In the text which opens this collection, Renee Gladman
raises the problem of writing about Gail Scott’s writing, the problem of
making Scott’s sentences into objects of literary study. It is difficult, her
text suggests, to say something about these sentences – and to do so using
sentences. Gladman finds her utterances becoming impossibly layered as soon as
she makes an attempt. The problem is not so much Scott’s sentences as the
English sentence which, in Gladman’s experience, does not lend itself to
thinking. Gladman’s solution is to narrate for us the process of drawing
specific sentences from Scott’s novels on the walls of her living space, of
turning them into “a geometry instead of a verbal consequence.” In her terms,
she keeps on saying and drawing until eventually she has “made a complex
observation and a picture-feeling.” I am reminded, here, of Guido Furci’s sense
that although cinema is relevant to Scott’s work, “parallels with painting
speaks more eloquently.” Gladman’s text is as much about her process of writing
as about Scott’s sentences. It has the effect of critically reframing as
collectively-authored, sentences usually taken to be individually-authored.
What is more, by writing Scott’s sentences on the wall – as in a museum, an
alley, a washroom or a project room – Gladman’s text turns them into public
statements, with the potential to stand as counter-discourse.
A
special issue of Open Letter devoted to a specific writer works a little
like Gladman’s text, citing and reframing that writer’s work, and foregrounding
its conceptual purchase. The contributors to this issue – the majority of whom
are themselves writers – responded to the call for texts with poems and essays.
Their essays are not so much ‘about’ Scott’s writing as instances of how to
read Scott and, especially, how to read alongside her. The poems engage in a
kind of co-authorship, whereby fragments from Scott’s prose, an image or a
phrase, become the occasion for more writing. Not surprisingly, the poems
dispense with quotation marks. As Scott puts it in an interview with Corey
Frost in the late 1990s, “we’re all quoting each other all the time anyway”
(66). In the terms of Robert Glück, from a discussion of Kathy Acker’s practice
of citation, “[a]ppropriation puts into question the place of the writer – in
fact, it turns the writer into a reader” (“Long Note on New Narrative” 32).
Appropriating Scott’s writing for new projects – social, textual and linguistic
– the texts collected here turn writers into readers and critics into poets.
Like Gladman’s sentences on the wall, they emphasize the collective and public
status of writing. (Lianne Moyes, “Introduction”)
Guest-edited by
Lianne Moyes in collaboration with Bronwyn Haslam comes the new issue of the
critical journal Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory
(Fourteenth Series, Number 9, Summer 2012), produced as “Sentences on the
Wall,” an issue on the work of Montreal writer Gail Scott. Moyes is also the
editor of Gail Scott: Essays on Her Works (Guernica Editions, 2002), and
its interesting to see how her interest in Scott’s writing continues after such
a project, furthering her own work with another. Given the fact that the same
editor oversaw both projects, does this issue become a re-examination of her
consideration of Scott after the first volume, a continuation or an update? One
of the highlights of the issue has to be former Montreal writer Corey Frost’s
exploration of Scott’s punctuation, “Punc’d: Towards a Poetics of Punctuation
in the Novels of Gail Scott,” or the collaborative “Temporality, Genealogy,
Secrecy: Gail Scott and the Obituary of Genre” by Angela Carr and KateEichhorn. A particular favourite was Vancouver writer Meredith Quartermain’s
“How Fiction Works: Gail Scott’s Heroine and The Obituary,” not
just for how she speaks of Scott’s fiction, but on the mechanics of fiction,
providing insight into her own writing, and in the possibilities of writing:
How does fiction work? What is the work or
knowledge-making or deconstructing analysis that fiction can do? Harry Mathews
reminds us that the fiction writer is not “’saying something’ to the reader”;
rather, the writer must “do no more than supply the reader with the materials
and … the space to create an experience” (7). Indeed he emphasizes that “of the
writer and reader, the reader is the only creator” (7). The writer and reader
are collaborators, and to establish a place for this, the writer must choose
“as the innermost substance of” the writing, “a terrain unfamiliar” to both
writer and reader (6). Furthermore, he argues “the unfamiliar matter the writer
chooses in nothing else than his [or her] own story” (7). Of course this is not
the familiar “publicity” story we tell about ourselves in casual conversation.
Rather it is the story or stories of what has made us what we are. We find this
story, he says, in our personal histories, in our bodies, and in our
consciousness, by which he means, not merely awareness of things but “what you
think and feel with.” Consciousness, he says does “not contain or
withhold meaning; and consciousness itself has no meaning at all”; it is “the
power to create meaning” (8-10). “What we long to know in our speculations
about the stars,” he says, “surpasses merely something: We long to know
everything. And in fact that consciousness is capable of exactly that: of
knowing not only anything but everything” (10).
As Moyes wrote in
her introduction, part of the appeal of such an issue is not only the range of
essays on Scott’s works, but the tributes included as well, with poems from
Fred Wah (from “Music at the Heart of Thinking”) and Camille Roy, as well as a
short essay/tribute, “My Two Cents” (an earlier version of which appeared in How2
1.2), by Robert Glück that opens with the sentence, “Every aesthetics is an
aesthetics of class.” He continues, writing:
In thinking about a poetics of class that knows
itself, it’s instructive to look at the history of feminist poetics. In the
first place (if you could call the sixties and early seventies the first
place), an innovative feminist poetics seems to be disallowed. If you were
going to make a feminist poem recognizable to feminists or to the avant-garde,
feminism was content. Formally innovative poems founded on radical politics
took their cues from Marxist and socialist critiques which did not include
sexuality, gender, or, somehow, glass.
As Camille Roy
writes of her “2 Miracle Plays,” “These poems are tributes to Gail Scott. They
incorporate specific ideas from a talk ‘The Sutured Subject’ that she gave at
the University of San Francisco in November 2009, as well as some lines taken
from her latest novel, The Obituary. In her talk she explored the
relation of history to the sentence, where history (and the dead) are encrypted
in our language and the sentence itself becomes a kind of crypt for what has
disappeared. The first ‘Miracle Play’ explores this relation, and uses the
English future tense (“I will…”) with its expression of will for the future
to highlight what Gail noted in her talk, that French lacks such a will for
the future.” I reproduce the first of Roy’s “2 Miracle Plays” here:
The Sentence As Sentence
On the afternoon we are murdered
our story will become malodorous.
We will arrive at prison’s gate wan & hesitant
to show: no guilty conscience.
Stripped of false unities
& without will for the future
we’ll hold to the blaze of our wrong idea.
Its sullen rejoinder & refusal to admit defeat!
The light of custom will be our bodies.
Call this play: as density,
encrypted & insensible.
Until a new sentence rises: in layers, tender as cake.
Creatures as words: so much alive.
Whinnying in the slammer.
Despite her work and
lengthy career as a writer, thinker and innovator, Gail Scott remains much
admired and followed by other literary writers, but critically
underrepresented. One can only hope that such a critical tribute and
exploration could do worse than bring a new group of readers to her difficult
and innovative ongoing work.
