Perhaps to begin is to respond, even in a non-responsiveness, to a lack.¹ The poet bpNichol begins his work Selected Organs, a poetic sequence which he subtitles Parts of an Autobiography, with a section entitled "The Vagina." The first sub-section of this section, this organ,² begins and ends with a blunt declaration of lack: "I never had one" (9). If we are to accept the presupposition of reading (at least in its beginning) as a linear and temporal act, Nichol begins his autobiographical text from a position of lacking, of shortcoming, of persistent loss. This mode of positioning one’s subjectivity is no longer new to our way of thinking. Freud, and the French writers influenced by his writings, have suggested that this is the primary condition of the Western subject. For Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, the speaking subject is born into and out of lack, into and out of a fundamental dehiscence of the subject from the mother, the subject from him/herself. It is this "primordial Discord," a scene described by Lacan as the "mirror stage," that activates the subject as a signifying subject, which inscribes the Western subject into the structure of language (4). This theory of the origin of signification, this figuration of language as a desire for re-unification with the Other is apparent in Nichol’s poetics. Later in the same organ, he writes of vaginas:

The "mouth" that is the vagina—a mouth that expels the speaking/ writing subject as though he were language—activates, from the instant that the subject comes out, the subject as speaking subject.³ Nichol’s writing subject is always already in language, in the midst of (failed) signification, pleased with himself for his ability to speak ("Oh I said that. I said that.") but also aware of the slipperiness and limits of his powers of signification, the slight but insurmountable gap between "waaah" and "Ma."

To follow this psychoanalytic reading too closely, it seems to me, is to become entangled in Nichol’s opening (umbilical) chord. Freud’s theory that the separation which activates the individual as a Western subject—whether male or female—is a separation from the penis, means that castration anxiety is always operating, at some volume, in the male subject, just as a feeling of having been castrated always operates in the female subject: "She acknowledges the fact of her castration, and with it, too, the superiority of the male and her own inferiority; but she rebels against this unwelcome state of affairs" (376). This phenomena is fundamental to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, and his figuring of the Western subject is dependent on the presupposition of this originary neurosis.⁴

To lack a vagina—and Nichol inaugurates his poetic autobiography with this declaration of lack—is to lack a lack. Nichol, then, seems to short-circuit the psychoanalytic trope by longing for what, Freud suggests, embodies an essential loss. Nichol fetishizes that which, again according to Freud, invokes the fetish object as a phallic substitute to fill in its own absence: "the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and—for reasons familiar to us—does not want to give up" (352). Yet, Freud suggests, the fetishizing subject is always aware that the fetish object is a constructed illusion. The subject knows (of) the vagina even as he denies its existence: "It is not true that, after the child has made his observation of the woman, he has preserved unaltered his belief that women have a phallus. He has retained that belief, but he has also given it up" (353). The movement of recognition and denial, like the movement of separation and re-unification performed in the fort/da game, is a doubled movement, a perpetual oscillation that blurs the distinction between the two extremes, and makes the distinction between the reification of the fetish and its transparent construction almost impossible to discern.

This oscillation between recognition and denial, experience and fantasy, is apparent in Nichol’s "Vagina." In the third section of this organ, the writing subject performs the persistent oscillation that informs his perception, his figuring, of the vagina:

What is at issue in this section (and in the space of this organ) is the act of representation. The writing subject invests in the promise of the representational act: he knows but he does not know, they are all hairless and yet they are not. The performance of misrecognition, indeterminacy, and lack demonstrates the desire to represent even in the foreknowledge of the violence of representation, the impossibility of representation. Nichol’s poem sketches the intersection of experience and fantasy, observation and figuration.

The inaugural moment of Nichol’s partial autobiography, the "opening" statement that (re)launches his textual attempt at self-representation, represents and fails to represent the lack of a lack. It is from this impossible support, this "absent" subjectile,⁵ that the writing subject initiates his autobiographical sketch. What is so often figured as lack is now represented, in "The Vagina," as excess—an excess just out of reach, barely apprehensible by language within the scene of representation at the moment it slips away from the power of language to possess, to define, to represent. Brian Henderson, in his analysis of Nichol’s "concrete" poetics, suggests that for Nichol the signifier is a source of limitless authority and no authority, and thus "emptiness becomes surplus" for the writing and reading subject (3). The same sort of positioning informs the scene of inscription in Selected Organs. The writing subject "begins" to inscribe himself, his body, on the subjectile of the absent vagina. The writing subject writes towards the "unspoken mouth" that initiates and compels language as it shows us the impossibility of the scene of representation:

What begins Nichol’s text, then, is a gesture. A gesture towards a question that has always already been open at the moment of the writing act: the question of representation. Is it possible to represent the female body? Is it possible to do anything but represent the female body? And by extension, by supplement, any body? Is it possible to speak of the body, or to do anything but speak the body?⁶

Certainly the question of representing the body textually is not new to critical theory in general. What is seen to be at stake, in this question of the body, is how corporeality is translated into the medium of the text (be it book, painting, video, audio), and how a textual image may come to stand in for the body, and indeed affect the receiver’s notions of what a body can mean. The issue is one of translation, a certain type of translation that is doubled and fluid: the translation of the body into image and the translation of this representation back into body.

I return to Leavey’s discussion of the Veronica legend in his essay on representation (as discussed in note 4) for an entry into this question of translation. What Leavey suggests is an implicit relationship between the work of representation and the female body. Leavey sketches a scene of representation wherein the imprint of Christ’s face is explained by means of a dubious legend: the story of the fictitious woman who provides the veil on which the impress can be received. Veronica the woman becomes the justification for the relic’s existence, the necessary subjectile for the icon. Yet the name Veronica—the name being "a barbarous compound of vera and icon and meaning ‘true image’" (191)—reveals the fiction of the woman, reveals that the support of the representation is an illusion. The female "body," in this case, is illusory and absent at the same time that it is present and necessary to receive the imprint of representation.

Leavey’s reading coincides with an array of feminist thinking on the relationship of the represented "female body" to the artist and viewer. In Reading "Rembrandt," Mieke Bal draws our attention to Dürer’s famous woodcut, Draughtsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman. In Dürer’s representation of a male artist practicing his craft on a nude female, Bal sees an icon for the Cartesian perspectivalism that appropriates and erases the object, or body, it renders into image. The artist who scrutinizes the woman through his grid while his hand automatically translates her onto the gridded paper, transforms the prone woman into landscape, into an object, "This is, indeed, the law of perspective. It turns the female body into a figure. This extreme fetishization of figuration is the perversion of a technical mastery that denies the female body in the very act of appropriating it" (174).

Bal’s reading of a body expropriated and negated by the scrutiny of a disembodied "gaze" is echoed in bell hooks’ construction of race and gender in Black Looks. In her essay "Eating the Other," hooks posits that "the commodification of difference promotes paradigms of consumption wherein whatever difference the Other inhabits is eradicated, via exchange, by a consumer cannibalism" that ultimately renders the Other displaced and decontextualized into insignificance (31). As in Bal’s reading of Dürer, hooks reads the fascinated scrutiny of white male culture as one that devours and denies the Other’s body. Whether motivated by hostility or attraction, the differences of the body are leveled by textual representation.

While Bal and hooks seem to offer the possibility of reclaiming the female body from the constraints of Cartesian representation, writers such as Donna Harraway argue that "the body," in the sense of what is uncontaminated by systems of representation or technology, has ceased to exist: "Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other" (151). Instead, the bodies we inhabit and interact with are "cyborg" bodies, "theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism" (150). Harraway’s approach to subjectivity, an approach that refuses to mourn an original loss of the body, is evident in many of the proponents of what has come to be termed "media philosophy." Writers such as Harraway, Jean Baudrillard, and Mark Taylor argue that the body has never existed as an immaculate and self-contained entity. As Taylor and Esa Saarinen state in their collaborative text, Imagologies, "If we rethink the disappearance of the subject in terms of telecommunications technology, it might be more accurate to argue that the postmodern subject becomes a medium. Perhaps it is less misleading to speak of the mediaization of the subject than of its disappearance" ("Shifting Subjects" 8).⁷

Many of the critics who have engaged with Nichol’s long poem, The Martyrology, have implicitly or explicitly worked from this model of the ‘mediaized’ subject. In The Martyrology Nichol’s writing subject actively engages in the process-oriented fluidity of his linguistic project, where, "meaning becomes a secretion, a loss or expenditure out of semantics’ ideal structure into the disseminatory material of the signifier" (McCaffery 195). The sense of meaning as excessive and contingent translates into the construction of subjectivity within the long poem, a construction that is ongoing, fluid, and contingent on one’s position within the textual scene: "Nichol presents the ‘i’-poet of The Martyrology as a construct of differences in process and demands that the reader produce his multiple selves" (Neuman 60).

Smaro Kamboureli, in her work on the long poem, sees The Martyrology as an autobiographical exploration, an active writing of a subjectivity that is always shifting, always displaced from its central position within the poem. According to Kamboureli, Nichol’s "autobiography functions not as a genre that seeks to encompass the life of the self by encompassing meaning and an ordering shape to it, but as a writing activity that unravels the complexity of the self by exploring its signification" (152). This view seems to agree with that of McCaffery and Neuman on the complexity of the subjectivity of the writing subject in The Martyrology. In addition, Roy Miki, in his introduction to his anthology of papers on The Martyrology, discusses the way Nichol’s narrative positioning breaks down the distinctions between subject and object in a poem which asks itself, "where does the "i" end and where does "it" begin?" (16). In this sense, critics such as Miki perceive a way of subverting the Cartesian perspectivalism in Nichol’s long poem. Nichol’s experiments in composition, the mechanics of shifting subjectivity and fluid linguistics which he employs in his poem, seem to challenge the notion of a sovereign, self-contained subject who defines himself against other objects. Nichol’s Martyrology is seen by these critics to side-step the violence of representation by being profoundly aware of it, by always pushing against the illusory structure of the Western language system.

I have sketched out these positions on the body and these assessments of Nichol’s most renowned work in order to better articulate the questions I am posing in relation to Nichol’s Selected Organs. For just as I would state that Harraway’s "body" is not Bal’s "body," or that hooks’ "body" is not Descartes’ "body," so too would I maintain that the multiple writing subject in the books of The Martyrology is not necessarily the same writing subject in Selected Organs. While it might be possible to read, as Kamboureli reads, The Martyrology as a continuing autobiography, this does not mean that the autobiographical project posed in Selected Organs is identical. What I am suggesting, rather, is that a new structure is employed and instituted for Nichol’s autobiography in Selected Organs. With the employment of the prose poem form, the structure of division of his writing into organs, and the initiating of his book with the figure of "The Vagina," Nichol moves his writing in a different direction than any of the multiple directions of The Martyrology. Along with the insights yielded by reading Nichol’s Selected Organs alongside contemporary thinking about the body, and alongside Nichol’s other texts and its interpretations, there is a thematics, a poetics, operating in this text that has not yet been articulated.

The questions remain, then, as I have left them suspended: What is at stake in the act of representation? What is privileged when the female body is represented? Is there a means of making the body material within the space of the text?

I have a friend who collects her own x-rays. She is fascinated, she tells me, when she looks at those uncanny images of her own internal structure, those photographs of a body that she has never directly seen. It is a shock, as she describes it to me, that is a simultaneous intermingling of recognition and distancing, identification and strangeness. In a sense, this is her body, the fundamental organs that make her work. And yet, they are unfamiliar regions, the site of a delightful méconnaissance within our illusion of self-knowledge.

bpNichol’s text concludes (if we assume the book is read in a linear trajectory), with an organ entitled "Sum of the Parts," a punning heading that promises to bring closure through a totalizing account even as it acknowledges that the textual investigation has only ever been partial (some of the parts).⁸ The writing subject in this section ends his text by confessing that he has never seen most of his own body, and likely never will:

Nichol’s writing subject is at once disturbed that he cannot comprehend his body in its entirety, and revolted by the prospect of seeing his own innards: "The sound of them is enough to make me vomit" (51).

Once again, the potential and the potential failure of autobiography returns the narrative to oblique references to the mouth. Just as "The Vagina" is figured as "an unspoken mouth" that sets "my mouth flapping" with his first inarticulate words, his internal organs similarly activate the mouth of Nichol’s writing subject, this time with "vomit." In either case, the mouth overflows itself, overflows the boundaries of the writing subject. The mouth, in these contexts, is a dangerous space, a space that plays out the drama of creation and destruction. In Julia Kristeva’s analysis of abjection in Powers of Horror, the mouth is located as the site where the "I" is created by the speaking subject, and where that construction has always already failed. Speech becomes, in Kristeva’s analysis, an action symptomatically indistinguishable from consumption and regurgitation, in that each process involves "a choking sensation inside from outside but draws them the one into the other, indefinitely" (25). This focus on the mouth may also recall bell hooks’ analysis in "Eating the Other," where a discourse of the exotic is merely a mask for a "devouring" of difference in Western culture’s consumerist imperialism.

In Nichol’s "Sum of the Parts," as in "The Vagina," the mouth stands as a source of discharge, an excessive space. Nichol’s "mouth" launches what is unassimilated, inarticulate, boundless. The figure of the mouth stands at the intersection of creation and collapse. The mouth consumes, desires consumption: it chews objects into words, it leaves the imprint of teeth (dental records) on the world it constructs for its subject under the auspices of the self-present voice. And yet the mouth cannot completely consume, cannot altogether swallow its subject matter.⁹

The mouth then, stands as a figure of the writing subject even as it represents the gap between the subject and his body: the mouth marks the narrator’s inability and unwillingness to identify with "sum of his parts." Fascinated and repelled, the writing subject is drawn to inscribe his own feelings of recognition and displacement towards the figure of the internal organ:

Nichol’s quest for self-representation invokes a performance that asserts the difference of the body, his body, while denying the reader or the writer access to that difference. The writing subject cannot see his own reflection in the anatomical texts he views, and yet cannot bring himself to examine his own organs. His innards stand, in the space of the text, as a signature that cannot be recognized: a mark that can neither be read nor effaced, the unrepresentable imprint of the unrecognizable structure of the body. The body figured in this text, the body that refuses textual representation, performs the perpetual dissipation of the siglum¹⁰ of the writing subject—a writing subject who figures himself in a distinctively textual form, using lower case initials as a signature, as Stephen Scobie suggests, "not as voice but as typography" (27).

This question of the signature, the mark under effacement, returns me to "The Vagina." For it is this organ that is figured as the subjectile which receives the signature of the writing subject—thus providing an alternate site to the "mouth" for the possibility of articulation. "The Vagina" is presented as the initial(ing) site for the performance of autobiography, the absent, folded non-surface which receives the siglum of the writing subject: "I liked that name for them because it began with 'v' and went 'g' in the middle" (10). This partial space seems to offer itself as a distanced but unforgotten siglum, its initials (vg) always already underwriting the initials that proliferate inside and outside of the textual space (bp). These organic initials figure the foundation as well as the erasure of the proper name, launching the writing subject into the space of the name while performing the scene of the impossibility of the name.

For autobiography is a genre concerned with the construction of the subject, with giving the subject a proper name. The autobiography is a site designed to hold the signature, to reify the signature. By articulating the life of the writing subject, autobiography offers the promise of maintaining the materiality of the subject’s autograph, the subject’s life, and thus preserving the materiality of the subject’s body within the text. In an investment in, and a subversion of, this promise, the trope of "The Vagina" in Nichol’s text holds itself almost imperceptibly as the ephemeral signature and as the remains of signature. "The Vagina," as the always vanishing support which inaugurates the writing subject of its textual representation, marks the writing subject as voice and writing at the moment when the subject inscribes his desire for voice, for the name ("I liked that name for them"). "The Vagina" receives the impress of the siglum of the writing subject (bp) even as it underwrites these initials with its own, under erasure (vg).

The initials, we might note, are doubly marked by typography and by voice: the inscription of the siglum is inflected with sound even as it is muted by the page ("it began with 'v' and went 'g' in the middle"). Certainly Nichol is persistently aware of sound, just as he is aware of the typographic structure of the grapheme. This organ’s passage, then, is an oscillating sketch of different registers of typography, a sketching that, as Peter Jaeger points out, "blurs the boundary between speech and writing, thereby holding both categories in suspension" (43).

Nichol’s "The Vagina" offers a moment where the concept of signature blurs and confounds various critical practices. This is the moment where the textual registers of sound and typography becomes, for critics such as Peter Jaeger and Stephen Scobie, a focal point for their assertion that Nichol’s poetic work challenges and surpasses the precepts of Derridean post-structuralism. Scobie, especially, emphasizes his belief that Nichol’s encoding of voice into text confounds "the heavy-handed rhetoric of most deconstructionist critics" (23). Citing Derrida’s questioning of the "voice," Scobie writes:

A similar point is made by Jaeger, who suggests that Nichol "ironizes both the humanist ideology that privileges speech and presence, and the post-modern, de-centred ideology that de-legitimates phonocentrism" (43). Both critics read Derrida as banishing the voice from the scene of writing, and demanding that writing be solely privileged in a Derridean ideology.

I see this type of argument as articulating a desire to move poetry beyond philosophy, theory, or critical writing. By asserting that Nichol’s writing is more complex than Derrida’s, Scobie and Jaeger seem to claim a lofty, transcendental space for the poetic text, a space that is highly Romantic in its parameters. Their arguments suggest that Derrida has simply flipped the binary, creating a hierarchy of writing over voice that is easily subverted by Nichol’s radical poetics. Instead, I would suggest that Derrida’s texts question the reifying of "voice" as self-presence, as pure thought, as the instantiation of what Derrida terms a "sacrificial structure of discourse" ( "‘Eating Well’" 112).

Derrida’s interest in reading the body, the corporeal markings within the structure of the text, is an interest in a voice that iterates the body, that resists the idea that "man is the only speaking being" ("‘Eating Well’" 116). Derrida continues to resist a metaphysical definition of voice, but does not exclude other corporeal registers of voice from the structure of his text. In this sense, Nichol’s encoding of voice into Selected Organs is in accord with Derrida’s thinking rather than in opposition to it. At the same time, I am not suggesting that Derrida is thinking ahead of Nichol, or that Nichol merely parrots a Derridean position. Rather, I am asking if we should privilege any genre of text over any other.

Nichol’s effaced and effacing signature, then, marks the flux of a movement between registers, between modes of inscription, and offers itself as a contingent and receding support for a representation of the body. "The Vagina" marks the becoming space of language and sound, the structure of a generic and corporeal blurring: the structure of a sketching of the body.¹¹

What begins Selected Organs, what stands at the head of the first page (page 9) of the "main body" of the work, is not the sentence I began by citing ("I never had one"), not even the title of the organ, but a small sketch of a vagina, carrying the legend "the vagina" above the rendering:¹²

The sketch—the image seems to draw attention to its roughness, its sketchiness—represents the object of the writing subject’s desire while conspicuously refusing to represent. The crudeness of Nichol’s drawing hand, the position of the sketch’s title, these aesthetic choices seem to acknowledge the difficulty a viewer might have in recognizing the rendered object.¹³ The hand of the writing subject—and the sketch draws attention to the act of inscription, of representation, as hand-work—seems at once compelled to represent "the vagina" even as it parodies the impossibility of such representation, such objectification.¹⁴

The question of whether Nichol’s sketch performs the objectification of the female body is central to the issue of representation in Selected Organs. In search of an answer, I am compelled to recall Nancy Vickers’ reading of the anatomical blazon as a poetic genre in sixteenth century France. Vickers examines not only the poetic structure of the blazon, which stresses "a fiction of lyric address in which the addressee was not a whole woman but, rather, a part of a woman—a nose, or a tooth, or a hand" (4), but also the woodcuts which were superimposed onto the poems in the published editions. More so even than the lyrics, these woodcuts of the body parts addressed by the poets forwarded a narrative of "radical fragmentation," by displaying "a body disembodied, divided, and conquered" (8).

Vickers directs attention to the estranging effect one might feel on viewing these representations of body segments amputated from the image of a unified body, "a foot without an attached leg resembles a broken piece of statuary; a single tear hangs in space; […] a breast is an isolated circle with a dot at the center" (9). In this context, Nichol’s disembodied rendering of "the vagina" may be read as a fragmentation and dissection of the female body. For "the vagina" is drafted without thighs, without legs surrounding it: "the vagina" is detached and distanced from any representation of the female body. Nichol’s sketch may, in this sense, replicate the violence that Vickers reads into the blazon genre, where "the body that is imagined in the most tactile and material of terms—that is partitioned, arranged and rearranged under the scrutiny necessitated by the genre itself—ultimately vanishes beneath the ‘anatomiste’s’ touch" (19).

The parallel between Vickers’ anatomiste and Nichol’s writing and sketching subject would locate the trope of the vagina in Selected Organs within the territory of the fetish. By dissecting the vagina from the female body and framing it as an icon, Nichol replicates the violence of Cartesian perspectivalism, a hand-work of the monocular male who scrutinizes women in order to represent woman: that is, to define, demarcate, and to possess by eradicating difference. Nichol’s writing hand becomes the transparent hand of Dürer’s draughtsman.

Yet, what distinguishes Nichol’s "The Vagina" from the blazons Vickers examines is the structure of Nichol’s poetic discourse. While the genre of the anatomical blazon addresses the body part as a discrete object, the part of a beloved woman which suddenly comes to be that woman, Nichol addresses the vagina that he never had. Rather than rendering the vagina accessible and tactile by partitioning the anatomical organ from its female body, "the vagina" stands as a sketch of Nichol’s narrator’s body, the body that is missing from his body, the anatomy which he lacks. This lacking, this desire for "the vagina" renders the representation a performance of a subjectivity in process rather than an exercise in objectification: not a vagina but "the vagina." Nichol’s sketch subverts any claim for the transcendence, universality, or metaphysics of the act of representation by the very roughness of the aesthetic he deploys. The hasty lines, the label above the sketch-work which identifies what is being represented, these artistic devices testify to the materiality of the sketch and to the corporeality of the hand which draws the sketch. Rather than rendering its writing hand invisible and its representation transparent, Nichol’s "the vagina" draws attention to the presence of the biological hand and to the impossibility of translating the body into the space of the text.

When the writing hand resists ‘disappearing’ from the scene of textual inscription, when it leaves a conspicuous trace of itself— through rhythm, through ambiguity or concealment—on the surface of the printed page, the writing hand withholds from itself the promise of definition.¹⁵ Nichol addresses the problem of the writing hand in another organ, "The Fingers":

In "The Fingers" the writing hand is glimpsed through the frame of the sketch, a sketch which portrays the discipline, the containment, of the writing hand and the meaning it would like to convey. The writing subject describes a mode of inscription that modulates between uncontainable excess and incomprehensible restraint. The narrative describes the control of the writing hand by the system, a system that severs the body from its writing matter.¹⁶ At the same time, the scene is a subversion of any attempt at discipline, a development of a handwriting so controlled "that noone could read it." The containment of the writing hand produces the signature, fixing its inscription within the boundaries of the structure, but the inability to control the hand renders the signature distant, unreadable, and subversive.

Just as Harraway describes a body that is inseparable from media technology, Nichol’s Selected Organs portrays a system of textual production that is inseparable from the material body. By refusing to disengage from the writing hand, Nichol’s writing performs an attempt to move away from representation as objectification: an attempt at representation that is neither Cartesian nor monocular, but is instead polyvocal, diffuse, corporeal. The illegibility of his project is encoded into the structure of the sketch. The sketch, Nichol’s sketch (and accompanying it, Nichol’s text), denies the transparency of the page, of the structure of representation.¹⁷

Nichol’s "the vagina" is a draft, as much occlusion as representation—"the vagina" portrays itself as a sketch without a mounting, without the already determined support of the female figure (for the referent does not exist, has never existed). "the vagina" displays itself, in its lack of represented body, as corporeal at the same time that it portrays the absence of the corporeal body within the scene of writing. Nichol’s sketch performs the failure of the scene of writing, the failure of the textual structure to receive the imprint, the signature, the inscription of presence. The sketch, the text, remains as a mark of the abortive scene—the impulse of the corporeal hand against the absent subjectile. From its inaugural moment, Selected Organs remains as a space without a proper name, without a proper place, a marking without possibility.