Contemporary Canadian literature: Lament for a literary nation
"Squalid acquiescence in the cast-offs
of reputed poetry. Here, Bellerophon,
is a livery hack, a gelding,
easy pace, easy to hire,
all mansuetude and indifference"
(Basil Bunting)
If Writing in Our Time: Canada's Radical Poetries in English (1957-2003), by Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2005) is the effect, the causes are enough to give pause. So what effects in particular? As a chronicle of fifty years of radical poetries, and a pretty well researched and thoughtful one at that, the book gives a rather straightforward narrative of interesting experimentalist writings (and researches), reinforced by relevant critical theory. In Butling and Rudy's own words,
We chose the adjective "radical" because its general definition—"tending or disposed to make extreme changes in existing views, habits, conditions, or institutions" (Webster's)—encompasses political, social, and aesthetic activities. The radical poetries in this study all enact "extreme changes." In the chapters that follow we discuss aspects of the TISH poetics, concrete and sound poetry, deconstructive poetics, and poetry inflected by race, gender, class, and sexuality (xi).Thoughtful commentary buttressed by good examples, and even interesting anecdotal information by author Butling who's lived with partner Fred Wah a good deal of the early 'radical' period in Vancouver, make for a good, informative read. They've done exactly what the Preface said they'd do, and in lucid, well-articulated and accessible prose (some of the technical 'bafflegab' kept to a tolerable minimum), surveying the course of the Canadian 'avant-garde' across generational, ethnic, national and cultural divides: leaving no doubt, in the end, as to the effects of this literary-cultural development on literary studies in Canada today.
And as for causes? Anything approximating the 'radical' in Canadian poetics can be traced to well-documented literary developments: firstly, a kind of student activism in the 60s aimed at dismantling traditional elitist 'imperial' discourses, and led by activist-poets like bpNichol, Fed Wah, George Bowering, etc; secondly,the concomitant rise of what the authors (citing American poet Robert Duncan) call "working ground magazines", the small "grass roots" type press that served, in place of mainstream media, as primary conduit for the dissemination of a new poetry and poetics; thirdly, the influence of the American Objectivist poets (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Diane di Prima, etc) visibly present on campus, teaching, workshopping and inspiring a generation of primarily middle-class student-writers; and lastly the direction the early literary activism gave to a later (perhaps even more radically) marginalized poetics of women, gays/lesbians, and First Nations writers.
But causes, especially when we consider those of experimentalist writing in Canada, can be every bit as authorially/textually unstable as the subject they try to develop. What I mean is that for every given there is a curiously implied ungiven: the troublesome 'shadow' to the work's claim to give true "historiographic and critical" things.The field is fraught with inconsistencies and clearly emerging 'political' predilections. Precisely because the book's so neatly documented and elucidated Butling and Rudy can't help but disclose (intentionally or not) a set of problems that lie at the basis of 'survey' studies in general and, in my view, threaten to undermine the work's own particular insights into the nature of a Canadian avant-garde. What looks like disinterested scholarly work serves as a reminder of why (and how) a real nationally distinctive poetics never could flourish here (even when it tried to): borrowing a phrase from George Grant, Writing in Our Time is actually a lament for a literary nation.
While not accusing authors Butling and Rudy of purposely misstating the case, the former seems to be aware, at least in principle, of how anything new ever tries to get a foothold here, anticipating (and anticipating only) a kind of balanced overview of the history of contemporary writing:
...new subjects do not birth themselves, fully formed by their individual talent and energy alone, as the restricted economy of capitalism would have us believe. They enter the social imaginary via the material spaces of little magazines and small presses and by virtue of the work of editors who change the discursive terms within those sites. (229)And that's as far as healthy 'self-critique' gets for it relapses again into what has been the book's predominantly self-justifying portrayal of literary newness. For given the tenor of her work she cannot believe that progressive editorial and publishing practices alone are sufficient, and says as much in a sentence or two below,
The literary struggles of the 1990s are informed by the broader social/political justice movements of the past few decades that sought self-government, territorial rights, redress, and legislated equality by and for historically disadvantaged groups. (229)
politicizing literary production in Canada in ways all too familiar to us. The rhetorics of this politicization of the Arts has been the subtext of this work. A radical poetry can't flourish here because it's bound to be (i) too imitative, (ii) too 'acritical' (not critical in the sense in which, for example, Peter Bürger claims in Theory of the Avant-Garde an avant-garde must be), and, most importantly, too creedal (read state-dependent) for a sense of its own value and self-legitimacy.
That a poetics native ('aboriginal' in a true sense ) to Canada never emerges is clear, to begin with, from Butling and Rudy's own characterization of the influence of American poets and literary movements on the TISH poets during the heady 60s Vancouver 'liberation' movements. (3 TISH: "The Problem of Margins"). Not just the seminal TISH but even magazines (small presses, too) like grOnk/Ganglia, blewointment, Scree, dANDdelion all look as if they could have been mimeographed in Robert Duncan's basement.
The authors also (and regrettably) rely for most of their exposition on Deleuzzian and Derridean notions of the 'rhizome', 'margins' and 'intertextuality' without considering if they belong at all on Canadian soil. Not that postmodern theory is a bad thing: it just seems to have been uncritically deployed. (See 4 bpNichol and a Gift Economy: "The Play of a Value and the Value of a Play"). Consequently not just poetry (workshopped and imitated ad nauseum) but poetics itself relies, ironically enough, on new imperialist languages of both French poststructuralist and American Objectivist, Beats and Language theory, an inconsistency that oddly seems not to have been noticed. Afraid to strike out on their own, towards a distinctive Canadian 'avant-garde', too many writers of experimentalist poetry sound 'derivative'. And so academic literary theory (and even appropriations of that current 'mainstream' view by publishers) tends to look 'acritical', neither too imitative nor too original in design but always something in between, a composite of all the fashionable 'isms' awkwardly handled. Just textbook critical discourse and the Ph.D industry it always empowers.
And if publishing (and the ancillary 'awards' and 'promotion' industry) is to flourish, it must read from the same critical texts so that a 'creedal' (read state-sponsored) notion of the Arts emerges in which writers "pick a critical apparatus" (186) and apply for the appropriate Canada Council grant. The result is the most indissoluble link of "politics and poetics" imaginable. Butling concludes her discussion of radical poetries by asking: "What is an activist poetics? So many of the cultural activists of the 1990s are also poets, but how are their politics and poetics linked?" (244) I think, ironically, she and co-author Susan Rudy may have unwittingly answered that question long before we get to the end.
