The Capilano Review 3.19: Narrative

NB [Nicole Brossard]: In How Writing is Written, Stein says that each generation has to take care of daily life and anyone being creative is not in advance of his or her time. We are always contemporaneous for we cannot live in the past because it is gone and cannot live in the future because we have no idea of it; therefore, in the act of living each one has to live as a contemporary. I agree. By taking care of the present, we formally take care of layers of narrative and we existentially absorb its poetic incentive. Stein invested a lot in repetition to craft the sentence, a means that allowed her to destabilize the meaning while constructing its logic at the same time.

The new issue of The Capilano Review, titled “Narrative,” opens wisely with a magnificent interview conducted by Susan Holbrook, “‘Delirious Coherence’: an Interview with Nicole Brossard.” For such an issue, I’m glad to see contributions from writers doing incredible things with prose narrative from a variety of angles, little of which has really garnered enough attention—Aaron Peck, Meredith Quartermain, Reg Johanson, Jen Currin, Michael Turner, derek beaulieu and Nicole Markotić—as well as writers who have been working the genre for years, such as Gail Scott, Vanessa Place and Nicole Brossard. Still, there are some other prose writers I wouldn’t have minded hearing from as well, including Margaret Christakos, Ken Sparling and Arjun Basu, each who have been shifting the terms of what prose might allow. Even the short pieces that I saw recently by Douglas Glover in Fence magazine [see my note on such here] might have been worth discussing. Still, there is much to be gleaned from the interview with Brossard, one of the smartest interviews I’ve seen in a while, as Brossard continues along her narrative thread:

Recently I have been more curious about fragments of prose and of narrative, how they infiltrate the poem to change its rhythm and renew its seduction, for example, by expanding time with predictable expressions or contracting it with surprising ones or weird punctuation. Here I think of how prose has invited itself in White Piano (2013), especially in the poem “Paragraphs of Eternity,” which concludes with a prose page referring to O.R., the main character of my first novel, A Book (1976), and with this sentence: “The grammar of the everyday won’t let go. From now on, the poem absorbs the dust of prose….” This text is also followed by the poem “Without Story” in which I finally admit that yes we do need stories to go on with meaning.

I’m fascinated by the way Brossard discusses how her prose work intermingles with her poetry, one genre impossible to keep separate from the other. The issue also has a selection of poems by Brossard, translated from French by Robert Majzels and Erin Moure into English, the same two who translated the poetry collection she references above, White Piano, newly out from Coach House Books.

Vancouver for Beginners #5—Fadeout

In dep fall we turn into ghosts or extend olive branches. Seasons clot us cluster us, husky with hair. Last summer’s nightfigher bounces emails off our cloud armour, our shrug tectonic, streets shapeshifting under rain’s snakework. Buildings rub their clayslipped chests together until winter. Until it lifts, vanish us. We surrender our genie coefficients to calendar art. Someone is painting murals on waterfalls again, someone is building a parking lot on a graveyard, someone is lacing branches in chainlink and planting a tree on a building to mean skyline. Our shoulders have rise to waterlevel in storms we assembled from junkyard pedigree. Nightly a horn sounds at the club corridor’s left earlobe, freighter pendant belly-up, spiked sleeper hit mouthing oiled words. The police are raiding shopping carts again, eight jackets reach open armed across the intersection, crows stride the fingerbridges swing claws in eye-yellow rings around the loophole we crouch in. around the peak of the house rain frames another peak. Half-shut our eyes guide us through the ocean cloud palindrome the slick watchstrap binding mountain to knee, weather is our tourniquet. (Alex Leslie)

Given their past few years of publishing, I’d be interested to hear interviews with Nicole Markotić and/or Aaron Peck on their prose works [see my reviews of such here and here], both of whom I’d highly recommend. The issue talks on narrative, and takes a number of approaches, from a photographic series titled “The Library” by Kyla Mallett, selections from Gail Scott’s novel The Obituary (Coach House Books, 2010), a combination of text and visuals by Jordan Abel, and a short selection of works-in-progress by Michael Turner, “9x11,” a poetic follow-up to his impressive novel 8x10 (Doubleday) [see my review of such here]. Part of what I wonder for a number of these writers, what does the idea of narrative mean for each of them? What are they attempting to achieve through their individual works? Many questions, and the issue opens up as many as it answers.

Shelled

A crow flaps four times over the Illingworth Kerr. Then a dog’s yelp. Frequently, 15 times 14 equals ESL lessons in her basement. Dionysus trumps Capricorn. True datum. Farmers forever fantasizing over crop circles forensics. Conchology, but with a lemon. Lastly, lastly, can’t a peon march in tune with the pity parade? Vestiges of caramel juice, mint on your forehead. Fingerprint under your chin, no under. But I wanted to want, and that’s why this train ride has multiple shell games. Driven by ferroequinology, forsooth! Please be careful when it comes time to unpack the vocabulary. Egg shell; sea shells; hell’s bells. You know, box o’wit isn’t always the only answer. Lit radio may correct, but I can hurl two stones farther than a straight line. Way. Or absolve the semi-colon; boxed in with the shock of locomotive. Farther than back there. (Nicole Markotić)

Another intriguing element of the issue is George Rammell’s “Crime Scene on Ice,” a site-specific exhibition/installation created in 2010 for SilvrettAtelier, “a biennial summer art symposium in the Austrian Alps.” In the work, he creates and records a contemporary version of “the 5300 year old Otzi Ice Man,” and the objects that would have been carried by him had he disappeared today, to “reconstruct the crime scene with modern equivalents of Otzi’s possessions […].” As Rammell writes:

Otzi’s possessions included a bronze axe, sophisticated fur and leather clothing, and a tethered pouch of wood conk mushrooms (Fomes Fomentarius) whose antibiotic properties relieve the systems of arthritis, which was evident in Otzi’s joints. He had 57 tattoos on acupuncture points throughout his body, possibly made to relieve his pain. His hair and lungs contained arsenic from inhaling copper fumes, suggesting he was a coppersmith 500 years before it was believed the Bronze Age began. An analysis of the mineral content in his tooth enamel indicated he was raised in valley to the south, 60 kilometres from where he was killed. His stomach contained einkorn bread, made from wheat that originated in Asia, deer and ibex meat, and, most notably, traces of pollen that revealed he was attempting to cross the Tisenjoch Pass in early spring, when unpredictable snowstorms are not uncommon.

Martha Baillie’s The Incident Report

I find myself bored by most Canadian fiction these days. What is it I’m missing? Why are so many authors seemingly uninterested in the flow of how a line or a paragraph moves across the page apart from the sheer push of plot? Fortunately, I recently picked up a copy of Martha Baillie’s The Incident Report (Pedlar Press, 2009), an author as interested in language itself and how it moves as in what the story is telling.

I’ve been reading Toronto author Martha Baillie’s fiction since the publication of her first novel, My Sister Esther (Turnstone Press), following that little book up with Madame Balashovskaya's Apartment (Turnstone Press) and The Shape I Gave You (Knopf, 2006), before this newest novel, The Incident Report, out with Toronto’s Pedlar Press. What’s been going on with Knopf, that Baillie is part of a small list of authors who move from small presses up, publish one novel with Knopf, and then move back again? Maggie Helwig recently did the same, with her own post-Knopf novel published by Coach House Books. Is this simply the industry shifting around again? In her fourth novel, Baillie writes out the story of a librarian in the Toronto Public Library system, filling out reports after specific occurrences. As Baillie begins, “Many incidents occur in public libraries, and when one does the librarian in charge is required to fill out the necessary forms, including a Suspect Identification Chart.” The book starts out simply enough, working individual report after individual report, but they start to collect, pool, and even form images, stories and characters. After the repetition of reports, the accumulation begins to trace out a particular story.

Incident Report 7

At 2:20 this afternoon, the unusually pale female patron who suggested a few days ago, that I deserved to be placed in a cage, walked briskly into the library. She was clothed in blue jogging shorts and a white tennis skirt, which she wore as if it were a Roman toga, the waistband slung confidently over her right shoulder. The crisp white pleats released themselves in a fan across her chest. We did not speak. She found what she wanted without my assistance. She left, almost skipping with delight. Sunlight fell through the windows in broad swaths. A man looked up from his book and smiled.

Baillie’s use of “incident reports” reminds slightly of the structural concerns with Michael Turner’s American Whiskey Bar, or even the more recent Aaron Peck novel from Baillie’s same publisher, The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis (2008), and come together, coalesce, in the most wonderful, lovely, and even heartbreaking way. Memory is like a deck of cards, Kristjana Gunnars once wrote, each card reacting to the one that came before, and so does Baillie’s novel, working and winding its own way through the reader. Why can’t more people put books together like Martha Baillie?

Incident Report 78

The time was 11:35 PM. Janko’s full weight descended upon me, burying my belly, and my breathing slipped inside his. In the spreading sweetness my name fell from his mouth.

The Laundromat Essay by Kyle Buckley

The closest equivalent I can think to Toronto poet Kyle Buckley’s first poetry collection, The Laundromat Essay (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2008) is to some of the experiments in online hyperlink poetry, a 1990s form that, for the most part, didn’t really go anywhere, one word or a phrase moving off into another direction, another poem (think, too, of those “choose your own adventure” novels you used to read as a kid). In this piece, the first thing you notice is the structure, and the second is the worry that it’s all a trick with no substance, before seeing the poem for its leagues of depth, for what it is. This is a poem that turns back on itself, with the poem on page thirty-nine reading:

The suit was hanging a little high up on my wall, but I needed something to wear, so I got a small ladder out to get it down. The ladder was around because of the work I was doing around my apartment, while my clothes were all at the laundromat because I’d just gotten home from a trip and had nothing left to wear and the laundromat owner wouldn’t let me back into his laundromat to get them because he said it was too late, they were closed. But he had his own reasons for not letting me back in.

In bold, the word “work” leads a line to the previous page, the left side where your eye might have slipped first, and finding:

I thought you and I should understand the life of furniture better than we did, so I brought some wooden beams down from the ceiling, which I could use to build a table. I started to tell you that we preferred rain in the house to mineral water.

Not that this is mere trick, but works instead as an added layer to the main thread. Buckley’s first collection is a poetry that references the merging with criticism, blurring the boundaries between, and a poem with a narrator and structures of story-telling. Through new elements, the original can only deepen in purpose and structure, like the blurring between poetry, fiction and performance that occurred in parts of Montreal of the 1990s (in the works of Corey Frost, Colin Christie, Catherine Kidd, Anne Stone and Dana Bath, for example), or the ongoing blurrings between creative writing and critical or cultural thinking (including David McGimpsey, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Nathalie Stephens, Jeff Derksen, Donato Mancini, Aaron Peck, Erin Mouré and Anne Carson). On the surface, without all the asides, this is a straightforward (somewhat) narrative of a story-teller telling us a particular story of his experiences in and around his neighbourhood laundromat. Is it as simple as this? What is the purpose to all these asides?

What is the purpose of poetry written using “essay” in the title? Buckley starts the poem with a quote by Steve McCaffery, already leading us in a particular direction, quoting his line “The disappointment of poetry.” The first page of Buckley’s text writes:

I know the owner of the laundromat but can’t remember his name, which could be for many reasons. He is closing up the laundromat as I get there.

Possibly the reason for forgetting his name cannot be sought to any special feature of the name itself, but is explained when I remember the subject we were discussing before I was trying to convince him to let me into the laundromat, which I am late getting to. The laundromat owner was asking me about the whereabouts of his son, Hoopy, whom I am familiar with a little but don’t feel comfortable discussing with the laundromat owner since it isn’t my business. If I try to think of the name of the laundromat owner, this new train of thought, I’m sure, would disturb its predecessor, since I am now interested in trying to get the laundromat owner to let me past him into the laundromat, which is now closed. I can no longer regard the fact that I forget the name of the laundromat owner as mere chance.

Is this a poetry that has somehow renounced itself? I already know that Vancouver fiction writer Aaron Peck has renounced poetry (and Toronto writer Brian Fawcett did too, before him, and then managed to write more on his renouncing than he wrote actual poems). In The Laundromat Essay, prose-poems fit inside other prose poems; there is the main text and a series of small offshoots, each section a series of hubs, central points along a linear line. Where is this essay going? A retail domestic poem, is this any laundromat we already know about? Is this the coin laundry on College Street in Toronto, just beside Cafe Diplomatico, former hangout of Victor Coleman and the late Daniel Jones, as well as various generations of film crews?

Is this an essay, a poem, or a novel? Or does the question even begin to matter? As the poem deepens, so too, does the story, and the structures within. Is this a poem, a fiction, an essay? On different pages, different sections, my answer would shift, and by the end, I would say all of the above. Does the question still matter? Either way, it’s a damned interesting book.

The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis by Aaron Peck

In the first novel by Vancouver writer and editor Aaron Peck, The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2008), we see the pre-story of the disappearance of archivist Bernard Willis. Does it matter where Willis eventually went? Written in fragments, this is a manuscript “found” by the two editors of the final project in the abandoned home of Willis himself, with instructions for whoever found it to simply take, working through the texts of Willis himself for publication, who worked to live in a perpetual state of “bewilderment.”

Is this a structure that sounds familiar? Don Quixote being a novel found and translated by a party not the narrator of the book, from Arabic, some of which is translated later, or never at all. Vancouver writer Michael Turner’s American Whiskey Bar (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1997), which is a novel structured as a film script, introduction, etcetera, of a film that is made but never actually finished, included layers and levels of structure between author and story, adding fictional writer, director, actors and the like. Do you recall Robert Kroetsch’s own Rita Kleinhart in his poetry collection The Hornbooks of Rita K (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2001), writing the small fragments by the disappeared Rita that were found, post-disappearance, by her own archivist, and possible lover, Raymond? How does a book get constructed?

WE WERE SITTING IN A DOUGHNUT SHOP in Mission Street. The sun was almost setting and the light had a pinkish hue reflected in off-white buildings. I dunked my glazed doughnut in coffee, and Larry listened. I was unsure what he was thinking while I talked about Flaubert. The two most obvious examples, I continued, are The Temptation of St. Anthony and “A Simple Heart.” The Temptation (what Foucault called “the first book to contain a library”) tracks the history of ideas, a theme he’d take up again in Bouvard and Pécuchet, through a series of visions ranging from the Gnostics all the way to modern science, culminating with the Devil taking St. Anthony to the moon, while “A Simple Heart” narrates, with remarkable sympathy and love, the story of a maidservant who, on her deathbed, mistakes the holy ghost for her dead parrot.

Peck’s novel is a book that works through fragments in such a way that the shape is made only in the reader’s head, working through the author’s own bewilderments, philosophies, stories and even digressions.

EXCITING AS ACCUSATION MAY BE, there is scant evidence to prove that in 1839 Louis Daguerre burnt down the Paris dioramas in order to fund his new curiosity, the daguerreotype. And exciting as speculation may be, whatever the reasons, we are after all tracing a series of effects without known cause; Daguerre’s energies had shifted long before that spectacular and fiery display. Distinct from current usage, the word diorama, as Toby Kamps notes, “derived from the Greek dia (through) and horama (to see) [and] was coined by French stage designer and pioneering photographer L.J.M. Daguerra and patented by him in 1822 to describe a new, theatrical form of visual art.” A series of naturalistic watercolours hung from theatre ceilings at various angles and depth, each image illuminated at times, with the back of the paper scratched off, effecting a three-dimensional impression, along with other such devices as the stereoscope and the cyclorama. Between the panoramas of the eighteenth century and the cinemas of the twentieth, dioramas were popular spectacles.

An impressive novel, first or otherwise, Peck has constructed a collage-work where characters flow in and out of focus, including Willis himself, with the editors not at all, but for their hand in the introduction and epilogue, and in working the order of the individual texts. But if the order is constructed by these fictional editors, are we missing something, deliberate or accidentally, in Willis’ “intent”? Is the ending, perhaps, entirely beside the point? In beautiful language, Peck makes a book worthy of the word, which so few of them are anymore, as the last section, “A Profane Halo: An Editor’s Epilogue” writes:

The story of Bernard Willis puzzles us. Motivation for his disappearance is scant, left to interpretation. Through an unknown circumstance, which we can only describe as bewilderment itself, Bernard Willis disappeared while at Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts. A glaring light blinds us, and Bernard is gone, like a conjurer’s assistant in a magic act: the veil is removed and—poof!—Bernard vanishes. By sheer luck or by providence, my companion and I found this manuscript. We have spent the past four years pain-stakingly ordering it, and preparing it for publication. We can only guess what kind of response it will receive.

But, dear reader, we have been accused of distortion, incoherence, aggrandizement, embellishment, forgery, greed, ineptitude and even worse. It breaks our hearts. Our efforts are little understood, and our reputation at risk. To allay our sorrow, and in honour of Bernard, we drink whisky on a Dundas Street rooftop. To Bernard, we toast, raising our tumblers to the sky. But even here as summer sun heats the tiles,
there is no way of assuring you that our preparation of the manuscript of Bernard Willis—that fumbling whirling dervish of the archive—is not a sham. Soon it will be too hot to sit here. Large oak trees’ leaves rustle in the wind. To the east, downtown is hardly visible through the smog, but we’re near a chocolate factory. Trust us, dear reader, the sound of the leaves is mesmerizing. In autumn those leaves will fall spinning in oblate circles. Nearby raccoons will scrap, wailing inhumanly, tearing off each other’s tails.