Discoveries of the Other : Alterity in the Work of Leonard Cohen, Hubert Aquin, Michael Ondaatje, and Nicole Brossard [1 ed.] 9781442683907, 9780802005175

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D I S C O V E R I E S OF THE OTHER: ALTERITY IN THE WORK OF LEONARD COHEN, HUBERT AQUIN, MICHAEL ONDAATJE, AND NICOLE BROSSARD

THEORY / CULTURE Editors: Linda Hutcheon, Gary Leonard, Janet Paterson, and Paul Perron

WINFRIED SIEMERLING

Discoveries of the Other: Alterity in the Work of Leonard Cohen, Hubert Aquin, Michael Ondaatje, and Nicole Brossard

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com Univnn'ersity of Toronto Press Incorporated 1994 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-0517-9

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Siemerling, Winfried, 1956Discoveries of the other (Theory/culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-0517-9 i. Canadian fiction - 2oth century - History and criticism. 2. Self in literature. I. Title. II. Series. Ps8i87.S541994 PR9192.5.S54 1994

c8i3'-54O9'384

094-930392-5

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

1 Introduction: Discoveries of the Other 3 2 Hailed by Koan: Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss 21 Poet, Priest, and Prophet: Community and the Production of the Other 21 Praying for Translation: Beautiful Losers and the Revenge of Names 36 3 Hubert Aquin: Language and Legitimation 62 An Other('s) Eye 62 An Other('s) Past 68 Language, Legitimation, Representation 74 Alterity, AlterNation, AlterNative: Symmetry and Rupture in Prochain Episode and Trou de memoire 79 Prochain Episode and the Originality of the Other: A Battle of Symmetries? 82 The F(l)ight of Reason: Trou de memoire 95 4 'Scared by the Company of the Mirror': Temptations of Identity and Limits of Control in the Work of Michael Ondaatje 106 'Governed by Fears of Certainty' 106 Sonographs of a Star in the Mirror: 'Author and Hero' in Coming Through Slaughter 113

vi

Contents Enacting Metaphor: Running in the Family 137 'Lights': Oral History and the Writing of the Other in In the Skin of a Lion 153

5 The Visibility of the Utopian Form in the Work of Nicole Brossard 173 'Ainsi qu'un reve polysemique': Writing the Virtual Other between Women 173 'En bordure de la langue': Picture theory 181 6 Conclusion: A Will to Metamorphosis 205 Notes 213 Bibliography 233 General Index 245 Index of Names 256

Acknowledgments

Others have assisted these discoveries. My interest in Canadian studies and Canadian and Quebecois literatures began to take shape at my first Canadian alma mater, Trent University, where Michael Peterman and Keith Walden were my encouraging guides. I have to thank the World University Service of Canada (WUSC) for providing me, a few years later, with an opportunity to begin working on this study. Again, I was reminded of how much depends on the help of others. To Linda Hutcheon, first of all, I would like to express my profound gratitude for everything. Her scholarship, professionalism, and constant support have helped this project in more ways than I could possibly begin to enumerate. I would also like to thank in particular Donna Bennett and Russell Brown, who showed me that 'Canadian Literature' is not only an exciting field of study, but also an open group of people and a 'live' experience; Ted Chamberlin, who probably neglected other obligations because one day he could not resist discussing Ondaatje's work, and who has been an inspiring influence on me ever since; Janet Paterson, who offered her invaluable expertise in the field of Quebecois writing and postmodernism together with a refreshing sense of humour; and Wlad Godzich, who volunteered time and advice freely and may wonder what I did with it all. The Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, guided by the teamwork of Peter Nesselroth and Ricardo Sternberg, provided a stimulating environment and support whenever it was needed. My thanks also to Lyn Michisor and Aphrodite Roussos for making sure that things remained on track. My gratitude is further due to Gerry Hallowell, Agnes Ambrus, and James Leahy at the University of Toronto Press, who helped - always impeded by the author - to take the enterprise to its present stage. If this group has made my project possible, others have helped to make it as passable as it may be, and my thanks go out to them. Paul Goetsch gave

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Acknowledgments

me the opportunity to test an earlier version of the chapter on In the Skin of a Lion at a conference of the German Research Council in Freiburg. Lillian Petroff allowed me to read the transcripts of her interviews with Nicholas Temelcoff. Leonard Cohen spent the better part of an afternoon patiently answering questions, and gave me permission to quote from published and unpublished material. The staff at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library made my life easier more than once. Patricia Merivale's perspicacious comments sparked many improvements. Portions of the chapters on Ondaatje and Cohen have appeared in different form (and, in the first instance, in a different language) in Mundliches Wissen in neuzeitlicher Literatur, edited by Paul Goetsch, Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature, edited by Kurt Miiller and Bernd Engler, Canadian Poetry 33, and the British journal Over Here. I am grateful to the editors of these publications for their interest in my work, and also to audiences in Los Angeles, Freiburg, Victoria, Osnabriick, Waterloo, Montreal, and Red Deer for offering their h/ear(ing) of the other (and) alterations of the arguments presented here. Finally, I should also like to express my appreciation to some friends who helped in one way or another: Brenda Braun, Will Braun, Juanita De Barros, Wendy Hawthorne, Ajay Heble, Michael Helm, Wolfgang Hockbruck, Russell Kilbourn, Rita Leistner, Sheila O'Reilly, Ernst Rudin, David Trott, Richard Vineyard; and last, but certainly not least, my parents.

D I S C O V E R I E S OF THE O T H E R : A L T E R I T Y IN T H E W O R K O F L E O N A R D C O H E N , HUBERT AQUIN, MICHAEL ONDAATJE, AND NICOLE BROSSARD

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1

Introduction: Discoveries of the Other

Exploring the relationship between self and other as textual figures of the unknown in a number of Canadian and Quebecois works of fiction, I could not but agree with the first sentence of Tzvetan Todorov's study, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other: 'My subject - the discovery self makes of the other - is so enormous that any general formulation soon ramifies into countless categories and directions/ Besides conveying a sense of consolation, however, this opening of the first chapter, 'The Discovery of America/ addresses at least two aspects of alterity that I shall be dealing with. On the one hand, the emphasis on a self-reflexive medium of discovery in conjunction with the other envisions a praxis of knowledge that is relational: it evokes potential alterations of both parties involved, announcing both the internal otherness that comes with self-reflection and the role of such a medium as condition for perceptions of the other. These reciprocal alterations, on the other hand, imply relationships that are measured on the scales of power and control. The term 'discovery,' in both Todorov's chapter title and his beginning, thus contrasts markedly with the term 'conquest' in the title of his book, posing the question of how closely the former is related to the latter. Do discoveries of the other inevitably motivate attempts at an imposition and extension of the self and of the same? Beyond the kind of moralistic overtones evoked by such an inquiry, a related question arises in the area of the possible epistemological strategies and choices that are played out in any encounter of knowledge with its limits, for which geographical discovery has provided many metaphors. To what extent may any exploration, even (and in particular) those searches that do not aim at the recognition of previously identified items, operate in the manner of an ambivalent 'apprehension' of the unknown other - in the various senses of that word? Are discoveries mainly or exclusively structured, and perhaps obstructed and

4

Discoveries of the Other

foreclosed, by needs for certainty (and fears of a disorienting loss of control) that impose the known categories of assimilation and eclipse the specific difference of the other? Before relating the issues of discovery and subjectivity to concerns in the area of language and to more specifically Canadian and Quebecois cultural grounds, let me offer a short preliminary sketch of two perspectives on the other, followed by a brief discussion of an example of the kind of text that has motivated this study. In a formal perspective that begins with what seems closest, the category of the other appears derived from a notion of the self and of identity. In a circular model of discovery and of identity, the movement of the self that lacks its complement (or is interrupted in its habitual knowledge or perception) leaves its known sphere to take cognizance of the other, and returns into its element. The optimism and intention that are implicit in such a model positing an identity of the unknown with the knowable - a model that seems to underlie most of our current praxes of knowledge - also suggest a narrative of progress from darkness to an even, unrestricted light. Discovery, however, does not necessarily imply an identification of the other. While we may think of discovery as the appearance of the other in the clear light provided by the categories of our knowledge, a further 'discovery of the other' may also remind us of the incongruity and difference that establish otherness as such. In contrast with a perspective that seeks to 'come to terms' with the object of its understanding in an adequation of its own thought with the being of the other, Emmanuel Levinas, for instance, brings a different intention to the fore, one that 'precisely, understands [entend] the remoteness, the alterity, and the exteriority of the other' (34).I The opposition between these two perspectives - which I will attempt to render, in a moment, more precisely as the distinction between the 'thetic' and the 'heterological' can be seen to animate the textual strategies of discovery in the works I shall discuss, and provides one motive for the plural of my title. No discovery appears final here: the question of the other constitutes the opening or gap of knowledge that sets these texts in motion; it also seems to return, however, in some form at their conclusion. And these unfinalized discoveries of the other are doubled, in a further plural, by another series that resembles the first. Since the erstwhile subject of the quest for knowledge, in its discoveries of the other, finds it difficult to return to a secure position, the supposed object of the inquiry begins to induce discoveries of a self that is also altered, time and again, by its discoveries of the other. This study began (or so I would like to think, in order to mark a point of reference in the realm of reading) with the experience of fascination and uncertainty conveyed by the relationship between the narrator and the main

Introduction

5

character in Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter. We are invited to witness a project of discovery that seems to concentrate on Buddy Bolden, a figure based upon the historical jazz cornet player by that name. Images of the New Orleans musician begin to appear. But the picture that at some point surfaces out of the acid tray under the eyes of a photographer and a detective (who appears here often as both a mise en abyme and a parody of the novelist in search of his story) is said to move in the opposite direction from the musician it portrays, who has disappeared in silence: 'Watching their friend float into the page smiling at them, the friend who in reality had reversed the process and gone back into white, who in this bad film seemed to have already half-receded with that smile which may not have been a smile at all, which may have been his mad dignity' (52-3). The enigmatic expression on Bolden's face and the aura of the photograph, readable in several ways yet not yielding their truth to discovery, are symptomatic. Eventually, the narrator admits that Bolden appeared differently to all those who knew him. Since these are the only views available to understanding, the novel shows the stories about Bolden to point outwards like the spokes of a rimless wheel. But beyond these discoveries of the other, the narrator will pose the question of his own motivation in this search - be it fascination or horror - that would have structured the quest for knowledge, and discovered and revealed moments of the T in the mirror image of the other. The T in Coming Through Slaughter traverses, indeed, a moment of specular identity with one of the images of its other. Significantly, however, it imagines Bolden as its other self at the moment of the musician's exit from the public stage, the end of his (narcissistic) self-constitution in the mirroring movement of his other - a dancing fan, in this case - and the mirror image of his fame. And while this moment of the end of recognition (and also of its traps) may constitute a recognition and an insight on the part of the discovering self, it is not the 'end' of the text - neither its last page nor its conclusion. Although the T has come through an imagined space and experience in the act of writing, it does not claim completed 'knowledge' either of the self or of the other. In spite of this inconclusiveness - or maybe because of it - the reader is invited to participate in a process of fascination that produces as many openended questions as answers. Coming Through Slaughter does offer images, stories, documents, and points of view - a kind of knowledge concerning Bolden. But simultaneously, the text seeks to 'produce' the local, specific circumstances of its partial evidence - both of its enunciatory context, and of its very materiality (the tapes, photographs, stories, and texts that appear or are described). In this textual process of discovery, the subject matter is shown to change with each observer, and with the process of understanding and signifi-

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Discoveries of the Other

cation that links one to the other. The variability of the impressions suggests, on the one hand, the active participation of the observing instance and the angle of perception. But since the text does not - unlike the detective plot it often parodies - pitch story against story in order to exclude false evidence, the eventual 'truth' or knowledge that the textual T attains with respect to the other does not claim to equal its object. In Levinas's terms, there remains a 'non-adequation' of thought to being, and thought - with the incomplete 'object' in which it finds its form - remains in the mode of what he calls 'infinition' (27). Since the other refers in Coming Through Slaughter to a historical figure, these unfinalized and self-reflexive explorations of 'the discovery self makes of the other' itself constitute in this case a hybrid space that has been discussed as 'historiographic metafiction' (see Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 61-77; A Poetics of Postmodernism 105-23). While the particular contexts of historical otherness and self-reflexive fiction make up only two specific (though very important) aspects of the wider inquiry into alterity I conduct, the much debated questions of both historiography and metafiction point to the non-transparency, inner logic, and materiality of language on the one hand, and to the discursive situation or context of enonciation on the other hand that play primordial roles in the constitution of self and other in language. Todorov's sentence itself offers an example of the former aspect in the difference between its English form and the French original which it has so far been assumed to correspond to unproblematically, yet which reveals a much more direct concern with the latter question. The 'discovery self makes of the other': through Richard Howard's transposition from the other language that brings its own perspective to bear on what it mediates (in particular by substituting the reflexive 'self for the pronoun T'), the Englishlanguage reader thus perceives indirectly Todorov's own opening sentence, which places a greater emphasis on the role of the discovering subject and its praxis of speech: 'Je veux parler de la decouverte que le je fait de I'autre' (11). Although this study will not restrict itself to the relationship between the other and the 'I/ Todorov's emphasis on the 'I/ and on the use of language speech or discourse - proves helpful since the T determines the deictic field of temporal and spatial 'pointing' in which the meaning of the 'here' and 'there/ the 'inside' and the 'outside/ and of the same and of the other are established in language. The T' has played, indeed, a primordial role in some of the discussions relevant to the questions I approach. If Todorov refers, in his unfolding of the T' and of the 'other/ to Rimbaud's '}e est un autre' (qtd 3),2 he points both to 'the other in ourselves' (3), and to the fact that we are not 'radically alien' to that which we perceive 'is not us' (3). But by referring

Introduction

7

to Rimbaud's famous phrase, Todorov also evokes the pronoun of the firstperson singular as the linguistic transport of that experience. A pronoun, indeed, not only stands in for another name, but represents in fact another kind of noun. The linguist Emile Benveniste, in his account of the non-lexical nature of personal pronouns, makes the shifting reference of the T explicit. It is linked to the context and the moment of its utterance (enonciation): 'I signifies "the person who is uttering the present instance of the discourse containing I"' (218). In his influential essay 'Subjectivity in Language,' he defines this mobile act of self-constitution as the principle of subjectivity as such, 'because language alone establishes the concept of the "ego" in reality, in its reality which is that of the being' (224). In Benveniste's perspective, subjectivity appears as 'the capacity of the speaker to posit himself as "subject"' (224). In opposition to notions of human 'essence,' Benveniste's concentration on subjectivity as a discursive phenomenon emphasizes the fact that subjectivity is produced under specific circumstances (and amenable to change and contextually variable), and provides a useful focus for textual study. But it also poses considerable problems. The far-reaching identification of discursive reality and being - both in the formulation above and in his apodictic equation '"Ego" is he who says "ego"' (224) ('Est "ego" qui dit "ego"' [260]) - declares itself by definition not concerned with the speaking subject who produces the subject in speech,^ and thus with concepts of extralinguistic subjectivity. Furthermore, Benveniste's discursive T' has inherited, from a Cartesian philosophical tradition, dominating and subsuming tendencies with respect to that which it is not. Although the discursive T' is only possible through the complement of the 'you,' and while each speaker takes up in turn the position of the subject, this 'polarity does not mean either equality or symmetry: "ego" always has a position of transcendence with regard to you' (225). If Benveniste refers here to a plurality of subjects, the '"interior/exterior" opposition' (225) of the T' and of the 'you' seems, qua subjectivity, inevitably dominated by the first term, the perspective proper to the T.' But such formulations of the dominance of the subject in language with respect to its objects or 'complements,' as well as the linguistic concentration on the visible subject in speech, lead to strategies that seek to delineate (albeit in language) the perspectival limit and determination we seem to re-enact with each sentence. Julia Kristeva, for instance, refers to Husserl's term 'thetic' in order to address the notion (implicit in Benveniste's formulation) that the T is produced itself as part of the sentence, together with the 'you' or with the object, by an instance outside language. In Kristeva's reading of

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Discoveries of the Other

Husserl's judging consciousness, 'the ego as support of the predicative act ... does not operate as the ego-cogito ... rather ... it takes shape within the predicative operation. This operation is thetic because it simultaneously posits the thesis (position) of both Being and ego' (Desire in Language 130). Kristeva's suggestion that 'thesis [is] above all a thesis of the "I"' (Revolution in Poetic Language 36) directs us toward the outside of the thetic act. An error by the translator only points to our almost 'natural' tendency to interpret the possible double genitive - 'thesis of the "I"' - from the ego's point of view. While Kristeva writes, 'Et alors, la question ne doit-elle pas porter sur ce qui produit le "je"' [what produces the T] (La Revolution du langage poetique 35), the translation inverts subject and object in the relative clause: 'Therefore, shouldn't the question be what the "I" produces' (36). The continuation of the passage insists precisely on another procedure: 'Far from positing the judging "I" as origin, for us such a question merely places the thetic and the doxic within the signifying process that goes beyond them' (36).4 While Kristeva proceeds to theorize, from this limit, articulations of the signifying process that are heterogeneous to meaning (the pre-thetic, and what she calls the semiotic chora), I have tried to investigate the movement of the thetic toward its limit from the inside. I have opted for that perspective since I assume that no discursive praxis itself can step outside the horizon that constitutes its limit and reality (at least not without abandoning that minimal denominator of translatability and relational correspondence between different thetic moments that may separate it from schizophrenia). And yet, while this limit cannot be crossed (out) and bridged, it has to be approached and negotiated in each contact with the other. In the pages that follow, I shall use the term 'thetic' (in Kristeva's acceptation) in order to indicate the simultaneous and interdependent production of the T' and of the other, as well as the limit and horizon of this process of predication and naming. I have found the term 'heterology' useful in order to refer to textual strategies that (a) question the discursive dominance of the T' (i.e., the subject of speech) over its 'complements' or 'objects/ and (b) orient themselves toward that which lies outside the thetic operation - without claiming to determine it. While the term heterology is directly related to the notion of heterogeneity, its second half refers to a form of logos: speech or thought. The relationship between the two parts of the word, however, allows for different interpretations, and the term has, indeed, recently been used in two different if related ways - the second of which will prove ultimately more important for the perspective chosen in this study. In a first sense, Todorov employs 'heterology/ in his study Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogic Principle, in order to

Introduction

9

translate Bakhtin's 'raznorechie' (rendered by Emerson and Holquist, in The Dialogic Imagination, as 'heteroglossia'), which refers to an 'irreducible diversity of discursive types' (Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin 56). In his essay 'Discourse in the Novel/ Bakhtin thus mentions 'authorial speech, the speech of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters' (The Dialogic Imagination 263) as 'heterogeneous stylistic unities' (with their internal stratifications) that interact to form a stylistic 'unity that cannot be identified with any single one of the unities subordinated to it' (262). In this interaction, Bakhtin sees the stylistic uniqueness of the novel as a genre [which] consists precisely in the combination of these subordinated, yet still relatively autonomous, unities ... into the higher unity of the work as a whole: the style of a novel is to be found in the combination of its styles; the language of a novel is the system of its 'languages.' (262)

In this sense, the heterological would refer to a space that comprises different sign systems, and produces meaning between them as an inter-discursivity parallel to the 'intertextuality' that Kristeva coined in her presentation of Bakhtin (Desire in Language 64-91), and defined later as the 'transposition of one (or several) sign system(s) into another' (Revolution 59-60). Todorov thus writes in Literature and Its Theorists: 'Rather than "construction" or "architectonics," the literary work is above all a heterology, a plurality of voices, an echo and anticipation of discourses past and to come; it is both a crossroads and a meeting place' (86). This insistence on the context in which words are uttered and received, which characterizes Bakhtin's notion of dialogism in the wider sense (Todorov reserves it for the relationship between two speakers, and for Bakhtin's concept of personality [Mikhail Bakhtin 60]), will play a role in the following discussion since it envisages the relationship of the thetic with its boundaries, both with other identifiable discourses, and with those future ones by which it will be read, and which it may enable. But while heterology can thus be taken to refer to the interaction of different forms of speech viewed from the outside, it can also refer to an orientation of speech or thought that addresses itself, as it were from the inside, that which is heterogeneous to it: a discourse of the unknown that marks its own incompletion and dependency, and seeks to construct, to comprehend, or to follow or to avoid, the unknown other appearing at its conscious boundary. This is the perspective of a discovery that does not (and maybe never will) encompass the other beyond its own horizon, an other that has to be thought of as heterogeneous with respect to the known (and to the self) lest it be taken for granted as the always already known. In this sense, as Rodolphe

10 Discoveries of the Other Gasche, suggests, heterology 'means "science of" or "discourse on" the Other' (ioo).5 The term heterology has become important in a philosophical debate that has taken shape in particular around the role of the other, negation, and negativity in Hegelian dialectics. This discussion is motivated, more specifically, by the suspicion that Hegel's dialectical movement can only accommodate those questions to which - in principle - the answer is already known. Since the other is always already determined - as negation - on the ground and in the categories of that which it negates, it appears homologous with the negated term (rather than heterogeneous to it). In this perspective, the 'discovery of the other' would not really leave the map of the known, because it would ultimately 'locate' the other inside the confines and the thesis of the known. Heterologies entertain therefore oblique relationships of negativity (rather than symmetrical negation) with respect to the known, and with such processes that Stephen Slemon describes, in a specifically post-colonial context and with reference to Gayatri Spivak's term 'othering,' as 'the projection of one's own systemic codes onto the "vacant" or "uninscribed" territory of the other' (7). To some extent, however, the thinking of the other involves by necessity a preliminary mapping of the unknown in terms of the perspectives proper to T.' More problematically (as I shall argue in particular in the chapters on Aquin), this logic also holds for the appropriated perspectives themselves that try to envision liberating alternatives to their complex predicaments, whether they have been 'othered' by inherited thetic definitions in general or more specifically by a textuality that, as Helen Tiffin suggests (again in a postcolonial context), 'constructed these worlds, "reading" their alterity assimilatively in terms of their own cognitive codes' (38). Heterological strategies thus engage a dilemma of negation that, to my mind, any concept of counterdiscourse has to take into account.7 While thinking cannot abandon the categories by which it itself exists as such (lest it become other to itself, either radically as silence, or in forms marked as non-thought), both the measuring of the existing other and the anticipation of (for instance Utopian) otherness through the symmetrically inverted grid of the same produce the treacherous visibility of projection that eclipses the other as such. In a philosophical context, in the words of Vincent Descombes, the issue hinges on the question of whether the same can become 'other with the other' (13). It is the perception that the philosophy perfected by Hegelian sublation and dialectics submits everything in its purview to a process of specular identification (with the mirror image of the same) that motivates formulations of its limit. Rodolphe Gasche sees it as an 'attempt to domesticate Otherness' (101), and uses the

Introduction

11

term heterology as a name for various strategies that seek to address and resist that impulse in Western philosophy (101). While I cannot follow here the specifically philosophical intricacies of that complex debate, I have adopted the term heterology in order to distinguish between two aspects of alterity. Whereas the ego of the thetic operation posits and comprehends the other as its other in its gaze and specular image (and defines its own position and identity together with that of its object), the other of heterology remains exterior to this figuration. As soon as it is posited, this other seems to insist on its alterity (its 'identity' as other), and beckons the 'V to follow its dislocating movement. Although the texts I shall discuss investigate questions of knowledge with respect to the other, they do not, to use a formulation by Jean-Frangois Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition (to which I will return), seem 'to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented' (81). These texts, like Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, thrive on the impossibility of coming to terms with the other - of negotiating a final definition of the relationship between self and other. In their movement that exceeds the thetic predication of the other, and in their exploration and partial 'discovery' of the T that is posited with respect to its other, these 'fictions' produce the other and the 'I' as entities continually 'made' (factum] in their textual practice. One important caveat is nevertheless in order before approaching, in the context of this problematic, a corpus of specific texts. A high frequency of the first-person singular in texts is certainly not by necessity indicative of a heterological outlook. The T' has, for instance, played the role of the very centre in which thought assimilates the other to its categories. Levinas, a champion of the heterological perspective, perceives the T' thus in its Cartesian form: 'The I is identical in its very alterations. It represents them to itself and thinks them. The universal identity in which the heterogeneous can be embraced has the ossature of a subject, of the first person. Universal thought is an I think' (36). By contrast, however, the T as a subject in language can also become the medium of a mobility that follows the enigma of the other without confining it to the known. The distinction is often delicate. Michel de Certeau's essay 'Montaigne's "Of Cannibals": The Savage "I"' - in his work significantly entitled Heterologies: Discourse on the Other - locates Montaigne's essay in a heterological tradition 'in which the discourse about the other is a means of constructing a discourse authorized by the other' (68). While the subject here claims the validity of its speech and creates a space of its own - which it must do qua (thetic) speech - it also comes into existence, as a subject in speech, with respect to an elusive other, and in 'relation to that which it is unable to appropriate' (73). While the word of the other, in Mon-

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Discoveries of the Other

taigne's text, draws increasingly closer to the 'place of production of the text that "cites" it' (78), an irreducible distance keeps the text 'permanently behind the word it cites and follows' (78). The T itself becomes 'a multiple, iconoclastic passer-by' (79) in the space of this text, 'adequate' only to an other who appears and yet remains outside a specular identification that would leave the T in its place. De Certeau thus studies a movement in which the self and an elusive other emerge interdependently, in a text that is constructed by that very operation of continual mutual definition and dislocation. It is this relationship between the self and the other, mapped in a space between the moment of the thetic and the questions of heterology, that T have tried to follow, and to 'hear and understand' (entendre), in the texts by the two English-Canadian and two Quebecois authors I discuss. Coming Through Slaughter seems only one striking example, in this perspective, of Ondaatje's willingness, as he put it in his 'Introduction' to The Long Poem Anthology, 'to be governed by curiosity' (11). Like Coming Through Slaughter, his other long works indicate both the need to situate the self in discoveries of the other, and a refusal of definition in this respect. Such a heterological mode of exploration, resisting definitive discovery of determinate knowledge while paying close attention to the specular implications of alterity, links Ondaatje's work with that of a writer a few years his elder, Leonard Cohen. But while Cohen's writings offer many parallels, they also invite consideration of further and different dimensions of alterity and heterology. If I begin, in the following chapter, with an exploration of self and other in his work, this choice is facilitated by the fact that Ondaatje's only extended critical study discusses Cohen's work, and comments in particular on Cohen's attention to the production of objectifying self-images mediated by others. Ondaatje directs us here also to the public dimension of Cohen's exploration of images of the writing self, that is, not only to the self-reflexive questions of literary performance that play a privileged role in a postmodern problematic (see Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 26) but also to the place that (non-artistic, public) reason often constructs for those praxes that make an exploration of the boundaries between self and other their very business. (In this context, it is no coincidence that asylums occur as settings, for instance, in Coming Through Slaughter, Beautiful Losers, and Prochain Episode, and that questions of 'unreason' are constantly at stake in the heterologies studied here, since articulations of the opposition between reason and madness generally take recourse to those between sameness and difference, and between self and other). Throughout his work, I would argue, Cohen has performed an ongoing

Introduction

13

research into grammars of self and other, and related in particular the 'various positions' (as the title of one of his albums has it) of a very mobile self to questions of address and the reason(ing)s of community's self-construction. Cohen's first, unpublished novel, 'A Ballet of Lepers,' explores the need (and ultimate failure) of a self-righteous consciousness to define, and exclude, an inferior other in order to establish its own boundaries. While Cohen's bestknown work of fiction, Beautiful Losers, questions similar boundaries to such an extent that it has been called just about everything from 'bankrupt and derivative' (Waddington 17) to 'a gorgeous novel' (Ondaatje, Leonard Cohen 45), it can also be read as a textbook on the power of naming and being named, on the need for, and the often prohibitive cost of, the thetic moment as an always specific, interdependent production of other and self. The initial speaker in Beautiful Losers begins explicitly with a question concerning the name and identity of his addressee - 'Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you?' in order to locate (to 'place') himself with respect to this other inscribed in the contexts of history and religion. Then, however, the novel proceeds to explore the acts of naming by (and of) the self, and in particular the implications of the baptism of the Iroquois other by the Jesuits. Very early in the novel, the T remarks: 'The French gave the Iroquois their name. Naming food is one thing, naming a people is another' (6). Here as elsewhere in Cohen's work, we are invited to consider the power of the thetic to diminish or erase the difference between objects and beings (with the faculty of posing their own perspective). By contrast, a heterological perspective risks its own certainty. Leaving the other its being, it abandons the delimitation of objects as definitive knowledge. By engaging for instance Edouard Lecompte's biography of Tekakwitha and, more generally, Jesuit historiography in an idiosyncratic act of counterdiscourse, Cohen's text opens up a specifically Quebecois and Canadian context (comparable in several aspects to Ondaatje's different engagement with Toronto history - or absence thereof in a sense - in In the Skin of a Lion). If Beautiful Losers evokes aspects of a national thematics, however, these entertain a problematic relationship not only with concepts of 'identity'; the text complicates also notions of 'the' post-colonial condition by offering considerations that go beyond those gauging the fate suffered by La Nouvelle France at the hand of the English, the continuing impact of both imperial founding nations on Quebec and the rest of Canada, or the perceived neo-imperialist impact of the United States. The aspects of colonial domination that come to the fore in this text include furthermore, as Linda Hutcheon has pointed out (Splitting Images 73), the French imperial role with respect to the indigenous population (whose internal differences are henceforth thetically homogenized

14

Discoveries of the Other

and othered as 'native'); yet a heterological imagination also extends such relationships here into the ecological realm and even asks the reader, in heterological hyperbole, to imagine the revenge of unconscious matter on (impositions of the self. Listen to the universal (self-)accusation - albeit ironically distanced - by F., the guru and Quebec separatist in Beautiful Losers: The English did to us what we did to the Indians, and the Americans did to the English what the English did to us. I demanded revenge for everyone. I saw cities burning, I saw movies falling into blackness. I saw the maize on fire. I saw the Jesuits punished. I saw the trees taking back the long-house roofs. I saw the shy deer murdering to get their dresses back. I saw the Indians punished. I saw chaos eat the gold roof of Parliament. I saw water dissolve the hoofs of drinking animals. I saw ... the gas stations swallowed up entire, highway after highway falling into the wild swamps. (199-200)

To a certain point, such staged indictments - in fact Cohen's entire novel can be profitably read from the perspective of a post-colonial problematic. The rich potential, however, that opens up at the intersections between the implications of post-colonial perspectives on the one hand and the interplay between thetic and heterological strategies of alterity on the other hand, would be foreclosed by short-circuiting or simply identifying the two. In Cohen's case, one of the lines I have tried to adumbrate links his usually ironic but also often mystic patterns of heterology to the - in turn highly mediated - connection with his Montreal Jewish background. In the very pursuit of that link, however, it quickly becomes clear that it is also hardly possible to treat Cohen's work in any simple way as 'representative' of a segment of this multicultural and often conflicted city (which is also Aquin's and Brossard's background) in the sense that it would speak about the concerns of, or for, a homogeneous group. Not only because of its controversial positions at least in the earlier texts discussed here, but also in its thematic concerns, address, and audience appeal, Cohen's work exceeds considerably the particular context from which it draws, as I shall argue, much strength and inspiration. In this sense I do not claim either that the other writers I discuss are 'representative' of identities or problematics defined in contexts of ethnicity or multiculturalism, two other categories that implicate (like the postcolonial) questions of alterity in many complex ways. While both these terms seem to stress, at a first glance, thetic aspects of alterity (the word 'multiculturalism' lends itself to particularly diverse interpretations in this respect), they provide a wide array of questions relevant - though to various degrees, depending on one's definitions - to many of the texts under scrutiny here. Yet the serious study of questions that begin with categories contingent on

Introduction

15

group identities and their definitions would require, for instance, a differently focused examination of the logic and rhetoric of cultural 'representation/ a detailed re-evaluation of the problems of 'thematic criticism/ and also suggest the exploration of a wider corpus (and/or a very careful approach to the logic of 'examples') and perhaps a greater emphasis on other types of discourse. As in the case of the post-colonial problematic, the intersections between such concepts and the category of alterity (with its thetic and heterological aspects) call for a program of research9 rather than for a conflation. While I obviously do draw on texts that have specific affinities to particular Quebecois and Canadian contexts, the corpus I discuss is intended to follow certain lines that offer different perspectives on questions of alterity. One such differentiating similarity emerges, for instance, when the model of thetic and heterological aspects of alterity is turned in the light of a direct link between Beautiful Losers and Hubert Aquin's first novel. Prochain Episode appears shortly before Beautiful Losers and features, like Cohen's novel, a separatist revolutionary who is regarded as criminally insane and finds himself in a Montreal asylum. Cohen often delineates a self-imprisonment (in a metaphorical sense) of the naming 'I/ yet has his revolutionary, the 'mystic wit' (37) F., subject himself to a simultaneously excluded and paradoxically 'exclusive' space in which the Indian 'head-piercer' Oscotarach can work on the thetic divisions of the brain 'as a necessary preparation for immortality': 'I had to apply to public wards in pursuit of my own operation' (196). In contexts of social domination, however, the defined, 'othered' self does not seem to have much of a choice - at least not at a first glance. Yet from this position of a self that experiences its own perspective prescribed and reified by an antagonistic other, the distinction between a thetic form of alterity and a heterology becomes particularly urgent. Unless a heterological otherness can be envisioned that is indeed heterogeneous to the categories and to the ground that posit the given self and the known other, a 'discourse authorized by the other' (de Certeau 68) would lead only to more of the same. But while the other of heterology, for that reason, cannot be found in a symmetrical inversion - the homologous negation - of a given self or of its antagonistic other, it seems as if any effort to conceptualize genuine otherness first has to do battle with the pitfalls of symmetry. This problem is given prominence by the specific perspective on Quebecois separatism that comes to the fore in Aquin's writings. His work shows the impact, in this respect, of a Sartrean concept of alterity that also influenced many of the discourses of decolonization in the fifties and early sixties (which, in turn, played an important role in Quebec's Quiet Revolution). For Sartre, the other (though he capitalizes the term) is identical with the object of the thetic operation. But the pos-

16

Discoveries of the Other

ited object of the other also implies, in Sartre's view, the apprehension of a symmetrical, inverse definition of the self under the other's gaze and judgment. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre's notion of human freedom appears closely linked to the ability to nihilate thetic knowledge that can state the truth only of what has been, and of what has been perceived in its completed objecthood (in contrast to a human project and praxis not accessible to knowledge in the strict sense). Aquin similarly formulates a need to break with the very terms that structure an adversarial context of domination and colonization when he suggests, in his essay 'Profession: ecrivain,' abandoning a 'dialogue dormne-dominateur/ and thus refusing speech from a position inside established meaning and its known distinctions: 'Faire la revolution ... a proprement parler, c'est divaguer' (Point de fuite 53). While we see, in Prochain Episode, the psychiatrically confined narrator in the process of inventing a powerful alter ego (who, in turn, pursues an adversarial other), the novel is thus haunted by the question of whether this projected, inverse mirror of the powerless self may actually have been foreseen (and pre-scribed) by the logic of defeat that defines the narrator's confinement. If Prochain Episode refuses the completion of a spy novel's quest (and refers in its title, like Aquin's subsequent novel, Trou de memoire, to a negative mode of knowledge), it also averts the completed definition of the self in terms of the dominant oppositions, and withdraws the heterological other from the sphere of prescribed knowledge. Nicole Brossard pursues similar textual and political concerns about a 'prochain episode' in a feminist context. As in the case of Aquin's perspective of decolonization, Brossard's texts engage the double problematic of both thetic alterity and heterology. 'Woman' as the other of a male-dominated discursive construction contrasts here with the possibility of an other woman or an other 'being woman' ('etre femme'). While Aquin's project of 'divaguer' brings unreason to the signification of self and other (and subjects that very distinction to undecidability) in order to unhinge internalized Quebecois patterns of thought that reflect and entrench domination by an other, Brossard's work interrogates the dichotomies sense/nonsense and fiction/reality (see Godard, 'Nicole Brossard' 123) with respect to their distribution of self and other in male-dominated meaning. But Brossard also tackles the 'terms' of posited meaning literally, by transgressing the limit of syntax and lexicon in her approach to a figuration of female subjectivity in language. Her title Picture theory alerts us to an inquiry into the possibilities of what can be seen, thought, and said; her writing aims, however, at a virtual other beyond a representation of the given, and resists the 'penchant "naturel" a refaire le meme' (Picture theory 107).

Introduction

17

In Brossard's earlier work, L'Amer, as in Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter and Running in the family, the question of self and other is posed explicitly in the image of a paradoxical mirror that reveals more than one image. Superimpositions of self and other occur, paralleled by differentiating (or doubling) tendencies, in varying degrees in Beautiful Losers, Prochain Episode, and Trou de memoire. But simultaneously, an unseen, heterological other is alluded to beyond these momentarily or partially posited symmetries. Whether the other is an already effective, yet still hidden, determining factor, or a not-yet-existing, possible mediation, these texts spell out questions beyond a thetic equation comparable to the mirror stage, beyond a repetition of the self and of the other in their sameness. In his early text 'Author and Hero/ Bakhtin remarks that the very sameness of the mirror image does not reveal 'a unitary and unique soul - a second participant is implicated in the event of self-contemplation, a fictitious other, a nonauthoritative and unfounded author. I am not alone when I look at myself in the mirror: I am possessed by someone else's soul' (33). But this process of a dialogic engendering of the self would also seem at work in the discovery of the other (to whom we attribute a sameness authored in the context of our perception). To pose the question of how the interdependent images of self and other are authored means to differentiate their seemingly 'natural' identities. I obviously do not mean to imply that these identities do not exist. They are part and parcel of the thetic process. Against the facile dismissal of the dichotomy of self and other, Paul Smith (referring us to both Adorno's Negative Dialectics and Derrida's remarks to the same effect) observes in his study Discerning the Subject: 'This venerable opposition or dialectic between "subject" and object, between self and other, does not seem readily susceptible to being radically overturned. The dialectic between the internal and the external will not quite go away, and the human species is not prone to think itself except with some version of that opposition' (xxviii). But in Homi K. Bhabha's analysis of the other in colonial discourse, for instance, we have also been reminded of the possible close connection between the repetition and 'fixity' (18) of such oppositions and the stereotype as a both powerful and blinding reality. Bhabha refers to the stereotype as a 'form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always "in place" ... and something that must be anxiously repeated' (18). Between this fixity and the abandonment of representational figuration, the works I shall discuss open the fascinating space between the making and the undoing of thetic and interdependent images of self and other, and explore their boundaries and limits. How, then, does the self see the other? Or does it, inversely, imagine itself in the gaze of the other it imagines, either recognizing a positive nomination

i8

Discoveries of the Other

here, or fleeing a dreaded fixation? Is the figure of the other, in these texts, a completion of the image of the self? A fascinating and appealing pole in a narrative that moves toward either a subsumption of or an identification with the other? Or does the other maintain its 'identity' as other, heterogeneous to the knowledge of a self that seeks to determine its own place? While the corpus I have chosen to explore such questions consists of Quebecois and English-Canadian texts, I have not endeavoured to establish an essential relationship between the textual strategies of otherness I study, and qualities posited as 'Canadian' or 'Quebecois.' It seems possible to argue, however, that the Canadian and Quebecois discursive spaces in which these works were written offer, in many cases, a particularly propitious ground for a study of alterity,10 since the other (nation, ethnic group, or language) seems to be always immediately present (and narratives of national identity are less homogeneously adhered to than, for example, south of the border). Limits and borders are often seen, in Canada and Quebec, to mark as much an outer boundary as an inner condition. In an international (English-) CanadianAmerican comparative perspective, Russell Brown suggests, for instance, that 'Canadians ... see the border as somehow self-defining' ('Crossing Borders' 154). Canada's border, in this respect, does not simply distinguish between self and other in a clear exclusion of the outside: 'Canada is a border land, and to live here is to experience a "being between"' (155). But 'border consciousness' (Brown, Borderlines and Borderlands in English Canada 14) is certainly also pre-eminent in a 'Canadian' comparative perspective (that deals with the literatures of the nation-state Canada). When Ted Blodgett refers to 'border country' in his study Configuration, he means the place where 'the fences of speech stand' (34), including those between English and French. While Blodgett suggests that to 'preserve that border is, paradox as it may appear, the national Canadian task/ he also turns, in a helpful move away from an exclusive confrontation of the two charter groups, to a model of 'a multinational society where one is always at home and abroad' (34). While the writers I have chosen for my corpus work in either English or French, the multiplicity of languages as a place of crossroads with the other is evident, on a very obvious level, in the recurrence of polyglossia in their texts. Aquin's narrator's fascination with Joan's English in Trou de memoire, Brossard's often bilingual texts and English titles, Cohen's (often playful) use of French, Iroquois, and Greek in Beautiful Losers, Ondaatje's reference to Sinhalese in Running in the family, or his extensive thematization of the immigrants' language experiences in In the Skin of a Lion, bear abundant witness to a multilingual space. But Robert Kroetsch, for instance, draws our attention also to the presence of several languages inside the French and

Introduction

19

English languages in Canada and Quebec (The Lovely Treachery of Words 52). In 'Unhiding the Hidden/ Kroetsch reads the English-Canadian indebtedness via language to both British and American experience in the context of Heidegger's remarks about the concealed presence of the Greek word in the Latin one (The Lovely Treachery 58), and opens up the double space of both an already effective and a potential other language inside the realm of one and the same language - the space of the unidentical other inside the apparent sameness of the self. The existence of a multiple geography of language - and the implication of an other space inside what appears to be home territory - can be emphatically greeted, or energetically refused, according to the perceived value of the other. But both identification with and the inverse exclusion of the other find their alternative in a tendency toward an undoing of the thetic, toward the border of the territory mapped by conceptual oppositions. Kroetsch, in what could be called his narrative of an (English-Canadian) national heterology, observes, 'in the Canadian writers whom I know personally, a peculiar will towards silence. Something that on the surface looks like a will towards failure' (The Lovely Treachery 54). He turns from the thetic dimensions of the southern border and the (British) past to an other space that, although first defined in opposition to the south, symbolizes what is inimical to definition: 'This silence - this impulse towards the natural, the uncreated, if you will - is summed up by the north. The north is not a typical American frontier, a natural world to be conquered and exploited. Rather, in spite of inroads, it remains a true wilderness, a continuing presence. We don't want to conquer it. Sometimes we want it to conquer us ... It presses southward into the Canadian consciousness' (54). Kroetsch thus evokes another kind of borderland - the other of a thetic other - when he suggests that the 'settled part of Canada becomes a borderland ... and a borderland is a place of interaction' (54). The attitude toward the other that appears in Kroetsch's view of the north - although I do not want to suggest a causal relationship between this geographical and cultural narrative and the work of the writers I am going to discuss - is paradigmatic of any subjectivity that does not view itself as the controlling instance of meaning, or strive to emulate what is perceived of as an other, established position of power. Kroetsch's paradoxical conclusion that 'in our very invisibility lies our chance for survival' (57) seems an interesting comment on any marginal strategy that does not wish to repeat itself in the image of the dominant other. In this respect English-Canadian literature, 'being dominated by a strong external presence' (Bennett 17), has to deal with problems of external

2O

Discoveries of the Other

determinations similar to those any Quebecois and any feminist voice encounters in compounded form - voices often marginalized in many senses, like that of Aquin's incarcerated revolutionary, or the lesbian feminist writing of Nicole Brossard. Although Brossard, for instance, is 'working against a language that makes women invisible' (Brossard, 'Feminization' 4) - and would likely take issue with Kroetsch's statement if unmodified - her work shares its resistance to determinacy and definition with other marginal strategies; it refuses, to use a formulation by Toril Moi, 'to become another enactment of the inexorable logic of the Same' (Moi 143). The impossibility of defining, in terms of oppositions that are felt to belong to a degraded reality, that which exists only as potential possibility occurs in Brossard's figure of 'celle par qui tout peut arriver' (Picture theory 165), and in the unidentifiable other at the end of Prochain Episode; it is addressed as well by Cohen's old man whose 'presence was like the shape of an hourglass, strongest where it was smallest' (258), and by the silence and absence that pervade Ondaatje's Buddy Bolden, supposedly New Orleans' loudest musician in his time. These figures, on the border of definition, the other of a posited other, allude to an unknown shape, a heterology. Defined by a complete equation with a thought that claims their being, these forms would lose what makes them real. The enigma of the other brings the text into being; but these figures that remain unknown (although they play their active part) also 'represent' in the text what remains outside the identification by thought, be it praxis and a prochain episode, the perspective of another T (and thus another story), or the realm outside signification. They remind knowledge of its other, by marking the limit of a dialectical quest for 'the other as a threat to be reduced, as a potential same-to-be, a yet-not-same' (Godzich, 'The Further Possibility of Knowledge' xiii).

2

Hailed by Koan: Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss

POET, PRIEST, AND PROPHET: COMMUNITY AND THE PRODUCTION OF THE OTHER

The ubiquity of the first-person singular in Cohen's work, from the 1956 publication of Let Us Compare Mythologies on, has sometimes overshadowed a perplexing oscillation and indefinite quality at its core. The oftennoted T-presence' (Gnarowski 4) and self-centredness (Scobie, Leonard Cohen 11) in Cohen's texts have been both admired1 and loathed. At the same time, this very insistence on the mobile pronoun signifier of the self and on a voice that frequently addresses us directly coincides, in many of the texts, with a curious absence of a determinate position we could easily identify or name. I will try to show that Cohen's textual choices in this respect constitute heterologial strategies that, while they rely often heavily on irony, are neither arbitrary nor despairing; rather, I will argue, they result from a conscientious search for positions from which poetic speech can meaningfully approach conditions of self and otherness. The patterns of disappearance and negativity employed by Cohen have left critics in disagreement. Desmond Pacey, for instance, identifies the 'voluntary loss of self for some higher cause' (88) as the main theme of Beautiful Losers, while Sandra Djwa reads the end of that novel as a (less positive) escape from the 'human predicament' in the 'Black Romantic' tradition (Djwa 104). Stephen Scobie responds to both these interpretations by countering that 'for "I" himself there is no "higher" cause for which the self is lost: the cause is the loss of self, which may be viewed as an answer to, rather than an escape from, the human predicament' ('Magic, not Magicians' 107). Linda Hutcheon similarly objects to Pacey's view and argues that the loss of self 'certainly gives way to nothing positive on a private or public level' ('All

22

Discoveries of the Other

the Polarities' 48). Her emphasis on 'the ironic tone of the novel' (48), however, contrasts with Scobie's assertion in this early article (developed in a comparison with Story of 'O'} that Cohen's attacks on a traditional construction of personality would equal 'the deliberate attempt to destroy one's own individuality' (106).2 An ironic assertion of multiple positions around the figure of negation indeed accommodates important aspects of Cohen's Ts (that never stay where we expect them to). Historically, in fact, the use of irony as a controlling strategy has provoked comments like Scobie's. Irony's bad press, from Hegel's indictment of it as schlechte Unendlichkeit (bad infinitude) to Wayne Booth's construction of the figure in its 'unstable form' as a despairing principle,3 clearly finds its echo also in Dennis Lee's assessment of Cohen's elusive textual selves. In contrast to many others, Lee, in his intriguing essay Savage Fields, does make the connection of the overwhelming presence of the many Ts with the disappearance and the loss of the one. In an elegiac lament for a pre-Nietzschean numinous presence, Lee sums up what he applauds as Cohen's achievement in Beautiful Losers: the successful demonstration of the failure of consciousness to undo its own unmediated, mastering tendencies,4 an interior 'psychomacheia' (92) grinding to a halt because consciousness so completely voids itself of any positive content that a preoccupation with this very process becomes its last remaining essence: 'Radical freedom means a plethora of alienated selves, free-floating I-systems, mocking a self which has been unselved of all but the will to create itself (Savage Fields 100). What Lee interprets as Cohen's effort to recover from this 'success' in the third part of the novel, therefore, would represent Cohen's failure to recognize his own achievement (95). But perhaps Lee himself fails to recognize part of his own contradictory project when he laments the bitterness of a 'radical freedom' that results from the absence of 'any pattern for being human which has absolute sanction' (99-100).5 The recognition of such a predicament could initiate a first step toward overcoming the very violence he diagnoses, with a reinterpretation of Heidegger's term 'world,' in all consciousness: 'Thinking proceeds by objectifying and mastering what is to be thought' (no). Irony offers a possible alternative to Lee's elegiac mode in order to speak in the absence of reliable meta-narratives guaranteed by 'absolute sanction' (which offer a prime example of the subsuming kind of thinking Lee rightly deplores). Lee's 'tasks for thinking' - to 'think the partial incoherence of world's project, coherently' (no) - have been engaged, for instance, in particular by a form of irony that we have come to call Romantic. Friedrich Schlegel, who played an important role in this reinterpretation of the classical trope of irony, celebrated 'self-creation' and 'self-destruction' as complemen-

Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss 23 tary necessities in the process of artistic creation and thought (Lyceum fragments 28 and 37 [Schlegel 149,151]). In his Athendum fragments 51 and 121 (Schlegel 172-3,184-5), ne considered irony as the highest level of this complex process. Schlegel recognizes the hubris inherent in totalizing assertions and claims to unqualified truth, as well as the stifling effect of complete systems: 'Es ist gleich todlich fur den Geist, ein System zu haben, und keins zu haben' (Athendum fragment 53 [Schlegel 173]; 'It is equally deadly for the spirit [Gefsf] to have a system, and to have none'). Like the anti-Hegelian tradition insisting on the incongruence of thought and being (from which Lee takes his Heideggerian clue), Schlegel's form of irony challenges the certainties of a self that unconditionally relies on systems and their truths.6 But this irony breaks the circle of absolute knowledge and self-knowledge without necessarily resulting in a 'bitter' freedom. Similarly, Cohen's mobile and elusive 'I,' a shifter that, paradoxically, often seems to accomplish what Lee calls for, unsettles willingly self-knowledge and certainties of the other time and again. It is perhaps true that Cohen's work often invites us not so much to think 'partial incoherence ... coherently' (as Lee wishes) as to ponder partially coherent ways in which to address the heterogeneity that being and the other maintain with respect to thought and knowledge. In this way, however, Cohen's subject in language enables heterologies that resist 'mastering what is to be thought' (Lee no). While Dennis Lee indicates the 'now' of the sixties and seventies as reference for the 'unsettling vision of order in our planet' (4) that he calls 'savage fields' (4), a more specific setting for a self that becomes particularly pronounced when it is 'loosened' or 'treed' from unproblematic identifications can be found in Cohen's relationship with the Jewish religious tradition7 and in his ambiguous connectedness with the Montreal Jewish community.8 Cohen's 'neurotic affiliations'9 with his Montreal background, however, are also mediated by broader 'disaffiliations.' Michael Gnarowski identifies, as one of the formative contexts of Cohen's work, the values associated with the beat movement. These values are 'typified by social attitudes which are best described as shifty saintliness and a terribly mobile sense of the self (2). In the mid-fifties, Gnarowski writes, the literary system thus faced the 'idea and practice of disaffiliation which invaded its vocabulary and its writing' (2). The loss of an old, defined self, however, and the mistrust of systematic coherence often inherent in such disaffiliations, can become highly productive in the context of positive views of irony (such as Schlegel's). It may be doubtful whether the 'central consciousness' (Lee 94) of Beautiful Losers, for instance, is successful in what Lee calls the 'quest' (94) that would lead to a 'final enlightenment' (93) in the novel. But the very notions of loss (evoked in the

24

Discoveries of the Other

title of Beautiful Losers], of success and failure, and of strength and weakness take on new meanings in the context of a re-evaluated negativity that comes with the acknowledgment of a necessary limit of knowledge, thought, and systems with respect to being. Cohen both shows and uses the inherent impossibilities of self-reflection as knowledge in the strict sense when he includes the self in his often polemical falsification of certainties. If the T of his texts, time and again, posits itself as its self and thus as object and as other, this thetic moment constitutes simultaneously a reflexive doubling. Since the positing subject differs from the posited object, at least in that it is the agent of the thetic act, the 'identity' of this subject of speech creates further questions - and calls for more text. The insistence on self-experience that comes to the fore in many of Cohen's texts, rather than a form of truth that would contain the self as the object of perfect knowledge, respects cognition, in Wlad Godzich's words, as 'the experience of an otherness' (The Domestication of Derrida' 32). Cohen's Ts, seeking to know, 'lose' themselves in a textual 'pro-duction' (literally, a bringing forth) of the other as a preliminary shape and name of the unknown, which will in turn be altered, become other. Cohen typically seeks the mobility of linguistic shifters (rather than the stability of names) in order to 'define' these positions of self and other, a fact that explains the often-noted frequency, instability, and interchangeability of pronouns in his corpus.10 The T occurs, in this process, as a relational function, instituting a subject in language momentarily with respect to that other it brings forth as much as it is brought forth by it as an initially apprehended and then altered form. One of Cohen's 'favourite games' thus consists of multiple interpretations and re-readings of configurations marked by personal pronouns. A striking example is the 'Master Song/ published, like Beautiful Losers, in 1966." Here, the linguistic shifters 'I,' 'you,' and 'he' produce alterity with particular ease by being regrouped in a process of overdetermination that Scobie summarizes as follows: 'All the positions are changed neatly around: the master becomes the pupil, the pupil becomes the prisoner, the prisoner becomes the master' (Leonard Cohen 132). On a massive scale, a similar re-reading and re-writing of constellations will also serve as the structuring principle of the 'comments' in a much later text, Death of a Lady's Man (1978). The following passage offers an example: We begin the Final Revision of My Life in Art... It took me years to write. During this time you were grinding out your bullshit... I did not quarrel with my voices. (21)

Initially, the first-person plural seems to indicate the internal dialogue of an

Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss

25

author, turned reader and editor, with himself; simultaneously it invites us as readers to share the same perspective, and be part of this 'community/ But with the occurrence of the pronoun 'you/ the erstwhile friendly voice calls into existence, and turns against, an other who appears to be a despised outsider. This other, however, refers to a previous T (19) that has been addressed (and distanced) in the third person in an introductory passage just before this attack on a 'you' who by now signifies both an other and an 'other' self. What is the role that we are offered as readers in this fast-moving shuffle of address and position? The textual 'othering' of the self, produced by self-distancing repetitions that result, here, from an act of reading rendered on the page, creates a peculiar position for our reading selves. The pronoun 'you', as the addressee of a writing T who is the first reader of his old self (and who also submits his own writing to a later 'you', transposes both the intimacy and the aggression of this self-distancing relationship onto the reader.12 If the second-person pronoun is used to refer both to a later position of reading and to the earlier 'you/ this equation hails us and provokes us - to the extent that we respond as readers to an unmarked 'you' - to 'own' Cohen's earlier, disowned self. We are drawn into Cohen's multiplicity of contending voices; we are asked both to insult and to be insulted, and to 'imitate such community/ 13 In Death of a Lady's Man, the combination of a multiple, often distanced or disappearing self and a paradoxically strong, teasing, or even insulting form of address oscillates continually and rapidly. Such a mobile production of otherness grants little support to a way of reading that seeks to construct the space of its own self by identifying with a defined presence in the text. A similar situation is epitomized, for instance, by the puzzling invitation extended to 'you' and to the reader with the last sentence of Beautiful Losers: 'Welcome to you, darling and friend, who miss me forever in your trip to the end/ More generally, although the self-configuration of the speaking subject in Cohen's work may offer - especially in some of the songs, as well as in the love poetry of The Spice-Box of Earth - a positive identification and 'emotional experience' that has been described as 'deeper and more humane' than the celebration of 'the broken self (Scobie, Leonard Cohen 13-14), it is more often driven by an ironic negativity with respect to (even that latter) comfortable certainty. The mechanics of address I have observed can be interpreted both as the bullying exertion of power and as an invitation. On the one hand, the reader's position seems locked into a space allocated by the writing T/ This T/ however, is a reader as well, and will be read in turn. Both sides of this double potential - in which writing, at the same time, plays out and analyses the

26 Discoveries of the Other possible thetic power of any form of address - have been stressed by critical responses. Stephen Scobie, although he has attested, in 'Surviving the Paraph-raise/ to the fundamental absence of any 'signataire' from the text signed, states in his earlier Leonard Cohen that 'Cohen's vision is so completely self-centered that there is no room in it for any individualized personality, male or female, other than his own' (11). Scobie here feels that Beautiful Losers, for instance, does not offer a space 'for the average reader to identify with its characters. The reader is forced to stand outside the action of the novel, as a spectator; he is not allowed to participate in it' (Leonard Cohen 125). Most of the book reviews that document the early reception in the sixties (see Fulford, Waddington, Wain) certainly support this view. But in response to Scobie's comment, Linda Hutcheon has argued that the role of the reader cannot be independent of the historically variable conventions that govern reading. The assumption that Cohen's textual strategy in this novel necessarily excludes the reader from involvement holds, she suggests, only inside the formal confines of realism: Readers of the postmodern novel (like the modernist one) must participate, even if we do not identify. In Beautiful Losers we only run into difficulty if we insist on reading it as a realist novel, with the accompanying 'ideology' that ignores or denies the existence of formal literary conventions. (The Canadian Postmodern 27)

The response from Scobie's 'average reader' would thus offer a comment on a similarly constructed 'average reading climate' in Canada, rather than on Cohen's text. Not only did Cohen show an awareness of this climate, but he effectively exploited typical horizons of expectation with respect to history, appropriate language, themes, and the whole novel genre, in order to provoke shock. It is precisely because this particular text prevents reader identification - because it does not offer an agreeable point of view or character that could serve easily to stabilize the average reader's transzendentale Obdachlosigkeit (Lukacs 32; 'transcendental unshelteredness') - that Beautiful Losers speaks to the audience rather than for it.14 In Death of a Lady's Man, Cohen will address the point of reader identification directly, albeit somewhat more rudely: The transmission is weakest in those passages where the reader is swept along in the story and the insights and the flow of events. We know what is best for this type of person who will put his arm into this pile of shit. His greed must be blocked at every turn' (184). In this passage, the withdrawal of a presence that could support identification explicitly draws the reader into the 'practice of disaffiliation' which has become self-reflexive in Cohen's texts. Instead of neutral address, the

Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss 27 deliberately and provocatively paternalistic 'we' thinly disguises (but also ironizes) the possibility that 'this type of person' could be the same reader maybe us - who may have enjoyed, moments earlier, the communal identification of the first-person plural. In Cohen's work, the process of disaffiliation and becoming other thus often combines a certain (ironic) rhetoric of power with the negation of self-presence. In Beautiful Losers, F. similarly stages his last moment of 'power' when he disappears, demanding, as part of his testament, of his reader T to 'go beyond me' (169). F. will indeed be bettered by the old man's performance in the last part of the novel, whose 'presence was like the shape of an hourglass, strongest where it was smallest' (258). This passage offers a poignant formulation of a logic that Scobie considers 'one of the major paradoxes in Cohen's work: namely, that the theme of the loss of personality is projected in terms of what appears to be a very strong personality and ego, that of the artist himself. Perhaps the obsession with the loss of self is only the ultimate form of self-expression' (Leonard Cohen n).15 This mobile combination of strength (and often of a powerful agent of speech) with an ungraspable self that eludes identification and representation is indeed central to Cohen's work. The concurrence of these seemingly opposed tendencies also propels the continual variation of Cohen's paradigmatic pairs, I and you, self and other, writer and reader, master and slave, pupil and teacher: as soon as they are posited, neither of these identities seems to remain in place for long. But the form of energy that comes to the fore and finds its 'transmission' (as Cohen puts it in the passage above) in this work of language is not 'self-expression' in the strict sense. The often ferocious energy operating in most of Cohen's textual transformations is aimed at anything but the exteriorization (ex-pression) of a previously present entity. It rather mocks self-presentations as perhaps necessary yet ultimately deluded scripts, left behind by an agency operating outside any particular self. Cohen's unpublished first novel, 'A Ballet of Lepers/ offers an extended meditation on the potential violence caused by strategies that seem to promise the discovery of a strong self at the cost of thetic identifications (and ultimately, exclusions) of the other. The first-person narrator, shown a way out of his many humiliations by the uninhibited personality of an old man he wrongly believes to be his forebear, leaves his job and finds a new self in his role as scourge of the ugly and inauthentic, represented by a repulsive baggage clerk. The narrator, who actually longs for the presence of his victim, watches him 'with the secret joy and contempt the pure have for the degraded' (55), opposing his own 'purity of the priest' (81) to the loathed inferiority of his enabling other, whom he calls a 'leper/ This act of purga-

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tion, the strengthening of the self by exclusion of the other as scapegoat, makes him finally feel part of his city, which now appears orderly by means of its 'walls between the pure and the impure.' A higher purpose seems to justify, and even demand, the exertion of power over his victim, in a 'painful chain toward salvation' (84). In this nuclear narrative that works to construct the self by means of the other, self and other are united in a cosmos of suffering that justifies power: 'I the torturer, he the tortured, we the sufferers' (84). At the height of his power, the self-appointed priest finally decides to humiliate his victim so thoroughly that the latter will have to admit his degraded plight and thus, at the moment of total weakness, be strong enough to abandon it. But the narrator's own self-presentation suddenly collapses in a recognition of the perverse violence he has exerted in the name of purity. He himself, in fact, has become the outcast, the madman, a form of the leper. This specular inversion of the figure of the other is simultaneously extended by the text to include the ultimate symbol of rationalized madness, the concentration camps: I have gone too far. I have told you too much. It is a mad story you say, told by a madman ... It happened, that is all, it happened just as Buchenwald happened, and Belsen and Auschwitz, and it will happen again ... But the madman is ourselves, the violent plans, the cruelties and indignities, they are all our own, and we are not mad, we are crying for purity and love. (93)

At the seemingly most powerful moment, the self collapses in a surprising identification with its opposite, the other who had been created by a role distribution and by exclusions that allow for self-presence. But the confessional energy of the self simultaneously seeks to invoke a communal 'we' that would abandon such founding exclusions. What kind of a voice thus construes its own space and its own reality by addressing, from a position of admitted or pretended failure, an implied reader it calls into being by an appeal that is also a provocation? In Cohen's first published novel, The Favourite Game (1963), the poet Breavman, more than once, receives the epithet 'traitor/ The term is used not only by his mother to burden him with family obligations (177, 207, 208), but by the narrator as well, in a chapter discussing Breavman's investiture (with the publication of his first book) as a writer in the Montreal Jewish community. In this case, his disaffiliation from more conventional roles (he turns down a scholarship that will permit him to do academic work, for instance) causes Breavman to be 'considered a mild traitor who could not be condemned out-

Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss 29 right' (102). To the marginalization of the writer by the community, Breavman reacts with inner exile.1 But from the position of the outsider, the poet in Cohen's next work, Flowers for Hitler (1964), will claim a paradoxically central place as both the other and the origin of a communal self. While the references concerning poetry in The Favourite Game mostly deal with love and the transposition of a banal reality into an ideal world, and while the narrator in 'A Ballet of Lepers' is only incidentally a poet, the selfaccusations (which also appear in 'A Ballet of Lepers') of an outsider who, however, also addresses a community from within, become programmatic in the voice of the opening poem of Flowers for Hitler, significantly entitled 'What I'm Doing Here:' I do not know if the world has lied I have lied I do not know if the world has conspired against love I have conspired against love The atmosphere of torture is no comfort I have tortured I refuse the universal alibi Like an empty telephone booth passed at night and remembered like mirrors in a movie palace lobby consulted only on the way out like a nymphomaniac who binds a thousand into strange brotherhood I wait for each of you to confess

After the threefold confessional refusal of the exclusion of the other ('the world/ in this case), reminiscent of the ending of 'A Ballet of Lepers,' the function of these excluding oppositions of self and other is disqualified as 'the universal alibi' of self-justification. In the last part, the poetic T casts itself in the image of an obsessive, lurking mirror which lies in wait, but which we ourselves, the addressees, have to consult, only to find ourselves bound in a confessional community that appears unlikely and alien, a 'strange brotherhood.' A movement toward a second-degree exclusion of the other, however, is discernible in this poem. After the self-indicting negation of a strategy of self-constitution (on a first level), the speaking voice nevertheless sets itself

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up as the inquisitional instance demanding its other, the addressees of the poem, to follow its own gesture. But the ratification of this demand would simultaneously acknowledge the superior and leading function of the T thus based on difference, and in a move toward identification and sameness in the new 'brotherhood' make the new convert speak from the same position. At this point, the exceptional role of the speaking T would dissolve in a community based, again, on the first kind of exclusion in a cosmos divided into believers and non-believers by a new communal 'alibi.' This (in a double sense) 'self-contradictory logic has the tendency to exceed the containment of a single stance, of balance, or of the closure of a poem or a book. This textual movement, while it does call a new self into being, also destabilizes it as soon as it becomes comfortably certain of itself. The conflict between thetic and heterological moments that appear almost concurrently is, I believe, responsible for the peculiar reading experience of our selves being hailed simultaneously as equals or paradoxical mirror images of an invisible poetic self, and by insult or deprecation. In the religious vocabulary often invoked by Cohen, the uncontainable difference between the two forms of 'selving' (which are, in fact, two forms of 'othering') is named as the opposition between priest and prophet. Cohen explicitly works out a propelling dialectic between these two terms in the same period that sees the publication of Flowers for Hitler (1964), a moment that Eli Mandel has characterized as the beginning of a 'murderously ambiguous seduction/repulsion pattern' mediated by the mode of address ('Cohen's Life as a Slave' 126) as well as by Cohen's shift to the context of history ("7). 'Loneliness and History/ the manuscript for the speech that Cohen gave at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal in 1964, is a text of considerable interest for any discussion of Beautiful Losers. It is preceded by the headings 'Traitor / Priest and prophet / Loneliness - Montreal / Silence / God.'17 Cohen situates the possibility of poetic speech, in his concrete context, on the boundary line between community and an unknown outside, a line that has been, and must be again, the locus of the creative energy and idea that calls a community into being, but is fossilized in the course of its history. The human race needs more traitors' (I),18 begins one of the fragments, before qualifying this statement by rebutting a reader's response to one of Cohen's books: 'But when he called me traitor he meant that I had joined another side. If he had read the book he would know that there are no sides for me' (I)/ 9 Cohen develops the relationship between poetic speech and its addressee, first, as a displacement of the poet from his community and, second, as a redefinition of the term 'community' itself. Although the poet becomes the

Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss 31 'nominal' community's other even in the sense of being a scapegoat, both are not only divided, but also linked as each one's other in their reference to a common ideal. Cohen engages his audience by using the Montreal Jewish community as an example. He casts A.M. Klein's position in a pattern of community and leader, the latter being divided internally by an opposition between priest and prophet. For Cohen, Klein's eventual silence20 is the consequence of his attempt to speak both as a prophet to, and as a representative for, the community. In this text, Cohen locates the opposition between the first-person T and plural 'we' as the line of exile from which poetry (and thus Cohen himself) can speak after Klein: 'I remember AM Klein speaking, whose poems disturbed me because at certain crucial moments in them he used the word "we" instead of the word "V" (i). The identification of the individual with the community, Klein's 'we,' obliges the poet to represent a cause, which is, Cohen contends, at odds with a form of speech marked by incompleteness: Klein often 'spoke with too much responsibility, he was too much a champion of the cause, too much the theorist of the Jewish party line' (i). On the other hand, Cohen suggests that Klein's poems offer a space for dialogue when the speaker does not seek to convey certainties of community and faith, but rather places himself in the face of an unknown, even multiple and overwhelming other, asking for the uncertain support of God against the adversary of madness: But when he is true to his terror, then he sings, when he begs God to keep 'the golden dome' [sic] his mind safe from disease, offering as sacrificial payment his limbs, his body's health - then he sings out of the terror which makes a man lively and comfortless ... and sometimes his nostalgia for a warm, rich past becomes more than nostalgia, becomes, rather, an impossible longing, an absolute and ruthless longing for the presence of the devine [sic], for the evidence of holiness. Then he is alone and I believe him. Then there is no room for 'we' and if I want to join him, if, even, I want to greet him, I must make my own loneliness. (i-2)21

In Cohen's account, Klein had agreed to speak on behalf of a community that had abandoned its founding openness to a prophetic instance. Klein's eventual breakdown and ensuing silence are seen in a causal relationship with the exiled position imposed upon him as a poet by his community, together with his willingness to administer as 'priest' a communal self in which poetic speech had been moved from the centre to a margin that implies loneliness:

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Klein chose to be a priest though it was as a prophet that we needed him, as a prophet he needed us and he needed himself... And now we have his silence. (2-5)

In Cohen's interpretation, Klein's silence becomes the eloquent sign of the exile it did not speak in order not to betray a community under pressure. But Cohen insists on the necessity to leave the 'British square' (4) in order to 'produce those values for which the square was invented to enclose + protect' (6), and to follow those who 'ventured into loneliness' (e).22 To speak from that outside position inside the 'British square/ however, is tantamount to letting 'the wilderness in' (Jones 8).23 Having thus read Klein's predicament, Cohen constructs, in this text from 1964, the possibility of poetic speech as the emphatic acceptance of an outsider position. This marginality nevertheless has a close connection with a community that is still its other, and which indirectly evokes its forgotten origin by the exclusion of a once-central position. The outsidedness of exile, for Cohen, signifies a paradoxically central possibility. Writers will not repeat Klein's path: They will prefer exile, the dialogue of exile, a dialogue which seems to be very one sided, but which is still the old rich dialogue between the prophet and the priest, and the larger idea of community includes both of the parties. The nominal community will continue to dismiss its writers and award them the title of traitor. (5-6)

The traitor is a crosser of boundaries who delivers a person, a value, or information from the inside to the outside. In Cohen's perspective, however, this disruptive resident alien is also a correspondent of the other who reverses the trade. He is both a marginalized member of the community and a beneficent agent who brings in the possibility of an unknown, emergent other self. He thus channels an energy from the outside that will save the community from the fossilizing power of its instituted self. The decisive intersection, however, is defined by the dialogue between the traitor-prophet and the priest. While the prophet is the exiled figure who seems closest to the unknown outside, the priest administers the community's established ways of experiencing and of dealing with this outside, but contains the unknown in a protocol that has to express the other in its known language. The space between these two moments of understanding brings forth an emergence of the unknown that does not destroy it as unknown, and surfaces in Cohen's text as an energy he calls 'idea.' Whereas 'idea is the Birth Notice and Obituary of creation' and 'the language of energy' (e), its trajectory as an unchanging form through time

Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss 33 necessitates failure; it becomes in fact, the abandonment of creation. The double - and strictly speaking forever incomplete - movement of crossing the border to the unknown and of simultaneously alluding to it in the horizon of the known can never be repeated identically. History is viewed here as the negative consequence of an almost impossibly brief coincidence. After a short moment when prophet and priest appear combined in one person, they divide into separate roles. The priest becomes the administrator of history, which is seen as 'the description of the path of an idea' (a). While the prophet cannot step outside the need to convey energy in a recognizable form and thus, at particular moments, must live with a priestly functioning that threatens him qua prophet, his openness to innovation creates an antagonism with priest and community: The priest is the archetype of the community which the original idea called into being. The community is marked with fossils of the original energy, and ... convinced that only adherence to the original form of the idea ... can rejuvenate it... The prophet, on the other hand, continues to pursue the idea as it changes forms, trying never to mistake the cast off shell with the swift changing thing that shed it. He follows it into the regions of danger, so that he comes alone, and by his nature becomes unwelcome to the community. The community is a museum of the old form and dedicated to it, and changes very slowly, and usually only under violence, (a-b)

The prophet is thus the instituting other of a communal self, and similar in his mobility to the undefinable T we have seen earlier. The stable T or self, by contrast, occurs as structured in an analogous position to the community's sense of self, which is administered by the priest (once it has been called into being), and threatened by the prophet. Self and community are 'marked with fossils of the original energy'; in other words, they are the institutions left behind by the prophet's instituting willingness to venture into blindness for a new vision.24 While the priest maintains a protocol that in fact degrades the founding idea by replacing it with a history of its path, the prophet moves toward an ambiguous outsidedness that disrupts the community as it is known, by calling for a different community that is not symmetrically opposed to the old one, but that emerges by displacing it. The vanishing point of the prophet's perspective is perceived in the image of those who came close to creation: I believe they beheld a unity, a barbarous finality, a vision of completion which their individual personalities could not resist, so they surrendered them. They become the idea, or as the Christians say, the word became flesh, (e)

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These lines certainly point to a 'loss of self as the means to perceive and convey an energy that is not amenable to the confines of the self; but if there be a 'cause/ it cannot be comprehended as a stable, repeatable form, which would be 'to mistake the cast off shell with the swift changing thing that shed it/ A 'higher cause' would precisely correspond to the type of exclusion that enables the walls both around the self and around the community in a nominal sense. The closest substitution for an idea that Cohen as yet claims to know 'very little about' (e) is the denial - or, ironically, the exclusion - of exclusion: T believe the idea concerned the sense of the universal holiness, of the incorruptibility of creation, of the indissoluble community of all that exists' (e).25 Cohen's text turns, toward the end, into verse, celebrating loneliness rather than the certainties of community and defined self - as a prerequisite for the 'awe of creation' that will make it possible to 'exult: We are not alone' (f). The poet clearly follows in the footsteps of the prophet, yet will ultimately try to have it both ways: to be a priest comprehended by his community and a prophet able to break the communal rule, and thus to combine the communication with an unknown other with the address of the priest to the community. 26 He will claim a place on both sides, the powerful outside of secure knowledge and community and the different role inside the circle in which the priest, however, is but a primus inter pares. From this intersection between two perspectives, Cohen would like to speak: Some moment in time, very brief, there must have been, among the ancient Hebrews, men who were both prophet + priest in the same office. I tease my imagination when I try to conceive of the energy of that combination, (c)

Cohen's imagination, itself installing power on the outside, teases itself by the double role of one of those mediators who are, in the words of Wlad Godzich, 'of the powerless but partake in the power whose effects they propose to channel. Perhaps even more important, they now span the gap between the two realms: they have made themselves, at least partially, other in order to ensure continued communication with the realm of the other' ('Afterword' 160). But Cohen's voices never know for sure from which side they speak, and do not simply exclude the addressee as powerless. His overdetermined shifters, as we have seen, invite mutual substitution, and as the 'you' can move into the position of the prophetic T by which it was addressed, the 'I/ in turn, can speak to a you as mystic 'thou.' The position of poetic speech, then, emerges as a connected outsidedness, a relative loneliness with respect to a 'priestly' transcription that replaces an

Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss 35 energy it only obliquely remembers by excluding it as other. While this form of history and naming of ideas creates a common ground and assures a communicable understanding inside a community, the function of the poet/ prophet would be to speak from outside the horizon of this knowledge and still be part of it in a wider sense - to be the internal other of the communal self. We can see how this kind of poet figure would be simultaneously endowed with the fascinating aura surrounding the presence of the unknown, 27 and yet potentially exposed to the kind of abjection (in the sense Kristeva describes in Powers of Horror] by which the community would try to rid and cleanse itself of the improper that is alien to its central values and its knowledge. Cohen's prophets suffer from precisely this predicament: 'We force them into the solitude of leading us, or we exile them or kill them' (e). The poet/prophet's speech thus implies shock as an almost natural quality. This speech is intent upon breaking a community's horizon, breaking the forms of naming that stabilize its founding idea in the form of history. To the extent that the prophet has to deal with his own self and his own priesthood, this speech will have to be self-distancing. Since it addresses the prophet's self, which is part of the community and his own other, this speech will be instructing and insulting with respect to others and the community; voiced, in turn, by a Cohenesque self thus instructed, it will be alternately aggressive or demanding and confessional with respect to that other who claims - like F. - the prophet's role; and finally, to the extent that it dares to approach the unknown (which by definition it cannot fully speak and which constitutes its exile), it will speak in a version of what Barthes called, in S/Z, 'the hermeneutic code.'28 Unlike the mode of detection that underlies Balzac's Sarrasine (the text under consideration in Barthes' study), however, this speech has to reveal what is shapeless, not given, and therefore not really amenable to revelation or reducible to sameness with the categories of self. This dimension approaches what Gershom Scholem calls 'the indefinable, incommunicable character of mystical experience,' which he distinguishes from clear and specific prophetic utterance (10). Cohen's prophetic T,' nevertheless, has much of Scholem's mystic, who both is in conflict with communal, religious authority and strives to rediscover its sources (7). The incongruities with communal horizons of expectation and with formal conventions of conveyance display the centrifugal fascination that exerts its pull on this prophetic T that also tries, however, like all but the most radical mystics, 'to find the way back to form, which is also the way to community' (Scholem 11).

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But the linguistic form of mystic speech - and this formal element pervades Cohen's texts often independently of the convictions he may have held at any given time29 - provides, as Michel de Certeau has put it, 'a path for those who "ask to get lost" ... It teaches "how not to return"' (80). Often beginning with an invocatio as a typical 'first moment of religious knowledge' (89), mystic speech creates a textual space that has a peculiar relationship to knowledge. Factual truth, in contrast to its decisive role in theology, is of little importance compared with the experience of speech in which the 'saying' takes precedence over the 'said' (90). The T of this speech, de Certeau tells us with reference to Benveniste, 'marks in the text the empty place (empty of world) where the other speaks, following a process discourse describes by recounting its own production' (94). De Certeau calls this 'knowledge' induced by 'the language of the other' an experimental heterology (93). The term 'heterology' sums up aptly what Cohen strives toward in 'Loneliness and History/ and what we encounter at the beginning of Beautiful Losers: an experimental language of the other, 'uttered by the "I" in the present, far removed from the common faith that has been subjugated by authority, in other words, by a "memory" which articulates the other of the past' (de Certeau 93). P R A Y I N G FOR T R A N S L A T I O N : BEAUTIFUL LOSERS AND THE R E V E N G E OF NAMES One more thing, perhaps, is mystical: the establishment of a space where change serves as a foundation and saying loss is an other beginning. Because it is always less than what comes through it and allows a genesis, the mystic poem is connected to the nothing that opens the future, the time to come. (de Certeau 100)

'I,' the narrator at the beginning of Beautiful Losers, who presents himself also as a reader and historian, embarks on a 'discovery of the other' with uncertain outcome. Trying to come to terms with texts that document the life of Catherine Tekakwitha - the seventeenth-century Iroquois proposed for canonization in the Roman Catholic Church30 - he finds himself engaged in a highly digressive act of reading. His efforts to understand the other through the intermediary of historical texts conspicuously parallel aspects of mystic reading as it is depicted by Scholem: The mystic transforms the holy text, the crux of this metamorphosis being that the hard, clear, unmistakable word of revelation is filled with infinite meaning' (Scholem 12). A remark by the narrator, identifying one of his quotations as a 'note by one Ed. L, S.J., written in August 1926' (5), specifies Edouard Lecompte's Line Vierge iroquoise:

Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss 37 Catherine Tekakwitha: Le Lis des bords de la Mohawk et du St-Laurent (1656-1680) as one of the texts he engages, repeatedly quoting or translating some of its passages. Yet as a result of his attempts at transposing - beyond the limits of literal translation (as for instance at the end, 259) - the significance of Lecompte's subject and the healing energy of Tekakwitha's miraculous powers into the circumstances of his own life, the causal flow and direction of meaning from the word of the other to his own language is anything but clearly determined. And precisely that kind of word that should, as opposed to the shifting translations of other words, refer to a unique instance - a proper name - turns out to be our translator's crux. The faithful transcriber of established equivalents is replaced by a searcher for meaning. The first two words both repeat the beginning of Lecompte's title and invoke a Catholic saint-to-be more enigmatic than her status would seem to suggest: 'Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you?' (3). The ensuing dates and questions simultaneously echo, translate, and interrogate the subtitle chosen by Lecompte (Le Lis des bords de la Mohawk et du St-Laurent (1656-1680)): 'Are you (1656-1680)? Is that enough? Are you the Iroquois Virgin? Are you the Lily of the Shores of the Mohawk River?' (3). In contrast to the successful quest for meaning in the historical narrative provided by the priest, however, our 'translator' - true to the proverbial treachery of his profession - betrays the commonly (and communally) accepted 'meaning' of the saint. But even in terms of the sexually desired other soon to be invoked, Beautiful Losers will leave us in doubt whether the enigma of the other has been unveiled and discovered. The veil will possibly have been lifted when the old man at the end encounters a female stranger who, naked below the armrest except for the moccasins that may reveal her as Tekakwitha, identifies herself as Isis. But she will do so in a foreign language (a moment to which I will return), and the chance of recognition seems lost on the old man, who confesses to be bored by foreigners (251). The coincidence of the novel's opening words with the name of a historically certified Catholic saint-to-be, comforting as it may seem to us at first (and as it has been to some of the first reviewers), poses more questions than it answers. Catherine Tekakwitha's name certainly invokes the historical intertexts that will loom large throughout the novel: the writings by the Jesuits on their missions among the Mohawk, and specifically the several accounts of Tekakwitha's life, both in French and in Latin.31 But her name refers, in the counter-discursive 'historiographic metafiction' of Cohen's novel, to a figure that both 'is and is not' the historical character (as Hutcheon puts it in an essay on Ondaatje's use of 'real' figures, 'Running in the Family: The Postmodernist Challenge' 3O5).32

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The words 'Catherine Tekakwitha/ we are soon reminded, are the product of naming (and an instance of the thetic): the novel's occasional use of the name she received with her baptism by the Jesuits, Kateri (for instance 105, 144-50), makes us aware that 'Catherine' implies yet another naming. With respect to her Iroquois name the text mentions explicitly 'the different spellings of Tekakwitha, Tegahouita, Tegahkouita, Tehgakwita, Tekakouita' (41) all resulting from transpositions of an oral name into a culture that relies on writing (and that has a different set of phonemes). From the beginning, the novel associates naming with the colonial practice of domesticating the other: The French gave the Iroquois their name. Naming food is one thing, naming a people is another' (6).33 But names have a cost and take revenge: they also blind the one who uses them to the concrete other that simultaneously is alluded to and disappears behind the perception named. 'You live in a world of names' (18) is the judgment pronounced on T by his friend, teacher, and guru, F., as an explanation for the pig-headedness that prevents him from perceiving anything, especially the gist of F.'s teaching. It is only fitting that the novel itself thus attributes main portions of its speech to two 'variables' rather than to instances identified by names - the one, T,' a linguistic shifter; the other, F., an abbreviation we are invited to decipher.34 F.'s verdict is made more explicit when he associates the single reference and determination attributed to names with history and the taxonomies of science - in a passage itself double-voiced and overdetermined by quotation: Into the world of names with us. F. said: Of all the laws which bind us to the past, the names of things are the most severe ... F. said: Names preserve the dignity of Appearance. F. said: Science begins in coarse naming, a willingness to disregard the particular shape and destiny of each red life, and call them all Rose. (43)

In obliterating concrete 'red life' by the hypostatized, upper-case poetic symbol, the name blots out, according to F., what it seems to present. At least, one could suggest with reference to Benjamin Lee Whorf, language for F. appears to segment 'life' in a very specific, if not arbitrary or even obstructive, way. This indictment of the supposedly 'fullest' form of speech, however, is only one example of the pessimism that greets, in this novel, all claims to a general truth that would be conveyed by language independently of the locally defined, subjective validity of its usage in speech. Affirmative speech is not T"s strength. He has already gone beyond F. in that he pronounces questions instead of teachings. Systematic assertions (like the one above) appear mostly as quotation, ascribed to the ironically distanced speech of F. And rather than abiding by the constructed object of his-

Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss

39

toriography, T thus asks Catherine Tekakwitha to speak to him in a language expressing its own circumstance rather than pretending to objective truth. The language he desires from her, the language of his desire, is marked by the 'hiro' and 'koue' from which the French derived their name for the Hodenosaunee, the People of the Long House: They [the Iroquois] had developed a new dimension to conversation. They ended every speech with the word hiro, which means: like I said. Thus each man took full responsibility for intruding into the inarticulate murmur of the spheres. To the hiro they added the word koue, a cry of joy or distress, according to whether it was sung or howled. Thus they essayed to pierce the mysterious curtain which hangs between all talking men: at the end of every utterance a man stepped back, so to speak, and attempted to interpret his words to the listener, attempted to subvert the beguiling intellect with the noise of true emotion. Catherine Tekakwitha, speak to me in Hiro-Koue. (8)35

In this emphasis on the performance of the speech act itself, the subjective, emotional value of the 'saying' comes to bear at least as much weight as the proposition uttered. The factum (the being made) of speech reveals itself, together with its agent, behind the spoken fact. This guiding principle of the performative will come to oppose the linearity of the Jesuit story.3 Thus, the opening inquiry into Tekakwitha's name does not omit the utterer of the question. In this context, the subtitle of the first section, 'The History of Them All/ announces ironically a subversion of its promise. The naming of the saint's 'history' will undergo the logic of Hiro-Koue, together with the history of T/ his dead wife, and F. The protocol of the schoolbook historian, '(1656-1680),' identifying the other as object by allocating it a distant stretch in time (and omitting the story of its own perspective), is met with scepticism: Ts that enough?' Although the lines emerging in response to this question concerning the other may not bring forth more words than those Lecompte produced, they open a wider field. 'Can I love you in my own way?' (3) This question announces the narrator's uncertain hope for a discovery of the self, along with that of the other. Simultaneously, it inaugurates a subjective level of reference that presages the novel's astonishing power of association, and sets it apart from many realist concerns. The narrator's hoped-for idiosyncrasy differs especially from the Jesuit emplotment of the saint's life. The first part of Beautiful Losers finds its structure in the continual interruption of existing meanings surrounding Tekakwitha's name by possibilities more relevant to the narrator's life (Tekakwitha is linked, for instance, to his dead wife Edith). The result is a contest between ostensible

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facticity and potentiality, between the Aristotelian realms of History and Poetry. Not only does T"s Hiro-Koue - the expression of his grief and hopes - establish itself in violation of his role as historian and 'authority' on Indian matters; it is also based on the refusal to acknowledge one of the founding exclusions that defines a saint, asexuality: 'I've come after you, Catherine Tekakwitha. I want to know what goes on under that rosy blanket' (3). The proper distinctions by which Jesuit historical discourse signals the meaning of the other are evoked only to be transgressed by this narrator's 'improper' merging of her sainthood and his sexual desire in one breath: the profanation of the sacred. The process of meaning begins with a calculated provocation of a communal horizon of expectation, a parody of iconographic interpretation. The narrator's particular hermeneutic skill refers in this case to the frontispiece of Lecompte's book: I fell in love with a religious picture of you. You were standing among birch trees, my favorite trees. God knows how far up your moccasins were laced ... Two birds in the left foreground would be delighted if you tickled their white throats or even if you used them as an example of something or other in a parable. (3)

The casual reference to holy matters as 'something or other,' as well as the address to the saint accompanied by an imaginary 'upward' glance (up her legs) that is hardly compatible with the intentions of the church, transgresses a traditional interpretive horizon in the same way in which F. seeks to intrude upon the narrator's thetic world of names. The name Catherine Tekakwitha has been forced upon T,' of course, by F.'s impossible task meant to lead him to an understanding of the limit of names - and of conceptual understanding - the koan 'Fuck a saint' (12). Many pages later, the baffled T' still ponders: 'What did F. mean by advising me to go down on a saint? ... How do I get close to a dead saint?' (101-2). Meanwhile, however, the holy name is inserted into a chain of signification involved in a continual, controversial dialogue with the kind of 'institutionalized' history that Cohen's 'Loneliness and History' had rejected. The name is addressed only by simultaneously crossing the boundaries of 'priestly' signification that define the saint as the Catholic community's 'instituted' other. T' has thus already learned more than he cares to admit from his teacher. The power of F., however, is restricted to his ability to point to an unnameable otherness, to be the 'Moses of our little exodus' (178) from what can be thought and said. His very act of teaching is bound to language, and thus operates with names, constantly installing the limits it tries to undo. While F.

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41

tries to circumvent this fact by using non-verbal teaching techniques designed to stun T's perception out of its customary ways (the Ottawa car ride, discussed below, for instance), he can do so inside language only by making language inoperable and by resorting to the kind of koan that puzzles T, thus preventing it from signifying 'properly' in the ways justified by its logical protocols. In the context of F.'s koan, the words 'Catherine Tekakwitha' name a desire impossible to fulfil (that nevertheless transforms the desiring subject). Instead of referring to a signified, the words are offered to a conceptual understanding that seeks to grasp its own limit, and thus to understand what it is not and what (by definition) it cannot understand without becoming other to itself. The name becomes the heterological other for thought seeking to defy its own thetic and boundary-defining logic, for a paradoxical thought larger-than-thought. As such, Catherine Tekakwitha's name is just one of several names that express a similar desire, although they belong to other times and places. The text will ultimately strive to collapse the differences between Catherine Tekakwitha, Edith, and Mary Voolnd in the idea of the goddess Isis with her all-encompassing, time-absolving, and healing attributes.37 Tekakwitha's name establishes one of T's main addressees and others in speech, and thus one of the important perspectives of self-configuration. In the transformations of the saint that begin as reading and as a kind of literal translation, in his 'interpretation' of F. and his koan, T seeks simultaneously to translate himself and his desire. Catherine Tekakwitha functions as both destination and departure, as confessional ear and healing source, as object and (implored) subject of address and transformation. Both sides, T and Tekakwitha's name, are thus subject to a syntax of desire and supplication, constituting a field of signification meant to transform the T,' but which also takes Tekakwitha beyond her historically defined role as a saint.3 She is not alone, however, either in her mutability or in her role of a confessional ear invested by the speaker with the power to respond and absolve. This position occurs as a standard element in a typically Cohenesque paradigm of self and other capable of various role distributions. As early as in 'A Ballet of Lepers,' for instance, the first-person narrator pleads with an implied reader: 'But I must not be gloomy at the beginning or you will leave me, and that, I suppose, is what I dread most' (i). Insisting that T must tell you about myself (3), this voice declares its own need: T desire only your love by the telling' (25). This results in the curious overdetermination of the position of the reader discussed in the previous section, since the reader in 'A Ballet of Lepers' is also subject to the attack on boundaries of the self. In Beautiful Losers,

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one of the main addressees has explicitly become a miracle-working saint, and we as readers are treated like T by E, both as the name-believing community in need of prophetic salvation (as outlined in 'Loneliness and History') and sometimes as absolving instance. F. himself, of course, is the other main addressee of the novel, another destination of the many pained calls for help by T.' But F. also belongs to both sides of the model of supplication. While he does not ask many questions but rather pretends to knowledge as a 'mystic wit' (37), he has the same need to be completed and fulfilled as 'I,' who is his enabling other in his role as a self-proclaimed teacher, and who is the necessary 'ear of the other'39 to his letter, and to his wish to be interpreted and transcended. Teaching thus makes F. both the purveyor and the recipient of meaning.40 The 'question of "I"' similarly opens a double perspective on the narrator, both as the object and as the subject of his project of discovery. The question of who he is, or of what he will become as object of F.'s koan, occurs as the reverse of his own question, 'Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you?' As the signifieds of Tekakwitha's name are transformed with his interpretation and translation, T/ inversely, emerges as the result of his interrogations of the other whom he creates in the act of reading and writing. The main goal of his readings that transform the Catholic saint is to transform himself by breaking down his ways of understanding. While the T of the first pages introduces himself repeatedly as an 'old scholar' (3-5) who tells his imagined Catherine Tekakwitha that T have come to rescue you from the Jesuits' (5), the continual interruptions of his scholarly discourse thus express more self-directed concerns: 'Catherine Tekakwitha, do you listen?' (5). The presence of the imagined other is invoked to transform the signification of T and to move him closer to sainthood, notwithstanding the bathos in which the prayer is couched: 'Should I save my fingernails? Is matter holy? I want the barber to bury my hair. Catherine Tekakwitha, are you at work on me already?' (6). The energy behind the linguistic shifter, T,' unhinging the name of the other, simultaneously asks to be taken over by this other, which it both undoes and brings into being. The energy, in fact, is built and maintained through a loss of definition. In the obvious demand for a Toss' of self, T' behaves like the embodiment of a self-conscious Hegelian concept, knowing its destiny is to be sublated - without knowing, however, the result. While the old man of the last section carries all the markers of embodying a concept that sublates T and F. (for instance the burnt thumb), he will simultaneously be positioned, as an allegorical representation of this incomplete dialectic, prior to another transformation and disappearance. This sacrificial and some-

Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss 43 times masochistic aesthetics, alluded to in the novel's title, is aimed at the boundary between the self and what it is not, or is not yet.41 We are given a wildly serious parody of this mental strategy of renunciation (that often aims at losing in order to gain) in T's literalized account of the dialectic between inside and outside, in his pleading with God to relieve him from constipation.42 The foolish belief in his mastery of memory and of history through words, we are informed, led to his predicament. A list arranging memories of his wife leaves him depressed (38-9), as do his notes on Catherine Tekakwitha: My briefcase fooled me. My tidy notes led me astray ... The evidence tricked me into mastery ... Constipation ever since I compiled the list ... How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me? The hater of history crouched over the immaculate bowl. (40)

But if trying to name the other is a means of control that simultaneously excludes it, so is the self-contradictory plan to renounce this intention in order to force the other (be it high or low) to speak. Grace will not be commanded: The squatting man bargains with God ... The straining man perched on a circle prepares to abandon all systems ... Yes, yes, I abandon even the system of renunciation ... Please make me empty, if I'm empty then I can receive, if I can receive it means it comes from somewhere outside of me ... I'm not alone! (41)

The predicament is symbolically rendered by the initial scene of his writing, the basement apartment without windows alluded to in the same context: 'What's it like outside? Is there an outside?' (42) The upward move to F.'s treehouse will not, however, return the world. The ascension of this tree of knowledge (the move as well from the basement of Freud's topology, from the unconscious, and from the lower part of the body toward consciousness, from 'it' to T) does not remove the partition that separates his senses from the outside: 'The trees around F.'s treehouse (where I am writing this), they are dark. I can't smell the apples' (90). This ontological wall between the self and the outside had gone up, as we have learned a few pages earlier, when the Iroquois were scared into taking their fingers out of their ears, a tactic that was meant to shield them from the Jesuits' converting speech. In the narrator's parodic inversion (he anachronistically endows the priest with knowledge of the Telephone Dance, which enables communion between F. and Edith elsewhere in the novel [29-36]), religious speech becomes the original sin:

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Discoveries of the Other

You must never put them [the fingers] back again. Old as you are, you must forget forever the Telephone Dance ... As those waxy digits were withdrawn a wall of silence was thrown up between the forest and the hearth, and the old people gathered at the priest's hem shivered with a new kind of loneliness. They could not hear the raspberries breaking into domes, they could not smell the numberless pine needles combing out the wind ... Like children who listen in vain to the sea in plastic sea shells they sat bewildered. (87)

With the opening of their ears to the words and the world of the Jesuits, the Indians are driven from what the novel constructs as their original garden, and the sensations of nature are replaced by a Jesuit cosmos after the fall. This cosmos is equated in the novel with 'thetic' consciousness tout court, a naming that posits the self as apart from the world. It translates consciousness into self-consciousness, inaugurates nature as other, and thus causes the self to experience 'a new kind of loneliness' quite different from the one sought in 'Loneliness and History.'43 The Indians' earlier speech and thinking, on the other hand, are paradoxically hypostatized as a cosmos prior to language as naming. The text thus compares the narrator's constipation prompted by his efforts to write history with the condition caused by the words of the Jesuits and by baptism in the narrated world of the Indians. The connection is made explicitly in a passage linking baptism - a term 'proper' to the story of Catherine Tekakwitha - with history in F.'s promise to T to 'relieve you of your final burden: the useless History under which you suffer in such confusion. Men of your nature never get far beyond the Baptism' (200). An episode featuring Catherine Tekakwitha's uncle, by contrast, relates a heterological ceremony of un-naming that undoes the boundaries of the self. One of the main villains in the story as it is told by Lecompte, the uncle plays an inverse role in Cohen's novel. While the possibility of Catherine's baptism almost occasions his death, a pronouncedly pagan antidote leads to his miraculous rejuvenation. During the harvest, his musings on the fertility and creation myths of his culture are suddenly interrupted when in 'his mind's heart he felt the sinister presence of le P. Jacques de Lamberville' (90), who is, in the village, on the way to his niece's cabin. The uncle's Shadow, sent to ward off the priest from the entrance, loses the fight and suffocates in the priest's robe. The uncle instantly knows that, for his people, 'there would be no harvest' (93). When Tekakwitha addresses the priest with her request to be baptized, the uncle collapses in the field; carried home, he refuses the priest's offer to be baptized himself (119-20). His healing will occur in a dance that is to restore communion with the world (and thus is symbolically akin to F. and

Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss 45 Edith's Telephone Dance). During an 'Andacwandet,' a ritual prayer and dance among the copulating members of his tribe, he sings over and over the following words: I change I am the same I change I am the same

(*39)

This sung prayer operates a paradoxical breakdown of logical oppositions. The seemingly contradictory values of identity and difference, of inside and outside, are equally attributed to the praying subject, which is fittingly represented by the linguistic shifter T.' The healing energy is equivalent to the end of masks, which - like names - posit identity by signifying difference. The dance is said to bring about the identity of the masks with the masked, and thus the redundancy of naming and signification: It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was a real mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was but one mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed and changed into itself over and over. (140; emphasis added)

The function of this 'greatest and truest sacred formula' (139) is constantly to leave the boundary of the self, to deliver it to what it is not and then return it to itself as other - a process that itself turns out to be the 'identity' of 'I.'44 Similarly, the prophet of 'Loneliness and History' had to act as traitor with respect to the community precisely in order to be true to it. He had to rescue it from the attrition of a religious protocol that rigidly posited identity by the exclusion of its enabling other. The prophet's task was to undo the gap between an energy and the name that was meant to reveal it, yet that in fact had come to supersede it. The Andacwandet, although it is called a 'unique mode of cure' (140), plays an exemplary role in the novel. The story of the uncle's illness and recovery, intermittently told on pages 90-140 of this work obsessed with spiritual and physical healing (and a concomitant vocabulary, from miracles to pharmacy and occupational therapy), is interspersed with episodes based on similar principles that all heal ontological rifts by unsettling the partitions that come with the thetic distinctions of self and other, and with the boundaries of thinking and naming.

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One overriding figure of thought in the novel equates the temporal structure of desire with the distances and distinctions posited by thought and language. Whereas the latter are associated with the colour 'white/ the opposing colour 'red' comes to stand for the magic perception of fulfilled (and thus abolished) desire, congruent with the end of time, of limits, and of identity in language. The colour red thus expresses the wish of thought to be present at its own absence, and to lose its self-defining boundary with the other.45 Even death ceases to constitute a barrier for the absolute extension of desire, and of the colour red. The red wine Tekakwitha spills at the feast in Quebec (a disruption of the 'white' world and its baptizing containment of the 'red' world)4 begins to taint more than just the tablecloth, while around her a conversation about the invention of the bayonet carries on: 'The stain spread quickly' (104). The spreading 'revenge' of the red against the white world reasserts Catherine's past Indian world, while alluding to the Christian symbolism of the Eucharist that belongs to her new white, Jesuit world. Red is connected both with the blood of death (as the end of time), and with the wine of a new life of total, fulfilled, and thus absent desire. F., for instance, had 'consecrated' a night to 'staining' (10) the white model of the holy Akropolis with a red nail polish called Tibetan desire/ which 'was, he claimed, such a contradiction in terms' (10). Red is thus linked with Tibet as a metonymy of the desired Buddhist ideal of a desireless state of mind, but it is also associated with a 'transfusion of blood' (10) (as it will be later in F/s aspirations to martyrdom because the 'Revolution needs a little blood' [143]). Death appears romantically desirable, its attraction even comparable to the commanding needs of the drug addict. T will thus attribute the story of the feast (for which he can find 'no mention ... in any of the standard biographers' [105]) to Edith's explanation of the effect of injected holy water from Tekakwitha's source. He will hold this effect, preferred by F. and Edith over the injection of heroin, responsible for her suicide (116). In the story of the feast, the 'entire company ... had directed its gaze outside, as if to find ... some reassurance of a multicolored universe' (104). But the red world has lost any boundary. With the perceived difference between the inside and the outside having come to an end, desire, time, and the world of thetic distinctions have been suffused by the colour red, a miracle that speaks through Catherine Tekakwitha but exceeds her control.47 The opposition between life and death itself appears, in this perspective, as just another effect of the projections of consciousness, of the thetic necessities of naming. This has already been implied by the artificially constructed death-experience that F. stages during the Ottawa car ride. While T expects death to appear as an impermeable wall, F/s artifice presents it as an illusory boundary: behind

Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss 47 the painted silk, T stares blankly at the most ordinary representation of the banal: a hot dog stand. Only his compartmentalization, F. suggests, prevented him from experiencing the expectation of death simultaneously with 'a great come' (99). This episode, following directly the beginning of the uncle's wrestling with death, is homologous with the Indian's own conceptualization of death in the story of Oscotarach. As part of his long journey after death, he will have to pass the hut of 'Oscotarach, the Head-Piercer' to have his brain removed as the 'necessary preparation of the Eternal Hunt' (121). The end of time thus coincides with the end of thinking, which is the medium in which the difference between the paradise of the 'Eternal Hunt' and its possible absence, and therefore desire, can occur. The narrator's earlier comment on Tekakwitha's miracle, 'it is my impression that the above is apocalyptic' (104), prepares for a connection between his search for the meaning of Tekakwitha with the story of Oscotarach. In a literal sense, because the saint is dead the end of time would abolish the main obstacle between T and the object of his desire: the historical distance.4 But the end of time has other rewards: The word apocalyptic has interesting origins. It comes from the Greek apokalupsis, which means revelation. This derives from the Greek apokalnptein, meaning uncover or disclose. Apo is a Greek prefix meaning from, derived from. Kaluptein means to cover. This is cognate with kalube which is cabin, and kalumma which means woman's veil. Therefore apocalyptic describes that which is revealed when the woman's veil is lifted. What have I done ... to lift your veil, to get under your blanket, Kateri Tekakwitha? (104-5)

The end of time would thus 'uncover or disclose' both Tekakwitha and himself. It would end the closure that contains Tekakwitha as historical entity and object of desire on the one hand, and the confinement of the writing, interpreting subject in his treehouse cabin on the other. The uncovering and disclosure of T' (which is also alluded to in a physical sense, both as nakedness and as the end of his constipation) finds its translation into the minimal physical move of the narrator-pilgrim's progress. After having left the closure of his basement apartment, he will now leave the cover of the treehouse (that represents the second stage of writing's progress). To disclose the self and the unknown other, the narrative (and eventually the narrator) will descend from Oscotarach's hut. As narrative form, T"s journal dies with its author's transformation, from a paraphraser of historical texts and F.'s speech, into a reader of F.'s long letter. F. leads the way toward the end of time in more ways than one. The narrator

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of Book I ends 'The History of Them All' - before concluding with a prayer to Tekakwitha mediated by a Greek-English phrase book49 - by recounting F/s farewell from his disciple. F/s plan is to die as a martyr to the Quebec cause by blowing up a statue of Queen Victoria during a visit of Prince Philip and the Queen. Losing his thumb rather than his life in the attempt, however, F. has enough time left after his arrest and before his death to direct T,' from a hospital for the criminally insane, 'to a place where I cannot go' (198). Book II, 'A Long Letter from F/ and part of the narrator's inheritance, includes a rendering of the last years of Tekakwitha's life. Speaking to its reader(s) in silence from beyond the grave, however, F/s writing is also close to the end of his own time. Furthermore, it describes its own production in an asylum for the insane, and thus in a space reserved by society for those who do not seem to abide by its usual distinctions - in short, a space where Oscotarach has worked part of his effects. Finally, F/s writing seems also on its way to the end of desire since it is portrayed as simultaneously fantasizing and seducing the reader, the nurse Mary Voolnd. F. insists both on the fact that this is his last 'written communication' (155; emphasis in original), and that he sees his progress as a matter of style. The next step beyond what F. refers to as 'the old language' thus would have to find its form and style in the other of language, beyond the limit of its known identity. F. thus addresses his reader(s) appropriately: T wonder where my style has led you' (155). While one answer to his demand to 'interpret me, go beyond me' (169) could be the literal negation of language in silence, F. suggests that the other margin of his own language can be found beyond its dominating function. Without using the term 'domination' itself here,50 F. develops more or less its etymology (domus: house, dominus: master of the house)51 when he associates male subjectivity with the silencing sound 'shhh/ which interiorizes everything under the roof and rule of its categories, and simultaneously excludes otherness. The ruler-lines his 'ball pen' draws on the white paper silence another language, just as Jesuit rule had made the Indians obtuse to nature. Compared with the female 'hiss,' the male 'shhh' dominates, rules, and excludes: It is the very opposite of a hiss, the sound men make. It is Shhh, the sound made around the index finger raised to the lips. Shhh, and the roofs are raised against the storm. Shhh, the forests are cleared so the wind will not rattle the trees. Shhh, the hydrogen rockets go off to silence dissent and variety ... Shhh, will everybody listen, please. Will the animals stop howling, please. Will the belly stop rumbling, please. Will Time call off its ultrasonic dogs, please. It is the sound my ball pen makes on the hospital paper ... Shhh, it says to the bil-

Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss 49 lion unlines of whiteness. Shhh, it whispers to the white chaos, lie down in dormitory rows. Shhh, it implores the dancing molecules, I love dances but I do not love foreign dances, I love dances that have rules, my rules.(i57)

The 'old language' - including historical naming or the Jesuit baptizing of Catherine Tekakwitha - appears thus to seek the salvation of the self and the voice of the other in this reduction to one determining, structuring protocol that would 'cultivate' the unknown: Now what about this silence we are so desperate to clear in the wilderness ? Have we labored, plowed, muzzled, fenced so that we might hear a Voice? Fat chance. The Voice comes out of the whirlwind, and long ago we hushed the whirlwind. I wish that you would remember that the Voice comes out of the whirlwind ... Wit, invention, shhh, shhh, now do you see why we've soundproofed the forest, carved benches round the wild arena? (157-9)

The uncle's dance, in this perspective, is both 'male' and 'female': it is distinctly the cure to the Jesuit silencing of the Indians' world, and appears as a 'foreign dance' and 'wilderness' to the Jesuits. Although it is itself a protocol destined to exclude and silence the Jesuits, it simultaneously translates sameness and change into each other, and is thus both self-protective and self-contradictory. The dance bears more than a passing resemblance to F.'s suggestion that some 'do not hear the individual noises shhh, hiss, they hear the sound of the sounds together, they behold the interstices flashing up and down the cone of the flowering whirlwind' (160). Similarly, a new language, a new style of writing would both be and not be language and its opposite; it would say and stutter the unsayable, would visualize the invisible, and come into being at the boundary between the language of the self and its unknown other. The dance of identity and negation and 'the sound of the sounds together' symbolize the end of desire as the end of the discrepancy between an inside and an outside of self. This perceptual movement would undo the domination of the real over the ideal. Cohen turns here to classical surrealist strategy, associating the utter permeability of the boundary between what Freud called primary and secondary processes with revolution.52 The dictatorship of the reality principle is expressed metaphorically by the movie theatre newsreel. The 'real news' inverts the relationship (although the two elements are politely said to 'merge')53 between the reality of the street and the 'subjective' reality of the feature:

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Discoveries of the Other

The newsreel lies between the street and the Feature like Boulder Dam, vital as a border in the Middle East - breach it (sol thought), and a miasmal mixture will imperialize existence by means of its sole quality of total corrosion. So I thought! ... It took courage! I let the newsreel escape, I invited it to walk right into plot, and they merged in awful originality. (237-8)

The cherished internal existence abolishes the self-defining borders with an 'evil/ imperializing outside, and the opposition between the subjective 'feature' and the previously external, 'objective' reality comes to an end. With the immediately following story of F.'s reluctant escape from the asylum, the end of boundaries induces a suspension and merging of oppositions in a generalized kind of synaesthesia. The madman escapes into the supposedly sane outside; the real world (in the form of police dogs) invades the fantasy of his letter (as his writing seems to turn into reality); the voice of the radio both interrupts and becomes the book ('ASSUMING THE FORM OF PRINT' 240); it tells of the impending escape of F. as a fact already past and crosses the lines both between hearing and seeing and between the source of information and its content, self-reflexively 'EXHIBITING A MOTION PICTURE OF ITSELF' (240). F. shows his readers - T and us - how it is happening, indeed. But as he states elsewhere, that 'is as far as I can take you. I cannot bring you into the middle of action. My hope is that I have prepared you for this pilgrimage' (175). The language of his letter - the 'old language' - cannot really cross its own limit and identity as language. F. follows the last command given by the radio emerging from his own writing - 'Drop your weapons!' - and puts down his pen. When we turn the page, we learn that the end of F.'s style is, in fact, the end of the book and the beginning of a new one, since 'Book Three: Beautiful Losers' is simultaneously announced as an 'Epilogue in the Third Person' (243). The new language appears not (yet) speakable, visible; instead we are offered an allegory of the state of mind into which F. and his reader(s) would have vanished. The old man whom we see descend from his treehouse (apo kalube') seems indeed to have solved F.'s impossible dilemma. Imagining himself T's Oscotarach (196), F. had to make this act self-reflexive: 'But who could perform the operation on Oscotarach? When you understand this question, you will understand my ordeal' (196). His predicament was defined by the need to use concepts to teach the magical loss of concepts, to employ power to undo power: 'I wanted to be a magician ... Here is a plea based on my whole experience: do not be a magician, be magic' (175). The old man seems to have done what neither 'I' nor F. could do in their 'domestic' struggle: to have posited,

Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss

51

memorized, and forgotten the language that leads to the power of loss. As a being created in language, however, we see him paradoxically both endowed with concepts of language, memory, and story, and utterly free of them: 'He scraped his memory for an incident out of his past with which to my thologize the change of season ... and his pain was finding none. His memory represented no incident, it was all one incident/ (246). Descending from the treehouse and threatened with death at the hand of a rule-defending mob, he becomes the truly apocalyptic incarnation of T and F. At a moment that can be interpreted as that of his real death as well, he enters a world in which normal concepts of temporal and spatial distinctions and of cognitive identity become inoperative. Self-fulfilling desire takes over reality, abolishing the syntagmatic sequence of single frames that constitutes time: In the woods behind, a Catholic posse was beating the bushes. The best he could expect at their hands was a death whipping ... Suddenly, as the action freezing into a still on the movie screen, an Oldsmobile materialized ... There was a beautiful girl behind the wheel ... Except for footwear, she was naked below the armrest. (250; emphasis added) His sexual encounter with the stranger who will reveal - in Greek - her 'identity' as Isis, suggests that the old man has lost the concept of self together with the memory upon which it is based. We have seen T study his Greek phrase book, and F. had been shown to understand Edith's Greek perfectly well when she proclaimed her identity as Isis (195). Her words are associated with a phrase that allows us to interpret the metaphorical equation of the end of time literally as revelation: 'I am all that has been, and is, and shall be, and my robe has never yet been uncovered by mortal men.'54 While at this moment, when perceptual time has stopped like 'a still on the movie screen,' the identity between Isis and Edith suggests that T's wife has been restored to the 'old man,'55 and while Isis' moccasins imply that Catherine Tekakwitha is simultaneously revealed to him, the old man is not interested in identities of self and other anymore. Fascination and desire of the self for the identity of the other have ended; neither her stilted English nor her Greek words result in the old charm: -Have you any idea who I am? -I'm not in the least interested. -\(n£eya>

-Foreigners bore me, Miss.

(251)

52

Discoveries of the Other

That desire has reached its self-annihilating goal is further suggested by the old man's farewell to Isis, 'Have a magnificent crash' (251), echoing the Ottawa car ride in which T"s concept of the end of time (and of his self), however, had made him withhold sexual pleasure. With the apocalyptic revelation of Isis, the old man reaches, literally and symbolically, the stage of F/s epiphany, the System Theatre (which has lost its two first neon letters 'which will never be repaired' [235]). F. had expressed his revelation metaphorically. Consciousness had occurred to him as movement in a container - smoke in a chimney, crystals in a test-tube, a snake in a telescope (236-7) - creating thetically the diverse phenomenal world we see through the form of its self-identical movement. Consulting the sameness of the projection beam rather than the system of thetic shapes and sequences that 'stem' from it (a mental exercise closely related to the Mohawk uncle's dance), he had compared its workings with those of the biblical snake (who had offered, with the knowledge of everything, the knowledge of the self as thing apart, and thus self-consciousness): We are now in the heart of the last feature in the System Theatre. Within severe limits ... the dusty projection beam above our hair twisted and changed ... Like battalions of sabotaged parachutists ... the frames streamed at the screen, splashing into contrast color as they hit, just as the bursting cocoons of arctic camouflage spread colorful organic contents over the snow as the divers disintegrate ... No it was more like ... the first snake in the shadows of the original garden, the albino orchard snake offering our female memory the taste of - everything! As it floated and danced and writhed in the gloom over us, I often raised my eyes to consult the projection beam rather than the story it carried. (236-7)

The images on the screen 'stem' from one principle, the identical mechanism of projection that thus 'betrays' its energy in visible form as object, and us as viewing subjects. Already the vignette of 'the favourite game' concluding the novel of that title was based on a similar idea. The narrator remembers the shapes he and his friends produced as children when they flung themselves into the snow. The Favourite Came ends: 'Then we walked, leaving a lovely white field of blossom-like shapes with footprint stems' (223). The stems lead to and away from these projections of their movement imprinted on the white surface, as the projection beam in the stem theatre leads the old man to and away from the images on the white screen.56 The old man who has 'known' Isis thus has done so, necessarily, unbeknownst to himself. Since he has 'seen' the end of time, incidences do not occur to him sequentially or causally; nor does he constitute knowledge and

Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss 53 its corollaries, subject and object. Void of temporal distinctions, and thus of the boundaries that engender the beholding self as different from the image beheld, he is portrayed by the narrator as identifying with the shutter speed. From the temporal perspective of the 'Master of the Yoga of the Movie Position' (252) himself, however, neither the pictures of the movie nor the identical black frames between them occur thetically as other of (and different from) a self. Without any opposition between the subjective speed (of his eye movement) and the projected images, the illusion of movement created by the shutter is not reconstructed as flow. The pictures therefore do not occur as the pictures of a film. They are not even constituted as external pictures, as objects of a self. Since perception here does not 'get' the picture as different from itself, neither self nor other is constituted as such. The novel presents the various aspects of this 'unconsciousness' (both surrealistically and tongue-in-cheek) in a temporal sequence. We are therefore offered an allusion to the unrepresentable: the disappearance of the world of appearances through the total identification of the 'empty' consciousness with its objects. While the old man experiences the blackness between the movie frames, he disappears for the other patrons of the theatre (253), and then reappears as the content of his own perception. The complementary version of the subject's disappearance as such is being played out when the old man and his perception literally turn into the feature - which appropriately has spilled from the theatre into the streets of Montreal. The last two pages of the novel can be roughly divided into three different sections, in which the narrative voice itself undergoes transformations similar to those of the figure it constructs - disintegrating, then reassembling and staging a problematic 'appearance' of itself. The first section deals with the 'performance' of the old man; the second - said to be 'rented' by the Jesuits is filled by a multilingual prayer and manifesto; in the third section, finally, a first-person narrator addresses the reader, who becomes the last element in a chain of quest(ion)ing and questionable subjects being hailed by the (dis)appearance of an elusive other. The old man's performance is triggered off when he prepares himself to play the broken 'De Luxe Polar Hunt' - a game that depends on the destruction of animals for the assertion of the self. The broken or inverted form of the game, however, evokes the loss associated in the novel's title with beauty. It negates systematic strength, or the strength of systems, meant to control the world and to arrange it in a single perspective. As opposed to Charles Axis and his student E, the old man can be understood as 'disarmed and empty, an instrument of Grace' (163). We are offered the result of this loss of a thetic

54 Discoveries of the Other self from the perspective of the 'second chancers' rushing toward the game and shooting alley: -Look at him! -What's happening?

(257-8)

Similar to the first section's narrator pondering the meaning of an image of Catherine Tekakwitha in the context of a koan, we are placed - with the spectators in the text - before a picture we do not understand. Whereas in that earlier case the text evoked a picture the signified of which seemed to dissolve, in this case the picture itself becomes highly volatile. We are challenged to interpret a scene that will end with an allusion to the miracles performed by Christ ('the row of giant fishes to feed the hungry multitude' [258]), and that seems to respond indeed to the Jesuits' petitioning for more miracles. From the recognized identity of the saintly object would flow the salvation and self-knowledge of the subject - this is the assumption, in Book I, behind the narrator's quest for the identity of the saint. But have his efforts to 'get the picture/ by naming and by history, led to revelation? With the announcement of an 'Epilogue in the third person' we may have hoped, after the unreliable first-person narrators of the journal and of F/s letter, to be offered a 'point of view' that would let us locate our selves with reference to the world presented. The intrusion of other voices, however, turns the image of the old man into a multiple object: contradicting voices announce the simultaneous recognition in the old man of a local pervert, a patriot, and a revolutionary terrorist (256). He reflects and emits a multiplicity of meanings, overdetermined like the name of Catherine Tekakwitha, and a spectacle beyond the surface of representation. His performance takes indeterminacy to its 'fullest' end: disappearing as visual entity, he is said to become (like the projection beam) the medium of all possibilities at once. His disintegration is described as occurring from the inside out, as the paradox of an extending emptiness rather than the splintering of a whole into deducible, positively describable parts: The old man had commenced his remarkable performance (which I do not intend to describe). Suffice it to say that he disintegrated slowly; just as a crater extends its circumference with endless tiny landslides along the rim, he dissolved from the inside out. (258)57

The parenthesis points to the insufficiency of language to 'present' absence. Only by immediately contradicting itself, language here evades as yet its own

Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss 55 disappearance,^8 proceeding by the image of an absence: 'His presence was like the shape of an hourglass, strongest where it was smallest' (258). Far from indicating a gruesome end of the old man, this passage (which cannot possibly be interpreted in a realist or representational context) combines a surrealist image (for those readers 'imagining' his 'presence' as spatial extension) with an allusion to a mystic via negative.59'The beautiful waist of the hourglass' appears as a present surrounded, yet undefined, by past and future. The future going both ways' creates, in the process of coming into being, its own past. The present is thus not determined by the logic of the already existent images. It is, rather, pure potentiality: 'For all the time it takes to launch a sigh he allowed the spectators a vision of All Chances At Once!' (258). At this point of 'Clear Light' (258), 'knowledge' does not have any representable extension. It occurs metaphorically as the pure (compressed) principle and 'stem' of all becoming, a relational point that represents nothing by itself: 'For a lovely briefness all the sand is compressed in the stem between the two flasks' (258). This point between, and different from, 'having been' on the one hand, and becoming on the other, is the potential of a different temporality, a kind of future that would change the implications of present and past - outside the categories of thought, different from a prolongation of the past. As such, it is different from simple negation, the inverse and thus still colonized other of the status quo; the text here does not just call for thetic alterity but for its other, the heterological: 'Let it change forever what we do not know' (258). Beyond the negation of the known and of the self, to change what we do not know would require a change of negation. The answer to this manifesto would have to be expressed differently somehow from the conceptual language of our 'domestic' horizon, and could not be represented by its inverted other- such as, for instance, the exotic. The void of utter potentiality, however, demands to be filled. Representation returns as a degraded Utopian mode when the flow of pictures is reconstituted, accompanied by temporal markers indicative of movie speed and greedy desire: 'Quickly now, as if even he participated in the excitement over the unknown, he greedily reassembled himself (258). The process of disintegration is completed and inverted when the old man turns into the representational form of a movie of Ray Charles. But this (hallucinogenic) performance of his own perceptual experience comes across, in turn, as object and as 'movie' - unless it be redeemed again by the spectators' 'performance' of their own experience. The naming (or baptizing) of the self's Utopian other - as in the case of Catherine Tekakwitha - turns the other into the object of an industry. Ray Charles himself, of

56

Discoveries of the Other

course, is blind like the old man at this moment. The moon that 'occupied one lens of his sunglasses' (258) refers us back to T"s question, with respect to the story of Oscotarach the head-piercer, whether the moonlight is about to 'get into my scull' (141), a question echoed later by F. (196). Ray Charles here is the medium of light from somewhere else that is reflected like the projected image in the movie theatre. He is the other on whom needs are projected. In an allusion to the traditional motive of blindness as a moment of vision unobstructed by appearances, the novel suggests that the eyes of the crowd will be opened only when they perceive what the old man (and the blind Ray Charles) see: 'a black screen' (253). To get the picture, the spectator will have to get past the picture. The audience's reaction to the spectacle is thus presented with a certain irony: Thank God, it's only a movie' (259) is one of the comments on this 'documentary on the Industry' (258), on this reality of the representation of desire as object and as name. Registering the event from a consumer's point of view as beholders of a representation, the audience seems distanced from the miracle in progress. The old man's transformation points allegorically to an experience in which, as we have seen, the outside is not posited and represented as determined object and other of the self. The 'New Jew/ while joyously exclaiming that 'Somebody's making it,' has not completed the hermeneutic journey from the picture s/he sees to its anti-representational implications, and is thus still 'laboring on the lever of the broken Strength Test' (259). The voice of the epilogue has shared, in the very act of naming the unnameable - by calling it Ray Charles - the problem of the 'movie' it evokes. It will not allow the reader, however, the continued comfort of a single perspective, voice, or image that derives its 'strength' from such stability. The next passage submits an authoritative discourse about miracles to a disintegration into many different voices. The religious voice of atemporal truth is, with the announcement that the end of the book has been 'rented to the Jesuits' (259), ironically steeped in the secular context of a commercial agreement. The penultimate paragraph of Beautiful Losers consists of an exact quotation, with the exception of one paragraph (and several spelling errors), of the ending of Lecompte's book, interrupted and segmented, however, by a word-for-word translation into English. Lecompte, after the completion of the historical narrative, and the presentation of the miracles brought about by Tekakwitha, petitions here for her beatification, and for more miracles. Taken out of the context of Lecompte's book, the already somewhat heterogeneous qualities of his ending increase. On the one hand, there is the heteroglossia of religious discourse ('il est essential [sic] que les miracles eclatent

Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss 57 de nouveau' [259, Lecompte 290]), political declaration ('Le Canada et les Etats-Unis puiseront de nouvelles forces'), and the undermining of the sacred by a profane, official miracle industry ('pour le succes [sic] de 1'enterprise [sic])/ which Cohen makes conspicuous by the commercial language ('rented') in the preceding passage. On the other hand, this heteroglossia is topped by the polyglossia of the translation, which, repeating each group of words in the other language, evokes a community repeating phrases of a prayer spoken by the priest: translation becomes prayer. 'Prayer is translation' (60); with these words F. had handed T the English-Greek phrase book that inspires the end of Book I. But prayer and translation, at least in the sense given to them by F., alter rather than identify. The intention of the prayer that is evoked, at the end of the novel, by the form is undermined by the very means by which it is achieved. The identification supposedly brought about by prayer is undercut by the different language of the repetition - in what already is an inauthentic, only 'rented' space. As translation had led, at the beginning of the book, to a completely altered text, it here turns the original text into a collage of polyphonic voices. Beyond the formal parody implemented by repetition as translation, Cohen omits from the middle of his citation Lecompte's penultimate paragraph: Quelle lec.on pour tous, sauvages et blancs, de voir un jour sur les autels une jeune Indienne, dont la foi et les moeurs furent mises a de rudes epreuves, mais en sortit toujours victorieuse! (Lecompte 290) The omission of this didactic paragraph, it is reasonable to assume, is occasioned by the fact that it contains the crucial word 'victorieuse/ The insistence on that always triumphant will and ending (which we might have been willing to read humanistically - in dubio pro reo - into the hypostatized image of Ray Charles) is not in keeping with the novel's title. If loss is beauty, it is still the surrender of certainty. This objection is literally emphasized by the passage Cohen inserts instead of the certified 'legon pour tous': We petition the country for miracle evidence, and we submit this document, whatever its intentions, as the first item in a revived testimonial to the Indian girl. (259) These words, of course, can refer both to the text signified by the translation, and to that incongruous translation and prayer that is Beautiful Losers. Consequently, the subject of the sentence is also in abeyance: does this 'we' refer us to the Jesuits, or to a pluralis majestatis used by the narrator of the novel, or to the elicited chorus of the hailed readers? The meaning of this sentence

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Discoveries of the Other

will be constructed in our reading when we decide on a translation - or in our multiple readings. We hear the translator's voice, but do not know anything about his intention; we hear the translated text, but its meaning has become multiple in an equivocal context. The last paragraph, finally, seems to include us in a community with others and with the speaker: 'Poor men, poor men, such as we, they've gone and fled' (259). But even if we could assume that 'they' were the Jesuits, 'we' would only find ourselves bereft of the already contextually undermined purveyors of reliable meta-narratives. Since we do not know who the speaker is, however, it is all but impossible to know who 'we' are supposed to be. The identity of this 'narrator' is as uncertain as the status of the rented space. Where are we to locate our own perspective, our point of view? The sentence leads into a prose poem that, in its rhythms and repeated subject, evokes the 'Holy Father.' In this text, however, a seemingly prophetic T has taken the position of the prayer's communal subject. This prayer - an ironic prophecy in a technical world ('electrical tower/ 'turret of plane,' 'Alone with my radio') - finally hails the reader directly. The last two verses have again the effect of a koan, and give the reader an impossible hermeneutic task: 'Welcome to you, darling and friend, who miss me forever in your trip to the end' (260). In order to understand who this prophet is, in order to locate and securely cover our selves, we would have to name his identity - a task, we are told simultaneously, we will never come to terms with. Nothing is yet 'revealed' in the prose poem; on the contrary: 'He will uncover His face' (259; my emphasis). Our quest for the prophet and his meaning would parallel the initial narrator's 'Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you?' The voice that has been heard by us seems to have 'known' the miracle (which, however, it did 'not intend to describe' [258]), but it has left us. What is revealed, then, in the trace left by the energy of that voice, written in the text of the novel? Strictly speaking, nothing. We have been led through the same sabotage of definitive meanings that the initial narrator had faced with the initial koan. If we are left with a prophet who still beckons, and with a feeling that the address to the saint seems to have made it happen, the specifications of salvation are lost in a multitude of undermined assertions. // the initial 'you' has granted what was requested, it is only negatively alluded to by the existence of the text. Beautiful Losers thus offers a strange kind of 'history/ a protocol of numbered passages that records the path of an experience in language, yet, it seems, perversely refuses to present us with representable meaning. How are we to respond to that other who greets us amiably - if somewhat ironically on the last page: 'Welcome to you who read me today'? Why does this final

Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss 59 voice seem to speak of a beginning rather than an ending when we are invited to join this T in his loneliness and, thus, in a strange kind of community? Could it not be that we are asked - or even forced - not to mistake the seemingly finished text as a container and token of the movement toward otherness it has enacted, not 'to mistake the cast off shell with the swift changing thing that shed it' (as Cohen had put it in 'Loneliness and History') ? A brief look at Martin Buber's / and Thou may be helpful in this context. Buber distinguishes between two 'basic words' (which are actually pairs of words) that mark two different modes of experience as present and past; the first is I-You, the second is I-It (53). I-It belongs to the realm of experience that is able to formulate an object, 'but objects consist in having been' (64). The I-You is relational, and only exists as present: 'What is essential is lived in the present, objects in the past' (64). Art, for Buber, is a relational encounter in the present in which a form is confronted and 'actualized': Tested for objectivity, the form is not 'there' at all; but what can equal its presence? And it is an actual relation: it acts on me as I act on it. Such work is creation, inventing is finding. Forming is discovery. As I actualize, I uncover. I lead the form across - into the world of It. (61)

And that is the inescapable implication: as soon as it is formulated, experience lived as present turns into a thing, into a described object, an I-It, a past: This, however, is the sublime melancholy of our lot that every You must become an It in our world ... The actualization of the work involves a loss of actuality. Genuine contemplation never lasts long; the natural being that only now revealed itself to me in the mystery of reciprocity has again become describable, analyzable, classifiable - the point at which manifold systems of laws intersect. (68)

Cohen's novel seeks to withhold, it seems to me, precisely this definition of its 'you' (and of its relational T) as 'It,' this naming of its revelation as recognized object and thus as past 'It' - although the completed novel cannot avoid its fate as an actualized form. We have already seen that the experience of the saying enjoys a certain dominance over the said in Beautiful Losers. As soon as the act of saying turns into the said, it belongs to the past and 'is history.' As both F. in the novel and Cohen in 'Loneliness and History' suggest, holding on to the recorded forms of revelation as object (an account of Tekakwitha's life, for instance) 'betrays' the energy itself in the double sense of the word 'betray': the recorded form both points to the signified energy and eclipses it. To re-establish contact with the heterological other, the prophet

60

Discoveries of the Other

had to leave the defined boundaries of the known and its subject, be it a communal or an individual self. As readers in Beautiful Losers, we have been taken through various positions of a grammar of self and other that emerges from 'Loneliness and History/ With 'I/ we have conjugated the perspective of confession and supplication. On the one hand, T approached the hypostatized other in his mystic invocation, asking it to be transformed; on the other hand, this T had a dual relationship with F/s mediating, prophetic stance. Having interiorized this voice, while at the same time resisting it, T was berated for still believing in words and names that R, however, had to use in order to undermine their power. His teachings, therefore, had sought to leave the self of reason, in search of that heterological wilderness of the unknown that is not communicable in the oppositions of thought and language, or in the protocol of the priest who only administers the prophet's heritage. R, as the incarnation of a form of speech and as 'Moses of our little exodus/ is unable, himself, to cross into the promised land of the 'new' language. Like any sign, and like the image of Ray Charles, he can point to but not take us 'into the middle of action/ The reader's interpretation of R, if it is to follow his desire to 'go beyond me,' can hardly be a 'translation' of this 'sacred speech' into a praxis of knowledge that relies on given objects. The having been said of R's speech turns it into history, and thus requires a new 'translation' of its energy. The end of thetic consciousness and speech occurs with the old man's silence during his performance. This performance and silence allude to the end of (the old) language, and prefigure the end of the written language of the book. The concrete image of a Utopian other (Ray Charles) occurs as a sign of the emptiness (which it signifies yet simultaneously obliterates), as one of the forms of the not-yet that rushes in as soon as Oscotarach has cleared the space. Since thinking posits forms, it seems impossible to think nothingness (the extended emptiness of the old man) as other than an object, impossible to think the other of the other, the heterological. At the very end we hear an T' of uncertain status - maybe a reader of R's letter like us, maybe the old T who here greets his 'darling and friend' (who could be Edith and R, or us), maybe a transformed old man who comes back from beyond speech. But as a prophetic voice this T shares R's problem with his student and reader T': to take the reader into action, it has to point away from itself, as a voice and writing that is but a trace of the unknown, and thus a contradiction in itself. Every language, in this perspective, belies the energy it asserts, and asks for translation as a praxis of response. The always already old language requires a constant letting in of the 'wilderness,' which is but

Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss 61 one of the costumes and relational names in which knowledge thinks its heterological other. As we have seen, however, such heterologies, in their very effort to find an opening with respect to the knowledge of what has been, carry along the categories of language and thinking as the medium of their existence, and always risk re-enacting what they seek to escape. These concerns inform very directly the political urgency in a group of texts that I shall discuss now, a number of essays and two novels by Hubert Aquin. Engaging and responding to historically created, communal Quebecois 'convictions inavouables et non ecrites de notre mentalite' (Aquin, Blocs erratiques 45), these writings deal quite explicitly with the implications of thetically emphasized otherness, a positioning that adheres, in Canada, to some extent to the very language that provides Aquin's medium. In an antagonistic context of alterity - evoked also by F/s ardent revolutionary separatism - perceived as domination, Aquin's texts resort to heterological strategies in response to the questioned legitimacy of protocols that reinscribe, although in often unsuspected ways, interiorized thetic definitions of self and other.

3

Hubert Aquin: Language and Legitimation

Faire la revolution, c'est sortir du dialogue domine-dominateur; a proprement parler, c'est divaguer. (Hubert Aquin, 'Profession: ecrivain') AN O T H E R ( ' S ) EYE

Like the 'patriot' and revolutionary scrivener in Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers, the writing protagonist of Hubert Aquin's first published novel, Prochain Episode (1965), finds himself imprisoned as a terrorist in a Montreal psychiatric institution. The scene of writing is associated, here as in Cohen's novel, with a space reserved for what is heterogeneous to meaning legitimized by commonly accepted norms. Aquin's first-person narrator and terrorist attempts to break a law of meaning he experiences as quite literally 'arresting/ and seeks, like F., to 'escape from the painful arrangement of things as they are' (in the latter's paraphrased words [Beautiful Losers 59]). This narrator desperately tries to discover the possibility of a heterological otherness that would exceed his given knowledge, thetically defined by antagonism and historical defeat. Prochain Episode, in its very title, points to a promised land beyond the reality of its own language that seems - like F., the 'Moses of our little exodus/ - unable to take T or 'je' into action. In Beautiful Losers, heterological otherness is mediated by the figure of Catherine Tekakwitha. She traverses T's discourse of the unknown as an other who eludes the known determinations of history, marked by 'non-adequation' (Levinas) with the thought that names her. While Beautiful Losers offers an orchestrated enumeration of the impossibilities of knowing who Catherine Tekakwitha is, this evasion of definition is also the productive condition of a heterology with a considerable potential of transformation. Cohen's T/ mobile and ironic, follows Tekakwitha, the other who is always 'wanted' and

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wanting, in order to transform its own being, yet itself produces the constantly changing appearances of the other by undoing earlier definitions. In Aquin's Prochain Episode, the names of H. de Heutz multiply in a series similar to the different spellings of the name Tekakwitha in Beautiful Losers. With K, we meet a further character named by an abbreviation, who is also increasingly difficult to identify. Transformation, mutuality, the impossibility of identification, and disappearance play as well an important role in Aquin's novel. But the narrator we encounter here is less confident about his own ability to alter definitions than the one who promises Tekakwitha to have 'come to rescue you from the Jesuits.' Aquin's narrator, of course, finds his own position physically confined to a place of writing from which - unlike T and F. - he cannot escape. His confinement in a psychiatric institution (which parallels Aquin's predicament when he wrote the novel)1 is caused, in fact, by his unsuccessful attempt to tamper with history. As separatist agent, he has been incarcerated for seeking to transform the reality of Quebec as it has been defined since the French defeat on the Plains of Abraham in 1759. Prochain Episode as well as Trou de memoire can hardly be read independently of the historical situation of Quebec. But while these circumstances play an undeniable role in the novels, they appear in them in mediated form. In this context, I shall pay attention in particular to the Sartrean notions of alterity and freedom. These notions, together with the discourses of decolonization that they influenced in the fifties and early sixties, constitute important mediations of the problem of history, not only in Prochain Episode and Trou de memoire, but also in many of Aquin's essays. Like the two novels, the essays - which in some cases refer to Sartre directly - often seek to construct a perspective (in French, literally a 'point de fuite') that escapes unwanted definitions by an other or by the past. The attraction that a Sartrean notion of freedom holds for such an enterprise lies in the fact that the French thinker argues an unavoidable incongruence of human beings with their past. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre asserts the ineluctable indeterminacy of human beings with respect to an essence that philosophy constructs after the event, as fact, as knowledge, and as description of what is because it has been. In the terms developed in Cohen's 'Loneliness and History,' the acceptance of Sartre's notion of freedom would be similar to the prophet's willingness to leave behind the certainties that are afforded by a priestly protocol and its proximities to history. In Being and Nothingness, however, the self realizes a limit of its freedom in the thetic gaze of the other. Perceiving the other first as one object among other objects, the subject then realizes that the other has the same power over the self - and therefore can no longer be defined purely as object. According

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to Sartre, the '"being-seen-by-the-Other" is the truth of "seeing-theOther"' (345). The perception of the other implies, in this perspective, the gaze of the other as thetic threat. This transfixing power is cited, for instance, in Fanon's account of a traumatic drama of black experience in Black Skin, White Masks, a book that has played an important role in Quebec: 'I was an object in the midst of other objects ... The movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye' (109). In The Other Question - The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse/ Homi K. Bhabha has analysed how in this scene, which in Fanon's text stands for 'everyday' colonial experience, 'the subject turns around the pivot of the "stereotype" to return to a point of total identification' (28). Bhabha points also to a dual identification by which both sides define their place in this relationship of otherness.2 Ex negative, an anti-representational strategy is thus adumbrated; it would neither see the other as pure negation of (and totally different from) the self, nor transfix otherness as object which in turn 'arrests' - or guarantees, depending on positionality a corresponding, unalterable self. Acted out most conspicuously (though not exclusively) in spatial battles against determination and the literally arresting powers of the other, such strategies will to a large extent generate the text of Prochain Episode. In many of Aquin's early texts of the fifties in Quartier latin (collected and reprinted as part I of Blocs erratiques), the promise of the possible freezes already under an objectifying gaze. 'Le regard de 1'autre' fixes the subject in its complete definition and visibility as determined and subjected, and negates its freedom to act. The phenomenology of self and other that comes to the fore in these texts prepares the ground for Aquin's articulation of alterity in the paradigm of oppressor and oppressed in the late fifties.^ Since the relationships between self and other that emerge in this period will be constantly evoked in both Prochain Episode and Trou de memoire, I shall examine some of the constellations of alterity that occur in these early writings. Not surprisingly for a French-speaking student of philosophy at the beginning of the fifties, Aquin is preoccupied with phenomenological models of visual perception and its thetic implications. The appearance of the other, and specifically the gaze of the other through which the subject constructs itself as object, plays a central role, for instance, in Sartre's Being and Nothingness. In the section The Existence of Others' (which develops the background for the later chapter on the gaze), Sartre writes: 'By the mere appearance of the Other, I am put in the position of passing judgment on myself as on an object, for it is as an object that I appear to the Other' (302). Aquin's short text, 'Le dernier mot/ similarly presents a subject that perceives its reality determined

Hubert Aquin: Language and Legitimation 65 by the gaze of the other: Tl me regardait comme un juge en mal de condamner ... son regard me reduisait a peu' (Blocs erratiques 15). The self-objectifying consciousness here seeks to hide from the eye of the other. But already in this short composition written in 1950, the narrator turns the tables on the other in a symmetrical inversion, and makes himself the viewing subject by finding 'un petit espace d'ou 1'observer sans qu'il me voie' (16). In another text from this period, Telerinage a 1'envers/ the absolute power of the gaze of the other occurs, from one point of view, as a promise of salvation; it is experienced, from an inverse perspective, as a threat. The narrator, having chosen the tomb of Christ for a night's rest in Jerusalem, steps into the morning light to find himself transfixed by the eyes of a crowd; he sees 'des yeux et des yeux se braquer sur moi' (21). Speaking 'nerveusement a ces yeux prets a me fusilier' (23-24), he turns expectation into anger as he refuses the role that has been imposed upon him by the place and time of his appearance. But in an appended moral, the narrator first inverts the judging gaze by attributing the guilt of imposture to those who impose roles and expectations upon others; in a further step, he confesses to have done the same, and thus constitutes himself, in turn, as an object of the earlier accusation. In these inversions, the thetic gaze begins to become ubiquitous, and falls back upon the one who directs it at the other. In a short text significantly entitled 'Tout est miroir/ the subject's gaze similarly returns - a sorcerer's apprentice - to be directed at its former master. The purview of the gaze becomes unlimited, and so do the efforts of the subject-turned-object to posit itself again as further subject, as a new cogito that would stand outside the realm of fixed objects. The transformation of the self includes irony, mockery, sarcasm, and finally revolt as strategies to remove the hero's life from the 'monnayage universel' (29), to escape the commonly accepted economy of meaning. His thinking turns into a veritable 'dark room' of mirroring inversions, a camera obscura: 'Au fond de sa chambre chaque soir cet homme fetait devant son miroir' (29). The operation soon begins to lose its symmetry, however, inverting not only the upright image, but any predetermined perception: 'Son regard deshabillait sa propre vie des details les plus insoupc,onnes; chaque objet avait un maximum de valeur de fete qu'il fallait exploiter, les plus ordinaires recelent parfois d'infinies interpretations. La fete c'est se refaire 1'oeil' (29). But beyond a Brechtian desire to render habitual perception strange to itself, the process here seeks to explode and de-face the house of reality with 'une juste quantite de dynamite pour la completement devisager' (29). This consciousness attempts, beyond inversion, complete indetermination: 'Deja il voyait toute chose a 1'envers, ne cherchant ... que le coup d'oeil gra-

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tuit' (29). The free eye that does not pay its debt to anything, and is not bought by any given reality, seems free only in the total decomposition and dismemberment of the perceived world and its meanings. Like Cohen's 'Dr. Frankenstein with a deadline' (Beautiful Losers 186], the character described here 'depouilla notre constitution seculaire de son assemblage habituelle. Il recollait ensemble des parties incompatibles du corps humain, composant ainsi, de ses paradoxes esthetiques, un mannequin baroque' (30). The capital return of this operation is described as an experience of power: Ah quel monde retourne! restait-it encore quelque chose que ce fol artiste n'avait pas totalement invert!? Sa frenesie avait-elle epargne une seule parcelle d'ordre?... Plus de baisers, plus d'etoiles, plus rien en vie que cette fete homicide. L'artiste etait sur le bord de la joie: son oeuvre dechiree lui renvoyait une image exageree de sa puissance. (30)

If the mad artist ('ce fol artiste') whom we see at work in this scene is only on the threshold of his particular jouissance ('sur le bord de la joie'), it is because one master plan has not yet been inverted, one eye not yet been torn out: the logic of inversion itself that is still determined by what it inverts and annihilates, the gaze of the artist himself that is still only a reflex, determined as symmetrical negation of the thetic gaze it seeks to destroy. The process of undoing given determinations ('Sa frenesie avait-elle epargne une seule parcelle d'ordre ?') is referred to as 'devergondage': a shameless excessiveness. For Sartre, shame and guilt are the automatic result of being watched by an other (301-2, 352, 531), of being judged by the existence of an other, of 'recognizing] that 7 am as the Other sees me' (302). In order to escape the shame of objecthood, consciousness-for-itself, in 'Tout est miroir,' annihilates the last eye: its own. The process of indefinition begins to precede the willed gaze that had begun the annihilation: 'Le rythme qu'il avait desire le devan^ait vertigineusement' (30). And this motive of vertigo, a spinning of perceptions - repeated time and again in Aquin's corpus - announces the nihilation of the last eye of an other, and the myth of absolute self-creation: Pour achever cette impensable fete il s'y jeta lui-meme. Pour finir, il fallait aneantir le dernier spectateur ... L'artiste se crucifia au milieu de son oeuvre. Ce fut le plus beau moment du spectacle quand le dernier oeil qui le regardait fut creve. Alors tout avait pris son sens. La fete, cet effort excentrique du cerveau, devenait une immense toupie ontologique qui se regardait sans rire. Ah! spectacle sans spectateur, qui, gorge de son propre vertige, s'enfongait en lui-meme comme une pensee qui se pense. Au centre de cette rotation sublime, il y avait I'ame de I'artiste, crispee cornme un Dieu. (31)

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'Une pensee qui se pense': a thought that is the object of no thought but itself, and that has emptied all outside existence by sublating it in itself - this seems impossible and unthinkable ('cette impensable fete'), because it would be a meta-thought always other than the one it thinks; and yet it is the Hegelian Geist coming into its own at the end of the Phenomenology. At this point, the 'fantasque aventure' (31) ends, an adventure in which the given thetic determinations are abolished, but under the absolute control of the artist. In a sense, it has to end, since the thought portrayed here has exhausted the realm outside thought and knowledge. It seems to possess, in fact, an autonomous and complete knowledge of itself. This situation, however, poses a problem of continuation, one that will arise again in Prochain Episode. Vincent Descombes points to a whole tradition in French literature that links the experience of having read Hegel with the experience of an impossibility of writing (45). He quotes in particular the letter by Mallarme to Cazalis that documents his depression after reading Hegel: 'I have just lived through an appalling year. My thought has thought itself' (qtd Descombes 45). In Aquin's 'une pensee qui se pense/ we encounter Mallarme's phrase in the present tense. But as in Hegel's view of history, as the progress of the spirit that finally grasps itself completely in its own thought, Aquin's spinning top of self-reflection and inversion ('une immense toupie ontologique') reaches a self-contained completion ('cette rotation sublime'). This moment, however, also represents a problematical stasis: when all has been thought and everything has been said, what else could literature (or any speech) be but anti-creation, predetermined repetition void of originality or freedom - despite all its autonomy and subjective might, a shameful, fixed object under the eyes of the past. Thought would be precluded from breaking through the circle of the past. Sartre, of course, emphatically rejects the idea of a knowledge that has been completed, an idea that has appalling implications for any contestatory strategy that seeks to escape, precisely, being as it is known. In his notion of freedom, Sartre does not support the Hegelian belief that the key to being has been found by a knowledge that would contain it. His main critique of Hegel hinges on the very question of whether 'a consciousness [is] modified by the fact that it is [being] known' (Being and Nothingness 326), and on his notion of an ineluctable freedom that necessarily alters what is known. Hegel's 'identification of being and knowledge' is rejected, and accused of 'epistemological optimism' (324). In 'Tout est miroir,' Aquin takes the Hegelian universe to its completion at the moment when 'tout avail pris son sens.' But the text also evokes the threat of a universe that is completely determined by the subject's knowledge. In a short framing remark at the end, the narrator ironically distances

68 Discoveries of the Other himself from the preceding 'adventure' of the spirit, suggesting implicitly that he has almost reached Hegel's absolute knowledge: 'En vous racontant cette fantasque aventure, j'ai passe pres de devenir Dieu' (31). Unlike Hegel, the narrator maintains an outsidedness to the total mirror of absolute knowledge, although he has thus to posit a creative principle heterogeneous to thought - a heterological negativity and an other he (ironically) refers to as God: 'Alors j'allais presque recreer le monde, mais je me suis arrete, car la concurrence de Dieu le pere me contrariait. C'est entendu qu'il sera toujours le plus fort, et je suis mauvais perdant' (31). While art can be seen as a self-creation and self-reflection under the autonomous control of the subject, Aquin's Tensees inclassables' evoke, already in 1950, a very contradictory notion of art that refers both to the self-reflective 'excess' of 'Tout est miroir' and to a shattering of this system of mirrors: L'art est une fete, mais excedente [sic], trop forte; c'est un miroir ou je me vois depuis longtemps et que tout a coup je fracasse avec mon seul regard concentre. Le propre de 1'art est de surprendre 1'homme en flagrant delit de profondeur. Meme celui qui s'attend a tout de lui-meme, garde un secret effroyable ou grandiose: c'est la que frappe I'art, tres pres du mystere. (Blocs erratiques 25)

Art is dead, long live art! Against the notion of art as autonomous self-creation and the aura of 'profondeur' that comes with it, this passage emphasizes art as a praxis that exceeds knowledge and given comprehension. It hypostasizes an 'other/ heterological eye able to 'surprise' ('surprendre') the self as the fixed, thetic other of knowledge in the strict sense. This 'other' eye would break even through the inversions created by a self-enclosed spinning circle of self-reflection so complete that the discovery of an other has come to an end. AN O T H E R ( ' S ) PAST

By 1961, after Aquin has joined the Rassemblement pour 1'Independence Nationale (RIN) and returned from a journey to Africa for a film on decolonization,4 the impulse in his texts to break with both a gaze imposed by an antagonistic other and a finalized knowledge is expressed in clearly historical and political categories. In 'Comprendre dangereusement,' one of his contributions to the journal Liberte, he specifies that it is the political system of Quebec that has to be the object of '1'eclatement, la convulsion, 1'attaque' (Blocs erratiques 45). This system, however, has been inscribed into a historically determined comprehension of self and other, and therefore 'repose d'abord sur les convictions inavouables et non ecrites de notre mentalite'

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(45). Since, in this view, historical conditioning seems to force individuals to reproduce and to re-enact the scenarios that have led to their predicament, Aquin poses the thorny problem of determinism and free will. In his essay 'L'Art de la defaite' (1965), Aquin formulates a striking example of the self-defeating effects that can be produced by the 'convictions inavouables' he mentions in 'Comprendre dangereusement.' Discussing the failure of the 1837 Rebellion, Aquin tells us that the Tatriotes' were defeated because their acts were based on a closed system of thought. All components were 'known/ predictable, and foreseeable. The factors of hazard and chance that exceed certainty and knowledge, and usually come with battle, were 'skilfully' avoided by the Tatriotes': Tout etait previsible, tout! Et tout a etc prevu; rien n'a etc laisse au hasard (car il faut se mefier du hasard occasionnellement propice a la victoire!). (Blocs enatiques 113)

Aquin suggests, in fact, that the Tatriotes' were unable to summon any other logic than that of their other. Their assessment of the confrontation in a perspective predetermined by a history of defeat precluded strategies heterogeneous to the known patterns (and thus prevented a certain heterology that might have led them to an unexpected and 'unknown' outcome). Aquin compares the 'explications objectives de la defaite' (113) provided by most historians with an argument Friedrich Engels makes in his Anti-Duhring: violent conflict is decided by the better armament, which is determined by superior production capabilities (Blocs enatiques 113-14). Aquin, however, reads this logic in the light of Frantz Fanon's discussion in The Wretched of the Earth (63-4). Fanon calls Engels' view a 'childish position,' and offers examples to the contrary. Spanish peasants, withstanding Napoleon's most powerful army in 1810, discovered a form of war that has since been called guerrilla, and that the American militias, Fanon suggests, had already practised against the English only a few decades earlier. Aquin points out that the Tatriotes' were quite aware of the incidents of the American War of Independence (with the final success of David against Goliath), and that the army of their enemy in 1837 was remarkably similar to the one defeated by the Americans earlier ("4). Aquin is particularly surprised by one decisive moment in the defeat of the Tatriotes': after their initial victory at Saint-Denis, they fail to capitalize on this advantage and do not pursue the defeated enemy. Two days after the opening surprise, they wait passively for the attack of a now better-prepared English army, and are destroyed: 'En bon colonises, les Patriotes jouent a

/o Discoveries of the Other 1'interieur des lignes blanches et se comportent ... en parfaits gentlemen ... On mange comme son hote. On se bat comme lui' (116). If the surprising success at the beginning appears understandable because of the emotional motivation of the rebels, the sudden immobility of the victorious rebel army seems truly inexplicable. Everything happens, Aquin suggests with a striking image, as if the chorus in a classical tragedy suffers a collective loss of memory: 'On se croirait a la representation d'une tragedie classique, a 1'instant ou le choeur, instantanement et dans une invraisemblable simultaneite, a un blanc de memoire' (115). But according to Aquin, the reality might have been much more cruel. The insurgents' downfall would have come about, not as a consequence of their forgetting the script, but because they remembered only too well a logic that did not foresee their own victory: a scenario based on their own experience of defeat, which, in this situation, produces a repetition and prolongation of the past.5 Reasonably expecting defeat at the hands of an opponent certified as powerful by the existing state of affairs, the insurgents wanted to get it over with: 'Us etaient surs de mourir glorieusement sous le tir des vrais soldats ... Us ont pris les armes avec une joie profonde et avec une certitude d'en finir avec une longue agonie' (116-18). A blueprint for Aquin's curious explanation of the outcome can be found in Sartre's definition of action. For Sartre, action, as an intentional modification of the world (Being and Nothingness 559), requires a withdrawal of consciousness from 'the full world of which it is consciousness' (560), in order to allow the anticipation of a certain 'non-being': 'Consciousness, in so far as it is considered exclusively in its being, is perpetually referred from being to being and can not find in being any motive for revealing non-being' (560). The consciousness that lacks negativity may riot, but it 'does not act' (561), since it is unable to conceive what does not (yet) exist. The following incident mentioned by Sartre appears custom-made for Aquin, and seems to provide his model: 'Masters of Lyon following a riot, the workers at Croix-Rousse do not know what to do with their victory; they return home bewildered, and the regular army has no trouble in overcoming them. Their misfortunes do not seem to them "habitual" but rather natural' (Being and Nothingness 561). Aquin, we will see, follows Sartre's notion of freedom, which is based not necessarily on the ability to obtain things, but on the 'autonomy of choice' (which 'supposes a commencement of realization in order that the choice may be distinguished from the dream and the wish' [622]). Consciousness, in (Hegel's and) Sartre's terms the 'being-for-itself that 'nihilates' the non-conscious 'being-in-itself/ does not have to be the slave of the given. Sartre's notion of freedom is conceived, however, not from the Hegelian perspective

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of the mastery of the already given realm of what there is to understand, but as an acceptance of the limit of consciousness. Freedom, and the possibility of acting, are a fall into nothingness: For an act is a projection of the for-itself toward what is not, and what is can in no way determine by itself what is not... Under no circumstances can the past in any way by itself produce an act; that is, the positing of an end ... This is what Hegel caught sight of when he wrote that 'the mind is negative/ although he seems not to have remembered this when he came to presenting his own theory of action and of freedom. (Being and Nothingness 562-3)

Sartre's notion of freedom represents an anti-essentialism. In Hegel's philosophy, by contrast, the absolute consciousness has thought the essence of what can be thought, and articulates the dominance of thought over a being that has been thought. In the perspective of Hegel's for-itself, 'Wesen ist was gewesen ist' ('Essence is what has been'; qtd Being and Nothingness 567). By contrast, when Sartre speaks of 'my particular consciousness, which like my freedom is beyond essence or ... for which to be is to have been' (566), it is clear that consciousness never knows itself: it cannot be simultaneously subject and object of its particular present self, but only consciousness of what it has been, its past. This is why 'voluntary deliberation is always a deception ... When I deliberate, the chips are down' (581). While consciousness can posit objects as the basis of intentional actions, it is simultaneously always late with respect to what is: 'And as it happens that our speech informs us of our thought, so our acts inform us of our intentions - that is, it will enable us to disengage our intentions, to schematize them, and to make objects of them instead of limiting us to living them' (622). Although it is possible to plan actions, knowledge about them will always be after the fact. This explains the double character of Sartre's notion of freedom, which is always the possibility of change, but which cannot be rejected: 'I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the causes and motives of my act. I am condemned to be free' (567). Sartre thus proposes a highly paradoxical possibility in the debate about historical determinism and free will that haunts Aquin. For Sartre, the human being is completely determined because it has no choice but to cast itself endlessly outside of its essence (defined by its past) - and is thus free. Since the determinations that constitute the stated essence of being are drawn from observations about what that being has been, the past - in striking contrast to a Hegelian or Marxist dialectic - is severely devalued as determining principle of the present:

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If negation comes into the world through human-reality, the latter must be a being who can realize a nihilating rupture with the world and with himself... This permanent possibility of nihilating what I am in the form of 'having-been' implies for man a particular type of existence ... Human reality is its own nothingness. For the for-itself, to be is to nihilate the in-itself which it is. Under these conditions freedom can be nothing other than this nihilation. It is through this that the for-itself escapes its being as its essence; it is through this that the for-itself is always something other than what can be said of it... The for-itself is the one which escapes this very denomination, the one which is already beyond the name which is given to it, beyond the property which is recognized in it. (Being and Nothingness 567)

This concept of human freedom, rejecting notions of human essence and reliance on naming and facticity as immobilizing perspectives, is crucial to Aquin's work. Many elements of this view also show distinctive similarities with Cohen's attack on a priestly protocol that upholds past essence in the face of prophetic nihilation. Aquin, though, will make a different use of a related sense of human reality always in danger of being defined as object under the weight of the past. Aquin's thematics of speed and pursuit can already be read into this passage, since the for-itself is said to escape its determination as an object (an in-itself), which occurs with its denomination, its naming. If consciousness is to remain a 'for-itself' capable of action (rather than becoming a thetically fixed object), it has to be always 'already beyond the name which is given to it, beyond the property which is recognized in it.' Already in 1951, Aquin writes to Louis-Georges Carrier in this sense: 'Plus on devient conscient, plus on s'eloigne de 1'acte; plus on sent le poids, la gravite. Je me demande meme si pour agir il ne faut pas, en un sens, confisquer la conscience, ou du moins 1'arreter a un certain point jamais ultime' (Point de fuite 117). In order to avoid the immobility of an object, in order to act, this consciousness, in Aquin's version, has constantly to surprise itself, and exceed its own knowledge of what has been. But not only the speed of his novels' spies and agents (to which we will return) as well as that of his own handwriting seems related to this logic;7 the notion of a self struggling for freedom and non-determination also motivates Aquin's view of the past of Quebec (as we have already seen in 'L'art de la defaite') - and thus his stance on its nationalism and future. In 'La Fatigue culturelle du Canada francais,' Aquin uses Sartre's model of freedom against Pierre Elliott Trudeau's belief in historical determination. In response to Trudeau's argument, based on precedents in the past, that nationalism both carries inherent tendencies toward the political right (Trudeau 1112) and represents the source of international wars (Trudeau 6), Aquin argues:

Hubert Aquin: Language and Legitimation 73 C'est la prejuger d'une orientation future d'apres d'anciennes aventures politiques; et rien ne m'oblige a croire que la realite de demain sera selon celle, regrettable j'en conviens, d'hier et d'avant-bier. Je ne crois pas plus a 1'essence predeterminee des peuples que je crois a celle des personnes; en politique, une doctrine essentialiste ne peut conclure qu'a rimmobilisme. Les peuples n'ont pas d'essence ... Les peuples sont ontologiquement indetermines, et cette indetermination est le fondement meme de leur liberte. L'histoire a venir d'un groupe bumain n'est pas fa tale, elle est imprevisible. 'Un homme se definit par son projet', a dit Jean-Paul Sartre. Un peuple aussi. (Blocs enatiques So)

While Trudeau seeks to justify a federal state that would incorporate both the French-speaking and the English-speaking founding nations, Aquin defends the concept of a nation based on cultural criteria such as language (81) as a viable possibility. Aquin contests federalism as a political form partially necessitated by a history that appears as the history written by an antagonistic other after the French defeat in 1759. Aquin furthermore uses the Sartrean argument of freedom in his effort to conceive of an 'other' history, a notion of history that would allow for a future not predetermined as linear prolongation of the past. In 1965, Aquin dedicates a pseudo-mathematical essay, 'Calcul differentiel de la centre-revolution,' to this problem of historical linearity. He first seeks to conceptualize the disruptive moment par excellence, revolution, in relation to its opposite: Cette propriete d'incommensurabilite nous induit en un nouveau chapitre (encore inconnu) des mathematiques. Un phenomene incalculable peut faire 1'objet d'une description precise en tant que phenomene incalculable: ce qui confere a la revolution sa qualite imperceptible peut done faire 1'objet d'une description phenomenologique du 'continuum' de toute donnee revolutionnaire. La discontinuity apparente recouvre un phenomene continu. (Blocs erratiques 125)

But this effort to understand the process of revolution in terms of positive knowledge and description implies the reduction of the supposedly incalculable to a model of continuity. Discontinuity appears as little else than 'une carence du continu' (125). Worse, the revolution that was meant to be understood by this logic loses its value, and is only a stepping-stone on the way to the next counter-revolution. The continuous pattern of explanation, one that excludes radical alterity, suddenly takes on the cloying aspect of glue, in particular with respect to those who find themselves excluded from the advantages of this continuity:

74 Discoveries of the Other Le continu est une notion hautement englobante, a tel point d'ailleurs que le discontinu n'y echappe pas! ... On souhaiterait ... pouvoir actionner le levier de contregenese et rompre la liquidite collante et polluee de ce fleuve continu-continu ... Le continu historique irreversible doit etre reversible, sans quoi je plains franchement ceux qui sont hors-continuum, desaxes (historiquement parlant). (125-6)

Salvation seems to come, as so often in Aquin, in the form of unannounced, unmediated inversion: 'En fait, il n'existe pas de continu unilateral ou lineaire, pas plus qu'il n'existe de progres absolu' (126). The deluge appears to him as the initial and primordial symbol of a 'contre-genese singulierement violente/ and as 'I'antithese de Hegel' (126). History is not an organized whole comprehending its parts, but consists of an interminable attack against 'le flanc mou et bleme du continu' (126). If revolutions seemed little more than the interrupting commas in the continuous sentence handed down by history, a simple inversion of the foreground-background relationship pronounces 'la structure secrete du deroulement de I'Histoire': 'Le discontinu est continu, done la revolution est permanente et la contre-re volution, cette tranquille, est une virgule. Point final' (126). The solution attempted here imposes an inverted segmentation on the chain of events, and insists on having the last word. Because all is well that ends well, the ability to impose a new frame implies the power to alter the meaning of previous events, and thus of history. This need for re-contextualization will occur in Aquin's novels as the ultimate flight and vanishing point of a text that is brought forth in response to the threat of imprisoning enclosure and thetic objectivation of the self. But while these inversions, in Aquin's texts, help to maintain a continuous expectation of the unexpected and thus construct a working hypothesis toward a possible revolution, the period of that sentence has not yet been reached. From the point of view of the permanent revolution, the exasperating counter-revolutionary commas that interrupt the continuity of the discontinuous will certainly require a 'prochain episode' in order to enable perspectives truly different from those that are made available by a past determined by the other. LANGUAGE, LEGITIMATION, REPRESENTATION

Aquin's inversion of historical continuity in 'Calcul differentiel de la contrerevolution' is problematic because it extends the main quality of the fatal determination it seeks to escape: the 'enemy's' logic of continuity. Aquin here seeks another kind of history by emphasizing the changes that have occurred in history. Projecting the continuity of past disruptions into the future, how-

Hubert Aquin: Language and Legitimation 75 ever, Aquin builds on a formalism that, in reality, could take on any concrete form, including 'discontinuities' for the worse. The problem of this discovery of the 'real structure' of history - if it were meant seriously - would be that it claims to know the unknown, that it constructs the other (despite its insistence on discontinuity) as the mirror image of the same. Only the slightly delirious form of the essay offers a certain distance from serious assertion, comparing '1'empire du discontinu' with the 'hoquet incalculable' that suddenly overcomes the author. These calculations, meant to permit a 'knowledge' of the unknown, can be contrasted with a related but different pursuit implicit in Jean-Francois Lyotard's view of a postmodern knowledge. For Lyotard, such knowledge would be quintessentially paradoxical because it produces the unknown not as a simple inversion of the status quo, but rather as a potential that has yet to be conceived of. This perspective is directed against an insistence on representation unwilling to conceive of the future as other than the known. In a subtitle of his essay 'Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?', Lyotard calls this insistence 'A Demand' (The Postmodern Condition 71). He sees postmodernism here as 'that which, in the modern, puts forward the unrepresentable in presentation itself (81). This strategy is implicitly ascribed a certain outsidedness: an 'illegitimacy' of meaning with respect to knowledge based on representation. The choice of verb in the French version of Lyotard's sentence cited above is anything but coincidental. Lyotard speaks here of the postmodern as 'ce qui dans le moderne allegue 1'impresentable dans la presentation elle-meme' ('Reponse a la question' 366). 'Alleguer' is defined as 'citer comme autorite, pour sa justification,' and as 'mettre en avant, invoquer (pour se justifier, s'excuser)' (Petit Robert}. The legal etymology of the verb reveals immediately a paradoxical problem of legitimation, since 'alleguer 1'impresentable' in order to produce evidence implies a certain form of irony. To the extent that Prochain Episode and Trou de memoire generate discourses of the unknown that allude to a possible, other self, writing produces here a certain 'knowledge,' one that flees and distorts, however, representations legitimated by the given. But Aquin's texts seek anything but a re-presentation of a self as a knowledge of what has been, and thus as an essence determined by the collective history in the wake of the French defeat. Both these novels, in their different ways, want to transform rather than remember history. They flee essentialist reality (as being that has been) in a space and time constructed and legitimated by a vanishing point that offers different angles and perspectives. But what relationship exists between the old and the new? Is the new chronotope little less than a symmetrical inversion (a .

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camera obscura that allows only elements pre-selected by inversion and negation), or will it establish oblique relationships with past reality? To add a new frame, a next episode, would seem to imply changing the frame of reference in such a way that the old self becomes distorted. Auto-'representation' is a highly problematic term with respect to Aquin's work, which is driven by a desperate attempt to avoid the re-presentation of a self to a self that wants to forget and 'se faire autre/ to move from identity and sameness to otherness. Aquin's comments on the relationship between himself and the self in those two novels parallels, in this context of non-identity and ultimately heterological otherness, his attack on Trudeau's view of historical determination: C'est vrai que je suis un Autre aujourd'hui; mais je suis toujours un Autre. Je ne crois pas qu'on puisse saisir un homme selon des categories definies, le figer dans un moment de sa vie. C'est dans 1'action que I'homme se revele a lui-meme. On dit que tout ce qu'on a fait nous determine. Je ne crois pas a cela: vivre est un projet. Si un homme peut se definir, c'est par ce qui vient, par ce qui le pousse en avant, non par ce qu'il a ete. Le passe ne m'interesse pas et je ne me reconnais pas en lui. Je suis un homme sans memoire - et il est significatif que mon deuxieme roman s'intitule Trou de memoire. C'est ce qui vient qui importe. Le titre de Prochain Episode est la negation meme du livre et la valorisation de ce qui vient apres. Or cela pourrait me definir. Ou, si vous voulez, ce qui me determine, c'est plus la chose a faire que la chose faite. A la limite, Prochain Episode n'existe pas. ('Ecrivain, faute d'etre banquier/ Point de fuite 18-19)

This project would aim at anything but a reality that is already painfully known (as historical defeat and personal imprisonment). It rather operates in the style of knowledge as it is constructed by Lyotard, an 'allegislation' of the unknown 9 that is inimical to a given empire of meaning, proceeding by allusion rather than representation: 'Finally, it must be clear that it is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented' (81). If 'to manipulate a metaphor means to make of the known an allusion to the unknown/ as Derrida remarks in the context of Freud's attempts to represent memory (Writing and Difference 199), we can see that Lyotard casts a highly 'literary' and fictive technique as the guiding principle of a knowledge with the power to alter reality, asserting, by implication, also a certain necessary fictionality of the real. Lyotard's perspective thus not only insists on the 'literary/ narrative, and fictional aspect of knowledge, but implies also the status of literature as potential knowledge. Furthermore, his suggestions as to what 'our business'

Hubert Aquin: Language and Legitimation 77 is inserts the search for the unknown in a problematics of the legitimate (that is, at least for Aquin, obviously not identical with 'the legal'). Lyotard's reflection on a knowledge that can no longer pretend only to differentiate and annotate the already given version of truth affirms a necessarily destabilizing vector of knowledge. Toward the end of his chapter, 'Postmodern Science as the Search for Instabilities/ Lyotard draws the conclusion that the continuous differentiable function is losing its preeminence as a paradigm of knowledge and prediction. Postmodern science - by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, 'fracta,' catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes - is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical ... It is producing not the known, but the unknown. (60)

We have already seen Aquin involved in such a search for instabilities in his attempt to conceive of an 'other' history. In his essay 'Profession: ecrivain/ published in 1963 two years before Prochain Episode, Aquin ponders the possibility of an 'other' writing that would similarly disrupt the 'known/ The essay questions precisely the legitimacy of a type of literature that is predetermined as a 'continuous, differentiable function' of the Quebec power structure: 'Oui, le domine vit un roman ecrit d'avance; il se conforme inconsciemment a des gestes assez equivoques pour que leur signification lui echappe ... Et tout rentre dans la coherence invisible. Refuser cette coherence revient a choisir pleinement et irreversiblement 1'incoherence' (Point de fuite 52-3). To maintain or establish individual coherence in the face of a meaningless universe has been seen for a long time, of course, as one of the most important functions of 'Literature/ Aquin refuses precisely this kind of compensatory, stabilizing exile that does not produce any open horizon whatsoever: 'L'aventure interieure que tant d'ecrivains revent de conduire en depit de 1'existence cyclothymique de notre groupe, c'est une oeuvre prefabriquee, portative comme une machine a ecrire, finie d'avance, piece jointe a enterrer aux archives' (58). Aquin thus theorizes the function of a whole field of literary production that takes on, in an oppressor-oppressed relationship, the signification of keeping the oppressed busy by stressing 'les forces inoffensives du groupe inferieur/ such as 'talents naturels pour la musique ou la creation' (50).10 Since individual choices inexorably take on a signification in a broader cultural context, Aquin concludes that Taxe du pays natal coincide implacablement avec celui de la conscience de soi' (57). Aquin therefore parodies the traditional notion of literature as the free enterprise and undetermined adventure of the inner world:

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On ne saurait mieux formuler le droit inalienable des ecrivains a disposer de leurs soirees a la maison. Le monde interieur figure la cage dont on ne sort pas, sinon pour aller se pourvoir, a la librairie dominicaine toujours fermee le dimanche, des livres ecrits par d'autres ecrivains qui ont valorise leur univers-capsule ... L'aventure interieure de 1'ecrivain, c'est la migration du jaune vital sous la coque hermetique de 1'oeuf. (55)

This distancing follows a strict refusal to function according to the determinism of the supposedly 'free space' provided by literature: Au fond, je refuse d'ecrire des oeuvres d'arts ... parce que je refuse la signification que prend 1'art dans un monde equivoque. Artiste, je jouerais le role qu'on m'a attribue: celui du domine qui a du talent. Or, je refuse ce talent, confusement peut-etre, parce que je refuse globalemnt [sic] ma domination.' (50-1).

Although Aquin problematizes a certain kind of literature in this essay, he does not necessarily advocate literary silence. Aquin's reflection on determinism and predictability does not lead him to a simple countermove that, as Lyotard points out, still operates in the terms of what it negates, and thus constitutes a 'bad move' (16). Aquin rather seeks to dismantle the operational mode of the status quo by destroying the system of oppositions in which its meaning is formulated. Since a refusal to write would appear to constitute a response as much predetermined by domination as the kind of writing he attacks, Aquin arrives at a position that Lyotard calls 'Legitimation by Paralogy' (60). This move in the legitimation of knowledge involves 'the invention of new rules, in other words, a change to a new game' (43)." Aquin suggests a similary 'paralogy' that would legitimize an other writing, giving him 'le droit de verser dans 1'illogisme': J'ai 1'intention de faire payer cher a sa majeste ma langue a moitie morte, mon incarceration syntaxique et 1'asphyxie qui me menace ... Je ne veux plus ecrire ... ni enoncer clairement 1'inconcevable ... Et apres tout, j'ai bien le droit de verser dans 1'illogisme a partir du moment ou je me decolle de toute mission semiologique. (Point de fuite 48)

Legitimacy, in such a situation, is seen as residing outside predictability and linear coherence. A few pages later, Aquin defines legitimate discourse as neither declamatory speech nor silence: Le revolutionnaire rompt avec la coherence de la domination et s'engage inconsidere-

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ment dans un monologue interrompu a chaque parole, nourri d'autant d'hesitations qu'il comporte de distance avec la raison dominante. Uhesitation engendre le monologue ... 11 n'y a de monologues vrais que dans 1'incoherence. L'incoherence dont je parle ici est une des modalites de la revolution, autant que le monologue en constitue le signe immanquable ... L'incoherence correspond ... a un dephasage irreversible d'avec la coherence ancienne. (53)

The obvious risk of such a position consists in the fact that it opens a new game that trades the predictability of the old one for invisibility, and the knowledge of a foreseeable 'prochain episode' for the unknown. Prochain Episode constitutes such a monologue that continually interrupts itself, seeking to establish its 'distance avec la raison dominante.' ALTERITY, ALTERNATION, A L T E R N A T I V E : SYMMETRY AND R U P T U R E IN PROCHAIN EPISODE AND TROU DE M E M O / R E

In the following discussion of some aspects of Prochain Episode and Trou de memoire, I will ask how these texts approach a 'prochain episode' of knowledge, how they practise a 'trou de memoire' as an other (of) logic and its determinations. Patricia Smart emphasizes the lack alluded to by the title Trou de memoire, the non-existing historical context in which a Quebecois identity could take on meaning (Hubert Aquin 22). The 'amnesie culturelle,' the lack of knowledge with respect to the colonized culture, however, goes hand in hand with an overwhelming cultural determination conveying the perspective of the colonizing culture.12 The title thus refers also to the necessary and quite desired forgetting of a context that is only too ubiquitous, a text, written by history and the other, that spells out a life sentence of defeat. The strategy plotted here, in order to attain some kind of 'identity/ has to aim first at a dis-identification.13 How to establish a 'paralogy' that writes sentences not originating from the authority of an other, that are not authored by the other? How to undo the empire of the determination by the other, and how to forget what is because it has been? How, finally, to escape the 'radical realism' of essence, in order to mobilize what is?14 In Sartre's account of the appearance of the other we arrive at the perception of our own objectivity by a remarkable symmetry: our own gaze sees the other among objects, but as that object that has the power to return the gaze, and annihilate the space originating from our own perception. To see the other thus induces a world seen by the other, and overlays our own perspective in 'a relation which is without parts ... inside of which there unfolds a spatiality which is not ray spatiality; for instead of a grouping toward me of

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the objects, there is now an orientation which flees from me' (Being and Nothingness 342) ('une orientation qui me fuit' [313]). The stable relationship between things that makes up a perspective, and thus implies the position and reality of the viewing subject, becomes drawn toward the other. In Sartre's account, perceived reality flees the subject, and takes on a different form: Thus suddenly an object has appeared which has stolen the world from me. Everything is in place; everything still exists for me; but everything is traversed by an invisible flight and fixed in the direction of a new object. The appearance of the Other in the world corresponds therefore to a fixed sliding of the whole universe, to a decentralization of the world which undermines the centralization which I am simultaneously effecting ... It appears that the world has a kind of drain hole in the middle of its being and that it is perpetually flowing off through this hole. (343; emphasis added)

This metamorphosis of the world is completed by an inversion of the subject: the further the angles of perception and perspective are drawn away toward the other, the more the subject turns into an object of the other's gaze. Ultimately, this vertiginous mobility comes full circle when it nails the subjectbecome-object in inverted form on the canvas. On the background of the camera obscura, mediated by the perception of the other, the self becomes fixed like a dead specimen, a visible object exhibited with its name. The notion that the world can be drained, flee, and disappear away from, and toward, points that are centres, but that simultaneously establish and decentre each other, perspectives that have determining power over the worlds held between their lines, is primordial for Aquin's work. The title of his essay collection, Point de fuite (with its inverted portal on the cover), evokes a perspectival Vanishing point/ the notions of flight and escape, and of a leak (as do the words 'trou de memoire'). And all of Aquin's novels deal, in one way or another, with chases, flights, and mobility, and with the threat of the fixing powers of determination. The strategies aiming at power, knowledge, and determination, inherent in a dialectic of the subject-object relationship, find counter-moves in attempts to elude the identity of a position or a name. It is not only in his use of amorphoses as structuring principle in Trou de memoire that Aquin plots ways of disappearing in an interrelation of perspective, between the movement of the observer and the observed, and with a variation of speed. The more fleeting the perceived image, the faster, by implication, the flight of the observer, and the more likely his escape from the defeating, thetic powers of the other. An increase in speed15 seems to equal, at least in Prochain Episode, an increase in indetermination and (Sartrean) freedom.

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This logic is complicated, however, by two facts. First, since it is the subject's gaze itself that constructs the gaze of the other, and thus its own objecthood, only surprising acceleration seems to unbalance the evenness and symmetrical powers of determining subject and determined object. Only acceleration, a word that becomes an equivalent of hope in Prochain Episode (just as slowing down indicates a loss of freedom with respect to the other), seems to induce a flight of the present from the past, and of writing both from representation and the predictabilities of genre, toward freedom and originality. Second, when the subject itself is in pursuit, the fleeting aspect or invisibility of the other is inversely a sign of the subject's inability to move and act, his captivity in time and space. Sartre uses the expression 'transphenomenality' with respect to Being always outside of knowledge (and of what can be said to be), and always already beyond that stage of perception in which thetic thinking fixes the world by identification and predication. H. de Heutz, the mobile, powerful opponent of the pursuing protagonist in Prochain Episode, allegorizes in many respects Sartre's 'transphenomenality.'16 A highly mobile agent, an authority on the relationship between the law-positing imperium and insurgents (between the Roman empire and the Helvetians), all of his own appearances are marked by disappearances, the power to elude (de)termination by the other. He himself eludes the imperialism of the name (his names and their spellings multiply), the thetic allocation of fixed roles, and subjection to the law; he often seems the true other, the more interesting alternative (or alter native) to the incarcerated self when compared with the imagined firstperson agent who is conceived in the image of Ferragus, but is no match for Balzac's hero and his 'anti-imperialist' battle 'sous 1'Empire et dans Paris' (Balzac i). But can the text, even in his figuration of the ungraspable H. de Heutz, really induce a rupture with respect to the 'imperial' determinations of the given and the past? Or could it be that this enigmatic other is but the essential, necessary complement that enables the pursuing agent to play his futile, predetermined role? Does the relationship of alterity between pursuer and pursued correspond to a true alternative, or does the 'battle/ in fact, only set up an eternally repetitive and stabilizing 'mecanique ondulatoire' that also seems to govern the complementary alternation between the powerless, imprisoned narrator and his 'delegue de pouvoir' (47) ? Janet Paterson discusses, in Moments postmodernes dans le roman quebecois, the importance of the concept of 'rupture' in the postmodern novel (her subsequent chapter on Aquin deals with Trou de memoire). She points to the 'force de la negation' (20) that inhabits rupture. Formal rupture exposes 'un imperialisme qui defend et qui neutralise d'autres modes de representation'

82 Discoveries of the Other (20), and thus is a form of that 'incredulite a Tegard des metarecits' in the name of which Lyotard denounces an ideological demand for representation of 'what is/ and of 'the known' as more of the same. Rupture implies '1'ordre de I'heterogene' (Paterson 20), and thus a certain heterology. This rupture and heterogeneity with respect to the empire of the given are intended by all of Aquin's writing. But a movement of alterity can have a double meaning. In the Sartrean account of the appearance of the other, the other is embraced by sameness: although first the object that breaks with objecthood, the other is the symmetrical inversion of the perceiving subjectivity, turning it into an object. In a similar sense, Derrida speaks of the 'movement of alterity' (Writing and Difference 89), which, in fact, is the all-encompassing move of dialectical negation and sublation, the imperialism of Hegelian reason, knowledge, and the absolute spirit - and thus the other of rupture. The writing of Prochain Episode is plagued - and alternately propelled forward or threatened - by this problem of the possible continuity at the heart of alterity. The implacable resistance of the subject to an identification with 'what is' brings forth an other world as text. This writing, however, is always threatened by death when it faces its own image as inverted sameness, as immobility, lack of freedom and originality. Prochain Episode and the Originality of the Other: A Battle of Symmetries? Vincent Descombes's evocation, in his Modern French Philosophy (in French significantly entitled Le Meme et I'autre), of the necessity by which dialectics needs to become its own other in order to remain true to itself, lays out a problematic Prochain Episode seeks to engage: Non-dialectical thinking would hold to the opposition between the rational and the irrational, but any thinking which aspires to be dialectical must, by definition, induce in reason a movement towards what is entirely foreign to it, towards the other. The whole issue now rests upon whether the other has been returned to the same in the course of this movement, or whether ... reason will have had to transform itself, losing its initial identity, ceasing to be the same and becoming other with the other. For the other of reason is unreason, or madness. Thus the problem is raised of the passage of reason through madness or aberration, a passage which would precede all access to an authentic wisdom. (13)

This problem of dialectics is continually posed in Prochain Episode; it is evoked most explicitly when the hero's (temporarily stalled) quest for the unknown logic of the heterogeneous leaves him in dire need to 'vider mon

Hubert Aquin: Language and Legitimation 83 chargeur dialectique sur cet inconnu' (58). How does the novel construct its other, and how does it deal with the questions of appropriation and metamorphosis posed by Descombes? Critical approaches to Prochain Episode have traditionally isolated two (for instance, Legris, Pelletier) or four levels (Melanc.on) of discourse in this novel. Melan^on labels the first one, in its first-person rendering of captivity and immobility, as 'autobiographical.' It anchors a second story, a high-speed pursuit around Lake Geneva, with another 'je' trying hard to maintain the active role of the pursuing subject. A third and fourth level discuss the relationship between the former two: a generic discussion of the spy novel (Melanc.on calls this level 'generique') seeks to determine the possibility of originality and freedom in a genre that deals, by its thematics of pursuit and detection, with the subject-object relationship in all its variations. The fourth level, finally, makes the continuation of writing - and by implication, the narrator's life dependent upon an escape from predictability and determination. This continuity hinges on the possibility of breaking with the past as a linear prolongation of captivity, and thus on a rupture and discontinuity. Whether there is a relationship of freedom between the first two levels, and thus between the past and a desired, alternative future, is the concern of the questions posed by the meta-levels of Prochain Episode. Is the imagined world around Lake Geneva a true heterocosm, or only a compensatory other world comprised by a logic of sameness? Finally, since the novel as a whole asks the question to what extent a future, a prochain episode, and freedom can exist outside a determination originated by the past, the question of domination arises with respect to the relationship between the four different discourses of the novel itself. Does the imaginary discourse develop enough power to dominate reality, and thus to justify Sartre's concept of freedom and indetermination? And failing that, can the 'literary theory' imbricated in Prochain Episode overcome the dilemma in which reality and fantasy might enable each other as alternating, complementary sides of a continuity of the same? Ultimately, if thinking cannot construct a way out of the known, only a radical praxis seems to guarantee a discontinuation of captivity as determined identity: the death either of the writing self17 or of the opponent of its autonomous origination: the representative of the other.1 Prochain Episode poses questions of opposites, symmetry, and reflection from the very beginning. As the fire of the revolution meets its opposite in the water of Lake Geneva in the opening sentence, the narrating 'je' disappears below the surface: Cuba coule en flammes au milieu du lac Leman pendant que je descends au fond des

84 Discoveries of the Other choses. Encaisse dans mes phrases, je glisse, fantome, dans les eaux nevrosees du fleuve et je decouvre, dans ma derive, le dessous des surfaces et I'image renversee des Alpes. (7)

But what is the nature of the surface that divides the above and below of this descent in language? Is it a reflecting surface in which the angles can be calculated, derived by inversion? The movement of what is both self and other, the 'je' and phantom who has crossed the watery surface that both reflects and yet has an other side, is between the uncontrollable and the regular: if the verb 'glisser' seems to indicate a somewhat impeded dislocation, the noun 'derive' suggests both irregularity and rule-guided derivation. The most obviously specular symmetrical inversion, 'I'image renversee des Alpes/ only covers another dimension underneath: the rectangular limitation of his sentences both mirrors the prison box ('encaisse') in which they are written, and uncertainly float in that neurotic river which is, not a contained lake, but a moving water.19 A double articulation thematizes the future as the limit of knowledge, between a reflected image as visible and symmetrically inverted representation of the known, and a possible universe underneath the surface (and behind its mirror), following lines bent in ways even different from the seeming angle we see in objects continuing under water. The text of Prochain Episode is created around this difference and limit, as a playing out of the unknown with respect to the known: 'J'ecris sur une table a jeu, pres d'une fenetre qui me decouvre un pare cintre par une grille coupante qui marque la frontiere entre 1'imprevisible et 1'enferme' (7). The very incarceration of the writing 'je,' 'encaisse dans mes phrases' as his act of writing is locked into the limit of a cell, guarantees the text: 'Nulle distraction peut done se substituer a 1'horlogerie de mon obsession, ni me faire devier de mon parcours ecrit' (7). The word 'horlogerie,' however, indicates that the text might not produce an alternative to his spatial limitation (only too well known), but at best an alternation between two sides of a coin. The mechanical movement of the swinging pendulum threatens to maintain an absolutely linear segmentation of time. Swinging symmetrically from one side to the other, it amasses its opposite points in an identical prolongation of the same. Since the continuity of uninterrupted time threatens to mirror and represent endlessly his immobilized objecthood, he guides his other self 'd'aller tuer le temps a Geneve en tuant quelques millier d'Helvetes a coup de balises, histoire de me faire un peu la main' (12). To terminate the time of the other implies the power to determine history, segmenting it according to the desired perspective, and therefore to 'termi-

Hubert Aquin: Language and Legitimation 85 nate' and free also a self that history has determined as defeated. Questions of control are primordial in the relationship between the writing 'je' imprisoned in the absolute predictability of his cell - and his other self projected beyond the 'frontiere entre 1'imprevisible et 1'enferme/ The dominance over the diegesis inverts the lack of authority over his own movement, and constructs the other as 'image renversee' of the self. The narrator, whose place and role as prisoner are unpleasantly determined, begins his phantasmic life, the life of his phantom, by determining places, roles, and names according to his pleasure: 'Et comme il me plairait ... de situer 1'action a Lausanne, c'est deja chose faite' (8). Decreeing history as what has 'been already done/ he is also the master over names and identities: 'Mais quoi! si Hamidou Diop me sied, il ne tient qu'a moi de lui conferer 1'investiture d'agent secret' (8). But the simple inversion of control, from the narrator's position as object of psychiatric authority and law enforcement to his status as naming and narrating subject, comes back immediately to haunt him. His mastery, the 'grande securite' of his superiority, is objectively based on the rules and laws of the spy novel genre, which he portrays as predictable and well defined: 'J'eprouve une grande securite ... a me pelotonner mollement dans le creuset d'un genre litteraire aussi bien defini' (8). His authority resides in a narratological linearity prescribing the movement of a heroic subject toward his desirable objects ('quelques espionnes desirable' and the annihilation of his opponent), before a supporting cast ('les agents du CIA et du Mi5'). This logic predetermines the 'facture algebrique du fil de 1'intrigue,'20 and represents a symmetrical inversion of the imprisoned narrator's separation in reality from the object of his desire. Thus renouncing any aspirations to originality, he submits his own mental operations - his specifically human freedom according to Sartre - to the inverting yet representational mechanics of the camera obscura. The world of his fantasy projects a predictable and linear prolongation of the same law and determination that constructs the essentialist knowledge of his imprisonment. The absolute control over his imagined hero only mirrors the absolute control of the known status quo, and thus reveals the nihilating power and liberating potential of his thoughts to equal zero. This awareness of a trap by which the perception of power dissimulates its very contrary, namely, a subjective world guided by the other, launches a meta-discourse in Prochain Episode that explicitly poses questions of control: 'Hamidou ... est deja lance. Mon roman futur est deja en orbite, tellement d'ailleurs, que je ne peux deja plus le rattraper. Je reste ici fige, bien plante dans mon alphabet qui m'enchaine; et je me pose des questions' (9). The 'roman futur,' as both his future writing and the writing of a genuine future, is endangered by a predictable,

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circular symmetry prolonging endlessly the known, and escaping his creation. The narrator's imagination thus spins 'out of control,' but also out of the predictable orbit of self and other, of the regular pendulum alternating between the reality of autobiography and the ideality of fiction. Hamidou, the first negation of captivity, thus undergoes a quick degradation (only one page later, he has already become 'ce pauvre Hamidou' [10]). Questions about ideas of non-imprisonment will have to multiply. Having thus quickly explored the limit of an inverted relationship of control, the narrator will have to investigate patterns of un-control. He is in need of heterological strategies that do not reinforce the reality of imprisonment by re-presenting it inverted in the mirror of his fiction. And thus Hamidou shakes hands with a disappearing 'representative' of the unknown, H. de Heutz. The model of the unknown solution sought in this liquidating writing ('J'assiste a ma solution') - lest it suffer the same narrative fate as Hamidou has to provide clues about a flight from determinacy. The only trace of the figure having parted with Hamidou, and thus with the object of the narrator's control, is a 'cryptogramme monophrase': an undecipherable chain of 'lettres majuscules ecrites sans espacement' (21) that all could stand for new initials of names, or hints of other untranslated sentences. This mise en abyme of the novel, a small model of the incomplete writing of an unknown other, leaves him with the 'sentiment de me trouver devant le mystere impenetrable par excellence. Plus je le cerne et le crible, plus il crott au-dela de mon etreinte, decuplant ma propre enigme lors meme que je multiplie les efforts pour la saisir' (21-2). With each effort to terminate this single-sentenced monster it seems to rear up, Hydra-like, with evernew and indeterminable faces. The effort to transcribe the equivalences of this one sentence turns into a series of alterations, of violent approximations of its message: 'Faute de le traduire dans mon langage, j'ecris dans 1'espoir insense qu'a force de paraphraser I'innommable, je finirai par le nommer' (22). Paraphrases are the uneven and incomplete substitutes for the impossible, since essential definitions of the unknown are necessarily self-defeating; any effort to name and identify the one thing called the unknown (or freedom, by Sartre) will result in an interminable chase seeking to nail it down nothing other than the contradiction of its minimal, formal definition. To define and terminate the elusive being that floats asymmetrically under the representational temptation of the signifiers H. de Heutz, de Heute, or von Ryndt, is to miss the unknown by grasping its other. When the projected 'je' seems to have mastered both time ('Je presse 1'acceTerateur au fond' [75]) and the fleeting enigma of H. de Heutz, he does not control the unknown in the Bois de Coppet. This being under his gun who now multiplies names in a

Hubert Aquin: Language and Legitimation 87 further flight of language (de Saudy, de Saugy, a reference to a certain Charles-Andre Junker [80]) does not reveal to him the radical, heterological other, but only the hero's own reflection, a symmetrically inverted mirror image of what he has been a few hours earlier, namely, a man confronted by a gun and threatened by termination. The two identical speeches under the gun, piling false identity upon false identity, delivered twice by the one who seeks to escape determination and termination, follow the Sartrean symmetrical construction of the other. In Sartre's analysis of the gaze, we have already seen a symmetrical substitution of the subjective perspective first eclipsed by the appearance of the other, and then inversely reconstructed from the other's point of view. Symmetrical exclusion and inverted repetition govern also the relationship between pursuer and pursued in Prochain Episode: 'Maintenant que nous sommes de nouveau face a face, vous comprenez que cette situation comporte un dilemme: c'est vous ou moi. C'est la logique du combat' (81). This seemingly unwarranted wordiness not only parodies tough-guy rhetorical convention, but also paraphrases Sartre's account of battle (which it evokes with its last sentence) as 'antagonistic reciprocity' (805) in his Critique of Dialectical Reason: 'And in fact the scandal of the presence in me (as a mark of my objectbeing) of the Other's freedom as the freedom-negation of my freedom, is itself a determination in rationality in so far as this negative freedom actualises in practice the impossibility of our co-existing in the field of scarcity' (815). The narrator's freedom does not equal by any means the superiority seemingly afforded by his gun: he cannot reduce the other to the object he wants to terminate, because he cannot comprehend him as object. Sartre's account reconstructs battle in terms of the reciprocal understanding of possibilities by which each antagonist constructs his other in his own comprehension, and thus has also to deduce an image of himself as constructed by the other (his own objectivity). 'La lutte est intelligibilite': Aquin had quoted this sentence, used here by Sartre (Critique de la raison dialectique 753), in 1962 as epigraph for a section of 'La Fatigue culturelle du Canada francos' (Blocs erratiques 90). Precisely this comprehension of the other is what the agent-'je' is lacking now, and what makes him feel, despite his seeming advantage, that he is the other's object. As Sartre explains: 'If one of the adversaries should cease to comprehend he would become the object of the Other' (816).21 The lack of comprehension has a double function. On the level of diegesis, the phantom beneath the many names escapes his objectivation precisely by refusing to offer a story of the other: the mirrored version of the subject's story represents and contains nothing but sameness. On the level of enuncia-

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tion, he thus saves the imprisoned narrator, who cannot afford to finish off his representation of the unrepresentable, his figure of the unknown. From the point of view of the imprisoned self, the unidentifiable character - 'cet inconnu' (58) threatened by termination ('sans aucun doute H. de Heutz' [60] runs the doubtful commentary) - is, after all, his own sublation, the negation of his own negation. The narrator's aspirations as 'chef national d'un peuple inedit' (25) already suffer a severe blow when he restricts his own space, having the hero capture his unknown other, and forcing him into the prison of his trunk: 'Je suis fatigue a la fin. Et mon probleme ressemble singulierement a celui de cet inconnu qui est couche en chien de fusil dans le coffre-arriere d'une Opel bleue' (67). The seeming triumph of his 'delegue de pouvoir' is therefore simultaneously cause for depression: 'Je n'avais qu'une chose a faire: rouler vers la grande depression au fond de laquelle j'apercevais la face lumineuse du lac Leman' (66; my emphasis). If his diegetic 'delegue de pouvoir en Volvo' (47) is hopelessly predetermined as his symmetrical other and negation, the other of this other has to be a heterological phenomenon larger than the known. In the position of defeat - as the Sartrean dialectic suggests - H. de Heutz would be the contained object of his other's calculation and comprehension: he would thus equal the imprisoned narrator. Consequently, this narrator would only eliminate, with H. de Heutz, his own Sartrean freedom to project himself toward the unknown. In their continual change of position, his imagined opponents seem to create each other constantly as calculated objects, which, however, immediately induce a reversal. Their unlikely formal identity, in fact, is perfectly in keeping with the 'vraisemblable' - with the extent of what the narrator's knowledge can tell him is true. If his writing is to retain any seriousness and 'vraisemblance,' he can not assert, but only allude to the truth and knowledge (the eventual having been) of the victory over his containing other. The Sartrean symmetrical construction of battle seems the limit of knowledge, because the eventual truth, when knowledge comes to gather it, will have been decided by praxis. Praxis - a key word in Sartre's vocabulary here as elsewhere - determines a truth accessible to knowledge only as what will have been; only in praxis are the determinations of the past eluded. For knowledge, the future remains necessarily that cryptogram of the unnameable that the narrator had hoped to name: 'Pourtant, j'ai beau couvrir de mots ce hieroglyphe, il m'echappe et je demeure sur 1'autre rive, dans 1'imprecision et le souhait. Coince dans ma sphere close, je descends, comprime, au fond du lac Leman et je ne parviens pas a me situer en dehors de la thematique fluante qui constitue le fil de 1'intrigue' (22). Earlier the narrator had already waited for the revealing moment when the

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other would place himself in his Opel, and thus identify himself. Waiting, he had listened to a discussion about the writer's (in this case, Balzac's) power or impotence, 'en attendant de tuer le temps d'un homme que je ne connaissais pas encore sinon par son invraisemblance et son indetermination' (52). This time of the other is the 'temporalization' of two beings: of H. de Heutz as the other who flees his objecthood - in Sartrean language, the flight (fuite) by which the for-itself annihilates its own status as object (escaping the determination of the in-itself it has been toward its future projection) - and of the narrator who seeks to kill his prison-time by revealing himself to himself as undefined by the essence of the past, as that same 'homme que je ne connaissais pas encore sinon par son invraisemblance et son indetermination.' The realization, however, that knowledge will not produce the unknown and will reveal nothing beyond a symmetrical identity between his invented hero and an other who may - or may not - be H. de Heutz negates his own temporalization as a flight toward an unknown freedom: Tout se ralentit ... L'agilite supersonique de mon esprit s'affaisse soudainement sous le charme malefique de H. de Heutz. Je m'immobilise, metamorphose en statue de sel, et ne puis m'empecher de me percevoir comme foudroye ... Un evenement que j'ai cesse de controler s'accomplit solonellement en moi' (88). The question, 'A qui ai-je affaire au juste?' (87) thus parallels the one by Cohen's 'I,' 'Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you?' At the moment of imagined control, the face of H. de Heutz has revealed nothing but a dissimulation: 'la representation de la douleur ... ne lui appartient pas plus que son nom propre' (87). In the face of this other, 'devant un homme impossible a identifier' (88), the narrating 'je' has certainly failed to determine 'unilaterally' the unknown; rather, he has begun to submit to this 'evenement que j'ai cesse de controler.' His writing thus leads to a certain tautology: that aspect of the other he can get hold of is the same story he had already known, whereas the original, heterological aspect of the other eludes his comprehension. His writing does not originate the other. This knowledge occasions, after precisely half the chapters (9 out of 18), the monologue of the writing 'je' on determinism; its opposite, freedom and the as-yet-invisible new, corresponds with literary originality: Rien n'est libre ici: ni mon coup d'ame, ni la traction adipeuse de 1'encre sur 1'imaginaire, ni les mouvements pressentis de H. de Heutz, ni la liberte qui m'est devolue de le tuer au bon moment. Rien n'est libre ici, rien: meme pas cette evasion fougueuse que je teleguide du bout des doigts et que je crois conduire quand elle m'efface. Rien! ... Quelque chose me dit qu'un modele anterieur plonge mon improvisation dans une

90 Discoveries of the Other forme atavique et qu'une alluvion ancienne etreint le fleuve instantane qui m'echappe. Je n'ecris pas, je suis ecrit. (89)

The recognition of total determination - and thus of the impossibility of freedom - in the tenth chapter, just after the middle of the novel, threatens to bring the writing process to an end (a moment of suspense, since the end of the writer as such would imply the premature death of the hero in a book so predominantly concerned with writing): 'Ce roman metisse n'est qu'une variante desordonnee d'autres livres ecrits par des ecrivains inconnus ... Ceci vaut pour tout ce que j'ecris: me voici done au fond d'une impasse ou je cesse de vouloir avancer' (91). The impossibility of causing a rupture with the past by projecting himself toward a future that avoids these determinations threatens both the meaning of his 'livre a venir' (92)" and the self-determination of his very existence: 'Ce n'est plus 1'originalite operatoire de la litterature que je desamorce, c'est 1'existence individuelle qui eclate soudain et me desenchante' (91). In 'Calcul differentiel de la contre-revolution,' Aquin had expressed a desire to 'actionner le levier de contre-genese et rompre la liquidite collante et polluee de ce fleuve continu-continu' (Blocs erratiques 125). His narrator regains the freedom to write at a highly overdetermined, contradictory moment similar to such a counter-genesis - precisely when he renounces control over it. Giving up his claims to determine freedom - to terminate or originate the unknown other - he both submits to it, and allows it to happen in his writing. The (in)decision not to kill the unknown other indicates that the narrator has run out of an original continuation and at the same time creates the possibility of an other spy novel, by altering its normal logic and alternative ('c'est vous ou moi'). Relinquishing the fiction of autonomous control over the other, this strategy seeks to evade the full circle by which the 'fonction d'originalite' (92) forces literature into a myth of self-creation that inversely mirrors, and thus to a certain extent represents, its contrary, a predetermined trap: 'L'originalite a tout prix est un ideal de preux: c'est le Graal esthetique qui fausse toute expedition. C'est la retransposition mythique du coup de fortune sur lequel s'est edifie le grand capitalisme' (92). Seeing 'un autre sens que la nouveaute percutante de son format final' (92) in his book, the writing 'je' submits to a certain determinism. But by the very acceptance of this defeat of his book as a book of defeat, of this 'livre defait qui me ressemble,' which is 'un produit de 1'histoire/ he can afford to escape the restricting narrative of the already free and independent creation of the self that Aquin describes as a direct function of the oppressed mentality, and his narrator, in Prochain Episode, as 'cette

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unicite surmultipliee [qui] n'est rien d'autre qu'une obsession de croises' (92). The acceptance of determination allows him to posit his own narrative as 'fragment inacheve de ce que je suis moi-meme et temoignage impur, par consequent, de la revolution chancelante que je continue d'exprimer, a ma fac,on, par mon delire institutionnel' (92). Such double logic alludes to an unpredictable future, and is reminiscent of Diderot's title hero in Jacques le Fataliste; continually affirming 'que tout etait ecrit la-haut,' this servant created before 'la grande revolution' paradoxically always makes more freedom to act for himself than his master, who significantly believes in the illusive powers of free will. Giving up control over his hero's unknown other, the narrator allows his hero to move toward making himself other with the other, a move that is not simply illogical (because it equates contraries), but cannot be described by the opposition between sense and nonsense; any allusion to the unknown must logically break with the continuity of the known if it is to transgress a tautological re-presentation of the same. This postulate formulated by Lyotard as a - or the - necessary condition of a knowledge that would produce the unknown is deduced by Descombes, we have seen, from inside dialectical reason. Having renounced the reduction of the unknown other to the orbit of the same, the narrator's hero and thinking begin a process of 'ceasing to be the same and becoming other with the other' (Descombes 13). This identification with the unknown occurs literally when the hero makes himself into his other in his car, in front of the chateau in which he intends to kill him. His strategy differentiates the logic of the same (and evokes Lyotard's paralogy): it is explicitly referred to as 'illogique' and 'Pure folie!' (117), representing, selon la logique courante de notre metier, 1'initiative contre-indiquee par excellence. Dans cette allure illogique reside toutefois sa qualite redoutable: c'est le contredeguisement! Oui, j'innove ... Je me deguise en victime du meurtre foudroyant que je vais commettre. Je prends sa place au volant d'une Opel bleue, je serai bientot dans ses meubles: c'est tout juste si je ne me mets pas dans sa peau. (116)

Eventually, this kind of 'unreason' will project the final point and decision of Prochain Episode out of the factual limit of its represented time-space. The undecidable identity of self and other will elongate the classical form that is alluded to by the 24-hour interval of the novel's action, in a fleeing perspective that creates a virtual space outside facticity.23 The first part of a five-act narrative, which initially seems to make the spy intrigue resemble the form of classical French theatre, begins when K sends the hero on his 24-hour orbit at the end of which he is supposed to return.

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The deroulement sees him driving, with his opponent under control in the trunk, toward a reversal in the Bois de Coppet; here, he loses control not only over his opponent, but over his direction. This obliquely inverted linearity is indicated by the overdetermination of K, who still is source and goal of the hero's trajectory, but simultaneously appears overdetermined in a role of 'adjuvant' of his unknown other,24 toward an identification with whom he now begins to move. During an ominous retardissement, the narrator makes his hero more and more equal to the unknown other, first in the 'habitacle de 1'Opel' (117), and then in the chateau of the unknown, a fascinating yet undecipherable 'univers second' (130) that the hero seeks to decipher in an attempted reading that parallels the narrator's writing of the other. This heterocosm, which mystifies the hero 'non pas tellement en tant qu'habitacle, mais en tant que chiffre' (131), finds its mise en abyme in the ex-libris, a treacherous sign of the identity of the unknown, 'plus indechiffrable qu'anonyme a vrai dire. A la place du nom du proprietaire, se trouve un dessin charge qui s'enroule sur lui-meme dans une serie de boucles et de spires qui forment en noeud gordien, veritable agglomerat de plusieurs initiales surimprimees les unes sur les autres' (130). The final confrontation of the opponents does not lead to a denouement, and to a recognition or revelation of essential identity, but to an equalization of opposites that prolongs the timespace of the novel outside itself; instead of working toward the classical decision between his hero and the opponent - and thus toward a formal containment - the narrator projects his book upon 'la forme meme de mon avenir: en lui et par lui, je prospecte mon indecision et mon futur improbable. Il est tourne globalement vers une conclusion qu'il ne contiendra pas puisqu'elle suivra, hors texte, le point final que j'apposerai au bas de la derniere page' (93)The 'balance cruel' between the two symmetrical warriors that supersedes, in the hero's perception, the image of the one warrior who braces himself against the invisible, indicates already the cruel impossibility of knowledge's going beyond itself, except through its own negation, praxis. The precise calculations of deducible equivalents by which the hero seeks to determine, comprehend, and comprise the future action 'dans cet espace euclidien' (133) subsequently prove incongruent with the 'irruption' of the unknown, the 'imprevisibilite de H. de Heutz' that announces the negation of knowledge: 'Avec lui, on ne sait jamais' (134). The fact that the unknown, in the following confrontation, eludes calculation, however, invests the hero himself with an incalculable freedom from his predetermined limit as a compensatory fantasy. By not killing H. de Heutz, 'je' becomes the equal of his other; unterminated, the other remains indeter-

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minate, and the hero thus becomes equal to the unknown. Aquin (not his narrator) explains the paradoxical identity thus: En ne tuant pas il devient un egal. Le fait meme de rater le meurtre qui pourrait, s'il etait reussi, etre interprete comme le meurtre du pere fait que nous nous trouvons devant un schema egalitaire. Done la relation entre 1'un et 1'autre est une relation (je me souviens de 1'image des deux guerriers enlaces) d'ennemis, d'egaux ou de freres. ('Aquin par Aquin' 133)

Not defined as omnipotent agent of the spy novel, and not determining his opponent, the hero is the spy of the unknown in the double sense, a spy for and on the unknown. He remains for his narrator, as Bakhtin formulates, 'une valeur a venir' ('L'auteur et le heros' 35), and also the indeterminate character of a 'livre a venir' at the end of this novel that only seems to have actualized its potentialities. This double character eludes having been written, like the narrator's brother-in-arms mentioned earlier: Mes freres selon la guerre sont virtuels comme les personnages improbables qui m'attendent plus loin au cours de ce recit, qui me surprendront peut-etre et, a mesure que je les determinerai a des actions precises, m'obligeront a me souvenir d'eux au lieu de les attendre comme en ce moment, fascine par I'aire de disponibilite dans laquelle ils se meuvent comme a 1'interieur d'une prehistoire qu'il ne tient qu'a moi de faire cesser en ecrivant ce qu'ils n'ont pas encore fait et qu'ils ne feront dans 1'exacte proportion ou mon invention sans elan les actualise. (97)

Prochain Episode does not end in its 'having-become' history. It remains a 'passe indefini' (167) in more ways than one. Already the double ending (Diderot left his Jacques fatalistically with at least three) by which 'je ne finirai pas ce livre inedit' (172) suggests a repetition with a difference that would have to precede an eventual 'FIN'; but this 'je' implies yet another elongation of the novel that implies a second writing, and invites a second reading from a different perspective. When the plot finally transports the 'je' back to the cell from which the narrative journey had started, the spatial separation between the world of factual confinement and its opposite space of imagined freedom comes to an end, but reveals simultaneously a multiple and contradictory way of how to think the 'je' and his situation. On the one hand, the first person as hero has been said to be the imagined and invented object, and thus derived from, and secondary to, the imprisoned 'je'; this invented object becomes now, however, the prior cause of the narrating subject. The paradox-

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ical structure, reminiscent of Escher's drawings, and evoked in the endlessly looping structure of the ex-libris, makes the narrated appear as the narrator from a different perspective and for a second reading. Subject and object of the enunciation coincide in an oscillating overdetermination, because the supposed fiction is now declared, with its arrival at, and 'return' to, the narrator's cell, as autobiography. The imprisoned 'je' thus appears as both the creation of his self-determined fiction, and as the victim of his other-determined biography. This return of the narrative upon itself, installing a structural parallel between the two 'je' figures who both create each other, produces an elongated virtual form that contradicts a representational logic (in which the 'je' would be mirrored by one story). At a first glance, the reader seems to face two possible, if contradictory, perspectives, each implying opposite assumptions about the temporal and factual status of the chase around Lake Geneva: either the story owes its existence solely to its being written as a figment and object of the imagination and thus co-exists temporally with the imprisoned 'je,' or the event actually precedes the imprisonment, and is thus the referent of a narrative that is strictly autobiographical rather than fictional. This choice, however, proves impossible on second thought, since we face a classical example of the liar's paradox. We can choose to believe the original narrator, who suggests he is truly imprisoned and writes a fictive story to divert his thoughts. In this case, we have to believe that the story leading up to his imprisonment is really fiction, and that therefore he is not imprisoned, but has lied already from the very beginning. To believe the original narrator would thus force us to believe he has lied. This assumption, however, implies that his statement about the fictionality of his story itself would be fictional, the story thus autobiographically true, and we should therefore conclude that this narrator is imprisoned, as he had said. To believe the original narrator a liar forces us to believe he speaks the truth. The liar's paradox, however, is built on a confusion of logical types: it only suggests the symmetrical identity of statements that are actually objects of constantly altered statements. And thus the prisoner at the end of the fictive story would and would not be the same as his narrator, since he can be perceived differently from two perspectives: under the aspect of an autobiographical re-presentation of the narrator's past, and thus as his origin, or as the object of his creation - in which case the pre-determined image of the narrator has been superseded by and substituted with a self-determined image of an imprisoned narrator. This subject of speech, however, has become the other of an other, and his story would establish yet a new perspective. This substitution of logical perspectives that each engender their own off-

Hubert Aquin: Language and Legitimation 95 spring suggests not that the indeterminate paradox of Prochain Episode corresponds to a circular alternating structure, but that the 'mecanique ondulatoire' keeps coming back upon itself as other, and thus in the form of an in(de)terminable spiral. The referents and creatures of this writing endlessly flee, like H. de Heutz, their determination, and thus their definitive reading. The F(l)ight of Reason: Trou de memoire The act of not killing H. de Heutz, in a sense, is the true terrorism against syllogistic deduction and 'just' procedure; earlier in Prochain Episode, a narrator despairing of endless pre-determination had already invoked 'illogism': 'On ne peut vouloir la revolution dans la sobriete, ni 1'expliquer comme un syllogisme, ni 1'appeler comme on precede en justice' (95). The endless flight from logical determination, as we have seen, has also literally elongating functions, producing more words after the scene in the Bois de Coppet, and creating virtual prolongations irreducible to one perspective at the 'end.' Trou de memoire, published three years later, is governed even more explicitly by an ongoing process of overdetermination that continually recontextualizes and alters previously introduced points of view. This process not only adds different perspectives, however, but simultaneously destabilizes the criteria that would allow the reader to establish a reliable hierarchy among these superimposed frames of reference. Such a movement comes to the fore in particular when the novel introduces metafictionally a similar example of overdetermined perspective in painting, the anamorphosis. Aquin repeats comments by Jurgis Baltrusaitis on Holbein's Les Ambassadeurs - dissimulating his source while obliquely acknowledging 'un grand historien de 1'art' (130).25 But Aquin's reiteration of the painting's effect (Trou de memoire 132-3) also extends some of the implications in the account Baltrusaitis gives of the anamorphosis, as a defined play in two acts in which the observer actualizes two subsequent perspectives. One perspective, resulting from a symmetrical positioning of painting and observer, offers a representation of worldly vanity; its negation, a memento mori in the form of a skull, accedes to visibility from an oblique angle resulting from the observer's movement sideways and away from the painting. The second perspective corresponds to a second vanishing point that not only constructs its own space and horizon, but annihilates and terminates the first perspective's power to determine either the time and space of the painting, or the implied position constructed and predetermined for the viewing subject. The adequate viewer created and demanded by the painting thus implies not a subject position, but a subject

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movement similar - up to a point - to the flight of temporalization by which the Sartrean subject projects itself from one determined perspective to another, and by which its space disappears and flees toward the other - an unidentical perspective either of the self's freedom, or of its enemy. But Baltrusaitis describes the dramatization of perception as completed with the alteration of the second step: 'Au lieu de la splendeur humaine, il voit le crane. Les personnages et tout leur attirail scientifique s'evanouissent et a leur place surgit le signe de la Fin. La piece est terminee' (101). Already Aquin's thematization of his TIN' in Prochain Episode, however, suggests that his interest in the anamorphosis exceeds its aspect of either an alternation of possible perspectives or a finished battle determined by the victory of one side. Some of the words that are substituted and added, in Trou de memone, to Baltrusaitis' description of the second act, are telling in this respect (see Randall, Le Context litteraire 216 for the juxtaposed passages). While Baltrusaitis' observer is left 'deconcerte' (101) by the first viewing, Aquin complicates the perspective with the formulation 'repu par les apparences infinitesimales du portrait mysterieux' (133; emphasis added) - thus suggesting an indefinite difference and sustained otherness of the painting with respect to what the observer believes has been seen. Similarly, Trou de memoire adds the seemingly insignificant qualification 'furtif to Baltrusaitis' 'dernier regard,' and Baltrusaitis' 'comprend tout' is rewritten, more ambiguously, as 'comprend d'un seul coup son double sens.' While these changes seem to substitute equivalences, they eliminate, in fact, the sense of closure after the second act in Baltrusaitis' formulations. Aquin's plagiarism itself of Baltrusaitis' account is anything but symmetrical. As Randall demonstrates, Aquin's writing both plagiarizes and seeks to draw attention to its own 'depraved' praxis, and thus destabilizes the clear opposition of these two perspectives on textual authority. 27 The perspective of death itself, which in Baltrusaitis' account finalizes the drama of perception offered by the painting, opens in Trou de memoire an exceedingly undetermined space. If Magnant's manuscript begins with the murder that had never occurred in Prochain Episode, this termination of the other only seems to end a continual alteration of perspectives: 'Justement, cela nous ressemble: quelques mots anglais - les derniers! - precedes de combien de conversations ou nous passions, chacun son tour et ne pas toujours dans le bon ordre, d'une langue a 1'autre' (28). But after the other - in this case, Joan - Vest rendue apres un combat valeureux' (41), her identity begins to multiply according to a movement already adumbrated by H. de Heutz. That part of Joan's possible identity that becomes the subject of Magnant's own colonial power and discourse offers him only his own image of defeat:

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En effet, des 1'instant ou je la reduisais a la defaite totale et irreversible, comment ne deviendrait-elle pas ma soeur selon la defaite? Conquise, elle a change du tout au tout ... D'un seul coup, Joan a epouse mon etre-conquis jusqu'a devenir ambigue soudain, changeante, hypocrite par moments, insaisissable comme un Cri sous le regard du premier colon, masquee comme je le suis. (41)

Undefinable ('insaisissable') and still fleeing the eye of the other, the power of Joan, which Magnant has sought in his control over her, remains as elusive as that of Ferragus or H. de Heutz in Prochain Episode. The images of self and other are immediately distorted and begin to flee toward a perspective of an other still wanted, and escaping arrest. This undefined object, however, leaves the pursuing subject well defined in defeat: mais je savais encore lire a travers ce voile de dissimulation en re-inventant, sous les traits de ma conquete, ma face de conquis. Etrangement ... je suis redevenu conquis a nouveau tellement j'etais seduit par ma nouvelle conquete: Joan ... me dominait de fac,on inedite. Des ce jour, notre histoire etait ecrite d'avance. (41)

Although Magnant has won what he sees as the first battle, his art of forgeting is still caught in an 'art de la defaite/ The repetition of the defeat of 1837 seems pre-scribed for a dualistic imagination that keeps re-presenting its objects, in an endless camera obscura, inside the lines of a symmetrical inversion: 'Quelque mecanisme vient de se detraquer dans mon inverseur de vie, 1837 cc injection directe et arbre a came en tete' (41). Already in 1837, the enemy had escaped being captured by a rebel imagination that did not alter the rules of the game, by the Patriotes who kept playing 'a 1'interieur des lignes blanches' (Blocs erratiques 116) of the same perspective. The power of Joan escapes again a perspective still fuelled directly by defeat, even if the engine of inverted representation is now driven from above by an 'arbre a came en tete,' by a 'superior' imagination with a camshaft on top. But this escape of the representable keeps the verbal engine in high speed: 'Bete a mots, ma pensee s'essouffle a vouloir rattraper les mots qui viennent de s'echapper en peloton en depit de toute vraisemblance' (41). This art of forgetting generates words that do not really determine their object, but words under which the objects are elongated in an uncertain relationship, distorted by uncertain perspectives. Magnant's writing is prolonged as transubstantiation of its other, Joan, who, precisely at the moment of being reduced to a victim -and thus to an image of the same defeat Magnant seeks to overcome - escapes (like H. de Heutz under his pursuer's gun) as heterological other, requiring a further movement and

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perspective from which Magnant would finally be able to decipher the secret of her power. Her corpse appears thus under two contradictory aspects: both as finite, victimized reality, and as an endless escape and departure. On the one hand, Magnant imagines it under the aspect of total annihilation: Ton corps n'est plus qu'une depouille anglicane que la famille ... s'empressera de reduire en poussiere volcanique' (84-5). But RR will later use the word 'poussiere' similarly to describe the fugitive and annihilating power of anamorphosis with respect to static perceptions of reality: 'Ce qui avait les proprietes de 1'immuable et de la presence reelle se trouve reduit en poussiere soudain!' (133). Such passages evoke the de-familiarization of perception called for in Brecht's 'A Short Organum' (Brecht is mentioned both earlier by the editor [101, 106], and again before RR's speech about her vantage point from the 'theatre superieur' [126]). RR's own 'superior' version of the story, of course, will reverse the victimization, and reveal herself, the seemingly superior observer, unsettled by the object. The anamorphic image 'creve les yeux' (133), as RR says with a deceiving formulation that can be read both literally and idiomatically (and appears passim in Trou de memoir e}: on the one hand, it puts the (old) eyes out, turning the living face into a skull; on the other hand, simultaneously with the suddenly conspicuous symbol of the end, a new perspective leaps to the eye. But the death of the known and the memento mori of the skull are precisely this: a negation of the known, not a determination and conquest of the unknown, or an equivalent of the Christ figure that appears behind it in Holbein's painting. And as the skull is nothing but the sign of the unknown, of 'la vanite inherente a toute puissance terrestre et de 1'absurdite de toute representation' (as a very un-Brechtian RR formulates with the anti-scientific logic behind Holbein's painting, yet simultaneously turning Christian representation against itself), Joan's corpse implies both a total annihilation, and a manifold 'resurrection' of a question similar to the 'enigme par excellence' that multiplies with each attempted answer in Prochain Episode. Her death thus draws the image both of infinite destruction and of her 'fuite absolue' (85). This euphemism evokes an interminable flight of perspectives that does not end after the second act, and only begins to multiply questions and signs of the unknown. And therefore Magnant's termination of the other is qualified by an inconspicuous yet decisive 'almost': J'ai presque tue a jamais les mots que Joan a proferes dans la phase precomateuse de son intoxication: elle n'a cesse de monologuer ... elle n'en finissait plus ... de proferer des dernieres paroles que d'autres, plus finales encore, rendaient ante-penultiemes et

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ainsi de suite, ce qui n'est pas conforme au mutisme des Anglais. Ce n'etait pas, a proprement parler, une agonie ... mais une translation. (86-7) The endlessly added words alter the finality of every previous determination, and every perspective transfigures the elements of the previous one not in death, but in 'translation.' Like H. de Heutz in Prochain Episode, Joan, under the aspect of defeat, approaches infinitely the image of the defeated who seeks to express the alternative to determined history by paralogy. Joan's absolute flight, her Vanishing point/ thus occurs to Magnant as a 'veritable demonstration desordonnee qui tend a prouver que les inferieurs (revolutionnaires ou autres ...) ne peuvent meme pas se prevaloir de leur droit de propriete sur le desordre incantatoire: Joan, a deux doigts de sa mort, a reussi a me voler les antiques privileges de mon peuple sur 1'incoherence et la deraison raisonnante' (87). Rather than in victory, his achievement and essence ('ce secret, seul, me reste et me tient lieu de passe') consist in having created, by his scheming reason and exertion of utmost control, yet another image of his own powerless state - in having invented the masked death of Joan who has escaped the mask of that representation. This secret, he says, both defines and brings him into being, 'me resume et m'enfante/ Joan's finally achieved immobility yet again only prefigures his 'grand oeuvre/ directed obliquely against 'un ennemi plus invisible encore et dont 1'absence, en cet instant supreme, constitue la pire insulte' (87). The only trace of his presumed victory, foiled again by the doubling of the other that reveals her objecthood as mask and engenders again the invisible unknown, is the text 'left behind' in the twofold sense of that formulation. His defeat at the very moment of seeming victory - and the elongating impact of this fact on his textual self - parallels the disturbing logic of the anamorphosis. At the moment of apparent perceptual power and triumph, the revealed insight testifies to the contrary, and signifies defeat: the skull almost grins at the observing perceiver just when perceptual triumph has escaped the first, incomprehensible perspective. The sign occurring in the new perspective offers a highly ironic revelation, since it signifies, again, only the unknown. It is therefore only fitting that a second skull should be painted, as Jean-Louis Ferrier has pointed out, in a yet-different perspective inside the first skull (see Malcuzynski 479). The anamorphosis as it appears in Holbein's painting is thus a cognitive trap that mocks understanding far beyond the second act: not only is the representation of the surface splendour and of knowledge, represented by the symbols of the liberal arts in the background, betrayed by the anamorphotic skull, but this 'superior' perspective itself victimizes end-

ioo

Discoveries of the Other

lessly the viewing subject it implies and constructs. This is the obsessive generative principle of Trou de memoire. Its various contradictory 'points of view' are endlessly determined and dominated by the question whether it is possible to create yet another vantage point or, rather, a point of flight, from which thought and writing can flee domination by the ever more resourceful, 'framing' other that the both paranoid and vengeful imagination continues to invent. Each narrator offers a certain version and perspective that is subsequently recontextualized, and thus withdrawn as reliable, absolute point of reference. This movement, which seeks to free its narrator from determination, does so, however, by trying to define the position, assumptions, and possibilities of the other it creates as its reader: it is highly manipulative. The experience of defeat at the very moment of understanding, of seeming comprehension and detection of the right perspective, is the regular if spiralling fate of each successive reader in the novel, be it the editor, RR, or ourselves at the very end.2 If Joan is a worthy descendant of H. de Heutz in her 'fuite absolue,' Magant, who 'almost' succeeds in silencing the object of his quest for domination, seems to reserve a similar defeat for his reader and pursuer, the editor. At the very moment the latter feels he has 'jamais assume avec tant d'ardeur ma mission d'editeur' (108), at the moment of his total editorial powers, he has actually been manoeuvred, by the double perspective and 'distanciations' of the text he seeks to control, into a problematical, spatially superior position on the page: 'Ses distanciations, imprevisibles et jamais semblables a elles-memes, constituent pour moi un veritable mystere que je vais tenter ... de detruire en completant le recit qu'il a fait par des versions complementaires (ou divergentes) des memes evenements' (75-6). But having been led, by the evasions of his object, up to the main part of the page, induced to 'take over' from the lower stage reserved for the footnotes, he finds himself 'ensorcele par la parole ecrite que je secrete maintenant comme une glu venimeuse' (108). At his loftiest moment as 'editor/ he has thus become the very opposite, a writer exposed to a 'secondary' perspective and understanding of an other. Since he has thus abandoned his 'superior' perspective at the bottom of the page as editor and viewing subject and now submits his writing as author to the later position of the reader, his very take-over positions him only seemingly 'en-dessus': 'Surtout que je suis juge et partie dans cette affaire (editeur et auteur ...), mais juge et bourreau meme! Comme cela est etrange, je veux dire: comme ma situation me parait soudain le contraire meme d'une situation privilegiee. Je n'ai pas le dessus dans cette affaire; je suis en-dessous, loin derriere, dans un etat voisin de 1'egarement' (76). The episode 'L'incident du Neptune,' which the editor has just inserted, not

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only is based on an inversely anamorphotic perception of a situation (the waiter can see after having positioned himself 'en plein milieu de la salle' [76; emphasis added]), but adds the perceiving eye of the waiter, and of the editor himself, to the story by Magnant. On the one hand, the editor's text now elongates the one by Magnant; on the other hand, we find the self-representation of an observing consciousness added to the scene of the couple as it is painted by Magnant (68-9). If we are willing to rediscover this picture from the second perspective offered by the editor, however, we are immediately drawn into the next act of this play, which sees the editor himself losing his superior position, his 'situation privilegiee.' His reader, RR in the 'Semifinale/ redefines all the previous participants and configurations in a different perspective, a further 'surdetermination anamorphotique' (Malcuzynski 478) that recasts our efforts to comprehend the cast. Her perspective, as we have already seen, emphasizes even more explicitly than the previous ones the sequence from superiority to a fall that elongates, under control of a later perspective, the self. And her own superior position, the 'theatre superieur' a term referring both to her position above the stage and Joan, and to the anamorphotic techniques used by Joan and thus observed by RR - turns itself immediately into a trap. RR finds herself, in this discussion of Holbein's painting, and in this further flight of textual perspective, 'enveloppee de veronique et de demi-veronique' (128). Her superior perspective is inversely controlled by the victim of the former perspective, and by the very 'veronique' (70) (both the veil of the saint, and, by analogy with the movement by which she dries the face of Christ, a deceiving manoeuvre in bull-fighting) which had silenced, in Magnant's story, the 'bouche inspiree' (70) of Joan. In this in(de)terminable further act of the anamorphosis, not only does the observer perceive Joan, Magnant, and the editor from a different angle, but the newly gained perceptive power encounters its undeterminable limit when the editor returns in the footnote on Holbein's painting (130). He thus not only encompasses his opponent, who claims to have relativized him, but comments - deceivingly - on the painting that contains the very principle of this endless displacement. The battle for domination - for the 'last word,' as it were -continues in the next footnotes (140, 142), until RR seems to terminate this section by the editor, misleadingly entitled 'Suite et fin'; her 'final' note, alluding admirably to the text's self-pursuance by a reflexive verb, is nothing but an avowal of the text's further flight: 'Ce texte doit vraisemblablement se poursuivre; toutefois, nous n'en possedons pas la suite. RR' (144). The 'Suite et fin' has thus been inverted again, the last act, end, and ultimate position turned into a penultimate stage to be subjected to a further perspective. The destabilization of the prior act of anamorphosis prolongs the

iO2

Discoveries of the Other

movement of consciousness endlessly, as the revelation of the skull is only the sign of the unknowable. Reading has become, in this process, the ironic knowledge of its own unknowing. Thus RR supplements Baltrusaitis' closing of the curtain at the supposed end of the anamorphosis with a never-ending epilogue; she remembers that Joan could 'epiloguer interminablement sur la composition savante de Holbein ou le rideau ne se ferme pas sur le "cabinet de verite" '(130; emphasis added). The curtain, however, is certainly closed in the background of Holbein's painting29 (and the source of the expression 'cabinet de verite' itself remains hidden in Aquin's text).30 The text enacts, in this very dissimulation of the painting, the endless epilogue that can be read in the painting's construction of a knowledge that negates knowledge. The described painting does 'leave its curtain open' - if not on the 'cabinet de verite' - on an elongated shape drawn in a surprising, previously unknown perspective, and also on the premeditated and yet endless elongation of an observing consciousness, manoeuvred into this predicament by the promise of a superior position. This movement /s the textual production by, and of, RR subsequent to her viewing of a theatre of anamorphoses from the perspective of her 'theatre superieur': Je me sens ... comme une effigie distordue qui, jamais regardee obliquement et selon le bon angle, reste infiniment une image defaite. Tableau secret aux lignes rallongees avec extravagance et non sans cruaute de ta part, je m'etire lamentablement dans une perspective que tu a premeditee et comme une anamorphose que nul regard amoureux ne rendra a une forme raccourcie, je veux dire: au temps retrouve! Tableau secret, je m'allonge demesurement sur une feuille bi-dimensionnelle qui, par un effet d'optique, m'enserre comme un linceul indechiffre. (129-30)

Aquin's text is this virtually in(de)terminable subjectivity: the projection of a spiral on paper (where it becomes longer and longer), a spiral in which the observed (and seemingly dominated) deceiving object manoeuvres the observer into its perspective, and thus objectifies the movement of the observing subject according to its own logic of flight. The text 'reste infiniment une image defaite': it remains the infinite signification re-engendering subject and object of the double genitive that is constructed by the double possible reading of the second word in 'image defaite/ as noun and adjective the image of defeat and the defeat of image. This textual image of defeat ('image-defaite') evolves also as the undoing of representation (and in particular of the image of defeat), doubled further by its being undone (both as being destroyed and as yet to be done). At the end, the 'final' editor and reader in the novel will continue this

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indeterminable logic that leaves both temporal sequence and the related power of objectivity in abeyance - and will thus put the same question of control and sequence to the next reader and other: us. Do we ever reach the end of the novel, and thus know its 'having been' and objecthood? Or is there a further 'epilogue' that reveals itself as prologue, that repositions our reading, in a further turn of the spiral, again at the receiving end (or beginning) of an other('s) sequence and perspective? The 'note finale' seems to provide us with the full history of the text, and with a final perspective on the intractable question of textual authority. But the opening of this promised ending, suggesting a superior point of view, is suspiciously assertive and repetitive when it identifies Olympe GhezzoQuenum again as 'le pharmacien de Grand-Bassam' (we already know this; should there be an other Olympe?): Tout a une fin. Le texte s'arrete ici; du moins, j'en decide ainsi avec la certitude que personne ne m'en voudra. Les derniers evenements racontes par Olympe GhezzoQuenum, le pharmacien de Grand-Bassam, se sont passes en 1967. (193)

The passage is another anamorphotic trap. The indicated year sends us back, first to the beginning of Olympe's 'Journal' - which indicates 14 May 1966 as the beginning of his entries (147), ending on 8 June of the same year. And now the reader, who in this case is 'repu par les apparences infinitesimales' of the discordant chronology, moves from the beginning of the journal further back to the beginning of the novel, and re-reads the date 28 September 1966 heading a very amiable letter to Magnant by a Ghezzo-Quenum, who is hardly the author of journal entries finished just two months earlier, full of horror about Magnant. The initial letter, which we thus reach at the end, is set, indeed, underneath a vague warning of dissimulation, 'En guise d'avantpropos/ We have been warned, of course, throughout the novel that dates, sequences, events, and identities may or may not have been falsified.^1 Over the shoulder of the reader who has thus returned to the letter written 'en guise d'avant-propos,' an other 'editor' seems to grin, one who might have added this passage later, or falsified a few more dates than we had suspected. This 'prologue' occurs thus as a hologrammatic double space, both as a further epilogue at the end of the novel we have just read, and as the beginning of a new reading of the 'same' novel. We are manoeuvred both into another reading, and again into an other's premeditated perspective. This perspective annihilates the facticity (the having-been) that a CharlesEdouard Mullahy alias Pierre X. Magnant seeks to lend, in the 'Note finale/ to his perspective, by alluding to the historical date of Expo 67 in Montreal.

1O4 Discoveries of the Other By implication, however, it also casts an undeterminable doubt on the facticity of the dates that a 'final' Rachel Ruskin assigns to the death of both Mullahy and Ghezzo-Quenum (201), and on the authority with which she claims Magnant's death. From a strictly logical perspective, her chronology and perspective, claiming the last date in the novel ('15 aout 1967' [201]), seem uncontradicted. But we have every reason, in the context of this work, to mistrust any passage that begins with the announcement of an end ('Ce furent ses dernieres paroles' [200]), and claims a final perspective, 'un point de vue final qui me fait decouvrir la verite raccourcie de cette perspective que chaque document rallongeait de facon indue' (201). In fact, we have to ascribe a historical forgetting and 'trou de memoire' to this Rachel Ruskin that she seeks (misguidingly ?) to contradict with the four 'terminal' dates she offers on page 201, determining the 'final' chronology (the death of Olympe, of Mullahy, the date Olympe has checked into the hotel room where his corpse is found, and the date of her 'final access' to the manuscript). The historically incorrect note concerning de Gaulle's 'Vive le Quebec libre!' from the balcony of Montreal City Hall (the speech is moved up from 24 to 12 July 1967 [193]) remains, together with the immediately preceding correct note, one of the few unsigned footnotes in Trou de memoire}2 Only a historically forgetful RR would not comment on this note (unless it is her own), which creates the double temporality and (impossibility - the two-way 'memory' - according to which Ghezzo-Quenum 'remembers' the revolutionary event several days prior to its occurrence: 'Le cri de de Gaulle lui avait rappele d'etranges souvenirs. Il faut dire qu'en cette chaude journee de juillet, tout semblait troublant a 1'esprit chancelant de GhezzoQuenum' (193). The emphasized, and conspicuous, repetition of 13 July as the day following de Gaulle's speech (194) remains uncommented upon by the supposed final instance of knowledge, 'moi RR, dans le role de 1'editeur' (201).^ There is, thus, reason to find unreasonable that final reading instance that says, 'Maintenant que je sais tout (car j'ai lu tout ce qui a precede)' (203) - and that lures us into its anamorphotic perspective. The bearer of this final vanishing point itself offers us a further clue (or doubt) when she has, on the last date mentioned in the novel, 'enfin acces au bureau de ce cher editeur: en quelque sorte, je n'en suis pas revenue' (201; emphasis added). The literal reading of this idiomatic expression seems, at the very least, possible: the speaking instance would have made itself 'other with the other/ like Olympe who 'signs in/ for his final date, under the name of Magnant. After all, this Olympe had been sent, by RR, to the very office that provides now her own point of view, and (also) 'n'en est jamais revenu; il n'en reviendra pas' (204). If this disappearance and uncertain identity point

Hubert Aquin: Language and Legitimation 105 in a direction that can also be found in a certain mystical teaching of 'how not to return/ it is not self-induced, but imposed. And the final observer shares this imposed and deceiving violence, since the reader of this novel shares much with the fate of Olympe, 'pauvre enfant depayse, qui a vecu mon drame, me sachant poursuivi par 1'autre' (204); and like Olympe, we are guided, without knowledge, 'vers 1'autre sans le savoir' (204).34 The novel thus ends with a paradoxical effort of domination, seeking to manoeuvre the future into a position not determined by a knowledge of its past, the earlier perspective that has engendered it. The 'end' is written, here, as a plea for forgetting, a wish to become other with an other, followed by three dots: 'Et je veux que mon enfant soit plus heureux que son pere et qu'il n'apprenne jamais comment il a ete conc,u, ni mon ancien nom' (204). Hoping for a form of historical 'forgetting,' this perspective asks for an indeterminate 'prochain episode' and 'knowledge' of the future, free from an essentialist identity that represents a new being as what it 'has been,' that is, by linear logical deduction. These are the qualities Olympe's letter had ascribed to the Magnant who remains, at the end of the novel, '1'autre/ and the illegitimate engenderer of the other of reason: 'Non, vous n'etes surement pas europeen, ni cartesien, ni rationaliste humanitariste ... Vous vomissez 1'affreuse logique qui, vous 1'avez si remarquablement dit dans votre discours, "n'est que la deformation professionnelle des policiers et des juges" ' (10). Similar to the combustion of a ' realite euclidienne stable et ordonnee' Aquin ascribes elsewhere to Joyce's Ulysses, Trou de memoire 's'apparente a une methode camouflee de reconstitution de la realite a la seule fin de mal reproduire ou de deformer son image' ('Considerations sur la forme romanesque d'Ulysse' 64). As both Holbein's anamorphosis and Descombes suggest, this encounter between the observing subject and its object - between knowledge and its other - may well lack its final perspective (lest the heterological other be missed by identifying its supposed sameness). Aquin asserts here the uncertain relationship that exists, on the one hand, between the novel and the reality it 'reads' and writes asymmetrically, and on the other hand, between the novel and its reader: 'Le roman se trouve done remis en question; et la representation du reel est finalement assimilable a la perception de 1'impossibilite de se representer unilateralement le reel dont il est question' (65; emphasis added).

4

'Scared by the Company of the Mirror': Temptations of Identity and Limits of Control in the Work of Michael Ondaatje

'GOVERNED BY FEARS OF CERTAINTY'

The encounters with the other in Michael Ondaatje's texts combine Cohen's willingness to be guided by the fascination of the unknown with Aquin's efforts to escape determination. Both Cohen and Aquin, of course, while emphasizing opposed moments, evoke also the complementary aspects of a process in which the fascination with the other, and a fear of being transfixed and controlled, coalesce. Aquin's protagonist in Prochain Episode both flees determination and is fascinated by his opponent, moving irresistibly toward identification with an unknown, heterological other whom the text ultimately refuses to depict. Similarly, the anamorphic change of perspective in Trou de memoire combines the promise of a hitherto unrevealed knowledge, of perceptual identification, power, and control, with the threat of a trap premeditated by an other. In Beautiful Losers, Cohen's initial T - in stark contrast with Aquin - approaches the object of his fascination almost unconditionally, and indicates a willed loss of control (that begins, in Beautiful Losers as in many of Ondaatje's works, with a picture). But this confidence is accompanied by many warnings; we are 'told' to mistrust any 'priestly' name, shape, or definition of the unknown, and are asked to submit to an experience of continual questioning. Ondaatje probes the precarious balance - the limit of stability in the relationship between subject and object - between the perceiving, writing subjectivity and its created other. With Aquin, he shares a predilection for parodic inversions of the detective novel's dichotomies, of observer and observed, of pursuer and pursued.1 Cohen's similar, if different, studies in the art of inverting and transforming objectifying images have been carefully scrutinized by Ondaatje. In his short monograph Leonard Cohen, he comments,

Identity and Control in the Work of Michael Ondaatje 107 for instance, on Cohen's self-reflexive play with his public status as artist: 'Rather than being defeated by the dangers and limitations that come with being a public figure, Cohen uses his status as part of his subject matter' (4). Not only here is Ondaatje acutely aware of the double-sided potential of pictures, as objects that we make and by which and into which we are made. He draws our attention to the 'cinematic style of Cohen's The Favourite Game' (26) - a style that plays an important role in his own writing - and points out the fact, similarly important for many of his own narrators, that 'Cohen constantly uses photographs, or he replays a scene, or he uses painters like Rousseau or Breughel to remind him that he is part of a portrait' (29). Breavman practises a double perspective on a self portrayed as other, and on the portrayed other as aspect of a self-creating imagination. Breavman, Ondaatje writes, 'studies himself as supposedly objective narrator, placing himself as "he" in the landscape with other characters ... Breavman, then, is studying his own portrait while making it, and the stress is on the fact that the portrait is unfinished' (24). Ondaatje certainly shares with Cohen this unfinalized simultaneous process of creation and contemplation, as well as the interest in the visual 'metaphoric equivalences' (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 46) that photography and film offer to a self-reflexive imagination mediating its own process in the other.2 One of the aspects many of his texts have specifically in common with Beautiful Losers is a beginning in the fascination with the other. Beautiful Losers addresses its initial question to a silent, static painting that, like a photograph, 'is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence' (Sontag 15). Furthermore, both Cohen and Ondaatje display a predilection for the 'moving picture' - for instance, in the uncontrollable projector beam and mobile movie pictures that refuse, in Beautiful Losers, the 'proper' distribution separating a subject on the inside from an object outside, or in Ondaatje's pictures that all seem in the process of emerging, like Bolden in Coming Through Slaughter, out of the acid tray. And like Cohen's initial picture, Ondaatje's pictures create for their observers a space in which to speak in response to the silent other. This speech often emerges in a polyphonic mode that exceeds the confines of a monologic self. Both Cohen and Ondaatje repeatedly allude to this mode with a musical metaphoric equivalent of mobility and (seeming) indefinition: that is, jazz. These silent pictures evoke a multiplicity of voices irreducible to one 'protocol/ and invite us to recognize 'the anarchy, the unfolding of musical order, the growls and muttering' that challenge Fats Waller's listeners in Ondaatje's Tn a Yellow Room' (Secular Love 119). This multiplicity of voices finds its most visible formal equivalent in the generic interaction 'of poetry, fiction and documents in a form ...

io8 Discoveries of the Other deploying a variety of genres and orchestrating a wide range of voices/ as Dennis Lee remarks about The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (Savage Fields 15).3 Cohen's Beautiful Losers exhibits a similar wealth of forms; it is thus perhaps not entirely surprising that the publication of Ondaatje's short monograph on Cohen coincides, in 1970, with the appearance of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Like The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter confronts the reader with the encounter of many formal perspectives on the page, including a single line on an otherwise empty page (60), passages of lyric prose poetry, narrative prose, lists, photographs, interviews, and tape transcripts. The writer's choice of genre, a decision concerning an overall organizing mode implying (among other things) the selection of verse or prose, is traditionally the first step in the writing process. For Ondaatje, this decision appears to represent a fixed pattern a priori, an answer to a question that the text insists does not, or should not, have an answer in the form of any single decision. Ondaatje's refusal of any predetermined path laid out by genre, rhythm, or metre - which normally allow the writer to travel more easily along predictable lines - parallels his protagonist's revolt against predictability in Coming Through Slaughter. Buddy Bolden is 'almost completely governed by fears of certainty' (15), and yet fascinated by the 'delicate rules and ceremonies' of his wife, Nora. Hating 'the sure lanes of the probable' (15-16), he revolts against the threatening paths of predictability, 'breaking chairs and windows glass doors in fury at her certain answers' (16). A similar double impulse of fury and fascination is discernible in Ondaatje's texts. The 'sure lanes of the probable' are effective as temptation and as threat, both in the sense of a formal perspective, and on the level of textual authority and perceptual security. On the one hand, the speaking voice seeks to decipher its own adumbrated self with respect to the objects it creates; on the other hand, it seeks to free those objects from their determinate status, for fear of being immobilized itself by ossified perceptions. Formal 'fears of certainty' thus find their parallel in the figures that emerge in Ondaatje's writing. All of his long projects gravitate around half-defined, half-evasive characters, adumbrated in the margins of history. The gaps in their history, the unwritten parts of their being, offer ample space both for Ondaatje's curious investigation, and for his willed transgressions of the historical 'sure lanes of the probable.' In his first extended exploration of the longer form, the man with seven toes, Ondaatje enlarges on the legend of a white woman, shipwrecked in Aus-

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tralia, who is captured by Aborigines before she can return to the civilization she is familiar with.4 Whether it is the popular legend of Billy the Kid or the biography of the unrecorded musician Buddy Bolden, the underlying historical model both offers a minimal historical guidance or factual temptation, and aids imaginative freedom by its 'unofficial/ off-centre quality. As if to demonstrate this decentred perspective, the first picture after the empty frame at the beginning of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid - an indication of the as-yet-unrealized poetic perception and its object - is dominated by a large figure in the foreground that literally walks off centre, and out of the picture. This 'move' destabilizes considerably the aesthetic assumption that photography should identify central moments, rather than the seemingly insignificant commotion between the acts. Similarly, the opening observations in Coming Through Slaughter take the reader to an area in New Orleans 'a mile or so from the streets made marble by jazz' (8); except for some tales, 'here there is little recorded history' (8). This last remark holds as well for the unwritten, only orally preserved and recreated histories of Ondaatje's own family and of the experience of Toronto immigrants, which he both 'records' and invents in Running in the Family and In the Skin of a Lion. But Ondaatje's longer works pose, along with the historical, the question of personal concern that we hear in 'White Dwarfs': Why do I love most among my heroes those who sail to that perfect edge where there is no social fuel Release of sandbags to understand their altitude there are those burned out stars who implode into silence after parading in the sky after such choreography what would they wish to speak of anyway (Rat Jelly 70-1)

The attraction of these semi-defined 'heroes' lies precisely in their disappearance, in the 'black empty spaces' and 'the possibilities in his silence' that Bellocq, for instance, offers Bolden in Coming Through Slaughter (91). This empty darkness and silence allow the poetic imagination to grow in the unde-

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fined areas, but simultaneously condemn it to be guided by a fatal fascination: to 'define' itself with respect to an unknown (or disappearing) other, and to trade thetic security for the uncertainties of heterology. Subjectivity in language thus typically begins (and often ends), in Michael Ondaatje's work, as a lack of knowledge, as the itinerary of a voice that mediates its self in what is unknown and yet appears fascinating, and therefore holds the promise of unrevealed meaning. 'Not a story about me through their eyes then/ we read, for instance, in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; 'Find the beginning, the slight silver key to unlock it, to dig it out. Here then is a maze to begin, be in' (20). The horizon and limit of knowledge arise again and again in the guise of its ambiguous means of detection, in eye and ear, writing and voice, photograph, film, tape, and radio. The reader is drawn into enigmatically meaningful universes, in which a number of searchers and detectives seek to come to terms with elusive figures that seem constantly to disappear from a world certain of its laws. But this quest for knowledge reveals, more often than not, its very nature as quest when it comes up against its other: namely, to bring the other into the horizon of the known, reduce it to more of the same, and thus to annihilate it as other. The responses to this dilemma vary. In some cases, the poetic voice makes itself 'other with the other' (Descombes) as its persona; in those cases, authorship and controlling authority appear reversed. Authority seems dubiously divided between poet and poeticized object in Ondaatje's title, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. At the end of this work, an undecidable ambiguity blurs the distinction between narrator and central character in a passage, isolated on the page, that could be spoken by either: It is now early morning, was a bad night. The hotel room seems large. The morning sun has concentrated all the cigarette smoke so one can see it hanging in pillars or sliding along the roof like amoeba. In the bathroom, I wash the loose nicotene [sic] out of my mouth. I smell the smoke still in my shirt. (105) As in many of his other works, Ondaatje thus writes into his conclusion an implicit identification or superimposition of self and other. The partial identity of the two seems to be underlined and yet somewhat decentred by the picture following, set in the corner of an otherwise empty frame that repeats the frame at the beginning. The photograph of a child in a cowboy outfit, Ondaatje has told us, is a portrait of himself (qtd Mundwiler 12).

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A similar layering'5 of identities is made explicit and problematized, as I shall discuss, at the end of Coming Through Slaughter, and in a moment of simultaneous identification and horror when the narrator of Running in the Family imagines his drunken father. 'Scared of the company of the mirror' (189), runs a sentence without subject there, presumably referring to the father. But we feel the same may be true for the narrator at this point of the novel, because he sees himself in the mirror of his father's life. This interpretation will shortly be argued by a closer analysis. These passages invite the reader to abolish or diminish the distance between the narrator and his 'hero' (and possibly between the narrator and the author, Michael Ondaatje). But if we thus follow the practice of Coming Through Slaughter itself, in which there 'have been some date changes, some characters brought together' (158), its final note (which has its equivalent in the 'Acknowledgements' at the end of Running in the Family, and at the beginning of In the Skin of a Lion] exposes simultaneously the fictional, metaphorical nature of such interactions. 'A typical, if small, gesture always ends the book,' writes Sam Solecki, calling these notes, appropriately, 'another "signature" - telling us what kind of a book we have not read' ('Michael Ondaatje' 340). The relationship between poetic self and created other moves in a space between a 'mirror-stage' of recognition, and a moment of distancing in which a degree of 'outsidedness' is restored. If the arrangement of frames at the end of The Collected Wor/cs of Billy the Kid, placing the small picture in the corner of an otherwise empty frame, maintains an oblique balance between identification and distancing, the last pages of Coming Through Slaughter seem to restore much more explicitly the ultimately unreachable autonomy of the historical Buddy Bolden. But this return to a symbolic separation between subject and object is preceded, as we have seen, by an experience of identification between self and other that is simultaneously a loss of self in the world of the other. In his article on Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, Ondaatje speaks explicitly of 'this search for the mirror image of the self, this suicide,' that satisfies both the lovers in the novel and the reader. The distinct worlds of self and other, the distinctions between the lovers, and between the reader and the fiction, disappear in this identification that 'extinguishes the town and people and story as if it was just a dream' ('Garcia Marquez and the Bus to Aracataca' 2-i). 'What I wanted,' reads an isolated line in Coming Through Slaughter, a line that seems to come both from Bolden at the moment he loses

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consciousness and falls into his long silence, and from a narrator who loses his self, at that point, in the consciousness of his created other who also encounters the limit of the self. Ondaatje's comments on Garcia Marquez foreshadow as well passages in In the Skin of a Lion that are marked as uncertain between dream and reality, between past and future, and between the voices of a searcher's self and the narrated other. Ondaatje's own work, like Garcia Marquez' great novel, is driven by 'this desire for the perfect moment in time when everything can be understood simultaneously ... to bring living and the parallel self-knowledge together ... The worlds of selfknowledge/solitude and exuberant life knit together' (31). In Ondaatje's texts, the juxtaposition and interweaving of self and other often approach an indistinguishable superimposition of threads. The thetic knowledge of the self as determinate entity disappears in such epiphanies at the border of the 'perfect moment.' Perhaps the 'perfect moment' is the one of disappearance itself, the moment between one identity and an uncertain other - the instant just before a discovery that then may spell a painful recognition, a joyful identification, or both. How are we to read those words in Coming Through Slaughter: 'What I wanted'? And what is the result of these interactions between self and other? It is uncertain, for instance, whether the last sentence that 'destroys the Buendfas, Macondo, and the book itself (31) is really the end of the book, or its 'end' as aim: to disappear as book, in the sense of an imagined world void of reality. The reader Michael Ondaatje, at least, tells us: T went around ... smiling to myself for a week ... There was fate-like completion, terrible and meticulous as a dream' (31). Similarly, the possibility is thus indicated that the other, by the end of Ondaatje's texts, leaves the narrator (and us) only as other - having begun to coexist, in ways difficult to determine, within the space of our self. Regained outsidedness seems as precarious in this context as a simple incorporation of the world of the other into our own imaginary and perceptual universes. Alberto Manguel hardly doubted Toronto's material reality when he wrote on the dust jacket of In the Skin of a Lion that the novel was 'making Toronto real at last.' Other readers have come away from Ondaatje's work with a similar sense of an altered world we previously thought familiar. And yet, while this 'other' Toronto may have become real for our self, unknown, unrealized invisible cities may lie beyond our new 'certainties.' In this respect, other 'friends and fathers' (Coming Through Slaughter 158) may tempt - and scare - Michael Ondaatje with an implied freedom that would also seem to imply great responsibility: ' "Great literature does not tell the truth, it makes it up," said Nabokov. Yup. Sometimes anyway' ('Garcia Marquez and the Bus to Aracataca' 21).

Identity and Control in the Work of Michael Ondaatje 113 SONOGRAPHS OF A STAR IN THE M I R R O R : 'AUTHOR AND HERO' IN COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it.

(Coming Through Slaughter 37) In 'Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity/ Bakhtin seeks to delineate the precarious battle for 'outsidedness' (exotopy), by means of which the artist achieves 'a determinate and stable image of the hero/ and which is simultaneously 'to a considerable extent a struggle with himself (6). Behind the quotation marks of my heading, however, the ear may discern others. Rather than applying Bakhtin's considerations to the author Michael Ondaatje, I am interested here in the narrator as a subject in language that encounters its own self in relationship with, and in the creation of, its characters and perceptions. Bakhtin's 'struggle/ I think, points to a crucial relationship in the fictional encounters in Coming Through Slaughter, a work that seems to situate its readers, already with the continuous verb form of its title, in the midst of a threatening process. Bakhtin, with his eye on the nineteenth-century Russian novel, discusses conditions of narrative control as an antagonism with the final aim of conquest: 'The relationship of the author to the hero ... is a deeply dynamic relationship: the author's position of being situated outside the hero is gained by conquest, and the struggle for it is often a struggle for life, especially in the case where the hero is autobiographical' (15). Bakhtin seems surprisingly tempted here, more than in most of his other categories, by an encompassing, Hegelian dialectics. Ondaatje's subject, however, is the limit of control, rather than its result in a finalized and stable portrait, in a thetic containment of the other. The French translation of Bakhtin's passage concerning the struggle for outsidedness suggests (more vividly than the English 'struggle for life') that, 'dans la bataille, on perd plus souvent sa peau qu'on ne la sauve' ('L'auteur et le heros' 36). Ondaatje's constant allusions to cut skin, broken glass, and mirrors, and to the process of falling or stepping through windows - in Coming Through Slaughter as elsewhere - aim precisely at the defining boundary of Bakhtin's 'outsidedness.' His narrative strategies approach, time and again, the limit of control and, simultaneously, of that 'perfect moment' that is 'the mirror image of the self, this suicide' ('Garcia Marquez' 21). He experiments with this double movement most conspicuously in the visual metaphors in Coming Through Slaughter. Bakhtin refers to 'the aesthetic relationship of an author/contemplator to an object in general and to a hero in particular' (11); in his treatment of the

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creative process, however, the creation owes its life first to its creator, who then contemplates the (partially) created 'hero/ The narrator in Coming Through Slaughter begins, by contrast, with the contemplation of an already existing object or 'hero' - the historical Buddy Bolden - whom he then proceeds to create as character. Thematizing the fascinating power of a given outsidedness, he extrapolates that aspect of the other he finds already active within the self. The process of creation thus seems reversed with respect to Bakhtin's active author and his 'consciousness that encompasses the consciousness and the world of the hero' (12). In Ondaatje's historical contemplation, the hero precedes the imagination, and does so not only temporally. In his fascinating power over the narrating consciousness, Bolden also exceeds the latter's 'excess' of knowledge (which Bakhtin stresses, by contrast, as the essential quality of the narrator [12]). Unlike Bakhtin's author, who 'reflects the hero's emotional-volitional position, but not his own position in relation to the hero' (6), Ondaatje's narrator does precisely this when he ponders his own fascination. And yet this narrator, who, in a sense, is created by this fascination for the other in his self, himself creates Buddy Bolden as 'historiographic referent' (Hutcheon, 'Running' 305); most commentators on Ondaatje's pervasive interest in history direct us toward this self-reflexive gesture of his writing. I am interested here in the fragile balance, not so much between historical accuracy and fictional 'excess' as between the 'worlds of self-knowledge/solitude and [thej exuberant life' ('Garcia Marquez' 31) of the other - and the narrative means of its existence. The intersection between these two worlds holds both fascination and horror. To gain access to what is transfixed by the fascination of the other, the self has to leave the boundary of its knowledge, and so become extinct as self-knowledge at the limit between T and non-T. At least in its original edition, Coming Through Slaughter begins the encounter between the world of the self and the world of the other - like The Collected Works of Billy the Kid - with a lack of words.7 The initial, silent frame is here constituted by the only known picture of Bolden and his band. The absence and silence of Bolden is emphasized throughout the text; it is certainly no coincidence that Ondaatje has chosen a musician who has probably never been recorded. Such factual silence, the gap, the absence that is also documented by a picture, rather than the illusion of presence evoked by representation - this is what Susan Sontag draws out attention to when she speaks of photography as an 'elegiac art' (On Photography 15). Walter Benjamin however, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,' discovers in the photographed 'human countenance' also the remnants of what he calls the 'aura': Tor the last time the aura emanates

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from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of the human face' (225-26). In Benjamin's definition, the aura refers, rather than to an elegiac pastness, to the experiences presence of a distance. In the area of natural objects, he defines the aura 'as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch' (222-23). The chronotope - the space-time - of the aura seems to suggest, for Benjamin, a momentary participation in a distant otherness through contemplation. Yet in his consideration of the aura as part of the cult value of a piece of art, he insists also on the otherness of the other that pulls the observing self away from itself, yet remains autonomous: 'The essentially distant object is the unapproachable one. Unapproachability is indeed a major quality of the cult image. True to its nature, it remains "distant, however close it may be"' (243, note 5). A similar combination of the presence of an otherness together with an irreducible distance is also what upholds fascination. If the threshold of otherness is crossed, the spell of fascination is broken. The Latin fascinare, as well as the Greek baskainein it derives from, designate the casting of a spell, the act of bewitching. And such a spell makes the narrator's senses - as we will see - stop at Bolden's picture and story, with both fascination and the recognition of significance. The aura, it is true, is an element that 'withers in the age of mechanical reproduction' (221) because the object's 'unique existence at the place where it happens to be' (220) is lacking in the reproduction. But we have seen that Benjamin speaks of an aura 'emanating' from faces in old portrait photographs, such as the picture of Bolden and his band. Furthermore, while the reproduced 'object' is detaced from its original space, such a technique also permits 'the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced' (Benjamin 221). The dialectic between proximity and distance pervades the aura emanating from Bolden's photograph at the very beginning of the text, and plays a crucial role throughout Coming Through Slaughter. The picture challenges our senses and - the more we learn about it - our understanding. All contrasts seem to coalesce. The outlines of the black musicians with their white shirts blend, particularly around Bolden, into the lighter background. The formal, static posture of the band belies the usual connotations that come with jazz, and like all pictures of musicians, the photograph evokes synaesthetic expectations of sound - but remains silent. Not only the book's metaphorical repertoires of jazz and photography are prefaced here. Ondaatje's text deals also with the fascinating power that appears in the aura of the self-destructive art-

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ist Bolden, which may actually prove too strong for the narrating consciousness and pull it, as it were, through the picture frame into its self-destructive ban. And with the narrator, we as readers become implicated in the question of the observer's position with respect to Bolden's world. The closer we let the picture and its stories come to us, the less certain becomes our own distanced observer status. Let me offer a somewhat technical preface to this aspect. In a curious episode in Coming Through Slaughter, a certain Antrim has a debate with a doctor over his right or left arm (142; see Scobie, 'Coming Through Slaughter' 7). With the use here of Billy the Kid's less-known historical name, Ondaatje alludes obliquely to his references concerning the inverting potential of photographs in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. The picture of Bolden's band is similarly caught up in a historical debate concerning its possible physical reversal. It should have been easy, one might think, to determine whether the musicians who played with Bolden were left- or right-handed at least in the thirties, when one of Ondaatje's acknowledged sources, Jazzmen, was written, or even in the forties and fifties, when jazz research blossomed. But in his book on Bolden, Donald Marquis, although he was able to ascertain the right-handedness of the bass player Johnson and of the guitarist Mumford (77), leaves the question finally undecided, and offers two photographs (a solution adopted as well, incidently, in the New Orleans Museum of Jazz). Stephen Scobie, who alerts us to this discussion, reminds us also of the parallel with the 'left handed poems' (subtitle) of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: 'Considering the fact that the legend of Billy the Kid's left-handedness originates with a reversed photograph, and that the original cover of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid featured a reverse image, it would indeed be intriguing to think that Bolden also comes to us in a reversed negative' ('Coming Through Slaughter' 21, note 2). Indeed, the question of reversal not only draws our attention to the materiality of the signs that are used to convey both Billy the Kid and Buddy Bolden, but, equally, concerns our own position: if the picture we see is reversed, we would find ourselves behind the correct version - and behind the faces that we see - as if we had stepped through a transparent negative, a window, or a permeable frame. It is not clear to what extent Ondaatje was aware of the ongoing debate about the picture (Marquis' book appeared after Coming Through Slaughter), although the reversed finger positions of the clarinetists (on which the debate hinges) are there to puzzle, at least subliminally, any jazz buff's eye (such as Ondaatje's). But when Ondaatje's Bolden compares people to rooms, and Bellocq's pictures to windows, Coming Through Slaughter certainly evokes a perception of spatial depth that brings out, like the disorientation caused by

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any inversely printed picture, an awareness of our own position with respect to picture surfaces: 'He was a photographer. Pictures. That were like ... windows ... We were furnished rooms and Bellocq was a window looking out' (59; first ellipsis in the original). In Ondaatje's text, the photographer Bellocq - to whom the picture of Bolden and his band is here attributed - similarly invites Bolden to step through other surfaces, such as the mirror image of his public persona in which he contemplates himself. He offers Bolden, in their unlikely friendship,9 a space behind the surface of the mirror, just as his pictures are said to give the observer an opening, a space in which to leave one's own mirrored position behind. In Coming Through Slaughter, surfaces and boundaries are usually not only approached, but also crossed. The next paragraph is enigmatically interrupted by a single line: 'Don't lean on that arm. Sorry. It got broken once' (59). Fifteen pages later, we may remember the context of rooms, mirrors, images, and windows, when this line is disambiguated; we learn how Bolden's left arm (evoking, with Billy's fictitious left-handedness the theme of photographic inversion) was broken in a fight with Bolden's narcissistic other, Tom Pickett. Pickett's breaking of the barber-shop mirror, of course, also provides him with a sharp weapon with which to cut the physical boundary of Bolden's self, just as Bolden has cut Pickett's face with his razor. But at the end of this deadly, mutual threat of destroyed surfaces and boundaries, both fighters find 'Liberty' (the New Orleans street with a conveniently symbolical name) after they go 'over the ice and glass and empty frame' (emphasis added). The fight with the mirror's glass traverses the surface and its thetic images. In this case, both participants end outside the room in which they opposed each other: Push again and he goes over the ice through the front window. A great creak as the thing folds over him like a spider web, he goes through ... and I come through over the ice and glass and empty frame. And we are on the street. Liberty.

(74)

On the other side of the window frame, the frozen ice from the inside is contrasted with the fluid water of rain: 'Grey with thick ropes of rain bouncing on the broken glass ... The rain like so many little windows going down around us' (74-5). Stable surfaces of containment seem to be replaced by a multiplicity of mobile window-spaces. Bolden and Pickett literally cut through each other, destroying the boundaries of mirrors, and crossing together the window glass in their violent exit

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from the confining, threatening room of their specular identity. In retrospect, Bolden's cutting into Pickett's 'beautiful' face attacks not only the lover of his wife, but also Pickett's narcissism - which mirrors Bolden's own. This link will be emphasized later when Bolden becomes aware that his cuckolding of Jaelin Brewitt inverts the situation between Nora, Pickett, and himself: 'Nora and Pickett and me. Robin and Jaelin and me. I saw an awful thing among us'

(99)The threatening logic of self and other is underlined when the narrator at the end examines his relationship with his other, in the picture of Bolden's band: The photograph moves and becomes a mirror. When I read he stood in front of mirrors and attacked himself, there was a shock of memory. For I had done that. Stood, and with a razor-blade cut into cheeks and forehead, shaved hair. Defiling people we did not wish to be. (133) Here, the narrator touches the boundary - the mirror and window - of the photograph he has earlier attributed to Bellocq. Remembering how he has immersed himself in Bolden's world when imagining the latter's multiple violations of boundaries - as skin, mirror, glass, and window - this narrator seeks to go further back to his own beginning in the image of the other. In this step through the mirror-window, the narrator-reader in the following passage sees his own self disappear into a space created by an account of Bolden's loss of self in madness: The thin sheaf of information. Why did my senses stop at you? There was the sentence 'Buddy Bolden who became a legend when he went berserk in a parade ... 'What was there in that, before I knew your nation your colour your age, that made me push my arm forward and spill through the front of your mirror and clutch myself? Did not want to pose in your accent but think in your brain and body, and you like a weatherbird arcing around in the middle of your life to exact opposites and burning your brains out. (134) This scene of an arm pushing forward, and of a figure spilling (its arm or itself) through the front, while clutching itself in the other, mirrors the earlier scene in which Bolden pushes Pickett through the front window while clutching him, and thus going through to the other side with the other. It also evokes the narrator's position with respect to Bolden, and thus brings back the question of our own position with respect to the picture at the beginning of the book.

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In Ondaatje's own photograph, 'High Class Saloon/ which prefaces the book and precedes Bolden's photograph in a later edition,10 our own position is all but impossible to determine. We seem to look at a mirror in which we see, however, a person from behind; sitting in a barber chair, this customer seems himself to be facing a mirror, but it is surrounded by what looks like an outside wall. Some further reflections could indicate the additional presence of semi-transparent glass, and the customer's face is overwritten by a letter we would expect on the outside of the shop window. But our possible outsidedness is contradicted, in turn, by the semblance of a sink in the very foreground. In these superimposed planes that merge in multiple reflections, Ondaatje experiments with a highly overdetermined labyrinth of possible positions and combinations of self and other. Similarly, the three sonographs that follow the cover and the picture of the band continue the question of our own reality with respect to the preceding silent photograph of jazz musicians. These pictures of dolphin's voices - photographs of recorded sound - and the commentary that follows take on additional overtones when we read in the 'Acknowledgements' that they are taken from Joan Maclntyre's Mind in the Water, a title that evokes the 'HYDROCEPHALIC (capitalized and repeated) photographer Bellocq, whom the novel credits with Bolden's picture, in which he will 'float into the page' (52)." The three sonographs are silent transcriptions of an inaudible world. As such they both 'translate' an aspect of the silent picture of the band, and represent, as mise en abyme, a self-reflexive metaphor of the 'sonograph' we are about to read: Ondaatje's writing. This secular triptych offers, more specifically, a central and yet elusive possibility flanked by two opposed ways in which the self can signify and locate itself with respect to its environment and the other: Three sonographs - pictures of dolphin sounds made by a machine that is more sensitive than the human ear. The top left sonograph shows a 'squawk.' Squawks are common emotional expressions that have many frequencies or pitches, which are vocalized simultaneously. The top right sonograph is a whistle. Note that the numbers of frequencies is small and this gives a 'pure' sound - not a squawk. Whistles are like personal signatures for dolphins and identify each dolphin as well as its location.(6)

This first part of the explanation comments on polar opposites. The signature whistle is thetic - it defines precise position and identity for the other. It has a relational, separating, and orienting function, since it signifies difference and identity both for the 'speaking' self with respect to the other, and for the other by whom it is recognized. The 'squawk,' by contrast, one could say is

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'all over the place/ Even the sonograph, already 'more sensitive than the human ear/ can only space this simultaneously voiced polyphony as a complex blur of shades. The many 'frequencies or pitches' that express emotion offer a much wider spectrum of degrees but are not focused with respect to what they 'represent/ While they are said to express emotions, they are at the furthest extreme from a clearly articulated self, and thus do not focus on any precise context they would seek to address. 'Squawks' are signals below the identifying threshold of denotative language. The middle sonograph does not quite combine the unspeakable with language - which would represent the magic possibility of containing the unthinkable, radical other as such within reason. But this seems to be the best picture consciousness can get of its relationship with its other, with what it is not ('That's the best I can get. Keep the print/ Bellocq says later to the searching Webb [53]): The middle sonograph shows a dolphin making two kinds of signals simultaneously. The vertical stripes are echolocation clicks (sharp, multi-frequency sounds) and the dark, mountain-like humps are the signature whistles. No one knows how a dolphin makes both, (emphasis added) While echolocation takes its measure from the surrounding other, the signature states 'known' identity. Consciousness does not comprehend, the last sentence could be read, both sides simultaneously: that semi-transparent plane on which it is still mirrored as self, and simultaneously already directed by its outside, becoming its altered other. The lack of knowledge does not deny the existence of the phenomenon in practice; we are only alerted to the fact that it lies outside the identifying process of consciousness. This simultaneity on the edge is ascribed to Bolden in a comment by (Ondaatje's) Frank Lewis: 'We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it' (37, emphasis added). Coming Through Slaughter not only presents Bolden's music in a way that resembles the middle sonograph; it reminds us, by its constant formal crossing of boundaries, that its own seeming formlessness is tormented by what is 'outside it' - both as another form of writing, and as the other subject, Bolden, with respect to which the writing self charts its course. Bolden is said to bring two realms into contact in a hitherto unknown way in his mixing of hymns and blues, one the salvation of the self, the other its negation: 'He's mixing them up. He's playing the blues and the hymn sadder than the blues and then the blues sadder than the hymn. That is the first time I ever heard hymns and blues cooked up together' (81).

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But while Bolden's musical practice produces the unknown, it is outside definable, repeatable knowledge. For the observer, this practice remains an object until we risk our own observing selves, and follow Bolden's imperative: Tut your hand through this window' (91). The following description from the point of view of an audience emphasizes the outsidedness of the conscious observer, or of the consciously observing part of any mind, with respect to the experience and practice of this moment in which one identity steps over the edge toward an other. Not coincidentally, the listeners stand outside the window that Bolden has broken in his previous fight with Pickett. Bolden has stepped through it again - this time in an illegal trespass of the barbershop owner's property (80) - to play alone in this room of crossed window frames and broken mirror glass: 'There's about three of us at the window now and a strange feeling comes over me. I'm sort of scared because I know the Lord don't like that mixing the Devil's music with His music ... When he blows blues I can see Lincoln Park with all the sinners and whores shaking and belly rubbing and the chicks getting way down and slapping themselves on the cheeks of their behind. Then when he blows the hymn I'm in my mother's church with everybody humming. The picture kept changing with the music. It sounded like a battle between the Good Lord and the Devil. Something tells me to listen and see who wins. If Bolden stops on the hymn, the Good Lord wins. If he stops on the blues, the Devil wins.' (81) Bolden's music continually traverses the line between different spaces; the observing consciousness - waiting for a resolution - listens from the outside, however. Like the sonographs, Ondaatje's writing projects an imperceptible simultaneity into the sequence of writing, and onto the space of a page - the limit of the perceptual moment in which the self goes through the window of the other, breaks through the mirror-image of the self, and loses (self-) consciousness. From the self's point of view, language as pattern of meaning can accompany and follow this movement only to its infinitesimal limit, and has to let it go at the point of its disappearance. Coming Through Slaughter constantly thematizes this limit of language and control with respect to the other. Only by imposing the language and images of our own meaning can we 'cover' the real incongruity of the other person with respect to our own perception, and more extremely, the existence of madness, death, and silence. When Bolden, for instance, slashes the surface of his narcissistic mirror-image, Pickett, and then pushes his mirror-breaking alter ego through the front window, Ondaatje's language speaks, as we have seen, of a 'great creak as the thing

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folds over him like a spider web, he goes through' (74). With the 'great creak' (/great creek) and the image of the spider's web, Ondaatje ingeniously interweaves some of his most important clusters of associations that deal, not only in Coming Through Slaughter, with the limit of control, and its other. The great creak/creek, on the one hand, will eventually lead to Bolden's trip along the Mississippi toward the asylum (during which he will come through the village of Slaughter), and also points to the imagery of water that seems to promise Bolden's mind shelter when he refuses to surface in the Brewitt's bathtub. The great creak, on the other hand, is the overall sound in which identifying signification, individualizing sounds and 'signatures' dissolve and become part of something large, like the small and individual creaks in Bolden's paper, The Cricket: 'Bolden took all the thick facts and dropped them into his pail of sub-history' (24). When Bolden reads The Cricket later which 'was my diary too, and everybody else's' (113) - he hears 'Cricket noises and Cricket music for that is what we are when watched by people bigger than us' (113-14). Coming Through Slaughter itself, of course, resembles Ondaatje's version of The Cricket,12 not only because it interweaves many voices and puts the self into a larger context. The Cricket, in many respects a metafictional mise en abyme of Coming Through Slaughter, for instance thus 'respected stray facts, manic theories, and well-told lies' (24). And like the writer/editor who assembles, in Coming Through Slaughter, 'found poems' - photographs, dolphin research, Storyville information, hospital files, tape transcripts, or Jazz historiography - the Cricket's writer/editor, Bolden, is not interested in verification: 'All the information he was given put unedited into the broadsheet' (13).13 But most significantly, language is also brought to Bolden by 'spiders' - informants and amateur detectives that create a web of leads for the police and serves as a protection and separating medium against its negation: the unspeakable beyond language and thought, death. 'The Cricket,' Ondaatje's language puts it with nice ambiguity, 'contained excessive reference to death. The possibilities were terrifying to Bolden and he hunted out examples obsessively as if building a wall. A boy with fear of heights climbing slowly up a tree' (24; emphasis added). The spiders' language web and Bolden's own 'amateur maps' (24) 'cover' death, the disappearance of the other that threatens the self with its own limit. Language thus offers the human mind an envelope of protection, a medium in which to project the inside universe of familiar and constructed meaning onto the outside - which thus appears under the healing illusion of answering and mirroring the human universe in its own language. Bolden's own obsession with the otherness of death announces its threat in

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his dreams; the reality of death is bearable only in its contextualized, fictionalized version: There were his dreams of his children dying. And then there was the first death, almost on top of him, saved by its fictional quality and nothing else' (24). This first real death in Bolden's life concerns his motherin-law, Mrs Bass. The 'detective' Webb, 'inventing' a narrative web and context for her inexplicable death, makes the unthinkable event amenable to reason. Referring to the historically known event of Isadora Duncan's death (she was strangled by her scarf caught in the wheel of her car), Webb suggests that Mrs Bass's pet snake would have strangled her in a similar fashion.14 This story also allows him to 'explain' the disappearance of the cause of death. The character of Webb offers a parodic mise en abyme of the search for Bolden that unfolds in Coming Through Slaughter. A lover of bananas like the speaker in Ondaatje's poem on control and chaos, 'King Kong meets Wallace Stevens,' Webb both lets us ponder the detective's ideological quest for control over the unknown, and embodies the project to 'cover' Bolden's disappearance. The structural element of his search also superimposes a semblance of linearity and novelistic causality on Ondaatje's album of silentspeaking sonographs. With the image of the spider's web, Ondaatje ironically likens the network of structured linearities and connections that his own writing leaves behind to a trap into which the other might fall like a victim, threatened to be encompassed and shrouded by it. 'You're a cop Webb' (19), Nora Bass scolds the detective Webb, who is in search of his elusive other Bolden, disappeared after the fight with Pickett. The missing comma reinforces the allusion to the spider's web. Although one could object that Ondaatje omits almost all commas in the dialogues of Coming Through Slaughter, it is precisely by thus drawing our attention to the oral quality of the words we read that this writing invites our inner ear to hear the silent sound that disappears in the written accusation against Webb, accusations against the written purveyor of meaning who collects information that is normally used by the police to contain its objects. Ondaatje invites us to reflect on the possibility that his own language, like the narrated searcher Webb, threatens to contain and police the both disquieting and fascinating other, Bolden. But Coming Through Slaughter shows Bolden escaping containment time and again. Writing appears as a tracing web that closes in on Bolden, but is ultimately both created and eluded by his movement. In Bolden's fall with Pickett through the window, the spider web is the last visible trace of the other who pulls Bolden with him, both of them crossing the frame. They disappear in a splintering of the separating and mirroring surface between two states. The fissuring structure records for a brief moment the 'break-through'

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of this narcissistic pair. The web Ondaatje's text evokes at this point simultaneously summons the security of a net that would hold the falling tightrope artists, and folds like a shroud over the fall to the outside, over the disappearance from the 'furnished' room. Bolden, of course, crashes through the mirroring and holding surface. The comparison of the rain on the other side with 'so many little windows' prefaces Bolden's disappearance into the Brewitts' world, one that is associated with silence, and the waters of both Lake Pontchartrain ('What was he doing when you saw him last? / He was on a boat' [30]) and its two framing bathtub episodes (see Scobie, 'Coming Through Slaughter' 16). The Brewitts' world ('The silent ones. Post music. After ambition' [39]) establishes, for Bolden and his author, a half-way house on the way from his public mirror images and stories into silence: 'Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room' (86). At this intersection and momentary superimposition of the writing self and its object, Bolden is shown on the dividing line between the tempting silence of Bellocq's window-photographs (and the potential to move 'to the perfect white between words' and to 'implode into silence' in the poem 'White Dwarfs'), and the language of Webb who will 'produce a leash' (89). Eventually, the writing self will look fully into its paraded mirror image when Bolden disappears from public sight the second time. At that point, the writing self will paradoxically return from the inviting move, performed by its other, toward silence, while it has also gone through the reflecting surface of that window. But in Bolden's first attempt at escape, writing rehearses the retreating moment of that more complex, double movement of the imagination. Bolden's first disappearance is in keeping with both the attack on his mirroring other (and their subsequent fall through the boundary of the familiar room, with its now broken mirror) and his growing familiarity with Bellocq and his photographs. Bellocq, whose pictures with their silence and 'black empty spaces' (91) seduce Bolden, is blamed directly by Nora Bass for Bolden's first disappearance ('Look at what he did to you' [127]). The nameless narrator, although more carefully balancing the give and take in the friendship between the musician and the photographer, attributes also a decisive influence to Bellocq: 'He had pushed his imagination into Buddy's brain ... not knowing the conversations were becoming steel in his only friend. They had talked for hours moving gradually off the edge of the social world' (64). In the invented story of Bellocq's death, Ondaatje presents us with the ultimate form of self-transgression, suicide. The Cricket, as we have seen, 'contains' death in a double sense, and helps Bolden both to imagine it and to

Identity and Control in the Work of Michael Ondaatje 125 fence it in. Suicide, Bellocq's eventual choice, is also 'contained' in Bolden's own half-hearted suicide attempt; imagining his wife with Pickett, Bolden seeks to exorcise his growing pain before his first escape into silence: 'Brought his left wrist to his teeth and bit hard ... his vein tingling at the near chance it had of almost going free. Ecstasy before death' (79). But in Bellocq's death we see the other of a romantic suicide. With death, the imagination of a thetic mirror image ends. The audience for whom thinking constructs its 'beautiful' suicide disappears. Like Bolden, who is later mirrored and caught, before drowning in his own blood, by the repeated roar 'as I hit each boundary of crowd' (129), Bellocq 'has expected the wall to be there and his body has prepared itself and his mind has prepared itself so his shape is constricted against an imaginary force looking as if he has come up against an invisible structure in the air' (67). This 'invisible structure,' indeed, is the expectation of alterity that Coming Through Slaughter exteriorizes in the image of Bellocq's final fall. But as Constance Rooke has pointed out, 'the final portrait [of Bellocq] ... features a man alone surrounded by a circular (fan-like) "balcony" of empty chairs' (280). In his fall, Bellocq is said to be 'dissolving out of his pose' and thus out of a constructed mirror image of the self. The flames in which the walls of his room dissolve - unlike water, mirrors, and window glass - offer neither a reflecting surface in which to catch the last moment, nor a world behind or below their limit. That 'wall is not there to catch or hide him. Nothing is there to clasp him into a certainty' (67)Ironically and, I think, significantly, Coming Through Slaughter presents the account of Bellocq's fall precisely after thematizing the picture of Bolden's band - supposedly taken by Bellocq, a picture tempting us and the narrator by its silence and undefined spaces. Ondaatje's writing, superimposing its own reality over the picture (claiming, 'This is what you see' [66], and then offering us descriptive words rather than a picture), refers to the fire it has not introduced yet: 'As a photograph it is not good or precise, partly because it was found after the fire. The picture, waterlogged by climbing hoses' (66). After the reference to the fire has been explained by the depiction on the next page of Bellocq's suicide, we may thus return to this description, which has now become for the reader, like the picture, a 'print [that] was found after the fire' (66). Writing thus warns us not only of the 'imprecise' nature of the photograph: its own context and meaning have been altered after the fire. The temporal and referential structure of writing here pulls us back from the following passage of Bellocq's fall; but it sends us even further back, to the photograph at the beginning. The meaning of the sentence, This is what you see' now appears altered as well. In the print 'after the fire,' the last image of

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Bellocq superimposes itself on the only picture of Bolden - allegedly by Bellocq - and comments on the observer's attraction and possible fall through the window of its surface. The picture, 'waterlogged by climbing hoses' (66), now occurs also in the context of 'the blood and water circulation' (57) of Bellocq's brain that drives him into suicide, and of Bolden's own 'dissolving' tendencies that seem to pull us into his picture, as he has been attracted by Bellocq's window-like photographs. Like the written passage that pulls us back from the scene and 'whiteness' (67) of Bellocq's fall, Webb, and the text's web, pull Bolden back from his first escape into silence. Webb, who encounters Bellocq in his search for Bolden, asks him to develop the photograph of Bolden's band for him. Like the movement of writing, the appearance of this 'print' is also described as a two-way street combining a return with a disappearance: Ten minutes later he bent over the sink with Bellocq, watching the paper weave in the acid tray. As if the search for his friend was finally ending ... The two of them watching the pink rectangle as it slowly began to grow black shapes, coming fast now. The sudden vertical lines which rose out of the pregnant white paper which were the outlines of the six men and their formally held instruments. The dark clothes coming first, leaving the space that was the shirt. Then the faces. Frank Lewis looking slightly to the left. All serious except for the smile on Bolden. Watching their friend float into the page smiling at them, the friend who in reality had reversed the process and gone back into white, who in this bad film seemed to have already half-receded with that smile which may not have been a smile at all, which may have been his mad dignity. (5^-3)

The passage evokes the fascination that both a developing picture and the process of writing exert on the observer. 'The sudden vertical lines' seem to create, like the vertical oscillations that are elongated into the writing of letters and words, the outline of characters on the page. But Bolden's enigmatic smile eludes the treacherous sense of grasped identity that the emerging black shapes on the white background seem to promise. And Webb, bent over the surface to which the image of his other rises 'as if his quest is completed, seems to understand the inverted process by which the medium of acid dissolves as much of the plate as it leaves in order to create the illusion of presence. Bolden himself has 'reversed the process and gone back into white' - a double reference both to the inverse vectors of writing and historical reality, and to the later 'white room' of the Brewitts' world, into which Webb intrudes to pull Bolden back - at least temporarily - onto the public stage. Our sense of

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possible false endings has thus already been sharpened when Webb knocks at the Brewitts' bathroom door and 'went in and found him' (82). The searching Webb, at the very moment of his seeming triumph, is left gazing, for a moment, at the surface of a bathtub in which Bolden literally inverts the appearance of his image in the acid tray. Till Bolden went underwater away from the noise, opening his eyes to look up through the liquid blur at the vague figure of Webb gazing down at him gesturing, till he could hardly breathe, his heart furious wanting to leap out and Bolden still holding himself down not wishing to come up gripping the side of the tub with his elbows to stop him to stop him o god jesus leave me alone his eyes staring up aching, if Webb reaches down and tries to pull him up he will never come up he knows that, air! his heart empty overpowers his arms and he breaks up showering Webb, gulping everything he possibly can in. (83) Bolden's furious refusal to come up for breath, combined with the 'dignity of his mad smile' in the earlier scene, likens him to the mad birds that contemplate suicide, or disappear below water surfaces in Ondaatje's other writings. These extend from Ondaatje's poetry15 to the 'damned birds' which Nora Bass - drowning herself in (alcoholic) liquid just before her death - sees in Audubon's drawings. While 'the Purple Gallinule' only 'seemed to lean over the water, its eyes closed, with thoughts of self-destruction,' the 'Prophet Ibis, obviously paranoid' seeks to contain death as Bolden does in his function as writer/editor, and 'built its nest high up before floods came' (25). But the last and most extreme bird in this series, 'her favourite - the Anhinga, the Water Turkey/ foreshadows, in the two stages of his response to disturbance, Bolden's own disappearance from the mirror surface of his public image. The Water Turkey 'she said would sit in the tree tops till disturbed and then plummet down into the river leaving hardly a ripple and swim off with just its eyes and beak cresting water - or if disturbed further would hide by submerging completely and walk along the river bottom, forgetting to breathe, and so drown' (25). But Bolden still comes up again this time and responds to Webb who restores the 'barrier glass' (86), thus bringing Bolden back to the side of the surface that reflects thetic images, histories, and identities. Webb 'could tilt me upside down till he was directing me like wayward traffic back home' (86). And with the 'cobweb' of Ondaatje's writing, Webb 'came here and placed my past and future on this table like a road' (86). Bolden knows he is being brought back from the white room of the unknown (without history and parading) to the mirror world he had almost

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left behind, in which 'reputation made the room narrower and narrower ... full of your own echoes, till you were drinking in only your own recycled air' (86). This is precisely Bolden's fate in the final parade, in which all the images and impulses he receives become a feedback of his own breath. He finally disappears from the surface of a mirrored self, from his own music, and from the eyes and ears of jazz history. In an echo of Ondaatje's early 'For John, Falling' ('while he drowned / in the beautiful dark orgasm of his mouth' [The Dainty Monsters 48]), Bolden drowns, at the end of his dance with the female fan, in his own blood with 'no intake gasp/ until Cornish lifts his instrument 'from the hard kiss of his mouth' (131). The section entitled 'Parade (5th Morning)' is a study of an increasing mirroring of the self in the other to the point of its limit in identity. This process is accompanied by an expanding paragraph length, and a lack of segmenting and retreating 'intake' punctuation of the self's voice. The beginning of the first, brief paragraph of this passage creates an atmosphere of immediacy by the omission of the subject. The opening participle, 'Coming down Iberville' (129), could refer both to the speaker and to the following, unexplained pronoun, 'she'; simultaneously, the phrase recalls the title's undecided reference. Bolden's subsequent incomplete sentences - short statements of contentment with his public image ('New shoes. Back in town' [129]) - suggest the speaker's autonomy. But the indistinct crowd that provides, in the second paragraph, the reflecting boundaries for Bolden's 'parade of ego/ is individualized already here, and begins to move toward Bolden when 'she [the fan] moves free of the crowd and travels at our own speed between us and the crowd/ In the first sentence of the next paragraph, Bolden's undefined 'squawk' tries to re-integrate and 'shoulder her into the crowd' (129). The crowd still provides a metronome-like regularity: its threefold, italicized roar catches Bolden's criss-crossing movement ('as I hit each boundary of crowd - roar' [129]), and structures the paragraph. Bolden's speed is still extremely slow here - a note every 15 seconds. But when he turns, in the next, longer paragraph, 'from the bank of people' and begins to move with the dancer and her companion, he leaves as well the march rhythm of his band behind, speeding the 'number till most of them drop off and just march behind, the notes more often now, every five seconds' (129). As the phrasing becomes longer and longer with the increasing speed of the described action, Bolden experiences a first physical warning, stated in the sudden, short fourth sentence: 'Eyes going dark in the hot bleached street.' The phrase in the next sentence - 'nearly over nearly over' - will appear again toward the end of the central, long paragraph; it begins to indicate the self's limit approaching 'Liberty' (129) - the New Orleans street into which

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Bolden had fallen through the window with Pickett,16 and which reminds us, with its symbolic name, of Bolden's vein almost 'going free' earlier (79). The next, long paragraph contains the breakdown of the boundary between the musician's improvising voice and the pattern against which it finds its definition. While Bolden has defined his relationship with and against the supporting rhythm of the band and of the stable edge of the audience, the dancer now imitates the movement of the music so closely that the patterns move toward identity: The girl is alone now mirroring my throat in her lonely tired dance/ Subsequently her movement will begin to precede Bolden's playing, which thus begins to project the mechanism of its control to a point outside itself. This minimal shift of balance between musician and dancer is associated, on the one hand, in the geographical reference 'Liberty-Iberville connect' with freedom, because the controlling instance outside has become identical with the inside process. On the other hand, the outside invades and takes control over the inside self, which disappears and drowns like the mad 'Prophet Ibis' who forgets to breathe. At the 'Liberty-Iberville connect/17 Bolden loses his capacity for an independent orientation, since the defining difference between self and other is annihilated. With the loss of hearing, Bolden's playing becomes synaesthetically identical with what he sees: The street silent but for us her tired breath I can hear for she's near me as I go round and round in the centre of the Liberty-Iberville connect. Then silent. For something's fallen in my body and I can't hear the music as I play it... She hitting each note with her body before it is even out so I know what I do through her. (130) Despite this first loss of one of his senses - that had allowed for orientation and 'echolocation' by sound - the silence only draws Bolden closer toward the boundary of this mirror through which he will lose his self, his 'privacy': God this is what I wanted to play for ... this mirror somewhere ... Half dead ... hardly hit the squawks anymore but when I do my body flicks as if I'm the dancer till the music is out there. ... This is what I wanted, always, loss of privacy in the playing, leaving the stage ... this hearer who can throw me in the direction and the speed she wishes like an angry shadow. (130; emphasis added) When the 'slow pure notes' of his defined self turn into the 'last long squawk/ Bolden's last perceptions are immersed in his blood, which is now 'going free.' The breakdown of boundaries ends the differences of self-orientation.

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Buddy Bolden's blindness ('can't see I CANT SEE') and second fall come at a moment when Ondaatje's writing 'goes with Bolden all the way' (Rooke 269), with the other of its subject, in the disappearance of controlling instances. The differential values approach zero both on the level of content (no differentiation between inside and outside, loss of sight, hearing, voice and breath), and on the formal level of sentence and paragraph structure (repetition, parataxis, omission of parts of speech and punctuation, no period at the end of the paragraph, no division into shorter paragraphs). At this point, the text both shifts its point of view, announcing its outsidedness with respect to Bolden's loss of boundary 'as he fell outward,' and identifies with Bolden's disappearance in an indistinguishable superimposition of voices that states completion: 'What I wanted.' In the following 'found poems' of the hospital charts and tape transcriptions (132, 137-8, i43~4/ 152-4), which seem to account for Bolden's life as a historical object, the narrator's voice disappears from the surface of the text. In its absence from these passages that sum up the completion of Bolden's life, this voice seems to have made itself other with its other; the voice seems to have fallen, through the mirror of Bolden's photograph and beyond the reflection of language, into silence. There is an uncertain sense that Ondaatje's writing has let its self go with its character Bolden, and let them both join the disappearance of the historical figure. But in the interstices of these documents, another voice withdraws from the brink of indifferentiation, and comes back from the window glass it has touched and gone through. While the book's 'signature whistle' ('What I wanted') has merged with its character in Bolden's last fall into the mirror and silence of the other, the difference between narrative voice and character is intermittently re-inaugurated. The voice that now takes us again to Bolden's streets emphasizes the sunlight that 'comes down flat and white' (133) on the scene, and evokes Gravier, Phillip Street, and Liberty as a fading photograph, a surface that has regained its two-dimensionality after we have come through the space that writing has imagined behind it. We are reminded of the 'complete absence of him' (133) - of the Bolden who, moments earlier, had completely dominated the book's (and our) imagination, and whose subjective presence has now disappeared into the (historical) object as such. All that can be heard is the self's searching sound. The echolocation clicks of the (self's) camera 'sound' the silent scene, in the same way in which we contemplate the initial, silent photograph without the sound of jazz: 'The place of his music is totally silent. There is so little noise that I easily hear the dick of my camera as I take fast bad photographs into the sun' (133; emphasis added). With the clicking of the camera that overtly 're-locates' our self on this side of the searching imagina-

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tion, the 'signature whistle' of an implied author's first person returns. The photograph that 'moves and becomes a mirror' (133) is restored as an object, an otherness, and a thetic boundary of the self. If the speaking T here recognizes himself (as we have seen above) in the other's mutilation of surfaces and mirror-images, it simultaneously reverses its own fall into otherness by returning to this side of the mirror, reflecting on its own reflection, and distancing the fall as completed past at the very moment of confession and identification: 'For I had done that/ There is, indeed, a temptation of completion. The narrator's heterology, his search for the unknown other, may have found its end in recognition. The impression of an ending is furthered by the silent serenity of Bolden's madness, which Ondaatje portrays in some of the final prose passages as a transformation of the real violence of the asylum. Bolden thus refuses to escape when (a neither bad nor 'Good') Lord 'called out Bolden's name again and again' (142), and does not cut himself when he is offered 'sharpened glass' by the same (Bertram) Lord, hearing 'the whispered order on the other side' (148). Sam Solecki, in his important essay 'Making and Destroying: Coming Through Slaughter and Extremist Art,' argues cogently that only in his madness in the asylum has the extremist artist Bolden 'found the peace he never possessed or could possess when sane' (263). Solecki therefore invites us to see 'Coming Through Slaughter as announcing the ultimate bankruptcy of extremist art' (264), as 'a work that seems to constitute a summary and criticism' (247) of the modern audience's notion of art, according to which only the suicidal madness of the artist authenticates the sincerity of his enterprise. The author Ondaatje, Solecki concludes, leaves that haunting demand and possibility behind by distancing it through Bolden's image: Tf Bolden's final commitment is to chaos, madness, and silence, Ondaatje's is to a controlled art that tries to understand Bolden's case - his own case - to make its contradictions intelligible without succumbing to them' (264). But I think that Ondaatje takes us, in Coming Through Slaughter, to the very limit of control, alluding to its other side without, ultimately, excluding it. The 'ending' of Coming Through Slaughter, I shall argue, comes undecidably close to the possibility of 'chaos, madness, and [particularly] silence.' Constance Rooke, on the other hand, disputes what she perceives as Solecki's (and Scobie's) emphasis on the exteriorization of the other in Coming Through Slaughter; she suggests, rather, a certain interiorization. In an essay significantly entitled 'Dog in a Grey Room: The Happy Ending of Coming Through Slaughter/ she defends the 'extremist' Bolden against readings she sees as 'concerned with splitting off the self-destructive Buddy Bolden from Ondaatje as articulate survivor' (268). Without questioning

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Solecki's biographical or formal considerations, Rooke shifts the terrain when she claims: 'Imaginatively ... Ondaatje goes with Bolden all the way. If in actuality he does not, that is beside the point' (269). While I agree with her in both respects, the question seems to remain: where does Bolden go, taking this imagination all the way? The text insists, at some point, that Bolden has 'gone back into white' (53). Rooke suggests a perfect grey; as opposed to the grey of misery in Bellocq's photographs, 'in Bolden's final room, a scene only of apparent misery, grey becomes the colour of a perfect blend' (278). Similarly, she sees a progress of Bolden's music toward 'the transcendence of the last parade (a perfect blend of self and other),' and considers Bolden's 'end triumphant' (279). In contrast with Bellocq, who 'cannot include the other in his construction of the self (279), Bolden finds 'an all-inclusive other ... and so can destroy one version of the self to make another' (279). Only the imagination of the final prose passages concerning Bolden's life in the asylum, however, is marked by a peace that Rooke constructs as a dialectical sublation. Even in these passages (which alternate with others in quite different moods), it is questionable whether Bolden's serene withdrawal has really encompassed his earlier versions in an integrating movement toward completion, or closed them out, in the way he moves Bertram Lord's 'foreign weapon' out of his room: 'Bolden ... peered at it, touched it with his foot and pushed it back slowly to Lord who eventually covered 28 doors' (148). I would like to suggest that Coming Through Slaughter has several endings, endings that I find very hard to reconcile and that perhaps should not be reconciled. These endings 'contain' Bolden as much as they may try to spew him back out into history. The 'struggle for life' between 'author and hero' can be seen, in this perspective, to continue through the finishing line. The collage of different text forms at the end retains the ideal of Bolden's music before 'coming through Slaughter.' Like Galloway's guitar, which Bolden is shown to admire, the last pages could be said to have 'swallowed moods and kept three or four going at the same time' (95; emphasis added). But the problem is precisely whether one can 'swallow' these moods and keep them 'going at the same time.' Ondaatje alludes to a certain violent indecision in that respect not only in the title of his earlier Rat Jelly (1973); when Bolden sublimates his rapist into a 'breastless woman in blue pyjamas,' for instance, Ondaatje adds to this brutal combination of serenity and violence the mood of humour. These sentences following the description of the rape suggest, however - as Kristeva has done in The Powers of Horror - the possibility of vomiting as a physical way (that bypasses consciousness) to eject what has 'penetrated' the orifices of the body, or the boundaries of the self:

Identity and Control in the Work of Michael Ondaatje 133 Boot in my throat, the food has to climb over it and then go down and meet with all their pals in the stomach. Hi sausage. Hi cabbage. Did yuh see that fuckin boot. Yeah I nearly turned round'n went back on the plate. Who is this guy we're in anyway?

(139)

If the reader can keep the whole paragraph down, including the rape at the beginning, it is perhaps because its ending is funny. But by keeping it down, we cannot quite rid ourselves of the horror we have swallowed with it. Similarly, the 'travelling spokes of light' (148), an image of reconciliation between light and shadow (echoing Benjy's bliss in The Sound and the Fury), occurs after a never-ending mutilation has been suggested: 'Bolden's hand going up into the air / in agony. / His brain driving it up into the / path of the circling fan' (136). The following line - separated by a white space that allows the reader to imagine thoroughly the previous image - significantly is not terminated by any punctuation and again is followed by almost half a page of open space: 'This movement happens forever and ever in his memory.' For Rooke, the 'last movement' into the fan that 'happens forever and ever in his memory' (136) suggests not eternal agony, but a transcendence which (beyond explanation) repeats harmoniously the play of opposites - as in the 'travelling spokes of light' Buddy can bathe his face and dry it. (290)

But the two passage mentioned here are offered to us in different forms. While the individual emotion of the eternal memory of pain is intensified by the isolation of the lyric lines on the page, the Edenic version is integrated in the context of a more distanced prose account of hospital life. The Bolden of the text, in all his serenity, flexes his muscle when he claims to exceed any effort to comprehend and 'swallow' him: 'Laughing in my room. As you try to explain me I will spit you, yellow, out of my mouth' (140). We are not forced to believe his claim. The text itself, however, continues to pursue the question of control in the relationship between language and its heterological object - Bolden - which it searches in need and fascination, and seeks to distance in horror. Cornish, for instance, who has stepped (in Ondaatje's fictive interview) into Bolden's life (and family), and whose life has been visited by Bolden 'in return', does not want to speak about him: 'All I had of Buddy was the picture here. Webb gave that to me. I never wanted to talk about him' (145). Only in Bolden's safe absence, 'when they began to realize that he would never come out then all the people he hardly knew, all the fools, [were] beginning to talk about him' (145). But Bolden

134 Discoveries of the Other haunts Ondaatje's writing itself in this incriminating oral account it produces as fictive 'transcription.' Much more drastically, Ondaatje's created character Webb tries - unsuccessfully - literally to vomit Bolden's story, which he has helped to create. Since he has imagined Bolden as 'just hiding' in the asylum, Nora's lie concerning his death has 'surprised' him; but the horror of Bolden's reality (or the reality of his horror) breaks through Webb's control with Bella Cornish's whisper: 'But he's not dead' (149). Like Bolden disappearing in the bathtub to avoid his words, Webb now tries to avoid the knowledge conveyed by the words of Bella Davenport, who 'talked on not knowing he had brought Buddy home' (150). The recognition of his role in Bolden's confinement makes his own situation unbearably similar to Bolden's, and turns into a room he desperately wants to flee: 'While he arched away his body stiff and hard trying to break through the wall every nerve on the outside as if Bella's mouth was crawling over him, and his unknown flesh had taken over, and crashed fast down the stairs' (150). But he has swallowed the story that refuses to leave him: 'I gotta throw up 'scuse me 'scuse me, but knowing there was nothing to come up at all' (151). The 'ugly' side of Bolden's story does not grant Webb the power to eject it - although part of it has come through Webb's surface, the 'sweat [which] had in those few minutes gone through his skin his shirt his Java jacket and driven itself into the wall' (151; emphasis added). As the stories about Bolden, with their haunting power of a ghost (in French, a revenant: one who returns), refuse to leave Webb in a 'clean' ending, we as readers are left with 'stories to finish' (The Collected Works of Billy the Kid 17) - although we are offered more choices. I think the considerations about beginnings, endings, and control, which Bolden's epistolary diary addresses to Webb, hold fairly well for the writing of Coming Through Slaughter itself -and its ending. Robichaux 'put his emotions into patterns which a listening crowd had to follow' (93). Bolden prefers motion without a teleological pattern of ending, because 'at each intersection people would hear just the fragment I happened to be playing and it would fade as I went further down Canal. They would not be there to hear the end of phrases, Robichaux's arches' (94). This sense of a series of fragments pertains also, I think, to Coming Through Slaughter. The text has a form comparable to the one Ondaatje once attributed to Phyllis Webb's Naked Poems, a 'narrative form as a kind of necklace in which each bead-poem while being related to the others on the string ... [is], nevertheless, self-sufficient, independent, lyrical' (Ondaatje, 'An Interview with Michael Ondaatje [1975]' 24). Although Ondaatje's beadpoems follow loosely the chronology of Bolden's life, and are held, to some extent, in the net of Webb's search (which Bolden ultimately eludes), they do

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not end up in a ideological whole. Webb himself 'circled ... taking his time ... entering the character of Bolden through every voice he spoke to' (63). But these voices offer 'stories [that] were like spokes on a rimless wheel ending in air. Buddy had lived a different life with every one of them' (63; emphasis added). The final 'bead-poems' of Coming Through Slaughter similarly continue to combine relatedness with an independence that points outward. Ondaatje expresses this open-endedness through Bolden's aesthetic hopes with respect to audiences: 'I wanted them to be able to come in where they pleased and leave when they pleased and somehow hear the germs of the start and all the possible endings at whatever point in the music I had reached then. Like your radio without the beginnings or endings' (94).lS Like the text's Webb, the reader has both 'found' Bolden, and been left behind with voices that offer different possible stories with their moods, beginnings, and endings, but that do not add up to one single trajectory or a 'moral' - be it one of debauched genius, of imagined Zen serenity in madness, or of a successful distancing of self-destructive drives. These voices leave us, at the end of Coming Through Slaughter, in 'our' room as Webb's radio leaves Bolden in his cabin: 'An abrupt station shut down. Voices said goodnight several times and the orchestra playing in the background collapsed into buzz again, a few yards away from me in your bedroom' (94). Several voices bow out 'several times' in the room that has been shared, but the orchestra that has provided them (and us) with a common ground does not come to an orderly, 'proper' conclusion. To the very end, Coming Through Slaughter lets us listen to these voices it has encountered in its temptation by, its quest for, and its horror of, the other. If there is any perfection in the very last fragment (before the 'Credits' and 'Acknowledgements'), it lies in the sense of incompleteness we are offered: I sit with this room. With the grey walls that darken into corner. And one window with teeth in it. Sit so still you can hear your hair rustle in your shirt. Look away from the window when clouds and other things go by. Thirty-one years old. There are no prizes. (156)

Like Bolden's music, this passage shows us 'all the possibilities in the middle of the story' (43) - of the 'discovery self makes of the other' (Todorov 3) in Coming Through Slaughter. Nothing is conquered. The very last words deny the telos of the quest. The age that indicates a point in a life's story is not attributed to either a subject or an object. This balance lingers hauntingly in the light of an earlier passage - 'When he went mad he was the same age as I am now' - that equates the altered age of Bolden at the time of his breakdown

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both with the age of the narrator, and with that of Michael Ondaatje two years before the publication of Coming Through Slaughter (133).I9 At this age, the Bolden addressed by the narrator is 'like a weatherbird arcing round in the middle of your life' (134). This middle is not inherently different from the 'right ending' suggested earlier, which 'is an open door you can't see too far out of. It can mean exactly the opposite of what you are thinking' (94). The speaking T in the final passage remains similarly undecided between a mirrored identity of the self and an outlook on the other. It coexists with a space in which each element - including middles and endings - is at the limit of its other. The T' neither has left this choice behind, nor encompasses it. The T sits neither inside nor outside, but with 'this room'; it sits also with the grey walls that 'darken into corner/ the absent definite article leaving them undecidably in the middle of becoming their opposite. Most important, the T' coexists with 'one window with teeth in it' - a single opening that, however, has several possible associations at this point. The teeth imply a threat of cutting and swallowing, and refer us to the literal imagination of Bolden's madness. But while the threatening element of the teeth evokes Bolden's memory of having gone through the window, we are also left with its aspect from the inside. The threat thus evokes simultaneously the precise limit Bolden's hand has 'hit' earlier without getting cut, independently of his conscious control: For a fraction of a second his open palm touched the glass, beginning simultaneously to draw back. The window starred and crumpled slowly two floors down. His hand miraculously uncut. It had acted exactly like a whip violating the target and still free, retreating from the outline of a star. She was delighted by the performance. Surprised he examined his fingers. (16)

From this perspective, one possible reading of the final passage could see a writing hand withdraw from 'the outline of a star' - from the star Bolden who, as for Webb's mind, is 'just an outline and music ... Something sharp' (51). In this case, the mirroring image has 'starred and crumpled slowly,' leaving the T' to examine his writing fingers and his 'hand miraculously uncut' by the threat of a suicidal imagination. But this imagination, which could belong to Bolden or to the writing T,' has a keen sense of the independence of such a performance with respect to conscious control, always expecting its breakdown while being constantly surprised at its existence. When Bolden watches Robin cutting carrots, 'the fingers have separated themselves from her body and move in a unity of their own that stops at the sleeve and bangle. As with all skills he watches for it to

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fail. If she thinks what she is doing she will lose control' (31). The mind ends with the perception of the knife's movement 'onto the cuts in the table's brown flesh' (31). A minimal move of the hand, of our perception, or of writing, can invert regularity and control, beginnings and endings: 'Sit so still you can hear your hair rustle in your shirt.' If we hear the T that the sentence omits, we hear factuality, silence, and maybe the sense of an ending. But the sentence, which includes us with a surprising, generalized 'you' (which recalls the work's initial address, 'Float by in a car'), can be read as well as at the very edge of its control, potentially the beginning of something unknown. The imperative of the verb advises us, and itself, not to react to the sound one might perceive synaesthetically in the sonograph of the star - recording the breaking of the window and silent like the photograph of Bolden's band at the beginning. The body and the imagination are warned not to budge, lest the sound of the other be heard. The eye, without the T,' is admonished to look away from the window' in which and through which - in this reading - it has obviously been watching the 'starred' teeth, the changing shapes of clouds, and 'other things.' It thus depends entirely on the control of our reading, on its linearity, and on the unhesitating smoothness of its segmenting movement to avoid its other, and 'the same stress as with stars / the one altered move that will make them maniac' (The Collected Works of Billy the Kid 41). E N A C T I N G METAPHOR: RUNNING IN THE FAMILY

In Running in the Family, the T traverses the room of its other in a movement of discovery that explicitly takes the form of a journey. While we read about the actual travels that allow the narrator to explore his family and its past, however, we are also invited to witness a writing process that shows him on a heterological voyage with an unknown destiny: 'Watch the hand move. Waiting for it to say something, to stumble casually on perception, the shape of an unknown thing' (190). In Running in the Family, this 'unknown thing' often appears between the shapes of things as they are known, before they are transformed by a perception that brings them into contact. When the T,' for instance, briefly recognizes himself in the mirror-image of his father (in a passage I shall discuss in detail later), Ondaatje offers a brief moment of identity. Although the comparison remains implicit, this perception brings two worlds together that previously appeared isolated. For a moment, the image of the other appears as metaphor of an aspect of the self. Like metaphor, however, the perception that here adumbrates 'the shape of an unknown thing' in a momentary concurrence of self and other does not invoke strict identity.

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Similar to Coming Through Slaughter, Running in the Family metamorphoses a juxtaposition of contrasting and incongruous worlds in a superimposition that develops the shades and contrasts, the moments of mutual relevance, in a new, composite space, produced in the act of writing by the mediation of the unknown other. As in Coming Through Slaughter, the discovery of the other follows a figure that has receded into silence. The narrator is aware of the fact that the information he gathers about his father will have been mediated by oral history and documents. Ultimately, Mervyn Ondaatje eludes him; in the end, he has escaped objectivization, and 'is still one of those books we long to read whose pages remain uncut' (200). Running in the Family, thematizing the movement from the self to the other in the journey(s) from Canada to Sri Lanka (the former Ceylon), shows the T simultaneously on a 'journey back' (22) as well as forward, 'discovering' a place where it has only seemingly already been. The other, as in Coming Through Slaughter, both is an inherent aspect of the self and remains to be discovered. The text traverses, in this process, the thetic boundary between 'the comfort and order' (22) of the self's life and the space of the other associated with chaos and unreality. In this journey, not only will self and other both meet and be overdetermined at some point, but further oppositional terms, together with autobiography and biography, encounter their respective other: fact and rumour, history and fiction, prose and poetry, photograph and text meet (see Hutcheon, 'Running in the Family') and are altered by the meeting.20 The invitation to equate author and narrator is extended even more explicitly than in Coming Through Slaughter. While the earlier book 'used real names and characters and historical situations' as well as 'more personal pieces of friends and fathers' ('Acknowledgements'), the connection between self and other is directly patronymic in Running in the Family. As the listing in the cataloguing information suggests, the book can be read as a biography. Representing the story of Mervyn Ondaatje through the eyes of his son Michael, however, the biography is, at the same time, autobiography.21 The subject thus affects itself 22 in the process of writing the other - the two emerging in a form of dialogic and overdetermining alterity. Yet the narrative in which the writer's hand approaches 'those relations from my parents' generation who stood in my memory like frozen opera' (22) reminds us of the movement of Buddy Bolden's palm: 'I wanted to touch them into words/ the narrator of Running in the Family tells us (22). At the end, the book withdraws from those 'relations' (the expression referring both to relatives and to historical narratives) with a gesture that ironically directs against itself an old invective against poets as liars; under 'Acknowledgements' the reader is

Identity and Control in the Work of Michael Ondaatje 139 informed that all names in the book refer to more than those people in reality, and that consequently all the Ondaatjes in the book are and are not real Ondaatjes: While all those names may give an air of authenticity, I must confess that the book is not a history but a portrait or 'gesture/ And if those listed above disapprove of the fictional air I apologize and can only say that in Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts. (206) The twofold movement of Ondaatje's narrative thus recalls the double move of Bolden's hand, which simultaneously touches the surface of the window and withdraws from its splintering surface. As the imagination approaches the window of the other and what it sees 'out there/ it begins to perceive its own reflection on the surface of the separating (and connecting) medium - as if the transparency of the window's glass receded behind the mirroring power of its surface, giving way to a superimposition of two images, and offering an identity both threatening and fascinating. In the metaphorical correlation between pictures and windows ('Pictures. That were like ... windows' [59]), and between pictures and mirrors ('The photograph moves and becomes a mirror' [133]), Coining Through Slaughter reduces the contrast between inside and outside, and between self and other, in a way comparable to the 'work of resemblance' and 'semantic innovation' (Ricoeur 143-4) tnat *s typical of metaphor - before shattering the resulting sameness. At the moment of identity, self and other meet in a simultaneous, mutual deviation from their respective 'proper' course, a strange heterology in which writing produces 'the shape of an unknown thing' (Running in the Family 190). Ondaatje, thus, has and has not written 'about' Billy the Kid, Buddy Bolden, and Mervyn Ondaatje: at the same time, and in each of these cases, he has and has not written about Michael Ondaatje. The ambiguous equations between fictive characters and narrators (each of the works mentioned contains undecidable passages - such as Billy the Kid 105, Slaughter 156, Running 188) are paralleled by similar equations between narrators and author: the picture with young Michael Ondaatje in Billy the Kid, the similarity of age in Coming Through Slaughter, the obvious references in Running in the Family. Linda Hutcheon remarks about reference in this context: When we read a novel, we assume, because of the conventions of the genre, that the referents of the text's language are fictive, rather than real, however much they may be made to resemble the real. The case is somewhat more complex in what we have called historiographic metafiction, because the fictionality of the referents is repeat-

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edly stressed by the text's self-reflexivity, while their historical nature is also constantly being implied: Chris Scott's Giordano Bruno (in Antichthon) both is and is not the real historical Giordano Bruno. In writing of both Billy the Kid and Buddy Bolden in the self-consciously metafictional way in which he did, Ondaatje too chose this middle ground of reference, creating what we might call a historiographic referent. Unlike the historical or real referent, this one is created in the text's writing (hence historiograp/nc). The referent here is a dialogic entity, in Bakhtin's sense of the word, partaking of two ontological realities. (Hutcheon, 'Running' 305) What Hutcheon refers to as the 'middle ground of reference/ I would argue, partakes of the structure of metaphor. Scott's Giordano Bruno 'both is and is not' the historical Giordano Bruno; as fictive character, he is also a function of the narrating consciousness - aspects of which he thus develops. To the extent that the character assumes the function of an 'objective correlative' for the internal world of the narrator, he 'both is and is not' this narrator. In the self-reflexive text, the historical figure begins to address interior aspects of the speaker, who thus becomes another referent. But the mutual predication in which both terms function simultaneously as signifier and signified, like the 'chemical reaction' of metaphor, leaves none of the 'ingredients' unmodified, and thus constitutes an implicit critique of reflection. The historical personalities that become characters in Ondaatje's fictions are not congruent mirror-images of an internal world already constituted in homologous form prior to the encounter in writing. Such images would be mutual substitutions of costumes, rather than an interaction (which occurs, for instance in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, between the initial empty frame and the costume picture at the end). Ondaatje's fictive real characters simultaneously are and are not the internal world they are brought in contact with. In one possible view of metaphor, they could be understood as models that allow seeing similarities and differences between them and an aspect of the self. Max Black, however, suggests rather an 'interaction theory' of metaphor: 'Metaphorical statement is not a substitute for a formal comparison or any other kind of literal statement, but has its own distinctive capacities and achievements' ('Metaphor' 284). He posits a dynamic function of metaphor that not only relates two known entities to each other but transcends the old horizon of both in a discovery of something new: 'It would be more illuminating in some of these cases to say that metaphor creates the similarity than to say that it formulates some similarity antecedently existing' ('Metaphor' 284-5). Similarly, the narrating subject in Running in the Family will not simply look into the mirror of his father, of his family, and of Ceylon, and find things that were there before;

Identity and Control in the Work of Michael Ondaatje 141 rather, a more profound transformation will affect both the visitor and the place visited. Running in the Family opens with incongruous representations of Ceylon. A symbol indicating true north and a scale offer, on the map at the beginning, the insignia of a factual representation. Before and after the map, however, the reader is invited to contemplate a picture of a slightly surreal costume party, the book's title written in an alphabet of bamboo, and two curious epigraphs. In the first, a fourteenth-century Franciscan friar ascribes to Ceylon 'country geese having two heads' and ingeniously hints at 'other miraculous things I will not here write of; in the second, a writer in the Ceylon Sunday Times informs us, through the agency of Ondaatje's book, that the Sinhalese and Tamils were unable to put a man on the moon because their 'knowledge of English was poor/ and they 'thought that the earth was flat.' The very power and adequacy of the vaunted colonial language seem questioned by this strange comment. The map of Ceylon is thus framed by elements contradicting its sober claim to give the true picture. Later in the book, we are taught to look at maps in different ways, as metaphors and stories in which worlds meet: Ceylon falls on a map and its outline is the shape of a tear. After the spaces of India and Canada it is so small. A miniature ... The country is cross-hatched with maze-like routes whose only escape is the sea. From a ship or plane you can turn back or look down at the disorder. Villages spill onto streets, the jungle encroaches on village. (147)

This passage is and is not about Ceylon - it is, at the same time, the creation of an internal world and the mise en abyme ('a miniature') of encounters and their stories.23 This shape of a tear, Ondaatje writes, 'is so small. A miniature.' Like the 'claude glass' in Secular Love - 'a somewhat dark or coloured hand mirror, used to concentrate the features of the landscape in subdued tones' (11) - this miniature concentrates the 'features of the landscape' of Ceylon that are brought out by their similarity with some of the stories in the text.24 We see a country 'cross-hatched with maze-like routes whose only escape is the sea' - a formulation that evokes Lalla's two 'sea-journeys' (the second of which is the description of her death), the narrator's own movements ('And then another wave of the party swirled me away' [23]), and the theme of drowning through alcohol, which is pervasive in Running in the Family and in particular in Mervyn Ondaatje's life (as well as in 'Claude Glass' in Secular Love}. Furthermore, the miniature concentrates an overall pattern of Running in the Family. Stephen Scobie, referring to the famous red sofa placed in a jungle in Henri Rousseau's painting The Dream and to

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Ondaatje's poem The Vault/ formulates a contrast typical of Rousseau and of Ondaatje as 'the coexistence, amounting to interpenetration, of a domestic scene and a jungle' (47). The contrast is shown, in Rousseau's painting, as simultaneity; it is our imagination and perception that travel from one part of the painting to the other. Similarly, the journeys of Running in the Family both the journey in the text and the itinerary of the text - enact a metaphor, the moment between two contrasting worlds that nonetheless intersect, and interact, at a point of equation and momentary coextension. This mutual 'encroachment' of one space upon the other, this 'spilling over' between 'domestic scene and jungle,' also appears concentrated in the miniature of Ceylon: 'You can turn back or look down at the disorder. Villages spill into streets, the jungle encroaches on village.' Not many words are accidental in a style in which the associations are as densely and precisely interconnected as in Ondaatje's. Ceylon as the shape of a tear is part of a web that the narrator begins to weave in the first of the two framing passages of the section 'Asian Rumours.' The first of these two passages - 'Asia' - renders a son's dream about his father and is told from a point of view located in Canada: What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto. I was sleeping at a friend's house. I saw my father, chaotic, surrounded by dogs, and all of them were screaming and barking into the tropical landscape. The noises woke me. I sat up on the uncomfortable sofa and I was in a jungle, hot, sweating. Street lights bounced off the snow and into the room through the hanging vines and ferns at my friend's window. A fish tank glowed in the corner. I had been weeping and my shoulders and face were exhausted. I wound the quilt around myself, leaned back against the head of the sofa, and sat there for most of the night. Tense, not wanting to move as the heat gradually left me, as the sweat evaporated and I became conscious again of brittle air outside the windows searing and howling through the streets and over the frozen cars hunched like sheep all the way down towards Lake Ontario. It was a new winter and I was already dreaming of Asia. (21-2)

At the moment of awakening, the speaker is simultaneously in two worlds that are characterized by sharp contrast, and that evoke 'a domestic scene and a jungle/ The contrast between snow and heat reinforces the one between the 'domestic' scene connected with Canada and a chaotic one associated with Ceylon. The speaker's sweat befits the dream about the father who is seen in a tropical landscape; but together with his tears, sweat is part of the water imagery that designates an expression of an internal world. As Ondaatje's world of Ceylon and its water imagery are condensed in the miniature of the

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tear as subjective expression and metaphor of an internal world, the more realistic aspects of jungle and surrounding ocean appear in the combination of the hanging vines and ferns in the window illuminated by streetlights and the fish tank that 'glowed' in the corner: they are the 'bright bone' of the dream. As the sights and sightings of Ceylon begin to emerge, Ondaatje's text marks moments in his understanding of the dream's role in his life. The progress of maps, again, provides a mise en abyme and 'claude glass' for the growing precision with which the narrator - travelling on the map of his ancestors that comes down to him as oral history and 'rumours' - translates and metamorphoses himself, together with the space of his other: On my brother's wall in Toronto are the false maps. Old portraits of Ceylon. The result of sightings, glances from trading vessels, the theories of sextant. The shapes differ so much they seem to be translations - by Ptolemy, Mercator, Francois Valentyn, Mortier, and Heydt - growing from mythic shapes into eventual accuracy. Amoeba, then stout rectangle, and then the island as we know it now, a pendant off the ear of India ... The maps reveal rumours of topography, the routes for invasion and trade, and the dark mad mind of travellers' tales appears throughout Arab and Chinese and medieval records. The island seduced all of Europe ... And so its name changed, as well as its shape ... the wife of many marriages, courted by invaders who stepped ashore and claimed everything with the power of their sword or bible or language. This pendant, once its shape stood still, became a mirror. It pretended to reflect each European power till newer ships arrived and spilled their nationalities, some of whom stayed and intermarried - my own ancestor arriving in 1600, a doctor ... rewarded with a foreign wife, and a new name which was a Dutch spelling of his own. Ondaatje. A parody of the ruling language ... and remaining. Here. At the centre of the rumour. At this point on the map.' (63-4)

The narrator inscribes himself, with the very words we are reading, 'at the centre of the rumour/ He becomes the next part in a chain of travellers, claiming the island with the power of his language and adding one more tale to the record. But as the island's name was changed by the invaders, so did Ondaatje's forebear change his name under the inverse influence of the island. Ondaatje's narrative enterprise, as an extended metaphor and mutual metamorphosis, similarly follows 'the routes for invasion and trade,' exchanging images and other features from two different worlds. Like the dynamic interaction of metaphor, the text both enacts a mutual 'invasion' of the territory of the other, and produces a certain form of exchange, and therefore, 'trade.' Ceylon is a 'pendant' in the double meaning of the word: as 'a

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pendant off the ear of India/ it is earring, focus of beauty, ornament, and art; as a source of narcissistic attraction and as cognitive instrument, the 'pendant' becomes again one of a pair, but now signifying the other as self: 'This pendant, once its shape stood still, became a mirror.' But like metaphor, the reflecting medium is 'the wife of many marriages': it is more than a mirror. The island only 'pretended to reflect each European power till newer ships arrived' (emphasis added). Similarly, Ondaatje arrives to look into this mirror, and to touch his silent other (and thus his own potential map and image) - the past of his family and his father - into words. The factual references to the island thus coexist with the metaphor of Ceylon as expression of an internal world that contains geographical, symbolic, and narrative journeys. On the one hand, Ondaatje takes us on a 'real,' geographical journey that, however, is already a fictive synthesis, 'a composite of two return journeys to Sri Lanka, in 1978 and 1980' (205). The fictive journey, on the other hand, enfolds the implications of the dream at the beginning. The unmediated juxtaposition of two worlds that touch briefly between dreaming and waking invites the imagination to travel the space in between, and thus create a text as the spatial and temporal extension of a brief moment. It is the dynamic aspect of metaphor that makes it into an event in the present - and thus could be seen to account for the gerunds in Ondaatje's titles. The fictional journey that uses as means of narrative transport the spacing or enacting of metaphor goes beyond known horizons. In Running in the Family, the poetic enterprise does not quite know what it is that it can 'hardly hold onto' (21) in the initial dream 'that began it all' (21). In this beginning of Ondaatje's exploration, the father appears to the narrator 'chaotic, surrounded by dogs, and all of them were screaming and barking into the tropical landscape' (21; emphasis added). (Dogs, as in 'The Strange Case' or in 'Biography,' often refer in Ondaatje's poetry to a more subterranean, chaotic 'alter ego,' or to the context of the Freudian id). We have already seen that the realistic representation of Ceylon by a map is framed by signs referring to a more fantastic Ceylon (the cover photograph and the two epigraphs). A similar structure places Ondaatje's drunk father as signifier of the fantastic around the representation of order when he takes over a train with one carriage full of 'high ranking British officers' in the middle. Since nobody wants to reveal the chaotic state of affairs in Ceylon to the British, everybody moving from one end of the train to the other tiptoes over the roof of the 'English carriage': My father, too, whenever he needed to speak with the driver, climbed out into the night

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and strolled over the train, clutching a bottle and revolver and greeting passengers in hushed tones who were coming the other way. Fellow officers who were trying to subdue him would never have considered waking up the English. They slept on serenely with their rage for order in the tropics, while the train shunted and reversed into the night and there was chaos and hilarity in the parentheses around them. (154; emphasis added) The two poles - order being surrounded by jungle, both existing simultaneously and defining each other as opposites - are connected in Michael Ondaatje's running from his 'domestic scene' to the jungle of his other, producing the electric spark of simultaneity that the short-circuiting of metaphor produces: I was running to Asia and everything would change. It began with that moment when I was dancing and laughing wildly within the comfort and order of my life. (22; emphasis added) Between the two worlds frozen in their separation - the 'frozen opera' of the Ceylon relations, and the Canadian winter where the journey starts - not only the flow of ink mediates; other fluids - such as the warming flow of alcohol, or the mentioned sweat, tears, waters, and floods - help, in Running in the Family, to 'liquidate' containing boundaries. The dream of Ondaatje's opening passage offers one way to evoke an internal world; the blurring of reality's edges through alcohol is another: 'Once a friend had told me that it was only when I was drunk that I seemed to know exactly what I wanted' (22). Two worlds thus meet: the external snow world of Canada meets its - in terms of semiotics, conveniently hot - counterpart, Ceylon; the guests of a farewell party, too, touch that heat, in the form of a fireplace and of alcohol: And so ... in the midst of the farewell party in my growing wildness ... I knew I was already running. Outside the continuing snow had made the streets narrow, almost impassable. Guests had arrived on foot, scarved, faces pink and frozen. They leaned against the fire-place and drank. (22) As opposed to the 'narrow, almost impassable' streets outside, Ondaatje's stream of associations will widen into floods on 'his journey back' - which is also a journey forward, toward the interaction of an internal world with an external landscape and a past. The widening of blood vessels through alcohol and the ensuing 'warming' effect parallel the widening streams of associations and the narrative.

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The ultimate extension of this movement is a total relaxation and widening of the present into an ideal and 'ancient' world associated with Asia, a blurring not only of temporal distinctions and phonetic edges, but, finally, of the line between life and death. This movement (and desire) is already announced in the brief first mentioning of Lalla's drowning at the beginning of the book, paralleled by the narrator's own movement: Asia. The name was a gasp from a dying mouth. An ancient word that had to be whispered, would never be used as a battle cry. The word sprawled. It had none of the clipped sound of Europe, America, Canada. The vowels took over, slept on the map with the S. ... Beside the fridge I tried to communicate some of the fragments I knew about my father, my grandmother. 'So how did your grandmother die?' 'Natural causes.' 'What?' 'Floods.' And then another wave of the party swirled me away. (22-3) The name 'from a dying mouth' that has to be 'whispered' is connected with 'the great death' Lalla is in search of, and that would come Tike a whisper': Tn her last years she was searching for the great death. She never found, looking under leaves, the giant snake, the fang that would brush against the ankle like a whisper' (125; emphasis added). Her death will come when she steps drunk - into the monsoon floods she had forgotten, and is carried through Nuwara Eliya: Tt was her last perfect journey ... her magic ride, the alcohol still in her - serene and relaxed' (129). The 'passions of Lalla/ as the section heading puts it, thus show certain parallels with the symbolic passions of the narrator, Michael Ondaatje, who knows he is 'already running' when he performs his trick with a wine glass during the 'farewell party/ 'a trick which seemed only possible when drunk and relaxed' (22). The 'homecoming' in Running in the Family - which eventually inverts Ondaatje's journey by bringing Ceylon into his kitchen in the Canadian winter (136) - is made explicit in the title of 'The Prodigal/ the section following 'The Passions of Lalla.' The passages in 'The Prodigal' similarly mark a fantastic and often ideal world that is hidden inside the real one. The house and garden in 'Kuttapitiya/ for instance, are described as unreal (and therefore perfect) places, 'perched high above the mist which filled the valley below like a mattress, cutting us off from the real world' (144). More often, the exotic other surfaces inside the interior, like the peacock who enters the living-room through the open window in 'Sir John/ With the arrival of a theatre group at the scene, the intermingling of two worlds increases even further: 'The dream-like setting is now made more surreal by Sinhalese actors wearing thick velvet costumes, pointed hats, and chain mail in this terrible May heat. A group of black knights mime festive songs among the peacocks and foun-

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tains. Guinevere kisses Arthur beside the tank of Australian fish' (159). Most important, however, The Prodigal' continues 'The Passions of Lalla' in its imagery of water as a medium in which boundaries dissolve. Like Lalla stepping into the monsoon floods, like Mervyn Ondaatje 'drowning' in alcohol or swimming after a departing ship, Michael Ondaatje will step into transforming waters. The first three titles in this section, 'Harbour,' 'Monsoon Notebook (ii)/ and 'How I Was Bathed,' are a clear indication of a movement that becomes most explicit in the following unit, 'Wilpattu/ and carries on through the whole section. In 'Wilpattu,' many worlds coalesce. As a delicate rain turns into a thunderstorm, we find in the following passage the association of drunkenness, beauty, animals, rain, pleasure, metamorphosis, cleansing, and death: A delicate rain begins pattering on the tin roof then suddenly veers into a thunder shower which whitens the landscape ... We are slightly drunk with this place - the beautiful house, the animals which are appearing now, and this tough cold rain turning the hard-baked earth into red mud. All of us are in our solitude. Not really concerned about the others, just revelling in a private pleasure. It is like a communal sleep ... A val oora - a large filthy black wild boar has appeared majestically out of the trees ... Wild black pig in a white rainstorm, concerned about this invasion, this metamorphosis of soap, this dented Volkswagen, this jeep. He can take his pick, any one of us. If I am to die soon I would choose to die now under his wet alphabet of tusk, while I am cool and clean and in good company. (140-2)

The phrase 'wet alphabet of tusk' echoes other phrases in the text that associate the Sinhalese alphabet with beauty and desire. T still believe the most beautiful alphabet was created by the Sinhalese' (83) begins a passage that describes this 'curling alphabet' (83); in 'Women Like You,' we read of an 'alphabet / whose motive was perfect desire' (93). If the death threat of the boar's 'alphabet of tusk' establishes a momentary separation between humans and the jungle, the boundary soon becomes permeable. In Ondaatje's poem 'Henri Rousseau and Friends' (The Dainty Monsters 26-7), for instance, the visitors to an art gallery ('just as intense a society') turn into the jungle scene they observe in one of Rousseau's paintings - one side of the metaphorical relationship between observed and observer organizing the view of the other. Here, the gazing wild pig that, at the centre of the jungle, places humans in an animal world, is made the object of a vision that turns animals into humans: What does this wild pig want soap for? Visions begin to form of the creature return-

148 Discoveries of the Other ing to his friends with Pears Transparent Soap and then all of them bathing and scrubbing their armpits in the rain in a foul parody of us. I can see their mouths open to catch drops of water on their tongues, washing their hooves, standing complacently under the drain spout, and then moving in Pears fragrance to a dinner of Manikappolu garbage. (143)

In this double parodic 'baptism/ the narrator faces the jungle around him, which is the jungle and chaos within him, and the possibility of death. But both sides meet, and coexist in mutual metamorphosis. The threat of death appears in the light of a preferred choice; and while the initially 'filthy black wild boar' is 'concerned about this invasion' of its 'domestic' jungle world, it will step, like his human counterparts earlier, into a 'metamorphosis of soap.' These moments come into being when the impression of an objective world encounters, in this vision, the expression of the internal world of the observer. At this point, the planes of self and other intersect, meeting in a brief metaphorical equation that produces something new. This principle holds also for the discovery of the other by the travelling T - for the textual mediation between Canada and Ceylon, son and father, and present and past. But the question remains to what extent the other is admitted, and what the implications of this process are. In the two stories about the wild boar, with their inverted perspectives, for instance, the imagination transforms the image of a threat into a humorous, anthropomorphic scene. The narrator has learned here from his Aunt Phyllis, who helps him 'trying to trace the maze of relationships in our ancestry' (25); she metamorphoses death into a pleasurable story, in 'her gleeful resume of the life and death of one foul Ondaatje who was "savaged to pieces by his own horse"' (25). But the text draws our attention to the inevitable transformations that oral history seems to bring about even more drastically than does its written counterpart: No story is ever told just once. Whether a memory or funny hideous scandal, we will return to it an hour later and retell the story with additions and this time a few judgements thrown in. In this way history is organized. (26)

Ondaatje's written text, while it reflects on this process in which it willingly participates, records, however, some of the different and opposing versions. The bath in the jungle, for instance, is immediately preceded by a passage that describes how Michael Ondaatje used to be bathed by a nurse, in his first school in Colombo. The 'tough cold rain' from the jungle scene occurs here as brutality:

Identity and Control in the Work of Michael Ondaatje 149 Another bucket was filled and hurled towards us hard as a police hose. Then she strode forward, grabbed a child by the hair, pulled him over to the centre, scrubbed him violently with carbolic soap and threw him towards the opposite side of the room. She plucked another. (138)

The nurse appears, in this bathing scene, comparable to the wild pig who 'can take his pick, any one of us/ This story, however, has passed into oblivion, and only re-emerges when it is told, with wild gestures that make everybody laugh, by Michael's sister Gillian. The narrator leaves the reader with a puzzle about autobiographical narratives: 'I am dreaming and wondering why this was never to be traumatically remembered. It is the kind of event that should have surfaced as the first chapter of an anguished autobiographical novel' (138). Ondaatje thematizes here the selective principle of memory and perception. Similarly, the narrator knows that he brings his own needs, fears, and expectations when he meets the world of his father, and the island that 'became a mirror' for all those who arrived before. Again, Running in the Family records opposing, incongruous versions. For some, the island signified paradise: '"From Seyllan to Paradise is forty miles," says a legend, "the sound of the fountains of Paradise is heard there"' (81). For others, among them 'Karapothas' such as D.H. Lawrence, the country looked different. While 'very few foreigners truly knew where they were' (83), the prisoner Robert Knox (who, according to Ondaatje, did know were he was) gives, not astonishingly, a most gruesome picture of the island. 'The leap from one imagination to the other can hardly be made' (81), Ondaatje summarizes the contrast between incongruous perceptual worlds. And yet these perspectives meet in the textual T: 'I am the foreigner. I am the prodigal who hates the foreigner' (79)For the foreigner Ondaatje who approaches Ceylon and constructs it in his imagination and perception as an emotional place in the past, it turns into a miracle like the metamorphosis in the jungle. Enriched by aspects of childhood, the 'original circle of love' (25), and the embellishments of story-telling, it is the representation of that original place of harmony to which the prodigal returns. But 'if this was paradise, it had a darker side' (81), the narrator says about this island to which he returns, and which brings home as well, in return, the stranger, 'darker side' of the dream about his father. In contrast to earlier transformations, the narrator in 'The Bone' claims that he 'cannot come to terms' with this story about his father, 'one of the versions of his train escapade' (181). In this case, the later version is the more sombre one. While the initial dream's association of his father with chaos and

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the jungle (21) appear as 'chaos and hilarity' (154) in the first telling of the train incident (the parody of the colonial 'rage for order in the tropics'), 'The Bone' offers an account in which 'this scene had no humour or gentleness in it' (182). In this image of his father in the jungle, the narrator sees him threatened by five black dogs he holds dangling in the air at the end of ropes: 'The danger was to the naked man who held them at arms length, towards whom they swung like dark magnets ... He had captured all the evil in the regions he had passed through and was holding it' (182). In the discovery of the other, the narrating subject moves as well toward this threatening image of the father. While Mervyn Ondaatje has 'escaped,' under the influence of alcohol, the train's progress in the jungle (a symbol of linearity and confined order in the face of chaos), he now must hold the evil forces at bay that he finds in that space outside order, and that swing toward him with magnetic attraction. This alcoholic jungle of the father is the other mirror image that the island offers to the prodigal and foreigner who arrives, not to conquer it with his language, but to 'touch' it into words. Again, the two worlds 'touch' in a form of subjectivity that the text produces with the help of its 'shifters' - its pronouns that facilitate a superimposition of reference.25 In 'Thanikama/ in the middle of the third-person account of the father's sorrows being drowned in alcohol, a suddenly intervening T can be read either as mirroring the other in his own act, or as that other's interior monologue: 'a case of liquor under his arm ... Into the bedroom, the bottle top already unscrewed. Tooby, Tooby, you should see your school friend now. The bottle top in my mouth as / sit on the bed like a lost ship in the white sea' (189; emphasis added). The repeated Tooby' evokes the possibility of death in Hamlet's monologue, but replaces the dialogue's alternative with a repeated affirmation - or the affirmation of a doubled existence. Indeed, an ambiguous 'he,' who 'saw himself with the bottle' is hunting for 'his book' - but, the text insists, it 'was not Shakespeare' (188). The passage increasingly superimposes the points of view and the images of the written father and the writing son, to the point of identity. Moving toward the mirror in the bathroom in order to 'look at his face' (189), this composite 'he' notices how 'nature advanced. Tea bush became jungle, branches put their arms into the windows. If you stood still you were invaded' (189). This invasion by the other is precisely what happens when the figure we observe reaches the mirror, and thus comes to a halt. When he finds 'his' book in front of the mirror, the ants of the jungle are carrying page 189 away - the page we are reading in Michael Ondaatje's book. The following sentences can refer both to the reading father, and to the son who deciphers - and creates - in the act of writing, his own self in the image of the

Identity and Control in the Work of Michael Ondaatje 151 other: 'It was page 189. He had not got that far in the book yet he surrendered it to them' (189). Running in the Family alludes here to the end of the fictive world of Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude - a novel that ends with an image of its own undoing when the jungle reclaims Macondo, 'the city of mirrors (or mirages)' (422). But Ondaatje's passage here can be read as occurring simultaneously before and after the mirror, depending on which participant in the encounter between son and father we perceive clearer in this oscillating double image that moves like a hologram (or Vexierbild). When the movement of the composite 'he' halts in front of the mirror, we are offered a double perspective: as the father surrenders 'his' book to the ants of the jungle ('If you stood still you were invaded'), the son can be seen to touch the surface of the mirror in which he observes and creates the chaos of his father at the very moment the latter surrenders to the other. In the same way in which Ondaatje speaks, as we have seen, of 'this search for the mirror image of the self, this suicide' in his article on One Hundred Years of Solitude, the imagination that approaches the mirror of the father in Running in the Family can be seen as disappearing in it. With the annihilation of the distance between observer and observed (and creator and created), the distinction between two realities in a mirroring relationship disappears. Similarly, the following sentences can be read both from the perspective of the father sitting down in front of the mirror, and through the eyes of the son in the process of surrendering (the gerund is important) to the jungle in the mirror, in spite of his fear: 'He sat down forgetting the mirror he had been moving towards. Scared by the company of the mirror' (189). Finally, Ondaatje extends this hologram by the ingenious formulation: 'The white rectangle moved with the busy arduous ants' (189). The mover and the moved are made indistinguishable with a verb that can be used, and read, in two different ways. It is left to us to decide whether the ants move the page in the world of the father - or on the page in the world of the son, like the black dots and letters of this 'intimate print' (189). And I think we are invited, as at the end of Coming Through Slaughter, to respond not only to the alternative, but also to the simultaneity of two possibilities that are coexisting aspects, separated only by a minimal shift in perceptual emphasis. The jungle in Running in the Family - as we have already seen - has a constant tendency to reverse the movement by which the imagination of the self ventures into this territory of its other, and to invade inversely the 'domestic scene,' the thetic space of the writing self. In this light, I shall briefly look, by way of conclusion to these considerations with respect to Running in the Family, at two other moments in which the text reflects on its own writing -

152 Discoveries of the Other the first set in Ceylon, the second in Canada. The initial vignette links, in its last sentence, the time and space of writing with a dash to the time and morning outside, by which it is rapidly overtaken: 'Half a page - and the morning is already ancient' (17). But the passage emphasizes also the possibility of a precarious balance, of a liminal plane of simultaneity. The outside world appears, during dawn, in a 'delicate light [that] is allowed only a brief moment of the day/ before the garden turns into a jungle, 'in a blaze of heat, frantic with noise and butterflies/ The narrator fears that the outside could invade his room as annihilating enemy, entirely absorbing the liquid of the body, as precious and precarious as ice in the heat of a drought: All across the city men roll carts with ice clothed in sawdust. Later on, during a fever, the drought still continuing, his nightmare is that thorn trees in the garden sent their hard roots underground towards the house climbing through windows so they can drink sweat off his body, steal the last saliva off his tongue.

But the room in which this nightmare is written (as we learn in the last line already mentioned) is permeable both to this threat, and to the more fascinating aspects of the furiously growing life outside. The window of the room may keep out a tangible thief, but not the heat and the light of the jungle perhaps not even the past: 'For twenty five years he has not lived in this country, though up to the age of eleven he slept in rooms like this - with no curtains, just delicate bars across the windows so no one could break in' (17). Such 'delicate' boundaries separate and connect the spaces in Ondaatje's text, and allow for highly 'unlimited' travel crossing the thetic boundaries between self and other, Canada and Ceylon, the present and the past, and reality and fiction. The bars across the windows did not always work' is the typical beginning of 'Monsoon Notebook (ii)/ The passage shows us initially a house in Ceylon being invaded by a jungle that annihilates printed 'images of family life' (very similar to the ones we are reading): Wildlife stormed or crept into homes this way. The snake either entered through the bathroom drain for remnants of water or, finding the porch doors open, came in like a king and moved in a straight line through the living room ... and out the back, as if taking the most civilized short cut to another street in town. Others moved in permanently ... the silverfish slid into steamer trunks and photograph albums - eating their way through portraits and wedding pictures. What images of family life they consumed in their minute jaws and took into their bodies no thicker than the pages they ate. (135-6)

But in the middle of this invasion of a 'domestic scene/ and of the world of a

Identity and Control in the Work of Michael Ondaatje 153 family's self on paper, a Canadian scene of writing appears out of this jungle upon which it feasts inversely. A cassette is the technical gimmick that helps to superimpose two worlds that 'consume' each other as much as they move through each other, bringing out aspects that were not perceived before: Now, and here, Canadian February, I write this in the kitchen and play that section of cassette to hear not just peacocks but all the noises of the night behind them - inaudible then because they were always there like breath. In this silent room (with its own unheard hum of fridge, fluorescent light) there are these frogs loud as river, gruntings ... but in that night so modest behind the peacocks they were unfocussed by the brain - nothing more than darkness. (136) As the jungle moves through the house, Ceylon and the past move through the present in the act of writing, and both sides leave their traces in the composite picture and perception of the imagination. The brain focuses on realities it cannot conceive of without the differential of that 'background' that is other, the presence of an absence, and more than just Ceylon itself. Significantly, these sounds are recorded out of a 'jungle sleep' - a kind of counterpart to the domestic jungle dream at the beginning of the text. During a 'visit to the jungle' (136), a 'casual movement' of one of the peacocks 'would waken them all' (and the narrator) in the middle of the night: 'One evening I kept the tape recorder beside my bed and wakened by them once more out of a deep sleep automatically pressed the machine on to record them' (136). These are the sounds the writer, 'now, and here,' listens to in his domestic room in the 'Canadian February.' We are thus reminded of Rousseau's 'The Dream,' of the initial jungle dream of Running in the Family, and of the line in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 'His Legend a Jungle Sleep'; and simultaneously those silent rooms in both The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Coming Through Slaughter appear, in which - as we have seen - two realities seem to coexist that would normally seem to be separated not only by spatial and temporal distances, but by the 'ontological' ones between fact and fiction. In In the Skin of a Lion, the work of a creative perception will similarly bring together different worlds of self and other, and produce between them, in their 'meeting place/ both the discovery of an invisible city and heterologies of an open present. 'LIGHTS': ORAL HISTORY AND THE WRITING OF THE OTHER IN IN THE SKIN OF A LION While Running in the Family charts an imagination that travels through

154 Discoveries of the Other aspects of its self and its past in a spatially distant world, In the Skin of a Lion seeks both to decipher and to invent the signs of another world that silently coexists within Toronto's written history and its present-day surface reality. If the earlier text offers a 'homecoming' abroad, In the Skin of a Lion defamiliarizes the local habitants' habitual perception of Toronto by superimposing, on this 'domestic scene,' a reconstructed and imagined arrival in a new world. With the non-English-speaking immigrants of Toronto, Ondaatje follows, in a discovery of the other by his own immigrant self, a whole community that literally crosses boundaries and borders to another reality and a new language. Again, a searching figure tries to decipher a disappearance. The 'searcher' Patrick Lewis initially attempts to elucidate the (historically authentic) disappearance of theatre impresario Ambrose Small. He ends up following the traces of immigrant pioneers into unknown territory, and reminds us both of Webb's search for Bolden, and of Michael Ondaatje's exploration of his father's world. As with the encounters in Coming Through Slaughter and Running in the Family, two figures and two worlds meet when Patrick Lewis finds Ambrose Small; they face each other, in a dreamlike scene and alone in a room, in 'mutual excitement, as if each were looking into a mirror' (93). But the disappearance of Small plays a secondary role, here, with respect to the silence and (historical) invisibility of the immigrants from abroad.2 In their lack of words and images in a new environment, Lewis, himself an 'immigrant to the city' (53) from rural Ontario, will recognize the beginnings of his own portrait. In the Skin of a Lion thus continues a shift away from the solitary encounter between self and other, a shift already discernible in Running in the Family, where the searcher discovers not only the traces of his father, but the oral history of a whole group.27 As in the initial dream in Running in the Family, the emergence of the world of the other begins, in In the Skin of a Lion, with a moment in the night. The as-yet-unnamed world of the immigrants that emerges in fragments of oral history, conversations, and passages closely related to dreams is associated throughout the novel with lights that are seen in the night. They are thus perceived against the negative of historical daylight and in the interstices of historically known (and constructed) perception of reality. Ondaatje's story, or rather, his stories about Ontario and Toronto in the twenties and thirties begin with a short framing vignette; it introduces the written text we are about to read in the context of oral speech and story telling: This is a story a young girl gathers in a car during the early hours of the morning. She listens and asks questions as the vehicle travels through darkness. Outside, the coun-

Identity and Control in the Work of Michael Ondaatje 155 tryside is unbetrayed. The man who is driving could say, 'In that field is a castle,' and it would be possible for her to believe him. (i) Besides alluding to the traditional request for a suspension of disbelief, this passage joins the mode of unfinalized, fantastic possibility with the atmosphere of a conversation during the night. The identity of the two as-yetunnamed participants we encounter in this conversation is still shrouded in darkness, as are the world outside just before dawn and the story not yet revealed. Light is shed upon the situation as the conversation progresses. The following lines begin to adumbrate an association of oral speech with light in the middle of darkness, that will later turn into one of the organizing metaphors for the invention of an other world: She listens to the man as he picks up and brings together various corners of the story, attempting to carry it all in his arms. And he is tired, sometimes as elliptical as his concentration on the road, at times overexcited - 'Do you see?' He turns to her in the faint light of the speedometer, (i) 'Do you see?' The formulation here suggests a connection between speech, understanding, and sight; an elliptical voice still in the process of searching is meant to bring insight. The question of visibility posed by the voice, which at this point finds its only support in the dim light of the speedometer, hints at a larger context that plays an important role in this novel. In his essay 'Licht als Metapher der Wahrheit' ('Light as Metaphor of Truth'), Hans Blumenberg reminds us of the inversion of the classical metaphor of light by the Romantic valorization of darkness. For Romantic thought, daylight signifies the limitations of a gaze bound by its finite objects, while objective determination recedes in the darkness of the night, which offers an 'affective unity of being' (442). The classical, unquestioned authority of light as a medium of general visibility is replaced, according to Blumenberg, by a directed arrangement of light (Lichtregie) (446).29 Ondaatje shows time and again an awareness of the authority that usually makes the 'evidence' of the visible carry the day, a power, however, that sets his own written text necessarily over against the oral memory culture it brings to light.30 When the narrative, in an account of its own genesis, both leads and returns to the car drive at the beginning, Ondaatje draws our attention, simultaneously, to the fact that the visual images of the literary creation and its world have now replaced the initial darkness - and maybe superseded some of its possibilities. Not only has this potential been filled with stories;

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we are made aware that our eyes have been 'listening/ in this light, to the simulation of an oral tale in writing31 - the ambiguous medium also used by a city historiography that has largely left out and overwritten the stories we have just read. But his last words - 'Lights, he said' - end the book with an inconspicuous fiat lux in the plural. As the text takes us thus back to the scene at the beginning, we are reminded that this 'elucidation' has been mediated by the 'light beams' of a mobile, composite subjectivity traversing, in conversation and conjecture, a landscape of the possible. If the novel suggests a certain precedence of the spoken word over the written, this mode32 seems to be called for in a book that creates a possible image of an immigrant experience that is remembered almost exclusively in oral form. It is only fitting also that Ondaatje's title should come from the Gilgamesh epos, the outcome of an oral tradition, and rich in prophecies and illuminating dreams, that has survived, however, in written form. The fragile material on which the epos has come down to us - the shards and fragments from which the text had to be reconstructed - lends itself to a comparison with the collecting of oral stories and 'rumours/ Ondaatje alludes to a similar process in which pieces of a puzzle are collected and pieced together when he likens his oral narrator (and implicitly his scriptor) in the already-mentioned framing passage to an archaeologist, 'as he picks up and brings together various corners of the story, attempting to carry it all in his arms' (i). But this speaker is, already here, part of a larger chain; his listener, the young girl, 'gathers' in turn the story that comes to her. The narrator of the initial scene, it will be revealed later in the stories he relates, is Patrick Lewis, who deciphers, with his slowly growing cognizance of other, foreign cultures, a new knowledge of himself. The first encounter between two different worlds is set, like the opening vignette, in the darkness of the early morning hours. Like the first signs of a landscape outside expected to arise out of the night, the lights of a 'collection of strangers' (7), of a 'strange community' (7), appear in the darkness outside the window of a small boy's room: he 'stands at the bedroom window and watches; he can see two or three lanterns' (7). The name and identity of the boy, Patrick, emerge for us gradually, as the world of the other appears for him out of the darkness. Patrick's own discovery of the names and signs in general that indicate a world outside is described later in terms of a fascinating attraction of bright light that contrasts with the darkness of the night: He longs for the summer nights, for the moment when he turns out the lights... Then the house is in darkness except for the bright light in the kitchen. He sits down at the long table and looks into his school geography book with the maps of the world, the

Identity and Control in the Work of Michael Ondaatje 157 white sweep of currents, testing the names to himself, mouthing the exotic ... He closes the book and brushes it with his palms, feeling the texture of the pebbled cover and its coloured dyes which create a map of Canada. (9; emphasis added)

The passage emphasizes the words, shapes, and colours that construct and create these worlds as entities for the imagination, as the only forms in which they exist as such. Simultaneously, the 'domestic' space comes into being like a discovery of the exotic; together with the names of the exotic, Patrick encounters the 'coloured dyes which create a map of Canada/ The light in which Patrick discovers names and shapes of places also brings his imagination in contact with the as-yet-unnamed fauna outside: 'He walks back into the bright kitchen and moves from window to window, to search out the moths pinioned against the screens, clinging to brightness. From across the fields they will have seen this one lighted room and travelled towards it. A summer night's inquiry' (9; emphasis added).33 We see him compare the 'fictional names' (9) he has created for them in his own world with their 'formal titles' (9); his hope, however, is that 'these creatures' have their own voice and may respond, that they are 'not mute at all. Perhaps it is just a lack of range in his hearing' (10). Rather than one voice, Patrick wants 'conversation - the language of damsel flies who need something to translate their breath the way he uses the ocarina to give himself a voice, something to leap over the wall of this place' (10). A similar chiasmic mediation of self and other begins to be adumbrated when Patrick leaves his room, and walks 'out from the long kitchen' to follow, inversely, a moth that had 'bathed briefly in light, and then disappeared into darkness' (20). As if he himself were a moth attracted by light, we see Patrick follow this 'rare winter moth' to another light outside: 'All that gave direction was a blink of amber' (20). The 'lights ... in front of him' (21) lead him to the boundary of his experience. As he 'crept on into the familiar woods as if walking into, testing the rooms of a haunted house' (21), he comes to the river, and stops at the edge of an unknown, heterological world. The (for him) nameless immigrant loggers he finds skating at night are seen, again, with lights in the darkness, but simultaneously show the observer a part of his world in another light: Patrick was transfixed. Skating the river at night each of them moving like a wedge into the blackness magically revealing the grey bushes of the shore, his shore, his river. (21; emphasis in original)

In this (as we have seen, for Ondaatje typical) specular inversion, the strang-

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ers show Patrick his own world as a strange world, different from the one he thought 'familiar.' Again, the scene appears (like a dream) with its bright lights against a (romantic) night that frees the daylight world from its usual boundaries: It was not just the pleasure of skating. They could have done that during the day. This was against the night ... Their lanterns replaced with new rushes which let them go further past boundaries, speed! romance! one man waltzing with his fire ... To the boy ... having lived all his life on that farm where day was work and night was rest, nothing would be the same. But on this night he did not trust either himself or these strangers of another language enough to be able to step forward and join them ... So at this stage in his life his mind raced ahead of his body. (22; emphasis added)

Patrick does not have words for this scene yet - which foreshadows, however, his future. The world of the immigrants will emerge only later for Patrick, in the realm of (a multiple) language, similar to the landscape and the very river itself, which have been shown earlier to appear also only gradually on maps, and in language: He was born into a region which did not appear on a map until 1910, though his family had worked there for twenty years and the land had been homesteaded since 1816. In the school atlas the place is pale green and nameless. The river slips out of an unnamed lake and is a simple blue line until it becomes the Napanee twenty-five miles south, and, only because of logging, will eventually be called Depot Creek. 'Deep Eau.' (11)

In this case, almost a hundred years of 'solitude' go by until the actual life and work are rendered by the written record. But in Ondaatje's passage, it takes significantly, furthermore, an ear to hear the double reality, the 'deep water' underneath the surface of the written names and the map of the area. The same is true for Patrick when he moves to an immigrant neighbourhood in Toronto, where he will eventually catch up with the unknown stories about the world of the loggers he has encountered as a child. Here he discovers also a whole world of the other, outside his familiar boundaries (and for us beyond the horizon of a Toronto history written predominantly in English). Most significantly, with the discovery of the (in terms of the English language) silent other, and his journey into a foreign language and culture, Patrick translates himself into a new reality as much as he is transformed by it. Leaving his own past, the 'immigrant to the city' (53) is, like the immi-

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grants from abroad, 'new even to himself (54), and finds his reflection in unknown contexts and objects: 'He saw his image in the glass of telephone booths' (54). When he works in the tunnels under Lake Ontario that are needed for the new waterworks, he moves into the neighbourhood of the Macedonians and Bulgarians who are his colleagues, and begins to perceive similarities between the contrasting worlds of self and other. As an English-speaking Canadian he becomes the foreign other of the foreigners in his own land, 'their alien' (113). Simultaneously he recognizes his own position as an outsider in their image: 'The people on the street, the Macedonians and Bulgarians, were his only mirror' (ii2)P 4 His knowledge of these other cultures is limited, however, to a formal awareness of a common experience of alienation. A mediation of horizons begins only with a knowledge that lies, with the foreign language, unelucidated in the dark, beyond the compass of immediate visibility. This lack of words pertains also to our own, present-day knowledge of the historical reality Patrick is shown to enter. The section of In the Skin of a Lion that introduces us to Patrick's work in the tunnels, 'Palace of Purification/ begins with the taking of a photograph, an act that imposes an eerie silence on the scene: 'For a moment, while the film receives the image, everything is still, the other tunnel workers silent' (105). Ondaatje's description of these photographs invites our ears, again, to hear another word and world underneath the written 'white lye' that indicates the site of the actual work also in a different, double sense a work yet to be done: Tn those photographs moisture in the tunnels appears white. There is a foreman's white shirt, there is white lye daubed onto rock to be dynamited. And all else is labour and darkness. Ashgrey faces. An unfinished world. The men work in the equivalent of the fallout of a candle' (111). Again, a small bright light is evoked as the illumination of a potential world that is 'unfinished/ and has not yet come to light. The darkness of labour, the dynamite to be blasted, and the workers silenced at the moment the picture is taken, are without sound or language in these pictures, which give us an 'unfinished' portrait of the reality they seek - or pretend - to convey. The code we need to decipher these scenes is absent. This potential process from silence into language is a journey similar to the one Patrick begins when we see him trying to understand the foreign world around him. At first, he is confronted with a lack of known words, with an exotic language, and with pictures separated from language and explanation. His first 'breakthrough' (112) comes with his first word in the foreign language, the Macedonian word for 'iguana' (an animal he has received from his

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and Ambrose Small's lover Clara, who thus provides him indirectly, not with a key to find the disappeared impresario, but with a lead for another kind of discovery). After the first word is found, a whole group of Macedonians 'then circled him trying desperately to leap over the code of language between them' (113). In a similar way, Patrick faces a silent picture without a code when he tries, later, to decipher the life of Clara's friend Alice. The old newspaper picture of construction workers at the Bloor Street Viaduct, which he is shown by Clara's daughter, Hana, has been separated from its caption. The windows of the library where Patrick hopes to find more information 'let in oceans of light' (143); but in this light only the written knowledge is visible that has been captured by the English language, and by the perspective of those who used it in this case: The articles and illustrations he found in the Riverdale Library depicted every detail about the soil, the wood, the weight of concrete, everything but information on those who actually built the bridge' (145). When Patrick is finally able to find the missing caption, the written language provides him with a date, and with the name of his Macedonian acquaintance, Nicholas Temelcoff. The texture behind these bare outlines of history, however, is woven only out of Temelcoff's memory and narrations when Patrick shows him the picture. Although these stories have potentially existed, they have remained in the dark. But not only for Patrick do they begin to come to light; for Temelcoff himself they have been practically non-existent: 'Nicholas Temelcoff never looks back ... Patrick's gift, that arrow into the past, shows him the wealth in himself, how he has been sewn into history. Now he will begin to tell stories' (149). These stories will turn out to be some of those related by (an unnamed) Patrick during the opening car ride - and superimpose two speakers. The simulated oral mode will thus be retroactively marked at least by a double accent, since we now know that Patrick's narration is inhabited by Temelcoff's voice. But as both Patrick and Temelcoff exceed the boundaries of their respective realities in their mutual encounter, the writing of In the Skin of a Lion uses this superimposition of worlds as well to stage its own encounter between recorded historical fact and created fiction, surpassing each realm's limit. Patrick's reconstruction of Temelcoff's life corresponds, to a certain extent, to factual historical research. Ondaatje's writing thus orchestrates a factual accent. Beyond that point, however, this written language enriches and enlightens history with its telling figures and their oral stories; but these fictional Tights,' in their fantastic travel through darkness, are not by any means irrelevant to the light in which we perceive the present-day reality of Toronto, or the pictures of its past. They propose one possible code to trans-

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late our own ('domestic') perceptual space into other worlds that potentially coexist with the buildings, streets, neighbourhoods, and people in the city as they are seen, although already differently, by each of us. The character of Nicholas Temelcoff is based on the Macedonian immigrant by the same name (who died on 12 September 1988 in Toronto),35 and in particular on the research and the interviews with Temelcoff by the historian Lillian Petroff. The historiographic invisibility, up to that point, of the Macedonian immigrant community in Canada begins with their immigration records; these reflect, however, only the passport definitions that listed Macedonians as Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians, or Serbians (Petroff 10-11). These immigrants shunned visibility in official written documentation by their own informed choice: 'Used to avoiding Turkish authorities, Macedonians tried to evade Canadian officialdom as well ... As in the old country, Macedonians risked official non-existence in North America' (Petroff 11). In the new country, this culture is characterized by an unequal distribution of languages. As Robert Harney points out in his introduction to the volume Gathering Place: Peoples and Neighbourhoods of Toronto, 1834-1945, ethnic group identity is often expressed at home in the familiar language of the old country, and barely surfaces in the English language, which dominates the professional lives of the immigrants outside their community in the city. This situation is one of the reasons responsible for the fact that certain group realities remain silent potentials in Toronto's multi-layered city history. With a quotation from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, however, Harney also opens an attack upon a form of city history that reinforces this tendency by emphasizing British immigration, reducing a multiplicity of group-specific perceptions of the city to monochromatic history: 'Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site with the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves' (qtd Harney 1-2). Referring to Clifford Geertz's notion of thinking as a profoundly public activity that takes place in markets, squares, and courtyards, Harney shows that these forms of public life still survive inside ethnic groups; the city as a whole, however, has not functioned as a communicative space - as that 'Gathering Place' that the city's Indian name refers to. Harney therefore suggests Toronto history rely more on oral history and its methodology. Petroff understands her own work in this sense, as an inner history of Macedonian immigration, as 'creation of oral history, of an understanding of the "memory culture" of Macedonian Canadians' (Petroff 10). But this elucidation, this coming to light of oral culture is of interest for Ondaatje also because of its implicit original disappearance, the inherent

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transformation exemplifying the possible and the unknown in motion. The first images we 'see' of Temelcoff in the text (who is, again, as yet unnamed) are thus set, like the initial vignette and the first images of Patrick and the group of strangers, in the darkness of the early morning. The 'faint light of the speedometer' in the moving vehicle at the beginning, however, has been transformed, by now, into a fire - and the landscape outside has become Toronto: 'A truck carries fire at five A.M. through central Toronto ... Aboard the flatbed three men stare into passing darkness ... But for now all that is visible is the fire on the flatbed' (25). As the number of people increases to 'twenty, crowded and silent' (25) (like the 'strange community' Patrick has witnessed earlier), 'the light begins to come out of the earth. They see their hands, the texture on a coat' (25). These strangers appear, for us as for themselves, out of the darkness like the bridge they build, which 'goes up in a dream' (26). Eventually, they will take over the bridge - which grows in the void of the valley like Ondaatje's fiction in an unwritten space - with their flickering lights in the middle of the night: The previous midnight the workers had arrived and brushed away officials who guarded the bridge ... moved with their own flickering lights - their candles for the bridge dead - like a wave of civilization, a net of summer insects over the valley' (27). Ondaatje's Temelcoff, like the unnamed workers moving on the truck in darkness, appears initially to himself invisible and silent after having crossed the border, after having left behind his old language and the old images of himself: 'He never realizes how often he is watched by others. He has no clue that his gestures are extreme. He has no portrait of himself ... As with sight, because Nicholas does not listen to most conversations around him, he assumes no one hears him' (42-3). Existing historiography ratifies this subjective self-perception objectively from the outside. In contrast to this perspective, however, Ondaatje offers Temelcoff's invisible presence between old and new in the many pictures that leave us searching in vain for the actual builders of the bridge: Even in archive photographs it is difficult to find him. Again and again you see vista before you and the eye must search along the wall of sky to the speck of burned paper across the valley that is him, an exclamation mark, somewhere in the distance between bridge and river. He floats at the three hinges of the crescent-shaped steel arches. These knit the bridge together. The moment of cubism ... He is a spinner. He links everyone. (34) Temelcoff's presence in these pictures exceeds visible reality, and takes place in the hitherto unbridged space between separate worlds. But his figure has

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also an architectural function for the novel that is similar to the moment in which the unfinished ends of the bridge meet in empty space. He both brings the different strands of the novel together and is the character in which the perspectives of historical fact and extending fictional elucidation intersect. The moment of linkage - which a narrator who looks with us at these pictures compares here, as in the title of John Berger's essay, to a 'moment of cubism' - is experienced later, in turn, by Patrick, when he finds Temelcoff's name underneath the picture of construction workers. He sees his own story beginning to intersect, like the perspectives in a cubist painting, with the many other perspectives he has learned about - interweaving with them like the instruments of a band he hears after leaving the library: The cornet and saxophone and drum chased each other across solos and then suddenly, as Patrick drew alongside them, fell together and rose within a chorus. He saw himself gazing at so many stories ... He saw the interactions, saw how each one of them was carried by the strength of something stronger than themselves ... The street band had depicted perfect company, with an ending full of embraces after the solos had made everyone stronger, more delineated. His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural. (144-5) But this mural is also composed, for us, of the anonymous pictures in which we are made to 'see' - by the narrator outside Patrick's world in the passage above - the invisible Temelcoff as part of the unknown. With this invitation to perceive a reality outside representation, In the Skin of a Lion offers a raise en abyme of its own reach into empty space. Temelcoff's invisibility in the pictures of the bridge is 'seen,' in In the Skin of a Lion, as part of a potential in which humanity extends itself beyond given reality. John Berger, in his essay 'The Moment of Cubism,' similarly describes an artistic confidence in new constructions as part of a historical moment in which the relationship between human possibilities and reality changed. In the years 1907-14 (the period prior to construction of the Toronto bridge), Berger sees human productivity transcend its old limits by means of new techniques and materials, through steel, electricity, radio, and film. A certain secularization is completed: 'But now man was able to extend himself indefinitely beyond the immediate: he took over the territory in space and time where God had been presumed to exist' (7). Berger finds this changed relationship between human being and reality in cubism as well (15); beyond the imitation of visible reality, but also beyond Romantic emphasis on subjective experience, cubism thinks subjective experience as part of, and continuous with, perceived reality (20-1). Berger ascribes the

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intimation of a new world to these pictures that model perception itself, and force the imagination of the observer to search and to test possibilities. Cubism, for Berger, is prophetic (9). To Ondaatje's commissioner Roland Harris, the progress of the bridge occurs, by night, like the prophecy of a Toronto that is invisible as yet. The bridge by night that exists half-real, half-imagined by the eyes that see in the darkness of the night, disappears beyond the edge of the valley, and transcends Toronto's visible image by day. This extending and prophetic vision is significantly compared with oral forms of language that construct other worlds in excess of given reality - rumours and tall tales: Tor Harris the night allowed scope. Night removed the limitations of detail and concentrated on form ... Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting' (29). Nicholas Temelcoff, who has already followed rumours, stories, and tall tales by coming to the new land, goes in Ondaatje's novel even beyond this human-made structure pointing into the void. With the other workers he disappears time and again although held by ropes - 'over the edge of the bridge into the night' (30). When Ondaatje refers to Temelcoff, who floats invisibly between the two sides of the valley as he lives between languages, as a 'spinner' linking everyone, he alludes, with the archaic meaning of the word, to the spider web as one of his preferred textual metaphors; but the word 'spinner' evokes also a 'teller of the yarn.' With the character of Temelcoff, who appears to us mediated by several instances, Ondaatje offers also an image of language that exceeds reality, and proceeds from the gaps of a historical discourse seeking strictly factual representation. Similar to Temelcoff's life between the old and the new continent and their languages, and between the two ends of the bridge opening out into the empty valley, Ondaatje's novel grows in the gaps of the transcribed interviews with the historical Nicholas Temelcoff. Although the work on the bridge is mentioned here, we learn next to nothing about the daily work experienced Simultaneously with Temelcoff's emergence in the new language, the new emerges in Ondaatje's language, an otherness beyond the factual knowledge asserted by recorded history. Like the workers who climb - secured by ropes and anchored in historical truth - day after day 'over the edge of the bridge into the night' (30), the novel advances in its telling of history; but, in a parallel formulation that recalls and contrasts with this secured advance, the story steps beyond that limit. A nun falls 'off the edge of the bridge. She disappeared into the night... into the long depth of air which held nothing' (31). This fall and disappearance into the undefined darkness of the night opens here the possibility of a metamorphosis, and offers the space for an untold

Identity and Control in the Work of Michael Ondaatje 165 story (not dissimilar to the 'vehicle' that 'travels through darkness' at the beginning). The fall of the nun is caught by a secularized deus ex machina, the stranger, the other, Nicholas Temelcoff.37 As so often in Ondaatje's texts, both participants in this encounter transcend the demarcations of their former spaces. On the one hand, after this meeting of historically certified figure with the purely fictional one, the nun will change her name and her life, translating religious aspirations into secular hope; on the other hand, Temelcoff's speech begins, in a conversation with the as-yet-nameless nun, to mix the accents and words of the old language with those of the new: 'He talked on, slipping into phrases from the radio songs which is how he learned his words and pronunciations' (37). Similar to Patrick's entrance into a double-voiced reality both in his discovery of Macedonian words, and in his telling of the stories of himself and others in the middle of the night, Temelcoff reveals himself, on the dividing line between wake and sleep, in a double language: 'He talked about himself, tired, unaware his voice split now into two languages' (37-8). Ondaatje draws - as so often in some of his most fascinating passages - on the materiality of signs to stage the encounter of different languages and realities. Whereas the technical medium of the radio and thus the ear and the spoken voice function here (both historically and at this point in the novel) already as a catalyst in the orchestration of realities, of languages, and of voices that are alien to each other, the eye will have to wait, significantly, for the 'talkies' to 'lighten' - to ease and bring light to - the immigrants' experience: 'The event that will lighten the way for immigration in North America is the talking picture' (43). The silent movie is associated with the voiceless darkness and grotesque of a nightmare: These comedies are nightmares. The audience emits horrified laughter as Chaplin, blindfolded, rollerskates near the edge of the unbalconied mezzanine. No one shouts to warn him. He cannot talk or listen. North America is still without language, gestures and work and bloodlines are the only currency. (43)

As if alluding to Bakhtin's 'dialogic orientation of a word among other words (of all kinds and degrees of otherness)' (Dialogic Imagination 275), Ondaatje tells us about immigrants who learn English by parroting actors in the theatre, destroying the punch lines with their multiple echo. Slow ballads and blues, rich with repetition, accommodate the newcomers as well. 'Sojourners walked out of their accent into regional American voices' (47), Ondaatje writes, letting Temelcoff alter himself in the modulations of the jazz singer Fats Waller: 'His emphasis on usually unnoticed syllables and the throwaway

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lines made him seem high-strung or dangerously anti-social or too loving.' (47) But the individual acquisition of the foreign language alone does not guarantee the visibility of the immigrants' experience in the written history of the host culture. With the interwoven story of the searcher and narrator Patrick, who himself accepts the status of a stranger in the world of the immigrant strangers, Ondaatje's novel listens to this historical silence and 'renders' unrecorded history in written, often necessarily fictional words. Patrick intervenes in a puppet play that stages, as a pantomime and mise en abyme, the immigrants' silent life in the English language of the city during an illegal meeting of workers at the waterworks, an 'illegal gathering of various nationalities' where 'many languages were being spoken' (ii5).38 Patrick's interruption of this pantomime enacting silent history will have been, at the end of the novel, one of his first steps as a mediator and eventually narrator of that silence. The play's main figure, whose silent gesture of despair he ends, has emerged from the play as human being among silent puppets. She turns out to be Alice Gull, who is later revealed as the 'flying' nun. If the nun has not spoken in the earlier scenes (silently added to the historical record of the bridge), she now gains a voice in the novel's story, in the fictional version of history. While Patrick has ended her silent play within the novel, she will end his silent role in the story. When Patrick reflects on his own outsidedness, on the fact that he 'has clung like moss to strangers, to the nooks and fissures of their situations' (156), unable ever to have 'been the hero of one of these stories' (157), he remembers Alice's description of a play in which the power of language is handed on among several heroines: After half an hour the powerful matriarch removed her large coat from which animal pelts dangled and she passed it, along with her strength, to one of the minor characters. In this way even a silent daughter could put on the cloak and be able to break through her chrysalis into language. Each person had their moment when they assumed the skins of wild animals, when they took responsibility for the story. (157)

The passage evokes the novel's title and its first epigraph, taken from the Epic of Gilgamesh: T will let my hair grow long for your sake, and I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion.'39 In the epos - the story of a double - Gilgamesh abandons his way of life after the death of his friend Enkidu, with whom he has transgressed the laws and the boundaries determined by the gods, in order to immortalize his name. He leaves his city and his friends in order to learn the secret of immortality from Utnapishtim, to

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whom eternal life has been given by the gods. But after a long journey through darkness, and over the waters of death, he cannot pass Utnapishtim's test: he cannot vanquish deathlike sleep for six days and seven nights.40 Patrick's friend Alice dies, not because she is punished by the gods like Enkidu, but through the more modern violence of a time bomb, meant to transgress the order of the city. Like Gilgamesh, Patrick leaves the city after the death of his friend. Burning down a resort hotel of the rich, he adopts the pose of a violent anarchist, both to take revenge on those Alice has taught him to oppose, and to transcend the limits of his former life (as Temelcoff and Alice have done before him).41 After his return from prison, Patrick aims more precisely at the demarcation line between the anonymous dead of history, and those who are granted immortality by its 'monuments.' He enters the waterworks through its intake pipe, after having made himself invisible with the help of Caravaggio - a thief who routinely transgresses the boundaries of buildings, and who has eluded the confinement of Kingston Prison by letting himself be painted into the roof. The italicized word 'Demarcation' (228) occurs here as the critical limit to be overcome; similarly, the word played a crucial role in Caravaggio's escape: 'Demarcation, said the prisoner named Caravaggio. That is all we need to remember' (i/9).42 The anticlimactic scene in which Patrick, after having crossed the dark Lake Ontario as Gilgamesh had traversed darkness and the waters of death,43 faces the city commissioner Harris (to whom history has granted immortality as the gods have done to Utnapishtim) at night inside the waterworks, takes on rich signification with the intertextual references to the epos. Patrick's encounter and dialogue with Harris pose the question of death and survival, practically at this decisive moment of the novel, and symbolically with respect to historically recorded reality. Threatening to destroy the building that today still immortalizes Harris' name, Patrick demands to know how many suffered death in the construction of the building. 'No record was kept,' (236) Harris answers. Patrick now asks Harris (who has survived in the light of written history), to turn off the light, and face him in his - Patrick's world of darkness. But Harris reveals himself as a visionary dreamer who can see potential worlds beyond the visible realities of daylight. His visions of the city that came to him in dreams, he tells Patrick, often turned out to be possibilities the city had dismissed. Such a possibility, Patrick is being told, is he himself: 'These were real places. They could have existed. I mean the Bloor Street Viaduct and this building here are just a hint of what could have been done here. You must realize you are like these places, Patrick' (237-8). Patrick does not accede to historical immortality by blowing up the waterworks, in this fictionalized version of Toronto's history. In a surprising turn

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of events, Patrick falls asleep while telling the story of Alice's death; we hear its end as part of a dream. While this solution hardly corresponds to the climactic expectations connected with the realistic novel, it is clearly motivated by the mythic theme of vanquishing sleep and death, a theme the novel transposes from the epos to the realities of historiography. In the early light of day, Harris wins over Patrick, and with him the written history we know. Like Gilgamesh, Patrick does not pass the test of conquering sleep. To take the skin of a lion, and accede to the language of historically recorded reality, remains a story between possibility and dream. This status between an uncertain power and prophecy distinguishes as well the narrative of an earlier stage in Gilgamesh's journey, which Ondaatje now quotes: '[Harris] stood over Patrick. "He lay down to sleep, until he was woken from out of a dream. He saw lions around him glorying in life; then he took his axe in his hand, he drew his sword from his belt, and he fell upon them like an arrow from the string"'(242; The Epic of Gilgamesh 94). Patrick is not awakened from out of his dream. Only in Ondaatje's novel, the historical possibility (and probability) of another history of Toronto comes to life, and with it a multi-faceted mural of the city that its dominant historiography has left in the dark. Ondaatje's writing distinguishes itself from this form of visible knowledge by appealing to an oral history that again and again finds its beginnings, in In the Skin of a Lion, as a tale about and of the other told in darkness. Like the bridge, Ondaatje's fictive oral stories are imagined in a night that, for Harris, 'removed the limitations of detail and concentrated on form' (29). And thus Patrick, who loses his reality with the beginning of daylight in the waterworks, remains awake when he tells his tale during the car ride at night when the novel returns to its beginning. But Patrick's tale has come about, in retrospect, as a structure in which many perspectives intersect. His narrative during the car ride is possible because, in this case, he is kept awake by Hana, the listener. 'She stays awake to keep him company,' we read at the beginning. At the end we learn, furthermore, that she has woken Patrick from his sleep (243), and made him talk by her questions - just as Patrick, earlier, has motivated Temelcoff to tell his stories. As we come to attribute certain passages in retrospect to both Temelcoff's and Patrick's discovered power of language, at the end the frame narrative similarly identifies, and thus overdetermines, the written novel we have read with the oral story being told at the beginning. And now, we learn also that Hana, the listener, has been sitting in 'the driver's seat' (244) part of the way, and has 'gathered' the slowly 'betrayed,' imagined landscape of the narrative from her own perspective, 'adapting the rearview mirror to her height' (244). Throughout the novel, the searcher Patrick, who has set out to find the

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disappeared, wealthy Ambrose Small, ends up finding the perspectives of 'excentrics' (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 94) that history has neglected: besides the story of Nicholas Temelcoff, those of ethnic minority immigrants, and those of women.44 These multiple possible perspectives and points of view often create an oscillating, hologrammatic simultaneity of different possible assumptions for the reader - concerning the identity of the speaker of a passage, of its point in time, and of its status with respect to reality (both in the novel and in historical reality). The novel uses, for instance, a non-linear structure in which chronologically later events of the plot are presented (frequently as memory from an even later point in time) prior to earlier events - the most extreme case being the final car scene presented at the beginning. Similarly, a prolepsis indirectly 'announces' Alice's end as memory (147-8), long before the details of her death are finally revealed in Patrick's dream. Furthermore, this very dream and Patrick's adventure in the waterworks are framed by a chronologically later episode, in which Patrick lies down to sleep (219, 243). The sentence 'He felt his clothes wet with the sweat of sleep' (243) recalls the water imagery of Patrick's journey through the lake on the previous pages; only his actually broken arm seems to balance the possibility that his encounter with Harris might have occurred in a dream.45 These interconnected temporal and 'ontological' oscillations remind us both of the double possible modes of dream and manuscript that Ondaatje discerns, as we have seen, in One Hundred Years of Solitude ('Garcia Marquez' 31), and of the double time structure he observes in Garcia Marquez' book: 'About halfway through the book you begin to feel that while you are still moving forward to the end you are simultaneously moving from midpoint to the beginning. Your consciousness is sliding both ways. Time has been shattered by Melquiades' experiments to overcome death' ('Garcia Marquez' 30). The juxtapositions and mutual framings of moments normally perceived as isolated in time, or by the separations between dream, possibility, and reality, emphasize the simultaneity of different historical and subjectively accessible spaces and times in the novel. Ondaatje answers thus John Berger's call that serves as his second epigraph: 'Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.' In the Skin of a Lion interprets effectively some of the possible implications of this manifesto by interweaving different planes of reality and time, thus opening the space for another dimension that coexists with the realities of Toronto (and Ontario) that we may be aware of. Worlds meet in a fluid choreography of possibility and actuality, dream and prophecy, versions of the past, of the present, and possibly of the future. This openness toward the space of the other, however, is accompanied by a

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self-reflexive awareness of mediality on the part of the writing self, which both discovers and opens itself to the silences, and the oral history, of the other. On the one hand, oral history plays a very conspicuous role in In the Skin of a Lion (as in Ondaatje's two previous works of 'fiction'), and Ondaatje may well be seen among those novelists who - 'despite themselves/ as Hutcheon has suspected - 'are McLuhan's true spiritual heirs' (The Canadian Postmodern 52). On the other hand, Ondaatje thematizes writing also very explicitly as an act of self-discovery. We see the thief Caravaggio, for instance, who 'had never witnessed someone writing before,' stand outside a window and observe a woman write, 'trying to discover what she was or what she was capable of making' (198). In this scene, the figure in the darkness outside begins to intermingle liminally with the room in which the written self is created - but the stranger at the window remains unnamed himself: He was anonymous ... He stood on the roof outside, an outline of a bear in her subconscious, and she quarried past it to another secret, one of her own, articulated wet and black on the page. The houses in Toronto he had helped build or paint or break into were unmarked. He would never leave his name where his skill had been. He was one of those who have a fury or a sadness of only being described by someone else. A tarrer of roads, a housebuilder, a painter, a thief - yet he was invisible to all around him. (199)

Caravaggio, an expert in the art of dealing with demarcations (like Ondaatje), enters the house, and dissolves the barriers as easily as he blends into the roof of the Kingston prison. The writing woman is not scared of the thief (who introduces himself with a fictional name in her language, 'David' [201]), partially, as he suggests, because he had already entered her unconscious universe: 'Because you've come back from someplace ... Or you're still there ... I did find you' (201). The writer has thus already followed his advice: 'Allow the darkness in' (201). Ondaatje reminds us repeatedly that the 'secrets' and perspectives of the writing (and reading) self share the space, in the room he offers us, with those figures who have appeared at the window like bright lights in the night. While they now permeate the space of writing, they are also part of a darkness into which Caravaggio, for instance, disappears again. For Ondaatje, language in general often appears to 'betray,' ambiguously, the unlimited wealth and silence of the other, and writing, in particular, an invisible multiplicity of voices. Ondaatje's novel stages both the potential violence and the fascinating possibilities inherent in the perception, history, and writing of the other that

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necessarily implies an act of self-mediation and mutual creation. If his writing is fictive memory, it creates an example - and adumbrates the outline - of a distinct necessity: the coexistence of 'invisible' cities (and individual existences), both in the past and in Toronto's present. We often know about these realities only that they exist, or must have existed - in silence. If invisibility and darkness are typically associated, in In the Skin of a Lion, with the rich potential of a collective oral history, the eye is made aware of its other through writing, a medium associated with light. In the Skin of a Lion overtly addresses this mediation; in its last plural, however, the text seeks both to evade the monoperspectival limits of this process, and to multiply its possibilities: 'Lights, he said' (244). The stories we have 'seen' in these lights accentuate the relationship between the room of the self and the worlds that appear at the window with an emphasis that differs, for instance, from that of Coming Through Slaughter. Ondaatje's trajectory from this work, over Running in the Family to In the Skin of a Lion, points away from brief moments of encounter (which still play an important role) to an extension of simultaneity. Coming Through Slaughter certainly orchestrates different voices that show us Buddy Bolden in many different 'lights.' In the Skin of a Lion, however, shifts its emphasis from the many worlds of one individual (a theme that still occurs in the rendering of Small's end) to a sense of whole 'invisible cities/ or communities. In addition, the temptation and altering space of the other exceed increasingly the moment of the mirror, in which the image of the other turns quickly into a threat of (and to) identity, thus evoking the limit of control. While Patrick recognizes his plight in the 'mirror' of the immigrants who are his neighbours, he becomes eventually a part of the picture — rather than 'facing' it individually. The discovery of Temelcoff's picture, for instance, leads to the scene of parallelism and mutual reinforcement that is metaphorically delineated with the jazz band in the street. Whereas Bolden keeps different moods going with his instrument, this scene emphasizes the continuous interaction between several instruments (that may all have a wide range of moods) - and is closer to the (albeit more 'vertical') image of the T as 'part of a human pyramid' in Running in the Family (27). If the room at the end of Coming Through Slaughter suggests a (highly charged) coexistence on the verge of instability, the rather continually permeable boundaries between worlds in Running in the Family seem closer to the coextensive perspectives staged effectively by the frame narrative of In the Skin of a Lion, and its orchestration of dreams and different points in time. A similar sense of an infinitely altering perspective that does not, however, approach resolution, remains after the 'final' encounter between Patrick

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and Harris. Harris reveals his 'other' side as a being of the night, thus becoming Patrick's equal. Because of this maintained identity between the two, the exclusion of the other - the expected arrest of Patrick - never occurs. But if this scene in the night carries a few traces of a dream, it brings its own possibility and potentiality to light. If this moment may not have happened except as a dream - either in history or in the novel - scenes of similar otherness and intent could have happened, and probably did in some form. The decision whether to exclude this reality of fiction, or whether to perceive the constructed fictionality of our own familiar room, is left to us.

5

The Visibility of the Utopian Form in the Work of Nicole Brossard

'AINSI QU'UN REVE POLYSEMIQUE': W R I T I N G THE VIRTUAL OTHER BETWEEN WOMEN

If I approach now some of the texts written by Nicole Brossard in order to envisage different 'lights' toward the end of my discussion, I will by necessity bring my own biases and interests to her work. With respect to a space that asserts, as Karen Gould formulates in Writing in the Feminine, 'the centrality of women's experience in writing' (35), this somewhat self-evident caveat of textual study acquires additional urgency in the case of a male subjectivity discussing (lesbian) feminist texts. Gender difference may be more important here, for instance, than different horizons of culture or language. But since Brossard's writing - in particular with the overt impact of feminist concerns from 1974 on - offers one of the most articulate and persistent efforts to think otherness and the implications of otherness that have been produced in Quebec and Canada since then, I shall consult some of her texts with respect to the very questions of visibility and otherness that may, on the one hand, lie between them and my own understanding, but that, on the other hand, constitute important impulses in Brossard's writing, and draw me to it in the context of this study. Since Brossard's return to writing from 'political action after becoming a committed feminist around 1974' (Godard, 'Nicole Brossard' 123), her texts have increasingly challenged a dilemma of silence and invisibility that she formulates, in 1975, in her essay (significantly entitled) '£ muet mutant':1 'La parole de la femme est sans consequence ... elle ne s'insere pas dans 1'histoire' (Double Impression 55). Writing, however, is seen as an effective means of intervening in the constructed collective memory and space that contains, beyond the 'invisible cities' that Brossard creates so effectively out

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of the cityscape of Montreal, a whole 'continent multiple' (Amantes 108) of possibilities created by feminist perspectives, as Brossard indicates with reference to other feminist writers in 'Ma continent' (a poem that already in its title transgresses the gender rules of the French language). Writing and publication participate thus for Brossard in a kind of geography of historical dimensions that has kept woman's words off the map: 'Mais il n'en va pas de meme pour ce qu'elle ecrit et public ... D'abord parce que son geste est inscrit, concret: le livre ... Il entre dans 1'histoire. Il participe a la memoire collective' (Double Impression 55). Writing in general, Brossard suggests, takes part in a process of visibility that can be either self-created or imposed by an other: 'Ecrire c'est se faire voir ... S'imposer au regard de 1'autre avant qu'il ne s'impose' ('E muet mutant,' Double Impression 55). Brossard's concern with the gaze of the other suggests, to some extent, certain continuities between Quebecois feminist concerns and a Quebecois nationalist discourse of decolonization that, as Karen Gould reminds us, offered 'many feminists a political and theoretical language in which to express their discontent' (10) in the sixties and early seventies. But the problem of the relationship between subject and object and of the possible mobility of this relationship - takes its point of departure here in gender difference. Brossard explores, in one of her typical investigations of words and set expressions, the subtle balances and potentials of subjectivity and objectivity involved in the project of 'se faire femme' in a kind of writing that implies offering oneself 'a la lecture, sans voile, au regard de 1'autre' (Double Impression 54). In this perspective of a writing that does not seek to hide its subjectivity in the text, the male writer would appear as 'travesti. Un etre qui s'emploie doublement a creuser/(s'ouvrir 1'univers) ... Il s'impose en tant que sujet; en tant qu'objet, il se risque et s'explore encore plus vitalement' (54). If writing appears here as an oscillating potential, implying visibility both as (potentially positive) object of exploration and as subject, Brossard emphasizes the importance of agency in this process. Everything depends on who makes use of this process of visibility: 'La femme qui ecrit passe done enfin dans 1'histoire ... Elle devient sujet. Elle propose. Impose son sujet' (Double Impression 55).2 The question of agency and the twofold potential of visibility (as subject and/or object) motivate two opposed relationships with alterity in many of Brossard's texts - a negative one as antagonism, and a positive one as opening toward the limit, the invisible, and the unknown. The 'thetic' or positing powers of the gaze can be set in an antagonistic encounter between self and other, in which the positing of women's subjectivity by women has to forestall the positing of their subjectivity as object by an other. This adversarial

Utopian Form in the Work of Nicole Brossard 175 strategy is directed against the kind of subsumption under a patriarchal law of the same' and its exclusive 'visibility' that Luce Irigaray has analysed, for instance, with respect to Freud's construction of female sexuality. In Speculum of the Other Woman, Irigaray outlines how Freud's equation of the early development of boys and girls is informed by, and reinforces, an 'a priori assumption of the same, since [for Freud] the little man that the girl is, must become a man minus certain attributes whose paradigm is morphological' (27). Irigaray shows, in particular with respect to the male gaze of the Viennese psychoanalyst, how his 'view' of female sexuality is based on a phallocentric expectation of sameness. Rather than being directed to a discussion of 'the effects of breast atrophy in the male' (23), this 'view' observes a female lack of a phallus at the centre of its vision: 'Now the little girl, the woman, supposedly has nothing you can see. She exposes, exhibits the possibility of a nothing to see' (47). While this specificity, seen as something in its own right (as Irigaray's transposition of the negative into a noun suggests), could have challenged an understanding 'often improperly regulated in terms of sight' (48), it occurs in Freud's view as woman's castration, 'defined as her having nothing you can see, as her having nothing' (48). This 'view' not only 'leaves woman with her sexual void,' but supports a general invisibility: 'Nothing to be seen is equivalent to having no thing. No being and no truth' (48). Ultimately, Irigaray argues, 'woman,' together with the unconscious, is made 'into a property of [man's] language' (137), and subjected to a discourse that forces 'into the same representation - the representation of the self/same - that which insists upon its heterogeneity, its otherness' (137)- This risk, for Irigaray, is implicit in any theory of the subject since she assumes that it 'has always been appropriated by the "masculine"' (133).^ Brossard has no qualms about the theoretical possibility of women's access to subjectivity (if not by dint of theory alone) through the praxis of writing, as she makes clear, for instance, in L'Amer (1977),4 or states again in her paper 'L'acces a 1'ecriture' (1984): 'C'est en cherchant ses mots - et nulle part ailleurs que dans 1'ecriture cherche-t-on autant ses mots -qu'une femme s'initie a I'image positive qui la fait exister comme sujet' (La Lettre aerienne 136). But her construction of the opposition 'sens/non-sens' follows paths similar to those laid out by Irigaray's critique of one of the most powerful male discourses constructing 'woman.' In her study of the semantic effects of the word 'femme' in 'De radicales a integrates,' Brossard suggests that a single meaning or usage of this word is impossible without a certain 'accent' (La Lettre aerienne 89-91) in the given context 'du sens et du non-sens, la ou perceptions, desirs, realite, fiction et ideologic se rencontrent, s'annulent ou se transforment' (88). This malleability of what it is that gains an existence

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endowed with accepted (or acceptable) meaning, or that attains the status of 'reality' in the field of perception, desire, and ideology, applies, for Brossard, to any construction of meaning. The question of what is made to appear in this field depends, again, on who has the agency over the process: 'Si le patriarcat est parvenu a ne pas faire exister ce qui existe, il nous sera sans doute possible de faire exister ce qui existe' (La Lettre aerienne 87). While the distribution of sense and non-sense is made in any case (a factum drawing on the potentiality of fiction), the question who 'makes' sense (both who produces it, and who is recognized by it) remains: 'Qui done etant femme voudrait prendre le risque d'etre une femme, c'est-a-dire une fiction dont elle ne serait pas a 1'origine. Dans le lieu qui la cerne, la femme n'existe pas, c'est-adire qu'elle ne fait pas sens. Hors du lieu qui la cerne, elle apparait comme non-sens' (94). The antagonism delineated here entails a concept of conquest that is, on the one hand, directed against patriarchal discourse and its concomitant privations of meaning. In Amantes, Brossard writes: 'Je prends le risque d'une conquete / pour n'etre point privee de sens' (29). The strategy aims, on the other hand, at the integrity of an as-yet-invisible, virtual, other 'being woman' to appear in a communal process of discovery of radical feminists, as Brossard explains in 'De radicales a integrates': 'On les appelle feministes radicales et leur humanite se trouve justement la, dans la conquete qu'elles font mot a mot, corps a corps, de I'etre femme' (La Lettre aerienne 95). The problematical term 'conquest' that Brossard uses here with respect to I'etre femme evokes a certain violence with respect to a subjectivity withheld and to be conquered. The term 'conquest' implies also a certain Utopian teleology that Brossard voices, for instance in her conversation with van Schendel and Fisette, as indeed a liminal point of reference: 'C'est la recherche de 1'unite. C'est la sortie de la dialectique. C'est la recherche de 1'extase. C'est la recherche de 1'unite ou il n'y a plus de besoin, ou il n'y a plus de dependance' ('Un livre a venir' 9). These remarks evoke questions such as those raised by Jean Fisette with respect to a possibly theological 'quete' ('Un livre a venir' 9), or more generally concerning the affinity of these concerns with patterns 'qu'on a voulu rejeter a une certaine epoque de nos vies et qu'on retrouve toujours' (9). Writing for Brossard, however, while it is directed toward the limit of dialectics with its implicit dichotomy of subject and object, never does reach that point: 'C'est la tendance au plaisir. C'est la recherche du plaisir mais jamais atteint' (9). Rather than reaching its aim and end, or producing prepositional knowledge, writing is constantly produced itself by the limit of knowledge: 'La limite on ne peut connaitre ... je pourrais ecrire le restant de mes jours parce que je ne connais pas la limite' (9). While writing does not

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produce the end of pleasure, for Brossard it reproduces subjectivity differently in the context and process of 'une experience du plaisir' (toward its limit), 'parce que c'est un acte de deconditionnement, de decolonisation que 1'on opere par rapport a soi en tant que sujet' (11). While writing, according to these remarks made during Brossard's preparatory work for L'Amer,5 seeks to move toward its limit and an unknown other, it tries to undo, on the contrary, an otherness that configures its object as singular possibility and fixity. The part of L'Amer entitled 'L'acte de 1'oeil' assembles, in its subtitles over ten pages (49-58), the line 'L'ACTE VIOLENT DE L'OEIL AU MAUVE EPRIS S'INFILTRE RAVI DEPLOYANT LA (58), and the section begins, with the object, 'FIGURE' (59), a further sequence of subtitles that are variations on the topic of 'FIGURATION' (60), ending with 'FIGURE LIBRE' (68). The sequence 'L'acte violent de 1'oeil au mauve' alludes, as Barbara Godard has pointed out, to a book by Yves Gabriel Brunei 'where "le regard saisit" the woman, "apprehends" her, "perception" implying "capture," taking' ('L'Amer or the Exploding Chapter' 24). The ten sections on pages 49-58, however, all begin with quotations expressing the multiple opposite views of different women writers (Luce Irigaray, Virginia Woolf, Mary Barnes, Monique Wittig, Sande Zweig ...) on eyes and their acts. The first quotation is significantly taken from a section of Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman that opposes the eye (in the singular) to the flames of desire: 'Tout pourtant aura ete tente pour que 1'oeil, au moins 1'oeil, ne soit pas detruit par les feux du desir' (L'Amer 49; trans. Speculum 147). Irigaray's reading of Plato, in this passage, is concerned with philosophy's 'production and projection of forms in the eye's camera obscura' (147). Philosophical vision avoids direct contact with light by an 'optical apparatus' (148) of 'projection and reproduction screens' (149) that converge toward the 'central point of vision' of 'the mirror of the eye' (149). For this vision, the universe seems amenable to a reproduction by means of a system of representation and reflection. By 'turning a mirror ... round and round,' Irigaray quotes Plato's Republic, 'you would soon make the sun and the heavens, and the earth and yourself... and all the other things of which we were just now speaking, in the mirror' (qtd Speculum 151). While the philosopher-subject in this passage seems to capture and configure all aspects of the universe in the space and figures of his mirror, Brossard's text disperses the figure produced by representation when her assembly of title words reaches its object, 'FIGURE' (59). The grasping of an object as determined and fixed figure in the singular, the text suggests in a passage that emphasizes the power of figuration (and itself partially transgresses the grasp of grammar), implies an act of power that becomes pure subjection (under the

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real) in the realist figure: 'La figure est reelle comme une intention politique de la soumettre au pluriel devant les yeux, ou singulierement le pouvoir. La figure realiste est alors la plus soumise qui soit' (L'Amer 59). The formulation 'de la soumettre au pluriel devant les yeux' itself creates a multiple figure, since it oscillates between the two meanings of 'soumettre/ implying potentially either 'subjection/ or the possibility to 'submit' other figurations of 'woman' (to the eyes of women). In the realist mode of figuration, however, even the plural is reduced, in Brossard's pun, to a multiple reproduction of a stereotype of 'woman' as mother: la femme ou image de lait femmes'

(59)This passage parodies and inverts, toward its end, the role distribution (which Irigaray highlights at the end of her passage) between Plato's moving mirror and the images it 'makes.' In Brossard's version, the signified begins to move at a speed that leaves philosophy's signifying 'matrix of appropriation' (Speculum 151) at a loss. The represented image gained by its mirror and reflection is dissolved into a 'migratory' figure: La figure se tourne alors, visage double, s'accelerant, vrille dans les yeux, les evenements, encore, dans un dernier effort centre la cecite: la saisir. Or la figure est en mouvement. La figure est meconnaissable a toute allure. Intente illisible. Sequence. La figure est migratoire. (L'Amer 59) By undoing 'le contrat qui la lie a la figuration' (60), Brossard's texts, parallel to their transgression of accepted configurations of words and of grammatical sentences, replace the presentation of objects with differential relations between self and other. The part of L'Amer entitled 'L'Etat de la difference' works toward such 'equations' leading to other forms of likeness, or to an otherness with a difference. Subjectivity, and the production of a form of meaning, continue to be mediated by an other instance; but the very meanings of the terms of identity, alterity, and difference are altered in the work and process of the text toward what it later calls 'reellite' (66). The identifying grasp of the other as a defined object is associated with the gaze of the father, and its distancing effect. The relationships between the women in the text (mother, lesbian lover, daughter, and the narrator seeing herself under all of these aspects), however, superimpose identifications and differences. 'This interlacing of women's bodies and voices/ Barbara Godard notes, 'confuses the categories of identity and difference, of self and other' ('L'Amer or the Exploding Chapter' 29)While the narrator in L'Amer begins with a categorical statement of other-

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ness with respect to the reproductive function of the mother ('J'ai tue le ventre' [n]), her text also works out aspects of identification or, at least, contiguity, with the mother, in a creation of multi-dimensional meaning similar to the layered possible readings of the title. In 'L'Etat de la difference/ the distancing eye of the father is opposed to the touch of the mother: 'Us sont differents: elle et moi nous nous touchons. Lui, il me parle ... It faut que j'apprenne a parler. Mot a mot comme lui' (31). This entrance into a distancing, alien(ating) language of the other is directly linked, again, to the male gaze and its figurations: 'J'ai choisi d'abord de parler de son regard. Parce que c'est ainsi que commence la perception de la difference' (33). The father's gaze traverses a given 'laboratoir ideologique' (33) before it returns its image and completed figure. One of the results of this trajectory is a distancing separation: 'Ce qu'il choisit de regarder, il choisit de ne point le vivre' (33), Brossard's text posits. This eye is conditioned to perceive the objectivity of the other: 'Ce que les yeux ont vu c'est 1'autre. Non point sa difference, mais son alterite' (36). In response to this distancing of the other, Brossard's writing develops a double vision that seeks to deal with the available images, views, and words of a given lexicon, in order to discover other angles that reveal different dimensions. Difference occurs between, and as a function of, sameness and otherness. With the eyes that have learned to see in the image of the father, difference can be perceived only in a certain 'visage blanc' coexisting with a likeness in the mirror: 'Se repeter visage blanc devant la glace: je ne suis pas la meme' (36). This sentence itself reveals several dimensions when it is read from different perspectives. On the one hand, the 'blank face' can refer to the invisibility and absence of meaning imposed on 'woman' as the other of patriarchal discourse; on the other, it points to the speaker's refusal to respond to that image. The denial of sameness with the visible image implies invisibility; but it can also be read as beginning and opening, as a visible difference with respect to what the text calls, one page earlier, the 'filles patriarcales s'exerc,ant a la mimique des visages frais rases du matin clair' (35). The look into the mirror thus returns both the gaze of the other and an other gaze. Brossard's textual movement looks for the transformational aspect that can discover a multiple dimension in the surface figure, and take active part in its movement as synthesis: Tour une femme, c'est chercher la 1'identite que d'etre devant la glace. Et de n'y voir qu'une allusion. Illusion, metamorphose: regard de 1'autre. Idee fixe ou juxtaposition de ses corps de mere et de femme ... La difference c'est ce qu'il en reste. L'effet de soustraction' (36). The 'regard de [regarder] 1'autre' can thus be seen as oscillation between the objectifying gaze exerted by the (patriarchal) other, or as the

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self's consideration (the French 'regard' can also mean respect, and concern) for/of another woman in a differential space that reveals both sameness and difference between two superimposed planes. Which aspect of the image is perceived depends on the perspective of the deciphering and authoring imagination. The image can either return an object, or be set in motion by a differential subject: 'Une meme femme seule. La difference avec elle et moi, c'est que nous savons le chemin a rebours, d'objet a sujet' (35). The two women have this difference that makes them authors of their subjectivity, 'with' (avec) and 'between' each other - both as shared identity, and shared otherness (in a further double sense) both between themselves and against stereotyped sameness - when they appear together. The difference between 'elle' and 'moi' - while it can refer here to another woman and to the speaking woman measuring her difference and sameness - can thus also refer to the other (elle) who becomes an aspect of a self-reflexive objectivity (moi) that offers, for Brossard, agency and access to subjectivity in the act of writing: 'De la difference a la difference: 1'entre deux. Un espace de fiction ... Tu te fais autre interieure' (38). The very opposition between 'meme' and 'autre' is altered by the differential process of Brossard's text: La difference, c'est que je ne puis vivre en differe. Surseoir a la transformation, la synthese d'une meme femme seule. Et c'est cette meme difference que je cherche sur ton corps, autre, de femme au meme regard que le mien. Identique au tien. Pareilles comme une equation differentielle. Derivees de nos fonctions. De but en blanc dans le spectre lumineux. Projetees 1'une centre 1'autre ainsi qu'un reve polysemique. (L'Amer 35)

This passage appears programmatic for the direction that Brossard's writing takes with L'Amer, a book that ends with the sentence: 'Je veux en effet voir s'organiser la forme des femmes dans la trajectoire de 1'espece' (99). For Brossard, the integral form of women's subjectivity, allowing them to leave 'nos defroques de femmes fragmentees pour devenir integrates' (La Lettre aerienne 97), occurs as a textual 'reve polysemique,' derived from an energy made possible by the encounter between women's bodies and women's perspectives ('regard') in an as-yet-unwritten, blank (or 'white') space. The 'regard de 1'autre,' as well as the act of 'regarder 1'autre,' appears altered in this process of synthesis, which emphasizes, rather than the distance between subject and object, the likeness in the difference between female self and female other, from which the form or likeness of an other woman is derived. As Brossard explains in 'La plaque tournante' (1975), this

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'other gaze' determines her process of writing: 'J'ecris comment? avec un regard de femme pose sur moi' (La Lettre aerienne 18). In Brossard's typical association of the (female) body with the text this mediation and alteration of the form of one woman through the form of an other woman generates meaning outside given images and forms: 'Qu'il s'agisse d'une affaire de peau ou d'une question linguistique, il me semble que tout glissement de sens occasionne une breche dans la realite, a tout le moins dans la fac,on que nous avons de percevoir cette derniere' (La Lettre aerienne 59). On the one hand, these new meanings and perspectives are written in the blanks of an 'old' language that defines 'Woman' as negative other of 'Man/ and monofunctionally as mother. In a perspective and language 'dont la raison d'etre est d'etre maternelle' (La Lettre aerienne 13), Brossard signifies women, at one point in Le Sens apparent, literally with the help of a half-page blank: Nous savons:

(20)

On the other hand, Brossard's writing works toward the other of this other, a heterological production of meaning mediated by other women, and by a fictional form that adds a virtual dimension to a process in which it becomes real, thus forcing memory to think (at least) twice: 'on convoque 1'autre en soi a une realite qui se transforme. La fiction se cherche un sujet de fiction et la memoire reste seule a ne pas flancher. La memoire se fait plurielle' (La Lettre aerienne 43). 'EN B O R D U R E DE LA L A N G U E ' : PICTURE THEORY

Brossard poses the problem of visibility explicitly in the title of her fiction Picture theory (1982). If this work - like many of Brossard's texts - offers a difficult task for the reader and often denies and derails immediately accessi-

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ble meaning, this experience of a productive screen of opacity corresponds to the project of the text. Meaning is not withheld by a narrator in possession of a knowledge used to create suspense; meaning in Picture theory is shown to come into being as a process of female subjectivity in language. Brossard works here through the conditions of a virtual form that could become visible in the blank of female otherness, and explores stages of a process that L'Amer had referred to as 'la synthese d'une meme femme seule' (35). This conspicuous singular, and the vocabulary of synthesis and sameness ('meme'), evokes certain suspicions if quoted in isolation, but we will see that Picture theory does not arrive at an essentialist, prescriptive, or representational picture of 'woman.' The text's project, however, is indeed both driven by and directed against the ideas 'en double' (La Lettre aerienne 12) that mark female subjectivity in a schism Brossard refers to in 'La plaque tournante' (1975): 'Je suis d'un savoir d'homme et d'une condition feminine: hybride' (La Lettre aerienne 12). While the contradiction between these two worlds provides the point of departure for writing in the feminine, it also defines - if perceived antagonistically as it is in the case of Brossard - not only an opportunity for exploration, but a necessity to devise strategies for survival. In her paper 'Acces a 1'ecriture,' given two years after the publication of Picture theory, Brossard delineates a process of writing intended to lead away from this threatening split toward a form of synthesis that corresponds to an ongoing process rather than a static representation: 'en ecrivant, je deviens toute, sujet, personnages et recits, hypothese, discours et certitude, metaphore et mouvement de la pensee. En ecrivant, je deviens un processus de construction mentale qui me permet de faire synthese de ce que dans la vie ... il faut departager en fiction et en realite ... Je sais qu'ecrire c'est se faire exister' (La Lettre aerienne 131-2). In the context of a 'rature de genre' (132) - of the invisibility of women as women in the male-dominated imaginary Brossard speaks thus without hesitancy of an 'image essentielle' (132), and of writing as access for a woman 'a 1'image positive qui la fait exister comme sujet' (136). Brossard's willingness to risk a language of synthesis and sometimes even essence echoes formulations such as Cixous's 'universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history' (The Laugh of the Medusa' 245) - perspectives that have been critiqued as essentialist by other feminists. But Brossard's transformation of one woman by and toward other women in Picture theory also participates in the kind of 'negative dialectics' that Cixous develops, in The Newly Born Woman, against Hegel's 'Empire of the Selfsame (Empirically from Bad to Worse)' (78). Traditionally, Cixous suggests, the 'paradox of other-

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ness is that, of course, at no moment in History is it tolerated or possible as such. The other is there only to be reappropriated, recaptured, and destroyed as other' (71). The subject that Hegel describes is 'going out into the other in order to come back to itself (78). The kind of writing Cixous associates with 'woman/ by contrast, 'is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me - the other that I am and am not, that I don't know how to be, but that I feel passing, that makes me live - that tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me' (The Newly Born Woman 85-6). As opposed to otherness that connotes negative images and women as absence in the context of the given (male) symbolic, the space of incomplete knowledge appears here itself as the mobile figure of an other both inside and outside, as an opening of meaning that alludes to the unknown. Picture theory projects an allusion to such an unknown as an enabling form of alterity that it produces, and by which it is produced. Toward the end of the text, this other 'gaze/ and a corresponding virtual reality, will thus appear as 'une femme subliminale venue dans la nuit des temps poser son regard sur une autre femme' (200). While this projection of a differential alterity already opens its own reality in the act of writing and in the created text, Picture theory interprets the production of this virtual, fictional form also as an integral part of a 'real' historical process that comprises the production of its imaginary forms. In order to imagine a virtual form of female subjectivity that could 'stimuler en nous une qualite d'emotion propice a notre insertion dans 1'histoire' (Picture theory 85), Brossard uses the image and the structure of the hologram: J'ai joue continuellement dans les enigmes, et la premiere, la plus grande: comment faire apparaitre une femme, comment 'montrer' celle par qui tout peut arriver. C'est sans doute pourquoi la notion d'hologramme est si importante dans ce livre: qu'est-ce qu'un hologramme sinon une realite visiblement fictive? C'est alors que je me suis pose la question a savoir si je n'allais pas a mon tour faire apparaitre une autre femme fictive. Alors que je veux faire apparaitre une femme reelle. Mais en meme temps, je n'ai pas pu evacuer 1'imaginaire que j'avais autour de l'hologramme et peut-etre meme que sans cet imaginaire, je ne serais pas parvenue a faire apparaitre avec des mots celle par qui tout peut arriver. ('Entretiens' 179-80)

The visual metaphor of the hologram corresponds to the difficult circumstances under which a 'tableau de realite' (as Brossard paraphrases/translates her title Picture theory in 'Entretiens' [178]) that produces the 'reellite' of women has to accede to visibility. For a feminist consciousness that cannot but negotiate its meanings in a symbolic space in which, as Brossard agrees

184 Discoveries of the Other with Louky Bersianik, '1'homme male ... a pris la place de 1'autre' (qtd La Lettre aerienne 51), the search for a perspective outside this form of otherness appears as problematical as it is necessary. In 'La Lettre aerienne' (1980),' having rejected a textual practice in which 'il n'etait pas symboliquement important de savoir qui etait 1'auteur en chair, en memoire et en enfance derriere le texte' (La Lettre aerienne 5o),7 Brossard poses the question of where a kind of writing can find its support that is neither neutrally self-engendering nor engendered by the male other: 'Quelle forme peut bien prendre une pensee contemporaine qui donnerait aux mots une autre tournure d'esprit, car le corps a ses raisons' (La Lettre aerienne 51). This 'other turn of mind/ as Brossard suggests here, has some of its reason in the body. Already in 'Le Cortex exuberant' (1974), Brossard refers to the body as the source of an 'enigmatic' writing that shares much with her concept of the hologram: 'L'histoire de 1'ecriture enigmatique ne reside qu'en les corps de ceux et de celles qui firent mirer 1'encre de toute leur sensualite. En 1'enigme, un trompe-l'oeil pour mieux nous initier aux images kaleidoscopiques eventuelles' (Le Centre blanc 399). From the mid-seventies on, Brossard associates the source and aim of her writing not only with the body, but increasingly with the female body8 (and more specifically with a lesbian experience of the female body) that brings a silenced reality into the realm of language: 'Le corps feminin va parler sa realite, ses images, les censures subies, son trop-plein de corps aussi' (La Lettre aerienne 51). Brossard's metaphor of the hologram explores one possible image of the process in which the experiences of women's bodies 'remplies d'une memoire inedite et globale' (La Lettre aerienne 51) become visible in writing: 'Tout corps porte en lui un projet de haute technologic sensuelle; 1'ecriture en est son hologramme' (La Lettre aerienne 45). Picture theory seeks to bring this invisible reality to light in a form intended, according to Brossard, to 'abstract' vital energy called forth by an experience between women, and in particular by the energy experienced between two female lovers. Brossard uses the word 'Utopian' in order to indicate the absence of a form in which this experience can be thought integrally, and made visible in the field of meaning. The word 'utopia' etait essentiel a mon projet. Car du reel, de la realite, par exemple dans la scene blanche, qui est une scene d'amour, il me fallait absolument abstraire 1'essentiel ou disons la lumiere, 1'aura produit par 1'energie des deux amantes. C'est pourquoi je termine ce chapitre en disant que 'nous etions devenues des abstractions vitales'. Ce n'est qu'une fois devenues abstractions que ces deux femmes peuvent etre tout, integrates. ('Entretiens' 190)

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If Brossard uses the hologram as metaphor for a perceptual form and a certain unity in which the thought and writing of female subjectivity can appear, this form offers a mobile structure that creates different aspects depending on the movement of the observer. In certain perspectival respects comparable to the anamorphosis, the hologram negates the fixity of representation, and multiplies the perspectives, points of view, or angles it opens for the observing consciousness and its positions. In Brossard's words, the hologram enables a 'play of images': 'Si on fonctionne avec rhologramme, c'est le sentiment du relief, et non pas le relief en tant que tel, qui predomine. C'est un jeu d'images virtuelles et reelles' ('Entretiens' 194). We have seen, however, that Brossard refers to her writing not only as a play of images that has the power to alter perception, but also as an abstraction of energy that sheds light on the 'nuit des temps' - an expression that inverts, when used 'in the feminine' as it is here, the darkness and invisibility ascribed to 'Woman' as negative other of 'Man.' Brossard thematizes this absence of light in chapter one of Picture theory, 'L'Ordinaire/ in scenes of the city evoking aspects of historically given and institutionalized reality, 'le noir etant ici associe au patriarcat' ('Entretiens' 183). The images of the hologram and of the laser thus not only refer to the production of multiple surfaces and different angles of a 'reality' that is shown under its virtual aspects, but thematize the source of its energy and light. The distribution of light and energy according to the patriarchal self/other dichotomy is initially to some extent inverted, and eventually entirely displaced. The hologrammatic projection of the several textual planes of Picture theory emanates from the energy of a 'scene blanche,' which Brossard calls 'effectivement la scene qui obsede tout le livre' ('Entretiens' 196). Brossard refers to this scene, which soon becomes associated both with a sexual experience between two women and with a book as virtual object (Picture theory 24, 27), as 'une scene relativement inedite de notre quotidien' ('Entretiens' 195). The 'scene blanche' enters the text, like a textual or perceptual 'blank,' between two sides: it not only occurs between two women, but also is first mentioned as appearing between reality and fiction, 'une seule realite nee en toute fiction. La scene blanche du 16 mai' (20). In 1969, in her long, spiralling prose poem 'Le Centre blanc,' Brossard writes of Tespace entre les zones PLEINES' that reveals 'la mise en marche des mecanismes' (Le Centre blanc 204). The 'blanc' opens the space for a neutralization of meaning in a body that is, in this text, still highly decontextualized: 'tout se neutralise et s'eclaire se vide de tout sens tout la mort souffle blanc silence de memoire' (233). The 'blanc' occurs here as a blank of memory, as an emptying of remembered meaning that shows some affinities with

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Aquin's versions of a 'trou de memoire.'9 In an interview with Caroline Bayard and Jack David, published in 1978, Brossard refers to the 'blanc' as 'un moment d'authenticite ou les mots ne peuvent pas circuler' (65), and associates it with a word that appears as well at the beginning of Picture theory, 'extase': 'Le blanc, pour moi, c'est fondamentalement 1'extase [sic], le Nirvana, mourir a soi pour revivre de sa propre energie' (Bayard and David, Out-posts/Avant-postes 69). While Brossard in this interview still asserts that she has 'jamais pose en termes de femme' (69) the (for her) related questions of the 'blanc' and of ecstasy, the 'blanc' occurs in the context of an 'image de deux societes paralleles: celle des hommes et celle des femmes/ when Brossard takes it up again in her journal intime (50).I0 In the entry dated '19 mars 1983,' she maintains two elements already mentioned - a revelation of certain mechanisms and the metaphorical and transformational death of the subject - but formulates the 'blanc' more explicitly as a space in which meaning that generates societal structures can be transformed: Je n'ai cesse depuis d'essayer de comprendre; non pas la societe mais ce qui se cache dans la pensee, comment la pensee travaille pour que soit advenue la societe telle que nous la connaissons et la subissons ... C'est en ralentissant entre chaque mot que j'ai appris a identifier un certain nombre de mecanismes de la pensee. J'ai aussi appris a voir venir les blancs, a les entendre sans jamais pouvoir m'en faire tout a fait 1'echo. Les blancs, que 1'on appelle des espaces blancs, sont en fait tellement remplis de pensees, de mots, de sensations, d'hesitations et d'audaces qu'on ne peut traduire tout cela que par une tautologie, c'est-a-dire, par un autre blanc, celui-la visuel. C'est dans le blanc que quiconque ecrit, tremble, meurt et renait. (Journal intime 5O-1)11

In Picture theory, the 'scene blanche,' in its multiple, reworked versions and variations, comes to stand between the literal, visual blank we have seen in Le Sens apparent (20), on the one hand, and the concentration of thoughts, words, feelings (or sensations), and hesitations that are so condensed and intertwined as to occasion the blank, on the other hand. The 'scene blanche' is described in Picture theory as 'un relais qui persiste comme ecriture pendant que le corps dicte ses cliches, ferme les yeux sur les bouches qui s'ouvrent a repetition ... Face a ce qui s'offre: 1'extravagance des surfaces, transparence de la scene holographiee' (27). The text's deployment of the 'scene blanche' thus seeks to (a)void an automatically reproduced itinerary of thought and language that makes the 'bouches qui s'ouvrent a repetition' invisible - both those of the lesbian kiss and those that bring its reality into language by a multiplication of meanings and sentences. The text replaces a single 'rendering' or reading of the 'scene

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blanche' between two women by a kind of reality that Brossard will refer to, in Le Desert mauve (1987), as 'un devenir espace dans la memoire' (37) - a formulation that will itself be repeated and 'remembered' differently in that text when we read later in that novel: 'La realite est un desir espace dans la memoire' (44). Similarly, the 'scene blanche' of desire, and of becoming other, is not just remembered and rendered in Picture theory, but in fact 'overcoded' and created. Indeed, when the scene is mentioned for the second time (in the first of four sections entitled 'La scene blanche'}, the narrator (who will later appear as M.V., Ma Vie, or Marie Vallee) refuses to 'reconstitute' the scene, claiming that its reality cannot be accounted for conclusively: 'reconstituer serait 1'aveu de ce qui n'a pu etre qu'en fiction transformee par le temps. Pourtant nous voila, 1'horizon, jamais je ne saurai narrer' (24). The same refusal to reconstitute meaning and memory as givens appears programmatically on the first page of text in Picture theory: D'instinct et de memoire, j'essaie de ne rien reconstituer. De memoire, j'entame. Et cela ne peut etre d'enfance. Seulement d'extase, de chute, de mots. Ou de corps autreinent. Cellule d'urgence comme c'est corps a son ultime, a son insu, la langue le dira.

(*9)

The writing of this body and the body of this writing do not obey what the text later calls the 'penchant "naturel" a refaire le meme' (107); they rather occur at the boundary toward their other, at the limit of the 'corps a son ultime,' be it as skin or sexual climax, or as the textual limit of language and of knowledge. In her essay 'La Lettre aerienne,' Brossard speaks of the textual aspect of this body coming into existence 'a la limite, la ou c,a peut basculer' (47), as a simultaneous reality of thinking and of being thought, constituting a movement toward a still unknown other: 'Ce corps pense devient pensant a la vitesse de la lumiere ... Je veux croire pour continuer a ecrire que ce corps pensant, dont la texture complexe [est] constituee d'infinies memoires actives et laborieuses ... demeure encore etranger au corps connu et ravi qu'il nous arrive parfois de toucher en quelques lignes ecrites d'une main febrile et pourtant precise' (La Lettre aerienne 55). Brossard's readiness to entrust the perspective and direction of her writing to an as-yet-unknown form, marked by non-identity with respect to the thought and language she is given, constitutes a genuinely Utopian expectation that thinking and writing are praxes that neither return to the same, nor lead to its symmetrical inversion. Writing toward a form that will think herself from the outside as other from the point of view of an unknown other, Brossard sees the textual strategies of

i88 Discoveries of the Other excess, of the circle, and of the void transformed by 'les effets au feminin par un glissement de sens allant de 1'exces au delire, du cercle a la spirale et du vide a 1'ouverture comme solution de continuite' (La Lettre aerienne 48). If Brossard's sentences and her intertextual as well as intratextual references continually return to earlier passages, contexts, and significations, this movement 'returns' to a different point at which signification has been replaced by a further turn of the textual spiral. Repetition and the altering effect of the second occurrence of the 'same' play a primordial role in Picture theory, and draw our attention very directly to the work of language itself. The second chapter ('livre un'), for instance, begins with the following introduction: 'Je sais que la scene amoureuse a deja etc vue et consommee dans plusieurs de ses mecaniques, je sais cela, je sais cela que repetee elle determine 1'ouverture et le point de non-retour de toute affirmation' (47). This affirmation of knowledge occurs here between two different versions of the scene, a repetition that in fact undermines the very claim to 'knowledge.' The fact that the scene has already appeared under several aspects by no means prevents a further exploration and turn of the spiral - that would be superfluous indeed, had knowledge been completed previously. (Brossard in fact states in 'Entretiens' that the text's announcement here is strategic [195].) The process of multiple readings and rewritings points to the fact that the scene's numerous and contradictory meanings exceed the scope of referential sentences, and of a determined meaning isomorphic with available language. The Utopian form Brossard seeks to project can thus not be 'rendered' or remembered, but only appear in the interstices of a textual body that creates meaning in the contact between and through its surfaces and presented elements. This turning of the spiral - this spiralling 'return' to the 'same' and point of origin that has become other, 'altered' by the repetition in a different context - occurs on the level of situation as a rereading and rewriting from ever new angles that add different perspectives and dimensions to the scene; on the level of words, this strategy is made explicit in Picture theory as a multiple reading, writing, and reinterpretation of the dictionary - both a disruption and an appropriation of its potential for the dissemination of meaning by which five women turn the patriarchal night into day: 'Toute la nuit explorant au grand jour le dictionnaire, le contexte dans lequel les idees s'etaient formees puis renouvelees, identiques et machine gun a repetition dans nos bouches ... Filles studieuses, nous detournerions le cours de la fiction, entrainant avec nous les mots tour a tour, spirale ignee, picture theory' (99). The other occurs in between the text's different forms of language (for instance, prose and poetry), in its inter- and intratextual references, between

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its differently read words, its grammatically altered and reiterated sentences and altered scenes - and ultimately, both between women and between them and the form of 'celle par qui tout peut arriver' (Picture theory 165). In Picture theory, this Utopian form, 'le mot [utopie] est "montre", ecrit' ('Entretiens' 190). Brossard's formulation concerning the textual enactment and praxis of a Utopian form refers to Wittgenstein's dictum 'qu'on ne peut pas dire la realite, mais qu'on ne peut que la montrer' (qtd 'Entretiens' 178). The attraction of Wittgenstein's thought in this context lies in the fact that it points to the limit of language, and in particular to the problem that language cannot, by speaking, comprise its own identity. 'What can be said can only be said by means of a sentence, and so nothing that is necessary for the understanding of all sentences can be said.' This formulation by Wittgenstein, which Brossard chooses as the second epigraph of Picture theory, is the logical consequence of Bertrand Russell's 'theory of types/ according to which a mixing of logical types in self-reflexive statements leads to paradoxical nonsense. Wittgenstein refers to this theory of antinomies (of which the Cretan's paradox would be an example) in the Tractatus: 'No proposition can make a statement about itself, because a prepositional sign cannot be contained in itself (that is the whole of the "theory of types")' (3.332). If the sentence refers to 'itself,' it becomes, in fact, the object (i.e., the proposition) of a later utterance. In this sense, repetition produces both another subject in speech, and another reference: in the second round (of the spiral), the earlier subject has moved outside the proposition that is now her/his object. This impossibility of the sentence to refer to itself as identical can either be viewed pessimistically, or - as in the case of Brossard - be greeted enthusiastically as an opening for the production of meaning. The Tractatus, in its construction of what is possible to say and to think, thematizes the limit of language and points implicitly to its beyond, its other, and its outside. The Tractatus does not dispute the existence of this other, but insists that it is outside the reach of language. According to the Tractatus, one cannot step outside one's language: 'The limits of my language mean the limits of my world' (5.6). Beyond this point, language is not possible: 'What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence' ('Author's Preface,' 3). That is the gist of the introduction to the Tractatus, as well as of its last sentence (proposition 7). But beyond the construction of the limit of what can be said and thought with respect to the other that appears ex negativo in this process of exclusion, Wittgenstein attributes a certain 'unworldliness' to this other when he asserts that the world ('my world') is identical with facts that can be stated: 'The world is the totality of facts, not of things' (1.1). This congruity of 'my world' with possi-

190 Discoveries of the Other ble thought, while it does not deny the existence of the unthinkable, heterological other, excludes its accessiblity by means of thought and language: 3.02 A thought contains the possibility of the situation of which it is the thought. What is thinkable is possible too. 3.03 Thought can never be of anything illogical, since, if it were, we should have to think illogically. 3.031 ... we could not sat/ what an 'illogical' world would look like.

Brossard partially subscribes to this logic when she quotes, as we have seen, Wittgenstein's 'qu'on ne peut pas dire la realite, mais qu'on ne peut que la montrer' (qtd 'Entretiens' 178). But Picture theory does not offer any reservations with respect to language's ability to 'show' through language what cannot be 'said' by language - that is, a Utopian other between the turns of the spiral that continually returns to the 'same' as other. Thus, Brossard's first epigraph (which precedes Wittgenstein's 'What can be said can only be said by means of a sentence') refers to an act of repetition in which language shows its own referential inadequacy, attaining - paradoxically - signification and meaning between the repeated words and propositions by pointing to the unsayable beyond their individual referential power. The first epigraph is: 'Une repetition sans spectacle n'a aucun sens a moins qu'elle ne soit la langue en elle-meme.'12 Brossard has an active interest in the double-sided 'non-sens' of given (and 'sayable') reality, both because it refers to the little sense this reality makes from (or offers to) a radical feminist point of view, and because the 'non-sens' of the status quo refers also to the 'invisible' other of its male-dominated meaning - woman. Brossard's usage of language seeks to 'show' the invisible, not-yet-existing Utopian reality that cannot be 'said' in the world constituted by given, male-dominated language and meaning. In Picture theory, we see Timagination tentee par 1'impossible, deborde par 1'utopie, utter, dutter, K.O. metaphysique' (Picture theory 115). Brossard thus takes Wittgenstein's Tractatus at its word.13 If, as Francois Charron has suggested, Brossard makes language 'refuser les recompenses du sens, provoquer des ruptures dans les habitudes de lecture' (73), she uses words literally to show the unthinkable. But as the feminist marker 'telles' in the opening epigraph of the section 'Hologramme' emphasizes, Wittgenstein's 'unthinkable' is more specifically associated, in Picture theory, with the other of male-dominated thought: 'La langue est un spectacle de ce que nous ne pouvons pas penser commes telles' (Picture theory 183). Brossard comments on this ungrammaticality: 'La seule fagon dont je pouvais montrer

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le spectacle de 1'impensable, c'etait par 1'intervention grammaticale du feminin pluriel' ('Entretiens' 178). The sentence makes the reading eye spin back and forth: coming from the demonstrative pronoun in the masculin singular 'ce' to the feminine plural 'telles' in the relative clause, the interpreting movement returns to the earlier 'ce/ and seeks to 'make sense' between these two grammatical aspects and perspectives of the sentence - a sense that is 'inter-dit/ Going in circles, reading will discover signification only on another level, namely in the incongruity between the two sides that establishes the hologrammatic picture - and the spiral - of the sentence. This multi-dimensional demonstrative 'ce ... telles' only 'shows' a reality by pointing to a breach of meaning - a certain 'blanc' that calls, however, for further language and many different tongues. Brossard here transposes and effectively recuperates the 'other' (nonsense) of Wittgenstein's single, decidable meaning into the context of a meaning production in the feminine plural. Simultaneously, the connection comes to the fore linking this 'demonstrable' work of language (beyond its 'sayable' meaning) to her concept of the hologram as a multi-perspectival ensemble of aspects that grow out of a 'blank' meaning in a spiralling movement. Louise Dupre suggests that the 'hologramme vient en quelque sorte illustrer la spirale ... Entre la spirale et 1'hologramme se dessine une trajectoire qui ... marque le desir de faire sortir le langage, 1'ecriture, la pensee meme de la bidimensionnalite' (Strategies du vertige 120). Brossard herself remarks: 'Wittgenstein est important comme support de stimulation, mais il ne faut pas oublier la notion d'hologramme qui deplacee au niveau de 1'ecriture m'incite a vouloir faire le tour d'un mot, d'une idee, d'un concept afin d'en saisir toutes les dimension. De meme qu'il s'agit de faire le tour de ma propre subjectivite' ('Entretiens' 178). The text of Picture theory thus comes into being as the writing of a virtual self that cannot really 'say' its self, but rather spirals again and again through the other - both the unsayable of the 'scene blanche/ and, as we will see, the space opened by the words of others. If the narrator M.V., Ma Vie (or Marie Vallee), who brings herself into being as other while bringing the other into her being, is perfectly able to speak of a conquest with respect to her project of 'showing' the blank of the dark continent, her approach to the white map does not imply the extension of sameness, but rather the elucidation of interstices: Ma Vie privee est une carte spherique d'influences et de points de rencontre, elle tourne autour de la langue comme hypothese et filtre du quotidien fictif et theorique. Dans la conquete, je flaire un espace mental qui ne serait pas occupe par des descrip-

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tions, ici anecdote, la penchant 'naturel' a refaire le meme ... : les urbaines radicales discernent dans les blues-prints, 1'occasion propice d'intervenir, jongleuses et aeriennes. (Picture theory 107)

The virtual space of the narrator's self, 'Ma Vie privee,' is anything but 'private' in the traditional sense of the word. It is, rather, likened to a network of itineraries and spaces 'in between' the self and the other. This network appears both as a reality becoming visible, through the filter of language, as 'other' with respect to the 'quotidien/ and as the space established between the 'influences' and 'points de recontre' - the plurality of others and of other texts. The community of 'urbaines radicales' that Picture theory mentions here as the enabling context of this other space is theorized, in 'La Lettre aerienne/ as a thinking perspective that becomes text as a projected hologrammatic 'memory' in the plural: Les radicales urbaines inventent des fictions qui leur ressemblent ... L'idee qu'elles se font de de la realite se transforme en line perspective pensante qui est la texture meme des textes qu'elles produisent. Ce que les urbaines radicales projettent dans 1'espace du reel ressemble a une memoire plurielle, toutes facettes miroitantes. Le texte vecu comme une image tridimensionelle. (La Lettre aerienne 60)

We thus see the initial 'je' of Picture theory mediate its own itinerary not only through an other woman called 'Florence Derive' but as well through Florence Derive's own acts of altered repetitions that appear as mise en abyme of Brossard's text: 'Florence Derive repete parfois un certain nombre de gestes qui subsistent ainsi qu'ecriture et chaque fois elle en deplace 1'ardeur et le sens' (19). If this subjectivity in motion 'se livre momentanement a la necessite d'etre ce que Ton nomme, parmi les encres, un personnage' (19), Florence Derive remains incongruous with the notion of character. Her telling last name is anything but coincidental, as the narrator later emphasizes: 'Derive etait un nom qu'il fallait savoir meriter en dehors des questions de famille' (95). Not only Florence Derive's repeated gestures leave the trace of a writing behind ('qui existent ainsi comme ecriture') that 'derives' its articulations in the space between different repetitions as much as it sets meaning 'adrift' (as an other translation of 'derive' suggests). This articulation leads quite literally from 'reality' to fiction, from what already exists (as written and as sayable) to what could exist, and to what comes into existence (at least as written reality and blueprint) in its altered repetition. Brossard delineates, in 'La Lettre aerienne' a whole praxis of writing that comes into existence as the articulation of this limit, between reality and fiction, and between the

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given (of what is, or can be written, said, thought) and its other: 'C'est done a la limite du reel et du fictif, entre ce qui parait possible a dire, a ecrire, mais qui s'avere souvent au moment de 1'ecrire, impensable et entre ce qui semble evident et qui apparait a la derniere seconde inavouable que se trace une ecriture de derive. Desir de derive / desir derive de' (La Lettre aerienne 53). On the one hand, the text's signifying movement (that 'derives' partially recognizable meaning as often as it 'derails' expected meaning) explores the space opened between the same and the other it becomes by repetition and by contextual alteration ('J'avance, j'avance, se dit-elle, vers la repetition' [33]). In this process, Brossard often underlines the displacement operated by these infratextual references by inserting them into violently clashing 'contexts.' When we read, for instance, 'Le poeme hurlait opening the mind' (Picture theory 170), this irruption of English into the French phrase both refers to, and enacts an opening of the mind toward a different context. But this reference to the violent self-articulation of language ('le poeme hurlait') has already come through other articulations that offer multiple 'derivations.' In the earlier formulation, 'Le poeme hurlait of course a rose is always following opening the mind' (40), for instance, we could read the English part both as the proposition of the poem's enunciation, or as a juxtaposed comment that in fact warns of the power of cliche inherent in any poetic utterance - a warning that in turn interrupts its own course, and our expectations (for instance, of Gertrude Stein's 'A rose is a rose is a rose') in many ways. On the other hand (as the last example already indicates), these intratextual 'derivations' of the same toward the other find their parallels in the spaces opened between the self's and the other's (textual) body. One of the passages entitled 'La scene blanche' begins thus with the preparations for these rooms that open intertextually: 'Des citations puisque les chambres anticipees sont remplis de livres a craquer' (31). Thus begins here a 'travail de formulation qu'un corps entreprend a 1'egard d'un autre pour y convenir d'un mouvement de la pensee' (31). In the introductory first chapter, 'L'Ordinaire,' the sections entitled 'La scene blanche' (24, 27, 31, 36) still appear interspersed with scenes and references to other texts that often denote the (patriarchal) 'ordinaire,' or that work their way out of this context. The citational process includes a conference text by Florence Derive on torture and women, a feminist journal (32), or a trilingual extract epitomizing Wotan's patriarchal power and violence in Wagner's Die Walkure. This praxis of quotation, beginning with the epigraphs (Wittgenstein, Gertrude Stein) and continuing throughout Picture theory^ is complemented by multiple references to other books and manuscripts produced by 'characters' in the text. All the members of the Derive

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family we learn about are said to be writers - from the mother whose second family name is also that of Gertrude Stein (Sarah Derive Stein [138]) to her daughters Florence and Claire, and her son John (a novelist and publisher who, however, 'n'avail aucune notion du roman' [20]). The text furthermore refers several times to the writing and the manuscript of a writer called Sandra Artskin (23, 39), whose last name is telling in a text concerned with writing as a process of signification that comes into existence between texts and bodies. While the introductory chapter one, 'L'Ordinaire,' often resembles a spiralling collage in which signification occurs between different (and differently repeated) texts and text types, the following 'livre un/ entitled 'La Perspective/ switches to poetry and concentrates on the 'scene blanche' between the narrator and Claire Derive. This approach to the 'scene blanche' - now isolated from the context of the negative other in which it had occurred before - emphasizes the parallel between the body and the textual body and their mediation in the other that had been prepared in the earlier sections entitled 'La scene blanche'. Claire Derive appears here both under the aspect of a physical other woman, and as the enabling catalyst and other who brings the textual body into being that will write: ]e suis eternelle sous la langue de Claire Derive presente comme line illusion produite de la realite. Je suis allongee et eternelle dans la blanche matinee qui inonde la scene. ]e suis (60)

As the expression 'illusion produite de la realite' and the reference to light suggest, the scene is likened to a hologrammatic 'being.' The last name of the other, Claire Derive, is in keeping with the movement between the interstices and different aspects of this multi-dimensional space that is both 'real' (but unsayable) and imagined, a 'realite nee en toute fiction' (20). The other's first name, Claire, evokes the register of light that has been prepared for earlier by a quoted museum inscription, 'En HOLOGRAPHIE, 1'element principal est le mode d'eclairage' (30). A later echo of the words 'hall d'entree' at the beginning of this chapter will thus refer explicitly to a hologram: 'Corps holographies dans le hall d'entree. Nous entrons' (135). The scene opens a virtual, complex space in which one body appears as aspect of the other body, as much as the physical experience and the mentally perceived form of it come into existence through each other. Each aspect of 'reality' appears, as it were, in the light of the other, an opening (toward an other body and an other meaning) that also endangers the boundary and circle of the self. This transparency, as one of the sections entitled 'La scene blanche' suggests, implies

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'1'aveu total et sans retour' (31): 'Conjugue a 1'eclairage, le plaisir d'audace revet dangereusement le corps de 1'autre d'une pellicule existentielle de laquelle surgit, condensee en une image, 1'harmonie qui fait sens' (31). Writing appears in the 'scene blanche' through the 'transparence des peaux' (36) on both sides of the boundary of self and other, who become Titteralement pellicule 1'une de 1'autre au coeur d'une motivation radicale' (36). In this metaphor of the skin as shared 'pellicule,' the boundary becomes a transparent mutual film and surface of self and other through (and on) which 'unedited' energy (or light) and invisible experience appear as meaningful form. In this form, writing creates its altered self together with its altering other, 'Claire Derive': the writing 'je' and Claire Derive appear - to recall a formulation from L'Amer - 'pareilles comme une equation differentielle. Derivees de nos fonctions ... Projetees 1'une contre 1'autre ainsi qu'un reve polysemique' (L'Amer 35). Similarly, both the 'real' and the virtually created 'scene blanche' appear together, and through each other, as two aspects of one process. At the beginning, they are presented as close but separate: 'II y a deux scenes alors. L'une datee du 16 mai 1'autre tres rapprochee. Celle du livre et celle du tapis' (27). But in the exploration of its own limit toward its unsayable other, writing superimposes these two aspects, as Brossard suggests, to the point where they cannot be told apart: 'Quelqu'un va chercher un livre, et on ne sait pas si c'est la scene du livre ou la scene blanche sur le tapis avec 1'indice arbitraire du 16 mai' ('Entretiens' 195). On the one hand, the scene of writing and the production of meaning appear through the body since they are 'derived' from the scene of love-making. The experience of the latter, on the other hand, occurs already in a space of meaning that either leaves it as invisible 'blanc,' or sets meaning adrift around that 'scene blanche' in a form of textual production. The writing of Picture theory thus becomes the virtual book it speaks of at the beginning of 'livre un' - just as the instance of enunciation, 'je/ both opens its meaning toward the other (drifts towards 'Derive'), and 'derives' its own becoming from this other whom it articulates. If, in this process, Tes lettres, dans une sorte de delire controle, devancent la conscience jugeante de celle qui ecrit' (Charron 73), the subject also seems to bring its own future into being at the boundary of its self, as a later passage in Picture theory asserts: 'J'EVOQUE. JE CERTIFIE MON ESPOIR. SKIN utopie lent vertige' (167). Meaning and writing, then, appear simultaneously on both sides of the 'blank mirror' of the unknown: self and other are written, at their limit and boundary, 'recto-verso.' At the beginning of Tivre un,' we thus read: j'entre simultanement dans le hall d'entree

196 Discoveries of the Other (un je se perd ici au travail ...) ma presence se confond a 1'odeur du bois

(49)

A book 'appears' here in the double sense. As (virtual) object it is mentioned at the very beginning: le livre, je 1'ai tout de suite remarque sur la table, a 1'envers et ouvert recto-verso le seul objet virtuel

(49)

But this virtual book, writing/written on both sides (recto-verso), open yet with its face down, also comes into being in this very scene. The 'je' who enters here, coming upon a scene in which an I (the self or the other?) loses itself in (the) work (of entering?), and who 'remarks' a virtual, double-sided book appears again later associated with the Todeur du bois' - but this time as the writer: recto-verso un livre promis a 1'envers et je composais dans 1'odeur du bois les relais sous la langue pour qu'elle parle

(61)

It is not clear where agency originates, whether in the speaking 'je' who composes forms as 'relais' under the tongue (of Claire Derive), or whether, inversely, language comes from that 'tongue' of the other. The skin, the body, and the transparent boundaries of self and other become more and more explicitly the 'relais' for a language ('puis venait la transparence les corps portes/ comme des relais' [63]) that moves, through the 'aura produit par I'energie des deux amantes' ('Entretiens' 190), to an abstraction of an open, transparent horizon. The formulation '... J'avais / centre mon corps abstrait la sensation du corps / de Claire Derive et je pronongais des emotions' (Picture theory 68) is thus later echoed and rewritten as an opening toward the unknown other (both as horizon and 'lapsus'): 'J'avais centre mon corps abstrait la sensation que 1'horizon me serait pour toujours accessible ... J'etait celle qui ecrit rendue visible par ses lapsus. Peau de synthese' (150). The Claire Derive/'claire derive' of the text is thus the translator of the invisible self, a moment in a spiralling movement between self and other that returns a different other, and 'returns' to a different self: 'je mettais ma bouche pres de la sienne / ... je I'aime, qu'elle traduit / ma bouche' (69). In this process, language and thought move toward the limit of visibility, until

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the instance of enunciation describes itself traversed by the invisible: je pensais reellement comme une peau qui vit sa raison d'etre. }e m'allongeais a 1'infini repetee et successive, une reponse diffuse traversee par 1'invisible j'etais devenue

(71)

If the speaker declares herself simultaneously traversed by invisibility and identical with it, she has made herself, to recall the formulation by Descombes, 'other with the other/ Not coincidentally, this other -invisibility - is also the quality of the textual other - Claire Derive - when the lighting of the scene ('En HOLOGRAPHIE, 1'element principal est le mode d'eclairage' [30]) is determined by her gaze: 'Claire Derive est invisible quand elle I inonde la scene de son regard' (72). And yet this becoming (of) the invisible other appears visible in writing, and leaves the text as the trace of its work in thought and language behind. As the formulation 'pellicule Tune de 1'autre' implies, a visible form appears through this mutual surface that is the boundary between self and other, but that the narrator and Claire Derive have 'between them' - in common with respect to the unknown other they are in the process of becoming. As the association of the skin with a screen later in Picture theory conveys, subjectivity is still filtered, as it was in the prior symbolic construction of Woman as invisible other of Man, through an other instance outside (from which it returns different). But this exteriority appears here through an other who is experienced outside a binary logic of exclusion - by a woman 'au meme regard que le mien' (L'Amer 35). In 'Entretiens/ Brossard remarks: 'Pour moi il clair [sic] que les femmes ne peuvent etre pensees que par elles-memes' (186-7). ^ *s tnus not surprising that early in chapter three ('livre deux'), which shows five women spending time among themselves on an island with Utopian connotations, a passage (which describes the journey there) begins: 'Chacune de nous prenait le relais vers la mer' (Picture theory 79). Neither the feminine singular in combination with the community of the first-person plural ('chacune de nous') nor the term 'relais' (which we have encountered as a description of the 'scene blanche' [27], and of the forms composed by 'je' [61]) appear unexpected in this context. Similarly, the passage continues in a symbolic register that marks the movement toward light: 'L'autoroute etait d'ombre et de lumiere vers la fin du voyage, au crepuscule' (79). This chapter unfolds the topography of a symbolic itinerary that leads to the sea ('la mer') - a word alluding

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on the level of the signifier to a transformation of the symbolic representation of women as mother ('la mere'; L'Amer}. While this form of symbolic representation is written in the contradictory, undecipherable field of patriarchal thought ('la mere est pleine de secrets' [81]), the rereading and rewriting of the signifier appear in a context of revealed meaning, as the repetition of the sentence 'la mer est sans secret' (43, 115, 192, passim) suggests throughout the text.The island that the women reach through the sea, however, carries itself the connotation of a 'relais' - surrounded by a boundary between transparency and the limit of visibility. From the island the narrator finds herself on, she gazes at the sea: 'Je regarde la mer d'une maniere insensee comme pour une premiere fois, situee a 1'origine et a 1'extreme de ma vie' (80). While the last two words here evoke her own subjectivity (Ma Vie, M.V., Marie Vallee), her own place on a (utopian) island is thematized by an other island that could be a further 'relais' toward a continent beyond the sea: 'La journee s'annoncait ensoleillee derriere ce qui semble etre une ile au loin mais qui sait peut-etre le continent. Une brume d'aube nous laissait dans le doute face a ce territoire emergeant avec le jour' (80). This emerging continent - evoking intertextually Brossard's 'Ma Continent/ and thus a subjectivity of women existing beyond the exceptional status implied by the Utopian island here in Picture theory - is still invisible behind a screen of haze in the early morning. But the whole chapter deals with a transformation of the night and its invisibility. On the one hand, the text refers here to Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, and in particular to the chapter 'Watchman, What of the Night?' ('"Veilleur qu'en est-il de la nuit" est le plus beau chapitre' [94]); in this chapter, Nora Flood comes upon the doctor O'Connor in women's clothes, 'at the hour when he had evacuated custom' (101), and thus finds him trying to escape the definitions of gender. Listening to his speech about the night, Nora responds: 'now I see that the night does something to a person's identity, even when asleep' (102-3). But m tn^s chapter of Picture theory, the gender definitions and invisibilities of the night are beginning to be transformed in a space between women who, 'toute la nuit explorant au grand jour le dictionnaire' (99), prepare for a different night, and for a different morning. The night that is traversed here by light is as symbolic as the invisibility of the 'territoire emergeant' beyond the horizon at dawn. But if women seek to define themselves, in this Utopian space attaining visibility, in the light and context of other women, la subjectivite de 1'Homme' determines value and visibility at the root of words that women as well have interiorized, and 'consommes avec leur racine' ('Entretiens' 191). Brossard thus formulates the question of how to displace the organizing principle by which visibility and

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meaning, and the very distribution of Utopia and reality, are organized: 'Maintenant nous sommes en train de nous deraciner de la subjectivite/objectivite de l'Homme pour nous enraciner dans notre propre subjectivite qui transforme la realite ... Comment faire pour que le mot femme puisse etre a 1'origine et generer du sens general et particulier, qu'il puisse etre moteur d'une lecture de toutes les realites?' (191). Unlike the structuring principle of male subjectivity, this point of origin and reference does not exist 'in the feminine': Tour les femmes, la question du sens est fondamentale parce qu'elle rejoint la question de leur existence ontosymbolique. Pour un homme, to be or not to be est une formule accessoire parce que l'Homme existe ... Pour une femme to be, c'est la question' (192). Since 'woman' does not (yet) exist - in the set of presuppositions that guide the project of Picture theory - as a productive principle of female subjectivity (in a world perceived under the bias of male subjectivity), one of the most important topics that is discussed, in the Utopian space among women in the third chapter of Picture theory, is the question of abstraction. Daily lived emotions, Claire Derive suggests, occur in a context of constructed meaning that takes form in abstractions: A la source de chaque emotion, il y a une abstraction dont 1'effet est 1'emotion mais dont les consequences derivent la fixite du regard et des idees. Chaque abstraction est une forme potentielle dans 1'espace mental ... Avoir recours a 1'abstraction est une necessite pour celle qui fait le projet, tentee par 1'existence, de traverser les anecdotes quotidiennes et les memoires d'utopie qu'elle rencontre a chaque usage de la parole.

(89)

In the movement of writing by which Picture theory traverses existing language and mental forms, the word 'femme' plays the role of such an abstraction. But for Brossard, the 'enigme vitale' of abstraction 'n'a rien d'abstrait' ('Entretiens' 188); in a spiralling movement, an abstraction is both the result, Taboutissement d'un sentiment, d'une intuition, ou d'une emotion,' and the orienting perspective for new intuitions and emotions: 'L'abstraction est le fil d'arrivee d'une subjectivite transcendee. Une fois enoncee, elle devient source d'emotion parce que le mystere, une fois de plus refait surface' ('Entretiens' 188). Since the project of Picture theory seeks to filter the conditions of this inherently incomplete meaning out of the given word-body - 'le corps / le dictionnaire' (169) that 'dicte ses cliches' (27) - from the perspective of an experience between women, the boundary of language is associated, as we have seen, with the boundary of/between women where the stages of

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abstraction surface. In the section 'SCREEN SKIN' of chapter four ('livre trois'), entitled 'La Pensee/ language appears as an 'ecran de selection/ and also turns concrete detail into a space of abstraction: 'Dans le concret de 1'ecriture, 1'abstraction continue. Space, ink skin a dessein' (127). At the boundary of this 'ink skin/ subjectivity in language not only spirals through the concrete and abstract forms of another woman and of particular other women, but brings itself constantly forth as writing at the limit of the invisible and the unknown. The text produces its forms between concrete moments (such as those between the five women on the island) and a process of abstraction that seeks to make an energy amenable to language that Brossard calls, indeed, Tessentiel': 'Celui-ci se fabrique entre deux femmes et va fabriquer des mots par la suite, va donner naissance a d'autre mots qui vont faire apparaitre cette femrne qui est tout a la fois abstraite, reelle, fictive, concrete et charnelle' ('Entretiens' 197). Brossard's body-text thus comes into existence 'en bordure de la langue, frange chromatique. Skin/link: oui la langue pouvait etre reconstitute en trois dimensions a partir de sa partie dite de plaisir la oil fusionnent le corps lesbien, la langue et I'energie' (Picture theory 188). Through the skin/link 'en bordure de la langue/ the self surmises and produces the other it becomes, reading and writing its own origin and cause (both enabling and created, earlier and later in the movement of the spiral). In the section 'Screen Skin Too/ this surface appears as 'une litophanie a 1'aspect changeant' (147), a medium of transformation by means of which M.V. - recounting a moment of the text's genesis - turns an emotion into the idea of 'la scene blanche' (and thus into a mediation or 'relais' [147]). But this form of increased meaning and visibility appears still through a semitransparent surface. 'Litophanie/ according to the dictionary, is a 'dessin sur une matiere rendue translucide par des inegalites d'epaisseur/ allowing it to obtain 'des effets de transparence dans le verre opaque' (Petit Robert). With the transition toward the section 'Screen Skin Utopia' (which in turn is followed by the 'Hologramme' at the end), the text invokes the voice of an other who will have left the obscuring aspects of the old language behind: 'La voix de Claire Derive est sans accent. Cette nuit, c'est elle qui parlera la pensee de nos corps souvenus et surgis comme des figures exposees a la lumiere ... Le corps generique s'apprete a souffler mots' (160). The 'corps generique/ like the idea of a 'scene blanche' before, is another abstraction as 'relais' toward a Utopian form. This form, however, does not appear as determined 'picture' amenable to representation either. The more visible and concrete this abstraction becomes, the more it appears as a 'clear drift' (Claire Derive) - a becoming other that the self interiorizes, and by

Utopian Form in the Work of Nicole Brossard 201 which it is engendered: 'En commenc.ant par le mot femme a propos de 1'utopie, M.V. avail choisie de se concentrer sur une abstraction pressentie. A partir du moment ou M.V. avait employe le corps generique comme expression, je savais que derriere elle 1'ecran serait baisse et qu'elle serait projetee dans mon univers' (165). On the one hand, the 'corps generique' has surfaced between Claire Derive and M.V.; on the other hand, M.V. appears here clearly distinct from the instance of enunciation, 'je/ She thus becomes the enabling other inside the first person, who writes herself as other through the other, surfacing through the 'transparency' of the thetic 'ecran' that posits subject and object as unmediated entities. In the 'corps generique/ the written and the writing body are thought of as coinciding, bringing each other forth continually: Je n'aurais pas a faire naitre d'une premiere femme une autre femme. Je n'aurais a 1'esprit que I'idee qu'elle puisse etre celle par qui tout peut arriver. J'aurais tout en I'ecrivant a imaginer une femme abstraite qui se glisserait dans mon texte, portant la fiction si loin que de loin, cette femme participant des mots, il faudrait la voir venir, virtuelle a 1'infini ... . Je n'aurais pas dans la fiction a 1'inventer. La fiction serait le fil d'arrivee de la pensee. Le terme exact. (165)

According to this projection, the abstract form of a virtual subject continually leaves its concrete effects in the written text behind, and is projected again, in turn, by that writing which it causes but with which it still remains - 'virtuelle a 1'infini' - unidentical. The enunciatory 'je' is thus not an independent agency prior to the form it invents in fiction. But while writing and its subject in language are brought forth by this virtual other, this form - which seems to exist already outside the written - would not come into visible existence without writing. 'Le fil d'arrivee de la pensee' - fiction that exceeds visible meaning, rather than a stated term - is the 'terme exact/ This formulation echoes Brossard's affirmation (via Wittgenstein) that one can only 'show' rather than 'say' unthought reality, that the invisible other eludes prepositional identification. The passages in Picture theory that offer, as textual moments, formulations of female subjectivity, refer not to a term, but to a process (in writing) of being thought by a virtual form that writing (having come through an 'ecran de selection' of experience between women) brings forth. 'Screen Skin Utopia' offers the following equation as an allusion to the unknown that continues to come into existence: 'Je suis la pensee d'une femme qui m'englobe et que je pense integrate' (166). The process of the virtual other that is formulated here as identity of a female subject ('Je suis la pensee') is clearly differ-

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entiated, on the next page, from a representable given; the virtual space of hologrammatic thought that has traversed 'L'Ordinaire/ the Utopian space between women, and the stages of a reflection on emotion and abstraction, offers a textual beginning rather than an achieved representation: 'De la, je commencerais, la femme en moi comme un centre d'attraction ... Je verrais une femme formelle s'ouvrir sur le sens car je sais que chaque image de femme est vitale dans 1'organisme pensant gyno-cortex. C'est au bout de la nuit patriarcale que le corps s'anticipe a 1'horizon que j'ai devant moi sur un ecran de peau, la mienne' (167). In 'Entretiens,' Brossard proposes that the project of Picture theory explores the question of whether the text can organize its own generating perspective as distinct from the 'sayable' that is prestructured by the horizon of given meaning: 'II y a une interrogation fondamentale au debut de ce roman: est-ce que le patriarcat va encore une fois avoir lieu?' (191). With the self-anticipation of the 'corps generique,' the novel alludes to the virtual form of the other, and to the concrete effects of its meaning-production that have begun to come into sight, as a kind of 'essential' singular (as opposed to the 'idees en double' of feminist thought having to express itself in a maleoriented symbolic) that produces, from this perspective and in this hologrammatic light, the multiple forms of subjectivity in the feminine. In the 'Preface' of the last chapter, 'Hologramme,' we thus read both a singular and a plural: 'je la vois venir les femmes synchrones au matin chaque fois plus nombreuse, elan vital' (Picture theory 189; 'nombreuse' in the original). This chapter presents itself literally as a virtual book and realized anticipation that surfaces inside the book we read. The chapter 'Hologramme' appears complete with a copyright page indicating the year 2002 as publication date, and referring to a past publication by the same author in 1985 (Picture theory was published in 1982), entitled Faire exister ce qui existe (176). The Utopian future occurs, as this title indicates, not simply on a chronological scale as a linear development in time. It is, rather, thought of as an invisible, unthought, and unwritten plane coexisting virtually with, inside, and in between the sayable that exists by 'virtue' of the given meanings of the 'dictionary.' 'Hologramme' would deny its own virtual reality were it to mark its allegiance with the sayable of the status quo by defining female subjectivity propositionally. Instead, the prose poem that appears 'at the end' of Picture theory is introduced: 'Le poeme entame la voix humaine. From my window, des phrases en surface d'elle la superposent multiple donnant signe de vie' (190). The prose poem itself begins with a mise en abyme of the body-text ('cortex') it enacts: 'peau la langue monte au cerveau comme un concept en plein travail' (194).

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The poem, which Brossard calls 'de 1'inedit en termes de souffle et en termes de rythme' ('Entretiens' 201), omits any punctuation (except for one parenthesis that notes an obscuration caused by the old dictionary)/5 although it can be segmented into phrases that are readable in the context of the previous chapters. These phrases and parts of a 'spiral of breath' concentrate elements of previously surfaced meaning as much as they create further relationships in the space between them. On the one hand, this relationship is intended for the whole project: 'Les phrases se posent les unes a la suite des autres et chacune fabrique la totalite du projet en montrant les autres phrases et en etant montree par elles ... Chacune des phrases construit le projet et rend plausible le dernier chapitre qui est l'hologramme' (180). On the other hand, the poem continues in its own space the praxis of repetition and variation of elements that accumulate virtual meaning between them. The text spirals time and again through the words 'femme/ 'peau/ 'langue/ 'monte' (coming to the surface): 'le bruit court qu'elle existe reellement la femme monte aux yeux comme une sensation en pleine fiction d'abondance' (195); 'peau la langue monte et 1'entoure serpentine spirale' (195); 'peau la langue 1'environne une femme se prononce dans son corps' (201-2); 'peau la phrase monte aux yeux une projection de soi' (205). Since the poem is announced by its title as 'Hologramme/ the reader may expect a decipherable, concrete image to appear. Indeed, the book ends with a claim to perfect visibility and readability: 'la forme humaine venait vers elle visible dans toute sa morphologie occupant sa pensee comme un territoire allant de soi elle en etait venue en pleine fiction d'abondance a se dire parfaitement lisible' (206-7). But what appears here as the creation of virtual planes of reality is not the unsayable itself, but rather language that avoids the construction of objects, and points, in its repetitions and variations, to its own spiralling, self-generating praxis instead. If the poem claims that Tinvisible est une femme parfaitement lisible' (199), there is no positive image of the invisible other woman 'shown' except a praxis of language that is at its own source and does not follow the 'penchant "naturel" a refaire le meme' i.e. give in to the temptations of representation. If the poem can speak of the book in the process of becoming (that it is a part of) as 'le livre qu'elle savait etre d'une femme' (197), this authoring origin and content (since the conspicuous 'etre' can be read here as verb or as noun) appear as a process of 'selfreflexivity' that does not 'reflect' a given self, but produces infinite alterity: Tidee qu'une femme puisse etre une phrase sonore complete songeant qu'une source de lumiere coherente s'apparente au projet de la voir venir' (198). This seemingly complete proposition itself, however, has been isolated here, by my segmenting citation, from the context of Brossard's infinite last

204 Discoveries of the Other 'sentence' that runs through the last fourteen pages of Picture theory, and opens, at the 'end/ without punctuation onto the white of the page. This infinite last 'sentence' - in which each proposition opens onto a new clause that in turn qualifies the earlier clause - not only emulates the physical qualities of the hologram, in which each element carries the information of the whole.16 The passage I have cited also 'shows' Brossard's epigraph from Wittgenstein, which insists that 'nothing that is necessary for the understanding of all sentences can be said.' As a phrase that contains forms of its own proposition, it endlessly overdetermines its subject. The content announced by the phrase '1'idee qu'une femme puisse etre' consists of 'une phrase ... songeant,' engendering in a further turn of the formal spiral as its object the proposition 'une source de lumiere coherente s'apparente au project'; this project finally refers us, with its pronoun 'la' ('de la voir venir'), back to the initial proposition that has not been determined, in this process, by its predicate, but appears altered in the context of a further turn. If Brossard's praxis of writing in Picture theory shows 'being of a woman' ('etre d'une femme') in language, it does not 'contain' woman, as the formal example above suggests, in the sense of representation or completion. Picture theory, rather, enacts a pattern that brings language into existence as its own origin and future alterity - 'antecedent et futur' (193) -in a virtual spiral of woman and women who are their respective others: 'elle est une femme subliminale venue dans la nuit des temps poser son regard sur une autre femme' (200). In this other 'regard de I'autre,' by which female subjectivity seeks to project and think itself 'en bordure de la langue/ the sentence and picture of the invisible other, far from containing itself as complete, remains a virtual other to its own language. In this sense, Brossard 'ends' her comments on her own, heterological praxis of the unknown: 'Aussi etrange que cela puisse paraitre, apres tout, je viens d'en parler longuement, Picture theory demeure encore pour moi une enigme. Je sais et je ne sais pas ce qui a ecrit ce livre. Dans ce sens, je sens qu'il va m'etre un outil de travail' ('Entretiens' 201).

6 Conclusion: A Will to Metamorphosis

A child grasps at everything to find out what it means. Tosses everything aside again, is restlessly curious and does not know what about. But already here the freshness, the otherness lives, of which we dream. (Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope 21)

'Un je se perd ici au travail/ the narrator in Picture theory remarks upon entering the place of the scene blanche (49). In this formulation that evinces, to use a formulation by Janet Paterson, 'a will to metamorphosis' ('A Poetics of Transformation' 322), several aspects of the relationship between what I have been calling the thetic and the heterological come to the fore. While an T is posited here, we also witness a heterological unsettling of its dominance and centrality. The indefinite article at the beginning puts the marker of the subject in language, the 'I,' into the context of other Ts. But not only does the T lose its singularity ('un je se perd') in this work of language; it loses its very self ('un je se perd') in a place ('ici') that refers, in the 'scene blanche' of Picture theory, both to an act of writing and to a meeting between self and other. This shift does not cancel the 'I,' but displaces it. Brossard's formulation, removing the T quite literally from the 'first' position in the sentence, makes it explicit as a posited part of discourse. It also opens the space of an other 'I/ in the possible double sense of an other's unknown perspective and of the self's discovery of its own, unknown otherness. These discoveries of an other T superimpose the thetic function with a heterological discourse on the other, an uncertain 'decouverte que le je fait de Vautre! We have seen this discovery of the other mediated by heteroglossia and intertextuality, and also in the writing of a virtual, partially or entirely unknown other in the texts by Aquin, Brossard, Cohen, and Ondaatje. The discovering perspective, often a speaking 'I,' loses its thetic power and stabil-

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ity to a considerable extent in this step over the horizon of the known identities of self and other. But this loss is highly willed from the perspective of a self that perceives itself defined against its will. The strategies followed by Brossard and Aquin - motivated directly by political exigencies (and often responding to a negative concept of 'alterite' germane to the discourses of decolonization I have briefly examined) - find their equivalent, in this respect, in Cohen's continual undoing of a 'priestly' protocol of naming, and in the 'fears of certainties' that we have seen to govern both the character of Buddy Bolden and the writer Ondaatje. This willed loss ambiguously appears in the reflexive verb of Brossard's sentence - 'se perd' - which oscillates between an impersonal disappearance ('se perdre': 'to get lost') and a selfinduced will that can constitute a form of agency. While the T,' to come back to a formulation by de Certeau, 'marks in the text the empty place (empty of world) where the other speaks' (94), this loss of a self that knows itself (as posited, thetic reality) appears in Brossard's 'se perd ici au travail' as a discovery of the heterological other not in the realm of knowledge, but in that of work and praxis. As we have seen - though not only in Brossard's texts - this praxis of language brings about a certain loss of the posited subject as it is defined in language. But this 'loss/ while it may appear detrimental to names and identities, motivates and enables the production of the text by a discourse of the unknown that works its way through ossified concepts, images, and identities. Very often, as Cohen's Beautiful Losers and his 'Loneliness and History' show, this praxis of language seeks to restore that original discovery of the undefined other that leaves behind as its trace protocols of language and established knowledge. The 'loss' that we encounter here may often look like mere negation with respect to knowledge and the thetic. But it constitutes, in fact, a negativity that marks a heterogeneous otherness. Kristeva, in her elaboration of this 'negativity' as the (forgotten) fourth 'term' of the Hegelian dialectic, is at pains to show why 'negativity should not be confused with negation in judgment' (Revolution 117). While negation 'puts the subject in a position of mastery over the statement as a structured whole' (124), Kristeva delineates negativity - the link between '"the real" and the "conceptual"' (no) - as a process and continual impulse that exceeds and disrupts the dialectic 'triplicity' of thesis, negation, and sublation. For Kristeva, negativity is 'transversal' (117) to the thetic judgment, pointing to the larger, material process in which the latter is produced. Knowledge and dialectics have to begin by positing terms and categories that represent one possible organizing perspective; in negativity, they find 'the liquefying and dissolving agent that does not destroy but rather reactivates new organizations and, in

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that sense, affirms' (109). With respect to Kristeva's reference here to the 'free subject par excellence' (Revolution no) of the Hegelian aesthetic (a subject marked by both negativity and affirmation), Paul Smith observes: 'Kristeva ... establishes an approximate synonymy between these concepts (heterogeneity, negativity, and freedom) and argues for their function as a disturbance across the constitution of fixed notions of self and other' (123). This context helps to explain why the loss' of a thetically fixed self would concur with an enigmatic other who refuses to be found in the place and shape called for by the thetic. By pointing to the limit of knowledge, this reciprocal, compound loss' and this 'freedom' of self and other disrupt the equation of thought with being, and remind knowledge rather productively of its own past (the absence of knowledge), of its very self-defining raison d'etre (the negation of this absence), and possibly of both its future tasks and its genuine other. While one may want to register reservations with respect to abstract narratives of freedom, the disturbance of a 'fixity' that entrenches representations of self and other as knowledge seems an all-important factor in the concrete 'heterologies' I have studied. The relationship between self and other is by no means negated in these texts by Aquin, Cohen, Ondaatje, and Brossard. On the contrary, the other seems always present, needed or abhorred (and often both, as in the fascinating yet antagonistic H. de Heutz, the self-destructive Buddy Bolden, or the alcoholic Mervyn Ondaatje). But this relationship between self and other undergoes the discursive praxis of uncertain discoveries. This work in language not only transforms self and other as such, but often displaces that very boundary in an oblique way. The moments of a dissociation from an earlier definition of the self, or of an inverse specular identity with the other, are exemplified by the recognition of the self as other in the mirror (as in L'Amer), or in a momentary identification with the alter ego (as, for instance, in the picture of Bolden). These instances concentrate an awareness of interiorized alterity on the one hand, and projections of a self on the other hand. But the texts I have studied come into being by acknowledging that the space between the images of self and other escapes representation or thetic knowledge. Rather, the articulation of this relationship constitutes a specific praxis and transformation, and creates moments in which things are neither simply one nor the other. Knowledge, in the strict sense, would seem to represent the realm of what is (and formulate thetic judgments on what can be true or be possible according to the laws of the known). By contrast, the discourse of an 'experimental' (de Certeau 93) heterology utters its hypothetical self in relation to an unknown other which it adumbrates and by which it is being created, yet which

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remains indeterminate. Such a discourse mediated by an unknown alterity (which partially becomes a discourse of the other) represents a praxis that is not the negation, but rather the heterogeneous other of knowledge: a 'negativity' that neither quite negates the truth of its statements, nor claims their general 'adequation' to being. In the light of this experimental heterology, the question as to who or what this other is gives way to questions of how the self can speak or write with respect to (or for) the other. We have seen partial 'answers' and possible 'moments' in the discoveries of the other that emerge in the texts discussed. These heterologies have their formal beginning in the positing of a moment of relevance that also marks a certain disruption of habitual patterns of perception. In the discovery of a significant link between the self and an other, the other emerges as such, and is delineated in a relationship that assigns the initial position of a self in a particular discursive context. In Cohen's 'A Ballet of Lepers,' the nomination of an other who enables the role of a dominating self turns into a heterology only at the very end, when this 'discovery of the other' leads to the inverse discovery of an unsuspected self. At that point, the relationship begins to take revenge on the thetic certainties that it afforded. The stable distribution of self and other and the repeatable assertion of identity (the 'moment,' as it were, of a positive science of the self and of the other) come to an end. In Beautiful Losers, this discovery of the otherness of the other is posited from the very beginning. In the opening question concerning the identity of Catherine Tekakwitha, the speaker establishes himself as a searcher. This speaker has begun to hear and understand, as Levinas put it, 'the remoteness, the alterity, and the exteriority of the other.' Similarly, the T of Coming Through Slaughter will offer his own discovery (and acceptance) of a moment of relevance when we read: 'Why did my senses stop at you? There was the sentence "Buddy Bolden who became a legend when he went berserk in a parade"' (134). As in the case of Beautiful Losers, the reader we witness here seeks to grasp himself in the other: 'What was there ... that made me push my arm forward and spill through the front of your mirror and clutch myself?' (134). While this narrator openly addresses his other in search of an answer, the speaker in Beautiful Losers, reading and transforming the historical texts concerning Tekakwitha, asks even more directly for a transformation: 'Catherine Tekakwitha, are you at work on me already?' (6). In a similar way, these two texts are, in turn, at work on their readers. (Or is it the other way around?) Beautiful Losers begins, after the initial question, with the description of a painting used as frontispiece in Lecompte's book. Coming Through Slaughter, at least in its original edition, confronts us

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directly with a photograph of the other. For the ways of seeing that inform these texts, however, nothing would appear more astonishing and worth our attention than that which seems to exist most 'naturally' - the visibility offered by physical representation. Cohen includes the reader in a process of uncertainty, and Beautiful Losers leaves us, at its 'conclusion' (which actually calls for a new beginning), in a position similar to that of the initial, interrogative 'I/ In a similar way, Coming Through Slaughter creates a 'community' of speaker and reader with respect to the unknown other when 'you' are invited to share the position and movement of the text: 'Float by in a car today' (8). But the historical alterity of the other, Buddy Bolden, exceeds the confines of a single glance. The movement of the observing perspective appears quite literally as a multiple 'reading' that has to go over the 'same' ground once more: 'Circle and wind back and forth in your car' (10). The moving frame of the car window appears again at the beginning of In the Skin of a Lion. This mobility of the observer seems required in order to do justice to the movement of the other. In The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (in a found poem attributed to the Western photographer L.A. Huffman) we thus read about plates that 'were made with the lens wide open and many of the best exposed when my horse was in motion' (5). But the other, in the texts under consideration here, continually eludes even the moving frame, maintaining a negativity that exceeds even the quick thetic snapshot. The elusive object determines the itinerary of the searching subject and its 'frames.' But whenever that subject discovers a new aspect, and is thus directed to a new angle of perception, it only discovers further questions. In Prochain Episode, for instance, this situation finds its mise en abyme in the 'cryptogramme monophrase' that leads to a multiplication of questions with each new hypothesis. In Coming Through Slaughter, one of the witnesses of Bolden's life corrects himself to begin again -'sorry, let me start again' (155); similarly, the narrator himself circles back to 'the barbershop where Buddy Bolden worked' (10), but in this version, the frame of his camera is 'aiming at the barber shop he probably worked in' (133; emphasis added).1 And following the movement of this narrator in Coming Through Slaughter, our own perception is set into motion beyond the images and posited frames offered by the text. While the thetic construction of alterity insists on the 'truth' of its representation and offers no space beyond, Ondaatje's text exposes a horizon that indicates the existence of a heterological other beyond that limit of knowledge. Whenever our thought is directed to Bolden as a reality of Ondaatje's fiction, we are beckoned to go further on our own. We do not know Bolden; but having looked at his picture, and having read about what may happen 'behind' the picture, he has become a form of our wondering.

2io Discoveries of the Other These moments that both posit the other and simultaneously mark this adumbrated shape as a sign of the unknown (that maintains, however, a relationship of 'non-adequation' with this sign) require a further movement on the part of the observing self. But an erstwhile knowing subject discovers, in this discourse and movement that relate to the other as unknown, also its own possible mobility, indeterminacy, and even agency. The narrator in Prochain Episode invites us to ponder the double articulation of these moving frames when he likens his sentences to both 'thetic' and sliding boxes (in which to escape his own being 'posited' in the immobile frame of his cell): 'Encaisse dans mes phrases, je glisse, fantome, dans les eaux nevrosees du fleuve et je decouvre, dans ma derive, le dessous des surfaces' (7). His own position becomes truly mobile, however, when the unknown other whom he posits in his fiction eludes his control to the point of threatening the very continuation of the narrative. Thus, at the limit of the narrative that is governed by the narrator's knowledge begins his freedom from what he knows he is, and from what he has been. His inability to recognize, to define, to 'know' the identity of the other at the end of the novel is akin, in this respect, to the loss of memory 'suffered' by the old man at the end of Beautiful Losers. When the latter encounters Isis unbeknownst to himself, Oscotarach the head-piercer (in the guise of F.) appears to have completed his beneficial work on stifling memory, on names, on thetic definitions. In Trou de memoire - a novel that alludes to discontinuity of knowledge by its very title - it is the anamorphic image that sets the observing subject in motion, a subject that at first appears to be in cognitive control of the represented object. The anamorphic image, as we have seen, 'creve les yeux' not only in an idiomatic sense because it is conspicuous, but also in a literal sense: in Trou de memoire, it reveals the empty caverns of the skull, and thus refers (like Oscotarach) to the end of the knowing subject. Putting the (old) eyes out, this particular anamorphosis both generates a further visibility and offers, as I have argued, another sign of the unknown. A certain 'negativity' with respect to knowledge and visible reality appears to be needed in order to escape what Aquin calls, in Blocs erratiques, 'le flanc mou et bleme du continu' (126), and what Brossard refers to as '!'ordinaire.' In In the Skin of A Lion, it is the night that allows vision both for Patrick (who 'gathers' his story of an unwritten reality) and for the architect Harris: 'Night removed the limitations of detail and concentrated on form ... Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting' (29). But the moment of negativity that occurs here with the transformation of a given reality is more than a negation. This imagination does not offer less, but creates more: a

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positive excess, a double exposure superimposing factuality and possibility, a multiple vision that accommodates several vanishing points as simultaneous (but not exhaustive) aspects of the real. The heterological possibilities and 'invisible cities' that come to light here, however, are not brought forth by eyes that would afford the 'panoramic existence and its disclosure' that Levinas denounces as a 'totalization' of the 'radical heterogeneity' (Levinas 294) of beings. The texts considered here deny the 'disclosure' of a general truth that would claim to reveal everything there is to say about the other (and thus claim its perspective), and do not omit the markers of their specific, particular perspective. As we have seen both in the role of 'lights' in In the Skin of a Lion and in the use of the hologram in Brossard's Picture theory, the source of light is mediated here by a mobile subjectivity that creates its own perspectives with respect to an other it continually interrogates. These discoveries of the other are creations of movement in the twofold sense of the double genitive. In the praxis of writing, the self creates the other as much as it is created, in turn, by the other. Toward the end of Running in the Family, a text investigating multiple, interacting and intersecting geographies as well as histories of self and other, we are invited to ponder this creation of perception: 'Watch the hand move. Waiting for it to say something, to stumble casually on perception, the shape of an unknown thing' (190). As in this case, the heterological discoveries of the other often create spaces and realities 'between' self and other. On the one hand, this intertextuality, 'interpicturality,' interweaving of perspectives realizes a common relevance that otherwise heterogeneous realities have for each other; on the other, it reveals a certain negativity with respect to prior delineations of self and other, offering thus a potential for transformation. The texts by Cohen, Aquin, Ondaatje, and Brossard - although betraying different interests, perspectives, and approaches to writing - time and again 'translate' (although incompletely) an unknown and invisible self in the process of 'translating' aspects of an unknown other. While this movement can reveal the self to be 'possessed by someone else's soul' (Bakhtin, 'Author and Hero' 33), it also appears to be the structure of a positive movement toward an unknown other, and of hope. In these moments of perceptual transformation, the self discovers in the other what is 'real,' yet unfinalized and open. In this respect, Brossard's only seemingly paradoxical formulation, 'Faire exister ce qui existe' (Picture theory 176), suggests what Ernst Bloch has called 'real possibility, What Is in real possibility, what is really still outstanding' (17). These formulations emphasize a very concrete dimension of Levinas's claim that 'being is exteriority ... exteriority, or, if one prefers, alterity' (290). The texts I

212 Discoveries of the Other have explored offer a discursive praxis of the unknown. Simultaneously, these heterological discoveries of self and other create aspects and moments of the real in which they participate. Yet they also address, respect, and affirm the exteriority, the heterogeneity, and the 'negativity' of the unknown other that traverses them.

Notes

CHAPTER i Introduction: Discoveries of the Other 1 Regarding the capitalized word, Other, the translator of Totality and Infinity notes: 'With the author's permission, we are translating "autrui" (the personal Other, the you) by "Other," and "autre" by "other." In doing so, we regrettably sacrifice the possibility of reproducing the author's use of capital or small letters with both these terms in the French text' (24). I have decided to use lower-case 'other' throughout, since the different ways in which translators and authors use capitalization of the term often cancel each other out, or sometimes vary from work to work (see for instance Roudiez's remarks in the introduction to Julia Kristeva's Desire in Language [17]). 2 The page reference indicates the English edition, as in further references to other available translations of secondary texts I use for ease of reading (unless the context requires recourse to the original). 3 See Silverman 43-7 for an account of this distinction, and of Benveniste's theory of subjectivity in language. 4 While Kristeva acknowledges the Husserlian, phenomenological 'Ego' as useful, she also points to its limit (which it shares, in her view, with the 'subject-bearer of syntactic synthesis' in Chomsky): 'Despite the difference between this CartesianChomskyan subject and the transcendental ego outlined by Benveniste and others in a more clearly phenomenological sense, both these notions of the act of understanding (or the linguistic act) rest on a common metaphysical foundation: consciousness as a synthesizing unity and the sole guarantee of Being' (Revolution 237, note 3). 5 Gasche capitalizes the word throughout. 6 See Gasche 79-105, and Godzich's 'Foreword: The Further Possibility of Knowledge' (a preface to de Certeau's Heterologies: Discourse on the Other).

214 Notes to pages 10-23 7 On the concept of counter-discourse see Tiffin, Slemon, and in particular Richard Terdiman's introduction to his Discourse I Counter-Discourse. Terdiman emphasizes the fact that 'counter-discourses are always interlocked with the domination they contest. It is this conflicted intimacy which is signified by the slash in this book's title' (16). 8 Jacques Derrida thus formulates the problem of a thought that would try to think the other of the Hegelian other: To insist upon thinking its other... In thinking it as such, in recognizing it, one misses it' (Margins of Philosophy xi). 9 See for instance Balan, Kroller, Loriggio, and Pivato. 10 For an attempt at a much closer linkage in this respect than the one I argue here, see in particular the introduction and conclusion of Sylvia Soderlind's Margin/ Alias. Soderlind also studies two novels discussed here, Beautiful Losers by Cohen and Trou de rnemoire by Aquin. CHAPTER 2 Hailed by Koan: Leonard Cohen and the Aesthetics of Loss 1 See Ondaatje, Leonard Cohen 4-5; Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 26. 2 Stephen Scobie has been one of the most consistent contributors to Cohen scholarship since the seventies. After the publication of his Leonard Cohen (1978), many of his positions have been altered by his engagement of deconstructive methodologies. See in particular the work on Cohen in his Signature, Event, Cantext (1989), the article 'Leonard Cohen, Phyllis Webb, and the End(s) of Modernism' (1991), and his assessment of Cohen criticism (including his own previous work) and of Cohen's work since 1978 in 'The Counterfeiter Begs Forgiveness: Leonard Cohen and Leonard Cohen' (1993). 3 See Behler, Klassische Ironie. Romantische Ironie. Tragische Ironie 112-24; Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony 240-77. 4 This is Hegel's reproach in the Phenomenology, after his famous analysis of the master-slave relationship, against the independent or 'free' self-consciousness in the form of Stoicism, Scepticism, and the 'Unhappy Consciousness' (119-38). 5 A situation Lyotard was to name, in The Postmodern Condition, 'incredulity toward metanarralives' (xxiv). 6 Friedrich Schlegel has been thought to stand (as the personification of irony) behind the 'declared evil' (das dehlarierte Bose) in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Behler, 'Friedrich Schlegel und Hegel' 204-8). On the relationship between irony and dialectics, see Behler, Klassische Ironie. Romantische Ironie. Tragische Ironie 85-103, 112-27. 7 See Scobie, Leonard Cohen 4-5. 8 For a historical account of the Montreal Jewish community, and for elements of Cohen's biographical background, see Lyons, 1-37 and 76-85; for a discussion of

Notes to pages 23-31

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21

215

Cohen's religious education, see the excellent interview by Michael Benazon in Matrix, 'Leonard Cohen of Montreal'; a concise biographical outline and background summary can be found in Hutcheon, Leonard Cohen and His Works 1-7. The phrase is Cohen's own, according to the back cover of The Spice-Box of Earth. See Scobie, Leonard Cohen 10, and Gnarowski 4. The 'Master Song' is recorded on Songs of Leonard Cohen, and is printed (without title) in Parasites of Heaven (76-7) ('I believe I heard your master sing'). Ken Norris points to a 'spirit of confrontation' in Death of a Lady's Man that often leaves the reader 'harangued and insulted' but also 'involved in a degree of textual play' (51). The device of the running commentary which doubles most of the passages, Norris suggests, furthermore 'tends to unsettle our reading assumptions, violating, as it does, the reader's integrity, the reader's right to confer interpretation' (55). Michael Ondaatje refers with this phrase to Fats Waller, whose body is said to have been a 'crowd,' and who practised a similar mode of double address, 'talking to someone over your shoulder as well as to you' (Secular Love 119). The prevention of identification is, of course, central to Brechtian aesthetics, and specifically to what has been mistranslated as the 'alienation effect.' Whereas 'alienation' would translate the term 'Enffremdung' by which, for instance, Marxist theory refers to the fact that the means of production are not controlled by those who operate them, Brecht's term 'Verfremdung' has positive connotations, and refers to the disruption of habitual patterns of perception (Brecht, 'A Short Organum for the Theatre,' in particular 191-4). Scobie is much more assertive about this point in Signature, Event, Cantext 67-8. In Third Solitudes, Michael Greenstein offers an extended reading of Breavman's Bildung and the increasingly complicated relationship with his origins (119-23). In a chapter entitled 'Subverting Westmount: Leonard Cohen's New Jews,' Greenstein describes a pattern of contradictory goals: 'Just as [Breavman's] entry into the future contends with his retreat to origins, so his spatial development proceeds in two contrary directions: the circle and the departure from the circle' (121). 'Leonard Cohen Papers.' Manuscript Collection 122, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, Box 9. In his pagination, Cohen uses both roman and arabic numerals as well as letters. The book referred to could have been Flowers for Hitler, which appeared in 1964. See Greenstein's 'Filling the Absence: Metalepsis and Liminality in Jewish-Canadian Poetry' for a discussion of the important role that both Klein's work and his silence have played for later Jewish-Canadian writers. The reference here is to the line 'But touch not, Lord, the golden bowl!' in Klein's 'Psalm XXII: A Prayer of Abraham, Against Madness' (The Collected Poems of A.M. Klein 223).

216 Notes to pages 32-7 22 Two pages of this fragment are marked, by mistake, as 'e.' 23 Jones's phrase designates the antidote to limitations implicit in the garrison culture, defined in Frye's 1965 'Conclusion' as a mentality trying to cope with an overwhelming wilderness (225). Scobie quotes this formulation by Jones when he refers to Cohen as a 'saint' (Leonard Cohen 6), a word he uses to describe the kind of figure 'who becomes an adept' in the 'mysteries' of the wilderness (7). 24 See Weber xiv-xv; commenting on Weber's Institution and Interpretation, Wlad Godzich compares the foundational moments of institutions to the individual blindness that Paul de Man has shown as enabling new achievements. Godzich observes that Weber 'differentiates between institutional functioning on the one hand ... and instituting on the other, which is precisely what thought is engaged in when it proceeds blindly, in de Man's sense, to cut a path where none had been traced before' ('Afterword' 155-6). Because of the constitutive function of otherness, discourses seeking to mediate or produce it (such as poetry) aim at moments crucial to knowledge (163-4). 25 This attitude occurs in F.'s 'It is all diamond' in Beautiful Losers (9), and in general in what Linda Hutcheon has referred to, with Bakhtin's term, as Cohen's insistence on the 'material bodily lower stratum' (The Canadian Postmodern 31). 26 Greenstein observes, in the same terms that emerge in 'Loneliness and History/ a formal parallel effecting a similar positionality in The favourite Game: 'Cohen combines roles of administering priest and rebellious poet: the alternating rhythm of his prose between negatives and parallel sentences creates an incantatory effect through which Cohen is able to participate in the ceremony and condemn it simultaneously. If Breavman wants to be among them but cannot be part of their brotherhood - an insider and an outsider - his denial of a vatic role does not negate his attitude as a poet-prophet who denounces false worship' (Third Solitudes 123). 27 Breavman in The favourite Game, for instance, is acutely aware of this access to a special status: 'His father's death gave him a touch of mystery, contact with the unknown. He could speak with extra authority on God and Hell' (27). 28 'Under the hermeneutic code, we list the various ... terms by which an enigma can be distinguished, suggested, formulated, held in suspense, and finally disclosed' (S/Zi 9 ). 29 Cohen has in typical - if self-contradictory - fashion asserted that 'my strength is that I have no ideas. I feel empty' ('After the Wipe-Out, a Renewal' 8). 30 Although the process leading to Catherine Tekakwitha's official beatification by Pope John Paul II was not completed until 1980 (she has not yet been canonized as a saint), the legend of her healing powers and her 'practical' status as a saint are presupposed by Cohen. 31 See Monkmann, and the bibliography in Lecompte 7-8. 32 In order to approach the question of reference in such cases, Hutcheon elsewhere

Notes to pages 37-42 217

33 34

35 36

37 38

39

suggests moving beyond the binary models based on the fictive/non-fictive distinction ('History and/as Intertext' 179). In terms of the levels of reference that Hutcheon discusses in A Poetics of Postmodernism (141-57), Beautiful Losers uses historiographic intertextual reference in various ways. Showing us, at the beginning, a reader at work, Cohen's novel models a process by which the words of historiography's 'textualized extra-textual reference' (Hutcheon 154) to Tekakwitha also 'hook into the world through the reader' (154), thereby producing the floating constructs of a 'hermeneutic reference' (154). This process creates furthermore a very idiosyncratic 'intra-textual' level of reference at which Tekakwitha is not a historical figure, but 'only' a creation of the novel. This level is privileged in standard definitions of literary reference, such as for instance Northrop Frye's: Tn literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motives. Wherever we have an autonomous verbal structure of this kind, we have literature' (Anatomy of Criticism 74). See the discussion of naming as control in Hutcheon, Canadian Postmodern 38-9, and Soderlind, Mar gin/Alias 49-54. Greenstein also suggests that the narrator's 'fascination with the tribe of "A-s" and his best friend F, bring to mind Kafka's initialed anti-heroes' (Third Solitudes 136). Parts of this passage are translated from Lecompte; see Monkman (58). A similar shifting from a purely sequential, syntagmatic progress of narrative to a 'vertical,' paradigmatic unfolding of subjective connotations is expressed in the remark on one of Cohen's note sheets for Beautiful Losers: 'Don't follow the story, follow the emotion' ('Leonard Cohen Papers,' Box 9). See Lee's chapter 'Messiah: The Isis Continuum,' Savage Fields 70-4. T will end the first section, for instance, by assuming the voice of a phrase book that translates requests for medical treatment into a foreign language, a move that will turn Catherine Tekakwitha/ in this instance, into a Greek pharmacist. The healing aspect of her legend is one of the link'; with Edith, and with Mary Voolnd, whose face F. will compare with Edith's: 'Yes, it is a face such as Edith often wore, our perfect nurse' (158). F.'s signature at the end of part two, 'Yours truly, Signe F.,' can be taken literally as a transposition of the self's name into the possession and production of, and by, the other, in a sense Derrida describes in the case of autobiography: Tn some way the signature will take place on the addressee's side, that is, on the side of him or her whose ear will be keen enough to hear my name, for example, or to understand my signature, that with which I sign ... It is the ear of the other that signs' (The Ear of the Other 50-1).

218 Notes to pages 42-6 40 Soderlind thus speaks of a relationship of 'specularity or reciprocity' (Margin/ Alias 42) between the communicatie situations between Book One and Book Two (in which T and F. are the speakers respectively), although I would argue that T's speech, while under the spell of F. whom it addresses but also refers to in the third person, is more directly oriented toward Tekakwitha. 41 The voluntary loss of thetic control in order to be transformed by the other, of course, is often a very controlled loss, of which the T in Book of Mercy will say: 'This was a strategy, and didn't work at all. Much time, years were wasted in such a minor mode' (i: 'I stopped to listen'). 42 Especially in the light of necrophilia as a recurrent theme in Beautiful Losers, Cohen's continual juxtaposition of the scatological with the eschatological, besides its hierarchical inversions implied in the Bakhtinian carnivalesque (see Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 30-3), resembles Bataille's excremental vision of the sacred, 'the identical attitude toward shit, gods, and cadavers': 'The notion of the (heterogeneous) foreign body permits one to note the elementary subjective identity between types of excrement (sperm, menstrual blood, urine, fecal matter) and everything that can be seen as sacred, divine, or marvelous' (Bataille 94). In 'Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,' Bataille similarly interprets sacrificial mutilation (which occurs in Beautiful Losers when F. slices off T's nipple and with F.'s sacrifice of his thumb for the revolution) as 'the necessity of throwing something of oneself out of oneself [which] remains the psychological or physiological mechanism that in certain cases can have no other end than death' (Bataille 67). 43 In 'Loneliness and History,' as I have tried to show, loneliness with respect to a human community after it has been estranged by history from creation is seen as a means to regain communion with creation, and thus to 'exult: We are not alone' (f). 44 T's speculation on the missed chance for 'unselving' in the following passage offers the same pattern: 'One night in our seventh year of marriage Edith coated herself with deep red greasy stuff ... saying: Let's be other people ... Perhaps she meant: Come on a new journey with me, a journey only strangers can take, and we can remember it when we are ourselves again, and therefore never be merely ourselves again' (15). 45 The novel repeatedly directs this principle against its own language, as, for instance, in F.'s distinction between female and male sounds (156-7, to be discussed below). To trust language with the accusation of language, of course, is to make the fox the keeper of the hen house. But to get past F.'s 'connect nothing' (18), T first has to connect with that sentence, and so do we. Douglas Barbour addresses the problem obliquely when he rejects this koan by F., interpreting it as an invitation 'to abdicate one's responsibility as a reader' ('Down With History' 136).

Notes to pages 46-55 219 46 See Hutcheon, 'All the Polarities' 43-4. 47 The miracle has occurred against the will of the newly baptized Catherine Tekakwitha: 'With a tiny abrupt movement which she did not command, she knocked over her glass of wine' (103; emphasis added). 48 T formulates his desire quite directly as necrophilia when he meditates on the preservation of the dead bodies of saints (134-5). 49 Cf. Soderlind 62-3. 50 He will later repent, in his prayer to a 'Father, Nameless and Free of Description/ the fact that he did not abandon domination by reason earlier: 'I tried to dominate Insanity so I could steal its Information' (190). 51 This self-accusation of language is directed against the house of language not only as male, but also as patriarchal: to descend from Oscotarach's hut, and thus from a house that makes one forget one's name (and thus one's father) seems a fitting lineage for 'an orphan lawless and serene' without 'the flaw of naming in his eye' ('F.'s Invocation to History in the Old Style,' Beautiful Losers 200-1). 52 The French surrealists were an early major factor in the reception of Freud's theories in France. During the period of their collective flirtation with the French Communist party (around 1928-30), they changed the name of their journal from La Revolution Surrealiste (1924-29) to Le Surrealisrne au Service de la Revolution, hoping to insert the subversive potential of the pleasure principle into a more political context. Most of the surrealists (Aragon being the most notable exception) were soon (asked) to leave the Communist party. 53 In keeping with the surrealist idea of revolution, toward the end of the novel the feature will become reality, reality the feature: 'the streets belong to the People! ... The theaters began to empty because they face the wrong way' (256). 54 Witt 67, quoted by Barbour 142; Pacey translates: T am Isis born, of all things, both what is and what shall be, and no mortal has ever lifted my robe' (88). For a discussion of the translation see Barbour 141-2; Lee 70, 123^; Soderlind, Margin/Alias 65-6. 55 T too uses this term to refer to himself (for instance 15). 56 By the same token, the reader is invited to perceive, together with the shapes of print on the white paper, the energy that produced them, pointing away from the page. For a different reading of this scene, see for instance Greenstein, Third Solitudes 125-6. 57 This image can be compared with the melting holes that Breavman produces, in The Favourite Game, when he stops the films showing his family: as the pellicule disappears under the influence of heat, Breavman produces emptiness, 'mutilating the film in his efforts at history' (10). 58 The novel has, at this point, tried again and again to overcome its own accusation of language, disrupting each particular language or style. It has thus moved

22O

Notes to pages 55-72

through its array of different discourses including lists, advertisements, dictionaries, comic strip language, and so forth. 59 In his interview with Alan Twigg, Cohen described thus what he calls 'the absolute' (61): 'It's the fundamental ground or field which is nothing, the still centre or whatever metaphor you use for it. It's neither dead or alive. It is an indescribable energy. That's zero. It's so empty that myriads and myriads of form rush in to fill it at every second' ('Garbage and Flowers' 62). CHAPTER 3 Hubert Aquin: Language and Legitimation ^ Aquin was arrested in 1964 while in possession of an illegal firearm and a stolen car. 2 The thetic connection by which colonialism posits in one move the identity of both the colonizer and of the colonized - explaining why the former needs the latter, and why the colonized are invited to read themselves in this distribution of otherness - is a repeated theme in the Sartrean account of the paradigm of oppressor and oppressed, for instance in Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew, in Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized, in Fanon's books, and, again, in Sartre's introductions to many of the texts mentioned here. 3 In an interview with Le Quebec litteraire, Aquin dates the beginning of his own social and political awareness at around 1954-5 ('vers 1'age de 25 ou 26 ans'), after his degree in philosophy (from the Universite de Montreal in 1951) and his contributions to Quartier latin: 'Moi, faisant ma philosophic, je n'etais pas un etre conscient des problemes sociaux et politiques du Quebec' ('Aquin par Aquin' 131). 4 A I'heure de la decolonisation, for the Office Nationale du Film du Canada (ONF). 5 Anthony Purdy comments on Aquin's view of the failed uprising: 'As Lord Durham would say in 1839, the French Canadians are a people without literature and without history; in Aquin's words they were a people caught in a history of which they would never be the author, a history made by others' (96). 6 Similarly, Martin Buber says in / and Thou, as we have seen, that 'objects consist in having been' (64). 7 In a conversation with Frangoise Maccabee-Iqbal, Jacques Languirand describes Aquin's writing process as a constant effort to escape a certain control (which obviously does not preclude prior planning and later editing): '11 se mettait ni plus ni moins dans un etat second et ecrivait a une vitesse absolument deconcertante. 11 n'y a qu'a voir ses ecrits, ses lettres, ses manuscrits qui sont carrement illisibles. Et quand il ecrivait, il avait une respiration haletante. 11 tournait les pages rapidement

Notes to pages 72-80 221

8

9 10

11

12 13 14

15

pour empecher, j'en suis sur, que n'intervienne 1'hemisphere gauche, tres fort, tres dominant chez lui' (Maccabee-Iqbal, Desafinado 133). This translation by Regis Durand of the French version of the essay from 1982 'Reponse a la question: qu'est-ce que le postmoderne?' - is printed in the appendix of the English translation. 'Unknown' is the last word of his The Postmodern Condition, as Fredric Jameson points out in the 'Foreword' (xx). In 'La Fatigue culturelle du Canada franc.ais,' Aquin refers to the acceptance of a role that would restrict the artist to such a limited notion of culture as 'fonctionnarisation' (Blocs erratiques 91). Jacques Ferron offers a similar comment in an essay appearing in 1962: 'Ainsi, en meme temps que notre culture se revalorise, elle voit son champ d'action se retrecir. On cherche a la confiner dans la litterature, laquelle devient par le fait meme un piege, et un piege dore car jamais les ecrivains n'ont ete si bien payes, honores, prebendes' (Ferron 8). 'Paralogy,' Lyotard writes, 'must be distinguished from innovation: the latter is under the command of the system, or at least used by it to improve its efficiency; the former is a move ... in the pragmatics of knowledge' (61). Memmi discusses this problem explicitly in the section 'L'ecole du colonise/ following the one Smart points to (Memmi 138-9). Aquin speaks, in the interview with A. Gagnon, of a 'des identification qui debouchera sur la decouverte d'une identite profonde' (14). In the section 'Fatigue dialectique' of 'La Fatigue culturelle du Canada franc.ais/ Aquin formulates this oppressive continuity: 'Nos penseurs ont deploye un grand appareil logique pour sortir de la dialectique canadienne-fran^aise qui demeure, encore aujourd'hui, epuisante, deprimante, inferiorisante pour le Canadien franc.ais. Le "comment en sortir?" a ete le probleme fondamental de nos penseurs et leurs fuites dialectiques ne font qu'exprimer tragiquement ce gout morbide pour 1'exil' (Blocs erratiques 99). Pharmacological 'Speed' is of literal importance for both Aquin and Cohen, who both wrote at times on amphetamines. Aquin's practice is to some extent based on the model of Sartre, who achieved his huge oeuvre, and the status of intellectual hero of a generation, by writing, at least at times, on amphetamines (see Maccabee-Iqbal, Desafinado 96). Besides Languirand's comment, already mentioned, on Aquin's actual writing speed as a means to evade the slowing control of the left brain, it is interesting to note the comments made by the 'editor' in Trou de memoire on the uncontrolled widening of Magnant's writing, which makes it almost escape readability and understanding: 'La dilatation de 1'ecriture atteint ici son paroxysme, a telle enseigne d'ailleurs qu'il a fallu ... dechiffrer presque au hasard'

222

Notes to pages 80-7

(32). This 'dilatation' resembles the elongation of forms typical of anamorphosis, and comes here with a movement of writing not acceptable to editorial norm and reason; the editor imposes order by inserting a chapter division, and is led 'a emonder la terminologie voisine de 1'indecence de ce texte' (32). Magnant's writing here is induced by 'speed': 'Cinq c'est vraiment trop ... J'ai 1'impression de me deplacer dans 1'espace anti-G ... La poussee me deporte a une vitesse incomptable' (20).

16 To the extent that he successfully flees comprehension by the pursuing 'I/ he remains 'heterogeneous to signification/ linked to the pre-thetic like the semiotic in Kristeva's definition: The semiotic can ... be understood as pre-thetic, preceding the positing of the subject. Previous to the ego thinking within a proposition, no Meaning exists, but there do exist articulations heterogeneous to signification and to the sign: the semiotic chora' (Revolution in Poetic Language 36). Kristeva's argument develops here in a discussion and critique of Husserl, whom Aquin certainly read as a student of philosophy, and whom he refers to repeatedly in 'Considerations sur la forme romanesque d'Ulysse, de James Joyce.' 17 'En fait, je reduirais encore le prix pour me couper avec un morceau de vitre: et j'en aurais fini avec la depression revolutionnaire! Oui, finies la maladie honteuse du conspirateur, la fracture mentale, la chute perpetree dans les cellules de la Surete' (Prochain Episode 35). 18 The ease with which some critics have ascribed a liberating power to Aquin's writing seems rather astonishing if one considers the hesitancy, circumspection, and even scepticism with which Aquin's texts themselves approach that very problem. Patricia Smart's allusion, for instance, to a 'perception ... dialectique, dans laquelle les contradictions de toutes choses peuvent se reconcilier' (7-8) and to a 'voie du salut... dans la participation a 1'activite creatrice' (84; quoted approvingly by Chanady, 'Le narcissisme liberateur ... ' 58-9) comes dangerously close to the traditional commonplace that art as such has a liberating function - an assertion vigorously rejected by Aquin. 19 The term 'nevrosees' evokes both the place of his writing - an asylum as containment and exclusion of the other of 'sane reason' - and Fanon's investigations of the relationship between colonialism and mental disorders. The descent ('je descends') underneath the surface of reality repeats, on a textual level, Aquin's disappearance, his going 'underground,' before surfacing in the arrest. 20 See also Anthony Purdy's reading of Prochain Episode in the light of Umberto Eco's analysis (in The Role of the Reader) of the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming (esp. Purdy 89-92; 101-3). 21 Accordingly, the narrator's first perception of the other climbing out of the trunk mentions the fact that his eyes seem to direct the scene, as the emphatic object pronoun emphasizes: 'Maintenant c'est moi qu'il regarde' (80).

Notes to pages 90-6 223 22 Aquin mentions Blanchot's Livre a venir also in his journal intime, 27 fevrier 1961: 'Une notion a retenir du Livre a venir de Blanchot: chaque roman implique la contestation du genre roman, chaque oeuvre est une exception' (qtd in Randall 67), Rene Lapierre's Les Masques du recit interprets Prochain Episode in a perspective strongly influenced by Blanchot. 23 The 'perspective acceleree' is described, for instance, in the first chapter of Baltrusaitis' Anamorphoses (a book usually commented on only in the context of Trou de memoire), among those other anamorphic forms that construct 'une dilatation, une projection des formes hors d'elle-memes' (5). The 'perspective acceleree' not only is evoked, in Prochain Episode, in the speed of writing and driving, but occurs more explicitly with respect to objects when the hero follows his unknown other: 'J'emboitais le pas derriere lui, en concentrant toute mon attention sur ses mouvements, si bien que je n'ai vu du decor somptueux de ce chateau que des images parcellaires et deformees par mon propre deplacement: des moulures dorees, la silhouette d'un buffet, un livre relie' (65). These objects, the statues and the book, occur again in chapter 13 (123-40) under a different angle, as art objects that both capture his admiration ('je me suis constitue prisonnier de cet homme' [132]) and remain undecipherable. 24 At the very moment the hero directs H. de Heutz's steps in front of him out of the chateau, the enemy seems to have doubled, and be at his back as well. The hero imagines in retrospect that he has been controlled at the very moment of his seeming control. He feels he has been the 'medium' of H. de Heutz, led on by him and observed by his invisible accomplice, by 'deux yeux braques sur moi' (100). This victimizing instance appears explicitly as abstract alterity: 'L'autre se tenait deja dans mon dos' (101); 'Et 1'autre m'a regarde manoeuvrer H. de Heutz selon un protocole un peu baroque' (101); 'sans jamais me perdre de vue: 1'autre!' (103). 25 The plagiarized passage here corresponds closely to Baltrusaitis' account (Anamorphoses 91). For a precise comparison, see Randall, Le Context littcraire 215-16. Randall gives an account of literary plagiarism in a wider context of decolonization in 'Appropriate(d) Discourse.' 26 For recent discussions of the functioning of the anamorphosis in Trou de memoire, see, for instance, the articles by Malcuzynski and Soderlind (or pp. 74-87 of her Margin/Alias) devoted to this problem, and also Chanady 64-6, Paterson, Moments postmodernes 45-6, Wall 310. 27 Randall shows the self-defeating logic the perfect plagiarism shares with the perfect crime. Undetected, it does not exist (for the other, one would have to add): 'Le plagiat, pratique intentionellement et systematiquement, c'est-a-dire sans laisser de traces lisibles dans le texte, releve de 1'esthetique du "crime parfait", parfait parce qu'invisible ... Le plagiat est soumis a la meme logique: reussi, il est voue a

224

Notes to pages 96-105

1'inexistence. Cedant alors a la tentation d'exhiber son oeuvre ... le texte parle le plagiat en meme temps qu'il le pratique' (Le Context litteraire 211). 28 See Albert Chesneau's analysis of the sevenfold repetition of the three-step writing-reading-rape/death in his article, 'Dechifrons [sic] L'Antiphonaire.' 29 With the exception of the tiny crucifix visible in the upper left corner at the end of the same axis that allows one to decipher the skull (the reproduction on page 92 of the 1969 Perrin edition of Anamorphoses cuts off this detail. I therefore refer to the 1984 edition). 30 The expression occurs in a sentence from Agrippa's Declamation sur I'incertitude, vanites et abus des sciences et des arts, which Baltrusaitis quotes in the following comment on Holbein's painting: 'Les sciences perissables sont etalees au premier plan, devant un grand rideau epais. Le rideau, dans 1'art du Moyen Age, s'ouvrait generalement sur une revelation ou une vision sacree. Ici il est tire sur les sciences divines: "le cabinet des verites est clos et ferme mesme aux saincts et aux sages'" (98). Aquin's double-sided truth about the 'cabinet des verites' parallels the comment about the narcotic penthotal (commonly called 'serum de verite') that Magnant asserts to quote from a certain Forgue: "'le penthotal et ses freres sont a double visage" ... je me considere comme un frere du penthotal - pain total!' (29). 31 Just to add another doubt (could it simply have been a fault by the copy editor of Trou de memoiret), the author of the first part of the journal, 'GHEZZO QUENUM' (147), distinguishes himself by a missing hyphen from the author of the letter, and the one of the elongating 'SUITE DU JOURNAL DE GHEZZO-QUENUM' (173). 32 In her book Hubert Aquin, Patricia Smart takes at face value both this footnote ('la visite du general de Gaulle a Montreal le 12 juillet 1967' [126]) and RR's passage in which 'ce texte rallonge m'apparait soudain si court' (Trou de memoire 201; emphasis added; qtd Smart 128). She thus comes to the problematic conclusion: 'Par ces mots, la demystification du texte litteraire se consomme, et la boucle de 1'entreprise romanesque est bouclee' (128). 33 The note on page 201, signed by RR, only heightens the indeterminacy. The thirteenth of July, the date it indicates as the moment Olympe checks into the room in which he is found only on 3 August, would mark a logical date for his suicide, on the day he has supposedly talked to the editor alias Magnant. His death, however, would pre-date as well de Gaulle's speech. But the note asserts only the moment of Olympe's arrival at the hotel, not of his death. 34 Between identifying herself as Rachel Ruskin and pointing to her 'role de 1'editeur/ this RR asks the reader to forgive her for having been supposedly the reader's other all along, guiding our reading from over our shoulder (we thus feel like the hero in Prochain Episode, who had felt Tautre' behind him when he thought he guided H. de Heutz in front of him): 'Qu'on me pardonne d'avoir indique, tout

Notes to pages 105-19 225 au long du livre, que je lisais derriere votre epaule et d'avoir manifestement multiplie les notes infra-paginales signees RR' (201). In the 1975 interview with Gagnon, Aquin interprets this writer-reader relationship in terms of a violent alterity (similar to Sartre's antagonistic reciprocity): 'Jusqu'a present, j'ai toujours imagine le lecteur au-dessus de mon epaule, en train de me dechiffrer pendant que j'ecris ... Je ne peux pas me souvenir d'une seul fois ou c,a ne m'a pas derange' (89). He affirms the altering power by which this perspective modifies his writing in a 'processus continuel de reflexivite/ and agrees to a certain sado-masochistic aspect by which his writing consciousness enjoys revenge over the reader's perspective. He expands: 'Le lecteur pose sans doute le probleme de 1'alterite dans toute son amplitude. L'autre, c'est d'abord un etre depourvu d'individuation, de differentiation sexuelle ou autre' (9). Aquin's strategy, at least in this account, flees determination by objectifying comprehension, in this battle of 'intelligibilite' with the reading other: 'Je me rejouis de lui rendre la lecture difficile' (9). CHAPTER 4 'Scared by the Company of the Mirror': Temptations of Identity and Limits of Control in the Work of Michael Ondaatje 1 See the article by Bjerring, as well as Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative 31-2, 71-6. 2 On the use of photographs in Ondaatje's work in general, see York 93-120. 3 On the interplay between narrative mode and poetic mode in The Collected Works and Coming Through Slaughter, see also Van Wart. 4 See Sam Solecki, 'Point Blank: Narrative in the man with seven toes' 136-8. 5 Tom Marshall uses the term in his article 'Layering: The Shorter Poems of Michael Ondaatje.' 6 See for instance Heble, 'Michael Ondaatje and the Problem of History'; Hutcheon, 'Canadian Historiographic Metafiction' and 'Running in the Family: The Postmodernist Challenge'; Scobie, 'Two Authors'; Varsava, 'History and/or His Story.' 7 For a reading of the 'white mythology' of the empty frame in The Collected Works, see Smaro Kamboureli's chapter on Ondaatje in her On the Edge of Genre, 184-202. 8 The negative on the back cover was replaced, in subsequent printings, by reviewers' and critics' comments, and by a picture of the author. 9 On the historical E.J. Bellocq (a white person) and the question of race in this context, see Douglas Barbour, Michael Ondaatje 101-3. Barbour assumes that Ondaatje's text constructs its fictional character Bellocq as black (101). 10 Toronto: General Paperbacks ('New Press Canadian Classics'), 1982. 11 Smaro Kamboureli points out other passages in which Bolden occurs in the context of 'sea and dolphin imagery' ('Poetics' 118-19).

226

Notes to pages 122-38

12 Its historical counterpart is acknowledged in Jazzmen (11), but, to my knowledge, nowhere actually documented. 13 Ondaatje, however, edits his 'found poems' to some extent. The line 'Bolden played nearly everything in B-Flat' (10) differs slightly from the source in Jazzmen (14); similarly, the tape transcripts at the end of Coming Through Slaughter show minor differences with the tapes in the Tulane Library. 14 As Barbour points out, however, 'Webb's use of the 14 September 1927 death of Isadora Duncan' constitutes one of many anachronisms in Coming Through Slaughter (Michael Ondaatje 101), which highlight the - in this case indirectly alluded to - 'fictional quality' (24) characteristic not only of many of the historical incidents that are evoked, but also of their combination in the text. 15 In 'Birds for Janet - The Heron/ we read, for instance, of a 'heron's suicide / tracks left empty / walking to the centre of the lake' (The Dainty Monsters 13); the theme of mad and suicidal birds reappears in 'Heron Rex,' Rat Jelly 52-3. 16 At the time dramatized in the text, Liberty intersected both with ist Street (the location of Joseph's Barber shop) and with Iberville. Liberty has been renamed since at the intersection where Bolden breaks down in Coming Through Slaughter. While Storyville had been closed already (since 1917), 'during the early 19405 the city fathers went so far in their continuing embarrassment as to change the names of some Storyville streets' (Rose ix). Although the city renamed many of the streets again when their appeal for tourism became evident, the old map was not restored precisely. See Rose 72 and 179 for the old names. 17 The association between 'Iberville' and the 'Prophet Ibis' is based mainly on the phonetic similarity. See Scobie for a short discussion of the connection ('Coming Through Slaughter' 17). 18 Again, Barbour draws our attention to the fact that historically, 'Buddy could not have listened to a radio playing the music of John Robichaux in 1906, as commercial radio did not come into use until about 1920' (Michael Ondaatje 102). 19 Ondaatje was born in 1943 and worked several years on Coming Through Slaughter prior to its publication in 1976. The chart 'Charles "Buddy" Bolden' on page 132 of Coming Through Slaughter begins with the entry 'Born 1876?' which makes Bolden 31 at the moment of his breakdown in 1907. The cataloguing data of the Anansi edition, however, lists Bolden as 'ca. 1868-1931' - an entry nicely followed by '-Fiction' (and completely omitted in the General Paperbacks' 'New Press Canadian Classics' 1982 reprint). Donald M. Marquis dedicates his In Search of Buddy Bolden 'To the memory of Charles "Buddy" Bolden, September 6, 1877 - November 4, 1931, who would probably wonder what all the fuss was about.' 20 For a discussion of the relationship between the photographs in the text and the passages they are associated with, see for instance John Russell.

Notes to pages 138-57 227 21 For a study of the generic indeterminacy of Running in the Family, see Kamboureli, 'The Alphabet of the Self.' 22 I paraphrase a formulation, here, by Roland Barthes, concerning the 'cas moyen.' As opposed to the active voice, 'dans le cas moyen, au contraire, en agissant, le sujet s'affecte lui-meme, il reste toujours interieur au proces, meme si ce proces comporte un objet, en sorte que le moyen n'exclut pas la transitivite' (Le Bruissernent de la langue 28). 23 The Ceylon that emerges in this encounter (similar to the 'historiographic' referents of the text) shows, indeed, the features of a highly personal horizon of the visitor. For discussions of the specificity of Ondaatje's vision of Sri Lanka, see Ernest Maclntyre, 'Outside of Time: Running in the Family'; and Arun P. Mukherjee, 'The Poetry of Michael Ondaatje and Cyril Dabydeen: Two Responses to Otherness.' 24 Secular Love and Running in the Family are written in the same period. Secular Love, although published in 1984, two years after Running in the Family, contains texts from 1978-83 (according to the information given at the end). Two of its poems, 'The Cinnamon Peeler' and 'Women like You,' appear as well in Running in the Family. 25 See Hutcheon for a similar reading of this passage ('Running in the Family' 311; The Canadian Postmodern 91-2). 26 The incident of Ambrose Small's unexplained disappearance provided an initial impulse for the novel, but became less important during the writing process, as Ondaatje explains in a conversation (Mumford 17). 27 For another reading of In the Skin of a Lion in terms of oral narrative strategies, see Gordon Gamlin. 28 The translation is mine; I paraphrase Blumenberg's formulations in this paragraph. 29 In this context, see Sards' excellent article on Ondaatje's play with sources of light in this novel, with specific reference to the use of light and darkness in the paintings by Caravaggio. 30 Blumenberg points out that the direct connection between light and knowledge comes from Greek thought (rather than the Old Testament). Knowledge and essence are derived, in the Greek eidos ('idea'), directly from sight, a founding of the logos on a 'collected having-seen' (Blumenberg 442). 31 For a survey of the function of simulated oral passages in texts, see Goetsch. 32 Blumenberg finds this mode exemplified, for instance, by the perception of reality typical of the Old Testament, in which 'seeing is always predetermined by hearing, questioned or overpowered by it' ('Sehen immer schon durch Horen vorbestimmt, in Frage gestellt oder iiberboten [1st]' [442]). 33 The playful allusion to Shakepeare's title evokes the notion of inquiry as a dream -

228 Notes to pages 157-66

34

35

36

37

38

39

which is relevant as one of the designations of imagined worlds throughout the novel. Already in 'Garcia Marquez/ Ondaatje suggests that One Hundred Years of Solitude 'is a dream, is an instant' (29). He continues: 'We have been reading the manuscript of Melqufades or witnessing the dream of the first Buendfa' (31). This double perspective on a written world between dream and reality plays an important role, as we will see, later in In the Skin of a Lion. Already in the opening pages, Patrick is referred to as the 'boy who witnesses this procession [of strangers in the darkness], and who even dreams about it' (8). Barbour points out that the immigrant Ondaatje 'sees the country from a new perspective and creates a protagonist who, despite belonging to the race and gender that control Canadian power, is alienated from them. A working-dass country boy come to the city, he is as much an outsider as the immigrant workers he finds himself among and whose community he eventually joins' (181). According to Barbour, Ondaatje once met Nicholas Temelcoff (233nn). Lillian Petroff suggested in conversation that Ondaatje knew his son, Dr Emile Temelcoff, better. The transcribed interviews do not offer, in this respect, any information beyond Petroff's account on page 143 of her thesis. I am grateful for her kind permission to read these transcripts, as well as for her support in general. Ondaatje's choice of incident seems motivated, to some extent, by Berger's description of cubism as a secularizing moment in which human invention extends itself into 'territory in space and time where God had been presumed to exist'; but Ondaatje's penchant for jokes also comes to the fore here, as well as his predilection for the transformation of contrasts: 'He saw it was a black-garbed bird, a girl's white face. He saw this in the light that sprayed down inconstantly from a flare fifteen yards above them' (32). Public meetings in foreign languages were prohibited in Toronto from 1928 on (Lemon 53). The novel refers to this interdiction again explicitly, placing the reader in Patrick's position: 'He catches only the names of streets, the name of Police Chief Draper, who has imposed laws against public meetings by foreigners. So if they speak this way in public, in any language other than English, they will be jailed. A rule of the city' (133). Patrick, as the one who inverts the position of the English language by being the stranger among immigrants, begins to listen to the silenced reality, excluded subsequently from the historical image of the city: 'He is immensely comfortable in this room. He remembers his father once passing the foreign loggers ... and saying, "They don't know where they are." And now, in this neighbourhood intricate with history and ceremony, Patrick smiles at himself at the irony of reversals' (133). Ondaatje quotes The Epic of Gilgame sh, trans. N.K. Sandars, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin 1960; the epigraph is taken from page 93.

Notes to pages 167-74 229 40 See Gamlin for further comment on The Epic of Gilgamesh in this context. In the light of my interpretation, however, I would disagree with Gamlin's statement that, by entering the waterworks, Patrick 'has successfully overcome the danger of being obliterated by official histories' (69). 41 The fact that Patrick turns to a violent version of anarchism also evokes, in the light of the novel's quotations from Joseph Conrad's letters, Conrad's treatment of this theme in The Secret Agent. 42 Blumenberg mentions Caravaggio (together with Rembrandt) as one of the first painters who used light as a localized factor, rather than letting a homogeneous light guarantee an evenly accented scene (446). 43 The episode of the Muskoka resort hotel announces some of the images and themes of the Lake Ontario scene, in which Patrick, however, swims away from the lights. After his attack on the hotel, Patrick swims one last time toward the lights. The lake at night here is already a dreamlike world removed from the visibility of daylight: 'Somewhere in his past he has dreamed such a moment: a criminal swimming in darkness to a lighted ship. He feels removed from any context of the world, wanting to sleep at this moment, wanting to ... return to the Garden of the Blind, and sleep' (171-2). He knows he is entering a world without lights, associated with historical oblivion: 'He remembers his departure from the world, stepping out onto the porte-cochere of the Muskoka hotel, flames behind him. Now he will be a member of the night. He sees his visage never emerging out of shadows. Unhistorical' (172). For the relationship between Ondaatje's fictionalized Muskoka and facticity, see Barbour 234n2i. 44 Before Patrick (and the story), for instance, reach Small, Patrick finds Clara and her friend Alice, 'both of these women like the sea through a foreground of men' (In the Skin of a Lion 128). 45 Similarly, Patrick wakes up wounded after his earlier encounter with Ambrose Small. As if in a dream, Small 'doesn't move as Patrick steps up to him and cuts him at the shoulder' (95). A few lines later, the text continues: 'When Patrick woke' (95). After one of several dreams Patrick has earlier about Small, he is directly asked by Clara: T said, were you dreaming?' - and answers: T don't know. Why?' (68). CHAPTER 5 The Visibility of the Utopian Form in the Work of Nicole Brossard 1 For surveys of Brossard's work up to that point, see Bayard, The New Poetics 1835; Godard, 'Nicole Brossard' 121-4; Gould 52-70; Dupre 85-95; Forsyth, 'Destructuring Formal Space' 334-40; see also Forsyth, 'Nicole Brossard and the Emergence of Feminist Literary Theory in Quebec Since 1970,' Parker. 2 Brossard underlines this point in a conversation, in 1976, with Michel van Schen-

230 Notes to pages 174-86

3

4 5

6 7 8

9

10

11

del and Jean Fisette: 'Le rapport qu'un sujet a a I'erriture a mon avis est identique pour un homme et pour une femme. Ce qui est important, c'est la notion du sujet ... La ou le rapport a 1'ecriture est different, c'est quand on commence a ecrire, a se penser comme sujet. Alors il y a toute une demarche d'hesi ration, de peur, d'avance, de retrait' (Brossard, 'Un livre a venir -Rencontre avec Nicole Brossard' 11-12). This position has raised, on the part of some of her readers and critics, the question of whether it is possible for Irigaray herself to speak from outside the logic she delineates, and whether Irigaray's 'woman' is not the kind of essentialized object she seeks to avoid. Toril Moi has offered a brief outline of this debate (Sexual/Textual Politics 137-49). 'C'est alors que par la force du processus, j'entre a mon tour dans 1'ideologie. Il m'est symbole, puisque maintenant j'ecris, je puis le manipuler' (L'Amer 34). As Jean Fisette points out in the introduction to 'Un livre a venir', the book in progress Brossard refers to several times during this conversation is L'Amer ou le chapitre effrite. The interview is dated 1976, and appears in 1977, the year L'Amer ou le chapitre effrite is published. See, for instance, Moi 113-20; for a discussion of this issue with respect to Irigaray, see Fuss 55-72. Brossard's own text, Le Centre blanc (1970), is still an example of this kind of 'neutral' writing. See Gould 42-51 for a discussion of the growing importance of the female body in women's writing in Quebec at that time, as well as a consideration of the 'body text' in Brossard, 70-8. Brossard mentions Aquin in a passage otAmantes m which she considers different types of memory: 'a ce sujet, je te renvoie a Prochain episode et a Trou de memoire ... ce sont des livres precieux pour explorer ce que tu appelles "les modalites de la conscience" ' (19; lower-case sentence beginning in the original). In an interview published, like Journal intime, in 1985, Brossard discusses the concept of the 'neutre,' under which the 'blanc' had been subsumed for her, as a 'beau deplacement me permettant d'oublier que j'etais une femme, c'est-a-dire que j'appartenait a la categoric des non-pensantes. La conscience feministe va me de-neutraliser, c'est a dire me permettre une integrate presence formelle plutot que formaliste' ('Ce qui pouvait etre ... ' 80). These last words in particular are reminiscent of passages by Cixous in which she refers to writing as a working 'in between' the same and the other: 'Writing is working; being worked; questioning (in) the between (letting oneself be questioned) of same and of other without which nothing lives' (The Newly Born Woman 86). In The Laugh of the Medusa' she writes: To admit that writing is precisely working (in) the in-between, inspecting the process of the same and of

Notes to pages 186-209 231

12 13

14

15 16

the other without which nothing can live, undoing the work of death - to admit this is first to want the two, as well as both, the ensemble of the one and the other, not fixed in sequences of struggle and expulsion or some other form of death but infinitely dynamized by an incessant process of exchange from one subject to another. A process of different subjects knowing one another and beginning one another anew only from the living boundaries of the other: a multiple and inexhaustible course with millions of encounters and transformations of the same into the other and into the in-between, from which woman takes her forms' (254). Lorraine Weir attributes this epigraph also to Wittgenstein (Weir 348). In Picture theory, it is given without quotation marks, and no source is indicated. In the later Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein gives up the central importance of elementary sentences (which are acts of naming that cannot be further analysed) upon which the representational logic of the Tractatus was built (Wenning 171). In the section 11, XI of the Philosophical Investigations, for instance, Wittgenstein discusses the implications of what he calls the duck-rabbit, a drawing that can be interpreted either as duck or as rabbit, according to the aspect perceived by the observer. The observer discovers the signifying potential of the picture between its two visible aspects only in a repeated reading of the picture, which thus reveals a multidimensional quality similar to the hologram. See in particular Lorraine Weir's article, 'From Picture to Hologram,' on intertextual references in Picture theory to texts by James Joyce, Monique Wittig, Sande Zweig, Ujuna Barnes, Wittgenstein, and others. 'visage (O non! c'est "partie anterieure de la tete de 1'homme"' (204; no closing parenthesis). See Dupre 128; Forsyth 342; Weir 350. CHAPTER 6 Conclusion: A Will to Metamorphosis

i Marquis' later biography, of course, informs us that the historical Buddy Bolden did not work there (6-7).

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General Index

abjection 35, 184-5 abstraction 199-200; emotion and 202 accent 160,165,175; double 160 action: definition of (Sartre) 70; theory of 71 address 13, 21, 25-6, 33-4, 58, 137; and community 30; and insult 25; mechanics of 25; mode of 30; thetic power of 26 addressee 30, 34^ 41-2 aesthetic, Hegelian 207 agency 174,176,180,196, 201, 206, 210 allusion 76 alterity/alterite 3-4, 10-11,18, 24, 55, 81, 125, 138, 174,178; and alternation 81, 84; and continuity 82; different aspects of 11; enabling form of 183; and ethnicity 14; future 204; historical 209; movement of 82; and multiculturalism 14; negative concept of 206; and paradigm of oppressor and oppressed 64; perceived as domination 61; radical 73; Sartrean notion of 15, 63; specular implications of 12; thetic and heterological aspects of 14-6; thetic construction of 209; unknown 208 American frontier 19

American War of Independence 69 anachronism (in In the Skin of a Lion) 226ni4, 226ni8 anamorphosis/anamorphic 80, 95, 98-9,

1O1-2, 105-6, 21O, 223U23,

223n26; and alternation 96; and hologram 185 antinomies, theory of 189 architectonics (vs heterology) 9 art 68, 222ni8; extremist 131 assimilation, and specific difference of the other 4 aura 5, 68,114-15; 'in the age of mechanical reproduction' 115; chronotope of 115; fascinating 35; and portrait photographs 115; author 131, 138; and hero 113-14,132 authority 36, 40, 79, 85,104, no; religious 35; textual 96, 103-4, 1Q8 autobiography/autobiographical 83, 86, 94, 138,149; and biography 138 baptism 38, 44-5, 49 bathos 42 battle 96-7; as 'antagonistic reciprocity' (Sartre) 87; Sartrean symmetrical construction of 88 biography 138

246

General Index

blindness 130 body/corps 181,184-5, 193~^/ 2O1' female 184, 23on8; textual 188,194; and textual body 194 body-text 202 border 18, 19, 162; thetic dimensions of the southern 19 borderland 19 boundaries 12-13, ^7~^r ^1> *45> 147/ 152, 154, 158, 160, 167; breakdown of 129; of community 30, 32, 40; determined by gods 166; of 'ink skin' 200; with other discourses 9; permeable 171; of self 41, 43-5, 132, 194-5; violations of 118

consciousness 71, 72; belatedness of 71; -for-itself 66; thetic 60 control 45, 97, 99-101, 103,106,123, 134, 137, 210; of the artist 67; cognitive 210; conscious 136; imagined 89; limit of 113, 122, 131, 171; limits of precise 77; loss of 106; naming as 217^3; of narrator over diegesis 85-6, 89-92; and power 3 counter-discourse 10, 13, 37, 214.117 creation 23, 32-4, 44, 59, 86, 90, 94, 107, 113-14 cubism 162-3 cultural representation, rhetoric of

Canada/Canadian 4, 13, 15, 18-19, 57, 61, 138, 142, 145-6, 152-3, 157, 173; consciousness 19 canonization (of Catherine Tekakwitha)

death 121-5, 127' 134/ M1/ 14~I8/ 150, 166-9 decolonization/decolonisation 16; discourses of 15, 63, 177, 206; film on (Aquin) 68; Quebecois nationalist discourse of 174 defeat 63, 70, 79, 88, 90, 97, 99-100, 102; historical 62; history of 69 deictic field 6 desire 41, 45, 47-9, 51-2, 147, 176-7; object of 85; representation of 56 detective: novel 106; plot 6 determination 90-1, 95, 98-100, 106; fixing powers of 80; historical 72,

36 Cartesian: form 11; tradition 7 certainty, fears of 31, 34, 206, 108 character: historical 140,161; named by abbreviation 38, 63, 2i7n6o cinematic style 107 closure 96. See also ending colonial 150; culture 79; discourse 17, 64; domination 13; language 141; practice 38 colonialism 22on2, 222ni9 colonization 16. See also decolonization community 30-5, 42, 45, 57-9, 154, 156, 161-2, 171, 191, 197, 2181143; and address 30; certainties of 31, 34; identification of the individual with 31; as institution 33; and leader 31; and prophet 31; self-construction of 13 confession(al) 30, 35, 41, 60, 131

15

76 determinism 78, 90; and free will 69, 71; and freedom 89 dialectic(al)/dialectics 10, 42, 82, 91, 113,176, 206; Marxist 71; movement 10; and the other 82; quest 20; Sartrean 88 dialogic/dialogism 9, 17 dictionary/dictionnaire 188, 198, 202-3 difference 45, 93, 178-9, 180 disaffiliation(s) 23, 26-8

General Index 247 disappearance 63, 104, 109, 123-4,127, 130,154,161 discontinuity 73 discourse/discursive: patriarchal 176; praxis, horizon and limit of 8; types 9. See also heteroglossia discovery: communal process of 176; and conquest 3; geographical 3; heterological 211, 212; and subjectivity 4; textual process of 5; textual strategies of 4 domestic scene 145,148, 152, 154; and jungle 142 domination 15-16, 48-9, 78, 83, 100, 105, 2i9n5o; battle for 101; quest for 100 dream(s) 142-5, 149, 153-4, *62,1679, 171, 228n33, 229n45 editor 25, 100-1, 103, 122; power of 100; as reader 102 emplotment 39 ending 127, 131-2, 134-7 energy, abstraction of 185 English-Canadian 12, 18-19; literature 19 Entfremdung (alienation) 215^:4 enunciation/enonciation 6, 87, 94, 193 Epic ofGilgamesh, The 168 essence/essentialism/essentialist 7, 713, 89, 182; anti- 71; radical realism of 79 ethnic groups 18, 161. See also immigrant ethnicity, and alterity 14 exclusion: binary logic of 197; of exclusion 34; founding 28 exile 30-2; compensatory 77 exotic 55, 146, 157 exteriority 4, 197, 211-12

fascination 4-5, 106-10,114, 126, 133; and otherness 115 father no—11, 137-8, 140, 142, 144, 146, 148-51, 154; gaze of 178-9 federalism 73 feminism/feminist 20, 173-4,17^/ ^2> 190; Quebecois 174 fiction, reality of 172 fictional 94 film 5, 107, no, 159, 163; pictures of 53 fixity 17,177; disturbance of 207 flight 80-1, 89, 95-6, 99,101-2; from determinacy 86; of perspective 98; of textual perspective 101; and vanishing point 80 footnote 101, 104 forgetting 97, 104-5 found poems 226ni3 freedom 22, 67, 72-3, 83, 85-8, 90-2, 210; abstract narratives of 207; imagined 93; impossibility of 90; ineluctable 67; limit of 63; loss of 81; and negativity 207; and non-determination 72; and originality 81, 82; and possibility of acting 71; Sartrean notion of 63, 67, 70-1 gaze 65-6, 178-9; analysis of 87; thetic 65-6; thetic powers of 174. See also other Geist 23, 67 gender: definitions of 198; difference 174; rules, of French language 174 Gilgamesh epos 156, 166, 229n4o Hegelian dialectics: and anti-Hegelian tradition 23; and negation 10; and negativity 10

248 General Index hermeneutic code 35 heterocosm 83, 92 heterogeneity/heterogeneous 8, 23, 82, 175; to meaning 8 heteroglossia 56,57, 205; and discursive types 9. See also heterology heterological 4, 9, 12-14, 55> 60, 157, 181, 205; ceremony 44; otherness, possibility of 62; strategies 21, 61, 86 heterology, heterologies 8-12, 16, 20, 23, 61-2, 69, 82,131,139,153, 207-8; discourse of 207; experimental 36; and first-person singular pronouns 11; (English-Canadian) national 19; and raznorechie (heteroglossia) 9; uncertainties of 109 Hiro-Koue 39, 40 historical 47; narrative 37, 56 historiography 6, 38, 39,114, 162, 168; dominant 168; Jesuit 13; and oral history 156 history/histoire 26, 30, 33, 35, 38-9, 43-4' 54' 58-63' 67, 69, 73-5, 77, 79, 84-5, 93, 99, 109, 122, 124, 132, 139, 148,

l6o, 163, 167-8, 170, 172-4, l82,

22on5; collective 75; and fiction 138; fictional version of 166; margins of 108; monochromatic 161; oral 138, 143, 153-4, 161, 168,171; recorded fact and created fiction 160; of text 103; of Toronto, fictionalized version of 167; written 166, 168, of Toronto 154, 158 hologram(matic)/hologramme 103, 151, 183, 184, 191, 194, 202-4; and anamorphosis 185; metaphor of 183, 184 horizons of expectation 26; communal 35, 40

horror 5, 103, 111, 114, 133-4 hubris 23 idea 200; founding 33; path of 33 identification(s) 30, 81-2, 106, 110-11, 131; communal 27; impossibility of 63; prevention of 2i6ni4; prepositional 201; reader 26; thetic, and exclusion of the other 27 identity 4, 150; essentialist 105; group 161; of the other 11; specular 118, with the other 207; symmetrical 89, 94 immigrant(s) 154,157-8,161,165,166, 171, 228n3&; ethnic minority 169; experience 156; Macedonian 161; unnamed world of 154. See also ethnic groups immobility 82, 83, 84 imperialism, of Hegelian reason 82 indeterminacy: generic 227n2i; ineluctable 63 insult 35 inter-discursivity 9 intertextuality 9, 188, 193, 198, 205, 211; historical 37 inversion 74-5, 84; logic of 66; and negation 76; specular 157; symmetrical 65, 75, 82, 85, 97, 187 invisibility 19, 79, 154, 163, 171,173, 175, 179, 198; historiographic 161; of women 182 invocatio 36 irony/ironic 21-3, 27, 39, 56, 58, 62, 65, 75, 99; and dialectics 2i4n6; reinterpretation of the classical trope of 22; Romantic 22 Iroquois 13, 18, 36-9, 43 jazz 107, 109, 115-16, 130, 171

General Index Jesuit(s) 37-9, 42-4 49, 53, 56, 57, 58; historical discourse 40 Jewish religious tradition 23 journal 47, 103 journey 137-8, 142,144-6, 158-9,167; of Gilgamesh 168; narrative 144 jungle 141-3, 145, 147-53 knowledge 4, 6, 23, 35, 52, 55, 61, 63, 66-8, 76-7, 80, 88, 91-2, 105, 156, 168, 182, 206, 2i6n24; absolute 23, 68; based on representation, illegitimacy of 75; and cognition 24; heterogeneous other of 208; identification of being and 67; incomplete 183; ironic 102; and its other 105; legitimation of 78; limit of 3, 24, 84, 88, no, 176; narrative and fictional aspect of 76; negative mode of 16; of other cultures 159; postmodern 75; and the postmodern n; praxis of 3, 4, 60; 'prochain episode' of 79; propositional 176; quest for 4-5, no; religious 36; representation of 99; thetic 112, 207; written 160 koan 41-2, 54, 58, 2i8n45 language 38, 45, 60-2, 73, 122, 150, 158; concealed presence of 19; conceptual 55; of desire 39; English 160-1, 165-6, in Toronto 228n38; exotic 159; familiar, of the old country 161; foreign 159; and heterological object 133; insufficiency of 54; and legitimation 74; limit of 50, 187, 189, with respect to other 121; limit of (en bordure de) 181, 200; male-dominated 190; negation of 48; new 60, 163; old 162, 200; power of 166, 168;

249

praxis of 206; protocols of 206; beyond reflection of 130; self-accusation of 123, 2i8n45, 2i9n58; subjectivity in no; Wittgenstein on 18990; work in 207; work of 27,188, 205 languages: distribution of 161; living between 163 legitimacy/legitimation 74-5, 77-8 lexicon 16, 179 Liberte 68 light(s) 4,154-7, 16o, 162, 168, 170-1, 173,184-5,197~8; absence of 185; hologrammatic 202; as metaphor 155; register of 194 linguistic shifters 23-4, 38, 42, 45, 150. See also personal pronouns literature 9, 19, 67, 76-8, 112; compensatory function of 77; and myth of self-creation 90 loneliness 30-1, 34, 44, 59, 2i8n43 Macedonians 159, 160-1 madness 82, 118, 121, 131, 135-6; and difference 12; and reason 12; and self and other 12 maps 141, 143-4, 157-8 margin(al)(ity) 31-2; strategies 19-20 memory 36, 51, 76, 104, 118, 133, 149, 160, 169, 181, 185, 187, 23on9; collective 173-4; collective loss of 70; fictive 171; hologrammatic 192; loss of 210; mastery of 43; oral 155 metafiction(al) 6, 95, 122, 140; historiographic 6,139, counter-discursive 37 meta-narratives/metarecit 22, 58, 82, 214^5 metaphor 3,137,139-41,143-5, M7~8, 155,163,195; as allusion to the unknown 76; hologram of 185; of

250 General Index internal world 143; light as 155 mirror 5, 10, 16-17, 30, 75, 86-7, 111, 113, 117-19, 121, 124, 127, 129, 130i, 137, 139-40, 143-4, 149~51' *54> 159, 168, 171, 177, 179, 207 mirror stage 17 mise en abyme 5, 86, 92, 119, 122,141, 143, 163, 166, 192, 209; parodic 123 Montreal Jewish community 28, 31, 2i4n8 monuments 167 movie 49, 51, 53, 55-6, 107; silent 165 multicultural(ism), and alterity 14 mural 163 mystic(al) 35-6, 55, 60; and community 35; poem 36; speech 36 name(s)/naming 13, 38, 44-5, 49, 546, 62, 72, 80, 85-6, 156, 165-6, 170, 192, 194, 206, 2i9n5i; beyond 72; imperialism of 81; limit of 40; Native Indian 161; proper 37 narrative: referent of 94; return upon itself 94 narrator 138; and author 139; as reader and historian 36; imprisoned 94 nation(al) 18; identity 18 nationalism 72 necrophilia 2181142 negation/negation 22, 55, 64, 72, 81, 86, 88, 92, 206; dialectical 82; of the known 98; and negativity 10; of self-presence 27; symmetrical 66 negativity 24, 70, 206, 208-12; and disappearance 21; as fourth term of Hegelian dialectic 206; and freedom 207; heterological 68; ironic 25; 'transversal' to thetic judgment 206 nihilation 16, 66, 72

nomination 17, 208 north, the 19 nothingness 60, 71-2 Old Testament 227^2 opacity 182 oral, stories 160; tradition 156. See also history originality/originalite 85, 89-90; and freedom 83 other 4, 96, 196 - adversarial/antagonistic 15-16, 73, -

*74 appearance of 4, 64, 79-80, 82, 87 apprehension of 3 arresting powers of 64 becoming 200 being-seen-by (Sartre) 64 colonial practice of domesticating 38 colonized 55 communication with the realm of

-

34 and community 31 comprehension of 87 constitution of 53 control over 90 correspondent of 32 determination by 81 and dialectics 82 disappearance of 109 distancing of 179 doubling of 99 ear of 42 elusive 53 emergent 32 enabling 45; inferiority of 27 encounters with 106 enigmatic 37, 81, 207 exclusion of 19, 27 28, 30, 172 exotic 146

General Index 251 -

experimental language of 36 exteriority of 4 exteriorization of 131 fascination for 107, 114, 123 gaze of 16, 63-5, 80-1, 97, 174, 179 Hegelian 2i4n8 heterological 15-17, 41, 59, 61, 87, 97, 106, 206, 209 heterological aspect of 89 heterological discourse on 205 horror of 135 hypostatized 60 identification of 4 instituted 40 instituting 33 internal 35 inverted 55 invisibility of 81, 197, 201 language of 179 as metapor of self 137, 144 mirror image of 5 name of 42 naming 38 narcissistic 117 nature as 44 and negation 88 as object 63; with power to return the gaze 79 oral history of 170 otherness of 60, 94, 115 past determined by 74 photograph of 209 picture of invisible 204 quest for 135 Sartrean symmetrical construction of 87 self and: boundary between 152, 195, 197; categories of 178; chiasmic mediation of 157; fixed notions of 207; interweaving of 112; repre-

sentations of 207; stable distribution of 208; superimposition of no; threatening logic of 118 - sexually desired 37,170 - silent 107, 130, 144, 158 - sound of 137 - specific difference of 4 - symmetrical 88 - territory of 143, 151 - thetic other of 19 - thetic containment of 113 - thetic powers of 80 - unidentifiable 20 - unknown 86, 177, 187,197, 207, 210, 212; adjuvant of 92; search for 131 - unsay able 195 - unwanted definitions by 63 - Utopian 60 - virtual 201-2 - writing the 92, 138, 153, 170 othering 10, 14, 25 otherness 3, 10, 21, 24, 59, 64, 76, 1723, 175, 177-9, 183-4, 205; exclusion of 48; function of 2i6n24; heterogeneous 206; heterological 62, 76; historical 6; paradox of 182; relationship of 64; shared 180; sustained 96; textual strategies of 18; thetically emphasized 61; unknown 205; unnameable 40; Utopian 10 outsidedness 111-13, 13°' 1^6; (exotopy) battle for 113; of exile 32 overdetermination, oscillating 94

paralogy 78, 79, 91, 99, 22inn; legitimation by 78 parody/parodic 5, 57, 143,178; inversions 106 Patriotes (1837 Rebellion) 69-70, 97

252

General Index

performance 12, 27, 53, 54, 55, 60; of speech 39 performative 39 personal pronouns 24; first-person plural 24; first-person singular 21; interchangeability of 24; non-lexical nature of 7; opposition between first-person singular and plural 31. See a/so linguistic shifters phenomenology/phenomenological 2i3n4; of visual perception 64 philosophy 64, 71, 81, 177-8 photograph/picture 107, 109-10, 114, 130, 133, 141, 144,159, 160, 162, 163, 171, 225n2, 226n2o; aura of 5; of Bolden's band 118, 125-6, 137; without language 159; and mirrors 139; and text 138; and windows, metaphorical correlation between 139 plagiarism 96, 223n27; and decolonization 2231125 polyglossia 18, 57 polyphony/polyphonic 57, 120 post-colonial 10, 13-15 postmodern(ism) 11, 75; and literary performance 12; science 77 praxis 88, 92, 96, 193, 206; not accessible to knowledge 16; of speech 6; of writing 175, 192, 204, 211 predictability 78, 79, 81, 85; escape from 83; revolt against 108 presence, illusion of 126 priest 44, 57, 72; comprehended by community 34; and historical narrative 37; and poet 2i6n26; and prophet 30, 32-5, 60, opposition 30-1; purity of 27 progress, narrative of 4 projection 10, 56,102,177; beam 52; of consciousness 45; of other self 85;

treacherous visibility of 10 prophecy 163 prophet 31, 35, 58, 59, 63, 72; and community 31; and priest 32 Quartier latin 64, 220013 Quebec/Quebecois 4, 12-15, 18-20, 45, 48, 61, 63-4, 68, 72, 173, 22on3; historical situation of 63; identity 79; nationalist discourse of decolonization 174; power structure 77; separatism 15 quest 23, 135; detective's, for control over unknown 123; for meaning 37 quotation 38, 56, 57, 193; praxis of 193 race 225^ radio no, 135, 163, 165, 226ni8 reader 25, 27, 53, 57-8, 60, 103, 105, 181, 208; author turned 25; average 26; in Death of a Lady's Man 2i5ni2; identification 26; as other 100, 103; pleading with 41; role of 26 reading 41-2, 58,103; act of 36; control of 137; definitive 95; double 102; multiple 188; mystic 36; second

93 realism, formal confines of 26 reference 217^2; historiographic 140; literary 217^2 repetition/repetition 57, 188, 190, 192, 194, 198; and alteration 193; and fixity 17; of the past 70; praxis of 203; self-distancing 25 representation 54-5, 74, 76, 99, 114, 141, 175, 177, 200-4, 2O9' demand for 82; fixity of 185; insistence on 75; reality outside 163; undoing of 102

General Index 253 representational figuration, abandonment of 17 revolution 73-4 rhythm 58, 108, 128-9, 2i6nz6 Romantic thought 155 rupture 79, 81-3, 90; and heterogeneity 82; of dialectic of thesis, negation, and sublation 206 scapegoat 31 self: - assertion of 53 - boundaries of 44-5, 132, 194-5 - communal 31, 33, 35; or individual 60 - and community 34 - community's sense of 33 - constitution of 53 - construction of 132; by means of the other 28 - defined 34 - determined by history 85 - freedom of 96 - hypothetical 207 - and identity 4 - immigrant 154 - instituted 32 - as institution 33 - limit of 112, 128 - loss of 21, 23, 27, 34, 42, 118, 206 — mirror image of 113 - mirrored identity of 136 - monologic 107 - negation of 55 - and other: grammar of 60; historically determined comprehension of 68; phenomenology of 64; predictable orbit of 86; thetic definitions of 61; thetic distinctions

between 45; undecidable identity of 91 - thetic 53, 54 - thetically fixed 207 - thetic boundary of 131 - thetic objectivation of 74 - transparent boundaries of 196 - Utopian other of 55 self-configuration 41 self-consciousness 44, 52 self-constitution 7, 30; narcissistic 5 self-creation 66 self-determination 90 self-discovery 170 self-distancing 35 self-experience 24 self-imprisonment 15 self-knowledge 23; of subject 54 self-reflection 3, 24; and inversion 67 semiotic 120, 222ni6; chora 8 sexuality 175 shame, Sartre on 66 shifters. See linguistic shifters shock 26, 35, 118 silence 19, 31-2, 48, 60, 109, 111, 114, 121,124-5,129' 13°~1'137/159/166, 173; historical 166 sonograph(s) 119, 120, 123 specular: identification 10; identity 5, 118; image 11; inversion 28; symmetrical inversion 84 specularity 2181140 speed: and flight of the observer 80; and freedom 80; of handwriting 72; pharmacological 22ini5; thematics of 72 spiral/spirale 95, 100, 102-3, 188, 191, 194, 203-4; and abstraction 199; and subjectivity in language 200 spy novel 83, 85, 90, 93

254 General Index stability: limit of 106; of names 24 state, federal 73 status quo 85; operational mode of 78 stereotype 17, 64, 178 story telling 154 Storyville 226ni6 subject 53, 57-8, 60, 63-4, 68, 81-2, 96, 180, 206, 210; communal 58; disappearance of 53; in language 7, 24, 113, 201, 205; narrating 93; and object, relationship between 106; ossature of 11; pursuing 83, 97; speaking 7; of speech 7-8, 24, 94, 189; theory of 175; -turned-object 65; viewing 52, 65, 80, 95, 100 subjectivity 4, 7, 19, 102, 174, 176-80, 197-9, 211; extra-linguistic 7; female 182, 183, 185, 199, 201, 202, 204; in language 182, 213^; male 199; in motion 192; of women 198; women's access to 175, 180 sublation 10, 88, 132 suicide 45, 104, 111, 113, 124-7, I51 surrealism/surrealist 49, 53, 55, 146, 2i9n52 survival 19, 167 symmetrical 96; inversion, and homologous negation 15 symmetry 15, 17, 65, 79, 81, 83-4, 86, 92 synaesthesia 50 syntax and lexicon, transgressing the limit of 16 synthesis 182 systematic coherence, mistrust of 23 teleology, Utopian 176 thematic criticism 15 thetic 4, 7-8, 10-11, 13, 17, 38, 52-3, 62, 72, 81, 205-6; act 24; allocation of

role 81; and its boundaries 9; certainties 208; consciousness 44; and heterological moments, conflict between 30; image 127; knowledge, nihilation of 16; limit of 8; logic 41; mirror image 125; moment 12, 24; necessities of naming 45; power 205; pre- 8; predication of the other 11; in Sartre 15; undoing of 19; world of names 40 time: end of 45, 47, 51, 52; structure, double 169, non-linear 169 traitor 28, 30, 32, 45 translation 36-7, 41-2, 44, 56-8, 60; as praxis of response 60 transphenomenality 81 trap: anamorphotic 103-4; cognitive 99; perceptual 101 uncertainty 4, 209 unconscious 14, 43, 170, 175 ungrammaticality 190 unknown 4, 75, 77, 84, 89, 92, 120—1, 124, 137, 162, 174, 195; allusion to 91; definition of 106; discourse of 9, 62, 75, 206; discursive praxis of 212; emergence of 32; essential definitions of 86; excitement over 55; figure of 88; heterological praxis of 204; heterological wilderness of 60; preliminary mapping of 10; preliminary name of 24; presence of 35; representative of 86; spy of 93; textual figures of 3; trace of 60 utopia(n)/utopie 10, 184, 187, 190, 197-202; form 188, 189, 200; island 198 vanishing point 95, 99

General Index Verfremdung 215111.4 visibility 174, 181, 198, 200, 203; limit of 196, 198. See also invisibility voyage 137. See also journey wilderness 19, 32, 60, 2i6n23 woman 175, 180, 183, 199; as mother 198 writer-reader relationship 2251134.

255

See also reader writing 137, 139, 150, 173-4, 177, 184, 187, 195, 199, 201; act of 153; of body 187; in the feminine 182; and historical reality, inverse vectors of 126; impossibility of 67; praxis of 175, 192, 204, 211; process of 181-2

Index of Names

Adorno, Theodor W. 17 Antrim (Billy the Kid) 116 Aquin, Hubert 10, 14-16, 18, 20, 61, 106, 186; 'L'Art de la defaite' 69, 72; Blocs erratiques 210; 'Calcul differentiel de la contre-revolution' 73, 90; 'Considerations sur la forme romanesque d'Ulysse, de James Joyce' 222ni6; 'La Fatigue culturelle du Canada frangais' 72, 87, 22inio, 22ini4; 'Profession: ecrivain' 16, 77-9; Point de fuite 16; Prochain Episode 12, 15-17, 20, 79-94, 106, 209-10, 222n2o, 223n23, 23on9; Trou de memoire 16-18, 95-106, 210, 22ini5, 23on9 Bakhtin, Mikhail 8-9, 17, 93, 113-14, 140,165, 211 Baltrusaitis, Jurgis 95-6, 102, 223^3 Balzac, Honore de 35, 81, 89 Barbour, Douglas 218045, 225n9, 226ni4 Barnes, Djuna 198 Barthes, Roland 35, 227^2 Bataille, George 2i8n42 Benazon, Michael 2i5n8

Benjamin, Walter 114-15 Bennett, Donna 19 Benveniste, Emile 7, 36, 213113, 2ijn4 Berger, John 163, 169 Bhabha, Homi K. 17, 64 Billy the Kid 109, 116 Black, Max 140 Blanchot, Maurice 223n22 Bloch, Ernst 205, 211 Blodgett, Edward Dickinson 18 Blumenberg, Hans 155 Bolden, Buddy 5, 20, 107-8, 109, 11136, 206, 225nn, 226ni9, 23ini Booth, Wayne 22 Brecht, Bertold 65, 98, 2i5ni4 Brossard, Nicole 14, 16-18, 20, 206; Acces a 1'ecriture' 182; 'L'acces a 1'ecriture' 175; Amantes 173-4, 176; L'Amer 17,175,177-80,182; 'Le Centre blanc' 185; Le Centre blanc 230^; 'Le Cortex exuberant' 184; Le Desert mauve 187; Double Impression 174;'£ muet mutant' 173; journal intime 186; La Lettre aerienne 175-6, 180-2, 184, 187-8, 192-3;'De radicales a integrals' 175, 176; Picture theory 181-204, 211'

Index of Names 2311114; Le Sens apparent 181, 186 Brown, Russell 18 Buber, Martin 59, 22on6 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 22/n29, 229n42 Chaplin, Charlie 165 Charles, Ray 55, 56, 57, 60 Cixous, Helene 182, 23onn Cohen, Leonard 12-14, 1^' 2O' 62, 66, 72, 89,106-8, 206; 'A Ballet of Lepers' 13, 27-8, 30-6, 41, 208; Beautiful Losers 12-13, 15' ^l-^> 2O> 36-63. 66, 106-8, 208, 210, 2i6n25, 217^6, 2i8n42; Death of a Lady's Man 246; The favourite Game 28-30, 52, 107, 2i6n26, 2i6n27, 219^7; Flowers for Hitler 30; Let Us Compare Mythologies 21; 'Loneliness and History' 30-6, 40, 42, 44, 45, 59, 60, 63, 206, 2i6n26, 2i8n43; 'Master Song' 24; The Spice-Box of Earth 25 Conrad, Joseph 229^1 de Certeau, Michel 11-12,15, 36, 206-7 de Gaulle, Charles 104, 224^2, 224n33 de Man, Paul 2i6n24 de Montaigne, Michel 11-12 Derrida, Jacques 17, 24, 76, 82, 2i4n8, n

2i/ 39 Descombes, Vincent 10, 67, 82, 83, 91, 105, no, 197 Diderot, Denis 91, 93 Djwa, Sandra 21 Duncan, Isadora 123, 226ni4 Dupre, Louise 191 Engels, Friedrich 69

257

Fanon, Frantz 64, 69, 220112, 2221119 Perron, Jacques 22inio Freud, Sigmund 49, 76, 175, 219^2 Frye, Northrop 2161123, 217^2 Fulford, Robert 26 Garcia Marquez, Gabriel 111, 112, 113, 114, 151, 169 Gasche, Rodolphe 10 Gilgamesh 166-8 Gnarowski, Michael 21, 23 Godard, Barbara 16 Godzich, Wlad 20, 24, 34, 2i6n24 Greenstein, Michael 2i5ni6, 2i5n2o, 2i6n26

Harney, Robert F. 161 Hegel, G.W.F. 22, 42, 67-8, 70-1, 74, 113, 182-3, 2i4n4, 2i4n6 Heidegger, Martin 19, 22-3 Holbein, Hans 98-9, 101-2, 105 Howard, Richard 6 Husserl, Edmund 7-8, 2i3n4 , 222ni6 Hutcheon, Linda 6, 12-13, 21' 2&> 37' 107,114,138-40,169-70, 2i6n25, 2i7n32 Irigaray, Luce 175, 230^ Isis 37, 41, 51-2, 210 Jameson, Fredric 22in9 Jones, D.G. 32, 2i6n23 Joyce, James 105 Klein, A.M. 31-2, 2i5n2o, 2i5n2i Kristeva, Julia 7-9, 35, 132, 206-7, 2i3ni, 2i3n4, 22zni6 Kroetsch, Robert 18-20

Lapierre, Rene 223^2

258

Index or Names

Lecompte, Edouard 13,36-7,39,40,44, 56-7, 208 Lee, Dennis 22-3,108, 219^4 Legris, Renee 83 Levinas, Emmanuel 4, 6, 11, 62, 208, 211 Lukacs, Georg 26 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 11, 75-8, 82, 91, 2i4n5 Maclntyre, Ernest 119 Malcuzynski, M.-Pierrette 99,101 Mallarme, Stephane 67 Mandel, Eli 30 Marquis, Donald M. 116, 226ni9, 23ini Marx, Karl 71 Melangon, Joseph 83 Memmi, Albert 22on2, 22ini2 Moi, Toril 20, 23003 Mundwiler, Leslie no Norris, Ken 2i5ni2 Ondaatje, Michael 12,18,20,37,206, 226ni9, 228n34; 'The Cinnamon Peeler' 227024; The Collected Works of Billy the Kid 110-11, 114, 116, 137, 140, 153, 209; Coming Through Slaughter 5-6, 11-12, 17, 20, no36, 138, 153-4, 171, 208-9; The Dainty Monsters 226ni5; 'Garcia Marquez and the Bus to Aracataca' in, 112, 169, 228033; 'High Class Saloon' (photograph) 119; In the Skin of a Lion 13, 18,109, in12, 153-80, 210-11; 'King Kong Meets Wallace Stevens' 123; Leonard Cohen 12-13, 1Q6; The Long Poem Anthology 12; the man with seven

toes 108-9; Rat Jelly 132, 2261115; Running in the family 17-18, 10911, 137-52, 154, 171, 211; Secular Love 141; 'Women Like You' 227^4 Oscotarach 15, 47-8, 50, 56, 60, 210 Pacey, Desmond 21, 219054 Paterson, Janet M. 81-2, 205 Pelletier, Jacques 83 Petroff, Lillian 161 Plato 177 Purdy, Anthony George 22on5 Randall, Marilyn 96, 2231125, 223^7 Rimbaud, Arthur 6-7 Robichaux, John 226ni8 Rooke, Constance 125, 130-3 Roudiez, Leon S. 2i3ni Rousseau, Henri 107, 141 Sartre, Jean-Paul 15-16, 63-4, 66-7, 7°~3/ 79~8i, 83, 85-8, 22on2, 22ini5 Schlegel, Friedrich 22-3, 2i4n6 Scholem, Gershom G. 35-6 Scobie, Stephen 21, 22, 24-7, 116, 124, 131,141, 21402, 2151115 Silverman, Kaja 21303 Slemon, Stephen 10 Small, Ambrose 227026 Smart, Patricia 79, 224^2 Smith, Paul 17, 207 Soderlind, Sylvia 2i4nio, 218040 Solecki, Sam in, 131-2 Sontag, Susan 107, 114 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 10 Stein, Gertrude 193 Tekakwitha, Catherine 13, 36-63, 89, 208, 2i6n3o

Index of Names 259 Temelcoff, Nicholas 2281135 Terdiman, Richard 21^7 Tiffin, Helen 10 Todorov, Tzvetan 3, 6-9, 135 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott 72-3, 76 Waddington, Miriam 13, 26 Wagner, Richard 193

Wain, John 26 Waller, Fats 107 Webb, Phyllis 134 Weber, Sam 2i6n24 Weir, Lorraine 23ini2, 23:11114 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 189-91,193, 201, 204, 23ini2, 23inrj