Bolder Flights: Essays on the Canadian Long Poem

Kristjana Gunnars' Carnival of Longing: A Passionate Reading

Kristjana Gunnars' Carnival of Longing: A Passionate Reading MEIRA COOK THE FIRST ESSAYinJulia Kristeva's Tales of Lovebegins by claiming the writer's speechlessness in the face of a lover's discourse, "[n]o matter how far back my love memories go, I find it difficult to talk about them" (1). When she does attempt to articulate them, Rristeva useswordslike "exaltation" and "erotics," "miraculous" and "delirium,"words that turn into passion because the language that we have used to fix the amatory relationship is inadequate, whatRristeva,in the same context, describes as "a flight of metaphors." For Kristeva, as for many other postmodern theorists, the discourse of love isreceived through language that isoverdetermined, digressive , metaphorical, and connotative, in which contradiction and misunderstanding become the most significant tropes bywhich we read the text, and errors, hallucination, and deception are a requirement ofjouissance. In the face of this claim to "speechlessness" I am interested in discovering a language to adequately articulate a discourse of passion in Kristjana Gunnars' long poem Carnival of Longing. Divided into five sections, the poem is located in a variety of distinctive places, such as the ship Gullfoss , a cabin on the Cheekeye Reserve, and the home place in Reykjavik. As well, each section occupies a separate season; "Dimmalimm" takes place in the July heat of Summer and "Gullfoss" occurs during a "winter without winter" (27), a spiritual desert of the heart. The section entitled "III" is a time of rain and spring thaw "when all texts soak into the grass" (45), and "Sunlamp," having been written in Summer, is conceived of in retrospect during the prolonged darkness of a Greenland Winter. The poem sequence ends with "Cheekeye," a fall into an Autumn of suspended time in which the poet-lover enters into a new and less linear contract with time: 162 as if there reallywere a backwardsand forwards to the lives we lead as if time had a direction a tightrope we could walk at will. (82) In his essay on the contemporary Canadian long poem, "For Play and Entrance," Robert Kroetsch speaks of the abandonment of an inherited grammar, the failure of system, and the preservation of that failure in the structure of the long poem. Gunnars' long poem Carnival of Longing begins after the love story has ended. As such, it contains within it as structure , the trajectory of the love story (always) already experienced as a grand narrative against which this present and particular love story may be told. In what Frank Davey has called its "announcement of futurity" (183), the long poem struggles to represent itself as an authentic departure from narrative inevitability,while the love story, particularly the unhappy love story, is nothing if not a chronology of this return. However, since the separate and possibly distinct claims of the love story and the long poem, as genre and structure, are, regrettably, beyond the limits of this present paper , let us begin again. Gunnars' Carnival of Longing begins after the love story has ended. In the place of the absent lover,words alternate with silences, each aspiring only to their relative levels of unrepresentability. In his absence, the lover can neither write, "myhead full of words that will/ not be written, cannot be written," nor speak, since her longing is "silenced" as love "that must not be voiced," a scar that must not be displayed (3). The third poem of this sequence returns to the originary place of desire, the house of "myfather who loved me" in an effort to articulate the minutiae of love available only through the unspoken: the red sweater her mother knitted, the black rubber boots she wore while her father "spoke with the men/ always speaking with the men" (5). The narrative proclaims itself as a clarification of that silence or absence, "what cannot be said withoutyou" (8). The poet awakesalone "in my private study" and resolves to transform this absence into an amphitheatre in which to construct "a carnival of my longing" (13). At the same time she is acutely aware of the paradox of attempting to represent the singularity of absence in the medium of language that is, by its nature, parodic, overdetermined, and self-referential: I do not want to write what there is to write words are ironic they speak of themselves and saywhat I had not intended. (17) 163 Words having failed her, the lover turns to "non-writing" (11...