A Sourcery for Books 1 and 2 of bpNichol’s ‘The Marlyrology’ by Irene Niechoda (review)

218 LETTERS IN CANADA 1992 It is Bouson's template that I quarrel with: in dealing with a body of work produced over twenty years by a mind as far-ranging and versatile as Atwood's, this narrowly categorical approach seems reductive and an impediment to the generation of real critical insight. The second difficulty with Brutal Choreographies is its overdependence upon other critics and their observations on Atwood. The book bulges with so many short quotations from so many I American and Canadian scholars' (sometimes citing seven or eight critics per page) that it seems at times more a critical pastiche than a seriously thought out personal response to Atwood's work. Each chapter routinely begins with quoted bits and ends with a marshalling of critical 'bytes' along interpretive lines - like so much critical laundry hung out to dry. This is a mark of much literary criticism in our time, it is true. It is aS'if the graduate school model (the mandatory writing of committee-driven, airtight, and 'publishable ' dissertations which acknowledge, if not incorporate, all prior criticism) has led to a blurring of the distinction between the kind of work and thought that characterizes the theses and that which ought to characterize books. The effect, as with Brutal Choreographies, is the production of too many books in which a great deal of scholarly time, work, and care has gone into the production of something that can only strike its scholarly audience as mechanical in the end. It seems ironical that while acknowledging the presence of a 'regular Atwood industry among academic literary critics' in the opening lines of this book, Bouson unfortunately fails to move beyond that industrial model in dealing with the longer fiction of Margaret Atwood. (MARILYN J. ROSE) Irene Niechoda. A SourcenJ for Books 1 and 2 of bpNicJlOl'S 'The Martyrology' ECW Press 1992.214. $25.00 paper Robert Kroetsch once remarked with wry humour that when he was a graduate student in America in the 1950s, literary scholarship consisted entirely of writing footnotes. He was referring to that loose amalgam of editorial and textual scholarship that results in either an annotated edition of a work or a separate volume of annotations and collected documents known as a sourcebook. While such editorial work would rarely represent itself as seeking to do anything more than facilitate the fullest possible reading of a text, supplementing a work by providing such information as cannot generally be assumed to be available to the 'average' reader, its underlying assumption often seems to be that a text can be completed by scholarship, can be reconnected with its 'source'; and in this bridging gesture its ambiguities, lacunae, and indeterminicies will be eradicated. Irene Niechoda's A Sourcery for Books 1 and 2 ofbpNicllOl'S 'The Martyrology ' belongs both within and outside this tradition of editorial scholarship HUMANITIES 219 as (in a familiar postmodern gesture) a kind of doubled repetition and subversion of its operating assumptions. The substantial introduction usefully traces the genesis and context of Nichol's poem in his Jventures in concrete and sound poetry,' in his adoption of pop-culture forms such as the comic strip, and in his attempted creation of an entire cosmogony of gods and saints. The remainder of Niechoda's study annotates the first two books of The Martyrology, seeking to fill in various kinds of traditional and untraditional 'source' infonnation. Niechoda traces obscure biographical and geographical references, fills out alternately arcane and calnp allusions (including those to various world mythologies and to the long defunct television series rrhe Avengers'), draws attention to misprints , and lists textual variants in the drafts and the earlier edition of books 1 and 2. Nichol deliberately resisted the exclusivity of traditional biblical, Greek, and canonical literary sources that he felt had exercised a kind of tyranny over Western thought. Thus the conventional handbooks to these sources prove even more inadequate than usual in negotiating this poem, and Nichol's readers wil1 be frequently grateful to Niechoda for many obscure bits of information. For example, the knowledge that Shanghalla, 'an airless satellite/ is Jthe Elysian Fields for D.C. comics superheroes' may save the reader a futile search through...