The
Conference should have gone well. After all, it was
our third, the first two having been what passes for
successful in the academic world: big names giving papers
everyone had heard before; graduate students slavering
after those big names and slaving over ponderous papers
with zippy titles they’d be grateful for us putting
into print; fluorescent badges that glowed on and off
the campus. One conferee evidently hasn’t taken
his off for two years, thereby going into the forthcoming
Guinness Book of Records for adhesion. He supplants
the Wichita State University professor who wore a badge
for three consecutive school terms. The W.S.U. professor
had, you see, been given, by mistake, a Yale University
address and designation at one MLA conference. Seeing
the glances not get as high as his jowly face and receding
hairline until the gazers were already lusting after
him because of his alluring signifier, he knew he’d
gotten hold of an identity he’d yearned for. (He
gave his tag up only after his tenure was revoked for
publishing hate literature, plagiarized from Paul de
Man’s Belgian journalist days; on the mean streets
he realized people did not discriminate between Yale
University and Yale locks.)
We had also gained a certain
amount of prestige and notoriety I must immodestly confess
at Decentre for Regressive Studies in the Avant-Garde,
the Institute I was named to head at its inception.
Waterversity of Uniloo has a “techie” reputation
that, it is fair, I think, to say, Decentre is in some
small way decentering. The Conference and its proceedings
are our flagship statement. This was boldly advertised
as a monadal conference in honour of Baron van Leibniz,
the only philosopher left when our university decided
to remake itself as a group of centers, centres, institutes
and sympos(eur)iums.
I had thought, at first,
we might give ourselves a really unique signature, housing
our delegates in individual cells and surrounding their
auditorium chairs with plexiglass to make them feel
properly monadal. What with budget cuts, though, the
possibility of that was eliminated. (Being a monad precludes
hyphenated yoking to any interest group and I couldn’t
think of any isolato who might fork over big bucks to
forge an alliance with long dead von Leibniz.) So each
year we’ve gone with the presentation of papers
in a more or less “trad” format. I’ve
been the one who chooses the work; in fact, I keep a
sharp eye out for art that advertises itself as a unit
and had already noted Book: A Novel as our
kind of lit before we got cooking on our Piggy
promo.
Bech: A Book
was the monad-designate that was the subject of our
first conference, in 1990. The program went smoothly,
if a little dully, the only feistiness occurring in
a graduate student’s rewriting of Updike with
a “y,” an attempt to rout John from the
hetero routines that are the staples of his books. (I
mean, c’mon, how stirring is academe these days,
anyway? Am I showing my age by remembering Louis Kampf
fondly? Those good ol’ Sixties days in which he
attempted to shanghai the MLA convention by quoting,
in his presidential address, chambermaids—“I
don’t understand these professors, all that drinking
and no fucking”—instead of The Maids?)
I thought Batman:
The Movie might draw a more diverse crowd, give
the event a little pizzazz, so it was the focus of our
conference in 1991. Although there were all kinds of
snappy visuals and the Dean was properly discombobulated
when just about everyone showed up at the reception
anonymously and homogeneously in the batmasks we provided
in each delegate’s welcome kit, the papers proved
to be a tad repetitive. By my count there were one hundred
and twelve references to Jack Nicholson’s metonymically
loony mouth; as a consequence, well, quite frankly,
I’m—it’s difficult for me to say,
but, godammit, I’m impotent! Wherever pleasure
portals were (and I used to find them housed diversely),
Jack’s mouth now lurks. I’m even scared
at the dentist, thinking the drillmeister thinks metonymically,
too, and only vaguely understands where he’s working.
“Piggy: A Poem”
(even if that isn’t its title, Piggy
stands so imposingly in its Canardian Poetry Press edition
that it deserves such generic singling out) had everything
going for it as our feature attraction for 1992. It
had Decentre’s momentum as well as its imprimatur;
even more important, of course, was “Piggy’s”
Canadian-ness and, even more specifically, its Southern
Ontario setting. SSHRC immediately committed itself
to going the whole hog with us. No big news, there.
Also, the local community, governmental as well as private,
went gaga. Oktoberfest organizers urged us to put a
Piggy float in their parade and promised to
print the poem on its posters. Schneider’s, the
meat people, offered us a catered banquet (which we
accepted) as well as a small grant to augment our budget.
(Evidently, according to one source, we would have had
a really substantial sum if we had adulterated Piggy
to include the word “schmecks,” but the
scrupulous nature of the editors prohibited them from
succumbing to a little arm twisting from me. You mustn’t
think me callous, though: our Decentre is gung-ho on
intertextuality, so, of course, pristine “trad”
critical notions about the text don’t
tend to hold much sway with me.)
With that little bit of
extra funding available, we lined up five of the hottest
literary theorists around. Surprisingly, all showed,
even . . . , but I shouldn’t gossip scurrilously.
Suffice it to say that one of our pantheon was known
to double and triple book conferences. Perhaps my tearing
cheques, sending half with the amount clearly visible
and a cover letter with Donald Barthelme’s maxim,
“Fragments are the only form I trust,” preceding
my cheery “Looking forward to seeing you,”
was a contributing factor in the appearance of all five.
Our first heavy I hadn’t
seen in years and so was taken aback when I saw him
shuffle up to the podium to greet me at the first plenary
session. The anxiety of influence had decidedly ravaged
the face and mien of the one on whom the mantle of articulating
contemporary critical consequences of Harold Bloom’s
The Anxiety of Influence had fallen. I’d
known “Bud” wasn’t his real first
name; it was at once too precious, too influenced, as
well as, ironically enough, too macho. He now wore in
his demeanour something the equivalent of “the
bloom is off the rose,” though an acronym of that
phrase hardly seems appropriate as a calling card. Nor
does “Rose” though it feminizes putative
authorship.
“Iffy: The Anxiety
of Influence in Piggy,” nonetheless, was smart
stuff. Touché for “Bud” for having
found that “This little piggy went to market”
was included by E.D. Hirsch in Cultural Literacy
as one of the 5,000 essential things a literate person
needs to know. If it’s true that he went too far
with his contention that Mary Buchanan was forced to
confront “This little piggy’s” impact,
he did have his audience on its toes! We agreed that
Buchanan’s anxiety translated into contingencies
and iffiness (lots of “ifs”) in Piggy.
When he moved, however, into his peroration by emphasizing
the importance of the Kabbalah to Piggy, of
the Kabbalistic significance of “thirty-two,”
the number of lines contained in Piggy, and
the Old Testament-ish refusal of “thirty-three,”
some of the audience balked. Churlishly, “Bud”
told the unconvinced questioners, afterwards, that their
resistance was a veritable map of misreading.
I had never met, nor would
I normally have thought to call our next featured speaker.
It’s as if he’d constructed his image out
of an Oxbridge fire sale: elbow patches on tweed, a
pipe, a Brit accent (though his c.v. said he came from
Kirkland Lake, Ont.) If Snorton hadn’t a demotic
“Honeymooners” ring, I’m sure he’d
have renamed himself to coincide with the school book
version of the canon. He, in fact, had contacted me,
hearing, in the phone booth of a milieu that is academe,
about, as he tried wittily to call it, our Pigfest-schrift.
It turns out that the man, beset by large scale evacuations
from his course on prosody, wanted to make a tentative
move into new historicism.
He had a paper, he told
me excitedly, that linked the trochees and spondees
of his near-emeritus trade to the rhythms of the hog
callers in turn-of-the-century southern Ontario. Having
collected tapes of contemporary callers and listened
to scratchy recordings of their ancestors, he, then,
produced a computer program (see how far he’s
moved onto the leading edge?) of their spacing and pacing;
this he grafted onto Piggy. Not only did this
unsettle Piggy’s somewhat too regular
rhythms, but it also reduced the oral delivery of the
poem to half a minute—a (and again here he tried
to—metaphorically speaking—drop his [wool]
pants) “pomo” attention span. Alas, his
presentation of “Piggymetrics,” his paper,
was a disaster. Graduate students, unused to the accoutrements
of formality that he carried and suspicious of his curmudgeonly
reputation (why hadn’t I suggested that he get
a tattoo or pierce his ear?), did not let him get very
far into his delivery. As soon as he cited the ABAB
rhyme scheme (preparing, I knew from having read his
abstract, to compare it to a hog caller’s device),
a couple of our more obstreperous ABDs launched into
“Dancing Queen” by the singing group ABBA.
Bewildered, flustered and unaware of the allusion—no
Snorton edition, laden with footnotes, gets published
coterminously with “life”—he abruptly
ceased his reading and stormed out of the hall.
“Piggyback”
was probably the most eagerly awaited paper. A Lacanian,
whose fame, nonetheless, resulted from her having given
the finger to Lacan at the infamous session in which
he averred that he’d proleptically made St. Teresa
come, the imposing woman presenter this time, curiously,
had her trademark ponytail corkscrewed into a pigtail.
In conjunction with the Schneider’s logo on her
shoulder (which might have been a “pomo”
quotation of Martina Navratilova’s billboard of
a tennis outfit) and the largesse which prompted her
to buy rounds of drinks at the conference’s cash
bar, her altered image led me to believe that some under-the-table
financing had been worked out. Regardless, her brand
of deaconstruction [sic] was very well received. That,
as well as being a noun, deacon is a verb which has
the dictionary meaning, “to castrate a pig or
other animal,” suited her incisive paper’s
cutting purposes perfectly. Using the gender-inclusive
“we” as, we were told, Mary Buchanan did
is a clue to the “authoress’s” strength,
her refusal to submit orthodoxly to Walter. Moreover,
the paper went on to maintain, her insistence on Walter
piggybacking her as a form of sexual gratification rendered
him impotent.
Such a “bare bones”
synopsis of “Piggyback” does not do justice
to its recondite character, to the density of argument
that had swerving clinamens, petits objets,
genotexts, phenotexts and more than enough “Others”
to launch a Lacanian dating service. The “hunh?”
uttered in the question and answer session at the paper’s
conclusion was taken as a compliment by the speaker.
“[B]oinking”
was what might be called the “always already”
heard paper. Piggy, after all, is about a “corker”
of a “porker” and who better to explore
its swine-ifications than the professor from the small
school on the Prairies who, about to be fired for finding
“sex” everywhere, even in World War II novels
about “trenches” and “tanks,”
got a doctor’s certificate claiming he had “copralalia.”
He’s now legendary and his papers provoke debates
about what is script and what is uncontrollable expletive.
Certainly, his epigraphs were apt and poised, to wit,
Grace Paley’s “Every man is his own rotisserie”
and Jim Bouton’s “Shitfuck.” (Those,
however, who hadn’t read Ball Four assumed—until
enlightened—that the latter quotation was a gratuitous
expletive.) There were lots of appropriate titters at
the linkage of Piggy to the turn-of-the-century
Pig Breeder’s Manual. All of it, though,
seemed a little passé to me, especially
since academe’s gone “pomo glam” and
I’d just heard papers at another conference in
which speakers rhapsodized about the “hard bard”
and constructed a “hermeneutics of butt-fucking.”
My favourite presentation
was by the woman who single-handedly created The Brillat-Savarin
School of Home Cooking, Noshing and Nouvelle Cuisine
(formerly the Home Economics Department at the University
of Toronto). Not only do she and her colleagues produce
some exemplary semiotical readings of food, they run
“Text-Mex,” the best cafeteria-cum-intelligentsia
hangout in all of Toronto. Her paper, called “Trayf,”
(or “non-kosher” for the uninitiated) offered
an incisive look at anti-semitism in Grey County (and
southern Ontario) at the time of the writing of Piggy.
Speaking of food, it was
left to me to deliver the final paper, this at the Banquet.
With a donated Brillat-Savarin-ish suckling pig at every
table, good cheer and bonhomie prevailed and promised
me an audience sympathetic and supportive. Thoughtfully,
I’d assembled Buchanans aplenty who’d had
any contact with Breezy Brae, Walter’s and Mary’s
home. Governmental and university leaders, as well as
movers and shakers from the business community, were
there. (P)Iggy Pop was played while dinner was served.
My presentation, I was
sure, was witty and insightful. Called “The Ost-pay
Odernmay Ondition-cay in Iggy-pay,” it was delivered
entirely in pig latin which I’d learned as a second
language many years ago in order to fulfill a stringent
Ph.D. requirement. Caught up, perhaps, in the lilting
cadences of my address, I didn’t notice the audience’s
strange behaviour until I was a fair way into my remarks.
Only when chairs were scraped along the floor, propelled
by people holding their (linen) napkins against their
mouths, and when I heard the sounds that could only
be emitted in a vomitorium did I realize that something
was very wrong.
For a moment I thought
it was something I might have said. (I was at that moment
linking Mary Buchanan’s assessment, “he’s
no beauty,” with Gaston Bachelard’s—I
render it in ig-pay atin-lay to give it full force—
“Ood-gay aste-tay is ired-acquay ensorship-cay.”)
Then someone spit out “Trichinosis” and
I realized everyone at the banquet except for myself
was heaving . (A vegetarian I was spared the poisonous
ingestion.)
The fever that trichinosis
causes produced another upset: a dapper, trim fellow
leapt up and interrupted me. He yelled in a Scottish
accent that he had been Mary Buchanan’s lover
and that the putrefaction then occurring was a curse
on those who had appropriated her voice. He bellowed,
“no one will resolve this mystery.” (Some
later swore that he said “mysterium.”)
The fiasco of a Piggy
conference had repercussions. Our Dean, after being
released from hospital, immediately requested my resignation
from Decentre. So eager was he to force me out that
he acceded to my demand for the newly created Chair
in Artificial Intelligence, which I currently occupy.
* A
report on the Uniloo Conference on Piggy, June,
15-16, 1992, Journal of Canardian Studs 27.4
(Winter 1992): 218-19. [back] |
