Sep 102013
 

Gordon Lish, known as Captain Fiction in the days when he edited fiction at Esquire Magazine, was my editor for my novel The Life and Times of Captain N. (Knopf, 1993). As I recall, Lish wrote the flap copy for that book, and he sent me to bill hayward to have my picture taken for the cover. Gordon also published a story of mine in The  Quarterly, “Swain Corliss, Hero of Malcolm’s Mills (Now Oakland, Ontario), November 6, 1814″ (it’s in my collection 16 Categories of Desire). Both bill and Gordon have now graced the pages of Numéro Cinq, and we’ve published Jason Lucarelli’s astonishing essay on Gordon Lish and his concept of consecution not to mention the radio interview I did with Gordon, yea, these many years ago. Gordon graciously consented to write a cover blurb for my book of stories, Savage Love, just now on the brink of publication. He sent me this page — he doesn’t use email (mostly he sends handwritten messages on blank white USPS postcards). It is typical of Gordon, ebullient, incantatory, celebratory, exotic, and dramatic. It was too long for the book cover, but he was graceful about letting me cut it, despite his admonition to the contrary at the bottom. Here are his words as they appear on Savage Love:

I, your admiring reader, report myself ever again restored to find in hand the company of your righteous sentences, shout hooray, shout hooray, even splendid, splendid, splendid (borrowing from the great poet Jack Gilbert), like loins, he wrote, like Rome, he wrote . . . .

And here, resplendent in all its glory, is the original, which, in fact, I like much better and for which I am deeply grateful.

dg

scan0024-001

 

Dec 112012
 


Photo by Bill Hayward

I interviewed Gordon Lish years ago, 1994, I think, when I had a weekly radio show. We knew each other as author and editor. He had published a story of mine in The Quarterly and also had been my editor for The Life and Times of Captain N (Knopf, 1993). Shortly after my novel appeared, Lish was let go at Knopf (I do not think there was a cause-and-effect relationship, but you never know). This interview took place in the aftermath of both events.

The interview touches on Lish’s relationship with Knopf and, earlier, Esquire, where he was dubbed Captain Fiction; also his lightning rod personality, his friendship with Don DeLillo, his own writing, the virtues of throwing away and cutting, and the difference between mystery and information in art. It is always a treat to hear Gordon speaking extemporaneously; his deep-voiced, rhythmic orotundity and his talent for finding the precise if unexpected phrase are inspiring as oratory. Best of all, he speaks of life, fate and art in ways that inscribe those subjects with a desperate significance, even heroism.

I found the old tape of this interview, along with others, in a box in storage. There is some extraneous noise for which I apologize.

—Douglas Glover

 

Interview with Gordon Lish Part I

Interview with Gordon Lish Part II

Nov 022011
 

Here’s a very smart, ever so pyrotechnical essay on my novel The Life and Times of Captain N by Cheryl Cowdy who teaches Canadian literature and children’s literature at York University in Toronto. The essay is an inspiration on several levels, not the least of which is Cheryl’s critical intuition that she could take the book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as a parallel text and let the two books illuminate one another. The result is an essay replete with brilliant reflections and intuitive leaps that says something about novels, art, the self, history and, um, the French penchant for complicated metaphors.

There is a story that goes with this essay. In 1999 the editors of Henry Street, a scholarly magazine published at Dalhousie University, got in touch with me. They had an exciting essay about Captain N, and they wanted me to enter into a dialogue by email with the author, which dialogue they would publish in conjunction with the essay.  This dialogue was a feature they had just invented called “Lines of Flight.” The first attempt hadn’t worked so well; the author got testy with the graduate student and the experience had not been sunny. The editors wanted to be sure I wasn’t going to be mean. I told them I am not a mean person (um, despite my students calling me the Shredder). They sent me the essay (which delighted me) and put me in touch with Cheryl. And then we spent a couple of lovely months shooting emails (once in a while, slightly lubricated) back and forth on novels, rhizomes, French theory, and life (camping trips and thunder storms impinged). We were strangers, but well disposed, and we were supposed to talk. I think we forgot, at times, that the result was going to be published. It was a sweet thing: two strangers, a bit on the spot, tentatively feeling each other out and then discovering moments of intellectual play. And, well, a dozen years later, we’re still friends.

Here is Cheryl’s self-bio note, too charming to rewrite:

I really hate writing biographies; can we just say I teach Canadian and children’s literature at York [University in Toronto]? My current obsessions have to do with play and ritual, but I’m still fascinated by the suburbs (I used a quote from “The Indonesian Client” in my dissertation on the burbs in Canned lit, did I tell you that?). Then can we tell the story of our correspondence over my Deleuzian reading of Capt N? It’s a good story, that one.

This essay and the accompanying “Lines of Flight” interchange were originally published in Henry Street, 8:1, 1999.

dg

Original Alfred A. Knopf edition.

.

Becoming is an antimemory. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 294

I am against the future. Hendrick “Dutch Henry” Nellis, The Scourge of Schoharie, 1779[1]

.

How does one write a book about Indians?  This is one of Oskar Nellis’s dilemmas in The Life and Times of Captain N.  Douglas Glover’s dilemma: How does one write a book about history?  My dilemma: How does one write an academic essay about The Life and Times of Captain N. and A Thousand Plateaus, two texts that seek liberation from linear structures of thought?  And does the problem of writing about Indians and History become part of my dilemma also?

But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work (Deleuze and Guattari 4).

And,

Literature is an assemblage (4).

Can I plug the Glover machine into the Deleuzo-Guattarian machine?  What kind of assemblage will this make?  Will it work?  (“Don’t ask questions you can’t answer”—My advice to undergraduates on writing research essays.  Here I am—breaking the rules.  Sometimes there are only questions . . . leading to more questions . . .)

Oskar thinks he could write a whole book, and there would be nothing in it but questions (Glover 24).

In many ways, A Thousand Plateaus seems antithetical to books about History and Indians.  “Becoming is an antimemory.”  Does this mean Deleuze and Guattari are against the past?  Hendrick Nellis, or Captain N., professes to be “against the future.”  Is this a contradiction, or are they both simply for the present?

“Unlike history,” say Deleuze and Guattari, “becoming cannot be conceptualized in terms of past and future.  Becoming-revolutionary remains indifferent to questions of a future and a past of the revolution” (292).

The present then.  But how shall I plug them all in together?  As Deleuze and Guattari advise,

Writing has nothing to do with signifying.  It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come (4-5).

And,

[W]rite at n – 1 dimensions.  A system of this kind could be called a rhizome (6).

A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles (7).

There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root.  There are only lines (8).[2]

Write rhizomatically.  But, I protest, there must be an argument!  There must be a thesis!

The majoritarian argument, then: According to Oskar Nellis, one of the storytellers and protagonists of Douglas Glover’s novel, The Life and Times of Captain N., “Everything is a sign of everything else.”  It is a state of being that causes him to feel “lost in a circular whirl of interchangeability based on masks” (52).  This state of being, or of interchangeability, might more aptly be called a Deleuzo-Guattarian “state of becoming.”  Like Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of identity in terms of “becomings,” Glover’s historical novel articulates a notion of cultural and national identity that privileges indiscernibility, symbolized by the Iroquoian whirlwind masks that figure so prominently in the novel.  This has a direct bearing on the question of History and Indians, for it is by reading Oskar’s book about Indians within the text of The Life and Times of Captain N. that he and his readers become-Indians (which is a fine way of saying we become-everybody/everything).

The minoritarian argument . . . But wait, Deleuze and Guattari object . . . “Flat multiplicities of n dimensions are asignifying and asubjective.  They are designated by indefinite articles, or rather by partitives (some couchgrass, some of a rhizome . . .)” (9).

Fine then . . . some minoritarian arguments: Plug The Life and Times of Captain N. and A Thousand Plateaus into each other.  Make an assemblage.  “Collective assemblages of enunciation function directly within machinic assemblages” (7).  Make a machine, a BwO (a Body without Organs, a Book without Origins).  Create: Lines of Flight.  Planes of Consistency.  Connections:  “and . . . and . . . and ”(25).[3] “[A] line of becoming has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination” (293).  A Becoming-Glover of Deleuze and Guattari and a Becoming-Deleuze-and-Guattari of Glover.  “Each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritorialization of the other” (10).  Is it true?

As Brian Massumi states in his foreword to A Thousand Plateaus, “The question is not: is it true?  But: does it work?  What new thoughts does it make it possible to think?  What new emotions does it make it possible to feel?  What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body?” (Massumi xv).  Will it work then?

I’m not sure, but the connections are there.  Like Deleuze and Guattari, Glover writes and theorizes the middle, the inbetween space elided by dualism machines.  Binary machines that separate being and nonbeing, self and other, “God and reason,” as well as America (“the rhizomatic West,” for Deleuze and Guattari, “with its Indians without ancestry, its ever-receding limit, its shifting and displaced frontiers” [19]) and “the old country” (Oskar “wondering which old country”—suggesting it doesn’t really matter [112]).  Many of the characters in The Life and Times of Captain N. feel they are, like Nellis himself, “between peoples” (19).  For Deleuze and Guattari, “the only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo . . .” (277).

“Are you ready to write?” asks Oskar (32). .

.

Becomings.  Becoming-masks.

A becoming is always in the middle; one can only get it by the middle. A becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation between the two; it is the in-between, the border or line of flight or descent running perpendicular to both. Deleuze and Guattari 293.

The Truth is a Mask & its Signe is Division. It is Nought but what lies between Things. It whirls. Yet I believe that to know It is a kind of Madness & a joyful Relief. Glover 99

.

In A Thousand Plateaus, the concept of becoming is described as “a zone of proximity and indiscernibility, a no-man’s-land” (293), as it were, that is itself the in-between of being and non-being.  When they speak of becoming-girl, becoming-woman, or becoming-animal, Deleuze and Guattari are not advocating an imitation or identification with the other.  Becoming is a notion that they are constantly reinventing, making it difficult to define.  However, several of the ways Deleuze and Guattari describe becoming are suited to a comparison with the articulation of identity in The Life and Times of Captain N.  Becoming is, as the epigraph to this section explains, an “in-between” zone, which is particularly resonant with Hendrick Nellis’ avowal in the novel that he is “between peoples” (Glover 19).  Deleuze and Guattari explain that becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes.  This is the sense in which becoming is a process of desire.  (272)

Becoming is a “process of desire” through which one becomes-other, abandoning one’s major identity with “state[s] of domination” to be “deterritorialized,” to communicate with the other (291).  As Elizabeth Grosz explains, becomings “always involve a substantial remaking of the subject, a major risk to the subject’s integration and social functioning” (174).

In The Life and Times of Captain N., being “between peoples” means being a split subject, risking one’s subjective integrity, as well as one’s social, national, or cultural identity.  There are times when Hendrick Nellis’ philosophy reads like a section from A Thousand Plateaus.  When he reflects on the attitudes of those people who cross cultures with ease, Nellis echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on becoming as a no-man’s-land, and as “a process of desire”:

In the no-man’s-land between peoples, languages, and customs, there is no custom, only naked desire and misunderstanding.  It is a childlike state, full of violent experiment—when I think of this I am reminded of the mask of the Whirlwind.  Once they have gone there, few ever return.  (80-81)

For the characters in The Life and Times of Captain N., Iroquoian masks are a sign of the often chaotic and confusing process of becoming-other.  It is, as Nellis observes, a violent state, potentially leading to “misunderstanding,” a risk to the stability of one’s identity.  Yet being-between is also the only state or process that allows one to enter into a relationship of mutuality with the other, to become-everybody/everything, to be redeemed.

By “becoming-masks” the characters of Life and Times lose all sense of stable national, cultural or gendered identities.  The Whirlwind mask, also called the mask of the Split-face god conveys this most effectively.  Ethnologist William N. Fenton translates the name of the mask as “He Whose Body is Riven in Twain.”  He explains that “his body is half human and half supernatural; hence his face is divided between deep red and pure black, symbolizing the east and the west, and he is free to wander at large even among the people” (Fenton 16).  As a being that is between life and death, the Split-face god is particularly suited to signifying becoming as a process of being-between.  (In photos he looks quite gleeful about this, as if he knows something we don’t).  In the zone of “in-betweenness,” the characters of the novel enter the whirlwind of indiscernibility where identity is turned upside down.

Many of the First Nations characters in the novel embody this state of being-between.  The “Black Minqua sorcerer,” Crow, paints his face like the Whirlwind; Hendrick Nellis takes the painting to mean, “he is half-spirit and half-human, half-dead and half-alive,” and hence “a medium for the magical forces of the forest, a messenger from the Land of the Dead” (43).  Oskar’s friend, Tom Wopat, who is “half-Savage” according to Oskar (14), is a maker of masks.[4] He is also a “down-fended Boy,” which Oskar tells us is “an ancient custom” of keeping a child thought to be “werrie powerful in Magic” (123).  It is a sign of his ability to live “between Worlds” (123).  Tom is also able to live in the space between dreams and the real.  As a “pawaganak” who appears in the dreams of Mary Hunsacker, Tom is “a manido or person who spoke to the Indians in their sleep” (90).  For Oskar, Tom is often the spokesperson for becoming-other as an experience that allows one to be renewed or redeemed.  Tom tells him that “we will be made new only when we learn to speak the language we cannot understand” (120).  This leads Oskar to wonder if this means “that difference itself is sacred?  That my savior is the other, whoever he is?”  (120).  As one of the characters who are “between peoples” (19), Tom understands that embracing difference enables one to gain new perspectives, to think new thoughts, feel new emotions, and open new sensations in the body.

Mary Hunsacker is one white character who learns to live “between peoples” after she is captured by the Mississauga Indians and adopted by them.  Mary’s process of becoming-Indian is inscribed with violence; when Scattering Light, one of the Mississauga, clubs her over the head with his death maul, Mary suffers a headache that is quite literally a splitting headache. She explains that the bruising that results from her injury turns her face into “a mask, which nevertheless seemed strangely familiar to me”(26).  Such physical pain is often a sign of the cultural in-betweenness that characters like Mary, Hendrick and Oskar experience.  Mary senses that her “mask of pain” hides a person she does not know inside (37), signifying the fluidity of her identity, as well as the potential for discomfort that this risk to one’s subjectivity involves.

As she becomes more comfortable with the Mississauga language and culture, Mary learns the skills of wabeno magic under the tutelage of Wabanooqua.  This occurs after a doctor for the King’s Regiment places a silver plate in her head, an operation that almost kills her and therefore increases her sense that she lives between the two worlds of life and death.  She describes her new subjectivity as a “strange state between being born and giving birth” (73).  Mary’s position enables her to be more accepting of ambivalence and in-betweenness.  As she explains,

You could never tell what a thing really was.  The world was full of shapeshifters and talking rocks and words that had souls.  I myself was both what I was and something more on account of that silver plate in my head, my dream, and my song.  (117)

Mary experiences her subjectivity as “something more” than her identity as a white woman colonist.[5]  As she later recalls, “The world had turned itself upside down for me.  I was an Indian, though pale, and a white woman, though I spoke and walked like an Indian” (125).  Mary feels that her ability to live between two worlds makes her “a machine for translation” (141).  As such, she functions as a “machine for becoming” for others.[6]  For Mary, becoming-Indian is a kind of becoming-minoritarian.  As Deleuze and Guattari explain, this is necessary since “only a minority is capable of serving as the active medium of becoming” (291).[7]

In many ways, Hendrick Nellis is the most outspoken advocate of becoming-Indian as a means of redemption.  He is also one of the most ambiguous characters in the novel.  As Glover remarks, “Nellis isn’t a liberal.  He’s no improver.  He has already rejected history and the future.  He’s a tragic hero, an Old Testament patriarch.  And his words are a kind of prophecy” (Yanofsky 14).  A self-appointed redeemer of whites captured by Indians, Nellis seems to be a paradoxical proponent of becoming-Indian.  He is a Tory and a loyalist, a captain in the King’s Regiment, yet it would seem he eventually comes to feel no real sense of allegiance to either side in the American Revolution.  For Nellis, war is a “species of conversation” more than a political conflict (17).  “The main effort for any man on the frontier” he suggests, “is the effort to understand the messages” (17).  Nellis interprets the messages as questions:  “Why am I here?  Who is the other?  What is he saying?”  (17).

According to Nellis, the American Revolution turns the world and people upside down: “I do not know if we are sane or insane, the world is so topsy-turvy.  The war is like a whirlwind, and the structures of our lives (army, Indian, colonist) have been upended” (79).[8]  Like Mary, Nellis suffers from headaches that cause him to feel “split in two,” and his physical symptoms are similar to the effect of the Whirlwind mask (81).  “The right side is on fire,” he explains, “and the left is in shadow” (81).  Like his face, Nellis’s subjectivity is split:  “What I believe is that I am split (we are all split) between what we dream (Indian) and what we fear is true (white)” (106).  In his “Address to Pilgrims,” Nellis preaches a doctrine that is founded on loving difference, and in which becoming-Indian is, like the Deleuzo-Guattarian notion of becoming, about entering into a relationship of proximity to the other:

Once I said that becoming an Indian was like unto entering a swarming madness, but it might redeem you.  I mean going out of yourself, abandoning the structure of mind which is peculiarly white, entering that area where, because it is neither one nor the other, you are nothing.  (173)

For Nellis, becoming-Indian is about relinquishing one’s identity with the majority and its domination over other minoritarian identities.  This is also important for Deleuze and Guattari: “Woman: we all have to become that, whether we are male or female.  Non-white: we all have to become that, whether we are white, yellow, or black” (470).  Moreover, it is not a question of identifying as either white or Indian, but of being comfortable with being somewhere in-between.  Nellis describes the process of becoming-other as one that ends with becoming-nothing.  His own madness and his belief that his brain enters a “process of disintegration” influence this idea when he settles in Canada (173).[9]  He is not fearful of this process; as he says, “I am against the future.  But I firmly believe that out of the collapse of everything something new arises” (182).

Similarly, for Deleuze and Guattari, the goal of all becomings is becoming-imperceptible.  “The imperceptible is the immanent end of becoming, its cosmic formula” (279).  Becomings move in “molecular segment[s]” that begin with becoming-woman and that are all “rushing toward” becoming-imperceptible (279).[10]  What becoming-imperceptible means is “to be like everybody else” (279), just as for Nellis it means, “entering that area where, because it is neither one nor the other, you are nothing” (173).  As Deleuze and Guattari explain:

Such is the link between imperceptibility, indiscernibility and impersonality—the three virtues.  To reduce oneself to an abstract line, a trait, in order to find one’s zone of indiscernibility with other traits, and in this way enter the haecceity and impersonality of the creator.  One is then like grass: one has made the world, everybody/everything, into a becoming, because one has made a necessarily communicating world, because one has suppressed in oneself everything that prevents us from slipping between things and growing in the midst of things.  (280)

There is, then, a redemptive quality in becoming-indiscernible.  While it does not necessarily erase difference, it does enable “a communicating world” open to slippages between different things, where, as Nellis suggests, we can attempt to understand the messages of the other.  As Oskar explains, Nellis regards becoming-Indian as redemption, as a process that opens one up to greater potentials for life and love of difference.  Nellis teaches his son that “for a White Man to become an Indian is like entering a swarming Madness.  Becoming an Indian is difficult as knowing the Truth or becoming a Child agin [sic].  But it might redeem you” (100).  Lunacy, Oskar explains, effects “a breach in . . . understanding which allows a new perspective” (180).  Neither this nor that, but in-between.

For Deleuze and Guattari, becomings are also redemptive, because they “rend” us from a “major identity” (291).  This is why the subject must always pass through becoming-woman first:

In this sense women, children, but also animals, plants, and molecules, are minoritarian.  It is perhaps the special situation of women in relation to the man-standard that accounts for the fact that becomings, being minoritarian, always pass through a becoming-woman. . . . In a way, the subject in a becoming is always “man,” but only when he enters a becoming-minoritarian that rends him from his major identity.  (291)

For Nellis’s son Oskar, the Iroquois are the other, the molecular minoritarian segment he must pass through in order to “rend” himself from “his major identity.”  In words that sound uncannily like Deleuze and Guattari’s, Oskar explains his relationship to the Iroquois:

Difference is their primary characteristic.  It envelops them in a luminous sheath.  They seem marvelous, more real than real.  They become everything that is not familiar, expected, and routine.  They become the mystic other, the female, the child, and the self, which I glimpse only fleetingly.  (66)

Yet Oskar’s attempts at becoming-Indian are often suspect.  When he shaves his head and wears a scalp lock or “practices walking like an Indian,” Oskar claims that “the world looks different” (101).  However, Nellis regards his son’s becoming-Indian as an imitation grounded on “naïveté and false bravado” (119).  Oskar seems incapable of distinguishing between becoming-Indian and “going-Indian” (a difference that is grounded in sincerity).  This may have something to do with Oskar’s attitude towards the Indian and the fact that he has not yet learned to embrace difference, to follow his father’s “11th Commandment,” which is “Love difference” (173).[11]  As he writes in one of his letters to General Washington: “This War has turned my Brain upside down.  That wch I loved I hate & that wch I oncet hated I love.  Such Inconstancy is a Sin” (137).  Mary, however, believes that

Under his clothes, Oskar was half-Indian.  Except when he was writing things down (he collected facts like butterflies, pinning them to the pages, dead) . . . He had an affinity for the edges of civilization—people at the edge are always closer to the other, more tolerant of difference; this tolerance brands them as sinful; it is a brand and a badge. (165-6)

Strangely, it is only after he has entered into the process of writing the book about Indians (and failed) that Oskar is able to relinquish the desire to master his subjects and truly come to “love difference.”  This is when he learns that becoming-other is not, as Deleuze and Guattari warn, about imitation and identification.  As Mary points out, he must recognize that he is “half-Indian” underneath his clothes, in his heart rather than by imitation.  He must not “go-Indian” but become-Indian, with sincerity and a desire to create a communicating world.  One must be aware, as Oskar says, “In Life, we should not pretend lest We lose ourselves & become that wch we pretend to be.  When you wear a Mask, you become the Mask” (185).  This does not mean one should not do it, however.  Oskar follows his warning with the admission that he is “haunted” by his father’s words: “But it might redeem you” (185).

“No longer white or Indian, what might we become?”  (Glover 180).  “Nomads” is one possibility that Glover, Deleuze and Guattari might all agree on because, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “The life of the nomad is the intermezzo” (380).  For Glover, being “a nomad, an expatriate, and a wandering Canadian” is part of his process of becoming-writer (Yanofsky 15).  Nomads are always becoming. .

.

The Book.  The Book About Indians..

[C]ontrary to a deeply rooted belief, the book is not an image of the world.  It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world; the book assures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world effects a reterritorialization of the book, which in turn deterritorializes itself in the world (if it is capable, if it can). Deleuze and Guattari 11

. By recording facts, the book separates the world of facts from the flow of memory, from individual consciousness, from poetry.

This is Oskar’s dilemma throughout the novel.  He writes to knit up the tear in his life, but the thing keeps unravelling again behind him.  At the moment of writing, though, he feels better.  So the book remains a mystery, even to us.  It is an impossible object.  It both condemns and redeems us. Glover, Interview with Yanofsky 14

.

For Deleuze and Guattari, books are not reflections or representations that simply mirror life or the world.  By suggesting that the book “forms a rhizome with the world,” Deleuze and Guattari rescue it from arborescent structures that limit how we understand the relationship between the two.  The book engages with the world and the world engages with the book; this engagement has the potential to “deterritorialize” but also to “reterritorialize” each, meaning they can have a liberatory, but also a mutually confining, relationship.

Glover understands the book in a similar way.  For him, the book has a relationship to the world, the “world of facts,” that is similar to the Deleuzo-Guattarian idea of the book.  He explains the dilemma of Oskar, whose Book about Indians often frames or directs the other narratives of The Life and Times of Captain N., as one that is involved in negotiating this relationship between the world and the book.  Oskar’s writing is an attempt to “knit up the tear” between the two—to “deterritorialize” them—but his attempts are often thwarted by the tendency to “reterritorialize.”  As Glover puts it, “the thing keeps unravelling again behind him.”  Oskar’s desire to connect the world and the book may be impossible, but as Glover suggests, the attempt makes him “feel better.”  When he suggests that the book “both condemns and redeems us,” Glover seems to be embracing the ambivalence of its potential to deterritorialize and reterritorialize ad infinitum.

Oskar’s compulsion to write is often a response to the “call to battle” of his teacher, the humpbacked dwarf, Witcacy (31).  “Are you ready?  he shouts. Are you ready to write?  Are you ready to tell the truth?”  (32).  But as much as Oskar may seek to tell the truth, his Book about Indians is constantly unravelling and undoing itself.  As he later confesses, “the book about Indians is not (a) a book or (b) about Indians.  It is about Indians tangentially.  And it is incomplete and unorganized, sheaves of notes sewn with a thread, scattered about” (65).  As Oskar comes to recognize, the reason his book about Indians is not a book about Indians has to do with his understanding of history, which changes when he compares the history of literate cultures to the dreams, myths and legends of native oral cultures.  “Scholars of savage lore err in concluding that the native myths and legends are a primitive form of history” he observes.  “They are nothing like history, which is an hypothesis about past events, cast in terms of cause and effect, based on evidence and stretching further and further back in time” (82-3).  It is the very act of writing a book about Indians that destroys them because writing is antithetical to the oral nature of their culture.  As Oskar observes, “the savages are fading now because they are being written—by writing this book, I erase any number of those creatures which I hold most dear, my subjects.  The real challenge, the hardest thing of all, is to write a book about Indians” (83).

The difference, as Oskar comes to realize, has to do with the relationship the two cultures have to the present.  “Savages dream in order to remember; we write in order to forget” (83).  While the Western notion of history follows what Deleuze and Guattari would call a linear or “punctual system,” the function of dreams in an oral culture is closer to the Deleuzo-Guattarian notion of “becoming” in relation to time and the past.  Deleuze and Guattari state that “Creations are like mutant abstract lines that have detached themselves from the task of representing a world, precisely because they assemble a new type of reality that history can only recontain or relocate in punctual systems” (296).  As Oskar discovers, “By writing history down, we try to extend the explanation of the present deep into the past.  But the savage, in his dreams, seeks to extend the present laterally, as it were, across the axis of time” (Glover 83).  The dream has a more creative relationship to time; by “detaching itself from the task of representing a world,” the dream (and the Indian) can assemble “a new type of reality” in a manner history cannot.

As Oskar comes to have greater respect for the native oral culture, his book becomes “an antibook”:

The book about Indians can’t be a book at all.  (As a book, I agree, it’s a mess, no substitute for all the histories, geographies, anthropologies, and novels that will one day illuminate the subject of Indians.)  It is a song, a hymn, a keen, a cry of mourning and condolence.  It is a recitation of names, a string of masks, a prayer.  It is a break, a rupture in the whole cloth of normal discourse.  It is an antibook meant to destroy all books.  It is pure ritual, mumbo jumbo, words of power, a spell—not to be read as a book at all, but to be incanted over and over until it infects the soul, until the words pierce the skull and suck out the brain, until the brain is turned upside down.  (121)

Oskar’s book becomes an antibook once he ceases to understand history in the traditional sense of literate culture and embraces the native way of being in the present.[12] “Part of the difficulty of writing a book (first impossible project) about Indians (second impossible project) is that the Indians themselves do not recognize our distinction between knowing and being.  What they know or say or remember about themselves they are” (109).  As Oskar says, “The book about Indians is against the being of Indians” because “the Indians believe that by telling the stories they are.  They exist in the telling of stories, the singing of songs, the dancing of dances” (109).

Oskar’s book about Indians becomes an anti-book at the moment when he too ceases to distinguish between being and knowing, which becomes possible only when “the brain is turned upside down,” allowing for the potentialities of a new perspective.  His book becomes an act—“a song, a hymn, a keen, a cry of mourning and condolence”—when Oskar relinquishes his need to write a history and to control the subjects of that history.  Most importantly, as it becomes an anti-book, it becomes, like A Thousand Plateaus, a book that enacts a becoming.  “If you read the book the correct way,” Oskar advises, “you will become an Indian (that is what I intend; that is the purpose of all books that are not books)” (121).  As Deleuze and Guattari explain, creative pursuits such as “Singing or composing, painting, writing have no other aim:  [but] to unleash these becomings” (272). .

.

Some Conclusions: History and Nomadology.  War and Love..

What counts is that love itself is a war machine endowed with strange and somewhat terrifying powers. Deleuze and Guattari 278.

The War has taught me a Grammar of Love.  We—Rebels & Tories & Whites & Indians—are having a violent Debate whose Subject is the Human Heart, its constituent Elements & Humors, its hidden Paths.  This is a Mystery.  The Effect of the Argument, the Structure of its Thought, is a curious Splitting or Splintering. Glover 162

.

History and Nomadology, War and Love: such binaries seem out of place in an essay that wants to be undoing dualism machines.  However, as Deleuze and Guattari tell us, “We invoke one dualism only in order to challenge another.  We employ a dualism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges all models” (20).  It is when these dualisms collide that the whirlwind is created; the brain is turned upside down.

[O]nly nomads have absolute movement, in other words, speed; vortical or swirling movement is an essential feature of their war machine (Deleuze and Guattari 381).

Deleuze and Guattari themselves are guilty of opposing History to Nomadology when they write, “History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is nomads.  What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a history” (23).

I think what Glover attempts to do in The Life and Times of Captain N. is to write a novel that is between History and Nomadology, one for which he, as a half-Canadian, half-American “nomad” is particularly well-suited to write.  As he explains,

I’m a nomad, an expatriate, a wandering Canadian (which is worse than just being a Canadian, I am doubly displaced, a Canadian squared), and I can no longer tell whether that’s because I am a writer or why I am a writer.  Some mornings I wake up and it’s a problem.  Some mornings I wake up and it’s a dance. (Yanofsky 15)

Glover’s novel is in-between history and fiction;[13] he creates a space in which dualisms collide, creates a whirlwind, a rhizome that turns North America upside down.

Of course it [America] is not immune from domination by trees or the search for roots.  This is evident even in the literature, in the quest for a national identity and even for a European ancestry or genealogy (Deleuze and Guattari 19).

Glover thwarts this “domination by trees” by subverting the “quest for a national identity.”  Neither Rebel nor Tory, White nor Indian, American nor British, what might we become?  Canadian nomads?  I am aware that the idea of a “Canadian nomad” seems to contradict my argument about the subversion of national identities.  However, Glover suggests that Canada is a place that embodies in-betweenness very well.  “Canada is a cracked mirror, a splintered psyche,” he explains, “the idea of being against the future and, consequently, somehow outside history is a powerful theme in the discourse of Canadianism” (Yanofsky 15).

I chose the two quotes on love and war for my epigraphs to this section, in which I am attempting to draw some conclusions, because they each connect a “grammar of love” to the terrifying possibilities of a war machine.  “All’s fair in love and war?”  Not quite.  But the “terrifying powers” of war to effect a splitting, a splintering of identity seems to be a creed common to both The Life and Times of Captain N. and A Thousand Plateaus.  And somehow, this “violent debate” that is war becomes, in the whirlwind, in the becoming, a “Grammar of Love.”  Dualisms become each other.  Love itself is a war machine.  Perhaps this is because, as Hendrick tells Mary, “violence has its own strange and perverse beauty—at least it makes you pay attention.  You get to know a man when you’re a-killing him, or he’s a-killing you” (168).

Returning to one of Massumi’s earlier questions—“Does it work?”—I feel some of the anxiety Oskar expressed when he acknowledged the messy state of his book.  My attempt to write rhizomatically has not been entirely successful—this paper is somewhere between a rhizome and a tree.  But perhaps this is the best strategy—a happy accident—for a paper that seeks an in-between space connecting two texts, a paper that is not, in fact, about Indians or History, but about becomings, nomads, wandering expatriates, whirlwind masks, chaos and books that are not books at all.

—Cheryl Cowdy

Notes

1 Douglas Glover, The Life and Times of Captain N., Epigraph ([ix]). [[2]] Deleuze and Guattari oppose rhizomatic to arborescent systems.  While the tree is a linear model that is suggestive of genealogies and origins, rhizomes (such as bulbs and tubers) are founded on principles of multiplicity and alliance.  See the chapter “Introduction: Rhizome,” 3-25.[[2]] 

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari.  A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.  Translation and Foreword by Brian Massumi.  Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Fenton, W. N.  Masked Medicine Societies of the Iroquois.  Ohsweken, Ontario: Iroqfrafts Reprints, 1984. Glover, Douglas.  The Life and Times of Captain N.  Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993. Grosz, Elizabeth.  Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism.  Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1994. Yanofsky, Joel.  “A Feeling for History.”  Interview with Douglas Glover.  Books In Canada 23:1 (February 1994): 13-15.

.
.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Douglas Glover, The Life and Times of Captain N., Epigraph ([ix]).
  2. Deleuze and Guattari oppose rhizomatic to arborescent systems.  While the tree is a linear model that is suggestive of genealogies and origins, rhizomes (such as bulbs and tubers) are founded on principles of multiplicity and alliance.  See the chapter “Introduction: Rhizome,” 3-25.
  3. “Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.  This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order” (Deleuze and Guattari 7).
  4. Oskar observes that one of Tom’s masks “looks suspiciously like a Continental soldier,” indicating that the masks themselves are capable of becoming-other, of being influenced by cultural exchanges (51).
  5. In his interview with Joel Yanofsky, Glover suggests that Mary demonstrates how “underclass whites and especially white women along the frontier in North America were close enough to their oral past that they often found the Native culture not so very alien.  This is borne out,” Glover adds, “in statistical studies of captivity and acculturation” (14).
  6. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that girls and children are particularly suited to becomings because they “draw their strength from the becoming-molecular they cause to pass between sexes and ages, the becoming-child of the adult as well as of the child, the becoming-woman of the man as well as of the woman” (277).  They seem to represent a more provisional status than other segments of becoming.
  7. Deleuze and Guattari explain that becomings “imply two simultaneous movements, one by which a term (the subject) is withdrawn from the majority, and another by which a term (the medium or agent) rises up from the minority” (291).  There is, therefore, no “becoming-man” because “all becoming is a becoming-minoritarian” (291).
  8. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that “Learning to undo things, and to undo oneself, is proper to the war machine: the ‘not doing’ of the warrior, the undoing of the subject” (400).
  9. Nellis’s disintegration as a subject is also conveyed by a dream he has of making love to the decomposing corpse of his former wife (61).  Canada seems to be a fitting place for Nellis’s process of disintegration to occur since he regards it as an “imitation country” (153), a place that is in-between the dichotomy of British colonialism and American republicanism created by the Revolution.
  10. Deleuze and Guattari identify “an apparent progression” of segments of becoming:  “becoming-woman, becoming-child; becoming-animal, -vegetable, or –mineral; becomings molecular of all kinds, becomings-particles”(272).  Yet they also say, “all becomings are already molecular” which means, “In a way, we must start at the end” (272).
  11. Glover refers to Nellis’s “Address to Pilgrims” and the injunction to “Love difference” as “the Law, the 11thCommandment” that Nellis is able to give because he inhabits a “rhetorical position of loss” (Yanofsky 15).
  12. Oskar demonstrates his rejection of Western philosophical traditions, as well as the emerging principles of the American revolution later, when he states, “I do not believe in God (old Europe, the King, loyalty, and authority) or reason (Locke’s blank slate, history, atoms, laws, freedom, and democracy)” (158).
  13. In his Author’s Note, Glover jokes that the “descendants and relatives on both sides of the border” of the people whose lives his novel is based on will “find much to complain of” ([xi]).
Nov 132010
 

Lively review of a new biography of Claude Lévi-Strauss, but this quote was the most interesting bit because it lines up with some of the ideas I tried to get across in Elle and The Life and Times of Captain N. The new technology of writing destroys oral cultures and we somehow feel nostalgic for those lost ways of being, but to think that any one culture is essentially less alienating than another is a sentimental mistake.

dg

Derrida showed that Lévi-Strauss’s position, far from breaking with a Eurocentric model, reproduced it. He demonstrated how the notion that the Nambikwara inhabited a different and better world, one before writing, reflected a long-held western prejudice that ignored the way in which any system of language had all the features of a writing system that Lévi-Strauss considered distinctively modern. The Amazonian enjoyed no more direct and unmediated a relationship with his surroundings than the western anthropologist…

via New Statesman – Claude Lévi-Strauss: the Poet in the Laboratory.

Oct 212010
 

Capture2

I just did Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s University of Toronto online class on Elle over three days this week. Since I hate to let words disappear into the ether, I am posting a digest of my answers to class questions here. I have deleted the actual questions since it would be too much work to get permissions from all the students (it was an intelligent, perceptive and eloquent group). Most of the questions are implicit in the answers.

dg

 

On researching Elle and historical novels in general: This is a vast question and speaks to some extent to an author’s intention. I don’t set out to create costume melodramas or documentary histories which might require huge amounts of research. I don’t try to recreate contemporary dialogue (always a failed project). I tend to research looking for precise kinds of facts. What did people think about? What were their motives? How did they act? Always assuming that people distantly removed in time from us are alien in systematic and peculiar ways but also in an evolutionary line and I look for crucial details that will dramatize and ironize that difference. I do a kind of anthropology, if you will. And I look for small, precise facts that will convince the reader I know everything there is to know.

Practically speaking, I read general books about a period. And then focus and refocus the research until I get to the stage of tracking through the bibliographies of scholarly papers looking for obscure essays on small details of custom or behaviour.

The best books I read, of course, are listed in the author’s note in the novel itself.
———————————-

On my editor’s contribution: The editor was quite restrained in her remarks. They mostly dealt with copy editing issues. And, no, I don’t recall any issues with historical accuracy. I had already published another historical novel, The Life and Times of Captain N, in which I used deliberate anachronism for structural effect. I don’t think anyone was confused.

On the other hand, I cut another 5,000 words out of the ms. after it came back to me. I always cut things at the last minute, the more the better.
———————-

On Gordon Lish and learning to cut: Thanks for your kind words about the birth scene. It was a deep pleasure to write. The thing to remember is that in prose though the words are written and read serially the effect can be simultaneous. So the passage works by the serial juxtaposition of images of deformity and death and images of maternal love.

The question about editing is interesting. Thanks for pushing me a little more. My best lessons in cutting came from Gordon Lish who was my editor for The Life and Times of Captain N at Knopf. He also took a story of mine for The Quarterly and I interviewed him once when I had a radio show at the Public Radio station in Albany.

He did very little hands on editing with the novel. He just sent it back with a note that said cut about 5,000 words of history, background and explanation. I did that and sent it back to him. Then he sent it back to me again and said cut another 5,000 words of history, background and explanation. He also said not to forget the commas around non-restrictive clauses beginning with “which.”

Every cut I made was like melting fat off a bone. The drama became quicker and clearer. As soon as the words were deleted, I forgot them. I have never regretted a cut scene or explanation. Later, when I interviewed him (I should get out the tape and listen to it again), we talked about his idea of “mystery,” how the white space on the page should somehow float the words in mystery. If you write too much, the mystery dissipates. Mystery here isn’t the same as being mysterious or obscure; it has an almost metaphysical tinge. When he explained it, I almost understood it.

Lesson learned though. At Vermont College, I am known as “the shredder” for my tendency to draw lines through page after page of student work. Boring and dull lines dilute energy. You want only the lines that burn left on the page. So much explanation, commentary and background is unnecessary.
————————————-

On making things seem real in a text: The question of verisimilitude is pretty broad and, in fact, I never think about it much. Though I do have an essay in the current issue of upstreet about truth, novels and history which might be enlightening in a general sort of way.

One tries to get the larger facts straight so that the general reader isn’t stopped by obvious errors. But beyond that, truth in fiction is a matter of consistency and coherence rather than reference. Kafka wrote a story about a young man who turns into a bug. The fact that this can’t be real in a certain sense doesn’t stop readers from believing in the story in another sense.

So you concentrate on giving enough precise and striking detail to make the reader sense the world of the fiction and then you repeat references to many of those details to give the reader a little pop of recognition here and there along the way. Repetition creates familiarity and familiarity (as in Kafka) is enough to make the reader feel that the fictional world is trustworthy enough to live inside for a while.

Also I think that a lot of verisimilitude in narrative derives from the author inventing plausible and consistent motives for character action. So much of what makes a reader identify with a story has to do with making him engage with the character’s hopes and dreams.
—————————–

On image patterns: Okay, yes. I call that image patterning. It’s part of the repetitive structure of the novel (or story). All writers do this to some extent. Margaret Atwood, for example, works wonders.

Basically, you take an image, some significant aspect of the character’s scene, and you repeat it. You can add or control meaning by giving the image a little story or by juxtaposition and association. And then you can split off sub-patterns of the main image. If I could do the art work here, I would draw you a diagram.

Once you get the hang of this, it’s a lot of fun. And then you start to set yourself impossible tasks. At the beginning of Elle, the girl throws the tennis ball off the ship and the dog jumps after it. Ball and dog gone, dead, defunct, out of the text. I knew I was doing to bring them back somehow. The problem was how. In the back of his or her mind, the reader is wondering this, too. Then there is the delight of recognition and discovery when Itslk shows up with the dog and the ball. Then the dog and the ball keep coming in again and again.

The tennis ball belongs to the tennis pro lover who dies very quickly in Canada. It’s an aspect of the opening scenes of the novel. It is a part of French culture imported to Canada. It doesn’t do much except remind us over and over of Richard and his failed attempt at colonization. The dog, on the other hand, becomes a kind of subplot. He ends up staying in Canada, the only member of the whole expedition to do so. You can chart the various colonizing strategies and levels of failure (these all count as subplots). Richard tries to make in Canada a replica of the Old World and dies. The General tries to force his French vision onto the new Canada with violence and fails. Elle, more open, finds herself turning hybrid and will never be at home again anywhere. And the dog finds a way to be happy in Canada.

The use of images helps control and focus the meaning of a story. It also creates a density of repetition and reference such that lines of text can be vibrating, as it were, on several different frequencies at once: plot, scene, image pattern, subplot, etc.

And then, of course, some of the repetitions carry barely any weight at all–I think the tennis rackets idea is mostly for fun. But the act of repetition in a text, as I said in my earlier response about verisimilitude, creates consistency, recognition and unity within the text. It relentlessly reminds the reader that, ah, yes, this is the world of the novel I am in.

In my novel The Life and Times of Captain N, there is a more inclusive and systematic use of image patterning. The main image is the Iroquois Whirlwind mask, painted half red and half black. The image represents the split of the Revolution, the split between oral and literate cultures, translation, etc. Everyone in the book eventually bears the mark of the split face. And then I splinter of sub-patterns. The Iroquois word for mask is also the word face. Death is Without-a-Face. And so on. But you can also learn a lot about patterning by reading Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye in which the main pattern is a cat’s eye marble.
——————————–

How long did it take to write Elle: Your question is pretty complex. How long did it take to write? Well, I got the idea years before I wrote the novel. At some point, I started to write it as a play, and some of the theatrical dialogue actually made it into the novel. Then I started it as a novel, writing a few paragraphs of Elle’s voice, much of the initial What do you do with a headstrong girl? passage. At the time, as often happens, I didn’t notice that this was actually pretty good. Later, I picked it up and started again. Once I got rolling, I think it took about nine months to write. But I had gathered a lot of notes and research materials prior to this final sprint.

I don’t really think about “inspiration” as such. I only think about what is going to happen next, the next line, the next bit of dialogue, the next scene, the next plot step. And I am always playing with a set of technical structures (repetitions, images, subplots, aphorisms) which are fun. And certain problems come up in the writing of any complicated novel. E.g. If I am in a strong first person single character narration, how can I possibly get in information about her uncle and the Quebec colony hundreds of miles away? And, then, since the novel has a mirror or butterfly-wing pattern at the centre (life in Canada and life back home in France), I had to invent a set of events for Elle’s return to France that were interesting and somewhat reflected what had happened to her in Canada. Thus I am always finding that form drives content.

If I am stuck for a way to move ahead, I tend to put in a linebreak and then start with something I have already put in the novel earlier (a character, a moment, a repetition, a theme), and out of that text something new often develops.

And then I am always frothing the text, as it were, looking for verbal excitement and surprise. That’s always fun, too. I am always thinking where can I go with this that will make the reader gasp or sit up and say, Wait a sec! You can’t do that. But I do it anyway. Good readers like to have their assumptions damaged.
—————————————–

On outlines: No, I don’t work from an outline at all. For both my historical novels, the putative historical facts provided a framework of sorts. But in the case of Elle, there was very little to go on, and I deformed some of it anyway. For example, in one contemporary source, it was said that she killed three bears “white as an egg.” This didn’t make much sense. I couldn’t find evidence of polar bears that far south. So I invented a mythic bear. Also the record indicates that she was on the island for two years and some months, but I ran out of plot events after a year, so she gets rescued in my book earlier than in real life (always assuming there was a real girl).

Instead of an outline, I think in terms of form: plot, repetition, reflective structures. If I knew too much of what was going to happen ahead of time I wouldn’t be so inventive.
—————————–

Reading recommendations: If you are interested in novel form and structure, you might want to look at my book about Cervantes The Enamoured Knight. The middle section is about the history of the form, the main elements of the form, and various theories of what a novel is and how they create unfortunate conflicts in people who don’t understand the differences.

The foundational document in terms of my views on writing and literature is an essay I wrote called “The Novel as a Poem” which you can find in my essay collection Notes Home from a Prodigal Son.

I later wrote an essay on novel form that appeared in The New Quarterly No. 87, Summer 2003, along with an essay on short story form. A somewhat rewritten version of this is currently in print in a book called Words Overflown by Stars (an anthology of Vermont College of Fine Arts faculty craft essays and lectures) edited by David Jauss.
——————————

On writing across genders: Elle is not my first female narrator by a long shot. Many stories and huge sections of my novel The Life and Times of Captain N are written from a woman’s point of view.

It’s really not unusual at all for a male writer to adopt a female voice or a female writer to adopt a male voice. As Brian Moore once said, It’s just part of the job. He meant that as a writer you’re supposed to imagine yourself into the minds of characters who are not like you.

At an early stage in my writing life, I got incredibly bored with myself and anyone like myself and discovered a feisty, talkative, sardonic female narrator I really liked to be around. If I recall correctly, she came to life in my short story “Red” which, amazingly enough, was first published in Playgirl (I believe it was the first issue with a fully erect  centrefold). She released me from the drudgery of male domination and allowed me to think about and poke fun at all sorts of things including men and women.

Whether I do it well or not is for other people to decide, but composing, now and then, from a female point of view has made writing a lot of fun. I don’t think there is any trick to it. I don’t sit there thinking, well, what are women like and how would a woman act in this case. As soon as you start thinking about how men or women act, you’re dead as a writer because you’re always supposed to be writing about a particular man or a particular woman and people differ vastly in their particulars.
—————————-

The state of marginality or liminality has been an especially interesting theme in my last two novels. And to me it has tremendous metaphorical throw. Every relationship contains a frontier zone wherein all the definitions have to be translated. It’s fascinating to think about love that way.

Same goes for the space between the official and the unofficial. Mikhail Bakhtin talks about the novel as a form that encapsulates the struggle between discourses. His idea of the carnivalesque, in part, derives from this–the idea that carnival is an upturning of the official by the unofficial, the spiritual by the carnal. I tend to think that way about fiction. It’s always meant to subvert some authoritative or generally accepted discourse, to surprise the reader with access to something real.
—————————————

On women writers (lost and found) and captivity narratives: But you should always examine and test your premises. Were there, in fact, as few female voices as you suggest? One of the main contemporary sources for the Elle legend is a famous collection of early short stories called the Heptameron by Marguerite de Navarre. She was brilliant and well known in her time.

Of course, at a certain level it’s true that some female writers have been overlooked. One of the joys of feminist criticism is its relentless search and rediscovery mission in favour of female writers. But you should always look around before you reiterate the received wisdom about the dearth of female voices from the past. They tend to surprise you by their presence.

As to captivity narratives, I have read a lot. But mostly they were of use in writing The Life and Times of Captain N which is, in part, the story of a captivity (whereas Elle is not). Mary Jemison’s little book was especially helpful because she actually knew Hendrick Nellis, my protagonist, although she misremembered his name as “Captain Nettles.” She also knew his Seneca captive wife Priscilla Ramsay. But beyond coincidental discoveries like that, the literature of captives–not just their narratives and biographies–is rich with anthropological implication. The scholar James Axtell is especially good on this.

—————————

Did she actually turn into a bear? Both Elle and The Life and Times of Captain N are about people who find themselves between languages and between cultures. And I don’t just mean the Euro-white protagonists. There are crossover characters coming the other way such as Itslk or Tom Wopat (a character in Captain N). Elle is between a European culture that’s Christian and literate. The natives she meets are from tribal, oral cultures with a shamanic elements in their religions. What is common sense and real in one culture is not necessarily real in the other culture. I ask the question: As one enters the world of the Other, does one actually begin to perceive a different reality? If so, what does that feel like? How does the subject perceive it’s own transformation? In my own mind, I wonder if the world really does look different within another cultural construct? What would I have been like had I been raised in a community that believed in shape-changing, animal totems and ritual curing.

The passages you’re referring to in the novel are an attempt to represent the confusing state of transition from one reality to the other. A native would say, yes, she changed into a bear; a European would say she was hallucinating. In our cynical day, it’s very easy to fall back on cultural relativism which amounts to saying that people believe different things but they’re all wrong except for the scientific observer (cultural relativism amounts, in my mind, to a covert reassertion of the metaphysical correctness of the Euro-white point of view).

On a slightly more personal level, imagine the state of falling in love, when you have to learn the other person’s definitions, point of view, and you begin to change yourself so that you fit into your lover’s sentences. What you thought was true might change or at least be altered ever so slightly. The world is different.

Or think of learning another language.

In philosophical terms, people used to talk about conceptual systems and wonder if different conceptual systems actually described actual different realities.

Frankly, I like the idea that she actually turned into a bear. I like a world where that is possible even though, I know myself, that I am incapable of that sort of transformation.

The objects that are taken out of her body are similarly multi-valenced. a) It’s common shamanic curing practice among the Algonquian natives to massage objects out of the flesh of patients. b) A white westerner sees obvious trickery and doesn’t believe the objects are actually inside the person being treated. c) The objects inside Elle, some of them, are images from other places in the novel (this is me playing with literary effect, even making little jokes). d) I never use the word symbol to describe what I am doing in a piece of writing.
————————————————————-

Irony: Basically, I think every sentence should turn the screw a couple of times so that the meaning of the text is both refining itself and becoming more complex (often by inversion) as it proceeds. Irony is a lovely tool.

And, of course, I and my characters generally take a dim view of life on earth, a view that has to express itself as comedy or we’d all be cutting our wrists.
—————————————

On the first person point of view: I think that if your first person character changes inappropriately from scene to scene it’s because you haven’t imagined yourself into the character deeply enough. In some ways, writing is like Method Acting–you have to become your character, at least, in your imagination. This isn’t a matter of knowing your character objectively, or writing out tedious character biographies on the side. I never even think of characterization as a technical issue. Characters are what they do and why (motivation). And perhaps that is the key–because consistent motivation is a major part of structure in all sorts of ways. A plot is a series of events on a consistent line of desire and resistance. Desire is motivation.

Okay, I’ve given two jumbled answers in one paragraph.

Inhabit your character. In other words, work hard to imagine yourself inside the character’s mind and body in an intuitive and tactile manner. Body is important. Sometimes at the end of a scene, if I don’t know where things are going next, I try to recede into the character’s body, imagine the effects of the scene just finished, imagine the overall desire/motive of the character in the text, and then feel the character’s next move. Given the overall direction of the text and the scene that has just taken place, where does my character go next and why? Sometimes characters change inappropriately from scene to scene simply because the author is foisting a plot move on the character that is out of character–that is, the author has a plan for the story as opposed to letting the story develop organically and playfully. Plans are terrible inhibitions. A sense of form, on the other hand, allows for discovery and play.

The fact that you retreat into the third person is interesting. It seems as if you are trying to escape your problem by pulling even farther away from your character’s subjectivity. Truth is there is very little difference between a close third person single character narration and a first person narration.

There is an awful lot of silly talk in the creative writing world about point of view. The best introductory book I’ve seen is one called Points of View by Moffett and McIlheney. There are two versions: try to find a copy of the older one which is out of print. It’s safe to say that most learning writers have an incredibly narrow idea of how point of view works. No point of view choice is wrong; they all have advantages and disadvantages. The main thing is that whatever point of view you pick, you need to be inventive and flexible. You need, as E. M. Forster says, to “bounce” the reader. Every point of view choice gives you technical options in terms of modulating distance (getting closer or farther away from the character’s mind) and in terms of incorporating other points of view (e.g. one of the disadvantages of the first person point of view is the narrator’s tendency to monopolize the text; but there are some lovely techniques for giving other characters a counter-voice in a first person text so the disadvantage can actually be avoided). You can even mix points of view to keep the reader from being bored. The main thing is to keep the point of view structure alive, surprising and flexible.

It’s possible that your first person character changes from scene to scene because you’ve manacled yourself with a constricting point of view structure and, in the back of your mind, you’re bored with it–so you change the character.

Of course, I say all this without the advantage of having read you work so I might be completely off base.
————————————–

Solving the first person monopoly problem: You may call that a standard technique for avoiding the first person monopoly, but I find most learning writers haven’t figured it out yet. It’s nice to see that you have.

So, yes, one thing you can do is have your first person narrator imagining, intuiting, speculating on, deducing and interpreting how other characters feel. In Pickwick Papers, Dickens introduces a dog’s point of view simply by having the narrator notice the dog as the coach drives by and imagine what the dog sees.

But the most useful technique would be conflict. The world outside the narrator intrudes upon the text by disagreeing with him and taking action against him. So you construct your scenes and plot such that things don’t go the way the protagonist expects. Reality (and other people) is always surprising, disappointing, hindering. This may seem obvious except that, in fact, in student stories, over and over, I find characters ambling through scenes (hitting all the jumps and gates according to the story plan) without any concrete opposition (passive avoidance, no one telling the truth–these are the worst). The character might as well be inhabiting a dream where everything is a projection of his thoughts.

If you think of a scene or event in a narrative as a win/lose situation, you can see that the most boring text would involve the main character winning every scene (interchange) and thinking about how he won it (self-congratulation). Other points of view become concrete by thwarting the main character. This can be in the dialogue as well–That’s what you think? Let me tell you what I think?
————————————-

More reading recommendations: Thinking about that last question, the point of view question: I wrote an essay on point of view called “The Masks of I” that’s in my collection Notes Home from a Prodigal Son if you are interested.

In addition, I’ve gradually been writing essays on reading and writing for another book of essays, moving toward completion.

Several have appeared in The New Quarterly. Probably not impossible to find via interlibrary loan, or you could wait til my next book of essays comes out.

There is one on the use of rhetorical devices in contemporary fiction. It’s called “How to Read a Mark Jarman Story.”

And there are two essays on writing strong sentences: “The Attack of the Copula Spiders” (on the importance of verb choice) and “The Drama of Grammar” (on the dramatic effect of what I call but-constructions).

If you want to dig more into Elle, you can start by reading the interview and essays about Elle in Bruce Stone’s book about my work The Art of Desire. Stone did an excellent interview with me and Stephen Henighan’s essay is one of the best.

And here is a little list of some terrific critical papers–very insightful and well-written.

“I am a Landscape of Desire: Gender, Genre and the Deconstruction of the Textuality of Empire in Douglas Glover’s Elle” by Pedro Carmona Rodríguez, Proceedings of the 29th AEDEAN Conference: Universidad de Jaén 15 al 20 diciembre 2005. CD-ROM. Ed. Alejandro Alcaraz Sintes et al. Jaén: AEDEAN / Servicio de Publicaciones U de Jaén, 2006. 539-45.

“‘…[D]estined always to be on the edge of things’: Prolegomenon to a Dialogue of Transdisciplinary and Curriculum Theory” by Patrick Howard, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Vol. 20. Iss. 4 p.45, Winter 2004

“Canadian Crusoes from Sea to Sea: The Oceanic Communities of Douglas Glover’s Elle and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi” by John Clement Bell, Moveable Margins, The Shifting Spaces of Canadian Literature, Chelva Kanaganayakam, ed., TSAR Publications, Toronto, 2005

“Surviving the Metaphorical Condition in Elle : Douglas Glover’s Impersonation of the First French Female in Canada” by María Jesús Hernáez Lerena, Canon Disorders: Gendered Perspectives on Literature and Film in Canada and the United States, Darias Beautell, Eva, and María Jesús Hernáez Lerena, eds., Ed. Logroño: Universidad de La Rioja/Universidad de La Laguna, 2007

“Visited Graves in Colonial Cemeteries: The Resurrection of Marguerite de Roberval” by María Jesús Hernáez Lerena, Canada Exposed/Le Canada a decouvert, Peter Lang Publishing, Berlin, New York, Brussels, Oxford, 2009

“Self as Garbled Translation: Douglas Glover’s Elle/Elle,” in Traduire depuis les marges/Translating from the Margins, Denise Merkle, Jane Koustas, Glen Nichols and Sherry Simon, eds. Montreal: Edition Nota bene, 2008. 59-74

—Douglas Glover

/
/

Jan 182010
 

I am still reading Adorno’s essay on Spengler.

Jonah and I went to see The Book of Eli Saturday night and then last night, pursuing our quest for the roots of dystopian movie-making, we rented Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome. The Mad Max movie was infinitely superior–wittily baroque and light at the ending with great 80s music (sounded like Maurice Jarre). The weirdly touching ironies of the “tell” are parodic, human and funny (the girl framing each cave drawing with sticks tied together at the end of a pole). Both movies have the same plot: stranger wandering through dried up, post-apocalyptic landscape comes to a town run by evil-doers and adventures happen. Both strangers are really good at fighting. But The Book of Eli is a violent pseudo-Christian strangeness. It reveals the paranoia, selfishness and self-righteousness behind some (not all) recent threads of Christian discourse (surprising to a Canadian who grew up in a country where Christian-based political parties fired the push for universal medical care in the 1950s). Denzel, intent on his mission (to save the book), can’t stop to help a woman being raped and murdered by a bunch of motorcycle thugs. Whereas Mel as Mad Max gets into trouble repeatedly for showing pity and forgetting to save his own skin. There are no children in The Book of Eli, but Mad Max is surrounded by innocence. (Both movies make young women look great in animal hides and rags.)

I’m not sure what this has to do with Adorno except that in my head I keep thinking about how he tells us the culture industry has rolled over for the unnameable powers of repression contained in our late stage capitalist so-called democracy, pouring out infotainment, reality tv and comforting or distracting folk tales which lull our pulverized synapses. All the modern dystopian, end-of-the-world movies have happy endings, often sneakily Christian (remember the “arks” that save the world at the end of John Cusack’s latest).

Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome doesn’t escape unscathed by Christian symbolism. The cave painting of Captain Walker is Christ on the cross. What does this mean? The Bible is a paradigm of a novel with a happy ending? The Biblical message has turned inexplicably dark between the 1980s and 2010?

dg

Jan 132010
 

My son Jacob is writing an essay on Montaigne’s “Of Experience” and so I was skimming that and then skimming some secondary sources–all the reading I could manage today. In graduate school I wrote an essay on “On Cannibals” and that had an echo later on in my interest in natives that came out in The Life and Times of Captain N and Elle. Montaigne is such a character in his essays, weaving the abstract and the personal, and by “personal” I mean really personal. In “Of Experience” he goes on about his bowel habits. And he says, in my translation, “Kings and philosophers go to stool, and ladies too” which in Jacob’s translation comes out as “and women shit.”

dg

Jan 122010
 

I’m not sure how much time I will have for this as the semester wears on. But I will try. As RichH noticed I did briefly have a post up about Theodor Adorno. I was reading his essay on Thorstein Veblen through the residency, a few lines at a time. I finished that the other night in the wee hours. Then as I was adding more things to the resource file-sharing site for you guys, I was rereading some more recent pieces on Shklovsky who is undergoing a surge (that word) of in the U.S. because my publisher Dalkey Archive is bringing out more and more of his books which were hitherto mostly unavailable. But then I happened upon a blog (American Airspace) by Michael Berube (I can’t figure out how to get accents on the letters, sorry) who is a culture critic I met years ago when I gave a talk at a university somewhere in Missouri (the name is out of my head). Michael later did a really nice piece on my novel The Life and Times of Captain N for the magazine Lingua Franca. Anyway I liked his blog post on Shklovsky although I can’t quite get my mind around some of his objections to Formalist theory–more on that another time. In any case, the whole blog itself is fun to read.

dg