— Break on Through to the Other Side?

—
The Reader’s Encounter with Postmodernism

By Patrick McEvoy-Halston
August 2002

When Phyllis Webb writes in “Breaking” “what are we whole or beautiful

or good for but to be absolutely broken,” for some this thought is a highly
paradoxical but revelatory definition of the purpose of life. A continual process
of breaking down inherited forms, inherited habits of reading and writing, and
of experiencing life so that one is always aware that no way of thinking or seeing
or living is either “right” or stable, is what postmodernism is all about, so no
surprise, really, that in our age Webb’s thought may be one of the few available
that beckons forth more prophets than skeptics. But, though most postmodern
writers characterize their writing as if breaking expectations helps release the
imprisoned reader from her chains, some of them understand that edged tools
are a torturer’s instruments, as well as a liberator’s. As we explore the poetry of
several Canadian poets, we will anticipate the effects of attempts to dislocate
and disorient the reader as I think Webb would have us, that is, without an easy
assumption that readers need to be startled in order to become self-aware.
Without care, without an enlarged concern for people that inspires close
attendance to the possible repercussions of dramatic challenges to readers—who
may already be well aware of what disruptions can make of life—the real toy-box
of innovation and opportunities opened up, in potentia, by postmodern
techniques, may be received by an audience that has become, or already was,
too dispirited, too wary, too broken to play with their new found toys.
Postmodernism, as it is by Stan Fogel in his review of Linda Hutcheon’s
book, The Canadian Postmodern, can be defined as the “shocking disruption by
messy things.” All postmodernists intend to disturb conventions, but some
seem more concerned than others regarding whether or not their paradoxical
medicine—which hurts in order to heal—works, that is, whether it leaves the
“patient” reader better off. Phyllis Webb, for example, appears to have a very
different understanding of how most of us experience our lives, as well as a
greater respect for our current palliative remedies, than does Erin Mouré. In
 2

“Prison Report,” Webb writes that “tenderness is also / a light and a shock.”
Considering how often she explores suffering, a gesture of tenderness may be a
shock in this poem, as in life, owing to its rarity. In “Love Story” she writes of
people guessing that an ape died “‘of shock’,” and in “Eschatology of Spring” she
refers to an “abrupt birth,” as if she believes that for so many of us, from
conception onwards, life is experienced as a succession of painful initiations. To
Webb (and other Canadian postmodern poets such as Michael Ondaatje, Jan
Zwicky, and Anne Carson) our need for “mending” (141) is as powerfully felt as
is her desire to disturb us. Though she intends to challenge many conventional
ways of representing language, we can imagine her respecting our need to cling
to old ways, our fear of what will happen to us “if we let go.” In contrast, though
Mouré conceives of our routines primarily as a suffocation of potential (Geddes
492-94); she has no patience for the ameliorative.
Mouré, with her impatient attitude toward form and conventions, is
perhaps a better representative of a postmodern thinker (or of what a
postmodern thinker is supposed to be like) than Webb is. By choosing to
imagine our familiar routines, our familiar world-view as the product of
ideologies forced upon us, many postmodernists attempt to make life
uncomfortable for the reader. By continually frustrating the reader’s attempts
to find meaning, by acquainting the reader with a feeling—true discomfort,
frustration—that had been largely banished from her/his life, the hope is that
the reader may conceive of her/his previous ways of apprehending the world as
optional, the first step to finding them wrong-headed as well.
It is probably misleading to characterize the experience of reading Mouré
as frustrating, though. Frustration is certainly the experience that arises from
reading poetry in which one repeatedly tries to find logical connections where
none exist. And in many of Mouré’s poems (as with “Postmodern Literature,”
for example), owing to our difficulty and to Mouré’s obvious facility in
discarding all need for thoughts between two periods to have much to do with
one another, reading her poems can indeed be frustrating. However, though
she speaks of wanting to create “momentary slippages” (qtd. in Geddes 493) in
language, and of “unbalancing” our normal expectations “a bit” (494), and
though she thinks that, in sum, an accumulation of these slippages can create a
 3

“[breakage of] usual reading habits” (494) that “opens” us to new ways of seeing
and to being healed, the experience of reading her work may not be of
encountering moderated and manageable disturbances which eventually
accumulate and create dramatic change in the reader. Rather, her poems
deliver shocks that impact upon us immediately and ruthlessly.
Reading “Toxicity,” for example, whatever the “slippages” from
conventions she creates (and there are many), is not so much to experience
frustration as to experience torture. Line-breaks and sentence fragments seem
well named to assist in articulating how we feel after encountering them in her
work. But if Mouré used language that was different from the sort she normally
uses, perhaps we might discover that the impact of her work owes less than we
might expect to their structural “play.” The images she evokes, even before they
are broken up or allowed to stand without further development, are so often so
horrifying to encounter. I am thinking of obvious examples such as the image of
the little girl who “pushes a thin / knife” (499) into a horse, or of “the gun-shot
wounds [. . . ] opening” (496), but also of the many times she refers to countries
such as, say, Guatemala in “Postmodern Literature,” or Argentina in
“Divergences,” or Nicaragua in “Toxicity,” that so resonate of political violence
and injustice that they do not need to be elaborated upon for us to understand:
She may be attempting to thwart our attempts to find meaning in her poems,
but we intuit an overall sense she thinks violence everywhere, and that, with her
critique in her poetry of Chatelaine, a fashion magazine many women still read,
and apparently of hockey, a sport that so many of us watch and play, we are
implicated somehow—guilty.
We may respond by becoming like the many patients of psychotherapy
who, despite their resistance and despite the pain that comes from discarding
old habits, gradually do become more aware how these same habits hampered
them from living. Or, perhaps as the sort of ordinary people who get their news
filtered and packaged by the six-o’clock news, we are already as much aware of
how, as Webb puts it, “death grows and grows in Chile and / Chad” (145) as we
are of just how much pain can be found closer to home—in us—that our
attention turns to the ongoing “bloody / judgement[s]” (145) of critics who find
little to like in the way we live our lives. As one person who wrote a letter to the
 4

editor of the Globe and Mail (August 24, 1998) suggests, in the end, after
reading and re-reading Mouré’s poetry, rather than experiencing an intellectual
uplift, we may be left feeling as if we have been beaten down by a “serious stick”
—and by someone too self-righteous to be easily imagined as doing it for our
own good.
This letter-writer definitely left reading Mouré wanting more to fight
than to play. But another response to some postmodern work that leaves some
of us feeling disoriented, or, rather, “used,” may be more common. Mouré’s
“Grief” includes something we normally do not encounter in poetry, a notation,
but at the end of the piece, which seems the natural, “organic” spot to insert it.
This example of modifying convention indeed feels more like a soft slippage
than a dramatic break. But again it is important to attend to Mouré’s language.
The last words, “or maybe not,” clearly cast doubt on whatever they are
intended to refer to. As the asterisk they follow is found nowhere else, we intuit
that everything in the poem is being called into question, including the title. A
poem titled “Grief,” then, may not be about grief at all. So paradoxical, so
postmodern—yes—but also so potentially disastrous for poets who want their
readers to approach their poems without their guard up.
If a reader has read many poets like Mouré, Michael Ondaatje might be
disappointed with how she reads “Elizabeth.” All she would need is the first
description of a child at play to know that “something bad is going to happen
here,” and would be preparing herself as she reads for the something bad sure to
follow. However, if a reader allowed herself to re-create the feelings and
emotions she imagines Elizabeth is experiencing, when she encounters the
deadening words, “When they axed his shoulders and neck,” it is possible that
she might finish reading the poem still open to “being broken” by postmodern
poetry. Why? Because we sense with Gary Geddes that Ondaatje, unlike
Mouré, “does not revel in the depiction of violence” (334). Though we may
sense an apocalyptic tone in some of his writing, in “Elizabeth,” by leaving us
with Elizabeth as she has come to prefer “cool [intellectual] entertainments,” we
sense we have been in the company of a writer who not only understands how
debilitating pain can be to our eagerness and willingness to playfully explore our
world, but who very, very much would prefer that all of us had been, as well as
 5

could be, spared the pain.

Ondaatje’s work may be understood as both modern and postmodern.
The words of his poems are allowed to create the poem’s form, so he is
postmodern in his respect for, and his valuing of, process. But if evoking the
reader’s emotions rather than involving her intellect is a modernist dictum, then
he is, perhaps, in some ways, “old guard.” Considering my profoundly non-
postmodern suspicion that it is possible to feel whole, that is, integrated and
happy, but that so many of us need help to become this way, my hope is that, as
his work soothes as much as shocks, mends as much it messes, he is an advance
guard of whatever the next literary movement will come to be called.
Many postmodernists would probably think they failed if people became
“acculturated” to their work. To them, life is “composed” of fragments that
never settle into pattern. We are either forced to be always aware of this fact, or
we will be prey to greater frustrations than postmodernists inflict upon us. So
some poets, including Jan Zwicky and Anne Carson, whose manipulations of
language and expectations often cease to disturb once we are accustomed to the
postmodern sensibility/sensibilities, may be conceived as either weak blooded
postmoderns, or, as I would prefer to imagine them, as postmodernism’s
spiritual successors.
Zwicky shows that sentences freed “from the tyranny of the left-hand
margin”1 are not only emancipated, but help give an organic form to poetry. For
example, in “Your Body,” a line begins directly under the last word in the
previous line that began with the same letter (“o”). Makes sense, actually; feels
both natural and soothing; and therefore is questionably a postmodern
maneuver. In “The Glass Essay,” Carson fills her work with sentence fragments,
but in a poem about a deeply traumatized woman. As we intuit that as she
gradually stitches herself together the language she uses might also come across
as more smoothly structured, the apparent equation of fragmentation with
trauma might also upset—or at least trouble—some postmodernists.
Then again, Robert Kroetsch, a prominent critic who identifies himself
self-consciously as postmodern, who “hate[s] the word organic” (13) and who
insists “upon discontinuity” (25), also “thinks that to go into pure chaos is to
vanish” (25). Kroetsch resists using the word “organic” because it smacks of
 6

integration, mergers, of “closure,” yet this word comes to mind in the process of
describing what he hopes to help create. To Kroetsch, as with all
postmodernists, the “self is a fragment” (7), but as with many postmodernists
(as with Zwicky and Carson) he also shows a desire, perhaps a longing, for
integration. Perhaps, then, one of the reasons Webb’s “what are we whole . . .
for but to be broken” catches our attention is not because we want to revel in its
paradoxical truth, but because we wonder what it might be like to feel whole. If
true, postmodernists may need to warm up to us before we open up to their
strange new entertainments.

Works Cited
Carson, Anne. “The Glass Essay.” 15 Canadian Poets X3. Ed. Gary Geddes.
Toronto: Oxford UP, 2001. 336-37. Print.
Fogel, Stan. “The Shocking Disruption By Messy Things.” Handout. English
453/Q01. Doug Beardsley. Victoria. University of Victoria. 2002. Print.
Geddes, Gary. 15 Canadian Poets X3. Print.
Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary
English–Canadian Fiction. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988. Print.
Kroetsch, Robert. Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch.
Eds. Shirley Neuman and Robert Wilson. Edmonton: NeWest Press,
1982. Print.
McGrenere, Tim. Letter. Globe and Mail [Toronto] 24 August. 1988. Print.
Mouré, Erin. “Divergences.” 15 Canadian Poets X3. 495-96.
- - - . “Miss Chatelaine.” 499.
- - - . “Post-Modern Literature.” 494-95.
- - - . “Toxicity.” 498-99.
Ondaatje, Michael. “Elizabeth.” 15 Canadian Poets X3. 336-37.
Webb, Phyllis. “Eschatology of Spring.” 15 Canadian Poets X3. 144-45.
- - - . “Love Story.” 140-41.
- - - . “Prison Report.” 145-46.
- - - . “Sitting.” 141.
Zwicky, Jan. “Your Body.” 15 Canadian Poets X3. 554-55.
7
1
I believe I am quoting Robert Kroetsch here (source unknown).