Garry Thomas Morse’s latest novel, Rogue Cells / Carbon Harbour is the second in his experimental, seductive, and rollicking The Chaos! Quincunx series. Lola Lemire Tostevin is the author of Singed Wings, a book of poetry that explores aging and the relationships of women to art and women artists to one another.

Morse and Tostevin will launch these two newly published books alongside Daniel Canty and Oana Avasilichioaei, author and translator of Wigrum (an inventory novel!), in Toronto on November 18 (event details here!).

GTM: As with much of Nicole Brossard’s writing, I have often been intrigued by your creative use of French and English in your works. By “creative,” I refer to your fluid movement between these two languages that discloses all kinds of relations that appear to challenge purely literal representation. For example, I’m sure I’ve beat my brains about over “trait d’union,” wondering how a French ‘hyphen’ could be the trait of a union. Would you care to elaborate on this quality in many of your writings?

LLT: Interesting that you view the movement between my two languages fluid since many readers view it as an impediment. I’ve often been asked “what am I supposed to do with the French poems?” or things to that effect. It is reminiscent of when I lived in Northern Ontario as a child where French was deemed the language of a lower class, or later in Montreal being told in a restaurant that if I wanted to be served I should speak English. French was a forbidden language even in a Francophone city. Of course, things have changed, but the evocation lingers. I suppose I incorporate French into my English poems for several reasons. First, although it has often failed me, I cannot completely abandon my mother tongue. Secondly, I do, as you say, like to challenge the purely literal representation of a language that became Law. You also do this in your writing by introducing several languages and even made-up words which displace (sometimes wickedly) the literal representation.

In your poetry I believe you do something more. In Discovery Passages, in your poem “500 Lines,” which consists of the repeated line “I will not speak Kwak’wala,” you emphasize an exercise that robs a child of his language. His mother tongue becomes a forbidden language. But when, at the end of this poem, you write the last two lines in Kwak’wala you inscribe the self into the forbidden language. Your poem is a perfect (and powerful) example of the inscription of the self into a forbidden act. To a certain extent, this is what I try to do when I introduce French into my English-written books.

Re: the French “trait d’union” and English “hyphen,” I’m not sure how you’re defining the English “trait.” As a distinguishing mark? In French, the “trait” of union refers to a stroke of a pen, a line, a dash between two words which unites them, turns two words into one. It’s a link of contact between different elements – words, languages, people, etc. It’s also a “contamination” whose etymology derives from “touching with hands.”

I’ve mentioned your fiction and poetry which to me are quite different on many fronts. While both are very creative, I wonder if you have specific but different goals when working in each genre?

GTM: More recently, my fiction and my poetry are more rapidly informing one another, and I think in the Beckettian sense, a number of my books in existence and in progress are adding up to a self.

My next poetry manuscript engages the concept of the “primitive” throughout, both in “primitive art” and also in non-objective art. Conceptual means are used to try for an aesthetic expressionism that is analogous to certain classical works or pieces of music. In this text, there is a sense of the self almost desperate to communicate anything through all these layers of language.

My fiction series, The Chaos! Quincunx, includes five “nodal” novels that parody various writing styles and literary genres, including surrealist prose, speculative fiction, environmental dystopia, historical narrative, and the most prurient bodice-rippers. However, I have a lengthy quote from The Surrealist Voice of Robert Desnos in which author Mary Ann Caws offers a theory that also may have bearing on my own approach to writing fiction, isolating a distinct quality in Desnos’s surrealist novels:

… certain points of focus are stressed in repetitions and modifications until they acquire an intensity and an emotive value far exceeding that of the less frequent images passing on the novel’s surface.It is to these linguistic and imaginative accretions, these deliberate constructions of literary energy, that we are here giving the name of “myth,” with the qualifying reminder that the myth in this sense is a voluntary creation of the poet of the elements of these constructions, which he builds and then destroys.

I suppose it’s another way of saying I’ve lost the plot.

In one of my newer novel projects, an aboriginal storyteller, something of a cross between Caliban and Scheherazade, is continually struggling with telling his story and at the same time, the story of his people. However, there is an outlandish ribald element that echoes the style of many First Nation creation myths. There’s also a lot in this book about public outcry against interesting works of art, and particular modes of aesthetic representation.

Of course, there’s also a little bit about Rodin. As such, I am particularly interested in your poetry about Camille Claudel. Your referencing of Debussy’s La Mer and also Claudel’s sculpture of the three women under a wave is quite inspiring and has had an everlasting effect on me. Would you care to remark on this and the section in your book, Singed Wings, titled “Daughters of Necessity”?

LLT: I look forward to reading the fourth and fifth “nodes” of the Quincunx series. I also look forward to your next project especially if it reflects the public outcry against interesting works of art. This outcry (often articulated in disdained silence) is particularly true where literature is concerned.

While I find cultural affinities in our backgrounds, I am struck by the different strategies in our work. While you go through layers of language on the page, I go through layers of language off the page and write down what has been stripped to the bone. While your strategy echoes the exuberance of different genres including First Nations myths, mine probably reflects years of imposed silence in a convent during my formative years. You say you want to lose the plot; I never felt I had a plot to lose. I’ve often told the story of a writer insisting “We must displace the ‘I’ in our writing,” to which I replied, “Great, I’ll displace it as soon as I find it.” Of course, I am referring to the Beckettian self undergoing a process of artistic creation that is continually built and destroyed.

Which brings me to the “Daughters of Necessity” section of Singed Wings. The seeds of this project were sown after a visit to the Musée Rodin for a Claudel retrospective. I spent hours viewing, retracing my steps. I was struck by the intensity of her work and how closely it related to her process of personal and artistic creation which, for me, out-measures Rodin’s masculine notion of power and strength. I also discovered that she did a lot of Rodin’s carving, i.e. the oversized hands and feet for his Burghers of Calais. When I came to her sculpture Clotho I was reminded of Plato’s phrase in the Republic about the three Fates being the Daughters of Necessity – Lachesis sings the past, Clotho sings the present, Atropos, the future. I don’t want to give the impression that I know much about Plato. Except for an intro course in philosophy many years ago, I know little, but seeing the sculpture of that old woman threw me. It was a confrontational moment in which I was facing my present, as a Beckettian “I” but also my physical “self.” One of them felt like an intruder.

You mention my poem referencing Debussy’s La Mer. Debussy and Claudel were very close for a while and he kept her sculpture La Valse on his piano until the day he died, over twenty years. If we go back to Plato’s story about the three Fates, he describes a line of light that holds together the circle of the universe, a spindle on which revolutions turn, whorls moving into each other forming a harmony. As in La Mer. As in La Valse. The sensation of that swaying movement, a spindle on which creativity turns. Claudel’s sculpture of the Hokusai wave titled La Vague – so close in sound to La Valse – threatens to overcome the three women cowering beneath. The three Fates? I find it interesting that Claudel’s sculpture of the Hokusai wave dates from 1896–97. Debussy’s La Mer, published with a cover depicting a reproduction of Hokusai’s Wave, dates from 1903-1905.

I could go on but it would explain too much. I have wondered if I didn’t strip too much from the source in order to arrive at the finished poem, carved too close to the bone. Who knows. I do know that the creativity of the women who serve as springboards in my book are my daughters of necessity, especially Clotho. I am letting go of Lachesis, the past, as much as this is possible, and Atropos holds little interest for me. Clotho is my present. As I say in one of the poems later in the book, it’s not what the landscapes of childhood mean, it’s what they no longer mean.

I went to a Weiwei exhibition last week and I so admire how he recycles objects from the past into new works of art – “sacred” antique Chinese vases covered in bright paint, old pieces of wall reconfigured into “new” forms, etc. A quote on one of the walls reads: “We can discover new possibilities from the process of dismantling, transforming and recreating…”

I’m aware that you parody genres in your fiction, but beyond parody what is the role of dismantling, transforming the “sacred” such as First Nation myths in your work? Is it to un/earth new possibilities?

GTM: The Regina Public Library has a small collection but they have a number of choice selections on music and art that have been helping my various projects and ideas along. This includes Mieke Bal’s Louise Bourgeois’ Spider: the architecture of art-writing, and I will cite Bal here:

No longer an escape from literal, material reality, metaphors à la Louise literalize their own name. Meta-phorein means transference, as in “translation.” We know this concept in its guise of “transference” from psychoanalytic theory. There, transference points to the process in which the analysand projects on the analyst her phantoms from the past. The point being, precisely, that these phantoms stand up in the present, so that they can be effectively dealt with. Transference is a narrative of performance that draws the past into the present in order to revise the play. But transference is a transfer in the material sense as well; any vacationer to Greece has seen the word “metaphor” on moving vans.

I will return to your fascination with Louise Bourgeois’s work, including Cells, in a moment, but in answer to your question, I find that it is not so much dismantling that is brought about by my work but rather this process of projecting phantoms from the past into the present (or multiple futures, as in Rogue Cells / Carbon Harbour). If these phantoms are also “daughters of necessity” they exist to resist the collective amnesia we seem to celebrate these days, in our breathless race to reduce knowledge to the most compact and digestible paste.

In Henry James’s unfinished novel The Sense of the Past, the protagonist must travel through time and experience the past in the guise of one of his ancestors first-hand in order to understand the present. This work inspired part of the final installment of The Chaos! Quincunx series called Minor Expectations, in which the time-travelling protagonist leaves a trail of “historical documents” that form a number of chapters lovingly curated by everyone’s favourite literary critic, Alfred J. Bastard. As the other volumes in the series deal with parallel universes in the near present and then with bizarre realities in dystopic futures, this volume is unique in its spillage of the same atmosphere and attitude upon our fixed (or perhaps “sacred”) view of history, although it takes the form of a Platonic dialogue, an Ancient Roman romp, a Medieval saga, an Italian Renaissance tale, a French comédie-ballet, a 19th century epistolary correspondence, and a 20th century World War II spy game.

As for First Nations myths, it is not so much about dismantling or transforming them but more about trying to return to their character and essence. My own perspective relates directly to the Kwakwaka’wakw people of the West Coast and what I feel is their character, as can be perceived through cultural rites, art, and history, often leading to a heady mixture of humour and terror. Also, for me, a novel would have no point if it were merely to retell a story, and once again, this is perhaps a creature of necessity in the form of a narrator that treats history as if it were a creation myth. I refer to this other project in progress as my first “Canadian” novel, although it is only a localized version of my writings that sensuously elbow their way into so many areas and directions of time and space. However, there is the same attempt to push the shears of Atropos aside, to weave another scene, to draw out another length of one’s tale…

I should point out that the outcry against interesting works of art I am referring to, at least in a First Nations context, whether they are by First Nations artists or are representations of First Nations figures by artists of various backgrounds, have been vocalized far beyond disdainful silences, and have for the most part been called “obscene,” and when considered in relation to similar instances in the history of European art, we find that our collective history is one of rejecting or removing these interesting works of art in favour of something simpler or more sedate that has no bearing on reality or history whatsoever.

Recently, I was really taken by a mixed-media work by Jane Ash Poitras in the Mackenzie Gallery called Rebirth of the Four Coyote Spirits that simultaneously obscures and discloses several layers of Native history, as do many of her paintings, with the inclusion of vibrant motifs from cave paintings, pictographs, petroglyphs, newspaper articles, and aboriginal alphabets. This is not the kind of art that can be boiled down to a sound bite or a sentimental T-shirt slogan. First Nations history, like any other, has this kind of layered complexity and I find it refreshing and very heartening to enter into the aura of such a work.

These methods are not entirely out of keeping with historical rearrangement in Louise Bourgeois’s works, including recontextualized paraphrases of sculptures by Bernini or a Pompeian tapestry fragment to be found in her Spider. As you have attended two retrospectives of Louise Bourgeois’s work and have visited many more exhibits, if that is the word, I would be interested in hearing from you how her works have impacted you and influenced your writing.

LLT: I envy you your access to First Nations history. I admire your clarity of vision as to how you want to delve into the layered complexity of their myths, which I think is extremely important to the collective Canadian consciousness. In my novel, Frog Moon, published a lifetime ago, I tell the story of a Native woman (I think you prefer First Nations?) donating her breast milk to a non-native four-month-old baby when its mother tries to wean her off the breast but the child rejects cow’s milk and formula. It is not only a historical metaphor, it is a true story. As for “historical rearrangement,” I agree that art cannot be removed from the condition of time. What you call “phantoms” I call “revenants,” subtle permutations that hang around the threshold of appearance. Your Henry James quote reminds me of Gertrude Stein’s “….History Teaches.” Except I’m more cynical. History repeats itself in different guises but doesn’t seem to teach us a hell of a lot.

Yes, Louise Bourgeois is one of my Daughters of Necessity – necessity as what is needed, a lack that has to be retrieved, but not in the Freudian sense. So many people offer psychoanalytic interpretations of Bourgeois’s art and yes, she did struggle with “father figures” – her own father, the fathers of surrealism, etc. – but her art far exceeds psychoanalytic thinking which does such a great disservice to art. An aside: the recent issue of Canadian Poetry Magazine published an essay review of mine criticizing Frank Davey’s psychoanalytic interpretation of bpNichol’s work and private life. Freud himself wondered if transference didn’t drive out one form of illness with another. In Bourgeois, it is not psychoanalysis that guarantees her sanity, but the making of her art. She worked on it for over seventy years so, of course, it changed significantly over those years.

I’m not as interested in the formal qualities of those first years, but I am in the later years, as well as the visceral aspect of those pieces that transform/reverse classic psychoanalytical theories. Her Arch of Hysteria depicts the body of a twentieth century man instead of a nineteenth century woman. Her Torso/Self-Portrait reproduces Brancusi’s Torso of a Young Man, the phallic “emphasis” replaced with labia, female buttocks, breasts. Many of her pieces parody the body reduced to organ-logic, a great rebuke to Freud’s penis/phallus fetish. I love her sense of irony and how she paraphrases just about every artist and art form she has come across. She cuts up antique tapestries to cover mannequin heads … One of her major works, The Blind leading the Blind, is a re-conceptualization of a Brueghel. Her old clothes have been turned into sculptures…

I have seen Spider, also known in French as Maman, many times in many places and, again, what I admire most are its formal qualities: the articulation of her spindly, awkward yet strong legs cast in bronze and her stainless steel and marble body. I love to walk in the shadow she casts. In English her name derives from “spinder,” one who spins thread. Bourgeois’s mother was a weaver who removed/repaired old tapestries. Spider is supposedly so greedy and predatory that she will sometimes eat the male after mating… Think of the psychoanalytical interpretations this must generate: enemy-mother devours, smothers, and subjects everyone to her power… Once again, however, Bourgeois does a reversal of this reductive analysis. “Why the spider,” she is asked, “Why Maman?” “Because my best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and useful as a spider.”

I do not believe that her words, or Weiwei’s, if used on t-shirts, reduce the soundness and the complexity of their creativity and ideas. My daughter wears t-shirts with Bourgeois’s Spider on it and she knows exactly what it means… Sentimental? Let’s not strip the true meaning of “sentiment” (AKA as sense) out of everything we create. The historical amnesia you refer to often means forgetting how to “feel.” There is an emotional flatness to much of so-called avant-garde art. I’m thinking of so-called “language poetry.” But, as you write in Major Ruckus, perhaps this French Canadian is merely “flapping through pea soup.”

I’ve come across Poitras’s work in art magazines, but have never seen it “in the flesh.” I will be sure to keep my eyes open for it. The ball is in your court.

GTM: I envy you your access to a Nation. All of these terms, as with your Maman, are problematic. Indian has an erroneous and disturbing history, although to entirely efface it would be to try and bury said history, as the Indian Act is still a very real thing. I probably prefer the term Native, although it can be confusing. First Nations is used nowadays for sake of clarity, but I often feel it is an umbrella term that doesn’t take into account the unique relationship of particular peoples to the land or their environs. Talking of “transference,” the changing of a name does not necessarily indicate the transfer of anything or the improvement of a given situation. Also, I suppose the modern preoccupation with mining rights and land ownership is all well and good, but it still represents a paradigmatic shift in consciousness, a severe cultural shift for some individuals, if not a particular people or nation. The materialist argument obviously outweighs one about the preciousness of consciousness or an aesthetic mode of being, but what if you are not a materialist?

Also, I do not feel I can speak on behalf of a Nation or a people, and barely for myself. The closest resonance with my own sentiments can be found in Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan, as the retreat into sorcery is something to do with the individual, and not solely to do with the sorrow felt by an oppressed people, as with the Yaqui Indians in Mexico. Generally, my former lifelong home has never been my home, as it is Coast Salish territory. After visiting what was once Beringia for a spell, I have found my way to Treaty 4 territory, ever hopeful. It is easier to speak a little through the flame of that narrator in my other novel, who is free to visit these places and also embody these phantoms of the past and present, and free to be at times something of a marauder, a seducer, a sorcerer. This is also a way of rewriting not only the novel but also a way of rewriting history, perhaps even as it appears to be, but subject to the character of some First Nations myths.

These days, people often differentiate, and call this “fiction,” and then merrily state their preference for “true” or “real” stories. That is also a paradigmatic shift from a time when there was no difference, as art and theatre was rigour and a way of life that also played a cathartic role within the community. Whether it is the collective contemporary amnesia I was talking about, or a genuine loss, it is sometimes hard to say. It seems to me that in many cases, the “real” story would probably be disconcerting and somewhat offputting. To use terms in the language Kwak’wala, I do believe there is a way of being in the world so that you can be lakhsa – showing the necessary rigour and willingness to be initiated into the ways of the main spirit of the hamatsa ritual. Generally, it is more common to be wikhsa, one of those who have only leaned against his walls. This may sound facile but it is but one of a number of specific cultural ideas that have informed what I consider my own artistic principles. One is put in the position of being a West Coast Native trying to import what are deemed foreign beliefs into a Western framework. This may sound like a grand complaint but I am only drawing attention to one such paradox that may arise from this condition you envy.

Just to be clear, I was not advocating psychoanalysis or a psychoanalytical approach … to anything really. In The Chaos! Quincunx, the psychoanalytic tropes you reference are frequently lampooned and there is a lot in it about the relationship between the subconscious and rapid forms of advertising, where the subconscious is being directed towards products or wholly commercial situations. This began in Minor Episodes and Major Ruckus but it is more prevalent in Rogue Cells and Carbon Harbour, in which there are ads for very peculiar products and services. One is called a gaspberry repoette, which is sort of a cross between a pillow mint, a series of poems, a real estate ad, and an erotic virtual encounter. All of this is a response to exploitive commercial forces that affect the way we perceive reality, on account of our inundation by countless forms of advertising and reportage that causes me to feel that the ‘pornographic’ has become relatively normalized, which is to say a continual addictive barrage of profitable yet exploitative situations that flood our nervous systems and are fully absorbed into our contemporary social interactions, whether we wish to partake of these gewgaws or not. One might call this my general thesis for the TC!Q series.

I suppose what I am also getting at are issues of representation, even in popular culture. This is a rather silly example, but at the moment, I’m thinking of a character on the British soap opera Eastenders, a very strong Muslim woman who is seen running businesses, raising her family by herself, and dealing with cultural tensions with her community at the mosque as she slowly adjust to her son’s decision to marry his gay lover and adopt a child. But of course, she’s temporarily absconded to Pakistan with a villainous doctor! Yes, there’s a lot going on and it is soapy and at lightning pace, but the point is that I am almost never seeing this kind of verismo treatment of characters in North American television or films. Also, I don’t need to look at any statistics to know that the two most common movie plots involve either a damsel in distress waiting for another comic book superhero to rescue her, or a stressed-out career gal who just needs to learn to relax, pretty much give up everything, and marry the leading man. Not only are these the dominant themes (fresh from the 1940s and ’50s!) but these are also the top-grossing products.

Now, here is a short quote from your “XIV Philippics” in Singed Wings, which speaks very gracefully to Cicero’s own meditations on aging:

So. To all the young poets with beautiful eyes
Let me tell you how the years will metastasize

You too will be confronted with desire
When the would-be lover
Is no other than the absent reader

As someone who has campaigned vociferously to the inside of my vacuum for an Orphic or Spicerian poetic in keeping with the transferred edicts of the aforementioned lakhsa and in the same breath, a continual expression of “necessary loneliness,” I wish to hear your thoughts about the aging artist, either as you describe her, or perhaps on a more personal note, as you would further describe how this concept in your book relates to your own life, and to quote the Talonbooks press release, “in an era when female artists covet spots on Top 30 Under 30 lists.” And in a time when there is relatively endless emphasis on the body and the image, is it more or less verboten to encourage the continual cultivation of the mind?

LLT: I wasn’t suggesting that you have access to a Nation per se, but to a particular history and mythology in a way a non-Native doesn’t. Because of your historical, cultural and racial backgrounds, and your appetites and interests, your palette seems larger than most. As evidenced in your work with its time-travel stops ranging from the primitive, cave paintings, the baroque, French novellas, surrealism, classic and contemporary art and culture, music, parody, history, writers such as Spicer, etc. Your landings sometimes light, sometimes hard. While I may have access to Native myths as a reader, I do not have access to them as a writer – a rare instance when I agree with the politically correct. And no, changing a name doesn’t necessarily improve a situation, in fact, it often erects institutional barriers in order to harness language and creativity and maintain power – my reaction to Baal’s transference comment might have been an opportunity for me to vent on one of my pet peeves. What she refers to as “transference” I would probably refer to as “palimpsest” or, as I previously mentioned, as “revenant,” a term on which a favorite artist of mine, Roberto Ciaccio, has based his entire oeuvre. I quote him:

The more that distance seems to be a physical and mental space of separation, the more hearing it gains in intensity, the greater is our awareness of the inevitability of its presence. The origin itself comes to meet us. It appears. It resounds within and around us. It is the beginning of a dialogue conducted in the proximity of difference.

I suppose all definitions are problematic insofar as we make them problematic. So, yes I do envy your access to a wide and wild range including Native myths, and I will not let anyone rob me of my definitions or my envy.

Describe the role of aging in my work and in my life via the poem you quote? Oh, let’s not. Let the poem speak for itself. You may, however, find an answer in my response to your remarks about the lack of verismo in North American television and films. I can’t tell you how many times Jerry and I have commented, after viewing a foreign film, “Well, that would never happen in an American movie.” I’m thinking particularly of the incredible 84-year-old Emmanuelle Riva in Michael Haneke’s film Amour. Haneke said in an interview that one of the reasons he chose her, other than her accomplished acting ability, was because she was the only actress in her age range he could find who hadn’t had a face lift! The film presents a very different interpretation of “amour” from the popular genre of love stories. It had an enormous impact on me. As did Agnès Varda’s Les Plages d’Agnès. Haneke’s Amour raised so many questions pertinent to my personal and creative lives:

How are life and “culture” inseparable from the way we live? How does an aged couple live in an environment where everything around them lacks authenticity? How did their elegant French apartment with all its books, art, music become such a mausoleum? Why is so much of our finest art the exclusive appropriation of the wealthy? Does hanging on to works of art mean that we are trying to hang on to values of the past? And, finally, what does “love” mean? Haneke provides several answers – none of them too comforting. The week after viewing this movie I gave away 30–40 boxes full of books.

I don’t need to draw parallels between the work of under-30 pop artists and mine. We do not occupy the same relational field. I decided many years ago that I would spend most of my time pursuing what interests me, without paying too much attention to the rest since I can’t change it other than to prevent it from dictating every area of my thinking. There are still too many books to read, interesting places to visit, art projects to realize, creative friends to see, to let dominant cultural themes and top-grossing products interfere. Well, there are a few mass-produced items I inevitably fall victim to, but they’re my secret… I don’t believe in purity…

So, dear Garry, there is so much more to “talk” about, but time and space dictate that we end this exchange. I don’t feel we have come to an end, but to the beginning of a dialogue conducted in the proximity of our differences where I will continue to pose questions and imagine your responses.

GTM: Ah, Lola, were there world and time enough, and could we do it all over, we might simply discuss our favourite French films! Until then, imagine away!

FIN