Bolder Flights: Essays on the Canadian Long Poem

The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem as System: Friesen, Atwood, Kroetsch, Arnason, McFadden

The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem as System: Friesen, Atwood, Kroetsch, Arnason, McFadden REINHOLD KRAMER Since Copernicus man has been rolling from the centre toward X. —NIETZSCHE The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. —FOUCAULT THE WISH TO BECOME someone else serves as one of the basic tropes, an aporetic trope one might say, for Foucault's life in James Miller's ThePassion of Michel Foucault. After the debate about a Foucauldian ethics,1 it is no doubt undignified to ask, but I ask, "to become who else?"A nineteenth-century evangelical woman? In order to find Foucault , "I call him by a name that he must assume or refuse in order to reply to me."2 And if I call him "Susanna Moodie," a name not normallyfastened on him, so much the better, because unlike "Michel Foucault," "Susanna Moodie" will not be mistaken as a natural signifier. Poststructuralists would, of course resist my facile leap from "someone else" to a name, since language (which coalesces around one's proper name) is in the poststructuralist view implicated as the tool that reduces imaginary dismemberments to compact, falsely complete bodies. Nevertheless, there are a few "names" that, anecdotally or intellectually, Foucault seems to have retained nostalgia for: Nietzsche, prisoner, night3 —names that are staged to 102 confront the bourgeoisie in a way not so different from the old Freudian discourse about repression, despite Foucault's wish to move beyond Freud.4 Poststructuralism has often been invoked with respect to the contemporary Canadian long poem. Most famously, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, but also many other long poems like Patrick Friesen's TheShunning , Kroetsch's Seed Catalogue, Arnason's Scrag, and Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie either have been or may be understood as resisting structure , as undoing epic, and as adapting themselves to the transitory and the local rather than to traditional aesthetic systems. The long poem, says Smaro Kamboureli, occurs outside of the law of genre; the long poem is unrealizable and indeterminate in its positioning of the self. Not simply parodying epic form, the long poem arrives at an unmappable form. Kamboureli 's is the most recent and complete version of a reading common to many poets and critics, including Mandel, Kroetsch, and Ondaatje.5 Kamboureli's reading identifies the post-consensual intentions of some of the long poets vis-a-vis their literary ancestors. More importantly, it conveys a proper distress at the edge of meaning. Mytenuous allegiance to a Christian order, however, makes me skeptical of claims to unmappability and indeterminacy. If structuralism's grammatical dream of the complete transparency of fiction seems rather distant nowadays, this does not mean that recent long poems are "lawless" or "without grammar" (Kamboureli xiv, 187). I argue, conversely, that it is a mystification to discover "X" or "someone else" in every formal experiment. Just asJames Miller admits of his biographical subject—"I was forced to ascribe to Foucault a persistent and purposeful self (Miller 7)—so if we look at recent long poems we discover mappable cultural forms and authorities even if these are not bound into sonnets. Neither the parody of older forms nor the destabilizing of older ideas creates unmappability.6 Long poems, like David McFadden's baggy sonnet sequence Gypsy Guitar, which are much quicker to acknowledge traditional and metaphysical forms of knowledge (including poetic genre), are not more determinate just because of this acknowledgement. There are several claims about poststructural reading that too long have insisted upon being interpreted as responses: history is a dream of facts, Authority is everywhereand lacerates without end, the (postmodern) author speaks in many competing discourses, the subject is an imaginary unity, in the beginning was repression, and the world is purely parodic. These claims, of which I discuss only the first three, usually explain themselves as responses to (respectively) the fundamentalist belief in non-discursive "facts," to the faith in the ultimate benignity of authority, to "monological" ways of speaking, to the naive confidence in the congruency 103 of myself to myself, and so on. If, instead, we momentarily freeze a statement like "history is a dream of facts," the contention begins to sound axiomatic , foundational, and not as fully parodic as it would have sounded had it remained always only a reply to a past conservative hegemony that waits, in the mask...