Discourse and Method: Narrative Strategy in George Bowering's West Window1

by Terry Whalen


If, as readers, we agree with Irving Layton that poetry is above all about freedom — or agree with Anton Chekhov that writing has got something to do with squeezing the serf out of our veins — we will want to remain alert to what Terry Eagleton calls the inevitable "link or nexus between discourses and power"2. There is a primary way in which the structures of art carry with them a political bias that can work on our minds at an unconscious level, and many Postmodernist writers, for instance, stay alert to this fact. A great deal of Postmodernist writing even takes as its central aim the unwriting of Modernist literature since it sees such literature as bookish, elitist, conservative, and serving or advocating what Michel Foucault would call régime.

It is in part because George Bowering shares in this alert Postmodern ist awareness that he has become one of the more vocal Canadian advocates of writing as freedom, play, spontaneous occurrence, happening, process. He is an advocate of poetry as freedom from the "mind-forged garrison"3, and as exemption from structured discourse, discourse that has intimate affinities with systems and régime. Robert Kroetsch speaks for many Postmodernists when he says, "as a Postmodernist I resist those overriding systems just as much as I resist religious or political ones"4, and Bowering will go so far as to say in Allophanes that "There is no system"5. Such comments serve in part to explain Bowering's interest in creating a sensation of cognitive bewilderment in his volumes, I think, and they are closely related to his rejection of the literature of hierarchy; the desire to evoke a sort of mental amazement in his readers is at the very core of his bias as a Postmodernist writer.

So, in an odd sense, Bowering is not as unsystematic as first impressions of his work and a series of his asides on poetry might make us think. Indeed, I would argue, his poetry of freedom is itself a poetry of power, and the shape of its system is available in its very reaction to the authority of Modernism and in its own intermittent didacticism. There is a relationship between discourse and method in Bowering's writing, but the discourse tends to be in the poet's critical prose and the method in the designed, scattering effect of his poetry, in its ostensible spontaneity. This is to suggest that the poetry, for all of its apparent chaos and its contempt for 'system', has chartable cumulative effects which add up to a statement about life that implies system after all.

West Window is a book of poems in which we can explore this odd contradiction in some detail. I have two questions to ask of this book, and I would suggest that the answers tell us potentially unsettling things about Bowering's bias as a Postmodernist poet. What do the suites of poems in West Window think of us as readers, how to they approach us? And, to what extent do they actually liberate us from the ideology of Modernism, the (supposed) tyranny of that literary-political régime?

West Window contains five suites of poems: Curious (1973); At War With the U.S. (1974); Allophanes (1976); Uncle Louis (1980); and Between The Sheets (1982). Curious, the first suite, is for the most part designedly low-key in the degree of its artifice primarily because Bowering is merely recording his surface impressions of some forty-eight poets he has met. What is interesting about the suite as a whole, for our purposes, is the odd, almost equivocal nature of the poet's attitudes towards others, his emotional movement between endearment and very sharp contempt. Significantly, such an equivocal attitude to others is also visible in the poet's relationship to his readers in many of his other works, and in this particular connection, the poet seems caught in the trap of his own aesthetic: as a Postmodernist, he wishes to adopt a benevolent view of the reader as worthy of liberation from structures and régime yet the potential for such an intimate, teacherly relationship is vitiated by the poet's phenomenological self-consciousness, and by a copresent impatience with the reader's (assumed) stupidity.

More specifically, in Smoking Mirror (1982) Bowering will beckon the reader into one of his poems with a line like, "You, too, reader, / don't go on to the next poem.! Stay here for a minute, I stay"6, and in Allophanes he invites us to "Have a seat on my language, / & here we go" (WW, p. 87). As he says in one of his essays, there is a way in which the "post-modernist invites his readers, & sometimes his characters, to take a hold somewhere & help him move the damned thing into position"7. But for all of the friendliness of this posture — and the friendliness of this poet's sudden wit and strong sense of imaginative fun — Bowering often damages his amiable contact with his readers by expecting too much of us when the writing skirts off in the direction of authorial collapse. In Curious, for example, he will turn to us and say "& now I cannot remember I what clever thing I was going to say about I liking or was it falling, look elsewhere" (WW, p. 29). Similarly, in "George, Vancouver" he says, "I keep losing sight of the subject, I Captain Vancouver seems lost in the poem"8. It is arguable that in such instances we are supposed to witness a value in the writer's bewilderment — witness an honesty, perhaps, an effacement of the writer's abilities. For at least a few readers, however, there persists a suspicion that such throat-clearing is a feckless, failed art which is delivered to us anyway simply because we deserve no better.

In such asides or pre-poetic gestures, we begin to see Bowering's lack of a genuine concern for his readers, a lack of concern which is made more explicit in an interview (in 1980) where he remarks: "When I'm writing and after I've written, I'm not interested in the relationship between the book and the public, I'm only interested in the relationship between the book and the writer, myself'9. Elsewhere we find him, in the suite Uncle Louis, for instance, putting an unsympathetic reader out of business by anticipating his comments (e.g. "As usual, it is difficult to imagine what Bowering's political ideas are, if indeed he has any" [WW, p. 126]), by testily punishing that (fictionally created) reader for requiring Uncle Louis to have more coherence in its narrative framework, a happier relationship between discourse and method. The upshot is that an otherwise expressive and engaging suite about the prosaic nature of Canadian heroes and Canadian mythology is trivialized by its involvement in the politics of the reader-writer relationship; it is a politics in which the writer guards his power, and the reader is considered dumb. The contempt for audience, in Uncle Louis and elsewhere in Bowering's work, quite often retards the expressive vigour of the poetry and turns it into a self-regarding and (ironically) authoritarian object. Like many experimental writers, Bower ing is often given to narrative obscurity. Too often, when he has his own doubts about the validity of that obscurity, it is the reader who is expected to pay the price. For, in the strange logic of a poem such as Uncle Louis, the poet is given to tossing aside the best ideals of the Postmodernist contract with audience and insisting on readerly subordination instead.

So it is not insignificant that the suite of poems in West Window which is the least troubled with audience, the most coherent in terms of narrative continuity and subject matter, and the most lyrical in the weight of feeling, is the highly readable At War With The U.S.. It is as though the poet's sufficient control over his highly charged subject matter saves him in this instance from self-conscious asides to the reader, saves him from those defensive, semi-paranoid postures which get in the way of the poet's clearer vision and his (undoubted) lyric integrity. At War With The U.S. is a poem of moral rage at the violent calculus of the Vietnam war and the authoritarian nature of the Nixon government. It describes itself as a gathering in of the "Cinders of a poem" (WW, p. 75) but it is ultimately a coherent gathering. And despite the fact that the speaker states that "I am no maker / what is left is ashes / of whatever fire, what ever / was consumed" (WW, p. 75), this is not a familiar, plaintive request that the reader consent to authorial aridity again, but it is rather the poet's recognition that the power of American imperialism — copresent with its habitual paranoia about all other nations — engendered a war, the horror of which ultimately silences the humanist voice, renders the poet aware of the weakness of his authority and the authority of art. In this context, the admission of artistic defeat is paradoxically effective: it effectively captures the dramatic sense of helplessness felt by protestors and poets alike during the Vietnam era. The poem's confusion is part of its coherence as a deeply felt public/private statement: it is a poem which has something to say.

In Allophanes a somewhat analogous attempt at coherence is visible in the cumulative effects of what amounts to a weighty, plentiful spilling forth of images, aphorisms and asides. In this suite Bowering appears to be acting, through his collage method, on the reader's servility next to the world of traditional, authoritative literature. Unlike At War With The U.S., this particular work has a direct didactic aim. It has a design on our (supposed) literary and political convictions — it is about the nexus between discourse and power. Ken Norris has said of this work that it is "in many ways a maze of thought and philosophy. Neither the reader nor the poet is ever quite sure of what exactly is taking place".10 And I think this is a problem; Allophanes is one of Bowering's least engaging works, one in which the poem is a lexical playfield, a dizzying maze of cryptic statements spoken by an ambiguous speaker who sometimes postures as an intimate friend only to end up as an impatient instructor.

For all of the obscurity of design, Allophanes appears to embody a perceptible Postmodernist view of literature. It contains many asides which have something in common, asides like, "Literature must be thought now" (WW, p. 85) and "What? / You don't want the untying / that frees the mind?" (WW, p. 89) and "Sacredness of the act of thought / is tranferred to the record, books made from trees, / & there it is, unmelting literature" (WW, p. 89). It is fair to say, I think, that Allophanes can be read as a Postmodernist exercise in the unwriting of aristocratic literature and in its preoccupation with "untying" the reader from enslavement to authoritarian structures — it is ostensibly about freedom.

Thus, if I am right, the narrative method is a mocking and a parodic one, a deconstructivist one. Authoritarian mythologies are ridiculed in this work, gods are knocked over, man in a state of emerging nature is celebrated; and lines such as "& where has Maud gone? (WW, p. 91) and "Oh sages standing in God's holy shit" (WW, p. 92) seem to exist as unwritings of Yeats in the name of getting the reader used to the new idea that "There is no system" (WW, p. 99) of literature, politics, or religion which is really adequate to encapsulate being. Traditional, all systems of the past are therefore in a sense fraudulent, merely fake in their claim to authority. This, if I have the long logic correct, is why we as readers need the "untying / that frees the mind" (WW, p. 89).

Allophanes is dedicated to Robin Blaser, so it is perhaps all the more credible that my disquiet about Bowering's apparent deconstructivist impulse here is made yet more disturbed by one of Blaser's own comments on Bowering's work. In his introduction to Particular Accidents, Selected Poems / George Bowering (1980), Blaser makes a comment on Bowering's Postmodernist concerns, a comment which effectively, if inadvertently, captures the presumption of authority that is (ironically) latent in aspects of the Postmodernist stance. Blaser says:

The term, 'post-modern', so conscientiously inserted into Canadian criticism by Frank Davey — and supported by Bowering's own literary essays — signals a strong movement among important Canadian writers to separate themselves from certain characteristics of modernism. Their emphasis is upon the democratic and against the authoritarian, upon naturalness of language, and upon fragment-structures of thought and feeling without undue anxiety about the absence of reconciliatory and conservative structures of meaning. Modernism is identified with 'hard, austere values' and authoritarianism. "Modernism," Davey writes, "was essentially an elitist, formalistic, anti-democratic and anti-terrestrial movement." The push is to shake off the structural hierarchies in modernism even as these are seen in Eliot, Pound and Yeats, forefathers. Davey, in the same context, notes that "politics and art have become interwoven as never before" and argues to solve this by diminished central authority. This then translates into counter-structures against form as completion or conclusion. Such counter-structures with their infinite variety must be witnessed again and again.11

As readers, we are implicitly viewed as passive here, or seen as pawns in a godgame.12 The nexus between discourse and power becomes the battle between Modernist and Postmodernist, and the reader is seen as programmed victim who is in dire need of deprogramming. In this version of the Postmodernist aesthetic, the reader exists primarily as a highly servile figure who is in need of being freed from the authoritarianism of Modernism by way of the deconstructivist narrative strategies of the Postmodernist. All of this also brings to mind Robert Scholes' rejoinder that "Your true deconstructivist sees interpretation as a perpetual exposure of blindness, just as your true Maoist sees the revolution as a perpetual decentering of the social structure. Both of these views imply the happy corollary that critics and revolutionaries will never be out of business"13. And if Davey and Blaser are right, we might add that Postmodernist, deconstructivist poets have their (repetitive) work cut out for them as well, since counter-structures must be seen "again and again".

Not only are Davey and Blaser's assumptions about the built-in politics of "form as completion" highly debatable ones14but the somewhat contemptuous view of audience in this aesthetic of (anarchist) power should also give us a bit of a jolt. For the assumption here is that the reader, unfree and serf-like, has been passively absorbing these devious Modernist "structures" all along. The deprogramming method described, one in which we must witness "again and again" so many counter- structures, very well accounts, I think, for why it is that in Bowering's least poetry (as opposed to his best), his most obscure and badgering lines, one feels manipulated or insulted toward consent to the guru authority of the poet rather than invited into a society of enlightened equals. It is not that the method is a consciously vicious one; but its lack of respect for the reader's ability to sort experience and to sort the influences of (any) literature quite ironically makes the Postmodernist stance appear as authoritarian (in its didacticism) as its enemy, Modernism. In short, it is a method which tends to become guilty of the aberration it set out to upend in the first place.

How we react to all of this is of course highly dependent on our own political view, and on the particular shape of our own readerly freedom. But I think that one measure of our freedom is there in the extent to which we are willing as readers to rebell, and to rebell when we see that our intelligence is thought so vacant that we are assumed to be victims of structures fromwhich we must "again and again" be liberated. Slavery is still slavery, no matter to which ideology or guru we enslave ourselves. Of course, another measure of our freedom is perhaps available in our willingness to seek out still other authorities and judge whether or not they have something valuable to say. And since I have been referring to authorities I have a regard for all along in this paper, I will allow myself one more reference to a commentator on politics and literature whose words seem especially sensible in the midst of this Postmodernist context. The authority is Confucious and these are his coherent words:

If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not meant, then what ought to be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if morals and art deteriorate, justice will go astray; if justice goes astray, the people will stand in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.15

For me, there is something crisply straightforward and respectful to readers in all of this. Separate from whether or not conservatism, Marxism, radical humanism, or genteel anarchism are adequate or not to the political complexities of our day, there is the issue of the politics of the reader-and-the-writer relationship in the first place, and the extent to which the nexus between discourse and power shows up in that relationship at the outset. I think Confucious is a good authority in this regard, since he bids us to be interested in the extent to which any writer seeks to take us past "helpless confusion" toward that clarity of thought and language which is the hallmark of truly genuine literature which is concerned with the reader's freedom. And I think the extent to which any writer is trustworthy in this regard has to do, not with the manipulation of structures and counter-structures, but rather with the extent to which any writer is informed with a strong, dramatic and convincing sense of pity and justice and can speak from that essentially egalitarian sense with a forthrightness and an eloquence which is honestly above board.

Interestingly, that sense of pity and justice is alive and well in Bowering's volumes, and I think it is most visible in suites like At War With the U.S., a work in which the poet's own "helpless confusion" is faced painfully in a private/public tension, and therefore in a way which assures a pressure of experience behind the words. Stated another way, Bowering is at his very best, not in the long, collage poems which are stuffed with lexical games, nugatory asides, phenomenological pauses and the lan guage of "arbitrariness", but in those instances where he leaves off such finally elitist gestures and writes clearly in a manner in which "what is said" is what is "meant". On one level, Bowering's long poems are very private in their self-discussion, and on another, their deconstructivist level, they embody that insult to the reader's freedom which marks and mars much Postmodernist practice — the assumption that we are just serfs.

There is a line I like very much in Allophanes, and it is perhaps a central one; "(Aw, poet, just tell us how you/felt about something)" (WW, p. 89). In their context these are the words of an insubordinate reader who is not awed by the poet's amazing, bewildering lines, his Postmodernist counter-structures. But I would also suggest that Bowering is here himself partly aware of a degree to which his poetry of designed, scattering effect just does read like befuddlement for the fun of it, reads as the inadequate production of a lesser artistic self.

Bowering's better artistic self is an achieved one, I think, and it is there in his shorter poems, and in those of his suites in which "what is said" is what is "meant", in poems such as "Grandfather" and "Moon Shadow" (to cite early examples) and "The second runner" and "A Clean park" (to mention visionary and recent examples in Smoking Mirror). So to say that, with the exception of At War With The U.S., he is writing in a discourse which has a dubious method and has an equivocal connection with power is not at all to dismiss his otherwise fine achievement, his assured stature as a significant poet. It is to say that reading, too, is above all about freedom and it involves the reader's right to modify, to sort and to choose.


Notes

  1. This paper, which is slightly revised, was presented in March 1985 at the Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA) Conference in Hartford, Connecticut during the session on The Long Poem: Narrative, Documentary, Post Modern.[back]

  2. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983; rpt. Minneapolis: Umv. Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 210.[back]

  3. George Bowering, A Way With Words (Ottawa: Oberon, 1982), p. 72.[back]

  4. Robert Kroetsch, in Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations With Robert Kroetsch, by Shirley Neuman and Robert Wilson, Western Canadian Literary Documents, Vol. 3 (Edmonton:   Newest, 1982), p. 31. [back]

  5. George Bowering, Allophanes, 1976; rpt. in West Window: The Selected Poetry of George Bowering, preface, Sheila Watson (Toronto: General, 1982), p. 99. All further references to this selection (WW) appear in the text. [back]

  6. George Bowering, "Calm after," in Smoking Mirror (Edmonton: Longspoon, 1982), p. 40. [back]

  7. George Bowering, "Modernism Could Not Last Forever," The Canadian Fiction Magazine, Nos. 32/33 (1979-80), p. 7. [back]

  8. George Bowering, George Vancouver (excerpts), 1970; rpt. in Particular Accidents: Selected Poems / George Bowering, ed. and introd. Robin Blaser (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1980), p. 76. [back]

  9. George Bowering, "Why Problem-solver George Bowering Vows Never to Write Another Historical Novel," Interview with Linda M. Leitch, Books in Canada, Vol. 9, No. 9 (November 1980), p. 30. [back]

  10. Ken Norris, "The Poetry of George Bowering," in Brave New Wave, ed. Jack David (Thornhill, Ontario: Black Moss, 1978), p. 106. [back]

  11. Robin Blaser, Particular Accidents, p. 24. Blaser's quotes from Frank Davey come from Davey's From There to Here (Erin, Ontario: Press Porcepic, 1974), p. 244. [back]

  12. I am using this term with an awareness of two of Robert Kroetsch's comments in Labyrinths of Voice. The first is: "This must be one of the functions of art: to put us into situations where we apprehend the rules only up to a point. This is where art, by the paradox of its difference from life, again becomes mimetic. We are all in games where we can't quite perceive the rules. We are in the godgame situation; this is central to my view of the importance of fiction" (p. 68). The second of his relevant comments is: "I suppose that is one of the reasons why we say that a certain book is a good book. It will make us experience its special emotions. A bad narrative exploits emotional confusions" (p. 69). [back]

  13. Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1982), p. 14. For a yet further pushing of deconstructivist thought to its inevitable corollaries, see Terry Eagleton's The Function of Criticism From The Spectator to Post-Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984), pp. 85-106. In a lingo which is coincidentally in tune with both Robin Blaser's words and Robert Scholes's at the same time, there is in Eagleton's text a reference to the work of Hillis Miller: "The deconstructive gesture, Hillis Miller has argued, always fails, 'so that it has to be performed again and again, interminably .. .' This is certainly a reassuring kind of failure to run up against — one that promises to keep you on the job indefinitely.. ." (p. 105). [back]

  14. For an immensely detailed discussion of the fallacy of viewing works of art as primarily formal structures, see Edward W. Said's The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge:   Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), especially pp. 178-225. [back]

  15. Confucius, as quoted by Stanley Kunitz in "Poet and State," 1975; rpt. in Poetry and Politics: An Anthology of Essays, ed. and introd. Richard Jones (New York: Quill, 1985), p. 119. [back]