novel by bill bissett (review)

For thirty-five years now, bill bissett has published almost a book a year with Vancouver independent publisher Talonbooks (twenty-five books since 1977, thirty in total) alongside an average of two or three books per year with other publishers. The books have become consistent enough that some have begun to question the quality within that quantity – or, more specifically, the novelty of each. These books are all immediately distinctive for their characteristic phonetic orthography, which now functions as something of a modernist stylistic signature akin to Stein’s agrammatical repetitions, James’s telegraphing sentences, or Joyce’s multilinguistic portmanteaus. bissett’s phonetic spelling achieves a similar rupture and novelty by encoding the author’s palpable presence into each utterance. As the words undergo multiple spelling variations within the same work, sometimes even within the same poem, it becomes clear that bissett has developed an important new notational tool for adding stress and nuance by adjusting the pronuncial accents of his words. It has a sonorous effect in reorienting the printed page from the eye to the ear, inflecting the printed word with the rich tones of the oral.

A line of scholarship has developed from this technique by connecting it to bissett’s asemic concrete and visual poetry as the eruption of the body into textuality, indeed as a kind of eruption of textuality altogether. The critics of this line (Steve McCaffery, Adena Karasick, Darren Wershler, derek beaulieu, Brian Henderson, among others) focus on the radical elements of bissett’s textual deviance while politely avoiding or less generously dismissing the thematic, lyrical content of the writing beneath his inconsistent spelling. To them, what was once radically new, with even revolutionary potential, has become rather familiar territory. Carl Peters’s textual vishyuns: image and text in the work of bill bissett (also with Talon-books) attempts to stop this line of criticism by mounting a concerted defence of a thematic, lyrical vishyun that sprawls across bissett’s enormous multi-generic multidisciplinary oeuvre. Put briefly, he defends bissett’s humanism, including his phonetic spelling, as an attempt to resacralize rather than break language. But Peters misunderstands the critical dismissal of bissett’s lyrical-cum-spiritual vision as ignorance rather than disinterest; their central complaint is that bissett – Canada’s great 1960s radical experimentalist – has been repeating himself ever since.

This is a short synopsis of the debate that has developed around the critical interpretation of bissett’s work (full disclosure: I take a stand in this debate in my recent scholarly edition of bissett’s postmodern classic Rush: What Fuckan Theory). How is it relevant to this new book novel?

In a fascinating deviation, novel attempts to orchestrate a complicated, messily interwoven structure to the entire book. Despite the title, this structure is not that of a novel in the narrative sense, but rather of three distinct orientations: lyric poems set in bill bissett’s present, a narrative sketch/story, and essays that respond to the critical debate surrounding his work. While the former poems are familiar and the middle narrative sketches an intriguing exploration of personae, the latter is a meta-conscious theoretical deviation not seen in bissett’s writing since Rush was published in 1972. He writes a poem to me (‘dere greg’) about his revolutionary phase in the 1960s and the politics surrounding the death of Pat Lowther. He writes another poem to Eric Schmaltz (‘duz narrativ reflect our digestiv systems … ’), a young graduate student who produced the first response to Peters in defence of McCaffery, about his ongoing commitment to the revolutionary function of literature. He writes an extended analysis of the limitations of linear narratives that concludes with the announcement of the ‘post narrativ revolushyun.’ The narrative section of novel, in fact, attempts to stage a new kind of storytelling in light of this arrival.

I read novel, then, as bissett’s unique and poignant response to the critical environment that now surrounds his writing. As one of his characters speaks plainly, ‘ium rebellious now against othr peopuls views or definishyuns uv me.’ Is...