Used Toys

— Used Toys — The Reader’s Encounter with Postmodernism, in Phyllis Webb’s “Breaking” By Patrick McEvoy-Halston August 2002 When Phyllis Webb writes in “Breaking” “what are we whole or beautiful or good for but to be absolutely broken,” for some this thought might seem a highly paradoxical but revelatory definition of the purpose of life. A continual process of breaking down inherited forms, inherited habits of reading and writing, and of experiencing life so that one is always aware that no way of thinking or seeing or living is either “right” or stable, is what postmodernism is all about, so no surprise, really, that in our age Webb’s thought may be one of the few articulated that beckons forth more prophets than skeptics. But though most postmodern writers characterize their writing as if breaking expectations helps release the imprisoned reader from her chains, some of them understand that edged tools are a torturer’s instruments, as well as a liberator’s. As we explore the poetry of several Canadian poets we will anticipate the effects of attempts to dislocate and disorient the reader as I think Webb would have us, that is, without an easy assumption that readers need to be rattled in order to made self-aware. Without care, without an enlarged concern for people that breeds close attendance to all possible repercussions of dramatic challenges to readers—who may already be well aware of what disruptions can make of life— the real toy-box of innovation and opportunities opened up, in potentia, by postmodern techniques, may be received by an audience that has become, or already was, too dispirited, too wary, too broken to feel much like playing with their new toys. Postmodernism, as it is by Stan Fogel in his review of Linda Hutcheon’s The Canadian Postmodern, can be defined as the “shocking disruption by messy things.” All postmodernists intend to disturb conventions, but some seem more concerned than others regarding whether their paradoxical medicine

2 —which hurts in order to heal—works, that is, whether it leaves the patient reader better off. Phyllis Webb, for example, appears to have a different understanding of how most of us experience our lives, as well as a greater respect for our current palliative remedies, than does Erin Mouré. In “Prison Report,” Webb writes that “tenderness is also / a light and a shock.” Considering how often she explores suffering, a gesture of tenderness may be a shock in this poem, as in life, owing to its rarity. In “Love Story” she writes of an ape that died “‘of shock’.” In “Eschatology of Spring” she speaks of an “abrupt birth.” She believes that for so many of us, conception to death affords shock after shock after shock. To Webb (and other Canadian postmodern poets such as Michael Ondaatje, Jan Zwicky, and Anne Carson) our need for “mending” (141) is as powerfully felt as is her desire to disturb us. Though she intends to challenge many conventional ways of representing language, we can imagine her respecting our desire to cling to old ways, our fear of what will happen to us should we let go. In contrast, though Mouré believes us in need of healing, she conceives of our routines as the suffocation of potential (Geddes 492-94)—as all constraint. Mouré, with her fixed conception of conventions as obstacles, is perhaps a better representative of a postmodern thinker (or of what a postmodern thinker is supposed to be like) than Webb is. By choosing to imagine our familiar routines, our familiar world-view as forced upon us, many postmodernists attempt to make life uncomfortable for the reader. By continually frustrating the reader’s attempts to find meaning, by acquainting the reader with a feeling—true discomfort, frustration—that had been largely banished from her life, the hope is that the reader may conceive of her previous ways of apprehending the world as optional, the first step to finding them wrong-headed, as well. It is probably misleading to characterize the experience of reading Mouré as frustrating, though. Frustration is certainly the experience that arises from reading poetry in which one repeatedly tries to find logical connections where none exist. And in many of Mouré’s poems (as with “Postmodern Literature,”

3 for example), owing to our difficulty and to Mouré’s obvious facility in discarding all need for thoughts between two periods to have much to do with one another, reading her poems can indeed be frustrating. However, though she speaks of wanting to create “momentary slippages” (qtd. in Geddes 493) in language, and of “unbalancing” our normal expectations “a bit” (494), and though she thinks that, in sum, an accumulation of these slippages can create a “[breakage of] usual reading habits” (494) that “opens” us to new ways of seeing and to being healed, the experience of reading her work may not be that of encountering moderated, manageable disturbances which eventually accumulate to effect a dramatic change in the reader. Rather, her poems hit hard immediately, and lastingly. Reading “Toxicity,” for example, whatever the “slippages” from conventions she creates (and there are many) is not so much to experience frustration as to undergo torture. Line breaks and sentence fragments are wellnamed to facilitate our articulation of are experiences with them. But if Mouré used language that was different from the sort she normally uses, perhaps we would learn that the impact of her work owes less than we might think to their structural “play.” The images she evokes, even before they are broken up, are so often horrifying to encounter. I am thinking of obvious examples such as the image of the little girl who “pushes a thin / knife” (499) into a horse, or of “the gun-shot wounds [. . . ] opening” (496), but also of the many times she refers to countries such Guatemala in “Postmodern Literature,” or Argentina in “Divergences,” or Nicaragua in “Toxicity,” that so resonate of political violence and injustice they do not need to be elaborated upon for us to understand: She may be attempting to thwart our attempts to find meaning in her poems, but we intuit an overall sense she thinks violence everywhere, and that, with her critique in her poetry of Chatelaine—a fashion magazine many women still read — and apparently of hockey—a sport so many of us watch and play—we are implicated, guilty. We may respond by becoming like the many patients of psychotherapy who, despite their resistance, and despite the pain that comes from discarding

4 old habits, gradually do become more aware how these same habits closed down their lives. Or perhaps as the sort of ordinary people who get their news filtered and packaged by the six-o’clock news, we are already as much aware of how, as Webb puts it, “death grows and grows in Chile and / Chad” (145) as we are of pain found closer to home—in us—that our attention begins to turn to and on the ongoing “bloody / judgement[s]” (145) of poets and other educators who find little to like in the way we live our lives. As one person who wrote a letter to the editor of the Globe and Mail (August 24, 1998) suggests, in the end, after reading and re-reading Mouré’s poetry, rather than experiencing an intellectual uplift, we may be left feeling as if we have been beaten down by a “serious stick” —and by someone too self-righteous to be easily imagined as doing it for our own good. This letter-writer definitely left reading Mouré wanting more to fight than to play. But another response to postmodern work that leaves us feeling disoriented, or, rather, “used,” may be more common. Mouré’s “Grief” includes something we normally do not encounter in poetry—a notation—but at the end of the piece, which seems the natural spot to insert it. This example of modifying convention indeed feels more like a soft slippage than a dramatic break. But, again, it is important to attend to Mouré’s language. The last words, “or maybe not,” clearly cast doubt on whatever they are intended to refer to. As the asterisk they follow is found nowhere else, we intuit that everything in the poem is being called into question, including the title. A poem titled “Grief,” then, may not be about grief at all. So paradoxical, so uncertain, so postmodern —yes. But also so potentially disastrous for poets who want their readers to approach their poems without their guard up. If a reader has encountered too many poets akin to Mouré, Michael Ondaatje might be disappointed with how she reads his “Elizabeth.” All she would need is the first description of a child at play to know “something bad is going to happen,” and would be preparing herself as she reads for the something bad sure to follow. However, if a reader allowed herself to re-create the feelings and emotions she imagines Elizabeth is experiencing, when she encounters the

5 deadly, “When they axed his shoulders and neck,” it is possible she might finish reading the poem still open to “being broken” by postmodern poetry. Why? Because we sense with Gary Geddes that Ondaatje, unlike Mouré, “does not revel in the depiction of violence” (334). Though we may sense an apocalyptic tone in some of his writing, in “Elizabeth,” by leaving us with Elizabeth as she has come to prefer “cool [intellectual] entertainments,” we sense we have been in the company of a writer who not only understands how debilitating pain can be to our eagerness and willingness to playfully explore our world, but who very, very much would prefer that all of us had been spared the pain in the first place. Ondaatje’s work may be understood as both modern and postmodern. The words of his poems are allowed to create the poem’s form, so he is postmodern in his respect for, and his valuing of, process. But if evoking the reader’s emotions rather than involving her intellect is a modernist dictum, then he is, perhaps, in some ways, “old guard.” Considering my profoundly nonpostmodern suspicion that it is possible to feel whole, that is, integrated and happy, but that so many of us need help to become this way, my hope is that as his work soothes as much as shocks, mends as much it messes, he is actually advance guard of whatever the next literary movement will come to be called. Many postmodernists would probably think they have failed if people became “acculturated” to their work. To them, life is “composed” of fragments that never settle into pattern. We are either made aware, or we will be prey to greater frustrations than postmodernists would now inflict upon us. So some poets, including Jan Zwicky and Anne Carson—whose manipulations of language and expectations often cease to disturb once we are accustomed to the postmodern sensibility—may be conceived as either weak-blooded postmoderns, or, as I would prefer to imagine them, as postmodernism’s spiritual successors. Zwicky shows that sentences freed “from the tyranny of the left-hand margin”1 are not only emancipated, but helps give an organic form to poetry. For example, in “Your Body,” a line begins directly under the last word in the previous line that began with the same letter (“o”). Makes sense, actually; feels

6 both natural and soothing; and therefore questionably a postmodern maneuver. In “The Glass Essay,” Carson fills her work with sentence fragments, but in a poem about a deeply traumatized woman. As we intuit that as she gradually stitches herself together the language she uses will also come across as more smoothly structured, the apparent equation of fragmentation with trauma might also upset, or at least trouble some postmodernists. Then again, Robert Kroetsch, a prominent critic who identifies himself self-consciously as postmodern, who “hate[s] the word organic” (13) and who insists “upon discontinuity” (25), also “thinks that to go into pure chaos is to vanish” (25). Kroetsch resists using the word “organic” because it smacks of integration, mergers, of “closure,” yet this word comes to mind in the process of describing what he hopes to help create. To Kroetsch, as with all postmodernists, the “self is a fragment” (7); but as with many postmodernists (as with Zwicky and Carson) he also shows a desire, perhaps a longing, for integration. Perhaps, then, one of the reasons Webb’s “what are we whole . . . for but to be broken” catches our attention is not because we want to revel in its paradoxical truth, but because we wonder what it might be like to feel whole. If true, postmodernists may need to warm up to us before we will open ourselves up to their strange new kind of entertainments. Works Cited Carson, Anne. “The Glass Essay.” 15 Canadian Poets X3. Ed. Gary Geddes. Toronto: Oxford UP, 2001. 336-37. Print. Fogel, Stan. “The Shocking Disruption By Messy Things.” Handout. English 453/Q01. Doug Beardsley. Victoria. University of Victoria. 2002. Print. Geddes, Gary. 15 Canadian Poets X3. Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English–Canadian Fiction. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988. Print. Kroetsch, Robert. Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch. Eds. Shirley Neuman and Robert Wilson. Edmonton: NeWest, 1982. Print.

7 McGrenere, Tim. Letter. Globe and Mail [Toronto] 24 August. 1988. Print. Mouré, Erin. “Divergences.” 15 Canadian Poets X3. 495-96. - - - . “Miss Chatelaine.” 499. - - - . “Post-Modern Literature.” 494-95. - - - . “Toxicity.” 498-99. Ondaatje, Michael. “Elizabeth.” 15 Canadian Poets X3. 336-37. Webb, Phyllis. “Eschatology of Spring.” 15 Canadian Poets X3. 144-45. - - - . “Love Story.” 140-41. - - - . “Prison Report.” 145-46. - - - . “Sitting.” 141. Zwicky, Jan. “Your Body.” 15 Canadian Poets X3. 554-55.

1

I believe I am quoting Robert Kroetsch here (source unknown).