Future Indicative: Literary Theory and Canadian Literature

Writer Writing, Ongoing Verb

Writer Writing, Ongoing Verb EDITED BY BETTY A. SCHELLENBERG MJased on the conversation between George Bowering and Robert Kroetsch, joined by conference participants, which launched the Future Indicative symposium. The chairperson was John Moss. JOHN MOSS Things feel right tonight. We're at the midway point between writing papers and polishing them into a book. This is the best part, gathering together, listening to each other, having a good time. I don't think I need to introduce George Bowering and Robert Kroetsch. They will speak for themselves. GEORGE BOWERING Kroetsch and I are in similar positions, in that we're both academics and we're both writers, and so we have the problem that in recent years we've heard the terminology of theory used, and we've read it, and we've heard our students using it, and we've had to learn it because our students use it. It's an interesting problem because when we sit down to write, we may be more conscious of what the critics are going to do when they read the book than of how the masses who are more familiar with our writing will respond. I thought about this when Kroetsch and I were talking to some people in Scarberia last month, and I began to solve the problem after I got home by starting a book called "Errata." It's going to be a sequence of discontinuous remarks about the business of writing and reading, and about trying to understand that business, despite the fact of theory and its terminology . The book will consist of little pieces numbered from one to one hundred, with little notes on the bottom saying what number to go to next for a continuous argument. But I've only done a few at the beginning so far, and I haven't got the numbers on the bottom yet. So if you don't mind, I'll just read a few of the pieces. I've never read these aloud since I've written B 6 them, and in fact the last one was written while a photographer was standing there taking pictures. He said, "Try to look like a writer," so I sat down and wrote. 1. In the theatre, each member of the audience sees a different play, because no two people are sitting in the same seat. This is much less true of the movie because the camera is in the middle, seeing for your eye. Those in the front of the movie theatre will feel a greater loyalty, perhaps, to a segment of the screen, but not much. Now, what about the readers of literature? A Montrealer reading The Stud-Horse Man probably sees it as a kind of more recent western ; it happens (oh yes, mythically) out there. But an intelligent reader in Leduc knows better than to look out the kitchen window for Demeter riding by; but her "out there" means outside the house. People who posit ideas such as The Canadian Tradition or The Northern Experience should travel less and spend time in more places. 2. People often ask, "What audience are you writing for?" But how can one write for an audience? One can read poems or stories to an audience. If one had the talent one could sing and dance for an audience, especially north of the fifty-fifth parallel. But when one is writing there is no audience there; at the best of times one is alone. Or nearly alone. There is no audience, but there is the text; one is alone except for the text. So one writes for the text. This is for you, one says, and one really hopes the text likes what one is doing. It is not, perhaps, the judge; but it is the significant and growing discernment one has to be aware of as company. When one happens to be the reader, producing the text that way too, one is also alone with the text. For instance,Surfacing:one is there, and the text is there—no one else. 3. Of course any text is an intertext. I have read other books and some forests, before I read Surfacing. In reading fiction we can no more hope to avoid intertextuality than we can hope to avoid deconstruction. Once I thought of writing a use-anywhere critique called "Rifling the Canon: A Study in Continuous Intertextuality ." The continuousness of the attacks on unity is the only continuousness I can think...