Gail Scott's Blog

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May 1, 2001: East Village

Any account of another country is an account of the one left behind. Satie called background music furniture music. I voted early and left for a month in Manhattan. On May 1, eve of the Canadian federal elections, Obama announced he'd finally got Osama Bin Laden. Already dumped in the ocean, OBL's mise à mort led off the 11 o'clock Canadian TV news, elbowing to second place those federal elections allegedly about to "historically change our electoral map," maybe even usher in a social democrat régime. While I packed for Manhattan Canadians, having got in the beer and chips for the historic joust next evening (it is kind of like watching the Stanley Cup playoffs) were treated  to a crowd of gleeful USians gathering in Times Square for a carnivalesque revenge celebration. --Only the worst tourists go to Times Square, snapped Eileen.

In 2008, I was also in Manhattan at election time. Canada seemed far away and vaguely provincial compared to the glory of the simultaneous US elections, on the verge of ushering in the first black president. I didn't vote in absentia, too riveted to US election polls and news channels as the beautiful Obamas strode toward the White House. But this time our dear little-big country to the North with its lefty (sort of) "orange wave"—possibly putting social democrats into office--seemed hot, exciting. My disdain of the media, however, was growing worse by the day—I thought the coverage often trivial, including, already, a couple of days earlier, their second-fiddling the so-called "historic" "map-changing" elections by giving the Royal Wedding the top half of the evening news. Maybe not so surprising, given that family values were the main plank, one way or the other, of both events: the Royal Wedding with its happy hopefully soon breeding couple to save the monarchy from itself projected a huge symbol of hope for normative family life. Maybe I'm just feeling cranky because hardly anyone I'm close to lives in the kind of family implied by "family values."

May 3: The Morning After.

Wake up on 9th street and ave A. No internet. No use turning on the local radio to see who won. They don't know, here; they don't care. The sun shines into my friend J's upper-floor East Village apartment, the J Museum I call it. J is a performance artist, her flat a stage set of objects, sculptures, props, so beautiful and strange, I can't find words to describe them. I watch the delicate red-orange tresses of a three-foot paper mobile curl gently in the breeze over the bed, before heading for J's vintage East Village bathtub, standing on its sturdy legs next the small kitchen sink, and covered by a board that serves as a kitchen counter. Tender green maple leaves are beckoning outside the window. The flat with the light breeze, the sun shining beyond the "grille" of the fire escape, conjures romantic tales of the Beats, jazz, Kerouac; or it's the 60s, Delany + Hacker on their way to breakfast. The buildings (mostly gentrified) are red brick with pretty cornices. And people stroll, village-like, relative to the intense anxious entrepreneurial pulse of Soho where I spent the fall of 2008.

Opposite Tomkins Park, Café Pick Me Up has $3.00 an hour internet access. I also order a double long. Several utterly miserable men emerge from the park gates opposite, their soiled clothes hanging loosely over their bony limbs, and proceed shakily downtown. I don't mean to imply we don't have this at home. But here's a happy one, jaunty as NDP leader Jack Layton, mustachioed and cane-swinging, dubbed Jack le débonair in the French press, the guy leans against a wall for balance before high-stepping happily on. Jack is on my screen with his 100+ new members of Parliament around him. One is 19; one spent the campaign vacationing in Vegas, indicating how unexpected this is, these NDP numbers, three heady times higher than last time. Alas, the right-wing Stephen Harper, Mr. SHhhh I call him, is marking, with a small tight smile and a thimbleful of champagne, his substantial majority and decimation of the centrist Liberals. Will this new polarization in the House of Commons be the beginning of US-style "culture wars," I wonder? A Canadian writer who lives in New York says the Canada Council for the arts expects to be cut by 40 per cent. The Times naturally buries the election story, it's only Canada, after all--but they do remember to say Harper twice shut down Parliament to save himself from political embarrassment.  And they get the most important point right: Mr. SHhhh has since the beginning promised to make Canada into a "default-Conservative" country.

May 5: Culture Wars

I phone my friend Rachel in Brooklyn to see exactly what USians mean by Culture Wars. Rachel is incredibly smart and perceptive. She turned the other night (I was following her lovely round behind up the Bowery, too crowded to walk double), and announced with her usual irony that she had called it!--that even in advance of his getting Osama, she could feel Obama was on a winning streak. But the culture wars? She muses that for the avant poets it's them (us) versus the academy. But yes, on a larger scale (here we check Wiki which has definitely replaced the Encyclopedia Britannica in its mahogany case that my mother bought from a travelling salesman when I was a kid): The culture war (or culture wars) in American usage is a metaphor used to claim that political conflict is based on sets of conflicting cultural values. The term frequently implies a conflict between those values considered traditional or conservative and those considered progressive or liberal . The "culture war" is sometimes traced to the 1960s and has taken various forms since then.

Really, I know that the culture wars in Canada didn't start yesterday; know that the present holds its past within it, a seed that only takes the right weather conditions to burst retrogressively into bloom. But what is this weather that has spurred Mr. SHhhh's rise, has spurred him ever closer to his goal. Not that we were exactly across-the-board radical before Mr. SHhhh stepped on the scene. It has to mean something, for example, that we still have the royals on our money..  Indeed, I got an inkling of how important the Royal Family still is (outside of Québec) one month before the federal elections, when I went to Toronto to give a reading at the prestigious one might even say crème de la crème venue of Harbourfront. My co-reader, a tall, handsome British dude mystery writer called Jasper Fford, is way more famous than I am. Notwithstanding the oddness of my prose, I admit to wanting to please, thus to a certain pre-reading anxiety about what to wear, which anxiety a close male writer friend assured me was never an issue (for him). Fford wore jeans (do any of you remember Hilary Clinton's commenting, during her embarrassing failed run for presidential candidate against gorgeous Barack Obama, how unfair it was that first thing in the morning she had hair-dresser and make-up, while he went to the gym?)  At any rate, at dinner, Mr. Fford and the Harbourfront director, an ex-Montrealer it turns out, whose family left the West Island when the Parti Québécois won their first elections, immediately bonded over the Royal family. Mercifully my mother taught me that staying away from thorny topics like politics is only good manners—so the witty banter about the Royals seemed harmless enough. The Harbourfront director regaled us with pictures of some embossed royal dishtowels—I believe they are dishtowels-- hanging in the kitchen of his yacht, presumably parked somewhere out there on Lake Ontario. We all agreed heartily (including myself, I was doing my best to rise to the occasion) how quickly William is aging ; someone wondered aloud if Harry is um, pure royal laine, and what are the chances of a bastard becoming King these days.

I of course gave the reading my all. As a cross-genre writer, my work is very rich in the sound department, has lots of voices coming in, some a little rowdy, grant it, because the novel is not only set in Québec but with the protagonist's Métis and "half-breed" ancestors, a certain amount of partying cannot be avoided. True, my protagonists--though the words of Karl Marx of Walter Benjamin or Gertrude Stein may issue, torqued, from their lips—do also tend to have a certain frayed blue-collar air to them that was beginning--in the face of all this Royal talk--to feel a little trashy. Mr. Fford balanced my eagerness by, instead of, for the most part, reading anything from his work--performing some smart stand up comedy, appealing to the Toronto crowd right away by commiserating with them that Prince William and his bride would be skipping Toronto on their honeymoon trip to our fair country. (I hate to say it but that joke would fall terribly flat in Montréal.)

After our readings, a line of women, some men, too, snaked in a line around the entire auditorium with armloads of books for Mr. Fford to sign. I was very grateful to nice elderly Jewish man originally from Montréal who courageously came to my table with a single copy of my book. Okay, it's pretentious to say this was a sign of the culture wars gathering on the horizon. Mr. Fford is just more fun. But it's my culture war. Being an experimental or cross-genre writer is a lonely place to be in Canada these days.

Today I am going to the Bowery Poetry Club to hear Juliana Spahr. She sometimes does kind of cross-genre stuff too.

Mrs. Beckett's Old Steamer Trunk

Gail Scott

            My home is in what I like to call the city state of Montréal, but a writer is a traveler. Like most writers, I keep moving, artistically as well as geographically; the question of dé/localisation or displacement as a writer in a complex language context (Québec), along with the feminist question – --the two coincided from the 80s to the early 90s—weighed hugely on my own attempts to find a mode of expression in my writing itinerary. As discussed in my book of essays Spaces Like Stairs and in my novel Heroine as well as in occasional publications of the period, feminism and translation were elements of a crucial avant-garde moment that included other feminist writers like Nicole Brossard and Louky Bersianik, a moment that offered a seminal contribution to experimental writing on the continent.

            One does not leave behind one's early loves; they become part of one; mercifully, only part. It is interesting how consciousness focuses and refocuses with changing social, textual, personal, context (as I write the headlines have again swung to the environmental question; young writers have started using words like "natural" and "authentic"; the Québec citizenship debate has gone from indépendatiste to the "reasonable accommodation (sic)" of minorities, and so on). If one's writerly modes and means keep changing, it is in the interest of staying focused on what seems to be the urgency of the moment. This is more a formal matter than it may appear at first glance. How to write is always the question: I'm interested in issues, but those I have written about best, the means I have found to write about them, get subsumed into an ongoing interrogation of "method." Every novel is an exploration of method. I feel, like Walter Benjamin in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History,"
            Of course, identity is part of the ongoing story – is it even possible to write without some minimal core identity? – but there are many identitary threads in the single human experience, so there seems no point in selecting one from the crowd, evermore. Conjunctoral identities and relations get worked on as part of a larger picture until they become integrated formally in the moment of language itself. One word feels another word, as one cheek feels another cheek: thus the story progresses. "Words are taken apart and, … instead of one complex word handed over like a chocolate bar at a candy store, we see before us a word-sound, a word-movement," to cite Viktor Shklovsky.
            The decline of teaching of poetry in the academy has distanced us from the idea that writing is "art." Cultural studies has diverted attention toward what is apparently signified, and away from questions of form. The thematic approach to criticism is especially a bane for experimental novel writers; the more the language of a novel approaches the intensity of poetry, the more there is an attendant risk of the work's being reduced to a small part of itself by thematic readings, and, in the process, of sthe author's being reduced to some kind of overstated posture that amounts to a binary: she is this, therefore not that. One of countless examples in critiques of my own work: a critic in a prestigious Canadian literary review, puzzling over the lack of active verbs in my novel My Paris, written almost entirely in gerundial phrases, concluded – and this was not intended negatively – that the novel must be a case of Lesbian aesthetics.

            I don't eschew many of the identitary tags that get applied to my work and my person: anglo-québecoise, left-wing, feminist, queer, new narrative, what have you. But sometimes I feel there are so many, I'm like one of those old steamer trunks, plastered with stickers. Does the "feminist" tag, for instance, divert attention from the formal attempt to grasp the total moment of time in which one happens to be writing a particular piece of prose? Is there a crisis of reading, so that many critics are at a loss to deal with other matters than that of the "what" of representation, be it the impact on anglo-québecoise letters of 80s feminist interrogation of language; be it the effort of certain writers to express the cadence of other languages and dialects on English, and  the broader implications of that; be it the breakdown of the writing subject under the pressure of new technologies, of queer theory (with its befuddling of gender identity); be it the pressures of nomadism of cultures and peoples on notions of citizenship? To be sure, writers in Montréal are very well qualified to deal with this confusion of subjectivities; there may even be a kind of tradition or tendency toward a porous speaking subject, tried by the pressure of multiple identities, whimsical, clown-like, carnivalesque, as seen in Beautiful Losers, by Leonard Cohen, my 80s novel Heroine, or young writer Heather O'Neill's very recent and remarkable Lullabies for Little Criminals. The WE of these novels, being not only I but the other in each of us, requires new writing subjects and approaches to criticism that do not eschew study of formal questions, especially regarding ambiguous or deconstructed subjectivities whose state of flux naturally muddies the narrative water.

            Globalisation in its current form--in itself an extension of western imperialism—has spawned very legitimate concerns regarding the survival of regional cultures; but it has also had the salutary effect of dismissing old binaries, revealing new questions, some of them, grant it, quite scary, such as the question that brooks no answer, for it allows for no singularity, and at the same time seems to resist provincial and sentimental postures towards so-called multiculturalism. This question is: 

                   Who am....................................WE? 

                   Each of the aforementioned novels seeks to answer this question by allowing the speech of the novel, if I can put it that way, to be poked full of holes by the exterior moment, or, to put it more eloquently, resuming notions of incorporation and intra-psychic secrets from the post-Freudian psychoanalysts Abraham + Torok
            The more singular or universalist the posture of the speaking subject, the less the author in his work brushes up against this complex contemporary question of Who am ... WE?: David Adams Richards [to take the example of a very good Canadian writer] can be born in New Brunswick, Canada's only officially bilingual province, without pronouncing a word of French in any way that anyone can understand [I deduce this from an introduction to my work, including its French-language titles, that Mr. Richards made at a recent public reading where we shared the stage]; further, Mr. Richards can write about, say, hunting – very beautifully, I might add – without critics saying: these are the aesthetics of a straight white anglo man walking into the forest. With a gun. Yet when I or a great many of my colleagues write of a woman's, or a gay or lesbian situation, in ways that allow difference to trouble form, the actual work of the writing is often ignored or given second place to the identitary issue.

            There are of course social, political and historical reasons for the fact that Mrs. Beckett is still pulling along the much stickered steamer trunk while Beckett himself floats on an arty cloud above. Yes, it is difficult to accept that even if some of us who have tackled class, race, gender issues at various times – and end up writing innovative prose with a combination of motifs, much in the way music is a combination of motifs; somewhat, perhaps, in the way of what Beckett managed to do, writing between French and Irish-English – one may be a Mrs. Beckett, but one is not Beckett. Yet, as I see it, writing at any given moment gives voice to the particular issues surging to the foreground of consciousness, issues that must share the stage with all the other things that make up a moment, that must also be fished up and incorporated into a single sentence, into relations between sentences. Walter Benjamin calls on writers to remember "Each morning, the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed."
            Given that my formative years were in late century Québec; given that writers were thinking about class, because so many came from working-class backgrounds, there was surrealism (art had to be revolutionary). In part, because of the interest in surrealism, there was an interest in psychoanalysis. As well, into that moment, went many of the other above-mentioned issues, endlessly woven then unwoven in an attempt to come up with sentences that could cross intangible gaps between differential perceptions. This is the role of art in any era. "To encompass both Breton and Le Corbusier--that would mean drawing the spirit of contemporary France like a bow, with which knowledge shoots the moment in the heart." (Benjamin again)
            Awhile ago an American friend dedicated his book to me with the words: "Salut citoyenne!" The writing subjects we need in order to express what « citoyenne » means today are not the ones that worked pre-globalization. But how complicated these questions are. In Québec some of us are confronted with the problem of writing in English while resisting the anglicization of Montréal, which is happening, which is little by little leading us toward New Orleans. More and more I think of what it is to be a citizen of what seems to me a city-state and I think also of all my other identitary and empathetic appartenances. And it seems to me my job is to make of these a writing subject--cumulating over the space of my work--that is responsible to our epoque. For this, it is necessary to allow the novel, or whatever subsequent form of story telling we come up with to transform profoundly: we need not only writing strategies but also reading strategies that are apace with our era.





Nicholas T. Rand, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, especially the chapter "Notes on the Phantom," pgs 171-176