The Language of ParadoxSmaro Kamboureli. On the Edge of Genre: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. 245 pp. Perhaps the most famous statement in English on the long poem is Edgar Allan Poe's comment in his 1850 essay "The Poetic Principle" that "I hold that the long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase 'a long poem' is simply a flat contradiction in terms" (33). Poe was considering the conflict embedded in the expression's combination of what he saw as (by definition) fleeting "poetical effects" and the long poem's extended duration. Smaro Kamboureli's On the Edge of Genre: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem, while it speaks to and from a very different time, place and body of texts than Poe's essay, is a book that reads the long poem as a genre ineluctably grounded in contradiction. Kamboureli's study seeks to negotiate the terms of the contradictions that she sees as both defining the contemporary Canadian long poem, and at the same time making it resistant to definition. On the Edge of Genre, very much to its credit, takes on a large and complex project that incorporates several related aspects, and should thus appeal to several related literary-critical audiences: it wants to theorize the whole idea of the long poem and/as genre; it wants to examine the past of the long poem in Canada; it wants to develop a theoretical framework that allows for more detailed discussion of examples of contemporary Canadian poems, explaining their generic affiliations, their "Canadianness" and, in effect, their participation in the "contemporary." Kamboureli should definitely be praised for her ambitious contextualization of Canadian literature in terms of theoretically post-structuralist, genre-oriented, national, and (to some degree) historical interests. Hers is a book for which — to borrow Kamboureli's paradoxical style — the claim of success would be an admission of failure, an acknowledgement of the acceptance of easy answers and pat formulae, as well as of the proposition that the energies of the long poem's textuality can be mastered, contained and explained by the critic. Kamboureli takes up this last issue when she writes of bp Nichol's important long poem that "Self and genre, the 'i' andThe Martyrology as a long poem, are bound by a paradoxical logic that the reader cannot subvert. To subvert it would mean to evoke the law of logos, to make sense of the senseless" (169). True, although it seems to me that Kamboureli's exploration of the nature of subjectivity in The Martyrology does make a great deal of sense of the poem's variable use of pronouns, and I mean sense in a good sense, because it allows for the reading of the poem as a provisional, productive, intersubjective activity of sense-making. On the other hand, Kamboureli sometimes avoids confronting important problematic issues, or allows epigrammatic post-structuralist aporetic statements (I will cite some in passing) to function as superficial solutions — indeed as forms of mastery — in themselves. One of the main examples of the former problem is the book's approach to the necessarily relative status of the long poem as a generic category. Kamboureli writes that "It would be naive to argue that length in itself could suffice to define the long poem as a distinct genre; by the same token, however, a long poem can only be long" (49). The tautology functions here as a kind of reverse paradox. Nevertheless, important questions that complicate the tautology remain: in what terms is the "long-ness" of the long poem defined, and on what scale is its length measured? Empirical formal, spatial indicators of length are deliberately rejected when Kamboureli indicates that the number of pages or lines in a poem is an inadequate criterion (50). She suggests an alternative measure in her remark that Phyllis Webb's Naked Poems is long because "the reading of this poem takes place processually, as the reader has often both to backtrack and to continue reading. The issue here is duration rather than length" (50). While the notion of a responsive measure of length is an attractive and fertile one (Poe found it so), it isn't developed convincingly, since, for example, the statement just cited might well be made about Webb's shorter individual lyrics, or those of many other writers, and the difference between a processual reading of the long poem and a processual reading of other genres is never fully elaborated. Kamboureli comments at one point that, unlike E.J. Pratt, Dorothy Livesay never attempted "the large long poem" (44), but the critic does not specify precisely how this distinction is made. What, further, distinguishes the long poem per se from the cycle of lyrics? the poetic novel? the thematically or formally coherent single-author collection of poetry or even multiple-author anthology? I am not suggesting that it is necessary — or even possible — to answer each of these questions, only that their dimensions might be explored at greater length. To be fair, the detailed negotiation in On The Edge of Genre's second chapter of various configurations of sexual/textual desire developed in recent Canadian critical work on the long poem by such poet-theorists as George Bowering, Michael Ondaatje, Robert Kroetsch and Frank Davey does address some possibilities of the psychodynamics of length, and results in the recognition of a kind of metaphysics of delay, prolongation and process in the long poem that is seen as the driving force of its length and is assumed to be related to the poet's philosophy of language: "Both delay and prolongation show the poet to dwell in language and hinge on the inscription of excess in the long poem" (85). Just how the impetus of desire is enacted in formal or structural terms in individual poems is not discussed in any detail; such a project would not necessarily be in conflict with Kamboureli's legitimate rejection of the notion of a rigid coherent "grammar" of the long poem. One way Kamboureli gets around the issue of length is by "measuring" the long poem by its very generic indeterminacy, as Eli Mandel did in his inaugural address to the Longliners Conference at York University in 1984 (Mandel 19), ironically titled "The Death of the Long Poem." This argument makes a per/verse sort of sense, since, if, as Derrida writes in "The Law of Genre," "as soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity" (53), then the long poem, because of its relative nature, defines itself by defying the nature of genre itself. Or, as Kamboureli puts it,
This is indeed a provocative paradigm that reads the expansiveness of the long poem as impelled by the desire to define itself by embodying other genres, literally in-corporating the other. Kamboureli the poet-critic gets swept off her feet by the sexual/textual trope here, extending it playfully into the realm of legislated "generic purity": the long poem, she writes, "solicits other literary kinds, going as far as to break the hymen of its own genre" (101). The metaphor is an engaging one, drawing on the correspondence between citation and solicitation, elaborating and feminizing the erotic inaugural imagery of Kroetsch's seminal essay "For Play and Entrance: the Contemporary Canadian Long Poem." The model also produces some compelling readings of individual poems, whose critical implications for genre theory I will touch on in a moment. However, in reading On the Edge of Genre, I cannot decide by precisely what logic its model has been reached. It is, somehow, too easy to argue that the long poem by its specific nature undermines or shifts or stretches generic classification when there are no established criteria (or candidates) for what is allowed to constitute the species "long poem" in the first place, and by definition there could be such criteria. This circularity is perhaps part of Kamboureli's own rejection of the law of logos by means of paradoxical formulations. However, I think my own sense of vertigo in this instance might have been remedied by an explanation of the process by which the poems that form the core of the category were selected. In addition, On the Edge of Genre does not consider the possibility that the long poem's definitive "undoing of genre" (91) might be part of the transgression of conventionally acceptable generic limits that Linda Hutcheon, for one, regards as characteristic of postmodern literature in general (Hutcheon 9). Is it not possible, for example, to argue that George Bowering's novel Burning Water might be read as equally subversive of genre as his long poem George, Vancouver, or that Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic (subtitled a novel) is engendered by the overturning of generic classifications, perhaps even more literally than her long poem Steveston? Hutcheon's work, on postmodernism in general and on historiographic metafiction in particular, does respond to such issues, and is conspicuous by its virtual absence from Kamboureli's book, perhaps because it raises the spectre of postmodernism as a movement in which the long poem's generically marginal and theoretically central position is necessarily displaced in favour of a larger paradigmatic shift. Indeed, Kamboureli's argument about the long poem, a genre whose "genericity depends less on a given set of generic codes than on the interrelationships of various embedded genres" (49), is also quite similar to that of Mikhail Bakhtin, another literary theorist infrequently cited but often evoked by this study.1 Bakhtin's work focuses on the generic problem of the novel, and takes in what he calls the "novelization of other genres" (6):
On the Edge of Genre's second chapter is sympathetically titled "A Genre in the Present Tense," and argues of the historical orientation of the long poem, as Bakhtin does of the novel's relation to the past (and as Hutcheon does of historiographic metafiction's relation to the past), that the present tense "validates not so much what is remembered but the act of remembering itself, not the 'true' origins of a bygone past but the subject's 'process of becoming' " (Kamboureli 59). In fact, much of the second chapter's consideration of the relation between epic conventions and the long poem resonates strongly with Bakhtin's "Epic and Novel," the first essay in The Dialogic Imagination. Is it simply an arbitrary choice of which generic category is centred as inclusive, or is the long poem somehow essentially more subversive than any other? Alan Knight has recently drawn attention to a connection between the long poem and the novelized genres in the context of Canadian writing, asserting that "the long poem is novelizing poetry — this means that, drawing upon Bakhtinian dialogism, the most characteristic feature of the long poem cum novel is that it cannot be generically fixed because it changes its structures as it changes the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves" (13). Kamboureli often uses Bakhtinian language, as when, for example, she comments that "a generic reading of the long poem should not valorize one of its novelized genres at the expense of another," but she does not specifically speculate on the connection between this "novelization" and the theory that places the novel rather than the long poem "on the edge of genre" (101). All of which is to say, perhaps, that Kamboureli cannot argue for "generic contamination" as a principle feature of the long poem (66) without, in practice, placing genre itself in question, including even the provisional genre of the long poem. One of the primary theoretical insights that grows out of her readings of long poems in terms of the conventions of the epic, lyric, and documentary (oddly, drama does not get equal time) and their subversion in Chapter Two, is that genre is always already contaminated. For example, she aptly demonstrates how in a poem like Lionel Kearns's Convergences the epic quest is refigured in terms of lyric conventions, revealed as a figure of desire, "the converging point of self and language" (57). Alastair Fowler's comment that genres in general are resistant to definition, Kamboureli argues, "holds all the more for the long poems of the 1970s and 1980s, which I am exploring as a genre whose main trait is precisely this resistance to definition" (45). The long poem, then, is not unique because of its generic indeterminacy, but because it foregrounds this indeterminacy; it makes indeterminacy its theme. Kamboureli begins her study by evoking both the general notion of genre as a system of regulation and, perhaps, more specifically, Derrida's article on genre: "The law of the long poem . . . is its lawlessness" (xiv). The volume ends with a chapter entitled "Outlawed Narrative" that can be read as an interpretation of Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid as an allegory of the long poem's escape from the closure of narrative (and other generic borderlines) into the realm of discourse. On the Edge of Genre sees the long poem as an "outlaw" genre. The poems it examines, like Ondaatje's Billy the Kid, flaunt their violation of the law (of genre). Kamboureli pursues the implications of this move, explaining that,
Given all its complex grounding in genre theories from the likes of Frye, Fowler, Hernandi and Derrida, it is disturbing that On the Edge of Genre is still capable of using the word "genre" too broadly, to the detriment of its sophisticated argument about the discursive orientation of the term itself. To cite one example, "genre" is used in a single sentence to classify both the book and the elegy (171). As I have already implied, Kamboureli also uses a terminological sleight of hand to avoid the contentious debates over postmodernism, using the ostensibly less "loaded" but overly diffuse category "contemporary" (or "new") which, she argues circularly, "offers a frame of chronological relativity whose margins are not categorically determined and that, as a result, can exceed both in a forwards and backwards movement the ever-tentative line that designates contemporaneity" (45). "Contemporaneity," turns out to have a specific theoretical sense of the split with modernity, rather than a strictly chronological one. It seems to designate the long poem's intent "to make its readers apprehensive of the dangers of the well-established epistemological principles of liberal humanism" (206). This post-humanist apprehension is, evidently, not simply a byproduct of the problem of genre; it is an explicitly intentional, thematic gesture of the contemporary long poem. The issues of theme and intention as they are brought forward in this study produce a problematic paradox, the postmodern equivalent of having your cake and eating it too, since an uneasy truce (the combination of Derridean trace and essentialist truth?) is established between ostensibly conflicting theoretical modes, post-Saussurean linguistics and a thematic reading of the text: thematic reading is endorsed, as long as the themes are post-structuralist. Fred Wah's poem Music at the Heart of Thinking, for example, seems to have it both ways, since it "Evades interpretation by making interpretation its theme" (69). Reflexivity becomes a kind of master trope that is capable of absorbing the dissenting generic and thematic paradigms the long poem admits, as is the case in the resolution of epic and lyric in Kamboureli's analysis of Eli Mandel's Out of Place in Chapter Three (138). This critical privileging of reflexivity is not necessarily a problem, and it is certainly not a move that can or should be reductively dismissed as a simple extension "of the thematic criticism of the 1970s," as one reviewer of the volume has argued (Darling 31), particularly since the bulk of Kamboureli's book is composed of analyses of poems that constitute a deft dance between formal and thematic issues in which she identifies both the thematization of formal devices and the formal representation of thematic elements. As well, the major themes explored in the volume, including genre, locality, subjectivity, and the idea of discourse, turn out to be mutually implicated at the level of the text, so that, for example, while Douglas Barbour's He & She & is analyzed in Chapter Two in terms of its revision of the conventions of lyric, the analysis also initiates the problem of locality and subjectivity (developed in separate chapters, using other poems) as involving the positioning of the reading and writing subject in relation both to the environment and language. One element this volume does share with the thematic criticisms of the 1970s is an interest in the issue of national identity and Canadian literature, although On the Edge of Genre, typically, simultaneously asserts and subverts the possibility of literary nationalism. If the aporia of the long poem is that the very essence of its genre is the subversion of "genericity" itself, then the corresponding "Canadian aporia par excellence" is the proposition that "Our continuous questioning of Canadian identity, no matter how tentative, might to a large extent constitute the very essence of our literary sensibility" (8). This perverse argument has been developed elsewhere and in various forms, notably by Robert Kroetsch, but it is the more complex here because it is implicitly contextualized by Kamboureli's theoretically-grounded discussion of the tension between self and identity as conceptualized in The Martyrology, Bowering's The Kerrisdale Elegies and Dennis Cooley's Bloody Jack in Chapter Four, "The Self in the Long Poem." Kamboureli writes that "The long poem deals with humanism as a set of aporias derived from a system of totality and the privileging of the self as a monologic subject. The self in this kind of poem does not recognize the constancy of the Cartesian ego; its own constancy is invariably that of a missing element located in language. That which is missing inspires longing (desire and deferral)" (148). That this psychoanalytic argument about the dynamics of language and subjectivity can be transferred to the specific question of national identity is something Kamboureli assumes. She takes it for granted that the longing described above also exists at the level of the Canadian subject . . . and has existed from the earliest long poems written in Canada. The idea of a transhistorical Canadian identity (which must, in light of Canada's history, also be seen as transcultural), even if that identity is a questioning of identity, is a troubling one, particularly in light of ideological issues Kamboureli raises in the conclusion of the volume. Her first chapter aims, in part, to pursue the issue of nationality and genre with relation to a selection of nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century long poems, including Joseph Howe's Acadia, Oliver Goldsmith's The Rising Village, Isabella Valancy Crawford's Malcolm's Katie,2 George Longmore's The Charivari (whose authorship is incorrectly attributed to Levi Adams (19)), E.J. Pratt's several long poems and Dorothy Livesay's The Documentaries. Following Michel Foucault, she calls the first chapter an "archaeology" of the long poem in Canada, but claims nevertheless to find that "alongside the pronounced differences of nineteenth- and twentieth-century long poems there resides a sameness that reveals the ideology informing this poetic form" (4). Yet she finds very little material to link her discussion of the poems considered in the first chapter with more contemporary examples, especially at the level of ideology, and Kamboureli affirms that two of the earlier poets she finds most interesting, Longmore and E.J. Pratt, do not really fit into the archaeology she has constructed. On the Edge of Genre argues that the long poem is produced within the "generic and cultural fissures it observes between . . . its colonial predecessors and postcolonial instances . . ." (204), but the volume is not by and large grounded in postcolonial theory, and the issue of postcolonialism is barely raised in later chapters. Colonialism, when it is discussed, is discussed less as a historical or ideological phenomenon, than as a rather abstract exemplar of the theory of supplementarity. In his long poem Acadia, for example, Joseph Howe "shows us that, despite his desire to recreate the missing origin, the origin is defined by the very traces with which he supplements its absence" (10). The first chapter of the volume argues that,
Despite its emphasis on rupture and discontinuity, the argument in the first chapter risks both implying an evolutionary narrative about the emergence of an indigenous Canadian aesthetic and, more generally, falling back on the binary oppositions (unified/ruptured, imperial power/colony, old world/'immediate' world, imported/indigenous) and liberal humanist assumptions it sets out to contradict. For example, Kamboureli argues that the colonial poet's old world literary tradition tends to resist the (implicitly essentialized) "experience of the writing subject" (18), and the poetry that results "loses sight of its immediate world" (17). The first chapter of the volume is set up to consider the genealogy of the contemporary Canadian long poem by examining early Canadian long poems. However, as Kamboureli's later discussion in part reveals, the reflexivity of many contemporary Canadian long poems ensures that they are forthcoming about representing their own genealogies. Kamboureli gives what is perhaps the earliest and most literal example in her analysis of the dialectic between Oliver Goldsmith's The Rising Village and the Canadian poet's great-uncle and namesake's The Deserted Village. She also refers to the way both Frank Davey in The Clallam and Eldon Garnet in Brébeuf: a Martyrdom of Jean de respond to E.J. Pratt's writing (The Titanic and Brébeuf and his Brethren, respectively). The "palimpsestic" relationship between George Bowering's The Kerrisdale Elegies and Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies is also taken into account, another relationship that exceeds national boundaries. Given the form's generic indeterminacy, there is no reason why the long poem's genealogy should be "homogeneric": D.G. Jones's Kate, These Flowers plays off against Lampman's lyrics, Jon Whyte's Homage, Henry Kelsey pays respects to Kelsey's explorer journals, Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid rewrites American Walter Noble Burns's biographical account. Indeed, several of the poems examined in On the Edge of Genre incorporate non-linguistic texts, though Kamboureli does not take these into account. For example, there are photographs and drawings in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, and both Daphne Marlatt's Steveston and Eli Mandel's Out of Place are collaborative efforts with photographers (Robert Minden and Ann Mandel, respectively). Neither photography nor the issue of collaboration is discussed, although Kamboureli's reading of Steveston emphasizes its thematization of the visual:
Given Kamboureli's linguistically-based, generic emphasis, it is a minor inconsistency that she identifies poems based on intertextual dialogue by the rather abstract term "conceptive" (98). It is important nonetheless to distinguish the responsive play with other writers and writings initiated by poems like Wah's Music at the Heart of Thinking, Kroetsch's Mile Zero, The Sad Phoenician, and Excerpts from the Real World, Lola Tostevin's 'sophie, and Betsy Warland's open is broken and Serpent (W)rite (98). In the brief Conclusion to On the Edge of Genre, Kamboureli considers the political consequences of the long poem's dialogue with given perspectives and its aesthetic subversion:
This is a central claim regarding the ideological stakes of the poems Kamboureli wants to consider. However, while it may very well be a valid statement, the readings offered in On the Edge of Genre do not stress the political dimension to any significant degree. For example, even in the discussion of an overtly feminist-philosophical poem like Tostevin's 'sophie, gender issues are introduced and virtually dismissed with the declaration that "Tostevin's employment of the lyric is informed by her desire to undo both gender and genre categories" (74-5). Tostevin is one of the few women (let alone feminist) writers considered to any significant degree in On the Edge of Genre, and Kamboureli does not consider whether women are somehow less likely to employ the long poetic form (the examples of Libby Scheier, Bronwen Wallace, Marlene Norbese Philip, Dionne Brand and others would demonstrate otherwise), or whether those women who do write long poems somehow do not conform to the standards she sets. In one of the few statements that historicizes the development of the `new' long poem in Canada, Kamboureli claims that
Again, this assertion is a potentially valid and insightful one, but the gestures of accommodation it suggests are not significantly borne out in Kamboureli's own selection of poets, which includes no Native writers or writers of colour and few women. The immigrant or "ethnic" experience is considered, for example in discussions of early Canadian long poems, as well as of Cooley's Bloody Jack and Mandel's Out of Place, but it is a largely white, male European immigrant experience. The question of what constitutes the canon of Canadian long poems is never really raised, and the process by which it has been developed cannot therefore be interrogated. As I suggested earlier, this is an issue that relates to the way the genre itself is defined. Despite its flaws, Kamboureli's book is a major work, not just of Canadian criticism but also of literary theory, not least because it points to important directions for further work(s) on/of the long poem. It also indirectly and perhaps inadvertently raises the problem of the paradox: it can result in a kind of gratuitous textual conundrum, or an insight into the dynamics of difference, a provocative challenge to aesthetic and ideological doxa. To borrow a phrase from the cover collage of Daphne Marlatt, Betsy Warland and Cheryl Sourkes' Double Negative (a lesbian feminist collaborative long poem not considered in On the Edge of Genre), the question is whether, when we add it up, the paradox is a double bind, or whether "two negatives make a positive." While it admits the possibility of the former, On the Edge Genre provides an example of critical practice that is open to the possibilities of the latter. Notes
Kamboureli's discussion of this poem is marred by a key error of fact. She talks about "The ring Malcolm gives Katie," which has their initials entwined on it, but, as the first line of the poem makes clear, it is Max, Katie's lover, not Malcolm, her father, who gives her the ring. [back] Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. "Epic and Novel." The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. 3-40. Darling, Michael. "Lit(t)er-a(i)ry Crit-ic(k)-ism." Books in Canada 21.4 (1992): 31-3. Derrida, Jacques. "The Law of Genre." On Narrative. Ed. W.J.T. Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. 51-77. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Knight, Alan. "Taking the Balls out of the Can(n)on: Open Letter and the Long-Liners Conference." Open Letter 7th series, no. 5 (1989): 9-14. Kroetsch, Robert. "For Play and Entrance: the Contemporary Canadian Long Poem." Open Letter 5th series, no. 4 (Spring 1983): 91- 110. Mandel, Eli. "The Death of the Long Poem." Open Letter Longliners Conference Issue. 6th series, numbers 2-3 (1985): 11-23. Marlatt, Daphne, Betsy Warland and Cheryl Sourkes. Double Negative. Charlottetowne: gynergy books, 1988. Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Poetic Principle." Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Robert L. Hough. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. 33-56. Manina Jones |