the past, in which certain liberational impulses are celebrated while other ideological complicities and conservatisms are deemed unrecoverable.

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Beyond the interconnected problems of violence and patriarchy, other dimensions make the ideological distance between contemporary art practice and the historical avant-garde models seem as though it has reached the point of total disconnect. For instance, with its fixed mandate for sociopolitical revolution (either before or after the production of liberated art), the term has no denotative relevance in an era in which art remains outside of the public arena. Part of this outsidedness is intentional: a product of the combination of what Frank Davey characterizes as the contemporary interest in art’s ‘anti-instrumentalism’ (‘The Power,’ 13) and what Jeff Derksen describes as the consistent and ongoing failure of aesthetic radicalisms that ‘are not able to “radically” transform the public sphere’ (289). Taken together, these might signal another era of divorce between the radical and aesthetic avant-gardes. In this case, however, the aesthetic avant-garde has itself shifted into a non-revolutionary phase in making art that is not going anywhere but that rather ‘takes the challenge of how meaning is produced socially as a central part of its project’ (298). Despite the political orientation of its experimentation, language writing in general – a category that includes the more specific L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry school – has suffered the same charges of elitism hurled at Mallarmé and Eliot for abandoning the public function of art in exchange for more private (though potentially still open) communities of readers. The writing here is marked by an alienation from language that serves to interrogate and trouble familiar literary conventions rather than use them. The difficulty and abstraction of the work, and even the possibility of literary forms enabling or expressing liberated consciousnesses, are shared concerns with the historical aesthetic avantgarde. What changes in language writing and the various post-avant schools that follow, such as flarf and conceptual writing, is a loss of faith in the possibility of aesthetic affect outside of art practice. The avantgarde, if it can be said to be such, has shifted focus from rebellion and the constitution of revolutionary new orders to the production of new self-consciously formalist and/or ironic modes of writing. Taking all the limitations together, Butling and Rudy build from Davey and other critical sources a catalogue of the specific shortcomings of avant-gardism as a contemporary model, including the inevitable hypocrisy of avant-garde claims to being counter-cultural (19) when, in Nichol’s words, all that signifies can be sold. There is no outside to this general economy, even if post-avant writing, as Derksen proposes, occupies a space ‘on the outer conceptual horizon of what is intelligible, of what is readable’ (298). The avant-garde no longer contains the ambition to lead

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society or even writing in toto anywhere. This phase of art making can be labelled ‘post’ avant precisely because such art already acknowledges the limitations of its own project. Thus the poet Karen Mac Cormack writes in a poem, ‘if avant garde is followed by only more avant garde / meaning is literal despite long lines yielding only merchandise / (Gwyneth Paltrow “becoming” the Meryl Streep of the future)’ (177). The failure to revolutionize is marked by the total containment within the terms and economics of the existing context: one garde ‘becomes’ the next garde in an endless, powerless sequence. Despite this conceptual conundrum, there have been enormous developments in new kinds of writing opened up by contemporary writers. Of particular significance is the shift in subject positions available to contemporary writers that now extends position beyond the narrow confines of the habitual white, male, Christian, upper-middle-class subject; one might even add the realist tradition as a coordinate of this privileged subject position. The changes, consistent with the rise in postmodernism, have precipitated a total collapse of the illusion of unidirectional culture. Consequently, rather than focusing on a single group out in front, leading literature forward, Butling and Rudy propose a nodal model that accepts multiplicity, difference, and alternative sites of contestation (20). They abandon the term ‘avant-garde,’ however, in favour of a regrettably inappropriate use of ‘radical’ – a term they neutralize by negating its specifically political or revolutionary connotation and lineage. ‘Seditious’ communist writers getting arrested for anti-government propaganda is a categorical difference from tenured professors exploring difficult (and important) theoretical concepts in verse. In any event, Butling and Rudy’s pioneering research into the field includes outlines and analysis of a diverse array of ‘radical writing communities’ and individual authors in Canada such as those associated with TISH, feminism, postmodernism, and minority writing, and also usefully connects these movements to particular publishing ventures, little magazines, and significant events in their history. True to their post-avant theorization, the effect of Butling and Rudy’s presentation method is to highlight the simultaneity, overlap, and diversity of experimental literary activity in contemporary Canada. Despite the fact that the field has not received critical response appropriate to its scope and contribution,14 the post-avant phase of Canadian experimental writing is, without question, the most prolific, complicated, and diverse period in the nation’s literary history. No single theory (or book) could possibly synthesize the multiplicity of directions of contemporary Canadian experimental writing. Post-avant, then, is an appropriate

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moniker for a period characterized by difference to the point of being oxymoronic. Post-avant – after the before – signals the tenuous, contradictory, and broken connections to the foundational avant-gardes that mapped out endless modes of writing and techniques that continue to inspire as well as the fundamental and resultant openness of the literary field in the present. Post-avant seems an appropriate conundrum to represent a world, as McCaffery and Nichol characterize it, ‘where all history is contemporaneous’ and merely ‘a fixture of chronicity within a human biology’ (‘TRG Report 2,’ 73). Few would deny that the ongoing interest in and influence of the historical avant-gardes make them a relevant context for new work in the contemporary moment and in contemporary writing. At the same time, contemporary experimental avenues, including flarf, conceptual writing, and even uncreative writing, present new conceptualizations of art as criticism of bourgeois institutions. The theorist Ottmar Ette offers another interpretation of the term ‘post-avant’ as ‘a multifunctional term that could capture paradigmatically the different forms of the “liquidation,” the “fading out” of the avant-gardes’ (219). Such a process signifies, under Ette’s estimation, a break with the break from tradition coupled with a dissolution of the category of tradition. While this captures the scepticism and post-revolutionary orientation of contemporary writing, it also accentuates the post-avant relation to and dependence on work from the past. While we now turn to the past and turn attention to three historical nodes of Canadian avant-gardism, it is worth keeping in mind that the debate over the theory and the contemporary manifestation of the avantgarde is ongoing and remains contested. Complicating matters is the fact that many contemporary authors sustain an interest and desire in working with the socio-historical and political implications and impact of experimental writing (especially in Canada), in a manner different from but similar to the avant-gardes of old. But without recourse to progressive illusions of history, without romanticized notions of the affective potential of individual artists, and without a sense of there being legitimate contenders to the ideologies being contested, the very concept and possibility of revolt becomes problematic. Kristeva characterizes this impasse simply: ‘We don’t know where to go. Are we still capable of going anywhere?’ (The Sense, 10). The hegemony of the Western world that avant-garde artists once fought and dismissed as hubris has largely come to pass. In light of the immensity of this hegemony, the possibility of founding a new revolutionary social contract, let alone altering the existing social contract, through art seems naive at

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best. The demise of forward-looking revolutionary experimentation coincides with a dramatic rise in backward-looking re-enactments: what often is said to constitute avant-garde activity in the contemporary period often turns out to be little more than a re-staging of previous avant-garde experiments. Performing the work of Artaud or Nichol (or staging a musical theatre version of Canadian sound poetry, such as with Kate Alton and Ross Manson’s ‘Four Horsemen Project’) acknowledges and pays tribute to the history and tradition of avant-gardism and constitutes an important correction to Canada’s habitual cultural amnesia, but is closer to the work of curation or unself-conscious parody than to participating or collaborating in that revolutionary tradition. Oddly, curation and the reshaping of the significance of existing moments of discourse by changing its context have become central dynamics of post-avant practice: New York poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s uncreative writing experiments involve copying and recontextualizing public language such as radio broadcasts, newspapers, or U.S. Senate committee exchanges into literary spaces as textual ready-mades; L.A. poet Vanessa Place does much the same with trial transcripts of sexual abuse cases; and New York poet Rob Fitterman’s latest project, Holocaust Museum (unpublished), involves listing the item descriptions in Holocaust museums without representing the objects described. The effect of work by each of these artists is to isolate moments when language works in society and to thereby disrupt its constructed impactfulness. While Fitterman’s project is slightly different because of how it shifts attention away from objects fetishized for having been touched by the Holocaust and back onto the idea of the history that makes the objects in Holocaust museums haunting, thus restoring power to the historical event rather than its traces, projects of these sorts offer profound and revealing insights into the performative function of language to mitigate, litigate, and historicize real-world experience. But they reveal rather than revolt. Furthermore, and more problematically, the historical avant-gardes with their politically revolutionary and anarchistic individualism offer little direction for the ideological multiplicity of the contemporary period. Indeed, in light of the monolithic domination of capitalist ideology, this new emerging art that might be called the avant-garde has distinctly lost any unified challenge or spirit of contestation (presuming, for a moment and for the sake of expedience, the existence of unity among the historical avant-gardes). For this reason, experimental and political authors and critics routinely distinguish themselves from avant-gardism in recognition of their difference from an idealism now perceived as

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naive or delusional. In the new millennium in Canada, only one poet of any note, Christian Bök, and one scholar, Barbara Godard (who passed away in 2010), have argued the currency of the term avant-garde for writing of the present. Both, however, have expressed reservations about its usage and implications and changed the connotations to suit their favoured aesthetics. Godard’s recent work reveals even more ambivalence: her 2009 introduction to a special issue of Open Letter on contemporary experimental women’s writing avoids the term ‘avant-garde’ altogether.15 Contemporary literature, meanwhile, has exploded into an unprecedented fragmentation of communities, models, and schools of experimental writing that lack unity in aesthetics, ambitions, politics, speech communities, publishing venues, metropolitan centres, arts funding (in terms of both amounts available and criteria by which artists may access that money), and so on – and that’s just in reference to contemporary Canadian writing. In the meantime, the metaphoric role of the avantgarde has shifted from a romantic phase of leading society forward (including both radical and aesthetical branches) to a sceptical/decadent phase of undermining the hubris of society by revealing its ideological paradigms to a post-revolutionary phase in the contemporary period of facilitating diverse challenges to particular sites of oppression. Bürger’s sense of the revelatory role of experimental art continues, but new socalled rhizomatic models of political resistance and political activism seek to unify broad, disparate, and even contradictory discourses and currents of art that challenge dominant ideological practices of the West. A growing body of diverse literatures within the framework of identity writing have combined the aesthetics of identity with formal experimentation to create a writing of unalienated subjectivities that embodies the new or proposed subjectivity in the formal characteristics of the work. Radical feminism, the Kootenay School of Writing, The Press Gang, and Canadian dub poetry combine formal experimentation with progressive, almost revolutionary, politics. Some of the leading writers from this broadly conceived current include Daphne Marlatt, Natalie Stephens, Lisa Robertson, Fred Wah, Roy Miki, Larissa Lai, Rita Wong, Lillian Allen, d’bi.young, Meredith Quartermain, and Erin Mouré. While the writing from these authors is extremely diverse, they function as a transcanadian current of activity in contemporary letters because of their shared fusion of postmodern mistrust of metanarratives that erase difference with a progressive politics that recognizes the utility in working in groups to challenge state and corporate oppressions. What makes their approach

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to group politics different is that, unlike the militaristic alignment of previous gardes (especially among the radical avant-gardes) their investigations and interrogations of discourses surrounding identity, citizenship, and community embrace and insist upon multiplicity and polyvocalism. The poet Rita Wong explained that ‘Whether we’re talking about owning one’s own history, language and labour, or one’s genetic inheritance, I’m interested in this question of power as it evolves from collaboration and communication, not as it is imposed by a hierarchical system’ (345). As with the attraction between other avant-gardes and disjunction, this postmodern current’s embrace of an essential incoherence in identities, citizenships, and communities has significant political content and intent. Thus, even while scientists have begun to increasingly speak of ‘the singularity’ of the future of humanity through spectacularly sci-fi prognostications (see Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology as an extreme example), politically progressive, non-revolutionary, non-utopian (especially in the Enlightenment sense that social progress is leading to a predictable, more perfect order), non-teleological, nonmilitaristic experimental artists have embraced difference (and arguably différance) as an orienting principle of their aesthetics. Rather than hardening themselves into advocates for particular ideologies, contemporary post-avant authors attempt to unsettle their contextual milieu by embracing the dynamism and vitalism of a changing world and planet. This aesthetic rejects the previous tendency to embrace utopian fantasies predicated on sociological stasis. Weightman notes that historical avantgardist projections of ‘the perfect society’ led many to imagine that they were peering into the future – ‘but in fact they were falling back on to a static conception … the more we learn about man, the more we realise that his so-called nature has included such a bewildering variety of customs, attitudes, beliefs, and artistic products that it is impossible for any one person to comprehend more than a very small part of the possible range’ (30). The lack of coherence in human behaviour renders human nature an impossible foundation for stable revolutionary projections. Post-avant authors, with their various allegiances to other historical trajectories, traditions, movements, and coalitions than just avant-gardism, characteristically rely upon this dynamism, this constant instability in human history and experience, to maintain their commitment to both progressive politics and experimental art in an era where, as Kristeva notes, revolt and revolution have become nonsensical.

Chapter Two

The Cosmic Canadians

‘The human soul will be revolutionized.’ Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness

‘We may some day imagine a truth that will revolutionize all recognized theories.’ Flora MacDonald Denison, ‘Altered Personality’

‘Nothing bores the ordinary man more than the cosmos.’ Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

Cosmic Consciousness The first node of Canadian aesthetic avant-garde activity began in smalltown Ontario at the turn of the century – in a period and geography that too many scholars hasten over, tripping to reach the urban promontory of modernism. Though there were substantial precursors to the moment, and certainly diverse coexistent influences, the landmark publication that begat the Cosmic Canadians was Dr Richard Maurice Bucke’s 1901 treatise Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. In his book, Bucke – a distinguished psychologist (née alienist) in London, Ontario – unleashed a Futurist’s vision of human experience after a revolutionary transformation of human consciousness. Predicated on mystical idealism, the religious tradition of enlightenment, and a dawning understanding of biological evolution, Bucke’s book offers visions of the world after an evolutionary revolution has altered human physiognomy thereby extending self-consciousness to cosmic consciousness. Even though the followers of Bucke’s millennial vision were not barricade-drawn militants,

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it is important to keep in mind that Bucke’s revolution was not in any way metaphorical or even philosophical: Bucke proposed a global sociopolitical transformation triggered by biological cognitive mutation. In this chapter, I refer to Bucke’s proposal as a r/evolution to highlight the two precedents he relies upon for his model, but more importantly to signal a difference in his theory from conventional understandings of both sociopolitical revolution and Darwinian evolution. His r/evolutionary theory explains that animals are trapped in simple consciousness – they think but do not think about thinking – while ‘the ordinary man’ has a self-consciousness that allows him or her to address and treat mental states as objects of consciousness (1). Language is both the evidence and objective superstructure of self-consciousness (2). He describes the next phase as a natural progression and expansion of the previous, normal state of human culture and consciousness: ‘Cosmic Consciousness is a third form which is as far above Self Consciousness as that is above Simple Consciousness … The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is, as its name implies, a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe … Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs an intellectual enlightenment or illumination which alone would place the individual on a new plane of existence – would make him almost a member of a new species.’ Given Bucke’s sense of language’s centrality to self-consciousness, the prospect of a paradigm shift raises the question of how humanity’s experience and use of language alters in light of this evolutionary leap. Bucke does not address this problem directly, except to note that those whom he documents with cosmic consciousness seem to gravitate towards religion and the arts. In fact, it takes nearly two decades before artists in this country responded to the linguistic implications of Bucke’s r/evolution by experimenting aggressively and inventing new approaches – cosmic approaches – to writing. These r/evolutionary experimentalists are the avant-garde writers, the Cosmic Canadians addressed below, about whom this chapter is primarily concerned. For Bucke, the fact that cosmic consciousness had thus far only appeared in isolated individuals – indeed, the very religious and artistic leaders who come to tower over the rest of the population – did not mean that the human species was dividing into distinctive camps of the enlightened versus the unenlightened. He wrote, ‘our descendents will sooner or later reach, as a race, the condition of cosmic consciousness, just as, long ago, our ancestors passed from simple to self consciousness.’ Bucke believed ‘that this step in evolution’ was even then ‘being made’ (3). Bucke’s book carries the explicit purpose of explaining this evolutionary

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leap, but was also written to foster and spread the transformation it documents. This new consciousness stood to be, he proposed, the final stage of humanity’s epochal revolutions – and one that can be hastened by ‘intelligent contact’ between self-conscious and cosmic-conscious individuals. His millennial vision proposes nothing less than the marriage of religion and science in the human body: this final r/evolution will ‘literally create a new heaven and a new earth. Old things will be done away and all will become new’ (4). Bucke’s theory also attempted to connect the physical extension of human faculties with the increasingly apparent and dramatic technological extensions, claiming that the invention of the airplane (which happened in 1903, after the book was published), for instance, would precipitate the end of national boundaries, tariffs, and even great cities. Global travel would homogenize all languages into one, just as cosmic consciousness would precipitate the end of religion and poverty. With the power of religion, technology, and the evolution of the human body combined, ‘The human soul will be revolutionized’ (4). While this technological projection connects his work to the ecstatic expostulations of the Russian and Italian Futurists like Velemir Klebnikov and F.T. Marinetti during the same approximate period, Bucke had none of their enthusiasm for war or for the violent erasure of the past. Cosmic consciousness, in fact, would give humanity better understanding of the unique achievements and insights into the divine experience of the great religious figures and mystics throughout human history, bridging the cultural divide between the East and West. Buddha (69), Jesus (81), St Paul (93), Plotinus (101), Mohammed (104), Confucius (216), and Ramakrishna (257), he wrote, all had the same cosmic consciousness. As the cosmicconscious r/evolution was to spread with increasing speed throughout humanity, all people would eventually gain access to a similar divine unity that underwrote the mystical teachings of these religious icons. Accordingly, all religions would become one. It was a unity, Bucke believed, that transcended the boundaries of individuality, gender, ethnicity, and religion, of course, but also of species, genus, phylum, kingdom, domain, life, and even of non-living phenomena like asteroids, planets, and stars. He proclaimed that the new consciousness ‘shows the cosmos to consist not of dead matter governed by unconscious, rigid, and unintending law; it shows it on the contrary as entirely immaterial, entirely spiritual and entirely alive; it shows that death is an absurdity, that everyone and everything has eternal life; it shows that the universe is God and that God is the universe, and that no evil ever did or will enter into it; a great deal of

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this is, of course, from the point of view of self consciousness, absurd; it is nevertheless undoubtedly true’ (17–18). Cosmic consciousness was not simply an awareness or rationalization of the unity between all things, but a lived experience and awareness that the cosmos is not made up of dead matter but is itself a living, unifying presence. If consciousness is the ability to recognize oneself in relation to the world, cosmic consciousness was the even more humbling experience of recognizing oneself as a microscopic particle in the universe. The country into which Bucke’s book appeared was ripe for such a fusion of science and religion. The historians Ramsay Cook and A.B. McKillop have demonstrated that Victorian Canada was troubled over the implications of Darwinian evolution and hungered for a reconciliation between science and religion. Bucke’s theories offered just such a bridge over the developing antagonism and conflict. As modernist scholar (and sceptic) Richard Ellmann notes, ‘Spiritual evolution restored the hope which natural evolution had removed, and materialism was utterly condemned’ (58). Though Bucke’s claims demonstrate a flawed understanding of Darwinian evolution for not including natural selection, he was no cosmic flake settled in the back snows of Ontario. As president of both the American Medico-Psychological Association and the psychology section of the British Medical Association, he delivered reports on the inevitability of this r/evolutionary cosmic consciousness before the leading scientists of the period. These reports were greeted enthusiastically. Even William James, the great pioneering psychologist, congratulated Bucke for his work on cosmic consciousness with the highest praise: ‘I believe that you have brought this kind of consciousness “home” to the students of human nature in a way so definite and unescapable that it will be impossible henceforth to overlook it, or ignore it’ (qtd. in Coyne, 65). While its maximum readership lay in the future, Bucke’s book steadily grew in significance. In the estimation of Gary Lachman, ‘By 1966 Cosmic Consciousness had gone through twenty-six printings and had become, along with Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, part of the canon of works firing the imagination of the burgeoning counterculture’ (3). Before this impact on mid-century experimentation, however, Bucke’s work helped to trigger a modernist upheaval in the 1920s in Toronto. It was a disruption and rebellion against the inherited division of spiritual realities and scientific discoveries. Cook connects this attempted unification to the arrival of modernism: ‘Modernist culture in Canada, as elsewhere, expressed itself in new music, new literature and

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new painting. Underlying it was a sea change in intellectual assumptions and religious beliefs. Central to this upheaval, and to an understanding of the new culture, was an assertion of spiritual values against the materialist thrust of the new sciences. The new spiritualism, occultism and mysticism, with its emphasis on “inner seeing,” illumination and the oneness of being and creation, [led] to a conception of art that emphasised the “inner image of the soul,” in [Edvard] Munch’s phrase, and attempted to paint reality, not representationally, but abstractly (Cook, ‘Nothing,’ 14). Mystical and secretive societies, like the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, and the Theosophical Society,1 thrived in an environment ripe for new cosmologies. In this esoteric context, Bucke’s map of the spread of cosmic consciousness was the most credible and scientific theory to feed this need by giving a name and authority to a widely held, indeed transnational and transcultural, hope for a spiritually infused, scientifically credible paradigm shift. One year after the publication of his book, Bucke died by a freak accident after slipping on the ice on his London, Ontario, veranda in 1902. Despite the loss, his theories, proved influential and spread well beyond Canada, and well beyond even the medical/psychological profession (where, in fact, its influence quickly waned). Acclaimed British philosophers like John Middleton Murry and Edward Carpenter wrestled and ultimately embraced Bucke’s projections. The Belgian Symbolist poet Maurice Maeterlinck toyed with the possibility of a spiritual r/ evolution – ‘Behold us then before the mystery of the cosmic consciousness … If this consciousness exist under the form which we have conceived, it is evident that we shall be there and take part in it’ (122). The Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky, in contrast, was more sanguine about the unconditional fact of cosmic consciousness: ‘The sense of the infinite is the first and most terrible trail before initiation. Nothing exists. A little miserable soul feels itself suspended in an infinite void. Then even the void disappears. There is only infinity, a constant and continuous division and dissolution of everything … Art (including music and poetry) is a path to cosmic consciousness’ (257, 331). Ouspensky dedicated the entire final chapter of Tertium Organum (1920), his most popular book, to an appreciation and criticism of Bucke’s writing: ‘But after all, various little imperfections of Dr. Bucke’s book are not important, nor additions which might possibly be made. What is important is the general conclusion to which Dr. Bucke comes: the possibility and the immanence of the NEW CONSCIOUSNESS’ (224). Theosophists, mystics, and occultists, such as the English authors A.E. (George William

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Russell) and Alfred Richard Orage (who, in turn, influenced Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Katherine Mansfield) and American authors like Claude Bragdon, G.E. Woodberry, Edna Wadsworth Moody, Mary Austin, and Allan Watts, incorporated Bucke’s work into their writing and teachings. In A.E.’s novel The Interpreters (1922), a novel that depicts the leadup to a future spiritual revolution, one of his characters explains to a non-believer: ‘I know I am part of an organism lit up by a cosmic consciousness which shall rule the world. Humanity has yet to be born from the world egg but it shall be born by the stirring of the cosmic consciousness through all its units. It shall control the elements and extend its dominion illimitably through Nature’ (G. Russell, 74). The considerable spread of influence of Bucke, especially through Ouspensky, Carpenter, and Orage, connects him and his ideas directly to the awakening AngloAmerican modernist and avant-garde spirit. As another link, T.E. Hulme, the British poet who arrived at the idea of imagist poetry as a response to the stark Canadian landscape, spent a significant amount of time meditating on the relationship between symbolic language and the evolution of matter into forms of consciousness: ‘Only in the fact of consciousness is there a unity in the world’ (222). Bucke’s influence was not limited to modernists or the avant-garde. Walter Russell (of no relation to A.E.), the American philosopher who pioneered a unified theory of physics and cosmogony and accurately predicted the existence of plutonium, popularized the contemporary sense of the idea of a ‘New Age’ in his 1944 essay ‘Power through Knowledge’ that was primarily concerned with explaining Bucke’s theory. Russell also published a book with his wife Lao Russell called A Course in Cosmic Consciousness in which they explain why they accept Bucke’s theories wholeheartedly. As the title indicates, the book is primarily concerned with teaching hopefuls how to hasten their own imminent mystical illumination. Camille Paglia claims that Bucke and his ideas were reintroduced to young American, particularly Californian, audiences through Alan Watt’s The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (1962). Bucke’s theory, she writes, became an important part of ‘the cultural atmosphere of the time’ (74). Indeed, she uses the term and the concept of cosmic consciousness to distinguish between the religious renaissance of the 1960s and the hedonistic factionalism of the 1970s and 1980s. Allen Ginsberg also used the term to connect his own work to W.B. Yeats’s ‘psychedelic universal cosmic consciousness’ (‘Identity Gossip,’ 18). Yeats may or may not have read and been influenced by Bucke’s book, but it has been documented that his wife ‘George,’ with

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whom he wrote the enigmatic book A Vision (1925), most certainly read and appreciated it (see Ann Saddlemyer’s Becoming George: The Life of Mrs. W.B. Yeats, especially pages 127 and 671). Algernon Blackwood, Yeats’s colleague in the occultist Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and a sometimes-Canadian author himself, also read and absorbed Bucke’s writing. Indeed, his most successful novel, The Centaur, is primarily concerned with varieties of conscious experiences, most poignantly with the ‘rare’ cosmic consciousness (78). Despite these alluring connections, the full impact of Bucke’s work on the global stage has yet to be tallied. In Canada, the first authors to be influenced by Bucke staged his r/evolutionary theories in literary forms inherited from the nineteenth century. The pantheistic intonations of English Romanticism were still popular in Canada at the turn of the century and gained new life as a result of Bucke’s influence. These authors, including prominent figures of the time such as A.E.S. Smythe, William Douw Lighthall, Wilfrid Campbell, J.W. Bengough, Robert Norwood, and A.M. Stephen, are but precursors to the avant-garde. Many critics have noted, and complained, that the starch, archaic language of texts of this sort is too often coupled with classical imagery that blurs such works into a timeless and ethereal abstraction. As Munro Beattie wrote of this post-Confederation-era and pre-modern literary current, ‘the versifiers of this arid period, having nothing to say, kept up a constant jejune chatter about infinity, licit love, devotion to the Empire, death, Beauty, God, and Nature … poetry in Canada as the 1920s opened was dying of emotional and intellectual anemia’ (235). The generally dogmatic writing Beattie highlights has overshadowed the more revolutionary mysticism that developed out of cosmic consciousness. The association, however, between neoromanticism and cosmic consciousness led W.E. Collins to read cosmic consciousness somewhat anachronistically into the poetry of Archibald Lampman (The White, 64) – a claim that was repeated and developed in Tom Marshall’s 1979 book Harsh and Lonely Land (21). Lampman’s fellow Confederation-era poet Charles G.D. Roberts did, in fact, dabble with the general religious spirit that can be associated with cosmic consciousness, even if developed independently from Bucke. The critic August R. Leisner claims that Roberts’s poem ‘Beyond the Tops of Time’ in particular ‘accentuate[s] the supra-cosmic status of the spirit’ with ‘glowing lyrical tempo and supra-cosmic depth.’ In that poem, Roberts outlines a visionary journey into a realm where ‘always we behold God’s face!’ (Roberts, line 72):

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With quiet and incurious eye I noted many a wondrous thing,– Seas of clear glass, and singing streams, In that high pageantry of dreams; Cities of sard and chrysoprase Where choired Hosannas never cease; Valhallas of celestial frays, And lotus-pools of endless peace; But still the faces gaped and cried– ‘Give us the dream for which we died!’ At length my quiet heart was stirred, Hearing them cry so long in vain. But while I listened for a word That should translate them from their pain I saw that here and there a face Shone, and was lifted from its place, And flashed into the moving dome An ecstasy of prismed fire. And then said I, ‘A soul has come To the deep zenith of desire!’ But still I wondered if it knew The dream for which it died was true.

(Roberts, 51–2)

Similar mystical themes can be found in many of Roberts’s poems, but none so fully developed as this openly cosmic journey/dream sequence. Roberts’s cousin Bliss Carman was in general more mystically inclined and explored the theme of the cosmic voyage in various works that predate Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness. Of his later works, ‘Shamballah’ from his 1925 collection Far Horizons connects the achievements and ambitions of authors (‘from Plotinus to Browning’), musicians (such as Beethoven and Handel), artists (such as Raphael and Michelangelo), and religious figures (‘From Krishna, Gautama, and Jesus / To Swedenborg, Blake, and Delsarte’) through a mystically conceived metaphor of place; the city of Shamballah. These ‘light-bearing sons of Shamballah … spread the ineffable word.’ The collection as a whole is infused with the spirit of the Cosmic Canadians, though written in the familiar styles of the Aestheticists and developing out of Carman’s interest in spiritualism. Thomas

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Hodd provides a useful survey of the occult and theosophical influence on Roberts and Carman, especially by the occultist William Sharp whom he connects to Yeats, in his essay ‘The Celtic Twilight in Canada.’ Beyond the swirl of interest in Bucke’s and related mystical ideas, it is interesting to note that social realists and antimodernists from the period also found Bucke’s message valuable. Peter McArthur, a popular writer of Ontario rural sketches and editor of New York’s legendary Truth magazine (and lifelong friend of Bliss Carman), argued that Bucke had underestimated the spread of cosmic consciousness by overestimating Walt Whitman (see Ballstadt, ‘Peter’). He proposed, in an unpublished essay on Bucke, that cosmic consciousness had already spread far beyond Bucke’s predictions. He was especially interested in how farming cultivated and inspired cosmic consciousness with men of the earth. McArthur, like many of the authors mentioned in this strain of avant-gardism, misused Bucke’s work; in this case, he did so as part of a general promotion of pastoral, agrarian, and decidedly anti-Futurist ambitions. Subsequent writers, the most notable of whom was Wilson MacDonald, fused their cosmic concerns with methodological inspiration from Bucke’s intimate friend Whitman (Bucke was Whitman’s executor, pallbearer, and eulogist, as well as the only authorized biographer) and produced a body of literature with much more vitality but still only occasional intersections with modernist writing. MacDonald tends to stand above this lot and the general stock of the neo-romantics by their own estimation for being something of a seer as well as a natural poet. Indeed, judging by the attitudes of some of his peers, he stood alongside the most acclaimed poets of all time. One of Toronto’s leading mystics, the poet and founder of the Toronto Theosophical Society Albert E.S. Smythe, in his introduction to The Song of the Prairie Land, recognized this exceptional promise in MacDonald’s talents: ‘Who is Wilson MacDonald? Only the records of palingenesis can reveal that secret, but I fancy that he has wandered from the lost Etruscan paradise and brought with him many of the arts and mysteries that glorified that ancient people … the spirit of his poetry is a prophecy of the extent and the future of Canadianism. We shall read these poems and say, not only is this what in Canada has been, but what in Canada shall be’ (9–10). Lorne Pierce prepared a promotional pamphlet of the praise MacDonald had received by 1923, which led one reader, a mystic from Vancouver, to muse ‘I am somewhat flabbergasted at what appears to be the extravagance of praise given … But remembering Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Bailey, Noyes, Whitman, Carman

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& a host of others, shall I proclaim here is one as great if not greater than these?’ (Fewster). MacDonald was an author of sixteen books, but his crowning achievement is undoubtedly his collection Out of the Wilderness (1926), which earned glowing reviews in the Canadian media as well as in the New York Times. The work is divided into three sections – ‘The Book of the Wilderness,’ ‘The Book of Man,’ and ‘The Book of the Rebel.’ The first two sections establish MacDonald’s literary lineage within the Romantic strain for his appreciation of and meditations on nature and beauty, whereas the third section embraces a more Symbolist type of dandyism as championed by Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Politics pervades much of the book, evoking his habitual advocacy for class consciousness, vegetarianism, and a moratorium of the death penalty. In the Times’ full-page review, William Arthur Deacon, himself a Cosmic Canadian, ignores the politics to praise the ‘magic and mystery … the harmony of the whole’ and its similarity to Whitman (8). He does not mention the book’s central premise, that MacDonald’s coming out of the wilderness was an attempt to condemn the decadence of the modern world, and more importantly to this present study, to articulate the means by which contemporary society could be redeemed. MacDonald’s book even forays into imagining just what such a redeemed society would look and feel like. Similar to Whitman’s cosmic egotism, the titular poem writes from the perspective of a redeemer who will cure the world of its ills: you who are arrogant, proud, and fevered with civilization … I am a force that you cannot deny; I am an offering that you finally must accept, For I am the herald of new things in a new land. (MacDonald, 3)

Lionel Stevenson in Appraisals of Canadian Literature acknowledges the emergence of a distinctly cosmic strain in the Canadian poetic outlook ‘especially in the work of Wilson MacDonald, Robert Norwood, and Albert Smythe’ (52). He describes the strain as an ‘intellectual revolution’ but dismisses the idea that it emanated from Whitman: ‘Rather, both he and the Canadian poets are the products of the great movements of the human mind which occurred during the nineteenth century.’ Stevenson would later add that ‘it is significant that the authoritative investigation of [cosmic consciousness] was by a Canadian, Richard Maurice Bucke. While he was classifying the records of mystics of all ages who have

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described their sense of unity with the Absolute, his countrymen were giving new utterance in poetry to the same pantheistic faith’ (86–7). MacDonald reaches his most prophetic extreme in ‘The Song of the New Communities,’ a 115-line poem that begins in the aftermath of a revolution – a real revolution that begat a violence where one might ‘see the last Reactionary sitting upon a pile of dead men … plead[ing] to save his soulless flesh’ (lines 4–5). What follows this start to the poem is a remarkable portrait of the revolutionary order, combining cosmic principles with anarchic individualism. The technological relics of modernity – he singles out movies, magazines, mechanical music, and motorcars by name – disappear, and much like Bucke’s future society, a liberated, evolved humanity emerges in all its utopic glory. In MacDonald’s prophetic vision, the world is unified into one culture, one religion, and one race. In many respects, though both were mystics and antimodernists, MacDonald’s utopian future communal fantasy reverses the dystopic future metropolitan nightmare in Lampman’s ‘The City of the End of Things,’ wherein humanity had been reduced to a grotesque parody of our former selves in a thoroughly machine-controlled hell. As a portrait of the increased detachment from nature that technology provokes, Lampman’s poem presents a dire warning of the imminent dangers and degradations of modernity. MacDonald’s poem, in contrast, is an expressionist act that builds a future through his articulation of its imminence. Indeed, his entire book is committed to enabling the future order. As a result of this ambition for the poem, MacDonald’s writing can be argued to be avant-garde in a sociopolitical sense of wanting to lead society forward. Overall, though, the formal properties of the poetry, including the rhythm, rhyme-scheme, and diction, while somewhat irregular, appear extremely conservative, if not downright reactionary, in the context of 1920s modernisms and avant-garde writing. The radical concepts that he proposes are not met with a similarly radical reimagining of aesthetic form or linguistic function. English Canada’s first modern literary magazine, The Sunset of Bon Echo, edited by Flora MacDonald Denison (née MacDonald), grew out of Bucke’s cosmic interpretation of Whitman. Denison’s editorial ambition for her little magazine – the official organ of the Whitman Club that she created – combined cosmic mysticism with suffragism, rejecting the tenets and application of sexism by the illegitimacy of all boundaries between souls: ‘Whitman is the poet of that divine democracy which gives equal rights to all the sons and daughters of this earth’ (‘Whitman,’ 1).

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The magazine combined mystical poetry and progressive politics, dry and romantic short stories, playful and revealing community gossip, manifestos and self-promotion, typographic experimentation and amateurish design. Whatever its limitations, the famous American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a regular visitor to Denison’s property, aptly praised Denison’s efforts: ‘The magazine emanates the spirit of Walt Whitman, of the advancement of women, of social progress’ (2). Denison’s editorial writings in each issue of the magazine advocate the mystical foundation of her favoured political cause, the suffragette movement, and delight in stories of conversions to both the women’s movement and cosmic mysticism. As is common in the small press, the magazine’s publication record was erratic, producing only six issues over five years of activity spanning 1916 to 1920. During the course of its publication, Denison’s home, the grand Bon Echo Inn just north of Napanee, Ontario, became a central meeting place and retreat for hundreds of cosmically inclined artists, thinkers, and public figures. It became a key setting and meeting place that helped enable the formation of Toronto’s cosmic avant-garde movement. In fact, the stated intention of the Bon Echo Inn was to create ‘a combination summer hotel and avant-garde spiritual community’ (qtd. in Lacombe, 107). In recognition of the inspiration she and the Cosmic Canadians took from Walt Whitman, she commissioned a huge cliff face to be engraved with a few lines of his poetry, alongside a dedication to tribute the good grey poet.2 Horace Traubel, Whitman’s self-described ‘spirit child’ and affectionate companion, died in 1919 while visiting Denison’s infamous resort on Mazinaw Lake. Denison’s home has since been transformed into the Bon Echo Provincial Park after her son, the playwright Merrill Denison, donated the property to the province of Ontario. Before she settled into her role as innkeeper and Cosmic Canadian advocate, Denison published a remarkable and strange novel (purportedly non-fiction) called Mary Melville: The Psychic (1900). The story presents an unlikely fusion of innocence and earnestness alongside a form of spiritualism more suited to a ghost story (distinguished from the more elevated tonal implications of the gothic). It tells the story of an enthusiastic and kindly girl with the ability to interact with the spirit world. Mary’s commune with the dead gives her the ability to move and control objects in the material world, but also provides her access to the cumulative knowledge of humanity. As a preteen, she delivers an astounding lecture on the history of mathematics to a collection of the world’s leading mathematicians. They recognize her unfettered genius and crown her vice-

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president of the Mathematical Society of Chicago (178) and eventually give her the president’s chair (194). Denison’s text shifts into symbolic feminism when the young girl slips into a fatal coma after she is told that she will one day be compelled to marry, and that her father would inevitably approve of the venture (200). The realization of Western compulsory heterosexuality and patriarchy literally kills the young genius. The Avant-Garde in Canada Albert Durrant Watson, one of the regular visitors to Denison’s spiritual avant-garde community at the Bon Echo Inn and a regular contributor to The Sunset of Bon Echo, was the first to shift away from neo-romanticism or imitative Whitmanism when he began, somewhat tepidly, experimenting with new literary forms to reflect and embody r/evolutionary new ideas. He was, for a period of approximately twenty years until the time of his death, considered one of Canada’s top mystical poets, and Denison appropriately described Watson as ‘a genuine poet with a cosmic outlook’ (‘Whitman,’ 3). Like Bucke, Watson attempted a series of meditations on those heroic figures who he believed had acquired cosmic consciousness. The poet Katherine Hale describes the project in vocabulary typical of the Cosmic Canadians: ‘The reach of the work is indeed universally wide and deep, including as it does not only the cosmic note, without which no voice may carry, but in a series of monologues called “The Immortals,” a remarkable insight into the lives and individualities of many of the world’s great seers and saviours’ (xiii). Watson’s most advanced work in the cosmic direction is The Aureole,3 a five-part 458-line apostrophe addressing the beloved of his life. The poem is Canada’s first published free-verse long poem and has been characterized for its rather flowery abstractions and neo-romantic metaphors. The text also, however, develops the structural irony of the apostrophe to make a rather finely honed point. Given the act of talking to someone not there as if they were, the silent other in the poem becomes a strategic foil for the speaker, in effect becoming a canvas upon which the poet presents his passions, his loves, his trials, and his hopes for the future. He has built a portrait of himself upon the absent people he addresses; but while there are at least four different people addressed in Watson’s poem, he gives them no names, only one abstracted ‘you.’ Though structured as an unbalanced dialogue, as befits the genre, the poem in fact functions as a fractured monologue. The shifting, unnamed addressee raises the question of what happens when the silent other of the apostrophe

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becomes a shifting subject. If the ‘I’ in the poem depends upon the ‘you,’ as the poet repeatedly claims in his praise for his beloved throughout the work, and the ‘you’ is a shifting, unstable pronoun, what does that suggest about the ‘I’? The poem itself tells us of the poet’s desire to conquer ‘self’ (line 325). The monologue becomes a polylogue. The ‘I’ becomes an other. The Aureole, in fact, breaks from the habitual stability of identity in early Canadian writing, even early Cosmic Canadian writing, by embracing indeterminacy as a necessary and inevitable element of the poet’s character and method. The ambiguity does not end with this intriguing use of pronouns: particularly and poignantly, the poem also questions the division of genders. Of the four identifiable characters addressed in the poem, the mother, the daughter, the childhood friend, and the lover, two are explicitly female while the other two are implicitly male. As with the pronouns, however, Watson plays with the form to create a touch of indeterminacy. The lines of all the relationships start to blur: the male speaker (‘I your baby boy!’ [40]) becomes ‘as mother’ to his daughter (132); the ‘comrade’ (53) becomes ‘my bride’ (67); and to ‘the multitude’ (261) he and his lover ‘were merely friends’ (262). The shifting gender lines do not merely hint at innuendo though: Watson pushes forth to champion a kind of mystical hermaphroditism that is reminiscent of Bucke’s claim that cosmic consciousness overcomes the boundary of gender. Appropriately, he finds this gender dualism in himself, in the growing ‘consciousness that he or she / is of my blood, that is, myself; / Therefore I love him or love her’ (296–8). The barriers all dissolve towards the end of the poem: ‘being thus your friend, / Am I the less your son, / Your husband, or your sire’ (342–4). On the one hand, the poem makes the point that love overcomes all boundaries and divisions. On the other hand, however, the poem posits the more radical thought that such boundaries and divisions are illegitimate. Love, as in each of the cases Watson outlines, provides the ‘blast that breaks / The fortress of the flesh’ (414–15). Outside of bodies, ageless, hermaphroditic souls commune in a grand and cosmic aureole. What appears to be a stable ‘I’ voice throughout the poem breaks down by degrees until it manifests but an emotive appeal to a greater, mystical unity beyond self – cosmic consciousness. These are the ‘harmonies of life’ (275) that he writes of, the ‘vaster union’ (288) he dreams to achieve. Rather than sing himself into a cosmic unity in the style of Walt Whitman, Watson goes the other way to test and tease and undermine the self, thereby blurring the borders between himself, his loved ones, and ultimately the cosmic unity.

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It is a grand pantheistic vision uncovered through moments of disintegrating confessional lyricism and can be recognized as an early, pioneering avant-garde attempt to manifest a still radical idea in aesthetic form. In the subsequent years after The Aureole was written, Watson recoiled from this blast into poetical experimentation. Instead, he turned to prose wherein he collected and organized his thoughts on cosmic mysticism into a massive and unpublished philosophical tome called ‘The Master Consciousness’ that outlines his conception of life, death, and the dawn of a new evolutionary-based spiritual revolution identical in spirit if not in name to Bucke’s visionary work. Watson’s avant-garde literary initiatives and his rational theosophizing, however, gave way to rampant occultism as he became increasingly interested in magical powers rather than mystical and evolutionary enlightenment – something most of the other Cosmic Canadians dabbled with but refused to take too seriously (Bucke, on the other hand, was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility of magic’s legitimacy [Cosmic, 304]). Watson’s reputation has since suffered, likely because his final three books include extensive transcriptions of interviews with the dead through mediums and seances. While people still attempt to communicate with the dead, this once common practice has become something of an embarrassment that discredits the authority of those who dabble with too much enthusiasm. Stan McMullin, for instance, notes that the prime minister of Canada during this phase of Watson’s career, William Lyon Mackenzie King, had an active and sincere interest in the occult. While this interest made his advisers ‘uncomfortable’ during his lifetime, his literary executors took the more regrettable and permanent action of burning all of his spiritualist notebooks in 1977 in order to protect his reputation (213). Still, after Watson’s death, and despite the controversy of his spiritualism, Lorne Pierce, the Methodist publisher of the Ryerson Press, was effusive in his praise in his eulogy to Watson published in The New Outlook, a Christian magazine with literary content: There have been greater thinkers, greater poets, but taken all in all he was the most Christ-like man I have ever known … No man during this generation in Toronto ever entertained so many strange faces, tongues, sects, systems, enthusiasms, artists, poets, fanatics, sages as he did: no home was more the ante-chamber to the universe … Allied with his cosmopolitanism is his cosmic consciousness in which he followed Walt Whitman and Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke. This is the mark and token of all spirits of the first magnitude. It is the consummation of all

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suffering and the reward of all culture. The poet’s mind takes its residence outside the universe. All the pageantry of beauty on earth, the stately processions of stars along their radiant highways, these were not yonder, but within the circle of his thoughts. (26)

Despite being unpublished, ‘The Master Consciousness’ remains a remarkable and noteworthy book in Canada not just for its ideas but for the way in which it bridges Bucke’s spiritual r/evolution with Kantian idealism. The book is a distinctly Canadian counterpart to Ouspensky’s famous tome Tertium Organum, which as noted above devotes a great deal of attention to the details and implications of Bucke’s work. Ouspensky (like Watson) sought to bridge evolution, mysticism, and transcendental idealism. Working from Kant’s conception of time and space as products of the human imagination, as interpretive methods rather than concrete truths, Ouspensky argues that mystical illumination – a sudden, ecstatic moment of perceptual expansion – effectively overcomes the limits of time/space perception. He advances the possibility of cosmic perception, one that introduces the mystical perception of the fourth dimension as a concrete and objective way to reach ‘a solution’ to the limitations of human perception (11). Ouspensky follows the Kantian precept that knowledge is a function of our perception of space and time: thus, if our perception is radically altered and accelerated by a developing spiritual or cosmic consciousness, our knowledge will also be radically altered and accelerated. All of these idealist tenets are echoed in various guises in Watson’s book. Like Bucke, Watson attempts to integrate his religious and philosophical theories with the rapid acceleration of new media and technology: ‘In a world where anyone can send a love message in a few moments to the farthest part of the globe, there can be no excuse for sending any other’ (‘The Master,’ 26). In Canada, the idealist philosophical tradition collected around the extremely distinguished philosopher and scholar at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Dr John Watson. He remains one of the most influential Kantian scholars, bridging the gap between the modernist crisis of faith and Kant’s almost Buddhistic notion of unconditioned realities. Watson used Kant’s proposition that ‘thought is a self-generating unity’ (J. Watson, 306) and Hegel’s development from Kant of the ‘original synthesis of apperception’ to link the limitations of perception to a rationally conceived universal ‘organic unity.’ Watson hailed this organic unity as part of a ‘new realism’ that was emerging in our degraded world (McKillop, 113). Despite the cosmic orientation of his followers and

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students, Watson conceived of this holistic spirituality in decidedly nonmystical terms. Watson’s conception of universal unity as the basis of an emerging realist movement, however, clearly connects to Evelyn Underhill’s then-popular definition of mysticism as ‘the art of union with Reality’ (qtd. in A. Davis, 4), and later even with the claim by Bertram Brooker, one of the foremost avant-garde Cosmic Canadians, that Bucke’s cosmic consciousness ‘debunked’ mysticism by proving its scientific reality: ‘the mystical experience is a thoroughly natural extension of powers possessed by every human being’ (‘Mysticism,’ 64). This natural sense of mysticism (or spiritual realism or cosmic realism or ‘new’ realism) dates back at least as far as Bucke himself, for in his book he already claimed that cosmic consciousness ‘must not be looked upon as being in any sense supernatural or supranormal – as anything more or less than a natural growth’ (Cosmic, 12). There was good reason, embedded in this realism, why Bucke’s theory appealed to the medical and scientific communities. Watson’s most famous student was the previously discussed unorthodox Methodist minister Salem Bland, a Cosmic Canadian who took Watson and Kant’s idealist philosophy – particularly Watson’s use of Kant’s conception of the sensus communis – as justification for radical social justice causes, including a Christian-socialist political economy. Though Bland was labelled ‘subversive’ by the RCMP and fired from Winnipeg’s Wesley College in 1917 for his anti-capitalist activism, he became deeply involved in Toronto’s mystical community. Like Albert Durrant Watson, Bertram Brooker, Lawren Harris, and many others, Bland was an active participant in the community surrounding Smythe’s Toronto Theosophical Society, and like Brooker, Harris, Ouspensky, Bucke, and both Watsons, he prophesied a new era of religious awakening. He was also, however, a committed radical leftist, leading Ian McKay to describe Bland’s landmark book The New Christianity (1920) as ‘one of the most exciting books produced by the Canadian left in this entire period … In The New Christianity Bland presented his readers with a sweeping cosmic vista of evolution, one that seemed destined to bring to humankind an entirely new way of life’ (232–3). Bland’s book begins with the familiar terms of radical industrial and economic revolution – ‘The revolution will be accomplished when the men of inventive and organizing directive ability recognize that their place is with the workers and not with the owners. Capitalistic control must pass away’ (17) – but grounds this sociopolitical initiative in religious terminology: ‘There is no diviner movement at work in the modern world. It is emancipative, educative, redemptive, regenerating’ (28). In this context, we can recognize Bland’s

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endeavour as an attempt to connect the revolutionary efforts of the radical left with the mystical ideas circulating in the emerging aesthetic avantgarde. Bland’s brazen arguments for the abolishment of capitalism include a sense of the revolutionary potential to launch a new civilization: ‘Old precedents have lost their authority, old calculations and presuppositions fail or mislead. It is a new age the world is entering’ (52). Bland’s new order, which he named ‘American Christianity,’ had an important precedent in Toronto with the Church of Revolution, established in 1907, which also sought to undo the alienating damage of capitalism through Christian socialism. The ferment of radical Christian socialism in Canada is, however, too far off topic to the present study beyond just acknowledging its existence as an active site of radical politics. Through the decided overlap in Toronto’s mystical, modernist, and radical leftist communities, Salem Bland and the painter and poet Lawren Harris became close acquaintances. Despite all the controversy surrounding Bland, Harris painted his famous portrait of the Methodist minister in 1925. Bland returned the favour that same year by reviewing a Group of Seven exhibition in his Toronto Star column. In his article, titled ‘The Group of Seven and the Canadian Soul,’ Bland praised the spiritual tone of their landscapes: ‘We are justified in taking this “Group of Seven” as representative of Canadian feeling in a high degree and as such I find their work extraordinarily exhilarating … I felt as if the Canadian soul were unveiling to me something secret and high and beautiful which I had never guessed – a strength and self-reliance and depth and a mysticism I had not suspected. ‘I saw as I had never seen before the part the wilderness is destined to play in molding the ultimate Canadian’ (6). Harris’s close association with Bland and the idealist tradition overlapped with his production of a widely acclaimed series of urban paintings and poetry – a phase that resulted in the publication of Canada’s first book of urban modernist free verse, Contrasts: A Book of Verse (1922). The dual vision of the poetry in this book (combining spiritual idealism with social justice) can be recognized by admitting the influence of social gospel on early Cosmic Canadian activity. Bland’s connections to Watson and the idealist tradition from Immanuel Kant also remind us how significant the conception of time and space was to a generation of Canadian intellectuals. Time, in fact, is a thematic trope of Harris’s poetry. In particular, Harris connects the perception of time with the degradation of the present, and the collapse of time, through ideas of infinity, as the antidote to the contemporary malaise. The ‘contrast’ fashions a division between permanence (connected with

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beauty, spirituality, transcendence, and the soul) and impermanence (connected with earthly ugliness, cynicism, degradation, and the body): a non-Buckean Cartesian duality that was strongly advocated by the Theosophical Society. The trouble, as the poems reveal, and a concept many in the international modernist movement struggled to reconcile, was the absolute disconnect between the world and the so-called spiritual realities. To dwell only in the material world indicates an unconscionable spiritual blindness. For instance, in his poem ‘Blasphemy,’ Harris defines spiritual irreverence as a failure to live with cosmic, infinite consciousness: ‘It is blasphemy / To be merely mortal’ (38). In ‘Isolation,’ he critiques the modern world for its lack of cosmic consciousness: Lost in time Direction is broken And scattered, And the fragments Sweetened All separately, alone In isolation anguish.

(52)

Throughout the poems, the working class who gain little spiritual relief from their exploited labours embody the futility of Harris’s perception of finite time. To dwell only in the spiritual world, however, in infinite time, was even then only a remote fantasy of millennial mystics. Even still, Harris plays with the fantasy in ‘This Fog’ through the figure of the paradox, imagining a time of ‘Multitudinous meetings in less than the wink of an eye, / And great home-comings without the least journeying’ (33). Similar prognostications were not uncommon in the mystical swirl of Toronto between the wars. While the Futurist, r/evolutionary, and utopian orientation of the Cosmic Canadians had been functionally mapped out by Bucke, and some of their philosophic, thematic, and formal concerns introduced by Denison, the two Watsons, and Harris, it was the reception of and reaction to the third edition of Cosmic Consciousness in 1923 by New York’s E.P. Dutton and Company that helped launch the avant-garde manifestation addressed here under the moniker of the Cosmic Canadians. As mentioned before, the period was ripe for mysticism and millennial visions. The Theosophical Society had entered its golden years of peak membership and influence (see Lacombe, passim), occultist authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Annie Besant, Aleister Crowley, and

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W.B. Yeats were visiting the country to access the rise in spiritualist and related aesthetic activity, and even the aforementioned Prime Minister King was participating in the very popular spiritualist parlour games. The optimism in Canada following the First World War (in poignant distinction to Europe’s disillusionment) left many keen and ready for some momentous indeed glorious occurrence. It was this generally optimistic and expectant zeitgeist that enabled the rise of interest in Bucke in 1923. The new edition coincided with a reprinting of Torontonian James H. Coyne’s Richard Maurice Bucke: A Sketch, edited and amended by Henry S. Saunders, also of Toronto, that included a rich biography detailing Bucke’s adventures fighting ‘Indians’ in the Sierra Nevadas, his international education, his pioneering work in the field of psychology, and the history behind the formation of his r/evolutionary ideas. The renewed interest in Bucke spread quickly across Canada’s mystical community. Canadian theosophist Matthew Gibson, for instance, embraced Bucke as an authority on the future progression of human consciousness, and used Bucke’s book as an absolute proof of ‘the scientific warrant … of the phenomena of illumination’ (Gibson, 150). Harris captured the enthusiasm and the upswing of interest in Bucke in Toronto with his ecstatic review of the third edition in 1924, where he proclaimed that Cosmic Consciousness was ‘the greatest book by a Canadian … the great heart of his book remains lofty and true’ (‘The Greatest,’ 38). In his review, Harris naturally connected Bucke to Ouspensky and encouraged his readers to embrace the idea of cosmic consciousness – ‘at the threshold of which humanity now stands’: ‘These two books belong to each other and should be read one after the other, the older one first. They can evoke an amazing awareness of all that is profound and high and glorious, they can inspire a soaring, breath-taking wonderment that overrides all quibbling, all littleness, all doubts. Ouspensky concludes that … art is the beginning of vision, that there is a logic of ecstasy, and that this higher logic is the only one worthy of consideration, that it contains complete corroboration of all the loftiest aspirations of men (38). Interestingly and appropriately, two phrases from this citation were used as the titles of studies of Harris and the Cosmic Canadians – ‘The Beginning of Vision’ by Joan Murray and The Logic of Ecstasy by Ann Davis. Toronto’s r/evolutionary mysticism reached a fevered pitch during the middle years of the decade. Notably, Harris’s enthusiasm for Bucke’s doctrine continued to grow, and reappeared in his landmark manifesto ‘Revelation of Art in Canada’ two years later. Harris was (as is well known) the founder and leader of the Group of Seven – an assortment of painters from various backgrounds committed

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to creating a distinctly Canadian style of landscape impressionism. They quickly achieved notoriety as Canada’s first modern art movement, even while they eschewed the more radical departures and experimentation underway in Europe. ‘Revelation of Art in Canada’ appeared in the aftermath of the Group of Seven’s acclaimed participation in the Wembley Exhibition in the United Kingdom in 1924 and their return show at the Grange in Toronto; both shows attracted considerable censure from conservative critics. While ostensibly written as a defence of the postcolonial Canadianness of the Group’s work, Harris’s 1926 article signalled his increasing commitment to exploring an uncompromising spiritual aesthetic that would contribute to as much as partake in the grand awakening of a mystical consciousness. Many of the members of the Group, particularly Arthur Lismer, Fred Varley, and J.E.H. MacDonald, were also notably interested in mystical themes – and could themselves be called more temperate Cosmic Canadians. But Harris’s attempt to find a formal correlative in art to his revolutionary spiritual themes led him to increasingly experiment with abstract geometries, creating a style that became increasingly incompatible with the landscape orientation of the Group. By 1934, Harris had stopped painting landscape canvases and dedicated the rest of his career to creating spiritual abstractions. It was in part Harris’s work in this direction that pushed the Cosmic Canadians into an avant-gardism parallel with and contemporary to international historical avant-garde movements. ‘Revelation’ appeared in the Canadian Theosophist, the official organ of the Canadian Theosophical Society, as an attempt to fuse Bucke’s spiritual r/evolution with the Group of Seven’s Canadian nationalism. Many of its themes were anticipated in Salem Bland’s review cited above, wherein he considers the spiritual impact of the wilderness in creating ‘the ultimate Canadian.’ Like Bland, Harris was a prominent member of the Canadian Theosophical Society, many of whose members were deeply interested in Bucke’s ideas. As part of his effort to marry his artistic and spiritual beliefs, Harris ran a series of workshops designed to help members incorporate art into their own spiritual practice. Geography became the lodestone of these efforts and of the article in question. Harris claimed that Canada’s climate, particularly our close proximity to the North, was a ‘source of spiritual flow’ that would alter consciousness and result in ‘an art more spacious, of a greater living quiet, perhaps a more certain conviction of eternal values’ (‘Revelation,’ 86). As if projecting and anticipating the history of the Group of Seven itself, Harris explains how the particular geography of his country contributes to the creation of a spiritual awareness distinctly similar to Bucke’s evolutionary basis for

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cosmic consciousness. The resonance of the land reveals an occult (i.e., hidden) spirit that gradually transforms the art to reflect ‘the exacting light of spiritual realms’: ‘We are in the fringe of the great North and its living whiteness, its loneliness and replenishment, it resignations and release, its call and answer – its cleansing rhythms … [The] spiritual meanings … [of the Canadian North] move into a man’s whole nature and evolve a growing, living response that melts his personal barriers, intensifies his awareness, and projects his awareness through appearances to the underlying hidden reality. This in time, in and through many men creates a persisting, cumulating mood that pervades a land, colouring the life of its people and increasing with every response of those people.’ Similar to the concurrent ambition of the European Surrealists to undo the repressive tendencies of Western civilization, Harris sought to uncover and unleash a hidden reality within humanity and thereby counteract Western materialism. The goal for both Harris and the Surrealists was an avant-garde fusion of art and life. Harris outlined three particular reasons to create an art that expressed Canada’s r/evolutionary spiritual landscape: ‘Thus, for us to create, to objectify our feelings and intuitions, our aspirations and devotion in art is a necessary, persisting and unescapable part of the unfolding of our life. Firstly, it is essential to the understanding of our environment and is eliciting power in our souls; and secondly, it is essential to the understanding of our life and the life of all peoples and times; and thirdly, it is essential if we are to comprehend, however little, the swift unfolding power of the creative spirit that gives faith and works within faith.’ These three precepts underscore Harris’s attachment to a particular time and place – Canada in the modern period – as well as his embrace of a timeless, cosmic consciousness that would transcend all material and temporal phenomena. Art and the creative spirit played a key role in bridging these seemingly contradictory realms and in helping humanity advance towards a more permanent paradigm shift: ‘Indeed the occurrence of a living art in every age, with every people, despite the constant down-drag of inertia and the dead weight of the ages, is a tremendous factor in the evolution of the soul’ (86). The linguistic implications of the shift into cosmic consciousness, which Bucke raised but did not address, resurfaced in Harris’s aesthetic approach to his own art. He would increasingly attempt to experiment with the formal dynamics of his own paintings to bridge his attachment to both a particular geography and cosmic consciousness. For Harris, these mystical aesthetics were his gateway into the international avant-garde community. By the time of his manifesto-esque article, Harris had already been invited to become a member of New York City’s

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avant-garde collective, the Société Anonyme. The group was organized by Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Katherine Dreier and made up of an exclusive inner circle of avant-garde painters and poets – from Kandinsky to Picasso to Dalí. Harris at the time was broadly acknowledged as Canada’s leading modern artist though other painters were already experimenting more aggressively. Harris, however, represented the extreme limit of Canadian tolerance for avant-garde aesthetics. It did not hurt his popularity in Canada that he came from one of the Dominion’s wealthiest and most recognizable families, nor that his close personal friends included luminaries like Vincent Massey. While the international recognition substantiates his participation in European and American avant-garde developments, Harris insisted that authentic Canadian art of the future would have to be dramatically different from European and American art. In his 1929 article ‘Creative Art and Canada,’ Harris explains the logic behind his rejection of the colonial imagination: ‘While imitative life or second hand living in European hand-me-downs is all too common amongst us, creative life is a comparatively rare manifestation and its immediate results are irritating and foreign … The creative faculty being spiritual, or rather, being the active channel for the infiltration of the light of the spiritual realm into the darkness of earth life, is universal and without Time. We thus have the seeming paradox that it needs the stimulus of earth resonance and of a particular place, people and time to evoke into activity a faculty that is universal and timeless (179). He writes of a ‘spiritual realism’ in modern art that was evidence of ‘a new race forming’ (181) and that would help Canadian artists both break their colonial legacy and trigger future innovations in art: ‘The Canadian artist serves the spirit of his land and people. He is aware of the spiritual flow from the replenishing North and believes that this should ever shed clarity into the growing race of America and that this, working in creative individuals, will give rise quite different from that of any European people’ (184). This concern with establishing an authentic connection to landscape, and with developing an art reflective of that authentic connection, anticipates the mid-century geopoetics of Ross, Dudek, and the TISH movement previously discussed. By 1927, in great part through Harris’s prescription for a r/evolutionary/revelationary art in Canada, the links and the differences between that new Canadian art and international avant-garde activity were generally understood and accepted by some practitioners in the local community. This emerging clarity allowed for increased confidence in considering new and avant-garde art from around the world. Thus, Lawren Harris

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served as local organizer and sponsor of the International Exhibition of Modern Art (IEMA) in Toronto in April of that year, which was discussed in the introduction. While careful to differentiate their own aesthetics from the radical aesthetics in the IEMA, the emerging local avant-garde community in Toronto embraced the need to pursue their own line of experimentation more aggressively. Aesthetic experimentation accelerated and, as befits an avant-garde manifestation, the work was distinctly multidisciplinary, formally inventive, and distinctly oriented towards a revolutionary end. Toronto-based artists began enthusiastically experimenting in painting, poetry, drama, music, sculpture, and prose. While critics like Michèle Lacombe point specifically to the Toronto Theosophical Society ‘for its role as a nurturing, cohesive force upon the intellectual community in one of its major stages of development’ (115), theosophy was but one manifestation of the Anschauung. Bucke’s ideas of cosmic consciousness served as a backdrop to this rise in activity, a supporting and venerated voice in a chorus of esoteric enthusiasm. The goal, which nonetheless coalesced from a diverse array of sources of inspiration, was to hasten the spiritual r/evolution by creating new kinds of art that embodied the grand borderblur of cosmic unity. One prominent and immediate development at the outset of the Cosmic Canadian activity was the establishment of the Little Theatre movement with national ambitions. Under the consecutive tutelage of Merrill Denison (son of Flora MacDonald Denison), Roy Mitchell (a committed mystic and prominent theosophist), Carroll Aitkin (a theosophist), and Herman Voaden (another prominent theosophist), Toronto’s Little Theatre movement was ripe ground for the mystical episteme of the period. In particular, the experimental work of Canada’s cosmic theatre begins with the Hart House Theatre that opened in 1919 and instantly became the country’s leading and most ambitious Little Theatre.4 In 1922, the Arts and Letters Club (the other important setting for the Cosmic Canadians alongside the Bon Echo Inn) also began aggressively funding dramaturgic experimentation by members of their club – whose members included all three Hart House directors, Brooker, all of the members of the Group of Seven, and many other important figures from this avant-garde node. The first noteworthy dramaturge was Merrill Denison, who gained acclaim for his fight against the established habits of the Canadian stage, which he decried for producing too sentimental and too blandly pseudo-Byronic poetic dramas. Denison developed a style of satiric realism that viciously poked fun at the traditions of Canada’s maudlin neo-romanticism. His tenure as artistic director at Hart House

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overlapped with both Mitchell and Voaden. Mitchell, who had been the first technical director of New York’s Greenwich Village Theatre and was Toronto’s best connection to Yeats, became director of Hart House Theatre in 1919 and also founded The Player’s Club, a resident company, that same year. Mitchell’s chief experiments in theatre were much less formally conservative than Denison’s, and included a spirited call for the development of little theatres throughout Canada and the need to break away from alien, foreign diction and methods. His creative push into extravagant and experimental set and lighting design coincided with his writing and production of dozens of experimental plays in both Ottawa and Toronto (Wagner, Introduction, 9). The distinctly spiritual nature of his theatrical ambitions would be summarized in Creative Theatre, published in 1929, and in a later essay5 on the relationship between contemporary thought and traditional spiritual systems called The Exile of the Soul, published posthumously by the Blavatsky Institute of Canada. Mitchell founded the Blavatsky Institute as a printing press designed to serve Toronto’s theosophical community (Lacombe, 103). Mitchell used his time in Toronto to develop a complex theory of a theosophical drama, a drama that would unleash a profound unity amongst all the composite elements of theatre. He called this unity ‘paradosis’ and explained its presence in theatre through distinctly transcendental language: ‘I think we can find a clue to it in that old idea that there is in each of us an all but untouched world of being above the realm of mind, a world that as the prophets and mystics used to say, we cannot enter alone but only hand in hand with others. The idea has been that beyond and transcending our individual consciousness there is an immensely more vivid group-consciousness which, because it is communal, can only be entered in an exercise of community’ (Creative, 5–6). Mitchell left Toronto before realizing his paradosis on the stage, and before the Cosmic Canadians had begun their aggressive aesthetic experimentation, but his early work – his research phase, if you will – at the Hart House Theatre proved a formative influence on the work of the much younger playwright Herman Voaden. Mitchell argued for a dynamic, expressionist theatre, something that Voaden successfully brought to stage in 1932 with the first examples of his r/evolutionary ‘Symphonic Expressionism’ theatre. Voaden became the head of the English department at Toronto’s Central High School of Commerce in 1928, where (paired with the abstract painter Lowrie Warrener) he began producing his first works.6 In that context, he developed a multimedia non-realist theatre intended to

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capture the new spirit rising in Canada. He called his new type of theatre ‘Symphonic Expressionism’ following Kandinsky’s famous definition of ‘symphonic’ as a ‘Complex composition, consisting of various forms, subjected more or less completely to a principal form … possessed of a strong inner value’ (Kandinsky, 56). In terms of the physical theatre, symphonic translates into a swirl and interpenetration of media on the stage, essentially the melding of various artistic media, including dance, visual components, music, and drama, in the exploration of a central theme or gnosis. ‘Expressionism’ in this context refers to Voaden’s symbolic and spiritual ambitions of using the medium to delve into new territories of human sense experience: ‘The new theatre awaits the playwright who will conceive and project his theme in beauty of word, light, color, movement and sound. It has been demonstrated that poetry, painting, dancing, music, sculpture and architecture are capable of vital translation to the theatre and powerful expression within it in conjunction with each other. When the composite artist-playwright appears he will use all these! He will create the new symphonic language of the stage. He will usher in the new theatre’ (Voaden, ‘Creed,’ 5). His stage became a truly multimedia swirl of narrative, song, poetry, painting, and dance. To the chagrin of conservative Toronto audiences, the sensory overload of his theatre came at the expense of narrative and conventional theatrical structuring devices. Voaden justified the sacrifice of these familiar elements of dramaturgy as necessary to the creation of a theatre that would counteract the spiritual cynicism pouring out of the Great Depression–ravaged Western world: ‘In a world fraught with dissatisfaction and haunted with a sense of spiritual inadequacy the theatre remains a repository for great hope, vision and belief. To youth it never gives dusty answers. The ideal of a symphonic expression is difficult of fulfillment. That is its challenge. Let us bring to the theatre the solidity and power of sculpture and architecture, the glory of painting, the spiritual immediacy of music. Let us restore to it the greatness of poetry, dance and ritual it once knew. Let us combine these in new plays written and produced in a language richer and more complete than heretofore evolved’ (‘Creed’). His attempts to revolutionize the Canadian theatre through the introduction of spiritual tropes and spiritualized techniques won over converts from the broad and growing Cosmic Canadian community. Indeed, while he developed his new theatre from Eugene O’Neill’s experimental work in the United States, he fused that work with the added vocabulary, intonation, and intent of Toronto’s Cosmic Canadian movement. Voaden consistently wrote and published manifesto-esque essays that spelled out precisely

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how he felt that his personal theatre and all the Canadian arts must endeavour to capture the intensity and spiritual fervour of the Group of Seven. In one such essay from 1928, published in The Canadian Forum, he argues for a pan-Canadian theatre: There is a feeling that the theatre has a deeper purpose to express, a finer message to bring; that it must be given new force and prominence in Canadian life; that it must bear a closer relation to our ideals and activities. The time for colonial dependence and slavish imitation is gone in art, as in politics. Canada has a definite part to play in the world. The artists, notably the Group of Seven, were among the first to strike out boldly. They carved new materials out of our landscape and evolved a different technique to handle them. It is probably true that the painters are the heralds always of wider and more far-reaching artistic developments. They make us artistically aware of a new scene. This new scene must produce its effect on character, and both scene and character are immediately at hand for the novelist, poet, and dramatist. (Voaden, ‘A National Drama League,’ 105)

This kind of transcendental homage to landscape continuously appears in his plays, such as in the euphoric conclusion of his 1932 Earth Song that finishes with a call towards an evolution in human form that could transcend the present limitations – identical in spirit to Bucke’s illuminated individuals with cosmic consciousness: What is this cry of weariness? Know earth, O man. Seek beauty. Fear not. Know earth. Earth is your power, your peace. In the strength and loveliness of the earth perfect yourself, becoming as these two – godlike – supernal! (Earth Song, 28)

Voaden’s aesthetic avant-garde work in the theatre, particularly his fusion of earth consciousness, nationalism, and cosmic consciousness, was popularly received by the Cosmic Canadian community and became a rallying point for ongoing activity and experimentation. Bertram Brooker’s award-winning novel in 1936, for instance, would echo Voaden’s call to ‘know earth’ in its very title – Think of the Earth. Indeed, under Mitchell and Voaden’s tutelage, Toronto’s Little Theatre with its communal nature drew together the diverse and multidisciplinary interests of the Cosmic Canadians. For a given production, actors could include sculptors, painters, musicians, and dancers, while Lawren

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Harris and other members of the Group of Seven designed sets for the plays. Voaden’s production of Brooker’s play ‘Within: A Drama of Mind in Revolt’ (1935) – in which Brooker himself played a starring role (Lacombe, 110) – turned the stage into the inside of a human head with competing desires, guilts, and demons, driving what plot and dialogue there was amid the colours, music, and dancing. Lawrence Mason reviewed the play for the Toronto Globe; he wrote: the ‘presentation, with choral speaking, massed groups, sculptural poses, shadow effects, contrasting voice-timbres, etc. was very striking … Evreinov’s “Theatre of the Soul,” Goethe’s opening soliloquy in Act II, Scene 1 of “Faust,” and other similar “sources” come to mind’ (Mason, 9; with acknowledgment to Anton Wagner’s ‘Herman’ for pointing me to this article). Voaden produced and directed a total of three symphonic expressionist plays written by Brooker, on top of the thirteen experimental plays he himself wrote and published.7 He also directed and produced plays and poems in his distinctive, experimental style by Yeats, Whitman, O’Neill, and Toronto poet E.J. Pratt. Another major figure of the Cosmic Canadian avant-garde that needs to be acknowledged is the enigmatic mystical imagist poet, W.W.E. Ross. Ross has been described as a strange man for his brooding silence and eccentric behaviour and essentially hermit-like lifestyle. Still, he was a regular participant in Toronto’s esoteric community, experimenting with spiritualism and eventually with a form of automatic writing he called ‘hypnogogism’ – a form that bears direct association with techniques developed by the European Surrealists. He incorporated explicitly mystical themes into his writing. His famous and frequently anthologized poems ‘Passage’ (Irrealities, 206) and ‘Death’ (207), for instance, allude to death in relation to geography and colour: ‘is it / dark / is it / black / is it / black is it / dark / is it dark?’ Trehearne connects Ross’s frequent explorations of esoteric themes to an aesthetic or Decadent mannerism (Aestheticism, 33). On the other hand, there is substantial evidence to support the argument that Ross’s esoteric dalliances were not affectations or literary symbolisms, but more like – to borrow a phrase from Ann Davis’s discussion of Brooker – a ‘sustaining beam in the erection of a philosophy’ (xiii). In other words, mystical themes in Ross are anything but an indication of autotelism: Ross embraced occultism and the naturalness of supernaturalism explicitly. He begins his poem ‘On the Supernatural,’ for instance, with the assertion that ‘We must affirm the supernatural … For it is ever near and ever real’ (80). Other poems such as ‘Identity?’ address ‘the spirits of the dead’ directly (Irrealities, 33).

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‘Visitant’ muses about the geographical relationship between the earthly terrain and the spirit world, while ‘The Unseen Dwellers’ openly wonders about the morality of accessing the spirit world ‘in dark séance’ (122). Trehearne allows his discussion of Ross’s imagism to steer momentarily into consideration of his mysticism and spiritualism, but he concludes that such observations ‘have a limited usefulness’ (69). Reframing Ross from the autotelic tradition of Canadian modernism (with its debt to Decadence and Aestheticism) to Canadian avant-gardism and especially Cosmic Canadian avant-gardism dramatically alters the significance of how we read and interpret his handling of mystical themes. For, rather than symbolic gestures, these themes become attempts to render the thing itself. Avant-garde writing has been identified more often than not by its formal deviation from literary conventions. As a result, the revolutionary content of avant-garde writing tends to be minimized in comparison to the extensive attention paid to formal features, especially in discussions of free verse, concrete poetry, or sound poetry. Despite the extended attention paid to Ross’s innovations with the imagist technique, and to his distinctive two-columns-of-juxtaposing-text method, the revolutionary mystical and spiritualist content of his writing has been largely ignored – especially by those critics who have consistently framed Ross as the first modernist poet in the country. Still, his interest in mysticism and spiritualism was the foundation for his interest in the Surrealist movement and his eventual experiments in that direction which led to translations of various Surrealist and avant-garde poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, André Salmon, Federico Garcia Lorca, and René Char.8 The avant-garde frame will inevitably shift how we read such overlooked and enigmatic poems as ‘Metroge’: A cube a sphere an octahedron. The shining cube, the shining sphere, the octahedron glows with a dull light. The shining of the cube reflecting the radiant energies dropped from the sun; the glittering of the smooth sphere; the discontentment of the octahedron. ‘Sphere’ he said ‘and cube, I know both of you and know you well as the moon knows its other side that we never see. But what of the octahedron?’ The answer was, briefly, this. ‘Granted the existence of a certain favouritism among the more geometrically abstruse figures; in spite of this the preferment

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shown not being welcome could not therefore be tolerated and the only alternative appeared to be the elimination of either one or the other.’ A cube a sphere an octahedron. (Ross, 12)

Given its extreme, abstract nature, relying on mathematical symbols, a disjointed and mysterious dialogue, and a repetitious conclusion befitting a riddle, it is difficult if not impossible to connect such a work to conventional thematic concerns of Canada’s modernists even at their most experimental. The fact that this prose poem was written in 1928 raises the possibility that it was an ekphrastic response to some of the experimental and decidedly geometrical canvases shown in the International Exhibition of Modern Art in Toronto in 1927 (similar to Brooker’s poem ‘The Destroyer,’ as discussed below). On the other hand, there was another art exhibit in 1927 that also drew considerable attention from the Cosmic Canadians: an enormous Renaissance exhibition that included work by Leonardo da Vinci, among many other masters. The exhibit was followed by a series of lectures on da Vinci, and even led one Torontonian, Mr John P. Bickle, to purchase an original and authenticated da Vinci picture of the Madonna and Child in 1928. Da Vinci might be significant to a discussion of Ross’s poems, not only because there are dozens of citations in the local Toronto media to his art and work that year, but because of his connections to the occultist tradition through his investigations of geometry and form. In 1509, Leonardo da Vinci painted a series of geometrical objects as illustrations to Luca Pacioli’s De Divina Proportione. The shapes include a cube, a sphere, and an octahedron, as well as others with mystical significance. In the text, Pacioli lists five regular bodies, through combinations of which many other dependent objects can be formed. Of these five, he connects the cube to the earth, while the octahedron is linked to air (the other figures are the tetrahedron or the pyramid, the icosahedron, and the dodecahedron). Pacioli’s list is borrowed from Plato’s elite pantheon of regular solids, which he developed in Timaeus into a complete cosmology of the universe. In that list, the sphere is also connected to the earth by its orbit. The mystery and the difference of the octahedron in Ross’s poem might stem from the fact that it is given a more privileged, abstract, and mystical role than either the cube or the sphere in Plato and Pacioli’s system. Mystical scientists, including Kepler, Newton, and of course da Vinci, have turned to Plato’s geometry as a key to Gnostic wisdom. As his archival papers attest, Ross envisioned himself as being a mystical scientist, and even went so far as

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to mail his prophecies (all meticulously calculated) to the Canadian Department of National Defence to aid in the war effort. Some of these prophecies extended decades into the future, up until the time of a foreseen Canadian revolution. It is likely best to consider Ross’s writing as straddling two active aesthetic communities in Canada at the time: the avant-garde Cosmic Canadians and the modernist imagist community. Thinking back to the models that propose a ‘colonial lag,’ it should be noted now that Canadian writers – including Ross – were not nearly as far cut-off from the international community as is often presumed. Though Canadians had no modernist little magazines of their own that were exclusively devoted to aesthetic material, Canadian imagists were actively publishing in the top forums in the world. Florence Randall Hamilton (Dorothy Livesay’s mother) was publishing poetry in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, and was close friends with the Montreal imagist poet Louise Morey Bowman, who released collections of free-verse poetry in 1922 and 1924 after she moved to Toronto in 1921. Raymond Knister, also in Toronto, was also publishing work in Poetry, Voices, The Midland, and This Quarter. In 1922, Florence Ayscough co-authored Fir-Flower Tablets with the acclaimed American pioneer in imagism, Amy Lowell. As is more commonly known and recorded in the canonical histories, by the year 1927, Toronto publishers had also released book-length free-verse experiments in imagism by Toronto-area writers F.O. Call, Arthur Phelps, and Arthur Stringer. Stringer and Call’s books, however, contained exuberant apologies for the modernization of poetic technique, and both abandoned their experimentation in the 1930s. Dorothy Livesay describes her experience of Toronto’s literary community during the 1920s as follows: ‘[Raymond] Knister sometimes appeared at our Toronto house as well, for my mother was preparing an anthology of Canadian verse (never published) to which Knister contributed. Robert Finch, she told me, thought highly of these bare, unmusical imagist verses. And in reading them I, too, was suddenly stirred, as if I had found my own voice speaking … There was a feeling of boom in the air, a quest for excitement which, however, had not of the carnival cynicism about it which attacked American life and literature’ (50, 52). Other writers experimenting with modernist literary techniques and ideas active in Toronto at the time include Mazo de la Roche, Lyon Sharman, Albert Watson, Clare Hopper, and Edward Sapir. Morley Callaghan, Ernest Hemingway, and Frank Prewett (who was associated with the Bloomsbury Group in England) also directly contributed to and participated in the rise of modernist activity in Canada. Others, such as Leo Kennedy, Leon

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Edel, A.M. Klein, and A.J.M. Smith, were active in the periphery, already contributing to the new culture emerging. In other words, Ross was hardly the total aberration or isolated modernist he is often presumed to have been. By the 1930s, Ross had pushed beyond simple imagist poems, and was increasingly experimenting with Surrealist methods and techniques. As evidenced in the recent volume of his selected poems Irrealities, Sonnets & Laconics, Ross was actively translating acclaimed avant-garde authors such as Max Jacob, Apollinaire, and André Salmon during this period. His experimental works such as ‘Metroge’ (12) and ‘Explanation’ (193) belie an interest in the symbolic weight of the ‘empire of geometry’ (‘Reality,’ 190) that inspired cubist experiments in form, whereas his ‘After the Battle’ (25), ‘Dream-Way’ (66), ‘The Image’ (134), ‘Incident’ (124), all push far into Surrealist styles, syntax, and disruption: ‘After the battle the soldiers danced and ate up the enemy’s dead. No one tried to stop them. “Help!” cried one of the corpses before it was devoured. The way lay clear before them. Action dictated solely by considerations of selfinterest and one’s own stomach consisted in doing just one thing. So that corpse too was eaten and the dance continued’ (‘After the Battle,’ 25). As the first Canadian to experiment with Surrealism proper, just years after the Cosmic Canadians first appeared as a formal group in 1924, Ross functions as an intriguing and important transitional figure between the Cosmic Canadians and the Automatists discussed in the following chapter. Despite this experimental turn, the material housed in the Ross archives (at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library) suggests that he did not continue his dabbling in Surrealism after the Second World War. The Destroyer: Bertram Brooker’s R/evolutionary Literature According to Ann Davis, Bertram Brooker, Canada’s first multidisciplinary and prototypical avant-gardist, underwent his first ‘real’ mystical experience in 1923. She found the details of Brooker’s mystical experience in an unpublished, archived biographical novel ‘A Candle in Sunshine,’ the title of which was taken from plate 21 of William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (293). The illustrated passage from Blake refers to lesser writers such as Swedenborg who will only ever be but a candle in sunshine to the true ‘masters.’ Brooker appears in the novel, barely disguised, as the character Bernard Bradley, but his foreword admits the autobiographical nature of the project. Brooker’s embarkation into the realm of such mystical masters took place in July 1923, in

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Dwight, near Lake of Bays, Ontario. He was drawn to the water where ‘everything became one; everything in the universe, in the world was one’ (‘A Candle,’ 24–5). The experience altered his sense of aesthetic value such that henceforward all of his art, including his widely celebrated paintings, his theatre, and his award-winning writing, reflected his commitment to illumination. While I was researching Brooker at the University of Manitoba archives, I happened to discover his personal copy of Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness in the library’s general stacks. In the marginalia of his copy of this landmark book, Brooker wrote that he experienced mystical illumination ‘when he was 33 years old’ (340), which would indicate the year 1921. More significantly than a quibble over the year, Brooker’s copy is filled with notes, comments, and observations about Bucke’s evolutionary scheme. By 1923, after his profound personal experience of mystical illumination and the same year that Bucke’s book reappeared in print, Brooker embraced the unified-universe cosmology implied by cosmic consciousness. As he explained in one of his many attempted experimental autobiographies: ‘Cosmic consciousness [–] the consciousness of man as a creature in a cosmic scheme – is as old as recorded history’ (‘Biography of a Mind,’ 4–5). With the onset of his self-described ‘mystical phase’ (‘Connor’) – a period that could arguably be said to begin with his arrival in Toronto in 1920 and last right up until the end of the Second World War – Brooker commenced a torrent of artistic activity to broad acclaim and influence. Alongside choir and theatre work and his constant attendance at performances, events, and social functions about town (not to mention his professional life as an advertiser), Brooker also began painting, editing, and writing in great abundance during this heightened period of activity. The guiding aesthetic focus for all of his activity was the experience and importance of mystical illumination. Brooker’s mystical phase and ramped-up production coincided with the arrival of the International Exhibition of Modern Art (IEMA) in Toronto in 1927. He provides us with a number of compelling examples in theatre, poetry, and short fiction of the rise of activity that was triggered by the exhibition. For instance, shortly after the exhibition, Brooker wrote an astonishing poem called ‘The Destroyer’ that blurred Nietzsche’s negativism with Bucke’s idealism. Though it is uncertain whether the poem was a direct response to the IEMA, the poem, unpublished in Brooker’s lifetime, is a landmark in Canadian letters for articulating in verse form the avant-garde ambitions of the Cosmic Canadians. Faintly reminiscent of Wilson MacDonald’s redeemer figure, the poem depicts a Nietzschean prophet heralding the dawn of a new spiritual age and of

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a profound shift in human consciousness. Brooker indulged himself in exploring the conscious thoughts of such a figure unfettered from the weight of historical or narrative realism. ‘The Destroyer’ explores the contrast between an enlightened individual with cosmic consciousness and the unenlightened population of the world: I have been where there is no evil and I have come back and they who are around me look dark they move around me like sleep walkers

(lines 8–12)

The first-person narrative documents specific concepts abundant in the modern world that need to be corrected or ‘destroyed’: such as the concept of ‘selves’ (line 2), ‘law’ and ‘sin’ (lines 15–16), ‘good’ (line 23), and even ‘god’ (line 34). The Nietzschean call to move beyond good and evil – a concept, of course, that long predated Nietzsche’s own career – emerged in the Destroyer’s desire to lead people beyond their sheltered conception of human affairs. Brooker explains the Judeo-Christian basis of this precept in his essay ‘Language and Life’: ‘The Adam and Eve story is also a parable of naming. It is a myth of man’s growing knowledge of good and evil, in a world that was formerly perfect – not divided into good and evil.’ Brooker’s novels and poetry consistently imagine the reversal of this foundational myth of good and evil. As he clarifies, ‘My gospel, if you can call it that, is simply that Opposites do not exist’ (‘Mankindness,’ 2). The Destroyer figure seeks to lead humanity beyond religion and into an awareness of our place within a cosmic unity that overwhelms any possible opposition or difference: I have been where there is no god and I have come back and all about me are believers believers in this and that propping themselves up with fancies they cannot face existence alone they cannot bear the responsibility of being the cause of all they see

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but we the selves are the only causes there are we are the only creators there are there is no creator there is no creation except our own creation where I have been was not created it is always what have I to do with creating I am come back only to destroy

(lines 22–53)

The web of human civilization, built by cords made of language, has formed a conceptual encasement around human consciousness that Brooker’s Destroyer is eager to disrupt. The vagueness of all human language contributes to fallacies inherent in empty religious creed as in the erroneous semantic conceptions of right and wrong. While other modernists saw hypocrisies and inconsistencies in Western metaphysics and ideology, Brooker looked beyond such criticism and recognized that even their straightforward rejection involved a participation in linguistically based, and therefore flawed, logic. A total revamp – a revolution predicated on the evolutionary expansion of human consciousness and thus a distinctly spiritual r/evolution – was therefore necessary to upset the traditional dependencies. Stylistically, Brooker matched this thematic by using the pared-down language of statements of fact and intent. There is no conventionally conceived time or place to the poem, and only a hazy outline of specific, traditionally understood characters. The poem’s internal logic relies upon a chronology of events: the Destroyer undergoes a transformation and spiritual evolution; the Destroyer awakens from the experience, deeply changed; the difference is recorded in the – essentially – dogmatic collection of aphorisms that composes the poem. As alluded to above, Bucke’s idea that language was proof of and structural enabler of selfconsciousness implied that authors endowed with cosmic consciousness would necessarily have a new relationship to language. This implication

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finds its first manifestation in literature in Brooker’s attempt to rework poetic language to suit the next phase. The poem’s empty language echoes the emptiness of the social world it depicts, but alludes to the mystical transformation as the necessary means to end the linguistic disconnect. Interestingly, Brooker depicts the transformation as having occurred within a vaguely metaphorical place defined by the negation of specific words and their associated concepts: ‘I have been / where there is no evil’ (lines 8–9). As in the transformation of the idea of avantgardism from the geographical expansion of the state by soldiers to a more metaphorical ideological progression by philosophers and artists, Brooker’s r/evolutionary setting occurs not in the physical world but in the mind. The time and place of this transformation are specifically defined by the experience of the subtraction of erroneous language – the ideas of selves, god, good, and evil – that binds and blinds contemporary human life. It is a place defined by negative characteristics, by a negative projection and a negative dialectic. The poem’s language offers only minimal emotional, spatial, or imagistic content. Instead, the poem through negative invocation asserts the possibility of a new conception of language and of life that must be experienced outside of the poem in order to be understood: as with the tradition of cosmic enlightenment, only initiates can truly know the ‘place’ the Destroyer has just returned from. One must be transformed before it is possible to access the content of the words on the page. The content, however, happens outside language – in the metaphorical ‘place’ of mystical experience. The poem provides no directions for getting there, only the bold declaration of the avant-garde Canadian artist’s role in unredeemed society upon achieving cosmic consciousness. Other poems that Brooker produced during this same period undermine the expressive and dogmatic tendencies of ‘The Destroyer’ and work towards realizing a formalist and linguistic equivalent to cosmic consciousness. As I have argued in another context, through all of his literary activity Brooker questioned the ability of language to document, express, and represent spiritual consciousness. Poems like ‘A Modern Dance’ and ‘The Iceman’ explore a poetics of rupture by including neologisms, disruptive grammar, and disjunctive narratives that have a cumulative effect of destabilizing the reflective nature of language. As a fundamental principle of his poetics, Brooker believed that language was a faulty tool precisely because it was invented by humans and therefore inevitably subject to the same distortions that limit the human mind. He explains, in the unpublished essay ‘Language and Life: (Nouns and Verbs),’ that language and thought were abstractions from and thereby

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distortions of the world: ‘There are moments when we recapture the innocence of Eden, the wonder of being alive in a world without names – moments when we erase from our mind all the names, the nouns, the labels, that have been placed on everything. We see that Action is the reason why the world began, and that Thought merely tries to put tags on it.’ While the moments he describes in this anti-noun essay include the ecstatic moment of cosmic consciousness, his argument attends more to the broader and more common experience of acting without conscious will: a moment without language in the conscious mind, and an experience of the world without mediation. His poetry attempts to draw attention to the limitations of language while insinuating the reality and integrity of such moments of experience behind and beyond language. The rare moment of mystical connection to the infinite universe, or the experience of cosmic consciousness, went even further in escaping selfconsciousness by enabling an individual to dwell within a state of total awareness of the ground pattern of life itself: it was to feel ‘the whole of Living, and ourselves in the midst of it, seeing the pattern, sensing the perfection, knowing that there can be no flaws in it, sure that it must have been ordered so from the beginning or the world would crack. At one step we pass from the puzzle of Life into the Paradise of Living.’ For Brooker, nouns such as ‘Life’ signify an unnatural detachment from the world. Verbs, in contrast, such as ‘Living’ signify a profoundly spiritual participation in the cosmos. The genuine artist must first rise up against bourgeois conventions, and must, furthermore, rise above the cacophony of the modern world and resist the appeal of accepting the surface validity of distinctions and categories. The power of art lies in unifying diverse objects, drawing them together despite the modern world’s penchant for taxonomy: ‘It is the modern artist and poet who is correcting this passion for precision which spreads from science and mechanized industry over our whole life’ (‘High Places’). In his poem ‘Two Modern Dances,’ Brooker describes a spectacular performance by the modern Russian ballet dancer Kalinova (also depicted in his novella The Wrong World) by mapping the colourful choreography of her movements on stage. As the performance reaches its climatic frenzy, Brooker’s description of the event dissolves into a circular string of verbs, adjectives, and adverbs – but no nouns, no subject, and no indication of self-consciousness: stately joyous light parading strutting suave erect imperious sweeping circles

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circles wheeling stately joyous light parading strutting suave erect imperious

In the dance, in the act of moving the body without self-consciousness, the dancer embodies the ideal of Brooker’s philosophy of the verb. Brooker, in fact, in a later essay, defines his ideal artist as one ‘who discards the straight-jacket of conventionality with all its inhibitions and its ridiculously sophisticated notions of what constitutes “red-bloodedness,” and who lets his body become creative – lets it respond to the energy it feels within it. The dance is precisely the most natural outlet of energy’ (‘The Seven Arts,’ 12 October 1929). He was attempting to resuscitate language so that it might more authentically represent genuine – ecstatic – experience or at the least to convey the energy produced by such a transformative event. With specific concepts like nouns (or, as in ‘The Destroyer,’ the concept of selves) erased, a solecistic language can begin to paradoxically reflect or evoke genuine extra-linguistic experience. Brooker is far more acclaimed for his work in painting than in literature, being the first Canadian to exhibit abstract art in this country.9 That event took place in January 1927, just a few months before the arrival of the IEMA. The paintings, like his poetry, work from cosmic consciousness impressionistically and abstractly rather than attempting to depict the experience realistically or objectively. Brooker was also active in Toronto’s emerging theatre community, with two of his experimental and abstract plays reaching the stage in 1935 and 1936. During this period, Brooker became a leading public face of the Cosmic Canadian avant-garde manifestation through his editorial and design work on the 1928–29 and the 1936 Yearbook of the Arts as well as his weekly column on modern art in Canada, published across the country by the Southam newspaper chain (there were eighty-six columns spanning three years in total). Brooker’s essays in these books, columns, and other forums explored the distinctive intersection between experimental modern art and Buckean spirituality that defines the Cosmic Canadians. His essay-cum-manifesto ‘When We Awake!’ in the first Yearbook caused paroxysms of joy among many Cosmic Canadians for its fine articulation of the desires and frustrations of their avant-garde initiative across the arts. The essay outlines the specific and pragmatic problems of producing an art predicated on ‘unity’ in Canada, but proceeds to outline the heroic efforts by specific figures to overcome the difficulties. The great hope of awakening, used by Brooker in the most r/evolutionary and mystical sense, lay ahead in the future: ‘the awakened consciousness of a new people with a new future, will itself

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become a quickening power, jogging laggards out of their dose in the bosom of dying orthodoxies, or counteracting the narcotic effects of scepticism, so that religion – and hence art – becomes vital and fresh; an hourly response to life’s exultations!’ (‘When We Awake,’ 17). In many respects, while Harris was certainly the most public and accomplished representative of the avant-garde initiative, Brooker’s multidisciplinary and unabashedly experimental art and criticism makes him the Cosmic Canadian’s most distinctive exemplar. His experimental ambitions carried him into music, sculpture, and even cinema, all of which explored spiritual, mystical, and cosmic themes. Though critics have responded unevenly to the book, the great novel of the Cosmic Canadians is Bertram Brooker’s remarkable 1936 work Think of the Earth. As an acknowledgment of its expression of the episteme in which it appeared, the novel won the country’s very first Governor General’s Award (then called the Tuidsmuir Award) for literature in 1937. It has been compared (both positively and negatively) to Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment for its brooding, psychological portrait of a would-be criminal justifying a murder. Geoffrey Tavistock, the would-be murderer, battles the vagaries of mystical illumination and a paranoid delusion that compels him towards homicide. He contemplates the act not as part of a financial scheme or as an act of vigilante justice, but as an act that would unleash a spiritual revolution that would alter the entire world. The novel thus includes explicitly avant-garde themes, in the character’s ambition to lead the world forward to a new, postChristian era. Jesus Christ, he claims, never experienced guilt, and therefore had no insight into or knowledge of the true nature of good and evil (Think of the Earth, 224). An act of murder (rather than self-sacrifice) that was committed innocently would create a new kind of martyrdom that would herald the new epoch. Tavistock would become ‘the Comforter – a greater Christ’ (209). What makes the novel remarkable and even more narratologically interesting is the fact that Tavistock realizes a logical error in his ecstatic projections. He backs away from his spiritually revolutionary act of murder, but does not back away from his criticisms of the Christian religion in the modern era. Through this exploration of the relationship between a spiritual revolution and the existing dominant ideology, Brooker’s text tests and probes the realistic realization of the Cosmic Canadian’s spiritual r/evolution. Despite this remarkable interrogation of what Frye would call the Christian and Western mythos, critics have been consistently distracted by the apparent conventionality of Brooker’s prose in Think of the Earth.

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David Arnason, for instance, claims that Brooker’s ‘innate conservatism’ prevented his writing from progressing beyond ‘nineteenth-century mysticism’ (‘Reluctant,’ 84). In fairness, the avant-garde aesthetics and experimentation Brooker pursued in the other arts seems to falter in Think of the Earth, enabling critic Sherrill Grace to declare: ‘Not even in a Canada between the wars could Brooker’s fiction be seen as modernist’ (‘Figures,’ 73). Brooker was the artist responsible for paintings like ‘Sounds Assembling’ and ‘Alleluia’ and for poems like ‘The Ice Man’ and ‘Two Modern Dances,’ and for many critics his ‘conservative’ writing does not seem to match his peak experimental innovations. When compared to those wonderfully strange and ambitious novels of Joyce or Lewis or Woolf – novels that have galvanized generations of readers in either utter puzzlement or rapturous delight – critics like Arnason and Grace find Brooker’s novels lacking the ‘intellectual donnée’ of modernism (Arnason, ‘Reluctant,’ 84). Instead, Brooker wrote what seems on the surface to be a rather straightforward prose rendition of a strange story of an egotistical man who got over himself by not killing someone. In his remarkable book on the modern Canadian novel, Glenn Willmott attempts to contrast Think of the Earth to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The comparison, however, underscores Think of the Earth’s difference from conventional modernism rather than illuminating its particular variant of the kind. The absence of horror – be it colonial or as manifest in Kurtz – separates it in such a profound way that loose echoes (Willmott argues that the character David Livingstone Linklater performs a ‘Kurtzian type’ function in the text despite his absolute powerlessness and domesticity throughout the book) do not overwhelm the vast differences between the ideology embodied in the two narratives. In short, there is nothing like Brooker’s novel in the modernist canon. But critics have all too often overlooked the fact that Brooker’s approach to the form and style of his prose fiction at the time of writing paralleled his aesthetic vision that led to his geometrical abstract canvases in the same period. In one of his weekly ‘Seven Arts’ columns, he explained his sense of how modernism had altered narrative structure in prose works: ‘The modernistic artist is not concerned … with real heroes menaced by real villains. In so far as he uses natural forms at all he is concerned only with their ‘relationships’ and not with their ‘character.’ Like the scientist he is concerned with the geometry of the universe, and not with its physical appearance’ (‘The Seven Arts,’ 3 August 1929). Brooker adds that geometrically imagined, abstract literature constituted the characteristic method of modernity: ‘It constitutes the present “direction” of conscious-

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ness. We may not like it, but we cannot ignore it.’ Modernism shaped the form, but Brooker attempted to connect this development in method to his conception of the emerging consciousness. The shift in consciousness that Brooker refers to only partially implies the pioneering aesthetic developments in formal techniques occurring in centres around Europe and in New York. It also includes the emerging episteme of modern mysticism. In the international context, this extends from Wassily Kandinsky’s call for a more spiritually infused art to Helena Blavatsky’s fight against soulless materialism. In Canada more specifically, this includes the rising wave of mystical modernism. Indeed, many Cosmic Canadians played a direct role in fostering and encouraging Think of the Earth, including Mitchell, Harris, and Fred Housser. Housser, a mystic though somewhat of an anti-modernist, was the author of the influential book A Canadian Art Movement: The Story of the Group of Seven (1926) that introduced the painters to the nation as a coherent art movement. It was he, in fact, as Brooker notes, who proposed the concept of the novel in the first place (‘The Bread of Carefulness,’ 16 April 1926). And behind these contributors, it is not too difficult to identify and locate the influence of Dr Richard Maurice Bucke in the novel. In fact, and perhaps as a veiled nod to his Cosmic Canadian peers, Brooker used Bucke as the model for one of his characters in the novel: the affable Dr Sturge Bundy. Like Bucke, Bundy is an alienist, a devout reader of Whitman, and a believer in the possibility of mystical illumination. The shift in consciousness and cosmic consciousness had another international correlative that Brooker also incorporates into his novel. In a 1930 review published in the Canadian Forum, Brooker compared John Middleton Murry’s God (1929) to Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness. Brooker begins the review by offering glowing praise of Bucke’s work, and proceeds to consider how cosmic consciousness informs Murry’s modern occultist text. Murry attempts to explain his own personal mystical illumination through complex literary analysis and subjective reading methods of great English authors like Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Keats. Murry’s book was widely distributed, widely read, and contributed to a longstanding, very public debate between its author and T.S. Eliot, conducted over a period of fifteen years in the pages of many journals, including The Criterion, of which Eliot was the editor. Eliot was hesitant about the overly subjective nature of Murry’s reliance on literary accounts of the experience of mystical illumination, which in both canonical literature and common accounts consistently depends on vague interpretations of and unquantifiable assertions about ambiguous literary passages. Eliot honed

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his criticism of Murry by adding that: ‘[Mr. Murry] seems to me to falsify not only philosophy and religion, but poetry too … Mr. Murry transforms Shakespeare, Coleridge, Keats and Goethe into prophets of his own philosophy … But what bothers me especially in Mr. Murry’s fluid world is that Truth itself seems to change, either imperceptibly or by sudden mutations … it reaches the point of a fatalism which is wholly destructive’ (‘A Response,’ 344–6). The theme of the falsification of literature, especially of the authors mentioned, is extremely relevant to Think of the Earth, where the exact same authors that Eliot mentions are explicitly distorted by Tavistock through either misquotation or misunderstanding in his effort to substantiate, justify, and understand his messianic mission on earth. The distortion of those authors reaches ‘the point of a fatalism’ in Tavistock’s homicidal mission: ‘I rebelled against a God who could make humanity suffer. But these voices – this damned memory of mine – these tags of poetry and God knows what – filling my mind all the time – blowing me up with bombast’ (111). It is in this context, as a gesture parallel to Eliot’s criticism of mystical literature, that the dialogical gesture of Brooker’s novel can be recognized as part of an avant-garde response to both modern society and modern approaches to literature. Think of the Earth depicts the protagonist Tavistock’s experience of mystical illumination: ‘I am one of those – that Keats speaks of,’ he bitterly complained, ‘one of those “to whom the miseries of the world are misery, and will not let them rest”’ (62). The Hamlet-esque plot revolves around his struggle to make sense of the experience and to act on his interpretation of its significance. On the one symbolic extreme, the novel evokes the messianic madness of a delusional monomaniac, but on the opposite realist extreme, the novel stages Tavistock’s struggle in an environment ravaged by a grim global imperialism that Willmott so effectively documents (and that sets up the aforementioned comparison to Conrad). Tavistock struggles against madness as much as against materialism, setting up the dialectical synthesis achieved in the conclusion, which proposes that he has finally balanced his state of cosmic consciousness with the material world. Tavistock’s experience of mystical illumination is confused, not enhanced, by the literature he consults to help explain and understand it. As Willmott notes, the character struggles to reverse the delusional abstraction that has enveloped his mind without trying to return to his pre-illuminated state. By the flexibility of its interpretation, however, literature leads the character astray from his proper development into cosmic consciousness and provokes a particular form of madness – or what

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they called at the time mental alienation. The method by which Brooker constructs and reveals Tavistock’s delusional abstraction demonstrates the subjectively unbalanced textual interpretations that Eliot criticized in Murry. Brooker’s character misrepresents, misinterprets, and even misquotes the very texts that predicate and determine the messianic mission in his mind. The novel recounts Tavistock’s self-obsessed attempt to launch, individually, a Buckean spiritual r/evolution that would end the division between sin and innocence, collapse the separation between good and evil, and accordingly, reverse the metaphysical basis of Western ideology. Recognizing the immensity of such a goal, Tavistock grapples with the idea that he might actually be the second coming of Christ; as he explains to his lover Laura: ‘If Christ had borne, once and for all, all sufferings – I shouldn’t have this to bear … You will perhaps be the only one who will understand me. In twenty centuries only one man conceived this idea – and if I fail – but I have – I have failed already. It won’t come again perhaps for years – for centuries. Do you see? I have had this chance’ (224–5). Brooker acknowledged the influence of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov on this second-coming aspect of the plot (‘Connor,’ 2). Specifically, Ivan Karamazov’s fictional essay ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ in the Russian novel proposes a return of Christ in the sixteenth century to visit his children in ‘his infinite mercy’ (320), redeeming and healing as before. The church, however, rejects the son of God and imprisons him for being too disruptive of the current religious order (in other words, a repeat of his first manifestation on earth). The church effectively stands between humanity and truth, between humanity and godliness, barring access of one to the other. In Brooker’s text, the second coming heralds universal redemption through an act even more liberating, revealing, and symbolic than Christ’s innocent martyrdom – an act of innocent murder. Brooker’s prose form reveals the paradoxical logic and madness in Tavistock’s psychopathic and paradoxical urge to commit murder innocently – the act that would reformulate cause and effect in the world. Tavistock builds his self-confirming cosmology through selected quotes, passages, and characters from primarily nineteenth-century sources and the Bible, but Brooker explicitly undermines the use of those texts for their role in Tavistock’s perversion. Tavistock’s delusion emerges by the freedom with which ambiguously metaphorical texts like literature and like the Bible can be misunderstood and abused: a principle of textual instability that permits reader intervention and interaction with literature. The title of the book, which comes from Keats’s abandoned epic ‘The Fall of Hyperion,’ offers a dramatic demonstration of Brooker’s singular

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method. Brooker includes a full twenty-eight line citation of the poem in his novel to demonstrate Tavistock’s understanding of his divine mission on earth. Tavistock uses a section of the poem, freely quoting from it, to convince other characters of the authenticity of his intended spiritual revolution, and as the narrator makes clear, to authenticate his madness. In the first use of the ‘Hyperion’ passage, Tavistock associates wholly with the mythological narrator of Keats’s poem. Moneta’s warning to Hyperion becomes redirected into a commentary on Tavistock’s spiritual quest. For Tavistock, to ‘think of the earth,’ in accordance with the theosophical and Cartesian privilege of mind and soul over body, would be to abandon his spiritual ambitions. Like Hyperion, Tavistock resists the temptation of resignation because it is a sign of ‘failure.’ In light of the significance of the poem in the narrative, the fact that Brooker chose the title for his book from the poem calls attention to the novel’s literary self-reflexivity: the novel makes references and literary allusions to other texts as a means to construct, develop, and reveal its own characters and narrative. In fact, Tavistock’s relationship and dependency on literature are explicit themes of the book: ‘His mind and his memory were leading him off again, as usual, into literature and metaphysics – whereas his real concern was with life – the lives people actually live in flesh and blood’ (111). In a fascinating twist, the Keats passage resurfaces after Tavistock manages to correct his mental aberration, control his messianic impulse, and abandon his delusional role in the spiritual r/evolution. When Tavistock quotes the same passage in the last words of the novel, the implication has shifted: ‘“Now,” [Tavistock] said to himself, “I can think of the earth.”’ (290). With this transformation, Tavistock adopts the position of Moneta, the Roman goddess of money, and explicitly admits the previous illness of his mind: in his words, ‘I can see now that it had become a mania’ (285). The difference can be thought of as a move from a theosophical/ Cartesian dualism between the mind and the body to a Buckean unity in which mind and body are singular. The gap between thought and the earth is overcome. While the economic implications of this reversal and his taking up this association with the goddess of money are somewhat ambiguous, at the least the transition signals Tavistock’s embrace of the material conditions of the world. With less ambiguity it can be said that Brooker’s careful use of the same passage from the same text to illustrate oppositional mental states demonstrates difference and illustrates the flexibility of textuality. The fact that he isolated this passage in his title confirms its central function in the narrative. From a slightly different interpretive perspective, with the

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additional stress on a particular nuance of wording, the implications of the passage radically shift. Brooker illustrates a textual instability that anticipates the work of post-structural and reader-response critics: that meaning of a text shifts depending on the reader and his or her reading technique. Meaning is influenced by the method of extraction as well as by the method of encryption. Brooker’s critique of Murry’s occultist reading practice emerges through a highly unusual narrative method. He demonstrates Tavistock’s relative madness through his flawed reading practice: ‘He had concerned himself too much with words – puzzling over them – wrestling with them – as Jacob did with the angel – trying to wring their secret from them’ (283). Not only does the character abuse his source texts by manipulating their lofty narratives to represent his own, but Tavistock misinterprets source texts, and even misquotes them – and is caught for doing so by other characters. ‘That’s not Whitman!’ says psychologist Dr Sturge Bundy after Tavistock misquotes and misrepresents the poet (238). Tavistock also misreads the Book of John in the Bible, convincing himself that he was in fact the incarnation of the ‘Comforter’ that Jesus prophesied would be sent to redeem humanity (209). Other characters acknowledge the errors, concluding that Tavistock was ‘mistaken – even wilfully mistaken’ (191). Brooker uses this deliberate distortion to reveal Tavistock’s spiritual confusion. More basically, this metatextuality contests the dubious nature of a textually transmitted genesis or even logocentric spirituality, while demonstrating the character’s transition away from superstitious, unstable mysticism to a more literally grounded spirituality. That Tavistock recovers from his spiritual delusion suggests that Brooker sided with Eliot’s criticism of Murry for relying too heavily on subjective intertextual interpretations of literature. Despite accepting this criticism of modern occultist critical practice, however, Brooker sustained the authenticity of mystical illumination in his writing and his beliefs and continued to resist the bludgeoning threat of materialism and global industrial capitalism. In this way, he ultimately sides with Murry’s idealistic faith in the power of mystical illumination. That Brooker developed an entirely original, relevant, and complex formal approach to challenge and test the more outlandish claims of the Cosmic Canadian spiritual r/ evolution, and yet still resolved his text with a positive affirmation of both mystical illumination and Richard Maurice Bucke’s work, demonstrates the complexity and nuance of the text’s engagement with Toronto’s avant-garde node.

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Critics like Arnason and Grace, who have been reluctant to accept the modernism of Brooker’s novel – let alone its avant-gardism – have focused on, among other things, the influence of Nietzsche on the text. Grace has been particularly convincing in mapping Brooker’s admiration for the German philosopher, especially in Brooker’s early work and theories. Brooker, in fact, began developing a philosophy that he called ‘Ultimatism’ in the working notes for an early play in 1912 that seems to echo Nietzsche’s call for a perspectivism in response to the absence of a unifying deity to provide meaning and value. Similarly, during the same period Brooker proposed the ‘Ultrahomo’ figure10 as a kind of evolutionary correlative to Nietzsche’s ‘Ubermensch.’ Despite this well-documented fascination (Brooker went so far as to record the date in 1907 he first read Thus Spake Zarathustra [‘Years’]), critics have been less attuned to the fact that Brooker broke away from Nietzsche even in the pre–First World War period. In a series of manifestos from between 1912–13, Brooker argued against the spread of negativism and blasted the followers of Nietzsche for embracing ‘the last possible negation … every destructive tendency that ever existed’ (‘The Spread of Negativism,’ 162). Though Nietzsche reappears periodically in his critical writing, most notably in the 1920s and 1930s, Brooker was more likely to invoke the German philosopher as someone who anticipated and even contributed to the moral quagmire of the modern period rather than as a moral leader who might lead society out of it. Brooker’s sense of the difference between his own views and Nietzsche’s philosophy is predicated on the same distinction made in the previous chapter between decadence and avant-gardism. As the avantgarde scholar Ca˘linescu has pointed out, Nietzsche’s theory of decadence, in fact, was extremely influential on the historical Decadent movement and perhaps vice versa as well. Nietzsche himself once claimed: ‘Nothing has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of decadence’ (The Birth, 51). In his argument that the morally degrading influence of decadence led to a misleadingly vigorous defence of lies at the expense of the truth, he identifies the ‘typical decadent’ as one ‘who has a sense of necessity in his corrupted taste, who claims it is a higher taste, who knows how to get his corruption accepted as law, as progress, as fulfillment’ (56). But while he defined decadence as an enthusiastic embrace of false direction, and as a permanent antagonist to the truth and to the will to live, he was also known to praise illusions, lies, and fiction. For their part, the Decadent artists in France, and later the Dadaists, the nihilists, and the existentialists, disregarded any hint of ambivalence

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on the issue and embraced Nietzsche’s rejection of all sense of value and truth. As Christian Bök notes, Nietzsche established a philosophical basis and credibility for the Decadent artists’ belief in illusions as realities: ‘For Jarry and Nietzsche, knowledge itself is so deceptive that it cannot even be corrected by this knowledge about knowledge’ (Pataphysics, 31). The line of influence between the Decadents/Symbolists and Nietzsche, however, went both ways; Ca˘linescu argues that there ‘should be little doubt’ that Nietzsche expanded his use of the term ‘decadent’ as a result of reading Bourget’s famous essay on the nature of decadence (186). Though Brooker flirted with this line of thought when he began writing in the pre–First World War years, he very quickly turned to an idealist belief in progress and evolution. The culmination of his difference from Nietzschean decadence and the Symbolist aesthetic finds its ultimate expression in Think of the Earth (Brooker’s explicit rejection of protoSymobolist T.S. Eliot happened much earlier in the 1929 essay ‘When We Awake!’). In this book, Brooker rejects the subjective and destabilizing experience of literature, which was a cornerstone of both occultism and the Symbolist aesthetic. To think of the earth was to use literature to escape literature and to discover ‘real eternity’ within the material world (110). In addition to Think of the Earth, and as a corroboration of his rejection of Nietzschean illusionism, Brooker had a career-long antagonism to the decadent tradition. Sometime after 1911 but before the War, having returned to Canada after an extended trip to London and New York, Brooker created an image ostensibly titled ‘Decadent.’ Though it is the earliest Canadian visual poem on record and Brooker’s earliest response to the Decadent movement, the image has never before been published nor publicly exhibited. As a part-time adman at the time, Brooker would have been well aware that rendering the art movement through the pictorial discourse of advertising was a satiric trivializing and undermining of the influential art movement. Brooker’s ‘Decadent’ presents an ironic commercial and consumable brand, built through the fame and celebrity of the art and the names of the artists associated. At the same time that he produced this image, working from his home in Neepawa, Manitoba, Brooker produced his series of manifestos that decried the ‘decay of art’ at the hand of what he called the ‘Negativists’ – his attempt to rebrand the decadent artists unfavourably. He writes, ‘The death-knell of Art is sounding! Boom! Doom! – Boom! Doom! … Art is degenerating into an accessory of all sorts of propaganda … Bernard Shaw is a propagandist of the most pronounced type … Who is there to lament the decay of Art?

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Who is there that shall say the mess of pottage was not worth the birthright? Only the religionists. Only the praters of Art for Art’s sake’ (‘The Decay of Art,’ 168–9). The reason Brooker rejected Nietzsche and the Decadent movement is the same reason that avant-garde artists in general can be distinguished from Decadent artists. Avant-gardism, in the words of Richard Kostelanetz, characterizes ‘art that is beginning something – while “decadent” art, by contrast, stands at the end of a prosperous development’ (Introduction, 3). Where decadence turns inward and analytic, focusing on such things as individual experience, social hypocrisy, or moral decay, avant-garde artists rely upon the prospect of social change and the possibility of progress. To quote Brooker, ‘In the name of progress we are casting down all ancient barriers. In the name of progress we are casting to the winds all ancient dogmas and doctrines’ (‘The Spread,’ 164). It is in the context of avant-garde idealism that another of Brooker’s early images is worth recalling: ‘A Defence of Futurism’ (1913), which includes the text ‘I believe.’ For his defence of Futurism, Brooker termed himself a ‘Cosmic Patriot’ and sought to ‘lead [us] across the psychic bridge to the Next Beyond’ (‘The Decay,’ 179). According to Brooker’s diary, his first art exhibition, the first exhibition of abstract art in Canada in January 1927, was in fact a total disaster. Lawren Harris and Arthur Lismer had organized the event at the Arts and Letters Club, but both baulked at introducing (let alone advocating on behalf of) the strange abstract paintings in light of the open scorn by the audience. Brooker was deflated, and followed a crowd out of the exhibition to visit the house of a local art critic where a crowd was gathered admiring a sculpture just purchased. The sculpture was an abstract bust by Duchamp-Villon of Charles Baudelaire, the progenitor of the Decadent movement. Brooker, filled with his anti-decadence idealism, responded by creating the decidedly avant-garde play discussed earlier, called ‘Within.’ It is a remarkable piece when read in the context of Brooker’s antagonism to Decadence, for he used Duchamp-Villon’s bust as a model for his stage design. In fact, the play is staged within Baudelaire’s head and concludes with a rejection of moral uncertainty, followed by an overt and dogmatic appeal for an embrace of cosmic consciousness. Did We Awaken? Denison, Harris, Brooker, Voaden, and Ross: these are the principal figures of the first node of aesthetic avant-garde activity in Canada. There

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are many other individuals with less direct connections to Bucke or the specific spiritual r/evolution, but who contributed to the initiative and have yet to be tabulated, such as Lorne Pierce, Katherine Hale, Kathleen Munn. To be clear, in no way would the Cosmic Canadians be recognized as a conventional avant-garde movement: they signed no group manifestos, published no centralized little magazines, and only tangentially spoke of themselves as a coherent group (and never by the name I have collected them under). Properly, then, we should rather refer to them as an avant-garde current rather than a movement. As discussed throughout this chapter, they did write manifestos individually, and published numerous programs of their aesthetics that outlined diverse explanations of where they were coming from. They were organized around central precepts of thought, such as Bucke’s notion of cosmic consciousness, universal unity, Whitman’s democratic spirit, the physical basis of mysticism, and the desire to use art to unify science and religion. They were revolutionary in the sense that they worked from a belief in a significant transformation that was already affecting their society, and they experimented with the formal dynamics of their art in order to both reflect the nature of that revolution and to hasten it along. They shared a goal, as stated explicitly by Harris and Brooker, of bridging art and life and making the two indistinguishable features of a post-revolutionary culture. Finally, they were able to break away from colonially oriented imitations of foreign art and, working through the specific r/evolutionary ideas of their avant-garde node, produce a substantial body of original and innovative work with unifying themes and forms. They all believed they had made that euphoric leap forward, and those who followed Bucke often claimed that they already possessed cosmic consciousness. The art was made from this kind of privileged vantage to help prepare the rational, secular world for the mystically infused culture of the future. The evolutionary progress of consciousness appears in the art in various guises: through direct representation, documentation, and expressionistic rendering. The Cosmic Canadians, centred on the Buckeans but extending far beyond his specific circle of influence, qualify as avant-garde precisely because the conception of a broad social progression guides and shapes the formal innovations of their art. The r/evolution was not merely expounded but embodied in the structure of the art itself. Approaching avant-garde art without abandoning its sociopolitical ambitions opens the category up to work that is not formally innovative. In comparison to the theatre and visual arts, for instance, the poetry of this mystical movement is less formally adventurous, tending more, as in

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E.J. Pratt’s ‘The Iron Door’11 or the neo-romantic writing of Wilson MacDonald and Albert Durrant Watson, towards expostulation and explanation – telling, rather than showing or manifesting. More sophisticated is W.W.E. Ross’s coupling of imagistic methods with paradox in reference to mystical themes – here, at least, we have an attempt to symbolize what lies ahead through the innovative form of the art. Consider his poem ‘The City,’ where he writes: ‘Sweetness of life and sweetness of death. The unbelievable is surely correct. Along the trenches of the understanding runs the electric explosive assault that ends by turning them in a new direction … There is a city in the distance that we had not seen before. There is a city…’ (143). The paradoxical and enigmatic poem ends ambiguously in a string of ellipses, a common indeterminacy found throughout Ross’s writing, providing enough ambiguity that Brian Trehearne includes Ross in his discussion of Canadian Decadent poetry. Approaching Ross with reference to avant-gardism and even Decadence probes the rhetorical staging of ideology in his work rather than measuring how precisely he approximates foreign models and standards, as is the colonial habit. The same advantage extends to the analysis and interpretation of pre–Second World War Canadian literature in general. Reading the representation of avant-garde ideology in art reveals a semiotics of sociopolitical revolution, a critical approach focused on the interpretation of the grammar of symbols of radical change. Each distinct avantgarde node in Canada presents a distinct semiotic syntax; naturally so, for their visions of the future culture are remarkably diverse. The rise and fall of the avant-garde phase of the Cosmic Canadians, which involved in various forms literally hundreds of participants working across all aspects of society, including all of the arts, barely lasted the two decades between the wars. The turning point was clearly the onset of the Great Depression which, as it dragged into the 1930s, increasingly led authors to social realist and even radical aesthetics. The displacement led Brooker to lambaste communist writers like Joe Wallace, Dorothy Livesay, Oscar Ryan, and the like for their utilitarian approach to art. He wrote that ‘art is not – and should not be – useful to society, in any sense whatever! … [But] among fanatical Communists an artist who does not use his gifts to further the cause of the revolution is stigmatized as a sort of traitor to his generation’ (‘Art and Society,’ xv, xxi). Even still, even while contesting the poetics of the group, Brooker recognized that individual pieces of writing emerging from that segment of Canadian letters deserved full recognition. He was the first to anthologize Dorothy Livesay’s Marxist long poem ‘Day and Night’ – in the same 1936

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collection in which he lambasted the leftist writers. Even during its peak years, however, the influence and presence of the Cosmic Canadian initiative was not ubiquitous. Ernest Hemingway, for instance, who was raising two children in Toronto at the time, was mystified by the lack of a public scene in the city – it had none of Europe’s cafe or public-square culture where diverse groups congregated in riotous fashion. True enough, the experimental activities of the Cosmic Canadians were confined to exclusive clubs, parlours, living rooms, or even cottages. The most important meeting places of the Cosmic Canadians, like Bon Echo Inn, Hart House Theatre, and the Arts and Letters Club (the latter of which Hemingway was a member), were all rather private and exclusive enterprises. Furthermore, semi-occultist secret societies thrived during the period, especially the fraternity of Freemasons, the Oddfellows, and the Theosophical Society, as well as literary clubs such as the women’sonly Heliconian Society or the Charles Dickens Society where discussion was sequestered by topics and participants. Even the Group of Seven’s iconic Studio Building which welcomed visitors was tucked away from the public eye on the edge of Rosedale. Significant – and, in their own way, arguably avant-garde – authors in Toronto were not touched by the potential nor the spirit of the Cosmic Canadian initiative. The writings of Morley Callaghan, Raymond Knister, and Frederick Philip Grove, for instance, evidence none of the thematic or formalistic traits of the movement, despite the fact that each of them had significant friendships and personal involvement with Cosmic authors (Callaghan with Ross, Knister and Grove with Wilson MacDonald). But still, when the BC painter and author Emily Carr visited Toronto in 1927 she caught the excitement of the avant-garde initiative. Particularly through her conversations with the charismatic Harris, she discovered the magic swirl of theosophy, cosmic consciousness, and experimental modern art. Harris gave her copies of Bucke’s and Ouspensky’s books (Carr, ‘Hundreds,’ 666), but more significantly gave her a boost of enthusiasm for the power of art in Canada. Years later, she renounced the theological implications of the cosmic initiative as foreign to her particular, unique aesthetics and religious feelings (A. Davis, 15). Indeed, neither Carr nor Hemingway were Cosmic Canadians in the specifically aesthetic r/evolutionary sense developed in this chapter, but the temporary impact and the lasting momentum it gave her substantiates the phenomenon and helps to explain how its influence spread and functioned in a private city like Toronto. Herman Voaden, for instance, described his cosmic experience of Toronto in the late 1920s and early 1930s as ‘a time

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of visions’ (Voaden, Earth Song, i). Another west coast mystic, Anne Charlotte Dalton, was also infected by the spirit of the moment. She produced books of poetry that relied upon established, traditional aesthetics and that worked with devotional themes in accordance with the dominant Christian theology. Still, in a 1931 lecture in Toronto before the Canadian Literature Club, she connected the future course of Canadian verse to her first encounter with paintings by Lawren Harris: ‘I shall not soon forget that amazing moment. It was not the intimate revelation of beauty alone which moved me so; it was as though I saw before me, the very soul of a new and tremendous poetry’ (Dalton, The Future, 1). She outlined the characteristics of this poetry in more detail: ‘If our painters are the first to achieve that much-debated thing, a national originality in art, the poets with no loss of prestige, may very well follow in their footsteps … All the virtues which I find therein, are those which I hope and believe will soon be the strongest characteristics of our poetry: the refreshment of originality, its restraint and freedom, its gift of spiritual illumination and expression; the extraordinary depth and quality of its feeling; its symbolism; and its wonderful suggestion of light’ (4, 5–6). Like Harris, she was also drawn to the foundational texts of Cosmic Canadian mysticism: as she wrote to Lorne Pierce in 1927, ‘Have you read Bucke’s “Cosmic Consciousness,” & the “Tertium Organum” by P.D. Ouspensky? I am never tired of these although mathematics means nothing to me. Anything on the fourth dimension is an attraction – perhaps you can recommend other books – I should be grateful’ (Dalton, Letter, 1). Dalton was not able herself to produce writing of the kind she envisioned, but, ironically not for her mystical verse, she might yet be considered avant-garde if only for her pioneering deaf activism. She begins her 1926 book The Silent Zone with a long introductory essay on deafness arriving at the desire to inspire ‘others to revolt’ (24). She writes, ‘I am growing used to being alone’ (34), but proceeds to create a community of deaf women to whom her poems respond. The final section of her book is titled ‘Revolt’ and includes an open call for ‘rebellion’ against the ‘bitterest agony’ of being mocked and isolated (‘A Rebel in Heaven,’ 67–9). She describes a dance of the deaf and dumb, ‘full of laughter’ communicating with their feet and fingers (‘The Dance,’ 89). In the eponymous finale, she writes: Rebel! this zone Too long its fetter round your souls has thrown; Too long, too long,

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Has cut you off from freedom, dance and song. Now for each other’s sake, Arise! arise and take The moated castle of your heart’s desire

(The Silent Zone, 107–10)

Here we have arrived at a unique point of intersection between the Cosmic Canadians and the radical identity politics of contemporary writing. Dalton’s loss of hearing awakened her eyes to the sensual depth of Harris’s canvases, unveiling to her the new consciousness that informed it and helping to inspire her political-poetic resistance. By 1938, Voaden was the last of the Cosmic Canadians still plugging away at it and staging plays without adapting his style to the much changed times. Even he, however, gradually admitted that the world had grown too sombre for the jubilant, r/evolutionary idealism of the Cosmic Canadians. With the onset of the Great Depression, Voaden’s art and that of the Cosmic Canadians in general was brushed aside in favour of social realism, Surrealism, and new orientations of experimental activity. This work might have been entirely forgotten had it not been for scholars like Dennis Reid, Anton Wagner, Birk Sproxton, Sherrill Grace, Ramsay Cook, Ann Davis, Michèle Lacombe, and others who began re-evaluating and rediscovering Toronto’s mystical modernist activity in the 1970s and 1980s.

Chapter Three

Canadian Surrealism: The Automatists

It is important to continue our group manifestations in Montréal. It is a revolutionary action of the first order. More and more people are counting on us. They are young and full of fire and we are almost the only counterweight to what is oppressing them. Paul-Émile Borduas, Letter to Jean-Paul Riopelle

Garagognialullulululululululululululululululululululullullululululullululullulu lululullululullullullululululululululululullulululululuuuuuuuu Claude Gauvreau, ‘Jappements à la lune’

I would suggest that cultural solitudes belong to our past, however tangible our differences and distances will always be. Caroline Bayard, The New Poetics in Canada and Québec

Situated somewhere between the Cosmic Canadian pursuit of a postcolonial Canadian art through spiritualized abstraction and the TISH realization of a postcolonial Canadian geopoetics is another group of artists who worked with the explicit ambition of liberating art and, by doing so, revolutionizing their society. The Automatists of Montreal are the most celebrated and recognizable avant-garde movement in Canada’s history. All of the hallmarks of canonical avant-garde behaviour are present: they self-identified as a group, performed or exhibited as representatives of the group, wrote manifestos that sought to articulate the aesthetic ambitions of the collective, and produced work with radically eruptive styles that formally embodied the sociopolitical values they mapped out for themselves. There have been retrospective conferences, exhibitions,

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catalogues, reissues and facsimile reproductions of iconic texts, and celebrations of their achievements: an honour few other movements let alone individual artists in Canada have ever been afforded. The catalyst for the movement was Paul-Émile Borduas, a Montreal educator and painter, who assembled the core group of younger but likeminded painters, poets, playwrights, and dancers. Inspired by Borduas’s discovery of continental Surrealism in the early 1940s, they all worked together to realize a specific aesthetic mandate that developed from the European avant-garde movement. In the words of dancer and designer Françoise Sullivan, this mandate included a total reimagining of the significance of the body in the world: ‘we must challenge the human organism and not be afraid to go as far as we must in the exploration of our total being … All our forces must be directed towards liberation, towards a rediscovery of ecstasy and love’ (104, 113). Sullivan’s essay was included in Refus Global (Total Refusal), the group’s most comprehensive articulation of their aesthetic philosophy. Also published in this 1948 catalogue was Borduas’s lead and eponymous manifesto – a radical document calling for ‘unpredictable passion’ and ‘total risk through global refusal’ (40) for which Borduas was fired from his teaching job at the École du meuble. It was precisely the kind of entrenched Québécois conservatism that cost Borduas his job that the Automatists were fighting against: ‘To hell with holy water and the French-Canadian tuque!’ (30). Borduas used the manifesto to explain the target of his rebellion: ‘We must break with the conventions of society once and for all, and reject its utilitarian spirit. We must refuse to function knowingly at less than our physical and mental potential … Enough brutal assassination of the present and future under repeated clubbings from the past’ (38). The contours of this revolt against utilitarianism and the past were borrowed from foreign sources, but the initiative was inspired by and remained focused on the immediate impact they might have on their contextual society. Unlike the other groups documented in this book, whose contributions would turn out to be limited almost exclusively to the history of art in this country, the Automatists have come to be recognized for their contribution to sociopolitical transformation and most notably to the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. In the words of art historian Dennis Reid, their manifesto Refus Global can be acknowledged as ‘the single most important social document in Quebec history and the most important aesthetic statement a Canadian has ever made’ (back cover). The framing of the Automatists as either a Québécois or Canadian movement has emerged as one of the most problematic aspects of their

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critical reception. It has certainly negatively affected the reception of the Automatists as a major avant-garde collective in the twentieth century. Instead, as Steve McCaffery has noted and lamented, the radius of their cultural influence and cachet has been limited to the borders of the province of Quebec (‘Sound,’ 17). During Borduas’s lifetime, however, he freely associated with regional and national arts institutions, and regularly exhibited in Ontario and outside the country as a representative Canadian artist. The locale of his refusal was crucial to his aesthetic and sociopolitical vision (as the epigraph above makes clear), but he knew that his art participated in global, transnational culture. Since his passing in 1955, and with the emergence of Quebec’s separatist movement, the especially regional orientation of his lead manifesto in Refus Global (which begins with the famous intonation, ‘We are the offspring of modest French-Canadian families…’ [27]) has been interpreted as a heroic expression of Quebec’s aspirations for independence. André G. Bourassa, in his monograph on the history of Surrealism and Quebec literature (1977, trans. 1984), goes so far as to construct a teleological narrative around the Automatist revolt that resolves in the realization of both the Quiet Revolution and the political emergence of Quebec nationalism and separatism. He sets the limit of the effect of their revolutionary art and writing to ‘the culture of Québec and its politics’ (inside cover). While Bourassa does spend a credible amount of time interrogating their aesthetics, including its international derivation, he frames that discussion as evidence of the ongoing discovery of ‘the voice of our people’ (xiii) that would ‘provoke us into prospecting our individual and collective myths, and realizing our dreams’ (266) – ‘our dreams,’ of course, being a specific reference to the founding of an independent Québécois political state. Bourassa twice quotes Cité Libre columnist Pierre Vadeboncoeur’s rather hyperbolic claim of Paul-Émile Borduas’s impact: ‘French Canada as we know it begins with him’ (Bourassa, 102, 265). The Automatists were revolutionaries and they did attempt to found a new sociopolitical order through their aesthetic project. But rather than focusing on the usefulness of the Automatist movement to the separatist cause, or representing them as an organic extension of Québécois culture, Ray Ellenwood, another leading Automatist scholar, positions the movement as an ideological extension of continental European art movements. While the impact they had was primarily local, and the particular conflicts they addressed were triggered by historical cues from Québécois history, he traces the mandate of their initiative back to the aesthetical and political debates of the European avant-garde. The point is not to

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erase the local significance of the movement, nor the inspiration they took from their region, but to foreground the indebtedness of the Automatists to the importation of specific cultural memes from abroad. Chief among these memes was the Surrealist movement’s technique of automatic writing, from which the Montreal group took their name. Automatists, Ellenwood details, moved freely between Montreal, New York, and Paris and never cordoned off or limited the geography of their art to just Quebec’s provincial borders. In this chapter I work from both of these scholarly strains by considering how and why this collection of avant-garde artists borrowed key concepts of avant-gardism from European progenitors and how their use of and distortion of foreign aesthetics connects to the broader Canadian context. To be sure, translating their work into this frame by including them in a discussion of Canadian avant-gardism runs against the habitual pattern of scholarship on the Automatists: Bourassa, for instance, never mentions Canada by name outside of quotations; and Ellenwood, while providing rich details about the local formation of the collective, looks much farther abroad for intellectual context and aesthetical comparisons. Reading the Automatist activity in relation to avant-garde literary activity in the rest of Canada helps to illuminate a range of parallel ambitions as well as provides a useful context in which to understand their original contributions to the emergence of avant-garde art in Canada. The Automatists emerged as a cultural force in Montreal sixty years ago, and since then Quebec has not separated from Canada. Meanwhile, the liberational ambition of these French Canadian artists, with their struggle against the conservative powers of Catholic and colonial rule, at the least provides a compelling parallel to the liberational ambitions of English Canadian artists, with their similar struggle against the conservative powers of Protestant and colonial rule. It is not often acknowledged, though it is growing in critical reception,1 that English Canada went through its own quiet revolution – though it was indeed a quieter revolution – that was comparably transformative to what happened in Quebec. I am far less interested in the national/nationalist implications of ‘Canadianizing’ the Automatists at the expense of their Québécois roots than in comparing the means by which artists in Canada’s unwritten neither/nor spaces used avant-garde aesthetics as the focalizer of broader sociopolitical revolutionary initiatives that aspired to overturn the unwritability of their locus. Avant-garde literature has faced very unique and particular conditions and restrictions in the early to mid-twentieth-century Canadian context

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that separates the nature of experimental art making in both French and English Canada from American or European circumstances. In this context, then, the Automatists can be recognized as the second non-objective avant-garde art movement. But whereas the Cosmic Canadians had sought to represent abstract spiritual feelings, the Automatists pursued a form of non-representationalism that drew as much attention to the medium of the art as to its content. Thus, their painting broke with figuration, impressionism, and expressionism and became primarily oriented to the sensual presence of paint on the canvas. The literature shifted into such para-semantic terrain as Claude Gauvreau’s ‘Voltégrahatahazine’ which begins: ‘Ornzcocox – arzmanncadelin ujuwolchépurl taufaugnel tadi craudarèl yavachartala’ (860). The sonic and visual movement between the words and letters rather than the signification of words became the subject of the work. It was a new kind of materialism predicated on non-rationalism and automatic techniques that pushed them beyond even the innovations of the continental Surrealist movement proper. They themselves were cognizant of their innovations in the context of Canadian art: as Gauvreau mused in 1947, the Automatists would be ‘of particular interest to Canadians, it being their original creation’ (qtd. in Bourassa, 88). To be clear, Gauvreau resisted the ‘hatred’ of ‘Racists and nationalists’ (Bourassa, 131) and preferred to situate his art as ‘the logical evolution of Christian civilization’ (86). Reading the Automatists in the context of Canadian literary avantgardism draws attention to a common resistance to closed writing forms, to inherited conservative traditions, and to the shared desire to unleash aesthetical freedoms comparable in spirit if different in mandate with those enjoyed by European artists. For while European avant-gardes reacted against the closed (bourgeois) imaginations of the institutions of art making in their society and on eluding the weight of nostalgia for historical cultural triumphs of the past, the Canadian avant-gardes were more primarily oriented towards working with and even creating art institutions and enabling supportive conditions for legitimate art making. For instance, in the same year that Refus Global was published, Saskatchewan launched the first publicly administered and funded arts council, the Saskatchewan Arts Board. The institution was instrumental in training and funding the avant-garde painting collective Regina Five (Flaman, 78) and in connecting them with leading modernist critics, thinkers, and artists (Nasgaard, 288). Many of the Cosmic Canadians discussed in the previous chapter were involved in the production of the 1951 Report of

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the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (generally known as the Massey Report) that sought to map out new directions and initiatives for Canadian art. In the section on visual art, the report acknowledged the significance of the Group of Seven, but looked specifically to Alfred Pellan whose ‘fresh and audacious work’ with abstraction and Surrealist methods were seen as indicative of the kind of activity the government should work to foster (Royal, 206). The report considered means by which similar ‘experimental’ work of this kind could be encouraged and developed by governmental institutions (208–9). The Massey Report led to the creation of Canada’s National Library (in 1953) and the Canada Council for the Encouragement of the Arts, Letters, Humanities and Social Sciences (in 1957), the latter of which has been recognized for fostering experimental even avant-garde writing in this country. Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy (whose study of radical writing in Canada begins with the formation of the Canada Council) explain the paradoxical implications of a governmental institution funding avantgarde work as a postcolonial initiative: ‘To prove to the world that the nation has shed its colonial past and achieved mature nation status (a nationalist goal), the government supports experimental, “avant-garde” art (a modernist goal). The Canada Council has thus regularly supported innovative, experimental, separatist, independent, even anarchic work as much as mainstream cultural production – work that often bites the hand that feeds it’ (42). Therefore, the Surrealist interest in primitive cultural modes and their however ironic anti-institutional endeavour to return art to a purer state was not of much use to the Automatists or other avantgarde Canadian artists, whereas the Surrealist insistence on the power of pure, unfettered imagination was extremely inspiring. This cultural context adds, at the least, an important complication and nuance to the ways in which Canada’s cultural ‘lag’ can be recognized as a strategy used by artists to address and alter cultural conditions here. The psychological implications of liberating the individual imagination and thereby liberating one’s society were central dogma of the Surrealist movement. But while the European progenitors were concerned with halting the cycle of violence and war, the Canadian participants were focused on breaking the cloistered culture of Canada and opening their society up to increased cultural options and opportunities. Pellan is quoted in the Massey Report as explaining the cultural environment of Canada (including Quebec) as one that failed to support aesthetic originality: ‘We are compelled to perform certain types of work which are irrelevant to our interests as artists; we are quite unable to live from our

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art alone’ (Royal, 208). While the government worked to develop institutions that would financially free the artist despite an unsupportive public, the artists (like their counterparts in South America and Africa) turned to Surrealism as a revolutionary and liberating tool that could potentially change the public’s colonial consciousness to a postcolonial and freethinking consciousness. Breton’s turn to primitivism and his rejection of what he termed ‘white brigandage’2 presents a somewhat undertheorized use of otherness (for reinscribing familiar exoticizations of cultural difference) as an attempt to break with the over-rationalized European civilization. In the hands of Latin American authors, however, this exoticization was rather easily transmuted into ‘real-marvellous’ writings and other kinds of antimimetic forms that used the tools of the European vanguard to advance their own sociopolitical agenda. Canadian First Nations artists like Lawrence Paul Yuxwelupton and Dana Claxton have also appropriated Surrealist techniques for their own political struggle against the spread of European culture – using tools developed within Europe to resist Europe, as it were.3 Through all the transnational manifestations of Surrealism, and though the sociopolitical implications varied widely, the primary locus for revolution for each remained the individual human mind. Yuxwelupton, for instance, who describes his work as ‘salvation art,’ consistently extends individual experience to involve a political protest against the abrogation of aboriginal land in Canada. He strives to regain a lost balance between humanity and the world we inhabit, starting first with the decolonization of his own mind, followed by the culture of his people, and ever outwards after that. Such an approach is consistent with European Surrealism in general, which developed out of efforts in the field of experimental psychology to use liberated imaginations to heal traumatized minds. There are thus important links between Surrealist activity in Canada and the work of others postcolonial revolutionaries such as Aimé Césaire, who sustained an interest in Surrealism, and Frantz Fanon, who was trained in psychology and played an important role in 1960s Québécois art. These links, however, extend too far beyond the purview of the current study to do more than acknowledge them here. The Surrealists borrowed many of their various methods of art making without the conscious rational mind, including the act of ‘automatism’, directly from pioneering psychologists. In the 1924 ‘Manifesto of Surrealism,’ Breton explained how to do automatic writing: ‘Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you’re writing and be tempted to reread what you have written. The

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first sentence will come spontaneously, so compelling is the truth that with every passing second there is a sentence unknown to our consciousness which is only crying out to be heard’ (29–30). With this faith in the human subconscious mind, and armed with psychological methods to release the buried imagination into art, the Surrealists became the largest and most influential of all of Europe’s avant-garde movements. The Surrealists provided a model for groups like the Automatists in Montreal to break with their society by turning inwards and releasing what their imagination dictated. Surrealism before Canada It was André Breton, the ‘soul of the movement’ in the words of Georges Bataille (‘Surrealism from Day to Day,’ 37), who first took inspiration from the field of psychology. During his service in the psychiatric centre in Saint-Dizier, France, during the First World War (Fraenkel, 56), he first encountered the work of the Austrian pioneer of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (Bate, 59). Intrigued by Freud’s associative techniques, Breton began to integrate and experiment with rudimentary and aberrant forms of psychoanalysis in his work in the neurological ward of the centre. He discovered that shell-shocked soldiers were producing disturbing and turbid images and writings that reflected their inner turmoil. Breton developed his fascination with both the psychoanalytic methods of treating these patients and the art that emerged from the treatments into a process he would eventually call ‘automatism,’ a term with roots in French psychology.4 Automatic art aimed to paint or write without interference from the conscious mind or by reason. Pioneering psychologists like Jean Charcot and Pierre Janet argued that a traumatized consciousness could divide and split off from itself, leading to fixations and hysteria (Pervin, 3). The behaviour of soldiers in the First World War was interpreted as an indication that their minds had divided and, subsequently, that they had lost access to regulatory parts of their personality as a result of the shock of their experience. Automatic methods of writing and painting were thought to encourage and enable communication with the dysfunctional portions of the mind and thus were regarded as one possible means of revealing the nature of the disturbance and potentially even correcting the lost balance. Breton reasoned, however, that the soldier’s trauma could be extrapolated to everybody in contemporary society, which he found (as many other modernists did) to be conditioned by schisms and deep personality rifts that

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protected individuals from confronting the trauma and hypocrisies of daily repressed life. The result of these defence mechanisms, however, was an alienation from true feelings and imagination. Automatic writing, he concluded, had a significant role to play in addressing the trauma of modern life. Following the war, in 1919, Breton founded the literary magazine Littérature with Louis Aragon and Phillipe Soupault as a forum for explorations of automatic writing and the limits of sanity (issues featured photographic studies of patients in asylums, for instance). Contributors to the magazine included many of those who would eventually join the Surrealist movement proper – including Francis Picabia, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Paul Eluard, among others. Through these initial experiments and explorations, Breton became increasingly convinced of the imaginative freedom of automatic writing and developed that particular freedom into a progressive cosmology. It led him to a radically new perspective on reality. Inspired by Freud’s metaphoric theories of the inner chamber of the mind, Breton became an advocate for releasing the repressed unconscious mind and thereby enjoining the conscious mind with the psychic force of the unconscious. The result would be a surreality, an unalienated experience of reality conditioned by an unfettered imagination: unlike Dada, Surrealism’s negation of boundaries and rules and its embrace of exuberant irrationalism was oriented towards a potentially positive and progressive remaking of society. While Picabia chanted, ‘Dada doesn’t smell anything, it is nothing, nothing, nothing. / It is like your hopes: nothing. / like your paradise: nothing’ (‘Dada Cannibalistic,’ 317), Breton countered with revolutionary spirit that ‘as soon as Surrealist methods begin to enjoy widespread flavor … a new morality must be substituted for the prevailing morality, the source of all our trials and tribulations’ (‘Manifesto,’ 44n). This was incommensurate with Dada’s anarchic negativism and highlights the avant-garde limitations of the movement. As Charles Russell explains: ‘The rebel or primitive can easily fail to become the seer and, instead, act only to undermine both the inherited values and the possibility of finding adequate grounds for the creation of the new. In no avant-garde movement is the negative or nihilist impulse so radical or all-encompassing as in dada’ (97). This nihilistic negativism in Dada included attacking Dada’s own role in the context of art movements. Picabia, in another manifesto, declared Dada and art nothing but ‘farce, my dear friends’ (‘DADA,’ 317). The movement, he predicted, would be swallowed and sanitized by the institution of art

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without changing any of its features (318). Dada proposed a rupture – but a rupture that even its protagonists acknowledged would be quickly sutured and that would barely leave a scar. Dada activity and influence has carried on around the world ever since, but in Paris its pioneering position dissolved and faded by approximately 1922. The Surrealist movement that followed Dada proposed a more earnest revolution aimed squarely against bourgeois institutions and consciousness, but more importantly for our purposes aimed as well towards a liberated future. In his first manifesto for Surrealism, which rejected the mandates and privations of civilization, Breton built from Dada and experimental psychology a delirious rejection of the adult world in favour of an embrace of madness and childlike wonder. Madness, for Breton, was a realm of imaginative freedom enjoyed by those outside of society’s regulatory superstructures. He explains it simply and delightfully as being ‘free not to care any longer’ about social obligations (‘Manifesto,’ 35). Breton credits Freud for revealing the conflict within each individual between this latent untamed imagination and the tyranny of logic of Western society (10). Surrealism was Breton’s answer to the loss of the imaginative freedom of dreams and the drained psychic mechanism in reality. As he explained, he believed in another possibility: ‘I believe in the future resolution of these two great states, dream and reality, … a surreality’ (14). The Surrealist artists could access an irrational core within themselves as a creative source more ontologically and metaphysically revealing than any contrived literary device. In doing so, Surrealist artists could provoke from within themselves a new aesthetic that embraced irrationality and the free association of images. Such an art could function as a corrective force in an unbalanced, war-ravaged Apollonian world. Surrealism, which he defined as ‘the absence of any control exercised by reason’ (26), both explained the genius of past ages and would enable a magical future of wonder and dismay – of madness and the real intertwined. Freud, on the other hand, famously refused all entreaties to ally himself with the Surrealists by explaining that he had no interest in dreams or the irrational mind as creative sources. For Freud, the motivating conflict for his work on dreams was between civilization, which ‘rests on a compulsion to work and a renunciation of instinct’ (The Future, 6), and the individual, who must suppress his or her instincts in order to work. The conflict produces an ‘internal discord’ (3) that could potentially, but not necessarily, lead to neuroses. Rather than exploiting madness and internal discord, art and religion play a balancing role in this conflict by compensating the members of a civilization ‘for the sufferings and

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privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them’ (14). In other words, art was useful in a society for redirecting the buried rage inside every member of that society into less destructive projections. While Freud’s theoretical models and framework shifted over the course of his career, he maintained his goal to study madness and neuroses in order to cure people of them: as he declares in The Future of an Illusion, ‘our appointed task [is] of reconciling men to civilization’ (49). His selfdeclared aim was to secure ‘the primacy of the intellect’ (49) against delusions and neuroses, a category of anti-social imaginings that included madness and religion. In contrast, Breton was an avant-garde artist more interested in reshaping normal life than in sustaining the status quo. Surrealism openly proposed a revolution that would ‘manifest itself in all aspects of social life’ (C. Russell, 25), and thereby revitalize European civilization. Breton’s ‘Manifesto of Surrealism,’ published in 1924, outlined a vision for an art that would reverse the current conditions in the West that were responsible for the general cultural decadence: ‘We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driving at. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest’ (9). Breton developed Surrealism as a technique to address what he believed to be the problems of primary interest: releasing the repressed subconscious mind and using it to transform how humans understand and experience the world. Surrealism was an attempt to draw the subconscious into the foreground and wrestle with the irrational content of human behaviour. Loosely cribbing from Freud’s analysis of the relationship between repression and civilization, Breton blamed the First World War on the repression of latent drives and unsatisfied urges. Releasing the imaginative core unfettered, he proposed, would initiate a new ideological direction for the West – one infinitely superior to the ‘mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit’ of realism and positivism (6). The primary focus and locus of the Surrealist revolution was internal and psychological: the expression and imagination of psychopathic acts would allow the mind unfettered access to its innermost, latent, and violent tendencies and desires. Beyond art, the Surrealists had a global vision for their faith in freedom which made them supportive of revolutionary uprisings, especially in the former colonies. As in Quebec, their work proved useful in those contexts. It was not, as Michael Richardson has argued of the relationship between Surrealism and the Caribbean,5 a case of Surrealism arriving from Europe and enlightening the lowly locals, but rather ‘it represented a confirmation of what writers and artists had

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already been looking for either individually or collectively … surrealism certainly did not offer a closed template from which to draw inspiration, but provided a point of convergence and interaction, within which they could attain and extend their freedom of expression’ (‘Surrealism Faced,’ 74–5). Surrealism, as a psychic place between the real and the imaginary, encouraged and enabled a space outside of the internal tensions and psychosis caused by sociopolitical repression and fixation. Aimé Césaire, for instance, an African-Martinian political poet, turned to the rhetorical tools of Surrealism as ‘the best means of conveying his troubled relationship to France, both its language and its culture’ (Noland, 64). It was through the appropriation of key aesthetic and rhetorical techniques, such as in borrowings of Aragon’s oft-repeated dictum, ‘No freedom for the enemies of freedom!’ that surrealism became implicated in postcolonial movements in the Caribbean, in South America, and in Africa. The Surrealist revolution, according to Breton, was in the process of revealing a new social contract that would expose the inherent frailty of Western civilization: ‘a society that feels itself threatened on all sides, as does bourgeois society, rightly thinks that such an eruption may be the death of it’ (‘Political Position,’ 232). Breton argued that Surrealism’s new aesthetics and experiments could modify individual consciousness, which would, in turn, result in the ‘new morality’ mentioned above that would fundamentally challenge the mechanisms of repression in Western society (i.e., the ideological state apparatus). Eventually, in the grand and utopian hope of the Surrealist revolution, the entire social contract would need to be altered. Following the self-destructive anarchism of Dada, the expectation of such a paradigm shift grew remarkably quickly in the years after the publication of Breton’s manifesto. As can be expected, the arts held a privileged place in Surrealist activity for the arts would serve as research site into Surrealist consciousness, evidence of the Surrealist revolution, and its best means of propagation and demonstration. The broad, social ambitions of the Surrealist movement led to an attempt to reconcile the rupture between aesthetic avant-gardism and radical avant-gardism. In early Surrealism, politics and the social revolution served art – becoming thereby an iconic example of the aesthetic avant-garde. However, Breton’s desire to liberate society through art on a practical level led him to offer himself and Surrealism to the communist revolution. In 1927, Breton, Aragon, Eluard, Unik, and Péret joined the Communist Party. In 1930, the principal literary magazine of the group, La Révolution surréaliste, was overhauled to reflect the increasingly political orientation of the movement. The title of the new publication,

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Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (Surrealism in the service of the revolution), announced the supporting role of the Surrealist movement to the now-primary cause of the communist worker’s revolution. The first issue of the magazine featured work by familiar Surrealists, but notably also included one offering by the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky who, like Breton, had begun his career as an anarchistic, aesthetic avant-gardist. Mayakovsky had become an extremely prominent artistpropagandist for the Communist Party and by the 1930s had come to symbolize a distinct set of aesthetic choices that Breton and Aragon (who actually edited the magazine) were interested in pursuing. In his article ‘Situation of Surrealism between the Wars,’ Breton would admit in hindsight that, beyond the similar political values, a great deal of the attraction was based on the effectiveness of the Communist Party as an organizational and revolutionary power. The attempt to unify the aesthetic avant-garde with the radical avantgarde ultimately failed despite the enthusiastic belief by the Surrealists that their work already served the same revolution. The communists came to reject the experimental modernist texts pouring out of the West, despite their initial support for all anti-fascist writing. Karl Radek delivered a speech to the Soviet Writers Congress in 1934 highlighting the confrontation between officially state-approved techniques of art making and experimental modernism: When [our writers] hear that a book of eight hundred pages, without any stops and without any commas, has appeared abroad, they ask: ‘Perhaps this is that new art which is rising out of chaos?’ … The literature of dying capitalism has become stunted in ideas. It is unable to portray those mighty forces which are shaking the world – the death agonies of the old, the birth pangs of the new. And this triviality of content is fully matched by the triviality of form displayed by bourgeois world literature. All the styles which were evolved by past bourgeois art, and in which great masterpieces were created – realism, naturalism, romanticism – all this has suffered attrition and disintegration; all this exists only in fragments, and is powerless to produce a single convincing picture.

Radek’s speech was delivered shortly after the internal, historical debates about the function of art in Soviet Russia had been temporarily resolved with Stalin’s 1932 decree that social realism be state policy for the Soviet Union (and for the Communist International).6 Stephen Spender explained that the policy implied the belief that ‘bourgeois art necessarily

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propagates bourgeois “ideology”’ (qtd. in Breton, ‘Political Position,’ 226). Liberated art could not be produced until after the era of (moral) decadence had been overcome, and thus, until that moment, Soviet Russia sought to codify art into partisan service of the revolution. Breton, in contrast, found this art – even the best of it from the likes of the great Russian poet Mayakovsky – ‘banal’ (‘Political,’ 227) and the Russian policy ‘not only quite disastrous but perfectly vain’ (227–8). For his contentious beliefs, Breton was expelled from the Communist Party in 1933; the Surrealists as a whole were denounced that same year by the International Congress for the Defence of Culture.7 In the years following the expulsion, Breton attempted to rearticulate his commitment to revolutionary, even radical, aesthetics without sacrificing the anarchic individualism and freedom that liberated art relied upon. In 1935, before an audience of leftist political activists in Czechoslovakia, Breton presented an emboldened defence of the aesthetical dimensions of Surrealism, in particular reconnecting his work in Surrealism to the French Symbolist literary tradition of Rimbaud (‘Political,’ 219) and Baudelaire (221). He claimed that automatic writing works from and even creates the necessary liberation of the imagination that social and political revolutions would eventually rely upon: ‘The fact is that art, somewhere during its whole evolution in modern times, is summoned to the realization that its quality resides in imagination alone, independently of the exterior object that brought it to birth. Namely, that everything depends on the freedom with which this imagination manages to express and assert itself and to portray only itself ’ (‘Political,’ 220). Polemical, didactic, and social realist writing relied upon the conscious, rational mind, whereas ‘Surrealism’s whole focus’ had been to track the ‘psychic charges’ of the preconscious mind striving for unity, liberation, and unfettered expression: ‘I shall never tire of repeating that automatism alone is the dispenser of the elements on which the secondary work of emotional amalgamation and passage from the unconscious to the preconscious can operate effectively’ (230). This psychological dimension in which preconscious knowledge was allowed to reassert itself was the key to the revitalized, reconceptualized Surrealist revolution that would, eventually, overwhelm the decadent social conditions of bourgeois life. Despite Breton’s realization of his irreconcilable differences with the Communist Party (complemented, of course, by the widespread disillusionment caused by the show trials in the Soviet Union and early evidence of Stalinist authoritarianism), it only caused him to refine rather than reject politics altogether. He realized that the imagined efficacy of the

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Communist Party was still predicated on a Hegelian dialectic of oppositions and antimonies. As an example of the failure of the Communist Party’s approach to art, he quotes the Moscow Tretyakov Gallery director’s claim that ‘Any artist who does not follow the example of Soviet art is an enemy of socialism’ (qtd. in Breton, ‘Why Is Contemporary,’ 263). Of such political attempts to control and limit art, Breton’s disillusionment was absolute: ‘we are dealing with a scheme of systematic destruction, of eradication by all means of what through the centuries we have learned to consider as art worthy of that name … [it is] a scheme demanding that a mortal blow be dealt to artistic conscience and freedom’ (263–4). Breton began to theorize that the natural ally of Surrealism had never been political movements that sought to ‘harness its energies’ but precisely the opposite: anarchic individualism, deliberate irrationalism, and the ‘spontaneous rejection of all the social and moral constraints of our times’ (‘Tower of Light,’ 265).8 For some critics, however, such as Mignon Nixon, the new phase represented a regrettable withdrawal from the political arena. The popular artful mannequins along the Surrealist Street in the 1938 Paris exhibition, for instance, signalled the reversion of Surrealism from a political movement back into a less radical, less revolutionary aesthetic avant-garde. These compelling aesthetic objects serve as ‘evidence to surrealism’s retreat from an earlier revolutionary politics. For, concomitant with the waning of the movement’s political ambitions and the slow scattering away of artists from Paris under the threat of invasion, these figures appeared as surrealism’s most vacuous variations on the theme of the female body as symbol of desire and dread’ (Nixon, 58). The depoliticized representation of the female body, no longer a symbol of the decadence of capitalism or a satiric attempt to protest the exploitation of women, had lost political resonance. For Mignon, these surrealist representations of women were now the all-too-recognizable objectifications of symptoms of the male imagination and psyche. The potentially radical opening and awareness of female subjectivity had been excised from the project. During the war years, Breton lived primarily in New York City, but also, notably, spent the summer of 1945 in Canada with his wife Elisa Breton (née Bindhoff) where he met key members of the emerging modern arts scene. His remarkable book Arcanum 17 details his time in Quebec’s Gaspé peninsula while Europe burned. Despite his productivity during the war years, the general sense was that, with most of the Surrealists in exile, the growth of the movement was on hold or else in rapid decline. Surrealist publications and activities nonetheless continued to pop up,

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such as New York’s VVV (1942–44, edited by David Hare, Breton, Ernst, and Duchamp). Though Bataille would return to the movement and publish a short prose piece in the catalogue to the 1947 Paris exhibition, in 1945 he declared that the Surrealist movement had exhausted itself: ‘Since 1940 people have hardly thought about it’ (‘The Surrealist Revolution,’ 52). Bataille’s sense of Surrealism’s sputtering is accurate in terms of continental, especially Bretonian, Surrealism, but premature in light of the subsequent activity around the globe. Similar to Bürger’s sense of the interaction between avant-garde art and politics, Bataille mutes his criticism by acknowledging that the story of Surrealism belonged to the history of world art rather than just to literary history (52–3). Breton predicted this development after the London exhibition in 1936, which featured work by artists from fourteen primarily European nations. The success of that exhibition lay ‘in the fact that it provided ample and conclusive evidence that surrealism now tends to unify under its banner the aspirations of the innovative writers and artists of all countries’ (Breton, ‘Nonnational,’ 9). Following the war, Breton returned to Paris and discovered a revitalized and reoriented interest in the possibilities of Surrealism. He worked to organize the 1947 International Exhibition of Surrealism in Paris, an event that positively demonstrated the ever-broadening, transnational circle of Surrealist influence. The event featured eighty-seven Surrealist artists from twenty-four different countries. It is here, in the 1947 exhibition, that we intersect with Canadian developments in and contributions to European Surrealism. Indeed, a remarkable group of Canadian painters were all invited to take part in the 1947 exhibition, including Jean-Paul Riopelle, Marcel Barbeau, Pierre Gauvreau, JeanPaul Mousseau, Paul-Émile Borduas, Fernand Leduc, and Roger Fauteux (Riopelle, Letter). In the end, however, only Riopelle exhibited alongside the Surrealists – the others declined (or in the case of Leduc, were declined) for reasons that the critic Ray Ellenwood characterizes as distinctly ambiguous (Egregore, 94). Borduas, for instance, wanted Breton to understand the differences and the Montréalité of his art before he felt he could align himself with the Surrealists proper. Riopelle, in contrast, exhibited and even signed the resulting manifesto ‘Rupture inaugurale’ – a document that clarified the Bretonian Surrealists’ formal rejection of communist affiliation. The invitation to the Canadians was by no means a random or out-ofthe-blue occurrence: indeed, these artists were the core members of a

Bertram Brooker (1888–1955). Courtesy of John Brooker, executor. Used with the permission of the Bertram Brooker Estate.

Bertram Brooker’s ‘Vortexing upward and outward through vaster births and deaths’ (ca 1913). Courtesy of John Brooker, executor. Used with the permission of the Bertram Brooker Estate.

Claude Gauvreau (1925–1971). ‘Pique-nique à Saint-Hillaire, 1947’ by Maurice Perron. Gelatin silver print, 24.2 × 19.3, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1999.151. Used with the permission of the Estate of Maurice Perron. Reprinted by kind permission of Line-Sylvie Perron.

Thérèse Renaud (1927–2005). ‘Thérèse Renaud’ by Maurice Perron. Gelatin silver print, 25.5 × 25.5, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 1999.298. Used with the permission of the Estate of Maurice Perron. Reprinted by kind permission of Line-Sylvie Perron.

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) and Wilfred Watson (1911–1998). Reprinted by kind permission of Fred Flahiff. Used with the permission of the Sheila Watson Estate.

Marshall McLuhan, Corinne McLuhan (1912–2008), and Sheila Watson. Reprinted by kind permission of Fred Flahiff. Used with the permission of the Sheila Watson Estate.

Page 66 from Counterblast (1969) by Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker (1915–1992). Reprinted by kind permission of Michael McLuhan and The Estate of Marshall McLuhan, and Margaret Parker and The Estate of Harley Parker.

‘Marshall McLuhan’ by Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957). Reprinted with the kind permission of Michael McLuhan and The Estate of Marshall McLuhan, and © by kind permission of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust (a registered charity).

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Canadian movement who had been approached to appear in the Paris exhibition as the representatives of a new, emerging strain of Surrealism in Quebec. These Canadian Surrealists were, of course, the Automatists – primarily a collection of visual artists, but whose work and achievements extended to all of the arts. Of particular interest to us here and now is their remarkable work in the fields of poetry, fiction, manifestos, essays, and especially Surrealist theatre in Canada. Surrealism in Canada Before Bretonian Surrealism arrived in Canada, many authors had dabbled and experimented in methods and aesthetics with distinct and poignant parallels. Most of these anticipatory surrealist moments, however, were fleeting or coincidental. They did not have near the same avantgarde relish for experimentalism or revolution as the Surrealist movement proper, nor did their work develop out of the same line of aesthetic inquiry. Still, some of these anticipatory surrealists are worth acknowledging for how they established the fertile ground into which the seed of Bretonian Surrealism was planted.9 The French Canadian scholar André G. Bourassa draws particular attention to a series of experiments by the poet Jean-Aubert Loranger (1896–1942) in his collection Les atmosphères suivi de Poëmes (1922) called ‘Images de poems irrealisés’ which present fragmented texts produced by an unusual collage technique. In his foreword to the 1970 reprint of Loranger’s book, Gilles Marcotte also lauds ‘the radical novelty of his enterprise in French-Canadian poetry’ (13; my translation).10 The Surrealist section of Loranger’s book, however, amounts to just two-and-half pages, just twenty-one lines of verse in a 148page collection of poems and poetic prose (169–71). The rest of the collection is indeed a remarkable gathering of poems but remains closer to the nineteenth-century Symbolist tradition than to Surrealism. Of more substantial note, the truncated career of poet Hector de SaintDenys Garneau (1912–43) included the production of experiments and games involving automatism (Poulin, 61). His book of poems Regards et jeux dans l’espace (1937) is particularly advanced in its experimentalism. Despite these anticipations, however, the interwar period in Quebec is more aptly characterized by the general atmosphere of catholic closemindedness, obscurantism, and more ominously, the rise of interest in fascism. Evidence of the fascist turn is easy to find: the popular journal La Relève dedicated an entire issue in 1934 to promoting the ‘spiritual’ values of fascism, while the editor of another periodical, Vivre, was

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comfortable publishing confessions in 1935 such as ‘I admire Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Ataturk … Mussolini is the creator of a new world’ (Gagnon, 2). The Canadian Forum in June 1933 documented various developments of fascism in Quebec, including the use of the ‘Roman salute’ by a Workers’ Association to greet the Honourable Mr Esioff-Léon Patenaude, a chief organizer for the Conservative Party in Montreal. The spectre of fascism appeared in English Canada, symbolically with the rise of labour camps in western Canada that were used to fight brewing radical leftist sentiment, but more literally with the emergence of the fascistic and furtive social club euphemistically named the Citizen’s League of Canada, and the Christie Pits riot of 1933 in Toronto that witnessed Jews and Italians battling neo-Nazi members of Canadian Swastika Clubs. The Cosmic Canadian poet, critic, and novelist A.M. Stephen catalogued fascistic activity in Canada in his 1934 pamphlet Hitlerism in Canada – in which he also reprints the founding manifesto of the Canadian League Against War and Fascism11 (33). This upsurge in fascist activity was largely inspired by the rise of fascist movements in Europe – which attracted even stalwart avant-gardists like Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. Though the Canadian-born Lewis returned to the country during the Second World War, as will be discussed in chapter four, it was largely to escape the notoriety his politics (and personality) had accrued. Canada, for this British Canadian avant-gardist, was no better than a cold refuge from a hostile world, and became a personal symbol for the author of his self-condemnation. By 1939, however, before the war, Lewis had already recanted his praise for Adolf Hitler. The preliminary encounters with European avant-garde and the official Surrealist art movement inside Canada began in 1927, just three years after the publication of the founding Surrealist manifesto. The International Exhibition of Modern Art, as previously discussed, prompted discussions about both the aesthetical and political implications of Surrealist art. A few years later, Toronto’s foremost communist magazine Masses published articles debating the role Surrealism could play in their movement. T. Richardson wrote ‘A Defense of Pure Art’ advocating for the connection between Surrealist art and political materialism – a unification between the aesthetic and radical avant-gardes. There is no evidence at present that these debates extended beyond theoretical musings into actual experimentation with Surrealist methods and techniques. Neither Masses nor its replacement New Frontier includes any literary or visual experimentation that push beyond modern or social realisms. Furthermore, counter-arguments in Masses demonstrate the

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general air of hostility between the radical left and the Surrealist movement. Breton, himself, as outlined above, was well aware of the hostility to his group’s aesthetics. To these criticisms, and demonstrating the separation between Surrealism and communism in the 1940s, he responded by counter-attacking the preferred art of the Communist Party: ‘There are plenty of us throughout the world who think that “socialist realist” is but one more imposture to lay at the door of a regime that alienates human freedom, systematically corrupts all the words that could predispose men to universal brotherhood, and eliminates in an ignominious way those individuals who did not bow their heads soon enough’ (‘Of “Socialist Realism,”’ 276). Brian Trehearne has carefully documented A.J.M. Smith’s flirtation with Surrealist ideas and effects in the 1930s and early 1940s, though Smith was loath and perhaps embarrassed to admit the association (‘A.J.M. Smith’s Eclectic Surrealism,’ 119). Bertram Brooker more openly acknowledged the significance and integrity of the Surrealists (‘When,’ 14–15), but also, like Smith, only tentatively dabbled with related irrational verse forms. Brooker, however, was not the Cosmic Canadian to push furthest into Surrealist methods or techniques. In September of 1927, a few months after the IEMA had triggered an increased awareness of avant-garde writing in Canada, W.W.E. Ross began to integrate Surrealist research methods into his own explorations of the subconscious. He began writing down his dreams, as unfiltered as his mind would allow him, through a technique he referred to as ‘hypnogogism’ (Ross, Diary). He was aware of the connections between his own, mystically infused experiments with the subconscious and the Surrealist exploration of the same, but believed himself to be in advance of their movement. As he explained to John Laughlin of New Directions in 1937, ‘I am quite experienced in so-called “psychic phenomena,” methods of divination etc., a sphere which the surrealists seem to me to be just on the edge of’ (Ross, Letter). In some respects, Ross was accurate in claiming to be avant the Surrealists, especially in Canada. His commitment to ‘psychic phenomena,’ otherwise known as magic, provides a compelling anticipation of the ecstatic proclamation found in Borduas’s 1948 dictum in his surrealist manifesto ‘Refus Global’: ‘MAKE WAY FOR MAGIC! MAKE WAY FOR OBJECTIVE MYSTERIES! / MAKE WAY FOR LOVE! / MAKE WAY FOR INTERNAL DRIVES!’ (37–8).12 Ross began to actively translate Surrealists like Max Jacob and André Salmon in the 1940s and 1950s, including one Surrealist poem that begins with the bold pronouncement: ‘The Breton – it is I – is seated in the midst of the flags of the world’ (‘Exhortation’). The

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poem concludes with an angel inspiring guilt in the narrator for his inability to read the holy language. The extent of Ross’s surrealist activities is only gradually coming to light, and these activities were certainly not the core dimension of his aesthetics that attracted modernist Montreal poets like Smith, Dudek, and Klein to his work in the 1940s and 1950s. During the period before the war, a few noteworthy exhibitions of visual art arrived in Ontario as part of the general internationalization of the Surrealist movement. The first of these exhibitions took place in 1937, when the American experimental painter Lucy Eisenberg showed her Surrealist work in Toronto. The Globe and Mail art critic Pearl McCarthy used the occasion to attempt to marginalize the importance of Surrealism as an art movement, encouraging a cool reception to the work from her readers. It seems ironic, though, that she balanced her dismissal of Surrealism with hearty praise of developments in local Canadian abstractionism given its own marginalization: Surrealism, with its fur teacups, ghost watches and the like, must not be confused with regular abstract art. We have had fine examples of abstract work in Canada, notably those by Lawren Harris and Bertram Brooker. These men express in visible form certain positive concepts which the mind can grasp. Lawren Harris’s landscapes are instinct with philosophical ideas about life, and relations which can be suggested by forms. Bertram Brooker’s beautiful, abstract designs also deal with concepts which can be acquired through the sense – with rhythm, movement, accent, repose, peaceful flow. These are among the highest, legitimate uses of art and have always been employed by great artists … But the surrealist, with his floating clocks and fur teacups, has dashed far beyond the field of symbolism in art, and seems to be trying to express the not-watch, the not-a-teacup idea, trying to make a positive, concrete expression out of a negative … At present, it boasts that it knows no discipline or organization. (22 February 1937)

McCarthy’s rather uneven philistinism was not unanimous in Toronto, however, and Fred Haines, commissioner of fine arts for the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) and former curator of the Art Gallery of Toronto, sought to tap into the growing interest in European avantgardism, and Surrealism in particular. He organized Toronto’s first legitimate follow-up exhibition to the IEMA, a two-week show in 1938 at the CNE. The exhibition featured sixty-five works by the likes of Hans Arp, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio De Chirico, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, René Magritte, André Masson, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, and many more (Catalogue, 50–61) – many of whom were appearing in Canada for

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the first time. The British art critic Herbert Read contributed a provocative one-page note on Surrealist art to the catalogue that challenged Canadians to embrace the avant-garde spirit of the paintings: ‘These works of art, therefore, are not offered, nor likely to be received, as objects of beauty. The old aesthetics is dead: these are the first lineaments of a new vision of the world’ (Read, 49). This particular Surrealist exhibition first appeared in London at the New Burlington Galleries (Pantazzi, 27), but did not visit any other North American city; it was a Toronto exclusive. Pearl McCarthy previewed the exhibition with her accustomed disdain for the movement: Everybody knows that surrealism purports to express what are called the subconscious ideas of the mind. While many of the pictures are slightly nasty, some have had an extraordinary imaginative power, seeming to open vistas into ‘faery lands forlorn’ … These high rhapsodic moments happen in surrealist art – once in a long, a very long time. But the basis of the whole thing is distasteful to us. The protagonists of the cause state proudly that they do not attempt to control their minds while expressing their notions in paint – that they permit the mind to run on, unfettered by reason. And anything allowed to run its course without the control of deliberate reason displeases us heartily. If we wish thrills, we shall steer into them deliberately, thank you, and not be carried along by anything, whether it be a mob, a gasoline engine, a popular creed or a ‘subconscious’ idea. We loathe all ‘letting go.’ But you can see at once that that is an entirely personal matter of taste. Because we feel that way does not mean that even we would deny that surrealism has interest. It has. (1 August 1938)

Given the date of her article, it is rather strange to encounter this equation of Surrealist abandon with a fear of the automobile – a technology that had long been entrenched into Canadian life, and almost thirty years after the Futurist exaltation of the car. Regardless of McCarthy’s trepidations, these two events were followed by a third exhibition of Surrealist art in 1946 at the Eaton’s College Street gallery, featuring the work of Braque, Chagall, Dalí, Degas, Gris, Modigliani, Picasso, and many others, that completes the prime share of the sparse offerings of European avantgarde and Surrealist art in Canada outside of Quebec. They do not constitute anything more than fledgling encounters, but demonstrate a general, soft interest in European activities and developments. In Montreal during the same period things were much more active. John Lyman, after returning to Canada from his training in the Académie Matisse, Matisse’s art school, offered public and private lectures on

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the value of modern art in Montreal (Charles Hill, 125). At the same time, the W. Scott & Sons gallery in Montreal began exhibiting work by Matisse, Modigliani, Léger, Braque, Derain, Dufy, and Picasso (see Exhibition of Modern French Paintings). This important gallery also hosted exhibitions by tentative Canadian abstractionists like Marian Scott, Goodridge Roberts, and Fritz Brandtner, as well as the first exhibition of the Eastern Group of Painters (organized by Lyman) in 1938. The interest in experimental art expanded throughout the decade, leading up to the formation of the Contemporary Arts Society (CAS), a group whose members included both Brandtner and Roberts, and an emerging ‘progressive’ modern named Paul-Émile Borduas, who was at the time an emerging painter and professor of visual arts at the École du meuble. In what might have been an intriguing point of connection between the Cosmic Canadians and the Canadian Surrealists, Group of Seven member and great friend of Bertram Brooker L.L. Fitzgerald was invited to join the CAS but declined. While the influence of the Group of Seven faded as a source of pioneering aesthetics in the country, Borduas would proceed to create and lead Canada’s second avant-garde movement, the Automatists. The difference between his art and the work of the Cosmic Canadians signals a shift from non-objective spiritual abstractions to non-representational post-impressionism. Properly, into this ripe context, Surrealism arrived in French Canada when the onset of the Second World War forced expatriate Canadians home and caused a generation of avant-garde artists to seek shelter from the violence of the European continent. Among the Canadians who returned, the most prominent and influential was undoubtedly the painter Alfred Pellan, the Quebec native who returned in 1940. One immediate and objective result of his return was a book of illustrated poems Les Iles de la nuit (1944), produced with Alain Grandbois, which is itself a landmark in the development of experimental writing and publishing in Canada. More importantly and more subjectively, however, Pellan had befriended André Breton in Paris and, upon his return, introduced a generation of Quebec artists to the cutting edge of modern art (D. Reid, A Concise, 212). Pellan’s credentials for doing so were impeccable: having moved to Paris in 1926, he had, in fact, exhibited his own visual art alongside Braque, Ernst, Kandinsky, Léger, Picasso, and Arp (Bourassa, 40). During the war years, both Léger and Soupault visited Canada resulting in the posthumous art book Fernand Léger: La forme humaine dans l’espace (1945) published in Montreal. When Breton and his third wife Elisa Bindhoff came to Canada to spend a summer in the Gaspé peninsula and

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in the small village of Sainte-Agathe, they took time to travel and meet with Pellan. The results of Breton’s time in Canada are recorded in Arcanum 17 (1944).13 While Pellan’s writing, manifestos, and ideas were circulating Montreal, Paul-Émile Borduas began exploring and experimenting with Surrealist-inspired methods and ideas. These came to first fruition on 1 May 1942, when Borduas held his first exhibition of Surrealist art – the first by a Canadian, approximately seventeen years after the founding of the Surrealist movement. Following the event, students from Montreal’s various art schools collected around him, including a core sampling of the future Automatists, soaking up the lessons of Surrealism. The movement caught momentum, and these young artists held their own exhibition of experimental visual arts under the group name the ‘Sagittarians’ on 30 April 1943. Borduas’s students and some from Montreal’s other arts school began actively seeking links to the numerous exiled avantgardists in North America, primarily in New York City. One of these students, Louis-Marcel Raymond, left Quebec for New York and Paris where he developed close ties with André Breton and other European avant-gardists. Raymond became a regular participant in Surrealist events and activities. He did not return to Canada. Others, such as Mimi Parent, a student of Pellan’s, and Jean Benoît, an eventual close friend of Breton, left Canada in 1947 and became intimately involved in American and European avant-garde activity (see Ellenwood and Betts, ‘Canada’s,’ 7–8). As a result of their enthusiasm, the connections between the young Québécois artists and the international avant-garde arrived quickly. On 17 September 1943, Breton wrote a letter to one of the young Sagittarians, Fernand Leduc, that included a note of recognition: ‘Nothing would please me more than to record your support and that of your friends for the surrealist movement, and I would be grateful to you for expressing it in a letter which could be printed in our periodical’ (qtd. in Bourassa, 46). Leduc’s response, however, was rather surprising considering the ambitions of the Montreal artists. He was diffident and resisted the kind of partisan declaration Breton seems to have been looking for: ‘At the moment, experimenting with surrealist techniques does not much matter to us … Formulating our participation in the surrealist movement is no easy task; our faith is that of neophytes’ (Bourassa, 46). There is something coy in Leduc’s claim to being green, for even at this early stage in the development of Automatism in Quebec they already felt a keen sense of difference from Bretonian Surrealism. This

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difference helped forge a community and an art movement of a distinctly French Canadian Surrealism. Automatism differs from Bretonian Surrealism because of its insistence upon the method of automatic art production. Automatism offered a subversion of rationalism by proposing a realm within and beyond the consciousness of each individual outside of reason. This non-rational space of consciousness consisted of wild and erratic drives that could manifest themselves in the conscious mind in the form of turbid and irregular images. Surrealism developed means to access this non-rational space and thereby to release the repressed treasure house of images. It was this cathartic release from over-rational consciousness that would in turn contribute to a general liberation – the particular avant-garde revolution at the core of the movement. But the European Surrealists were inclined towards literal renderings of subconscious experiences, memories, and images through figurative drawings and representational imagery. The Automatists enthusiastically embraced Surrealism’s revolutionary promise, but as Ellenwood has pointed out, believed that the Surrealist’s penchant for representing the subconscious (rather than allowing the subconscious to manifest itself) used art for revolutionary purposes at the expense of the integrity and freedom of the art work: ‘the emphasis has to be put back on the art itself’ (Egregore, 177). Even though the Surrealists were rejected by the Communist Party for not being willing to use art for political ends, the Automatists felt the art was compromised in trying to translate the subconscious through symbolism and imagery for a general audience. Ellenwood quotes Leduc explaining the difference: ‘There has been in Surrealism “too much reason in the search for the marvellous, the means tends to get confused with the mode of working”’ (Egregore, 178). For the Automatists, in contrast, ‘the art object becomes a concrete entity in itself, not expressing some other kind of thought through itself’ (180). Behind this distinction lies an appeal to pure form and an emphatic embrace of the value of art. Furthermore, considering the ultramontanism that dominated Quebec during the dark Duplessis years, it seems rather natural that rebellious young artists would congregate under the giant umbrella of Surrealism, with its European context providing gravitas, its unapologetic embrace of irrationalism providing an opening for new art, and its status at the fore of the avant-garde providing relevance. The pursuit of pure, unmediated form led from Borduas’s vaguely representational works like ‘Abstraction 6 or Chanteclair or Tête de coq’ (1942) and Jean-Paul Riopelle’s surrealist landscape gouaches to work

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that became rapidly less and less figurative. By the 1950s, Automatist canvases were explosive encounters with dynamic paint – abstractions that take colour and morphic impressionism as subject. Less geometrical and rigid than Brooker’s or Harris’s abstractions, the Automatist work explores the liquidity of paint on the surface of their canvases. In the words of Simon Dresdnere, ‘I must confess that my initial response to the Automatist idiom was more of a visceral nature than an intellectual perception of it. To put it simply: it excited me. The brush stroke, with all its unpredictability, combined with the artist’s gestural calligraphy – all that was new on the art scene in Montreal in the mid-50s.’ Reid traces the dramatic shift in the early Automatist painting to the visit by the avantgarde French painter Fernand Léger in 1943 – from whose work Borduas developed his distinctive ‘intense, frenetic’ style (Reid, A Concise, 217). Avant-garde literature by the Automatists began appearing prior to 1948, in particular from a new experimental small press, Les Cahiers de la file indienne, founded in 1946. The founding editors, Eloi de Grandmont and Gilles Hénault, brought to the press their associations with the emerging Surrealists as well as with Montreal’s communists. They published five books that straddle these two communities, effectively and momentarily bridging the aesthetic and radical avant-gardes. Two books in particular stand out from their backlist: Théâtre en plein air by Gilles Hénault, illustrated with drawings by Charles Daudelin, and Les Sables du rêve by Thérèse Renaud (later Thérèse Leduc), illustrated with drawings by Jean-Paul Mousseau in the manner of André Masson. The latter text has been credited for being the ‘first truly Surrealist collection in Canada’ (inside cover), and was certainly the first book in Canada where Surrealist language experiments are explored alongside similarly produced illustrations.14 The images produced by Jean-Paul Mousseau do not attempt to illustrate the poems or translate the poems but stand beside them as accomplices in a new aesthetic adventure. They corroborate the energy behind the experiment. Readers confused by the lack of conventional logic in the literary imagery need only reference Mousseau’s drawings to realize that their experience of disorientation is appropriate. Renaud’s Surrealist poems, written when she was just 15 and 16 years old (Smart, 122), help to illuminate the mandate and ambitions of the Automatist movement. They were directly inspired by Rimbaud’s ‘La Lettre du voyant’ and Renaud’s early exposure to avant-garde and Surrealist poetry (Smart, 41). The poems in Les Sables du rêve are intended to sidestep the conscious rational mind in order to allow the subconscious mind to represent itself. As such, they are filled with strange and

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irrational poetic images that evoke the derangement of dreams. This irrationalism can be measured through a variety of specific techniques. The body, for instance, appears in distorted guise: a woman’s nose becomes a trombone upon which she ‘can drum all the folk tunes’ and her hands ‘are made of flying cactus’ (Renaud, 11). Objects are animated and occasionally anthropomorphized: her husband wears a necktie that is a snake (5), mirrors talk back to her (11), and a bouquet attempts to seduce a statue (16). The rules of physics are inevitably waylaid by magical and dreamlike powers: stars cause fires on the earth as ‘they rush by’ (12); the poems’ speaker strolls on clouds (22) and pulls roads from her pockets (24). The images seem loose and free, but develop networks of symbolic resonances from their recurrence throughout the book. For instance, the threatening phallic image of her husband’s snake necktie (5) juxtaposes the protecting gynecic image of the oyster bed to which she retreats (12). Sexuality and desire recur throughout the collection with a poignant connection to Christian symbolism: she hears ‘the bell in the steeple chime’ and becomes ‘The Desire-Bee’ (23), she eats ‘angels’ breasts’ and laughs freely (26); more suggestively, the erotically charged ‘night visitor’ who steals into her bed chamber and watches her undress, leaves and shoots himself ‘twice in the temple’ (6). The religious symbology of the poems evokes the largely unchecked Catholic control of Quebec society at the time. For the Automatists, breaking up the control of religion over their local society was intertwined with the Surrealist agenda of challenging the dominance of reason in Western thought; both of these complementary agendas were oriented towards sex by their interest in Freud’s theory of preconscious drives. While the unconscious has no language, the preconscious is able to make use of words and stories gleaned from the world and invest them with psychical meaning through the charge of unconscious desires. Conscious experience with language is thus charged with unconscious drives and distortions of literal reality. Renaud described these poems as built from poetic images that form ‘counter-truths,’ which means that while they were composed of ‘incoherent images’ they ‘nonetheless expressed a very painful reality for me: these are sad, even heartrending poems … poems about a tragic reality, expressing an inner turmoil when I found myself misunderstood and troubled in a bourgeois family atmosphere, being educated by nuns’ (38). These poems, then, are not attempts to counter the repressive atmosphere, nor to express desires, but to open up language to unconscious desires despite the contextual religious repression of those desires. While language, for Freud, is always intermixed with the preconscious, the

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conscious mind (taking its cue from social forces and ideology) actively represses the full release of unconscious drives. Renaud’s poetry externalizes this tension and this wrestling such that the howl of desire is mixed with emotions of guilt and torment. Sex and the speaker’s relationship to her own body evoke or perhaps provoke her use of an inherited symbolic order, distorting the Christian mythos according to unconscious and libidinal forces within her. She realizes that her own ancient history is associated with her genitals: her legs that she uses ‘for bookends’ will project her into ‘a gulf so deep’ that she will see in it her ‘hungry ancestors’ (30). The gulf/orifice metaphor appears earlier on page 15 where a ‘steep abyss [with] fathomless depth’ is associated with cat imagery. On page 9, the pun of the French slang ‘chatte’ (similar to the English ‘pussy’) creates an elaborate metaphor for masturbation: ‘I have a cat melting like a scream in my hands. / If I pat him he becomes a burning sun so I’m forced to abandon him’ (9). The ‘cruel and vicious black cat’ that ‘rocks me to ecstasy’ yet inspires thoughts of cutting ‘off his tail.’ The suggestive metaphor thus evokes the sexual repression of Quebec at the time, reminiscent of the same sexual guilt felt by Catholics the world over. She later has an encounter with ‘a naked woman covered with brambles’ who pops out of her cupboard (34). She closes the cupboard, avoids the ‘sweat and cruel joys,’ and immediately laments her repressed behaviour: ‘Oh! Lock me up for hiding this secret and having the misfortune of seeing love without falling to its knees. . .’ As Automatic texts struggling towards the cathartic release of repressed desires, these poems are resistant to any closed reading that hinges upon the intentionality of the author – their very avant-gardism insists upon the fundamental openness of the images. In other words, these poems cannot be interpreted as didactic texts in the service of Surrealism, in general, or Automatism, in particular. They are complete unto themselves, enacting (or attempting to enact) a kind of aesthetic purity unprecedented in Canada at the time. But while the images are decidedly outré and even hermetic, they also present a tension that mirrors the Surrealist’s endeavour to reconcile unabridged desire with bourgeois conditioning. As the example of the cruel and vicious black cat reveals, the poetic images blur the boundaries between representation, metaphor, and metonymy, for they are intertwined with psychic pressures and drives. There is no resolution, nor a utopian projection for a possible resolution: these are texts of internal struggle. At the same time, even admitting the tension caused by repression was a significant challenge or revolt to the existing Augustinian code that equated rationalism with moral goodness.

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Turning away from this repressive logic, Renaud said, ‘it’s true that the universe of Surrealist games represented an immense liberation for me, as it did for our friends at the time, and we were always looking for ways to astonish each other’ (38). The fact of her engagement with the psychic pressures of sexuality and gender makes her a significant precursor to subsequent generations of more politically oriented artists – avant-garde and not – working to understand and unravel the sociological and psychological restrictions placed on ((French) Canadian) women. Her poem ‘I Lay My Head’ from Les Sables du rêve was recognized as an important contribution in Penelope Rosemont’s international anthology Surrealist Women. While Automatism coagulated primarily as a movement from pioneering ambitions and achievements in painting, the movement quickly spread to dance, theatre, and poetry. Indeed, included in Refus Global, the landmark Automatist manifesto published in 1948, are one remarkable essay on dance by Françoise Sullivan and three short one-act plays by Claude Gauvreau. The manifesto was published in an edition of only 400 mimeographed copies. It was primarily intended to serve as a catalogue for an exhibition of Automatist visual art, but was extended to offer a window of insight into the collective itself. With illustrations by JeanPaul Riopelle, sections printed on coloured paper and others on cardboard, and sections left unsewn into the binding, the varied printing techniques mirror the multidisciplinary and experimental approaches of the Automatist collective. The fact that they numbered each copy in the manner of book art suggests that they were well aware that this catalogue had ambitions of its own. The limited-edition, handmade manifesto was launched at Montreal’s Librairie Tranquille on 9 August 1948. The lead manifesto was signed by fifteen members of the Automatist collective. Despite the importance of the manifesto and the excitement it quickly generated, the publication had serious and unanticipated consequences. Borduas lost his teaching position at the École du meuble in response to the public uproar triggered by the manifesto. In the wake of his dismissal, Montreal’s arts community divided between those who supported the school and those who supported the artist. Over the next four years, while the art continued to develop, the egregore splintered: Borduas left Montreal, others drifted into other circles in New York or Paris. Like Harris before him, Borduas, the alienated and antagonized leader of one of Canada’s early avant-garde nodes, fled the country for the openness and perhaps anonymity of America, arriving in New York in 1953. This date qualifies as an end point of the Automatist movement, although

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some scholars, including Ellenwood, argue that activity sputtered on until 1955. Despite the end of Automatism, however, Surrealism had been forcefully introduced into Canada. Its spirit of jubilant, deliberate irrationalism spread throughout Quebec and across Canada. While Quebec’s Automatist movement emerged from a conscious deliberation on the Québécois’ specific intellectual inheritance from the continental European avant-garde, there was nothing random in their break from Surrealism – going so far, as mentioned above, as to reject André Breton’s personal invitation to participate in the 1947 International Surrealist Exhibition.15 Fernand Leduc explained the minute but fundamental point of distinction between Montreal’s Automatists and the continental Surrealists in a letter to André Breton in January 1948: ‘Surrealism has wronged art – and especially painting – not in having used it, obviously, but in not knowing how to bridge science and art on the poetic plane, in falsifying the meaning of art by only considering it valuable as proof of something else … Surrealism should have distinguished between logical proofs literally expressed in pictorial form and the authentic expression of visually formulated intentions’ (qtd. in Bourassa, 68). The Automatists were primarily concerned with creating aesthetic objects – be that in painting or drama or poetry or dance – that embodied or was produced through an unfettered consciousness rather than indirectly expressing or representing or ‘proving’ revolutionary ideas. They rejected the fusion of the two avant-gardes sought by Breton: and in their art, they sought an aesthetic purity that surpassed the original Surrealists. The Automatists kept their focus on Surrealist irrationalism as a means to overcome the limitations of the conscious mind. But instead of using irrationalism in the service of the sociopolitical revolution, they stayed primarily focused on the revolutionary implications of irrational art. PaulÉmile Borduas’s lead and eponymous contribution to the infamous Refus Global manifesto suite (1948) poignantly and powerfully articulates the need for political revolution in Quebec. However, he (as well as Leduc, Gauvreau, and the other signatories of the Automatist manifesto) believed that if revolutionary politics triggered radical social change before the consciousness of the general populace itself has undergone radical change, the achievements of the revolution would come undone. Instead, they proposed a new way of writing that would enable and provoke a new consciousness that would, in turn and eventually, contribute to sociopolitical revolution: ‘You can keep your spoils, rational and premeditated like everything else on the warm bosom of decadence. We’ll settle for unpredictable passion; we’ll settle for total risk through global refusal …

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history teaches that only a full development of our faculties, followed by a complete renewal of our emotional well-springs, can take us out of this dead end, onto the open road leading towards a civilization impatient to be born’ (‘Refus Global,’ 40). Implicit in Borduas’s polemic is a reminder to contemporary revolutionary avant-gardists of the failure of the rampant idealism of the French Revolution to enact sustainable revolutionary change. The civilization that was waiting to be born had to be different from that fashioned by previous failed revolutions. They could only achieve this goal by starting with a liberated consciousness no longer at work repressing unconscious drives. Borduas and the other Automatists believed that they had uncovered a radical aesthetic form that could make or provoke this liberational leap. The Automatist art had been touched by the radical nature of human form. What is at stake in such a discovery is precisely the ability to write freely, unfettered, and unencumbered in the Canadian geography. Language, as Freud discovered, is always a negotiation of internal prelinguistic drives and desires that struggle to attach to the semiotics of the external world. Writing is always a negotiation of this internal subjective and external social dynamic. The Automatists, by embracing surrealist writing techniques, what Kristeva describes as ‘a kind of writing whose very logic was raving mad’ (The Sense, 118), discovered a means to avoid the semiotic restrictions of a colonial space that denies the legitimacy of local experience. Automatism depends on the integrity of the author in the immediate circumstance of facing the page; in the challenge of opening up the conscious mind to the charge of the preconscious and even unconscious. By including the body in the confrontation with the page, the divide between art and life breaks down just as the divide between the internal (irrational) and external (rational) pressures shaping the aesthetic act becomes destabilized and uncontrollable. The postcolonial geopoetics of the TISH authors similarly enabled them to write ‘intelligently perceptive of sensation’ (Davey, ed., 19) and to create a poetry that was ‘a merging of [the poet] with his natural surroundings, aiming at establishing a connection between language and reality’ (23). Canada’s first avant-garde writers, including the Cosmic Canadians who also sought the literary liberation of a postcolonial imagination, were not drawn to the radically negativist aesthetics of the Symbolists or to Dada because of the more immediate problem of writing in a colonial space that denied the legitimacy of local experience and perspective. It was thus a radical postcolonial proposal from Davey in 1961 in Vancouver to claim that ‘the poet must start (and stay) WHERE HE IS’ (‘The Problem,’ 65), and it was an

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avant-garde proposal to develop a radical art form that reoriented the writer in terms of the page, their own body, and the world: where the poetic line extends out from ‘the poet’s locus along the page and to the reader’ (66). The Automatists were less immediately interested in the communicatory and expressive dynamic of their art, but they too discovered a means to elude the repressive colonial and religious culture that denied the legitimacy of their (physical) experience in the world. It was through their embrace of surrational irrationalism, of ‘folie’ with its denotative combination of playfulness, madness, and exuberance, that they were able to create this liberated art. It was in their break from the Surrealists, however, that they affirmed the postcolonial nature of their project. Just Playing Mad: Three Plays by Claude Gauvreau With the Automatist’s aspiration to ‘cast off their useless chains’ to ‘realize their full, individual potential according to the unpredictable, necessary order of spontaneity – in splendid anarchy’ (Borduas, ‘Refus Global,’ 41), they believed that they were in fact rejecting Surrealism for what they deemed ‘surrationalism’ (Borduas, ‘Comments,’ 53). The rejection highlights the particular difference of art’s role in the revolution as conceived by the two movements. For the playwright Claude Gauvreau, for instance, it was unconscionable to use art in the service of anything – revolutionary, capital, or social. The art had to be imaginatively free and aesthetically pure. This freedom and purity found its correlative in the idea and embodiment of madness as theme and method. Gauvreau explored this madness as part of his endeavour to create a nonrepresentational but transformational art. His use of madness as trope and as aesthetic were both part of the broader Automatist ambition to unfetter the image – which would, in turn, unfetter the individual, and eventually contribute to the general liberation of all of society. Steve McCaffery once praised the ‘infinite theoretical implications’ of the non-signifying words in Gauvreau’s poetry (Performance Preamble), select texts of which contain only neologistic morphemes strung together for emotive rather than semantic impact. In a series of letters to Jean-Claude Dussault, Gauvreau offered a defence of such disjunctive writing: ‘And let’s have no stupid objections that certain poems – perfectly materialist and concrete – are hermetic and inaccessible! I can grasp Tzara’s poems completely, and if I can do that, anybody is capable of understanding any poetic reality! Of course they have to clean the mud out of their sensitivities first!’ (Letter, 197–8). The blocked sensitivities are what prevent the realization of

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words as physical and psychical objects. Words have a sensual pleasure in noise, in look, and in the movement of the tongue. Words, even nonsignifying words, also have resonance in their ghostly echo of familiar language. The preconscious gravitates towards such utterances, filling them in like gestalt objects with unconscious, libidinal desires. While his writing responded to the particular Catholic-dominated ultra-rationalism of Québécois society at the time, Gauvreau participated in a broader avant-garde tradition that sought to manifest revolutionary ambitions in the radical openness of his aesthetic form and practice. Such texts are intended to be experienced as transformative catalysts rather than read with the customary detachment of closed-form texts that rely more on denotative signification. During his lifetime, Gauvreau published three books, including a novel, and many articles and commentaries, but the full wealth of his writing remained generally inaccessible until six years after his death. In 1977, Gauvreau’s collected works were published in a 1498-page tome Œuvres créatrices complètes by the press Parti Pris in Ottawa. As evidenced by this remarkable document, the range of his writing extends from an early engagement with European Surrealism to more disjunctive nonsignifying paralinguistic writings, using what he once described in the letter to Dussault as ‘image exploréene,’ or a free, explorational use of language.16 All of Gauvreau’s writings, from his first dramatic objects to his later poetry and even his novel, exude a sophisticated conceptualization of the discursive function of language systems. In this way, his Automatist experiments from 1947 to 1971 explore central concerns of the international avant-garde from the late 1960s through to the end of the millennium – a period in which continental French avant-garde authors and philosophers held unprecedented and substantial influence over international, particularly Western, artists. In the first major recognition of Gauvreau’s innovation in English Canada, in 1978, Steve McCaffery traced Gauvreau’s aesthetic lineage from early European avant-gardes that explored the sonic potential of poetry: In Canada, things [sound poetry, in particular] start not with Bill Bissett or bpNichol, but with Montreal Automatiste Claude Gauvreau. Gauvreau, working in the 40s, made structural modifications to French Surrealist ideas, especially the diminishment of pictorial image in favour of what he terms ‘rhythmic images.’ Gauvreau’s work, which bears comparison to Artaud and the Dadaists, is theoretically hermetic – a non-semantic language of pure sound which, however, never dominates in any one text.

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Rather Gauvreau exploits the tension between familiar and unfamiliar linguistic experiences, thrusting the listener into disturbingly volatile states of alternate comprehension and uncomprehension. Gauvreau’s influence, however, has never extended outside Québec (his work, for instance, was a seminal influence of Raoul Duguay) and Anglophone sound poetry does not surface until the early sixties in the work of bpNichol and Bill Bissett. (‘Sound,’ 16–17)

Though McCaffery highlights the provincial nature of Gauvreau’s reputation and influence, it is worth noting that he also credits Gauvreau for being the immediate and logical precursor to the English Canadian avant-garde nodes that erupted in Vancouver and Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s. In a lineage shaped by aesthetic experimentation into the radical formalist implications of language as object, McCaffery gives Gauvreau primacy of place in Canada. As suggested in McCaffery’s brief assessment of Gauvreau’s writing, Gauvreau’s innovative approach to aesthetics involved the conceptually sophisticated exploration of the tension between meaningful and irrational expression. From his first play in 1947 to his final experiments in 1971, Gauvreau increasingly undermined rational, conventional deployment of language – moving from Surreal imagery and highly symbolic narratives to non-expressive linguistic utterances completely devoid of plot, character, or semantic content. Recognizing the transition in his writing himself, Gauvreau once mused that his plays present ‘a coherent progression which would be instructive if viewed as a whole’ (qtd. in Bourassa, 108). The increasingly anti-rational orientation of his writing and his sense of the discursive function of non-meaningful language – notably a direction already present, if underdeveloped, in the dramatic objects included in Refus Global – evoke a formal linguistic aesthetic of madness that his earliest works address primarily through thematic and narrative content. The three dramatic objects that were published in Refus Global reveal an early manifestation of this discursive function of madness. These three are all landmarks in the development of Canadian avant-garde literature not just for overcoming the ‘colonial lag’ by catching up with the foreign artists who helped inspire them, but also for pioneering a radical formal correlative to the sociopolitical ambitions of the Automatist collective. The borders between gothic conventions and medical diagnoses tend to be blurred in fictional uses of madness. ‘Folie,’ however, in Gauvreau’s literature seems to derive its functional intensity from its etymological

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roots in the Old French meanings for both amorous delight (Folie générale) and violent outburst (Folie furieuse) (Le Trésor de la Langue Française) – which combine to suggest a libidinal pleasure from behaving foolishly, potentially violently (in English, ‘madness,’ similarly, derives from the Old English term for violent excitement). Gauvreau’s etymologically correct usage contradicts the more religious and legal understanding and use of madness as proceeding from a mythical and deleterious moment of possession, a metaphorically invasive affliction that relieves the individual of the mens rea responsibility for the deeds they do – deeds that range from disgusting crimes to disjunctive art. Instead, Gauvreau’s writing speaks to and appeals to the liberating potential of foolish, bawdy delight. In such a rupture of linguistic decorum, Gauvreau opens the possibility for broader personal and sociopolitical liberations, which, as Kristeva writes, is the key to pleasure in a text: ‘happiness exists only at the price of a revolt. None of us has pleasure without confronting an obstacle, prohibition, authority, or law that allows us to realize ourselves as autonomous and free’ (The Sense, 7). Even though his madness appears disjunctive, deliberately open-ended, mystifying, or anti-aesthetic, it yet functions as a plot device in his narrative scenarios. Madness appears by name in each of the three plays included in Refus Global: the man in ‘In the Heart of the Bulrushes’ (‘Au Coeur des quenouilles’) uses madness as a metaphor to explain his predicament and earnest attempt to break free from conventional ways of thinking and seeing the world, claiming ‘I am a madman just like the strong ones. I am a mad killer, I am an escaped madman’ (Gauvreau, 63);17 In ‘The Good Life’ (‘Bien-être’), the woman also describes her predicament through a metaphoric madness, ‘Throats of madness in basins full of perspiration’ (Gauvreau, 79);18 and in ‘The Shadow on the Hoop’ (‘L’ombre sur le cerceau’), The Shadow describes Clement as a ‘buffoon’ (Gauvreau, 92).19 But beyond this meaningful use of madness as topos, each of these three plays (and especially the third) also presents the kind of linguistically embodied irrationalism that would become an increasing part of Gauvreau’s writing: an irrationalism that, in escaping narrative, provokes meaning not by signification nor by representation, but by clearing the listener’s conscious mind to make room for unconscious, prelinguistic drives. Madness, as the loss of control of the conscious mind, was a common trope of avant-garde artists, frequently spoken of as a form of possession, of being taken over by an alien influence that provoked strange and twisted images and ideas. Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser, for instance, took

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inspiration and dictation from ‘spirit mediums,’ while Hugo Ball, Guillaume Apollinaire, and W.B. Yeats all had their own experiences and interactions with occult sources of inspiration. Even Bertram Brooker claimed that a genuine author was in fact just a ‘receiving-station’ of the Weltanschauung of the times (‘When,’ 12). It was the continental French Surrealists, though, who pursued the aesthetic potential (in contrast to the anti-aesthetic potential explored by the Dadaists) of non-conscious art making to its extreme – who embraced the idea of madness as an aesthetic. With their flurry of games and research and methods to outwit the conscious mind, they were much less interested in surrendering to alien forces then in unleashing an inner madness; the inner irrational core they believed dwelt within all humanity. The first goal in the freeing of the Surrealist consciousness, as Breton explained in the first ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924), was to remove the obstructive impediment of social decorum that limits behaviour and consequently the imagination: ‘Poetic Surrealism, which is the subject of this study, has focused its efforts up to this point on re-establishing dialogue in its absolute truth, by freeing both interlocutors from any obligations of politeness … Thus the analysis of the mysterious effects and special pleasures it can produce’ (35–6). In breaking free from the ordinances of everyday manners, a particular kind of irrational and libidinal series of images issues forth into the liberated imagination: ‘The mind becomes aware of the limitless expanses wherein its desires are made manifest, where the pros and cons are constantly consumed, where its obscurity does not betray it. It goes forward, borne by these images which enrapture it, which scarcely leave it any time to blow upon the fire in its fingers. This is the most beautiful night of all, the lightning-filled night’ (37–8). The consciously chosen Surrealist attack on the inhibitory reflex and their advocacy for a nonconformist, antisocial behaviour suggests a paradoxically intentional irrationalism. The fiction and the function of aesthetic madness, this staged irrationalism, consciously concocted to support sharply defined and expressed ambitions, is precisely what I wish to explore in three plays by Claude Gauvreau, the pre-eminent dramatist of this Canadian Surrealist moment; and perhaps Canada’s most accomplished artist at playing mad. ‘Hands in the abyss making leaves. That’s a wedding’ (Gauvreau, ‘The Good Life,’ 69): when these lines were first uttered on stage, to quote the playwright, ‘the entire audience burst into outrageous and uncontrollably hysterical laughter’ (qtd. in Ellenwood, Egregore, 97). Yet, in the words of Borduas, ‘Of the crowd of our friends who were there [few] emerged intact.’ Gauvreau’s elusive yet suggestive lines on the wonders of marital

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life, couched as they are in an unrealistic, seemingly plotless play, signalled an imaginative eruption in Montreal, indeed in Canada. They are the opening lines of Gauvreau’s very first play, ‘The Good Life,’ first performed on 20 May 1947 in Montreal, and published in Refus Global. Gauvreau’s two other theatre pieces in the manifesto suite attempt a ‘surrational’ theatre, defined by Borduas as ‘above and beyond the rational possibilities of the moment … The surrational act takes risks with unknown possibilities’ (‘Comments,’ 53). The theatre pieces included in Refus Global embody and enact the anti-rational aesthetic of the group. It was through their deliberate use of madness that these plays sought to fulfil the avant-garde and revolutionary ambitions of the group in their Québécois context. It was almost certainly not the storyline of Gauvreau’s play ‘The Good Life’ that jolted his audience into hilarity, but it might have been the incongruity of the narrative event, the strangeness of the language, and the defamiliarized locus of the stage. Furthermore, laughter is hardly an inappropriate response to the spectacle arranged by Gauvreau, especially if we follow Wyndham Lewis’s definition of laughter as a tragic delight in the ‘sense of absurdity, or if you like, the madness of our life’ (‘Inferior Religions,’ 151). Two newlyweds begin on the stage, conversing in sparse, random images filled with connotations of love and childbearing and biblical allusions. They hear the woman’s twin in another room playing a constant five-note refrain on the piano – the language turns lusty. The woman suddenly and inexplicably dies and the man discovers he has no hands. Two burly movers come for the piano in the other room which continues to play throughout the play. When the piano appears for the first time, like an image from a Jean Cocteau film, the man’s missing hands are on the keys, still obsessively playing the five-note refrain. As the play ends, according to Gauvreau’s stage notes, the refrain should sound, ‘played by the orchestra in a crescendo that amplifies infinitely’ (‘The Good Life,’ 87). Ostensibly a saga of love and aging, Gauvreau’s depiction of the ‘good life’ satirizes conventional relationships and the oppressiveness of normal life. Art and even the ability to make art are carried off at the end of the play, away from the despairing husband, in a parable suggesting that conventional, middle-class living has lost genuine art and is stuck in a highly repetitious mode. The play raises the question of how an artist and even a regular citizen could access and release the vital inner mysteries. Madness, in this play, the madness of our life, metaphorically transforms the stultifying condition of conventional social life into the weakness, the hamartia, that will cause its downfall. If Gauvreau’s play

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suggests that the ‘good life’ is already conditioned by madness, it is the self-destroying madness of melancholy that is evoked here and not the liberating irrationalism conjured and pursued by Surrealists. The space between metaphorical tropic madness and embodied madness highlights a difference in modes of discourse that directly connects to the Automatist’s relationship to revolution. Before Gauvreau’s writing became imbued with what Michel de Certeau describes as non-semantic glossolalia, the Automatists were already aware of the rebellious implications of irrationalism contra the divine rationalism heralded by the Catholic Church. Embracing madness meant, in the Augustinian tradition, to turn away from God’s influence. The Automatists well understood the theological implications of their use of madness as a discursive act in a very particular, Catholic milieu. As Borduas wrote in the lead manifesto, ‘Christian civilization has reached the end of its tether … Exploitation began in the heart of the church with the self-serving use of emotions which were already there, but petrified; it began with the rational study of scriptures for the sake of maintaining a supremacy gained originally through spontaneity’ (‘Refus Global,’ 30, 34). For the Automatists, the problems with Quebec were caused by problems within the Catholic Church, which were in turn a symptom of a broader trend in Western civilization towards the rationalization of spirituality. Automatic writing, with its inevitable turn away from sculpted, mediated, and precise logic, offered a means to access the spiritual spontaneity that had been lost over the centuries of the Christian era. Signatory Françoise Sullivan eloquently explains their ambition: ‘The true and profound treasure to be found in the unconscious is energy. Master of all internal forces, a portion of the cosmic energy, it is the motive power behind our actions … [which allows us to] reach a trance-like state and make contact with the points of magic’ (113). The released consciousness caused by automatic writing became a focus for those interested in releasing Quebec from the conservative bondage of Catholic rule. Borduas’s manifesto concludes with a rejection of the primacy of sociopolitical revolution, but offers Automatism and the Automatist’s art as a liberated, irruptive non-space: ‘Let those moved by the spirit of this adventure join us’ (37–8, 41). And indeed, as Michel Van Schendel, Ruth G. Koizim, and Edward M. Corbett have argued, it was in this invitation to first revolutionize the mind that led the Automatists to play a key role in instigating artistic contributions to the Quiet Revolution that successfully overthrew the Catholic hold on their contextual society. In this way, and ironically, the group fulfilled Freud’s claims of art by using their creative work to help balance the impact of civilization on

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individual liberty in Quebec. They did so, however, not by appeasing the conflicted torment of the individual, but by spurring the French Canadian citizen to (quiet) revolutionary action and change. This social and anti-Catholic agenda is useful in explaining and contextualizing the sustained biblical language and imagery in Gauvreau’s early theatre – particularly in ‘The Good Life’ that critiqued the existing paradigms of conventional behaviour. More importantly, though, Gauvreau and the Automatists were keenly aware of the liberating potential of playing mad on the stage and in their art. Theatre like Gauvreau’s, produced through the automatic associational method (Gauvreau, Letter, 200), must yet be rehearsed and requires a significant and substantial degree of intentional preparation in representing the original spontaneous, irrational moment. Gauvreau’s intentional representation of irrationalism seemingly contradicts the Surrealist dictum to act without ‘any control exercised by reason,’ but, significantly, does not contradict André Breton’s definition of madness, which as mentioned before meant being ‘free not to care any longer.’ Though Gauvreau’s staged irrationalism intentionally provoked his audience and was designed to contribute to the agitations for change in his society, it begins to embody the ‘total refusal’ ambition of the group. The Automatists were deliberately disruptive, or as Borduas wrote, in search of ‘a magical process’ that would give their art a ‘convulsive, transforming power’ (‘About,’ 57–8). Despite its radical formal characteristics and its strange, transformational language, it is important to keep in mind that ‘The Good Life’ is still a representational play that relies on many of the conventions of traditional theatre. Over the course of his career, Gauvreau’s theatre progressed into increasingly difficult and obtuse experimentation, arriving at an extreme of expression that is parallel to what Certeau has described as literary ‘glossolalia’ – that is, a breed of neologisms issued forth without semantic signification, aspiring towards a ‘vocal utopia’ that evokes ‘the possibility of any particular language’ (30). Texts built with glossolalia rely on other structural principals such as rhythmic, sonic, and even allusive semantics to organize and orient the writing. Moreover, Certeau argues that glossolalia combines a prelinguistic return to the origin of language with a postlinguistic end of language to create its eruptive moment (33). Roland Barthes, in writing about the extreme presence of the sound of language in cinema, celebrates the particular and liberating pleasure (‘jouissance’) of that eruptive moment as found in sound-conscious performance: ‘what it searches for (in a perspective of bliss) are the pulsational incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the

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throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language … it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss’ (66–7). In Gauvreau’s later works, most notably the ‘Jappements à la Lune’ (1968), the author makes exceptional use of the textural pleasure of the enunciation of meaningless syllabic packets that lack signification beyond their enunciation but yet that still excite or suppose the meaningful orientations of language. He named this poetic glossolalia ‘explorational images,’ and felt they fulfilled the aesthetic ideals of Automatism in literature: To go deeper into the unconscious, to dynamite certain apparently unscalable walls, what you need is exactly the commotion of an emotional volcano. To allow a strong emotion to build up after it has shaken and shocked all our mental barriers, and then to write down in order, without any kind of preconceived idea or method, the whole unique sequence which has unwound like an endless snake (until you’ve had enough), that is how to expose in broad daylight caverns and deep recesses that the murmurings of the superficial unconscious won’t even allow us to imagine. And that is Surrational Automatism … The explorational image is the authentic offshoot of Surrational Automatism. (Letter, 199)

A key dynamic in Gauvreau’s progression towards increasingly nonfigurative language, was the Montreal Automatists’ embrace of absolute automatism. Whereas European Surrealists explored figurative dream memories and other means to represent memory in their art, the French Canadian Surrealists insisted that the art embody the psychological content of any form rather than represent it. In a radical formal departure, subject was defined entirely by plastic qualities, merging form and content. Having been, in the words of Fernand Leduc, ‘liberated by automatism and enriched by all that Surrealism has given us’ (Ellenwood, Egregore, 177), the Automatists believed their imaginations were thus and thereby free to return their focus to the work of art rather than to the sociopolitical context of the mind producing it. Borduas, furthermore, accused the Surrealists of putting too much emphasis on intention within the construction of the work of art, rather than allowing the art to exist as a concrete, non-figurative entity unto itself. The representational Surrealist landscapes of Salvador Dalí and Yves Tanguy were notably described as

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‘mild’ and ready to be surpassed (Borduas, ‘Comments,’ 46–7). Such Surrealist works were touched by intentional representation rather than the brash aesthetic of irrationalism and focused more ‘on the subject treated’ than on the ‘real subject’ which was the artwork as psychological complex composed by unconscious as much as conscious drives. In Gauvreau’s words, ‘the Surrealists still exercise a kind of aesthetic control over all of their productions’ (Gauvreau, Letter, 199). This line of criticism of intentionalism and representationalism in art stems from Freud’s theories of the role and function of art within a civilization: art that relies on memory is marked by the inhibitions of the artist and the artist’s contextual civilization. The Surrealists accepted art with representational qualities, whereas Gauvreau and the Automatists wanted a genuinely liberated and cathartic art and thus pushed further by increasingly focusing on the non-figurative manifest content of a work of art. Just as expressive language began to disappear from Gauvreau’s dramatic objects, representational imagery disappeared from Automatist paintings. Such works do not depict madness or the ‘free not to care any longer’ mandate so much as manifest it, and perhaps, ideally, provoke it. Gauvreau’s three plays published in Refus Global appear relatively early in this transition but yet already demonstrate his interest in an embodied rather than symbolic art. The second piece in Refus Global, ‘In the Heart of the Bulrushes,’ presents an allegorical myth of a liberated, uninhibited protagonist accessing that which all others have been denied: ‘my destiny,’ he says, ‘is given over to escaping’ (63). He describes himself as a ‘snickering madman’ as he rows down a stream into a thick bulrush. An angel with a sword appears and blocks his way. The angel declares that our protagonist has come ‘farther than he should’ (64) but that he is not the first. None have carried on past the threatening figure of the angel, and as proof, bodies line the bottom of the river. The angel is established as an externalization of ‘repressed things,’ which the man, in a flurry of erotic and violent images, overcomes by accessing the ‘mad killer’ within himself (63). His embrace of his own irrationalism enables the man to push forward where others have cowered and failed – he gets through successfully to the allegorical domain of enlightenment. Like ‘The Good Life,’ this text also uses madness as a symbolic trope that functions as an important plot device; madness explains the triumph of the protagonist. Unlike ‘The Good Life,’ however, madness symbolizes the potential for imaginative liberation. The discursive language event of the play explains the bizarre, occult initiation embodied in passing through the gates to the forbidden territory by the character’s embrace of a self-conceptualization inclusive of violent and sexual madness.

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The third play included in Refus Global is ‘The Shadow on the Hoop,’ a short monologue by the shadow cast ‘by a leaping acrobat’ (91). Unlike the others included in the book, this play breaks with the discursive function of meaning exchange by including a few examples of literary glossolalia, evoking but yet defying grammar and conventional semantic practice. The play begins: ‘Listen to the harvest of Belval and the thuriferous fork which has come to glean the careful rows of pupazzi pastiches and anglioche-glioche and Bux the Clown ejaculating trapeze and crossbow’ (91). While not his most experimental piece, this unconventional dramatic object demonstrates the increasingly anti-rational direction Gauvreau pursued and would continue to follow. In the content of the play, it is notable that the Shadow rejects the ‘Bones of sentimental anthologies’ for the ‘algaesia of the planks [who] sings at the top of its glass under the melodious spell of the siphon’ (92). While suggestive of symbolisms, the insertion of neologisms spun from familiar words (algaesia [‘l’alguèze’ (Œuvres, 139)] suggests algae and amnesia, for instance) evokes a tension between the recognition of meaningfulness and misrecognition of ambiguous expression. The play’s use of conventional linguistic constructs, most notably by using parsable sentence and word structures, invites the anticipation of a discursive language event only to evade reference. In this case, madness and the irrational content of the play are embedded in the form of language itself rather than in the discursive exchange of meaning. The three primary uses of madness in these plays – negative languageevent, positive language-event, and non-discursive language event – each with overlap, indicate the centrality of irrationalism to Gauvreau’s work. In a statement on his poetics, Gauvreau expressed his desire to create ‘a new concrete reality’ by moving beyond recognizable, comprehensible images that could be decoded through memory or pre-existing, nonexperiential knowledge (Letter, 197). He pursued unencumbered imagery, images that were literally and figuratively free not to care any longer. Certeau cautions against falling into the habitual pattern of reactions to such vocalic delinquency that seek to minimize or display the images’ implication: ‘In our era in the West … the serious and jubilant play of speech always receives a rather clever hermeneutic response that reduces the “want to say” to a “want to say something”’ (33). In Gauvreau’s antiaesthetic madness, will and intention drive a need to speak – but, significantly, increasingly lead the poet away from saying ‘something.’ As Gauvreau’s art was of the stage, this fact requires a shift in Certeau’s vocabulary from the ‘want to say’ to the ‘want to play.’ Pushing further, in the ‘want to play mad,’ staged madness embodies the lack of something

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that Certeau insists functions as the core of glossolalia; madness embodies the lack of signification – and, thus, the liberating potential of the staged madness of Gauvreau’s art. It is in pursuing the euphoric release of the uninhibited, anti-aesthetic image, only achieved by playing mad, that Gauvreau presents an opportunity for the playwright as for his audience to escape the compromise demanded by the rational, civilized world – a revolution of the senses in preparation for and contribution to the sociopolitical revolution all Surrealists longed for. Indeed, Gauvreau experimented with the fundamentally discursive function of his language precisely because he understood the performative implications of delivering an increasingly irrational language into a society overly dominated by rationalism. Gauvreau’s conscious choice to embrace an anti-aesthetic, disjunctive style was predicated on the presumption that while his dramatic language was no longer signifying it was still doing something (a revolutionary politics motivating Certeau’s idea of the ‘want to say’ in glossolalia). Borrowing from the British linguist J.L. Austin, Ricoeur divides speech events into the respective acts of the locutionary and the perlocutionary. The former he defines as ‘the act of saying’ (‘The Model,’ 93) whereas the latter denotes ‘that which we do by saying’ (94). He gives the perlocutionary act special status for its particular resistance to inscription precisely because it depends on phenomenal effects in an interlocutor for its definition: it is, he writes, ‘the discourse as stimulus’ (94) and as such is a particular phenomenon of speech that evades written discourse. It was through a similar division of language function that Freud rejected abstract metalanguage for psychoanalysis and concentrated on narrative language where the preconscious could be more free to invest the speech act with unconscious, repressed drives. Gauvreau’s dramatic objects, in moving from a writing that indicates subjectivity and personality while it explicates the implications of madness to a writing that evades expressive properties by embodying and enacting madness, suggest an attempt to include the perlocutionary speech act in writing. Of course, Gauvreau’s dramatic objects were intended for the stage and for spoken performance. Gauvreau could have anticipated that the delivery of his non-signifying explorational language would be complemented by illocutionary acts (gestural and performative cues) that would guide and shape audience interpretation of the glossolalia. Still, the ambiguity of the non-signifying language shaped by grammatical structures like sentences and words produces by itself a significant rupture in the exchange of meaning and thus opens a space in his theatre

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audience for their own unconscious drives to manifest. As Gauvreau explained, such moments were not intended to express subjective personality; they were written to provoke a transformational experience in his audience. This sense of the performative potential of non-signifying language enables us to consider Gauvreau’s language events as perlocutionary speech acts, as discursive, even though they lack reference or meaning. Poignantly for our discussion, they invite the audience to feel and experience the liberating catharsis of a momentary madness for themselves. The progression of Gauvreau’s writing towards increasing use of glossolalia corresponds to his recognition of the affective potential of non-signifying language – and the revolutionary potential of the effect. Ricoeur’s linguistic philosophy allows us to begin to consider this use of language as an extreme literary example of the perlocutionary speech act. Recalling Sullivan’s goal for Automatism, as cited above, Ricoeur’s explanation of perlocution as an affective exchange of energy is remarkably consistent with the surrational and magical aesthetics pursued by the Automatists. He claims that perlocutionary speech ‘acts, not by my interlocutor’s recognition of my intention, but energetically, by direct influence upon the emotions and the affective dispositions’ (‘The Model,’ 96). Refus Global was originally published as a catalogue accompaniment to an exhibition of paintings (and other art events). Like Ricoeur’s claim for the perlocutionary, Borduas warns the audience of the exhibition that they will not understand the intentions of the paintings, but that they will feel the effects of the works emotionally: Looking at the pictures in this exhibition your mind will be blank. You won’t even be allowed the idea of a picture. These paintings don’t correspond to a landscape, nor to a still life nor to any scene you’re familiar with, nor even to a geometrical abstraction. Thus, with all your mental habits put to flight, unable to make any kind of visual contact, you will have the uncomfortable feeling of a serious illness, a painful and needless amputation, a frustration. You’ll want to cry sacrilege, madness, early senility, hoax. If you’re less honest, more cagey, you’ll talk about visual and intellectual clichés and phony drawing-room revolutions … The violent necessities of sensual understanding will pursue their own destiny. (50–1)

Even though these paintings and Gauvreau’s glossolalia reject the expressive functions of discourse and narrative, the affective, performative

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intention motivating the aesthetic fulfils the definition of the perlocutionary language event. Ricoeur was aware of the increasing interest in abstractionism and non-signification among authors and artists in the twentieth century, but dismissed ‘sophisticated’ texts ‘without reference’ as being anti-discursive (From Text, 96). Ricoeur defines discourse as specifically referring to language events in which messages and meanings are exchanged: ‘Discourse cannot fail to be about something’ (From Text, 148). He claims anti-discursive texts are an ‘exception,’ and redirects his analysis back to ‘all other texts which in one manner or another speak about the world’ (From Text, 96). Surrealist madness, however, as the formal manifestation of an avant-garde revolutionary ambition, was never meant to be a renunciation of the world. Gauvreau’s performative use of non-referential language, in fact, functions as a perlocutionary speech act that was intended to impact (and liberate) the imagination of his audience. Etymological madness, it will be remembered, proposes the distinctly pleasurable moment of action (potentially violent and/or sexual) without recourse to reason or the mind. Gauvreau integrated perlocutionary glossolalia into his writing as an attempt to embody madness into the formal properties of his language. Thus, rather than thematize madness, Gauvreau increasingly insisted on madness as an experiential objective of his theatre. While perlocutionary madness was clearly one effect of delinking language from signification, as a final note it is worth considering another way that such an unconventional use of language participates in and contributes to a revolutionary politics. Contemporary avant-garde theorist Sianne Ngai offers in her essay ‘Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust’ a hermeneutics of cacophony that is notably useful for interpreting the political implications of non-signifying language. Her work provides a theoretical model that considers how harsh, gyrating sounds resist being consumed or incorporated into the general economy of art production and consumption. As many writers since Theodor Adorno have noted, being readily consumable effectively disables revolutionary disruption. But Ngai critiques Adorno’s aesthetic theory by arguing that art’s inability to change bourgeois alienation has become an important theme of bourgeois art. Thus, for critics investigating bourgeois culture, bourgeois art that includes moments of cultural dissonance becomes ‘the ideal space to investigate ugly feelings that obviously ramify beyond the domain of the aesthetic proper’ (Ugly Feelings, 3). Ugly feelings in literature (such as envy, irritation, anxiety, and paranoia) become powerful in diagnosing ‘situations marked by blocked or thwarted action’ (27). Art work that is

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marked by what she calls ‘raw matter’ goes further than just revealing sociopolitical frustrations by breaching the symbolic order of the contextual society – drawing attention to and its power from an imaginative space outside of the cultural limits. As the Dada poet and visual artist Francis Picabia once wrote, ‘society as a whole is unconsciously / haunted by the fear of corpses / my evil little idol / should cure me / of a police raid’ (‘Thoughts,’ 159). The power of corpses, iconic examples of raw matter in Ngai’s theory, is precisely a sociopolitical power that annuls the legitimacy of the existing social contract. While Barthes’s theory of cinematic sounds highlights the potential and particular pleasures of a nonsignifying use of language, Ngai’s poetics of disgust evokes the ‘total refusal’ revolutionary impulse of the Surrealists and Automatists. It is, she writes, precisely through its indigestibility that discordance enacts a rejection of its contextual ideological predicament. Working against Freud’s model of how art helps to sustain a civilization, Gauvreau’s literary glossolalia create a dynamic space in the theatre whereby perlocutionary language events allow and provoke the experience of being outside the rational, existent world – a chance to turn away from the world, to play mad and experience the childlike freedom to not care, if only for the duration of the act. Life in the Abyss, after the Automatists If the Automatist movement ended in 1953 or 1955, Gauvreau’s aesthetic development and subsequent prominence in avant-garde circles in the 1960s and 1970s highlights the fact that Surrealist aesthetics did not disappear from the Canadian landscape. In point of fact, experimentation in Quebec as in the rest of Canada exploded in the 1960s in a wide variety of directions, some of which stemmed from the pioneering work by the Automatists. Barbara Godard and Christl Verduyn, for instance, credit Surrealist influence ‘for its spirit of revolt … [and] for having taught us that we are what has been made of us and that it is up to the individual to create his or her self’ (Verduyn, 71). Specifically, they connect writers such as Nicole Brossard, Anne Hébert, and Suzanne Paradis to this line of influence. Caroline Bayard also connects the psychically attuned aesthetic models developed by the Surrealists with the concrete poetics of experimentalists such as Claude Péloquin, bpNichol, and bill bissett (84). The most prominent avant-garde collectives to emerge in Quebec after the Automatists, such as Parti Pris (which began as a political and cultural

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magazine in 1963), La Barre du Jour (a magazine founded in 1965) and Les Herbes Rouges (a publishing house established in 1968), however, broke from the Surrealist interest in the subconscious mind. As Bayard outlines, La Barre du Jour authors rejected ‘poetry as the expression of a social, personal, and perceptual reality … the subjectivity of the author [was] to be destroyed at all costs’ (92), while the authors of Les Herbes Rouges extended this rejection of socio-realism into Marxist and radical directions (96–7). These groups helped to introduce postmodernism and theory-driven art into North America, but only connect to Surrealism through a shared interest in irrational expression and a shared disinterest in or suspicion of linguistic referentiality, clarity, and unnuanced language use. They were not interested in the new forms of realism – the surrealism – proposed by the fusion of the subconscious with the conscious mind, nor were they motivated by the mystical and socio-theological implications of Surrealism. It was, in fact, the utopian potential illuminating the Surrealist challenge to the dominant ideology and linguistic practice that experimentalists like Steve McCaffery and bpNichol recognized in Gauvreau’s Automatism as an antecedent to their own avant-garde work in sound poetry. In contrast, the Parti Pris little magazine and publishing house developed into a veritable radical leftist, Québécois separatist movement of its own, with strong connections to the FLQ terrorist/ liberationist organization. As evidenced by their publication history, they were open to all manner of avant-garde experimentation including Surrealism and thus embody yet another moment of marriage between the radical and aesthetic avant-gardes. Specifically Surrealist activity in Canada was not limited to Quebec. During the 1960s and 1970s, a diverse collection of west coast writers and painters experimented with Surrealist techniques (especially collage) and developed their own variant of the international movement. These artists, including Gregg Simpson, Gary Lee Nova, Claude Breeze, David W. Harris (also known as David UU), Michael Bullock, and bill bissett, worked across media with a pronounced enthusiasm in the mystical potential of their work. The poet Roy Kiyooka, while not officially affiliated with this movement, was also associated with the interest in Surrealism in Vancouver. In 1970, Simpson published a declarative statement about the group’s background and ambitions in Vancouver’s Georgia Strait: Forty-six years after the publication of the first draft of the Surrealist Manifesto by André Breton, we are pleased to announce the absolute triumph of the surreal and magical consciousness. It was the expressed aim of

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Breton and his followers to alter the course of the unconscious of society. We feel that this has been accomplished. It has been largely a question of those who are initiates in the esoteric arts remaining hidden and, in the process, becoming the shadowy figures they are … With the Age of Aquarius beginning, we find attention shifting to the image of the sun. The general condition of mankind is to become peaceful and benevolent. But even if this is not true or evident, those who have reflected on the Egyptian sense of time and phenomena to the Hopi’s time system, will realize that it is they themselves who are already embodying these manifestations. True, there are many hangovers from the last era: wars, racism, pollution, etc., but they are just that: ‘hangovers,’ which must clear up as the day continues. Perhaps ritual will resume its rightful place as the proper outlet for aggressive tendencies. In this case, the artist who is involved in the processes I have mentioned, is the likely person to help in describing the form of these rituals. There will also be a coming awareness of the true descent of Western culture from Atlantis. (‘The Triumph of the Surreal’)

The mystical orientation of West Coast Surrealism evidenced by the essay provides a remarkable bridge between the ambition of Automatists like François Sullivan, who advocated a return to mystical inflections and religious rituals informing art (as outlined in her article ‘Dance and Hope’), and the ambition of Cosmic Canadians, who regarded art as a potential portal for a universal spiritual awakening. Furthermore, on the technical level, UU’s 1968 sound poem ‘Corn Plasters & My Heart’ shares a similar spirit and distorting effect with Gauvreau’s transformational images that invite recognition but elude semantic closure: ‘shi ensie sum / takelmik so ett / min groso lumb / quinnt betchel el / el martinate’ (32). Poignantly, Jack Wise argues in the group’s primary publication that from their paintings one might discover a ‘drop of cosmic consciousness’ (3). The rampant mysticism of the West Coast Surrealists led them to pattern their organization in accordance with the occultist tradition of such devotional groups as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Ordo Templi Orientis (the latter of which had an active presence in British Columbia). Thus, they created the Divine Order of the Lodge Salon and a mixed-media aesthetic concoction unique to them known as Ritual Theatre. Bolstered by a series of remarkable publications, including their magazine Lodgisticks (edited by UU), the contributions to visual art quickly became the most prominent public face of the movement, leading to the creation of the Vancouver School of Collage, and a remark-

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able travelling exhibition of West Coast Surrealist paintings that featured work by Gilles Foisey, Gary Lee Nova, Gregg Simpson, Ed Varney, Jack Wise, and UU. The exhibition was given the title ‘Canadian West Coast Hermetics: The Metaphysical Landscape’ and sent on a European tour in 1973 to Paris, London, St. Brieuc (Brittany), and Carlerio (Belgium). In 1974 there were two exhibitions in Ontario, one at McMaster University in Hamilton and one at the University of Western Ontario in London. Gregg Simpson’s 1973 book Saturated Scenes collects examples of their particular style of Surrealist collage, complete with occasionally overt pataphysical themes such as ‘Ubu Apothicos,’ a piece that depicts a giant pair of arms extending from a medicine cabinet, set in a soft landscape complete with stiff, pensive natives. In the January 1975 issue of Lodgisticks, UU published his ‘Homage to Andre Breton,’ which is worth citing in full to demonstrate the emphatic sense of connection that existed between these Canadian artists and their continental forbears: surrealism existed before me and i firmly believe that it will survive me surrealism existed before me and i firmly believe that it will survive me surrealism existed before me and i firmly believe that it will survive me surrealism existed before me and i firmly believe that it will survive me surrealism existed before me and i firmly believe that it will survive me surrealism existed before me and i firmly believe that it will survive me surrealism existed before me and i firmly believe that it will survive me surrealism existed before me and i firmly believe that it will survive me surrealism existed before me and i firmly believe that it will survive me surrealism existed before me and i firmly believe that it will survive me surrealism existed before me and i firmly believe that it will survive me surrealism existed before me and i firmly believe that it will survive me survival existed before me and i firmly believe that it will survive me surrealize survival surrealism existed before and i firmly believe (17)

A more nuanced exploration of Surrealist themes can be found in Roy Kiyooka’s Fontainebleau Dream Machine, which was published in 1977 by Toronto’s Coach House Press. The book transforms the idea of dreams into a series of speculative images, tropes, conceits, metaphors, personifications, technologies and more: ‘step quietly but firmly thru / the door way of your incredulity where all the dreams / “death remainders” lie in

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the folded Silt under a Mute’s tongue.’ Remembering Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy’s notion of a unified avant-garde in Canada during the 1970s, it is worth noting that Kiyooka’s book is dedicated to Angela and George Bowering, bpNichol, and Wilfred Watson, among others. The English poet Michael Bullock moved to Canada in 1968 and became an active member of the West Coast Surrealists throughout their tenure. He would also become a member of the UBC Creative Writing faculty and publish a number of Surrealist-influenced books of poetry and fiction with Vancouver presses Sono Nis and Rainbird Press. The group continued to produce new work and exhibit as a Surrealist node throughout the 1980s, highlighted by their show at Vancouver’s Gallery Move entitled West Coast Surrealists. The exhibition, which involved participation by José Pierre, a scholar actively studying Surrealism in Canada, included works by Robert Davidson, Ladislav Guderna, Martin Guderna, Ted Kingan, Dave Mayrs, Gregg Simpson, Francis Thenard, David UU, and Ed Varney. The group produced two other serialized magazines, Melmoth and Scarabeus, that became connected with the international network of Surrealists worldwide. Melmoth stopped in 1986, but Scarabeus continued publishing regularly until 1998. Another significant western Canadian Surrealist was Edmonton’s Brion Gysin, the collaborator and great friend of William Burroughs. Gysin was raised in Edmonton and finished his education in England (where, in fact, he had been born in a Canadian military hospital). In 1934, he moved to Paris where he became a short-lived member of the Surrealist Group. He was scheduled to exhibit his paintings alongside Ernst, Picasso, Arp, Dalí, and others, but in one of his more erratic outbursts Breton intervened the night before the exhibition and demanded that Paul Eluard remove all of Gysin’s contributions (Geiger, 302). After Gysin’s expulsion from the group, he travelled extensively but ended up back in Canada during the Second World War, where he became a spy for the Canadian Intelligence Corps in their S-20 unit based in Vancouver. After the war, he published the non-fiction work To Master a Long Goodnight: The History of Slavery in Canada (1946) that explored the legal history of race relations in Canada. Gysin’s meandering, digressive career led him around the world and eventually back to Paris where he re-engaged with the avant-garde. It was there that he discovered the creative potential of redeploying Surrealist collage in literature in the form of ‘cut-ups,’ a method made famous after they were adopted by his close friend and collaborator William Burroughs. Gysin’s links to Surrealism can be felt in the Automatist nature of this technique, as well as in his subsequent

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inventions such as the ‘Dreamachine,’ (1960) an insidious device designed to alter the consciousness of receptive users. Gysin’s ambitions for the device were positively revolutionary, as he believed it ‘may bring about a change of consciousness inasmuch as it throws back the limits of the visible world’ (Geiger, 162). Gysin returned to Canada twice in the 1960s to attend to his mother (197, 203), but by that point he had become an American citizen with a decidedly international identity. Although he is depicted in Anthony Burgess’s 1968 novel Enderby Outside as a Canadian professor (spouting lines heavily borrowed from a genuine Canadian professor, Marshall McLuhan), from 1946 onward he lived primarily in Tangiers, New York, and Paris. Toronto also became an important node for international Surrealist activity with the arrival of Ludwig Zeller and Susanna Wald in 1970.20 Born in the Chilean desert of Atacama to German and Chilean parents in 1927, Zeller gravitated towards the cultural nexus in Santiago where he with his collaborator/partner Susanna Wald of Budapest founded the Casa de la Luna press, art gallery, salon, and coffee house. The two were poets and painters deeply mired in the South American Surrealist movement, and Casa de la Luna became an important meeting point for the production of new directions for South American Surrealism. When Salvador Allende’s government collapsed, the two moved to Toronto where they remained connected to Surrealism through a new publishing house Oasis Publications – the first dedicated Surrealist publisher in Canada. Beyond her extensive work as an illustrator and visual artist, Wald’s trilingual translations with the press has made it a major point of access to other Surrealist traditions for English readers: the press published more than forty-five works of English, Spanish, and French Surrealism. When asked in Toronto about Surrealism, Zeller replied, ‘To live in this century and to ignore the absolute change that Surrealism signifies in literature, is like being inside a storm and not realizing what is going on. Surrealism as I see it runs contrary to academia; I believe in the élan that it has lent us toward a new vision of the world by providing us with tools, such as psychoanalysis, automatic writing, objective chance, which had remained excluded from the literary task until then’ (Zeller, Focus on Ludwig, 5). As Anna Balakian points out, Zeller was not an imitative Surrealist, but rather developed from Bretonian Surrealism an approach to dreams, madness, and the subconscious that approaches ‘the mystic horrors’ (11). Wald and Zeller left Canada in 1994 for Oaxaca, Mexico, where Wald continues to produce Surrealist collages and other visual works, and Zeller continues to publish Surrealist poetry and visual

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work. Zeller published more than thirty books in Canada, including Woman in Dream (1975), Visions and Wounds (1978), In the Country of the Antipodes (1979), Alphacollage: An Alphabet of Twenty-seven Letters (1979), and 50 Collages (1981). Wald’s daughter from a previous marriage Beatriz Hausner (previously Zeller) continues the family’s Surrealist tradition as a contemporary poet. Her books, The Wardrobe Mistress (2003), Towards the Ideal Man Poems (2003), The Stitched Heart (2004), The Archival Stone (2005), and Sew Him Up (2010) evoke Surrealism through elaborate metaphoric collage and strange personifications. The trance-like imagery envelopes the speaker in a world of dreams made real. Her poems also appeared in the anthology, Surreal Estate: 13 Poets under the Influence, a collection that the Toronto-based editor Stuart Ross admits ‘isn’t a book of Surrealist poetry, nor a book of poetry by Surrealists’ but rather a confession by a diverse field of contemporary writers ‘influenced by the literary phenomenon spearheaded by Breton, Jacob, Eluard, Reverdy & Co.’ (9). The book is certainly a post-avant, non-revolutionary exploration of Surrealist technique and influence, as noted; however, at least three of the authors in the book do self-identify as being Surrealist. Hausner’s commitment to the movement has led her (like her mother) to produce numerous translations of acclaimed Latin American and European Surrealists such as Eugenio Granell, Edouard Jaguer, César Moro, Olga Orozco, Ludwig Zeller, Enrique Molina, and Jorge Cáceres. Another veritable Surrealist in the collection is Lillian Necakov, who was born in Belgrade and now lives in Toronto where she created the small press Surrealist Poets Gardening Association. The third Surrealist proper in Surreal Estate is William A. Davidson who founded Recordism with Sherri Lyn Higgins. He describes Recordism as ‘an artistic ideology … rooted in a reevaluation of chance and automatism, the basic principles of Dada and Surrealism.’21 Davidson’s new postSurrealist school has led to work in film, video, music, performance art, installations, sculpture, painting, drawing, collage, comics, games, prose, and poetry. Davidson’s example demonstrates the need to reorient our conceptualization of avant-garde movements away from strictly Eurocentric parameters and consider what happens to such cultural models when they arrive here – how it is both unconvincing and even distorting to label and evaluate Canadian artists exclusively by foreign models and standards. In studying Canadian literature, a movement like Surrealism is interesting in as much as it reveals aspects and dynamics of Canadian writing. It is, I would suggest, more interesting to consider how writers

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here use and deviate from those foreign templates. Indeed, Davidson and Higgins performed in protest in front of a 2002 Surrealist exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario – the so-called Biggest Surrealist Experience Ever – that included exactly zero Canadian works despite its size and the diversity of represented Surrealisms. The protest piece they performed was poignantly a theatrical adaptation of Magritte’s ‘The Lovers.’ Their almost kissing heads were completely covered in white cloth while a leaflet explained that ‘there are active Surrealist groups all over the world’ (Ellenwood and Betts, ‘Canada’s,’ 9), including in Canada.

Chapter Four

Canadian Vorticism

He quoted Mallarme/ and Paul Verlaine. She was a triumph at Tango teas; At Vorticist’s suppers he sought to please. She thought that Franz Lehar was utterly great; Of Strauss and Stravinsky he’d piously prate. She loved elegance, he loved art; They were as wide as the poles apart Robert Service, ‘The Philistine and the Bohemian’

Mythology is a vortex around which revolves and evolves the various aspects of creative life. David UU, ‘The Hermetic Document’

The final topic of this discourse concerns the smallest, least developed, yet conversely most internationally recognized collection of Canada’s early avant-gardists. There were only a handful of Canadian artists directly influenced by Vorticism, the English avant-garde movement, but three of the four that I will focus on here are among our most celebrated and distinguished writers: Marshall McLuhan, the internationally acclaimed theorist and media critic; Sheila Watson, the celebrated novelist and short-story writer; and Wilfred Watson, the award-winning poet and playwright. Vorticism is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down (William Wees quotes one of its participants Helen Saunders declaring that ‘“Vorticism” now seems more a period label than an aesthetic programme’ [3]), but can at the least be explained as a short-lived avant-garde art movement from England of less than a dozen members that lasted roughly

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from 1914 to 1915 (with some activity continuing until 1919). The movement’s name, coined by Ezra Pound, comes from the image of the inner circle of a whirlpool where the churning energy of water is at its maximum speed and intensity. Sarah Stanners expands the significance by connecting it to the group’s principle magazine Blast: ‘With reference to the vortex as the symbol of the vital life force at the centre of all things, even the word blast was spun from the vortex, since its full term is explained to be blastoderm, a word describing the first incarnations of human life in the womb’ (109). But the inherent violence of the image appealed to the Vorticist’s commitment to an art that was characteristically aggressive, masculinist, violent, and dangerous – but as the Saunders quote above suggests, the actual manifestation of Vorticist aesthetics was decidedly less than coherent. In this study, Vorticism refers specifically to the influence of Pound’s early work and Lewis’s career-long assault on Western/English culture. The influence McLuhan took from Lewis in particular, and Pound in general, has been widely acknowledged by many scholars and biographers, but this influence has never before been situated within the context of a general Canadian current of interest in Lewis, Pound, and the Vorticist group. This chapter will expand upon the nature and significance of the impact of this influence and consider how this group of Canadian writers can be distinguished from the original Vorticist movement. The social cohesion of Canadian Vorticism is fairly straightforward and easy to sketch: Lewis moved to Canada, Lewis befriended McLuhan, McLuhan supervised Sheila Watson’s doctoral dissertation on Lewis’s aesthetics, and Sheila Watson (née Doherty) married Wilfred Watson who co-wrote From Cliché to Archetype with McLuhan. Nearby to McLuhan at St Michael’s College at the University of Toronto was John Reid, the fourth central figure of Canadian Vorticism, the novelist who lived with Pound in Rapallo, Italy, for nine months (having secured an invitation through T.S. Eliot), before returning to Canada. Reid was an Ontario-born novelist who eventually settled in Toronto where he converted to Catholicism and became a priest affiliated with St Michael’s College – where McLuhan also taught, as did Sheila Watson’s biographer Fred Flahiff, and did many others who were interested in Lewis and Vorticism. It was Reid, though, who convinced Lewis to come to Canada, a suggestion for which Lewis never forgave his young disciple. Reid had sent Lewis his first novel, ‘There Was a Tree,’ a still-unpublished book written through ‘the Lewis exemplar’ and that was characterized by the author himself for its adulation of Lewis (‘Journey out of Anguish,’ 97). Lewis liked the book when

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he first read it, but only later, after arriving in Canada where things turned out badly, did he change his opinion about its merit. In 1948, McLuhan wrote what would have been his first book, ‘The New American Vortex,’ a manuscript that remains unpublished. The book was not an attempt to articulate the tight network of writers in question as a coherent avant-garde – in fact, the Canadian Vorticists never formally organized or promoted themselves as a group, though they all shared a pronounced common interest in Lewis and Vorticist ideas and aesthetics and, most importantly, explored that interest in their work – but it is instructive as an early attempt to articulate this desire for a new eruption of Vorticism in North American: ‘In 1914 Lewis announced in Blast the new English vortex. The war ended that, as we shall see, and England won’t have another intellectual vortex in our time. But a new one is forming in America – the second in American history … What has happened in America is this. We are very suddenly back in the morning daylight world of our first age, the Jeffersonian era … The new vortex is to be an affair of intellectual daylight in which the action of the storm can be studied and conducted with complete objectivity. The vortex begins to move as the present presses upon and modifies the past … The main axis in the new vortex will not be geographic, as in American origins but intellectual’ (McLuhan, ‘The New,’ 1–2, 4). Though the book as a whole is far more scholarly than the millennial tone of the introduction might imply, McLuhan was keen to participate in the new Vorticism. He outlined in broad strokes the direction and source of the new Vorticism: ‘After Mallarmé high art had no alternative but to embrace the whole range of human consciousness, past and present, as its matter. After Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Lewis it is for us in America to form the new vortex in which a totally new assimilation of human traditions must occur. The initial steps have been taken by them. Their work provides the tools and analogies for the new effort and perception’ (‘The New,’ 13). Andrew Brian Chrystall interprets McLuhan’s efforts to ‘set about establishing a second front … to create his own second vortex’ (Chrystall, 2) as part of a broader exercise in rhetoric and cultural criticism. Chrystall acknowledges, however, that McLuhan’s attraction to Vorticism stemmed from avant-garde – even ‘utopian’ (6) – ambitions of his own as an artist (15). It is in this impetus to put himself at the centre of the vortex, to fashion a new mode of critical writing invested in a mode of consciousness that was informed by the Vorticist ‘effort and perception’ that we begin to encounter the terms and aspirations of Canadian Vorticism. To be clear, however, the Canadian avant-gardists mapped out in this chapter

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were not Vorticists in the historical, cultural, and geographical sense of the term; a specificity that modifying the term as ‘Canadian’ already shatters. Describing them as a collective is in no way intended to reduce the difference between their respective aesthetic ambitions (which was never bounded by Vorticism alone), but it does serve to draw attention to the sense of shared interests between them. This collective spirit can be traced to particular sites, such as St Michael’s College, where McLuhan, Reid, and the visual artist Harley Parker worked and Sheila Watson studied alongside other faculty members with interests in Lewis and Vorticism, or the University of Alberta, where both Watsons worked, as did Norman Yates and others with shared interests. Chrystall describes McLuhan’s work with Parker on Through the Vanishing Point as an attempt to instil the new Vorticist perspective in its readers: they take their reader ‘outside and beyond a sensibility patterned by literacy and the strictures of visual space, and into new multi-sensuous terrain (where all the senses are in interplay). McLuhan and Parker do this so that the users of the book might be afforded the chance to encounter both: a) the new technological landscapes and translucent art forms which bear little to no semblance with any of the forms discussed in the work, and b) the variety of parallels now existing between pre-literate and post-literate cultures’ (Chrystall, 400). Chrystall’s analysis of this particular text highlights an attempt to provoke a shift in consciousness towards a new Vorticism through formally experimental, indeed avant-garde scholarship. In this chapter, I will document some of the ways in which these Canadian authors formed a community around their interest in Lewis and Vorticism, highlight specific points of influence from the English avantgarde movement, and explore some of the ways in which the influence of Vorticist ideas appears in the work of Canadian writers. Informing this extraliterary discussion will be specific attention to the aesthetic and sociopolitical implications of Vorticism as well as of Vorticism appearing in Canada. They all departed from the original models, extending Vorticist ideas in a variety of different directions more relevant to their particular time and place and poignantly minimizing the anger and political verve/antagonism of the progenitor. Wilfred Watson, in fact, goes some length in observing the differences in various strains of Vorticism in his poem ‘re maelström and vortex’: the ezra vortex a

1 2 3

pound is structure of

4

energies

Canadian Vorticism the percy

5

wyndham lewis

a

7

structure

9 by which artist up

1 2 3

the holds the

to

5

its

the

7

mcluhan

vortex 6

is

of

8

enmity

dead

4

world

living

6

shame–

vortex, 8 9 beautiful with 1 of 2 as 3 fell

5

writes

7

9 the maelström 1 the 2

concupiscence ergo-sum the parabola in love an equation versus maelström …

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as

4

descartes

6

with,

8

for

(38)

Watson’s poem relies upon Pound’s definition of Vorticism as the maximal point of energy, Lewis’s use of Vorticism in general as a means to blast the decadent and deadened cultural habits of the English Georgians and their European counterparts, and McLuhan’s attempt, especially as in The Mechanical Bride, to develop a more contemporary variant of Vorticism to counteract the ‘maelström’ experience of life in the mass-media age. Watson’s description of McLuhan’s ‘concupiscence’ draws attention to an ambivalence in McLuhan’s paradoxical (or ‘parabolic’) fascination with and repulsion from electric-media culture that is characteristically different from the pseudo-militant Vorticist antagonism to the Vorticists’ contextual society. The rest of Watson’s poem outlines the limitations of McLuhan’s Vorticism, suggesting that Watson was attempting to develop his own variant. Describing this collective, especially McLuhan and the two Watsons, as Canadian Vorticists highlights their conscious and explicit attention to and development from the historical Vorticist movement,

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drawing attention to this shared influence on their variegated projects. It does not help to simplify or narrow the definition of the term Vorticism, but in fact draws additional nuance to its usage by adding these Canadians to the list of artists seeking to explore and extend its implications. Lewis might seem an unlikely avant-garde influence for this diverse group of Canadians, given his starchy detachment from literary circles, his unpopular politics, and his pronounced animosity to Canada. This detachment might have worked to his advantage, though, as Sheila Watson notes that his outsider/enemy perspective enabled an ironical reading of mass cultural phenomenon: ‘Lewis as we have seen, watching men from the position of a privileged spectator had observed their actions, their gait, their behaviour’ (Wyndham, 143). Lewis’s conclusion from these observations was that ‘There is nothing that is animal (and we as bodies are animal) that is not absurd’ (qtd. in Watson, Wyndham, 132). This combined sense of detachment and absurdity separated him from bourgeois models of art production, and helped him to situate general tendencies and cutting edge art-world trends into broader social contexts. In turn, these revelations about the relationship between culture and art led Lewis to imagine and propose correctives both in criticism and in art that had the potential to redeem the ‘irresponsible, Peterpannish psychology’ that dominated experimental literature at the time and that was characteristic of a common mode of thought that has ‘broken the back of our will in the Western countries, and [has] already forced us into the greatest catastrophes’ (Time, 53). It is through his advocacy for correction that Lewis transforms from a ‘hero malgré moi’ (Self-Condemned, 23) into something avant-garde. The Canadian writers who took influence from Lewis used his writings and the detached perspective he painfully wrought with the hopes of addressing, understanding, and perchance correcting particular structural mistakes of their contemporary society. This chapter will outline the Vorticist-influenced activity by Canadian authors, and will explore the blurred borders and yet revolutionary implications of this node of avant-garde activity in Canada. Vorticism before Canada William C. Wees begins his book Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde with a series of declarative, contradictory statements about the Vorticist movement by its principal participants, concluding with Lewis’s own admission: ‘Vorticism … What does this word mean? I do not know’ (3). The confusion and the ambiguity of the term no doubt stem from the contrast

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between the brevity and small size of the movement and the enormity of cultural associations that coalesce in Vorticism. The movement, for instance, grew out of the impressionism of Italian Futurism by fusing imagism and French cubism with German Expressionism. It has been historicized and interpreted as an offshoot and a subset of each of these transnational movements. It was, however, a short-lived experience such that Vorticism, as a self-contained movement, amounts to little more than the desire and the energy for revolution, or at least an iconic national avant-garde art movement, rather than the revolutionary force itself. The ‘vortex’ metaphor was fashioned by the Adamite Ezra Pound, who, just prior to the appearance of the group’s manifesto in the first issue of their magazine Blast, published an attempt at definition for the sake of promoting the emerging garde: ‘The vortex is the point of maximum energy. / It represents, in mechanics, the greatest efficiency’ (‘Vortex,’ 151). Geographically, the fine point of maximum energy was intended to be the Rebel Art Centre in London, an avant-garde atelier proposed and funded by Kate Lechmere and established in 1914 (Wees, 68). The group, however, never achieved the desired efficiency or success. Despite attracting a regular host of Vorticist painters and writers, and public readings from the likes of now celebrated avant-garde icons F.T. Marinetti, Ford Madox Ford, and Ezra Pound, the Rebel Art Centre’s proposed combination of art school, gallery, meeting place, and lecture hall collapsed almost instantly the same year. Overall, the entire movement lasted from 1913–19, years that encompass the group’s initial evolution out of Marinetti’s Futurism to Lewis’s short book The Caliph’s Design: Architects! Where is Your Vortex?, which sought to revive Vorticism in the post–First World War period. In an article in 1919 appropriately titled ‘The Death of Vorticism,’ Pound in fact attempted to contest the death of the movement, but by 1920 any remaining semblance of or hope for the movement dissipated. Group members and supporters were dead, dispersed, or heavily indebted, but not before they had collectively published two issues of their manifesto-laden magazine Blast, exhibited at least three times, and seen the publication of one monograph on a member by a member (Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir by Pound in 1916). Hardly a staggering sum of production, Vorticism, much like Canadian nodes of avant-garde manifestations, is better understood as more than just its public face. It was an avant-garde school – in Pound’s sense, where a ‘school exists when two or three young men agree, more or less, to call certain things good’ (‘State Rerum,’ 112) – that briefly tipped over into a prototypical movement. It was the fine (swirling, not still) point of

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intersection between the avant-garde artists working in London. Blast, then, was an attempt to focalize expression of the things the assembled artists had agreed to call ‘good,’ the conclusions they came to about what in art and society was desirable. Their failure to pursue those conclusions was unavoidably caused by the continent’s plunge into massive war. As Wees suggests: ‘If Blast had appeared a few months earlier, it might have set off a full-scale avant-garde movement. But the coming of the war in August broke the Vorticists’ momentum. Like any popular success, Blast was at the mercy of sudden shifts in public interest. When the war came, Blast and Vorticism, like much else in English life, quickly faded from the public mind’ (197). While Vorticism can also be pinned down to a visual style of ‘juxtaposing abstract, geometrical shapes’ (Wees, 6) that are ‘locked into an endless struggle of conflicting geometrical forms’ (5); the revolutionary motivations that animated the experiments with this style are perhaps more significant. The lead editorial by Lewis in the second issue of Blast outlines some of their ambition in the familiar revolutionary rhetoric of the avant-garde: ‘This paper wishes to stand rigidly opposed, from start to finish, to every form that the Poetry of a former condition of life, no longer existing, has foisted upon us. It seeks to oppose to this inapposite poetry, the intensest aroma of a different humanity (that is Romance) the Poetry which is the as yet unexpressed spirit of the present time, and of new conditions and possibilities of life’ (Editorial, 5). Just as Marinetti had declared London a ‘Futurist city,’ so too did the Vorticists propose that the new humanity of which they wrote already – in part – existed. Consequently, Lewis developed his famous ‘Bless’ and ‘Blast’ cataloguing method to help distinguish those contributing to the realization of the possibilities of life from those defined as inapposite to the present time. Like the imagist poetic image, the Vorticists were attempting to create an art form that accessed the pure energy and spirit of the present moment. The past was dangerous and stultifying and had to be erased or at least effaced. While Vorticism is generally understood to have grown out of Italian Futurism (and indeed Marinetti offered to promote the Vorticists as an English Futurist manifestation), the group was hesitant about what they identified as the Futurist’s impressionistic response to specific technologies. They were quick to ‘applaud the vivacity and high-spirits of the Italian Futurists,’ but Marinetti, the great showman of Futurism, quickly came to embody the Vorticist’s sense of difference: ‘Their work is very much prejudiced by Marinetti’s propaganda, which is always too tyrannically literary, and insists on certain points that are not

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essential to their painting and is in itself rather stupid. His “Automobilism” is simply an Impressionist pedantry. His War-ravings is the term of a local and limited pugnacity, romantic and rhetorical’ (Lewis, ‘A Review,’ 40–1). The Vorticists, for strategic reasons, reduced Futurism down to a caricature built exclusively from Marinetti’s engorged personality. The inevitable distortion and oversimplification of the Italian movement helps to explain the particular ambitions of their own group, as they sought to define themselves positively through these negative depictions of rival avant-gardes. In contrast, Marjorie Perloff highlights the generality of the revolutionary fervour of the Futurists by examining how the diverse members participated in and contributed to a widespread ‘attack on the aestheticism of the previous generation’ (The Futurist, 37). The German Expressionists also shared the desire for a revitalized, revolutionary art, but yet were also reduced by the Vorticists to a single representative member, Wassily Kandinsky. Lewis dismissed the German Expressionists by noting that Kandinsky’s experiments with abstractions ended up rather ‘wandering and slack’ (Lewis, ‘A Review,’ 40). Vorticism, it was said, and in contrast, sought to maximize energy and violence within a social context with revolutionary intent. Sherrill Grace borrows from Sheila Watson (who developed her own theory in response to critical comments by Lewis) in distinguishing between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ schools of German Expressionism, dividing Marc, Pechstein, and Kandinsky from Scheffler, Worringer, and Spengler for instance (Regression, 189). Despite this acknowledged nuance, the Vorticists presented themselves as ‘parallel’ to Expressionism in that they worked from a similar sense of inner necessity with a commitment to abstractionism, but divergent in their embrace of icons and representationalism. To quote Lewis, their aesthetic ambition was to ‘ENRICH abstraction till it is almost plain life, or rather to get deeply immersed in material life to experience the shaping power amongst its vibrations, and to accentuate and perpetuate these’ (qtd. in Grace, Regression, 190). Figures, then, and some degree of representationalism were permitted, if only to a limited and somewhat uncertain degree. Kandinsky became metonymic of the movement as a whole precisely for his commitment to pure abstraction, bereft of iconicity and material life. Vorticism’s short life left its members with barely enough occasion to distinguish themselves from rival art movements. Sheila Watson, however, argues in her dissertation that despite the quick collapse of the historical Vorticist movement, Lewis’s own aesthetics remained consistent from this initiating moment to the end of his career. She finds connections

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between the ambitions of Vorticism and his publications through the 1920s and ’30s, including his savage satires and criticisms of the Bloomsbury Group and the general ‘child-cult’ that he associated with the followers of Bergson. The name ‘vorticism’ itself seems like a deliberate reversal of the dominant novelistic metaphor of the time, stream of consciousness. Woolf, like Joyce, was a master of the technique, but Lewis was impressed by neither. He believed that stream of consciousness was a technique ‘based upon Greek naturalist canons’ with ‘flowing lines, the absence of linear organization’ that hid dubious ethics: ‘If you consider the naturalism of the Greek plastic as a phenomenon of decadence (contrasted with the masculine formalism of the Egyptian or the Chinese) then you will regard likewise the method of the “internal monologue” (or the romantic snapshotting of the wandering stream of the Unconscious) as a phenomenon of decadence’ (Men, 127). In contrast, the vortex arrested the stream and condensed the energy of consciousness to a brutally clear point (as Lewis proclaims with his pointedly gendered language). This drive for a violent intensity in art, grounded in the recognition of how art participates and shapes its contextual society, informed Lewis’s critical writing throughout his career. It certainly informed his preference for an expressive approach to literature as opposed the impressionistic methods of his modernist peers. Grace describes Lewis and Watson’s writing technique as expressive abstraction – she uses the German ‘Einfühlung’ – in that it arises from ‘the dual artistic impulse of empathy and abstraction’ (Regression, 192). In turn, this Berkleyian drive to regard and record (external) behaviours as opposed to (internal) drives can be taken as a central characteristic of a general Vorticist school, for it is precisely Lewis’s wide-lens approach, his self-conscious art-in-the-world, coupled with Pound’s dictum to cut out literary flaccidity that came to inspire the Canadian current. Anticipating (or more likely providing) McLuhan’s vocabulary, Lewis ‘dogmatically’ declares himself ‘for the wisdom of the eye, rather than that of the ear’ (Men, 128). Harley Parker, for instance, took up the sensorial orientation of the Vorticist perspective: ‘Of course [art] is subversive just because it makes the environment visible. The more we hybridize our art forms to encompass many sensory inputs the closer we get to life.’ Hugh Kenner in The Pound Era repeatedly uses the term ‘the Vortex’ to refer to Yeats, Eliot, Pound, and Lewis, despite the significant differences between them (they were, however, all English-language authors associated with the Vorticist movement). I propose a more specific model by limiting my use of ‘Vorticism’ to the revolutionary impulse developed

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by the English school to alter society by altering communication patterns. Language, from the Vorticist (as with the Surrealist) perspective, is no longer significant for its relation to unconscious drives but becomes a technology and an archive of a particular culture. By focusing on the way language determines or shapes culture, and by extension the cultural function of media, the Vorticist impulse subjugates the expressive content of communication to the mode of communication (thus, the medium becomes the message). The historical Vorticists realized that controlling language, and by extension the media, meant controlling the culture and all those in it. It was this realization, and the revolutionary impulse to correct the degenerating course of Western culture it inspired, that led both Pound and Lewis to fascism, and that led others like Gaudier-Brzeska and T.E. Hulme to champion a ‘cleansing’ war that would lead to their deaths. It led the less violent and less fascistically inclined Canadian authors to experiment with the meaning of ritual and language in the electric age, in the hopes of ‘reversing’ the helplessness and passivity they found to be characteristic of quotidian experience (McLuhan, The Mechanical, v). The new, unique perspective on how reality functions that the Vorticist artists felt had been uncovered in their work led directly to a total rejection of the bourgeois world, which they characterized for its rising democratic spirit. This democratic spirit, with its hegemonic populism, extreme passivity, and models of mass consumption, was rising and cutting the Western world off from legitimate vitality (the decadence Lewis disclaimed above). Thus, Pound’s progressive insistence that artist’s ‘make it new’ was paradoxically coupled with his conservative devotion to the older literatures of Dante, the French troubadours, as well as Eastern traditions and literatures. The need for novelty, for Pound, meant not imitating but accessing the vital language and culture of these older literatures in order to properly respond to the particular circumstances of the contemporary Western world and its overwhelming, as he described it, ‘circumjacent stupidity’ (Gaudier-Brzeska, 93). Lewis was sympathetic to Pound’s critique of culture: his landmark book Time and Western Man provided a clear analogy between cinema and advertising linked in the figure of the passive ‘revolutionary simpleton’ whom he used to characterize all Western democracies. In Lewis’s theory, this figure represents the end of ‘all individual continuity’ (13). With the cultural modes increasingly insisting upon interaction rather than heroic isolation, the isolated heroic personality of the previous age dissolves into the sensual multiplicity of the life-of-the-moment that characterizes capitalist culture,

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creating what he called ‘the perfect American’ – a passive consumer of exclusively superficial culture. Time and Western Man presents a unified vision of the zeitgeist of Western culture ‘battered and deadened’ by its reification of the here and now, altering the nature of subjectivity and individuality into an overstimulated stupor. Vorticism, then, for Lewis, was an attempt to challenge this broad cultural failure by replacing it with renewed vitalism. It was his role, and indeed the role of avant-garde art, to remake society in order to reclaim what has been lost: ‘I was born, if ever man was, for utopias, built upon a dazzlingly white and abstract ground. I was cut out to erect visionary residences, for the “free spirit” … Most “tradition” appears to me to be merely a bad tradition … crystallized mistakes’ (qtd. in Sheila Watson, Wyndham, 3). The cultural rot was felt to be settled most obviously in the language and thus the literature of the culture, which is how Lewis justified his vicious attacks on fellow writers. While it is an old argument that modernism characteristically staged a retreat from the degraded wasteland of the modern world into the hermetic arena of autotelism or art for art’s sake or, in T.S. Eliot’s case, as David Trotter argues, into a study of the automatism engendered by a raft of new technologies,1 for both Lewis and Pound, the fact that art, politics, society, and ideology were inextricably intertwined invited, indeed demanded, intervention. As it has been widely theorized, such a realization becomes avant-garde when artists attempt to break down the barriers between the world in art and the world surrounding it. Or as Peter Bürger succinctly writes, the intention of the avant-garde is ‘to do away with art as a sphere that is separate from the praxis of life’ in order to bring about a broader cultural and thus sociopolitical revolution (53). The Vorticist swirl of art and politics and social commentary is, therefore, similar to other avant-garde initiatives that emerged in response to the first manifestations of capitalist mass culture and globalization. As noted in the previous section, the Surrealists also saw their work as part of a global struggle against the deadening forces of capitalism. The unfettered ambition to redefine the global experience of reality, led the Surrealists to allegiances with other revolutionary movements. Breton wrote in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, ‘My sympathies are in fact … wholeheartedly with those who will bring about the social Revolution’ (143) wherein Surrealism is but a ‘tiny foot bridge over the abyss’ (146). The boundaries of such an ambition extend far beyond art, limited only by the entire human population. For Lewis, the fact that civilization seemed to rest on the edge of total catastrophe justified or rather immunized him from any potential revolutionary violence. The future seemed desperately

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dire or at least fixed: ‘Perpetual War may well be our next civilization’ (‘A Super-Krupp,’ 13). As with the Futurists, for the Vorticists the inevitability of war and violence at least contained the possibility of cleansing the moral decadence of the moment (Lewis concludes the quote above on perpetual war by saying, ‘I personally should much prefer that’) and could even lead to utopian social arrangements. Lewis warned that violent change was imminent regardless of its outcome: ‘By the agreement of the workers of the world, through their accredited representatives, to align themselves with the sovietic and fascist power, that unity would immediately be achieved. But if it is not done voluntarily, it will undoubtedly be achieved by compulsion and violence’ (The Art, 49). It is from a sense of uncovering something sacred, some alternative possible reality predicated upon a secret truth lost in the globalizing culture of mass-market capitalism, that the avant-garde, the Futurists, the Vorticists, and the Surrealists, developed their own countervailing transnational agenda. This central paradox of a progressive revolutionary ambition to resurrect or conserve veiled truths orients the earnest endeavour to transform the world and led many avant-gardists to mass political movements with overtly transnational ambitions. Prior to the Second World War, in the peak historical moment of European avant-gardism, fascism and communism were the two most powerful transnational social movements. Consequently, it has become somewhat commonplace to speak of the associations between avant-garde artists and the various extreme political movements that arose during this period. Various histories have been written about renowned artists such as, to list a small sampling, Umberto Boccioni, F.T. Marinetti, Le Corbusier, and even Ezra Pound who became active in fascist parties and movements, or André Breton, Andre Gide, Antonin Artaud, Diego Rivera, and Bertolt Brecht who became involved in the Communist Party. The reasons these figures explored radical politics to the extent that they did are diverse and personal, and it is worth noting that many later recanted their involvement. The significant fact, however, is that avant-garde artists (keeping in mind the distinction between radical and decadent artists) have been consistently drawn to political power, tempted by the opportunity to see their revolutionary projections realized in a world in need of revitalizing. The appeal of mass political movements explicitly oriented towards global manifestations and enormous power for avant-garde artists is obvious. For André Breton, the Communist Party’s efficacy and influence attracted him – even though the association proved predictably disastrous. He would later write that the more natural link for his Surrealist movement was not with

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Karl Marx but with the anarchistic free spirit of Alfred Jarry (see his essay ‘Alfred Jarry as Precursor and Initiator’ for an elaboration of this shift). Surrealism’s aborted relationship to the Communist Party draws attention to the rampant revolutionary idealism of avant-garde movements. The Surrealists, like all avant-garde schools and movements, were motivated by a spirit of openness rather than a prescribed set of pragmatic answers. Such failed engagements with radical politics, from the Surrealists to the (especially Berlin-based) Dadaists, from the Symbolists to the Vorticists, suggest a kind of art movement unwilling to accept the boundaries of art and the ideologies of their contextual society. These art movements, these avant-garde artists, turned to politics to realize the redemptive power of art; they pushed against the borders of art, and sought to break through the galleries, the museums, even the bindings of books, to affect society at large. It is in this attempt to reconceive the boundaries of art, and to annul the category of artist by bringing all humanity into artful living that we encounter the transnational agenda of movements like Futurism, Surrealism, and Vorticism: a desire to revolutionize the way humans encounter the world through art. In the words of theorist Charles Russell, ‘the avant-garde explores through aesthetic disruption and innovation the possibilities of creating new art forms and languages which will bring forth new modes of perceiving, expressing, and acting – which will, in effect, proclaim the avant-garde writers as poets, prophets, and revolutionaries’ (4). To be avant-garde, in this very specific sense, is to be in advance of and fighting for a new kind of social contract, a new kind of consciousness, and a new kind of human. Restricting the denotative field of the term to this very focalized agenda could problematically be used to wrest individuals out of avant-garde categorization as a means of delegitimizing them. For instance, was what Kristeva describes as Aragon’s ‘return to utilitarian reason’ (The Sense, 117) a compromise of his Surrealist avant-gardism? Does Picabia’s call to help ‘the masses’ make ‘the most of themselves’ (‘Picabia Versus Dada,’ 326) and his desire to ‘discern the true from the false … [to] relearn what a beautiful form and a beautiful conscience are’ (327), while contradicting the spirit of Dada decadence, make him avant-garde or conservative?2 Such concerns are much less problematic with a more nuanced approach to avant-gardism that admits that a revolutionary impulse circulated within a particular community and that individual artists were by turns attracted or repelled by this impulse. This more flexible and nuanced model allows the discussion of the revolutionary sociopolitical mandate of avant-gardism without having to attend to every contradiction of individual artists over the course of their

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careers. It also isolates avant-gardism to a very specific revolutionary impulse emerging out of and in response to modern culture – including modernist literatures – and helps to explain the enormous contradictions in avant-garde interest in radical politics. Lewis, for instance, praised Adolf Hitler’s revolutionary spirit and was captivated by his transformational energy, but yet dismissed the foundational orientation of Hitler’s cultural ambitions. Lewis wrote in his book-length tribute to Hitler, ‘I am exceedingly sceptical about, and unresponsive to, all “nationalist” excitements whatever’ (Hitler, 5). With the rise of mass culture, Lewis believed the world was rapidly unifying into a singular cultural domain. National boundaries were thus archaic technologies; the crystallized mistakes of a previous age. Nonetheless, he was attracted to Hitler because he sensed the enormous impact Hitler would have on Europe and he too wanted Europe remade and revolutionized. In other words, it was Lewis’s impatience with the pace of cultural change led by avant-garde artists that led him to praise a political typhoon promising radical imminent change. For Lewis, democracy, mass culture, and industrial capitalism were conspiring against the vitality of European culture. This anti-populism also helps to explain Lewis’s rejection of Futurism, which, as Perloff notes, was a movement characteristically enthralled at the possibility of mass culture. Her idea of a generalizable ‘Futurist Moment’ that overlaps but comes to exclude the Vorticists describes a ‘brief phase when the avantgarde defined itself by its relation to the mass audience’ (The Futurist, 38). Lewis explained (in his 1939 rejection of Adolf Hitler and of Nazism) that he was primarily opposed to the capitalist levelling of culture, which he attributed to being the structural nature of the cultural malaise: ‘I do not like the present Capitalist system. It seems to me to be a very bad system indeed. I believe that it brings into anything it touches something destructive and evil’ (The Hitler Cult, 97). It was on this point of cultural antagonism to the institutions of the West that Lewis and Pound, two founders of Vorticism, openly defended and even advocated for fascism. It heralded a revolutionary potential to redeem capitalism’s destructive evil. They turned to fascistic political movements as a natural extension of their avant-garde agenda, as a means to fulfil their transnational revolutionary impulse. Though fascism is now frequently understood and characterized as a monolithic social contract, Pound and Lewis were both attracted to its potential power as an antidote to the spread of democratic capitalism, which they regarded as monolithic and ‘as barbarous as that of war’ (Lewis, Time, 23). During the Second World War, Pound, as is well known, took to the airwaves in defence of Mussolini, attacking usury and

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Jewish moneylenders. Jews were not his first target, though. Starting from the Vorticist period, Pound increasingly insisted upon the political, polemical function of the artist – including participation in violent revolutionary movements. Unlike Breton and many others, Pound did not back away from the extreme beliefs associated with radical politics even after realizing the terrible violence associated with those movements: in fact, he continued to defend fascism long after his incarceration. As John Tytell and Louis Dudek have documented, Pound also sustained his antiSemitism beyond the war (in 1950, for instance, Pound recommended Mein Kampf, ‘preferably in the original,’ as well as Lewis’s 1931 defence of Nazism, Hitler, to the Canadian poet Dudek [Dudek, Dk, 16]), and it follows that racial prejudice and his obsession with usury can plausibly explain at least some of Pound’s attachment to the fascist movement. Wendy Flory, in her essay ‘Pound and Antisemitism,’ claims that because Mussolini’s fascism was not originally shaped by anti-Semitism, the formal alignment with Hitler hastened Pound’s mental deterioration into the ‘paranoid psychosis’ for which he was interned back in America (287) – and which characterized his visits with Dudek. Regardless of the cause, Pound believed that radical politics was a natural extension of his avantgarde revolutionary ambitions. Lewis, on the other hand, presents a much trickier case of allegiance. Unlike Pound, he did recant his fascism. Even before the Second World War erupted, he dismissed the Nazis as the ‘fustian accessories of patriotic demagoguery’ (The Hitler Cult, 44), admitting that he ‘was badly taken in, in 1930’ (37). That was the year he wrote Hitler, an apology for Nazism that made such disastrous prophetic claims as ‘In Adolf Hitler, the German Man, we have, I assert, a “Man of Peace” … [he] is not a sabrerattler at all … I believe Hitler himself – once he had obtained power – would show increasing moderation and tolerance toward the Jews … Hitler is a prophet, like Mahomet’ (32, 46, 48). Such delusional beliefs were motivated by a desire to combat what he described as the ‘the hysterical imbecility’ of both modern culture and modernist literature. As he tried to explain: ‘whatever can be said in favour of “democracy” of any description, it must always be charged against it, with great reason, that its political realization is invariably at the mercy of the hypnotist. But no artist can ever love democracy or its doctrinaire and more primitive relative, communism … The uniformity aimed at by the method of masssuggestion is, as an ideal, only a counsel of desperation. Any man of intelligence must be instinctively against it’ (26).

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In his 1919 book The Caliph’s Design, Lewis outlined the motivating vision that informed his desire for autocracy: he begins the book with a fascist parable depicting a powerful caliph compelling the architects under his control to instantly remake his city based on a whimsical design dashed off over breakfast. The power of the caliph was primarily appealing as a corrective to a global force that Lewis believed had infected even the most cutting-edge and experimental writing of modernism. For Lewis, writers like T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and the Bloomsbury Group were not using their prodigious talents and intellect to fight the imbecility of mass culture but were in fact cataloguing the symptoms of its pervasive ideology. As Paul Edwards writes, Lewis used the caliph parable ‘to articulate by contrast a savage relish in the apparent impotence of art to affect the actual world’s banality’ (148). Lewis’s definition of modernism as a whole highlights this impotence, for it is ‘merely the nervous jingo exaggeration of the more futile novelties of the Zeitgeist’ (Men, 131). It is worth bearing in mind that this belief in the limitation of art is shared by many critics of modernism, including Fredric Jameson and Julia Kristeva, the latter of whom argues that within the capitalist system a text ‘abdicates any active social function’ (Revolution, 214). The situationist Guy Debord, looking back at modernism, argued too that ‘artists whose renown was derived from their contempt for and destruction of art were not engaged in a contradictory practice, for their contempt was dictated by the course of social progress itself’ (‘The Great Sleep,’ 22). Literature, by this vantage, even radical or critical literature, becomes complicit with and symptomatic of its cultural milieu, a consistent Lewisian and radical avant-gardist trope. This idea also surfaces in Wilfred Watson’s notebooks where he writes: ‘What after all is Joyce’s contribution – I don’t see him opposing the age in any way – how can one make a contribution without opposition?’ (qtd. in Tiessen, 116). Lewis’s iconoclastic stance as the enemy was, for Watson, a necessary starting point for broad cultural renewal as well as an ethically defensible cultural contribution. Notably, however, Watson and the other Canadian Vorticists learned from Lewis’s status as cultural pariah the dangers of aligning themselves however temporarily with extreme political factions. Lewis’s particular criticism of Joyce’s autotelism was shared by Pound, who once said of Finnegans Wake that ‘Joyce had no civic responsibility’ (Dudek, Dk, 34). While both the autotelic elitism of the modernist authors and the sociopolitical revolutionary ambitions of the avant-garde rejected the current bourgeois and democratic social contract, the key

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distinction between them was that only the avant-garde felt a compulsion, a civic responsibility, to remake it. In the revolutionary words of Debord, as a result of the ‘extreme point reached by the deterioration of all forms of modern culture … we must no longer lead an external opposition based only on the future development of issues close to us, but seize hold of modern culture in order to use it for our own ends’ (‘One Step Back,’ 25). Avant-garde texts, unlike modernist works that participated in or despaired at bourgeois culture, wrestled symplegmatically with (that is, in Derrida’s sense, to both dance with and struggle against) bourgeois ideology with the revolutionary ambition of overturning and replacing that culture. Lewis’s embrace of the ‘Sheet-Iron puritanism’ of Vorticism and even his flirtations with Nazism, like Pound’s similar embrace of Mussolini’s fascism, explicitly aspired to advance a potential antidote to the democratic decadence of Western art. Both were unabashed intellectual elitists in a period that witnessed the arrival of mass popular culture and the unfettered spread of capitalist culture and ideology. Pound and Lewis present one stream of response to the broader problems provoked by the rise of mass culture and globalization. As Zeev Sternhell has pointed out, in confronting the juggernaut of neoliberalism, the Marxist far-left and the fascist far-right, despite the fundamentally different objectives motivating the objections, were actually unified in their opposition. Sternhell traces this superficially unlikely unity to the influence of Georges Sorel, the Marxist founder of syndicalism, who argued against cultural nationalism and in favour of class warfare and violence. Lewis, in turn, seems to have shared this notably eccentric rereading of political history by describing Sorel as a man ‘of irreproachable honour’ (Time, 331) and by drawing attention to the fact that both fascists and Marxists were heavily influenced by him. It was from this spirit that Wilfred Watson wrote and produced his trilogy of plays ‘Gramsci x 3’ on the theme of the intersection of fascism and communism through Sorel. In the play, Mussolini imprisons the communist Gramsci in order to write a ‘Sorelian myth I wanted for fascism’ (592). In response to being asked whether he had read Sorel, Mussolini declared, ‘I AM Sorel’ (564). His Sorelian fascism was an attempt to ‘investigate money as a technical problem’ (567) and reverse ‘the moral, intellectual, philosophical, artistic and cultural bankruptcy which the invention of money extended over the centuries has led to’ (566). In response to this same capitalist juggernaut, Lewis aligned himself with the exponentially uglier Nazism, proclaiming through Hitler that

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‘the most colossally Golden Age of any yet would be upon us. It would be such a Golden Age as Man has never either passed through or so much as imagined’ (Hitler, 188). Though such optimism follows logically from his rejection of democratic decadence, it was nevertheless a disastrous reading of history, and one from which Lewis’s reputation has never fully recovered. After his brilliant portrait of T.S. Eliot was rejected by the Royal Academy, he left England a pariah, arriving indirectly into Canada in the early stages of the Second World War. His life in this country was secluded and lonely – for he had managed to further offend significant portions of the Canadian intelligentsia even before his arrival with a brutal satire of Toronto’s beloved arts and sports complex Hart House (the primary site of our Little Theatre renaissance), published in America, I Presume (1940). Still, Lewis eked out a living in the city through portraiture, lectures, and odd jobs, and in the meantime became tight friends with Group of Seven painter A.Y. Jackson, the young English professor Marshall McLuhan, and a handful of others. He impatiently returned to England in 1945 at war’s end. Pound, meanwhile, had been incarcerated by the American army on charges of treason and brought back to the United States. He was declared insane, by which he managed to avoid execution for the treason charge, and was held at St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC, for more than twelve years until the charges against him were dropped. While he was incarcerated by the Americans, Pound continued to produce contributions to his poetic epic, the Cantos. Critics have begun revisiting this text through its relation to his Vorticist aesthetics, and indeed Pound’s own theories of art offer useful justification for this reconsideration. In 1918, he argued that ‘Vorticism has reawakened our sense of form’ (‘The Vortographs,’ 155) precisely because it offered ‘apparently the only art-theory in England which is based on the actual effects of form and colour on the human eye’ (‘Art Notes,’ 89). William Wees argues that the discovery of Vorticism’s art theory of form has a special significance to Pound’s subsequent writing: This vivid sense of abstract visual form helped Pound cross from Imagism to Vorticism, declaring, as he made the crossing, that a poem is Imagist in so far as it ‘falls in with the new pictures and the new sculpture.’ It also prepared him to deal with the Chinese written character. His beginning to work on Ernest Fenellosa’s manuscript coincided with his transition from Imagism to Vorticism, and both involved understanding things in a new, visual way … Vorticism helped Pound appreciate [Fenellosa’s ideas of]

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visual-verbal relationship, and it may have influenced the form of Pound’s Cantos, where the innumerable disparate elements of the poem can be thought of as ‘planes in relation’ or ‘diverse planes’ that, like fragments of Japanese armour, ‘overlie in a certain manner.’ To have picked up a ‘new sense of form’ at that stage in his development probably helped Pound re-examine and expand upon the techniques of Imagism. (209)

In the ensuing discussion of the influence of Vorticism on Canadian writing, my primary attention will be paid to specific, historical points of intersection with the revolutionary impulse that motivated it. However, both Wees’s theory of the formative impact of Vorticism on Pound’s development and the consistency of Lewis’s aesthetics to Vorticism, introduce a more general conception of how to read Vorticism’s influence on a much wider body of work. The avant-garde impulse that emerges from the historical Vorticist movement is shaped by the revolutionary desire to change cultures through attention to the medium of communication – including to language itself. Vorticism in Canada Despite the strong associations in Europe, aesthetic avant-gardism does not by necessity imply a connection to radical and violent political movements. To reiterate, avant-gardism begins with artists working against societal norms and articulating revolutionary alternatives through their art. Canadian avant-gardes before the 1960s typically worked in the wake of European schools and movements. While this meant that the Canadians were less inclined to test the political extremes, it raises one immediate paradox in studying the earliest nodes of the Canadian avant-garde in that our cutting-edge and radical art is often reactive, safer, and even worse, imitative of work and aesthetics developed in Europe. The idea of a behind-the-curve avant-garde has been enough of a semantic conundrum to generally truncate discussion of the implications of a Canadian avant-garde, despite the fact that extensive work of an avant-garde character happened here. For very different reasons, a similar shroud has consistently covered scholarship on Wyndham Lewis’s extensive avant-garde work since at least his 1930 defence of Adolf Hitler. In Fables of Aggression, Fredric Jameson cautions his contemporary readers against reading Lewis, suggesting that they will likely be offended by Lewis’s unique blend of homophobia, misogyny, and proto-fascism (4). Ideologically speaking, Lewis was behind

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the curve of twentieth-century social politics. The initial portrait Jameson draws of the man who self-identified as ‘the Enemy’ creates the impression of a self-destructive and hypocritical rage cast against both society and himself. The warning to readers is perhaps unnecessary: as Stephen Ross recently pointed out, while Jameson’s cautionary tale has been reprinted in a high-profile new edition, making it something of a classic of literary theory, ironically Lewis’s own catalogue continues to become increasingly obscure and removed from canonized modernisms (Ross, ‘Lewis’). The isolation, Jameson suggests, was and remains caused by Lewis’s personality and polemics. As he writes, Lewis made the ‘unfortunate’ mistake of ‘forcing his readership to choose between himself and virtually everything else … in the modern canon’ (Fables, 3–4). Consequently, and despite Jameson’s acknowledgement of Lewis as one of ‘the great modernists of his generation,’ Lewis’s literary corpus is ‘one of the most … little known bodies of fiction produced in English in recent times’ (1). His canonization remains minuscule when compared to the lionization of his titanic peers, Pound, Eliot, and Joyce, who have been transformed into national heroes complete with statuary, guided walking tours, mugs, T-shirts, and mouse pads. In Canada, however, the influence of Lewis and Vorticism begins early and was sustained for many decades. Scholars have already begun mapping out Lewis’s influence in Canada: Donna Palmateer Pennee, for instance, reads Sheila Watson’s fiction through Lewis as a masculinist aesthetics of modernism. Watson was not alone in her interest, of course, and as mentioned earlier, Marshall McLuhan and Lewis became friends during Lewis’s time in the country. Scholars have already traced Lewis’s impact on McLuhan to the period before their first meeting: both Glenn Willmott and Richard Cavell read McLuhan’s earliest criticism as developing out of Lewis’s own mass-media theories. McLuhan began reading Lewis voraciously in 1934 (Willmott, McLuhan, 40) and was particularly inspired by Time and Western Man (Cavell, 9–12). Poignantly, considering McLuhan’s media theories, this landmark book provides a clear analogy between cinema and advertising linked in the increasing passivity of the population in Western democracies. McLuhan would later describe this as a shift in consciousness away from ‘literate man’ with his self-possessed sense of individuality towards a multidimensional, global ‘post-literate’ man. It was Lewis’s total social vision of the individual perpetually altered by his or her evolving context and consequently reflected in evolving art that, Willmott argues, became ‘the fundamental project of McLuhan’s work’ (McLuhan, 44).

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Studying groups and movements like Vorticism in the context of Canadian literature has many potential pitfalls – especially in the temptation to overinflate a particular author’s participation or identification with a group – but has the advantage of acknowledging the wider, sympathetic context in which a particular Canadian author produced avant-garde writing. This context is especially useful with experimental Canadian authors who exist on the outside of an already marginal cultural community and can easily find themselves ostracized within their contextual society. Lewis, who was pushed out of his society, rejected literary groups as a refuge for bad writers. Still, group aesthetics have become a prominent component of theories of the avant-garde because they are useful in identifying the networks of influence and aesthetics at play in movements like Vorticism, especially as the styles, techniques, and propositional ideologies of these movements spread across borders and beyond the control of the original members. They also attend to a different kind of group dynamic particular to avant-garde currents, schools, and movements that traditional models of paternalistic, anxiety-inducing influence, colonialist mimicry, or postmodern models of intertextuality tend to overlook. The concepts of schools and movements both articulate different strategies through which the aesthetics of a diverse group of authors might be set in proximity to one another. This attempt to unify and bring together artists seems to be the nature of C.J. Fox’s discussion of the parallels between Lewis and E.J. Pratt – two authors who Fox believes ‘should have come together’ (1) but is forced to admit were never acquaintances, never discussed each other’s work in print, and possibly never even read each other’s work (2). Fox connects them through the rewarding comparison of the shared ‘general themes’ in their work and the convergence of their ‘visions of the modern world’ (3). Renato Poggioli characterizes such biographically intangible yet perfectly relevant associations between artists through the German concept of the Weltanschauung, the world view of a group. He uses the concept of the Weltanschauung to distinguish between schools and movements, which differ in that schools centre around static traditions with presupposed masters determining their course, while movements, in contrast, are ‘essentially dynamic,’ leaderless centres of activity and energy and thus more dependent on a general world view (20). Pratt was not a follower of Lewis, nor did he subscribe to a pattern of static aesthetics. Rather, Fox’s characterization of the PrattLewis convergence suggests their common participation in a general movement – in their case, one defined not so much by the spirit of the times as by a shared antagonism to the zeitgeist. In contrast, novelist John

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Reid’s Horses with Blindfolds presents a rather flat attempt to imitate Lewis’s later novels and suggests a Canadian Vorticist school for its devotion to a central (and foreign) master. Peter Bürger notes that the sociopolitical revolutionary ambition of avant-gardism works against distinct categories of production and reception (53). The intention of the avant-garde is to enable a ‘liberating art praxis’ that blurs the border between artist and audience and in fact negates the category of art altogether (54). He acknowledges, however, that until the avant-garde revolution actually occurs there remains a distance between art and life. Consequently, these would-be defunct categories are still functional if only to highlight the extent of the failure to fulfil revolutionary ambitions. Similarly, even though Lewis’s definition of Vorticism embraced activity as opposed to passivity, and was opposed to the imitative (thus also rejecting the division between production and reception), there were yet artists who imitated the Vorticist style. Lewis was hostile to such acolytes, and hostile to John Reid in particular, but when I refer to Canadian Vorticism I keep in mind the schools and the movements, the imitators and collaborators, through which Lewis and the movement are implicated in Canada. Vorticism is perhaps the wrong word for such a movement, and certainly runs slipshod over Lewis’s own turn against his spawn as an example of the disastrous ‘disease’ of extremism (The Demon, 3). Still, the primary problem Lewis had with Vorticism as a particular movement, Toby Foshay points out, was its inability to revolutionize the institutional barriers of life: ‘It is in The Caliph’s Design that his critical consciousness first achieves the unity and coherence of a cultural vision, a vision which is shaped by the modernist revolution, but which denounces what it sees as the failure of the deeper and more radical aims of that revolution’ (Foshay, 21). In the subtitle to The Caliph’s Design, Lewis asks, ‘Architects! Where is your vortex?’ using the idea of the vortex to symbolize the dissolution of the boundaries between art and life. As Foshay writes, ‘In The Caliph’s Design, Lewis launches himself on the avantgardiste career that made him the pariah of English modernism for almost forty years’ (21). Referring to Lewis’s avant-gardism as Vorticism might be somewhat anachronistic, given the historical, geographical, and cultural boundedness of the movement, but it is from this revolutionary impulse and this more general, ahistorical sense of Vorticism, of Lewis’s particular challenge to the function of art in bourgeois society, that I turn to Canadian writing in search of its impact here. Canadians played a significant role in Lewis’s career throughout his lifetime. From his patrons Robert Ross and Lord Beaverbrook in the

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beginning to his many friends among the maligned colonials towards the end, many Canadians have prodigiously and thanklessly tried to serve, patronize, and promote him. There have been book-length considerations from Hugh Kenner, Walter Wees, and Toby Foshay, various editions from the likes of C.J. Fox and Frank Davey, and more than a dozen doctoral dissertations at schools across the country. Canadians were instrumental in two collections of scholarly essays, including Wyndham Lewis in Canada and Wyndham Lewis: A Revaluation. It is possible to explain some of the Canadian interest through nationalism: born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, Lewis kept a Canadian passport throughout his life (A. Lewis, 2) and even renewed it in 1950, raising speculations that he wanted to return (in contrast, Sheila Watson argues that his Canadian connections inspired his greater vitriol). He served with the Canadian military as a painter and soldier during the First World War, and famously lived in Canada for five miserable years during the Second World War. He was, without doubt, the most Canadian of all the so-called titans of AngloAmerican modernism. Most often, Lewis’s birth country has been treated as though it were entirely an accident. But, despite Lewis’s best efforts to obfuscate his past, it has been uncovered that these links were less than the coincidence generally imagined; Lewis’s family, on both his mother’s and father’s side, had extensive Canadian connections (Dilworth, Mastin, and Stacey, The Talented Intruder, 17). In fact, Lewis’s great uncle Charles Edward Romain was a prominent and wealthy patron of the arts in Toronto in the mid-nineteenth century (18), and his grandmother was French Canadian – perhaps explaining why Lewis was baptized in Montreal rather than Nova Scotia. Lewis planned to explore and exploit this heritage in an unwritten novel called ‘Hill 100’ that would have addressed Québécois trappers, the mining life in Timmins, Ontario, and ‘the social structure of the city of Toronto, which is in fact a vast mining camp’ (19). As Fox has documented, Lewis on at least one occasion teased his audience with the possibility that he had First Nations blood and ancestry (20). Having never heard his own voice before, Lewis even believed that he had a ‘kind of rugged American voice’ until McLuhan recorded him reading and exposed Lewis to himself: Lewis found the revelation hilarious (McLuhan, ‘McLuhan on Lewis,’ 12). As for his biographical connections to literature in Canada, the life of one of Lewis’s verifiable relatives, William Chisholm, who worked in Oakville’s ‘white-oak stave trade,’ helped to inspire Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna series based on the fictional Whiteoak family. Other Canadian connections, certainly more than need be summarized here, are catalogued

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in Thomas Dilworth, Catharine Mastin, and Robert Stacey’s prodigious 200-page catalogue called ‘The Talented Intruder’: Wyndham Lewis in Canada – proving that we are not stretching the bounds of credibility in probing Lewis’s relationship and contribution to Canadian literature. ‘The Talented Intruder’ advanced work already done by Sheila Watson in the 1967 special issue of artscanada that focused on Lewis’s Canadian work. Watson cleverly alludes to the design and layout of The Art of Being Ruled with her own typographical design. It was, in fact, a technique she developed in her PhD dissertation on Lewis that was completed in 1964, supervised by McLuhan. The first to explore and test the implications of Vorticism in the Canadian context was, perhaps not surprisingly, Bertram Brooker. Given the range of his production in painting, prose, poetry, drama, and art criticism, it is fair to say that Brooker was more like Lewis, the avantgarde painter, novelist, poet, playwright, and art critic, than any other Canadian I have yet come across. But whereas Lewis handed his first short stories directly to Ford Madox Ford (then Hueffer) in London in 1909 and quickly rose to national and international prominence (Kenner, Wyndham, 1), Brooker that same year lived in the small village of Neepawa, Manitoba, working on the railway, where until long after the war his stories and essays were considered by the local media to be entirely unpublishable. While his experimental work suffered almost total neglect, Brooker managed to avoid succumbing to the pressures of standardization which would have meant abandoning his unabashedly grandiose literary ambitions. Instead, and remarkably, he developed a theory of a virtual movement he called ultimatism based on the idea of an Ultra-homo, and began scanning global literature in search of likeminded individuals. In defence of this virtual avant-garde, he wrote manifestos, stories, and plays, and produced illustrations through which we can recognize the influence of Futurism – particularly Russian Futurism. He transformed himself, literally, into a one-man avant-garde. He also, during the early period, became aware of Lewis, producing in 1913 an image poignantly titled ‘Vortexing upward and outward through vaster births and deaths.’ As discussed earlier, Brooker relocated to Lawren Harris’s Toronto in 1921, discovered mysticism, and became an advocate for a spiritual revolution that he described through the idea of an evolutionary spread of cosmic consciousness. Two weeks before Brooker officially became Canada’s first abstract painter in 1927, he gave a lecture on William Blake and Lewis’s Time and Western Man at Toronto’s Hart House

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(ironically, the same venue Lewis satirized a decade later in America, I Presume). Borrowing from Lewis, Brooker introduced his talk by arguing against the ‘splitting up of artistic tendencies into schools and groups, each with their blasts and manifestoes’ (‘Blake,’ 1). Brooker’s spiritual r/evolution was predicated on a grand cosmic unity, and he therefore resisted the partisanship of groups, schools, and movements. He turned to one of Lewis’s most mystical utterances to contradict the modernist artistic disunity: he quotes Lewis in The Enemy writing: ‘If you say that creative art is a spell, a talisman, an incantation – that it is magic, in short; there, too, I believe you would be correctly describing it. That the artist uses and manipulates a supernatural power seems very likely’ (Brooker, ‘Blake’). Brooker interpreted Lewis’s supernaturalism through the Weltanschauung of his own mystical modernism: ‘He means more – he means that to be at all, in any real sense, is to become one with the world of imagination, to give up the self, literally, to god, who is, so to speak, the sum of human imagination’ (11). It was by this act of surrender – reminiscent of Pullman’s earnest prayers and ascension at the end of The Human Age – that Brooker reasoned artists could evolve into cosmic consciousness. Society in general and Canada in particular needed to be remade in order to facilitate this general awakening. Similar to the Pratt convergence, Lewis and Brooker both advocated for a parallel avantgarde approach to art and society – what we can discuss now as a revolutionary aesthetic avant-gardism. In his essays on Canadian modernism throughout the 1920s, Brooker frequently borrows Lewis’s particular criticisms of Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Stein for their distortions of time. Even his 1936 essay, ‘Art and Society,’ bears distinct echoes of Lewis: compare Brooker’s claim that ‘art has nothing to do with science or journalism – with facts or photos. Art is not – and should not be – useful to society, in any sense whatever!’ (xv) with Lewis’s 1915 claim that ‘the artist is NOT a useful figure, though he may be ornamental. In fact the moment he becomes USEFUL and active he ceases to be artist’ (‘A Review,’ 40). By 1930, however, in an essay called ‘Prophet’s Wanted’ first published in England in John Middleton Murry’s The Adelphi, Brooker carefully distinguishes his own mystical idealism from Lewis – whom he critiques for not being revolutionary enough. Lewis, he writes, cries ‘in the wilderness of pessimism … bewailing what men have lost, and yet [he is] afraid … to die into life’ (Brooker, ‘Prophet’s Wanted,’ 11). Brooker dismisses Lewis, in the end, as ‘cloistered and unadventurous’ unwilling to accept that ‘soon’ the human race will be ‘utterly changed.’ Lewis, he realized, despite a revolutionary imagination,

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was no longer actively working to support a specific sociopolitical revolution. For his part, Brooker entered the world of advertising conscious of the fact that it had the power to change society, and hoped to harness that power to move humanity to what he called ‘The Next Beyond.’ Though he would eventually sour to the potential of advertising, for decades Brooker envisioned a vortex of art, media, and advertising that would disrupt all of the lifeless habits of Western culture. Brooker’s mystical and experimental aesthetics engage with many of the same sources that inspired Lewis and the Vorticists – including Kandinsky and ideas that disseminated from the philosopher Henri Bergson. But whereas Brooker, like Joyce and Woolf, sustained his exploration of the so-called school of flux and German Expressionism, the Vorticists and especially Lewis turned against Kandinsky and his ilk. This turn can be located in the formative period wherein the Vorticists consciously sought to differentiate themselves from other movements in order to promote their own, new group: ‘Kandinsky’s spiritual values and musical analogies seem to be undesirable, even if feasible: just as, although believing in the existence of the supernatural, you may regard it as redundant and nothing to do with life. The art of painting, further, is for a living man, and the art most attached to life’ (‘A Review,’ 44). Still, despite this split, both Brooker and Lewis uniquely explored multimedia conceptions and approaches to art and fashioned a pioneering geometrical use of form. Furthermore, Brooker like Lewis worked with the awareness that ‘the processing techniques of corporate business are shared with those of artistic production’ – an idea that McLuhan would take up and explore in his own writing decades later (Cavell, 178). Though Brooker was the first published novelist associated with Canadian Vorticism, John Reid was most certainly the first Canadian Vorticist novelist. As mentioned earlier, Reid lived in Rapallo, Italy, near Ezra Pound for nine months in 1938–9. In 1939, at Pound’s promptings, Reid sent Lewis a manuscript version of his still unpublished novel ‘There Was a Tree’ (Reid, ‘Journey,’ 97). The novel was written with ‘the Lewis exemplar’ explicitly in mind, and Lewis was flattered enough to offer an introduction (98). Reid wrote to Morley Callaghan, Canada’s most prominent face in international avant-garde circles, asking if Toronto was worth returning to. In the letter, he also claims to have secured a publisher for his novel: As I am a Canadian I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t agree with you … It is necessary to get away from your own country for various reasons. Now I

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have thought of returning. One place is much the same as the next (a Munich suburb, Kensington S.W.7. and parts of Toronto are much the same: the people are becoming more and more the same); Europe is not especially better or worse than Canada. There are possibly more hypocrites in London or Paris … You have been home again for some years and you have stayed there. If you can spare me time and typewriter ribbon, and think it worth while, could you tell me whether you think it a mistake to return, say, at the end of the year, when my novel will likely be published. I already have a publisher. I can live cheaply in France or Italy and E.P.’s old pants and coat fit me nicely. (Reid, Letter)

This letter implies an ongoing, but now missing, correspondence between them about the state of Canadian literature vis-à-vis global currents. Reid did return to Canada before the war, and helped to inspire Lewis to join him there. Years later, when things in the New World went awry, however, Lewis blamed Reid (Reid, ‘Journey,’ 101) and perhaps for good reason: ‘for more than anyone else except Wyndham Lewis I was to blame for his coming to Toronto’ (102). Reid was speaking literally: he drove Lewis from Buffalo to Ontario’s capital to help with the move (S. Watson, Interview, 1). When things turned out badly for Lewis in Canada, Reid was cast out of the bonds of friendship and fealty – but not entirely. In 1948, Pound encouraged McLuhan to look up Reid; McLuhan did and even promised to ‘see more of him’ (Letter to Ezra Pound, 194–5). According to Matie Molinaro, Corrine McLuhan, and William Toye, the association between McLuhan and Reid lasted until 1954 when they had a falling out (195n3), but Sheila Watson’s interview with Reid (cited above) took place in the McLuhan’s Wychwood home in 1961. There was, in time, a grand falling out between them – prompting Reid to write a book-length rebuttal of McLuhan’s theories that remains unpublished in his archives. His second novel, The Faithless Mirror (self-published in 1974), also takes up the anti-McLuhanite theme. Still, despite the fallout, McLuhan’s young Canadian disciple Hugh Kenner dedicated his important 1954 monograph on Lewis to Reid in high style: ‘This book is for John Reid, preceptor and catalyst.’ The note was similar to Kenner’s 1951 dedication to The Poetry of Ezra Pound which reads ‘To Marshall McLuhan / A catalogue, his jewels of conversation.’ In a rather obscure Catholic newsletter, McLuhan reviewed Kenner’s book on Lewis and declared it ‘an unfriendly book’ (‘Nihilism,’ 97). Rather than prove the extent of the conflict, these examples might be said to better illustrate the tight network of association between Canada’s Vorticists.

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Despite his claim to having a publisher secured, Reid’s first novel appeared nearly three decades later in 1968, published by Longmans of Canada. Horses with Blindfolds is set in Pigrizia, Spain, where the Canadian protagonist has taken refuge from a hostile world ravaged by war. While the quiet, thoughtful book echoes Lewis’s rooming-house misadventure Self-Condemned, with Lewis’s Canada played by Reid’s Spain, it lacks the devastating, philosophically charged narrative of Lewis’s work. The scandals that disrupt all social graces in Horses with Blindfolds relate to adultery and miscegenation, but are easily cast into thin allegories for the post–Second World War Western world. Reid’s characters also suggest characters from Lewis’s novels, such as the unfortunately named Hans Goebbels who evokes Tarr’s Kreisler. Lewis’s ideas about American mechanical bourgeois life and the ‘decadence’ of abstract art spill from each of the character’s lips, such as one character’s complaint: ‘Cold, precise engineering. That’s our trouble. Made by a cold, precise mind. It’s our own minds that are destroying us’ (Reid, 121–2). Besides Lewis, other modernist texts and authors are frequently evoked. The very first line of the book, for instance, reads: ‘The sun also rises in Pigrizia’ (9), and to be sure, the entire book could be read as a rejection of Hemingway’s bullring heroics as political metaphor.3 Here, too, Reid notably takes his cue from Lewis, whose 1934 essay ‘Ernest Hemingway: The “Dumb Ox”’ sketched the argument:4 ‘it is difficult to imagine a writer whose mind is more entirely closed to politics than is Hemingway’s … but violence with Hemingway is deadly matter-of-fact (as if there were only violent action and nothing else in the world)’ (Men, 19, 20). Reid’s book, though it chronicles failed relationships on both the personal and political levels, begins with a tribute to Lewis for avoiding the shambles of the world in his own life (in contrast to Hemingway). The novel is dedicated to ‘Anne who remembered her husband’ – a reference to Lewis’s first and only wife affectionately nicknamed ‘Froanna.’ In his 1971 article on Lewis in Canada, Reid would cite Froanna’s loyalty as proof of Lewis’s character: ‘In the decade since his death, Gladys Anne Lewis has not deserted his memory or his cause: that is a sign of a merit more than literary’ (‘Journey,’ 103). Reid’s second novel The Faithless Mirror is a much more uneven, semibiographical novel chronicling his work as a priest attempting to save the hippies in Yorkville from moral decadence. Although this book begins like a reprise of Morley Callaghan’s modernist priest-in-spiritual-crisis novels, it veers psychedelic and oddly Nietzschean towards the end. The narrative becomes increasingly permeated with McLuhan’s arguments

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about the retribalization of the Western world through media until it reaches a libidinal crescendo in which the carefully wrought realism of the first half of the book disintegrates into something much more experimental and formally adventurous. The narrative deviation shifts the text into the realm of radical form, but serves the paranoiac plot twist rather than revolutionary ambitions. In some ways, the book marks the end of Reid’s Vorticism as the McLuhanisms in the text serve an impossible villain determined to use media and culture for nefarious ends. McLuhan’s own devotion to Lewis can be registered in his 1954 tribute to the publication of Blast. McLuhan’s second book, the seventeen-page manifesto COUNTERBLAST, was intended to be an acknowledgment and commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of Lewis’s avant-garde magazine. Though the time lag between the parallel projects suggests Canada’s paradoxical behind-the-curve avant-gardism, McLuhan did try to update Lewis’s model to the ‘new media of communication’ as well as to the Canadian context. As he explains in the introductory note, ‘COUNTERBLAST 1954 blows aside this dust [of European nationalism and individualism] for a few moments and offers a view of the cradle, the bough, and the direction of the winds of the new media in these latitudes’ (1). Sarah Stanners notes that the production of the booklet developed as a direct response to the 1951 report from the Massey Commission with its ‘call for High Kulcha in Canada’ (111). But as McLuhan further explained in a letter to Lewis, the work pushed beyond a simple parody of the government report: ‘As theme for Blast forty years later I have taken in place of abstract art and industrial culture, the new media of communication and their power of metamorphosis’ (Letters, 245). Thus, rather than blasting English climate, the English channel, and the various public figures who were felt to deserve ill-treatment, McLuhan blasts ‘The canadian BEAVER, / submarine symbol of the / SLOW / UNHAPPY / subintelligentsias’ (COUNTERBLAST, 3). He also adds his blessing to the ‘crafty cubist JIVE of the daily / press awakening the political appetite of / COSMIC MAN’ as well as to ‘French Canadian HOCKEY PLAYERS / for keeping art on ice / for our one contribution to / INTERNATIONAL CULTURE’ (8). The project draws poignant attention to the structure of Canadian culture, including offering insight into various early Canadian cultural icons. Similar to the revolutionary Vorticist impulse, the book’s analysis addresses the media landscape and its impact on communication within the culture. McLuhan’s COUNTERBLAST was designed by Harley Parker, a Toronto painter who was also swept up in the maelstrom of Canadian Vorticism

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(McLuhan, Letters, 246). One of McLuhan’s students, Tom Dilworth, remembers Parker as a McLuhan ‘minion’ (‘McLuhan as Medium,’ 22), but McLuhan begins the 1969 version of COUNTERBLAST with an epigraph from Parker – ‘Good taste is the first refuge of the witless’ – suggesting more mutual respect than Dilworth implies. The two would eventually publish Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting together in 1968, a book McLuhan described as ‘the logical companion to Cliché and Archetype’ (Letter to Sheila Watson, 16 August 1965). The book offers a scattershot analysis of poetry and visual art designed to highlight the development of techniques that create ‘a continuum between spectator and art situation’ (Through, 12). In accordance with avant-garde ambitions, McLuhan and Parker argue for regarding ‘the entire environment as a work of art’ (7). They explain avant-garde examples of anti-art or disjunctive works as probes ‘that [make] the environment visible. It is a form of symbolic, or parabolic, action. Parable comes from a word that means literally “to throw against,” just as symbol comes from one meaning “to throw together”’ (252). The rupture created by avant-garde work thus provides an opening, a counter-environment as he would later describe the new vantage, through which to regard the culture as a whole. In their book, as in McLuhan’s early books, the vortex functions as a central symbol of the age being described. In this case, the vortex is linked to the energy produced and released through the act of incorporation and organization into collectivities: ‘In contrast to phonetic letters, the ideograph is a vortex that responds to lines of force. It is a mask of corporate energy’ (39); ‘The ballad form was a new vortex. A corporate mask of the pastoral antique’ (135); ‘A new poetic, or musical, rhythm is a vortex of corporate energy’ (183); ‘Wyndham Lewis regarded Pound and Joyce as a Sargasso Sea, a vortex of historical debris’ (191); ‘The sitter’s mask as a vortex is a processing of personal energy by the new industrial environment’ (193). Their concept of the vortex develops from the Vorticist’s desire to access the maximal point of energy by attributing amplification to the creation of formalist structures. The amplification is, in turn, connected to a kind of cosmic consciousness that results from pushing the individual outside of and beyond themselves through the encounter with new vortices of energy: ‘No question here of privacy or private identity, but a free flow of corporate energy. Here the people make their world and are not contained in it. The cosmos becomes an extension of their energies’ (33). Brooker and the other Cosmic Canadians, in contrast, felt that language limited their living experience

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of the cosmos. By this point in his development as a thinker, McLuhan proposed technologies including language as possessing a liberating rather than obfuscating function; energy was produced by these extensions of ‘man’ – ‘In the all-at-onceness of electric technology we humbly encounter the man from the backward country as avant-garde’ (197). The book begins with a probe into a poem written by Parker and McLuhan that establishes a fusion between the environment and the human subject. They selfconsciously note that the line in the poem that reads ‘Weed in a river am I’ (32) presents an emersive metaphor that could have been extended to language itself: ‘An artist might have said, “Used by words am I”’ (33). Unlike the case of the novelist John Reid, and perhaps Harley Parker, the hierarchical model of imitation is of only limited value in discussing McLuhan’s work. Critics like Glenn Willmott and Richard Cavell catalogue the complexity of McLuhan’s early development, emerging out of New Criticism, Eisenstein’s radical cinema, and McLuhan’s own direct response to modern art. Both critics, however, acknowledge that Lewis provided McLuhan with a perspective by which to regard the totality of the processes at play in contemporary culture and – perhaps more importantly – a technique by which to stage that perspective. In McLuhan’s own words: ‘Having a look at WL’s “Inferior Religions” was a shock. Right there on the first page was “my” media theory – media as ablation of sense and function’ (Letter to Wilfred and Sheila Watson, 6 May 1961). But whereas Lewis turned to satire and criticism to expose the mediated ‘truth’ of his era’s ideology, McLuhan turned to a fusion of art and criticism that self-consciously parodies the forms he wanted to expose. In Dilworth’s estimation, this creative approach to literary history and scholarship made him ‘half genius, half foolish – too sincere and playful to be what he sometimes seemed, half hoax’ (‘McLuhan,’ 22). McLuhan developed this schism into his first major publication, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man – a title that evokes Lewis’s critique of the machine-like nature of mundane human life. Sheila Watson, in British Columbia, was deeply affected by The Mechanical Bride when it was published in 1951 and declared it a global landmark for revealing the electronic media’s ‘world of social myths’ (‘Myth,’ 119–20). She did not realize that she was already responding to a Canadian Vorticism – for as McLuhan freely admitted to Lewis directly, the book ‘owes much to you of course’ (Letters, 241). Though the title of the book alludes directly to Marcel Duchamp’s Dadaist sculpture of the same name, The Mechanical Bride is filled with conceptual borrowings from Lewis’s Time and Western Man, and even the

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design of McLuhan’s next book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, imitates Lewis (Letters, 236). This latter book was written while McLuhan was supervising Sheila Watson’s dissertation, and it was his idea that her book also follow Lewis’s design template. Both were intent on using their writing to wake society up from, in Lewis’s terms, ‘the hysterical imbecility’ induced by the ‘mesmeric methods’ of media and advertising (Time and Western Man, 26). The Vorticist impulse motivating McLuhan’s first book can be registered in its endeavour to mend the divisions afflicting people in the industrial age: ‘These divisions cannot be mended until their fullest extent is perceived’ (The Mechanical Bride, 157). Thus, the ambition of the book is to enable a vantage of mass-media culture and its sociopolitical effects. Part of McLuhan’s ambition, especially in the early stages of his career, was given towards ‘mending’ the divisions within industrial citizens and healing the violence these divisions represent. It was McLuhan himself who connected this rather revolutionary impulse to the historical Vorticist movement. He admitted in a letter to Ezra Pound in 1951 that he regarded himself as taking the same position adopted by Lewis during the Vorticist period: ‘I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon.’ (Letters, 227). In 1953, McLuhan described Lewis as a ‘one man army-corps’ (The Interior, 83), and in 1971, as if misquoting himself, described Lewis as ‘an avant-garde by himself’ (‘Lewis’s,’ 64). In both contexts, McLuhan argues that Lewis was motivated by the singular aim of delivering ‘us from the bondage of primitive religion’ (The Interior, 85); this was an ambition McLuhan enthusiastically embraced for himself and a concern that resurfaces in Sheila Watson’s novel The Double Hook discussed below. His 1947 essay ‘American Advertising,’ for instance, lambastes the ‘strong totalitarian squint’ of contemporary advertising with its aim to produce ‘a zombie horde’ (14) driven by monolithically constructed fears and desires. His essay argues for increased educational budgets and new educational techniques to combat the subconscious impact of advertising. He reiterated the same point in 1948, adding that ‘literary men [have] a prime responsibility to infuse intelligence into daily social life’ (‘The New,’ 11). Rereading and rethinking Marshall McLuhan through a potential Canadian Vorticism would invite, among other considerations, a re-examination of his blending of theory, traditional literary criticism, and experimental writing. For, rather than indicating sloppy scholarship or a detached conservative perspective as some critics have contested, with the connection to Lewis we can read McLuhan’s theories

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and the radical form of his critical style as an avant-garde attempt to disrupt the passivity of bourgeois culture to the mediums and institutions that structure communication in the West. Drawing attention to the function of the form of media was framed as a possible rebellion from this passivity. It was, in many ways, an attempt to enter into the maelstrom of contemporary life while yet securing a vantage point by which to regard and contest the swirling and destructive vortex. As Wilfred Watson wrote, McLuhan’s Vorticism put forth a ‘maelström’ of his own ‘versus / the … maelström’ of Western culture (‘re maelström,’ 38). The revolutionary nature of McLuhan’s Vorticism can be connected to McLuhan’s writing that, on a formal level, privileged ‘acoustic’ rather than ‘visual’ space. These terms, of course, are McLuhan’s own terms, and the principles are being applied according to his own theorization of them. Acoustic space, McLuhan argues in his 1972 lecture ‘The End of Work Ethic,’ functions differently than the sharply discrete boundedness of visual space; it envelops, overlaps, and works through resonances that shatter divisions (see 193–4 in particular). While Western civilization has privileged the isolation of the visual sense since the invention of the printing press, McLuhan’s own writing privileges the sense of hearing, thereby blurring the borders between seemingly isolated phenomena. As Dilworth summarizes of McLuhan’s theory, ‘As vision is lost, so are goals, ideals, principles – intellectual principles, moral concepts. These are undone by the perceptual imbalance of hearing over vision. With loss of eyesight, you are immersed, and privacy is impossible; with loss of hearing, you experience solitude’ (‘McLuhan,’ 25). The radical form of McLuhan’s writing disoriented his listeners and readers, but also created an immersive environment through which seemingly disconnected aspects of culture coalesced. McLuhan himself linked the blurring of cultural borders to his own response to contemporary culture: ‘it is out of the extreme discontinuity of modern existence, with its mingling of many cultures and periods, that there is being born today the vision of a rich and complex harmony. We do not have a single, coherent present to live in, and so we need a multiple vision in order to see at all’ (The Mechanical, 97). Consequently, newspapers, comic strips, professional sports, and politics became aspects of a unified culture that could be read in relation to one another. The desire for a multifaceted perspective led McLuhan to experiment with ‘mosaic’ style essays and books, as well as typographical experiments that shattered ‘the flat earth approach’ of visually oriented media (COUNTERBLAST 1969, 22). For critics like Donald Theall, McLuhan’s approach amounts to a ‘quasi-poetic, critical-intellectual satire’ (6) that reflected the subject and

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phenomenon he was tracking: ‘the poetic strategy adapted from the new criticism as a way of dramatizing media as vortices of power was to underlie his work throughout the rest of his career’ (5). Theall makes use of the whirlpool metaphor that was central to McLuhan’s early writing, and by doing so draws useful attention to the historical Vorticist metaphor which celebrated the maelstrom precisely for its physical power to disrupt the flow of the stream – or, leaving the metaphor, the flow of culture which is passively received by people within the stream. McLuhan’s use of the metaphor, however, considered all of culture to be an enormous and powerful vortex that could only be resisted or challenged from within. His writing, therefore, echoes the rhythms and imagery of the culture he studied in order to identify and make visible that same culture. McLuhan identified and described a similar creative method in Joyce: ‘To write his epic of the modern Ulysses [Joyce] studied all his life the ads, the comics, the pulps, and popular speech’ (The Mechanical, 59). Of course, McLuhan made this observation in the context of a book that also studied ads, comics, pulps, and popular speech, thereby drawing attention to his recognition of his own creative process. Elena Lamberti picked up on McLuhan’s playful, indeed disruptive, use of language: ‘Just like Joyce, McLuhan uses words neither to represent the world, nor to explain a theory; instead, he works upon language in order to read through it’ (71). This is an avant-garde, expressionistic approach to language, through which the perception of the world is dramatically reversed. For McLuhan (and poignantly, considering the history of avant-gardism), the millennialong reign of visually dominant, literate consciousness was first challenged by Baudelaire’s direct challenge to his readers: ‘This all ended with the symbolist recovery of tribal, collective awareness: Hypocrite lecteur’ (COUNTERBLAST 1969, 25). As he explains at more length throughout this book, Baudelaire’s charge ‘Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère’ collapses the boundaries between reader and author: ‘The reader puts on the audience as his corporate or tribal mask. The audience creates the author as the author shapes the awareness of the audience’ (138). McLuhan’s creative approach to academic non-fiction can be regarded as avant-garde in its own right to the extent that his works managed to achieve this experience of dislocation of passive Western communication habits. ‘You must be a duet in everything’: Watson’s The Double Hook The most acclaimed literary contribution to the maelstrom of this proposed Canadian Vorticism is Sheila Watson’s novel The Double Hook, a

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book that was first conceived in Toronto shortly after Lewis left the city. The book, published in 1959, depicts the spiritual struggle of a community locked in paralysis struggling with violence and isolation. McLuhan summarized the book as a portrait ‘of people in a simple frontier community in British Columbia trying to create a sort of unity in their inner lives by forming images of social cohesion and communication’ (‘Canada,’ 119). McLuhan’s summary evokes the book’s modernist search for order in chaos, and hints at the Vorticist avant-garde impulse to focus on how external language (and by extension media) shapes and determines culture including the internal experience of people living within that culture. Watson died in Nanaimo in 1998, prompting the publication of her dissertation on Lewis in 2003 and a biography by Fred Flahiff in 2007. Combined, these more recent publications draw attention to the substantial influence of Lewis on Watson’s aesthetics and writing. Donna Pennee critiques this influence on Watson’s novel, arguing that it embodies to its discredit the aesthetics of modernism. She notes that the habitual critical vocabulary used to describe the book, through terms such as ‘refined,’ ‘hard,’ ‘clear,’ ‘static,’ and ‘significant’ (239) and the general ‘rhetoric of virility, hardness, and experiment’ (197), incorporates the novel into a broader modernist ambition to thematize ‘the redemption of a culture through ritual, myth, and the W(w)ord.’ This modernism has been explicitly hostile to both feminism and female participation – Pennee notes that, despite being penned by a woman, redemption in The Double Hook happens over ‘a dead woman’s body’ (240). Ezra Pound uses a similar hyper-masculinist rhetoric (which Pennee also critiques) in his 1914 defence of the Vorticist movement, with his rejection of ‘mushy’ and ornamental technique in favour of the ‘impersonal’ poetry of mathematical equations (‘Vortex,’ 133–5). It is, indeed, a matricide that occurs in the first words of the book, as James Potter kills his mother to ostensibly free himself from her domination. To further substantiate the masculinism in the work, Pennee notes that Watson herself has repeatedly protested against any attempt to connect her to the ghetto of ‘women’s writing’ (249). True to Pennee’s analysis of Watson’s aesthetics, it was precisely this rejection of ornamentation that Watson found inspiring in Lewis’s writing. As revealed in her Paris journals,5 she found in his work a concrete answer to a narratological problem she had been wrestling with for decades on how ‘to get the narrator out of’ her writing (Flahiff, Always, 48) and yet let the things she knew ‘create their own space’ (49). On 21 October 1955 Watson sent an early manuscript of The Double Hook to Chatto

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and Windus, which she noted had to the same address as Bloomsbury Group member Leonard Woolf and the Hogarth Press (114). The manuscript was rejected and returned on 21 November 1955 (124). Three days later, according to her journal, she purchased two novels by Lewis – Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, books two and three of his Human Age trilogy: they were, she wrote, ‘the best thing I’ve read for some time.’ She took particular note of his detached narrative voice and perspective: ‘There is no malice, no excitement, no castigation’ (125). The Paris years were difficult for Watson, whose marital problems provoked references to her ‘crushed’ heart and led her to wonder at ‘how hard it is for an artist to live at all’ (121). In contrast, the cool neutrality of Lewis’s supernatural ‘literature of ideas … of salvation’ (125) provided her with a literary model that both intelligently and elegantly limited emotionalism and avoided her own predilection for over-intrusive narrators. On 23 November 1955 she purchased Lewis’s The Apes of God, read it, and by 10 January 1956 had transformed her study of Lewis’s writing into a tidy aesthetic formula. Echoing her observations about Lewis’s prose style, she declares, ‘It is absolutely necessary to liquidate anger, chagrin or contempt before writing. In short, a writer must have mastered the emotions before he can use the insight which the emotion has given him’ (136). She was gravitating to the characteristic Lewisian detachment and the broad cultural Vorticist perspective it facilitated. Thus inspired, on 26 March 1956 Watson began editing The Double Hook – taking out the narrator as a Joycean personality, taking out the history of the characters, taking out cultural references and backgrounds. As she explained in an interview in 1984: ‘I didn’t want it to be an ethnic novel – not a novel about Indians or any other deprived group, but rather a novel about a number of people who had no ability to communicate because they had found little to replace the myths and rituals which might have bound them together’ (Meyer and O’Riordon, 159). She wrote in her journal on 21 April 1956: ‘Now I ask myself if I have the power to make it come whole – to fuse completely character, event, setting’ (Always, 151). By most scholarly accounts, she indeed managed to fuse the figures in her text with the ground in which they operated by dehistoricizing, even deracinating, her characters. The characters in confronting their spiritual paralysis are born on the page, characterized by the extent of their willingness to embrace life and reject mechanical passivity. This shift is consistent with Lewis’s own embrace of the active mind and with the orientation of his art to what McLuhan called the ‘pure present’ (The Interior, 92). Pound described Lewis as ‘the man who was

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wrong about everything except the superiority of live mind to dead mind; for which basic verity God bless his holy name’ (qtd. in Kenner, Wyndham, xiii). Lewis’s general ideas on the central importance of communication and externality in shaping (even creating) the individual in society strongly resonate with the ideas explored and embodied in Watson’s fiction. For instance, in The Art of Being Ruled Lewis writes what could serve as a terse plot summary of the first two-thirds of The Double Hook: ‘a brutalized society is not amenable to ideas at all … Personality takes the place of thought, and physical things of spiritual’ (7). In the second issue of Blast, Lewis also insisted that artists embrace the importance of binaries: ‘You must talk with two tongues … There is nothing so impressive as the number TWO. / You must be a duet in everything. / For, the Individual, the single object, and the isolated, is, you will admit, an absurdity. / Why try and give the impression of a consistent and indivisible personality’ (‘Vortex,’ 91). Many critics have drawn attention to the overwhelming dualities that structure Watson’s novels, highlighted most obviously by the very title of the work itself. Through Lewis, these dualities can be seen to shift the novel’s focus away from the internal psychological life common to modernist texts to include external social life as a challenge to the ‘absurdity’ of isolated individualism – a lesson that Watson’s character James learns when he tries to escape his village. Watson’s editing phase in Paris lasted four steady months. When the book was published, she had separated from her philandering husband Wilfred Watson, and Lewis was by that point already two years deceased. Wilfred Watson wrote to congratulate her on the appearance of this remarkable first book. The way he phrased his congratulations is worth repeating for what it reveals of both his own egotism and, more importantly, his sense of the text’s genesis. He writes: ‘I and Wyndham Lewis and a third critic (E.P.) approve of this book’ (Flahiff, Always, 166).6 After all the changes to the text, the trace of Lewis’s symbology can be found in the Old Lady who, upon her death, emerges as a violent vortex of energy disrupting the isolation of the individuals in the community. Ara, for instance, sees the Old Lady (after the Old Lady has been killed by James) ‘rounding the bend of the creek … fishing upstream to the source’ (13). The water is low, barely ankle deep, but the sight of the Old Lady provokes a vision of ‘death leaking through the centre of the earth. Death rising to the knee. Death rising to the loin.’ This is a premonition of regenerative violence, the necessary disruptive violence in order to counteract the violence caused by their isolation. The spiritual death of the community is symbolized by the dusty, dry (waste)land of the waterless

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Dog Creek. Characters try to ‘fence’ the Old Lady out (19), but their isolation has already been transformed into a condition of the past: the present moment subsumes them with its violence into a bewildered community struggling to escape their solitude. In the 1914 manifesto ‘Our Vortex,’ Richard Aldington defines the movement’s relationship to time: ‘Our vortex is not afraid of the Past: it has forgotten its existence. / Our vortex regards the Future as as sentimental as the Past … The new vortex plunges to the heart of the Present’ (342). Watson’s character Felix Prosper is disturbed from his sleep by a violent storm potentially laden with the redemptive waters. The storm forces upon him an experience of the Vorticist present: ‘The remembrance of event and the slash of rain merged. Time annihilated in the concurrence’ (The Double Hook, 29). Felix’s experience evokes past memories that cause him to confront the continual presence of the past in the present, and the necessary disruption in linear time. Angela Bowering explains that situations like this indicate that the whole narrative world is upset, destabilized, and set into an interactive motion, rather than developing progressively: ‘Seeing and knowing are both indeterminate,’ she writes, ‘like the figures themselves, like the figure of Coyote, like “the source”’ (13). Without origin, without ‘source,’ the figures are forced into participation and association with their ground, just as Watson’s prose style forces the reader into participation in the text: ‘The incompleteness of outlines forces us to close the Gestalt by participating in the making of these figurae’ (A. Bowering, 32). In the storm scene with Felix Prosper, Watson unifies three disparate images in a symbolic vortex: ‘White foam on the brown swirl of it’ (The Double Hook, 30) describes simultaneously the coffee he drinks in the present, the memory of his dog attacking a rat in the past, and the prospect of the Old Lady ‘fishing in the brown water for fish she’d never eat’ in the future. It is this awareness of the symbolic wealth of the vortex of the present and of the things in the world that awakens Felix to his redemptive role in the community. Notably, he begins by reclaiming and remembering ritualistic language to change the silence and isolation that characterizes the community. Immediately after awakening to the famous significance of both Coyote as mischief maker and the double hook as central image of duality in a passage that would for a time be used as the novel’s epigraph, the character Kip experiences the vortex himself: ‘His mind awake floated on the tide of objects about him. Was swirled in a pool. Caught in the fork of a tangle. Diverted from its course. Swept into the main stream’ (50). The disorientation causes Kip to ‘stumble’ (51) into Lenchen, which in turn

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sets in course a violent series of events that includes James’s attack on Kip that leaves the boy blinded (55), James’s use of a whip on his sister Greta and his lover Lenchen (56), his desertion of the village, and his sister’s suicide by fire (72–4). On his own, after escaping, James realizes that ‘all he’d done was scum rolled up to the top of a pot by the boiling motion beneath. Now the fire was out’ (86). The necessary external violence of the vortex had led the villagers out of themselves, out of their isolated individual internality to a more balanced, dualistic redemption. With the fire extinguished (James’s rebellion metaphorically, but the house fire that killed Greta literally) and the damage done, Ara again feels something rise up from the earth – though not death this time: ‘her tired eyes saw water issuing from under the burned threshold. Welling up and flowing down to fill the dry creek’ (100). Her vision, which can be read as a premonition of the novel’s final (re)birth scene, includes the image of a great and fertile river: ‘Everything shall live where the river comes, she said out loud. And she saw a great multitude of fish, each fish springing arched through the slanting light.’ While the return of the river, with its symbolic association with modernist stream of consciousness and internal psychology, might seem to suggest a retreat from Vorticist iconography, Watson’s text in fact focuses on abundant fish leaping out of the river. They, though creatures of the stream, become a symbol of vitality in breaking, bursting, out of the stream. Margaret Morriss documents the extensive changes made by Watson to her manuscript of The Double Hook in Paris. Morriss does not, however, connect the edited text’s ‘brief and jagged statements, shorn of all context and details’ (60) to Watson’s reading of Lewis during the same period. Sherrill Grace, on the other hand, and without the benefit of the Paris journals, reads the narrative and Watson’s structural method in The Double Hook as highly expressionistic and evocative of the violence and regeneration championed by Lewis through Vorticism (Regression, 188– 9). Both critics draw attention to Watson’s infamous remarks, delivered on the occasion of one of the very few public readings of the novel, in which she provides the basic vocabulary critics would come to use in discussing the novel for generations: ‘I’d been away for a long time before I realized that if I had something I wanted to say, it was going to be said in these images. And there was something I wanted to say: about how people are driven, how if they have no art, how if they have no tradition, how if they have no ritual, they are driven in one of two ways, either towards violence or towards insensibility – if they have no mediating rituals which manifest themselves in what I suppose we call art forms. And so it

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was with this that the novel began’ (Regression, 183). Watson’s comment notably echoes the sentiment in Lewis’s The Art of Being Ruled noted above as well as in his Men Without Art in which he studies the violence in Hemingway and Faulkner as endemic to environments that witness the disintegration of ‘classical’ culture. He singles out American violence for being compounded by the lack of any antecedent culture: the lack of stabilizing art and ritual are inevitable given its proximity to wilderness. The American, he writes, ‘is still the white settler’ in a landscape defined by ‘hardness’ and ‘crudity’ (151). Lewis uses the example of exiled Americans Henry James and T.S. Eliot to highlight the cultural ‘desert’ of America (149) and the resultant, unprecedented ‘lawless’ age – there is ‘nothing [outside America] to compare with Capone’ (106). With such characteristic New World lawlessness in mind, it is worth remembering the common observation of The Double Hook that no one thinks to call the police after James kills his mother. A final image of the vortex appears in the denouement of the novel, after James has returned from town to discover the devastation of his former home. He finds William and the Widow’s boy waiting for him in the burnt land: ‘I ran away, he said, but I circled and ended here the way a man does when he’s lost. / I’ve a notion, William said, that a person only escapes in circles no matter how far the rope spins’ (116). The disorientation that James confesses recalls Kip’s own experience of the vortex that helped launch the sequence of violence. William’s response, however, suggests a more fundamental conclusion of the vortex being a permanent condition akin to the permanence of the present moment. Aldington’s manifesto offers a similar conclusion: ‘With our Vortex the Present is the only active thing’ (342). James has just returned from town where he encountered two prostitutes who stole his money: an event described as ‘the price of his escape’ (95). Penniless, and now indebted for his board, he realizes that ‘a debt is a sort of bond’ (106). His escape from the brothel amounts to an acceptance of his responsibility to the present, including the care of his soon-to-be newborn son. While Watson’s novel does not exactly present the conclusion that the masculinist Vorticists championed, where ‘everything is permitted,’ Aldington’s manifesto does offer these lines with relevance to Watson’s text: ‘The Past and Future are the prostitutes Nature has provided. / Art is periodic escapes from this Brothel’ (343). If violence is the symptom of ‘men without art,’ the tenuous redemption at the end of The Double Hook suggests that this escape from the brothel presages the arrival of a kind of necessary and prosperous art into the remote community.

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Having made the connection between Lewis and Watson in both the initial conceptualization of The Double Hook as well as in the extensive editing down to its characteristic style, it is important now to return to Jameson and Pennee’s question of gender and Lewis’s Vorticist aesthetics or else risk having this potential Canadian Vorticist school be dismissed as yet another example of what Lesley Higgins has described as a ‘masculinist’ modernist paradigm that could ‘never accommodate the work of women writers and artists’ (4). Lewis’s influential aesthetics, however, include another dimension that troubles the structuralist and misogynist orientation of modernism. Ironically, it is Jameson, the critic who cautioned against Lewis, who uncovers this other dimension in Lewis’s fiction. From Tarr to The Human Age, Jameson tracks a recurring grammar that destabilizes the modernist ‘unification … of subjectivity’ that characterizes the inward explorations of modernism (Fables, 58). Thus, while even the characters in a text as radical as Joyce’s Ulysses ‘retain … monadic unity,’ in ‘Lewis, however, it is not the unification but rather the dispersal of subjectivity which is aimed at.’ Jameson notably avoids Finnegans Wake in this calculation, but in developing from this point, he explicitly connects the dispersal of subjectivity in Lewis’s writing to ‘the contemporary poststructuralist aesthetic, which signals the dissolution of the modernist paradigm … and foretells the emergence of some new, properly postmodernist or schizophrenic conception of the cultural artefact … stressing discontinuity, allegory, the mechanical, the gap between signifier and signified, the lapse in meaning’ (20). This grammatical anticipation of post-structuralism, which is connected to McLuhan’s post-literate individuality, requires a change in how we read Lewis. Jameson acknowledges the awkwardness of defending violently sexist, homophobic, and protofascistic expressions: ‘I wonder if I will be understood when I suggest that Lewis’ expression of this particular idée fixe is so extreme as to be virtually beyond sexism. Misogyny in Lewis no longer exists at the level of mere personal opinion.’ The ideology (in Althusser’s sense of the term) that informs Lewis’s ugly didacticisms on the surface of the language unravels through the disjunctive force of subconversations that emerge through destabilized subjectivities and a self-consciously failed language. Jameson characterizes the use of these subconversations in literature as the mark of a double articulation: a writing that speaks against itself, revealing itself (if at all) through a negative dialectic. Otto Kreisler’s sexism, for instance, in Tarr becomes symptomatic of a kind of ‘unbound impulse’ (Fables, 21), a psychic violence reacting against the spiritual and sexual repressions of ‘respectable consciousness intent on keeping up appearances’: he is

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‘beyond any whitewashing and liberal revisionism, in all their primal ugliness.’ Kreisler is a violent force, drawing everything into his destructive vortex. Significantly, this frame of analysis shifts Lewis out of the centre of the ideological implications of his texts – for he does not associate with any group inside this ideological field. Lewis the author is shifted into his preferred role as outsider and enemy of modernism and the modernist. Jameson’s analysis of Lewis’s use of ideological perversity draws attention to a communicative crisis in Lewis that is nearly identical to the one explored in Sheila Watson’s famous novel. In a passage that echoes numerous critical responses to The Double Hook, Jameson writes of Lewis: ‘It is as though the old common language of everyday life had ceased to be an adequate vehicle for individual expression, let alone communication. Brittle with cliché, great surfaces of it corroded by publicity and received ideas, that alienated and conventionalized language begins to break apart, leaving deserts of silence visible between the cracks’ (Fables, 40). Despite Watson’s organic unity of form and content, and her modernist faith in redemption through art, it has been widely acknowledged that her novel disaccommodates her characters by stripping them of all but empty clichés. The characters struggle against their own conventionalized language to overcome their alienation, leaving their redemption at the novel’s conclusion problematic and elusive. Glenn Willmott connects the disaccommodated language of Watson’s characters to broader postmodern implications, arguing that the troubling character of Coyote, for instance, who appears to narrate or at least frame the text, presents ‘an existential becoming, a turning, twisting or “trickiness,”’ rather than a more modernist ‘metaphysical being, an essence, or a centre in life’ (Willmott, ‘The Nature,’ 37). Recognizing the text as not entirely contained by the tenets of modernism, its modernist misogyny seems less inevitable or unavoidable. Indeed, despite Pennee’s repeated attention to the fact that redemption occurs in The Double Hook over ‘a dead woman,’ the Old Woman dies on the first page but reappears on the second and proceeds to haunt all of the characters in the subsequent chapters. The character of the Old Woman, who is directly connected to the trickster Coyote, disrupts rather than causes paralysis in the community. The use of Coyote should not be confused with the modernist (and even avant-garde) privileging of the primitive – for Watson herself has expressed regret over the attention the figure has garnered and admitted that she would have taken the character out altogether. Like the Old Woman, Coyote represents an external if mythological force hounding the characters out of themselves. Grace goes so far in

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the opposite direction of Pennee’s critique as to describe the Old Woman as ‘the presiding goddess’ of the community (Regression, 203) who ‘participates in the renewal of the community’ (201). Like Lewis’s Kreisler, she is a destructive force that lashes out against isolation and paralysis. It is not the Old Woman who blocks the villagers and paralyses the village but rather the failure and barrenness of their collective language. Watson’s book, as Barbara Godard has argued, stages the tragedy of language by characters who are ‘alienated, they have only fragments of experience left, fragments that have hardened into cliché, have become mechanical gestures of sinister aspect’ (‘Ex-centriques,’ 65). The fact that Coyote reappears to Ara at the very end of the book, after the birth of James and Lenchen’s child (The Double Hook, 118), undermines the tenuous redemption that is achieved. Wilfred Watson and McLuhan in From Cliché to Archetype argue that modernist writing characteristically sought to reverse the stupefaction caused by such a deadened language as haunts the denizens of Sheila Watson’s fiction. The failure of modernism, however, emerges in the fact that present clichés can only ever be replaced by future clichés. ‘Initially,’ they write, ‘any cliché is a breakthrough into a new dimension of experience’ (58). The tragedy of language is not overcome by avoiding cliché, for it can only be temporarily deferred by inventing new clichés. Wilfred Watson and McLuhan note that absurdist texts make use of the ultimate irrelevance of inventing new clichés. Thus, the tragedies of Samuel Beckett posit characters caught at an absolute impasse of expression (From Cliché, 8); born astride the grave, there is nothing to be done. So too Sheila Watson in Deep Hollow Creek, her other novel, encounters the failure of communication to break through the linguistic shroud to meaningful expression. McLuhan and Wilfred Watson historicize this failing in relation to the emergence of print culture in the seventeenth century when ‘the languages of the heart were pushed down into the unconscious by the dominant print cliché’ (5). Skipping forward, they read Lewis as one in a long tradition of authors to question the role of the author in this silencing; the author figure in Lewis’s work becomes a manipulator who deadens experience by reusing a dead language (28). While the modernists attempted to ‘burn always with a hard gemlike flame,’ to borrow Pater’s famous phrase, authors like Lewis reject the possibility of such a permanence by, ultimately, writing against writing. In Deep Hollow Creek, Sheila Watson explores the isolating effect literature has on her protagonist’s life – cutting her off from the natural world and from the human community. Watson, however, found even this thematic exploration of the problems of language and literature too

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complicit in the problems she was attempting to explore. The alternative, she realized through writers like Lewis and Stein, is an art and literature that performs the gaps and silences of language – a writing that draws attention to dead language and cliché, but that yet evokes subconversations, libidinal drives, and subconscious processes. As Watson praises of Stein’s method, ‘it divests language of its associations and creates a new way of seeing’ (‘Gertrude Stein,’ 171). This kind of writing belongs to the avant-garde tradition that Julia Kristeva and Marjorie Perloff have theorized as a poetics of rupture: a branch of writing that, unlike the modernist traditionalism and faith in redemption, collapses language with revolutionary intent. Clichés and repetitive language present an opportunity to encounter the empty space in language, a rupture in expression that reveals a gap that is always present but unconscious in all language. As Wilfred Watson and McLuhan write, ‘Gaps create the conditions of maximal participation’ (68). Godard’s analysis of The Double Hook reaches a similar conclusion: ‘beginning with a dislocation of the ordinary lexical meaning of words, Watson explores their musical and visual properties, moving into silence when the “light” has been born into the world and the possibilities of minimal language exhausted’ (‘Ex-centriques,’ 65–6). Such an abstract, visual-spatial conceptualization of language highlights Watson’s close proximity to what was previously discussed as the Vorticist theory of form. The novel’s reception has grown gradually to the point that it is now generally regarded as one of the landmark texts in Canadian literary modernism, with some critics arguing further that its ahistorical focus on interactivity anticipates tropes and styles of postmodernism. The Double Hook should not be read as an imitation of Lewis, but rather it should be read with some awareness of the fact that Watson’s engagement with his work helped her to develop and then edit and thereby hone the aesthetics at play in the book. In her dissertation, she describes Lewis’s total project as developing ‘in a specific matrix … responsive to the conditions of its existence’ (Wyndham, 195). In other words, despite the slightly modified vocabulary, her theory of Lewis’s work was identical to her own literary ambition of fusing figures with their ground. Such an ambition connects to the avant-garde which, as contemporary theorist Matei Ca˘linescu explains, develops from a desire ‘to overthrow all the binding formal traditions of art … For they believed that to revolutionize art was the same as to revolutionize life’ (112). Situating Sheila Watson within a Canadian Vorticist node invites, among other considerations, a re-examination of her figure/ground aesthetic initiative. For, rather than aspiring to a modernist aesthetic integrity or a

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postmodern deconstruction, with the connection to Lewis we can read her text as part of a Vorticist avant-garde attempt to shift attention away from the psychological turmoil of characters and onto the means by which characters struggle to create community. It is an attention that reimagines language, art, and ritual as the fundamental technologies of community, of civilization even. The failure of language, art, and ritual, though external media, signals and embodies the internal and moral failure of the inhabitants of the culture. In Deep Hollow Creek, literature contributes to the isolation of the protagonist from a turbulent world,7 and in The Double Hook, the village descends into violence without ritual, myth, or expressive language. Language is the problem in all of these contexts, with all that is said marked by an emptiness, a detachment, and abstraction. The more problematic a particular utterance, the further it strays from permissible utterances, the more it exposes the trappings of ideology. Pound once claimed that in Lewis’s work the ‘motif is the fury of intelligence baffled and shut in by circumjacent stupidity’ (GaudierBrzeska, 93). To bend and borrow Althusser’s description of ideology in art to the current context, Lewis gives ‘us a “view” of the ideology to which [his] work alludes and with which it is constantly fed, a view which presupposes a retreat, an internal distantiation, from the very ideology from which [his] novels emerged’ (qtd. in Jameson, Fables, 21). Ideology, for Althusser, is a representation of imaginary relations. The violence and pathology of Lewis’s texts responds to the limits of these imaginary relations, suggesting, as post-structuralist critics have begun recognizing, a fundamental ideological crisis in representation. This double articulation used by Lewis implies the efforts of Canadian Vorticists – an avant-garde school of writing that writes against itself in the hopes of undoing the ‘hysterical imbecility’ of both modern culture and modernist redemption. Some Canadian Vortexts Lewis died in England in 1957, and though his reputation fell significantly, he continued to inspire new works with relevance to this discussion and to the conceptualization of a Canadian Vorticism. Wilfred Watson, for one, continued to evoke Lewis and Vorticism by name in relation to his own work. Wilfred Watson’s most widely acclaimed literary accomplishment was Friday’s Child, a collection of poems published by London’s Faber & Faber in 1955. The book won that year’s Governor General’s Award for poetry, and was declared by T.S. Eliot to be ‘the first book of legitimate poetry to come out of Canada’ (qtd. in Flahiff, 155). Though the poetry in Friday’s Child was decidedly modernist and shaped by an

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aesthetic that could be described as autotelic, Wilfred included all of the poems from the book under the punning section heading ‘Invortication’ in his 1986 Poems: Collected/Unpublished/New. Coincident with the release of Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook in 1959 as well as her active dissertation work on Lewis, Wilfred’s interest in Vorticism grew ever more pronounced. One text from 1960, for instance, called ‘A Manifesto for Beast Poetry’ begins with the following epigraph from Lewis: ‘The expression of the soul of the dumb ox would have a penetrating beauty of its own if it were uttered with genius – with bovine genius …’ (50). The passage comes from the same essay that inspired John Reid’s anti-Hemingway thesis in Horses with Blindfolds. Wilfred’s response to the essay does not attempt to take up the radical form of this postulated bovine literature, nor does he reiterate Lewis’s critique of Hemingway, but instead he attempts to develop an aesthetic formula that foregrounds humanity’s animal nature. Wilfred locates the foundational impulse of beast poetry in the body, the blood, and the irrational: It is of course very difficult of comprehension. It is an affair of images, without thought. It is the blood crying it is the blood crying down the corridors of the arteries the blood crying as it turns corners in the veins the blood crying in a passionate mindlessness. It is always an alien thing.

Wilfred’s text is not the ‘alien thing’ he envisions, but presents (as the title suggests) a manifesto for just such a potential literary mode that would ‘make Gertrude Stein shudder’ because ‘it doesn’t think at all’: ‘it is / incomprehending with the deep unreason / of the deep incomprehensible beast.’ The final stanza concludes the manifesto with a prophetic call for this revolutionary art to be unleashed upon the world: therefore I call out aloud to the future I summon the age about to be not to debase itself in any petty way to the sub-human, but to cut itself off boldly from all its ancestors; to descend impudently down to the shameless depths of beast-poetry. I am weary of this shabby-parrot, this figurative lingerie, and of the free & easy verse opinions. I await the terrible new beast-poetry

(56)

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Wilfred’s flatly sexist language suggests the degree to which he internalized or shared the misogyny in Lewis’s writing, but also – if one accepts Jameson’s post-misogynist argument of Lewis – his rather unsophisticated, un-self-critical regurgitation of the same. The final line of the manifesto signals the degree to which he recognized that his own experiments with writing had not yet developed a truly radical form that reflected and embodied his revolutionary ambition. The Vorticist impulse, however, is yet strongly present in this work in his desire for a new approach to language that would in turn revolutionize society. The prospect of beast poetry provides a useful connection between various nodes of Canadian avant-gardism. Wilfred’s proposal echoes Brooker’s definition of the ideal artist as one ‘who discards the straightjacket of conventionality with all its inhibitions and its ridiculously sophisticated notions of what constitutes “red-bloodedness,” and who lets his body become creative – lets it respond to the energy it feels within it’ (‘The Seven Arts,’ 12 October 1929). Both Brooker’s and Wilfred’s turn to the body also anticipate McCaffery’s manifesto ‘poetry of blood’ which, as discussed earlier, also proposes a poetry enlivened by the wild body and characterized by a ‘cosmic’ vitalism that overwhelms rationalism. Recognizing the entanglement of over-rational bourgeois life with a deadened and debased language, all three – Brooker, McCaffery, and Wilfred Watson – attempt to reconnect art to the human body, and consequently reverse the conventional implications of the Cartesian divide. McLuhan, who has been connected to all three of them, was in the meantime actively theorizing that the habitual Western fragmentation of human perception was in the process of reversing itself as a result of the acceleration of media and electricity. Art, especially avant-garde art, McLuhan argued, was actively working alongside this emerging ‘new thing’ as he called it ‘to permit inclusive or simultaneous perception of a total diversified field’ (The Gutenberg, 267). In his theories, the senses were being realigned; in their art, Brooker, Wilfred Watson, and McCaffery were all attempting to provoke just such a sensually unified, transmedia experience. Given the extensive connections to other nodes of Canadian avantgardism, it is useful to ask how Wilfred Watson’s work might be distinguished as distinctly Vorticist. Richard Cavell, in his study of McLuhan, provides a revealing quote from a letter he received from Watson on the subject of Vorticism in Canada: ‘I was continually having vorticism thrust upon me – Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Eliot, Jack Shadbolt, Marshall McLuhan … In my theatre scripts I wanted to backwards and forwards grammatologize [sic] the actors so that their bodies became patterns of

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energy’ (298). Watson understood that the experimental theatre he was attempting to create was aspiring for something impossible, not just difficult or unlikely. In the headnote for his play ‘o holy ghost dip your finger in the blood of canada and write, i love you,’ he connects his theatrical endeavour to ‘Marshall McLuhan’s famous pun … i.e., total theatre’ (351). Reminiscent of Herman Voaden’s expressionistic experimental theatre, total theatre proposes a multisensory fusion of mediums and disciplines, a fusion of environment and experience, that realigns consciousness away from singularity and towards multiplicity. Of his endeavour, Watson writes: ‘I wanted to achieve it for them, but I knew it was an impossibility, and not even desirable.’ The problem is not the limitations of theatre, per se, but what he calls ‘the absolutism of the technologies and the media.’ Thus, while McLuhan sought to use a maelstrom of self-consciousness against the maelstrom of contemporary mass-mediated culture, Watson was more hesitant about the power dynamics of total social mediation. His theatre yet struggled to try and release this vortex of energy from the mass-media, multimediated external world. In a similar way, beast poetry articulates the linguistic and imagistic orientation of this performative vortex: ‘beast-poetry uses words in a totally new way, / it uses words as experiences. It excludes speech’ (‘A Manifesto,’ 55). Neither Pound, nor Lewis, nor any other writer associated with Vorticism used their writing to explore non-expressive language games – or other approximations of glossolalic sound poetry. The aesthetic Watson calls for thus deviates and develops from the historical models of Vorticism (which foregrounded experimental representation and maximal energy) and manages to find a point of commonality with other avant-garde movements that tried to break free of representational language in favour of performative language. Thus, rather than locutionary speech, with its reliance on expression and what language says, the language of beast poetry functions analogously to Claude Gauvreau’s transformational images by using only the perlocutionary effect of language. It is not an account of an experience; it is the experience itself. As with the Surrealist agenda in general, beast poetry attempts a deliberate shirking off of the burden of rationality as an attempt to overcome the confines of a degraded language. Just as Brooker believed Canada was an appropriate place for a spiritual r/evolution, so too did Wilfred claim that Canada’s landscape (both natural and cultural/mediated) provides an appropriate venue for this linguistic, revolutionary art to appear: ‘It is excusable in a Canadian to believe that the great beast-poetry / slouches towards Toronto to be born’ (55).

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Wilfred Watson worked on a theatrical adaptation of Lewis’s The Apes of God (McLuhan, Letter to Sheila Watson, 3 December 1961) that might have sought to stage the revolutionary art, but the project was never realized. Six years after the manifesto, he published another work called ‘I Shot a Trumpet into My Brain’ that also develops from an epigraph by Lewis to a propositional new artwork. By this point, however, Watson’s Vorticism was increasingly influenced by McLuhan’s increasingly depoliticized interest in reading media for its impact on sense ratios, and how the reorienting of the senses amounts to the content of the medium regardless of its intended message. Watson’s poem is consequently laden with McLuhanisms such as ‘I shot a trumpet into my brain / my sensorium was infected with a, b, c’s … in the lesion festered a printing press’ (147). The press is a consequence of the alphabet, just as becoming aware of the relationship between language and print culture is revealed by the trumpet blast into his mind. The poem is composed of this kind of unusual pairings and attributions of causality – all of which would be familiar to a reader of McLuhan’s theories. In the years after his 1960 manifesto, Watson’s work grew more metaconscious and culturally analytical and less perlocutionary. Ironically, given his call for a beast poetry of the body in a period in which experiments in sound and proprioceptive poetry were emerging in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, his experiments became increasingly cerebral, satiric, and abstract rather than physical. Even number-grid verse (a complex and radical formal arrangement of words in the poem into ‘slots’ which are laid out on the page as a grid that functions as ‘a device for counting’ [‘Note’]), though decidedly experimental and totally unlike anything else being produced at the time, was more of an extension of traditional verse rhythms and scansion than it was a revolutionary rethinking of the human body in literature. His work with McLuhan on From Cliché to Archetype, which was written from 1959 to 1970 (Tiessen, 128), culminated in a book that neither author was ultimately happy with. Watson, like John Reid at the same time, proceeded to produce a creative work that put McLuhan’s work on ‘trial’ and tried to announce the arrival of the post-McLuhan era (Tiessen, 129). The play in question ‘Let’s Murder Clytemnestra According to the Principles of Marshall McLuhan’ was staged after Watson and McLuhan’s book was finished but before it was published. Watson himself describes it as his ‘anti-McLuhan’ play (Tiessen, 130). The text, though, is dominated by Vorticist concerns with language: as Tiessen describes it, ‘Myth, archetype, cliché and the word (to borrow from Watson) “detonate” here; they are filled with threats of what seem like

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undisclosed arbitrarily declared meanings’ (130). The play is anti-realist, and marked by Watson’s characteristic experimental technique of excessive repetition and language games. Indeed, one of the characters even confesses, ‘I’m afraid there’s a language gap’ (‘Let’s Murder,’ 351). Like Sheila Watson’s most acclaimed short story ‘Antigone,’ the characters are ‘hospitalized cases’ at an asylum, in this case, ‘the Banff Parks Board PSF treatment compound for disturbed’ (349–50). Consequently, their language is marked by an estrangement from reality that Wilfred Watson hoped would reflect outward onto the empty, cliché language of contemporary discourse, including that of the television intellectual that McLuhan had become in the 1970s. Given Watson’s increasing distrust of the (American-dominated) mass media, it is appropriate that he turned to the live experience of the stage as a platform to develop an alternative mode. Watson’s theatre, though entirely different from his imagined ‘beast poetry,’ was in its way a radical formal reimagination of the stage and of language. It is the furthest he would get in achieving his goal, as a writer, of effecting ‘a revolution in sensibility,’ as he wrote to Sheila Watson in 1959 (Flahiff, Always, 114). His final play trilogy, Gramsci x 3 (1983), revisits questions and concepts central to Vorticism by critically examining Mussolini and Italian fascism’s reaction to the decadence of capitalism. Fragments of the play began appearing in the 1970s in the form of Watson’s number-grid verse such as ‘re nino gramsci’ and more substantially ‘returning to square one,’ which retells the Christian Passion in reverse order. The poem invites readers to ‘begin’ in the moment before Christ’s martyrdom and resurrection, before the Western world receives its foundational myth. By the early 1970s, the Watsons had long left Toronto and were living in Edmonton where their interest in McLuhan and Lewis continued unabated. It becomes prominent in their participation in the little magazine White Pelican (1971–5) – founded and funded by Sheila Watson. Though the magazine was eclectic in nature, its editorial mandate was heavily influenced by the Watsons’ aesthetic interests. The first issue begins with poems by Elizabeth McLuhan, Marshall’s daughter (who did her dissertation on Vorticism [E. McLuhan, Letter, 1]), and concludes with an essay by Wilfred called ‘Towards a Canadian Theatre’ that discusses McLuhan’s ideas on technology and Lewis’s ideas about the nature of art as expressed in The Caliph’s Design (55–9). Despite the obvious sympathy to a particular vein of experimental direction and precedence, the magazine was not the exclusive organ of the Canadian Vorticist current. In fact, there were six editors on White Pelican’s editorial board, Sheila Watson, Stephen Scobie,

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Douglas Barbour, John Orrell, Norman Yates, and Dorothy Livesay (whom Wilfred replaced in Fall 1972 [volume 2, issue 4]), who all brought with them a very different and not necessarily avant-garde (or Vorticist) aesthetic. Still, it was without question the dominant forum for the expression and circulation of Canadian Vorticism in the 1970s. The extent to which the other editors shared the Watsons’ interest in Lewis and Vorticism is unclear, but the fact that the Watsons were able to work alongside Scobie and Barbour – two of Canada’s foremost sound poets – corroborates Frank Davey’s sense that Canada’s avant-garde communities enjoyed a spirit of common purpose during the decade (‘The Power,’ 15). The magazine published seventeen issues over four years, four of which were edited exclusively by Sheila Watson (and a fifth that she coedited with the painter Norman Yates), and two exclusively by Wilfred Watson. Both Watsons and Harley Parker also contributed to McLuhan’s magazine Explorations – although its focus was even less specific to the terms of a Canadian Vorticism. Having already breached the historical, geographical, and cultural specificity of the Vorticist movement, the tenuous ensemble haled here as the Canadian Vorticists highlights a small but diverse collection of writers who endeavoured to use art to ‘revolutionize sensibilities’ by drawing attention to the structural determinants of culture – primarily language and media. The influence of the writers who were involved in this Canadian Vorticist node of activity on other Canadian and international writers was inevitably heterogeneous and somewhat diffuse, but they can yet be linked to other streams of aesthetic enquiry that were also deeply interested in using art to open new possible relationships to landscape, memory, and the body. Daphne Marlatt’s Steveston, for instance, written in 1974, could hardly be called a specifically Vorticist text, but there are enough useful links and parallels between her ‘Black Mountain’ poetics and the models developed by the Canadian Vorticists to provoke a comparative consideration. Marlatt’s ‘Black Mountain’ writings have already been studied in relation to Canadian and North American women’s writing, in relation to Olsonian proprioceptive writing, and even for their association to contemporary ecopoetic concerns. None of these are contradicted by the influence she took from Sheila Watson, Marshall McLuhan, or Ezra Pound. In fact, the characteristic Canadian Vorticist impulse to examine how language (or media) functions as an externalized technology that preserves or shapes culture, including the internal experience of people within that culture, corroborates Marlatt’s study of the impact of commerce, landscape, and language on the inhabitants of Steveston.

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Steveston was published nearly a decade after Marlatt’s stint as editor of TISH, but the text still makes use of the geopoetics of place that TISH authors developed from the likes of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson. The TISH authors were extremely interested in connecting the physical experience of the poet, including breath and the body, to textual practice. The Black Mountain poets had already extended this particular attention to physical bodies in the world to engage with wider geographies, and the Canadian authors keenly developed this tendency in their own studies of Canadian geographies. Steveston was, in fact, one among many texts by authors associated with TISH to explore specific geographies through the perspective of subjective bodies. Such an aesthetic grows out of Pound’s insistence on attaining maximum energy, vitality, and presence in the poetic image. Of course, to represent the point of maximal energy Pound used the symbol of the vortex. TISH was another beachhead of Pound’s influence in Canada through the influence they took from the Black Mountain School. The leaders of this school, especially Charles Olson,8 established the immediate precedents for Canadian long poems that explored a particular geography in relation to an experiencing subject that remains in process. Marlatt’s Steveston makes use of the aesthetic models developed by Pound and Olson, and brings their techniques into the British Columbian landscape. Though Steveston was not the first of her poetry books to do so, its use of water imagery, fragmented colloquial language, and mythological resonances make it a poignant parallel text to Watson’s The Double Hook. Here is a passage from a poem in Steveston titled ‘In time’: how the river washes them bare, roots trees put down, knotted & twining into the wash of the Gulf, tidal, in, in & out to the mouth, the gulf all trees, roots, clumps & knottings of men’s nets wash out to. Washing from east to west, how the river flows, washing its filth downstream & silting islands of work men dredge their channels thru, grassland, sedge. The work it takes to keep men busy, dredge at it, all day long to keep a channel thru, street, straight thru (west) to … (29)

The river is a central image and symbol in Marlatt’s depiction of the Japanese Canadian fishing settlement Steveston. The language itself tends to imitate the flow of the water, passing over regular grammatical boundaries. At the same time the language asserts its difference from the eroding, amnesiac water that empties out into the endless ocean: language is also the archive of experience, even as it is experience itself.

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Flowing water, in the form of stream of consciousness, precipitated the historical Vorticist revolt against the dominant (or at least characteristic) modernist prose technique. It was a style that evidenced a ‘dreamy and disordered naturalism … [it] is akin to the floating, ill-organized, vapours of the plastic of the spiritist’ (Lewis, Men, 120). The Vorticists championed the vortex as the still point of disruption of the river’s movement. Marlatt, similarly, represents the human figures and the human settlements as still points in the dreamy and disordered – even Lethean – waters, and she characterizes the settlement by its difference from the river. The main street, for instance, ‘walks a straight line that begins & ends. Never a river, not even at season’s peak or its end’ and her description of the people highlights their stillness despite the surrounding movement of water and time: ‘no one runs & the street does not flow … These individual lives, discrete, closed off from one another, but known & recognized. Islands of men the day weaves its way thru’ (30). In a vortex, the centre point is paradoxically both the stillest point and also the point defined by the maximal energy of the borders of the maelstrom that frame it. Consequently, Marlatt’s text attends primarily to the human characters which she represents as the still points in a turbulent natural context. Watson’s novel, of course, also uses the river as a central metaphor, drying up while Dog Creek’s inhabitants descend into violence. Joanne Saul’s analysis of Steveston draws attention to textual strategies that integrate the narrative voice into the geography of the writing: ‘In Marlatt’s poetry, place does not exist outside of her, but rather simultaneously with her perception so that the border between outside and inside, object and subject, is broken down’ (62–3). Her method, which is similar to Watson’s in many respects, is a fusion of the internal stream of consciousness and the external classical approaches favoured by Lewis (although Lewis admitted using stream of consciousness when appropriate [Men, 120]). Saul draws attention to Marlatt’s interest in the mythology of particular places as reflecting her outsider status to cultures she wanted to understand (63). Though less avant-garde than her later feminist texts, Marlatt’s poem shares with Watson’s a radical interrogation of gender, language, and culture as they relate to the viability of communities in Canada’s west coast. The question of its Canadian Vorticism or even its avant-gardism is not meant to be resolved here, but does rather illustrate the impact of shifting the study of acclaimed Canadian texts to include consideration of such avant-garde para-traditions.

L’Envoi: The Future of the Avant

The early avant-garde in Canada responded to the arrival of foreign cultural models at first by learning and imitating but eventually by translating cultural practices into the Canadian context. The Cosmic Canadians borrowed European models of idealism, occultism, and mysticism, as well as American models of transcendental idealism and poetic form, but developed these influences into a distinctly Canadian r/evolutionary node. The cultural products that emerged from this Anschauung remain marked by idealism, occultism, and mysticism, but became something else, something entirely new, as they colluded with the rising national spirit, the ideas of Richard Maurice Bucke, the general North American difference, and of course, the personal imprint of all of the individuals involved. The tendency in Canadian criticism has largely been to assume that early twentieth-century writing was entirely imitative, or else to ignore the international context from which Canadian authors worked. Accepting that the early Canadian avant-gardists produced something original through imitation, however, is a position more in keeping with contemporary theories of postmodernism, post-structuralism, and perhaps most importantly to the present discussion, translation studies. The colonial consciousness of our ‘major’ authors has been and continues to be tightly mapped. As literary studies have always privileged the exceptional figures, it is well worth accepting that such clinaminic or exceptional authors also existed and continue to exist in Canada – no matter how conservative our central canon resolves itself to being. The Automatists and the Canadian Vorticists imported cultural models and adapted them through a process of absorption that rendered these Canadian nodes different from their primary sources. Derrida, in ‘Des Tours de Babel,’ theorizes that all acts of translation dislocate a text enough that a new original text is created.

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This theoretical model provides a compelling metaphor for what happened in the shift of European avant-gardes to Canadian shores: something original, avant-garde in its own right, emerged out of the act of moving aesthetic models across borders. As discussed throughout this book, this difference – postcolonial and avant-garde – was consciously sought after for its revolutionary implications. Derrida’s text marks a turning point in the development of translation studies as a distinct avenue of enquiry for its exploration of the theoretical implications of the act of translation. This turn was accompanied by an enormous growth in the field, and the increasing exploration of, in Susan Bassnett’s terms, the ‘broader issues of context, history and convention’ (‘The Translation Turn,’ 123). Rather than merely focusing on the craft of how to best approximate a text in another language, translation studies has developed into a discipline concerned with ‘the entire system of aesthetic features bound up with the language of the translation’ (Bassnett, Translation Studies, 6). Bassnett clarifies that translation studies belongs to the larger field of semiotics for its attention to the act of moving meaning between sign systems, processes, and functions (13). To explain the general significance of the field’s position, she quotes linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir saying that ‘language is a guide to social reality … No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.’ Social reality and local contexts alter the significance of words in a fundamental way. Similarly, the implications of Sapir (a European who lived in Canada and America) and Sapir’s ideas are utterly changed from when they first appeared in his address to a joint meeting of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Anthropological Association in 1928 (Sapir, The Collected Works, 207n1) to their (attributed but uncited) reappearance in Bassnett’s manifesto that sought to ‘set out the basics’ of a new discipline and a new field of study (Translation Studies, 10). In the words of James Smith, ‘Context, then determines the meaning of a text, the construal of a thing, or the “reading” of an event’ (52). Sapir’s ideas were taken up and pursued by the likes of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Jurí Lotman, and Roman Jakobson who developed his belief that language is inextricably aligned with culture and cultural identity into systematic approaches to semiotics and the meaning of language. Sapir’s impact on translation studies is significant to the present discussion in other ways, for he lived in Canada from 1910 to 1925 during the early

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years of Cosmic Canadian activity. He worked for the federal government on First Nations issues (at the same time that the Confederation-era poet Duncan Campbell Scott was advocating assimilation as deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs) and with the Cree in particular as head of the anthropology division at the Geological Survey of Canada, where he hired, among other notable figures, Maurius Barbeau who would have an enormous impact on Canadian folklore studies. Rather than translate the languages of Canada’s First Nations into the aesthetic conventions of the target language as per convention, Sapir sought to preserve the complex cultural patterns of customs and beliefs that informed their speech. During Sapir’s time in Canada, he also published widely in the popular press on a diverse array of topics and concerns, including publishing a book of poems in 1917 called Dreams and Gibes. The book is light and features a range of topics from satiric invective to anti-war polemics to semiotic meditations, including many poems in free verse. If there is a revolutionary tremor in the book, it yet admits its powerlessness to change the world: ‘I have no respect for what is … [but] the brutal fact remains / And the tyrant world wags on’ (‘Helpless Revolt,’ 64). His poems typically feature reflections on the movement between cultural spaces, such as the contrast between civilian life and the theatre of war. He developed this theme into a more complex and sonorous metaphor in his poem ‘Into the Sea,’ published in the Canadian Forum in 1925: We fly to the sun Coming on the water. Ankle to ankle We bathe in gold. Arm in arm We kindle fire In heaving cold, Lip on lip, Desire in desire.

(183)

While McKillop notes the impact of Freudianism in such ‘highly personal contributions’ to the Canadian Forum (151n22), suggesting the possibility of an avant-garde subtext, it was his work on the movement of culture through languages that had the most impact in the country as indeed around the world. A.J.M. Smith would write of Sapir that only because of his translation work ‘has it become possible to make genuine poetry out of the native mythology in Canada, as for example in the translations of

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Haida poems by Hermia Harris Fraser’ (Towards, 56–7). Smith’s comment was couched in a decidedly but characteristically harsh rejection of the Confederation-era poets (such as the assimilationist Scott) and their ilk for not catching the real pulse of the country, including a possible mythological inheritance from First Nations communities. He rejects, as does Reaney, the pre-Sapir authors as the ‘dear bad poets / Who wrote / Early in Canada’ (57). Sapir, in contrast to the colonialism of Canada’s early authors, encouraged his readers to consider alternative methods of representing complex world views, including radically different conceptualizations of reality. In 1926, Raymond Knister declared Edward Sapir Canada’s ‘best litterateur’ in a letter to Poetry Magazine’s Harriet Monroe (Letter, 1). His translation model is instructive of the overarching, futureoriented agenda of the avant-garde, but also represents an important turning point in the Canadian creative push to break from colonial and colonialist ideological habits. His model allowed for localized sites of difference which amounts to an endorsement of the legitimacy of local experience and marginal alternatives to dominant patterns. The three nodes of early Canadian avant-garde activity documented in this book all sought to develop heterogeneous methods of representing and encoding new conceptions of reality into literary modes that were, in point of fact, developed to serve older conceptions. In rudimentary form, this involved a kind of translation from the new consciousness back into a language and medium that would be familiar to the old consciousness, as in the various manifestos or manifesto-esque poems and essays produced to explain and promote each avant-garde initiative. In more complex realizations, and one that radical avant-gardes resisted pursuing, this metaphorical act of translation provoked a rupture in aesthetic practice as a radically new kind of literature emerged in the attempts to embody rather than represent or promote the new consciousness. Canada’s early avant-garde artists made use of the space between, in Sapir’s term, social realities to upset old conventions and experiment with new possibilities. This, too, is an act of translation, but one in which the division between the source language (or social reality) and text language (or social reality) break down and arrive at a third category: the liberated, radically different avant-garde art object. It was only with the rise of postmodernism in Canada, however, that experimental writers began exploring the more radical and indeed avantgarde theoretical implications of translation directly. Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, two pioneers from this shift who have already been mentioned in various capacities, developed the art of ‘homolinguistic’ translation,

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which as Peter Jaeger points out provided an intriguing twist to Jakobson’s idea of the ‘intralingual translation’ (Jaeger, ABC, 106). Homolinguistic translation explores the practice of translating a text into the same language but marked by some other difference: ‘If we no longer consider translation as being necessarily an information service – the one’s tongue’s access into other tongues – then it can become a creative endeavour in its own right’ (McCaffery and Nichol, Rational, 32). For them, creative translations represented an opportunity to engage with and encounter another author through or rather despite the language of the source text. In a different context, Nichol explained his ambition ‘of finding as many exits as possible from the self (language/communication exits) in order to form as many entrances as possible for the other’ (‘Statement,’ 142). Homolinguistic translation was one such entrance point by which to encounter and then to wrestle intimately with another through words. Other Canadians during the same period were also experimenting with other kinds of translation such as by moving mundane objects into the realm of art in a manner similar to Dadaist collage and readymade art practices. The poets John Robert Colombo, F.R. Scott, Eli Mandel, Robert Kroetsch (whose work has been more finely described as documentary collage), and Greg Curnoe began experimenting with ‘found’ poetry that took commonplace examples of language, such as menu items, graffiti, or catalogues, and rendered them artful by recontextualizing them. The endeavour can be read as equivalent to the general avant-garde campaign against the bourgeois borders between art and life. Found-text work has expanded widely with the mass popularization of digital and sampling technologies. From John Oswald’s ‘plunderphonic’ experiments to John Riddell’s shredded text collages, the plunderverse of appropriative writing has been opened to reveal a vast new range of textual possibilities. Appropriative writing, which balances dangerously on the lip of the moral outrage of plagiarism, has also been explored as a site of critique of capitalism, commercialism, patriarchal discourse, and failed consensual notions of Western individualism. This work can be and has been set within broader political movements, such as copyleft and the Creative Commons, that seek to challenge the hegemony of corporatist copyright laws and thereby rethink the relationship between art, artists, and society at large. Translation studies have rarely been extended to include the experimental nexus of such intermediary work, but yet in Canada the study of avant-garde and experimental writing has developed with remarkably close proximity to translation studies. Given our officially bilingual

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national space, and the lived reality of primarily unilingual solitudes, this might seem rather inevitable. Coupled with the transnational nature of avant-gardism in general, access to avant-garde texts and aesthetic models takes on an extraordinary significance in the development of the already behind-the-curve field of early Canadian avant-gardes. Similar hurdles can be found in the dissemination of avant-garde work within the country. Indeed, for most English Canadians, it was the work of the widely acclaimed translator Ray Ellenwood which introduced them to Canada’s foremost Surrealist movement, including of their foundational manifesto Refus Global nearly four decades after its first publication.1 Ellenwood’s extensive translations of Automatist texts have subsequently opened up an enormous site of Canadian avant-garde activity. Would Sapir contest that the translation of the Automatist’s work into English constitutes a radical distortion of a social reality? Sapir, as a translator, argued for more careful and nuanced renderings of source texts in translation. The question, however, can be further complicated by the problem of the Automatists’ experimental and indeed avant-garde distortion of Québécois French linguistic practice in order to register the difference of their awakening liberated, Surrealist consciousness. The translated texts are thus doubly marked by their difference (some would argue compromise) from the unfiltered and radical ambitions that provoked the writing, and require both interlingual (between languages) and intralingual (within one language) translation. Derrida, confronting the essentially polyvalent instability of language, raised a pertinent question of such multiplicitous translations, ‘How is the effect of plurality to be “rendered”?’ (‘Des Tours,’ 250). While we must not allow these marks of difference to silence and stifle work, it is certainly fair and wise to consider how Ellenwood’s AngloCanadianization of the Automatist writing leaves a distinct trace on the translated work. Benjamin’s famous quip provides a sense of the supreme difficulty involved in moving a text between social realities: it makes for ‘the impossible task of the translator’ (qtd. in Derrida, ‘Letter,’ 274). In Derrida’s theory, however, the impossibility is conditioned by the inevitability of translation, both proper and figurative: ‘Translation becomes law, duty and debt, but the debt one can no longer discharge’ (‘Des Tours,’ 249). Working from the spirit of Derrida’s challenge, Ellenwood’s career as a translator demonstrates an extremely conscientious engagement with this problem. He was one of many involved in establishing the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, opened in 2003, as a site in which translators can confront and wrestle with precisely the question of their role and relation to source and produced texts.

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Radical feminist writers in Canada have taken up the schism of social realities between languages as a potential site of liberation from the patriarchy intrinsic to both of Canada’s official languages. Barbara Godard, who was also an instrumental figure in developing translation studies as a discipline in the international context, has argued for a kind of translation that makes visible the translator, who makes their presence within a text more explicit (‘Theorizing Feminist Discourse,’ passim). Doing so presents female authors with the opportunity of both dismantling exclusionary language and also of developing a language to suit the needs of their own voices and subjectivities. According to the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies, Godard’s theories emerged in response to the pioneering experiments of Nicole Brossard, whose work ‘seeks to undermine this conventional [patriarchal] language and develop experimental forms for preferred use in women’s writing’ (Baker and Saldanha, 125). These experimental forms included the creation of neologisms that undo the gendered implications of the French language, such as with the coined terms like ‘auther’ and ‘essentielle,’ for instance. Brossard’s remarkable novel Le Désert mauve (1987) includes a homolinguistic translation of the eponymous novella by an internal character/reader. The subtle changes between the two texts (which were translated into English as Mauve Desert (1990) by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood) begin to establish a gynocentric language through the all-female dialogue between the original (fictional) author of the novella and the translator. The resultant text is thus one stage further removed from the patriarchal linguistic context, though it too remains marked by the violence of the masculine world against women. This experimental, avant-garde model of translation seeks a means by which to escape, in Godard’s terms, an asignifying language, an ‘intransigent language that has become detached from reality’ (‘Excentriques,’ 61). Brossard stated, ‘I am already a translation by being bilingue, I am already a translation by being a lesbian feminist, I am already a translation by being a woman’ (qtd. in Curran, 110). The linguistic lacunae of breaking out of patriarchal codes opens up to reveal a revolutionary potential for the liberated subjectivities to emerge as expressive and empowered citizens. Brossard said, ‘If my writing is full of rupture, it is . . . my way of creating new spaces for new meaning which would not appear if I wrote in a linear way.’ This endeavour to create a new, liberated space through language experiments, I would contend, is the last revolutionary manifestation of avant-gardism in Canada before the metaphor becomes unrecognizably distorted by its extension to all manner of experimental activity.

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If the revolutionary mandate of avant-gardism in Canada has indeed come to a close, the future of avant-garde studies in the Canadian context must contend with the broad shift away from revolutionary rhetoric towards what Kristeva calls ‘the culture of entertainment, the culture of performance, the culture of the show’ (The Sense, 6). Conversely, Canadian avant-garde studies must expand its attention to a very different kind of translation project involving the borders between spoken language and computer programming languages. Canadian investigation of the uses and implications of digital poetics begins (perhaps not surprisingly) with bpNichol and his 1983 and 1984 ‘programmed, kinetic poems’ produced on an Apple IIe program (Andrews et al.). The impact of digitalization can be tracked widely, including back to Nichol’s work with the sound poetry quartet The Four Horsemen who insisted upon limiting themselves to the unfiltered, unmediated, organic human voice. The Four Horsemen, however, have been recently translated into an intermediary event of their own involving animation, video, song, and dance by Kate Alton and Ross Manson. What gets translated into this transmediary, digital context has little to do with the revolutionary ambitions of the original artists; the group morphs into a spectacle event whose aesthetic radicalism is contained by the conventions of the off-Broadway musical. They are thus retrieved from the past (and thereby rescued from Canada’s habitual cultural amnesia), translated, and recuperated for the entertainment of contemporary Canadian audiences. What gets lost is the sense that the division between art and life can be shattered by art; precisely the revolutionary potential in creative language use that inspired McCaffery and Nichol at the outset of their careers. Another transmediary text with contemporary avant-garde implications is Neil Hennessy’s ‘JABBER: The Jabberwocky Engine’ which uses the Java programming environment (a Canadian invention) to set a flurry of letters into free movement until they physically bump into each other. As he explains in the documentation text: ‘When a letter comes into contact with another letter or group of letters, a calculation occurs to determine whether they bond according to the likelihood that they would appear contiguously in the English lexicon. Clusters of letters accumulate to form words, which results in a dynamic nonsense word sound poem floating around on the screen with each iteration of the generator.’ The program then interprets the resultant dynamic cyber-generated sound-text by colour encoding the produced text into word fragments, compound words, and garbage words (that will eventually explode and be reconstituted). Hennessey’s random text generation machine provides tacit proof

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of the coming challenges to authorship. Language, as Sheila Watson and the Vorticists suggested, can be understood as a systematic technology that always remains external – and thus essentially artificial – to its users: we are stuck with living through and despite the hollowness of total cliché. It is entirely predictable that computers and artificial intelligence systems, also systematic technologies external to its users (and makers), will achieve ever more potent capabilities with language. It seems natural that contemporary writers interested in the kinds of questions raised by artifice would want revisit the work of Samuel Beckett whose plays such as Krapp’s Last Tape (1957) and Play (1963) explore the outering and alienating effects of technology. Sandra Alland’s book Blissful Times (2007) does just this in presenting sixty-three radically different translations of Beckett’s play Happy Days (1960) (which she oddly calls a poem). Alland’s book includes two poems with nothing but a URL, provoking readers to cross mediums in order to access the texts. Her use of experimental translation has been recently connected to feminist poetics (see Stout, ‘Rewriting,’ 179–83), positioning her book as a work that explores the unique lacuna between mediums and genders. Rachel Zolf’s Human Resources does something similar in using specialized search engines to critique ‘capitalism’s tendency to consume, destroy and discard language’ (Milne, 136). Her work, which won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry in 2008, uses Internet search engines to conflate mundane business language with the more diabolical themes of corporate exploitation, anti-Semitism, and a dead, cliché-ridden language. The emergence of the search engine has, in fact, become an enormously significant spawn of experimental poetics. In the United States, despite the New York School’s claim to being ‘the last avant-garde,’ a new somewhat tongue-in-cheek avant-garde movement known as flarf has attained a certain notoriety for its radical and disjunctive use of the Internet as a source and inspiration for parodical and yet pataphysical new texts. Two Canadians working in a similar vein preceded flarf with a text produced almost entirely by a program they developed that collects phrases from the Internet: ‘At any given time, the online version of the poem is potentially as large as the Web itself’ (Kennedy and WershlerHenry, 288). Darren Wershler,2 former editor of Coach House Books, and Bill Kennedy, director of the Scream Literary Festival, pioneered Internet harvesting for literary purposes with their book apostrophe – a book in which the Internet itself speaks directly to the reader by harvesting ‘you are’ statements from unacknowledged websites. Apostrophe dangles the tantalizing and terrifying possibility that machines, which have

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already surpassed human performance in speed, strength, and brute intelligence, may yet surpass us in the finer arts as well. Such a move radically, perhaps finally, disrupts romantic assumptions about the production of art that the avant-garde has never been able to completely elude. They followed apostrophe up with a second collaborative, post-authorship text called Update that harvests poetry from Facebook status updates and playfully misattributes them to famous authors. As the shift into digital poetics suggests, in the latter half of the twentieth century a substantial change in the direction of literary experimentation undermined the relevance of avant-gardism as a description of the activity. While various groups have dissected the ideological implications of the term’s etymology (as discussed in the introduction), the revolutionary radical and/or aesthetic mandate of the avant-garde was dropped for only the external signs or markings of unconventionality. Thus, Kostelanetz, in attempting to suit the term to present realities of art production, proposes three ongoing and stable criteria for avant-gardism: (1) initial unacceptability by an artist’s contextual society, (2) an art that transcends present conditions, and (3) an art that has its maximum audience in the future (‘ABC,’ 2). In this configuration, stand-alone texts, outside movements, schools, currents, and nodes, become avant-garde in the contemporary period not by their revolt from aesthetic conventions and social practices, nor for their embodied advocacy of ideological alternatives, but primarily by the novelty of the formal dynamics of their work and its influence. On the one hand, this democratization and broadening of the senses reflects the explosion of multifarious directions of literary experimentation. Literature, now, insists on its own heterogeneity. On the other hand, however, this approach eradicates the significance of the category avant-garde by extending its borders to the broadest, blandest extremities. Indeed, as many have noted, the term has become functionally synonymous with yellow-pages advertising lingo like ‘innovation’ and ‘new’ and ‘exciting.’ While the ideological contestation of aesthetic avant-gardisms and the pure political ambitions of radical avant-gardisms are no longer deemed fundamental and essential aspects of post-millennial avant-garde art, the personal struggle involved in making the art has become significantly more important. Kostelanetz is hardly alone in his thinking, and the pervasiveness of this redefinition has no doubt contributed to the demise of avant-gardism as a legitimate or progressive social position to most experimental authors in the contemporary period. As Weightman writes, ‘the forward-looking self-righteousness of the poète maudit, who is

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alienated from his average contemporaries, and will only be appreciated by posterity, has become just as much a cliché as the conventions against which he is supposed to be revolting’ (Weightman, 29). Substituting the poverty, isolation, suffering, and persecution of the artist for the ideological, aesthetic, and contestational ambitions of the artwork in determining avant-gardism renders the category avant-garde primarily a social rather than aesthetic or political phenomenon – or as Michael Kirby sarcastically writes of the aesthetics that informs this phenomenon, ‘if society accepts the work without first punishing the creator with its rejection, the art is necessarily inferior’ (19). While digital and post-avant poetics, such as apostrophe, have managed to uncover a novel way to avoid the charge, avant-gardism has fallen prey to the abused notion of the tortured artist suffering the brilliance of their personal genius. This individualism negates or ignores the tradition of social and political radicalism of the avant-garde’s revolutionary idealism: most pointedly, rejecting its progressive directionality and ambition to provoke a rupture in historical continuity. Instead, this rather bland and general sense appeals to a moral integrity determined by how well the author withstands and repels the pressures to conform: in other words, it ignores the revolutionary ambitions of the avant-garde for the changing costumes of the rebel. It also ignores the fact that many historically revolutionary avant-garde authors lived in poverty or destitution not because of the total initial unacceptability or what could be called the financial ostracization of their aesthetics but because of secondary, lifestyle entanglements – including all manner of things from addictions to poor money management to gambling. (Eric Wilson collects anecdotes of many of these self-destructive melancholics in his book Against Happiness, a paean to the creative potential of unhappiness and personal trauma.) In contrast, while the Futurists and the Dadaists were indeed widely scorned, even persecuted, other counter-cultural icons such as Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, and Allen Ginsberg3 presided over their contextual periods as authorities of the new in art (as did Lawren Harris in Canada). Marshall McLuhan was Canada’s most important avant-garde theorist in the 1960s and 1970s, during which period the American author Tom Wolfe compared him to Darwin, Einstein, and Freud. While controversial, McLuhan’s hugely influential and revolutionary ideas (as well as his ideas of revolution) were only initially unacceptable to a select group of conservative academics. Recognition and appreciation of avantgarde work is never universal, but what artist of any stripe, Shakespeare included, has ever achieved universal endorsement? For one to successfully

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make the case that avant-gardism depends on total marginality and notoriety and rejection in their time, one would have to exclude the work of a huge number of avant-garde artists and authors on the basis of the least relevant and least interesting aspect of their work. Such an approach confuses the biography of the artist, the personal struggle, with the revolutionary ambition embedded within the radical aesthetics of a work of art. The use of the term avant-garde has become entirely unhinged from its literal or metaphoric connotations. What has remained, however, is the romanticism of the avant-garde artist. This once revolutionary rebel has blurred with an American prepackaged icon – the rebellious but moral hero, the great liberator – such that the revolutionary aesthetic imperative of avant-gardism becomes a secondary and unnecessary characteristic. No longer antagonistic to the capitalist/humanist/liberal/Western/bourgeois values of their contextual society, such avant-gardes become mere rivals or accessories of corporations competing for influence over the direction of trends and styles. In his aesthetic response to the Bolshevik ABC of Communism (1919), Ezra Pound once defined art as ‘news that stays news,’ but even Baudelaire would have to smile at how things have changed: fashion, once seen as the antithesis of art, has become ironically analogous with even the avantgarde art of the contemporary period. The antagonist of this kind of avant-gardism is supposed to be a vaguely defined philistine and an even more nebulous boogeyman with conservative tastes. The historically outré avant-gardes have also been swallowed and digested by populist tastes and installed in permanent exhibitions in glamorous museums that are increasingly celebrated for their economic benefit to their communities. Such institutions contain eccentricity and reconnect radical art with the economy of the culture, thereby diminishing any residual revolutionary spirit that yearns for particular futures that might overthrow the very institutions of art profiting from the work. Indeed, the polymorphous institution of art now easily swallows its fiercest critics, the most revolutionary of idealists, as well as any futurist crank. Art has returned to the function mapped out by Freud as a palliative to the repressions necessitated by civilization – only, in this case, it is avant-garde art that provides the momentary psychological release. In the light of the hegemony of capitalism in the contemporary experience, and the failure of alternative models of social organization in the previous centuries, the possibility of a legitimate, revolutionary avantgarde movement has dimmed dramatically to the point that it has become an increasingly closed – and already nostalgic – phase of modern art. Ray Ellenwood’s review of Stuart Ross’s anthology of contemporary

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Canadian surrealism Surreal Estate thus begins, ‘Sometimes I get nostalgic in these early days of a twenty-first century already stained with bellicose religiosity and self-righteous oppression. I get nostalgic about international movements of writers and artists who thought it worthwhile to call for human emancipation and weren’t afraid of aggressive polemic’ (‘Surrealestatement,’ 9). Polemic these days comes at most couched in thick layers of irony and parody, or else is dismissed as naive. One of the perhaps unintentional revelations of postmodern decadence, especially as revolutionary hopes mutated into cynicism and irony, was a widespread awareness about the limitations of the idea of avant-gardism, especially for its dependency on untenable models of history and individualism. Despite Ellenwood’s nostalgia, the heroic avant-garde did not achieve ‘the radical transformation of society’ that they announced (‘Surrealestatement,’ 9). Such revelations have cost avant-gardism its once privileged and rather romantic position within political struggles, even while the romance of individual artists and their struggles continue unabated in contemporary art. It follows that scholars of the historical avant-garde, such as Russell, Ca˘linescu, Poggioli, almost unanimously agree that the avant-garde era proper has come to a close. The superficial question of ‘what do we call experimental, innovative art?’ in the post-revolutionary, contemporary period pales in comparison to the more substantial question of ‘what are the possibilities for disjunctive art now?’ The implications of the move away from avant-garde models of social progress and social change are far from clear. In the final chapter of Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva turns from the infinite possibilities of poetic language (with its open, polysemantic contradictions) to the ideological limits of the avant-garde. The problem she presents revisits the aesthetic versus radical contest that has haunted and divided avant-gardism from its very beginning. Revolutionary aesthetic avantgarde art, while enabling an eruptive and ‘ethical’ (233) potential subjectivity through polysemantic language, does so only through being outside the dominant cultural mode – so far outside, in fact, that it has no power within the cultural sphere. Avant-garde art cannot fulfil its own ethical and revolutionary function within society, and society will not allow itself to be pulled into a self-destroying revolution. The result is either compromised art or irrelevance in socio-historical politics (precisely why Mallarmé claimed political and textual activity were contradictory practices). Kristeva writes: ‘In capitalist society, where class struggle unsettles all institutions and where every subject and discourse are ultimately determined by their position in production and politics, to keep heterogeneous contradiction within a simply subjective representation is

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to make it inaudible or complicit with dominant bourgeois ideology. Although the latter can accept experimental subjectivism, it can only barely tolerate – or will reject altogether – the critique of its own foundations’ (Revolution, 190). Her argument seems to respond to the ever increasing divide between the revolutionary and the radical avant-gardes, and furthermore with the increasingly non-revolutionary, non-utopian, non-political nature of contemporary ‘avant-garde’ art. The only alternative she proposes is a return to the fusion of progressive radical ideology with experimental, disruptive art practice (233). In contrast to the forceful and pointed argumentation of the rest of her book, this proposition seems speculative and abstract, and even uncertain. This uncertainty resurfaces as a central theme of her more recent book, the aptly titled The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt. The sense of the failings of the revolutionary contributions of avantgarde art had long ago been articulated in the radical versus revolutionary debates of the nineteenth century. Towards the end of the avant-garde, wherein so-called avant-garde artists themselves lost revolutionary idealism, these arguments become increasingly damning of the sagging ambition of such work. In his 1957 book of essays Literature and Evil, Georges Bataille’s rejection of the revolutionary force of poetry anticipates the increasingly non-revolutionary orientation of contemporary experimental art. In fact, he denies poetry any legitimate claim to revolutionary or avant-garde status: ‘Though poetry may trample verbally on the established order, it is no substitute for it. When disgust with a powerless liberty thoroughly commits the poet to political action, he abandons poetry. But he immediately assumes responsibility for the order to come: he asserts the direction of activity, the major attitude. When we see him we cannot help being aware that poetic existence, in which we once saw the possibility of a sovereign attitude, is really a minor attitude. It becomes no more than a child’s attitude, a gratuitous game’ (Literature, 38). Shifting the romantic hope of an avant-garde class of writers leading their society forward to the dismissive hostility accorded to an overgrown adolescent still amused by childhood games, Bataille rejects the very idea of revolutionary potential in mid-twentieth-century avant-garde literature. Without any possibility to change or revolutionize society through writing, contemporary avant-garde authors become symptoms – not potential cures – of the society in which they work. The problems confronting contemporary experimental artists are thus complex and diffuse. On the one hand, there is a constant need to experiment with literary forms and models to sustain art’s connection to the

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vital, dynamic world. The dilemmas of the present, semantic and essential, highlight the distance from the first generations of experimental writing in Canada, the early avant-garde, with its exuberant confidence in the possibility of revolution. Returning to the nodes of avant-garde activity documented in this book does little to help predict the future course of contemporary experimentalism. In the end, looking forward, there are only questions. Will writing return to the didactic mode and become nonmetaphorically revolutionary once again? Will it remain locked in a deconstructive, autotelic mode? In a review article, John Stout highlights the success of contemporary feminist poets Margaret Christakos, Sandra Alland, and Angela Carr in fulfilling ‘the feminist goal of questioning and prompting the reader to rethink the representation of women in literature’ (175). The practice of interrogating expression in order to reveal, expose, and disempower the ideology informing language is a potent if reactive tool developed in postmodern writing, but as Heather Milne acknowledges, ‘The younger generation of feminist writers and readers is not utopian in its outlook’ (135). These authors are ‘critical of the ways in which our understandings of corporeality have become irrevocably mediated by technology’ (136), but tend to highlight the problems rather than attempt to uncover or establish a national (let alone international) countervailing social reality. This does not call their literary achievements into question; rather, it draws attention to the contemporary irrelevance and misleading characteristic of the label avant-garde. Contemporary theorists such as Lev Manovich, Hal Foster, and Craig Dworkin, however, are in the process of attempting to revive the category of avant-gardism to reflect the altered perceptual environments provoked by especially digital poetics, contemporary pataphysical experiments (such as Kenneth Goldsmith’s ‘uncreative writing’ and Christian Bök’s constraint-based heroics), and procedural texts that catalogue the actual use of language in ways dramatically more literal than any realist text would ever dare. Dworkin refers to this emerging genre of texts as the ‘new media avant-garde’ (46), a term that appropriately reflects its embeddedness within and indebtedness to specific and existing cultural practice – and a term that equally appropriately separates itself from the historical avant-garde’s endeavour to replace existing language with new language and thus unleash a new, possible, social reality.

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Notes

Introduction 1 The full catalogue is reproduced as appendix B in L.R. Pfaff’s ‘Lawren Harris’ (85–91). 2 Both articles are reproduced in the appendices to Pfaff’s ‘Lawren Harris.’ 3 Dick Stewart, in Saturday Night, declared that ‘the whole thing appears to me infinitely childish and silly’ and implied the answer to his own question, ‘is this progress?’ (5). Hector Charlesworth, the prominent art critic with the same publication, merely dismissed the exhibition as ‘nerve wracking’ when he finally took the time to acknowledge it (3). 4 Two of Weber’s paintings, Contemplation and Retirement, that were listed in the catalogue were not hung (Pfaff, 91). 5 The anecdote I began with addresses activity specifically relevant to the visual arts, but serves to demonstrate the presence of acknowledged and iconic avant-gardists in Canada. The chapters of this book on the Cosmic Canadians, the Automatists, and the Canadian Vorticists all highlight early literary avant-gardism in the country. 6 See Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, in particular, where she defines the modern concept of revolution as being ‘inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before, is about to unfold … revolutions [attempt] to usher in an entirely new era’ (18–19). She makes it clear that the essential concept of revolution is bound up with an initial violence that establishes the break from a previous order: ‘where violence is used to constitute an altogether different form of government, to bring about the formation of a new body politic, where the liberation from oppression aims at least at the constitution of freedom can we speak of revolution’ (25).

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7 Kostelanetz, in contrast to my sense of revolutionary aesthetics, proposes imitation and influence – digestion by the cultural industry, as it were – as the essential criteria of avant-gardism. This position limits the significance of avant-garde art to formal innovation without recognizing the revolutionary ideological and sociopolitical contestation motivating the experimentation and innovation. 8 This perhaps explains why avant-garde artists such as William Burroughs, Christopher Dewdney, and Christian Bök have been so fascinated by the parallel between art and viruses. 1. Theory of the Avant-Gardes in Canada 1 Such critics whom I will be referring to throughout this book include Renato Poggioli, Matei Ca˘linescu, Rosalind Krauss, Marc Aronson, Mark Lasner, and Margaret D. Stetz, as well as American scholars like John Weightman, Charles Russell, Marjorie Perloff, Jerome Rothenberg, and Richard Kostelanetz, among many others. 2 See Matei Ca˘linescu, 99. 3 If, as Baudelaire satirizes, avant-gardists all ‘porte des moustaches,’ it is also true that they did so ‘mais faits pour la discipline’ (Journaux intimes, 691). 4 I am using capital d Decadence to refer to the historical movements of France and England and the lower-case d decadence to refer to the general, transhistorical, transnational phenomenon. 5 Hugo’s Notre Dame Hunchback was based on a famous Parisian SaintSimonian advocate who became an unlikely but hugely popular icon for both the Saint-Simonian movement and the modern artist (see Menon, 259). 6 However, Ca˘linescu offers substantial evidence of Baudelaire’s use of the term as a positive synonym for modernity (165–6). 7 Original French: ‘Je suis l’empire à la fin de la decadence.’ 8 Original French: ‘le signe seul existe.’ 9 See my article ‘Non compos mentis: A Meta-Historical Survey of the Historiographic Narratives of Louis Riel’s “Insanity”’ for more on the historical range of reactions to Riel. 10 Original French: ‘L’Avant-Garde sera un organ quotidian du matin, et un auxiliare zélé des vaillants journaux conservateurs français qui se publient, l’après-midi, dans notre ville … Nous combattrons dans la mesure de nos forces pour la cause conservatrice.’

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11 Original French: ‘un des travailleurs les plus bardis de l’avant-garde philosophique.’ 12 See also Candida Rifkind’s ‘The Hungry Thirties: Writing Food and Gender During the Depression’; Dean Irvine’s ‘Among Masses: Dorothy Livesay and the English Canadian Leftist Magazine Culture of the Early 1930s’; and Caren Irr’s The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and Canada during the 1930s for additional resources on this topic. 13 Dean Irvine notes that the PACs were founded in Toronto in 1931 when the initial planning began (‘Among,’ 185). The group became a public presence the next year, most notably with the publication of the first issue of Masses in April. 14 Many significant other post-avant communities in Canada were either left out of or marginally acknowledged in Butling and Rudy’s survey, such as those nodes of activity surrounding L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, Véhicule Press, contemporary Surrealism, digital poetics and cyberpunk, constraintbased and aleatoric experimentation, contemporary concrete and sound poetry, to give a few examples. Of contemporary experimental women’s writing, important figures such as Lissa Wolsak, Esta Spalding, Anne Hébert, Lola Lemire Tostevin, and Karen Mac Cormack are entirely ignored – and the catalogue of historical Canadian experimental women writers left out is too long to mention – all of which leaves plenty of room for future research projects. Texts like Nate Dorward’s Antiphonies: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada, Dean Irvine’s Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916–1956, Ken Norris and Peter Van Toorn’s The Insecurity of Art: Essays on Poetics, and even rob mclennan’s side/lines: a new Canadian poetics all cover experimental nodes left untouched by Writing in Our Time. 15 For this observation, I am indebted to Alessandra Capperdoni’s essay ‘Feminist Poetics as Avant-Garde Poetics’ that explores at length the question of whether contemporary Canadian feminist writing should be read as ‘avant-garde’ or not. 2. The Cosmic Canadians 1 See Michèle Lacombe’s ‘Theosophy and the Canadian Idealist Tradition’ for an excellent account of the Theosophical Society’s role in the period. 2 The full inscription in foot-tall lettering reads: ‘OLD WALT / 1819–1919 / Dedicated to the democratic ideals of / Walt Whitman / by/ Haurace Traubel and Flora Macdonald / “My foothold is tenon’d and mortised in

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granite / I laugh at what you call dissolution / and I know the amplitude of time.”’ The citation is from chapter 20 of Song of Myself. The poem was brought back into print in chapbook form by Toronto’s BookThug Press in 2007. Portions of my analysis here serve as an afterword in this publication. Historical details about the development of Canada’s theatre were extracted from Richard Perkyns’ Major Plays of the Canadian Theatre, Anton Wagner’s Herman Voaden’s Symphonic Expressionism, and Don Rubin’s Canadian Theatre History. Mitchell’s writings on theosophy include ‘Theosophy in Action,’ a series of lectures published in The Canadian Theosophist in 1923 (vols. 3–8), and ‘The Use of the Secret Doctrine’, published online through the Canadian Theosophical Association website (www.theosophical.ca). His articles on theosophy in The Canadian Theosophist are concentrated on the period from 15 May 1923 (vol. 4, no. 3) to 15 October 1925 (vol. 6, no. 8). See also ‘The Blavatsky Institute of Canada,’ 15 February 1926 (vol. 6, no. 12). The Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia, ‘Voaden, Herman.’ http://www.canadiantheatre.com/dict.pl?term=Voaden%2C%20Herman (accessed 12 April 2009). The plays are available online, courtesy of Anton Wagner: www.lib.unb.ca/ Texts/Theatre/voaden. Some of which were first published in the New York little magazine Fifth Floor Window 1.4 (May 1932) and others published for the first time in Irrealities, Sonnets & Laconics (2003). Roald Nasgaard clarifies that Kathleen Munn produced abstract paintings without exhibiting them years before Brooker’s exhibition (see Nasgaard, 19–21). Nasgaard notes, however, that Brooker demonstrated his interest in producing abstract works as early as 1913 in response to the Armory Show in the United States (see Nasgaard, 21–7). Some of Munn’s earliest abstractions are speculated to be responses to the work Brooker was doing in studio before his exhibition. Brooker also produced a portrait of the figure titled Ultrahomo – The Prophet. A poem that was, in fact, turned into an avant-garde experimental play produced by Herman Voaden and dramatized by Nathaniel Benson in February 1935. 3. Canadian Surrealism: The Automatists

1 See José E. Igartua’s The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in Canada 1945–1971 for an analysis of the changes in English Canada. Most

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prominently discussed in the book is the decoupling of Canadian culture from British culture. The full passage, from a speech to Haitian students, is: ‘Surrealism is allied with peoples of colour, first because it has sided with them against all forms of imperialism and white brigandage’ (Breton, What, 256). The critic Bruce Braun adds an important point of nuance to First Nations indebtedness to the European avant-garde by noting that ‘if we reinsert into the story the circulation of Northwest Coast Native artefacts in European culture during the late 1800s and early 1900s, we can see European modernisms as enabled at least in part by the jolt that these objects gave to conventional ways of seeing. Indeed, it is only through an act of selective memory that modern aesthetics has been made out to be a development internal to Europe’ (211). Later, in his landmark essay ‘Surrealism and Painting,’ Breton would explain the connection between psychology and Surrealism: ‘A work cannot be considered Surrealist unless the artist strains to reach the total psychological scope of which consciousness is only a small part. Freud has shown that there prevails at this “unfathomable” depth a total absence of contradiction, a new mobility of the emotional blocks caused by repression, a timelessness and a substitution of psychic reality for external reality, all subject to the principle of pleasure alone. Automatism leads straight to this region’ (84). See also Richardson’s Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean (London: Verso, 1996). The official decree by the Central Committee of the Communist Party was sent out on 23 April 1932 and was titled ‘On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations.’ The decree outlined the plan to abolish all arts groups and reorganize them under the central control of the Union of Artists, something that would not actually take place until 1937. Glants explains that the official embrace of social realism was ‘supposed to provide a foundation for Soviet Literature and art that would overcome their national and historical distinctions, traditions, and other differences. In practice the formulation was a way of levelling art and eliminating national differences. All of these acts were a part of Stalin’s policy to convert art and literature into an instrument of party policy’ (71). Breton details the denunciation in full in his essay ‘On the Time When the Surrealists Were Right’ (1935). In hindsight, their methods and art practices all pointed in this direction, away from the radical avant-garde and away from the negative practices of Dada, towards revolutionary aesthetic avant-gardism. Breton (a former

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Dadaist) realized the fundamental mistake in his exploration of radical avant-gardism: Through some dreadful irony, the libertarian world we had imagined has given way to a world where the most servile obedience is expected, where the most basic human rights are denied, where all social life revolves around the policeman and the executioner. As in all cases where a human ideal reaches such depths of corruption, the only cure is to immerse oneself anew in the great current of sensibility where this ideal originated, to go back to the principles from which it had sprung. Those who complete the journey, one that today it is more than ever imperative to undertake, will discover that anarchism alone is the only remaining solution. (267) The Surrealist embrace and subsequent rejection of communist politics cost Breton many key supporters; some, like Aragon, remained committed to the Communist Party, whereas others, like Raymond Queneau and Jacques Prévert, had been alienated and expelled from the Surrealist movement because of lack of revolutionary commitment. Despite the division, Breton was able to recover from this about-face flirtation with the radical avant-garde. The rise and fall of Surrealism’s political association with communism lasted less than a decade, though continuities and parallels begin before and extend well after this framing. The explorations of irrationalism and other avant-garde tendencies in work by Philippe Aubert de Gaspé fils (1786–1871), Joseph Lenoir (1822– 1861), Octave Crémazie (1827–1879), Alfred Garneau (1836–1904), Émile Nelligan (1879–1941), and Guy Delahaye, pseudonym of FrançoisGuillaume Lahaise (1888–1969), are particularly worthy of note as anticipatory surrealisms in Canada. Original French: ‘la nouveauté radicale de son entreprise dans la poésie canadienne-française.’ The League was a committee of the Communist Party of Canada. The committee’s name was later changed to the Canadian League for Peace and Democracy in a bid to avoid political persecution by the federal government. Nonetheless, the League was banned in 1940 under the War Measures Act that also outlawed association with the Communist Party. A similar and more famous incantation appears in Leonard Cohen’s postmodern novel Beautiful Losers in which the narrator chants variations of ‘God is alive and magic is afoot’ (167). Cohen’s iterative prayer (which was turned into a popular folksong by Joan Baez) accesses this remarkably similar mystical insight through the avant-garde node of postmodern decadence,

Notes to pages 161–219

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suggesting that with the Cosmic Canadians and the Automatists these three nodes of avant-garde activity have more in common than is generally admitted. Bucke was, as previously noted, widely read and influential during the magical exuberance of the 1960s countercultural movement. For Breton’s connections to other Canadians, see Bourassa, 47–9. This groundbreaking book was translated into English for the first time in 2007 by Ray Ellenwood in a facsimile edition by Toronto-based BookThug’s Department of Reissue. See Ellenwood, Egregore, 90–6, for a full historical account of the split. See Egregore for a transcription of the full letter (especially page 196). Original French: ‘Je suis un fou assimilé aux forts. Je suis un fou qui a tué, je suis un fou qui s’évade’ (82). Original French: ‘Des gorges de folie dans des bassins remplis de transpiration’ (43). Original French: ‘le pitre Clément’ (138). To note: there is some confusion over when Zeller and Wald arrived in Canada; Beatriz Zeller’s 1991 introduction to Focus on Ludwig Zeller lists his arrival in Canada as 1970 (6), whereas her 1987 afterword to Ludwig Zeller: A Celebration lists 1971 (‘About,’ 110). In personal communications, she clarified that different members of the family came at different times. See Davidson’s biographical note on page 160 of Surreal Estate. 4. Canadian Vorticism

1 Trotter’s argument develops from Garrett Stewart and Fredric Jameson to propose a kind of writing that is neither expressionist nor impressionist, but yet still part of a subjectified environmental encounter with new technologies. Trotter writes that Eliot ‘intended his poems to reveal what it felt like to (want to) behave automatically. The poems are at once an enactment and a critique of the will-to-automatism animating the pleasures and the psychopathologies of everyday modern life. Modernism was not the product of a machine age. It was (among many other things) a wilful enquiry into the age’s wilful absorption in the kinds of automatic behaviour exemplified by machinery in general’ (240). 2 Marc Lowenthal notes that the essay cited was Picabia’s last major publication in Paris and was ‘a signal to many that Picabia was thenceforth irrelevant’ (325). 3 C.J. Fox, in a private conversation, pointed out that while Tarr starts with a quote from Hemingway, it ends with a direct quotation from the last line of

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6 7 8

Notes to pages 219–53

Lewis’s The Vulgar Streak, a book published shortly after the author’s arrival in Toronto. According to McLuhan, when Hemingway first read Lewis’s essay in Sylvia Beach’s bookstore in Paris, he became enraged, threw an inkwell across the room, flipped over a table ‘and proceeded to run amok among the book shelves’ (‘McLuhan on Lewis,’ 5). Still, in 1944, Hemingway wrote an enthusiastic letter of endorsement for Lewis to be given a commission to paint the portrait of Dr Joseph Erlanger, professor of physics at Washington University in St Louis. The Paris Journals were published as a discrete section within Fred Flahiff’s biography of Watson, Always Someone to Kill the Doves. In-text references to this publication will hereafter be listed as Always; the citation is listed under Flahiff’s name. ‘E.P.’ is logically presumed by Flahiff to be Ezra Pound. For more on this topic, see my essay comparing Deep Hollow Creek with The Double Hook (Betts, ‘Media’). While Olson’s Maximus Poems develop specifically from Pound’s aesthetic, scholars such as Anne Day Dewey note the increased fragmentation as a development from Pound in the underlying vision of the text: Olson’s departure in the Maximus Poems from the unifying devices used by Williams and Pound dissolves the individual and cosmic order into interacting processes in which form becomes local and changing rather than universal. Olson’s reception of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism helped him to articulate this departure from his Modernist predecessors. (55) Lewis attacked Whitehead as one of the key figures in the ‘philosophy of flux’ and for his ‘war upon clear ideas’ (Time, 183), further suggesting the distinction between Olson’s aesthetics and Vorticism. Still, this philosophical shift was expressed through techniques and sensibilities that developed through the Vorticist movement. L’Envoi: The Future of the Avant

1 Ellenwood’s was not, however, the first English translation of the manifesto: Borduas’s eponymous contribution, for instance, was first translated into English in 1950 by the British avant-garde author Simon Watson Taylor. In 1978, François Marc Gagnon published another version in Paul-Émile Borduas, Écrits/Writings, 1942–1958. 2 The book was published under his former name, Darren Wershler-Henry.

Note to page 255

269

3 Ginsberg was literally persecuted for various transgressions, including his open homosexuality, but he was also simultaneously widely celebrated and rewarded for his rebellion. For instance, just before being thrown out of Czechoslovakia by the state, Ginsberg was crowned the ‘King of May’ – the Kraj Majales – by a cheering audience of approximately 100,000 people, most of whom were students. The celebrity he enjoyed during his lifetime at the least complicates the myth of marginalization.

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The private collection of the Bertram Brooker Estate. John M. Kelly Library, University of Toronto. Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa. W.D. Jordan Special Collections, Queen’s University. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. Elizabeth Dafoe Library, University of Manitoba. University of Western Ontario Special Collections. William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University.

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Acknowledgments

This book is the product of many hands and many minds. It has run through the filter of editors, friends, peer-reviewers, conference attendees, and generous colleagues. I am grateful to all of you. In particular, I would like to thank the following people for conversation, advice, insight, encouragement, and overview: Ray Ellenwood, John Lennox, Steve McCaffery, Darren Wershler, Adam Lauder, Beatriz Hausner, Christian Bök, Fred Flahiff, Anton Wagner, C.J. Fox, Paul Hjartarson, Paul Tiessen, John Brooker, Dean Irvine, Colin Hill, Jay MillAr, Misao Dean, Barry Callaghan, Michael Callaghan, Nicky Drumbolis, and Carl Spadoni. Thanks to my family, especially Diane Betts and Peter Wilson. A special thanks to my editor at the University of Toronto Press, Siobhan McMenemy, who recognized the potential in this manuscript many years ago and has diligently and professionally facilitated its production. I would like to thank all of my colleagues at Brock University for having created such a rich and encouraging research environment: Robert Alexander, James Allard, Lynn Arner, Tim Conley, Gale Coskan-Johnson, Martin Danahay, Adam Dickinson, Neta Gordon, Ann Howey, Douglas Kneale, Leah Knight, John Lye, Mathew Martin, Marilyn Rose, Elizabeth Sauer, Barbara Seeber, Angus Somerville, Sue Spearey, Carole Stewart, Sherryl Vint, Catherine Parayre, Rosemary Hale, Keri Cronin, and Linda Steer. I am also greatly indebted to the archivists and staff at the many libraries, archives, and special collections that I consulted: these are the people upon whom rests the responsibility for maintaining the very possibility of this project. I am especially grateful for the help I received from Linda Jansma, Michael McLuhan, Anna St Onge, Kate Van Dusen, and Phyllis Smith who were all exceedingly generous with their time during

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my research. A life of thanks and love to the divinely inspiring Lisa Betts and the divinely distracting Jasper John Betts. Further acknowledgments: this book presents a combination of new work with a synthesis of portions of previously published material that appeared in venues such as Studies in Canadian Literature, Rampike, Canadian Poetry, The Brock Review, Re:Reading the Postmodern, and the reissue of Albert Watson’s The Aureole by BookThug Press.

Index

A.E., 91 Acorn, Milton, 65–6, 68 Adorno, Theodor, 46, 182 Aesthetic Avant-Garde, 19, 33–6, 57– 8, 65, 156–7 Aestheticism, 36, 38, 53, 113–14 Agamben, Giorgio, 15 Aitkin, Carroll, 109 Albers, Joseph, 3 Albert-Birot, Pierre, 30 Aldington, Richard, 12, 229–31 Alland, Sandra, 253, 259 Allen, Lillian, 84 Allende, Salvador, 188 Althusser, Louis, 27, 236 Alton, Kate, 83, 252 Anderson, Patrick, 64 Anderson, Perry, 20 Antin, David, 24 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 114, 117, 173, 255 Aragon, Louis, 19, 147, 150, 204, 265n8 Archipenko, Alexander, 3, 6 Arnason, David, 125, 131 Aronson, Marc, 262n1 Arp, Hans, 3, 158, 160, 187

Arrendt, Hannah, 13, 27, 50, 74, 77, 261n6 Artaud, Antonin, 46, 83, 203 Arts and Letters Club, 109, 136 Ataturk, Mustafa, 156 Atwood, Margaret, 78 Aubrey, Beardsley, 38 Austin, Mary, 91 Automatism, 25 Ayscough, Florence, 116 Baird, Irene, 58 Balakian, Anna, 188 Ball, Hugo, 32, 173 Balzac, Honoré de, 35 Barbeau, Marcel, 154 Barbour, Douglas, 242 Barthes, Roland, 70, 176 Bassnett, Susan, 246 Bataille, Georges, 154, 258 Baudelaire, Charles, 29, 36–8, 40–1, 47–8, 53, 77, 95, 133, 152, 225, 262n2 Bayard, Caroline, 16, 139, 183–4 Beach, Sylvia, 268n4 Beatriz Zeller, 267n20 Beattie, Munro, 92

302 Beaverbrook, Lord (Max Aikin), 213 Beckett, Samuel, 253 Bengough, J.W., 92 Benjamin, Walter, 86, 250 Benoît, Jean, 161 Benson, Nathaniel, 264n11 Bentley, D.M.R., 58 Bergson, Henri, 200, 217 Bessant, Annie, 104 Betts, Gregory, 57, 262n9, 268n7 Bickle, John P., 115 bissett, bill, 68, 70–2, 77, 183–4 Blackwood, Algernon, 92 Bland, Salem, 36, 54, 102–3, 106 Blast, 192 Blew Ointment, 68 Boccioni, Umberto, 3, 203 Bök, Christian, 9, 16, 69, 84, 132, 259, 262n8 Borduas, Paul-Émile, 9, 139–41, 154, 157, 160–1, 166–9, 173–4, 178, 181, 268n1 Borges, Jorge Luis, 44 Bourassa, André G., 16, 141–2, 155 Bourget, Paul, 38, 48, 132 Bowering, Angela, 229 Bowering, George, 65–6, 68, 187 Bowman, Louise Moray, 116 Bragdon, Claude, 91 Brandtner, Fritz, 160 Braque, Georges, 3, 159–60 Braun, Bruce, 265n3 Brecht, Bertolt, 203 Breeze, Claude, 184 Breton, André, 32, 145–55, 157, 160–2, 167, 173, 176, 185–8, 203, 206, 255, 265n4, n7, n8, 267n13 Breton, Elisa, 153 Brooker, Bertram, 4–7, 9, 15, 25, 102, 109, 112–14, 117–34, 157–8,

Index 160, 163, 173, 215–17, 221, 238– 9, 264n9, n10 Brossard, Nicole, 16, 74–5, 183, 251 Brown, E.K., 54–5, 62 Bucke, Richard Maurice, 10, 86–7, 89–90, 91–6, 98–101, 104–7, 109, 112, 120, 126, 130, 134, 136–7, 245, 266n12 Budden, Alfred, 55 Bullock, Michael, 184, 187 Bürger, Peter, 14, 22, 31–2, 73, 84, 154, 202, 213 Burgess, Anthony, 188 Burroughs, William S., 187, 262n8 Butling, Pauline, 9, 21, 23, 57, 61, 68–9, 80–1, 144, 187 Butterfield, Christopher, 16 Ca˘linescu, Matei, 27–8, 32, 38, 45, 47, 131, 257, 262n1, n2, n6 Call, F.O., 116 Callaghan, Morley, 8, 116, 136, 217, 219 Campbell, Wilfrid, 92 Canada Council for the Arts, 57 Canadian Bookman, The, 59 Canadian Forum, 5, 56, 112, 126, 247 Canadian Labor World, The, 54 Capperdoni, Alessandra, 263n15 Carlyle, Thomas, 35 Carman, Bliss, 58, 66, 94 Carpenter, Edward, 90 Carr, Angela, 259 Carr, Emily, 136 Carriére, Marie J., 16 Cartier, Jacques, 12 Cavell, Richard, 16, 211, 217, 219, 238 Cendrars, Blaise, 28 Certeau, Michel de, 175–80 Césaire, Aimé, 150

Index Chagall, Marc, 159 Chamberland, Paul, 73, 77 Chambers, Bertram, 56 Char, René, 114 Charcot, Jean, 146 Charlesworth, Hector, 261n3 Chisholm, William, 214 Christakos, Margaret, 259 Chrystall, Andrew Brian, 193–4 Cixous, Hélène, 76 Claxton, Dana, 145 Cohen, Leonard, 66, 266n12 Collins, W.E., 62, 92 Collins, Wilkie, 39 Colombo, John Robert, 249 Comte, Auguste de, 35 Conrad, Joseph, 125 Contemporary Verse, 64 Cook, Ramsay, 4, 89–90, 138 Copithorne, Judith, 70–1 Corbett, Edward M., 175 Cowley, Aleister, 104 Coyne, James H., 105 Crawford, Isabella Valancy, 50 Crawley, Alan, 64 Creeley, Robert, 66, 243 Crémazie, Octave, 266n9 Crevel, René, 147 Cubism, 3, 72, 197 Curnoe, Greg, 249 da Vinci, Leonardo, 115 Dada, 3, 13, 18–21, 32, 40, 47, 71, 131, 147–8, 150, 168, 173, 183, 204, 222, 249, 255, 265n8 Dalí, Salvador, 108, 158–9, 177, 187 Dalton, Anne Charlotte, 137–8 Daudelin, Charles, 163 Davey, Frank, 16, 61, 66, 68, 80, 168, 214, 242

303

David, Jack, 16 Davidson, John, 39 Davidson, Robert, 187 Davidson, William A., 189–90 Davis, Ann, 16, 102, 105, 113, 117, 136, 138 Day, Margaret, 64 De Chirico, Giorgio, 158 Deacon, William Arthur, 7, 95 Debord, Guy, 15, 207–8 Decadence, 18–20, 29–30, 32, 35–49, 53, 60, 69–73, 113–14, 131–3, 135 Delahaye, Guy, 266n9 Deleuze, Gilles, 15 Denison, Flora MacDonald, 9, 60, 86, 96–8, 104, 109, 133 Denison, Merrill, 109–10 Derain, André, 160 Derksen, Jeff, 16, 49, 80 Derrida, Jacques, 208, 245–6, 250 Desnos, Robert, 147 Dewdney, Christopher, 9, 262n8 Dilworth, Tom, 214–15, 221 Direction, 59 Dorward, Nate, 263n14 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 128 Doyle, James, 55 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 104 Drake, Richard, 39 Dreier, Katherine, 4–5, 7, 108 Dresdnere, Simon, 163 Drinkwater, George, 6 Drucker, Johanna, 16, 70 Duchamp, Marcel, 3, 108, 154, 222 Duchamp-Villon, Raymond, 133 Dudek, Louis, 57, 62–3, 66, 108, 158, 206 Dufy, Raoul, 160 Duguay, Raoul, 72–3 Duncan, Robert, 66, 243

304 Duplessis, Maurice, 162 Duplessis, Rachel Blau, 13–14 Dussault, Jean-Claude, 169–70 Dworkin, Craig, 259 Eagleton, Terry, 43, 47 Edwards, L.F., 57 Edwards, Paul, 207 Eisenberg, Lucy, 158 Eliot, T.S., 30, 32, 41, 80, 91, 126–7, 130, 132, 200, 202, 207, 209, 211, 216, 231, 236, 238, 267n1 Ellenwood, Ray, 16, 141–2, 154, 161–2, 167, 250, 256–7, 267n14, n15, 268n1 Ellmann, Richard, 89 Eluard, Paul, 147, 150, 187 Engels, Friedrich, 35 Ernst, Max, 3, 154, 158, 160, 187 Ette, Omar, 82 Fanon, Frantz, 145 Fascism, 34, 41–2, 155–6, 203–6, 232, 241 Faulkner, William, 231 Fauteux, Roger, 154 Ferne, Doris, 64 First Nations, 49–51, 71, 145, 214, 247–8, 265n3 First Statement, 59, 64 Fitterman, Rob, 83 Fitzgerald, L.L., 160 Flahiff, Fred, 16, 192, 268n5, n6 Foisey, Gilles, 186 Ford, Ford Madox, 197 Foshay, Toby, 16, 213–14 Foster, Hal, 76–9, 259 Four Horsemen, The, 70, 83, 252 Fox, C.J., 212, 214, 267n3

Index Freud, Sigmund, 7, 146–9, 164, 183, 255–6 Frye, Northrop, 29–30, 40–1, 43, 61, 66, 73, 77–8, 124 Futurism, 3, 13, 21, 24, 32, 86, 88, 104, 133, 197–205, 255 Gagnon, François-Marc, 16 Garneau, Alfred, 266n9 Garneau, Hector de Saint-Denys, 155 Gaspé fils, Philippe Aubert de, 266n9 Gaudier-Brzeska, 201 Gautier, Théophile, 29, 35 Gauvreau, Claude, 9, 12, 25, 139, 143, 166–7, 169–84, 239 Gauvreau, Pierre, 154 Georgia Strait, 184 Gibson, Matthew, 105 Gide, André, 203 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 97 Ginsberg, Allen, 91, 255, 269n3 Godard, Barbara, 16, 24, 75–6, 79, 84, 183, 234, 251 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 83, 259 Grace, Sherrill, 16, 125, 131, 138, 199, 230 Gramsci, Antonio, 39 Grandbois, Alain, 160 Grandmont, Eloi de, 163 Grant, George, 78 Gribble, Wilfred, 55 Gris, Juan, 159 Group of Seven, 5, 103, 105–6, 109, 112–13, 136, 144, 160, 209 Grove, Frederick Philip, 136 Guderna, Ladislav, 187 Guderna, Martin, 187 Gysin, Brion, 187–8

Index Habermas, Jürgen, 22, 45 Haines, Fred, 158 Hale, Katherine, 134 Hamilton, Florence Randall, 116 Hare, David, 154 Harmon, Catherine, 64 Harris, David W. See UU, David Harris, Lawren, 3–5, 7, 9, 12, 15, 25, 102–7, 113, 124, 126, 133–4, 136–8, 158, 163, 166, 215, 261n1 and n2 Hart House Theatre, 136 Hausner, Beatriz (previously Zeller), 189 Hébert, Anne, 75, 183, 263n14 Hemingway, Ernest, 116, 136, 219, 231, 267n3, 268n4 Hénault, Gilles, 163 Henderson, Brian, 72 Hennessy, Neil, 252 Here & Now, 64 Higgins, Lesley, 232 Higgins, Sheeri Lyn, 189–90 Hill, Colin, 56, 58 Hine, Daryl, 66 Hitler, Adolf, 156, 205–6, 208, 210 Hjartarson, Paul, 16 Hodd, Thomas, 94 Hopper, Clare, 116 Housser, Fred, 126 Hucheon, Linda, 16 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 40 Hughes, Langston, 24, 56 Hugo, Victor, 35 Hulme, T.E., 91, 201 Igartua, José E., 264n1 International Exhibition of Modern Art 1913 (New York’s Armory Show), 4–5

305

International Exhibition of Modern Art 1927 (IEMA), 3–6, 8, 109, 115, 118, 123, 156–8 Irvine, Dean, 9, 56, 60–1, 263n12, n13, and n14 Jackson, A.Y., 209 Jacob, Max, 114, 117, 157 Jaeger, Peter, 249 Jakobson, Roman, 246 James, Henry, 231 James, William, 33, 89 Jameson, Fredric, 76, 210–11, 232–3, 267n1 Janet, Pierre, 146 Jarry, Alfred, 42, 45, 132, 204 Jencks, Charles, 21 Johnson, E. Pauline, 50 Johnston, Franz, 5 Jones, D.G., 66 Joyce, James, 9, 31, 42–4, 46, 71, 193, 200, 207, 211, 216–17, 219, 225, 227, 232 Kandinsky, Wassily, 3, 108, 111, 126, 160, 199, 217 Kant, Immanuel, 101, 103 Karl, Frederick, 3 Keats, John, 39–40, 126–9 Kennedy, Bill, 253–4 Kennedy, Leo, 116 Kenner, Hugh, 42–3, 200, 214, 218 King, William Lyon Mackenzie, 100, 105 Kingan, Ted, 187 Kiyooka, Roy, 71, 184, 186–7 Klebnikov, Velemir, 88 Klee, Paul, 3, 158 Klein, A.M., 64, 117, 158

306 Knister, Raymond, 116, 136, 248 Koizim, Ruth G., 175 Kostelanetz, Richard, 12, 14, 23, 48, 133, 254, 262n7, 262n1 Kraus, Rosalind, 262n1 Kristeva, Julia, 14, 42, 45–6, 82, 85, 168, 172, 207, 235, 252, 257–8 Kroetsch, Robert, 78, 249 Kroker, Arthur, 77–8 L’Avant Garde (1960s), 52 L’Avant-garde (1848), 36 L’Avant-Garde: Journal politique quotidian (1896), 51 La Barre du Jour, 184 La Révolution surréaliste, 150 Lachman, Gary, 89 Lacombe, Michèle, 16, 109, 113, 138, 263n1 Laforge, Jules, 29 Lahaise, François-Guillaume, 266n9 Lahontan, Louis, 49 Lai, Larissa, 84 Lamberti, Elena, 225 Lampman, Archibald, 55, 66, 92, 95 LAMPS, The, 59 Lareau, Edmond, 52 Lasner, Mark, 262n1 Laughlin, John, 157 Lautréamont, Comte de, 46 Laverdant, Gabriel-Désiré, 26 Layton, Irving, 63, 66 Le Corbusier, 203 Le Gallienne, Robert, 58 Le Nigog, 52–3 Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, 151 Leacock, Stephen, 55 Lechmere, Kate, 197 Leduc, Fernand, 154, 161–2, 167, 177

Index Léger, Ferdinand, 3, 160 Lenin, Vladimir, 13, 156 Lennox, John, 16 Lenoir, Joseph, 266 Lewis, Anne, 214, 219 Lewis, Wyndham, 10, 12, 18, 20–1, 31, 42, 156, 174, 192–6, 199–242, 244, 268n4 Lighthall, William Douw, 92 Lismer, Arthur, 106, 133 Littérature, 147 Livesay, Dorothy, 56, 60, 64, 115, 135, 242 Loranger, Jean-Aubert, 155 Lorca, Federico Garcia, 114 Lotman, Jurí, 246 Lowell, Amy, 116 Lowenthal, Marc, 267n2 Lyman, John, 159 Lyotard, Jean-François, 46–7, 73 Mac Cormack, Karen, 81, 263n14 MacDonald, J.E.H., 106 MacDonald, Wilson, 9, 94–6, 118, 135–6 MacEwan, Gwendolyn, 66 MacLeish, Archibald, 35 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 90 Magritte, René, 158, 190 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 29, 38–41, 44– 6, 48, 53, 80, 193, 257 Mandel, Eli, 66, 78, 249 Manovich, Lev, 259 Mansfield, Katherine, 91 Manson, Ross, 252 Marcotte, Gilles, 155 Marinetti, Filippo, 32, 88, 197–9, 203 Marlatt, Daphne, 65, 76, 79, 84, 242–4

Index Marriott, Anne, 60, 64 Marshall, Tom, 92 Marx, Karl, and Marxism, 19, 22, 35, 46, 50, 55–6, 77, 79, 135, 204, 208 Mason, Lawrence, 113 Masses, 53, 56–9, 156 Massey, Vincent, 108, 144 Masson, André, 158, 163 Mastin, Catherine M., 16, 214–15 Matisse, Henri, 159–60 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 151–2 Mayrs, Dave, 187 McArthur, Peter, 55, 94 McCaffery, Steve, 9, 44, 70, 72–4, 82, 141, 169–71, 184, 238, 248–9, 252 McCann, Gillian, 16 McCarthy, Pearl, 158–9 McGee, Thomas D’Arcy, 51 McGill Fortnightly Review, 58 McKay, Ian, 102 McKillop, A.B., 89, 247 McLaren, Foris Clarke, 64 McLennan, Rob, 263n14 McLuhan, Elizabeth, 241 McLuhan, Marshall, 9, 13, 15, 42, 73, 78, 188, 191–5, 200, 209, 211, 218–25, 227, 232, 234–5, 238–9, 255 Miki, Roy, 24, 84 Mill, John Stuart, 35 Milne, Heather, 259 Miró, Joan, 3, 158 Mitchell, Roy, 109–10, 112, 126, 264n5 Modigliani, Amedeo, 159–60 Mondrian, Piet, 3 Monroe, Harriet, 116 Moody, Edna Wadsworth, 91 Morin, Léo-Pol, 53 Morriss, Margaret, 230

307

Mouré, Erin, 84 Mousseau, Jean-Paul, 154, 163 Munn, Kathleen, 134, 264n9 Munro, Alice, 78 Murray, Joan, 105 Murry, John Middleton, 90, 126–8, 130, 216 Mussolini, Benito, 156, 205–8, 241 Nasgaard, Roald, 16, 264n9 National Progress, 53 Nazism, 34, 205–9 Necakov, Lillian, 189 Nelligan, Émile, 53, 266n9 New Democracy, The, 53–4 New Directions, 157 New Frontier, 53, 56, 58–9, 156 New Outlook, 100 New Provinces, 59 Ngai, Sianne, 182–3 Nichol, bp, 9, 24, 44, 70–4, 80, 82–3, 183–4, 187, 248–9, 252 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 28, 39, 118–19, 131–3, 219 Nixon, Mignon, 153 Norris, Ken, 58–9, 263n14 Norwood, Robert, 92, 95 Nova, Gary Lee, 184, 186 Nowland, Alden, 66 O’Neill, Eugene, 111, 113 Olson, Charles, 64, 66–7, 242–3, 268n8 Open Letter, 84 Orage, Alfred Richard, 91 Orrell, John, 242 Oswald, John, 249 Ouspensky, P.D., 90–1, 101, 105, 136–7 Owen Sound, 70

308 Pacioli, Luca, 115 Page, P.K., 60, 64 Paglia, Camille, 91 Paradis, Suzanne, 183 Parent, Mimi, 161 Paris Commune, 22, 34 Parker, Harley, 194, 200, 220–2, 242 Patenaude, Esioff-Léon, 156 Paz, Octavio, 44 Pellan, Alfred, 144, 160–1 Péloquin, Claude, 183 Pennee, Donna Palmateer, 211, 226, 232–4 Péret, Benjamin, 150 Perloff, Marjorie, 14, 16, 43, 199, 204, 235, 262n1 Pfaff, L.R., 16 Phelps, Arthur, 116 Philip, Marlene NourbeSe, 24 Picabia, Francis, 3, 147, 183, 204, 267n2 Picasso, Pablo, 3, 35, 108, 158–9, 187 Pierce, Lorne, 100, 134, 137 Place, Vanessa, 83 Plato, 115 Poetry, 248 Poggioli, Renato, 14, 22, 34, 36, 212, 257, 262n1 Post-Avant, 20–1, 77–85 Postcolonialism, 9, 62–5, 69, 139, 168, 171, 245–8 Postmodern Decadence, 19–20, 69–77 Postmodernism, 16, 43–5, 47, 69–77, 85, 245–9 Pound, Ezra, 10, 12, 14, 41–2, 63, 66, 91, 156, 192–5, 197, 200–3, 205–11, 216, 221, 223, 226, 228, 239, 242–3, 256, 268n6 Pratt, E.J., 113, 135, 212 Préfontaine, Fernand, 52 Prévert, Jacques, 265n8

Index Preview, 59, 64 Prewett, Frank, 116 Puchner, Martin, 18, 20 Purdy, Al, 65–6 Quartermain, Meredith, 84 Queneau, Raymond, 265n8 Radek, Karl, 151 Radical Avant-Garde, 18–19, 33–6, 53–8, 156–7, 168 Ray, Man, 4, 108, 158 Raymond, Louis-Marcel, 161 Re:Sounding, 70 Read, Herbert, 159 Rebel, The, 59 Rebick, Judy, 16 Reid, Dennis, 16, 138, 140, 163 Reid, John, 9, 15, 192, 194, 213, 217– 20, 222 Renaud, Thérèse (Thérèse Leduc), 9, 163–6 Rich, Adrienne, 75 Richardson, Michael, 149 Richardson, T., 57, 156 Ricoeur, Paul, 180–2 Riddell, John, 249 Riel, Louis, 50 Rifkind, Candida, 58, 263n12 Rimbaud, Arthur, 27–8, 34, 38–9, 43, 95, 152, 163 Riopelle, Jean-Paul, 139, 154, 162, 166 Rivera, Diego, 203 Roberts, Charles G.D., 58, 92–4 Roberts, Gooderidge, 160 Robertson, Lisa, 19, 84 Robin, Martin, 34 Roche, Mazo de la, 116, 214 Romain, Charles Edward, 214 Roquebrune, Robert de, 52

Index Ross, Robert, 213 Ross, Stephen, 211 Ross, Stuart, 189, 256 Ross, W.W.E., 57, 66, 108, 113–17, 133, 135–6, 157–8 Rothenberg, Jerome, 262n1 Roudiez, Leon S., 45 Ruddick, Bruce, 64 Rudy, Susan, 9, 21, 23, 57, 61, 68–9, 80–1, 144, 187 Russell, Charles, 14, 31, 45, 147, 204, 257, 262n1 Russell, John, 6 Russell, Walter, 91 Russell, William, 91 Ryan, Oscar, 56, 135 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 26, 28, 35–6, 262n5 Salmon, André, 114, 117, 157 Sandburg, Carl, 63 Sapir, Edward, 116, 246–8, 250 Saul, Joanne, 244 Saunders, Helen, 191 Saunders, Henry S., 105 Schendel, Michel Van, 175 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 39 Schwitters, Kurt, 3, 30 Scobie, Stephen, 16, 241–2 Scott, D.C., 55, 248 Scott, F.R., 55, 64, 66, 249 Scott, Gail, 75 Scott, Marian, 160 Service, Robert, 191 Shadbolt, Jack, 238 Shakespeare, William, 255 Sharman, Lyon, 116 Shaw, Neufville, 64 Simpson, Gregg, 184, 186–7 Smith, A.J.M., 59–64, 117, 157–8, 247–8

309

Smith, James, 246 Smythe, A.E.S., 92, 94–5 Société Anonyme, 4–5, 108 Solway, David, 66 Sorel, Georges, 208 Soupault, Phillipe, 147 Souster, Raymond, 63, 66 Spalding, Esta, 263n14 Spender, Stephen, 151 Spicer, Jack, 172, 243 Sproxton, Birk, 16, 138 Stacey, Robert, 16, 214–15 Stanner, Sarah, 192 Stein, Gertrude, 31, 207, 216, 235, 237 Stella, Joseph, 3 Stephen, A.M., 92, 156 Stephens, Natalie, 84 Sternhell, Zeev, 208 Stetz, Margaret D., 262n1 Stevenson, Lionel, 95 Stewart, Dick, 261n3 Stout, John, 259 Stringer, Arthur, 116 Suleiman, Susan, 47, 61, 79 Sullivan, Françoise, 9, 140, 166, 175, 181, 185 Sunset of Bon Echo, The, 56, 59, 96 Surrealism, 3, 9–10, 18–19, 24, 32, 34, 71, 76, 107, 113, 117, 139–88, 201–4, 250, 256–7, 263n14, 265n8 Sutherland, John, 62–4 Symbolism, 13, 29, 35, 36–8, 40–3, 60, 95, 132, 152, 155, 168 Tacon, Edna, 4 Tanguy, Yves, 158, 177 Theall, Donald, 224–5 Thenard, Francis, 187 Thomas, Audrey, 75 Tiessen, Paul, 16

310 TISH, 64–9, 81, 108, 139, 168, 243 Tostevin, Lola Lemire, 263n14 Traubel, Horace, 54, 97 Trehearne, Brian, 38, 60–1, 66, 113, 135, 157 Trotter, David, 202, 267n1 Trudeau, Pierre, 78 Truth, 94 Tzara, Tristan, 20, 32, 169 Unik, Pierre, 150 UU, David, 184–7, 191 Vadeboncoeur, Pierre, 141 Valéry, Paul, 29, 41 Van Toorn, Peter, 263n14 Varley, Fred, 106 Varney, Ed, 186–7 Verduyn, Christl, 183 Verlaine, Paul Marie, 38–9, 53, 191 Verwaayen, Kimberly, 75 Voaden, Herman, 109–13, 133, 136, 138, 239, 264n4, n6, n7, n11 Vorticism, 9–10, 12, 24–5, 31, 34, 40, 191–244, 245 VVV, 154 Waddington, Miriam, 64 Wagner, Anton, 138, 264n4, n7 Wagner, Richard, 39 Wah, Fred, 24, 84 Wald, Susanna, 188 Wallace, Joe, 135 Watson, Albert Durrant, 98–104, 116, 135 Watson, John, 101–4 Watson, Sheila, 9, 15–16, 191–2, 196, 199, 211, 214–15, 218–19, 222–3, 225–37

Index Watson, Wilfred, 9, 187, 191–5, 207– 8, 224, 228, 234–42 Watt, Frank, 55 Watts, Allan, 91 Webb, Phyllis, 66 Webber, Gordon, 4 Weber, Max, 6 Wees, William C, 196, 209, 214 Weightman, John, 49, 85, 254, 262n1 Werschler, Darren, 253–4, 268n2 White Pelican, 241–2 Whitehead, Alfred North, 268n8 Whitman, Walt, 54, 63, 94–6, 99, 113, 130, 134, 263n2 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 246 Wilde, Oscar, 35, 38–9 Williams, William Carlos, 64, 243, 268n8 Willmott, Glenn, 16, 125, 127, 211, 219, 233 Wilson, Eric, 255 Wise, Jack, 185–6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 43 Wolfe, Tom, 255 Wolsak, Lisa, 263n14 Wong, Rita, 84–5 Woodberry, G.E., 91 Woolf, Leonard, 227 Woolf, Virginia, 200, 217 Yates, Norman, 242 Yeats, W.B., 41, 91, 94, 105, 113, 173, 200 young, d’bi, 84 Yuxwelupton, Lawrence Paul, 145 Zeller, Ludwig, 188–9 Zolf, Rachel, 253