Between Two Worlds

Caroline Bayard, The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec: From Concretism to Post-Modernism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989, x + 374 pp.

This ambitious, provocative book offers both more and less than its title promises.  Caroline Bayard's inquiry into the presuppositions of contemporary poetry goes far beyond an examination of Canadian writers, situating them globally with respect to fields of writing and theory that range from Brazil to Scandinavia.  This attempted synthesis is an enormous undertaking, and if some of the findings appear skewed or sketchy it is because Bayard has taken risks of a kind not often attempted in the insular world of studies in Canadian literature.  In the end, unfortunately, the attempt at a magisterial breadth and depth falters: attention to international trends comes at the expense of due attention to the context and diversity of recent Canadian poetry, and the impressive account of "concretism" only high lights an inadequate treatment of that most inexhaustible subject of current interest, post-modernism.  These flaws of substance are compounded by some serious structural faults in the text.  What might have been the definitive book on Canadian concrete poetry proves to be a frustratingly uneven, incomplete study of "radical poetics" in Canada during the past three decades.

     The number of pages cited above for this book gives a misleading impression of amplitude.   In fact, the critical text runs to just 198 pages; the remainder comprises a seventy-page anthology of "figures" — that is, primary texts (mostly concrete poems) — discussed in the critical narrative, and over one hundred pages of notes, bibliography, and index.  This extraordinary proportion of space given to apparatus is an indication of Bayard's scholarly industry and of the sheer density of argument and citation in the text itself.  This density of exposition, however, is not always complemented by clarity, nor does it leave space for a number of important issues that should fall within the purview of this study.

     The "Introduction" and first chapter, "Theoretical Background of a Crisis," together present a fifty-page overview of recent critical theory.   While acknowledging that "attention to the ideological implications of concrete and post-modern texts is very much warranted at this time," Bayard affirms that her primary responsibility is "to the prosodic and linguistic components of the texts in question" (7).  Neither the subsequent discussion of theory nor the treatment of particular movements, writers, and texts sustains this declared priority: the ideological dimension of contemporary writing receives a great deal of attention.   What follows, in the first chapter, is a condensed account of influential voices and trends in recent theory, an account virtually devoid of reference to the "scene in writing" in Canada.  Advanced students will already be familiar with much of this material: Saussure, semiotics, Derrida, logocentrism, deconstruction, Marxism, French feminism, psychoanalysis, the hegemony of the signifier, the problematizing of the human subject, the subversion of claims to authoritative truth, and so on.  Uninitiated students may be baffled by the condensed presentation.  Some paragraphs in this book invoke up to half a dozen theorists, summarizing their positions in a fashion apt to induce vertigo if not indigestion.  The attempt to summarize and clarify the mass of varying perspectives in current literary discourse is a worthy undertaking, but it has already been done elsewhere with greater comprehensiveness and style.  Moreover, the relevance of much of this material to the book's ostensibly Canadian focus is not demonstrated.  Some of the issues involved could have been advantageously deferred to later sections, and related more directly to their Canadian manifestations and proponents, and the main thesis of the book could then have been established with much greater economy.

     That thesis, roughly summarized, is that the assumptions underlying much concrete poetry both in Canada and abroad have been shattered and supplanted by the theory and practice of post-modern writing.  Bayard argues that the concrete poetry of the nineteen fifties (elsewhere) and sixties (in Canada) characteristically implies a poetics of isomorphism, that is, "the fusion of sign and object" (15), or the necessary "coincidence between signifier and signified, word and object" (30).  As such, concrete constitutes a recrudescence of the longing for a universal, univocal language intrinsically tied to the things of which it speaks — a longing that can be traced in philosophy and language theory as far back as Plato's Kratylus.   Bayard qualifies this analysis with reference to a split within the concrete movement between those writers committed to isomorphic premises and others "who rejected this iconicity and along with it semantic accountability to emphasize pure visuality, the text as texture, and the constructivist possibilities of words" (21).   Developments in the past two decades have brought to a crisis the contradiction between "graphic repre sentationality" and "arbitrariness" (18) that can be traced throughout the history of writing and language theory.  This crisis, Bayard believes, is of epochal importance, and is signally reflected in the "rupture" between the avant-garde writers of the earlier twentieth century and the post-modern ethos now ascendant.  Bayard emphasizes that this development is no mere change in literary fashion: "It becomes not so much the rejection of a certain aesthetics (after all, literary history is full of such claims), but rather the expression of a totally new perception of reality, of a new ontology" (52).

     This thesis is potentially valuable as a general interpretation of recent literary/critical discourse.  The evidence marshalled for it in the second chapter ("How Theory Suggests New Roles: The Canadian and Québécois Experiences") is stimulating and substantial, but it is also badly organized and incomplete.  The first three sections of this chapter deal with "Concrete Theory in Canada," "The Emergence of Performance Theory in a Post-Modern Era," and "Concrete and Post-Modern Theory in Quebec"; the last two comprise "A Brief Literary History" of (1) Canada, and (2) Quebec.  The section on performance theory is a highly compressed report on recent French, American, and Canadian research on this topic, and, as such, seems displaced from the global overview undertaken in Chapter One.  As to the other aspects of this chapter's organization, while there is some advantage in having separate sections on writing in (English) Canada and (French) Quebec, the separation of "theory" from "literary history" is theoretically unsound and damaging to the book's structure.  What is theory but the precipitate of history?  What is history but the construction of theory?  In fact, the sections on theory, especially the one dealing with poetics in Quebec, are organized along plainly historical lines, while the sections on "literary history" provide many insights into the theoretical implications of the new writing under consideration.   Apparently, the discrete sections on theory are intended to bridge the gap between Chapters One and Two by addressing the question: "What did Canadians contribute to an already massive and complex theoretical edifice?" (56).  But there is no reason that this question could not be raised in a more fully integrated discussion of theory as a signal aspect and determinant of recent literary history in Canada.

     My more serious reservations about this chapter, and about the book as a whole, concern the loosely-defined perimeters of the study.  At the outset, Bayard formulates her task in this way: "how could one attempt to define radical poetics in this country and still try to relate them to a wider ensemble?" (5).  A logical starting point, and one which she does not exploit, would be the presuppositions of the "old poetics."  It is not enough to refer generally, and fleetingly, to a "dominant academic and popular taste" (3) against which avant-garde writers are said to have defined themselves.  To construct "the tradition" in so monolithic and simplified a fashion is to accept uncritically the avant-garde's own polemics.  One or two incidental remarks on earlier Canadian writing do indicate that Bayard might have situated her study of the new, in relation to the old, much more tellingly had she chosen to do so.  For example, she introduces her account of Daphne Marlatt's feminist poetics by noting that "the feeling of being disenfranchised by language and left unaccounted for in history, already present in the early years of Canadian literature, came to find its most intense articulations in later years" (160).  More such astute perceptions of connections between the new and the old would have endowed this book with more perspective.

     To attempt to define concrete poetry is one thing; to broach the question of post-modernism in Canadian poetry is to open up a critical problem of another magnitude.   While Bayard's analysis of avant-garde thinking and practice in its concrete phase is thorough and authoritative, her attempt to delineate that subsequent, post-modern radicalism that (as she says) sup planted the avant-garde is highly questionable in its emphases and exclusions.  The problem of post-modernism involves a whole range of difficulties as to its definition, antecedents, and extent, and in addressing these formidable questions, Bayard errs on the side of narrowness.  For example, her "brief literary history" of "three decades of experiments" in English Canada gives scant attention to a number of important writers and trends, and wholly omits others.  George Bowering is considered chiefly important for having put bp Nichol in touch with European concrete poets.  Robert Kroetsch and Daphne Marlatt are acknowledged as important post-modern theorists, but the main commentary on their contributions is, curiously, displaced from this "literary history" to the next chapter, "The Texts on Their Own."  There is no reference at all to Victor Coleman, Michael Ondaatje, or Margaret Atwood.  Granted, the extent to which the latter two writers are bona fide post-modernists can be debated; nevertheless, pre cisely for this reason some attention to their work might have helped Bayard delineate more exactly the ambiguous fault-line between modernist and post-modernist Canadian writing, as might closer attention to older poets such as Dorothy Livesay, Earle Birney, and P.K. Page, whose careers show an exemplary movement from a modernist to a post-modernist sensibility.

     The use of the undefined phrase "radical poetics" to encompass both concrete and post-modern theory also begs a number of questions.  I am left wondering whether an attempt "to define radical poetics in this country" should take into account certain other events in our recent literary history.  What about the vogue for "minimal" poetry sparked by Phyllis Webb's Naked Poems (1965), or the genre-breaking and genre-blending of a num ber of poet-novelists (Bowering, Ondaatje, Atwood)?  What about the valorization of the serial poem and the devaluation of the lyric in the work of the Tish poets?  Should an attempt to define radical poetics also extend to the concern with the politics of voice that has enlivened literary debate in Canada over the past three decades, from Dennis Lee's nationalism to the regionalism of Dennis Cooley and the "ethnic position" of Marlene Nourbese Philip?  I am not insisting that Bayard should necessarily have lavished attention on any one of these writers or issues; I do think that the vaguely defined limits of her study (and perhaps her binary fixation on "Canada" vis-a-vis "Quebec") leave her vulnerable to charges of an arbitrary and exclusionist procedure.

     Defects of structure and omission aside, Chapter Two is, in terms of information and analysis, the most rewarding section of The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec. Bayard provides a formidably knowledgeable account of concrete poetry in Canada as it evolved from its visual to its aural phase, and she offers helpful explanations of various concrete forms: comics, collages, semiotic poems, performance texts, video, and others.   She traces the crucial role of literary magazines and presses in disseminating the new poetics, commenting on the distinctive orientation and contribution of each: Tish, Open Letter, Ganglia/Gronk, Blew Ointment, and Véhicule Press, in English Canada; Parti Pris, La Barre du Jour, Les Herbes Rouges, La Nouvelle Barre du Jour, Main Mise, Chroniques, Stratégie, and others, in Quebec.  Her analysis of the concrete movement is the stronger for its emphasis upon diversity and contradiction among the "experimental" writers of the sixties and early seventies.  "Canadian concrete sound," she insists, must be understood as "a continuously evolving form and one that rejects systematic principles" (70); similarly, manifestos by various Quebec writers "all share one common tenet: they suggest the need for artistic manifestations to proceed from pluralistic viewpoints, not to be content with homogeneity, coherence, or logic" (127).  Nevertheless, within this diversity Bayard is able to delineate characteristic principles and theoretical cruxes that give the phenomenon its shape and significance.  She notes, for example, the intersection of these writers' concerns with ideological issues generated by the sixties' counterculture and contemporary political theorists both in Canada and abroad: in particular, the problem of power in textual as well as social relationships.  Accordingly, she rightly stresses the recurring concern with the empowerment of the reader / viewer / audience in much concrete and postmodernist theory.

     This book will be especially valuable for English-Canadian readers whose access to information about recent writing in Quebec is limited.  The comparative approach that structures the text from its title to its conclusion entails risks, but also yields insights.  While she charts similar developments in the poetics of Anglophone and Francophone writers, Bayard also points out a number of important differences.  She remarks upon the lack of antecedents for English-Canadian experimental writers and their marginal situation in Anglophone literary culture, in contrast to the availability of an avant-garde tradition and the recognition given to their counterparts in Quebec.  She also analyzes the metaphysical implications of a good deal of English-Canadian concrete, as opposed to the largely secular premises of radical Quebec writers: against a certain nostalgia for the absolute in bill bissett and bp Nichol, the poststructuralist élan of François Charron and André Roy.  In Bayard's view, there has been a persistent inconsistency among Anglophone writers between "the metaphysics of concrete and the materialistic assumptions" of their theory, especially that of Nichol and Steve McCaffery, writing in Open Letter as the Toronto Research Group (72).  In contrast, the most striking inconsistency of Quebec's avant-garde was "the constant opposition, even contradiction one detects in these texts and artistic productions between (a) their emphasis on fusion, integration, and the bringing together of heterogeneous elements, and (b) their ideological insistence upon separatism, revolutionary practices, and the bursting out of obsolete political structures" (128).  The main factor in the differences between Anglophone and Francophone radicals was, of course, the much greater urgency of political motives in the work of the latter.  Generally, Bayard's comparisons seem apt, though in one or two cases they require qualification.  She states that whereas "feminist concerns" in Quebec "first emerged out of a community of women, the voices of Daphne Marlatt and Lola Lemire Tostevin appear to be relatively isolated" (159).  This generalization should certainly be amended in light of the work of the Tessera collective, various Anglophone journals and publishers committed to women's writing, and the production in English Canada of such collective scholarship as In the Feminine: Women and Words (1985), A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing (1986), and Gynocritics: Feminist Approaches to Writing by Canadian and Québécoise Women (1987).

     Chapter Three, "The Texts on Their Own: From Isomorphism to Post-Modern Disseminations" is, like the preceding chapter, full of valuable information and acute critical perceptions, but marred by problems of focus and organization.  The purpose of this chapter is to scrutinize a series of exemplary texts, many of them reproduced in the book's appendix, so as to illustrate "trends and currents" and also provide "a nuanced evaluation of the quality of the works in question" (138).  The ensuing discussion, however, ranges far beyond an analysis of "texts on their own."  It offers brief general assessments of the oeuvres of writers such as Kroetsch, Marlatt, and Nicole Brossard, as well as many further generalizations about recent Canadian writing: material that logically belongs in the preceding chapter.  While this procedure leads to some needless repetition in belabouring the book's thesis, it does yield important elaborations of that thesis: notably an analysis of the treatment of history as a distinctive compulsion of post-modernist writing.  There is also a persuasive case put that "the most decisive impact" of the avant-garde was its influence upon the layout, typography, and syntax of mainstream poetry (138), and there are helpful explanations of the different reading practices appropriate to a variety of experimental styles: "effaced" texts, "dissimulated" texts, "exploded" texts, and so on.

     One of the most attractive features of this book is its generous appendix of concrete and post-modernist texts, which are a pleasure to peruse, and ready to hand if readers should wish to check Bayard's interpretations against their own.  In general, I find her readings of individual texts illuminating and highly instructive, but in some instances her categories do appear to constrain her insights.  Her insistence that Nichol's "Captain Poetry" drawings are about the death of poetry leads her to underestimate their semiotic richness: the cartoon reproduced as Fig. 6 appears to me to go far beyond positing the irony "that language destroying itself still remains language; the death of poetry brings us more poetry" (141).  In its self-compromised illusion of monumental solidity, and its play with the conventions of landscape, figure, and frame, this text raises all sorts of questions about visual representation and linguistic interpretation.  Differences of interpretation aside, there are some outright errors in Bayard's handling of these texts, with consequences for her understanding of them.  The Nichol poem to which she gives the title "love/evol" (Fig. 19) is actually titled "Blues": a recognition of this title, clearly printed in the bottom right-hand corner, would surely modify her interpretation.  Similarly, I think that she misses the rich verbal possibilities inscribed in the untitled concrete visual by bissett here included as Fig. 31; this text, which has been reproduced upside down, is more than "a simple aggregated mass of graphics" (152).  It is perhaps worth noting that the evaluation of many of these poems is couched in modernist or traditional terms.  Bayard values the "sophistica tion and elegance" of pieces by Judith Copithorne (141) and Robert Zend (148), the "complex functioning" of works by Raoul Duguay (178) and Carole Massé (188), the "ambiguous" quality of texts by Karl Young (152), bissett (165), and Brossard (185).  As against these virtues, she reproaches the "facile" (140) and merely "ludic" (155) character of much visual poetry, the obviousness of Nichol's "em ty" ("not likely to provide us with multiple insights" [147]), and the "didactic" aspect of Madeleine Gagnon's Poélitique (181).  If the coherence prized by modernist writers has gone by the board, their commitment to irony, ambiguity, and complexity has certainly persisted in both their post-modernist successors and current scholarship on post-modernism.

     As my comments have indicated, coherence is the score on which I find The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec most wanting.  To some extent, this weakness is a function of the book's scope in its attention to an enormous number of writers and texts in two languages, and to the immensely complex if not anarchic scene of the "new" writing in Canada during the past three decades.  But to some extent, the incoherences of this text participate in the post-modernist project that it seeks to examine.  An endeavour to "totalize" or fully integrate the findings of this inquiry would certainly run counter to the post-modernist principles that Bayard discusses and with which she sympathizes.  As she observes, "the development of post-modernism has placed us, both as a society and as producers of imaginary constructs, in a wholly different terrain.  The post-modern imagination rejects linearity.   Links within a large contextual ensemble . . . do not operate along straight horizontal lines and genealogical structures.  Intersections, palimpsest, and blanks would be more appropriate descriptive tools" (155).  I am as yet unpersuaded that critical scholarship can use such tools effectively.  Like many, these days, Bayard seems to be caught, awkwardly, between two worlds: the old academic scholarship, with its canons of clarity and coherence, and the poststructuralist arena of self-conscious critical performance.

Len Early