Combat Journal for Place d'Armes. Scott Symons
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Bank,” or public, like the federal civil service, can do to a person’s openness to life. As he puts it in his brief biography at the end of the volume: “Status: A Para-Canadian, released from any allegiance to the Canadian State but obsessively devoted to the Canadian nation.” He is concerned with the “man,” the human being and the human consequences of accepting such restrictive modes of consciousness and expression, the effects of surrender to the “world of memo” and “mere competence.”
It is surely no accident that the “novel” begins with a flat imitation of a tourist blurb about historic Place d’Armes. Symons’s initial narrator, Hugh Anderson, is appalled at the ease with which he is able to produce this competent but empty approach to La Place. The false distance that it implies is precisely that reduction of the human to an alienated consumer, of a culture to its merely cultural effects, a reduction that Symons will combat in this book and in all of his published and unpublished work. He knows that the risk of failure is high, as is that of ridicule, but he must try.
“Que veux-tu? It’s my last chance ... my own people have put our cultures into national committee. They have deliberately killed any danger of a positive personal response.” (100)
The resistance of the “demissionary” is precisely the existential affirmation of a positive personal response.
Twenty-five years after the resignation from Toronto respectability, the démission that became a life mission, Symons recalled the choice in these terms:
The choice risked my life because it risked my sanity. I knew that this was where one had to move, to open the doors to male sentience. T.S. Eliot said that if he hadn’t pursued the path he did — a very dry life — he would have gone in the direction of Durrell’s Black Book. I’d read that before I jumped. At the same time, women’s lib was just beginning to explode. I couldn’t go to another woman because I already had the woman of my choice. I have always found it odd that I am considered the black wolf of CanLit. I’m a very conservative guy who went to Easter Mass at Saint Thomas’s. I’m a quiet person and in many ways timid. I was brought up with a deep sense of civic participation and commitment.12
Defence and Illustration
Place d’Armes and all of Symons’s published work seeks a language adequate to the kind of heightened experience upon which he gambles all. Symons’s language is enlivening, empassioning, neologizing, inventive, sensitive to the evolution of English, forward-looking in its assumed heritage of the freedom of the modern avant-gardes, but rooted in place and in history, and, of supreme importance, in a constant rapport of translation with its nearest other, French.
Some of the strategies utilized by Symons include alliterative punning (e.g., “the Nicean niceties”); discombobulating prefixes (e.g., impatriate for expatriate); transforming proper names into verbs (e.g., he Michelangeled me); the development of new compound nouns frequently to describe the kind of radical sensorial/emotive/conceptual shifts he intuits (e.g., umbilink, cocktit, assoul, manscape); the development of signifying and significant identity abbreviations that can be reused in the novel (e.g., ECM, Emancipated Canadian Methodist).
Aural punning on homonyms is also a favourite tactic of Scott Symons who frequently underlines the difference (or differance) of writing and orality. Phallacy is one particularly nice find, pointing as it does to a critique of phallocentrism in a writer sometimes accused of “hypervirility” or even “misogyny.” For Symons the male sexual organ is at the centre of the “perceptor set” joining self and world, but it is always, like so much else in this work, set off, relativized, in relation to inner, spiritual connections. And to the truths of language speaking itself. Phallacy argues gently against the risks of the narrowly phallic, the too-literally male, the vainly cock-focused.
Carnal joy, joy incarnate, then isn’t joy made by carnal manipulation, by mere phallacy ... it is a rejoicing at the world I already know ... it is quite simply the perception of that world, at any moment, eternally. Eternity intersects time at the moment, that ...; the moment that you see — really see. And makejoy is killjoy. Phallicity is fallen ... (267)
At times such punning, neologizing play might seem emptily clever, willfully mechanical or forced, but as Elspeth Cameron has pointed out, “The word play in Place d’Armes … is not mere sophistry. As in Joyce, it is part of the breakdown of fixed forms which recreates the cosmic flux of experience.” The moments of maximal linguistic extension and uninhibited inventivity occur at points when the Communion vision, the slipping into 4-D, seems to be at hand (though we must note that the final experience of the work is that of ellipsis, the spent and holy silence of the blank page).
Much of Symons’s writing confronts the mysteries of mystical participation in the universe. Examples of sensory shift, even of synesthesia, when one mode of sensory apprehension overlays or replaces another, abound. Some crucial moments occur in the Church when the candles, on various visits, confront Hugh-Andrew-Scott with their roaring. At one point this extends to a total vision: “The sight of their sound was heaven” (246). This is an impossible representation, yet one that Symons will repeatedly endeavour to have his readers experience, sublime failure after sublime failure.
When Symons refers to himself as a “Canadian de langue française” (96), he not only establishes a relation to French Canada that is non-appropriative, respectful of its difference, and respectful of the ground of its attainments, but he cunningly-punningly situates his artistic project at the intersection of two languages and indirectly asserts a cultural entitlement to that Other. In particular Symons will push the boundaries of English to capture the lived consequences, the pull, the feel of quintessentially French structures, particularly reflexive verbs, creating not-quite-correct pronominal structures like “I seat me” or “I write me” or “It sufficed him” (394). The relation between self and world is thereby underlined, rendered slightly strange, heightened or exacerbated; it is part of the opening that Place d’Armes enacts: “I am living me in French, being lived in French,” he exclaims revealingly at one point, yet he is “writing me in English” (285). Much of the singular force of the language in this work derives from this simultaneous existential translation.
Communion
I would say that anyone who sat down with my three books could have no doubts at the end of the three as to what it was I was going through. Anybody could see that I was negotiating my way through a series of secular experiences — of blatantly secular experiences — and trying, through them, to find the spiritual. I was trying to find sacramental reality. And my effort — again this is where I’m not a writer — my effort is not to explain these experiences to the reader, but rather to put the reader through them.13
Symons, through the adventure and the proof of his text, aspires to a quasi-sacramental yet heterodox incarnacy, the Real Presence of Catholic theology passed through very radical modern freedom. He seeks to make revelation of profanation after having made profanation of revelation, in a useful turn of phrase belonging to French poet Michel Deguy.14 “He thought again of the Communion. That was the verity … of Body and Blood. It was inevitable if not yet completely achieved.” (385)
Communion takes many forms in the work, and the economy of ingestion, swallowing, digestion, assimilation, and transformation is operative in everything from lunch dates to fellatio to the close observation of furniture and buildings. “You eat the site till it is inside you, then you are inside it, and your relationship is no longer one of juxtaposition ... but an unending series of internalities. It’s like looking at mirrors in mirrors ... or rather crystal balls in crystal balls. That’s my job now ... to reinsite the world I’ve nearly lost.” (126) The swallower swallowed would not be a bad subtitle for the work as a whole. “Eschew the historic plaques. Eat the building.” (140) In the ecstatic yet dominated orchestration of conclusion, Holy Impasse has become procreative impasse, a substantial transformation, the breakthrough to “4-D,” a swallowing that is a swallowing up, total communion. The swirling, poetic evocations of Day Twenty-Two have been read in strikingly divergent ways by critics, but whatever the dominant images might be, the