To
view; to re-view. A second sight, as it were, and a
second site. Always already, not the view but the re-view.
A motion moved and seconded (or seconded): where else
can we stand but at this site, in this (in)stance, on
the reviewing stand? A second person (the reader), and
a second second person: vous; re-vous. And
before us, a pig.
I take pen in hand (if
I may be permitted to utilise a locution which has now
become metaphorical, or perhaps, as Roman Jakobson would
say, metonymical, to the concretely circumstantiated
socio-political reality of setting digit to keyboard)
in order to review (in all the senses adumbrated above)
this seminal/ovarian text of Canardian literature, the
edition of Mrs. Walter Buchanan’s Piggy
(Canardian Poetry Press, 1991, hereinafter abbreviated
as P). I find much to admire in this work,
and in this edition. Indeed, I am irresistibly reminded
by it of the passage in Glas (the discerning
reader will doubtless recall it) in which Jacques Derrida,
in his amusing Gallic fashion, writes:“This discourse
on sexual difference belongs to the philosophy of nature.
It concerns the natural life of differentiated animals.
Silent about the lower animals and about the limit that
determines them, this discourse excludes plants. There
would be no sexual difference in the plants, the first
‘Potenz’ of the organic process.
The Jena philosophy of nature stresses this. The tuber,
for example, is undoubtedly divided (entzweit sich)
into a ‘different opposition (differenten
Gegensatz)’ of masculine and feminine, but
the difference remains formal. . . . Hegel notes in
passing that in the cryptogram in general the sexual
parts are assumed to be ‘infinitely small’”
(Glas 114a)—a conclusion with which Mrs
Walter Buchanan would have been in full agreement with
her German counterpart.
“Silent about the
lower animals”! It is this phrase, I fear, which
extrudes itself, phenomenologically speaking, from the
above context, and forces itself, with all the energy
of the return of the repressed, into the textuality
of our present intercourse. I refer, of course (if you
will allow me to bracket the question of reference,
and to use, or at least to refer to, the word “refer”
[as it were] under erasure), to the unfortunate and
marginalised “Duckies.” For Bailey and Bentley’s
edition, this poem is indeed, marginalised:
marginalised within marginalisation, one might say,
mise en abyme, abyssed within the abyss of
Canardian literature. Such is the fate of this problematic
text (if you will forgive the tautology). Piggy,
as this edition amply demonstrates, has long been marginalised,
thrust to the outer limits, the borders, boundaries,
edges, slippages, marshes, margins, gutters, parerga
of our discipline. But in addressing this psycho-socio-politico-economico-literaryo
devaluation of a text which is not, after all, without
some interest, has not this editorialisation
itself fallen into the trap [die Versenkung]
of committing in its turn, as if compelled by some Nietzschean
recurrence, some vastly ironic repetition complex of
destiny [quelque complexe ironique du sort et du
ressort], the same tragic flaw? Observe: for Piggy,
magisterial as it is, an Introduction of twenty-one
pages, Editorial Emendations, Explanatory Notes, the
full cryptogram (as Derrida so lucidly puts
it) of the scholarly apparatus. And then, as a mere
afterthought, an “Appendix,” without benefit
of Introduction, Editorial Emendations, or Explanatory
Notes—there, neglected, shivering, on its own,
marginalised, appendicised: “Duckies”.
The process of marginalisation,
as is well known, is akin to the process of repression
as outlined by Freud.1
But here, at this critical juncture of editorial Saddamism
and retrogressive speciesism, we must put ourselves
in the position of posing ourselves the question, however
uncomfortable such a pose may be, of why “Duckies”
should suffer such inferioritisation? Are we to postulate
some deeply unresolved neuro-sexual trauma in the editors’
remote childhood—an incident, perhaps, trivial
at the time but traumatic in psychoanalytic retrospectiveness,
with a rubber ducky, which would then need
to be ruthlessly incorporated in the form of an Appendix?
Such might well be the conclusion to which a hasty graduate
student, or indeed an untenured professor, might unguardedly
leap. Likely as it might be, however, in the case of
a text with a sole editor, the duality of editorship
in this text (its doubleness, its Entzweitung,
its ménage à deux) renders this
solution at least statistically improbable at this point
in time. Rather, I feel (if I may be permitted such
a verbal gesture of romanticised subjectivity) that
the solution is not to be sought in the supposed “individuality”
of the editor(s)2
but in their socio-economic stationing within the political
and constitutional structures of Canarda, specifically,
that is to say, with regard to and in light of the quintessentially
Canardian phenomemon, brought on by constitutional excess,
of the denial of the political (la negation du lac
Meech) (known also as the Charlottetown Discord
or la folie du Joe).
For what is “Duckies”
if not an extended political allegory, and
one, moreover, which may now be read, in an extratemporal
milieu of transgenerational intertextuality, as remarkably
apposite to the currently appertaining political phenomenologisation
of Canarda? Consider, for instanciation, “Duckies,”
lines 37-38: “Long, too long, the turkey / Has
held the place of state.” If that is not an allusion
to Brian Mulroney, I’ll eat my Lacanian cranial
covering. These lines, indeed, might well be inscribed
upon the banners of marchers from coast to coast [a
mari jusque ad mare], summoning to their aid the
words of one of Canarda’s finest bards as they
struggle against the dialectical structures of the socio-economic
discourses of inequalitisation and referential disinstantiation
of pseudo-capitalist neo-post-modernism.
Indeed, once one has performed
the initial hermeneutic gesture of transcoding “Duckies”
into the referential set of Canardian politics, it all
becomes as clear as day—as clear, even, as Jean
Baudrillard. Note the obvious allusion to politicians’
propensity for accepting bribes, in lines 7-8: “And
of fowls that gobble stuff / Ducks can beat them all.”
Observe Mrs. Buchanan’s acerbic satire on the
process of forming governments (she may have had the
Italian model in mind at this point): “Paddle,
paddle, paddle, / Out they go and in” (ll. 9-10).
“Holding business meeting” (l. 15) may be
as complimentary as the poem ever allows itself to be,
but the momentary sense of political worth is immediately
dispelled in the aporetic dystopia of the following
line: “Or a sociable pow-wow.” The Senate,
Dear Reader, the Senate!
Having established such
a Weltanschauung for the text, I need scarcely
comment in detail on the implications of such lines
as “Patter, patter, patter, / What are they doing
now?” (ll. 19-20), “See them preen their
feathers” (l. 21), or “And for all outsiders
/ They do not care a rap” (ll. 23-24). I must,
however, note both the extreme subtlety and (I fear)
the disturbing signs of American cultural imperialism
which pervade the fourth stanza. This stanza sets up
an elaborate subtextual mythographic diegesis, in which
the annual ritual sacrifice of the birds at “Thanksgiving”
is implicitly (through that wonderful absent silence
which becomes, in the hands of the greatest poets, a
speaking presence) compared to the election of Canardian
politicians. “Off goes duckies [sic] heads,”
as some candidates are defeated; “Make our feather
beds” say those retired to the Senate or the C.R.T.C.;
“eaten up, or sold” bewail the Opposition
backbenchers. The problem, as I earlier adumbrated,
is that a ritual annual (or quadrennial) election/sacrifice
at Thanksgiving is an American political exemplum,
not necessarily a Canardian one. Mrs Buchanan’s
patriotism is here rendered subservient to the appealing
(if fearful) symmetry of the putative Levi-Straussian
conceit in comparative structuralist mythology.
Within this interpretive
framework (if, that is, any reading can ever be said
to remain “within” a framework—frameworks,
as we know too well, being always already subject to
bilateral contamination and semantic transgression),
it is evidentially supportable that “Duckies”
is formatted as a poetico-political nexus capable of
utmostly impacting Canardian text processors (and processees).
Its remarginalisation in this edition is therefore all
the more regrettable. It is my modest hope that the
present deconstruction of the ideological sub-pinning
of the text’s Althusserian discursive strata may
contribute to its re-elevation into the cognitive sphere
of canonical Canardian ephemera. As Derrida so pithily
remarks, “In botany, erianthus designates an organism
furnished with villous and fleecy flowers. Thus one
can no longer decide, and that is the whole interest
of writing” (Glas 70b).
*Rev.
of Mrs. Walter Buchanan, Piggy, ed. Susan Bailey
and D.M.R. Bentley (London: Canardian Poetry P, 1991)
in Canardian Literature 666 (Winter 1991):
175-77. [back]
Notes
- (See
especially “Resistance and Repression,”
in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,
The Penguin Freud Library, Volume 1, Trans. James
Strachey, Ed. James Strachey and Angela Richards [Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1974], 327-343). [back]
- All
that Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault have to say
about the “Death of the Author” can, indubitably
and unerringly, be extended into this sphere as well.
Is it not time, Editors Bailey and Bentley, for us
boldly to proclaim the Death of the Editor? [back]
|
