BEING PATIENT WITH EMPTINESS: A POSTSTRUCTURALIST CRITIC AS POET REMEMBERS
Contents
1.
2.
Already in Picasso
WORKS CITED
Scobie, Stephen. Dunino. Montreal: Signal-Vehicule, 1989.
STEPHEN SCOBlE'S Dunino begins, appropriately, with a poem that defies beginnings in their originary
sense. The poem "Picasso's Radio" (the title piece for the 22 poems collected in the first part of the
volume) challenges chronological trajectories of influence, blurs formal and generic boundaries of art forms,
conflates high and popular cultures, and delights with its puns. In other words, it signals to those in the
poet's interpretive community his interest in several poststructuralist issues -- questions of originality,
canonicity, textual discreteness, and the games language plays (or languages play, as French, German,
Scots, and English mingle in the later poems).
Picasso the pop culturist, "Sitting in Paris in 1911 / . . . was already listening to Bob Dylan. / He knew The
Rolling Stones by heart" (11), but he could not convince an interartistic Georges Braque to give up his Bach
(because Bach is in Braque), nor could he get a laugh out of Gertrude Stein, no doubt because his pun
mocks not only her rhetorical style but her sexual preference:
. . . "Gertrude," Pablo would say, "you'd love this record called Blonde on Blonde," but Stein would give him
a stony stare and turn a deaf ear. (11)
When Picasso "moved / to bourgeois quarters," he "left his radio behind": appropriately, it is now the
property of a nameless "secondhand dealer," for there are no firsthand cultural goods (11).
The poem "Rider" similarly, but sometimes more opaquely, plays with high theory and popular culture,
where "rider" differs from "writer" by /d/ and /t/, and where the rider of the movie Western (and writer of
Western texts) is always on the move, enacting deferral, entering the screen out of nowhere, riding out of
the picture into no determinate place. This is a poem of difference, where John Wayne is poststructuralist
hero: "there's always already someplace else / you have to be" (14); the poet, too, is poststructuralist hero,
"moving / through a slippage of images, scattered debris / of rocks . . . split off / from the great rock logical
walls" (13). Here is rider as "supplement, essential afterthought": for "whenever something is missing and
yet required / the Rider enters, though he never stays" (15). Here is the poet appropriating and
undermining Western philosophy and masculine myths in their various forms: the macho hero of the range
in his self-imposed marginality, the drifting lover of the traditional blues text, the Norse warrior god, the
Christian hero, and the Arthurian quester whose cup the speaker refuses, saying, "immortality / was always
a mug's game" (15). Jean-Luc Godard, John Wayne, Christ, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Odin, et, al., ride in
and out, are written into and out, of "Rider."
Frederick Philip Grove is also "Rider/writer" in the poem "Felix Paul Greve" (17). Here Scobie offers the
reader the differential play on phonemes that is so necessary to opening up significances in the earlier
"Rider" poem, and shifts deferral, absence, desire, and inscription onto and into a Canadian text, quest, and
landscape:
Rider/writer, doubling back
you wrote the myth of Canada, our long
disguising of desire -. . . Autobiographer,
you were not "he," you were not "I,"
doubling the tracks of your desire
against the voices you must have heard call
Else, elsewhere in that other world we read
beneath the traces of your tales -writer/rider, over prairie trails. (17)
Consciously splitting his subjectivity, writing his life "onto the white / snow-covered page of Manitoba" and
"onto the civil palimpsest of Canada's respectable history," Felix Paul Greve becomes a Canadian version of
the poststructuralist hero (17).
Three poems into the volume, then, we are intensely in the spaces of intertextuality -- which is where we
always already are, and in Scobie's collection of poems we witness and enact the intertexture of reading
and writing, of rewriting and misreading. The intertextuality of Dunino makes it a travelogue of sorts.
Movement is the necessarily dominant trope in a collection that thematizes absence -- whether it is the
absence of centre, origin, lover, biological father, or poetic forefathers -- as well as the state of desire and
mourning perpetuated by absence end deferral. The poems move and are "about"movement between
places, texts, art forms, languages, past(s) and present(s). Titles are a convenient shorthand here:
"Laufen/Oberndorf," "Gare de l'Est: Information," "The Movement Out," "Interstate Seattle," "For Maureen
in the Deep South," "On Not Visiting the Grave of Gertrude Stein in the Cemetery of Pere Lachaise."
The cemetery in this last poem is the site of that saddest of ironies where death and language meet:
inscriptions on tombstones in no significant way make present the absent ones whose memory they
attempt to serve. They can only cite the presence of absence: ". . . we turn, and turn again . . . in search of
that absent centre, that missing sign / round which our mo[u]rning vainly spins" (30). The ironies
proliferate in the case of Gertrude Stein, for in this poem, Scobie is able to include (insofar as his own
poetic inscription can do so) those who are not represented: "Gertrude and Alice haven't made / the
Michelin map, there is no trace / of their final carved metonymy" (30), but there is (and is not) now,
through the poem's citation of the trace.
Death and other instances of absence have been treated in Scobie's earlier collections of poems, most
notably in A Grand Memory for Forgetting (1981), but there the intertexts seem more intimate and
generally less obscure than those in this latest collection. In A Grand Memory, history and histories are
invoked through what are for me more affective, event-ual, and material modes than they are in Dunino
(see, for example, "A Death in the Family" [64-66], the untitled poems on the poet's birthplace [67] and
"the furniture of childhood" [69], or the poems under the general title "Lovers and Friends" [79-983]. In
Dunino, there is no escaping (because; after reading Derrida, the latest guru for a select group of Canadian
poets that includes Scobie, there is no escape from) textuality and language. A poem such as "Les Cygnes,"
for example, requires that we travel between English and French, between "cygnes" and "signs," and
between signs and swans, dissenting and saying,
The swans are floating in one
unfrozen corner of the frozen
though signs say DANGER, tout
is out for a Sunday stroll on
small
lake:
le monde
ice
the swans as irresponsible as angels
les anges qui se trouvent au milieu de DANGER
comme disent les signes
comme chantent les cygnes (27)
"Three Part Suite" extends the linguistic play of, for example, "Toom temps. Tu m'aimes, tu m'cmpty me"
into several sites (37), most immediately the self-reflexive and intertextual "Tu m'" of Marcel Duchamp
(36), the "tomb" of Christ made empty and "echo of womb" (36), and "Toom" as in "empty cloak, Toom
Tabard (37), which, as the note explains, refers (in part) to "John Balliol, a 13th century pretender to the
Scottish throne" (44). The poems under the title "Translations (for Louky Bersianik)," as the note indicates,
make similar demands: "These poems are translations into English of invented French texts. For example,
'Otherwise, how the other one lies' translates the otherwise non-existent 'Autrement, comme I autre
meet"'(44).
Translation is indeed another trope in Duino, signalling the processes of metaphor and metonymy, of
deferral and movement that mark language and the uses to which we put it. The second part of Scobie's
collection, "Dunino," forces translation on us. For example, it renders passages of Rilke's letters, written
originally in French, into English, and parts of his Dunino Elegies, written originally in German, into Scots;
"Dunino" propels us towards both Rilkes volume of poems (the standard edition of which prints the German
and English texts facing each other) and to the glossary of Scots terms that ends Dunino. "The Scots in
these poems is," the note informs us, "like Hugh MacDiarmid's, frankly synthetic: that is, it uncorporates
forms and idioms from many different regions and time periods" (75). The "Rilke" in these poems is also
synthetic, as are the poet and his speakers. As Scobie explains, "'Dunino' is bunt on a counterpoint between
Germany and Scotland [and between German, French, English, and Scoes], between the 'Duino Elegies' of
Rilke and the village of Dunino, just outside St. Andrews, in the East Neuk of Fife" (73). These poems
translate Rilke into Scobie, Germany into Scotland, Scobie in Germany into Scobie in Scotland as he travels
from a conference in Grainau (the "Gesellschaft fur Kanada-Seudien" [73]) to his Scottish birthplace (while
writing in his home in Victoria), place(s) of syntheses of Scobies distantly, recently, and always already
past.
The "Dunino" poems are also a moving synthesis of Derridean philosophy and the poet's personal
memories, whether the texts remembered are poetic ones (such as Rilke's Elegies, the poems of Andy
Lothian and Alan Davidson, traditional folk songs, the Lorimer translation of the Book of Revelations), or
people, events, and places (such as, especially, the poet's father, Patrice, Dunino churchyard, castles and
mountains in Germany and Scotland, gardens in Victoria and Carnbee [and in Rilke's poems and Genesis]).
These remembered texts participate in, and constitute the syntheses and endless translations created by "il
n'y a pas de hors-texte" and by a Lacanian sense of intersubjectivity, the longing and desire made "at long
and last" by absence (72), and signed by epitaphs of various sorts.
"[A]n inscription sublimely imposed itself on you," writes Rilke in "The First Elegy" (29); inscriptions
imposed on Scobie are translated into elegies on the fleetingness, fragmentariness, misreadability, and
emptiness of texts in what Rilke calls this "interpreted world" (Rilke 27; Scobie, "Dunino" 50). In Scobie's
second elegy, for example, there is his father's wilful (because necessary to stave off distance and desire)
misreading of a line from Revelations, "there shall be no more sea" (50). There is the tombstone in the
Dunino churchyard:
There is no date on this stone,
no name that survives. Along the top edge
what might have been a face and wings:
a residual angel. Lacunae of text.
A reading
in the interpreted world:
But reading may be misreading. Later
a book of local history reveals
that the word I wished to decipher as "sea"
is really "scroll," to complete the rhyme and the
text, again, from Revelations. Still
I prefer to read "sea." I watch it vanishing: (51-52)
Discipleship is inevitable, as are absence and longing:
. . . Le nom du pere
which is (is not) negation (no), is
mere survival, on the shore
of seals and s/tone
So here I am writing of him again
and not about my mother; and is it only
that elegies are for the dead,
or is it that any son must somehow fail
to know his father, and must write across
that No, that knowing of his name?
And the writing displaces him still:
it multiplies metonymies, numbers them n,
a supplement to bring us all back home. (70-71)
"Dunino" as word, place, title, comes to synthesize and translate these insistent Derridean and (less so)
Lacanian dimensions of the poems, marked by Rilke and his elegies, his strong sense of place and of
context, his angel, his longing, and his sometimes celebration of, sometimes mourning for "Supernumerous
existence" (Rilke 89). Rilke's intertexts are here, too, especially Picasso's painting, Les Saltimbanques, so
important to a winter in Rilke's life (winter is setting and intertext for "Dunino") and to his "Fifth Elegy." The
painting and its figures are refigured in Scobie's fifth elegy:
Already in Picasso
the clowns are saying a rose farewell
to all that painting ever meant. At the edge
of a sea, on their ocean's last beach,
they balance on the shoreline of the tide
will sweep them away. By the time
that Rilke lived with them, the family
of Saltimbanques were history. The war had begun. (68)
Looking at a reproduction of Les Saltimbanques after reading Scobie's poems, I cannot help but read the
figures and the whole of Dunino through lines from another poem in the collection. The lines come from
"For Jacques Derrida: On the Death of Michel Foucault, Toronto, June 25th, 1984," and for me they
characterize the implications of the ubiquity of ecriture and absence in this volume, and Scobie's elegiac
responses to what language must, yet cannot bear: ". . . For if this seems an / empty conclusion, he said,
there are times we must be / very patient with emptiness" (38). Dunino demonstrates Scobie's academic
and poetic patience with emptiness.
WORKS CITED
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duinn Elegies. Trans. J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender. 1939. London: Chatto,
1978.
Scobie, Stephen. A Grand Memory for Forgetting. Edmonton: Longspoon, 1981.
------. Dunino. Montreal: Signal-Vehicule, 1989.
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By DONNA PALMATEER PENNEE
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