Death
and the Long Poem:
E.F. Dyck's The Mossbank Canon
by Alexandre L.
Amprimoz
Ed Dyck, who is
what happens to literature after postmodern.
Robert
Kroetsch
Among today's
young poets, E. F. Dyck is one of the few to be both extremely aware of tradition and also
willing to go beyond the most avant-garde aesthetic constructions. The first thing that
strikes the reader of The Mossbank Canon is that death is a subtle but central
hypogram of the text.1
In a metacritical article on the state of our experimental poetry today, Robert Kroetsch
situates with vigour and precision the nature and dynamics of the contemporary Canadian
long poem.2 While echoing a Derridian perspective
he makes the central connection between the new long poem and death:
the poet, the lover, compelled
towards an ending (conclusion, death, orgasm: coming) that must, out of love be
(diffèrance) deferred.3
It seems
indispensable to re-examine the definition of "diffèrance" within the
Kroetschean context in order to find a possible key to The Mossbank Canon. Ferdinand
de Saussure's simpler concept of "diffèrance" implied that language was made up
of "diffèrances" only. The word "mare," for instance only means
something because I can differentiate it from "horse" and other terms within the
same paradigm. A sign, in the end, does not have within the scope of Saussurean
theories any independent content or meaning. On that basis Jacques Derrida
established the key notion of "diffèrance." "diffèrance" became the
process through which any code gives itself an historical status as a material made up of
"diffèrences." It is therefore "diffèrance" that defers
"diffèrences."
The Mossbank Canon is the story of the parallel lives of Mao Tse Tung and
"Jong," a Chinese immigrant in Mossbank, Saskatchewan. An abstract concept has
therefore followed a route towards concrete applications within the parameters of
contemporary avant-garde aesthetics: what was the deferring applied to a sign (Saussure)
became the deferring disseminated through a code (Derrida). Then, such a temporalization
of a virtual structure gained specific semantic investment (Kroetsch) to finally end up as
a "diffèrance" of two referential systems (Dyck). One simple constant emerges
in such an evolution: death, or rather its paradigmatic substitutions (conclusion, orgasm,
coming, etc.), must be delayed if artistic creation is going to take place at all. I
believe that Kroetsch is preaching just that here and that Dyck is practicing such a
religion.
But death as a hypogram must not be actualized if the poem is to survive. In the words of
Robert Kroetsch:
Death as deferral only, as
another grammar of delay. The poem itself, surfacing. The poem of the place, the place
lost. Things fall into place in the poem.4
It seems clear
now that death is more a method than a theme and it becomes necessary to comment on one of
Kroetsch's direct statements about Dyck: "Dyck's poem, attempting its own end (or
epilogue)."5 The reference here is Odpoems
Et where the last section indeed reads "32. Epilogue." Now, section
"30. Convergence" reads as follows:
he approaches
the limit of the
sequence
of his jumps
and dies.6
Between
"Convergence" and "Epilogue" comes "31. Testament." There
is, first of all, an assumption on the part of Kroetsch who equates Od and E. F. Dyck. The
illusion of autobiography certainly plays its role here and part of the reading is to go
along and not distinguish between the persona and the author.7
So in a given text an author anticipates his own death. Without being very original, the
idea is far from trivial. A prosaic and rather recent example would be Morley Callaghan's A
Fine and Private Place, a novel in which the author describes "the writer's
death" and takes the story beyond it in order to prove that his influence on other
characters continues even after his departure. But the parallel with Morley Callaghan and
others must stop here for E. F. Dyck spares us a pompous funeral. The death of Od is the
death of the long poem. It is a satisfying end in as far as "diffèrance" has
become sameness. One cannot help noticing that Od finishes with a jump, just like he
began:
quick jump
and a kick8
One also notices
that the above two lines very successfully frame the first poem "Lo / How Od
Looks." For Od, then, death is the last jump, the one that closes a signifying
system: no one jumps beyond "the limit of the sequence and remains within the same
space. Death is seen here in sure mathematical terms: when the number of jumps tends
towards the infinite, the sequence tends towards its converging point, its limit. When Od
becomes what he always was, he can die. But Robert Kroetsch is not impressed by the fact
that Dyck writes about his own death. He is not even impressed by the fact that he writes
about his own testament. The central notion seems more of an elliptic redefinition of
"epilogue":
Dyck's
poem, attempting its own end (or epilogue):
on the morning of the day of
cre(m)ation the Poet
at coffee raises his eye
as she lands on the stool
beside him it sinks
he left you his love & pulley
he says the latter of which
I happen to have with me here
& he hands her Od's pulley
then he converged
she asks
he died says the Poet9
It is beyond the
epilogue that the poet continues his research by delaying the generating process to the
point of establishing a "diffèrance" of a particular kind, one where the ego
has totally restricted its functions to the level of the signifier. The most tangible
examples of such processes are discussed in Roland Barthes' L'Empire des signes:
Jardin
Zen:
"Nulle fleur nul pas:
Ou est l'homme?
Dans le transport des rochers,
dans la trace du râteau,
dans le travail de l'écriture."10
Beyond the
epilogue and the autobiographical thickness, one finds The Mossbank Canon. E. F.
Dyck has, in a brief introduction, states his methodology as well as his objectives in the
most concise way.11 But the poems speak for
themselves through their signifying absence. This paradoxical nature of Dyck's experiments
is already encoded in the first poem:
- The December sun shone on banners waving
in Kwantung province a mother bore Jong
Banners blown
:blown by the wind
Dark was the mountain :overcast the north
in Hunan province
:when Mao was born
A red star gleamed in the dark red north.12
The effect
produced on the reader by these few syntagms and blanks is one of desolation and of
separation. The emotional impact cannot be denied, only nuanced. Understanding, on the
other hand must be acquired.
Although an author's interpretation of his own work is of particular interest to the
reader it bears no absolute authority. To invoke the yang/yin opposition in order
to explain E. F. Dyck's formal choices would make us fall first of all into the known trap
of intentional fallacy. So, it is precisely the poet's explanation of his own work that
must be resisted here. Without critical resistance the aesthetic excitement would
disappear for the reader of experimental literature. Roland Barthes' known distinction
between "readerly" and "writerly" texts can fruitfully be applied
here. The Mossbank Canon cannot be read for simple information or even for
"the pleasure of the text." The reader must generate his own text from The
Mossbank Canon. The work of E. F. Dyck is most "writerly." An additional
reason stops me from following the dualistic aesthetics advanced by the poet. To see his
masculine vs. feminine opposition as the text-generator would also lead to what
Michael Riffaterre calls the "Referential Fallacy."13 In other words the I Ching is either too much or not
enough to serve as a reading map for The Mossbank Canon. But it is exactly the
ambiguous application of the I Ching that makes the poetry attractive.
It might be useful to dwell a little longer on this "diffèrance" that the
reader perceives between E. F. Dyck's principles and its poetic applications. To begin
with, the distinction between "broken" and "unbroken" cannot be easily
transposed from the Chinese hexagrams, basically because Western languages are neither
iconic nor ideogrammatic. It is no coincidence that post-modernism has elevated the
line-break to the rank of poetic formal apparatus, one replacing rhymes and tropes, in
particular traditional rhetorical figures such as similes and metaphors. In the case of
the poem under analysis, what blurs the distinction between the yang (masculine
line) and the yin (feminine line) is the poet's use of enjambement. Let us remember
that such a technique flourishes in periods of reaction such as Romantic revivals. We
usually have in such situations the signs of a poetic discourse at odds with restrictive
rules governing the composition of verse. But what was a controlled reaction with the
Romantics becomes a source of polysemy with the postmodernists. Let us indicate all
possible line-breaks in the first hexagram:
- The December sun shone on banners waving/
in Kwantung province/a mother bore Jong
Banners blown/
: blown by the wind/
Dark was the mountain/ : overcast the north/
in Hunan province/
: when Mao
was born/
A red star gleamed/in the dark red north
If all the distinctive features must apply, then we can only conclude that the first line
is masculine and the following five are feminine. In such a case all hope for symmetry is
lost. So what in Western poetry was at one time a morphological rule becomes here a
constantly transgressed semantic one which in its ambiguities must be constantly broken.
Furthermore, the richness of the text is founded on syntaxic ambiguities created by the
intentionally problematic enjambement. In other words, the surface structures seem at odds
here with the deep structures of the language.14
The reader's desire is to understand that Jong was born under the sun, while Mao was born
under an overcast sky. The reader's desire stems here from what I will call the symbolic
fallacy. Indeed, the following interpretation would facilitate everything: Jong wears the
white hat and Mao wears the black hat. The formal ambiguity is therefore present to remind
the reader that in The Mossbank Canon nothing is quite black nor quite white. The
search for meaning must then take other avenues.
At the semantic level, in spite of the many allusions, the poem seems
"anti-referential" to me. Everything in the text points to cold births under the
North Star. There is nothing warm, at least in our sociolect about a "December
sun" and there is nothing particularly positive about the banners' overdetermination
to blow in the wind. One birth is not that distinct from the other because the
"December sun" is not more cheerful than the overcast sky. And amidst the
elements of the Northern isotopy (semantic field within the particular text) the referent
(not the text) tells us that the Kwantung, as the Hunan province, is in the south of
China. The interest of the text, perhaps its irony, lies here: the signifieds point North
while the referent points South. This is what I mean by the affirmation that the
signifying function is anti-referential. Furthermore, the referent cannot help the fact
that the "red star" will be tagged in a pejorative way. The "dark red
north" contradicts our Western cultural habits: this is no Christmas. But the most
important subtlety of this first section is that the signifier is disconnected and gives
us the illusion of independence as it points to formal distinctions. Birth as the
inchoative metonymy of life should imply paradigms of joy. In other words the narrative is
about life while the discourse, through its coloration, is about death.
The above statements should again be seen in a particular light. What allows me to move
away from standard interpretations is the complexity of the phenomenon of enunciation that
could not be reduced to either Barthian or Riffaterrian principles. Perhaps the reader
might very well be the space where all textual effects are finally inscribed. But the
reader cannot decide where the margins of either the poetic or the critical discourse are
located. The enunciator of the poetic text is one who expresses himself in English and
therefore submits the Chinese sociolect to a first interpretation, perhaps to a first
"Westernization." To this first deviance one must add two others: The enunciator
of the critical discourse and the reader. But the textual reality transcends the fact that
the form of the poem is spatially symmetrical. The pejorative tagging of the red star is
not a political one based on the reader's perspective on communism, it is above all of a
textual nature. So if in the reading process the margins of the discourse seemed to have
switched to a Western cultural code the impression is with the reader: E.F. Dyck is not a
Chinese poet. The interest of The Mossbank Canon also resides in the fact that the
text is not quite Western either: it is situated in the mental space of
"diffèrance."
The distinction between life and death as the actualization of the distinction between
narrative and discourse can also be justified by the poet's textual strategies, or at
least by the perception that the reader has of them: only the two births as events escape
the wintry isotopies of the discourse.
In this first poem, as in many of the subsequent ones, Dyck is basically saying: narrative
is life and discourse is death. The work of the poet in the long poem becomes a
celebration of his technical failure, his unsatisfied desire to melt facts into absence.
One writes because one wants, through the artifice of discourse, to dissolve a narrative
not invent one. There is one way to stress the importance of the signifier: that is
repetition. The aim of the poet then is to reduce the meaning of words to almost nothing.
This process is far more complex than sound poetry as it recoguizes its own failure before
it begins. In other words, the sad births of Mao and Jong are symbolic of the very poetic
form that explores them. Another section of the poem can illustrate this desire for
non-meaning:
3. Righteous Harmony Fists
beat foreign devils
red was the dark north :red
was the north
They beat to death a German on the streets
red was the dark north : red
was the north
They besieged the running dogs of Peking
red was the dark north : red
was the north15
One can see that
the repetition of "red was the dark north : red was the north" functions as a
refrain. About the introduction of such devices in poetry, Michael Riffaterre has made the
following comment:
The one riddle that does not
require solution is that of the refrain, since a refrain need not have any connection with
the song it gives a beat to or divides into stanzas, and it can even be made of nonsense
words.16
It might be important here to express a few reservations regarding the above Riffaterrian
statement that seems something of a generalization, not one quite applicable to The
Mossbank Canon. When facing such a text we reach an area of nuances: the refrain is
not quite a refrain, the meaning is not quite a meaning and forms are blurred. Often the
repetition, even of nonsense words (and such is not the case with Dyck), carries a meaning
in spite of itself. There are many reasons for such an impossibility to dissolve meaning:
some are related to the general theory of communication, some stem from the nature of
poetic texts. It is, for instance, now universally accepted that redundancy is encoded in
any form of communication. What is less known is that over-determination is one of the
distinctive features of literariness. Hence, to the dynamics of "diffèrance,"
exemplified by the dynamics of margins marked by Mao and Jong, one can oppose the still
sameness of form and repetition. Refrains, even implicit ones, produce the effect of
non-meaning. In other words, repetition becomes paradoxically the best mimesis of
non-sense. Repetition then, as in the mouth of a drunkard, becomes the death of meaning.
In turn, the paradigmatic substitutions of "red" and "dark," when
juxtaposed to such signifieds (and perhaps referents, if we believe Dyck's introduction)
as "They beat to death a German on the streets," serves as an overdetermination
of death and violence.
To put it simply, the technique consists of trying to mean less and more at the same time.
We are in a situation where a text 't' and a refrain 'r' are preceded by opposite signs:
t + r = o ® t = -r
Readers would
have a tendency to see the refrain according to a symbolic code, one that is perhaps a
trap because it is too obvious. Such a symbolic code would be based purely on a
referential reading and would ignore the fact that texts can also be read as rigorously
self-generated by their signifying functions. So the referential reader would understand
about red being a chromatic metonymy of communism: he would also more specifically recall
Mao's red star. Then the conclusion would be that Mao has brought death (symbolized by
"dark") to the Northern provinces. Dyck would then simply echo cruel clichés
such as: there is no revolution without blood baths or, to use one of Mao's litotes:
"The Revolution is not a dinner party."
However it seems to me that the signifying reading undermines the referential one. Simply
consider that the chromatic metonymy for North is (through associated signifieds such as
"snow and "ice") white. Also the reader will have no problem admitting that
dark is a semantic litote for black. The text appears then to be generated by a system of
permutations applied to signifiers without consideration for signified impossibilities:
red was the dark north ® red = black
red was the north
® red = white
The conclusion is
then:
red = white
= black
So, the presence
of all colours is equal to the absence of all colours and is also equal to no colour. The
effort here is to approach a non-meaning at the signifying level, but this non-meaning in
turn gives the referential meaning a deeper perspective. We can at least conclude that the
refrain was symptomatic and that it did pose a problem. The chromatic associations with
the objective of generating non-meaning are not peculiar to Dyck. The expression
"Neige noire" is found in the poetry of Emile Nelligan and it is also the title
of Hubert Aquin's last novel. A more universal example might be Corneille's well-known
oxymoron, "obscure clarté."
Again, some objections might be raised here. Why do I focus on a chromatic analysis? The
value and the symbolic significance of colours is culturally coded. The absence of
universal signifieds is far from exerting a paralyzing force on the reading here. My
Western outlook, my tagging of white with North, winter and snow is first of all a reader
response. Furthermore, even leaving E.F. Dyck out of this, let us admit that Jong as an
actor and an immigrant has also been at least partly "westernized." Objections
to my type of Riffaterrian reader-response criticism only tend to show that my
interpretations remain valid even if one would want to return to traditional approaches.
Chromatic substitutions on the paradigm of death are confirmed by another example from The
Mossbank Canon:
5. After walking at dusk
under a red sky
Mao swam in the red waters of the pond
A white lily was his pledged child-bride
Closed, her flower : closed, her eyes
Red were the eyes : of his weeping mother
as her star swam past the white budded lotus.17
Note the semantic presence of the same three colours. White is overdetermined by
"white lily," "child-bride" and "the white budded lotus."
Black is implied in "dusk," "closed, her eyes" and perhaps more
complex constructions. Red is the most explicit presence as an epitaph of nature.
The stability of the system is however only evident at the level of surface structures.
The first two lines, for instance, are not as red as they seem. Even if the sky is red at
dusk, the poem begins with "after." When Mao swims, the waters of the pond can
no longer be red for the swimming follows the evening walk. The red waters of the pond are
actually black. The same anti-referential creation is applied to the eyes. Those of the
bride or those of the mother can very well be red from crying. But when they are closed
their colour cannot be seen by the observer. On the side of the observed the colour can
only be black. Indeed, when the eyes are closed we only have the absence of colour, that
is black. "Her flower," even if we are dealing here with the obvious symbol of
virginity (this particular one would tend to prove that universal signifieds do exist),
when closed, is also black.
From what precedes we have triple proof:
red = black and white = black
The equation of
white and black; the Western reader at first believes he has perceived it through the
value of orientalism in his own sociolect. We all know the stories of funerals in white
and we all recall the rites of the dead that prescribe the wrapping of genitals in lotus
leaves and petals. But what we have here is the dream-like fluidity of a male in the
presence of a nocturnal bride allowing him to search for the maternal origin.
The poem is quite reminiscent of the German Romantics and their intuition of feminine
principles of regeneration. Under the Faustian sign of Marguerite we find Moritz' Anton
Reiser, most of Brentano and Rünenberg of Tieck. One example should suffice to
establish the parallel here.
Right from the start of his Heinrich Von Ofterdingen, Novalis dreams that he enters
a cave and that there he cannot resist a swim. There, in a dream-like landscape he feels
wrapped by "a mist reddened by dusk" and that "every wave presses against
him like amorous breast." The poet then falls asleep and dreams of a mysterious
flower that becomes a woman who turns out to be his mother and will in turn become his
beloved. In his dream such things are possible under dark magic waters.18 Dark islight and black is white. In this poem too,
therefore, we have:
red = black =
white
I will spare the
reader further examples. The poems 17 to 24 that make up Section III of The Mossbank
Canon and bear the significant title "Moose Jaw (1920's): The Klan"
constitute further proof that white is black. But the proof resides, as it has been shown,
first of all in every hexagram. The reading at the integral level reveals death as a
theme, the reading at the differential level makes of death a structure in process, as I
have already said, a discursive method. It leads us to an open ending.
The semes of death that have generated the poem are still present in the conclusion of The
Mossbank Canon:
64. Riddle of life
: riddle of noodle
We crawl at morn, stand at noon, crouch at night
Ready in minutes : for eating and dying
In every place : winds
are blowing
Every summer sun shines on banners waving
Propellers turn in every White Dove Cafe.19
Clearly death is
there but life must go on. In the end death itself must die because the experiment must
end, as it began, with the contemplation of another semantic impossibility.
E.F. Dyck deserves far more attention than he has been getting. A recent review of his
Pisseat Songs20 is quite symptomatic of the
state of the contemporary reader:
The
poems are brief and quick with puns. Their pleasure lies in combining that clear, brief
statement with the sudden turn of meaning on a single word that a pun can accomplish.
The danger of such a style is that it becomes too ingenious.21
Critics fear the
text as adventure and they prefer the readerly ready noodle to the writerly riddle. I
welcome E.F. Dyck's sudden turn of meaning away from immediate emotional satisfaction,
towards his type of refined lyricism where Descartes meets a new form of Romanticism.
Notes
EF. Dyck, The Mossbank Canon (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1982). See also:
E.F. Dyck, Odpoems Et (Moose Jaw: Coteau Books, 1978). I use the term hypogram in
the Riffaterrian sense. One of the most useful definitions that the author of Semiotics
of Poetry gives of that key term is the following: "The hypogram is formed out
of a word's semes and/or its presuppositions. The poetic sign actualizes some of these;
the hypogram's nuclear word itself may or may not be actualized" (Bloomington and
London: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 25. What makes death a particularly
interesting hypogram to be studied in contemporary poetry is the fact that nine times out
often it is not actualized. I would ventme to say that virtual hypograms are the
characteristic formal feature of contemporary Canadian literature. This feature remains
valid at the metatextual level, the one found in such statements as: "Al Purdy is so
Canadian that he would never admit that he knows anything." [back]
By "metacritical" I intend to qualify a scholarly text that has remained
the essential speculative nature of the best criticism but has abandoned the traditional
academic ornaments. To my knowledge metacriticism is in its infancy. Besides rare examples
of less radical attempts in Poétique and Tel Quel or the critical work of
Michel Butor, I do not know of any other such enterprises. In the Robert Kroetsch project
I see the first signs, naturally, of the death of criticism, perhaps the birth of a
movement that might take us beyond the recent repetitious exercises of minor
deconstructionists. Hence, the direction of the long poem and that of literary analysis
possibly merging towards metacriticism.[back]
Robert Kroetsch, "For Play and Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long
Poem," Dandelion, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1982), p. 63.[back]
Ibid., p. 69.[back]
Ibid., p. 80.[back]
Odpoems Et, p. 12.[back]
One should however note that a whole rhetoric of desire takes shape here. The
abbreviation of the poet's first name "Ed" becomes "Od" and what is
narrated is the evolution of an ideal self logically taken to its end.[back]
Odpoems Et, p. 12.[back]
Robert Kroetsch, p. 80.[back]
Roland Barthes, L'Empire des signes (Paris/Genève: Flammarion/Skira,
1970), p. 102. The illustration is a Zen garden and Barthes notices that the traces of man
are absent. Only the traces of his work (of his writing) are visible.[back]
Here is the poet's explanation: "These poems constitute, as the common phrase
has it, an experiment in form. By that I mean that each of the sixty-four stanzas has its
six lines based on the form of the I Ching hexagrams, and each line is either yang
(unbroken, virile, active nominative, indicative) or yin (broken, muliebral,
passive, imperative or subjunctive, prepositional). The I Ching forms provide, I
hope, a resonance (as Joseph Neednam, Science and Civilization in China Volume 2,
uses the word) otherwise lacking from my telling of a particular story. The content of the
poems derives from the actual case history of a Chinese immigrant to Canada, from the
biographies and writings of Mao Tse Tung, and from the histories of Mossbank and Moose
Jaw. The narrative proceeds chronologically, following the divergent careers of Mao and
'Jong'" (p. 5). [back]
The Mossbank Canon, p. 11.[back]
Michael Riffaterre, "The Referential Fallacy," Columbia Review 57
(Winter 1978): 21-35. Part of the literary phenomenon the dialectic between the
text and the reader consists of a "naïve faith in a direct contact or
relation between words and referents." This is "the referential fallacy."[back]
I use the structural distinction here according to Noam Chomsky's Cartesian
Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (New York: University
Press of America, 1966), pp. 31-59.[back]
The Mossbank Canon, p. 13.[back]
Michael Riffaterre, p. 77.[back]
The Mossbank Canon, p. 15.[back]
Novalis, Schrifften hem us gegeben von Ludwig Tieck und Fr. Schlegel (Leipzig:
Baudry, 1840), Vol. 1, pp. 101-103 and pp. 181-83. For further standard interpretations of
onirism in Novalis see: Albert Bégin, Le Rêve chez les romantiques allemands et dans
la pensée française moderne (Marseille: cahiers du Sud, 1937).[back]
The Mossbank Canon, p. 87.[back]
E.F. Dyck, Pisscat Songs (Ilderton: Brick Books, 1983).[back]
Robert Quickenden, "Five Chapbooks," Prairie Fire Vol. 7, No. 2
(Summer 1986), p. 74.[back]
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