Intricate Preparations: Writing Leonard Cohen

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Intricate Preparations:

WRITING LEONARD COHEN

Edited by STEPHEN S C O B I E

ECW P R E S S

The publication of Intricate Preparations has been generously supported by The Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program. Copyright © ECW Press, 2000 CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Main entry under title: Intricate preparations: writing Leonard Cohen Includes bibliographical references ISBN 1-5502,2-433-6 i. Cohen, Leonard, 1534- - Criticism and interpretation. 2. Canadian poetry (English) - 2oth century.* I. Stephen Scobie, 1943- . PS85O5-O22Z754 2,000 c8n'.54 000-931022-3 PR9I95?.3.0572754 2000 Cover design by Guylaine Regimbald. Cover photo of Leonard Cohen and Joshu Sazaki by Don Farber, reproduced by permission of Don Farber Photography. Interior design by Yolande Martel. Printed by AGMV 1'Imprimeur, Cap-Saint-Ignace, Quebec. Distributed by General Distribution Services, 325 Humber College Blvd., Etobicoke, Ontario M9W 7C3. Published by ECW Press, 2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario M4E 1E2. ecwpress.com PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ADRIENNE CLARKSON

i

Counterpoint Leonard Cohen

STEPHEN SCOBIE

3

Introduction

DOUG BEARDSLEY

5

On First Looking into Leonard Cohen

KEVIN FLYNN

9

Balanced on Wooden Stilts and Dancing: What Irving Layton Taught Me about Leonard Cohen

FRANK DAVEY

iz

Beautiful Losers: Leonard Cohen's Postcolonial Novel

PETER WILKINS

Z4

"Nightmares of Identity": Nationalism and Loss in Beautiful Losers

GEOFFREY WREN

51

Letter

JENNY L.M. KERBER

53

"There is a crack in everything": Preservation, Fortification, and Destruction in The Favourite Game

CARMEN ELLISON

64

"Not My Real Face": Corporeal Grammar in The Favourite Game

SUSAN MACFARLANE

73

The Voice of Trust in Leonard Cohen

CAROL MATTHEWS

84

"So Long, Marianne"

HENNING FRANZ

86

Poem

CYNTHIA CECIL

87

Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen ... Mr. Ralph Gustafson

100 Famous Blue Raincoat: A Symposium RUTHANNE WROBEL 117 Four Grounds: Ways to Play in Cohen's Garden of Verses ROBERT DE YOUNG i.i$ "My Black Pages": Reconsidering Death of a Lady's Man and Death of a Ladies' Man JARKKO ARJATSALO 140 Your Man On-Line ED. BY STEPHEN scoBiE i jo Who's the Boss? An Internet discussion on "Closing Time" KIWI SCHUSTER

158

Poems

LORI EMERSON and 160 Miming/Differance: JOE HOOPER Leonard Cohen Live CHRISTOF GRAF 184 Leonard Cohen Live in Germany, 1993 SANDRA WYNANDS 198 The Representation of the Holocaust in Flowers for Hitler PETER JAEGER 2io When to Write Prose (for Leonard Cohen) ROBERT DAVID STAGEY 213 Pornographic Sublime: Beautiful Losers and Narrative Excess PAUL MILTON 23 5 Beyond Agonistics: Vertiginous Games in the Fiction of Leonard Cohen LEONARD COHEN

260 Poems

262 Contributers

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Counterpoint Leonard Cohen ADRIENNE CLARKSON

EVERYTHING LEONARD COHEN says is a sleek embodiment of meaning coming down a corridor at you from the gilded rooms of a glittering palace you only dream about. When he speaks to you, a pattern appears in the shadow on the wall, the floor moulds to your feet. Your head turns but as though you were following it and it were on someone else's neck. Each conversation is one in which he doesn't "dwell on what / has passed away / or what is yet to be," because he knows you can "forget your perfect offering. / There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." The first time Leonard sang on television was in 1967 on our CBC Television show Take Thirty, and his grey flannel suit was the most beautifully cut garment with hand-stitched lapels you could ever hope to see. He then slung his guitar over his shoulder with a rueful smile, without messing up the front of the suit. The guitar slid down the front of the suit — and fitted. We had wondered why he wanted to sing at all, especially as he had just had a firestorm success with Beautiful Losers, from which many of us were already memorizing whole passages. "Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance... . His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. ... It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love." The producer, Cynthia Scott, and I had both read his poem "I heard of a man / who says words so beautifully / that if he only speaks their name / women give themselves to him" when we were teenagers so short a time before, and we thought he was that man himself. Now he wanted to sing on our television show with an ethereal group of blond androgynes called the Stormy Clovers. We were giving in to this whim (none of us had heard him sing a note, and we were terrified of doing so, in the dread that our utter adoration

i

of him would crumble into bathos) in order to do a very serious interview with L. Cohen, POET. It turned out that the interview was ridiculous and the singing a revelation. It was "The Stranger Song" and went on for twenty minutes. After the final dress rehearsal, we cut it, delicately, in hushed tones of profound respect. Leonard said to me softly, and with only the slightest hint of irony, "The time is over, Adrienne, when poets sit on marble steps wearing long black capes." The impact on his callow interviewer was such that I could only stare down at my hands, which were plucking at my woollen skirt in an agitated fashion. Some years later in Montreal, off the Main, we worked desultorily on selecting poems for a collection and making a film about him. He ate Cheese Whiz with a kind of baleful hunger, chased down with freshly squeezed orange juice from Beauty's, the brunch cafe of choice. His space heater rattled, and he looked through his poems with a wary perfectionism. To me, the only American presidential debate of any consequence will always be the one between Carter and Ford, because Leonard and I shared a fancy hamburger at the Windsor Arms Hotel while watching it. We assured each other that the debate, surreal in accent and content, wasn't really happening. I think it was immediately after Leonard had been in, through, and out the other side of something — a religion, a car, some person. Sly laughter didn't fill the space between skin and bone that it normally did. The world is the space for creatures who can compare mythologies. In Paris, he entered the Cafe Flore, and before two dazzled French fans could shout LAYonard COHEN! he had glided onto the banquette beside me and continued the conversation we had started six years before about terrorism. We were somewhere between conquering Manhattan and taking Berlin. Once, Leonard showed me where the Cohens of Montreal are buried, on the side of the mountain outside the gate. It is impossible to think of him as joining them there. But maybe he'll just be in California instead. On a forever basis. As he said in one of his latest interviews, "Living in Los Angeles is like being in the French Foreign Legion; no one here has a last name." Rideau Hall 3 January 2000

2,

Introduction STEPHEN SCOBIE

LEONARD COHEN is a singer who hasn't issued a new album for seven years, a poet who hasn't published a new collection for sixteen years, and a novelist who hasn't written a new novel for thirty-four years.1 Yet he remains a vital presence not only in Canadian literature but also on the international stage constituted by the virtual phenomenon of the Internet. Scarcely a day goes by on alt.music. leonard-cohen without a plaintive inquiry, from somewhere in the world, about a new book, a new record, a new concert tour. Indeed, Cohen is acquiring a new generation of fans who have never seen him perform live (but who are nonetheless fanatical). Over the years, his reputation has had its ups and downs, at least in the academic community. But there seems to be a solid base of devotion that will ensure the survival of his work for years to come. My main intention in editing this collection was to represent the paradoxical nature of Cohen's reputation and reception. Thus, the collection has its fair share of academic essays: deeply serious examinations of topics such as the treatment of the Holocaust in his poetry, aspects of personal and national identity in his novels, and the theoretical problems of performance in his songs. But I also wanted to represent the discussion, less formal but no less intelligent, that goes on in nonacademic circles: for instance, an Internet newsgroup thread on "Closing Time" or the reactions of mass pop music audiences in Germany. I have included personal reminiscences of Montreal in the 19508 and 19608 as well as an account of teaching a Cohen song to a high school class in the 19905. Several writers pay tribute to Cohen by contributing poems that "translate" his work into new idioms. And, of course, the collection is fully international in character, with contributors from Canada, Australia, Great Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Norway, and Finland. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Leonard Cohen himself: for his work, first of all, for its continuing presence and inspiration in my 3

life, but also for his customary graciousness and generosity in relation to this collection, especially for the two previously unpublished poems that give him, appropriately, the last word. This collection would not have been possible without the assistance of Kelley Lynch, who has made every rough path smooth. I also thank Betty Gustafson for making available the extract from her late husband's diary and for providing some wonderful historical photos. I remember the first time I saw Cohen: at a poetry reading in Vancouver in 1966. He strode into a huge university classroom packed with eager listeners, and much to our surprise he carried a guitar under his arm. We were puzzled. Most of us had expected the romantic poet of The Spice-Box of Earth; some of us (including me) had secretly hoped for the startling novelist of the newly published Beautiful Losers. None of us was prepared for a strummed guitar and a strange, haunting song about a woman named Suzanne. So we were all astonished. A third of a century later, I still am.

NOTE 1

This rather contentious sentence chooses to ignore a couple of new tracks on the second greatest-hits CD and declines to accept the sometimes drastic revisions of older poems in Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs as constituting a "new book" of poetry. I write it for rhetorical effect, but I am also tempting fate to repeat itself. On two previous occasions (in my book Leonard Cohen in 1978 and at the Red Deer conference in 1993), I lamented the nonappearance of long-promised Cohen books; in both cases, the books appeared before the ink on my words was dry. Third time lucky: perhaps this rash statement will produce the long-awaited Book of Longingl

4

On First Looking into Leonard Cohen DOUG BEARDS LEY

THERE WERE six OR EIGHT OF us — never mind how many — sixteen-year-old boys with hormones for blood aching to peek at the unreal world of women, that strange, forbidden fruit we'd only conjured up behind the locked door of the family bathroom. With such sublimated desires roiling just beneath the surfaces of our adolescent lives, we considered ourselves fortunate to be coming of age in the Montreal of the late 19505, a place where everything was available in the city that never slept. We had other interests: sports, cars, Mahler, Mingus. And we were eager to learn about the world. So every weekend jaunt downtown began with a quart or two of beer in Mansfield Tavern just south of the McGill University gates. The pink formica tables and decrepit washrooms, where you felt passed over if you weren't felt up, served better than any classroom for the ideas of Marx, Freud, Hayek, and Ortega Gasset. What we couldn't admit to ourselves then — or now — was that all of this was simply a guise for the real business of the night: to see before our amazed, dilated pupils the Montreal strippers in all their unadorned glory. But external appearances had to be maintained; after all, we were good Town of Mount Royal Protestant boys with reputations at stake. We couldn't let either our pants or our parents down. We couldn't afford to get caught. We were also underage. So, to see such forbidden sights, we required further deceptive garb. We'd spend an hour or two at two or three different nightclubs — to hear the music. It fell to me, as resident jazz aficionado, to know who was playing. And where. In this task, I was aided by my older brother, who had a friend named Bill Barwick. He was beginning to gain a small reputation as an up-and-coming drummer. We all thought that Billy was pretty good, considering he'd chopped off the toes of his left 5

foot in a lawn-mowing accident when he was nine. He had the meanest high hat in town, though few people knew why. On such arcane knowledge, adolescent boys feed. So our second stop that night would be at Dunn's steak house, where the Bill Barwick Trio was performing upstairs, Dunn's emporium on Saint Catherine Street West had at least two floors. What went on above the second floor remained a mystery to us, but the street-level restaurant was one of the finest delis in Montreal, second only to Ben's as the best smoked-meat establishment in the English west end. But the extraordinary ground-floor window momentarily delayed even the hungriest soul from entering. The entire window was filled: four tiers of huge jars the size of patio planters containing beets, carrots, onions, the inevitable dills, and salamis that hung like stalactites. The window was a sea of swimming reds, oranges, yellows, and greens that resembled an undersea garden of the nightmare imagination. A passing early-morning drunk would have sworn off alcohol forever. The upper-level nightclub experienced several metamorphoses over the years, but when we inhabited the place it was known as Birdland, a touch of wishful thinking bearing little relation to the original New York shrine. But the fact that the Dunn brothers were willing to give jazz any room at all in the summer of 1957 was considered a victory for common sense and good taste. Jazz, however, wasn't the only item on the program. We'd also come to see the dancers, the tappetettes, though no name justified what we were presented with. They neither danced nor stripped but simply strutted, dropped a veil or seven, and occasionally stumbled about on heels so high they used the ceiling for support. We had expected the finest young women in the city at Dunn's and felt let down. To show our disdain, we put on our best shades and swivelled in our seats until we faced the huge Rothko-like mirrors that ran around the entire room. We were lucky we weren't shot (earlier that year we'd witnessed a shooting, and on another occasion a dead body had been rolled by us as we came up the stairs of a particularly shady tenderloin establishment), but since the dancers stared only at the reflections of themselves, never looking at the customers, it seemed like a natural response. And we could still listen to the Bill Barwick Trio, who played what passed for dance music behind the solipsistic hoofers. We knew if we could only wait

6

them out the trio would get its just reward: a chance to open up and play real jazz after the last glamourine had left the stage. The night unfolded as we'd hoped it would, and the Barwick trio flew beyond the normal boundaries of the tin-pan alley tunes they were playing, while each drum solo by Billy received prolonged applause only from our table, which, on one occasion, arose en masse in an ovation that startled the drunks awake, had the owners reaching for their side pockets, and turned Billy's face the colour of the beets in the downstairs window. So it went until the trio suddenly stopped playing and a small, wan figure dressed in black emerged from behind the purple curtain like a defiant waif. He looked like a university student (second-year arts, McGill). As he drifted toward the mike, a voice from the back hollered: "Hey, man, we don't need no MC." "What's that under his arm?" one of my friends asked. The black manuscript seemed to emerge out of his frail body as if it were an additional appendage. But I mostly remember the set position of his tiny jaw. It was tilted upward, at about seventy degrees, a most uncharacteristic Canadian angle. There was nothing diffident about this guy. The piano player laid down a conventional riff. The first lines seemed to come not from the would-be MC'S mouth but from his nose, in a kind of nasal drip: "Go by brooks, love, / Where fish stare, / Go by brooks, / 1 will pass there." "What the hell!" a friend muttered. Who was this guy? Who did he think he was? Barwick had gone to his brushes for the first time in his life. And then the present and future master of ceremonies read his poems: "For Anne," the short "Song" beginning "I almost went to bed," "My Lady Can Sleep," "Gift," and "As the Mist Leaves No Scar." At the next table, a drunk mouthed "What the fuck?" and fell into his spilled beer. Hoods stared at each other in consternation. When he read the concluding lines of "I Wonder How Many People in This City" — "I wonder how many go back to their desks / and write this down" — he left the stage as he had entered. Barwick hurriedly packed up his kit. We were dumbfounded. But we knew enough to realize that something odd, something new, had taken place. Years later, in a class taught by M.L. Rosenthal, the esteemed New York teacher 7

and critic, the learned professor effectively denigrated the oral presentation of a young student by pointing out that Leonard Cohen's diminutive poems were lyrics that had little or no meaning. He was right, but he'd missed the point. It wasn't the sense of these thin lyrics that mattered; rather, it was the aura that they created, the sense of the mysterious, the unknown that every human being experiences simply by being alive. We made our way to the next club, but there wasn't much talk after that. It was as if we'd already been spoken for.

8

Balanced on Wooden Stilts and Dancing: What Irving Layton Taught Me about Leonard Cohen KEVIN FLYNN

"DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE PROBLEM WITH LEONARD COHEN IS?"

I'd heard this question before, usually as the preface to some illconceived rant on Cohen's sexism, or his Buddhism, or (to coin a phrase) his gravelly-voice-ism. On most occasions, the question would elicit little more from me than a roll of the eyes and an uninterested "No. What?" as I braced myself for the Cohen bashing that was sure to follow. But on this occasion I leaned forward to pay careful attention, because the person asking the question was Irving Layton. And he seemed to have something to say. We were gathered, a handful of us, at the Montreal home of Brian Trehearne, a professor of English at McGill University and the host of that Saturday night's small dinner party, to which a number of his graduate students had been invited but at which Layton was, to say the least, the main attraction. I had arrived a little late and was surprised to find that something had cast a pall over the room. There were no smiles, none of the nervous laughter that one might expect from a group of CanLit graduate students in the presence of an icon in their field. What I didn't know, until Professor Trehearne asked me if I'd heard, was that Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated after a peace rally earlier that November day. The news had made its way from Israel to the heart of our gathering that night, where it weighed on Layton like a millstone. He was glum, dispirited, incapable of summoning up even a sign of his legendary orneriness. I'd seen him read a few years earlier and had been amazed at his combination of frailty and energy. Tonight all I could see was frailty. Rabin's assassin had been doubly cruel. After an awkward conversation composed as much of silences as of words, we moved to the dining room and took our places. Layton was seated at the head of the table, with a young woman on each side. He reintroduced himself to them, and his spirit seemed to 9

be warmed by the exercise of his Laytonic charm. After a while, he was peppering us with questions. Who were we? What had we read recently? Did we write poetry? Why? We peppered him right back, asking him about his poetry and his life. His answers were often cryptic and meandering, his train of thought interrupted each time he took a sip of wine, lifted a spoonful of soup to his mouth, or decided to reacquaint himself with the two women on either side of him. But it was, nonetheless, a virtuoso performance, finally full of all the energy I had seen and felt in him a few years earlier. Layton told us some wonderful stories that evening, but two or three are particularly memorable. There was the time many years ago, for instance, that he rescued a drunken Dylan Thomas from a bar shortly before his death. He got Thomas home somehow and steered him toward the couch, flopping him down and watching in fascination as this broken poet roused himself from his stupor to stand up and recite his poetry in a strong, clear voice. We could all see the amazement in Layton's eyes as he described the majesty of Thomas's poetry and his own wonder at bearing witness to it. A little later that evening, Layton told us the story of his handball match with Louis Dudek to determine who was the greater poet. Although he'd been shrunk down into his chair for most of the evening, Layton stood as he told this story and began swinging his arm, telling us of smiting that handball a mighty blow before declaring himself the victor. As a reenactment of the game itself, it was marvellous; he was breathing life into Canadian literary mythology before our very eyes. As an unintentional reenactment of the story of Thomas — with Layton himself now playing the role of the drunk poet — it was breathtaking and a little sad. News of the death of Rabin was still thick in the room, and we were all aware that Layton, who had fallen on hard times, would not be around forever to tell these stories. But the evening wasn't all high seriousness. One of the highlights for me came when Layton, in the midst of another story and apropos of nothing, mentioned that he'd been born circumcised. I threw down my knife and fork and said "Hallelujah!" I'd first heard about this physiological oddity in high school, and I'd always wondered whether it, along with the legend that Layton took it as a sign that he was the Messiah, was true. At that Layton reading a few years earlier, I had almost got up enough courage to ask him about it. But given that the reading had been held in Professor Trehearne's undergraduate class in Canadian poetry, in which I had been a 10

student, that hadn't seemed a particularly prudent course of action. So, hallelujah, here was my chance. Before anyone (including myself) could stop me, I blurted it out: "So you were born circumcised?" "Yes," he said matter-of-factly. "So . . . what did you take this to mean?" "What do you mean?" "Well, what was its significance to you? You know, how did you interpret it?" He leaned over and looked at me with those dark, penetrating eyes of his and asked me again. "What do you mean, how did I interpret it?" "Okay. You were born circumcised," I said, beginning to feel exasperated (and more than a little foolish; it's not every day, after all, that you discuss the penis of one of Canada's greatest poets with him over dinner). "Did that have any special significance? What did it mean to you?" "Well," he replied, "that I was Messiah. What else could it mean?" We all laughed at his reply until he fixed that unwavering eye on me again, swallowed a mouthful of wine, and said, cannily, "Of course, I only know that I was born circumcised because that's what my mother told me." Priceless. So the evening went. We enjoyed a good meal and good company as our conversation ranged far and wide about places we'd been to, poems we loved, and books we had read. The subject turned, inevitably, to Leonard Cohen, whom Layton had befriended and adopted as a kindred poetic spirit many years earlier. Had he heard from Cohen recently? What did he think of Cohen's decision to turn to music? Did he still consider him a poet? It was at this point that Layton asked us his question: "Do you know what the problem with Leonard Cohen is?" Silence. Seven people hanging on every word, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It did. "Leonard Cohen is a narcissist who hates himself." He didn't say anything else. He didn't have to. On a day bled dry of joy by the death of Rabin, Irving Layton grabbed hold of the night and poured life into it as no one else could.

ii

Beautiful Losers: Leonard Cohen's Postcolonial Novel FRANK DAVEY

It is not merely because I am French.. . . — Beautiful Losers (186) INTERPRETERS of Beautiful Losers have offered little comment about its Quebec setting or the cultural context of its characterizations. They have focused on the novel's critiques of history and material ambition and on the apparent transcending of time, cultural specificity, and identity that occurs in its closing pages. What is transcended has, in these interpretations, remained largely generic — "history" rather than particular histories, "style" rather than particular styles, "systems" rather than the instances — Catholicism, commerce, the nation-state — offered by the novel. Beautiful Losers encourages such readings through its telescoping of specificities, such as its blurring of Catherine Tekakwitha, Edith, and Mary Voolrid, and the blonde housewife who drives the Oldsmobile in Book Three, into transcendent woman or Isis (183, 235), or its blurring of charismatic sexual abstinence and obsessive sexual excess into a general figure of self-martyrdom. It encourages them as well through its obscuring of the histories of its characters, giving the reader a single "History of Them All" rather than individual, teleological histories. Thus, it offers two male characters who have become known to Cohen criticism only as F. and L, and whose identities bleed into each other in the novel's third section, and female characters whose most significant attributes may indeed be those they share with a Roman goddess. It also offers, as Douglas Barbour has noted (139), vague and somewhat inconsistent chronologies that make it difficult to sort out the ages of characters during specific events, their ages at their deaths, or even their ages relative to each other. Yet despite the various thematic elements that emphasize generality, diffusion, and transcendence, Beautiful Losers is also closely 12

tied to history — specifically located in time and place, in terms of both its writing and publishing history and its setting. It is very much an English-language novel of the 19605, locatable in that decade's Anglo-American economy of mysticism within which the financial successes of Timothy Leary's and Carlos Castenada's writings, the Mystic Arts Book Club, the Beatles' album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the Broadway musical Hair also occurred. Michael Ondaatje, reading Beautiful Losers in the late 19605, could approvingly locate it within a number of 19605 discourses: Norman O. Brown's sexual mysticism, Michael McClure's "beast" language, and the repetitive narratives of Donald Barthelme's Snow White and Joseph Heller's Catch-zz. The critical history of the novel has also been tied closely to the 19605 and 19705 — being composed substantially of chapters in Ondaatje's 1970 monograph Leonard Cohen, Patricia Morley's 1972, study The Immoral Moralists., Stephen Scobie's 1978 monograph, and Linda Hutcheon's 1980 monograph and of reviews and articles in Michael Gnarowski's 1976 collection Leonard Cohen: The Artist and His Critics. As well, Beautiful Losers is unambiguously tied to francophone Montreal of the 19605 — the Montreal of rival francophone nationalist groups and of bomb attacks on mailboxes and statues and other symbols of Canadian federalism, the Montreal that in 1966, the year of the novel's publication, saw bomber Paul Joseph Chartier travel to Ottawa and accidentally blow himself up in a parliamentary washroom and in 1968 saw a separatist cell kidnap and murder Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte. "Tonight I will blow that symbol [a statue of Queen Victoria] to smithereens — and myself with it," F. declares (135). However, apart from New York Times reviewer Lawrence M. Bensky, who identified F. as "a French separatist politician" and I. as a Jewish scholar (2,7), few critics have defied the novel's devaluing of individual identity to inquire into the language and ethnicity of F., I., or Edith, or defied its disregard for the conventions of realism to ask what it implies about 19605 francophone Montreal culture, or even asked in what language or languages F. and I, converse.

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Prayer is translation. — Beautiful Losers (56) Because Beautiful Losers is written in English, and almost all of its conversations are rendered in English, it is very easy — but perhaps not wise — to forget that its major characters — E, Edith, and perhaps even I. — are likely not native English speakers. The English language of Beautiful Losers is in many passages merely a convention for representing speech in another language. Catherine Tekakwitha and the priest R Jacques de Lamberville, for example, would likely have spoken an Aboriginal language to each other, and possibly some French, but in Book One, section 3 7, their conversation is presented in English. Catherine's aunts in Book One, section 16, would have spoken in their Aboriginal language, but again their speech is represented in English. At the separatist rally in Pare Lafontaine in Book One, section 47, the young filmmaker who addresses the crowd is undoubtedly speaking in French even though the novel represents his speech in English while rendering many of the crowd's responses in French ("Bravo! Mon pays malheureux! Quebec Libre!") (115)). This disguising of languages and the quick movement from one to the other in the novel's narrative discourse might make a reader wary of assuming that any character is anglophone merely because he or she appears to be speaking in English or that a passage is to be understood as having been written by a character in English merely because it appears in that language in the novel. "A Long Letter from E," for example, part 2 of the novel, is readable as a French text, one that is presented to the reader in English through the same riovelistic convention that presents the Aboriginal speech of Catherine's aunts as English. There is overwhelming evidence in the novel that F. is francophone. He identifies himself in this letter as Quebecois: "It is not merely because I am French that I long for an independent Quebec.... [T]he English did to us what we did to the Indians, and the Americans did to the English what the English did to us" (186). The separatists at the rally recognize E not only as one of them but also as one of their heroes — as a "patriot" because of his opposition to conscription while serving as a Member oi Parliament in 15*44. This epithet links him to' Quebecois history by associating him with Louis-Joseph Papineau and his supporters of the 1837 rebellion. It links him as well with the folk history of francophone Quebec, in which the 14

image of a patriote with his musket would become the logo for the FLQ'S communiques in 1970, and the green, white, and red flag of the patriotes would become the cover of Leandre Bergeron's 1971 Petit manuel d'histoire du Quebec. F. further characterizes himself as ethnically Quebecois and politically separatist when he announces his plans to destroy by means of a suicide bomb a bronze statue of Queen Victoria: "The Revolution needs a little blood. . .. [The queen's] advisors in London must be made to understand that our dignity is fed with the same food as anyone's ..." (134). In addition, there is strong evidence in the novel that F. and I. grew up together in the same linguistic environment. I. notes that he and F. "lived on the same street, . . . went to school together,.. . were in the same class" (19). In section Z9, he recalls them at age thirteen being in an orphanage together, where they began their intermittent homosexual dalliance. The orphanage appears to have been operated in downtown Montreal by Jesuit priests: "Homage to my teachers in the orphanage of downtown Montreal who smelled of semen and incense" (99-100). F. and I. undoubtedly share a background in Roman Catholicism. In a passage that echoes Zola's "J'accuse" defence of Dreyfus, I, accuses the Catholic Church of various offences against both him and others: I accuse the Roman Catholic Church of Quebec of ruining my sex life and of shoving my member up a relic box meant for a finger, I accuse the R.C.C. of Q. of making me commit queer horrible acts with F., another victim of the system, I accuse the Church of killing Indians, I accuse the Church of refusing to let Edith go down on me properly, I accuse the Church of covering Edith in red grease and of depriving Catherine Tekakwitha of red grease, I accuse the Church of haunting automobiles and causing pimples, I accuse the Church of building green masturbation toilets, I accuse the Church of squashing Mohawk dances and of not collecting folk songs, I accuse the Church of stealing my sun tan and of promoting dandruff. . . . (47) I. certainly seems to be obsessed here and elsewhere with the Catholic Church. If I. is the "Jewish scholar" that Bensky thought him to be (and I can find no evidence that he is), then he seems unlikely to be more than an ethnic Jew, brought up in the Catholic faith, and educated in French. He makes no similar comments T

5

about the Jewish faith (it is F. who recommends being a "New Jew" [16]]), but he has made an emotional preoccupation with the Mohawk Christian mystic Catherine Tekakwitha, who would be beatified by the Church m 1970, into a consuming "scholarly" interest. Whether I. was born a francophone, however, is ambiguous. At the separatist political rally, he is able to pass as a francophone until he becomes hysterically anxious about his unconsummated sexual encounter with a woman in the crowd. It appears to be his behaviour, not his language, that suddenly marks him as different. Some of the francophones in the crowd are perplexed by him and suggest identities that might explain him: "He looks English." "He looks Jewish." "This man is a sex pervert" (12,2). If a reader assumes that I. is capable here of passing as a Quebecois francophone, then the crowd's speculations become a caricature of 19608 Quebecois nationalists as comical but dangerous bigots who are unable to associate deviance with one of their own. If the behaviour of I. is aberrant, then apparently he cannot be, in the crowd's eyes, anything but an ethnic other, Jewish or English, whatever his French accent. Then F. appears and convinces the gathering that I. has the appropriate "pedigree" (123) — a word that adds to the passage's satirical and historicizing potential. On the other hand, when planning to begin a chapter on Quebec Indians by turning off the light and writing "Triompher du mal par le bien," I. appears to characterize himself as nonfrancophone. "St. Paul," he comments. "That will begin the chapter. I feel better already. Foreign languages are a good corset" (64). Here it appears that for I. French is a foreign language and that he does his own writing in English. In the novel's third section, however, where I. and F. ostensibly blur together into a single "old man," their language may be French. As at Pare Lafontaine, the drama and diction of the shouts and exchanges at the Main Shooting and Game Alley indicate the scene's language to be mostly French and its politics to be independantiste versus federalist: "Isn't he the Terrorist Leader that escaped tonight? ... He stays! He's a Patriot! ... He's very nearly the President of our country" (239). Edith, the wife of L, also an orphan (55*), is almost certainly both Catholic — as the "J'accuse" passage suggests — and francophone. She spent her childhood in a French-speaking Quebec mining town on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River. At age thirteen, according to I,, she was raped by four Quebecois men: "These men 16

had watched her for years. French-Canadian schoolbooks do not encourage respect for the Indians. Some part of the Canadian Catholic mind is not certain of the Church's victory over the Medicine Man" (58). In his characterization of these men, I. implicates both their ethnicity and their religion in the crime: "the Canadian Catholic mind." Later he suggests that the crime occurred because news of Edith's difference — her "freakishly long nipples" — "had inflamed the root of the whole town" (59), had made "every single person . . . secretly obsessed with this nipple information. The Mass is undermined with nipple dream": "I believe that in some way the village delegated these four men to pursue Edith into the forest. Get Edith! commanded the Collective Will. Get her magic nipples off Our Mind!" (60). Her cries for help, rendered by the novel in English, are plausibly uttered in French and are openly Catholic in character: " — Help me, Mother Mary!" (60), and " — Help me, Saint Kateri!" (61).

I guess I owe you all an apology. — Beautiful Losers (98) Some of the most historicizing aspects of this novel that have often been read as attempts to discredit history are the particular qualities of F.'s Quebec nationalism — its affinities both with independantiste thought of the 19605 and with postcolonial theory of the 19608 and 19708. Both echoes of Frantz Fanon's Peau noire, masques blancs (1952.) and premonitions of Pierre Vallieres's Negres blancs de I'Amerique (1968) and Michele Lalonde's "Speak White" (1968) can be heard in pronouncements by F. such as that the crowd of independantistes is "beautiful" "Because they think they are Negroes, and that is the best feeling a man can have in this century" (118). F.'s use of the Negro figure of abjection, however, is sharply different from its use by Vallieres and Lalonde, and its general use in independantiste discourse, and constitutes an unmistakable criticism of them. For Vallieres and Lalonde, "Negro" is a means of stirring up indignation and is implicitly racist, as in "How dare anyone treat a white population as mere blacks?" For F., as for Cohen's novel generally, race is one more category to be transcended, along with genital sexuality, bourgeois family structure, and the nation-state. 17

As racially marked Aboriginal women, both Catherine and Edith are linked by the novel to the Negro figure and arguably constitute its symbolic blacks. Like the Negro, and like the protesting Quebecois, they are both subjected and abjected, victims in a daisy chain of imperialist oppression. F. writes that The English did to us what we did to the Indians, and the Americans did to the English what the English did to us. I demanded revenge for everyone. I saw cities burning, I saw movies falling into blackness, I saw the maize on fire. I saw the Jesuits punished. I saw the trees taking back the longhouse roofs. I saw the shy deer murdering to get their dresses back. I saw the Indians punished. I saw chaos eat the gold roof of Parliament... . (187) The stain that spreads from the glass of wine that Catherine spills at the intendant's banquet, and at which she looks "frozen with shame" (97), is a double symbol: both the stain of imperialism unveiled — "the imperial hue" (98) — and the stain of race, of negritude, which the imperial glass has been unable to contain. Her baptism — itself a breach of an arbitrary boundary between "white" and "coloured" — has led to her invitation to the banquet, where her mishap with the wine at once reveals the totalizing force of the imperial project and announces her irreducible racial difference. "A beautiful lady gave out a cry of pain as her fine hand turned purple. A total chromatic metamorphosis took place in a matter of minutes. Wails and oaths resounded through the purple hall as faces, clothes, tapestries, and furniture displayed the same deep shade" (98). At another extreme, Edith and her "A ------- " tribe are the most abjected of North American Native people, the tribe that never wins a battle, whose women can never achieve orgasm, whose numbers always decline. The novel's juxtaposition of these two women with the imperialist founders of New France and their independantiste successors strongly undercuts the latter's claims of abjection and negritude. Concurrently, F.'s celebration of abjection as a means of transcending difference and category operates to condemn Quebec nationalism as merely a way of reinstating oppression in the form of different oppressors — oppressions dramatized by the novel in Edith's rape and in the independantistes' threats at Pare Lafontaine to assault I. because he may be a Jew. 18

Down with genital imperialism. — Beautiful Losers (32.) The kind of Quebec nationalism espoused by F. and by the novel thus has much more in common with the psychological theories popularized in the 19608 by Wilhelm Reich and Norman O. Brown than it does with the programs of francophone nationalists who demonstrated in Pare Lafontaine in this period, and curiously it has a great deal in common with the postcolonial psychology of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari of the following decade. The political theories of Cohen's F., like those of Deleuze and Guattari in AntiOedipe (1972) and Mille Plateaux (1980), are constructed on a critique of genitally restricted sexuality and of capitalist exploitation of desire. The most significant politics of the Pare Lafontaine rally for Cohen's novel reside not in the speaker's xenophobic exhortations but in the crowd's sense of shared and anonymous sexual excitement. The novel's deterritorialization of the body, through the assumption that "All parts of the body are erotogenic" (17-28), that "All flesh can come" (32), leads ultimately to the deterritorialization of the nation-state and the would-be nation-state. The tribe of "New Jews" that F. dreams of joining, along with I. and Edith, "dissolves history and ritual by accepting unconditionally the complete package. . . . [The New Jew] travels without passports. . ." (161). Similarly, the erotics of Catherine Tekakwitha's conversion sweep aside, as in the tide of red wine that she spills, the categorizing pretensions and condescensions of imperial France. F.'s desire to "slip out of history" (163), with its wars, rebellions, massacres, memories, vendettas, and triumphs, is, like most of his desires, a wish to slip out of categories that deprive the subject of everything they exclude and to gain access to what the merged old man of the novel's conclusion promises, "a vision of All Chances at Once" (142).

How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me? — Beautiful Losers (38) What I am suggesting, then, is that Beautiful Losers can be read as a strong response to francophone Quebec nationalism of the 19605, 19

especially to its "je me souviens" appeals to history, from the defeat on the Plains of Abraham to the crushing of the patriots' revolt in 1837. Its portrait of F. is of a political thinker who evolves from a narrowly nationalist and anticonscription position when he is elected to Parliament in the 15)405 to a position that envisions deterritorialization of both the body and politics — a position in which he can understand and sympathize with the sovereigntist rhetoric of the Pare Lafontaine speaker but can imagine a world without its boundaries or sovereignties. In part 3 of Beautiful Losers, where the "connect nothing" dictum of F. appears to be achieved (16), there can be no stable ethnic or cultural identities. In contrast, the Quebecois nationalist crowd in the park, and the speaker addressing it, represent the antithesis of F.'s advice to I. that he should shed his "final burden: the useless History under which you suffer in such confusion" (188). "Give us back our History!" the crowd shouts. "The English have stolen our History!" (118). "In [964 ... History commands that the English surrender this land" (118-15)), the speaker replies, and he goes on to "burden" them with more of the weight of "yesterday": " — Yesterday it was the Turn of the English to have French maids from our villages in Gaspe. Yesterday it was the Turn of the French to have Aristotle and bad teeth" (119-20). Interestingly, the narrator I. is positioned from the beginning of the novel both inside and outside francophone cultural consciousness. Arguably both francophone and anglophone, and thus more orphaned than F., perhaps able to pass for either, he literally becomes a conjunction by the third part of the novel — Barbour argues for the conjunction I. + F. (137) — of the francophone F. and his own ambiguous I. identity. In such an approach to the novel, one could read Edith's suicide as a transitional moment in the evolutions of F. and I. — a moment in which her body is still a site of imperialist contentions between them, as the accusations that I. makes on the evening of her death indicate: "You lousy fucker, I said, how many times [did F. sleep with Edith], five or six?" (7).* In such a reading, it is possible to put special emphasis on the orphanhood in which I. arid F. begin their lives. Orphanhood in Beautiful Losers is positively portrayed and contrasts sharply with the emphasis on genealogy in Quebecois culture and on the veille souche Quebecoisite implicit in the angry comments of the crowd in Pare Lafontaine. Orphanhood disconnects the subject from both family and community history and destabilizes personal identity, 20

adding yet another layer of uncertainty to questions such as mine here about the linguistic communities to which E and I. belong. Orphanhood removes historical depth from an individual life and gives additional meaning to propositions such as F.'s "We've got to learn to stop bravely at the surface" (4). It offers the possibility of liberty — of the end of patriarchal lines of descent that underpin nationalism. Even as the speaker at Pare Lafontaine is invoking the old patriarchal family of blood and history — "From the earliest dawn of our race, this Blood, this shadowy stream of life, has been our nourishment and our destiny. Blood is the builder of the body, and Blood is the source of the spirit of the race. In Blood lurks our ancestral inheritance ..." (121) — I. is glimpsing a new "family" beyond patriarchy and beyond the ethnic excitement that he amusingly, and dangerously, misreads as sexual excitement: "We began our rhythmical movements which responded to the very breathing of the mob, which was our family and the incubator of our desire.... [A]nd I knew that all of us, not just the girl and me, all of us were going to come together" (12,0-21). When the crowd suddenly dissolves, I. is again the orphan — until E can invent a historicized identity for him, a "pedigree" — and is unconcerned about the particulars of Quebec history that still inflame the crowd. Implicit here and throughout a novel titled Beautiful Losers is a sharp critique of the Quebecois nationalist discourse of humiliation — the discourse that seeks redress because of past defeats and ongoing constructions of embarrassment. If — as the novel implies — there is beauty in being a loser, or in imagining oneself a Negro, burden and constipation in remaining tied to history, and anguish in imagining oneself humiliated because one's wife has slept with a friend, then the francophone nationalists of Pare Lafontaine appear to embrace mostly constipation and anguish.

Spring comes into Quebec from Japan.. . . — Beautiful Losers (245) The final day of Beautiful Losers, the day on which I. descends from his treehouse and the marvellous merging of I. and E occurs, is — according to the novel — Quebec's one day of spring, a day of deterritorialization and miscegenation, a day on which global currents pass through the province and transform it: 21

Spring comes into Quebec from the west. It is the warm Japanese current that brings the change of season.... Spring comes into Montreal like an American movie of Riviera Romance, and suddenly everyone has to sleep with a foreigner. ... Spring passes through our midst like a Swedish tourist co-ed visiting an Italian restaurant for mustache experience.... (229-30) Spring, one might say, is a remote cultural possibility, like the events of its day — I. coming from his treehouse without desire or need for food and without memory, having his comical sexual encounter with the half-naked Isis/Edith/Catherine in her Oldsmobile, and creating an apocalyptic moment: "the first night of spring, the night of small religions" (241) — for the assorted independantiste and anti-independantiste at the Main Shooting and Game Alley. The movement toward this "All Chances at Once" begins in the border-transcending imagery of springtime and culminates in the avoidance of a "sordid political riot" over Quebec separatism as I. + E, the "old man," turns himself inside-out to become a sky-sized movie of Ray Charles. This spring day is undoubtedly a day when magic is afoot and when most of the desires of the novel — that I. absorb F. and his teachings, that the petty ambitions of the flesh be transcended, that distinctions between diamonds and excrement be erased — are achieved. Notably, though, what is specifically transcended in this episode is Quebec's ongoing federalist-independantiste argument, which Cohen locates again in the independantiste figure that he establishes early in the novel in the person of F. That is, the day of celebratory Montreal harmony with which Beautiful Losers concludes begins in a near riot between federalists and francophone separatists over the identity of Cohen's old man: Twenty men were swarming towards him, half to expel the disgusting intruder, half to restrain the expulsionists and consequently to boost the noble heap on their shoulders.... For the first time in theii lives, twenty men experienced the delicious certainty that they were at the very center of action, no matter which side. A cry of happiness escaped from each man as he closed in on his object. (239-40) 22

This is not a political ending, of course, for its action takes place outside time, in miracle, at "the point of Clear Light" where the future streams through the hourglass moment of the old man's transformation, "going both ways" (2.41). But it is an ending that addresses, and mocks, a specific political question, Quebec separatism, and the Frenchness and quebecoisite of F. — particulars in which F. urges his friend early in the novel not to get "lost" (27). It is an ending that addresses, through miscegenation and through deterritorialization of the racialized body, racial and ethnic conflicts, English-French, European-Aboriginal, Canadian-American, that have been prominent throughout the novel. Perhaps by this point in the narrative, F. signifies not only a mad guru but also "frangais" even "French Canadian." Perhaps I. is any English Canadian reader. Perhaps the old man, Barbour's "IF," is a possibility beyond not only culture and time but also Quebec ethnic and racial conflict. If so, then he is also a cynical political comment on Canada's repetitive francophone Quebec question.

NOTE 1

Edith's death is also, of course, interpretable as a profoundly sexist moment in which the woman's death facilitates the spiritual journeys of her two lovers. However, in a novel that appears to regard death as a transcending of the ordinary boundaries of the human body and human politics, and that visibly resurrects one of its ostensibly dead characters, E, and quite possibly Edith herself in the form of part 3'$ blonde housewife (134), it is perhaps perverse to get exercised about the deaths of any of its characters, including Edith.

WORKS CITED

Barbour, Douglas. "Down with History." Gnarowski 136-49. Bensky, Lawrence M. "What Happened to Tekakwitha?" Gnarowski ^Jz8.

Cohen, Leonard. Beautiful Losers. New York: Viking, 1966. Gnarowski, Michael, ed. Leonard Cohen: The Artist and His Critics, Toronto: McGraw, 1976. Ondaatje, Michael. Leonard Cohen. Toronto: McClelland, 1970.

2-3

"Nightmares of Identity": Nationalism and Loss in Beautiful Losers PETER WILKINS

THIS ESSAY pursues Linda Hutcheon's claim that Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers allegorizes Canada's historical-political situation: That central bizarre triangle of symbolically orphaned characters ... allegorically acts out ... the history and political destiny of the Canadian nation: of its successive conquests (mirrored in the deaths of the Indian, Edith, and then of the Frenchman, F.) and perhaps also its future fate (turning into an American fiction). ('''Caveat Lector" 28-29) According to Hutcheon's logic, the two first-person narrators of the novel — an unnamed anglophone, perhaps Jewish, historian; and a Quebecois revolutionary known only as F. — represent the two dominant, conflicting "national" positions in Canada, while the historian's wife, Edith, and Catherine Tekakwitha represent the First Nations people displaced by the European colonizers.1 The Canadian situation that Beautiful Losers represents is one of victimization, in which the anglophone and francophone positions are double edged. As E, the Quebecois narrator, puts it, "The English did to us what we did to the Indians, and the Americans did to the English what the English did to us" (199). Anglophones and francophones, according to this logic, are both victims and oppressors, while the Indians are simply victims and the Americans are simply oppressors. But as the allegorical examples of the historian and F. make clear, anglophones and francophones recognize themselves only as victims and not as oppressors. Behind the apparent opposition between the historian and F., anglophone and francophone, though, lies the "truth" of Beautiful Losers: however different they appear, these two figures are bound by their double-edged positions as oppressors and victims and the relationship to loss that these positions entail. In response to this dilemma, Beautiful Losers pro24

poses an ethical way to deal with loss that breaks out of the oppressor/victim deadlock: instead of dwelling on our own loss, we must recognize loss of/in the other. On the national level, this means that the only escape from the deadlock between Quebecois and anglophone Canadians is to establish a "national" identity of shared loss. Victimization is a feeling that someone else has diminished us or taken something away from us. The ethical question that the novel poses is how we can become "beautiful losers" able to deal with our loss without taking it out on someone else. I apply a Lacanian principle to the novel: loss (insufficiency, lack, castration) is universal, while each person's (and in this case each ethnic or linguistic group's) relationship to loss is unique. The ethical response to this universal loss is to recognize the uniqueness of the other's position, the other's fantasy response to loss, rather than impose one's own fantasy on the other. When the novel begins, neither the historian nor F. fits this "beautiful" category. In fact, they illustrate opposed but equally inappropriate ways to respond to loss: passive abjection in the anglophone historian's case, and active but blind self-aggrandizement in the francophone E's case. Each position is unethical because the ego becomes everything at the expense of the other; the individual becomes so self-absorbed that there is no room in his consciousness or conscience for anyone else: the other is merely a prop in his egotistical fantasy. The narrators' projects of psychic completion allegorize collective (both English and French) demands for wholeness and integrity. In each case, though, the enigmatic wound in the subject and the nation persists because wholeness and integrity are impossible in a world where lack is a subjective universal.2The positions of the two narrators can be mapped out by their opposite responses to victimhood: the historian's position is marked by passive identification with victims, whereas F.'s position is marked by active self-transformation to overcome victimhood. The historian tries to compensate for his lack of positive identity, the fundamental anglophone Canadian crisis, by identifying with the ultimate Canadian victim, Catherine Tekakwitha, an Iroquois converted to Catholicism by the Jesuits in the seventeenth century. Although seeking positive identity by indulging in victimhood initially seems to be ludicrous, the novel shows how the self-indulgen victim or false martyr, while appearing to be the opposite of the tyrant, is in fact a version of the tyrant. The historian thus represents 2-5

the anglophone Canadian role of the tyrannical victim who appropriates the position of the minority other to avoid any responsibility either toward the other or for himself: the absolute victim can do no wrong because he does not act but is acted upon. In a logical twist in which the weakest becomes the strongest, the historian thinks that, by becoming a pure victim, he can make himself powerful. Whereas the historian identifies with victims to avoid taking action and responsibility, F. engages in continual self-reinvention, transforming himself through a metaphorical "bodybuilding" that promises to make the ninety-eight-pound weakling into the "Hero of the Beach." His revolutionary activity attempts a similar transformation for Quebec so that it too will become independent and strong. However, while F.'s approach sounds appealing, his actions risk becoming totalitarian; as the novel illustrates, heroes become bullies as easily as victims become oppressors. Freud's explanation of melancholia and mania in "Mourning and Melancholia" as two possible responses to loss helps us to see the underlying connection between the two seemingly opposed narrators. Mourning dominates the narrative of the historian, who fits Freud's definition of the melancholic as one who mourns to excess. The historian's mourning, although it has real objects in Edith and F., who are dead prior to the start of his story, overwhelms his personality; it becomes what Freud calls "pathological mourning" (2,60) because the historian turns his loss into an egotistical obsession. Freud describes melancholia as "a profoundly painful dejection ... and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment" (252). The historian's choice of Catherine Tekakwitha as his object of identification is fitting, because her "saintly" self-mortification parallels his own despising of self. F., meanwhile, is characterized by mania, melancholia's opposite. According to Freud, mania manifests itself as unbounded libidinal energy: "the manic subject plainly demonstrates his liberation from the object that was the cause of his suffering, by seeking like a ravenously hungry man for new object-cathexis" (264). Given the symbolic connection between the narrators' complexes and Canada's complex, we can argue that melancholy and mania represent possible responses to a national loss or fissure: melancholy defines the anglophone Canadian perspective, while mania defines the Quebecois perspective. Although they appear to be opposites, melancholia and mania, Freud claims, wrestle "with 26

the same 'complex,' but . . . probably in melancholia the ego has succumbed to the complex whereas in mania it has mastered it or pushed it aside" (2,63). The link between mania and melancholia lies in their relation to a lost object, and, although the ego triumphs in mania, "what the ego has surmounted and what it is triumphing over remain hidden from it" (2,64). In the same way, the melancholic's lost object remains obscure, even in a case like the historian's, in which obvious objects of mourning are in place: "one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either" (2.54).3 The narrative structure of Beautiful Losers also involves two approaches to the "same complex," to the same sense of loss that denies the subject autonomy and completeness. Beautiful Losers establishes a dialogic interplay between the two narrators. E's narrative of active transformation challenges the historian's narrative of passive identification and vice versa in a way that exposes the limitations of each. The historian's passive anticipation of identity through abjection ignores the necessity of acting in the world and relating to others, while E's active pursuit of identity through "bodybuilding" risks producing a monstrosity. But there is an alternative to these unethical extremes that we can determine from the way in which the narrators' fantasies of plenitude are stripped bare and from the final section of the novel, which is narrated by an anonymous third person who exemplifies the "beautiful" loser and symbolically abandons or "orphans" the reader. The orphanhood of the two narrators signifies primary abandonment and isolation, which require one either to construct interdependency with others without being able to fall back on given familial/social bonds or to remain in isolation. Orphanhood represents the inherent lack in the subject (all subjects) that demands a response, which will be either ethical or unethical. While the unethical response is to convert abandonment into egotistical individualism, the ethical response is to recognize the wound in the other and to see both its particularity or uniqueness and how it is analogous to one's own lack. This acknowledgement of the wound is ultimately what being a "beautiful" loser means on both individual and national levels.

2.7

From Historical Mastery to Hysterical Mystery By studying losers — primarily the "A s," an Indian tribe whose enigmatically incomplete name "is the word for corpse in the language of all the neighboring tribes" — the historian identifies with victims for his own fantasy ends, getting a kick out of their suffering because it reinforces his own: "My interest in this pack of failures betrays my character" (Cohen 5). An exception to the rule that historians always tell the victor's tale, he studies the detritus or leftovers of history: "There are, perhaps, ten full-blooded A— left..." (4). But his study of the A——s does not attempt to redeem them or define their importance to the big picture of history. Rather, he studies them because he wants to make their loss his. While he acknowledges this fact, he seems to be unable to change: "I'm far too willing to shoulder the alleged humiliations of harmless peoples ..." (6). As Margaret Atwood writes, "Beautiful Losers depicts not only the sufferings of the victim, but the mentality of the Canadian onlooker who needs to identify with victims" (100). The historian's identification absorbs and thus nullifies its object; his history of "fictional victims" (Cohen 7) constitutes a mirror into which he endlessly stares, always finding his own image. He never sees the other as other, only as some version of himself. The historian claims that "All the victims we ourselves do not murder or imprison are fictional victims" (7), suggesting the innocence of his indulgence. His wife, Edith, attempts to break this illusion by committing suicide: "She was going to teach me a lesson, my old wife. You and your fictional victims she used to say" (7). She crouches in the elevator shaft in the sub-basement where they live so that when the historian returns from the library he will crush her. Edith is an "A ——," and her action revenges the fictional victim by making her flesh and blood rather than fantasy. Presumably, she intends to demonstrate through physical cause and effect who is the dominator and who the victim. But her lesson gets shortcircuited; an errant delivery boy takes the historian's place in the fateful elevator. Edith dies while the historian works in the library, fostering his identification with losers by writing a paper on lemmings. Her death intensifies his melancholic obsession with victims. Her suicide introduces a crisis between his object of study and the life around him, between the "fictional victims" and the flesh and blood in the elevator shaft. Even though its immediate lesson is inter28

rapted, Edith's death forces the historian to evaluate the differences between fictional victims and real ones, between word — the "dusty mind full of the junk of maybe five thousand books" (4) — and mangled, tortured, or mortified flesh. The historian thus remains stuck in a perverse identification with victims, for it affords him the only kind of mastery available to the melancholic. F. sees the oppression that the historian lives under and, somewhat like Edith, tries to teach the historian a lesson that will free him from the oppressive bonds of his discipline. F. says, "Oh my darling, what a hunchback History and the Past have made of your body, what a pitiful hunchback" (142,). Whereas the historian allows the weight of history to oppress him, F. treats history frivolously, in keeping with his manic disposition, as if he can manipulate it at will: "He compared the Indians to the ancient Greeks... . His knowledge of ancient Greece was based entirely on a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, a few homosexual encounters with restaurateurs . .. , and a plaster reproduction of the Akropolis ..." (9-10). While F.'s own narrative exposes the flaws of his perspective, the historian's narrative makes it seem as if F. knows how to live without being oppressed by history, how to accept surfaces without the burden of the past. Only after E's death does the historian glean some understanding of E's efforts to destabilize his perspective, but even then F.'s ultimate purpose is obscure: "Now that I look back he seemed to be training me for something, and he was ready to use any damn method to keep me hysterical. Hysteria is my classroom F. said once" (59). A little hysteria, F. suggests, is good for one because it precludes mastery and identification. Even though E's denial of history is suspect, his effort to hystericize the historian is a valid way of dealing with the historian's pursuit of mastery through identification with victims. Hysteria, according to Slavoj Zizek's Lacanian perspective, is a matter of self-justification. The hysteric's "basic problem is how to justify, bow to account for his/her existence (in the eyes of the big Other)" (Looking Awry 131). As Zizek writes, "the hysterical question articulates the experience of a fissure, of an irreducible gap," between the subject and his or her identification (131). Whereas the historian would like to assert his victimhood through identification with the A —— s, hysteria would force him to ask what it is in him that makes him a victim. The discourse of the hysteric addresses itself to the gap in knowledge, demanding that this gap be accounted for rather than 2-9

glossed over. F. suggests that only by shifting his perspective from historical mastery to hysterical mystery can the historian confront the gap in his being that makes him want to be a victim. When the historian complains that F. turns "Canada into a vast analyst's couch from which we dream and redream nightmares of identity" (Cohen 142), we see the allegorical connection between the historian's personal dilemma and the anglophone Canadian national self-image.4 As the symbol of the Quebecois thorn in the anglophone Canadian side, R hystericizes Canadian nationalism; he embodies the gap or wound in the nationalist desire for wholeness. Moreover, if the Quebecois can claim to be victimized by anglophone Canada, then an anglophone nationalism based on identification with victims is clearly invalid. In this sense, F.'s lesson is the same as Edith's because it attempts to get the oppressor who claims to be a victim to acknowledge the gap in his fantasy identification. Thus, F. is both analyst and symptom of the anglophone Canadian split. But the patient is obviously resistant to the kind of knowledge that F. represents. F. knows that the only way to make the historian/anglophone Canadian recognize the split is to make him approach self-knowledge through a seemingly impossible task: "that's the only way you value it. When it falls on you from out of the trees you think it's rotten fruit" (34). Hence, the task that F. sets for the historian is to "Fuck a saint" (13), the ultimate koan or parable that should teach the historian to recognize his finitude. F.'s language suggests that the task's aim is not transcendence but a return to Earth: "get tangled in her airy robes, suck her nothing juices, .. . then climb down to this fat earth and slouch around the fat earth in your stone shoes . .." (13). The historian recognizes the impossibility of his project — "What is this fucking of a dead saint? It's impossible. We all know that" (37) — but he doesn't know how to respond to its hystericizing effects until he learns how to address the other.

The Minority Other in the Place of the Big Other The historian chooses not just any saint but Catherine Tekakwitha,5 arguably the first "Canadian": the first colonial subject of significance to Canadian history but a foreign object from the historian's perspective because she represents the two primary others of the anglophone Canadian, the Indians and the French (thanks to her conversion to Catholicism by the Jesuits). The historian wants to 30

"rescue" Catherine from the Jesuits (Cohen 5), suggesting a tug-ofwar over a crucial colonial symbol, but he also wants to put himself in the Jesuits' place, to be the one who made this founding conversion. Fucking this particular saint "to stumble upon the truth about Canada" (37) is thus a form of incorporation in the psychoanalytic sense; the historian attempts to find subjective completion by appropriating Canada's Franco Indian origin. Catherine makes the perfect target for his attentions because she is so willing to be incorporated, as she shows in her relations with the French. In contrast to her guardian uncle, who sees the Jesuit conversion of the Iroquois as the death of Indian ways, Catherine embraces Catholicism wholeheartedly, even excessively: the priests have to restrain her from overdoing self-mortification. When her skin colour whitens after her death (z 24), it is a sign that her saintliness stems from her willingness to be colonized. But the problem for the historian is that she has dedicated herself to another other, the French Catholics, deep in the past. In fact, though, by suggesting that Catherine has left on Canada a symbolic residue of her Iroquois heritage that no conversion can obliterate, the historian implies that the French have not claimed Catherine completely, leaving room for his rescue efforts. In a story that Edith has told him, not found in the accounts of "any of the standard biographers" (105), Catherine spills a glass of wine at a dinner held by the French colonizers shortly after her baptism: "With a tiny abrupt movement which she did not command, she knocked over her glass of wine. She stared at the whale-shaped stain, frozen with shame" (103). The blot on the white ground of the tablecloth ultimately usurps the whole scene in a "total chromatic metamorphosis": "The entire company, servants and masters, had directed its gaze outside, as if to find beyond the contaminated hall some reassurance of a multicoloured universe. Before their eyes these drifts of spring snow darkened into shades of spilled wine, and the moon itself absorbed the imperial hue" (104). The contaminating stain turns the white world red in an ironic inversion of Catherine's becoming white; it marks an unconscious interruption in her conversion, the originary, indelible stain that conversion introduces to Canada as a European colony.6 The historian identifies the wine spilling as an "apocalyptic" moment, as if it revealed some crucial truth about Catherine, perhaps even the ultimate truth that he has been seeking from her:

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It is my impression that the above is apocalyptic. The word apocalyptic has interesting origins. It comes from the Greek apokalupsis, which means revelation. This derives from the Greek apokaluptein, meaning uncover or disclose. Apo is a Greek prefix meaning from, derived from. Kaluptein means to cover. This is cognate with kalube, which is cabin, and kalumma which means woman's veil. Therefore apocalyptic describes that which is revealed when the woman's veil is lifted. What have I done, what have I not done, to lift your veil, to get under your blanket, Kateri Tekakwitha? (104) The story that the historian has told us, however, contradicts this definition of apocalypse. Staining and unveiling are markedly different. In fact, we can argue that the stain is precisely what resists the historian's attempt to co-opt Catherine, just as it resists Catherine's attempt to whiten herself and the Jesuits' effort to erase the Iroquois by converting them. By linking Catherine with apocalypse, the historian puts her, the racial other, in the position of the Absolute or big "Other."7 He identifies her with all that is inaccessible, particularizing the Absolute by identifying it with her otherness; for the anglophone Canadian, the curious combination of Indianness and Frenchness that Catherine represents is an inaccessible mystery. Fucking her would tear the veil of that mystery so that the anglophone could dominate those others. The historian is thus attempting to prove that he has the phallus, which Lacan defines as the imaginary instrument signifying that one lacks nothing. Catherine's conversion to the religion of the French colonizers interferes with this phallic ambition, making the historian fearfully jealous that the French have what he lacks, a jealousy that carries over into his fear that F. and his Indian wife, Edith, have had an affair. This unmanning signifies that the French and the Indians have cut the anglophone Canadian off from his full identity; they have something between them that he can't possess. The notion that the Quebecois possess the phallus while the historian doesn't emerges when he attends a separatist demonstration in "Pare Lafontaine Park" with F. and gets so carried away in the fervour of speeches about Quebecois history and blood that he starts shouting "Fuck the English" along with the rest of the crowd (125). The unity that the demonstration creates has an erotic charge:: "all of us were going to come together" (12.51). But this is an 32

entirely phallic fusion rather than a union of sexual opposites: "I noticed that everyone had a hard-on, including the women" (1^5). The nationalist fervour of the crowd lends it a phallic unity and identity in which the historian momentarily participates. Even though he is not Quebecois, he identifies with them because this apparent phallic positivity compensates for the lack in his own identity. Nationalism, Zizek notes, is always a matter of identification with the phallus; the subject tries to find what he lacks in the nation: "the subject attempts to fill out its constitutive lack by means of identification, by identifying itself with some master-signifier guaranteeing its place in the symbolic network" (Looking Awry 163). By identifying with the Quebecois nationalists, the historian can compensate for the nonexistence of the anglophone Canadian "master-signifier" of nationalism. Because anglophone Canadian identity is always a "not this" — not British, not American — rather than a positive entity, the historian can participate in nationalist identification only by borrowing the Quebecois phallus. But this appropriation can't last. At the end of the demonstration, people start to notice the historian and the fact that he doesn't belong to the group: — He looks English! — He looks Jewish! ... — Let's beat the shit out of him. He's probably a sex pervert. (Cohen 130) The historian is a contaminant from outside, threatening the homogeneity of the nationalists, rather than a "joyful particle" in the phallic unity (1x5). His sudden alienation from the crowd forces him to recognize that he is an orphan. His exclusion forces him to confront his negativity and lack. With this scene, Beautiful Losers illustrates the irony that the Quebecois can produce a nationalist identification through their oppression by English Canadians, whereas English Canadians can do no such thing. While Americans, as E claims, may have oppressed English Canadians as they in turn have oppressed French Canadians, English Canadians cannot create a national identity out of their oppression because they fear that they have no significant cultural, religious, or linguistic markers to distinguish them from Americans. In contrast, linguistic difference allows Quebecois nationalists to view themselves as a unique entity cut off from anglophone Canadians. 33

Indeed, this scene suggests that the Quebecois can identify themselves with African Americans and their struggle against racial oppression by white Americans. The demonstrators in Pare Lafontaine Park are beautiful, according to E, "Because they think they are Negroes, and that is the best feeling a man can have in this century" (12,5). African Americans can achieve solidarity in their political demands because their oppression is spelled out in black-and-white terms. This clear division between oppressor and oppressed is what the Quebecois seek. By parallelling themselves with blacks in America, they can constitute their own positive identity by borrowing such an oppositional logic. We can see why the historian wants to identify with victims: in a strange paradox, victims get the phallus and the positive identity that goes with it as long as they can participate in an absolute oppositional logic.8 In both Catherine's conversion and the Quebecois demonstration, an oppressed identity transforms into a powerful one, a transformation that the historian cannot enact for himself. The apparent erasure of Catherine's Indianness produces something indelible. And, by borrowing African Americans' oppositional logic, the Quebecois can simulate possession of the phallus. Fucking Catherine is a gesture that the historian hopes will grant him access to both positivities, phallus and stain, so that he can achieve the full identity of the oppressed victim. But he has no idea how to perform this gesture: "Here I am courting with research, the only juggling I can do, waiting for the statues to move — and what happens?" (37). This failure, though, is perhaps his saving grace, because the impossibility of fucking Catherine can teach him some form of addressing the other besides either passive identification or violent appropriation. While the historian never properly divests himself of his desire to be a victim, his failure to unveil Catherine forces him to come to terms with his finitude, as we see toward the end of his narrative when prayer replaces phallic aggression as his means of addressing her. Whereas fucking implies mastery through the domination and annihilation of its object, prayer is an act of humility and supplication that preserves an essential distance between the desiring subject and the object of desire, allowing the other to remain other. A prayer is a monologue set up as a dialogue, a fact especially relevant to the historian's solitude and solipsism. The historian makes a final attempt to contact Catherine using an English-Greek phrase book that E has given to him. Thus, the most mundane and humble of 34

communication aids becomes a means of addressing the inaccessible saint. Using a phrase book to speak in a foreign tongue amounts to an admission of one's insufficiency, making it the appropriate symbol of the fact that the historian must find humility. "Prayer is translation," E announces. "A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered. Study the book.... Comb it for prayers and guidance. It will teach you how to breathe" (60). While prayer, like the historian's phallic demand, concerns a desire for the Absolute, it is fundamentally different from demand because it admits the gap between one and the Absolute, between who one is and what one wants, and does not try to cross that gap.9 Although F. makes the supplicant's request sound excessive, even outrageous, placing this request for everything in a language that one has "barely mastered" emphasizes not the desired result of the prayer but the insufficiency of the one who prays, as the historian comes to recognize: O God, O God, I have asked for too much, I have asked for everything! I hear myself asking for everything in every sound I make. I did not know, in my coldest terror, I did not know how much I needed. O God, I grow silent as I hear myself begin to pray.. . . (150-51) Since the phrase book contains typical exchanges between tourists and service providers, the historian puts Catherine in the position of the native shop clerk who can fulfil the needs of her customers. The idea of fucking the other who blocks one's full identity gives way to polite requests for assistance. The phallic demand responds to loss with violence, whereas prayer responds with humility. Therefore, it is appropriate that the phrase book's final prayer/ transaction occurs in a pharmacy and that the request is "please, nurse this wound" (151). For most of his narrative, the historian has been trying to overcome his wound by identifying with victimized others, the Indian and the Quebecois. The project of fucking a saint has been an attempt to turn their loss into his gain. By the end of his narrative, the historian comes to acknowledge his finitude by recognizing his wound as something that can never properly be healed. In this sense, his hystericization has been successful. Returning to the parallel between the historian and the analysand of psychoanalysis, we can say that the transition from fucking to prayer represents the aim of the analysis, which lays the wound of 35

the subject bare so that he or she can recognize that his or her fantasy identification "cannot be made part of a larger, universal, symbolic medium" (Zizek, Looking Awry 157). That is, the historian must recognize that he cannot universalize his position by appropriating the other. Zizek asks, is not the very aim oi the psychoanalytic process to shake the foundations of the analysand's fundamental fantasy, i.e., to bring about the "subjective destitution" by which the subject acquires a sort of distance toward his fundamental fantasy as the last support of his (symbolic) reality? Is not the psychoanalytic process itself, then, a refined and therefore all the more cruel method of humiliation, of removing the very ground beneath the subject's feet, of forcing him to experience the utter nullity of those "divine details" around which all his enjoyment is crystallized? (156) Through this humiliation, Zizek argues, "we can acquire a sense of the dignity of another's fantasy . . . by assuming a kind of distance toward our own ..." (157), The historian in Beautiful Losers undergoes a strikingly analogous process. In the beginning, through his identification with victims whom he recognizes only as "fictional," he tries to appropriate the fantasy of the other (Catherine's martyrdom, the Quebecois reclamation of the phallus through nationalism) as his own. This failure to "fuck a saint" marks the failure of the historian's identification: instead of absolutizing himself as a victim, the historian finds himself in a position of destitute finitude, a position of humility rather tih an mastery. If we read his position in light of Margaret Atwood's argument that the typical perspective in Canadian literature is one of identification with victims, then we can say that the historian's narrative in Beautiful Losers undermines that perspective by showing its ethical consequences for the Canadian minority other(s). In Beautiful Losers, we see the progressive dismantling of the historian's concept of the "fictional victim." Only through his own subjective destitution can the historian recognize the victimized other as "real." While he is obviously destitute from the beginning of his narrative, his subjective destitution is transformed from a false one that merely screens his desire for mastery to a true one that strips him of the possibility of mastering the other.

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Charles Axis: Bodybuilding and the Transcendental Idea The historian's narrative presents R as a triumphant figure. But F.'s own narrative, "A Long Letter from R," shows that he too is a "loser." His difference from the historian, as I have argued, is that he glosses over his loss with manic action rather than melancholic passivity. In contrast to the historian's identification with victims, F.'s strategy is to convert his loss into gain by refashioning himsel as a master. His role as a leader in the Quebecois nationalist movement is part of this refashioning: R wants Quebec to transform itself from oppressed province to sovereign nation. But his strategy turns out to be as flawed as the historian's, because absolute mastery is as ineffective as absolute victimization in resolving the problem of loss. R finds the material for his transformation in ads in the backs of comic books and magazines that promise readers resolution to all sorts of personal problems. These ads urge readers to "act now!" The historian, meanwhile, wants a miracle to occur as event rather than act: "I didn't want to climb to success on a ladder of coupons! I wanted to wake up suddenly with X-ray Vision! I confess!" (Cohen 124). But waiting for miracles means taking the chance that nothing will ever happen, as R suggests when he chastises the historian for not trying a "SCIENTIFIC HOME METHOD" on his warts: "Look at the man who can wait. Look at the man who has a thousand years on his hands" (108). Urgency defines F.'s perspective. While this immediacy seems to be vital and triumphant, action without reflection, F.'s story shows, produces monstrosity. In Beautiful Losers, the parody of the familiar Charles Atlas comic book advertisement provides the symbolic reference for F.'s self-transformation. R chastises the historian for wanting "to live at the front of the comic," where superheroes are magically endowed with powers without having to work for them (12,4). In contrast, R believes in the power of will to change the ninety-eight-pound weakling into the Ubermensch. In the original ad, Mac, the emasculated, skinny man, suffers humiliation in front of his girlfriend when a muscular bully kicks sand in his face. Disgusted by his inability to respond, Mac sends for the Charles Atlas program. After a regimen of fifteen-minute-a-day workouts, Mac returns to the scene of his humiliation and vanquishes the bully; in the last frame of the ad, the words "Hero of the Beach" hover radiantly above Mac and the girlfriend who previously spurned him as a "little 37

man." Beautiful Losers changes the names of the characters and the outcome of the story. Mac becomes "Joe," and Charles Atlas becomes "Charles Axis," linking the muscle man to fascism, with critical implications for F.'s application of this model to Quebecois nationalism. E, a skinny weakling like Joe, takes up the Charles Axis challenge and builds up his physique, only to have a bully kick sand in his face. F. offers no resistance to this assault, however, because the bully is Axis himself: F.'s model becomes his tormentor. Cohen's restructuring of the Charles Atlas story so that the ideal becomes the tormentor illustrates that the Atlas promise that one can achieve an ideal, become a "new man," torments us; it replicates the actions of the bully of the beach even as it tells us that we can overcome that bully. Atlas appears to give flesh to the Absolute, suggesting that the ideal can be achieved on Earth through one's own labour. But F.'s experience of having Charles Axis kick sand in his face shows that something always interferes with the ideal selftransformation, just as with the historian's ideal self-negation. The effort to give body to the Absolute torments us instead of setting us free. Those who attempt to possess the ideal will suffer as much, if not more, than those oppressed by bullies. Moreover, they will likely make others suffer by becoming bullies themselves. What applies to the individual in the parody of personal transformation also applies to the nation. If the weakling transformed into the muscle man represents the ideal of masculine individualism, then an autonomous Quebec, free of the sand-kicking anglophone Canadian bully, reclaiming its history and purifying its blood, represents the ideal of Quebecois nationalism. But this nationalism runs the same risk of hero becoming bully that the Charles Axis ad illustrates, a risk that lies in its demand for the "national Thing," the imaginary phallic plenitude of its people. As Zizek writes, "The national Thing functions ... as a kind of 'particular Absolute' resisting universalization ..." (Tarrying 206-07). That is, a national group imagines itself as having a unique claim on human destiny. Examples include the apocalypticism of the early American Puritans and the Aryanism of Hitler. While not always extreme, nationalism seems to be inconceivable without some version of the particular Absolute. In the case of Quebec, the national Thing is the idea of a linguistically and culturally based unity that runs the risk of excluding ethnic others in the same way that nationalist Quebecois themselves claim to have been excluded. Thus, F.'s Charles Axis transformation, applied to Quebec, risks the fascist obliteration of 38

internal difference. The irony of the nationalist position is that, as long as the Quebecois remain an oppressed group in Canada, they remain on strong ethical ground in their resistance to assimilation. But as soon as they achieve their aim of independence, that ethical ground dissolves, and they have to confront themselves as potential oppressors. Herein lies the crisis of the national transition from weakling to hero, according to Beautiful Losers: the hero automatically becomes the bully. Intensifying this irony, the internal resistance of Quebec strengthens the rest of Canada's distinctiveness from the United States. Indeed, E ultimately claims to be acting in the name not of nationalist purity but of difference: "I want to hammer a beautiful colored bruise on the whole American monolith.... I want two hundred million to know that everything can be different, any old different" (Cohen 199). Here F.'s separatism is directed at Canada only because Canada participates in the American monolith, absorbed into the homogenizing power of the United States, so that Quebec will become a cultural token: "without independence we will be nothing but a Louisiana of the north, a few good restaurants and a Latin Quarter the only relics of our blood" (198-99). Paradoxically, then, F. acts on behalf of Canada because the bruise that he tries to create is the wound of antagonism that sustains Canada's difference from the United States. F.'s nationalism is thus far from simple jingoism; it clearly represents both his dissatisfaction with the world and his manic desire for action. Unlike melancholies such as the historian, who put the love/lost object in the place of the Other or Absolute, "creators" such as F. put themselves in that position. This megalomania spurs them on to take history by the horns and to direct destiny: new systems are forced upon the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is. Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique. If Hitler had been born in Nazi Germany he wouldn't have been content to enjoy the atmosphere. .. . [The creator's] allegiance is to the notion that he is not bound to the world as given, that he can escape from the painful arrangement of things as they are. (58-59) F.'s participation in nationalism establishes the ethical problem of the creator's position: he maps his egotistical designs onto the nation. 39

When the creator operates on the collective following the Charles Axis principle, the danger of imposing one's own fantasy on the community at the expense of the other appears. As Hannah Arendt argues, "aspiration toward omnipotence always implies — apart from its Utopian hubris — the destruction of plurality" (180-81). E's vision of a Quebec transformed in his own muscle man image obliterates the other, as does the historian's identification with the other in his desire for perfect victimhood, and for the same reason: each bases his project on a demand for self-totalization that leaves no space for the other. The novel's inclusion of Adolf Hitler as E's mirror illustrates the danger of his "aspiration toward omnipotence." If African Americans represent the pure ethical demand of the victim in Beautiful Losers, then the Nazis represent the opposite position of the genocidal oppressor. The Nazis provide the most horrific example of the attempt to produce national purity based on one creator's ideal. Nazi Germany is the political application of the Charles "Axis" system, in which the desire to attain the Aryan ideal results in the brutal eradication of the Jews, who, for the Nazis, were the contaminant hindering national satisfaction.10 F. recalls meeting Hitler in a way that makes him appear unconscious of Hitler's infamy, describing him merely as the "Former Lord of a few miserable European acres" (175). As we have seen, F. is interested in history only insofar as it serves his desires. If the historian's obsession with history has made him a hunchback, then E's ignorance of it has made him a blind man. In a crucial symbolic gesture, F. receives from Hitler a bar of soap made of human flesh, a talisman of the Holocaust: "I wanted it. I wanted it. My lust for secular gray magic. Human soap. A full bar, minus the wear of one bath in which I plunged myself, for better or for worse" (175). The soap symbolizes the leftover or waste product of Hitler's self-aggrandizement and the possible product of E's nationalist bodybuilding. Bodybuilding glorifies subjective se//"-transformation, whereas the soap degrades the other, reducing him or her to a remnant, the residue of the other in the case of manic egotism. Edith, the historian's wife, symbolizes what happens when the "creator" acts upon the minority other.11 In this case, the Quebecois nationalist operates upon the Indian. F. wants to transform Edith for what he believes is her own good, and she goes along with him to a certain point. While he has no particular desire to exterminate Indians, his attempt to transform her according to his Charles Axis 40

logic shows that any imposition of one's absolutist project on the other has fascist overtones. Once F. begins to work on Edith, the ethical dimension of his activity changes because it is no longer autonomous self-production but a social act that takes others as objects: the bodybuilding of Charles Axis is grafted onto the hubris of Victor Frankenstein. F. claims to have constructed Edith's body, giving examples of his attempts to modify and control it. The experiment begins with coupons from the back pages of magazines that promise miracles of bodily transformation, echoing the Charles Axis ads (115-116). Here F. uses ads promising "skinny legs" combined with injections of water from Lourdes and Catherine Tekakwitha's spring to remake Edith's body. F.'s "Pygmalion tampering" (195) is initially successful: "Her buttocks were my masterpiece.... [T]he bum was perfect. It's true that from year to year it required electronic massage and applications of hormone mold, but the conception was perfect" (175-76). A gap persists, however, between "conception" and result because Edith's transformed body will not retain its shape; the mad scientist imagines perfection but ends up with monstrosity. Edith has trouble controlling the body that F. has given to her: "it kept changing sizes, she even feared that it might be dying" (175). What produces disaster in this case is fanatic idealism, the desire to give body to the Absolute, rather than action itself. F.'s intentions may not be evil, but his "aspiration toward omnipotence" corrupts his action. When Edith accuses him of meddling with God for his own selfish reasons, he replies: "Was it selfish of me to try to end your pain, yours and his (you, dear old comrade)?" (185). Although his question is rhetorical, we can answer it both positively and negatively: F. is unselfish in that he wants to end other people's pain, but he is selfish because he assumes a position of egotistical omnipotence in his response to that pain. He assumes too much responsibility in his hubristic belief that he can solve other people's problems according to his own model, without respect for'other models. He learns the error of his ways too late: I seemed to wake up in the middle of a car accident, limbs strewn everywhere, detached voices screaming for comfort, severed fingers pointing homeward, all the debris withering like sliced cheese out of Cellophane — and all I had in the wrecked world was a needle and thread, so I got down on my knees, I pulled pieces out of the mess and I started to stitch them together. (186-87) 4i

E follows a manic imperative that denies reflection: "Caution was a luxury. There was no time for me to examine my motives. ... As I limped down the street every window broadcast a command: Change! Purify! Experiment! Cauterize! Reverse! Burn! Preserve!" (186). In this case, Frankenstein's secluded laboratory is an emergency ward in which the "monster" is born not of patient study but of desperation: E is "Dr. Frankenstein with a deadline" (186), and this urgency defeats the Charles Axis model: "I had an idea of what a man should look like, but it kept changing. I couldn't devote a lifetime to discovering the ideal physique" (187). Again, this failure of the Axis model applies to Quebec: "I will confess that I never saw the Quebec revolution clearly" (173). The great failing of the Axis model is that it can only work in a world in which events can be accurately predicted, a world without the contingency and chance that blur the ideal vision. E's confession exposes his desire to flesh out a fantasy ideal that cannot operate in the face of plurality. His imperative to the historian — "Connect Nothing!" — no longer works when he must acknowledge and respond to others. In the image of the social body as car wreck, we see E not: only trying to connect but also sewing himself into the wreck: "sometimes I found I'd run the thread right through my own flesh and I was joined to one of my own grotesque creations — I'd rip us apart — and then I heard my own voice howling with the others, and I knew that I was also truly part of the disaster" (187). When E sees himself not merely as an individual who must tend to his own woundedness but also as "part of the disaster," he recognizes that the social body is also wounded in a way that is too complex for any individual to heal by mapping his or her own vision of wholeness onto it. In the Charles Axis model, the relationship is between the individual and his ideal of himself — that is, a relationship between the one and the ONE." But in the realm of the social, multiplicity and competing visions of how to construct the world defeat this isomorphism: "But I also realized that I was not the only one on my knees sewing frantically. There were others like me, making the same monstrous mistakes, driven by the same impure urgency, stitching themselves into the ruined heap, painfully extracting themselves" (187). In this vision, E confronts his own finitude — the fact that his own intervention is but one among several and is not even particularly powerful or effective. But he can come to this recognition only in retrospect, after his egotistical idealism has failed and the experiment has escaped his control. 42

If the historian's acknowledgement of the ultimate distance between himself and Catherine Tekakwitha signifies the failure of his and anglophone Canada's identification with victims, then E's recognition that his project is a monstrous mistake signifies the failure of his and Quebec's attempt to transform victims into heroes. In each case, we see a breakdown in the capacity of the individual to absolutize himself and to represent a universal perspective. In the national allegory of Beautiful Losers, this failure necessitates a return to the Canadian wound, a return that renounces the universality and infinitude of the absolute individual and accepts finitude and loss as necessary to an engagement with the other in a nation defined by its ethnic, racial, and linguistic fissures. It would be a mistake to suggest that the acceptance of finitude and loss necessitates an acceptance of the status quo in Canada, a renunciation of action. For instance, E's ultimate acceptance of finitude does not support the notion that the Quebecois should merely submit to their oppression at the hands of English Canada. Rather, it suggests the necessity of some alternative action not based purely on ethnic identification with its fascist overtones.

Conclusion: Accepting Loss The third section of the book, "Beautiful Losers: An Epilogue," shifts the novel's perspective yet again, lifting us out of the private obsessions of the historian and E in order to universalize the condition of loss and to stress the importance of responding to that loss in a finite manner that recognizes the other. Written in an anonymous third-person voice, this section depicts the dissolution of the first two narrators and "welcomes" the reader to his or her missing of the speaker. It stresses the inevitable misconnection between people, the basic manifestation of the novel's theme of loss. Through engaging us in this intersubjective gap, the novel leads us to contemplate our own alienation and inadequacy in relation to others. Once the historian and E have had their fantasies of victimhood and mastery stripped bare, it is our turn to go through the same process so that we can see the relationship between our own fantasy identifications and those of the first two narrators. The fantastic metamorphoses of the historian and E in this section are inversions of each other. Given that both characters wish to absolutize themselves through some transformation, we can say that the ending of the novel 43

grants them this desire, but not in the way that they expect: the historian disappears into the space between the frames of a movie, while F. becomes a movie image of Ray Charles projected against the Montreal sky (268).I3 These concluding transformations of the historian and F. are not continuations of their stories, which end with recognition of the impossibility of their fantasies, but recapitulations of what they represent in Beautiful Losers prior to that recognition/4 The historian, on the run from the law for moral perversion, finds his way to the System Theatre, a movie house, where his vision adjusts itself to the speed of the projector so that he sees a black screen while everyone else sees the picture: "The movie was invisible to him. His eyes were blinking at the same rate as the shutter in the projector, times per second, and therefore the screen was merely black" (252,). As his eyes merge with the projector, his body disappears; the beam of the usher's flashlight goes right through him. Throughout his narrative, the historian desires revelation; he is driven by his desire to see beneath Catherine Tekakwitha's blanket. In the System Theatre, his merging with the projector yields the exact opposite of his scopic demand. If the world of appearances is a movie, then what lies behind the projected image is not the thing in itself but the black screen. Thus, this staging of the historian's project ends not with revelation but with the dissolution and invisibility that the historian has tried to counteract from the beginning of his own narrative. Prior to his transformation into a movie image, F. finds himself at the "Main Shooting and Game Alley," where all the machines are broken. His attempt to win at pinball on a broken machine reformulates the scene in which he responds to the symbolic car wreck. The broken machines demand a certain kind of player, a "Promethean" who can transcend brokenness (254). We see how the Promethean feeds off of imperfection, because it gives him the chance to play the saviour and to exert his egotism. The Promethean has to be the one to beat the broken machine. As F. plays, the people around him recognize him and fight over him. Some denigrate him as a terrorist, while others see him as a hero: "He's very nearly the President of our country!" (256). But before the issue can be decided, F. dissolves and reassembles into a sublime movie image in the sky. We might expect him to reassemble himself as Charles Axis, but he reemerges as "a movie of Ray Charles," the blind African American singer. The irony of his transformation is that it evokes his earlier comment on the Quebecois demonstrators in Pare Lafontaine Park — 44

"they think they are Negroes" — and his stated desire to be an American even though he wants to "bruise" the "American monolith." Finally, F. ends up both black and American, leaving us to ponder the symbolic distance between Charles Axis and Ray Charles (between one Charles and another). The transformation reasserts F.'s position as an oppressed minority, albeit in sublime form, rather than a transcendental bodybuilder. At the same time, Ray Charles provides an unforeseen alternative to the Charles Axis model of transformative work, one apparent in the novel's epigraph: "Somebody said lift that bale," a line from the song "OP Man River." While the traditional song has no known author, for purposes that only become clear with F.'s transformation, Cohen specifies "Ray Charles singing 'Ol' Man River.'" Sylvia Soderlind has an ingenious explanation of the relationship between the epigraph and revelation: "In modern Greek, the letter B is pronounced V; thus, carried over into the language of the scripture, the words "bale" and "veil" would be homonymous. The lifting of the bale about which Ray Charles sings in the epigraph becomes . . . the lifting of the veil" (64). This reading neatly accounts for why Cohen would have Charles sing the epigraph and then have F. reveal himself in the image of Charles at the end of the novel: the idealist visionary must give way to the blind blues singer. However, given the text's resistance to revelation of the Absolute, reversing Soderlind's formulation makes more sense. "Lift that veil" becomes "lift that bale," not vice versa. In my reading, revelation gives way to a labour that is necessarily blind, with no Absolute to guide it. In "Beautiful Losers: All the Polarities," Linda Hutcheon suggests that the image of Ray Charles fits into an oppositional, undecidable logic: "Is the Ray Charles movie an image of the final conqueror, the American mechanical cultural victimizer of Canada, or is it ... a symbol of the ultimate victim, the black and blind American, used for entertainment value?" (54). In Hutcheon's reading, Charles is either master or victim. But I argue that he represents a way out of the master/victim deadlock. After all, he is a performer who, in the blues tradition, turns his loss into song or "performance," the word that the narrator uses to describe F.'s final act. Charles's performance testifies to loss, sustaining it without filling it in or submitting to it as martyred victim. When Charles sings, he lifts the bale rather than the veil.15 In so doing, he appropriately represents the novel's take on loss: failure to lift the veil on the perfect victim or the absolute master sends us back to our loss so that we might work 45

with it. Again, this return to loss does not necessitate a political quietism on the part of oppressed groups such as African Americans or the Quebecois, nor does it entail a retreat from politics into aesthetics. Rather, the testimony to loss insists that politics is a matter of lifting the bale rather than the veil. The last paragraph of the novel, which shifts problematically back to the first person, leaving open the question of who is speaking, stresses that Beautiful Losers itself is a novelistic analogue to Ray Charles's singing that directly implicates the reader: "Welcome to you who read me today. Welcome to you who put my heart down. Welcome to you, darling and friend, who miss me forever in your trip to the end" (Cohen 2,60). Both Hutcheon and Soderlind identify this speaker as Cohen himself. Hutcheon, for instance, noting the play between addresser and addressee throughout the novel, argues that the last paragraph shows how Beautiful Losers treats the relationship between author and reader in a particularly postmodern way, inviting the reader to participate in making meaning. She argues, however, that Cohen trumps readers by calling them to his rescue: "Narcissus does not drown in the self-reflecting pool; it is we, the voyeuristic readers, who save him — as the postmodern novel had planned all along" ("Caveat Lector" 43). Thus, Hutcheon sees the ending as a postmodern/Romantic magic act sustained by authorial egotism. Soderlind reaches a similar conclusion: "Leonard 'koan' ... has turned the book into a figurative relic-box for his own saintly body, which in the end is magically resurrected to exult in the game played with the reader" (67). According to Soderlind, the ending shows "the final assumption of control by the author whose claim to speak for a collective is soon obscured by the return to the first-person singular and whose presence is revealed in the anarnorphic strategies that oblige the reader to assume the receptive position" (68). These readings ignore the fundamental ambiguity of the concluding address, presuming without evidence that Cohen is speaking as himself. If he has simply put himself as author in the position of Absolute at the end of the novel, then all the text's undercutting of the historian's and F.'s demands to absolutize themselves is for naught. The point of this undercutting has been to illuminate the dangers of speaking "for the collective" as if it were the individual writ large. If we keep this crucial idea in mind, then the return to the first-person singular at the end of the novel is not the gesture of egotistical domination that 46

Soderlind and Hutcheon make it out to be but an expression of the necessary finitude of the first-person perspective, which can only speak to and not for the other. The ending reasserts the fundamental loneliness of the subject, but it is a loneliness that pays heed to the space between oneself and the other, not the self-enclosed universe of egotism. The novel's conclusion invites the reader to pay heed to the gap between addresser and addressee, the obstacle to both community and subjective fulfilment. The gap between us and revelation is figured in the words of others who precede us and who miss our connection with them. Indeed, the last paragraph of Beautiful Losers reads like a note tacked to a tree in the wilderness: one comes upon it and feels both the call to answer and the impossibility of doing so.16 That this "welcome" concludes the text invites the reader to confront the blank space where the words of the novel stop. Denied satisfaction, we are left to consider what our response to this space should be. Beautiful Losers insists that any relationship with the other, whether in the context of Canadian history's ethnic and racial fissures or in a broader context of human relations in general, must heed subjective limitation if it is to avoid isolating abjection or totalizing mastery, each of which is oppressive in its own way. NOTES 1

Because the conflict between English and French in Canada has become primarily linguistic rather than ethnic, at least on the anglophone side, whether the historian is Jewish or WASP is not as significant as the fact that he speaks English. z Although suggesting that an individual can represent a nation may be problematic, nationalism is a psychological phenomenon, a mental state or a frame of mind. Therefore, we can discuss nationalist perspectives as belonging to representative people, especially allegorical figures in novels. In this case, each narrator is an object lesson that condenses the nationalist condition into the individual psyche. For convincing psychoanalytic arguments applied to issues of nationalism, see the works of Slavoj Zizek, particularly Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, in which he analyses Balkan nationalisms in Lacanian terms. 3 In this sense, loss is ill defined. What is lost is not identifiable; there is just the perception that something is missing. The subject is not autonomous, complete. 4 In this light, one possibility for F.'s name is Freud.

47

5

Catherine is not an official saint according to the Catholic Church, though she is beatified. 6 The stain reminds us that, while Catherine converts willingly, her conversion marks the beginning of the end of Iroquois life that her uncle fears. The image of red covering white recurs in Beautiful Losers. For instance, F. imagines the Indians possessing a red Akropolis, which overlays the Greek foundations of white Western culture with the Aboriginal culture of Canada in a symbolic inversion of the colonial whitening of Canada. I In Lacanian terms, the historian's transposition is a paranoid one that imagines an other behind the other, a fantasy being pulling the strings behind appearances. 8 Ironically, the Quebecois, like the historian, also borrow the phallus by identifying with African Americans. Pierre Vallieres made this parallel an overt part of Quebecois nationalism in his autobiography, White Niggers of America. Vallieres, a member of the Front du Liberation du Quebec, pointedly takes on the position of the "nigger" to legitimate his actions as an FLQ terrorist. He invokes the black/white racial grid to absolutize the difference between anglophone and francophone Canadians who share a white European heritage. 9 For a philosophical perspective on a kind of prayer similar to that presented here, see Levinas. 10 Montreal's significant Jewish population, almost entirely English speaking and opposed to Quebec separation, has been an obstacle to Quebecois nationalism. In the provincial referendum on sovereignty in 1995, most commentators argued that the Jewish vote ensured the federalists' slim victory. Jacques Parizeau, leader of the Parti Quebecois and chief supporter of the sovereigntist position in the referendum, ignited AngloJewish-Quebecois tensions when he made a speech after the referendum was over blaming the sovereigntist loss on "money and ethnics." However, though Cohen himself is a Jewish Montrealer, Beautiful Losers is silent on the tensions between the Quebecois and anglophone Jews. II The First Nations of Quebec persist as a thorn in the side of Quebecois separatism. By and large, they wish to remain in Canada so that they can continue land claims and self-government negotiations with the federal government, believing that all such negotiations would be radically transformed if Quebec were to become a sovereign nation. A key question about the separatist demands of the Parti Quebecois is what would happen to the Indians if Quebec achieved sovereignty. 14 See Jean-Luc Nancy's essay "The Inoperative Community" for a theorization of this logic. 13 Winfried Siemerling claims that the conclusion presents only one old man (51, 53), which is understandable since the conclusion uses only the third-person singular pronoun, but the novel shows a break between one 48

story and another, and the features of the old man in each story clearly suggest that the first old man is the historian while the second is F. 14 This reading explains why E, who is supposed to be dead, is resurrected for the conclusion. 15 One of Charles's most famous songs is "Born to Lose," which Cohen has recorded with Elton John. 16 The effect here recalls E's comment that "I am always startled when a pay phone rings. It is so imperial and forlorn, like the best poem of a minor poet, like King Michael saying good-by to Communist Romania, like a message in a floating bottle which begins: If anyone finds this, know that —" (3z).

WORKS CITED

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. New York: Doubleday, 1959. Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi, 1972.. Cohen, Leonard. Beautiful Losers. 1966. New Canadian Library 153. Toronto: McClelland, 1986. Freud, Sigmund. "Mourning and Melancholia." On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. Trans. James Strachey. Ed. Angela Richards. The Pelican Freud Library n. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1984. 246-68. Hutcheon, Linda. "Beautiful Losers: All the Polarities." Canadian Literature 59 (1974): 4Z-56. . "Caveat Lector: The Early Postmodernism of Leonard Cohen." The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction. Studies in Canadian Literature. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988. 2.6-44. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1978. Levinas, Emmanuel. The Levinas Reader. Ed. Sean Hand. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The Inoperative Community." The Inoperative Community. Trans. Peter Connor et al. Ed. Connor. Theory and History of Literature 76. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991. 1-42.. Siemerling, Winfried. Discoveries of the Other: Alterity in the Work of Leonard Cohen, Hubert Aquin, Michael Ondaatje, and Nicole Brossard. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994. Soderlind, Sylvia. Margin/Alias: Language and Colonization in Canadian and Quebecois Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991.

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Vallieres, Pierre. White Niggers of America: The Precocious Autobiography of a Quebec "Terrorist." Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review, 1971. Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991. . Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

50

GEOFFREY WREN

Dear Leonard, Today I picked up a large horse-chestnut leaf that had fallen early. I had listened some days ago to "Strange Fruits" — an old Billie Holliday song describing lynched coloured people who had to be cut down from a tree, and that was what I was thinking about as I studied this fantastic creation. It had an intricate system of nerve canals used to distribute water. From the strong central nerve all the minor veins forked out — gradually leading to smaller and smaller ones until there was not a single area on the entire leaf that was more than half a millimetre from a supply of water. It was green and supple. I understood the "If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn ..." metaphor you once used, but this is May — it's still only springtime. I suppose God is an artist with the same mentality as those who carve statues in ice, or who chalk beautiful poetry and art on sidewalks — or who build elaborate castles on sandy beaches. Everything has to be so cruel and temporary. Everything has to eventually corrode and disappear, and God sits there like a Sphinx. Is it strange that we lynch each other! We are killers. No-one buys a gun for decoration or to frighten someone off their property — one doesn't buy a gun unless one is willing to use it. Nothing makes much sense any more, my prayers merely reflect that fact. the lord is my shepherd who maketh veins stand out like highways all along the wrist tattood with concentration camp numbers i shall not want an ice-pick in my skull like trotsky or listen to midgets & walruses blow snotty fanfares through their noses in d minor he maketh me to lie down in green pastures with the ira knee-capped victim who sees the sun flatten to the earth with the mound of soil marking the grave of his executed brother he leadeth me beside the still waters where boadicea's freckled face launched a 5i

thousand ships that sunk after albatrosses disguised as Jonathan livingstone seagull sat in crow's nests watching mutineers walk the plank into the jaws of kangaroo court justice he restoreth my soul with a single filing cabinet filled with the atrocoties of the kosovo war & a two-way bathroom mirror where he surveys all through the eyes of a hallowe'en pumpkin he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness driven on by fifteen truck-loads of documents concerning a fig-leaf monica took from the president's penis for his name's sake i weave rumplestiltskin's hay into napalm &c use my firstborn child's photograph as a mein kampf bookmark yea though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death feeding the hungry five thousand with five gold rings four calling birds three french dressings two cauldrons containing Jonestown poisonlaced concoction & a thumbscrew on mata hari i will fear no evil from the brutal truth of newsweek's photos of war and death in glorious united colours of benetton for thou art with me like long John silver's parrot encouraging a war-dance around the golden calf for thirty pieces of macaroni that can be threaded into a religious rosary bead noose thy rod and thy staff they comfort me as imitation psychiatric diplomas & a hose fixed onto exhaust pipes comfort car drivers on their way to silent stethoscopes thou preparest a table before me where garbage men carry away refuse sacks filled with aids infected syringes that stab their shoulders & the phlegm of unspoken apologies spits at my back like a cat-o'-nine-tails & in the presence of mine enemies who strap me into a pillory and pelt me with plastic crucifix-filled kinder eggs thou anointest my head with oil that prevents rust irom eating iron maiden hinges my cup runneth over with the spit from hitler's snarling speeches of hate surely goodness & mercy shall follow me into the fuck-hole grotto of mother nature's winter twilight zone where vaginal wall cave paintings depict closed doors that neither molotov cocktails nor houdini could open all the days of my life i've listened to the story of little black sambo dc people using my bathroom who make empty tin-cans crash to the floor when opening the slanting-shelved trick medicine chest marked private & I will dwell in the house of the lord forever where the owners of pissing guard-dogs of hypocrisy walk around marking their territory while singing we all live in a yellow submarine amen g 5*

"There is a crack in everything": Preservation,, Fortification., and Destruction in The Favourite Game JENNY L.M. KERBER

THE PROBLEM WITH LAWRENCE BREAVMAN, I promptly and rather harshly decided upon turning the final pages of The Favourite Game for the first time, is that he cannot let go of anything. In Leonard Cohen's first novel, memories, childhood games, pop songs, and a multitude of female love objects are constantly desired by the protagonist in terms sharply defined by permanence. It is striking to note the frequency with which the term "always" is interwoven with Breavman's various desires — the desire always to hurtle past the same scenery on night drives with his friend Krantz (101), the desire that the lute in Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy always remain poised and full of music (6x), the desire always to keep his lover Shell four hundred miles away where he can write her pretty poems and letters (225) — Breavman's wish to preserve the moments and individuals that surround him is undeniably strong.1 If only the categorization of Breavman were so simple. Cohen is surely no stranger to complexity, and even in his earliest novel he presents the reader not with a one-sided artistic vision but rather with an artistic mode that is defined by forces that exist in paradoxical but necessary tension with one another. In The Favourite Game, Cohen's protagonist assumes an ambivalent position poised delicately between the desire for the destruction of all recognizable structures and systems on the one hand, and the yearning to preserve fragile moments, memories, and individuals on the other. The path to a higher form of insight, a path that leads through art, is achieved only at the expense of all that surrounds it. In an artistic process fuelled by destruction, Breavman is left struggling in the end to preserve himself. Breavman's instinct for preservation is suggested most strongly in his desire to stop time, thus capturing particular moments in what he terms "the quick freeze" (102). Arguably the most pointed ex53

amples of this desire occur during the night drives he takes with his friend Krantz into the countryside surrounding Montreal. When faced with the hypothetical choice of whether to move on in the natural progression of life or to remain immersed in a single moment, Breavman overwhelmingly chooses the latter, launching into what Patricia Morley aptly calls a three-page "litany" (57) that asserts his wish, in various forms, to let everything remain "as it is right now" (Cohen, Favourite 100). Before anything from the world governed by historical time can contaminate Breavman's perfect image, he must capture and preserve it in "the eternal case in the astral museum" where he can forever possess it, even if only voyeuristically (102). Desmond Pacey argues that, for Cohen, "escapist modes such as movies, games, radio hit tunes, art and prayer are desirable things because they lift us out of the ruck or routine and above the rubble of time" (14). Such escapism might indeed be very desirable, but it comprises only one half of the equation that Cohen constructs; the other, more sobering half is that time inevitably moves on. Certainly, without the movement of historical time, the creation of a museumlike atmosphere would be impossible, for the act of preservation itself implies a knowledge of the impermanence of historical conditions. At some level, Breavman seems to know this better than anyone, for if time did not pass on there would be nothing for him to preserve. A number of factors underlie and struggle with Breavman's desire for stasis in the night-drive scene. First, the very motion in which he and Krantz are engaged is one of forward momentum, as they hurtle through the countryside at "eighty miles an hour" (98). They paradoxically attempt to outrace historical time by moving all the more quickly, but it is a race that they will inevitably lose. Second, the protagonist's very name suggests his own susceptibility to the ravages of time: not only is he "bereaved" by the deaths of those around him (notably his father and Martin Stark) but his name can also be understood in the terms of a brief man, suggesting "man's participation in time and decay ... , an impermanence which the novel contrasts with the permanence, the quick-freeze of art" (Morley 59). Finally, the scene ends not with a triumph of permanence but with acquiescence to the desires of the flesh. Instead of fuelling Breavman's desire to freeze the moment into stasis, Krantz breaks his reverie and pulls him back to the present by asking, "Want to stop for a hamburger?" (102,). Krantz is able to move 54

comfortably in historical time in a way that Breavman cannot; toward the end of the novel, for example, Breavman spends much of his time at the summer camp waiting for his "old dialogue" with Krantz to resume (189). In the meantime, his friend accomplishes myriad tasks, leading to an impressive catalogue of activity: "Krantz lectured the counsellors on Indoor Games for Rainy Days. Krantz prepared a days-off schedule. Krantz set up a new buddy system for the waterfront and drilled counsellors for two hours . . . Krantz was busy" (189). While he shares Breavman's ability to freeze images, as he does while commanding the action on the beach as a lifeguard, Krantz also possesses the ability to release time to run again, a capacity that Breavman fails to acquire (103). Breavman's fascination with the paintings of Henri Rousseau is further evidence of his desire for stasis: "Breavman loves the pictures of Henri Rousseau, the way he stops time" (61). In his brief descriptions of paintings such as The Sleeping Gypsy and Forest Landscape with Setting Sun, Breavman seems to prefer both the potential for and the anticipation of violence and destruction more than destruction itself. In the latter painting, for example, we see a human in the midst of being toppled by the leopard but never witness the killing itself. Similarly, the lion in The Sleeping Gypsy will "always be sniffing the robes of the gypsy, there will be no attack, no guts on the sand" (61). Rousseau captures scenes that satisfy Breavman's desire for the postponement of the inevitable: "The moon, even though it is doomed to travel, will never go down on this scene" (61). To bring anything to fulfilment is inevitably to bring on its destruction, and while Breavman often desires such destruction, his behaviour throughout the novel is characterized by the sentiment he expresses to Shell after he denies their relationship the possibility of long-term growth: "I'm afraid to live any place but in expectation" (iz5). This desire to dwell in expectation also defines Breavman's (and Cohen's) approach to his art. For Breavman, the emphasis in art is placed on process rather than product. He resists the accomplishment of a finished artistic product because once a work or structure is completed it then becomes vulnerable to decay. In his critical study on Cohen, Michael Ondaatje points to the importance of a form of art that remains in process for Cohen's protagonist: "Breavman, then, is studying his own portrait while making it, and the stress is on the fact that the portrait is unfinished. The last paragraph [of the novel] gives no conclusion or summary but adds 55

a new segment to the portrait from the past. 'Jesus! I just remembered what Lisa's favourite game was ...'" (24). While Breavman will not allow his art to decay, the destruction of the material used to fuel it (primarily his relationships with women) is seen as a necessary aspect to the artistic process. While at times it may seem as though Breavman is in denial of violence and destruction, both are in fact integral to his vision. The flux brought on by destruction and the permanence of stasis cannot be separated from one another; they are different sides of the same coin, and each requires the other in order to exist. Returning to Rousseau's work, Breavman comes to this realization: "Wherever the violence or stillness happens, it is the centre of the picture, no matter how tiny or hidden. Cover it with your thumb and all the foliage dies" (6z). Even as a viewer of Rousseau's work attempts to preserve him- or herself by concealing one moment of violence, he or she inadvertently commits another violent act by killing any artistic effect the surrounding foliage may have had. The audience does not enjoy immunity from violence in Breavman's artistic vision, and Breavman certainly has no fuel for his art without at least the implication of destruction. It is this desire for destruction that offers an effective counterbalance to Breavman's search for permanence in the individuals and moments that surround him. In light of such a tension, Venetia Pollock's comments in her 15*63 review of the novel seem to oversimplify matters. Pollock expresses the optimistic sentiment that "For once a young Jew is presented as cocky and gay, proud of his religion to the point of arrogance, which is a delightful change from the usual gloom and chips." Perhaps Breavman is proud of his religion, and no doubt he has a keen awareness of the comic, but to argue that he is presented as decidedly "cocky and gay" is to ignore the equally pervasive sense of impending destruction in the novel. Breavman seems to be anything but optimistic about the current structure of his religion; rather, he views the Jewish structure under which his uncles operate as in dire need of an overhaul. It is a structure that has become cumbersome and whose meaningful roots have been obscured. Breavman notes that of chief importance to his uncles is "to be first, to be respected, to sit close to the altar, to be called up to lift the scrolls. They weren't pledged to any other idea. They did not believe their blood was consecrated" (123). Only the young Lawrence sees how close the entire structure is to crumbling hopelessly into ruins: "In the most solemn or joyous part 56

of the ritual Breavman knew the whole procedure could revert in a second to desolation ..." (12.4). It is significant that the religious structure maintained by men such as Breavman's uncles is not in danger of crumbling due to external pressures so much as it is rotting from within.2- Breavman is keen to witness the internal devastation of structures, and in particular he is fascinated by the violation of the boundaries of the flesh from the inside. The wrinkles that Breavman's mother tirelessly hunts violate the boundaries of her skin as age and stress take their toll (10), and his father, appearing crisp and neat in his bed, is also undergoing internal destruction: "There was something inside the softening body, some enemy, some limpness of heart" (22). The anguish associated with such descriptions of the internally violated bodies around him testify to Breavman's initial assertion that "It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. It is hard to show a pimple" (9). It is this fleshly version of Frye's "garrison mentality" that fuels Breavman's art; such a mentality leads one to focus on those destructive threats to existing boundaries that lie without., while ignoring the inherent fragility that threatens one's boundaries from within (Frye 831). For Breavman, destruction is not merely an external force that acts upon individuals and situations and is then observed and interpreted by the artist; rather, destruction of the flesh from within is the very source of the art produced. Breavman invokes the mythopoetic statement from the Gospel of John when he states that "A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh" (9). While this statement on the nature of inscription and the creation of art focuses on an external violation of surfaces, I would argue that the statement can also be looked at from another angle. The artist is able to create not only by beginning with the logos and inscribing it onto the flesh but also by taking the flesh as the source and then turning it into the logos, into art. In a discussion of the reader's role in Cohen's first two novels, Linda Hutcheon offers a useful reflection on this latter process: "Like Cohen himself, the reader of The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers effects a grand ironic reversal of the tradition of the Word made flesh: the sexuality and obscenity of theme and form in both novels force us to see that here it is the flesh that is made word. In fact, without the flesh, the word would never be" (32). The paradox that lies within this framework, however, is that the source of the word, that which gives life to the text of art, inevitably decays. It seems, then, that although the word is reliant upon 57

the flesh for its conception, the two cannot ultimately coexist. One is sacrificed to give more permanent life to the other. While Breavman awaits and even embraces destruction as a source for his art, however, he is generally reluctant to bring on the destruction himself. He longs for action but, with the exception of his artistic creations, is more often defined by inaction. Instead of tearing down the Westmount Jewish structure he deems to be hollow and hypocritical, he turns away from the city entirely (124). Instead of destroying that which has been constructed by "the great successes, the eloquent speakers, [and] the synagogue builders," Breavman paces about impatiently, waiting "for the blast of a .38 which would clean the house and bring a terrible change" (2,2,). Rather than assuming the position of the destroyer, Breavman more frequently envisions himself as one who moves in after the destruction to make sense of the pieces, giving them a new artistic configuration. In short, Breavman desires to be an archaeologist. While his reference to himself as the '''original archaeologist of earlobes" who deciphers meaning out of the tiny sites of destruction of Shell's skin can certainly be read as comic, the impulse underlying this mock designation has a deeper basis (23). It is not so much Breavman's concern to create the ruins as to uncover them, showing "all the layers like a geologist's sample" and then converting them into art (101). When structures have crumbled, boundaries have been violated, and relationships have been destroyed, Breavman is there as an archaeologist to preserve the pieces and arrange them in his own immortalized sequence of meaning. The ultimate and arguably the most pervasive artefact that Breavman aims to preserve is the female body, particularly the body of Shell, his most significant lover. Breavman wonders if it might be possible to preserve her in a static state, which also disturbingly suggests the necessity of her death: "Could he enbalm [sic] her for easy reference?" (180). Coupled with his desire to preserve the female body in his art is the unsettling desire to then possess what he has deemed to be his creation. Earlier in the novel, Breavman explains to another lover, Tamara, the need he feels to possess that which he has preserved in art: "The lover must totally familiarize himself with his beloved. ... He must know her so completely that she becomes, in effect, his own creation.... This is the only successful kind of sexual love: the love of the creator for his creation. In other words, the love of the creator for himself" (5*4). It is this narcissistic and possessive desire of the artist to turn those around 58

him into products for himself that Shell firmly resists. For Breavman, the boundary between the lover and the artistic creation has been dissolved, but it is a boundary that Shell must struggle to maintain if she is to keep her own sense of personal autonomy. When Breavman realizes that Shell will continue to resist his attempts to dissolve the boundary between her as autonomous individual and her as his artistic creation, he decides to leave her. Ultimately he cannot own her body: "Shell, the Shell he knew, was the owner of the body. It answered her, was her. It didn't serve him from a pedestal. He had collided with a particular person" (80). Breavman has run into a fortification that cannot easily be violated. Shell, however, for all that she adamantly defends the integrity of certain boundaries, also willingly and even wilfully violates others. She embodies the tension that exists between the polarities of fortification and destruction. Her ambivalent position toward fortification is contained within her very name: without any clear opening, a shell is the most admirable and resilient of fortifications, and yet it is also inherently fragile, a structure that is ultimately designed to be broken. Further, what may appear to be the perfectly white and intact shell of an egg or other organism, for example, may conceal a rot that teems within. Shell is described as a classic beauty, but emotionally she is betrayed by the fact that she hates her body (130). Like Breavman, she is keenly aware that beneath tidy structural surfaces can lie impending ruin, demonstrated by both the ruin of the internal body, "dead under the velvet" (149), and the ruin of her marriage with Gordon, hidden by the emerging structural shell of a lavish country house (148). She longs to violate the fortification that protects their empty marriage, and to some degree she succeeds in "destroy[ing] the rising house" by using the dynamite of her adultery with the Lebanese academic Med (159). Shell's desire to violate boundaries and destroy certain structures unites her with Breavman, but it also distances her from him. Breavman is concerned with an artistic form of preservation that is able to render powerless the forces of mortal decay. Shell, however, is much more willing to immerse herself in the world of mortality. Ondaatje points to the incident in the tourist-house room as indicative of their differing attitudes toward the boundaries of artistic expression: "When Breavman begins his affair with Shell, what irritates him most about her is her desire to break out of the boundaries of the room. Even in motels she insists on altering the furniture. She makes the rooms reflect themselves; not satisfied that it is eternal 59

and impersonal as it was with Tamara, she wants it to be mortal" (30). Shell's allowance for the rooms to "reflect themselves" involves striking a balance between turning them into eternal works of art outside of time and allowing for the flaws and decay of mortality. She may add a few aesthetic touches by fluffing a pillow or tucking an unsightly table into the closet, but in this scene she also seems to accept the flaws she cannot: change, such as the crack in the porcelain sink. Breavman, on the other hand, seems to be stuck in an uncomfortable position of ambivalence between two extremes. He would like to achieve the perfect aesthetic image, ripping the flawed sink from the wall and causing it to disappear with "a magician's flourish," but on the other hand he would also like to plunge Samson-like into total destruction: "he would have liked to wrench [the sink] from its grimy roots and swing it like a jawbone, completely demolish the room she had begun to ruin" (136). In some sense, it is the image of the crack in the porcelain sink that best captures Breavman's ambivalent position between preservation and destruction. In a song lyric written earlier in his career that appears in a recent album, Cohen concisely expresses the paradoxical relationship between these opposing tendencies: "There is a crack in everything. / That's how the light gets in" ("Anthem" 373). Cohen's lyric restates the approach to art that he was already developing in The Favourite Game, The paradox in the relationship between preservation and destruction is that the site that affords a path to eternal insight and enlightenment is also the starting point from which destruction inevitably spreads. As the crack grows wider, destruction becomes inevitable, but without the destruction, a more eternal form of knowledge can never be achieved. While Breavman does realize the potential to transform destruction into art, The Favourite Game also still shows an artist who has not completely surrendered himself to total demolishment. Instead of giving himself over completely to destruction and then using his own sense of ruin as fuel for his art, there remains in Breavman an element that still wishes to remain the controlling artist. For example, his refusal to sit helplessly in the passenger seat of the car while Shell drives them through the night suggests that Breavman welcomes chaos only as long as he is preserved from total immersion in it: "If he had to find himself hurtling down a highway, neon motels and hamburgers arresting him absurdly like those uncertain images that were always flashing in his mind, he himself wanted to

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be in charge of the chaos" (135). The young artist welcomes, and even requires, devastation, but also reserves a part of himself that imposes order upon it, transforming it into art. Breavman's tendency to guard himself against total self-surrender is particularly evident in his relationships with women. Critic George Woodcock notes that although Breavman's life has been measured off by relationships with women, "yet in none has [he] been able to lose himself, to dissolve in passion that observing mind which even at the height of love is there as — in the words of the excellent forgotten Thirties poet A.S.J. Tessimond — 'the third in the narrow bed'" (161). Even when Cohen's detached third lover seems to give himself over to passion, as in the early poem "You Have the Lovers," expressions of love for another inevitably become confused with the persona's obsession with himself and his own artistic power: "You create an embrace and fall into it" (14). The imposition of order upon reality is also intimately tied to Breavman's fascination with and love for games. Pacey argues that "The game is beautiful for Cohen because it is associated with the innocence of childhood and because it is a successful attempt of the human imagination to impose order upon reality" (14). Perhaps the game is a beautiful construct, but Breavman cannot remain a child forever (though his act of befriending Martin Stark is perhaps a way of trying to achieve a kind of childhood stasis). Further, a deeper question remains: what happens when one steps outside of the rules or boundaries of the game? When Lisa calls an end to the whipping game early in the novel, for example, all magic is quickly lost, imaginative speech ceases, and the garage in which the game is played is returned once more to its original dull state (19-20). If the only place that an ordered reality can be achieved is within the strict confines of a game, one is left pondering what defines the nature of reality beyond the rules of the game. In The Favourite Game, the reader is given only a brief (and ominous) suggestion of what exists outside of the rules. Only at some undefined point in the future beyond the scope of the novel does Breavman eventually experience the chaos that exists beyond the boundaries he has struggled to control: "One day what he did to her, to the child, would enter his understanding with such a smash of guilt that he would sit motionless for days, until others carried him and medical machines brought him back to speech" (233). I would further argue that it is only in Cohen's second novel, Beautiful Losers, that one sees a total immersion of the individual into a 61

form of chaos that subsequently brings enlightenment. In Beautiful Losers Cohen more fully adopts the ethos that is only suggested in The Favourite Game. Only when one has completely given him- or herself over to chaos, having given up both reason and the reasonable, does one become, as Douglas Barbour argues, "remotely human" (48). In The Favourite Game, the developing artist has not yet submitted to one half of the preservation/destruction dichotomy in order to achieve the other. Rather, Breavman remains poised delicately on the high wire maintaining the tension between these two polarities, and we watch with fascination to see if he can maintain his balance. NOTES 1

Cohen self-reflexively highlights and instructs the reader to note the importance of permanence in the opening passages of Book II, declaring that "Always is the word that must be used" (61). ^ Cohen's concern with Judaism here centres on the problem of internal violation rather than the obvious external assault of the Holocaust. There are startlingly few references to the Holocaust in the novel, a particularly odd omission in light of Cohen's frequent treatment of the subject in much of his other work, especially the 1964 volume of poetry Flowers for Hitler.

WORKS CITED

Barbour, Douglas. "Down with History: Some Notes towards an Understanding of Beautiful Losers." Open Letter znd ser. 8 (1574): 48-60. Cohen, Leonard. Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs. Toronto: McClelland, 1994. —— The Favourite Game. 1963. Toronto: McClelland, 1994.. Frye, Northrop. Conclusion. Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. Gen. ed. Carl F. Klinck. Vol. i. Toronto: U of Toronto P, [965. 82,1-49. 4 vols. 1976-1990. Hutcheon, Linda. "Leonard Cohen." Canadian Writers and Their Works. Fiction Series. Ed. Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley. Vol. 10. Toronto: ECW, 1989. 2.5-65. 12 vols. 1983-. Morlev, Patricia. "'The Knowledge of Strangerhood': The Monuments' Were Made of Worms." Journal of Canadian Fiction 1.3 (1972): 56-60. Ondaatje, Michael. Leonard Cohen. Toronto: McClelland, 1970. 62

Pacey, Desmond. "The Phenomenon of Leonard Cohen." Canadian Literature 34 (1967): 5-23. Pollock, Venetia. Rev. of The Favourite Game, by Cohen. Punch z Oct. 1963: 505. Woodcock, George. "The Song of the Sirens: Reflections on Leonard Cohen." Leonard Cohen: The Artist and His Critics. Ed. Michael Gnarowski. Toronto: McGraw, 1976. 150-67.

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"Not My Real Face": Corporeal Grammar in The Favourite Game CARMEN ELLISON

As soon as I write, as a matter of fact, I share the desires and illusions of autobiographers, and I am surely not ready to renounce them. I say outloud: "I is someone else," and in a whisper perhaps I add: "but what a shame!" I am therefore inside and outside at the same time, in a situation of overlap. — Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography (133) GENERICALLY, The Favourite Game is a difficult text. It is both novel and autobiography, both portraiture and self-portraiture. It is written primarily in the third person, although the first-person "I" is sometimes elided or is present implicitly in a "we" that grammatically marks the gap and connection between "I" and "he." In this paper, I want first to locate the text as an autobiographical novel. As a text in a borderland genre, The Favourite Game presents characteristics of both autobiography and fiction. "Lawrence Breavman isn't me but we did a lot of the same things," Cohen has written (qtd. in Nadel 88). Reading the text as both autobiography and fiction, I will then discuss how its constructed subjectivities both inflect and are inflected by ideas of the body, skin, and textuality. These tropes are key locations for Breavman's/Cohen's1 understanding oi his relationship with the objective world, his own interiority, and the textuality of the body. Central to this complex of relations is the image of the scar that moves between them. "A scar," Cohen writes, "is what happens when the word is made flesh" (9).

"The Autobiographical Pact": Satisfaction by Biography and Blurb In "The Autobiographical Pact," Philippe Lejeune argues that, for a book to be read as autobiography, there must be an agreement

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between the reader and the writer. This "pact" must mark a relationship of "identity" between "author, narrator, and hero" in an "'autodiegetic' narrative" (15). That is, all three terms must be identical in name or "signature" (14), and the text must be written in the first person. The Favourite Game was written by Leonard Cohen and is narrated by an unnamed first person who reconstructs a past-tense "hero" named Lawrence Breavman. The Favourite Game, then, does not qualify as autobiography. Or does it? For Lejeune, the pact can be satisfied implicitly by elements "at the edge of the text" (12,7): a book titled My Life or a preface stating that "This is an autobiography. The T in the text is also me." Still The Favourite Game does not qualify. However, to critics who claimed that his definitions are too rigid, Lejeune responded in later work by stating that he had "apparently overvaluated the contract"2 in his attempt to "distinguish autobiography from the autobiographical novel" (12,7). Lejeune admits that, "if we remain on the level of analysis within the text, there is no difference" (iZ7). Hence, he concentrates his theoretical efforts at the site of surrounding textual apparatus. In the case of The Favourite Game, however, one can argue that the pact is satisfied, but only through the text's reception and history — elements that may not be what Lejeune had in mind but that, for me at least, exist at the edge of the text. The latest publisher's blurb for The Favourite Game, on the 1994 New Canadian Library edition by McClelland and Stewart, describes the book as both a "semiautobiographical portrait" and a "novel." Cohen's biographer, Ira Nadel, reads the book as problematically autobiographical, but autobiographical nonetheless: "His father's death in January 1944 was the central event of Cohen's youth and provided a rationale for his art. As he explained in The Favourite Game: 'deprivation is the mother of poetry'" (6). Nadel gives autobiographical weight to narrative statements in Cohen's text. He is careful3 in his role as biographer: "Every biography is, of course, incomplete; it can only approximate moments that represent the life of its subject" (4). However, a key element of Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen is the linking of Cohen's artistic work with the real events of his life. For example, Nadel writes that "Cohen's idyllic relationship with Marianne was unraveling. Travel and contact with others stimulated his creativity but dimmed his love. His song 'So Long, Marianne,' expresses these sentiments" (12,2,). Narrative and song explain and express the facts of Cohen's life.4 Nadel's text is 65

constructed by overlapping events and time periods. It narrates what led up to a particular event and then moves backward to tell what else happened during that time.5 This structuring problematizes the realism of the text, but Nadel does link Cohen's work with his art: "most of Cohen's artistic energy has gone toward approximating those moments [that represent life], too, providing the biographer with some clues to the mystery of Leonard Cohen" (4). I am not suggesting that The Favourite Game should be read as factual or even as strictly autobiographical. Rather, I am arguing that events and emotions in the book can be, and have been, read as both fictional and autobiographical6 and that the result of generic interplay is a set of discursive effects that negotiate the boundaries between self and other. Cohen writes about himself as someone else, yet the other, Breavman, is also Cohen. Lejeune argues that, historically, autobiography "tends to assimilate progressively techniques which have been well broken in in the domain of fiction" (127), so that this stylistic "signal" complicates the reader's generic reception. He also notes that in "literary autobiography" there is a "paradox," "an essential double game" centred on the "tension between referential transparency and aesthetic pursuit" (12,8). If we read Cohen's text with this tension in mind, as a textual scar where the word of fiction is made the flesh of autobiography, then we can read The Favourite Game as an autobiography about writing and a novel about autobiography — a telling of the self as a past-tense other.

Pronoun Oscillations Lejeune discusses pronoun negotiations between self and other in his essay "Autobiography in the Third Person" in On Autobiography. There he troubles his own notions of both the strict definitions of the autobiographical pact and the division between autobiographical fiction and third-person autobiography: by reading the genres against or with each other, both reader and writer can watch "mirrors overflow the universe of fiction and invade the reading contract" (51). This "splitting in two" (51) is a game played out repeatedly in third-person autobiographies, and I want to keep this framework in mind while discussing how the grammatical structures of The Favourite Game relate to the contexts of the larger narrative.

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Cohen's pronoun oscillations constitute textuality, subjectivity, and corporeality in the book. For the most part, Cohen writes strictly in a third-person format. Breavman and all the other "characters" do and say certain things, but Cohen sometimes breaks the continuity and objectivity of the third person. He begins on the first page by complicating the boundary between the narrator and Breavman: "His mother regarded her whole body as a scar grown over some earlier perfection which she sought in mirrors and windows and hub-caps. Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh" (9). The third person signalled by "His mother" in the first paragraph slips to an unenunciated "I" in the second paragraph: an "I" who thinks and writes these thoughts but who remains nameless and implied — absent as Cohen and Breavman. This slip into the absent first person happens often in the text, and one could argue that these statements without surrounding quotation marks are simply Breavman's thoughts, an implied interior monologue; however, inclusion of "we" at certain crucial junctures in the text points to a more complex system of narrativity and identity. Cohen's text presents what Lejeune calls a "system of oscillation" in pronoun use: "If T and 'he' hide one another reciprocally, is it not best to let them be unmasked one by the other while systematically alternating their use?" (43). It may be going too far to argue that there is a systematic alternation between first and third person, but there are breaks in the narrative of The Favourite Game marked by the oscillation of pronouns: "He tore the books as his father weakened. He didn't know why he hated the careful diagrams and coloured plates. We do. It was to scorn the world of detail, information, precision, all the false knowledge which cannot intrude on decay" (2,2,). Just as in traditional autobiography, where the "I" splits itself between past and present selves in order to reconstitute personal history, Cohen's "we" also works to pose the past as an object to be studied. Personal history becomes something that can be understood by the narrator, the implied author, and the reader. This understanding of past subject positions is held within a complex network of pronouns. "He" is not without his own semantic difficulties — the third person functions as a displaced "I" who views himself as another would.7 "We" is troubled by the questions of inclusion and exclusion brought up by "The Code of Breavman" (n) and, implicitly, by the themes of community and family identity 67

that occur throughout the book. The code is a list of the characteristics on which Lawrence believes the Breavmans pride themselves, but it remains unclear where Cohen fits within that structure: "He [Breavman] couldn't be part of their brotherhood but he wanted to be among them" (12,4). Where does Lawrence fit within the code, the family, and the community? Does the "we" in the code function to exclude him from the Breavmans and to exclude the Breavmans from Lawrence? Does he, as both pronoun and character, fit at all? When an "I" does appear in the text (outside characters' speech), it is generally within the boundaries of Breavman's writing. Breavman sits down with Shell to exchange "gossip and plans" (171), and what follows in the text is a poem or a fragment of a poem: "Wherever you move /1 hear the sound of closing wings / of falling wings /1 am speechless" (171). This mediated enunciation of the "I" interrupts the telling of gossip and the making of plans. At this point in his life, "He thought poems made things happen" (171). Breavman believes that the act of writing will change the course of his life, as it does when Tamara takes his "notes of a long story" for transparently mimetic representation (92). When the speaking subject in the story notes an ending to the relationship (not necessarily the ending), where the now doubly textual "Tamara" leaves, the singly textual Tamara. does not recognize the slippage of Breavman's narrative. She does not recognize the const ructedness of stories, but Breavman does nothing to explain his own position in relation to his text: "I'll tell her I wanted to challenge her love with a display of venom. She'll say, Oh that's what I wanted to hear, and she'll hug me to prove the venom failed" (97). Breavman and Tamara try, unsuccessfully, to understand each other's notion of narrativity. She wants his subjectivity laid bare; he wants to elicit a reaction from her. He wants interplay between representation and reality; she wants representation to be reality. But he refuses to explain.

"Some Crazy Position" It is not until the end of The Favourite Game that Breavman's subjectivity becomes more fluid and comfortable. The final words of the book explore the power of memory to mend the disjunctures necessitated by textuality's pronouns and tenses. Cohen/Breavman is able to reconstruct history and subjectivity through writing: 68

A memory hit him urgently and he asked a waitress for her pencil. On a napkin he scribbled: Jesus! I just remembered what Lisa's favourite game was. After a heavy snow we would go into a back yard with a few of our friends. The expanse of snow would be white and unbroken. Bertha was the spinner. You held her hands while she turned on her heels, you circled her until your feet left the ground. Then she let go and you flew over the snow. You remained still in whatever position you landed. When everyone had been flung in this fashion into the fresh snow, the beautiful part of the game began. You stood up carefully, taking great pains not to disturb the impression you had made. Now the comparisons. Of course you would have done your best to land in some crazy position, arms and legs sticking out. Then we walked away, leaving a lovely white field of blossom-like shapes with footprint stems. (2,34)

The progression of what Breavman/Cohen writes on the napkin rereads The Favourite Game as autobiography and fiction. While Breavman is held in the present tense at the beginning of the book, still "mutilating the film in his efforts at history" (n), temporality at the end of the book becomes likewise immediate. Breavman is "hit" by his "memory" and writes what he "just remembered." The gap of years between narrative present and remembered past that characterizes much of The Favourite Game is collapsed into this immediacy; the past tense here signals a past that is nearly tangible. Within the text written on the napkin, however, the temporality of memory is positioned both in the past and in the present and as both singular and plural. While it is unclear whether the snow game occurred more than once, the details must be written as singular. The grammar of the sentences, however, undoes that seemingly necessary singularity: the conditional past tense of "we would go into the back yard" and "would be white and unbroken" signals the possibility of a repeated game and the contingency of its recuperation as memory. The indefinite article a in "a back yard" and the unnamed group of "a few of our friends" also allow for repetition, changing players, and different landscapes. The smoothness of textuality here, of traditional narrative and autobiographical "voice," holds the possibility of multiple places, people, and times. This possibility, however, should (or "would") remain contained by the necessities of language. But Breavman/Cohen ends the passage with shifting pronouns and tenses and without a return to the familiar present/past third-person narrative. As "you" play the

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game in the past tense ("she turned," "you circled," "you landed"), the possible players are collapsed into an object pronoun that includes the speaker and invites the reader. In the final lines of the book, the pronoun changes back with "we walked away," and the group is brought together again in a pronoun grouping that suggests the subjective agency of the speaker and the others. The scar that "we" leaves on the "lovely white field" is impermanent in the past but permanent in the produced texts. This final passage of memory as text is framed by the place on which it is written. Breavrnan scribbles on a napkin that bridges the gap between text and body. The napkin's intended use, to remove something external from the body, something that should have become internal, is translated to a new use. It is inscribed (scarred) with a story that makes history fluid and allows subject and object, speaking self and other, to play corporeal games in the space of the text. As a concluding exercise in the fictional recuperation of autobiographical material, this passage's grammatical structures ask the same basic questions that I am asking in trying to classify The Favourite Game. How do we (Cohen, Breavrnan, and I) read the textual present in relation to the past? "Where Is It, Where's Your Real Face?" Body and text are often related in The Favourite Game. This relationship begins in the poem that opens the book: "my body leaves no scar / On you, nor ever will" (5). The impermanence of bodies and the permanence of texts comprise a traditional theme of love poetry, from Shakespeare to Cohen. But for Cohen/Breavman, this tradition is reinflected by his early attempts to conflate body and text. Breavman's mother regards "her body as a scar grown over some earlier perfection" (9). Her body is the remnant of an overall wound, and she sees her own face as something unfamiliar: "Look at me. Is this what I look like?" "Where is it, where's your real face?" "I don't know, in Russia, when I was a girl." He pulled the huge atlas out of the shelf and fell with it. He sifted pages like a goldminer until he found it, the whole of Russia, pale and vast. He kneeled over the distances until his eyes blurred and he made the lakes and rivers and names 70

become an incredible face, dim and beautiful and easily lost. The maid had to drag him to supper. A lady's face floated over the silver and the food. (10) This scene, which takes place early in the book, "maps" out bodily/ textual possibilities that are reconfigured throughout. Breavman is confused about the boundary between the corporeal and the textual, but he finds in The Favourite Game that geography, names, and representation cannot be unproblematically grafted onto the body. The book ends with a scarring where the word is made flesh but where those who play the game are held in pronouns, tenses, and an overall generic structure that mark them as both present and absent.

NOTES 1

1 am not suggesting here that Breavman and Cohen should be conflated; rather, the line between them is always unclear. There is a line, however, that I hope is performed in this text by "Breavman/Cohen." z See Lejeune, "Autobiographical Pact" and "Autobiography." 3 Nadel has written a book of biography theory, Biography: Fiction, Fact, and Form (1984), that discusses and problematizes the history and construction of lives in biographies. 4 One of Nadel's perspectives on Cohen becomes more clear if one considers the title of his first book on Cohen, Leonard Cohen: A Life in Art (1994). 5 For example, in the chapter "Plastic Algebra," Nadel moves from the writing of "Ain't No Cure for Love" in 1984 and the inception of Cohen and Jennifer Warnes working on Famous Blue Raincoat in 1986 (2.34-44) to the end of Cohen's relationship with actress Rebecca De Mornay in 1993 (2.56). The text then skips backward to a discussion of the "renaissance" that Cohen's songs enjoyed in the early 19905, but by chapter's end the text has moved forward only as far as 1991. 6 Cohen has commented on The Favourite Game and its first draft, "Beauty at Close Quarters," on various occasions. In a letter to Jack McClelland in October 1960, he noted that "every event described happened with the exception of the death of Robert at the end of the second section. . . . [I] wanted to tell about a certain society and a certain man and reveal insights into the bastard Art of Poetry. I think I know what I'm talking about. Autobiography? Lawrence Breavman isn't me but we did a lot of the same things. But we reacted differently to them and so we became different men" (qtd. in Nadel 88). In a later letter to McClelland, Cohen

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called the revised work "a book without alibis" (qtd. in Nadel 88). Similarly, in a letter to Seymour Lawrence of the Atlantic Monthly Press, Cohen wrote that the book "cleared my mind of dogging autobiographical material" (qtd. in Nadel 88-89). 7 1 have adapted this comment from Lejeune, who, in discussing autobiographies written as dialogue, argues that, "if one seeks to make someone else's point of view part of his autobiography, it could only be in an imaginary way, by restoring the other as a character in the novel; these games or these fantasies will translate, in the eyes of the reader, the idea that the autobiographer has of the idea the other can have of him" (46).

WORKS CITED

Cohen, Leonard. The Favourite Game. 1963. New Canadian Library. Toronto: McClelland, 195)4. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Trans. Katherine Leary. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Nadel, Ira B. Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen. New York: Pantheon, 1996.

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The Voice of Trust in Leonard Cohen SUSAN MACFARLANE

IMAGINE THAT YOU ARE A READER of a text that presents itself as essentially factual: autobiographical fiction, perhaps, or even literary commentary. The intrusion of a voice that may not represent the author's viewpoint — that is, a narrator who is distinct from the writer — disturbs your sense of the boundaries and parameters of the textual world of which you have become a part. A new character has been introduced, and that changes everything because that character is your eyes and ears. Most readers would try to ignore the traces of this sort of distortion, this artifice, and read on: searching for answers, for reconciliation, for grounding, for signs of the real goods, for the genuine author. This is why Leonard Cohen's fiction concerns me. See, here's the thing: it's the voice. Is that the voice of Cohen speaking through Lawrence Breavman in The Favourite Game? Is it Cohen's voice speaking as I. or maybe even F. in Beautiful Losers'? Or is Cohen standing back and presenting the reader with characters whose voices are separate from the author's, characters whose experiences and opinions are — how should I say — fiction? Oh, I know that all writers construct characters in their work, and when a writer seems to be part of his or her own work, seems to have written a character who is a lot like the writer, well, you can be sure there's significant artifice going on even there. You can be sure there's some distance between the character's voice and the author's. Sure, I know that. Still, with Cohen's writing, particularly with The Favourite Game, the suggestion is that it's more autobiography than fiction — that the distance between character, narrator, and author is narrow indeed — although maybe that, too, is part of the construction. But that's why it's so disturbing. Is it just me? Do you find it disturbing when you don't know where the voice is coming from? 73

I had started to do some research on the voice in Cohen's fiction, going to the library and thumbing through a few books of critical essays, when I saw another volume that had fallen behind the books on the shelf. This book was dusty and had clearly been undisturbed for some time. I pulled it out and a sheaf of pages fell to the floor. Glancing through, I could see it was exactly what I was looking for: an essay on disturbing elements in Cohen's fiction, focusing on the voice. It appeared to be a fragment. At some point while I was reading it I began to argue with the cranky voice, and my own writing took shape around central passages of the fragment manuscript. My views were quite different from the anonymous author's, but I found I just couldn't get passages from the manuscript out of my head. There was no author's name on the essay, although he left the initials L.C. at the end and describes himself briefly. I like to think of him as a ghost academic, perhaps a disillusioned colleague of I. in Beautiful Losers.

There are no rules anymore, it seems; everyone goes willy-nilly about writing whatever they please, with no regard for tradition, expectation, or even the balm of common courtesy in extending a band to the bemused reader. Here, friend, reader, take my hand. I really do believe it's important that readers have a sense of who is speaking to them — with what agenda or slant, from what perspective, with what purpose — so as a matter of introduction, I should tell you that my family is of God-fearing Scots Presbyterian stock. My doctoral research is on Catherine Tekakwitha, and I follow Cohen's work as an eccentricity, my wife tells me. I'm old enough that I was thoroughly schooled in the classics and educated at Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto at a time when attending good schools counted for something. I was taught by great men that criticism should illuminate literature, not obfuscate it in jargon or presume to stand alone as if it was an autonomous literary form. The matter at hand is not moi, however, but the artful chicanery of our national treasure, Mr. Leonard Cohen. Mr. Cohen, of course, is well known to have had an alternative lifestyle long before "alternative" became commonplace. His Bohemian entertainments in Montreal, Greece, and New York, including numerous amours and less-than-judicious drug use, add much to

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The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers. His fiction has always been called autobiographical. But what does that mean, exactly? Autobiography, according to the eminent critic Mr. Northrop Frye, "merges with the novel by a series of insensible gradations. Most autobiographies are inspired by a creative, and therefore fictional, impulse to select only those events and experiences in the writer's life that go to build up an integrated pattern" (307). Autobiography, then, is already fiction, to a degree. However, this presents a dilemma, this sliding scale between autobiography and fiction, between fact and fable. It is a problem acknowledged in Beautiful Losers by F. in his concern for the consequences lest the newsreel escape into the feature: F. confesses that "I let the newsreel escape, I invited it to walk right into plot, and they merged in aweful originality" (282). Here we have the crux of the matter: this apocalyptic miscegenation has spawned a creature whose "aweful originality" threatens our very sense of what is true and what is merely fiction. Considering Mr. Cohen's work, then, we see that he is adept at staging evidently autobiographical moments in highly controlled scenes, creating a fictional whole that is fuelled by teasingly autobiographical revelations — "teasingly" autobiographical because these are the hooks that reel the reader in, the tantalizing promise of Truth. It would be disingenuous to deny the scandalous appeal of peering in on the life of someone who seems to have had more (or better) than the average adventures. Clearly, the reader is set up to enjoy The Favourite Game as thinly veiled autobiography, which is the standard entree into a novel. But something happens. The careful reader starts picking up clues that the narrator is not always of the same mind as Breavman. And that's where the cheating comes in. Cheating, you say, eyebrows raised (perhaps disapproving, perhaps intrigued)? Tell me more, you say. Whether teasingly or as an adept marketing strategy, the Canadian publishers of The Favourite Game include an introduction that calls the novel "strongly autobiographical." To market the book by capitalizing on the public image of Cohen as a ladies' man, they put a quote by Irving Layton on the cover: "Leonard Cohen is a man 'who seduces women through words and vice versa.'" The protagonist Breavman's story is told in the third person, but that's a simple feint that won't dissuade any reader, particularly when it's weighed against the strong autobiographical elements: Breavman 75

writes poetry, seduces women, and lives in Montreal, where his family is prominent within the powerful Jewish community. The shame we would feel in being party to our neighbour's indiscretions stops at the book cover. We have no discomfort in the voyeuristic exercise of reading autobiographical works, and, indeed, the acknowledgement that the text is based on actual events comforts the reader because it grounds the genuine emotions that are invariably summoned up by characters and events. That is, when you realize a story is untrue and you have been made to feel sympathy, fear, resentment, or anything at all for the character, it smacks of fraud; you've been cheated, your sensitive nature manipulated by a nonexistent crisis. But when you know (or believe) the events actually happened, it's more satisfying to let loose your empathy and tears. This is a rather delicate situation, you surmise. How to write without violating that sacred trust the reader proffers in good faith? Unfortunately, my belief is that Mr. Cohen violates this most sacred trust between a writer and his reader. There is a contract assumed between reader and writer (or at least most readers assume one) that guarantees a certain correspondence (actual or virtual) between the scene as set and a real-life situation. Some readers even assume a high degree of verisimilitude. That's so naive, some contemporary theorists chide, this belief that art can chronicle life, attempting to lure the reader into suspending a disbelief that no critical reader can. Nonsense: readers want to suspend disbelief; they are comfortable with verisimilitude. Mr. Cohen makes the reader uncomfortable by making it difficult — very difficult — to suspend disbelief. Readers want to read an autobiographical novel (with emphasis on the autobiography), but they keep being reminded that this is a novel, In a confessional, autobiographical form, the reader is already scripted in; so too is the writer, as a writer: crafting, selecting, manipulating words and themes. Readers of autobiographical fiction may indeed be looking for the genuine article, the author's life experiences, but they can't escape the fact that their presence is part of the scene as set; they are being addressed and what they are reading is not a life but a story, a story made by a writer. The reader expects the writer to be detached from the story he is telling to the degree that an adult would be removed from the memories of his or her own youth. In The Favourite Game, the narrator, too, is shown to be detached from the story he is telling, 76

since he is able to range from Breavman's childhood consciousness to a mature, broader social perspective. In describing Breavman's childhood war games, the narrator adopts a childish perspective with a twist of adult irony: "The Japs and Germans were beautiful enemies. They had buck teeth or cruel monocles and commanded in crude English with much saliva" (15). And then the narrator departs completely from Breavman's childhood mind into social commentary: "European children starved and watched their parents scheme and die. Here we grew up with toy whips. Early warning against our future leaders, the war babies" (16). As these scenes from the early pages show, the reader has been led into the book believing that Breavman is a younger incarnation of the narrator, who is presumed to be the writer, Cohen. So long as there is cohesion between Cohen, the narrator, and Breavman, there is no difficulty for the reader, and one's natural assumption of verisimilitude is unassailed. Tragically, that cohesion is repeatedly challenged. Another scene from these early pages demonstrates how quickly our assumptions are assailed. We see Breavman the character is himself detached from his own story when the narrator describes him as aestheticizing his experiences: Breavman as a child is playing with his young friends Krantz and Bertha, climbing in an apple tree; when Bertha tumbles from the tree, Breavman and Krantz "survey" her "twisted into a position she could never achieve in gym" (14). This chilling detachment of an artist from his tableau is what the critic Mr. Ira Nadel describes as "a central conflict in all of Cohen's work: his art demands distancing from the very sources that feed it" (59). Theoretically, one demonstration of distance would be sufficient to skew the identity relation, but just to keep the reader from forgetting (or getting too comfortable), there are repeated, almost obsessive discordances on every level. As an example, I will quote a scene at length and analyze it in some detail. In describing to Shell an earlier sexual encounter with Norma, Breavman imagines it as a film, with himself a character. He is explicitly editing his experience — "Eight years later he told Shell about it, but not everything" (70) — to protect Shell and his own self-image. What was her name? he demanded of himself. I forget. It was a sweet, Jewish last name which meant mother-of-pearl or rose-forest. 77

How dare you forget? Norma. . .. Did you love her? I loved to kiss her bieasts, the few times she let m e . . . . She was engaged? But I was young. She kept telling me I was a baby. So nothing we did was really important. She phoned him long distance every night. I stood beside her as she spoke.... What about her face when she talked to him? I believe I could read guilt on it. Liar. We both felt terribly guilty, I guess.... I told her stories. She made up a blues called "My Golden Bourgeois Baby Sold His House For Me." No, that's a lie.... The camera takes them from faraway, moves through the forest, catches the glint of a raccoon's eyes, examines the water, reeds, closed water-flowers, involves itself with mist and rocks. "Lie beside me," Norma's voice, maybe Breavman's. (7073) This is confusing, so let's try to unpack the three narrative levels of this scene carefully: Breavrnan and Norma are actors in a film — that's one level — being selectively composed from memory by Breavrnan the filmmaker — another level — whose reconstruction is being commented upon and (again) selectively narrated to Shell — a third level. The artist/filmmaker is in the middle, alone, editing experience and providing the material for the commentary. At one point he claims Norma made up a song, then demurs (whether in the filmmaker's or the narrator's voice), "No, that's a lie" (71). The roles (Breavrnan as narrator, filmmaker, actor) are delineated only to be blurred. The blurring of roles spreads not just hierarchically between levels but laterally within one level. The passage is written in questiori-and-answer style without speaker tags or quotation marks, so internal dialogue is not distinguished from speech. This makes it unclear whether Breavrnan (as filmmaker) is asking himself (as actor), "How dare you forget [Norma's name]?" or whether this is in fact Shell's voice; and when he claims he could read guilt on Norma's face, does the response "Liar" (71) come from Shell or himself (as narrator)? So the confusion of voice happens on the narrative level between 78

Breavman and Shell, among levels between Breavman as actor, filmmaker, and narrator, and is also part of the filmmaker's theme: '"Lie beside me,' Norma's voice, maybe Breavman's" (73). To confuse the issue of voice, stance, and authority even further, the characters watching the film, so to speak, start self-consciously posing, speaking of themselves in the third person, as if to shelter themselves when the details become dangerous to their relationship. When Shell presses Breavman to describe Norma, he retreats into denial, then they both retreat into third person, impersonal detachment: I don't know. Why can't you tell Shell? My voice would depress her. (75) This is a kind of baby talk between lovers, but within the context of the scene it works to further undermine identity between narrator and character. With this detachment, ironic tone, and commentary, the author is undermining the character's authority (and by logical extension, the narrator's, too). "Authority," you ask? Yes, I am speaking of the authority that a character has to represent the writer's views, the authority that a reader assumes a character speaks from. Undermining a narrator's authority is an even more abhorrent violation of the contract between writer and reader, particularly when that contract has been presented as based on autobiography and verisimilitude. Consider the damaging effect of the following scene: Breavman walks a young lady named Muffin home from a party. The narrator steps out of Breavman's head for a moment and into hers: "Muffin didn't want to sit on the grass because of her dress, but maybe he was going to ask her to go steady. She'd refuse, but what a beautiful party that would make it" (39). That's not Breavman's intention at all; it's entirely Muffin's fiction, but it's not her story. By losing the connection with Breavman, the narrator is here creating a problem of authority. The narrator's role in an autobiographical fiction is to mediate between the protagonist and author, and the reader's assumption is that these three figures are (virtually) identical. Muffin has no authority to co-opt the narrative voice. If we are to acknowledge (as we evidently must) that the narrative voice is peripatetic, animating first one character and then another, we cannot escape the fact that the narrator is detached from the characters. That detachment must be strictly limited, however. One

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simply can't accept the suggestion that there is complete detachment between Cohen the author and his narrative alter ego, Breavman. To do so would be to reject the principles of verisimilitude that our cult of authorship is founded upon. For if there ceases to be a necessary connection between author and character, then it follows that anyone could have created Breavman, and whoever happened to do so becomes unimportant, thereby losing their power and authority, their proprietary interest. Writers are never disinterested observers of their texts. They can't be, despite a prevailing fiction of unseen hands crafting seamless texts. Similarly, readers are often imagined as anonymous voyeurs, undetected observers of the narrative proceedings. But Cohen disturbs the comfort of detached anonymity. According to George Bowering, we readers are called into the narrative in Beautiful Losers: "Cohen's narrator at one point gives himself away to address the reader directly: 'O Reader, do you know that a man is writing this?'" There is no distance between narrative levels here since, as Bowering claims, "Reader can't help noting that he is being spoken to by author as well as narrator. Anti-realist Cohen intrudes, as they say, into the reading of the book" (5). The reader's quiet solitude is then broached by this disturbance, and Reader becomes a character as much as Writer does. When Cohen shows himself intent on the construction of his image within the text — as a man writing — that disturbs the intimacy between reader and text and also undermines the text's authority, making the writing more obviously a pose, an act. Paradoxically, these obvious signs of artifice remind the reader of the actual situation — a reader reading words a man has written — thereby heightening the reader's desire to uncover the man behind the story — to achieve a sort of intimacy and unmask the "real" story. It is part of the elaborate conceit of The Favourite Game that such a recovery is imaginable. Since the novel adopts conventions of the Kunstlerroman (the artist's apprenticeship), the reader persists in looking for signs of Cohen the young man, wilfully forgetting that we're faced with Cohen as an experimenting artificer. In The Favourite Game at least the reader is afforded a ruse to reconcile the narrative distance as the reflective consciousness of reminiscence — an older Breavman (identified with the narrator and the author) reflecting on his youth. Even that persuasive fiction is not available to the reader of Beautiful Losers.

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I, the narrator of "The History of Them All," is reluctant to control the narrative as you would expect a narrator to. He is an expert who knows how little he knows — I. the scholar, choked by dusty book knowledge, says "I've forgotten most of what I've read and, frankly, it never seemed very important to me or to the world" (4) — a writer who places no importance on what is written. This stance must be anathema to all writers and readers of serious purpose. Genuine, strong writing takes a stand and leads you, the reader, to see that it is the only right stand. A character may be unsure for a while, as a reader may be, but the thrust of the whole business is toward decisive clarity. In the end, the force of reason prevails to reveal the truth. An author should act with authority. In Beautiful Losers Mr. Cohen declines to do so. This is, paradoxically, where his narration comes closest to authentic autobiography. It is with rare comprehension that we read lines possessed of such self-deprecating irony as the following from I.: "My interest in this pack of failures [the A-s] betrays my character" (5). I. may not value writing, but he values communication when the speaker accepts responsibility for his own utterance and when it is grounded in emotion and immediacy: he admires the Iroquois who "ended every speech with the word hiro, which means: like I said. Thus each man took full responsibility for intruding into the articulate murmur of the spheres" (9). Using hiro "at the end of every utterance a man stepped back, so to speak, and attempted to interpret his words to the listener, attempted to subvert the beguiling intellect with the noise of true emotion" (9). I would compare the articulation of hiro to I.'s reminder that a man is writing what you, reader, are reading. And lest we forget that both writer and reader are inscribed here, the book's final words are: "Welcome to you who read me today. Welcome to you who put my heart down. Welcome to you, darling and friend, who miss me forever in your trip to the end" (307). Do we miss this narrator through concentrating on the story, the plot, and not the storytelling? And who is the narrator who welcomes the reader — the book itself as a character, perhaps? The reader wants to know what happens in a book. It is certainly not a lot to ask, and it has been taken for granted that that is what books are for and how they are supposed to behave. When a narrator starts slipping so that the reader can no longer determine where he stands, what his perspective is, and what his relation to 81

the story is, then there is no respect for the simple, time-honoured truths of narrative. That ivriter is no reader's friend. The narrator of this third section is the tree-house paedophile, the apparent amalgamation of I. and F. (into IF, who is "a remote human possibility," as Douglas Barbour has argued [49]) who calls "Homage to the one who couldn't sink his teeth into himself, who was the coward me, who was the author of this history, and who is frightened at this moment in his booth above the drifts of Canada" (128). The narrator mutates in each of the book's three sections, which leaves the reader with no uniting voice to ascribe to Mr. Cohen. The reader is unable to place him in relation to the text, unless he is all the characters. In Beautiful Losers the I. narrator/character i so different from the F. narrator/character that they cannot be reconciled in the reader's mind as a single narrator (until possibly in the syncretic third section). Faced with no unitary voice or consciousness to lead the reader, we have only chaos. When Mr. Cohen stands at too great a remove from the narrative, the draw of his persona is lost and the reader, too, is lost. It is not merely narrative voice (as if narrative voice could be a triviality) that suffers disjuncture to the point of collapse in Beautiful Losers but also structure (the novel is disjointed and so challenging to chronological time that I would call it distemporal) and ultimately form, as the resolution of the book seems not quite revelatory, not entirely clear, and not perhaps an ending so much as a mutation. One comes to the end and feels considerably less illumined than one is wont. In poetry one expects a degree of ambiguity, deferral, and hesitancy, since the form depends so much upon lexical overdetermination and the suspensive punctuation of line breaks. But in fiction hesitancy is rarer. The assertion of linear form and a structure derived from logical causality (the sheer force of "this happened, which caused that") underpins narrative, thereby working against hesitancy of any sort. The linearity of narrative is like the logical cohesion of a critical essay, in fact. If I, as a character inscribed within my own essay, were at this point to go off on a tangent, that's exactly how you would read it (and dismiss it): as tangential to my real purpose. Cohen is an author who will not let the reader dismiss his tangents, who demands that deferral and even doubt be treated as themselves purposeful. Beautiful Losers, then, is rare among fiction for its insistence on doubt and deferral. But within the body of Cohen's 82

work, doubt (particularly self-doubt and religious doubt) and deferral are prevalent, even ubiquitous. I would propose that this constitutes a large part of his appeal. Oh, a trifle of slippage can be tantalizing, can pique curiosity with the touch of the artiste, but the breakdown of the whole system, such as we see in Beautiful Losers, is so drastic as to put the reader's comprehension in jeopardy, and that's where deceit of this sort leads. Readers are threatened by this breakdown in narrative voice; it is as if they are being cheated. They want to know that this is the authorized article: Mr. Leonard Cohen himself was here. He signed it. L.C.

WORKS CITED

Barbour, Douglas. "Down with History: Some Notes towards an Understanding of Beautiful Losers." Open Letter xnd ser. 8 (1974): 48-59. Bowering, George. "A Great Northward Darkness." Imaginary Hand. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli. The Writer as Critic I. Edmonton: NeWest, 1988. i-zi. Cohen, Leonard. Beautiful Losers. 1966. New York: Bantam, 1967. . The Favourite Game. 1963. Toronto: McClelland, 1970. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Nadel, Ira. Leonard Cohen: A Life in Art. Toronto: ECW, 1994.

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"So Long, Marianne" CAROL MATTHEWS

WHEN I MOVED TO MONTREAL IN THE EARLY 19608, I heard a lot

about Leonard Cohen, who, it was said, could be seen there from time to time on his way to New York or Hydra. I heard reports of sightings at the Swiss Hut on Sherbrooke Street, by the Bistro on Mountain Street, or at the Pam Pam on Stanley Street. Black. All in black, they said. He'd swoop by in a long black cape. Or white. All in white, wearing a suit that was somehow brighter than white. Radiant white. Luminous. I went to those places and watched closely but never actually saw Cohen. I read his books, though. The Favourite Game. Beautiful Losers. The Spice-Box of Earth. I was twenty-one at the time, and I didn't know what to think. I had to admire the fact that he was a Canadian writer, not to mention Jewish, and that he lived on a Greek island and spent a lot of time in New York. I admired the cameo appearances and the fact that he had made and worn the shining white suit. But I didn't admire his writing, which seemed to have both too much and too little of the man I imagined him to be. I started to think of him as a kind of chimera. More symbol than substance. A few years later, I heard that Cohen was turning his poems into songs. This seemed like another trick. Did he have any kind of voice? Didn't almost everyone I knew play the guitar better than him? But when, in 15)68, I walked into a friend's apartment and heard a strangely familiar voice inviting me to "laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again," it was magical. All that had happened and might yet happen in the 19605 was in the air. Precisely. Inescapably. "I forget to pray for the angels / and then the angels forget to pray for us," Cohen sang. The song seemed to tell the truth. About my time in Montreal, about the 19605, about the people I knew. About angels. I once read an interview with him in which he said 84

that "An angel has no will of its own. An angel is only a messenger, only a channel." Cohen may not be an angel, but he knows what they are. That's how I felt the first time I heard "So Long, Marianne." I guess I always knew that Leonard Cohen was worth watching for. Worth waiting for.

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HENNING FRANZ

MARITA I'M ALMOST 40 NOW FORGET IT

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Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen .. . Mr, Ralph Gustafson CYNTHIA CECIL

"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN" is an address not often heard today, an archaic phrase that evokes a chivalric time when men were gentle and women were ladies. Nothing is wrong with this image per se, and two true gentlemen in the 19605 were Ralph Gustafson and Leonard Cohen. Gentle in manner, refined in taste, well dressed, and soft spoken, the two poets, who shared a passion for poetry and music, nonetheless couldn't have been more different. Ralph Barker Gustafson (1909-95), as both a poet and a man, exhibited a spirit at once erudite, civilized, and compassionate. The compelling essays that accompany his early anthology of Canadian poets, The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse (1958), demonstrate a serious lifetime commitment to identifying and nurturing Canadian poetry. His own poetry demonstrates an evolution from his highly formal early writing to the visual clarity of "the local heart" in his later writing. A poem such as "Quebec Winterscene" locates the source of his poetic achievement in his beloved Eastern Townships, where he was born. Classical music aficionado, critic, poet, classical musician — Gustafson was a great gentleman, a cachet that did not go unnoticed by Cohen, who treated him throughout their friendship with the greatest respect. Figure i is an excerpt from the diary of Gustafson, and it reveals a resounding clash between classical and pop culture during the 19605.

Party at F.R. Scott's, Clarke Avenue, Montreal, 8 January 1966 Francis (Frank) Reginald Scott (1899-1985) was born in Quebec City, where his father was an Anglican minister and poet. He studied law at McGill University, where he graduated and joined the Faculty 87

F.R.Sott COURTEST BETTY GSTAFSON

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PARTY AT P.P. SCOTT'S, Clarke Ave, Montreal

Jan 8, 1966 Car to Sherbrooke; express bus to Montreal arr« ll:U5am; book plane tickets to N.Y. for MIchelangeli Recital on 21st« Prank's for lunch: Louis Dudek, Buffy & Elma Glasscos Eldon & Sylvi Greer; Al furdy; Leonard Cohen fr Derek May; Doug Jonea & Micheline 4 PM: 3 films at Nat'l Film Board: "horning on the Lievre" of Lanpmar read by Geo Whalley, Pretty. "Leonard Cphen"? the inflation of a "Genius"; embarrassing and distasteful,, Cohen as a child; Cohen on skis; Cohen visiting hi mother; his uncles at a wedding; Cohen shown to be at home in pub hangouts & Greek restaurants; Cohen getting up in a cheap rooming house in Montreal in undershirt and jock-strap; Cohen looking profoundly wise looking at Montreal streets; Cohen in the park; Chhen at a table writing poems ("I do my writing myse Cohen autographing in a bookstore; Cohen reading poems; and finally, Cohen taking a bath & writing Caveat Emptor hmmama (with a lipstick?) on the vail above the bathtub— but the show was free, thank God« Who would want to end up with Cohen in a bathtub? The poems read were social realism filled with gooc Oh yes; Cohen and his jokes— one sequence about hair, advocatir a museum for unwanted hair* Hairraisingo "Autobiography": on A.M. Klein. Short and good,, It was good to get a goy (Lampman) somewhere in the afternoc (Buffy stays home and sleeps) Back to Prank's: Mike & Dianne Gnarowski come ins then Irving & Av3 Irving goes over to Louis at the fireplace and wishes him a Happy New Year* Frank reads Lampman letter: reply to one sent from Drummondville b F.G. Scott asking for Lampman's volume of poems,, Lampman says he hasnT but six cents. Admonishes F.G, for envying him his life and associations in Ottawa, sayingj dont, everyone he meets in Ottawa is a "mirage»" Cohen advocates Bob Dylan as present great poet-singer., Frank goes out ff buys 2 Dylan records. Frank cant stand them; Purdy 3e aves ro< Marian votes for Dylan. Dylan is mental chewing-gunu Frank ^raises Purdy1 s Eskimo poems as "excellent",, Purdy plies Jones with whiskey; Doug gets sloshed; Micheline rejec Jones for overnight; Doug drives home; car smashed at Waterloo. Eldon sits quietly through visit; tells tale of releasing 7 young Americans from a taverna at HeiracKlion held captive by owner & plied with liquor, Irving, tbe genial goon, wants to be the 1st poet to make a fcmilli to destroy popular image of poet as an incompetent; berates me a scab for not getting diminished work-load as Poet in Residence. Thinks "Sift in an Hourglass" as a title is CAA, weak title. Pre "Burnt Bronze." (Frank too has doubts about title, Louis arguing every inch of conversation off top of his nead. Is j bv Aileen Collins during evening, Mike leaving Lakehead for Sir Geo Williams, Another "Yes" on way. Wynne Francis comes in; writing biography of Irving; Dudek next. Bacon & esrgs with ^ank ft Betty. Bed. Breakfast- Home, Worried strain*

FIGURE I

Journal entry of Ralph Gustafson for 8 January 1966. 89

of Law in 15128. He was Dean from 1961 to 1964 and retired in 1968. In 15)28, he married Marian Dale, a young Montreal artist. By January 1966, Scott had published several volumes of poetry (Selected Poems appeared in 1966), coedited with AJ.M Smith two anthologies, and distinguished himself as an early translator of Quebec poetry. In 1965, he had won a Canada Council award for outstanding achievements in the arts and humanities and the social sciences. Scott achieved distinction not only as a poet but also as a political activist and a leading constitutional lawyer. At this time, it was only natural that the launch of Cohen's new film would be at Scott's home, as Scott was (in the words of Al Purdy) "the den mother of Montreal poets" (137). Louis Dudek The 19505 were Louis Dudek's most prolific years as a poet. This period coincided with his correspondence with Ezra Pound, who was being held at the St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington, DC. Under the tutelage of Dudek, Pound's modernist poetics had a farreaching influence on the poetry published in Montreal at this time. In the fall of 1954, Cohen was a student in Dudek's poetry course that focused on the modernists. As evidenced by his early publications in civ/n, Cohen rebelled against the modernism of Dudek and others in favour of a late-Romantic tradition in poetry. In 1957, Dudek began publishing his own magazine, Delta, which lasted until 1966. As well, he created the McGill Poetry Series. Despite Cohen's and Dudek's creative differences, Cohen was offered the first volume in the series: Let Us Compare Mythologies (i956). John (Buffy)

Glassco

John Glassco is best known for his Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970), but in January 1966 his most recent publication was English Poetry in Quebec (1965), which detailed the proceedings of the Foster Poetry Conference (12-14 October 1963), the first of its kind, initiated by Glassco, A.J.M. Smith, and ER. Scott. The idea had been to hold an informal conference of poets in the Eastern Townships. The conference took place at the Glen Mountain Ski Chalet in West Bolton. Most notable among the speakers were A.J.M. Smith, who delivered the paper "The Poet and the Nuclear 90

Leonard Cohen; in background, Aviva Layton and unidentified woman. COURTESY BETTY GUSTAFSON

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Crisis," and George Whalley, who gave the address "Revolution and Poetry." Delegates included Leonard Cohen, Louis Dudek, John Glassco, Eldon Grier, Ralph Gustafson, D.G. Jones, Irving Layton, Eli Mandel, Seymour Mayne, ER. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, Ronald Sutherland, and George Whalley. Interestingly, among the five poets unable to attend the conference were Margaret Avison and Phyllis Webb — the only women out of twenty-five invited delegates. Selections from the poetry readings are included in the book, Cohen being represented by "Alexander Trocchi, Public Junky, Priez Pour Nous." According to Glassco, "Leonard Cohen said there were thousands of poems and thousands of poets in the world and that most of the poems don't get written down. The poets are specifically anal characters who like to collect it all" (42). Glassco sums up the conference thus: however tedious, smug, hidebound and anaesthetized the older poets may appear to the younger, and however tedious, frightened, bewildered and incoherent the younger may appear to the older — the conference at least brought representatives of both age-groups into a friendly and often hilarious apposition, and clarified, though of course without reconciling, the aesthetic and intellectual positions which are always proper to each. (8) Eldon and Sylvia Grier Eldon Grier is a poet and artist from Montreal (born in London, England, in 15117) now residing in West Vancouver. Prior to 1966, he published five collections of poems, the most recent being A Friction of Lights (1963). His wife, Sylvia Grier (nee Tate), is also an artist. Al Purdy Alfred Wellington Purdy was born in 1918 near Wooler, Ontario. His breakthrough collection, Poems for All the Annettes, appeared in 1962 from Contact Press. The Cariboo Horses, published by McClelland and Stewart, won the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry in English in 1966.

92.

Derek May Derek May was a Montreal actor who worked with filmmaker Don Owen and editor Barrie Howells (director and editor, respectively, of Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr, Leonard Cohen) on two NFB films produced in Montreal in the mid-1960s: Notes for a Film about Donnie and Gail (1966) and The Ernie Game (1967). Cohen is credited for the music ("Kensington Market") in The Ernie Game. In Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, May is introduced as one of a small circle of real friends, and Cohen says that "He is the most irreverent person that I know. His humour is based on the idea of upset. That's what he does with ideas. He rocks them like those boxing toys that never fall over." From the Gustafson journal excerpt, it appears that May arrived with Cohen at the party. Doug Jones D.G. Jones was born in 1929 in Bancroft, Ontario. Before 1966, two of his books were published by Contact Press, Frost on the Sun (1957) and The Sun Is Axeman (1961). Archibald Lampman Archibald Lampman's first volume of poetry, Among the Millet and Other Poems, was published in 1888; his second, Lyrics of Earth, appeared in 1896; and a third, Alcyon, was in press when he died in 1899. George Whalley Born in 1915 in Kingston, Ontario, George Whalley had two volumes of poetry published in his lifetime: Poems 1939-44 ( I 946)> and No Man an Island (1948). He wrote his poems during the Second World War. After the war, he turned his attention to the theory of poetry and a lifetime study of the work of Coleridge.

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Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen National Film Board of Canada, 1965 (44 min., black-and-white) Directors: Donald Brittain, Don Owen; producer: John Kemeny; writing: Donald Brittain; editing: Barrie Howells; music: Donald Douglas; photography: Paul Leach, Laval Fortier, Roger Racine; sound: Margot Payette. Awards: American Film Festival, 1966-67, blue ribbon award; Canadian Film Awards, 1966-67, award in TV information category; International Festival of Short Films, 1968, exceptional merit award. Caveat Emptor The buyer must keep his eyes open, for the bargain that he agrees to is binding. The full legal maxim is Caveat emptor, quia ignorare non debuit quod ius alienum emit ("Let a purchaser beware, for he ought not to be ignorant of the nature of the property that he is buying from another party"). Gustafson's journal entry questions the use of lipstick to write on the bathroom wall. In the film, Cohen uses his pen to write what he calls "a warning" to the aiadience, signalling that the film is "not entirely devoid of the con." AM. Klein Abraham Moses Klein began writing seriously as a student at McGill University (192,6-30), where he first met A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, Leon Edel, and Leo Kennedy. Klein won the Governor General's Literary Award in 1949 for The Rocking Chair and Other Poems (1948), and he gained great critical success with his novel The Second Scroll (1951). His publications also include Hath Not a Jew (1940) and The Hitleriad (1944). Ira Nadel mentions that Klein was an instrumental figure in Cohen's life. Klein suffered a nervous breakdown and withdrew from writing in the mid-1950s,, and Cohen interpreted Klein's breakdown as the result of being exiled from his community.... "I always was more interested in the exile," Cohen has commented, "somebody who can't claim the entire landscape as his own.... His [Klein's] 94

fate was very important to me, what happened to and what would happen to a Jewish writer writing in Montreal who was writing in English.... He made a step outside the community. He was no longer protected by it." (67-68) Speaking at a 2,9 December 1963 symposium entitled The Future of Judaism in Canada, Cohen gave an address titled "Loneliness and History" in tribute to Klein, whom he claimed to be the last great poet who tried to be prophet and priest. The NFB film Autobiographical by A.M. Klein (1965) is based on a Klein poem about his Jewish childhood in Montreal. Mike Gnarowski During the 19605, Mike Gnarowski was editor of Yes (see note below) and a published poet. Postscript for St. James Street was published in 1965 by Delta in Montreal, with a foreword written by Louis Dudek. Gnarowski edited Leonard Cohen: The Artist and His Critics (1976). Irving and Aviva Layton Irving Layton was born in Romania in 1911. His family moved to Montreal a year later. His first book of poems, Here and Now,, appeared in 1945. In 1959, McClelland and Stewart published his award-winning collection A Red Carpet for the Sun. Layton married Aviva Cantor (a writer of children's books) in 1961. In the 19605, Layton became a well-known public figure. His dynamic personality and provocative views were highly influential for Cohen. Nadel enthusiastically describes his role as mentor: Layton was responsible for strong-arming Cohen into the wonderful, boisterous, in-your-face world of serious poetry, where dedication to the art was all, and all of you had to be put into the work. The quest for bold experiences was the poet's finest teacher, Layton preached, and in Cohen he had a willing disciple. (41) Nadel also notes that over the years the influence was reciprocal: "'I taught him how to dress; he taught me how to live forever,' Cohen has remarked" (42,).

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Irving and aviva layton COURTESY BETTY GUSTAESON

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EG. Scott Frederick George Scott was the father of F.R. Scott. His Collected Poems appeared in 1936. Lampman Letter In 1959, a collection of Lampman's correspondence was published in a book titled Some Letters of Duncan Campbell Scott, Archibald Lampman, and Others, selected and edited by Arthur S. Bourinot. It is not known if the letter read at Scott's party in January 1966 was from this collection or an original. Lampman's correspondence is currently housed at the University of Ottawa. Bob Dylan as Present Great Poet-Singer Bob Dylan's influence on Cohen is well documented. "Cohen has stated his appreciation of Dylan's work many times, calling him, at one point, 'our most sophisticated singer in a generation. . . . [N]obody is identifying our popular singers like a Matisse or Picasso. Dylan's a Picasso . . .'" (Nadel 156). The two albums that F.R. Scott purchased are not documented by Gustafson. However, Dylan did release two albums in 1965, Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. These two titles are confirmed by Nadel (141). Purdy Leaves the Room Purdy gives another account of the party in Take This Waltz: A Celebration of Leonard Cohen (1994): And another time at Frank Scott's place in Westmount. Scott was sort of den mother to writers; a law prof, he fought Premier Duplessis in the courts and won. Cohen had recommended Bob Dylan to Scott, the latter rushing out to buy a couple of records. Then a dozen of us listened to Dylan, lounging around on sofas and carpet, imbibing culture. I couldn't stand it. Dylan sounded to me as if he had a bad cold, pneumonia in the offing. I retired to the kitchen where Marian (Frank's wife) kept the beer. (137)

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Nadel quotes Purdy as shouting, "It's an awful bore. I can't listen to any more of this" as he "bounded out of the room as though booted from behind" (141). Purdy's Eskimo Poems Funded by a Canada Council grant, Purdy went to Baffin Island in 15)65, and the result was the publication of North of Summer (1967). Irving, the Genial Goon Layton seems true to form in this exchange. Gustafson was poet in residence at Bishop's University. Despite Layton's criticism, Gustafson used his original title for his next collection. Sift in an Hourglass was published in 1966. Aileen Collins Editor of civ/n, a Montreal literary magazine of the 19505, Aileen Collins married Louis Dudek in 1970. Most recently, she edited Dudek's publication 1941 Diary: Louis Dudek (1996). "Another 'Yes' on the Way" Yes was a semiannual literary magazine published in Montreal under the editorship of McGill grad student Mike Gnarowski. Yes reprinted some highlights of a scathing review of Layton and Cohen by Dudek, first printed in the Montreal Star in November 1963, as well as Layton's rebuttal: "As a literary performance it probably isn't even minor. As truth, or wisdom, or insight, it will never appear on a shelf of philosophy. What it is in Canada, is popular buffoonery — and since Canadians don't know poetry anyhow, it passes for poetry." That was all professor Dudek wanted to say about Mr. Layton's book, but the waspish mood was still in him, and he went for lesser game. With sure aim he brought Mr. Leonard Cohen flapping to the ground. The message for Mr. Cohen who is so proud of his "neurotic affiliations" of his poetry, rings with the calm of the Hippocratic Oath — "heal thyself." ... [Layton's rebuttal] "To use an old cliche 98

on the subject, why shouldn't poetry be prostituted too?" (Gnarowski [i]) Issue 14 (September 1965) featured poems by Ralph Gustafson, Louis Dudek, Ron Everson, Douglas Barbour, and Ron Sutherland. Issue 15 (September 1966) ("another 'Yes' on the way") featured poems, a translation, and a diary by John Glassco. Issue 16 (October 1967) published Al Purdy and a young Michael Ondaatje (a poem titled "Come to the Desert"). Wynne Francis Wynne Francis published Irving Layton and His Works in 1984 and edited the preface of his Selected Poems in 1969. She had published "Montreal Poets of the Forties" in Canadian Literature 14 in 1962 and "A Critic of Life: Louis Dudek as Man of Letters" in Canadian Literature zz in 1964. WORKS CITED

Glassco, John, ed. English Poetry in Quebec: Proceedings of the Poster Poetry Conference, Oct. 11-14, 1963. Montreal: McGill UP, 1965. Gnarowski, Michael. "Of Prophets and Multiple Visions." Yes 13 (1964): [i-3lGustafson, Ralph. "Quebec Winterscene." Collected Poems. Vol. i. Victoria: Sono Nis, 1987. 59. Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen. Dir. Donald Brittain and Don Owen. NBF, 1965. Nadel, Ira B. Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen. New York: Pantheon, 1996. Purdy, Al. "Leonardo." Take This Waltz: A Celebration of Leonard Cohen. Ed. Michael Fournier and Ken Norris. Ste. Anne de Bellevue, PQ: Muses', 1994. 137-38.

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Famous Blue Raincoat: A Symposium Douglas Barbour W[H]earing it. Fragmented memories. I know the song well & for me it always had that end of December feeling, a way of writing you now, singing the good times as well as the bad. I also wore a raincoat in New York's cold or anywhere I'm living. Then there's music meant to last all thru the evening, a slow orgasm of tears deep in the desert of song. I never could afford a Burberry but he could, or did, the proceeds of some kind of record I bought (& later the CD I'm listening to this moment), & you did too. I got it — the joke, the book, the song's contrapuntal ironies in those doubled words he didn't need to go to London to learn. Now you, I, even he in all his fame &t glory, look so much older than in 1955*. Because we are. It seems to be a way of slipping the self, that ego hung out through the open window (flung out), ironically the more he escaped the more he was trapped heroically going to the station to meet every train when not one would take him far enough away from I. Who changed his face so often, took pains to hide, yet always came back out from the monastery, the recording studio, 100

the little house on Hydra. In Paris, lining the streets outside L'Olympia and cheering for the 23rd encore, the beast achieved critical mass and gave him the glory he insisted he refused to seek. When later that voice goes lower the lines refuse the easy rhyme just for the frayed moment: raincoat, Jane, you, & the sleeves torn at the shoulder were part of the guesswork, loss, forgiveness, all repaired like the coat. The enemy sleeping now with your woman (Jane?) may be a taste of the trouble you took from her eyes, some little lock of hair for remembrance, the black leather coat that replaced that famous blue one finally. Things tend downwards, hard days turn worse. Those were the days, the nights, the voice more or less clear. Enough for poetry and song. I mostly listen to others now, those tough women, but knew those lyrics well &c how the lyric lies in wait to catch the imagination still, dress it up in identification, or at least overhearing those sly come-ons we still believed in the days before we took Berlin. George Bowering I like the song, but I dont even know any of the words. Jim Devlin Reflections on "Famous Blue Raincoat" •

Quite simply, it's the inevitability of each successive note in Leonard's melody, notes that for the most part move up or down only by a tone, that gives the song such a resonance. This in turn is enhanced further by Bob Johnston's production: those 101

faint wind chimes in the intro; ethereal female backups, separated so eerily in the stereo mix; the strings seeping in during the second and third choruses and again in the final few bars. ... •

It all begins somewhat unpromisingly, though, with Leonard's by then almost de rigueur low-down broken chords on guitar, in a minor key; in this song, however, the pulse is considerably slower than in, for example, the earlier "Master Song," "The Stranger Song," and "Avalanche." •

•

but before I can really begin to figure out to whom the letter is addressed, the first verse is over, and my mind and ears have gone out on a different path to be welcomed by that gorgeous burst of modulation to C major in the first chorus: "... Jane came by with a lock of your hair" — it's just a momentary thin crack in the gloom to let some light in, but it's enough . . . it's enough . . . •

•

A cold 4 a.m. apartment in a wintry New York ... the solitary writer at his desk, penning a letter to ...

at which point, I was reminded of the other great songwriter in my life, Franz Schubert, and the intimate regard he had for keys and their relationship within a song; and having duly consulted John Reed's marvellous "Schubert Song Companion," I come to realize that in this song Leonard has indeed matched Schubert's "instinctive awareness of the emotional colour of individual keys," for Reed continues: "C Major is the key of clear morning . .. and sublimity ..." — though in Leonard's case the additional reference to "the intoxication of first love" is certainly not relevant!

At some point afterward comes the realization that the song itself has nothing to do with a raincoat — famous, blue, or otherwise. (And if you pursue the thought, somewhat tangentially I must admit, you might also realize that "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong" is another title that bears little resemblance to that song's mise-en-scene.}

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® Leonard sings his song very well; on the album, it follows "Love Calls You by Your Name," and I can't think of a more mesmeric sequence of two love songs anywhere else in his entire discography; and I love it — it's a great song; but I don't like it performed in concert in front of thousands of people.... ®

I much prefer hearing it in the comfort of my own warm living room — at four in the morning, at the end of December.. . .

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Sincerely . . .

Bill van Dyk If you ever doubted that Leonard Cohen was capable of writing a good melody, listen carefully to "Famous Blue Raincoat." Listen to how quietly and unobtrusively it announces itself: "it's four in the morning," as if it was four in the morning, "the end of December," as quiet and distant as a lone figure in a snowstorm. He's writing to see if his friend has recovered his health, the melody rising gently as he reports that this man is building a house in the desert and that he is "living for nothing now." The melody never rises quite so far that you might think he has escaped some kind of tragic realization. The narrator is living on Clinton Street, in New York, as Cohen was at the time he wrote the song, but he is addressing someone who owns a "famous blue raincoat," which is also obviously Cohen — he has referred to this raincoat many times in interviews and concerts. So the physical facts suggest that both men are Cohen. Is he addressing a duality within himself? The narrator relates that "Jane came by with a lock of your hair." He credits his "enemy" with removing the "trouble" from her eyes, which he, the narrator, had believed was there for good. He addresses this man as his "brother," his "killer," and asks if he has ever succeeded in going "clear." He thanks him — ironically, ambivalently ("I guess I forgive you") — for standing in his way. It seems to me that one Cohen has left Jane, in order to live in a desert, to seek Lili Marlene, perhaps to end up in a monastery on some mountain somewhere. The other Cohen watches over her while she sleeps and welcomes her when she comes by "with a lock of your hair," a pathetic relic of a failed relationship. The phrase "go clear" is a likely reference to Scientology, to the objective of a process for removing "engrams," the residue of 103

morally destructive behaviours accumulated during this life or previous lives. (Cohen was a disciple of this movement for a time, though he later withdrew from it.) He asks, at the end of every chorus, "did you ever go clear?" Are you at peace with yourself, after treating Jane to a mere "flake" of your life? Is he addressing himself? Does the song make psychological sense from that point of view? Surely, some of Cohen's relationships ended painfully, and Cohen must, at times, have felt responsible for a certain degree of emotional harm. I read this song as an intimate expression of grief and as an acknowledgement of the fact he himself was responsible for the bitter end of this relationship. He is his own brother, his own killer; he stands in his own way. After accepting Jane's love, he retreats to his house in the desert so that he can live for nothing. I don't sense that anything hopeful exists, at this moment, between the narrator, the alter ego, and Jane, other than the fact that he is there for her, watching over her as she sleeps, as if he is that part of him that wishes the relationship would endure. He makes this amazing statement: "Thanks for the trouble you took from her eyes, I thought it was there for good so I never tried" — as if, even in his compassion for Jane, he doesn't really believe he is capable of giving her more than just another "flake" of himself. Perhaps it also indicates acceptance of the fact that the part of him that Jane loves — the creative, sensitive, restless soul — is the same part of him that seeks some kind of solace in a desert — in emotional distance. "Famous Blue Raincoat" is about a failed triangle consisting of a vulnerable woman and a divided man. Judith Fitzgerald The Dancer and His Cain (An excerpt from The Art and Craft of the Master of Song, a book-length exegesis devoted to the words and music of Leonard Cohen, © 1999 by Judith Fitzgerald)

In the history of human culture there is no example of a conscious adjustment of the various factors of personal and social life to new extensions except in the puny and peripheral efforts of artists. — Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (70) 104

"Famous Blue Raincoat," the sixth of eight sides on Leonard Cohen's impeccably arranged Songs of Love and Hate (1981), finds the narrator wearing (against the elements) the flesh of the beloved raised up in the blizzard of "Avalanche" before descending into "the rain" pelting "Last Year's Man." Here he's reluctantly donned "a uniform" until all involved (or implicated) fall together and "flesh" becomes a veil (contextualized in the god-awful union of Bethlehem and Babylon). The deflated declaration at the centre of the song's raison d'etre — "Jesus was the honeymoon and Cain was just the man" — echoes and reverberates in cinematic clusters of images involving, predominantly, clothing and degrees of nakedness (or exposure). The pattern is seamlessly reinforced by references to what individuals wear (and consequently bear, pardon the pun) throughout the song cycle, balancing "the snowman and the rain" ("Love Calls You by Your Name"). Rips, rags, slashes, and tears dominate the material vision, however blinding or obscured that vision may, of necessity, be (in terms of love and light most keenly felt when the narrator protests the bright cruelty of both). In the structural long view, "Famous Blue Raincoat" neatly mirrors (or reflects back upon) the album's third side, "Dress Rehearsal Rag," earmarking its organizational counterpoint in the binary narrative of love and hate played out over eight interconnected compositions (balanced as four songs of love and four of hate or four in the morning and four in the afternoon). Commonly considered Cohen's grimmest representation of the squalor of the achingly impoverished and incomprehensibly surreal marginalization of the contemporary individual, "Dress Rehearsal Rag" is, no doubt, music to slit one's wrists by. Then it was four in the afternoon (anticipating the grieving doubles of "four in the morning"), and, of paramount importance to the coherent dualistic vision Songs of Love and Hate embodies, now its sonic epiphanies are wrapped in the cut of the cloth as an inversion of the rags-to-riches narrative culminating in the coupon "written on your wrist" (a sign Holocaust survivors know too well, particularly since the numbers are indelibly branded in an unforgiving gun-metal blue). Cohen, so the story goes, partial to a raincoat he sported during his sojourn in London, found himself minus said protection on cold New York's Clinton Street. It had gone missing. So, by extension, had its owner or, more accurately, the better-half narrator Cohen regularly employs carving out the contours of the dynamic and dualistic nature of such an owner. In this instance, the individual is 105

one acutely sincere L. Cohen who, in the ultimate act of revealing all, conforms with the concurrent notion of concealment (as Freud would have us believe) and vice versa. Concluding with such a salutation smacks of an almost self-flagellating zeal to create — urgently, nakedly, and with almost joyously painful resignation — a more or less accurate portrait of the doppelganger coming to grips with a world where grand-central chaos reigns supreme. "It's four in the morning, the end of December, I'm writing you now just to see if you're better...." Winter's an avalanche frame of mind, the darkest nights of the year at a time when "I" write to "you" while righting the imbalance between comprehension and recognition. The speaker animates the double (also understood as brother or killer) within the constructs of love/hate, self/ego, anima/ariimus, et cetera. Here love is a seductive monster, and spirit is gripped with an austerely exquisite brutality — echoed in the sparse and often clumsy guitar accompaniment played against Jennifer Wames's breathy and haunting voice intertwined with stripped-down strings — and the shattered splinters of knowledge collide to demonstrate visibly, without flinching (despite the tear at the shoulder), the palpable complicity in betraying the better man within himself in the name of "some kind of record," the one for whom the mourning is well advanced. Jane, the lock of hair, and did you ever go clear? Jane's the wife of the universal nobody already described as "living for nothing, now." Jane, who came . .. with the lock (on the little house deep in the desert) ... before leaving, sends her regards. Did the narrator ever go clear, come clean, get down to the marrow of that matter about truth and trouble? Have we been tipped off? Are we dealing with Samson and Delilah? Or, more likely, does this constitute yet another example of Cohen's fascination with John Donne's line in "The Relic" (1633), the one concerning "a bracelet of bright hair about the bone"? (Variant interpretations suggest Scientology's theory of engrams and so on. Cohen acknowledges he flirted with several belief systems, Scientology among them; however, he found the teachings of Lafayette Ronald Hubbard Jess than satisfactory for his purposes. In "Dress Rehearsal Rag," of course, the Rosicrucians are similarly discounted [again reinforcing the relationship between the pair of tunes].) "Thanks for the trouble you took from her eyes . . . I thought it was there for good so I nevei tried. ..." A lovely twist and turn (of 106

the Nazi dagger) opening out on the first-person singular, the pair of eyes, vision, and seeing double. Double trouble. "I" thought it was there for good (or goodness perhaps) while the other "I," the flake who "never tried," had "been to the station to meet every train" or, not to put too fine a Freudian point on it, had almost obsessively dallied only to discover his carnal quest seeking the universal ideal embodied in Lili Marlene of World War II and bigscreen fame had vanished. One does not endure a holocaust of the soul and immediately find words to express that devastation; sometimes, the heart is simply too shattered to articulate how shattered it is. "Famous Blue Raincoat," then, comprises an internal dialogue, voice-over division, contrasting the better man made manifest as the slain brother relieved of his famous blue raincoat (protection against the elements) with one more thin gypsy thief that night that he "planned to go clear" or come clean. When Cohen's voice cracks ever so slightly dropping down to the final "go," listeners intuitively know the honeymoon's over. Christoph Herold Extracts from "Famous Blue Raincoat: An Approach to an Integrated Analysis of a Song" The song is written in the key of A minor. The time signature is 3/4, which is slightly uncommon in the rock and pop genre but is used by Cohen in several other songs as well, such as "Chelsea Hotel #2," or "Take This Waltz." The tempo is fairly slow, and the musical arrangement is very sparse. The lyric itself is not written in a strict meter, but, especially during the stanzas, the speech rhythm is essentially dactylic, which fits well with a 3/4 time signature. Interestingly enough, in the stanzas, where speech rhythm and musical rhythm would naturally coincide, Cohen's phrasing is very free, with many entrances slightly ahead of or after the beat, whereas during the bridges and the choruses, which are written in free verse, he sticks much closer to the underlying beat. The melodic range of the song stretches from G to g, a range well within the normal parameters for the speaking voice. In the melody, seconds are predominant; occasionally, Cohen uses thirds and, between bridges and choruses, octaves. In his singing, Cohen often glides from one note to the next, connecting the notes even more strongly. Since the

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volume of his voice stays on a moderate to quiet level throughout the song, the vocals are very close to normal speech. This is especially apparent when compared to Jennifer Warnes's version of the song, which is far more "musical," with the rhythm of the vocals far closer to the underlying beat and more nuances in timbre, tone colour, and dynamics. The structure of the song stays close to the standard stanzabridge-chorus pattern often found in popular music, without adhering to it too strictly. The basic chord patterns are as follows. Stanzas: Am Am F F Dmy Dmy E7 E7 Bridges: Am Am Hm Hm Am Am Hm Hm Am Am G G F F G7G7 Choruses: C C C C Gj Gj Gj Gj Am Am F F Em Em G G F F Em Em The song ends with a guitar outro, which uses the same pattern as in the stanzas but ends after seven measures on the minor dominant, giving the ending an open, unfinished character. The final harmonic resolution is missing the same way as the resolution of the personal situation of the three characters in the song is. In this instance, the musical structure of the song can be said to carry meaning independently of the text, an observation that leads to the question of the nature of the relationship between music and lyric in "Famous Blue Raincoat." The question of whether, in a given song, the music or the lyric is predominant is always difficult to answer, precisely because a song is more than just the sum of its ingredients. One could say, of course, that the melody does not contribute much to "Famous Blue Raincoat" because it is fairly simple. On the other hand, one could also argue that this is a matter of choice and that a simple melody fits the quiet atmosphere of the song better than a more intricate melody would (even though, in Cohen's case, the melodic lines might also be influenced by the acknowledged limitations of his voice). All in all, one can probably say that the function of the music in "Famous Blue Raincoat" is to support the lyric rather than to supply an independent level of meaning, to constitute a second sign system, as it were. It supports the lyric in two ways: harmony and rhythm create a basic structure on top of which Cohen places the text. The musical structure is far more regular than that of the lyric, and the rhythm creates a foundation on 108

which Cohen can phrase more freely without losing rhythmic coherence. On the level of sound, the music, with the minor key, the sparse instrumentation, the slow tempo, and the evenly low volume, helps to create the melancholy mood inherent in the text. Development takes place in the lyric, but the music essentially remains the same throughout the song, or at least throughout corresponding sections. The relatively subordinate nature of the arrangement also becomes evident when comparing Cohen's original version with that of Jennifer Warnes, with a completely different instrumentation. The nature of the song is changed far more by the fact that it is not Cohen himself singing than by the fact that the accompaniment consists of piano and fretless bass. It might be interesting to examine whether this assumption concerning the relationship between music and lyric holds true for all of Cohen's songs: in a BBC broadcast in 1994, Cohen and Warnes mentioned a marked change in his writing in his latest records, when he was able to present his ideas more clearly to musicians by using a keyboard. At the end of an analysis like this one, there is always the question whether the gain in information was worth the effort that went into it and whether dissecting a song does not diminish its aura. As a singer, I have been singing "Famous Blue Raincoat" for years, but as the analysis progressed I was nevertheless increasingly amazed at how much I hadn't noticed all that time. And, listening to it now, I do so with an increased awareness of the interplay of so many different elements, whose interaction makes songs, especially Cohen's songs, such a unique art form. Drew Mildon Leonard, Bob, Joan, and Me My experience of "Famous Blue Raincoat" will always be deeply textured by the nature of my initial reading, a reading done, not to the baritone vacancy of Cohen's vocal instrument, but to the clear, tuneful interpretation of Joan Baez. Her rewriting of the song, on Diamonds and Rust in the Bullring, nullifies the much-discussed "complexities" of the original's pronouns and, to some extent, erases the "problem" of the famously odd signature with which it ends. Yet, despite the solutions provided by lyrical changes, Baez's version forces a reevaluation of those questions while also enhancing the sensation-producing power of the piece. 109

The inescapable fact of the song is that it is first and foremost a letter, a musical version of a (usually) textual form. The further complication of the signature is dealt with by Baez by making the sender universal, like Jennifer Warnes, altering it from "sincerely, L. Cohen," to "sincerely, a friend." This seems, at first notice, to be a reasonable change, a functional alteration to suit a new voice. However, this change is made more significant when one considers the surrounding tracks of the album on which this altered version appears. Diamonds and Rust in the Bullring opens with its title track, Baez's tour de force indictment of Dylan, a song that, like "Famous Blue Raincoat," purports to be something that it is not, in this case a phone call from "a booth in the mid-west." In a fantastic twist, Baez sings "my poetry was lousy you said" in the middle of a beautifully crafted poem/song; this is, nonetheless, a statement that the songstress seems to take to heart, for the rest of the album consists of covers and traditional songs. The similarity of the content of the two songs is striking, and, joined on the album, they hit the listener with a nearly unbearable double dose of nostalgic melancholy. We are faced with two legendary male figures: Dylan, the unnamed lover of "Diamonds," and Cohen, the unnamed writer of "Famous Blue Raincoat." The tangible absence of these two figures, especially the purposefully erased Cohen, is further complicated by the song that lies mashed between them, Bob Marley's "No Woman, No Cry." Like the other two, this song is about memory and relationships, but unlike them it has an indisputably positive overtone. Unlike in the other songs, Baez goes out of her way to attribute "No Woman, No Cry" to the songwriter, urging the crowd in Spanish to "Sing with me this song by Bob Marley." In certain situations, I would suggest that Baez chooses to erase the presence of the two white men while privileging her own female voice and that of the African man. In other company (say, over pints at the pub), I would suggest that what we have here is a hint about the biographical roots of Cohen's original song. Yet these issues have never been at the heart of the song for me. Instead, the power of "Famous Blue Raincoat" lies in its form, personal and essential, and in a combination of sensations produced by choice lines. The opening verse calls to mind the smell, black streets, white snow, and interrupting grey-brown slush seen from behind numb-cheek ridges in northern cities; mixed with this image, the Baez line "I see you standing with brown leaves falling no

all around you and snow in your hair" leaves a tangible and indelible vision of a past lover in the Cohen landscape. Together these lines overwhelm me with a sensual experience while throwing me into the emotional theatre of jealousies and failed past relationships. Mimi Baez once told Cohen that "you quit jealousy like you quit smoking"; frankly, for all the talk of "going clear," people rarely quit smoking, and jealousy is something you summon from the desk drawer of your memory like an old snow globe and shake it to watch the colours and the flakes swirl and to remember the cold and the leaves and the smoke. Do we ever go clear? Probably not. Definitely not. Christopher Rollason "New York is cold," the narrator of "Famous Blue Raincoat" declares, "but I like where I'm living." The Big Apple location plunges the listener into the world of the great 19608 songwriters — the city's famous harsh winters also feature in Paul Simon's "The Boxer" ("where the New York City winters aren't bleeding me") and in Bob Dylan's first self-penned song (or first in track sequence of the two on his debut album), "Talkin' New York" ("somebody could freeze right to the bone ... New York Times said it was the coldest winter in seventeen years"). But in Cohen's song, the snowy city half-conceals the heat and ferment of social revolution. Quaint and archaic as it may have seemed from the neoconservative 19908, the 19605 and early 19705 were a time of social experimentation to a degree that many have now forgotten or prefer to forget. One belief of the day that held brief sway in certain radical circles was "nonjealousy"' — a corollary of the phenomena of "open couples" and "multiple relationships" that some favoured at the time in both theory and practice — even if to recall all that today might seem like what Dylan, in "My Back Pages," calls "memorising politics of ancient history." This aspect of the period's social history is touched on only marginally in the work of Dylan — indeed, only retrospectively, in the Montague Street episode in "Tangled Up in Blue," his song of 1974 that is also his farewell to the 19605. In Cohen's work of the 19605 and 19705, however, nonjealousy is a recurrent theme. "Sisters of Mercy" from his first album contains the line "And you won't make me jealous if I hear that they sweetened your night," and "Paper Thin Hotel" from Death of a Ladies' Man (1977) offers up the in

theme with remarkable explicitness. Even as late as Various Positions (1985), we hear, in the song "Coming Back to You," But I have to deal with envy When you choose the precious few Who've left their pride on the other side of Coming back to you. "Famous Blue Raincoat" is centred on the same 19608 theme. Cohen's text throws out the gauntlet to traditional views of monogamy and exclusiveriess in marriage — to the conventional wisdom that prevailed before^ and now prevails after, the experimentation of the revolutionary period. The song is in the form of a letter, from the narrator, "L. Cohen" (best taken as a fictional character), who is also the husband of "Jane," to an unnamed third (male) person who at some point in the past engaged with "Jane" in a practical demonstration of nonexclusivist interpersonal relations: "And you treated rny woman to a flake of your life / And when she came back she was nobody's wife." The writer of the letter tells the addressee that he forgives him, and he even claims that the whole experience was fruitful: "I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you / I'm glad that you stood in my way ... thanks for the trouble you took from her eyes." Not only that, but he also invites his alter ego ("my brother, my killer") to repeat the experiment some day: "If you ever come by here for Jane or for me / I want you to know that your enemy is sleeping /1 want you to know that his woman is free." This gesture could be seen as one of extreme, even Christ-like, magnanimity — or, indeed, as a message from a social universe on the verge of eruption, a signal from the vanguard of a revolution that never quite happened. Such a reading seems to me, at any rate, more useful than trying to read the song as autobiography. It is true, of course, that this song as letter is signed "Sincerely, L. Cohen," and that in other songs Cohen allows a signature to enter — on New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974); in the title of "Field Commander Cohen" (but thai: song is clearly a fiction); and on Recent Songs (1979) in the line "My darling says, 'Leonard, just let it go by,'" at the end of "Ballad of the Absent Mare" (but that song visibly deals in symbol and allegory). However, all these signatures are best taken as pointing not to the individual Leonard Cohen but to the producer of the text and, 112

therefore, to the fictional entity "Leonard Cohen" created out of the body of texts signed with that name (equally, the "Bob Dylan" whose name appears in the song title of "Bob Dylan's Dream" is not the historical Zimmerman-Dylan but a fictional character dreamed into being by a series of dream texts). Judy Collins seems to have got the point in her cover version of Cohen's song (featured on her 1971 album Living). In contrast to Emmylou Harris, who, in her version of "Absent Mare" on her album Cowgirl's Prayer, mutates Cohen's title into "Ballad of a Runaway Horse," Collins makes no attempt to "feminize" the song's "I" or to reverse its gender attributions — and, notably, she does not transmogrify the signature into "J. Collins" but retains the "Sincerely, L. Cohen." I do not mean to suggest that the "L. Cohen" of "Famous Blue Raincoat" is — any more than the "Bob Dylan" of "Bob Dylan's Dream" — a fiction in the sense of being a free-floating, arbitrary construct dissociated from all human history. My point is that this song — like many others by Cohen and by Dylan — communicates certain experiences and sensations of the 19608 that were ultimately collective and does so all the more powerfully by operating, not through the register of unmediated autobiography, but through that of a resonant and multilevelled fiction. Stephen Scobie Yes, but it's always the signature I come back to — "Sincerely, L. Cohen" — and whenever I hear a cover version I always wait to see whether the singer will preserve the original line or take refuge in "A Friend." Jennifer Warnes, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Tori Amos — why is this highly gender-specific song, of all Cohen's songs, the one most often and most memorably covered by women? (I love the way Tori Amos drops her whispered, scarcely audible "thanks" into the surrounding, forgiving silence.) I've written before, in Signature Event Cantext, about this irruption of proper names, act[ing] in a quite improper manner, abandoning the propriety and the property-rights of their (as)signed station in order to invade the text, to appear in poems in their own name, and in their own write. .. . The effect is always equivocal: to detach the name from its position of power, on the title or the copyright page, and to set it free in the text of the poem 113

itself, is to risk losing control altogether of the logocentric presence of the author, and of his author-ity. (145-48) The poetic signature like a self-composed epitaph: a sign of absence, a sign of death. But this time, what puzzles me even more is the form the signature assumes: initial and surname. Not "Sincerely, Leonard," or "Lenny," or even "Leonard Cohen," but a cold, formal, distanced "L. Cohen" — bureaucratic, legalese^ denying all intimacy or even simple acquaintance. At the end of such a song, when the secrets of the heart have been opened for us to share; after all that love, and scarcely daring hope, and desperate shame; after we have burned in that house in the desert, shivered in the streets of New York; after we have invited our killer in and given him thanks; after we have locked or unlocked the relics that are now all that remain — how can we possibly retreat to the stiff formality of "L. Cohen"? Whatever else may have "gone clear," clearly that signature hasn't. It's an abrupt, callous gesture — an attempt, perhaps, to disengage the singer (and us) from the intensity of the emotional experience of the song. Similar, perhaps, to the "I don't even think of you that often" at the end of "Chelsea Hotel" — and similarly, in the end, unsuccessful. Because we're not disengaged. The song haunts us still. And we know that the name of the ghost is deeper, and closer to us, than "L. Cohen." Jacques Willaert "Famous Blue Raincoat" — I've carried that song with me for twenty-five years. Every night that I'm awake at four in the morning (Vargtimmen), I know there is something special in my heart. The ambiguity: the pain of a fundamental, existential loneliness; and the gratitude that it is the way it is. So we can talk about the beauty of things that don't live (a raincoat, a station, a cold December), or things that are past (we reconstruct them in our own ways, no two people's the same), but we cannot talk with the present or with the other things that live. We speak other languages, we are separated by the others, and, besides, we are total strangers. We don't even care if we care too much, we don't even love if we love too much. We know we are alone, and we know that this is the only way it can work. "Jane . . . my brother, my killer ... the 114

trouble you took from her eyes": all show this pain and this gratitude. And both are condensed in a sublimated escape to things that cannot be hurt: a raincoat, for instance, blue, famous.. .. "And his woman is free" is not a gift but a fact. The only way to get close is to share our pain and the fight against the facts. But that is also the perfect way to lose. "It's four in the morning, the end of December." Some day, some time, some place, some moment, some person writes a letter to some friend. Why? "To see if you're better"? I don't believe so. The writer is jealous, so sad when he writes late at night from Clinton Street, NYC. He writes to some enemy, to some friend who took his girlfriend, Jane. He does not want to live with a jealous virus, because it will kill him sooner or later. So what can he do? Consciousness of a fundamental, inevitable distance always remaining between him and his Jane, between all lovers, is not something he can bear. Can he transport his love to a higher level where it is safe? "And his woman is free." A higher level is to give away the things you like most of all. To put the thing higher than you. But he feels pain: not he but some friend, isolated in some desert, took away the troubles from Jane's eyes. Not he but someone in a station by accident almost. He cannot control the thing(s). "I see Jane's awake." It is the end of his naivete, the beginning of a new way of life. He also awakes. His love for Jane is great, so great that he can never handle it on his own. He needs help, but there is no help. On the contrary, there are only "flakes," everywhere and all the time flakes, so small but so powerful that they can beat the greatest things in someone's life. He discovers that the stuff of life is flakes. Things take place by the action of flakes. "You treated my woman to a flake of your life" — the crucial sentence of the song. A sad flake for him, an every-minute-changing flake for Jane, and maybe a meaningless flake for the friend. But certainly also a sweet, soft, beautiful, and innocent flake. A flake with the destructive power of a hurricane and the magnificence of a wonder. Sad or sweet depends on the person, the moment (now-past-future), and the action of the other flakes. "Did you ever go clear?" It is not important. Whatever you do, the flakes don't care. The action of the flakes is random. Being random, flakes cause the crucial moments of our lives. Sometimes these moments are glorious, sometimes catastrophic. The song is built up with examples of flakes: the flakes you can see immediately (a man in the station with a rose in his teeth), the flakes you remember (a lock of your 115

hair, a famous blue raincoat). The flakes contain all the mysteries of the universe. As matter is built up with molecules, life is built up with these flakes. Very small changes in daily life caused by random flakes result in very big changes (a perfect illustration of "chaos theory"). The unpredictable behaviour of human beings as a result of very small, random changes caused by an infinite number of infinitesimal flakes. Unpredictable and different every moment, for every person, for every combination of persons, for a whole society and its history. "If you corne by here for Jane or for me." The only thing we can do is accept the presence of the flakes and their great power. What we cannot control can never make us guilty. So maybe the flakes will take Jane away. But the same flakes brought Jane here. Sometimes they are cruel, sometimes they are brilliant. Sometimes snow is cold and wet, sometimes snow crystals are pure and beautiful like diamonds. Human beings are touched every day by many flakes. Some are good, some are bad. But all of them are innocent and mysterious. Watching them, remember them and recognize that they gave us this beautiful song. Sincerely, a friend

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Four Grounds: Ways to Play in Cohen's Garden of Verses RUTHANNE WROBEL

Constructing a Framework for Analysis THE LYRICAL VERSES OF LEONARD COHEN are graceful invitations in my classroom, enticing students to look up, listen closely, think again, and read aloud. For some memorable lessons in listening skills, I first outline the concepts of "figure" and "ground" as they appear in the work of Marshall McLuhan; then I send students off to explore our cultural landscape as described by Cohen in his prescient words on The Future and other albums.1 Filled as they are with multiple levels of meaning, cultural and literary allusions, wordplay, figures of speech, metaphor clusters, and lines that cross boundaries and blur distinctions, Cohen's verses create a verdant garden for young minds to explore. This essay focuses on "Closing Time" as a case study in figure-ground analysis. High school students are amused, amazed, and enlightened as they examine this composition from varied grounds such as history, politics, literature, and personal experience. To begin our studies, we refer to the following definitions. Figure: the item or subject in the foreground that first attracts attention; whatever stands out as the main feature for conscious observation, the focal point for concentrated study; the content that clearly commands attention, the obvious message. Ground: the setting or background, the underlying situation or foundation from which figures emerge; elements that, while often overlooked or ignored, structure, define, and limit options and actions; the design that shapes the content, the medium that determines the message. We work with general questions that can be applied to any subject, item, or text.2 We then tailor questions to suit a literary example. The result is a four-part framework designed to help teachers and students phrase questions, analyze effectively, and decipher levels of 117

meaning in many texts. This approach encourages careful reading, critical thinking, and creative interpretations. Questions for a Literary Text i. Textual forms and figures — a close reading of the verbal form to find the central figure or literal meaning. Which are the most important words? Which are the most vivid images? Which words are repeated? Find examples of literary devices or artistic techniques. Does this text follow a pattern? What is the central question, contrast, conflict, or tension? What is the literal meaning or obvious message? z. Contextual grounds — reading a text with geography and history, economics and politics, in mind to locate the text clearly in place and time. Where did this text originate? Did geography influence this work? What view of nature is expressed? When was the text composed? How might historical or current events have influenced the author? 3. Subtextual grounds — reading a text with insights from psychology in mind. Imagine how emotions, memories, phobias, and phantoms might motivate the author, the artist, the protagonist, the players, the audience. Which emotions are expressed and evoked? Which fears are expressed and evoked? Which views of human nature, relationships, birth, and death are expressed? What do we know about the personal life of the author? 4. Intertextual grounds — reading for connections between one text and others in the classics of world literature. Within a verbal universe, a world of words, no text exists alone. Every author writes to others by exploring conventional archetypes, myths, motifs, and metaphors. What central metaphor is expressed or explored? What aspects might be viewed as archetypal or mythic? Compare this text with Shakespeare, the Bible, Homer, Greek myths. What is known about sources familiar to the author?

Applying the Framework to "Closing Time" "Closing Time" is a perfect specimen for close scrutiny. Multiple meanings emerge from applying this method, as the sections that follow suggest. 118

First Impressions There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music. — John Keats, qtd. in Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (293) As the class listens to "Closing Time," we collect impressions, feelings, and phrases to describe the setting, the action, and the general mood. Students respond to the musical style, to the country and western rhythm and tempo. They hear repetitions such as "drinking" and "dancing," "happening" and "happened," "something" and "nothing," "opened" and "closing." They voice the central question in the song as "What is happening?" or "Wha's happenin'?" "Where am I?" or "Where am I going?" Contrary to Cohen's other compositions, no central female figure rises to attention in this song. No Suzanne, Marianne, Joan of Arc, or Gypsy Wife catches the eye, even with a "very sweet" and "very close companion" nearby. As students scrutinize the words to each stanza, they feel free to focus on various figures — "Angel of Compassion," "fiddler," "the Holy Spirit," the speaker in the third stanza, and "the Boss" in the final lines. Guided by McLuhan, we engage in some discussion of figure. Our Western eyes have an affinity for figure, an object or subject to define and delineate. Greco-Roman and Renaissance figures rule our mental horizons and dictate our artistic expectations. We fear their fragmentation and denounce their disappearance. Most of our training is directed toward keeping clear the distinction between figure and ground. ... When you see all the figures at once, you are experiencing the sense of configuration; . . . all figures at once means NO figures — just outlines and interfaces, just structure.. .. [T]he ground is never static; it is always changing. (McLuhan, Hutchon, and McLuhan 10) The exercise of shifting figures in this song alerts students to shifting grounds, to shaky grounds around the singer. They sense that the message of this text will arise from various grounds, so they proceed to examine these configurations more closely.

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Ground Zero What time is it? You mean Now? — Yogi Berra, qtd. in Zen to Go (71) A catastrophe has taken place, but now we're waiting for the flood. — Leonard Cohen, "Songwriter" We're in the midst of a Flood of biblical proportions. — Leonard Cohen, qtd. in Iyer (68) Another way to phrase a key question for this song is "When is closing time?" Students are quick to volunteer multiple meanings, including the last round before the bar closes, the blinding lights before the police burst in, the lingering kiss before leaving a lover, the rumble of thunder, the lightning flash before a storm, and the last gasp that grasps at life before death. In the context of the late 19905, apocalyptic overtones surface with a grim "sense of overtime" in this song. Ominous words of warning and lamentation sound: "when the fiddler stops," "the place got wrecked," "the place is dead." Students create lists of signs showing that dire shifts are under way, transforming our world for the worse. Catastrophe and conspiracy theories surface from many sources as medical, environmental, economic, and self-styled experts pour their predictions into a potent mix of science, statistics, guestimates, and wishful thinking. From the grounds of America, that "cradle of the best and the worst," Cohen orates this anthem at the close of the century.3 In a country and western dance club, he creates an inverted microcosm of America the Beautiful, where "the Johnny Walker wisdom" runs high until "the whole damn place goes crazy" and "we're busted in the blinding lights." Through storm, fire, and earthquake, only the dancers remain; they "struggle and stagger," "fumbling" to the music of the fiddler. Do these dancers bear some resemblance to the skeletal figures of the danse macabre, "the dance of death" motifs that cavort at burial grounds in drawings made during the Great Plague or Black Death of the i4oos?4 One student suggested that the hymn "Lord of the Dance" may belong in this reading, while another recalled the image of Lord Shiva dancing. Wherever we are, we are called to dance, even to the end of time. "Dance me to the end of love," and "save the last dance for me."5 120

Grounded by Love A poem can't mean anything it doesn't mean to you. — T.S. Eliot, qtd. in McLuhan, Hutchon, and McLuhan (2,1) Names that become adjectives, as when Christ converts to Christian or Freud slips to Freudian, signal shifts as historical figures enter our cultural grounds. Today's students sense that "the personal is political" and vice versa, and most are avid fans of psychology and Freudian subtext. Knowing plenty about the personal lives of politicians and celebrities, they scan between the lines of fictional texts for clues tied to real stories of life and love. "Closing Time" is a love song, or rather a "hurtin' song," because a "sweet companion" drifts away, becoming a "partner lost." In this version of the song, we watch as a doomed relationship deteriorates. She is an "Angel" who flirts with "half the world" on a "fragrant" summer night beneath a "naked" moon. Some students admit to knowing some country music, at least from camp or the cottage. They agree that this song feels right at home in the company of "cheatin' hearts," "lyin' eyes," and barroom brawls.6 The video of "Closing Time," filmed at the legendary Matador Club in Toronto, clearly depicts this down-home ground populated by nighthawks, cowboys, hard-livin' drinkers, high-flyin' dancers, and young drifters looking for love. As students wonder why kitchen chairs, not bar stools, arc across the screen, one of them responds with two words, "musical chairs." "Of course," we realize. The game of love plays out in this song, a game of hide and seek, lost and found, choose your partner, spin the bottle — patterns of play that began in childhood endure until "she's a hundred." Students confirm that this song belongs to the corpus of Cohen's work, wherein lie so many lines filled with love, lust, and longing.7 From this point of view, "the Awful Truth / which you can't reveal to the Ears of Youth" becomes a sombre message of sobriety and moderation from a woeful voice of experience. Holy Ground [I]t is closing time in the gardens of the West. . .. — Cyril Connolly, "Comment" (362)8 At this point, some students suspect that they have just scratched the surface of multiple meanings in this song. They know enough of 121

Cohen's literary sources to feel that hallowed ground, the Promised Land, a biblical landscape, must form part of the cultural ground of this composition.9 They are alert to biblical settings, images, and themes as we replay the words anew. With our eyes open to catch glimpses of Eden, we find lines that point to several signs of our original home. The scene opens on a fragrant "summer night" filled with wisdom, a "sweet companion," a "happy face," freedom, and nakedness as "the women tear their blouses off." If the "Angel of Compassion" is Eve, then the other "half [of] the world" is Adam. The "cider laced with acid" becomes a potent symbol in this reading — surely this phrase implies an apple, the forbidden fruit. One student knows the story well enough to quote Genesis 3.9: "The Lord God called to the man, and said to him, 'Where are you?'" (RSV). She is delighted with Cohen's cheeky rendition of "the Holy Spirit crying, 'Where's the beef?'" The snake makes an inevitable appearance in this version as the speaker defends himself during interrogation by the "voice that sounds like G-d," swearing that "it happened just like this": "The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate" (Gen. 3.12; RSV). By this time, the Gates of Love have "budged," and the blessed garden of delights has been wrecked by "the weeds of sex." Loss of innocence, then expulsion from Eden, and the rest is history, our human story of struggling to stay afloat. It "looks like freedom but it feels like death" and is somewhere or "something in between." Both Satan and Christ have roles to play in our salvation history, as a "mighty expectation," a "mighty judgement," or, in the words of William Butler Yeats, "surely some revelation is at hand." In an interview in January 15)93, Cohen expressed one of the themes of The Future with these words: "the human predicament has no solution. We were tossed out of the garden; this isn't paradise" ("Songwriter"). Most teachers feel an obligation to be optimistic with the young, and Cohen's words certainly qualify as "the Awful Truth / which you can't reveal to the Ears of Youth." But with this song, of course, Cohen does speak to them of sorrow, at least to those who have ears to hear. From Genesis to Revelation, from Ararat to Armageddon, from Babel to Babylon and back home, Cohen's garden of verses embraces all of our hopes and fears. Students are enthralled by our various versions of "Closing Time" and deeply impressed by the poet's vision. Cohen may not be Milton, but my students seem to prefer this lively and timely version of Paradise Lost. We thank you, Leonard Cohen. 122

NOTES 1

These lessons retrieve ideas from the book City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media, compiled by Eric and Marshall McLuhan with Kathryn Hutchon in 1977, a practical handbook for students and teachers filled with ideas and activities for studying the effects of technology on culture, of media on society. As a conceptual framework for planning and presenting lessons on diverse topics, the study of figure and ground has many applications. 2 For McLuhan, "text" refers to many artifacts and activities that display a pattern or purpose. History, literature, arts, sports, and advertising, for example, all offer "texts" for analysis. To perform a figure-ground analysis, begin with the following general questions. (i) Who or what is the central figure? What draws attention to it? Find words to describe this figure, (z) What forms the ground around this figure? What connections exist between the figure and the ground? What message or meaning is obvious to you? (3) What is your personal response to this example? What aspects of the figure or the ground are familiar to you from the ground of your own experience? Do you sense a hidden message here? (4) Compare this with similar things that you have encountered elsewhere. Are there any echoes from Greek mythology, the Bible, Shakespeare, history, popular culture? How do such allusions enhance the figure or the message? Do you have to recognize the allusions to appreciate the example? 3 Was Cohen perhaps thinking of another work, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (1987), by Alan Bloom? 4 The AIDS epidemic of our age is clearly part of the ground in other Cohen songs, such as "Everybody Knows." Some victims of HIV have requested that "There Ain't No Cure for Love" be played at their funerals. 5 Students who still jive to "American Pie" are entranced by Cohen's apocalyptic version of "the day the music died." 6 Like Kenny Rogers's "Lucille," she has picked a fine time to leave him, and, like "Queen of the Silver Dollar," she lays claim to her conquests from a bar-stool throne. 7 Some students are convinced that the essential spirit of this song springs from another lifelong relationship for Cohen — namely, a "love affair with the bottle." Is alcohol the "very sweet companion" from the first stanza, who is described as "well-aged," "a hundred," but "wearing something tight" in the fourth stanza? The "mighty expectation of relief" takes on special meaning in this reading, as does the line "I loved you for 123

your body." As our singer tries to sober up, he "just do[es]n't care what happens next." Intoxication or its aftermath can indeed look "like freedom" but feels "like death" and probably is best described as "something in between." 8 This quotation comes from the final issue of Horizon, a literary magazine edited by Cyril Connolly and published in London, England, from 1939 to 1949. At an early point in his career, Cohen must have taken these words to heart: "'Nothing dreadful is ever done with, no bad thing gets any better; you can't be too serious.' This is the message of the Forties from, which, alas, there seems no escape, for it is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair" (362). 9 Our school's grade 10 English program, inspired by Northrop Frye, teaches "The Bible as/in Literature." Cohen's poems have an honoured place in our studies, especially "The Story of Isaac" and "Passing Through."

WORKS CITED

Cohen, Leonard. "Closing Time.1" The Future, Columbia, CT 53226,1992. ——. "Songwriter Says LA Riots May Have Boosted Popularity." Interview. Toronto Star 3 Jan. 1993: D8. Connolly, Cyril. "Comment." Horizon Dec. 1949-Jan. 1950: 359-62. Iyer, Pico. "Leonard Cohen: Several Lifetimes Already." Shambhala Sun Sept. 1998: 50-60, 68. McLuhan, Marshall, Kathryn Hutchon, and Eric McLuhan. City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media. Agincourt, ON: Book Society of Canada, 1977. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. 3rd ed. 1980. Yeats, William Butler. "The Second Coming." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 4th ed. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 1979. 1973. Zen to Go. Ed. Jon Winokur. Markham, ON: Penguin-NAL, 1989.

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"My Black Pages": Reconsiderinj Death of a Lady's Man and Death of a Ladies' Man ROBERT DE YOUNG

STEPHEN SCOBIE REMARKED in his keynote address at the 1993 Red Deer conference on Leonard Cohen that Death of a Lady's Man — the collection of poems and prose poems published in 1978 — had attracted little critical attention from either academics or Cohen fans. There are a number of possible explanations for this neglect. Scobie notes William Ruhlmann's point that, "by the late seventies, 'Cohen's reputation among literary critics and academics had simply evaporated since he had so long been identified as a songwriter and pop star'" ("Counterfeiter" 10). Similarly, Linda Hutcheon has made the point that "Cohen's success as a performer, documented by the near-idolatrous reviews of his European concert tours, has almost eclipsed his career as a poet and novelist" (z6). T And as Scobie himself has bluntly stated, another "reason for Cohen's neglect is, more straightforwardly, academic snobbery. Many critics still have a great deal of trouble dealing with Leonard Cohen as the writer and performer of popular songs" (n). Because the volume was published after the release of the similarly titled album Death of a Ladies' Man in 1977, probably the least favourably received of all of Cohen's albums (and one that initially Cohen himself seemed to reject), the merits of Death of a Lady's Man seem largely to have been overshadowed by the puzzled responses to Cohen's collaborative efforts with Phil Spector on the album. And while Cohen is frequently celebrated as a "Black Romantic," it has to be said that, even in the context of the sometimes bleak content of his canon, Death of a Lady's Man covers some very difficult and unpleasant emotional terrain: the breakdown of a "marriage" between the narrator and his dark lady, Lilith. Ira Nadel quotes Cohen's own statement on this period: "every relationship I had broke down. Every single relationship broke down. There was nothing left standing" (218).

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However, this critical neglect is contrary to Cohen's own interest in the genesis of Death of a Lady's Man, Scobie quotes Cohen's rather obscure and convoluted description of the history of this work in a letter Cohen sent him in July 1977: "Death of a Lady's Man derives from a longer book called My Life in Art, which I finished last year and decided not to publish. The Woman Being Born was the title of another manuscript and also an alternative title for both My Life in Art and Death of a Lady's Man" ("Counterfeiter" 8). To further complicate matters, all three works mentioned in Cohen's letter — and myriad other "notebooks" from years earlier — are frequently cited in the text of Death of a Lady's Man itsel and become part of Cohen's playful and complex textual strategies. We know from Cohen's own comments in interviews that it is not unusual for him to rework material over long periods of time (for example, his five hundred drafts of "Take This Waltz," which he discusses in the CBC documentary with Adrienne Clarkson), whether he is writing poetry, songs, or novels. But Death of a Lady's Man arguably has been accorded an extraordinary level of attention by Cohen. As Nadel documents, the protracted publication history of the volume clearly evinces Cohen's continual reworking and revisiting of the text from at least March 1976 to the date of its publication in the fall of 1978. Notwithstanding the pressure from his publisher, Jack McClelland, and his editor to complete the work, Cohen kept making changes and withholding the text from publication. McClelland was hardly thrilled with Cohen's lastminute decision to add the commentaries: "He says he is writing a 5>o-page commentary on the book itself. What ever the hell that means. I fear the worst" (qtd. in Nadel 221). Even as recently as 1993, during preparations for the publication of the anthology entitled Stranger Music, Cohen returned yet again to the text. As Nadel observes of Stranger Music, "the most widely cited text is Death of a Lady's Man, reworked and in some cases reordered from the original book, with new headings for some sections. Cohen himself has said that he is happiest with this version of the work, for he at last made the book 'coherent,' ridding it of a great deal that could not be penetrated in the original text" (265). Moreover, Stranger Music does not contain any material from Cohen's first novel, The Favourite Game, a work that many critics have seen as being of greater literary worth than Death of a Lady's Man, and thus a more obvious text to include in the anthology. It seems clear, then, that Cohen himself regards Death of a Lady's Man as

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an important literary enterprise and one worthy of his — and our — continued attention. This essay reevaluates Death of a Lady's Man alongside Death of a Ladies3 Man in an attempt to reinstate both of these neglected works as central to an understanding of Cohen's craft and powers as a writer as well as a songwriter and performer. The album Death of a Ladies' Man, cowritten with and produced by Phil ("wall of sound") Spector, also has not been well received. Nadel quotes review headlines such as "Leonard Cohen's doo-wop Nightmare" or "Doyen of Doom meets Teen Tycoon" (2,17), although reviewer Ken Waxman remarked that " Spector's talents spur Cohen in the way that an exceptional director's skill will sometimes pull unexpectedly fine performances from certain actors" (61). To further complicate attempts to assess the album's merits, Cohen continually distanced himself from both Spector and the production during the promotion following the album's release. As he told Janet Maslin for an article in the New York Times, I never thought I would give up that much control. I didn't even know when it was being mixed — I never heard the mix and I don't approve of it. The mix is a catastrophe. No air. No breath. No rest. It's like what he [Spector] has become himself. He doesn't know how to let a situation breathe, let alone a song. But it's very hard to fight him — he just disappears. He was in possession of the tapes; his bodyguard took them back to his house every night. I knew he was mad, but I thought his madness would be more adorable, on the ordinary daily level. I love the guy, but he's out of control. Finally, I just said let the thing go. There's nothing I like about it, there are four seconds on the record that I think are music. The music in some places is very powerful, but by and large I think it's too loud, too aggressive. . . . I think it's a classic this record. . . . Like a lot of classics — somehow they're too dense, too boring. But they have some enduring power, and you know there's something excellent and strong about them. You just don't like them, that's all. (18, 40) In her review, Maslin herself comments that Death of a Ladies' Man "combines Cohen's solemn delivery and thoughtful lyrics with Spector's full-blown, danceable production sound. These elements are so unreconciled, and their net effect is at first so bewildering, 127

that this record may be one of the most bizarre, slowly satisfying hybrids pop music has ever produced" (18). Even the album design is unusual for a Cohen album. On the front cover, he sits, in a somewhat uncharacteristic white suit, between a sombre Suzanne Elrod (the mother of Cohen's two children, Adam and Lorca, and usually deemed the dark woman of Death of a Lady's Man) and actor Eva LaPierre. Suzanne's image, this time separated from Cohen and the other woman, is repeated on the back cover. According to the liner notes, the cover photograph is by an "anonymous roving photographer at a forgotten Polynesian restaurant." Cohen in a white suit in a restaurant filled with palm trees seems more than a little incongruous as the cover for this album. Maslin's remark that the elements of this album are "unreconciled" seems to reflect both the "bizarre" production values (the relationship between Cohen and Spector) and the subject matter — marital breakdown. But why does she, like audiences in general, seem to find the effect "so bewildering"? In many respects, the inter nal tensions and contradictions on this album are strikingly similar to the strategies Cohen uses in his collection of poems and commentaries published the following year. Moreover, it is clear that Cohen was working on these two projects simultaneously. The names already provide a strong link, with only the spelling distinguishing the two. The album title, declaring the "death" of the "ladies' man," is repeated in the titular poem of the published volume Death of a Lady's Man, although the death in the literary text is of one "lady's man." Cohen, the apparent "ladies' man," appears between two women on the cover of the album, while, as noted on the dust jacket, the cover of the published text reproduces a sixteenth-century woodcut of "coniunctio spirituum, or the spiritual union of the male and female principle from the alchemical text Rosararium Philosophorum (1550)." The most direct link between the two works is provided by the lyrics of the final song on the album, which are subsequently published as the poem "Death of a Lady's Man." But perhaps the most revelatory and complex link between these two seemingly disparate works is precisely their postmodern playfulness with form. Maslin is correct in identifying the bizarre differences between Cohen's voice and lyrics and Spector's overwhelming production. Unlike most of Cohen's other albums, these songs are difficult to reproduce outside of the complex studio environment, and, apart from "Memories," which was performed in concerts 128

throughout the late 19705 and early 19805, very few of these songs have ever been performed live.2 In keeping with Maslin, Scobie objects to the album performances of "Fingerprints" and "I Left a Woman Waiting" because he feels the seriousness of the lyrics — both are adapted from earlier poems — is compromised by the music (Leonard 171). But this tension and contradiction is precisely the point. Certainly the collaboration of Spector and Cohen is, superficially, somewhat bizarre, but as a strategy for providing playful commentary it is very effective and perfectly in accord with Cohen's eleventh-hour decision the following year to add an italicized commentary on the facing page of each poem in Death of a Lady's Man. Ironically, the commentary3 to the poem "O Wife Unmasked" — "Claustrophobia! Bullshit! Air! Air! Give us air! Is there an antidote to this mustard gas of domestic spiritism?" (129) — echoes Cohen's own comments to the New York Times on Spector's contribution: "The mix is a catastrophe. No air. No breath. No rest. It's like what he has become himself. He doesn't know how to let a situation breathe, let alone a song" (Maslin 40). What Cohen may be objecting to is his lack of creative control in the final production of the album, but the hybridity produced by his collaboration with Spector is strikingly similar to his own strategies in Death of a Lady's Man., especially the last-minute addition of the commentaries. The album opens with "True Love Leaves No Traces," which, as Scobie has observed (Leonard 168-74), is largely based on Cohen's earlier poem "As the Mist Leaves No Scar" from the 1961 volume The Spice-Box of Earth. A performance of this poem also appears in the 1965 Canadian National Film Board documentary Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen. Like the poem, the song lyrically echoes the language and themes of seventeenth-century poet John Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" and "Song (Sweetest Love, I Do Not Go)" and provides a deceptively sweet introduction to the largely abrasive songs that follow. Indeed, the song that follows is "Iodine," which, in spite of its rather jaunty musical accompaniment, sets the darker mood and tone for the album: You let me love you till I was a failure — Your beauty on my bruise like iodine

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I asked you if a man could be forgiven And though I failed at love was this a crime? You said, Don't worry, don't worry, darling There are many ways a man can serve his time These lyrics do not appear in Death of a Lady's Man the following year — or in the later collection Stranger Music, for that matter — but the language and themes are perfectly in accord with the later poems' various accounts of the dissolution of marriage. In this case, though, the role of the commentary (largely used in the volume to distance and provide irony and humour) is provided by Spector's musical arrangement. As Cohen rasps out "Your saintly kisses reeked of iodine / Your fragrance with fume of iodine," Spector's brass instruments lilt joyfully along. "Paper Thin Hotel" is possibly the song that gives rise to Scobie's comment on the "sheer incongruity between the fragility of Cohen's voice and the massive 'wall of sound' with which Spector surrounds it" (Leonard 169). But again, arguably it is this incongruity that provides a strength to the performance of the song, just as throughout Death of a Lady's Man, the frail, often shrill voice of the poet is alternately (de)constructed, (re)constructed, and supported by the voices of the commentaries. Cohen's pained, deadpan voice sounds like it is trapped in a paper-thin echo chamber where the voices, sounds, and emotions of the lovers in the next room continually reverberate. The singer's fantasy And I can't wait to tell you to your face And I can't wait for you to take my place echoes the continual "paper-thin" textual slippage between the male and female voices within the poems and commentaries and the poems and commentaries themselves in Death of a Lady's Man. "Memories," with its classic late i^jos-early 19605 Spector sound, is probably the clearest example of the humorous links between the musical arrangements and Cohen's lyrics: 130

Frankie Lane was singing "Jezebel" I pinned an Iron Cross to my lapel I walked up to the tallest and the blondest girl I said, Look, you don't know me now but very soon you will So won't you let me see Won't you let me see Won't you let me see Your naked body The scene is very reminiscent of the ill-fated attempts by Breavman and Krantz to gate-crash a francophone party in order to score in Cohen's first novel, The Favourite Game. The song itself takes the form of a dialogue between the hopeful, swaggering youth and the tall and equally determined blonde concerning the sexual mores of an earlier decade, while Specter's rousing musical arrangement provides a witty allusion to the musical tastes at the dawn of rock and roll, including his own arrangements for songs such as "To Know Him Is to Love Him" or The Crystals' "And Then He Kissed Me." In 1984 Cohen takes this rather playful sense of the historical past a step further in his video I Am a Hotel, where he performs "Memories" dressed entirely in black, detached and aloof from the dance floor, his face an expressionless mask behind sunglasses. The narrator/singer is no longer the hapless youth on the dance floor fumbling with a blouse but has instead been transformed into the successful rock star on the balcony. The raucous and crude "Don't Go Home with Your Hard-On" — which includes Bob Dylan4 and Allen Ginsberg on backing vocals, and even Spector himself — sees Cohen giving an impressively gravelly vocal performance that recalls the unpleasant, rasping tones of the chorus in "Diamonds in the Mine" from the 1970 album Songs of Love and Hate: Here comes your bride with her veil on Approach her, you wretch, if you dare Approach her, you ape with your tail on Once you have her she'll always be there 131

But don't go home with your hard-on It will only drive you insane You can't shake it (or break it) with your Motown You can't melt it down in the rain In spite of the speaker's protestation that sexual desire cannot be quenched with "Motown," the creation and existence of the song itself and its urgent performance seem to contradict this idea. Throughout both this album and the poems of Death of a Lady's Man, as in most of Cohen's work, there is a continuing play and dialogue between sexual desire and the craft of writing. As Ken Norris has observed of Death of a Lady's Man, "Marriage is a central metaphor that extends outward to other interrelationships: the poet 'married' to his life in art, the poem 'married' to its commentary, a possible implied marriage of the reader to the text" (53). This vexed but close relationship between sexual desire and the drive to write is clearly articulated throughout Death of a Lady's Man. For example, in "Another Room" we read: I climbed the stairs with my key and my brown leather bag and I entered room eight. I heard Aleece mounting the steps behind me. Room eight. My own room in a warm country. A bed, a table, a chair. Perhaps I could become a poet again. Aleece was making noises in the hall. I could see the ocean in the late afternoon light outside my window. I should look at the ocean but I don't feel like it. The interior voice said, You will only sing again if you give up lechery. Choose. This is a place where you may begin again. But I want her. Let me have her. Throw yourself upon your stiffness and take up your pen. (2,2) And in the witty commentary to "Daily Commerce/' Cohen writes: "my dark erection unmanifested I except within the pants of poesy" (175). As Hutcheon has summarized, "The pen and the penis meet once again.... As in both novels, the autoerotic and the literary are closely connected" (51). Maybe "Motown" can help the speaker with his hard-on after all. The final song on the album is "Death of a Ladies' Man," which 132

also appears in the poetry volume the following year. The poem/ song is arguably the strongest in the collection/album, and its textual strategies — both as performed on the album and in the book — provide an important creative link between the two works. Unlike much of the work in Death of a Lady's Man, this poem does not use the first person but instead uses the third person to distance the narrator from the subject matter: The man she wanted all her life was hanging by a thread. "I never even knew how much I wanted you," she said. His muscles they were numbered and his style was obsolete. "O baby, I have come too late." She knelt beside his feet. (30) Specter's production of the song on the album has been much criticized. Nadel gives the following account of the circumstances of the recording session: The recording of the song "Death of a Ladies' Man" was indicative of the album's creation. The session began at 7:30 in the evening, but by 2:30 in the morning a complete take had not yet been made. The musicians were on double time after midnight; it escalated to quadruple time at z:oo a.m. By 3:30 in the morning they had not even played the song all the way through yet. Spector took away the charts and prevented the musicians from playing more than six bars. Cohen sat crosslegged on the floor through most of this until around 4:00 a.m., when Spector clapped his hands and told Cohen to do the vocal. Approaching the microphone, a very tired Cohen sang the song flawlessly. Cohen has since said of the song, "It's direct and confessional. I wanted the lyrics in a tender setting rather than a harsh situation. At times that fusion was achieved. Sometimes the heart must roast on the fire like shish kebab." (2,16) More than on any other song on the album, Spector, in spite of the lateness of the hour, seems to have been able to capture the mood of the lyric very effectively. After the fashion of "Paper Thin Hotel," 133

Cohen's slightly reverberated voice sounds isolated, desolate, and weary and the regularity of the drum beat heavy and monotonous rather than jaunty. "Motown" does not seem to offer much consolation here. While the third-person narration provides some sense of distance, Cohen sounds truly strained. As in some of the confessional, first-person poems in Death of a Lady's Man, there is a mood of genuine anguish. Specter's production of the final verse of the song is especially effective: So the great affair is over but whoever would have guessed it would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed. It's like our visit to the moon or to that other star: I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far. The musical wall of sound seems literally to collapse under its own weight as Cohen's lyrics grind to a halt — the final four lines are repeated twice as the song, like the marriage and life of the lady's man, unravels and grows less audible and more distant. Cohen's commentary to the poem "Death of a Lady's Man" is worth quoting: Darling, I'm afraid we have to go to the end of love. or O Darling, I'm afraid that we will have to go to the end of love. and many variations, some signed, some unsigned, obviously meant for someone's eyes, written in the margin of this and other pages. (33) In many respects this is typical of the commentaries throughout Death of a Lady's Man. At one level, they provide textual variations for the reader's contemplation (and, frequently, amusement), although in this case, these "variations" do not seem to be very substantial or contribute anything new to the existing poem: they simply are evidence of the creative process of what Cohen calls "blackening pages." The final remarks are perhaps more interesting 134

and typical of what Norris has called "a wild display of style and irony embodied in the commentaries that interrogate, elucidate and undermine the original text" (53). Unlike the well-known signature at the end of "Famous Blue Raincoat" — "Sincerely L. Cohen" (Stranger 153) — Cohen here simultaneously suggests the transparently personal nature of text and yet casually dismisses it. Furthermore, unlike other instances in the commentaries, where there is an almost obsessive level of detail provided on the manuscript sources for the material quoted (e.g., "The original version is found in a sturdy Swedish notebook, the Atlanta Radio-Serie /A 2202-6/120 BL. It was written sometime in 15*73 a* the Bayshore Inn in Vancouver" [105]), Cohen simply states in a rather throwaway fashion that these, and other variations, are "written in the I margin of this and other pages." The text, no matter what its content, is continually subject to the artist's commentary. In spite of the emotionally charged nature of the material, Cohen the writer maintains a degree of distance and playful detachment from his "texts." Indeed, the reader has no way of verifying whether or not these variable "texts" have any existence outside the pages of the present work — they simply unsettle the reader and any conclusive meaning. It seems entirely appropriate, given the internal contradictions and tensions within the text and Cohen's obsession with examining his craft, that one of the sources for Death of a Lady's Man that he cites in his letter to Scobie is called "My Life in Art," apparently completed by 1976 but not published. However, as mentioned above, obscure and deliberately confusing references to this earlier text appear throughout Death of a Lady's Man. Given that the notion of the "death" of the lady's (or ladies') man is central, it is worth quoting the earliest references to "My Life in Art," which appears in the poem "Death to This Book" and its commentary: Death to this book or fuck this book and fuck this marriage. Fuck the twenty-six letters of my cowardice. Fuck you for breaking the mirror and throwing the eyebrow tweezers out the window. Your dead bed night after night and nothing warm but baby talk. Fuck marriage and theology and the cold goodnight. Fuck the idolatry of anger and the priests who say so. How dare they. How dare they. Thanks for your judgement on me. Murder and a fast train to Paris and me thin again in my blue raincoat, and Barbara waiting at the Cluny Square Hotel. Fuck her for never turning up. 135

The violence of this paragraph is somewhat mitigated by the sense of nostalgia and loss in the last two lines. Does he really wish to negate his life and his work? Although the energy is similar, we get a different picture from the first passage of an unpublished manuscript called My Life in Art, from which many of the pieces of this present volume are excerpted or reworked. We begin the Final Revision of My Life in Art. There hasn't been a book like this in a long time. Much of the effort in this ultimate version will be expended trying to dignify a worthless piece of junk. The modern reader will be provided a framework of defeat through which he may view without intimidation a triumph of blazing genius. I have the manuscript beside me now. It took me ten years to write. During this time you were grinding out your bullshit. It will become clear that I am the stylist of my era and the only honest man in town. I did not quarrel with my voices. I took it down out of the air. This is called work by those who know and should not be confused with an Eastern trance. (2,0-2,1) This passage is one of many examples throughout the volume where there is a rather vexed relationship between the poem and the commentary. As opposed to the condemnation both of "this marriage" and "this book" in the poem, the commentary provides an emotionally detached critique of the "violence" of the poem and suggests that the unpublished work "My Life in Art" is a more satisfactory literary source arid provides a more moderated "energy." However, once the author of the commentary begins to justify his claim and quote from "My Life in Art," the circles within circles appear again immediately: "We begin the Final Revision of My Life in Art." Moreover, the nonitalicized passage that follows the commentary, apparently quoted from "My Life in Art," refers to another "manuscript" that took "years to write." It's becoming hard for the alert reader to believe that the author of these multifaceted and layered texts is "the only honest man in town." And, to add to the confusion, a few pages further on we are told of another text that is entitled the "Final Revision of My Life in Art" (29). In any case, even assuming that "My Life in Art" is an actual completed manuscript, Death of a Lady's Man abounds with references to "the Notebooks" (2,9, 69, 73, 77) and myriad other sources. 136

In the commentary to "The Photograph," he demands: "Examine this suppressed passage from the original manuscript of My Life in Art" (57). Why suppressed? Like the other sources cited, it has never been published. As Norris has argued, "In Death of a Lady's Man the erosion of particular self only leads to the establishment of particular selves, not to a revelation of the absolute, nor the concrete establishment of the author's presence" (54). As with Spector's wall-of-sound arrangements for Death of a Ladies' Man, the commentaries and their entangled relationships with the poems render it almost impossible to discern a single voice. But no matter how much the writer is undermined, the "honesty" and integrity of the writer's craft remain, as the commentary to "It's Probably Spring" makes clear: I would like to lose my faith in this poet, but I can't. I would like to say that I have discovered in him something glib. I want to disqualify him. He comes too close to betraying me. He comes too close to reeling me in. I want to say that he was too rich. I want to prove that his marriage was happy. I want to say that I only thought he was that good because I misunderstood him. But I am afraid I do not misunderstand him. I understand him. Tonight I understand him perfectly. . . . I read the piece again and again, so pleased that the poet has taken such pains not to touch me. If only I had touched her this lightly, I might not be sitting here now. (59) In The Energy of Slaves, another collection of poetry published in I97Z, Cohen declares in poem after poem that he cannot write, that his poetic gifts have left him. But in Death of a Lady's Man, as elsewhere in his work, writing and word games provide consolation for the death of the lady's/ladies' man. But typically for Cohen, even the death itself is subject to question, as the poem "Final Examination" makes clear: I am almost 90 Everyone I know has died off except Leonard He can still be seen hobbling with his love (2,12.) And, just in case we missed Cohen's self-irony and humour in both Death of a Ladies' Man and Death of a Lady's Man, Spector 137

provides his own "commentary" in his contribution to the 1996 collection compiled for Cohen's sixtieth birthday, Take This Waltz: I would be remiss, if I did not mention at this time, one particular person, poet and artist, who confessed to me that he was extremely influenced by the Partridge Family. And that artist is Leonard Cohen. Underneath that brooding, moody, depressed soul which Leonard possesses, lies an outand-out Partridge Family freak. He never misses their re-runs on Nickelodeon; belongs to their fan club; and for lack of a more appropriate word, is a Partridge Family "groupie," albeit one who still remains "in the closet" in connection with these feelings. May I suggest you contact him, and I am sure he will provide you with much in-depth information as to how profound was the way in which the Partridge Family influenced every facet of his personal and professional life. (176) NOTES 1

Hutcheon chooses to discuss Death of a Lady's Man in the fiction rather than the poetry series of the ECW Press series Canadian Writers and Their Works because of the similarities she observes with both The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers. 2 According to Devlin, Cohen performed "Don't Go Home with Your Hard-On" and an early version of "Iodine" as early as 1975 during his North American tour, and he performed "Iodine" a number of times during the 1979 European tour (30-34). 3 As is the printing practice throughout Death of a Lady's Man, the names and text of commentaries to poems are given in italics. 4 As I point out in "Behind the Frames," it is worth noting that Bob Dylan, like Cohen, was going through his marriage breakup during this period and his divorce from Sara Lowndes was finalized some three weeks after these recording sessions.

WORKS CITED

Cohen, Leonard. Death of a Ladies' Man. Columbia, 90436, 1977. ——. Death of a Lady's Man. London: Deutsch, 1978. ——. "Famous Blue Raincoat." Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs. Toronto: McClelland, 1994. 153. 138

Devlin, Jim. Is This What You Wanted. N.p.: n.p., 1997. de Young, Robert. "Behind the Frames." Metro izi/izz (zooo): 86-94. Hutcheon, Linda. "Leonard Cohen and His Works." Canadian Writers and Their Works. Fiction Series. Vol. 10. Ed. Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley. Toronto: ECW, 1989. 2.3-65. iz vols. 1981-96. Maslin, Janet. "There's Nothing I Like about It — But It May Be a Classic." New York Times 6 Nov. 1977: 18, 40. Nadel, Ira B. Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen. London: Bloomsbury, 1996. Norris, Ken. '"Healing Itself the Moment It Is Condemned': Cohen's Death of a Lady's Man." Canadian Poetry zo (1987): 55-61. Scobie, Stephen. "The Counterfeiter Begs Forgiveness: Leonard Cohen and Leonard Cohen." Proceedings of the Leonard Cohen Conference. Spec, issue of Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 33 (1993): 7-21. ——. Leonard Cohen. Vancouver: Douglas, 197 Spector, Phil. "I Would Be Remiss ...." Take This Waltz: A Celebration of Leonard Cohen. Ed. Michael Fournier and Ken Norris. Quebec: Muses', 1994. 176. Waxman, Ken. "Rebirth of a Ladies' Man." Saturday Night Mar. 1978: 61-63.

139

Your Man On-Line JARKKO ARJATSALO

"i AM NO LONGER LIVING ON MOUNT BALDY." Leonard Cohen revealed this change in his lifestyle to me on 18 June 1995? in Los Angeles. I placed this information on the front page of my Internet site, The Leonard Cohen Files, immediately upon my return home to Finland. The news spread within hours among Cohen's fans all over the world, boosted by additional notices on the Web-based Leonard Cohen Newsgroup, other unofficial Web sites, and various electronic mailing lists. For the previous five years, Cohen was a full-time resident of the Mount Baldy Zen Center near Los Angeles. He was officially ordained as a Zen Buddhist monk on 9 August 1996 and was given the name of Jikan ("Silent One"). But he decided to move on, and he found the Internet a proper place to tell his fans about his decision. Cohen also handed me a copy of his poem "Dear Roshi," with a colour drawing that he said could also be posted on my site. The drawing was an original from the most recent of his famous notebooks, in constant use for "blackening pages." In the poem, he sheds light on his decision to come down from the mountain and, in his inimitable style, intimates that his love for women played a part in his decision. The Web posting immediately raised a furor among acquaintances and Zen adherents and resulted in numerous requests for rights to reproduce the materials. After a week, we decided to delete the drawing and poem from the site. The incident proved that the Web site is being read and monitored by many more people than I had imagined. This paper describes the genesis and evolution of the unofficial Leonard Cohen sites. Other Web activities are also noted, and the final section details the incredible number of Cohen cover songs that have been discovered through Web communications. Not more than five years ago, when Cohen moved to Mount Baldy, it would have been impossible to disseminate news about

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him to such a large international group of people so quickly and efficiently. Now an announcement is available to anyone with a computer and Internet access as soon as it is saved on the hard disc of my server. In the 19805, a worldwide communications network, open to anybody, was more science fiction than reality. Things began to develop very fast in the 19905, however, and unofficial fan pages for numerous artists were among the first Web sites opened. Many of them pioneered work in both Internet content and design well before commercial sites caught on and began to open. In January 2000,1 searched the Web for "Leonard Cohen" using the AltaVista search engine and received notice of 17,146 Web sites that had at least some mention of Cohen. While many, of course, only provide brief mentions of him, several are fully devoted to his work. The number of sites is even more impressive in light of recent estimates that no current search engine reaches even twenty percent of the 800 million pages (six trillion characters) on the Web. The history of Leonard Cohen home pages matches the history of the Web itself. Carter Page launched his site, Bird on the Wire: The Leonard Cohen Home Page, in 1994 using the technical resources of the University of Pennsylvania. This site was the first of several large home pages devoted to Cohen and his work. At about the same time, Paul Black and Adi Heindl opened sites (just to mention some work that is still available on-line). Dan Engelhardt compiled a discography and the collected lyrics to all of Cohen's songs about the same time. He also made a list of Cohen's songs that were available in cover versions by other singers. His listings were first posted on Page's Web site, and many other sites soon repeated them. Page also posted articles, interviews, and album information about Cohen. While Page's site still exists, it has not been updated since late 1995. (For readers who use the Web, links to all the sites mentioned in this article and to a number of others can be found on the links page at my site: www.nebula.simplenet.com/cohen/links.html). I opened my Cohen site in September 1995. It was first titled The Leonard Cohen Fan Information Files but was later renamed The Leonard Cohen Files with the permission of Stranger Management Inc. (Cohen's business manager). This title was simpler and more fitting. Sony printed the link to it on the cover booklet for the More Best of Leonard Cohen album in 1997. Sony also maintains a professional site devoted to Cohen, but it contains only a fraction of the information on the unofficial sites. 141

My son, Rauli Arjatsalo (born 1980), has taken care of the technical details and maintenance of my site since its inception, while I collect and edit its contents. The site is available on a U.S. server and is mirrored (identical contents) on a Finnish server. The front page of the site can be found at www.leonardcohenfiles.com. The roots of my site go back to the period when network technology was not yet racing with printed media. I was an enthusiastic reader of The Leonard Cohen Newsletter edited and distributed by Leonard Cohen Information Service, run in Sheffield, United Kingdom, by Jim Devlin. He ran the service for ten years, from 1984 to 1994. Michael Lohse, Gerhard Schinzel, and Martin Rupps had established the newsletter in Germany, and it had moved to the United Kingdom when Devlin took over. All thirty-seven issues were full of invaluable news items about Cohen's tours and records, cover versions of his music, and collectible items. In 1994, Devlin decided to end the newsletter. Partly he wanted to concentrate on writing books about Cohen, which he has done. But mostly he was afraid there would not be an adequate quantity of new Cohen material for future issues. As the recent Internet activity proves, Devlin needn't have worried. After the demise of the newsletter, the only regularly distributed print: medium for Cohen's fans has been the Intensity fanzine compiled in Holland by Yvonne Hakze and Bea de Koning. This quarterly publication concentrates on reprinting articles from newspapers and magazines worldwide, and it includes discussions on other Cohen topics. However, the editors have preferred to keep circulation within reasonable limits of their publishing resources, so they have not advertised the fanzine widely. (The Intensity editors also arrange a small Leonard Cohen meeting in Amsterdam every fall.) Soon after Devlin's newsletter was discontinued, I opened my Internet site in Finland. I quickly realized what a magnificent channel for Cohen information the Web would be. The existing Cohen sites and the Usenet news group indicated that other Cohen fans might be anxious to take advantage of such resources. I collected some basic material during the summer of 1995 and launched the site on 3 September 15*95, with the initial content on about seventy different pages. The number of visitors began to grow, first slowly and then faster and faster. The counter on the front page registered the ioo,oooth visitor in July 195)8 and the 2oo,oooth in September 1999. At the 142

time of this writing (January 2000), the daily average is over three hundred. Web visitors have come from sixty-six countries and from all continents. The geographical distribution of visitors to my site is almost identical to the availability of Internet services. Most hits come from the United States, Canada, and the central and northern European countries. Lately, more and more fans from Latin America and Asia have visited the site. Interestingly, a notable number of Cohen fans from South Africa also visit it, but the rest of Africa has not been represented. Cohen's work is also becoming more popular in eastern Europe and Asia. E-mails from countries such as Japan, Taiwan, India, Bangladesh, Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon show that his work, both his poetry and his music, is studied by the young generations in these areas, even though their local religious beliefs may be very different. Surprisingly, after the collapse of the USSR, many Cohen covers have been released in eastern Europe, and new editions and translations of his novels and poetry have been printed in many countries. In just the past years (1998 and 1999), new editions of his books have been published in Hebrew, Chinese, Swedish, Danish, Portuguese, Spanish, Czech, and Croatian. Curiously, however, many of these books are unavailable in English! The Leonard Cohen Files currently offers more than seven hundred Web pages and contains as many photos. Much of this content has never been available before to the public. New information keeps arriving from contributors in various countries, and my work as the host has become more and more similar to that of an editor. Several Cohen biographers, such as Jim Devlin, Christof Graf, Stephen Scobie, and Vlad Arghir, are providing me with their work. As described below, however, the most important contributions to the site are new poems, song lyrics, and drawings from Cohen himself. The Leonard Cohen Files features numerous sections, including Cohen's song lyrics, with analysis; his books, with special summaries written by Scobie; books about Cohen; his filmography, with a listing of songs used on soundtracks all over the world; his discography, including poetry records; complete listings of all his tours, including venues and many track listings; an article and interview archive; and listings of tribute albums and cover versions of his songs. Collectors' rarities are also shown in a special section, and there is a marketplace for those who are trying to find a missing 143

record or book. Other popular sections contain art inspired by Cohen, and almost one hundred of his active fans are featured with their photos in "The Gallery of Beautiful Losers." Internet activities have also created a flood of Cohen meetings in many countries; information on past events is available in the "Fandom" section of the site. The biggest European gathering so far took place in Lincoln, United Kingdom, in the spring of 1998, but "'The Leonard Cohen Event" in May 2000 in Montreal will be in its own category both in size and quality of the program. The organizers are posting updated information to all sites and will maintain a special event page at www.cohenzooo.com. Without a doubt, though, the most important section of The Leonard Cohen Files is "Blackening Pages." Here poems, lyrics, and artwork have been posted by Cohen himself. Most of this material is still unpublished in any other format, though a number of the poems will probably appear in the forthcoming Book of Longing. Visitors to the site have also been able to follow in real time how the lyrics of a new song, "A Thousand Kisses Deep," have been developing. Cohen began to contribute to The Leonard Cohen Files in the spring of 1997 with colour copies of sketches, paintings, drawings, and computer art taken from his numerous scrapbooks. Granting permission to show these materials in the "Blackening Pages" section, Cohen wrote. "I want to send, among other things, the first manuscript scratchings for 'Suzanne' and other early songs. I'd like to make the process clear, or at least throw some light on the mysterious activity of writing." Later on-line readers have been offered more and more contributions from Cohen: some twenty new poems, many of them written on Mount Baldy, which reveal his thoughts and desires, and most recently his decision to move on. Cohen reported to the editors of the French Internet magazine Planete Internet in December 1997 that Now I put up new poems or drawings — in fact I use the Internet as a tool for publication. I don't know whether it's really a universal tool, but I notice that nowadays I carry on all my correspondence by e-mail and it's a way of keeping in touch, especially here. (Cohen and Arjatsalo 44) Cohen does not have concerns about copyright issues. As he explained to Susan Nunziata, the Billboard magazine editor, in December 1998, 144

I have been posting a lot of original material on the Finnish site. I don't know what the ramifications are. Speaking as a writer towards the end of his life, where most of my work is out there, I've collected royalties on it, I've been able to live and maybe even provide for a respectable retirement. I'd be happy to publish everything on the Internet at this stage of the game. (1,03) Today there are more Web sites than ever that pay homage to Cohen. Twenty to thirty sites dedicated to his work are active, and the number is growing all the time. Although some sites exist for only a brief period, a phenomenon typical to all noncommercial sites on the Internet, many national sites in various languages have been opened lately, and it appears that they will be maintained for some time. For instance, new sites have appeared in Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, and France. The French site, hosted by Patrice Clos, is one of the most remarkable and comprehensive sites. There are also sites that concentrate on special subjects, such as Marie Mazur's Speaking Cohen, an extensive site of newspaper and magazine articles and interviews, and Judith V. Braun's The Beautiful Losers Creative Files, which features poetry inspired by Cohen's work. Since autumn 1999, The Leonard Cohen Webring has grouped together ten major Web sites dedicated to Cohen's work. Links on each of the member Web sites allow visitors to move from one site to the next. Sony Canada maintains an official Cohen site at www.music. sony.com with some basic album information and sound samples, and it hosts the www.buzzwords.com page with a limited number of news items (the most recent ones are from the spring of 1998). Sony has also reserved a special domain, www.leonardcohen.com, but its contents are identical to those of the Sony Canada site. Nunziata asked Cohen if he is thinking of creating a Web site of his own. Cohen answered "No.... There's a kind of family that is gathered around my work. It's not fixed at my work, but merely uses it as a reference to their own lives and to their own very amusing and touching flirtations, communications, confessions, exchanges" (10-3). Cohen was referring here to the Leonard Cohen Newsgroup (news:alt.music.leonard-cohen), an active Usenet group for those who want to discuss Cohen's work and recent news. Some twenty 145

to thirty new postings appear daily in numerous threads. Every message since i January 1996 has been archived by www.deja.com and can be found using the search facilities provided by that site. The Usenet newsgroup was established in the spring of 1995. Ear~ lier there was an informative Cohen mailing list of some fifty e-mail users, but it ended after two years once the Usenet group was born. People interested in Cohen also meet periodically on IRC chat lines And, last but not least, numerous mailing lists and e-mail discussion groups spread information and opinions and offer chances for more private conversations. The typical reaction of a visitor to The Leonard Cohen Files has been joyful surprise to find such extensive information on Cohen's work available on-line. Many Cohen fans have never before met anyone else with a deep interest in his work, and they are thrilled to find hundreds or thousands of like-minded people on the Internet. Cohen's new albums and books are rare. It is therefore noteworthy that his fans remain so fiercely faithful. Comments and interests expressed on the Internet demonstrate that new editions of all Cohen books, as well as new or reissued videos for home use, would find an audience ready to purchase them. Cover, Cover, Cover A worthwhile Internet activity has evolved around the collection of information about cover versions and tribute albums. The Internet community has helped The Leonard Cohen Files to build a complete listing, one that keeps expanding with new discoveries. Usually, only two compilations by various artists are mentioned when tribute records are discussed. I'm Your Fan and Tower of Song. Sometimes Cohen pa Norsk — a Norwegian tribute put together by that country's leading female artists — is mentioned, along with the early covers by Judy Collins on several of her albums. The outstanding album Famous Blue Raincoat by Jennifer Warnes also receives deserved attention. However, numerous contributors have sent data and records to me, arid they show that at least a dozen tribute albums (containing only Cohen songs) have been released in addition to those mentioned above. Tribute albums have been made in the United States, Canada, Iceland, Poland, France, Italy, Sweden, Germany, South 146

Africa, the Czech Republic, Croatia, and Hungary, In Spain, an excellent Lorca-Cohen album by Enrique Morente features four Cohen songs in modern flamenco style. Nobody, including Cohen and his business staff, realized that so many cover versions had been recorded in so many countries. As of February 2000, we found and posted 575 cover songs. About one hundred of them we found as a result of a contest organized by The Leonard Cohen Files and Cohen's Stranger Management staff in 1998. Artists in North America and almost every country in Europe, as well as Brazil, Israel, Iran, Korea, Taiwan, South Africa, and other countries, have recorded Cohen songs. Maciej Zembaty, a well-known Polish musician and translator, has recorded at least forty-four songs written by Cohen. Graeme Allwright, a New Zealand-born artist living in France, has made fourteen cover songs. Both artists have also helped to introduce Cohen's work in their countries. Cohen's work as a singer-songwriter has been most popular in Poland, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Norway, and other northern European countries, if Internet feedback is reliable. Indeed, those fans persisted during the difficult period in the early 19805 when Cohen was virtually neglected in North America (e.g., Various Positions was released in 1985 in Europe but not by his record company in the United States). The most covered song, according to our lists, is "Suzanne," with ninety recordings located. "Bird on the Wire" takes second place with fifty entries, followed by "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye" (twenty-seven) and "So Long, Marianne" and "Famous Blue Raincoat" (both twenty-one). Following is a list of the major tribute albums. Tribute Albums to Leonard Cohen (All Songs by Cohen) 1. Graeme Allwright. Graeme Allwright chante Leonard Cohen. France, 1973. [9 songs in French]. 2. Daiano. lo come chiunque, sulla pista di Cohen. Italy, 1974. [10 songs in Italian]. 3. Pierre Strom. Pierre Strom sjunger Leonard Cohen. Sweden, 1975. [10 songs in Swedish]. 4. Maciej Zembaty. Ballady Leonarda Cohena. Poland, 1983. [17 songs in Polish], 5. Maciej Zembaty. Alleluja. Poland, 1985. [10 songs in Polish]. 147

6. Jennifer Warnes. Famous Blue Raincoat. United States, 1986. [9 songs in English]. 7. Maciej Zembaty. First We Take Manhattan, Then We Take Warsaw. Poland, 1988. [10 songs in Polish]; reissued on CD in 15)98 and retitled More Cohen. 8. Various artists. I'm Your Fan. France, 1991. [17 songs in English and i in French] 9. Various artists. Cohen pa norsk: Hadde mdnen en s0ster. Norway, 1993. [12, songs in Norwegian]. 10. Various artists. Tower of Song. United States, 1995. [13 songs in English]. 11. Juraj Kukura. Jsem tvuj muz. Czech Republic, 1995. [9 songs in Czech], 12. Daniele Pascal. Dance Me to the End of Love. South Africa, 1996. [n songs in English]. 13. Tom Northcott. Joyful Songs of Leonard Cohen. Canada, 1997. [10 songs in English]. 14. Kern Andras. Engem vdrsz. Hungary, 1998. [10 songs in Hungarian]. 15. Ibrica Jusic. Hazarder: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen. Croatia, 1999. [12 songs in Croatian]. 16. Valur og Regnulpurnar. Reykjavik er kold: Cohen a islensku. Iceland, 2000. [i poem and 9 songs in Icelandic]. 17. Mean Larry & Friends: Chelsea Hotel: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen. Volume One. USA, 2000. [10 live songs in English]. Other Remarkable Albums (Containing at Least Four Cover Songs) 1. Judy Collins. 10 covers on her albums In My Life (1966), Wildflowers (1967), Who Knows Where the Time Goes (1968), Living (1972), Bread and Roses (1976); many of them were rereleased on other alburns. 2. Tapani Perttu. Tanssi eldmdn tanssi. Finland, 1988. [4 songs in Finnish]. 3. Graeme Allwright. More Cohen songs on the album Suzanne, Vol. 3 [n songs, reissued in 1991], Demain sera bien: Graeme Allwright live en concert [4 songs, 1993], and Sacree bouteille [4 songs, 1994]. 4. Enrique Morente y Lagartija Nick. Cantando a Federico Garcia Lorca y Leonard Cohen. Spain, 1996. [4 Cohen songs in Spanish]. 148

5. Juergen Jaensch und Gerald Block. Ich Kenne Deine Trdume. Germany, 1997. [Private release, 9 Cohen songs in German, poetry, and songs inspired by Cohen]. 6. Maciej Zembaty. Zembaty STGS. Poland, 1999. [5 songs in Polish].

WORKS CITED

Cohen, Leonard. "The Billboard Interview: Leonard Cohen." With Susan Nunziata. Billboard z8 Nov. 1998: 103-10. Cohen, Leonard, and Jarkko Arjatsalo. "Le Repaire numerique de Leonard Cohen." With Jerome Thorel and Pierre-Olivier Chanez. Planete Internet 2.5 (dec. i^^y-jan. 1998): 44-46.

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Who's the Boss? An Internet discussion on "Closing Time" EDITED BY STEPHEN SCOBIE

Fiona Harrington Wed, Aug n, 1999 Who's the "Boss," the one that "don't like these dizzy heights"? (This isn't a test, as in: "you there at the back, tell me who's the Boss. You don't know? You haven't been listening to a single thing I've said, have you? Stay in after class and listen to 'Closing Time' a hundred times.") I'm genuinely interested in knowing who this boss is for people. Elsie (Norway) Wed, Aug u, 1999 I always thought it was Bruce Springsteen?? Ania Wed, Aug n, 1999 maybe i'm simplistic, but i've always interpreted it to be God. Judith V. Braun Wed, Aug n, 1999 Yep, I'm with Ania on this. "Knowing" our poet, I can't think of any other interpretation. And according to my almost 4 decade-old acquaintance I recognize The Boss's scent around the song. Plus my heart so much depends on Him to be The Boss. And on Cohen to sing songs for and about Him — kind of acting deputy into both directions of this sometimes so difficult communication.. . . When I listen to Cohen, it helps me to better understand My Lord's voice.

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When The Almighty One listens to Cohen, it helps Him to better understand the rest of His Children's voices. Geoff Gompers Wed, Aug n, 1999 If it is God, then is this a reference to the Tower of Babel? The Boss don't like these dizzy heights? StSquidgy Wed, Aug ii, 1999 scratching head> Hmmmm.... I'd always assumed he was just talking about the guy who owns the bar.... But you're saying he's actually referring to The G-y Who Really Owns The Whole Damn Bar? Far out, ania Wed, Aug n, 1999 yep. God Him/herself. hmmmmmmmmmmm.... well... i actually found it really interesting to see a post asking about this issue at all, because for me there was no doubt about who Ic was addressing when i listened to 'closing time' even for the very first time. as i said, i may be way off and perhaps i am being too simplistic, or maybe not simplistic enough. sincerely, ania Fiona Harrington Thu, Aug 12, 1999 Thanks for all the replies, they've been illuminating. Even the idea of Bruce Springsteen — perhaps Leonard and "the boss" Bruce were jamming together in this manic bar, it would have been quite a session! The God thesis is tempting to stay with, and I like very much Judith's idea of the listening dialogue between the Maker and the singer, each further clarifying the other's communications. But my view of the boss, and of the entire song, is more secular I'm afraid. 151

I take the view that "the boss" is the singer himself, not necessarily literally Leonard Cohen but some aspect of himself that he's sending forth in the song, the first person, the "I." The "Boss" may be, let's say, the particular facade he's wearing on this occasion, or the facade he always wears, but is, rather wryly, aware that he's wearing. It's a front he knows he displays. I think he's ironically referring to himself as the boss in the knowledge that he isn't really in control at all, of his own life, or the scene, or anything. We like to think we're in control of our destinies, that we're the bosses of our own lives, but that's a joke, and the bigger joke is when we realise that it is so. I hadn't played The Future for some time and when I did again a few days ago I listened to it with fresh ears. "Closing Time" is the song that's intrigued me most in some ways, and for while I heard it as a terrific dance tune with some strange and macabre lyrics. Cohen is a master of this kind of shock tactic — marrying upbeat even jaunty melodies with the darkest, and most sublime, of words. Listening to it again, and reading the words, I think it is an exercise in pure cynicism. I don't think God is anywhere to be found here. At least not the God of light and goodness and mercy and love. The God that I find here, I don't want to describe "him" as G-d for fear of offending sensibilities, is a God who hides both the devil and Christ within himself, a being of extremes, the source of all possibilities and potentialities. A raunchy and reckless God. But he's not the boss. That's my opinion anyway, so I'm going to allow myself the luxury of an "interpretation." Whether anyone agrees or not, or finds it remotely interesting, or even bothers to read it, doesn't matter; the ideas come because I'm writing, and they're interesting to me. There's more than "Johnny Walker" fuelling this manic spree of a party! The cider's "laced with acid" and there's something else too. Whatever it is, the party is in full spate, people are whirling around in an abandoned Dionysian dance, clothes and caution thrown to the winds. The combination of music, drink, drugs and wild, wild women makes a heady brew. Thrown in is lust, the loss or abandonment of love and the possibility of finding fresh romance. The partners lost and found may not necessarily be the same partners, the person you came with not necessarily the one you're going to go home with, and that's a pretty thrilling prospect! He, the "I," is taking part in all this in the persona of the boss, but he's uneasy, it's all a bit too much for him, he can't quite deal with it, it's making him dizzy, he doesn't really like being so high, in any sense, 152

because he might lose control. There's an aspect of himself standing outside of it all looking on, the one that's aware of the front he's putting on and knows that no matter how wild and wonderful it all is, it can't last, that there's going to be a come down. And he's not sure of his "very close companion" either, she's spinning off in all directions, the life and soul of the party, she's the "Angel of Compassion" alright, to everyone but him, and it's all a bit lonely, a bit sad, he can see that, perhaps because he's not quite so drunk as all the other revellers he sees through the facade of the whole occasion. And it makes him cynical. His love affair may be over — it's gone into "overtime" already in fact, the weeds are growing over it, it's just about maintained by sex. It's when you know it's over but this one last time, you'll forget and drown your resentments and sorrow and knock out one final great time. The winds of change have blown over the relationship and it's doomed. In fact they're blowing over everything. Everything is changing, nothing is solid or certain. Is that the "Awful Truth"? That nothing lasts, not even love, everything runs down eventually? Nothing is worth anything, but you've got to pretend, especially to the "Ears of Youth," that there are things that might be worth more than a dime, that love heals all wounds, that there's a God and that He cares. But he nonetheless kind of glories in the nihilism he presents, he lifts his glass to the "Awful Truth." In the meantime he's still prowling around looking for love. There's a promise, in the sex, the "hungry kiss," but it stopped there, not much more happened. Life looked like it was going to open up, there was a possibility for a moment, his cynicism dissolved for a while, but then again came disappointment, closing time, mundane life closed in once more, on him and perhaps on people he's been observing, and he knows how it is, he's been there. It's when you go to party and you know it's going to be one hell of a great party, there's someone you're interested in, things look promising for a while and then the guy, or the girl, goes home with someone else, and as if that's not depressing enough you don't even shine like you were sure you would. You feel like a wallflower, interesting to no one, and the party has turned into hell, the initial promise of the evening has turned sour, so maybe you drink a bit more to lose your inhibitions and just throw yourself into the thick of things and begin perhaps to enjoy yourself in a mindless way for a while. But eventually has to come Closing Time. I think that's how this Boss is feeling a bit. He's contemplating the end of a relationship and his own ordinariness. Again things look 153

up for a bit, she comes back, his very close companion, she's seen it all before too of course, but she's "wearing something tight," she excites him and she gets him enjoying the proceedings once more, he laughs, fumbles, but still at the back of his mind is "the Awful Truth." He just managed to forget it for a while. But then the music stops, the lights come up, everyone blinks in the blinding light and their covers are blown, the truth is revealed. Everyone looks beautiful and feels beautiful under soft light, but when the full lights come on you see yourself and everyone else as they really are, and the glamour disappears. The Johnny Walker wisdom and wit and sexiness quickly dry up in the harsh, cold light. You've got to deal perhaps, with the debris of last night's revelry, you know too you're going to be paying the price of your inebriation. Everyone's "busted" and he, the one behind the boss he's created, is more aware of that than anyone. It's been a high night of extremes and now everyone has crashed. I suppose you could really drag this party theme out and make it a metaphor for Life and Death and the denial of death and all sorts of big things and I think that would be appropriate too. And maybe God is there somewhere looking on and muttering and chuckling to himself about it all, thinking "there they go again, will they ever learn? I suppose I'll just have to pick up the pieces as usual." Elsie Thu, Aug 12, 1999 Thank you Fiona, you haven't bored me at all. I enjoy it when you deepen my own vague thoughts in such a brilliant way. I also tend to think that Leonard here refers to himself as being the boss, as an experienced voyeur. Like you, I can't find God in this madhouse of a song, and I'm glad I can't, because I really don't think He belongs in there. Listening to "Closing Time" makes me understand so well why Leonard took shelter in Mt. Baldy for a while, completely fed up with the crazy circus he describes so well in this song. It's a hollow scene. And yet, most of us attend the party over and over again. So much for human nature. Judith Thu, Aug 12, 1999 Unfortunately I missed Fiona's posting — could somebody send it to me via email, please? The few quotes appearing in the responses 154

made me greedy to read it, too. As you may figure, the given subject is a very acute one to me right now, so this thread is a wonderful pasture for me, when coming home at nighttime.. .. >Like you, I can't find God in this madhouse of a song, and I'm >glad I can't, because I really don't think He belongs in there. Part of myself not only understands this statement, but also wants to be with you on this. But part of me whispers: No, that's a fatal error. This madhouse of a song doesn't merely mirror something we could call 'the party,' but portrays our human life in general. So it is exactly this madhouse of a life, where we seem to have lost connection with Him, ergo it logically is here, where we'll have to search for Him and where we happen to find Him again — from time to time. > Cohen is a master of this kind of shock tactic — marrying upbeat >even jaunty melodies with the darkest, and most sublime, of words. >Listening to it again, and reading the words, I think it is an exercise >in pure cynicism. Well, part one of the above quote brilliantly underlines why I yesterday labelled Cohen my trustworthy translator when it comes to lowly Judith trying to understand Her Creator's unfathomable paths and decisions. Ever since I can think back I found that also The Highest One is a master of shock tactics — "marrying upbeat even jaunty melodies with the darkest, and most sublime, of words" — even one jot more effective than manages great Cohen. . .. On part two, however, I'd like to contradict. Neither did I ever recognize pure cynicism in any Cohen work, nor would I label The Boss a pure cynic — even though the both of them doubtlessly do house a kindred kind of extremely sinister humor. But cynical — in my eyes at least — sounds cold. Sounds like strumming on the highly tightened emotional chords of the audience-instruments for no other reason than to gleefully relish the entertaining effects which are produced. As far as I understand this sublime humor, it is rather hot than cold. Actually so flamingly hot, that it burns us to clean pure ashes in its bonfire of inescapable truth. OK — Cohen can only scorch and singe our hearts as far as we don't switch off the CD-player and don't close the book, from 155

which that cunning arsonist reaches out for his voluptously shivering victims. Yet neither of us can escape from the tunes and texts The Boss heats the furnace with, where we all are sitting in. Barb Fri, Aug 13, 1999 I have searched for cynicism and I can't find it. Only realism! And a tenderness for all of us who struggle, and are lonely, and continue to be romantic, he tells us "that doesn't make a fool of me." But it's time for some of us in the bar to make our exit. You can't tell the young ones how tough it is going to be. But just as Cohen was the one who conjoined reverence and the body, worship and sex, love and survival, here he reminds us once again (Please Don't Pass Me By) that the Angel of Compassion is alive and well and making at least half the world happy. Like any Dance of Life, it has to end. And it can end in laughter! It can end in laughter, even for someone like me, solitary, but still wearing something tight! I am my body till I don't have one anymore., And I will never forget that the Gates of Love budged an inch. That inch was enough. And sure, it's startling when the lights come on ... but I think the "blinding lights" are the ones facing those at the party who don't have to dance anymore. Who will be welcomed into the Light! Where all disappointments become meaningless and Love is All. "My heart is restless till it rests in Thee." Just my opinion, but I've already told my kids I want this played at my funeral! StSquidgy Mon, Aug 16, 1999 In the main, Elsie, I agree with your interpretation of this song.... I've never heard it as overtly religious, although on some level everything Leonard writes is.... Just because "Closing Time" has lines with "angel" and "heaven" in them didn't lead me to the conclusion that "the boss" is referring to the Judeo-Christian God who "don't like these dizzy heights." Seems to me he is painting a scene of Dionysian (or as we'd prefer down here in Mardi Gras City, Bacchanalian) revelry which is being enjoyed by a bunch of youngsters, and Leonard is feeling a bit alienated from the "youth" 156

all around him. He's already been here, done this before a million times and it's become a bit tedious. I hear a bit of sarcasm in the phrase "angel of compassion" . . . the chick is perhaps pissing him off a bit, and she represents chicks in general. So he's observing everybody else having a grand old time, but he himself really isn't anymore. The boss, i.e. the guy who runs the bar, isn't having any fun either, it's only a job, he's tired and watching the clock, he wants to shut it down and go home. And Leonard is to some extent in agreement, watching the Boss watching the action, and wanting to go home too . .. and for me, therein lies the metaphor — "closing time" being death, or withdrawal from society. I'd always heard the song as a sort of ode to manic-depression with suicidal undertones but perhaps this is because I've been unduly influenced by my manic-depressive friends in real life who, without exception, all name "Closing Time" as their favorite Cohen song. However, the others who say the Boss is God have caused me to consider this and thanks for that. Also, it brings to mind the context of the song's publication.... It was released shortly before Leonard went off to the mountain, so in the context of withdrawing from the world . . . well, then, yes. God, judgement, blinding light....

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KIWI SCHUSTER

Travelling Lady they who are the strangers live in a tower of song sentenced to death by the blues, they greet me from the other side, they want me to leave my masterpiece unsigned and head off to meet twenty women in vienna (where the waltz has been dying for years), i however will always prefer you, nancy, my lady of solitude, who wouldn't advertise forms of boredom as poetry but knows what the darkness is for. like me, you have turned your back on the crowd, trying (in your way as i do in mine) to be free. to unwire the rose and unwind the swan i would have to change into a traitor, hexagram in hand, i leave the sisters of mercy, avoiding the avalanche, i return to the system with a monkey, a plywood violin and oranges from china, i'll end the dress-rehearsal rag within the next couple of days, that's a promise, nancy.

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Now That We Are Free I one moody morning she watched her hand hovering high, landing light on her head, she lowered it slowly to cover her face. my friend, she addressed her reflection, suicide seems a good proof of affection. one ear-marked evening she watched her hand move swiftly towards the knife on the table, confusion bade her abandon the chase. the fragrance wafted into her brain. rose petals blunted the blade like rain. II

one needs to talk to someone, a hand takes a mirror lying on the desk. I need, my hand, my mirror. I ask my reflection suicide how do you feel about that one eye looks straight back at me but my hand is raised to shield the other on my face I can see the expression change the look of surprise surging up as I smell the rose you sent me this morning.

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Miming/Differance: Leonard Cohen Live LORI EMERSON AND JOE HOOPER

THIS COLLABORATIVE EFFORT began with our realization that we were both aiming to articulate, though from different theoretical frameworks, Leonard Cohen's live performances. I wanted to explore Cohen's concerts, though I couldn't since he wasn't currently on tour, so I settled for the next best thing: videotaped performances, a dark room to watch them in, and a huge television. I, on the other hand, wanted to analyse audio recordings of Cohen's concerts through the lens of (phenomenological) studies of theatre. After much discussion, we laid our accounts of Cohen "live" side by side, and we found that each complemented the other, extending its content.

Not long ago, two students had a conversation about Leonard Cohen's live performances. Eventually, it led to the question of whether Cohen was "acting" or "being himself" on stage. I have since come to appreciate the naivete of this question. Indeed, I have found that the question itself is flawed. For one thing, neither of us has been to one of Cohen's live performances, so we

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must resort to watching them on video; this itself raises several issues. However, of greater interest to me is that Cohen is an ambiguous figure on stage (and off); he "exists in a milieu of multiple divisions" surrounding the notions of presence and self in live performance (Scobie 64). As such, when we speak of "Cohen live," not only are notions of presence and self rendered fluid (in that they may refer to Cohen, the audience, or both), but also strict divisions of "acting" and "being himself" simply do not exist. Part of our exploration of the dynamics of Cohen's live performances, then, will occur within the framework of a Derridean analysis/ method/critique to understand the "multiple divisions" in the relationship of acting to the self. One thing I want to show is that Cohen's concerts are a play of differance, meaning that they never have one point of origin and that elements of the performance gain

That is, our understanding of Cohen "live" has necessarily been mediated by technology; consequently, though the effect of technology on the listening and viewing experience is often unacknowledged, its effect on our understanding of Cohen cannot be denied. As Simon Frith writes, listening to a live recording is like listening to "the noise of spectacle; the noise of communicated signals and audible responses" (239), a spectacle at which we can be present only by imagining ourselves in that particular time and place, from which, in reality, we will always be absent. Similarly, in watching videotapes of Cohen's concerts, we see something from which we were, and continue to be, absent. Regardless of the technological mediation, though, live performance is inherently audience contingent.

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meaning in relation to others that aren't present. The metaphysics of presence "postulates a 'personal encounter' as something which takes place between two independent, fully self-present individuals" (Scobie 6z). In Cohen's concerts, (Western) metaphysics affixes the individuals as Cohen and members of the audiences. Derrida states that metaphysics adheres to the idea that presence organizes concepts of being and that the meaning of being in general is determined by presence (Collins and Mayblin 49-50). The most important aspect to focus on is the term "fully self-present individuals." In fact, these individuals exist in the aforementioned "milieu of multiple divisions" and hence can never be "fully present." According to metaphysics, presence can be spatial in terms of proximity, adjacency, and immediacy; in this sense, spatial presence has no intervening material or mediation.

For Cohen, singing is like acting: it is the playing of a role, the taking on of a character in the presence of an audience that must in turn take on his character as its own. As well, given his recognition that singing always carries with it the potential for what I will later refer to as the "mimetic involvement" of the audience with the singer and vice versa, Cohen is also aware of the possibility for the discovery, transformation, and healing inherent in the singing (or the performance) of the song itself.

That the performer and audience can never be "fully present" may appear to be a counterintuitive assertion, especially in light of theorists, such as Andre Bazin, who, beginning with a 162

Since concerts are staged events that fall under the rubric of performance (and thus belong to the same lineage as theatre), they must reveal the same principles of human involvement as those demonstrated in the theatre. Specifically, Bruce Wilshire's phenomenological study of the theatre provides a framework

It can also be temporal since it evokes the now, the single present moment without delay, deferral, or lapse (49). The notion of presence is unified in both instances. According to Derrida, then, the undivided point of origin (the logos) is that to which truth is ascribed as well as the origin of truth in general. What Derrida attempts is an introduction of "undecidability" across the logos using palaeonomics and neologisms. The palaeonomic use of the term "writing" is significant in light of Cohen's live performances. The undecidable nature of the word, played out in the idea of the trace, strikes at the roots of metaphysics' reliance on full/unified presence. Writing (in the Derridean sense) is always slipping and sliding between presence and absence, as shown with the notion of the trace. Thus, a singer's words can never be followed back to a logos or unified source. Indeed, the singer can not be viewed as the logos.

similar premise, that "what is specific to the theatre ... is the impossibility of separating off action and actor" (95; emphasis added), conclude that "the stage welcomes every illusion except that of presence.... To be in the presence of someone' is to recognize him as existing contemporaneously with us and to note that he comes within the actual range of our senses" (96). However, our contention is that the impossibility of separating actor from action is not unlike the impossibility of separating actor from audience, audience from performer, consequently turning the theatre, the performance, into an embodied instance of what we alternatively call either differance or mimetic involvement. Moreover, insofar as presence determines and defines being, our assertions about the metaphysics of presence in performance naturally become ontological: the origin of performance, of acting and/ or being acted upon, 163

that can be used to articulate the nature of Cohen in concert and the ways in which he both literalizes and problematizes the dynamics of performance. (Given the central importance to my argument of the relation between the audience and Cohen, I have based my argument on his earlier album, Live Songs from 1973, and ignored almost completely the 1993 Cohen Live, in which, with the exception of brief clips of applause and Cohen thanking the audience for its support, there is very little spontaneous interaction with the audience.) For Wilshire, in thinking of the study of phenomenology as a discipline that reveals the hidden obviousness of the actual, the phenomenology of the theatre reveals the anatomy of the theatre as that of phenomenology or, arguably, existence itself. When Wilshire writes that "theatre as phenomenology is a fictive variation of human relationships and of human acts in

The notion of differance, like the palaeonomy "writing," introduces undecidability into the metaphysical reliance on presence. Similarly, the structure of "writing" is purely differential. Ferdinand de Saussure summarized this notion with his statement that "... language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system" (qtd. in Collins and Mayblin 68). As I have mentioned, the logos in a performance is typically viewed as the singer/actor. Yet, by using the neologism "differance" Derrida again disrupts the idea of a unified self on stage. The self is not a grounding presence ' that precedes the performance; rather, it is "an effect of the play of differance that constitutes theatrical discourse" (Auslander 36)

is as unfixed as the division between actor and audience member. As Stanley Cavell writes, ... the actors can do for the audience what the audience cannot do for themselves, and the audience can do for the actors what the actors cannot do for themselves. That is, the audience participates in the "world" from the side of the world and in its relative passivity, its mimetic involvements and engulfments in the world can be called forth through recognition of, and participation with, similar involvements in the play's "world." (358)

Theorists such as Constantin Stanislavski, Bertolt Brecht, and Jerzy

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act" (357), he is claiming that theatre is not so much a reenactment of everyday life as it is a form of life in process (or the live unfolding or acting out of "presence") separate from the mainstream of everyday life. Herein lies the basis of the social function that the theatre serves and our appreciation of it. In large part, the structural space of the theatre signals to us that what is presented is presented "as presented and not for everyday use." Insofar as we enter a darkened space that we cannot leave during the performance, the theatre physically shuts us out from our everyday lives and emotionally shuts us out from the concerns that normally absorb us. Moreover, the theatre's insistence on immobilizing us not only forces us to focus solely on the lighted stage but also ensures that our helplessness before the events presented to us is accounted for; as Stanley Cavell writes, "Why do I sit there?

And the honest answer has to be: There is nothing I can d o . . . . There is nothing and we know there is nothing we can do" (147). In this way, then, the structural space of the theatre is the enabling condition for the creation of an objectifying distance. Similarly, in What Is Cinemas'Andre Bazin writes that "the mere fact that it is exposed to view on the stage removes it from everyday existence and turns it into something seen as it were in a shop window. It is in a measure part of the natural order but it is profoundly modified by the conditions under which we observe it" (64). However, while this detachment from our everyday lives allows us to see (in the straightforward, literal sense) what is being shown on the stage, perhaps more importantly it allows us to see the "stuff" of our everyday lives. Thus, this detachment is not so much one that enables us, the audience, to look passively on as our

Grotowski have designated the self as the logos of performance (Auslander 30). All assume that the singer's presence precedes and grounds the performance and provides the audience with access to human truth(s) (30). However, Derridean analysis undermines the concept of logos, thus disrupting these theorists' work. In particular, the self not only produces the performance but is also produced by it. However, each of the authors raises points that are crucial to Cohen's performances. Stanislavski's theory is clearly inscribed within the notion of logocentrism. For Stanislavski, good performance is based on the performer's own experiences and emotions (Auslander 3z). The self is divided into consciousness and unconsciousness, with the latter as the logos, the centre of "emotions that are dearer to ... [the actor] than his everyday feelings" (31). This does not completely exclude consciousness, however, since it 165

lives are reflected back at us as it is one that ensures our complete presentness to the staged event. As Wilshire points out, once we are "detached from our involvements, we can begin to experience them for what they are" (354). Only after this has been established does the objectifying distance that detachment otherwise engenders give way to our surrender to what is being presented — without which we would fail to see that we are being portrayed on stage.

assists in the production of meaning; the conscious chooses the emotions to be used in the performance. The performer draws on emotions (based on personal experience) analogous to those of her or his stage persona or those to be produced in the performance. These emotions drive the performance forward, since ideally the performer and the stage persona should fuse (Stanislavski 32.34, 37). This reading of Stanislavski appears to fix the self as the logos of the performance; the stage persona is an extension of the self that stems from the unconscious. Yet is the self really so unified? While Stanislavski treats the subconscious as a "repository of retrievable data" (Auslander 31), Derrida views the unconscious not as a source of originary truth but as subject to construction and mediation. In a reading of Freud, Derrida states that the making conscious of unconscious materials is a process of creation, not of retrieval

However, even though we take it for granted that the theatre presents fictionalized accounts of our selves, we only recognize ourselves as presented when we surrender to the characters by standing in as them. When we stand-in as the other, we identify with her or him in such a way that, regardless of whether or not we like the character, our reactions to it make us more fully known to ourselves. However, since this recognition of ourselves in the

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other, as the other, is also always mitigated by the actor's (bodily) standing-in as the character, it is really that we stand-in through the actor's standing-in — in which case the experience of the theatre is an allembracing "physiognomic metaphor" for our involvements as persons with persons (Wilshire 358). Thus, since our experience of theatre as meaningful necessarily depends on the presence of others, the theatre or the staged event ultimately foregrounds the fact that we are (as John Ashbery has written in his poem "Clepsydra") "single and twin," that our existence is simultaneously defined individually and communally.

(31). The very process of recording unconscious materials creates them, or, as Derrida states, "Everything begins with reproduction," and "We are written only as we write" (31). Mediation is introduced between the conscious and the unconscious, thus disrupting the unity demanded by the metaphysical notion of presence, Brecht also grounds the performer in the translation of personal experience into performance. Unlike Stanislavski, however, Brecht favours the conscious over the unconscious (Auslander 33). Brecht's theory of acting depends on three processes, the first of which is the general acquainting of the performer with the character or stage persona. The performer then moves to Stanislavski's method of drawing on unconscious emotional experience. In the third phase, the performer steps back from the stage persona and provides commentary on it from the

I would also like to draw attention to another, equally significant, aspect of the theatre that Wilshire does not touch on in his essay. Despite the implicit assumption that what we see on stage is neither entirely "natural" nor entirely spontaneous (in other 167

standpoint of the conscious (Brecht 16— zo). Again the self is privileged, though for a different reason. Whereas Stanislavski views the performer as the seat of emotion and hence of "good performance," Brecht believes that the self must carry greater authority than the persona to provide useful social and class commentary on it. The performer is to exercise the role of a teacher for the audience. However, as with Stanislavski, the persona is formulated as an extension of the self. Grotowski's theory is based on "the relation of the 'mask of lies' that we wear in everyday life to the 'secret motor' behind the mask" (Auslander 34). The persona in this instance is a means for the self to discover its "deep roots and hidden motives" (34). The "mask of lies" is removed only through self-realization, which comes during the performance when the self finally confronts the truth that it has always been acting,

words, carefully orchestrated and therefore unreal), the theatre plays host to events that centre on "live" people acting in "real" time, their bodies moving, gesturing, sweating under the exertion of their acting, all of which takes place a determinable distance away from us. Moreover, insofar as the performer is seen as "real," is even watched and/or judged on the degree to which she or he reflects, transgresses, or escapes from reality, the everpresent possibility that she or he might make a "mistake" charges the event with a sadomasochistic sense of both dread and anticipation — all of which is imbued with the desire for "this one" not to present us as we are but to be the exemplary one, the one whom we long to be, the one who does not make mistakes. Hence, when the performer stumbles (as inevitably happens), our discomfort is over what we imagine to be the performer's own discomfort, and our

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That is, missing from Wilshire's account of the theatre as phenomenology is the notion of presence. Not only are we in the presence of the actors, but also they are in our presence. It is also part of the theatre experience that, at the end of a performance, audience and actors draw attention to their presence through the ritual of giving and accepting applause. But perhaps the larger significance of such a tradition is that, in foregrounding the primacy (as well as the necessity) of the codependent relationship between audience and actors, applause reveals itself as another aspect of what Wilshire calls the "mimetic involve-

even before the performance. Thus, in a pattern established by Stanislavski and Brecht, the self is again seen as the logos of performance. Yet the process of selfrealization is divided precisely at the point where Grotowski affixes its unity. "Realization" involves making unconscious materials conscious, a process that has already been shown to be mediated by the act of creation.

impulse is to do for the performer what we wish we could do ourselves: correct the mistake. Our discussion later of Cohen's audience-assisted improvisation of "Suzanne" is an ideal instance of just this, exemplifying both the lack of division between performer and audience and the nature of mimetic involvement.

These theorists illustrate aspects of performance that have been attributed to Cohen. As I quoted earlier, Cohen "exists in a milieu of multiple divisions" (Scobie 64). These divisions exist (albeit arbitrarily) under the general themes of time, the performer, and the audience. We are aware that these categories do not exist individually and in fact overlap continually. What I intend to show is that Cohen is not the unified logos of performance and in fact actively disrupts, or is disrupted by, the three aforementioned subjects. 169

ment" or the standing-in as the other that defines both the theatre experience and our everyday lives. For example, while applause is a culturally condoned expression of (sometimes enthusiastic) approval, it is also the one moment when we (the audience) can break out of our immobilization and clap, stand, yell, whistle, or cheer to show to ourselves, each other, and the actors on stage that we have been silent and still together as we lived through and alongside the lives of the characters, all of us crying and laughing together at the characters' (mis)fortunes. And while it is expected that at the end of the performance the actors will gather to receive the applause with a bow, it is also the moment when they leave their characters behind, reveal themselves as they are to us, and confirm for us that what just took place was a standingin as another and that such a standing-in was done in the constant awareness of (and dependence on) the audience.

The notion of presence is also used to determine types of performance. The common assumption is that a play is not a "live" performance so much as it is a "show" or just a "performance." Even though plays are spatially and temporally cut off from everyday life in a way that all performances are, our awareness that they are carefully scripted, rehearsed, and performed before an audience of which the actors ostensibly remain oblivious leads us to conclude that a play is further removed from the audience and thus from "life" than, say, a jazz concert in a small nightclub. In other words, implicit in how we classify performances is the assumption that, the more intimate the presence, the more direct the contact between the performer and the audience, the more the performance is akin to "real life." Undoubtedly, in the case of popular music concerts (whether held in a hall, auditorium, nightclub, or even stadium), they

A different way to explain this is to say that Cohen is differance and that differance is Cohen. The notion of temporality is of obvious importance to his live performances. The metaphysics of presence evokes the temporal as the single present moment, the now, but this concept does not articulate the many divisions within temporality. Cohen on stage seems to evoke the metaphysical aspect of the now; as he "sings," there seems to be no mediation between his voice and the audience. Through Derridean analysis, it becomes evident that this is inadequate; indeed, the unified temporal moment, the now, is not unified at all. Cohen himself is acutely aware of the nature of live performance; as he said to his audience in 1985 in a concert in Copenhagen, "I am here tonight to play for you as long as you want" (1985). Seemingly, he wanted to confound the very notion that his concert was bound by temporal limits; he was 170

willing to perform as long as, or longer than, the crowd desired. According to metaphysics, the temporal presence must be without delay or lapse, yet inherent in every performance are delay and deferral. Prior to singing "Bird on the Wire" (or any other song), Cohen wrote the words, creating a split in the logos between the writer and the written; "There is no pure, unmediated moment of 'original' creation" (Scobie 6z). Cohen's songs are thus doubled as they repeat prior texts (62). Prefigured dialogue has been used extensively by Cohen throughout his career and is frequently disrupted temporally in the same manner as his songs. His comic or speech routines, such as his joke "One thousand years ago, there was a brief period of ten or twelve minutes known as the sixties . . . " (15*93), are used repeatedly in different concerts. As with his songs, Cohen wrote the routines beforehand, thus separating

comprise a form of performance more tightly bound to the audience than any other. This is a sentiment that Stephen Scobie echoes in "Racing the Midnight Train: Leonard Cohen in Performance," in which he writes that "Live performance is valued because it is seen as bringing the artist into direct personal contact with his or her audience" (62)

While this is the point at which our dialogue departs from a univocal use of the term "presence" (in either the metaphysical or the phenomenological sense, since in this case we are drawing from different sides of the same philosophical tradition that runs through and beyond Heidegger), presence remains the centre around which our counterpoint voices are arranged throughout this essay. In fact, given that "Cohen" is not a unified presence but differance, mimetic 171

While presence is a helpful concept in determining different kinds of staged events and performances, essentially it is yet another way of articulating mimetic involvement and as such points more toward the fact that all performances are fictionalized variations of human relations in process. This brings me to the centre of my argument: given that a phenomenological study of the theatre reveals the nature of existence itself, and since live concerts are staged events that fall under the rubric of performance (and thus

the writer from his script. Similarly, an improvised piece, such as "Suzanne" from the film Bird on a Wire, seerns to undermine the divided nature of temporality in live performance. In the strictest sense, the nature of improvisation precludes one from writing the material beforehand; indeed, it seems that improvisation leads back to Cohen and affixes him as the logos by eliminating any mediation between the self and the now. The words are "new" since they haven't been written before, so there seems to be no disruption in the logos. Yet Cohen does disrupt it, though very ambiguously. As Scobie notes, Cohen's singing of the lyric "I am the man who wrote 'Suzanne'" seems to affirm the unity of Cohen as both writer and performer; Scobie also notes, however, the disruption of Cohen as logos with the different times that he claims to have written the songs, both a hundred and a thousand years ago

involvement — in the context of the phenomenology of Cohen's (theatrical) live performances — is simply an explanation of the underlying, organizing mechanics of presence at work at any Cohen concert. Come on Suzanne, don't leave me now. Been waiting for you for a long long time, you know a lot has happened since I wrote that song for you, dear, oh yes, I'm the man who wrote "Suzanne" a thousand years ago, oh yes, I'm the man who wrote "Suzanne" a hundred years ago. And I don't want anyone to lose it And I don't want anyone to use it but I'm the man who wrote "Suzanne" a hundred years ago. (qtd. in Scobie 63)

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belong to the same lineage as theatre), they reveal the same principles of human involvement as those demonstrated in the theatre. Specifically, the foregoing phenomenological framework around the theatre can also be used to articulate the nature of Cohen in concert, revealing not only his precise understanding of his role as a performer and his relationship with the audience but also the ways in which he both literalizes and problematizes the dynamics of performance. The structural space of a Cohen concert is the same as that of a staged event in the theatre: in entering a designated space, usually darkened, with rows of seats facing an elevated and lit stage, audience members are physically and emotionally detached from their everyday lives. And even though silence and stillness are not demanded of them to the same extent as in the theatre, the structural space of the venue insists on a

detachment that engenders their mimetic involvement. Notably, Cohen's concerts almost always have assigned seating and therefore take on the features of a theatre performance; however, even in the few cases where the audience is given the freedom to stand, sway, dance, and cheer during any part of the concert, a space arguably opens for an embodied forgetfulness (or detachment) and the complete surrender to the other on stage that the conventional (theatre) show cannot offer. Venue protocol and audience restrictions aside, the next logical question is, while detachment in the theatre allows the audience to surrender to the character through the actors, to whom or what do we surrender at a Cohen concert? It would be naive to claim that Cohen is just "being himself" when he performs in concert, that we are simply being shown Cohen as he always is, how he might be with friends, for the physical fact of the venue itself

(63). Cohen is not "unified" since he metaphorically wrote the words at two different times; in fact, there seem to be multiple versions of him. Further compounding this is his line "Come on Suzanne, don't leave me now." "Now" is an ambiguous term, especially in a song performed live and deeply indebted to memory. The line shows that temporality is lapsed or deferred in at least three ways in the improvised song. "Now" can mean the present moment, the now in the metaphysical sense, but as mentioned earlier there is no moment of "original creation." A second interpretation of the line is that Cohen is recalling a past event. On a first reading, this again appears to fix him as the logos. However, to do so would be to use Stanislavski's notion of memory as originary truth. Derrida states that the recollection of memory is the creation of it as well (see Auslander 31); by recording the memory, 173

Cohen creates it and thus disrupts the logos again. A third division of temporality is reading "now" in a transitory manner, such as "now one thing and now another." In this reading, Cohen is aware of the constantly slipping notion of temporality and how it is never fixed, never tied to a logos. I have used "now" as a palaeonomy and have reconceptualized it "between" the previous two meanings of past and present; it now inherits the meaning of both while simultaneously meaning something different. It is differance. Clearly, temporality is not the logos of performance; it is too unstable and divided ever to be considered as such. Stemming from the discussion of time, and indeed part of it, is the notion of Cohen as the performer on stage. Again the "milieu of multiple divisions" exists and thus undermines the concept of Cohen as the logos of the performance. I have

precludes this possibility. Live Songs clearly demonstrates the ways in which Leonard Cohen stands-in as "Leonard Cohen" the character, the personality, the star, in order to build on the notion of "theatre as discovery" and transform it into "the singer as healer." The album begins (as, we are led to believe, the concert began) with Cohen half-speaking, halfsinging a "Minute Prologue" to a subdued audience.

I've been listening to all the dissension I've been listening to all the pain and I feel that no matter what I do for you it's going to come back again but I think that I can heal it but I think that I can heal it I'm a fool but I think that I can heal it with this song ...

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Superficially, Cohen is expressing his belief in the redemptive powers of song and the healing potential of music to override the dissension and pain in the world as well as his own cynicism and lurking despair. However, this declaration of hope also foregrounds his awareness of his role as a performer and the ways in which it carries the potential to "do" for audience members what they cannot do for themselves, as well as the possibilities for his performance, his

singing, to do for him what he could not otherwise do. Moreover, implicit in this awareness of potentiality in performance is that such "doing" cannot be realized without Cohen's own surrender to the demands of the song, coupled with the audience's surrender to both the experience of each song and the larger ongoing song that is the concert itself.

already revealed such a division: the split between Cohen and his writing at the very moment that he writes. However, those familiar with his work will recall seemingly contradictory statements. In truly ambiguous fashion, Cohen admits that, "When I stand on stage, I feel I bring my private life with me there and that's what's interesting or amusing," and "I never got out of my personal life" (qtd. in Nadel 2,06, zz8). This statement seems to counter the idea that Cohen is not the logos of performance. His personal life appears to be the source of his work. Yet the personal is not exclusive of division; drawing from the personal is a process of creation and division, so Cohen's self on stage is continually divided. Furthermore, in a statement to which I will return, Cohen suggests that "I'm interested in the style of my own life. My life. Not the public figure. Just the kind of dude I am, just the way I move around" ("Cohen's" 5). Cohen

This is not unlike Wilshire's definition of the theatre as that which allows us to discover ourselves as we are through a mimetic standing-in as the other — the only difference being that, while in the theatre we stand-in through the actor's standing-in as the character, at a Cohen concert we stand-in through Cohen's standing-in as Cohen the singer. Insofar as we are aware that the first song is a prologue, we are justified in thinking for a minute that there is no separation between Cohen and the "I" of the song, that Cohen has not yet stepped 175

into his role as singer or performer, and that Cohen as himself is introducing the main act, who is Cohen as singer. However, what follows problematizes any attempt to divide clearly the one from the other. For example, the song that immediately follows the prologue (paradoxically one that Cohen did not write) is "Passing Through," an allegorical story of a persona who passes through human history as he meets with Jesus, Adam, Washington, and Roosevelt; the end of each meeting corresponds to the end of each verse, and between each verse and meeting we hear Cohen and his backup vocals sing the chorus.

has imbued himself with a moveable/ transitory persona; metaphorically, the "I" continually moves around, is not "fixed" at one point, and thus cannot be considered the logos. Hence, as we are trying to show, he acknowledges the divided self. The statement that Cohen is not interested "in the public figure" serves as the pivot for my discussion of the performing self in relation to the audience. Indeed, by stating that he does not believe in the public figure, he affirms its existence. Richard Poirier notes the separate existence of the two figures when he states that "... there exists a perpetually tensed antagonism between acts of local performance, carried out in private delight... and those acts of presentation where the author, spruce, smiling, now a public man, gives the finished work to the world" (88).

Passing through, passing through sometimes happy sometimes blue glad that I ran into you tell the people that you saw me passing through ...

Ira Nadel mentions that, "In Montreal, Cohen had always sung in front of a full 176

On the one hand, the narrative in the song leads us to believe that each chorus is sung by the persona, who is simply singing to the audience as he was sung to by each figure whom he met, each one glad to run into the persona and desiring that "you" (the persona) "tell the people" that they met; given this line of

interpretation, each chorus would therefore be read as the persona's standing-in as each of the historical figures. But Cohen's request during the song for the audience to "come a little closer friends," which for a moment places Cohen outside the "I" of the song as well as the audience's rhythmic clapping during the chorus, as if either in answer to the "you" or in acknowledgement of its identification with "the people," reminds the listener (as well as the concertgoer) that the song is also a performance and thus precludes interpretations of it only as story. Instead, we are made more aware of the ways in which singing — like acting — is the playing of a role, the taking on of a character.

length mirror, partly because he needed to see himself perform and partly to imagine what an audience might see" (152). Although not interested in "the public figure," Cohen is aware that such a figure exists. This quotation affirms my previous notion that the self not only produces the performance but is also created by it. Furthermore, it emphasizes the division of the self. Obviously, a crucial part of this creation is the audience in that "... a singer can always be doubled by the audience" (Scobie 63). The term "doubling" itself is divided. As mentioned, Cohen doubles himself by creating a persona for the audience. Furthermore, during his live performances, another performance occurs as the audience listens. Of course, the audience not only listens but also often sings along. The audience can sing the lyrics and is often encouraged to do so, or, as in the case of Cohen, it can assist the performer when he or she forgets the

Simon Frith also makes this connection, though in less elaborate terms: "All songs are implied narratives. They have a central character, the singer; a character with an attitude, in a situation, talking to someone (if only to 177

herself).... 'Song,' in this respect, 'is theatre'" (169-70). However, while for Frith the song is what he later calls "narrative-in-action," I would argue that it is so in addition to the narrative that is the concert as a whole — the "narrative-inaction" that is the story of both the audience's and the performer's ongoing mimetic involvement with the character of the singer/performer, which must change with each character for whom he or she stands-in. In the chorus of "Passing Through," the audience stands-in as any or all of the characters called "I," "you," "he," and "people" in the song, all of which are also mitigated by Cohen's standing-in as any or all of the "I," "you," and "he." Interestingly, such a surrender by both Cohen and the audience also creates a constant indeterminacy of pronouns in the song itself, which allows multiple interpretations of who addresses whom and therefore multiple ways in

lyrics. If the audience doubles Cohen, in terms of having him create a persona for them (metaphorically doubling himself) and listening to and singing with him (doubling his performance through their own performance), then how does one account for the improvised "Suzanne"? This version is the result of Cohen's resisting the creation of the persona that the audience desires. In the performance, Cohen begins singing the words to the original "Suzanne," gets confused, and states, "No, wait a second, I forgot the words." The audience then shouts out the words "Suzanne takes you down to her place by the river," prompting him to continue (Cohen, Bird; Scobie 6z). For Cohen to be doubled by his audience, he should revert to the original version, but he does not. Rather than singing the lines expected of him, and hence be the persona that the audience expects, Cohen 178

improvises the new lines. The audience seems to be prevented from doubling him through singing. Although this seems to undermine only partially the notion of Cohen being doubled by his audience, it must still be addressed. I still find disruption and undecidability within the improvised piece in which the audience doubles Cohen. As I mentioned earlier, the audience can participate in two variations of performance: listening and singing. In the case of the improvised "Suzanne," the audience doubles Cohen's performance with its own performance of silence. Division, redivision, and undecidability are once again the results of the deconstruction of the logos.

which the audience and Cohen can come to know themselves. "Please Don't Pass Me By" is an even more astounding example of Cohen's awareness of the possibilities for mimetic involvement and discovery offered by performance and song. Cohen begins by introducing the song to the audience. I was walking in New York City and I brushed up against a man in front of me; I felt a cardboard placard on his back and when we passed a streetlight I could read it, it said, "Please don't pass me by I am blind but you can see I've been blinded totally, please don't pass me by ..."

... and you know as I was walking I thought it was them who were singing it I 179

The last phrase, "please don't pass me by," becomes the chorus. However, what makes the performance astounding is that the song's narrative evolves into one that is less about New York or the "pain" and "dissension" in the world than it is about itself, about the constant potential for multiple levels of mimetic involvement in song that singing itself — or the performance of the song — can realize. For example, as Cohen or "I" continues walking through New York, he begins to sing "Please don't pass me by, I am blind but you can see I've been blinded totally"; however, in singing the song, he

thought it was they who was singing it I thought it was the other who was singing it I thought it was someone else but as I moved along I knew it was me and that I was singing it myself...

I know that you still think that it's me, I know that you still think that it's somebody else I know that these words aren't yours but I tell you friends one day you're going to get down on your knees you're going to get down on your knees ... I know that you're sitting there deep in your velvet seats and you're thinking "he's up there singing something that he thinks about, but I'll never have to sing that song," but I promise you friends that you're going to be singing this song — it may not be tonight, may not be tomorrow, but one day you'll be on your knees and I want you to know the words when the time 180

loses control over it and can no longer distinguish it from the world, himself from others, his singing of the song from others' singing of it. It is almost as if, during the singing, Cohen or the persona in the song is faced with the fact that discovery (of the ways in which we are both singly and communally defined) through surrender to the other and to the song depends on mutual participation. In particular, the persona ostensibly reprimands the (actual, attending) audience members for their inability to surrender mimetically to both the singer and the song or their refusal to surrender themselves in exchange for possession of the singer and the song. It is also this incomplete, illusory perception of the self (in relation to song, singer, character, performer) as rigid, immobile, and passive that accounts for the subtitle of the song: "A Disgrace." "Disgrace" carries valences of shame and

comes because you're going to have to sing it to yourself or to another or to your brother you're going to have to learn how to sing this song . .. I'm with you singing this song, I wish you would go home with someone else yup someone else I wish you would go home with someone else; don't be the person that you came with oh don't be the person that you came with oh don't be the person that you came with oh I'm not going to be I can't stand him I can't stand who I am, that's why I got to get down on my knees because I can't make it by myself you know, I'm not by myself anymore . ..

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dishonour — which, in "Passing Through," apply as much to the blind man's fall from grace as to the singer and the audience members in/of the song who are "blind" to the fundamental fact of their single and twin existence. But there is also the (etymological) implication that being deprived of dignity or divine favour is precisely what can bring about redemption: once we "get down on our knees," we are forced to move away from a conventional understanding of ourselves as fully differentiated, isolated entities that we hope will one day prove exceptional enough to be elevated above all others (as on a stage) and toward a discovery of ourselves as we are through surrender to others. Thus, Cohen actually links the possibility for recovery with the inevitable ("one day you'll be on your knees") and necessary ("that's why I got to get down on my knees") disgrace — pointing again to his belief in the inherent power of music to heal.

Our dialogue has been divided between an account of how elements of performance are disrupted and never affixed to a logos and how for Cohen, in order for the performance-experience to be completed and its transformative potential realized, mimetic involvement between himself (or the singer) and the audience must take place — thus pointing toward our original assertion that each of our voices is an extension of the content of the other. That is, since I, on the one hand, believe that all of the elements of Cohen's performances are divided (temporality, Cohen himself, and the audience), I have argued that his concerts are best explored through the idea of difference. What makes his concerts a play of differance is that all of these factors gain meaning from each other, though not all are present in the performance itself. Time, Cohen, and the audience are themselves products of differance, divided continually with no "centre" from which meaning comes. Indeed, when confronted with the figure that Nadel has described as "The enigma of Leonard Cohen: a well tailored bohemian, an infamous lover who lives alone, a singer whose voice resides in the basement of song, a Jew who practices Zen" (i), it is not surprising that a logos cannot be found. And I, on the other hand, have endeavoured to show, by way of Wilshire's phenomeriological study of the theatre, that Cohen "live" — especially as he comes across in Live Songs — is not only aware of the ways in which performance is an all-embracing metaphor for everyday human involvements but also both literalizes and problematizes such involvements.

WORKS CITED

Ashbery, John. Selected Poems. New York: Viking, 1585. Auslarider, Phillip. From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1997. Bazin, Andre. What Is Cinema? Vol. i. Berkeley: U of California P, 1967. Brecht., Bertolt. Brecht on Theater. Ed. Henry Willington. New York: Hill, 1977. Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enl. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979. Cohen, Leonard. Cohen Live: Leonard Cohen in Concert. Audiocassette. Sony Music Entertainment, 1994. 182

. "Cohen's Life Counts First: Poetry Is Reflection." Interview. Music Scene Mar.-Apr. 1971: 4-5. . Live Songs. Columbia, 1973. . 1972 Bird on a Wire Documentary. Videocassette. . 1985 Copenhagen Concert. Videocassette. . 1993 Boston Concert Film. Videocassette. Collins, Jeff, and Bill Mayblin. Derrida for Beginners. Ed. Richard Appignanesi. Cambridge, UK: Biddies, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 19 8 2. Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996. Nadel, Ira B. Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen. New York: Pantheon, 1996. Poirier, Richard. The Performing Self. New York: Oxford UP, 1971. Scobie, Stephen. "Racing the Midnight Train: Leonard Cohen in Performance." Canadian Literature 152-53 (1997): 52-68. Stanislavski, Constantin. An Actor Prepares. Trans. Ernest Vestingston. New York: Oxford UP, 1980. Wilshire, Bruce. "Theatre as Phenomenology: The Disclosure of Historical Life." Phenomenology: Dialogues and Bridges. Ed. Ronald Bruzina and Wilshire. Albany: State U of New York P, 1982. 353-61.

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Leonard Cohen Live in Germany, 1993 CHRISTOF GRAF

ARRIVING AT THE FRANKFURT AIRPORT for the German shows of his 1988 I'm Your Man tour, Leonard Cohen was a bit surprised by the large number of journalists waiting to welcome him: "My God," he said, "I thought I'd been forgotten." Since he had released only two alburns in the 19808, the previous one in 1983, five long years earlier, the laws of the music business predicted such a reaction. Today there's hardly an artist who can let his or her audience wait impatiently for five years for new material, and there is hardly a record company that would allow the artist to do so, unless a certain loss of market value or a disappearance from the public eye is a calculated risk — or unless you're Leonard Cohen, who has enjoyed undiminished popularity and constant success with albums and tours alike. And it would take almost another five years until the release of his next album, The Future. Nevertheless, Cohen's The Future world tour in 1993 was a great success. Almost every concert was sold out, and almost every review was favourable. But the reaction of the German media was rather modest in contrast to their enthusiastic reports about Cohen's previous activities. Cohen, too, was modest about press affairs. Promotional interviews, which nowadays usually take place three to four months prior to the release of an album or the start of a tour, were not as numerous as in the past. Shortly before the release of The Future, Cohen briefly visited Hamburg to promote the album. Unfortunately, because of a bad cold, he cancelled most of the interviews. Those he did give were being conducted from his sickbed in the hotel. The album itself had been released at the end of November 1992. However, instead of going through the drudgery of talking to innumerable journalists, who "all ask the same questions anyway," Cohen said, he arranged only two interviews with press agencies. 184

On 2,3 November 1992, the release date of The Future in Germany, I received the delightful message from SONY'S long-time press principal Helga Strehle that I had an interview date with Cohen at the Arabella Hotel, Suite 392, in Frankfurt am Main. Of course, the interview was far too short to evolve into a deep conversation, since Cohen needs almost as much time to answer a question as he needs to write a song. Thinking for a long time, sitting almost devoutly, he sometimes gave the impression that the wrong question had been asked, but then, surprisingly, he gave either a short, almost monosyllabic, statement or an answer that sounded like one of his poems. "Your questions are wonderful," he said at one point. "I'm looking for the 'diamonds in the mine'" was my answer. "The work in a minefield is hard work" was his response. "But it's worth it," I replied. Cohen stayed in Frankfurt for less than a day during his twoweek promotional tour in Europe. He left Frankfurt around lunchtime to give an interview the same night on SWF 3, a German radi station (called SWR 3 today), and had to endure a bad translation. The next day he was in Brussels. The first printed interviews can be found in magazines such as Rock World, Me/Sounds, Live Magazin Saar, Tabou,, and Hifi/Vision as well as in daily newspapers such as Saarbriicker Zeitung, Niirnberger Nachrichten, Badische Zeitung, and Frankfurter Allgemeine, At the time of the interviews, the dates for the spring tour were not certain, though a tour had been confirmed. Finally, in the April edition of the magazine In Concert., the concert dates were revealed. Surprisingly, three of the six dates were to be open-air concerts. On zz May 1993, his first concert night in Germany, at the Rock am See festival in Konstanz, Bodensee, Cohen returned to German stages as the headliner of the evening, playing alongside the Spanish rock newcomer Heroes Del Silencio, the German pop band Pur, rappers Die Fantastischen Vier, and the Brit rockers The Levellers, among many more. A month earlier, on 25 April, the European tour had started in Holstebro, Denmark. Although Cohen had received effusive praise for his concerts in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands, Belgium, England, France, Spain, Italy, and Switzerland, the opinion of the audience in Konstanz, some of whom had probably seen the concert in Zurich the previous night, was divided. 185

cOHEN,1993 COURTESY CHRISTOF GREF

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About half of the approximately fifteen thousand people at the Bodensee Stadion, a predominantly young audience, left after Heroes Del Silencio finished singing. But his "friends," as Cohen lovingly referred to the remaining crowd, devoutly listened to his songs. He opened his show with "Dance Me to the End of Love," which became the opener of the following concerts. The audience quickly understood the sense of the song, singing along and moving rhythmically to it. "You are making an old kid very happy," Cohen said, touched. He wore his grey hair with pride and the deep wrinkles in his face with dignity. Cohen was fifty-eight at the time, still no reason, being among many senile musicians, to make him a sad old man. Sometimes he is lost in the nowhere realm between Frank Sinatra and E.M. Cioran — a grieving man who controls his tearful craft as masterfully as others control theirs by trashing guitars, a man of doubts and despairs who submits to the beautiful poses of compromise. In starting "Dance Me to the End of Love," "The Future," and "Ain't No Cure for Love" with the same introduction, he escaped with a little dry smile shortly before the lyrics say that he is looking for freedom his way. In fact, in the gospel arrangement of "Bird on the Wire," he showed elegantly the noble attitude of Weltschmerz that he has rescued over the years — even though he no longer sings many of his old songs. But the audience honoured his new songs, some of which Cohen probably wrote for his new vocal range, by listening closely, holding each other, and sometimes even dancing. Nice ending for a pleasant summer festival. Cohen, actually prepared for rejection by the audience, thanked his fans several times in German, rather unusual for him, and with the essential husky version of "Suzanne." "The first concert in Germany ended after fourteen songs and ninety minutes with a lukewarm version of 'Hallelujah'" reported the Suddeutsche Zeitung. There will always be people who criticize Cohen since "the poet of the us underground" dared to put his poems to music (New York Times], yet he is on his way to becoming "a famous old man" (Frankfurter Allgemeine). The review in the Saarbriicker Zeitung, certainly not written by a music expert, called Cohen's first concert in Germany a "bla bla from a worldweary pervert." Of course, Cohen had to perform in Berlin, the German city he likes least and has immortalized in songs on his previous two albums. But his 1993 concert in the "new" old capital was less 187

provocative than those in the 19708 and 15)805. In 1972, the Berliner Zeitung was not very pleased with Cohen's statement about Goebbels. "Do you want another war?" he asked back then. But the Berlin Bild knew exactly how to report the concert at the ice in 1980: "Quiet! Leonard is talking loudly!" Cohen asked his fans to tear down the ice and to take home the chairs. "If you see this terrible plastic, you see the dark side of our lives" was his remark about the German Nazi past. But his concert at the Tempodrom in Berlin in 1993 was a very different affair. Cohen touched the "German misery" (Der Tagesspiegel) when he sang lyrics such as "Give Me Back the Berlin Wall" while "the audience made the tent in the Tierpark shake, like drinkers do in their favourite corner bar. [The] magical master of monotony . .. was given a tribute by his audience of all ages with long-lasting applause" (Berliner Morgenpost). Cohen was very touched by the ovations at all six sold-out concerts in Germany, and his plan to leave the country quickly almost came to nothing. He knows best what he means with lyrics such as "First We Take Manhattan, Then We Take Berlin." If you try to read his mind, you'll probably interpret that he always wanted to say "I saw everything, I made up my mind about it, and I am the only one who is responsible for that." Cohen as a prophet? Why not? "'First We Take Manhattan' was probably prophetic," said Cohen during our interview. "But more in a way that it was prophetic about the growth of extremism in everybody's mind. I don't mean in society. I mean in the mind. Everybody has become an extremist. And everybody is ready to defend extreme positions." Cohen also confronts the Zeitgeist of the 19905 with the title track of The Future: "Yes, there is a close relationship between 'First We Take Manhattan' and 'The Future.' 'The Future' is my struggle with the future. I think it will be more or less like everybody else's struggle with the future. Nobody will experience peace." "Therefore the demand for democracy?" I asked. "In 'Democracy,' which originally was a song of eighty verses, there was a verse about Europe: 'It ain't coming to us European style Concentration camp behind the smile It ain't coming from the East 188

With its temporary feast As Count Dracula comes strolling down the aisle.' So I was about the only one of my friends who was not rejoicing when the Wall came down. I said, this is going to be a mess. Just between us. And I wrote those words around '88/'89, 'As Count Dracula comes strolling down the aisle.' That is Europe." In Me/Sounds, Cohen was asked about why he omitted another line in this song: "Give me love or give me Adolf Hitler." Well, that part of the song evolved into "The Future." And that is what a lot of people would be saying: "give me love or give me Adolf Hitler." They'll be saying it in their hearts. Jews will be saying it. Gentiles will be saying it. The Turks will be saying it. The young Germany will be saying it. They are saying it already, because if there is nothing in the air, if there is no nourishment in the culture, as there isn't now, then of course young people will embrace this extremist, this refreshing extremist position and have the feeling of shaving lotion on their skin. Enough of the ambiguities, enough of the complexities. Nobody will be able to take the freedom. As I say in another song, "It looks like freedom but it feels like death It's something in between I guess. It's closing time." It feels like death. It is no death, but it feels like death. And that is gonna scare the shit out of people. It is already. And you can detect it in yourself. This is not a sociological study. This is a reportage of the center of my own life. And I think that is where people are going. Into the extreme. It is the only way where there is any comfort. Otherwise, who are we? What are we supposed to be doing? Where is it? Even though some members of the press and the public alike still consider Cohen's image to be that of "a bunch of sorrow," they can't help but appreciate that Cohen is the most reliable prophet of their hearts. Frankfurt am Main, Alte Oper. For me, this was the best concert of the tour. Cohen used "Bird on the Wire" as his opener on past tours, but in 1993 "Dance Me to the End of Love" indicated a new 189

unidentifield. COURTESY CHRISTOF GREF

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orientation. Even though many people still see him as a melancholic, with "The Future" his melancholy, which I think always describes the positive side, became more subjective. "Melancholy is a feeling and not a survival kit" Cohen philosophized during a conversation. Precisely at 8 p.m. the lights go out, and Cohen welcomes his audience: "Good evening, my friends. Thank you!" A man in a black suit stands on the stage, his hair is grey, his "golden voice" is deep but not yet broken. He announces his second song, "The Future," as though announcing "his way of thinking and living" (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). For Cohen, it is important that he is understood. That's why, for the first time, he quoted excerpts of his songs during this tour. He thought he'd always been misunderstood, in part because of translation problems, especially into German. Also, his facial expressions have not always been easy to interpret. It seemed that everybody in the audience just waited for Cohen to show them, with the necessary indiscretion, how life was treating them. In any case, there is no longer any reason to fight about Cohen's work as either a writer or a musician. You can defy him, analyse him, or disassemble him as a myth. Yet millions of people whom he has reached throughout the years with poems and songs are still touched. "Those who are faithful toward Cohen are those who are treating their own lives carefully. To regret letting Cohen into one's own life is impossible in his presence" (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). Cohen's concerts always evoke intense feelings among audience members. Cohen, like no other musician (except maybe Bob Dylan, who combines mesmerizingly beautiful lyrics with blunt trivialities), ties together written and spoken words. And, above everything, he ties together the past and the future with the present, and he is therefore still in touch with the latest intellectual ideas and is not simply growing old with his beat-generation background. Other things add to Cohen's personality. The combination of musical simplicity and almost aggressive lyrics creates maximum dramatic effect and minimum extravagance. But Cohen does not consider himself above criticism. He felt pleased holding security back while a female fan came on stage. Flattered, he accepted a bunch of roses in front of four thousand witnesses. The "high priest of hopelessness" (Frankfurter Rundschau) hadn't lost his credibility. Leaving the stage, he thanked his fans with old-fashioned small bows. Half the time his eyes were closed, almost as if he didn't want to be reached by the outside world. After eight songs — "Dance Me to 191

Zurich 1993,with Julie Christtension and Perla Batana (right)

courtesy Christof Graf

c.1993. COURTESY CHRISTOF GAF

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the End of Love," "The Future," "Ain't No Cure for Love," "Bird on the Wire," "Everybody Knows," "Anthem," "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong," and "First We Take Manhattan" with Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen (the "Sisters of Mercy") — Cohen took a break. The first half of an unforgettable evening was over. Cohen returned without his black jacket, wearing just a black sweatshirt, and started the second part of the show with "Avalanche," accompanying himself on the guitar, followed by "Suzanne." After this far too short acoustic set, the band — a fantastic unit consisting of Jorge Calderon (bass guitar), Bob Furgo (violin, keyboards), Bill Ginn (keyboards), Steve Meador (guitar), Bob Metzger (guitar, pedal steel), and Paul Ostermayer (saxophone, keyboards) — returned to the stage, and Cohen continued in fine form with "Tower of Song," "Democracy," "Waiting for the Miracle," "I'm Your Man," "Joan of Arc," "Closing Time," "Take This Waltz," "There Is a War," and "Sisters of Mercy." You can hear a little blues and folk, a little gospel, a little pop in his music. There is virtually no stage show, for Cohen succeeds in doing what others dream of doing — that is, being brilliant just by being present. Just by being there precisely. After three hours of offering most of the highlights of his career, Cohen closed the show with encores of "Hallelujah," "Passin5 Thru," "I Tried to Leave You," and "So Long, Marianne." Then, with a final encore of the biblical song "Whither Thou Goest," Cohen was saying good-bye. Marek Lieberberg, a longtime Cohen fan and the tour promoter, had arranged a meeting after the concert between Leonard Cohen and Herman van Veen, who was to play at the Alte Oper two nights later. The Dutch singer, who had recorded a version of the world hit "Suzanne" in the 19705, felt inspired by his first-ever Cohen concert. He called it "A performance filled with enormous spirituality." After the concert in the Circus Krone-Bau in Munich, Cohen was treated to standing ovations. "Almost motionlessly Leonard Cohen is talking about God and the world, talking about dying a lot of small and big deaths" (Miinchener Abendzeitung). Cohen's final concert in Germany in 1993 was to take place in front of an audience of over fifty thousand at the Rock at the Ring festival near Nuremberg, which has been a major open-air event since 1985. In 1993, the blending of different styles of music was the statement of the festival. To succeed with the "three-day trip" through rock history, innovators (Maldita Vecindad, Jayhawks, 193

World Party, and Hothouse Flowers), classics (ex-Queen Brian May, ex-Led Zeppelin Robert Plant, and Def Leppard), and newcomers (Faith No More, Ugly Kid Joe, Danzig, The Black Crowes, Melissa Etheridge, INXS, and many more) were included in the line-up of the festival. However, although Cohen was supposed to fit right into the time journey between May and Etheridge and all the other "heavy" bands, it was a mistake to let him play there. It was hard for Cohen to find friends in the middle of all those heavy-metal freaks, even though he had a fantastic band playing behind him and had more to offer than just a melancholic statement. "He even made a journey into blues-rock and offered a fine version of 'First We Take Manhattan'" (Kolner Rundschau). But Cohen quickly realized that his efforts weren't appreciated by the audience and concentrated more on spontaneous rock-oriented variations, familiar from previous concerts of his tour. Yet the well-meant gesture was not well accepted by the mainly young audience. Almost half of the people there ignored Cohen's fifty-minute, ten-song set, which even included "Suzanne." "Who would ever have imagined a sunny openair festival, Leonard Cohen is singing 'Suzanne,' and half of the audience is booing?" asked the Kolner Stadtanzeiger. If all those heavy-metal freaks would just listen to Cohen once, they would probably react differently. The best example is the leader of The Sisters of Mercy, Andrew Eldritch, who played at the festival a year earlier. He paid tribute to Cohen not only with the name of his band but also with a cover version of that terrific song by Cohen, "Teachers." Eldritch's best performance of this song remains the time he played it Jive for the first time, on 16 February 1981. Twelve years later, he still showed his fondness for Cohen. During an interview that year, he confessed, "I believe that Leonard Cohen is understood wrong. Everybody thinks he is making depressive music, but his songs are actually humorous. Cohen possesses black and sensible humour. His albums are definitely not depressive, as sometimes is taken wrongly. Nobody would buy an album to feel bad." Eldritch's fascination with Cohen is so deep that his dream is to work with Cohen one day. Marek Lieberberg shares Eldritch's fascination. He insisted upon going on stage after Cohen's performance just to make the crowd more aware of Cohen's engagement. He reminded everybody there of the violent Nazi assaults in Molln and Solingen, the latter assault occurring just a day earlier. Lieberberg called for tolerance for Cohen's comments against those assassinations. Cohen's daughter, 194

Lorca, who lives in Paris, stayed backstage during the concert and gave him comfort right after his show. He was also comforted by Rebecca De Mornay, his girlfriend at the time. Consolation also came from the artists. The late INXS frontman, Michael Hutchence, also mentioned during a conversation his adoration of Cohen. Cohen's European tour ended one day after the Rock at the Ring festival with a show in Vienna on 30 May 1993. Seven days later, Cohen resumed touring in the United States and Canada.

Attentive listeners at these concerts heard some extra verses in addition to the six on the released version of "Democracy." In Munich, London, Philadelphia, Stockholm, Konstanz, Frankfurt, Detroit, Boston, and Toronto, Cohen added the following verses. It ain't coming to us European style Concentration camp behind the smile It ain't coming from the East With its temporary feast As Count Dracula comes strolling down the aisle And I know your baby's missing But we sighted her today She was cleaning her machine-gun Democracy is coming to the USA

It ain't comin' from the beauty of her face As she stands so tall above the blackened waves From the shining of her brow As she renews her solemn vow To liberate the energy of slaves From the eye above the pyramid In the dollar's cruel display From the law behind the law We still obey Democracy is coming to the USA

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First we killed the Lord and then we stole the blues This gutter people always in the news But who really gets to laugh Behind the black man's back When he makes his little crack about the Jews Who really gets to profit And who really gets to pay Who gets to ride the ship Right into Charleston Bay Democracy is coming to the USA

From the church where the outcasts can hide From the Mosque where the blood is dignified Like the fingers on your hand Like an hour-glass of sand We can separate but not divide

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Hamburg, 1993. COURTESY CHRISTOF GRAF

*-y /

The Representation of the Holocaust in Flowers for Hitler SANDRA WYNANDS

FOR MANY MEMBERS of the post-World War II generations who reached intellectual maturity after the war, awareness of the war and the Third Reich raised, beyond the theoretical difficulties of integrating into one's intellectual makeup a completely unprecedented event, a number of personal issues. A decisive factor in the German student revolt of the 19605, for instance, was critical detachment from the parental generation. These young people had to come to terms with their parents' potentially dubious pasts as party members, or at least with their inexplicable inactivity in the face of pure inhumanity. The ubiquitous generation gap was in this case further exacerbated — rightly or wrongly — by young Germans who viewed their parents as potential murderers or spineless collaborators. Along the same lines, Leonard Cohen might have asked himself where his life would have taken him had he been born in another place — say, Germany. Cohen's generation, Jewish or not, was the first to have to cope with the knowledge and the consequences of the Holocaust, which was a recent event, even in 1964 when Cohen's collection of poems entitled Flowers for Hitler was published. This awareness is reflected in the literature of the period, which was written not only with fresh, undigested moral indignation but, as in Cohen's case, also from a perspective of potential personal involvement: Cohen himself belongs to the primary target group of the Nazis' exterminating crusades. "Where is the poet who can make clear for us Belsen?" (xviii) Irving Layton asks in his preface to Balls for a One-Armed Juggler (1963). Layton calls upon intellectuals to speak up against the silence that brings about forgetfulness and to rise to the challenge of trying to make comprehensible the incomprehensible. Just a year later, as if in response to Layton, Cohen publishes Flowers for Hitler. Both Layton (by demanding that the Holocaust be written about) and Cohen (by actually writing about it) have moved beyond a 198

crucial question that provoked substantial controversy in the immediate postwar period, particularly among writers: can and should the Holocaust be written about at all? Do such horrors as happened during the Third Reich defy representation in language altogether? Related to this, and even more important, is the question of whether writing about it is helpful (insofar as it keeps forgetfulness at bay and thus reduces the risk of a phenomenon like the Holocaust reoccurring1) or whether writing about it is an indecency toward the suffering of millions, or presumptuousness on the part of the poet? Most famously, Theodor Adorno polemically voiced his objections: "Noch das aufierste Bewufitsein vom Verhdngnis droht zum Geschwdtz zu entarten. Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei gegenuber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frifit auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmoglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben" (Die 30).2Adorno's well-known criticism in his essay Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft relies on a twofold assumption, based on the process of aestheticization and repetition inherent in the production of a work of art: by becoming a subject in art, the Holocaust is deprived of its horrifying singularity. The work tries to instil in the reader the emotion evoked by the experience by aesthetically recreating it on a more or less mimetic level. It can therefore be maintained, as did Adorno, that any "re-creation" can, in view of the complete incomprehensibility of the event, only be a simulacrum of the original, a weak copy that can never do justice to the experience, that can only be "Geschwdtz" ("blather") and as such an offence to the sensibilities of people whose lives were destroyed by the Nazi death machine. Taken to its logical conclusion, the argument would be that such an act of re-creation can even be seen as legitimizing the Holocaust by repeating it in an aesthetic realm. Implicit in this objection is, of course, a disapproval of the aestheticization of the Holocaust. Human beings derive aesthetic pleasure from experiencing art. Again, the question arises whether any kind of pleasure derived (however indirectly) from the disaster the Holocaust represents is an immorality and an offence to the victims. Lawrence Langer suggests, almost perversely, that the inclusion of an inordinate amount of graphic detail of the atrocities could function as a saving grace insofar as a pleasurable response to these details is out of the question. Such an observation merely defers the problem, though, as even though the poem's content is 199

unlikely to instil feelings of pleasure, its success as a poem might. Similarly, the "infiltration into the work of the grotesque, the senseless, and the unimaginable, to such a degree that the possibility of aesthetic pleasure as Adorno conceives of it [?] is intrinsically eliminated" (3), is a doubtful technique. Such a view segregates responses to art into the legitimate and the illegitimate. No matter whether a feeling of pleasure is derived primarily from a poem's subject matter, its careful construction, or a fusion of both, in the ideal case all of these sentiments find their origin in the same root. Paul Celan's poem "Fugue of Death" is extremely moving and instils the feeling of exhilaration that accompanies all great art because it achieves such an inseparable unity between content and form — in other words, because it is a well-made poem about the Holocaust. Does Langer suggest a division of pleasure into a superficial and a metaphysical variety, depending on whether it is brought about by conventional aestheticism or its reversal, thus implying that Adorno's criticism could only have been aimed at the former? This distinction seems exceedingly artificial. Finally, then, the problem of writing after Auschwitz comes down not to questions of technique (superrealism or surrealism) in order to exclude unwanted responses but to fundamental attitudes toward art and a person's faith or distrust in language. Is it possible to move other human beings so deeply through art that making the Holocaust a topic in art is not a condescension? And if so, what strategies are used in order to achieve this objective and do justice to the Holocaust's uniqueness? Giinther Grass says in Dog Years: "for even I — you can tell by my modest literary efforts — lack the vital grip, the quivering flesh of reality; the technique is there but not the substance. I've been unable to capture the this-is-how-itwas, the substantial reality that throws a shadow" (471). By what strategy should artists attempt to capture the essence of what they would like to convey? Langer moves quickly from Grass's famous quote to Peter Weiss's play — or should one say theatrical experiment? — entitled The Investigation, which stages with minimum alteration the testimonies of witnesses at the Nuremberg trials. But if "the quivering flesh of reality" were captured in art by replaying the bare facts of reality in a fictional (artificial?) setting, The Investigation should have been a dramatic success, yet Langer finds it "singularly undramatic": "oddly, and certainly unintentionally, the result is not a new aesthetic distance, but an aesthetic indifference" (31). 200

Certainly, one interesting question would be whether this verdict of aesthetic indifference is not entirely Langer's personal response. Does it really matter whether the words are spoken by an actual concentration camp survivor or by an impersonator thereof? In other words, do the same words have different effects depending on whether they make their appearance in "reality" or in "art"? The events and their representation in language remain the same. If the stage event is experienced as mediated, then maybe the experience in the courtroom just feeds on a basic voyeurism that the play no longer satisfies. Or is a completely different aesthetic needed in art in order to achieve the same effect — one that moves historical fact inevitably into the realm of fiction in order to do justice to art's own idiosyncratic mechanisms? This would then be a necessary move away from the unembellished "quivering flesh of reality" and potentially toward inadequate "Geschtvdtz." How do artists, and in this particular case Cohen, try to avoid the pitfalls of inadequacy, once they have decided to raise their voices in response to the Holocaust and thus defy the forces that brought it about? In The Investigation the obvious motivation for Weiss to stage the unembellished historical fact is an acute awareness of the inadequacy of one's own imagination when confronted with the Holocaust as an experience. David Rousset writes, "Normal men do not know that everything is possible. Even if the evidence forces their intelligence to admit it, their muscles do not believe it. The concentrationees do know. . . . They are set apart from the rest of the world by an experience impossible to communicate" (168-69). Action and reaction depend upon context. In a given context — say, middleclass everyday life — only a limited range of situations based on an equally limited range of human behavioural patterns are thought likely. Therefore, for lack of experience, the ordinary imagination does not know how to cope with a phenomenon such as the Holocaust, since its frame of reference is missing.3 Out of this evolves the belief that there is nothing the creative imagination could add to the event itself. Anything beyond the statement of pure fact would inevitably result in meaningless babble, because the unimaginable cannot be imagined. Cohen's approach in his poem "All There Is to Know about Adolph Eichmann" is reminiscent of Weiss's, except that Cohen moves exclusively in an artistic realm: all of the words were specifically chosen to serve a purpose in an artistic construct. In passport style, the familiar enumeration of a person's identifying features is given, but

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it turns out that the investigation yields no spectacular results: Eichmann's fact file of distinguishing characteristics fits the vast majority of the human population; he has no distinguishing characteristics. He is of ordinary physical appearance and average intelligence. Cohen does not turn to flamboyantly poetic language, which would tentatively circle and zoom in on the phenomenon "Adolph Eichmann." Instead, he chooses the head-on assault of a mere statement of facts, as if to say that as a poet he can do nothing to make the ugly reality more bearable or digestible. All he can do is make the facts speak for themselves in a language exceedingly sparse so as not to distract from them — and the facts are all the more effective and incomprehensible for their unremarkable nature. Although Eichmann stands out in history for his atrocious deeds, there is nothing in his physical or intellectual makeup or background that singles him out for such a career. A monster, complete with "talons" and "oversize incisors," or a man stricken with "madness" (66) would have implied the comfort of the utterly extraordinary; a case of one in a million. "Madness" would have offered the certainty of an explanation, but the facts are unable to provide any such certainties. Eichmann was singled out only by the opportunity of circumstance: he happened to be in a particular place at a particular time. An individual's idiosyncratic fate could have been dramatized or given more elaborate descriptions. True to the genre of biography, the poet could have investigated how the individual became what he or she ended up to be through nature and nurture, or causal relationships could have been established between personal tragedies and their disparate psychological effects. But none of this can be done for Eichmann, as he emerges not as an individual but as Everyman. The reader is left with the sheer incomprehensibility of how average human beings can commit crimes such as Eichmann's. With this goes the awareness of potential reoccurrence: if neither the protagonists nor the circumstances were extraordinary, the implication is that a disaster similar to the Holocaust can repeat itself at any time in a society structured like Western industrialized society. In his book Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman very convincingly reveals the Holocaust to be a phenomenon deeply rooted in modernity: "The truth is that every 'ingredient' of the Holocaust — all those things that rendered it possible — was normal . . . in the sense of being fully in keeping with everything we know about our civilization, its guiding spirit, its priorities, its immanent 2,02,

vision of the world ..." (8). Bauman reveals the Holocaust to be not a relapse into barbarism4 as was commonly believed but an outgrowth of modern culture, if not its continuation (no). The Holocaust took neither madmen nor a degenerate society. In their own ways, both Cohen and Bauman arrive at the realization that in order to come to terms with the Holocaust, the conditions that brought it about have to be accepted as part of everyday life. In Cohen's poetry, this idea resurfaces in the surreal, disjointed ramblings of "A Migrating Dialogue." Disparate figures of contemporary Western culture are listed as collaborators in the Nazi crimes: "Joe Palooka manufactured the whips. / Li'l Abner packed the whips in cases. / The Katzenjammer Kids thought up experiments" (72,). No peculiarly German form of authoritarianism or mentality produced the Holocaust but rather Western culture as a whole, including exponents of ostensibly "innocent" popular culture such as children's comics. No culture structured along its principles can claim immunity: "I said WIPE THAT SMIRK including the mouthfoam of superior disgust" (72). In Flowers for Hitler this knowledge of the ubiquity of evil results in a reversal of conventional aesthetics. The poems in the book present a series of disparate, surreal glimpses of scenes that revel in the grotesque, the senseless, the tasteless. Rather than follow a logical progression, the individual pictures seem joined together to create an atmospheric effect designed to take the reader into Cohen's world of aesthetic and moral inversions. Cohen becomes a chronicler of the dark side of life, which is at the creative root of the work: Flowers for Hitler draws its creative strength from a celebration of all those elements that in conventional aesthetics stand for decay. The back-cover blurb for the book quotes Cohen as saying, "This book moves me from the world of the golden-boy poet into the dung pile of the front-line writer," and Sandra Djwa concludes that "this is a movement from a qualified acceptance of the romantic ideal as it is embodied in art ... to the decadent romanticism of a fin de siecle aesthetic in which the ugly replaces the beautiful as the inspiration for art" (32). Almost as a parallelism to the literature of the Decadence, Cohen looks for new revelations in the experience of failure. Decadence literature follows the same principle: common Romantic motifs are radically reinterpreted, inverted so as to achieve freedom from the repressive limitations of Victorian, positivist notions of linear growth and progress. 203

According to Adorno the ideals of the Enlightenment — the further domination of nature in the name of progress in order to enable humans to make their history as autonomous beings, free from the constraints nature puts on them — inevitably turn against themselves ("Der Fluch des unaufhaltsamen Fortschritts ist die unaufhaltsame Regression"5 [Die 53]). As soon as nature is reduced to subservience by human instrumentalism, the drive for domination is taken out on other humans who are then dominated in nature's place. Thus, Adorno sees Enlightenment thinking as inevitably spiralling into fascism. As if to break free of the thought patterns that were seen by Adorno to be directly responsible for fascism and the Holocaust, Cohen turns to the same methods with which his Decadent precursors tried to free themselves from the constraints of positivist thought. Even the title of Cohen's book, as has often been noted, evokes Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mai. "A Migrating Dialogue," one of the most effective poems in the collection, combines many of the book's distinguishing characteristics. The poem opens with the image of a Nazi henchman in camouflage, travelling abroad with a companion after the war to flee prosecution by the allied forces. He is wearing "a black moustache" (72) (itself, of course, Hitler's own primary characteristic, prominent in every caricature of the man) and cannot quite conceal his mindset: even in camouflage he and his companion are talking "about the gypsies," presumably as being a "subhuman" "race." Cohen establishes firmly what the reader has to expect: he is not going to count himself among the poets who wallow in their own (ostensible) sensitivity and write a poem about the hardships of the Holocaust refugees. Instead, he undermines the expectations of bourgeois morality by perverting the conventional setting: he is going to write about a Nazi on the run from the forces of righteousness. In the following lines a clearer picture of the "refugee" emerges. His companion showers him with advice: "Don't bite your nails, I told him. / ... Be cute. / Don't stay up all night watching parades on the Very Very Very Late Show. / Don't ka-ka in your uniform" (72). The advice is centred on simple behavioural patterns that need to be maintained in "exile," so as to remain inconspicuous. It could just as well be directed at an ill-behaved child. Reminiscences of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove shoot through the reader's head: suddenly the "refugee" is transformed into a pathetic figure who lapses at times of uncontrollable psychological stress into old,

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deeply ingrained habits, which society does not sanction any longer (parades now have to be watched in the small hours of the morning, "on the Very Very Very Late Show"), and the poem's farcical character is established. From here onward any logical, linear progression in the poem breaks down and it no longer communicates through a single or unified narrative voice. Some statements the reader can agree with, such as the one that implicates all of Western culture in the possibility of the Holocaust by denying idiosyncratically German traits as its origin. Others are clearly designed to offend the reader's sensibilities: "Peekaboo Miss Human Soap" (73) combines the blunt statement of historical fact with a disrespectful way of presenting it. As an overall poetic strategy, the overstatement of farce or parody is mixed with ideas that sound overly familiar to the reader. Most of the provocative voices reiterate historical statements from the far right of the political spectrum: "Don't believe everything you see in museums. / . .. / Don't tell me we dropped fire into cribs. / 1 think you are exaggerating" (73). Cohen drives his point home by topping these historical offences with his own, thus intensifying the points: "I think we should let sleeping ashes lie" (73), he says bluntly, as if to rub the reader's nose in the ignorance and obtuseness one is up against. Mixed in with these statements are allusions that the reader is guaranteed to pick up on and that strike sensitive notes: "Don't tell me we dropped fire into cribs" refers to any air raid during the war, but more specifically to the firebombing of Dresden, and although the reader is unsure of where the narrative voice is coming from, since neither the Nazi protagonist nor his companion are likely to have been part of that, the image of burning Dresden is evoked for effect, not to make sense in any logical progression in the poem; I believe in gold teeth" (73) evokes the mountains of gold teeth extracted from the victims before they were sent to the gas chambers; "There is sad confetti sprinkling / from the windows of departing trains" (73) is reminiscent of both the celebrations that happened around the trains that sent soldiers to the front in World War I and of the boxcars that took Jews to the Nazi death camps. World War I was the most popular war in history. In the reader's mind this exuberance mixes with the awareness that the young men who were called upon to fight in it, and who proudly did, did so with a high probability of not returning from the front. This image of death is topped by the role of trains in the organized mass murder 205

of the Third Reich. A tight network of allusions is established, which makes its point far more forcefully than a graphic description of atrocities could, as more freedom is left to the reader's imagination and a more sweeping treatment of the entire phenomenon is possible. The slap in the face of (established bourgeois) morality emerges as a way of coming to terms with the horrors the poem describes. In an almost cathartic fashion, Cohen piles one (implied) atrocity on top of the next, always with a lighthearted flippancy and without going into detail, but in the multiplicity of voices suddenly a single voice emerges that goes beyond the dominant flippancy and articulates concerns similar to Adorno's: "I don't like the way you go to work every morning. / How come the buses still run? / How come they're still making movies?" (73). In the face of the ultimate human tragedy that is the Holocaust, ordinary, everyday pursuits seem mundane, insignificant, and lacking in legitimacy. Apart from the fact that all of these pursuits shrink in significance, Cohen also expresses his incomprehension of the world's "quick" return to business as usual: the world must somehow function differently after it allowed the Holocaust to happen, and if it does not, it is fake, covering up an irrevocably altered conscience and consciousness, suppressing it instead of confronting it. What the poem conveys very well, then, is the inability to reconcile normality with the knowledge of horror and at the same time the inability to imagine such horror in the presence of normality — which again is reminiscent of Rousset's statement quoted above. The poem is an attempt at overcoming this speechlessness in ramblings that still convey ineffability in their disorganization. In its stance against conventional aesthetics, Flowers for Hitler also takes a stand against formally "good" poems: under no conventional criteria is "A Migrating Dialogue" a "good" poem, yet it makes its point precisely because of this lack of form. Cohen thematizes this programmatic stance of the book in the poem entitled "Style": "I will forget my style / I will have no style" (27), he announces — a statement that, as soon as it is elevated to a stance, becomes in itself a style, of course. Conventional aesthetics, he suspects, has aided the world in lying, and by participating in it he has become a collaborator in the world's insincerity. "I do not know if the world has lied / I have lied" (13), he says in "What I Am Doing Here," the strategically placed poem that, as the title suggests, introduces the collection. In order to free himself from the tangle of these lies and to be true to

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himself again and escape the mauvaise foi in which he has been implicated, he has to radically question every preconceived idea, emblematically epitomized in style (being a set of ideas society has labelled acceptable without questioning its validity). Having become the "front line writer" who (in Cohen's view) functions as the disseminator of the ugly truths of life, he can then lie back, as it were, and "wait for each one of you to confess" (13). Just like the members of the literary Decadence at the turn of the nineteenth century, then, Cohen presents a work that is a slap in the face of bourgeois sensibilities (cf. Koppen 66). Within the context of Canadian writing at the time, this is a rather unusual and unconventional development: "its awareness of the darker side of human consciousness is a helpful counterbalance to a literary tradition that professes an ignorance of the human animal as complete as any of the Pollyanna Glad books" (42.), Djwa says polemically. But Cohen's acute awareness of taking a stance with the book is part of the problem. Again in the blurb on the book's back cover, he says: "I say that there has never been a book like this, prose or poetry, written in Canada: All I ask is that you put it in the hands of my generation and it will be recognized." Cohen is, of course, among other things, referring to the generational conflict outlined at the very beginning of this paper, but he is also making a personal declaration of his function as a poet that is summarized in the golden-boy poet/front-line writer dichotomy. It is his self-conscious positioning of the artist as persona that detracts from the poems as effective works of art about the Holocaust. His conviction that a descent into the underworld of human consciousness and experience is necessary for artistic creation precedes the work and determines it: "Because it is Cohen's thesis that the experience of failure is indispensable for the creation of art, the book becomes a case study of the fleurs du mal beauty of such losers," Djwa says (38). In a way, Cohen brings his own concept of artistic creation along and imposes it on his treatment of his topic. The book's aesthetic is as such only partly determined by the subject matter. Rather, the subject matter lends itself to such a treatment as Cohen has chosen, but it is at least partly used as a vehicle for Cohen's own selfpresentation and his concept of artistic creation. Once again Cohen finds his literary forebears in the Decadents, who also set up their own lives as antitheses to bourgeois sensibilities. By adopting the whole Decadent stance, Cohen avoids a mimetic approach to the Holocaust and thus the dangers outlined in the 207

first pages of this essay: rather than appeal to the readers' empathy, he deliberately alienates them from the work of art by disfiguring it (Lariger 3) and thus removing it from the familiar world. What Langer is apparently driving at by his cryptic remark "aesthetic pleasure as Adorno conceives of it" (3) is pleasure derived from a poern that does not make the conventional reception process an issue: in Flowers for Hitler the flow of information in the conventional communication model with sender and receiver at opposite ends is obstructed by a "message" that is experienced as unpleasant or perverse (which is the origin of the initial defensive reaction to Decadent art). Thus, the reader is forced to see her- or himself as a radically separate entity rather than one compliant with and pleasurably immersed in the world of the poem. With the reception process becoming an issue, the work takes on vaguely metafictional characteristics: the readers reflect on their own function and that of the poem, and become active constituents in the process. This obstructive mechanism helps Cohen circumvent a re-presentation of the Holocaust. NOTES 1

Cf. Schnurre's comment: "Lyrik ist sinnlich. Also meint sie das Leben. Also verteidigt sie es. Und da soil sie, nach einem derart globalen Todessieg, schweigen?" (14; "Poetry is sensual. Therefore it is about life. Therefore it defends it. And now, after such a global victory of death, poetry is supposed to be silent?" [my translation]). 2 "Even the most extreme awareness of the disaster is in danger of degenerating into blather. Cultural criticism is confronted with the final phase of the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and this also influences the realization that articulates why it became impossible to write poems today" (my translation). 3 In fact, one of the problems the Holocaust poses is that the frame of reference was so familiar: inconceivable atrocities happened in a modern, Western, civilized country. What concentrationees learned was not to trust what were believed to be the certainties of everyday life. 4 "The Holocaust was not an irrational outflow of the not-yet-fullyeradicated residues of pre-modern barbarity. It was a legitimate resident in the house of modernity; indeed, one who would not be at home in any other house" (17). 5 "The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression" (Dialectic 36).

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WORKS CITED

Adorno, Theodor W. Gesammelte Schriften: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft i. Vol. 10. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977. Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cummings. New York: Continuum, 1990. . Die Dialektik der Aufklarung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989. Cohen, Leonard. Flowers for Hitler. Toronto: McClelland, 1964. Djwa, Sandra. "Leonard Cohen: Black Romantic." Canadian Literature 34 (1967): 32--42Grass, Giinter. Dog Years. New York: Harcourt, 1965. Koppen, Erwin. Dekadenter Wagnerismus. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1973. Langer, Lawrence L. The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975. Layton, Irving. Balls for a One-Armed Juggler. Toronto: McClelland, 1963 Rousset, David. The Other Kingdom. New York: Reynal, 1947. Schnurre, Wolfdietrich. "Dichten nach Auschwitz?" Schreiben nach Auschwitz. Ed. Peter Mosler. Koln: Bund, 1989. 11-15

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When to Write Prose (for Leonard Cohen) PETER JAEGER

Leave the concept caterpillar. To loose this concept it is essential to gild an annex. It is essential to augment. The concept caterpillar is a real increase. There is the increase but there isn't the caterpillar. If I clarify this one departure, swell has no right to cry with me. Am I failing to declare that I hate caterpillars, or that I hardly misunderstand their culture? The concept caterpillar is more than lore. It is an accident through which I drop, sink, make enemies with astroturf, dialogue with ugliness and strength, but in no way inhabit insects. Act inside concepts. Always act inside concepts. Always open my mouth when you write about hate. If I'm averse to history, I should forget to grace myself and the immaterial. What is the quiet that youth guesses? Youth guesses at every quiet whatsoever. They have heard records of laughing fathers. They are fascinated by the solace of our prospering pictures. Everything they hide from me differs from the comedy of that end. I will not be accompanied by uncontained pronouns or the praise of those who have thought gadgets simple. They elaborate moderations of location. No one suspects I am anorexic and am oddly paying to sit down. I work with machines who green good fortune. This won't break my little noise. Write the concept, suppress abridge, roll over. No one suspects I am not out of relief. I concede nothing I imagine about hate in none of the spaces of hate that I write. Roll over, we suspect what you suspect, we never would have guessed. I haven't anything to learn from us. 1 am more ugly than you. I am dumber. Whisper at me. Require an exit. That is virtue. If I hide my public site, I reconfigure lies. Where is your desire? To be near an artificial gender, to be near an artifice of sex. Pretend we're hated speech writers for a leadership who precedes our sway. Their boost and plus produces less. We produce a phase. There is still also. I am legal angels. Now be proud. Write the concept, suppress abridge, roll over. Nothing votes sky. Nothing outs meagre. Put me off.

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That is an exterior figure. It is outside. It is public. Be rude to the publicity of the immaterial. Those wholes were raucously spoken. The cowardice of the work is to write them. The laxity of the work is to honour them. Let the performers consider your hate of cleave. Be bad asexuals. The prose is a campaign. It can advertise me. It can demote my obscure indifference. I am celibate. I am an innocent maiden. All this currency about the police of hatred. I am a professor of laxity. Act inside concepts. The concepts live when I act in them, and they are Right with everything but my ambition. Write the concepts with the careless inaccuracy with which you would overlook incline. Become theoretical vinyl. Become soft when you amplify. Get solid around textiles. The pages should provoke an alert impression inside your mouth. There is a desire to laugh at your prolonged seepage. Smell is there to make you forget the social norm. It is just your tilt. It gazes back at you. It wears you. Prose is everything and lore. It is the aristocracy of publicity. If you claim and deflate it then you are better than those you praise. You are more than someone hindering symbols and cracking costly rebuffs with the cruelty of intellectual turncoats. Feel the concepts as lore, not data. They are a tale. You are writing to a parting of the probe or transnational span. The machines are ignorant about your safety. They shame you by leaving grants. If you dilate you compliment their aloofness. Write to me about the bowels of extend, the frills you saved, and be vague about depth and the ahistorical fall. Play the performers for giggles. If you are ineligible for giggles it will be from your own ingratitude, not from ours. It will be measured as hearsay, in the stasis of the pen and the mending of a vacuum with smarts. It will be in the lore and the blaring muddle of your where. Address the ostentatious. Fear frailty. Be proud of stamina. You sound like you could come out never. I am the linguistic turn of your ugly.

When to Write Prose I wanted to disappear once outside of this paragraph normed to write hello. I knew the above passage was Right. Especially in the least persistence of the funeral clean-up, with the boy awake and the girl in torture. I knew the above could be doubted to discon2,11

tinue asymmetry. It can. It isn't noisy enough for that kind of text. It has to drool and masturbate before work on Monday evening. We're assumed to stand at attention when the villain writes a new nutritious myth of indulgence. Sanitation gets it off the hook. How dare it dismiss the married of America from its middle! How dare it mend its lie of noise to ramble, in the number of the Machines, to the gravy-trained plastic of its moralistic actualities! I love it for something else. It will earn big for this secular honesty. It will drop water from its Mind. It will return to this death as a grizzly discard. Life to the Comrades of the Right etc.! Life to the Comrades of certainty! I love its jerk-off backside, silly with indifference. Let it watch T.V., and let it look at sad rhythms in the business room. Always let it speak once. And never let it stand inside with selftaught newborns while the clothes-horse straightens none.

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Pornographic Sublime: Beautiful Losers and Narrative Excess1 ROBERT DAVID STAGEY

Beautiful Losers contains no literature that even vaguely resembles art. There is no real reason to drag in every foul word that would never be aired in your livingroom. Sex is dragged even lower into the gutter, and any pretense at plot or narrative is abandoned in an orgy of filth. — John Fisher, letter to Jack McClelland IF BEAUTIFUL LOSERS IS ABOUT THE BEAUTY OF FAILURE, it is also

about the failure of beauty. I'm thinking of Kant. The beautiful is the feeling corresponding to a mode of aesthetic representation that deals in pleasing forms that allow for the harmonization of "imagination" and "understanding." As such, the beautiful feeling points to a particular kind of judgement, a judgement of "taste" that demands universal agreement on the basis of a sensus communis, a "common sense." Thus, beauty involves a "standard idea" itself "fixed by a concept of objective purposiveness" (Kant 81). In other words, objects that produce the beautiful feeling (which, when recognized as such, constitutes a "reflective" judgement of taste) are formed in such a way as to make themselves amenable to the "free play" of the subject's mental powers. "The beautiful . .. concerns the form of the object, which consists of the object['sl being bounded" (98). Because the form of the object is fixed, stable, and discrete, its apprehension is fully adequate to, and commensurate with, its comprehension and vice versa. Consequently, taste may be seen to perform the social function of "protecting consciousness from doubt" that Jean-Francois Lyotard explicitly assigns to literary realism operating under the aegis of "political academicism" that "understands and imposes a priori criteria of the 'beautiful,' criteria that can, in one move and once and for all, select works and their public" (Postmodern Explained 7). The ultimate purpose of this policing of the aesthetic is the "formation and stabilization of 213

taste" (n), such that a constructed and artificial "reality" remains unassailed and unquestioned. Opposed to the beautiful is the sublime, the feeling of "a momentary inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger" (Kant 98), a feeling best described as a painful pleasure, a pleasing pain elicited by aesthetic objects "contrapurposive for our power of judgment, incommensurate with our power of exhibition, and as it were violent to our imagination" (5*9). The sublime is that which cannot be said, cannot be shown, cannot even be understood, in the limited sense of making itself available as experience. As Henry Sussman puts it, "through its progressive abandonment of scale and measurement, sublimity pushes representation to the very brink or limit of nonrepresentability" (41). While the economy of taste, governed by the "established rules of the beautiful," determines the "'correct' images" and "'correct' narratives" for producing social conformity (Lyotard, Postmodern Explained 7), the aesthetics of sublimity, through the very formlessness of its objects, challenges the social contract implicit in judgements of taste. It does so by disorganizing the "effect of the real" that effaces the contradictions of late-capitalist society as it simultaneously constructs a "free, unified, autonomous subjectivity" that is nothing of the sort (Belsey 67). As for Beautiful Losers, I'd like to suggest that, despite its title, it is underwritten by an aesthetics of the sublime that has a great deal to do with its much-celebrated "postmodernism" and everything to do with its much-less-celebrated pornographic elements. I say "elements" rather than "material" or "content" because one of my aims in this paper is to extend a reading of Cohen's use of pornography beyond the troubling content that has occupied most critics so as to address strategies of pornographic narration that I understand to be critical to the antirealist, anticonformist project of sublimity outlined above. This conjunction of the pornographic (often understood in terms of its paralysing effect on human agency) and the sublime (which, in the context of postmodernism, is the basis for an ostensibly liberating aesthetic) may seem counterintuitive; it is certainly not unproblematic, as will become clear. Nevertheless, the idea of a "pornographic sublime" does open up some interesting avenues for reading Beautiful Losers, "the most revolting book ever written in Canada" according to Robert Fulforcl (qtd. in Nadel 138), and it may even have broader implications for the study of postmodern narration. 214

One of the earliest claims for the postmodernity of Beautiful Losers is made in Douglas Barbour's "Down with History: Some Notes towards an Understanding of Beautiful Losers," first published in 1974. For Barbour, Beautiful Losers is "deliberately . . . committed to ... excess" (145). Cohen's novel "so outrages our sense of the 'normal,' using every technique, including the forms of literary parody, at his disposal, that we perforce undergo an apocalypse of mind while reading. In this it is a most contemporary, post-Modern work" (146). Thus, for Barbour, Cohen's postmodernism manifests itself as a self-reflexive and parodic allusiveness (what would later be called "intertextuality") — an exploitation of "every technique" of literary representation that, following David Ketterer's work on apocalyptic writing, Barbour suggests performs "a metaphorical destruction of that 'real' world in the reader's head" (144). Importantly, Cohen's novel does not synthesize these various techniques; they are not unified but merely incorporated. Beautiful Losers is the product of the unresolved and unresolvable tensions between the various strategies that it employs. Consequently, the book as a "whole" resists classification. The blurb that Cohen supplied for the novel's first edition is telling in this respect: Beautiful Losers is a love story, a psalm, a Black mass, a monument, a satire, a prayer, a shriek, a road map through the wilderness, a joke, a tasteless affront, an hallucination, a bore, an irrelevant display of diseased virtuosity, a Jesuitical tract, an Orange sneer, a scatological Lutheran extravagance, in short a disagreeable religious epic of incomparable beauty, (qtd. in Nadel 137) Nothing exceeds like excess: plurality and contradiction. The eclecticism of the preceding passage may seem to be at odds with the narrator's many claims to a fully synthetic imagination: "Sometimes after I have come or just before I fall asleep, my mind seems to go out on a path the width of a thread of endless length" that "sews the world together," uniting All the disparates of the world, the different wings of the paradox, coin faces of problem, petal-pulling questions, scissors-shaped conscience, all the polarities, things and their 215

images and things which cast no shadow and just the everyday explosions of the street, this face and that, a house and a toothache, explosions which merely have different letters in their names ... and I myself, my greedy fantasies, everything which has existed and does exist, we are part of a necklace of incomparable beauty and unmeaning. (Cohen 18) One could argue, of course, that this unity is merely inclusive, that "[a]ll the disparates" are simply brought together, that their heterogeneity is highlighted in, not resolved by, the narrator's expanding vision. In any case, the transcendence of this moment is severely undercut by E, who, detecting "some glimmering of a fake universal comprehension" in his friend's "swooning eyes," exhorts him to "Connect nothing" (17). What remains is the having said of the above, the rhetorical exercise, which, even if insincere, even if "unmeaning," boasts an apocalyptic expressiveness that Barbour sees in the "grandiose over-reaching involved in every sentence" (146). It is in relation to this rhetorical excess, which more than anything else characterizes the novel, that we can begin to see the connections between postmodernism and the sublime — for the sublime, Sussman argues, "constitutes a cultural attempt at negotiating grandiosity" (29). But Cohen's "over-reaching," as Barbour puts it, misses the mark. To surpass is to fall short. The grandiose is always insufficient for the task of representing the sublime, which is, by definition, unrepresentable. It is perhaps more accurate to say that grandiosity (of statement, of concept, of the aesthetic object itself), by its very inability fully or adequately to express the most extreme and elevating experiences of the mind, calls forth the sublime as the index of that inadequacy. Extending this principle to postmodern art, Lyotard states that The postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations — not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable. (Postmodern Explained 15) 216

If, as Sylvia Soderlind contends, Beautiful Losers is, "without doubt, the quintessential Canadian postmodern novel" (41), then we should find in it exactly this disregard for "correct forms" that Lyotard holds essential to the postmodern's invocation of the sublime as the means (and sign) of an "initial forgetting" (Postmodern Explained 80), which enables alternative and oppositional presentations of literary experience. Beyond the typological confusions enacted by Beautiful Losers, its use of the sublime suggests a radical departure from (or challenge to) the basic organizing, meaning-making, feature of the novel itself: narrative. Sandra Djwa's comment that the creative process for Cohen "moves between aspiration and disintegration" (99) nicely expresses the tension between the mind's experience of an "absolute" that can only be rendered formally as an absence of form. Kant states that the sublime can be "found in a formless object, insofar as we present unboundedness" (98). To present "unboundedness" is to exempt oneself from the rules that govern the beautiful, to cast off, in effect, the limits that ensure intelligibility. Before the "old man" — a hybrid character combining aspects of both the narrator and F. — transforms himself into a "movie of Ray Charles" at the end of the novel, he "disintegrate^] slowly," allowing lookers-on a "vision of All Chances at Once" (Cohen 258). The extreme limit of "aspiration" is "disintegration," which Djwa intimates when she likens Cohen's quest for "the absolute" to exactly the kind of dangerous thrill seeking precipitated in the early nineteenth century by popularization of the sublime: "daring the abyss is a propulsion into an irrational, frightening world" (99). Furthermore, "daring the abyss" constitutes a "disintegrative experience that is both frightening and pleasurable" (99). Since with the sublime the "mind is not just attracted by the object but alternately always repelled as well" (98), it represents a masochistic commingling of contradictory impulses that differs radically from the relatively simple and "pure" pleasure taken in a contemplation of the beautiful. "I'm tired of facts, I'm tired of speculations. I want to be consumed by unreason. I want to be swept along" writes the narrator of Book One; "O God, please terrify me" (Cohen 49).2 This plea is part and parcel of the kind of self-mortification that Cohen regularly sets as a precondition for revelation, for those apocalyptic truths that overwhelm (almost to the point of annihilation) yet glorify the subject who seeks them. But to the extent that the narrator's openness to revelation constitutes a quest for knowl217

edge, things get complicated. The sublime moment of truth — if it is to remain sublime — opposes, in some key respects, the story of its attainment. Since the sublime deals in formlessness, it opposes narrative to the extent that narrative is an organizing discourse that "demarcates, encloses, establishes limits, orders" (Brooks 4). Plot, "the structure of action in closed and legible wholes" (91), which Peter Brooks argues is the "internal logic" of narrative discourse, is particularly subject to a radical deconstruction when it attempts to express irrationality and "unlboundedness." Since, as Lyotard maintains, "Form, thanks to its recognizable consistency,... offer[s] the reader . .. material for consolation and pleasure" (Postmodern Explained 14), the relative absence or disruption of form (read plot) in postmodern writing is accompanied by a loss of (simple) enjoyment, itself merely the sign of a reader's interpellation as a passive consumer of the text. Practically every commentator on Beautiful Losers has addressed its lack of a coherent, linear plot. Stephen Scobie notes that "there is no conventional linear development. For most of the book, the situation is static, and even when a change of some sort occurs, the time sequence is deliberately distorted, indeed abandoned" (Leonard Cohen 96). Likewise, Douglas Barbour warns that readers will be "confused" if they "try to take the narrative, wherever it may be, in a linear fashion" (140). For his part, Michael Ondaatje writes that "An ordered progression of scenes is completely blasted: key scenes come up again and again," such that "The book progresses not by a logical movement of plot, but rather by expanding situations" (49). To be sure, the text is flagrant in its disregard for logical causality, such as when F, at the end of Book Two, hears on the radio a "recorded historical news flash" concerning his escape from the mental asylum before it actually occurs (Cohen 240). It's not that the action of Beautiful Losers is simply episodic or nonchronological (which it is) but that time ceases to serve as the basis of interrelations between events. This seems to be the effect of introducing the sublime (conceived as a moment) into a narrative system based on the notion of temporal succession, plotted time: the narrative doesn't develop, it occasionally explodes. And the detritus of such explosions doesn't recede politely into the narrative past but blows about, peppering the story with a present tense that simply won't go away. In Beautiful Losers, time no longer contains the plot — or, put another way, the plot refuses to reproduce the logic of temporal succession. zi8

E, who "exempts" himself "from all these categories" (159), is eloquent about his desire to disrupt plot, if only through an overabundance of plot. Being a terrorist, a politician, an entrepreneur, a seducer, and the narrator's teacher, E is the novel's master "plotter." He asks, What will happen when the newsreel occurs at its own pleasure or accident in any whatever frame of the Vistavision, willy nilly? The newsreel lies between the street and the Feature like Boulder Dam, vital as a border in the Middle East — breach it (so I thought), and a miasmal mixture will imperialize existence by means of its sole quality of total corrosion. (137) The "newsreel," of course, represents history, and Beautiful Losers is, among other things, a historical novel — one in which the "newsreel" of facts does occur "willy nilly" throughout the story. But history is more than a collection of facts; more often than not, it's a narrative wherein facts are ordered to express a putatively truthful version of the past. So inseparable are history and narrative that Lyotard can say, "For if we claim that the world is historical, we necessarily intend to treat it narratively" (Postmodern Explained 23). But the narrative necessity, or necessarily narrative quality, of historical representation is challenged when heterogeneous plots collide in a single text, when "accident" is introduced into the discourse and works against the inevitability of narrative as an "organic whole." As F. says, "It took courage! I let the newsreel escape, I invited it to walk right into plot, and they merged in aweful originality, just as trees and plastic synthesize new powerful landscapes in those districts of the highway devoted to motels" (Cohen 2,38). The "synthesis" that F. describes here, like the merging of trees and plastic (Cohen's working title for Beautiful Losers was "Plastic Birchbark"), is monstrous, neither organic nor inorganic: a hybrid. In The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary EnglishCanadian Fiction, Linda Hutcheon discusses the role that the carnivalesque plays in the novel. The "aweful" creation that F. allows can be seen as another example of the novel's exploitation of the "grotesque" as the means of achieving the (philosophical, psychological, cultural, physical) inversions endorsed by the carnivalesque.3 Interestingly, Hutcheon notes that the grotesque is characterized by "incompleteness" in that the grotesque body, being 219

interstitial, is always "unfinished" and "open" (31). F.'s narratological hybrid, embodying the movement from singularity to plurality, remains incomplete by virtue of its "having more." Once again, we are presented with the paradoxical situation of the superadded being yet insufficient, of the too much being not enough — in other words, the situation of the sublime. As Catherine Belsey demonstrates in Critical Practice, the chief mode of historical writing and "the dominant popular mode in literature, film and television" has been and arguably continues to be that of "classic realism" (67). "Realism," writes Lyotard, "can be defined only by its intention of avoiding the question of reality implied in the question of art" (Postmodern Explained 7). It does so by obscuring the gaps and contradictions implicit in all linguistic discourse. The operations of realism are accomplished in narrative by "the logic of its structure," "the movement towards closure" (Belsey 82), and the "presentation of events from a specific and unified point of view" (76). I will return to these aspects of the realist novel's form shortly (though we can already see how Beautiful Losers eschews them). For the time being, it's important to note that they function in concert to represent (re-present), as normative, the interrelations between objects., subjectivities, and social institutions that already exist in the culture of the text's production — though in a much less organized and more discordant way. The world presented in the realistic text "is always intelligible because familiar" (75) and always pleasing because intelligible. Accordingly, if Beautiful Losers aligns itself with what Lyotard, in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, describes as "the slow, uncertain movement" that seeks to remove artistic production "from the techne of beautiful forms" (153), then the stakes are high indeed: If the painter and novelist do not want to be, in their turn, apologists for what exists (and minor ones at that), they must renounce such therapeutic occupations. They must question the rules of the art of painting and narration as learned and received from their predecessors. They soon find that such rules are so many methods of deception, seduction and reassurance that make it impossible to be "truthful." ... Those who refuse to reexamine the rules of art will make careers in mass conformism, using "correct rules" to bring the endemic desire for reality into communication with 220

objects and situations capable of satisfying it. Pornography is the use of photographs and film to this end. It becomes a general model for those pictorial and narrative arts that have not risen to the challenge of mass media. (Postmodern Explained 6) Realism is therefore simply another name for the beautiful that never poses a threat to representation as such, never overwhelms our powers of understanding or imagination. And the beautiful, insofar as it is entirely rule bound (and therefore "bounded"), is pornographic: it deceives, it seduces, it reassures — it "contains" the reading subject and prevents his or her questioning of "reality." On the other hand, the postmodern (not simply so, but still another name for the sublime) is exactly that which isn't pornographic, isn't beautiful, isn't realistic. We now confront a problem, one that speaks to the question of what's at stake in Beautiful Losers, which is neither beautiful nor realistic but is certainly pornographic. Reconciliations have been attempted. For Soderlind, Cohen's emphasis on the "sado-masochistic relationship, .. . which finds its most articulate expression in the discourse of the pornographer," emphasizes his "preoccupation with the inscription of power relationships on the body" (43-44). She goes on to suggest that this "pornography paradigm" is related to the novel's intertextuality in that it coordinates and "subsumes" other forms and accounts of "colonization" (45). As might be expected, Hutcheon argues that the obscene content of Beautiful Losers typifies the carnivalesque celebration of the grotesque body, the undeniable corporeality of which is parallelled in the novel's own "self-conscious physical textuality" (36). Both critics ultimately reduce the text's pornographic presentations to forms of quotation, since Hutcheon also stresses their intertextual dimension, which she sees as parodic of "sex manuals and pornographic fiction" (34). Like Dennis Lee, who describes the tone of the novel as "spoofingly pornographic" (85), most critics have felt compelled to say that Beautiful Losers is like pornography but really isn't pornography. I agree that the novel is not naively pornographic and may even be called metapornographic in that it is self-reflexive about pornography as a mode of representation. But I also think that Susan Sontag is right when she points out that "A parody of pornography, so far as it has any real competence, always remains pornography" (51). One might even argue that pornography itself is almost always parodic: 2,21

de Sade parodies the encyclopaedic form in 120 Days of Sodom and the sentimental novels of Richardson in Justine; The Story of O. (to which Scobie compares Beautiful Losers] parodies de Sade; the Emmanuelle novels parody the travelogue form; and pornographic movies constantly make use of the plots, characters, and settings of mainstream cinema (hence titles such as Robo-Cock, Edward Penishands, and Forest Hump}. For all its allusiveness, Beautiful Losers remains pornographic, and the idea of its opposition to a postmodern aesthetic remains untroubled though troubling.

Lyotard understands pornography to be the "general model" for all realism and the ultimate expression of taste. Is it, though? Beautiful Losers, at least, is taste/ess. It's an assault on the reader's sense of social and literary propriety. It's obscene. It's offensive in the truest sense of the word. In "The Pornographic Imagination" (written in 1967 and so more or less contemporaneous with Beautiful Losers], Sontag endeavours to explain contemporary art's fascination with pornography and sexual excess. She comes very close to describing the postmodernist's attack on the aesthetics of "pleasing forms." The contemporary artist, she writes, " advance [s] one step further in the dialectic of outrage. He seeks to make his work repulsive, obscure, inaccessible; in short, to give us what is not wanted" (45). Somewhat paradoxically, the text performs this attack on enjoyment at the same time that it, being pornographic after all, titillates the reader. Is this contradictory response not something of a painful pleasure that finds its analogue in the sadomasochistic sex that dominates Beautiful Losers and, more broadly, in the feeling of the sublime? Culturally speaking, "Pornography becomes the absolute against which we measure our own human dignity, our very sanity" (Bloom 12). It is "one of the branches of literature ... aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation" (Sontag 47). Since, as Neil Hertz notes, "it is precisely the mind's unity that is at stake" in discussions of the sublime (71), we are invited to consider the ways in which pornography might actually participate in a (postmodern) aesthetics of the sublime, precipitating its feeling and supporting its discourses. I have already mentioned Douglas Barbour's use of David Ketterer's work on apocalypse in his reading of Beautiful Losers. The apocalyptic might be read as only a slight variation on the 222

theme of the sublime. Like the sublime, it provokes a radical dislocation of the human subject from the structures of ordinary experience (thus posing a threat to the subject's mental integrity) and questions "the fundamental epistemological assumptions of the human situation" (Ketterer, qtd. in Barbour 144). For Northrop Frye, "Apocalypse means revelation" (12,5) — though the narrator in Beautiful Losers helpfully provides his own definition, which starts there but through a devious twist in etymology prepares the way for the text's equation of (pornographic) sex and the sublime: The word apocalyptic has interesting origins. It comes from the Greek apokalupsis, which means revelation. This derives from the Greek apokaluptein, meaning uncover or disclose. Apo is the Greek prefix meaning from, derived from. Kaluptein means to cover. This is cognate with kalube which is cabin, and kalluma which means woman's veil. Therefore apocalyptic describes that which is revealed when the woman's veil is lifted. (Cohen 105) The sexual implication here is later made explicit in F.'s account of a "dirty weekend" that he spends with Edith in Argentina. Following a marathon masturbation session during which F. reads aloud, as erotic material, a sex guide including "mutilation, shock, voyeurism, pain, [and] torture" (180), a "glossary of sexual terms" (181), and an account of the slaying of Brebeuf and Lalemant (183), and during which both F. and Edith fall victim to a fully automated, fully animated "Danish vibrator" on their "journey of pleasure beyond pleasure" (184), and which concludes with group sex between Edith, E, and Hitler, who makes them "kiss the whip" (194) — following this ordeal, F. asks Edith, "who are you," to which she replies (in Greek): "I am Isis. I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and no mortal has lifted my veil" (195). Is it more than merely fortuitous that Kant, discussing this very inscription in the Critique of Judgment, says that "Perhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said, or a thought ever been expressed more sublimely" (i85n)? This sublime prohibition, whose transgression would be totally apocalyptic (and still sublime), is presented in the novel as something of a sexual dare. During an earlier masturbatory episode, though this time "between" F. and the narrator and in a moving car, F. tries to "dislocate the narrator into a great Romantic epiphany" (Lee 69): 123

Thus we existed in some eye for a second: two men in a hurtling steel shell aimed at Ottawa, blinded by a mechanical mounting ecstasy, .. . two swelling pricks pointed at eternity. . .. — Ay ay ay ay ay! cried E from the very top of his ladder. — Slof tlif, sounded the geysers of his semen as they hit the dashboard.... As for me, I knew that one more stroke would deliver me — I hovered on the edge of my orgasm like a parachutist in the whistling doorway — I was suddenly forlorn — I was suddenly without desire — I was suddenly more awake (for this fraction of a second) than ever before in my whole life — — The wall! The wall occupied the whole windshield, first as a blur, then focused precisely as if an expert had adjusted the microscope — . . . then the windshield blurred again as the wall rushed into the glass of the headlights.... — Rrrrriiiiippppp, went the wall. We passed through the wall because the wall was a scrim of painted silk. (Cohen 5*8-95)) I don't think I'm exaggerating if I say that this is something of a sublime moment (though a purist might say there's nothing funny about the sublime). The rhetorical excess is there. The idea of an absolute limit is presented and transgressed. And the commingling of sex and death (of production and destruction) speaks to the sublime understood as a moment of mental and physical conflict. Also, the car ripping through the wall of "painted silk" echoes both the lifting of the woman's veil of the apocalypse and the sublime veil of Isis. Admittedly, someone doesn't love a wall: the narrator fails to achieve orgasm. "You missed a great come" says E (99). The narrator has failed not only to come but also the test, the dare: the sublime is invoked, but only in contrast to the narrator's limited vision, which at this point is still dominated by worldly concerns. Importantly, though, the narrator does eventually lift the veil of Isis (insofar as he is part of the epilogue's weird hybrid focalizer), and he does so in a manner that both literalizes and sexualizes the notion of sublime transgression: he gives Isis oral sex. Rescued by a female motorist who calls herself "Isis" (in Greek) from a guntoting "posse" out to get him for his molestation of a young boy, the "old man" notices that she is naked below the waist and has

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"slanted the air ventilator to play on her pubic hair." She commands him to "eat" her, and he complies (250). The idea of lifting the veil of Isis recalls (through a complicated series of equivalences and allusions) E's advice to the narrator to "fuck a saint": find a little saint and fuck her over and over in some pleasant part of heaven, get right into her plastic altar, dwell in her silver medal, fuck her till she tinkles like a souvenir music box, until the memorial lights go on for free, find a little saintly faker like Teresa or Catherine Tekakwitha or Lesbia, whom prick never knew but who lay around all day in a chocolate poem, find one of these quaint impossible cunts and fuck her for your life, coming all over the sky, fuck her on the moon with a steel hourglass up your hole, get tangled in her airy robes.... (13) This passage is important for at least two reasons. First, it reminds us that the novel's sexual epiphanies are never far removed from its ecstatic religious ones. (Sontag suggests that pornography and religion are among the few discourses that possess a vocabulary to represent extreme experience.) Second, the impossible desire to "fuck a saint" connotes, on a thematic level, what the text successfully accomplishes on the level of form. The saint, "whom prick never knew but who lay around all day in a chocolate poem," is both uncontaminated and self-contained; she is "pure." Beautiful Losers violates the purity of the beautiful by "fucking up" the novelistic form, and it does so by putting so much emphasis on, well, fucking. Sontag insists that the pornographic imagination is "not seduced by the solutions of a more realistic and less abstract fiction" (63). While it is hard to imagine something less "abstract" than the standard pornographic novel or film (though this difficulty may have to do with the assumption that pornography is always and only mimetic, which it isn't), the incorporation of pornographic content into a novel has consequences for its form that render it antithetical to the classic realist novel (the bane of postmodern writing). To begin with, pornographic stories often lack the structure of beginning, middle, and end often associated with a well-formed narrative. In fact, pornography challenges the very notion of what constitutes a narrative: "The porn text does not tell a story, it presents a series of sexual acts without any organic relation between them" (Pendleton

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165). David Pendleton is discussing here the contemporary gay male porn film, which, like its straight and lesbian counterparts, has moved increasingly to a "collage" of random scenes. More traditional pornographic narratives revolve around the principle of "exhaustiveness," either by introducing a growing number of participants in sex scenes or by simply exploring all the permutations of a given sexual situation. Pornography expands and combines rather than progresses, though this expansion is almost always mitigated by a degree of repetition (both at the level of the characters' movements during intercourse and at the level of situation). The same could be said of Beautiful Losers, in which, as Ondaatje has said, "key scenes come up again and again" but which nevertheless advances "by expanding situations" (49). This is not to say that plot plays no role in the pornographic text; usually, though, the plot takes a back seat to the sexual "performance." Pornography lacks what Roland Barthes calls the hermeneutic code, "the various (formal) terms by which an enigma can be distinguished, suggested, held in suspense, and finally disclosed" (19). Rather than move toward disclosure (which, as Belsey has argued, is really a type of enclosure), the pornographic narrative dilly-dallies in exposure. Pendleton describes the "problem porn has with narrative": "Every few minutes, the story freezes in order to allow the display of the sexual scene. The bodies are arranged in theatrical tableaux, nearly static, ... and must maintain these positions long enough to constitute an episode" (160). As Linda Williams has demonstrated in her critical work on adult film, pornographic narrative resembles that of the Broadway musical, which interrupts its story to make way for the song-and-dance numbers. (The epigraph to Beautiful Losers is a line from "Old Man River," the signature song from Show Boat.} The comparison is helpful, I think, though I would hasten to add that in pornography the "numbers" pose a greater threat of overwhelming the plot altogether. This is the case with Beautiful Losers, a novel made up almost entirely of set pieces, most of which (like the autoerotic auto accident, the rape of Catherine, the Native "Andacwandet" or sex cure ceremony [140], the weekend in Argentina) are flagrantly sexual. Likewise, much of the text is comprised of "prayers" (such as the famous "God is Alive. Magic is afoot" sequence [167]) that don't advance the plot in any obvious way but draw attention to the "tableaux" of words and images in the text. In "Revelations about Pornography," Peter Lehman argues that 226

the "appeal of the sexual number lies outside its narrative contextualization" (4) — that is, it is not dependent on the construction of meaning, the resolution of conflict, or the solution of an enigma — all aspects of the realistic novel with its predilection for closure.4 It doesn't even matter if the pornographic text does attempt some resolution to, or summation of, its movement: that's simply not why people read pornography — or how they read it, for that matter. (Parts of certain books are more dog-eared than others.) As Lee writes, "It is finally a waste of time to read Beautiful Losers right through. . .. The authentic action is incomplete, but unforgettable" (95). Finding the ending in particular unfulfilling, Lee complains that it "fails to find a satisfactory voice and form" (94). This failure, as he sees it, might in fact be the novel's strength. If "the moment of closure is the point at which the events of the story become fully intelligible to the reader" (Belsey 70), then Beautiful Losers, by forgoing the hermeneutic process, resists the temptation to implicate the reader in a reinstatement of order or to "transmit.. . the set of . . . rules that constitutes the social bond" (Lyotard, Postmodern Condition 2,1). Instead, it offers the reader a context of "heterogeneous, fleeting, and fragmentary pleasures" (Lehman 7) that is perfectly in line with the postmodern's attack on plot and the sublime's presentation of formlessness. The concomitant threat to intelligibility, of failing to mean, is expressed by the text's use of "nonsense language" and what in music are sometimes called "vocables" as the means of conveying sexual experience: "amazing forbidden protoplasmic amoeba fulfilled woman gla gla galaxy please appear in small helmet of hope lap lap oh pearl pink precious radio crystal marvelous fruit pit of whole bumcunt harvest" (Cohen 69). The text's use of language (and its unavoidable dependence on it) are most clear when words are most in danger of disappearing altogether. Just as sexuality disappears under the microscope of pornography, which exposes the minutiae of sex, narrativity disappears (or begins to) when the text moves past meaning to mechanics, the "ordinary eternal machinery" (35, 217) of "how it happens" (198). Beautiful Losers, rather dialogically, focuses its microscope on the mechanics of film. "Lie down on my paper, little movie flesh," writes F. in Book Two (219). By mechanics, I don't mean film's structures of meaning; rather, I mean its actual material processes. Watching a movie at the System Theatre, whose sign — interest-

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ingly enough — fails to signify correctly, having fallen apart so that it reads "stem Theatre" (2,35), E often raises his eyes "to consult the projection beam rather than the story it carried": like smoke in a chimney, the dusty projection beam above our hair twisted and changed. Like crystals rioting in a test-tube suspension, the unstable ray changed and changed in its black confinement. Like battalions of sabotaged parachutists falling from the training tower straight down in various contortions, the frames streamed at the screen, splashing into contrast color as they hit,,... (237) Like Horkheimer and Adorno before him, Lyotard criticizes "industrial cinema" for perfecting "the containment of diachronies within organic totalities" (Postmodern Explained 5), the effects of which are "to stabilize the referent" (6) and support the self-understandings of the viewer. F.'s interest in the process of projection has nothing to do with the process of decoding narrative but with the instabilities (and possibilities) of the mechanical system. Obsessed with the medium, F. avoids the message, thereby opening up film to radical transformations at a material level, such as letting the newsreel mix with the feature. As Soderlind and others have noted, the "old man" (blinking in perfect synchronization with the film projector's shutter and therefore blind to the action on the screen) literally becomes the "unstable ray" of the projection beam when he transforms himself into a "movie of Ray Charles," which "enlarged the screen, degree by degree," until "the moon occupied one lens of his sunglasses" (Cohen 258; emphasis added), thus achieving F.'s ambition of "coming all over the sky" (13). This is not an inappropriate "climax" for a novel so obviously concerned with pornography and pornographic representation. But if the ending is unsatisfactory, as Lee claims, then it's likely because, properly speaking, it isn't an ending at all; it is merely a conclusion that, while it resonates with particular motifs and ideas presented throughout the text, isn't internally necessary. In the final line of the novel, the "author" playfully greets the reader, warning him or her against the fetishization of endings: "Welcome to you, darling and friend, who miss me forever in your trip to the end" (260). If we haven't missed him, then it's because we've moved beyond endings and the search for closure in order to 228

concentrate on what remains after form has been wiped out: those "heterogeneous, fleeting, and fragmentary" pleasures that Lehman associates with the pornographic text. At the same time that the text undermines readerly expectations and perpetrates violence on the aesthetics of taste, it pleases — practically in spite of itself. In the relative absence of plot, closure, and a unified point of view (since the text is comprised of two books, each with its own first-person narrator, and an epilogue written in the third person), Beautiful Losers should, by all accounts, entirely forgo "easy" pleasures. That it does not says something about what a pornographic postmodern novel accomplishes in the area of reader participation. Barthes distinguishes between "readerly" and "writerly" texts. The readerly text is typified by the classic realist novel, of which readers are merely passive consumers. Their task is mere appreciation since meanings are constructed for them; to read the readerly is simply to grant it permission to implicate them in its textual operations. Thus, readers are always outside the text yet circumscribed by its meanings. The writerly text, on the other hand, allows the reader to become an active "producer of the text" (4). These are the pluralistic, "dissonant," incomplete texts that we have come to associate with the postmodern. This binarism is complicated in and by Beautiful Losers (whose postmodern credentials have been established by now), which seems to pull in two different directions at once. As Clive Bloom argues, pornographic material excludes the viewer; his powerlessness is reflected in his erection, which can only be relieved by "selfapplication." Pornography involves narcissism because it denies access to those in the picture or book. The pornographic appetite is therefore reclusive and autistic, given to people whose personality has been wholly or partly denied access to societal interaction; pornography is the province of the cut-off, lonely, and ashamed in society, (zi) Ignoring, for the moment, Bloom's judgemental tone, we see that pornography (just as Lyotard assumed) manifests qualities of the readerly. Hence Scobie's comment that the reader of Beautiful Losers "is forced to stand outside the action of the novel, as a spectator; he is not allowed to participate in it" (125). His use of "spectator" to describe the limited role granted to the reader of Beautiful Losers is fitting given the novel's interest in cinema. The narrator, who

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spends much of the novel masturbating and living alone in a treehouse, certainly resembles the "cut-off, lonely, and ashamed" consumer of pornography. Nevertheless, he is overt in his attack on the readerly in pornographic cinema: No marriage in these stark confines, everybody sitting on their genitals because: silver genitals on the screen. Bring back hidden sex! Let cocks again rise and twine like ivy round the gold projector beam, and cunts yawn under gloves and white paper bags of candy, and no naked flashing breasts lure the dirty laundry of our daily lives into the movie palace, deadly as a radar signal, no neorealist patent fucking hang the impenetrable curtains of impossibility between each member of the audience! (Cohen 23) The "curtains of impossibility" that get hung between the viewers of "neorealist patent fucking" constitute another version of the veil of Isis that must be lifted, ripped, passed through if the subject is to abandon realism in favour of the sublime.5 It is not clear, though, that this is a demand for viewer participation in the action of the film or simply a plea for a different kind of action, one that brings back "hidden sex" by virtue of its more fantastical content and form(lessness). Whatever the narrator is dridng at, it sounds as though he means it to be watched, but in a way that precludes the viewer's identification with the spectacle — the reader would be neither an active producer of the text (as in the case of the writerly) nor its implicated supporter (as in the readerly). Outside the text, readers/viewers would simply watch without any sort of investment whatsoever: closed off, they would remain open to (in this case) sexual adventure and erotic stimulation. In other words, they would be blocked from but not by the aesthetic object that they contemplate. In still other words, Beautiful Losers is less a narrative than a random display ("of diseased virtuosity") that, given its filmic preoccupations, might be called "eye candy." While much about the novel is simply displeasing, revolting, or grotesque, whatever pleasure we do take is not a sign of our conscription but what Lehman calls an "unintegrated pleasure" (8), which arises precisely from our being absolved from the strictures of plot and from "an identification with the fictional bodies on the screen" (6). There is something (alarmingly? thrillingly?) anarchical, even

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irresponsible, about this absolution. Lee writes that Beautiful Losers invokes the "demonic realities of our era" by presenting "de Sade and Hitler as normative men" (85). De Sade and Hitler, I would argue, have never been normative men, and the text does not present them as such. Rather, because they represent the extremes of violence and human degradation and have therefore come to mean so much, they are used to test the limits of the novel's radical attempt to divorce pleasure from meaning. To this end, Edith and F. have sex with Hitler. "The implications of ... [their] pleasure are enormous" (Cohen 191), such that perhaps they call forth the sublime as the only reliable measure of the distance that the text puts between itself and the social responsibilities of the beautiful. It may be reassuring to learn that this achievement is not our own. As in all pornography, the reader must be content to occupy a voyeuristic position, merely to "Watch the words, watch how it happens" (198). In the novel's final scenes, once again, the old man first begins to "disintegrate slowly" (2,58). I have already suggested that this disintegration is in line with a postmodern (and writerly) interest in formlessness as the means of presenting the unpresentable "going beyond" of sublimity, which in turn exposes the inadequacies of realism. But true to the novel's equal commitment to the pleasures of uncommitted spectacle, this is only half the "performance," for the old man then "greedily reassembled himself into — into a movie of Ray Charles" (158). Importantly, we discover that the narrator of the epilogue is, like each of us, one of the "spectators" watching the old man's transformation: "A fleet of jet planes dragged his voice over us who were holding hands" (2,58, 2,59). "Just sit back and enjoy it, I guess," says a spectator. "Thank God it's only a movie," says another. Finally, a "New Jew" cries "Hey! . .. Somebody's making it!" (2,59). Euphemistically, "making it" once again returns the old man's moment of "grandiose over-reaching" to the matter of sex: in a sense, he has become his own dirty movie, a pornographically sublime vision of "All Chances at Once" (2-58). At the beginning of Book One, F. says, "We've got to learn to stop bravely at the surface. We've got to learn to love appearances" (4). If the idea that Beautiful Losers is all surface is painful to us, then it is because we haven't learned to sit back, relax, and forget about meaning — knowing all the while that this is not enough.

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NOTES 1

An earlier draft of this paper was written for a graduate course in narratology taught by Barbara Godard at York University. I would like to thank Professor Godard for her comments and suggestions, which proved very helpful in the development of this paper. 2 Incidentally, the terms used here are strikingly similar to those of Edmund Burke in his discussion of the sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful: "Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on with an irresistible force" (57). Like Kant, Burke sees formlessness as productive of the sublime: "The mind is hurried out of itself by a croud of great and confused images, which affect because they are crouded and confused" (6z). 3 Attempting to justify his modifications of her body to Edith ("the tits, the cunt, the hydraulic buttock failures" (Cohen 195), E declaims, "Call me Dr. Frankenstein with a deadline" (186). He is fully aware of having made "monstrous mistakes": "I seemed to wake up in the middle of a car accident, limbs strewn everywhere, . . . and all I had in the wrecked world was a needle and a thread, so I got down on my knees, I pulled pieces out of the mess, I started to stitch them together.... My needle going so madly, sometimes I found I'd run the thread right through my own flesh and I was joined to one of my own grotesque creations — I'd rip us apart — and then I heard my own voice howling with the others and I knew that I was also truly part of the disaster" (186-87). We might want to read E's vision of plot as the kind of "sewing together" that necessitates a "ripping apart." 4 I'm not saying that pornography doesn't impart ideas or influence behaviour, merely that, if it does, then it does so as spectacle rather than narrative. One can certainly argue that Beautiful Losers, despite its subversion of heterosexual norms, falls into the trap of much straight pornography in limiting the agency of its female characters. Likewise, the novel's "ejaculatory" rhetoric betrays what is surely a masculinist approach to both sex and literary production. Nevertheless, an answer to the question of what and how content means in pornography might mitigate the potentially deleterious effects of its presentations. 5 It is possible to exaggerate the social dimensions of this transgression. Since the sublime by definition supersedes the sensus communis of the beautiful, it is always an individualistic pursuit; it can't be shared. It does demonstrate to others, though, that there is "something else" beyond the organized illusion that passes for reality. Linda Hutcheon writes that "Cohen often parodies pornography in order (allegorically, once again) to reinforce this extra-textual connection with the reader on the level of process. And he achieves this kind of link between art and life through 2,32,

intertextual and auto-referential metafictional techniques that would, like masturbation, appear on the surface to be narcissistic in the extreme. But it is by these very means that the postmodern text can 'get to' its reader" (37). While I agree with Hutcheon that the text draws attention to itself, I think that she underestimates its reliance on the effects of pornography. For good or for bad, Beautiful Losers ultimately is narcissistic, but then so is the sublime: "For the beautiful in nature we must seek a basis outside ourselves, but for the sublime a basis merely within ourselves and in our way of thinking that introduces sublimity into our way of presentation" (Kant 100).

WORKS CITED

Barbour, Douglas. "Down with History: Some Notes towards an Understanding of Beautiful Losers." Gnarowski 136-49. Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill, 1974Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Methuen, 1980. Bloom, Clive. "Grinding with the Bachelors: Pornography in a Machine Age." Perspectives on Pornography: Sexuality in Film and Literature. Ed. Gary Day and Clive Bloom. New York: St. Martin's, 1988. 9-2,5. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. James Boulton. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1968. Cohen, Leonard. Beautiful Losers. 1966. Toronto: McClelland, 1991. Djwa, Sandra. "Leonard Cohen: Black Romantic." Gnarowski 94-105. Fisher, John. Letter. Imagining Canadian Literature: The Selected Letters of Jack McClelland. Ed. Sam Solecki. Toronto: Key, 1998. no-iz. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971. Gnarowski, Michael, ed. Leonard Cohen: The Artist and His Critics. Toronto: McGraw, 1976. Hertz, Neil. "The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime." Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text. Ed. Geoffrey Hartman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. 62.-S5. Hutcheon, Linda. "Caveat Lector: The Early Postmodernism of Leonard Cohen." The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary EnglishCanadian Fiction. Studies in Canadian Literature. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988. 26-60.

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Kant, Iinmanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. Lee, Dennis. Savage Fields: An Essay in Literature and Cosmology. Toronto: Anansi, 1977. Lehman, Peter. "Revelations about Pornography." Film Criticism zo.i-2, (1995-96): 3-16. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenburg. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. . The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. . The Postmodern Explained. Trans, and ed. Julian Prefanis and Morgan Thomas. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Nadel, Ira B. Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen. Toronto: Random, 1996. Ondaatje, Michael. Leonard Cohen. Toronto: McClelland, 1970. Pendleton, David. "Obscene Allegories: Narrative, Representation, Pornography." Discourse 15.1 (1992): 154-68. Scobie, Stephen. Leonard Cohen. Vancouver: Douglas, 1978. Soderlind, Sylvia. "Beautiful Losers: The Novel as Cure." Margin/Alias: Language and Colonization in Canadian and Quebecois Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991. 41-69. Sontag, Susan. "The Pornographic Imagination." Styles of Radical Will. New York: Anchor, 1991. 35-73. Sussman, Henry. Psyche and Text: The Sublime and the Grandiose in Literature, Psycho-Pathology, and Culture. New York: State U of New York P, 1993.

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Beyond Agonistics: Vertiginous Games in the Fiction of Leonard Cohen PAUL MILTON

Games are nature's most beautiful creation. All animals play games, and the truly Messianic vision of the brotherhood of creatures must be based on the idea of the game. — Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (31) GAMES DISPLAY THE HUMAN PROPENSITY for

rule-governed

behaviour and strategic thought and represent an important object of study for researchers in a variety of the human sciences, including cultural anthropology. A notable example of this study appears in Clifford Geertz's exemplary essay "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" (1972), in which the terms of gaming provide a material index to the culture from which the game proceeds. Moving from the fieldwork of Geertz, students of play can point to games as revelatory of cultural laws. In an investigative context, games may act as indicators by which a culture may be understood. Following Friedrich Schiller, many studies of play focus on the essential characteristics of the phenomenon of play across cultures and history. However, the study of games in a specific context demands a theory that will account for the particular types of games played in a given time and place. Given that a game is a negotiation between rules and the desire to play, the dominant games in a given culture reflect the interaction between forces of social order and disorder within that culture. Literary critics have also demonstrated interest in play and games over the past thirty years, notably in such books as Mihai Spariosu's Dionysus Reborn (1989), Wolfgang Iser's Prospecting (1989), Robert Rawdon Wilson's In Palamedes' Shadow (1990), and Warren F. Motte's Playtexts (1995). The novels of Leonard Cohen present a useful site from which to examine the playfulness of the fiction of the 19605, an era in which play was regarded as a means of subverting the status quo. Both of Cohen's published novels use the rhetoric of games. The first, The Favourite Game (1963), takes its title from a symbolic child's game

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played by the protagonist and his friends. The second, Beautiful Losers (1966), also emphasizes games through the central concept of loss and victory and through its own symbolic pinball game. For Cohen, games provide an important metafictional symbol of the relationship between the reader and the text. His two novels share this symbol, and, by focusing on the nature of games and play as they appear in both novels, we can observe a motivated development from one type of game to another. In fact, we can read the second novel as a development on the ludic themes of, or even as a ludic rewriting of, the first. According to Ira Nadel, "Cohen has said on occasion that an artist has only one or two songs or poems that he constantly reinvents and that his earliest work contains all his later themes and variations. This is true of Songs of Leonard Cohen" (154). It is also true of the novels. To develop my reading of Cohen's novels, I begin with two ideas that emerge from students of games and play: Roger Caillois's notion of vertiginous games and the recurrent notion of playing to lose. First, I take my working definition of games from Bernard Suits's philosophical dialogue The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia: "to play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity" (34). The definition recognizes two constitutive parts of the game;: the end, or prelusory goal, and the means to achieve that end,, A player's lusory attitude is categorized according to his or her respect for either of these criteria. The bona fide player respects both end and means by attempting to achieve the end by the prescribed means (or at least not by proscribed means). But there are three other types of players who display a lack of respect for either means or ends or both: spoilsport, cheat, and trifler. A game depends upon at least one constitutive rule as the sine qua non of its existence. If this rule is breached, then the game dissolves. To ignore this rule destroys the illusory game space, which is not the act of a cheat: but of a spoilsport. The cheat will not dissolve the game space because the cheat, while ignoring the rule, accepts the goal of the game. The cheat breaks the rule to achieve the goal more efficiently. The trifler plays according to the rule but rejects the goal of the game, preferring to revel in the sheer aesthetics of the game. The cheat recognizes goals but not rules, while the trifler recognizes rules but not goals. Z36

To add to Suits's definition, I would emphasize that game exists as a negotiation between two concepts: free play and rule. Game describes a continuum of activities suspended between the two poles. Aesthetic play can be opposed to the rule of imitation. Play measures the degree of variance from what we might imagine a perfect execution of the conventions of representation. The more liberties an artist takes with conventional representation, the more playful the work of art. When an artist determines the work by deliberately introducing play into the process, the art work constitutes a form of game. Art is then a transaction that promises to deliver, in place of a referent, the opportunity to participate playfully in the creation of the artefact. Historically, aesthetic play has moved in and out of the forefront of Western thought. Spariosu argues that play, which was a central concern for pre-Socratic thinkers, most notably Heraclitus, lost its centrality when Plato inaugurated an intellectual era of rationalism. Play becomes increasingly ignored in the history of philosophy, only making its return in the idealism of Kant and Schiller, who advance notions of play as functional guarantor of social order. Schiller raises play to the level of an essential human characteristic: "man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays" (107). The prerational values associated with Heraclitus reappear in the Nietzschean strain of ludic philosophy that challenges Platonic and Aristotelian rationalism. In rationalist approaches to play, the game acts as a bearer of ideology, a mode of social training, and a safety valve for antisocial instincts. Social values are mirrored in and taught by games. One twentieth-century figure who describes this cultural work of games is Caillois, author of Man, Play and Games (1958). Caillois's theories develop from the work of Johan Huizinga who, in Homo Ludens (1938), argues that physiological definitions of play fail to recognize its cultural significance; for Huizinga, play precedes and produces culture. Caillois accepts this essential tenet but suggests that Huizinga's work, which develops an essential definition of play based on a wide range of examples, is excessively broad in its sweep of the topic and yet too narrow in that it restricts its understanding of the ludic to the agonistic mode of play. Caillois divides games into four general categories: competitive or agonistic games, games of mimicry, games of chance, and games of vertigo.1 Within each of these categories, games may tend toward one of two poles,

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paidia or ludus. The former refers to child's play, the latter to organized, rule-determined activities. Employing this taxonomy, he develops a sociology of play that categorizes societies by the games they favour. In Caillois's four-part taxonomy, each phase of social development favours two complementary modes of dominant game. "Primitive" societies favour games of simulation and vertigo, while "civilized" societies are dominated by those of competition and chance. Caillois's problematic adjectives demonstrate his commitment to an ethnocentric narrative of human progress. He advances the rationalist notion of games as producers of social order: "Games discipline instincts and institutionalize them. For the time that they afford formal and limited satisfaction, they educate, enrich, and immunize the mind against their virulence. At the same time, they are made fit to contribute usefully to the enrichment and the establishment of various patterns of culture" (55). By subordinating instincts to socially acceptable forms of behaviour, games function as models of the society in which the players live. In Western societies, citizens obtain status through merit arid chance. Some are born into wealth and achieve status through the chance of birth. Others ascend the hierarchy by displaying merit in competition. Hence, the dominant games in "civilized" Western societies are competition and chance. As competition and chance are apparently connected with the principles governing the structure of society, then games of mimicry and vertigo represent principles or instincts that must be curbed. In a civilized society, vertigo is a threatening proposition, and the pursuit of it draws participants away from their proper identification 'with normative behaviour. Games based on the pursuit of vertigo "consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. In all cases, it is a question of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness" (23). Success in games of competition often depends upon strategic behaviour and rational, efficient problem solving. Through mental control, the body becomes an instrument oriented toward the efficient achievement of specific goals. Vertiginous games shatter this delicate balance to the point where goals other than the attainment of ecstasy cannot be achieved. For Caillois, this diversion of energy away from positive ends represents a threat to order, economy, and equity because it "is readily linked to the desire for disorder and destruction, a drive which is normally repressed" (14).2 238

Caillois's theory has undergone some modifications at the hands of sympathetic critics. Motte says that Caillois's taxonomy marks his major break from Huizinga's descriptive anthropology of play. Motte finds the taxonomy useful within limits but suggests that Caillois fails to acknowledge some blurring of the boundaries between categories. Motte also challenges both Caillois and Huizinga on their uncritical acceptance of the narrative of human progress, an acceptance implicit in the split of paidia and ludus, which suggests that games and societies develop from child's play to more orderly, rule-governed adult play. As a result, the theory suffers from its ethnocentric, paternalistic, colonialist privileging of a historical narrative that follows societies from a primitive state to civilization, from disorder to order, a movement marked by the progressive evolution of the society's dominant games. Likewise, Jacques Ehrmann notes, in "Homo Ludens Revisited," that Caillois bases his model on the norm of the healthy body. Ehrmann argues that the language of Man, Play and Games operates on the dichotomy of a disordered nature and an ordered civilization that "institutionalizes" the instincts, "immunizes" the body against "virulence," and aspires to fitness. In the context of civilization, play functions as "a remedy for a nature which is inherently sick since it is subject to destructive instincts" (38). Underlying this position is a view of history as a narrative of reality being progressively ameliorated by play. He overturns Caillois's hierarchies and challenges the binaries that put play in opposition to work, gratuitousness in opposition to utility, unreality in opposition to reality. He suggests that the opposition of leisure to work is characteristically ethnocentric and that the antithetical relationship of play and work corresponds to the industrial phase of history, realism in the arts, and materialist-idealist metaphysics (47-48). Jean Baudrillard extends Caillois's ludic narrative of history to emphasize what he perceives to be the centrality of vertiginous games in contemporary Western society and to celebrate their preeminence: Perhaps Roger Caillois was correct in his terminology, and our entire culture is in the process of slipping from competitive and expressive games to games of chance and vertigo. The very uncertainty about the purpose of it all pushes us toward a dizzying over-multiplication of formal qualities, and therefore to the form of ecstasy. Ecstasy is the quality

2-39

proper to any body that spins until all sense is lost, and then shines forth in its pure and empty form. (9) Baudrillard accepts Caillois's terminology, but his cultural analysis here goes beyond Caillois's narrative of history. Caillois admits that vertigo may operate with chance and may even serve its ends (7374), but he does not locate this combination in his historical sociological pattern. Baudrillard, in effect, posits a new phase in which the dominant games come from the categories considered inferior in the primitive and civilized contexts. In combining Caillois's basic typology with Baudrillard's additions, I will substitute "premodern" and "modern" for "primitive" and "civilized." Although these terms remain problematic, they register some awareness of the ethnocentrism and permit a merging with the periodic implications of the adjective "postmodern." Vertigo appears as the subordinate term to simulation in the games associated with premodern societies. The two are combined in the mask rituals, which Caillois believes serve to protect and mystify power.3 The mask is part of a ceremony in which a vertiginous trance is also invoked as a means of approximating divinity. Acceptance of this order of things requires what Baudrillard would call an "ironic strategy" grounded in an acceptance of the unreality of the world. Baudrillard distinguishes three different categories of strategies: ironic, banal, and fatal. The banal strategy begins with a belief in the referent (i.e., the subject, power, the real) and operates on the principle that the subject is superior to the object. Fatal strategies privilege the object and attempt to replicate the means by which it escapes mastery by the subject. Given this tripartite division, Baudrillard's strategic discourse fits into Caillois's narrative of history: Ground

Social Phase

Strategy

Dominant Games

Unreal Real Hyperreal

Premodern Modern Postmodern

Ironic Banal Fatal

Simulation/Vertigo Competition/Chance Vertigo/Chance

This third phase, which Caillois does not name, is Baudrillard's addition to his theory. In inferring the third phase as a conjunction of the potentially dangerous modes of play, Baudrillard invokes a synthetic movement, albeit one that appears to reject a dialectical progressiveness. 240

The implicit commitment to a progressive view of history that Motte detects in both Caillois and Huizinga disappears. Caillois's terms are used against the implicit functionalism of his theory. Similarly, the play space is purged of the ethos of competition that serves a capitalist social order. In its place remains a literature that produces only itself and the effects of disorientation in a reader, training that reader to exist in disorder. In accepting mutual vertigo, the reader and the writer disidentify with a productivist paradigm and favour a multiplicity of games that share a dysfunctional family resemblance. Critics have applied Caillois's categories with varying degrees of enthusiasm and fidelity. Robert Detweiler, in examining American fiction after 1965, divides game fiction into three categories that correspond to chance, simulation, and competition, but he excludes vertigo (48-49). Within these categories, he emphasizes the originating power of the author and neglects the duality by which the author as player is also the plaything of the game itself. Peter Hutchinson offers a broader appreciation of the playful in literature in Games Authors Play. Unlike Detweiler, Hutchinson does not attempt to harmonize his division of ludic activities with Caillois's, pointedly rejecting any facile application of the latter's categories as "a rather procrustean exercise" (4). He does acknowledge some applications of the categories, although "it is on the whole obvious that they are not ideally suited to literary games" (6). Competition appears in a text that has a mystery for the reader to solve; chance occurs when the reader confronts a variety of possible paths through the narrative; simulation corresponds to a text where narrators assume obviously false personae; and, finally, he locates vertigo "in works where the reader is subjected to constant attempts to surprise, puzzle or confound him" (6). The surprised, puzzled, and confounded reader is the subject of vertigo, caught in a whirl of signs that are not easily decoded. In working with avant-garde or postmodern fictions, I accord greater importance to cultural games of vertigo than do either Hutchinson or Detweiler. Vertigo, as a physical phenomenon, describes a state where the subject's relationship to its surroundings is disturbed. The subject's standard relationship to the object world might be described as balance or equilibrium; when this relationship is altered, vertigo occurs. When the rate of change in the object world increases, a vertiginous effect is registered in the subject trying to coordinate the phenomena of an era of increasingly rapid change or Z4I

information overload. In fiction, the reader may experience an analogous effect when facing a verbally playful text oriented to excess with a complex system of intertextual relations or a complex narrative structure, such as may be found in Beautiful Losers. Unde this effect, the object simultaneously attracts and repels the subject; there is an excitement in vertigo even as there is a perception of danger. When the subject intentionally and freely pursues this effect, vertigo exists as a game. The subject pursues and submits to vertigo at the risk of loss but with confidence in the ability to escape the situation. Hutchinson's modification of vertigo depends upon the author's ability to remain outside the effects of the game set in motion. While the vertiginous text may surprise, puzzle, or confound the reader, it also requires that the author submit to the vertiginous possibilities of semantic excess. In setting a vertiginous text into motion, the author promotes a range of possible interpretations, thereby losing a degree of control over the meaning generated by the reader's act of reading. The response of the confounded reader must be unpredictable. Vertigo constitutes the unstable element of the system of games; by incorporating it into his system, however gingerly, Caillois recognizes the disruptive potential of this mode of play. Hutchinson and Detweiler, both of whom consider the author as a game player but not a plaything, exclude the vertiginous possibility because it threatens the stability of the system. The novelist who courts vertigo plays a losing game, rejecting the conventional strategies of the contest that are oriented toward victory. In this, vertigo implies a rejection of the logic of agonistics. There are a variety of ways to account for this. Pierre Bourdieu identifies the strategy of "loser wins" as a factor defining the reversal of hierarchies that occurs in the field of cultural production relative to the larger field of social power (39). But in terms of Suits's lusory attitudes, the player who plays to lose is nothing more than a trifler. Trifling makes victory hollow and unsatisfying for the victor, as in Robert Kroetsch's The Studhorse Man where Hazard Lepage grows weary of a game of gin rummy that the other players let him win (46). Kroetsch relates this vignette to the game of writing: "I think we do play to lose. A serious writer who can always win is bored and boring just as it was boring for Hazard to win in that rummy game. We push to a point where we begin to risk losing. That's where fiction acquires a game element. In fiction, in writing itself, I think there is what we might call a temptation to

242,

failure" (qtd. in Neuman and Wilson 50). In this instance, the game pits the writer against literature, and the writer is confounded in the attempt to replenish the exhausted gamebox. He finds the challenge invigorating, but the notion of the critic's desire to defeat the author promotes a degree of anxiety. As Kroetsch says, "that is where game theory becomes dangerous, or at least in the agonistic model. Reading literature cannot be an either-or solution in which one either wins or loses" (60). In "The Game of Poetics," Michel Beaujour suggests that the poet plays an agonistic game against language and the subconscious. The poet wins by taming the subconscious and manipulating language to produce an artefact that achieves poetry according to the standard rules of the game. A poet dissatisfied with the standard rules may play a losing game by rejecting the criteria that define victory and producing an artefact that allows the subconscious free rein and rejects the rigorous technique associated with winning poetry. For Beaujour, "playing a serious game in order to lose is a very sophisticated behaviour, and perhaps the ultimate sophistication within a given culture" (62). The surrealist poet, for example, "plays in order to be played with, in order to put himself at the mercy of something of which he becomes the toy. . . . When they are successful, the Surrealists become the passive toys of uncontrolled 'magnetic fields'" (64-65). They approach the autonomous pole of Bourdieu's field of cultural production, the pole where the loser wins. In effect, the surrealist trifles to transform the game. In Cohen's two published novels, both of which rely upon the rhetoric of games, we can observe Cohen's game metaphor coalescing around a model of vertiginous games involving players who reject the agonistic model by playing to lose. The very titles of the novels, The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers, foreground Cohen's interest in the notion of the game and in the economy of victory and loss. Indeed, I would suggest even further that Cohen works through the idea of the game from two perspectives shifting from the agonistic mode to the vertiginous mode in each novel. At the same time, the second novel can be read as a revision of the first, which intensifies the effects of vertigo. By examining the representation of games in The Favourite Game, I will isolate Cohen's theory of games in preparation for the more sophisticated employment of game structures in the author-text-reader relationship of Beautiful Losers. In many ways, the earlier novel prefigures the later one. 243

The Favourite Game takes the conventional form of Kunstlerroman, outlining the development of the artist and by extension the conditions of artistic production. The protagonist, Lawrence Breavman, interweaves discussions about the human body, writing, and play in his memories of childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. The body becomes metaphorically linked to texts, toys, and playgrounds as Breavman charts his course through life using various bodies and games as signposts marking his progress. The novel progresses through a series of agonistic encounters between Breavman and the female characters of the novel, notably the contest of snow walking with Lisa, and culminates in his realization that vertigo is the favourite game. The key passage that indicates this progress and gives the novel its title comes in the form of an epiphany in the final paragraph: Jesus! I just remembered what Lisa's favourite game was. After a heavy snow we would go into a back yard with a few of our friends. The expanse of snow would be white and unbroken. Bertha was the spinner. You held her hands while she turned on her heels, you circled her until your feet left the ground. Then she let go and you flew over the snow. You remained still in whatever position you landed. When everyone had been flung in this fashion into the fresh snow, the beautiful part of the game began. You stood up carefully, taking great pains not to disturb the impression you had made. Now the comparisons. Of course you would have done your best to land in some crazy position, arms and legs sticking out. Then we walked away, leaving a lovely white field of blossom-like shapes with footprint stems. (2,2,3) The object of the game is to create an idiosyncratic representation of the body, a metaphor for art. Here, art is produced by the same activity that produces vertigo. The favourite game then consists of an artistic practice that represents the body through chance and vertigo. The body becomes the instrument of artistic creation. In the "beautiful part of the game," the artist examines the artefact left behind by this activity of vertiginous surrender and fatal submission. The body is the site of play m both of Cohen's novels, and often the play culminates in curious twisting of the body. Lisa's favourite game involves the wilful pursuit of such twisting in order to create the ephemeral artefact against the snow. But Lisa's twisted body is 244

prefigured by that of Bertha, the spinner, which is twisted in the fall from the torture tree, an episode reminiscent of the biblical Fall. Bertha is an Eve figure and her flute represents the serpent. She falls from the torture tree after Breavman utters the proud "Fuck God" in response to her challenge that he say "Something terribly, horribly dirty" about God (13). Then, "Krantz and Breavman survey her for one second twisted into a position she could never achieve in gym" (14). Breavman believes that she is dead and, in recompense for his part in silencing the artist, vows that he will study the flute so that "the number of people who know how to play remains the same" (15). The fall from innocence drives Breavman to an artistic vocation in an effort to restore the equilibrium of art in the world or to recuperate the loss of an artist fallen from Eden. Bertha's twisted body is not the product of a game of vertigo but rather is associated with the agonistic challenge she throws out to her opponent, Breavman. Her fall represents loss. As is generally noted, Breavman's name suggests loss or bereavement. The most conspicuous bereavement he suffers is the death of his father, which is analogous to the loss of his relationship with the divine father in Bertha's fall from the torture tree. Art becomes the compensation for these losses. The loss of the father leaves the family structure, in the Judeo-Christian patriarchal tradition, without its defining centre, just as the loss of a relationship with God leaves the spiritual structure without a centre. If God is dead, all things are permitted; if nothing fixes the structure, there is only free play of the elements. In this rewriting of the Fall myth, free play, mobilized by an act of blasphemy, becomes the precondition for art. Breavman violates a rule of the Judeo-Christian tradition (the second commandment) and in doing so establishes a new rule that replaces the old rule, the shattered structure of perfection cracked in the Fall. As the utterance of the word leads ineluctably to the destruction of one world (the world of God/the father), it leads to the creation of a new world (the world of Breavman/the son). Breavman recognizes that his voice is powerful and that he must not use it while he learns to play the flute, reserving his own power while he tries to recuperate the lost paradise of art. In rejecting the father, Breavman finds a new mother in Bertha. In Cohen's hands, the body of the Edenic myth suffers the same bodily mutation as Bertha to create a new myth of artistic origins. Thus, Breavman the artist is born out of the bodily pain of Bertha, the artist/mother, as a consequence of his desire to sustain the constant 245

level of play in the universe. At the same time, she is also an object of sexual desire. A chain of allusion links Bertha's flute, as the source of temptation, with the serpent and the phallus, in which case Breavman's intense desire to see Bertha play the flute is suggestive of the oral eroticism that will pervade Beautiful Losers. The sexual connotations of the oral act also contribute to Breavman's sense of guilt and to the fall. Breavman's commitment to learning the flute is an image of autofellatio consistent with his characteristic narcissism. In its rejection of the father as a condition of the pursuit of the mother, this scene constitutes a mutation of the Oedipal narrative and an implied resistance to the law of the father. Martin Stark also rejects the imposition, by the father figure of camp counsellor Krantz, of the camp games. Krantz wants Breavman to force Martin to play, which is contrary to Huizinga's definition of play as voluntary: "Play to order is no longer play: it could at best be but a forcible imitation" (7). Martin's idiosyncratic games involve him in unlikely mathematical contests, activities that other boys might consider too serious for play. As Stephen Scobie suggests, Martin foreshadows the beautiful losers of the later book by his disruption of the system of the camp (92). He is defined by his refusal to play the camp games. He instead invents his own games and dies in the pursuit of them, crushed by the machine as Edith is in the later novel. Like Bertha and Lisa before him, Martin becomes a twisted body as a result of his games and his act of self-definition. The refusal to conform is the basis of Lisa's favourite game. The constitutive rule of that activity, which makes it a game (ludus] rather than ateleological play (paidia), requires that the player try to leave the most grotesque outline of his or her body in the snow. Lisa leaves this grotesque shape after being spun by Bertha, thereby losing a degree of control over her body to vertigo. Whereas competitive games pit antagonists against each other, vertigo pits the subject against its own body. In this way, a person can be said to be taking control of the body by losing control of it, by subverting the control principle that holds body and mind in a state of dialectic tension. The subject twists the body to gain control over it. Control of the body is a repeated motif in the novel. Lisa exercises control over her body when she ends the whipping game by refusing to play and then forcing the boys to turn around while she gets dressed, even though within the game she has bared herself to them apparently without modesty (18). Her body, which has been the playground for Krantz and Breavman for the duration of the 246

game, becomes off-limits when Lisa decides to terminate the game. Later, she makes her body off-limits to Breavman when she gets her first period (31). This marks Lisa's passage into adulthood, while Breavman remains a child. He then takes his body into his own hands, as the narrative moves to the consideration of masturbation (32-33). The following winter, Breavman and Lisa are engaged in the contest of crust walking, after which he tries unsuccessfully to wrestle her to the ground. His failure shows that he has lost whatever control he had over Lisa's body. If Lisa's body is the playground, Breavman is locked out and can only look on impotently. Tamara is most closely linked in Breavman's mind with the physical image of the park or playground. He wants her "because she lives one street away from me. She belongs to me for the same reason the park does" (76). He wants her as the playground of his imagination; however, he encounters resistance because she is, to his mind, surprisingly aware of her body. When she tells him she is "tight," he responds (although not to her): "Who was she, who owned her body?" (78). Again, in agonistic terms, she is an opponent to be defeated or mastered. He attempts to counter her selfpossession by hypnotizing her, a tactic that has already helped him take advantage of his mother's maid. Similar to vertigo, hypnosis seeks to control the body by undermining the control of the conscious mind. Tamara is impervious to this, and Breavman considers her resistance to be due to a diminishment in his powers: "I can't make things happen so easily these days, alas. Things happen to me. I couldn't even hypnotize you last night" (80). He repeats the same words shortly thereafter: "He couldn't make things happen" (83). These words simultaneously echo Breavman's comment to Krantz after Bertha's fall, "there's something special about my voice.... I can make things happen" (15), and Auden's comment in his elegy on Yeats, "Poetry makes nothing happen" (82). Breavman then attempts to master Tamara by recasting her in a story that is more reflective of his character and his manner of speaking than hers. But his sense of proprietorship over the text is weakened when others, including Tamara, read his work: "The act of writing had been completed when he handed her the manuscript. He no longer felt ownership" (93). Then in turning the book out into the public marketplace, he feels jealous: "He started seeing it on the bookshelves of his friends and relatives and he resented their having it. It was none of their business how Tamara's breasts looked in the artificial moonlight of Stanley Street" (101). To possess 2-47

the text is to possess part of Tamara's body, and Breavman feels this as a loss of his own power of exclusive possession. If the favourite game is a form of self-representation, then it must refer doubly: to Lisa's spinning game and to the novel itself, whose title suggests that it is as much a game of grotesque self-representation as Lisa's game of leaving traces in the snow. The text is The Favourite Game and the text is the favourite game. The title becomes a mark of metafiction. Michael Ondaatje points out that Breavman is not only the main character of the novel but is also writing the novel that we are reading: "The book is written in the third person, but we are always conscious that it is Breavman writing in order to discover a clearer, more objective picture of himself" (24). Whether the goal is a "clearer, more objective picture" or a scattered, grotesque picture may be debatable. Ondaatje and Scobie both note that Breavman is depicted (or at least read) as ironic, that in representing himself, he is at least conscious of the ironic implications of some of his actions. His short story depicting himself and Tamara as unself-consciously romantic is a form of grotesquerie. Their language, if read as realist representation, is archaic or at least highly stylized. In the mouth of Breavman, outside the text, this may be ironic, but offered as a realistic depiction it is grotesque. His self-depiction is grotesque. Given this, the reader might wonder if the entire novel, as written by Breavman, is not also an ironic grotesquerie. If we can locate Breavman somewhere between the narrative and the novelist, where can we locate the novelist in this pattern? Nadel tracks the autobiographical resonances within the novel's plot, but also quotes Cohen's letter to Jack McClelland in which he says, "Lawrence Breavman isn't me but we did a lot of the same things. But we reacted differently to them and so we became different men" (qtd. in Nadel 88). Breavman, then, is a grotesque or twisted figure of Cohen, who is simultaneously absent and present in the traces that constitute that character. Cohen plays in the gap between the mimetic presence and the absence of the open-ended text. The novel's playfulness lies not in its form but in its ability to tease the reader, who has as an available intertext the public persona of Leonard Cohen himself. But The Favourite Game goes beyond the story of Breavman, which in turn goes beyond the autobiographical matter that may be its model. The struggle between Breavman and Cohen over this text prefigures the struggle between I. and E in Beautiful Losers; however, the later novel also goes beyond its 248

precursor as its play becomes more intense. If The Favourite Game shows Breavman's developing artistic sensibility, then its concluding epiphany emphasizes the centrality of vertigo and its implied transgression of bodily norms that limit and define play. The first two books of Beautiful Losers contain the bulk of the narrative describing the tempestuous friendship between the novel's two main characters, an unnamed narrator who refers to himself simply as "I." and his friend F. I. is an ageing anthropologist, an expert on a rapidly disappearing Native tribe who are referred to as the A——s. He is obsessed with his attempt to revise the standard life story of Saint Catherine Tekakwitha, which is based on accounts written by French Jesuits. As he says in one of his opening apostrophes to Catherine, "I have come to rescue you from the Jesuits" (5). Book i consists of a 52,-entry journal composed by I. at F.'s request. In it, I. charts his progress toward producing the life of Catherine, reviews and orders his memories of life with Edith and F., and comments on his interminable loneliness and his symbolic constipation. Book 2 consists of a long letter from F. written to I., which he is to read five years after F.'s death. In it, F., a French Canadian revolutionary who has been I.'s friend and lover since they met as children in an orphanage, continues his lifelong attempt to influence and control I.'s life. He produces a conclusion to I.'s life of Catherine, something I. is incapable of doing, mocking I.'s attempts to write history. The letter also advises I. how to employ the materials bequeathed to him in F.'s last will and testament. Books i and 2 describe a dialogic struggle between opposing forces, I. and F., who struggle over three distinct entities within the narrative: I.'s own body, I.'s text (the biography of Catherine or, metonymically, Catherine's body), and Edith's body. But beyond the main narrative, these voices also struggle over the novel under question here, Beautiful Losers. Out of their struggle, and the struggle of other voices surrounding the main contest, Beautiful Losers is produced. The struggle constitutes a psychomachia between the impulse to write and the impulse to get it right, between free play and the rule of historical veracity. I.'s attempt to produce the true life of Catherine conflicts both with the Jesuit authors who have repressed that story and with F., who freely creates a life. I.'s fragmentary narrative bears the traces of these contesting voices and of its own historicity, marked by the infiltration of contemporary speech patterns and images. The struggle between I. and F. approximates the relationship 249

between writer and reader, blurring the line dividing the two positions. L, putative writer, finds in E a challenge to his authority and becomes F.'s reader in book i.. I. effectively surrenders the novel to F. L and F. are both writers and, to add a syntactical, extratextual twist here, I am also the writer of Beautiful Losers. The syntactical twist registers the intervention of my own voice, that of the extratextual reader of the novel. In my own moment of sylleptic play, I can say: I am not the narrator of book i but L is. This gesture signifies one implication of Cohen's use of the first-person pronoun as a character name: in the moment of critical discourse, the intratextual I. and the extratextual I intersect. In a mise en abyme, I, the extratextual reader, write about my reading of L, the intratextual reader, who writes about his reading of F. The pattern recalls Ondaatje's characterization of The Favourite Game as Breavman writing about Breavman writing about Tamara. In the earlier novel, the manoeuvre hides behind the conventional third-person narrative, but in the later novel, it is obscenely visible. Nadel cites a letter to Jack McClelland in which Cohen claims, in mock dialogue with the critics, to have been the author of the novel only briefly: "Soon it will be the book that you have written and you will treasure it" (136). Linda Hutcheon's analyses of Beautiful Losers show that the novel concentrates, through its autoreferentiality, on the reading act as an allegory of the processes of coding and decoding in ordinary life (see Canadian and Narcissistic). It focuses narcissistically on the process of reading, engaging the reader in the subversive politics loosed by multiple voicing. The reader becomes complicit in creating the conditions whereby F.'s ludic and revolutionary precepts challenge I.'s liberal orthodoxy, which in turn mounts an ineffectual challenge to the historical conservatism of the Jesuits. The reader's propensity to connect the fragments of this not-wholly-realized possible world constitutes the political act. Douglas Barbour draws attention to the "all-out attack upon the middle road (way) of liberalism, E.M. Forster's 'Only connect'" (48) in F.'s injunction to "Connect nothing" and in his rejection of history. Barbour sees this as an ironic manoeuvre in a novel that seems to demand connections (both intertextual and intratextual) of its readers (both intratextual and extratextual). However, the connections are not rigid and may be altered to create a different configuration. "Place things side by side on your arborite table, if you must, but connect nothing," says F. (18). To connect is to impose

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structure, but to resist connection is to permit the free play of potential relationships. The ideal is that of the saint, which is not organization but a surrender to "the laws of gravity and chance.... A saint does not dissolve the chaos" (101). The novel emphasizes the possibility of connections, the stem rather than the system. As F. writes to I., the marquee lights at the System Theatre have burned out to spell "stem" rather than "System" (135). The novel may appear to demand connections, but it does so to emphasize its own disjunctions and disconnections, which become apparent in the diminished referentiality of embedded allusions and in the intertextual parodies that loosen texts from their familiar readings. This implies two interpretive activities: one to connect and thereby impose a structure on the fragments, and another to observe the possibilities of free play. The second activity does not necessitate passivity but might require a greater degree of activity to coordinate the plurality of readings or to keep up with the endless generation of new configurations. Parody disturbs and reconfigures the reader's experiences of prior texts. As I.'s first words constitute him as a questing historian, F.'s first words mark him as a ludic author through their parody of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey": "Five years with the length of five years" (155). Similarly, when he hands over the English-Greek phrase book to L, his words, "Your need is greater than mine" (60), mimic Sir Philip Sidney's reported dying words. Combined with his alteration of the colour of the model Akropolis, these allusions suggest that F.'s project amounts to a parody of Western tradition in the way that it attacks the integrity of the classical image and parodies two canonical poetic theorists. The whiteness of the classical image signifies purity and classicism, which F. travesties by employing a colour called "Tibetan Desire," simultaneously gesturing eastward and rejecting the Apollonian reserve associated with Hellenism (10). But F. does the greatest violence to a text when he uses Jesuit accounts of the tortures of Brebeuf and Lalemant as a means of arousing Edith. This episode confronts I.'s anxiety about the Jesuitical texts but, as Ondaatje suggests, can be read as a bythe-way swipe at the epic grandeur of EJ. Pratt's mythopoetic Brebeuf and his Brethren (50). In short, F.'s own anti-imperialist political affiliations are paralleled by the postcolonial rejection of European cultural traditions but also by a critique of New World neocolonialism. Whereas E writes off the old world, I. proves himself incapable 251

of writing a new world into being. Book i, entitled "The History of Them All," can be read as a parody of Whitman's "Song of Myself" that falls short of Whitman's project of writing America. Comparing the titles, as parallel structures around the common preposition "of," we find Whitman's "Song" transmuted into I.'s "The History," which suggests the debate between poets and historians that figures in Plato and Sidney. On the other side of the preposition, Whitman's confident assertion of self contrasts with I.'s deliberate distancing of himself from his text by focusing on "Them All" as the topic of his discourse. I. seeks to maintain his distance and integrity where Whitman seeks to appropriate the experience of all into himself. Where I. shrinks from Edith's suggestion, "let's be other people" (15), Whitman confidently proclaims: "I contain multitudes" (51). Ironically, I. does contain multitudes in his constipation, although his niggardly production contrasts again with Whitman's expansive poetic output. I.'s attempt to maintain his integrity and distinction collapses eventually at the separatist rally at which "Hats were jumping above us like popping corn, and no one cared whose hat he got back because we all owned each other's hats" (izy). By naming the narrator simply I., the text turns that character into an every-subject signified by an empty sign that needs to be occupied to accrue meaning. I. is therefore as exemplary as he is distinct, if not more so. At the same time, I. depends upon the present speaker of the utterance for its reference. On the other hand, by using initials to name I.'s friend, K, and the object of his research, the A—— s, the text maximizes the referential potential of each of those entities. Scobie and Barbour both add the I. and the F. to create IF, the "remote human possibility" (Beautiful 101) prophesied by the text and actualized by the composite figure of book 3, the saint who, created by a vertiginous loss of self, goes beyond the agonistic duality of I. and F. F.'s will constitutes another interesting model of the writer's relationship to the text and the reader. In effect, the will literalizes Barthes's metaphor of the dead author; the will is not efficacious until its author is declared legally dead. The author and the will cannot occupy the same world at the same time. The will comes to represent the legal powers that are guaranteed by the body in life. Effectively, the potency attached to the body during life passes into the text of the will. The will becomes a vessel into which the disembodied legal entity that was the legator passes, before it can be Z52,

reanimated in the body of the legatee. Upon execution of the will, that entity attaches legally to the legatee through a form of legally constituted metempsychosis; so the person of F. can go beyond the limitations of the corporal body through rebirth in I.'s body. F.'s will transfers to the body of I. "his room downtown, the factory he bought, his tree house, his soap collection, his papers" (43) and his fireworks. Through the agency of the will, I. receives the disembodied presence of F. In the execution of the will, I. absorbs the material excess of F.'s life and is occupied by F. "His style is colonizing me," says I. (43). In informing us that he doesn't "like the discharge from my pecker" (43), I. intimates that he has also been infected by F. The syphilis that rotted F. is a part of the legacy along with the tree house, the soap collection, the papers, and the factory. The factory is functional and signifies the power to "make" (poesis); F. owns the means of production and through the will turns that power over to I. F.'s rejection of Western paradigms and prior texts extends to The Favourite Game, which, as we have noted, records a myth of the author's artistic origins. The two texts are linked by parallel symbolic reference points: Bertha's torture tree becomes I.'s tree house; Breavman's home movies become the Ray Charles film into which the old man mutates in book 3; Krantz and Breavman's fast car ride becomes the midnight ride to Ottawa; the brawl at the dance hall becomes the separatist rally; and Breavman's job at the foundry parallels F.'s job at the factory. F. comes to own the factory that once owned him, and his excitement at that dismays L: "Factories, like parks, are public places, and it was an offence to the democratic mind to see F. so deeply moved by his ownership" (44). The analogy of the park with the factory draws a parallel between the sites of play and manufacture. The idea that the place of play can be capital in an economy of revenge is offensive to I. Yet Breavman displays a proprietary relationship to his park and playground: "At night the park was his domain" (66). Like Breavman's park, which is empty at night, F.'s factory must be purged (hence the soap collection) in order for play to occur, and the process of origination must begin anew (hence the tree house). When F. starts up the machinery in the dormant factory, he reproduces the sound of the "ordinary eternal machinery" (35) that can be heard in the telephone dance. He addresses the ghosts in the factory, telling one in particular, Larry, "I've turned it into a playground. . . . I've done what I promised" (44). F. has transformed 253

the site of his oppression by labour into the site of his freedom to play. "We're standing in the future," he tells I. (45). The future is a time postlabour, a time beyond the rule of a promissory capitalism with its deferral of pleasure. The machine, which signalled tyranny over the labourer, is now a thing of play. Larry as a ghost could be Lawrence Breavman, who himself promised to play after Bertha's fall from the torture tree. F. is haunted by his own promise, a force of necessity that he must overcome to free the factory from its commitment to labour. Breavman also haunts the book intertextually as the text of Cohen, a role that the new novel desires to fulfil. Beautiful Losers must be purged of The Favourite Game. If The Favourite Game accounts for the development of the writer, then Beautiful Losers accounts for the development of the reader and the exorcism of the authorial subject, here figured by the ghost of Larry and soon to be figured by a disintegrating I. and the creation of a composite being (a reader who is a writer/a writer who is a reader) caught in the vertigo of ecriture. The exorcism of Larry is an internal process. As F. notes, "Larry didn't expect it of me, it wasn't binding. My boyhood promise was an alibi! ... I wanted to taste revenge. I wanted to be an American. I wanted to tie up my life with a visit. That isn't what Larry meant" (45). Breavman, in abandoning his study of the flute, also recognizes his promise as not binding. The compulsion he takes from it is selfgenerated, an excuse to pursue his own desires. By invoking Larry in this way, F. draws our attention to the relationships between text and author. As F.'s promise to Larry compels F., so The Favourite Game compels Beautiful Losers and so F.'s will compels I. Each relationship demands an exorcism that will permit a "going beyond." The injunction to go beyond extends to the human body. F. is an expert of the body in contrast to I., the cerebral historian; consequently, F. teaches I. to replace the brain with the body as the site of meaning. F.'s experiments on and with Edith and I. are attempts to push back the boundaries of bodily experience and possibility. However, F. dies out of his own instantial body into the altered body of his will. He transcends his own bodily limit by metamorphosing into an instance of discourse. The will constitutes the limit-text of F. Within the terms of this interpretation, F.'s injunction to I. to go beyond requires I. to transcend the biological body. Erotic desire has exhausted the capacities of the biological body to satisfy it. In its earliest stage, this fact manifests itself in the employment of mechanical devices for erotic purposes, such as the

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Danish Vibrator. But the Danish Vibrator, the machine that takes on energy and life from its human sexual partners, represents technology that itself will be transcended in an unending "trip to the end" (260). Technology will be absorbed in the form of the cyborg. Claudia Springer locates an ambivalence in contemporary science fiction toward the imperfect biological body, suggesting both a desire to escape that body and yet retain its capacities for erotic fulfilment. The cyborg embodies that ambivalence, combining the biological capacity for satisfaction with a heightened physical ability to act sexually. In E's terms, the cyborg goes beyond the limits of the biological body; as Springer suggests, when humans interface with technology in pop culture, their human subjectivity is altered to reflect elements of both human and mechanical identity. The pleasure of the interface "results from the computer's offer to lead us into a microelectronic Imaginary where our bodies are obliterated and our consciousness integrated into the matrix" (306). Human beings become ghosts in the machine, freed from the corporeal but destined to haunt the network in search of erotic satisfaction. The cyborg myth marks a rejection of the biblical myth of origins. As Donna Haraway notes, the cyborg was not born in a garden, has not fallen from it, and understands no need to return to the image of organic wholeness. Similarly, the orphans of Beautiful Losers have to reject the image of return and push beyond the world defined by dualism. When the old man descends from the treehouse in book 3 as a fugitive, he, like the cyborg body, is not innocent. At this point, he is a composite: I.'s body occupied by the powers of F. The transformation is not yet complete; he must consume (eat) the female principle embodied by Isis. The struggle between F. and I. that dominates the narrative in the first two books disappears in the third book. The agonistic voices give way to an external voice that lacks access to the internal psychomachia. In Caillois's terms, the first two books bear the traces of a world whose characteristic game is competition or agon, F.'s death and I.'s schizophrenia mark the exhaustion of that world and establish the conditions for a new mode of interaction based on the logic of a new game. The model of that game appears in the Main Shooting and Game Alley: There were a few yellow pinball machines of ancient variety, models from before the introduction of flippers. Flippers, of course, have destroyed the sport by legalizing the notion of

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the second chance. They have weakened the now-or-never nerve of the player and modified the sickening plunge of an unobstructed steel ball. Flippers represent the first totalitarian assault against Crime; by incorporating it into the game mechanically they subvert: its old thrill and challenge. Since flippers, no new generation has really mastered the illegal body exertions, and TILT, once as honorable as a saber scar, is no more important than a foul ball. The second chance is the essential criminal idea; it is the lever of heroism, and the only sanctuary of the desperate. But unless it is wrenched from fate, the second chance loses its vitality, and it creates not criminals but nuisances, amateur pickpockets rather than Prometheans. Homage to the Main Shooting and Game Alley, where a man can still be trained. (253-54) Flippers demarcate the boundary between the game and the player, between the object and the subject. The player can maintain a sense of distinctiveness so long as he or she can influence the game through the agency of the flippers. However, when the flippers are removed, the only way to avoid defeat is by entering into closer physical contact with the game through the "illegal body exertions" that tilt the machine. By twisting and turning the body (and by extension, the machine), the outcome can be influenced, but the cost is the distinction between the body and the machine. The body, by taking on the role of the flippers, becomes part of the machine. The illegal body exertions suggest a forbidden sexual communion, and the body penetrates the machine in order to subvert its power. The subject is seduced by the object into desiring a oneness that leads to twisting of the body and an uninterrupted interface with the mechanism. At the cost of self-definition, the player risks loss in order to play. Loss in a pinball game without flippers is inevitable and it seems madness even to play. But the desire to engage the machine overrides the desire to win and the contractual rule that suggests that the machine not be influenced by proscribed means. The desire to play overrides the desire to observe the proprieties that mask the hidden visceral and atavistic implications of the game itself. The desire to penetrate the machine implies that there is something within to be obtained. Similarly, Mary Voolnd has something hidden within her body that F. is enjoined to retrieve, the announcement of his imminent escape. As the fingers manipulate the pinball flippers, ^56

so E's fingers manipulate Mary's genitalia in quest of both sexual release and release from incarceration. As E recounts his version of Catherine's life, he says, "I've got to go fast because the organs of Mary Voolnd will not buzz forever in sexual surprise like an eternal pinball machine and maybe even my four-fingered hand will tire" (2,04). Mary is the machine with whom E interfaces; her name suggests in onomatopoeic fashion the sound of a pinball rebounding off targets as the player scores. Mary's body, ripped apart by dogs after she liberates E, becomes, like that of her New Testament namesake, the vessel through which E can realize his martyrdom. The body of Isis becomes the instrument of I.'s martyrdom, the difference being that Mary submits to death at the teeth of biological entities while Isis submits to destruction by machine like Martin and Edith. Inevitably, the Main Shooting and Game Alley pinball machines lead to loss. The player cannot win and neither can F. in his playing of Mary. He appears to win by revealing the secret, penetrating the game and influencing the outcome, but the message announces his death. F. cannot live beyond the playground of the body. He attempts to do so by discovering the telephone dance, in which the panorgasmic body becomes the conduit for the energy and noise generated by the "ordinary eternal machinery" (44). Still, the interface occurs between two biological bodies. The high-speed masturbation scene on the midnight ride to Ottawa again links orgasm to an expression of machine power, but the interface, although a closed circuit, remains rigidly biological. F. achieves momentarily his conjunction with the machine during his Argentine escapade. This marks E's apotheosis, the one instance where the will of God (Barbour has made the connection between the initials of the Danish Vibrator and the Latin term deo volente meaning will of God) works through him and Edith. But it too "goes beyond" him, escaping out the window and down the beach. In this episode, E concedes his defeat. "Nothing is as I planned it" (193), he tells Edith, and on learning that she is Isis he confesses that she too is "beyond my gadgetry" (1515). Here, like the "Dr. Frankenstein with a deadline" that he has claimed to be (186), E, Edith's creator, discovers that his creation has gone beyond him and he cannot contain it. The beautiful loser is a trifler who eschews the efficient pursuit of victory and risks loss in an effort to transform the game. As such, both novels describe this movement from agonistic games that train the subject in a social order to vertiginous games that train the 257

subject for social disorder. Like Baudrillard, Cohen imagines a cultural game somewhere outside of Caillois's progressive narrative of history, beyond agonistics.

NOTES 1

In Man, Play and Games, Caillois employs an awkward terminology to describe these games: competition = agon, mimicry = mimesis, chance = alea, vertigo = ilinx. For the sake of clarity, particularly because mimesis has a specific meaning in literary criticism, I prefer the anglicized terms. 2 It is important to note the distinction between games of vertigo and chemically induced vertigo (through the use of alcohol or narcotics). Because chemically induced vertigo carries the possibility of addiction, it cannot qualify as gamelike because it compromises the participant's ability to voluntarily enter and exit the vertiginous experience. 3 Henry Pernet's Ritual Masks: Deceptions and Revelations suggests that these truisms about mask rituals may not be appropriate.

WORKS CITED

Auden, W.H. "In Memory of W.B. Yeats." Selected Poems. New York: Vintage, 1989. 80-83. Barbour, Douglas. "Down with History: Some Notes towards an Understanding of Beautiful Losers." Open Letter 2nd ser. 8 (1974): 48-59. Baudrillard, Jean. Fatal Strategies. 1983. New York: Semiotext(e), 1990. Beaujour, Michel. "The Game of Poetics." Yale French Studies 41 (1968): 58-67. Bourdieu, Pierre. "The Field of Cultural Production: Or, The Economic World Reversed." The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 2973Caillois, Roger. Man, Play and Games. 1958. Trans. Meyer Burash. New York: Free, 1961. Cohen, Leonard. Beautiful Losers. 1966. Toronto: McClelland, 1989. . The Favourite Game. 1963. Toronto: McClelland, 1990. Detweiler, Robert. "Games and Play in Modern American Fiction." Contemporary Literature 17.1 (1976): 44-62. Ehrmann, Jacques. "'Homo Ludens Revisited." Trans. Cathy Lewis and Phil Lewis. Yale French Studies 41 (1968): 31-57. Geertz, Clifford. "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." Daedalus 101.1 (1972): 1-37.

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Haraway, Donna. "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 19805." Socialist Review 15.80 (1985): 65107. Huizmga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. 1938. Boston: Beacon, 1955. Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study in Contemporary Canadian fiction. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988. . Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Waterloo: Wilfrid Launer UP, 1980. Hutchmson, Peter. Games Authors Play. London: Methuen, 1983. Iser, Wolfgang. Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. Kroetsch, Robert. The Studhorse Man. 1970. Markham: Paperjacks, 1977. Motte, Warren E Playtexts: Ludics in Contemporary Literature. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995. Nadel, Ira B. Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen. Toronto: Vintage, 1996. Neuman, Shirley, and Robert Wilson. Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch. Edmonton: NeWest, i98z. Ondaatje, Michael. Leonard Cohen. Toronto: McClelland, 1970. Pernet, Henry. Ritual Masks: Deceptions and Revelations. 1988. Trans. Laura Grille. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1992,. Schiller, Fnednch. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. 1795. Ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon, 1967. Scobie, Stephen. Leonard Cohen. North Vancouver: Douglas, 1978. Spanosu, Mihai. Dionysus Reborn: Play and the Aesthetic Dimension in Modern Philosophical and Scientific Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989. Springer, Claudia. "The Pleasure of the Interface." Screen 32,.3 (1991): 303-23. Suits, Bernard. The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1978. Whitman, Walt. "Song of Myself." Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose. Ed. Lawrence Buell. New York: Modern, 1981. 23-75. Wilson, Robert Rawdon. In Palamedes' Shadow: Explorations in Play, Game, and Narrative Theory. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1990. Wordsworth, William. "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey." The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. E. de Selmcourt. 2nd ed. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1952.

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LEONARD COHEN

Kitchen Table The same useless thoughts arise but no one claims them — Loneliness seizes the frame and shakes away hope but no one is hopeless no one is lonely — The intricate preparations for the next moment direct you to read this now — Surrendered to the one who placed me here I sit at the very table where these songs began some forty years ago — busy as a bee in the solitude Hydra, 1999

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What Baffled Me I took the pills for my memory but I could not stop it erasing I had a family once They could walk on water There was a one-way chain that held me to a woman's body She didn't know she jerked me everywhichway But who was she and who were they? in the midst of the explanation I forgot what baffled me

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Contributors Jarkko Arjatsalo, Finland Douglas Barbour, University of Alberta Doug Beardsley, University of Victoria George Bowering, Simon Fraser University Cynthia Cecil, University of Victoria Adrienne Clarkson, Ottawa Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles Frank Davey, University of Western Ontario Jim Devlin, United Kingdom Bill van Dyk, Kitchener, Ontario Carmen Ellison, University of Victoria Lori Emerson, University of Victoria Judith Fitzgerald, Sundridge, Ontario Kevin Flynn, McGill University Henning Franz, Germany Christof Graf, Germany Chris toph Herold, University of Wuerzburg Joe Hooper, University of Victoria Peter Jaeger, London, England Jenny L.M. Kerber, University of Victoria Susan MacFarlane Carol Matthews, Malaspina College Drew Mildon, University of British Columbia Paul Milton, Acadia University Christopher Rollason Stephen Scobie, University of Victoria Kiwi Schuster, University of Marburg Robert David Stacy, York University Peter Wilkins, Douglas College, New Westminster Jacques Willaert, Belgium Geoffrey Wren, Norway Ruthanne Wrobel, Havergal College Sandra Wynands, University of Victoria Robert de Young, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia 262.