Writing Surfaces: Selected Fiction of John Riddell

Introduction: Media Studies and Writing Surfaces

Introduction Media Studies and Writing Surfaces Writing Surfaces: Selected Fiction of John Riddell brings an overview of the work of John Riddell to a twenty-first-century audience, an audience that will see this volume as a radical, literary manifestation of media archaeology. This is, in the words of the promotional material of Riddell’s 1977 Criss-cross: a Text Book of Modern Composition, a “long-overdue debut by one of our most striking new fictioneers.” Since 1963 John Riddell’s work has appeared in such foundational literary journals as grOnk, Rampike, Open Letter, and Descant as part of an ongoing dialogue with Canadian literary radicality. Riddell was an early contributing editor to bpNichol’s Ganglia, a micro-press dedicated to the development of community-level publishing and the distribution of experimental poetries. This relationship continued to evolve with his co-founding of Phenomenon Press and Kontakte magazine with Richard Truhlar (1976) and his involvement with Underwhich Editions (founded in 1978): a “fusion of high production standards and top-quality literary innovation” that focused on “presenting, in diverse and appealing physical formats, new works by contemporary creators, focusing on formal invention and encompassing the expanded frontiers of literary endeavour.” Writing Surfaces: Selected Fiction of John Riddell reflects Riddell’s participation in these Toronto-based, Marshall McLuhan–influenced, experimental poetry communities from the 1960s until roughly the mid-to-late 1980s. 1 I N T R O D U C T I O N These communities, and the work of contemporaries bpNichol, Paul Dutton , jwcurry, Richard Truhlar, and Steve McCaffery, give context to Riddell’s literary practice and his focus on “pataphysics, philosophically-investigative prose and process-driven visual fiction.” While many of his colleagues were morerenownedfortheirpoeticandsound-basedinvestigations,Riddellclearly shared both Nichol’s fondness for the doubleness of the visual-verbal pun and Steve McCaffery’s technical virtuosity and philosophical sophistication. In his magazine publications, small-press ephemera, and trade publications, Riddell created a conversation between these two sets of poetics and extended it into the realm of fiction (exploring a truly hybrid form that is fiction as much as it is poetry) and pushed his own writing to the very limit of what conceivably counts as writing through writing. While it’s true that the title Writing Surfaces carries with it the doubling and reversibility of noun and verb, reminding us of how the page is as much a flat canvas for visual expression as it is a container for thought, the first title we proposed for this collection was “Media Studies.” The latter, while admittedly too academic-sounding to describe writing as visually and conceptually alive as Riddell’s, could still describe Riddell’s entire oeuvre; the term not only refers to the study of everyday media (such as television, radio, the digital computer, and so on) but it can—in fact should—encompass the study of textual media and the ways in which writing engages with how it is shaped and defined by mediating technologies. In other words, Riddell’s work is a kind of textbook for the study of media through writing, or the writing of writing. The best-known example of Riddell’s writing of writing is “Pope Leo, El ELoPE: A Tragedy in Four Letters,” initially published in April 1969 with mimeograph illustrations by bpNichol through Nichol’s small but influential Canadian magazine grOnk. It was published again by Nichol, with more refined, hand-drawn, illustrations, in the Governor General’s Award–winning anthology The Cosmic Chef: An Evening of Concrete (1970, the version included here). A further iteration appeared in Criss-cross: a Text Book of Modern Composition , with illustrations by Filipino-Canadian comic-book artist Franc Reyes, who would later pencil and ink Tarzan, House of Mystery, and Weird War for DC comics and was involved with 1970s underground Canadian comix publisher Andromeda. “Pope Leo” relates a stripped-down comicstrip tale of the tragic murder of Pope Leo; the narrative unfolds partly by way of frames within frames, windows within windows, telling a minimalist story in which the comic-strip frame is nothing but a simple hand-drawn square with the remarkable power to bring a story into being. The anagrammatic text is an exploration of the language possibilities inherent in the letters “p,” 2 I N T R O D U C T I O N “o,” “l,” and “e” (hence the subtitle, “a tragedy in four letters”)—sometimes using...