Leonard Cohen and the French Canadians

[linda_lakeside]

Cohendrix,

He said that around the time of the Future? Odd. Well, right now I don't think Quebec supports the GEOGRAPHICAL separation. I take it the weather has done so much damage as to require a gift from Ottawa. However, I'm not up to speed on my Quebec and the rest of us relations these days, either. B.C. has enough problems. We, in the West, have been ignored so long by the East, that B.C. has come to be referred to as 'Beside Canada'.

Interesting remark though. I don't know that Quebec could support (oops) don't want to open that can of worms. It's been talked about for so long, by so many as to render the entire separation topic as just talk. Maybe in someone else's lifetime....

Linda.

[tomsakic]

Where's that quotation, Linda? I don't see it in Cohendrix's post?

I didn't proceed. I had enough of Atwood after Alias Grace, I think I wrote something about that back there. Then many others things came in; I have 3 or 4 things to do (exams in PhD course) before I go back to that semesters' course about Hutcheon's Historical Metafiction. I guess I'll do that later this year, and the theme for essay will be something about Beatiful Losers because they fit beautifully in Hutcheon's theories; it's both postmodern metafiction (it has selfconscious metanarration) and historical (the plot about Catherine Tekakwitha).

[linda_lakeside]

Hi Tom,

I'm glad that Hutcheon's work is going to work so well into your work ??? That sounded redundant. Anyway, Cohendrix' quote is in the subject line of the post. Like he says (in the post). You know that little line in the corner that no one ever reads? It's there. At least in part. The rest of it is just me flapping my jaws. But, it does say "I support the GEOGRAPHICAL separation & ..."

Linda.

[tomsakic]

Yes, I see that part. I thought that subject line was "Cohen and French Canadians", and that, when you reply to the thread, Subject Line usually stays blank. But it appears you obvioulsy can write something into the subject line.
You learn something new every day.

- but I'd like to hear rest of that quotation.

[Cohendrix]

"I support the GEOGRAPHICAL separation of Canada and Quebec."

Re: Hutcheon on Cohen--certainly a sympathetic critic, but not the most insightful one on his work . . . She uses Cohen's work to forward theories rather than using theory to illuminate Cohen's work . . . ~yawn~ thankfully, that type of scholar's day is waning . . . (I hope)

[tomsakic]

It is, it is - but scholars still use only those parts of someone's work which fits int o their theories

[linda_lakeside]

Tom,

This is a time-honoured practice - one which scholars will be using for many, many more years to come.

Linda.

[Cohendrix]

Yes, yes--pure induction and deduction don't exist, so both approaches will always exist, but the best critics write more coherently than Hutcheon's "Caveat Lector" in _The Canadian Postmodern_, for instance. I prefer realist critics motivated by ideals to idealist critics motivated by careers. "Caveat Lector" is a classic example of a quotable circuitous text that isn't particularly concerned about communication or the work it is talking about. Cohen deserves a better critic--one who cares to spin out implications of _Beautiful Losers_, one of the few 20th century Canadian novels that people will bother with 100 years from now.

[tomsakic]

Hmm, I didn't read Hutcheon yet. I recently acquired her Leonard Cohen and His Works: Fiction, and Poetry is coming soon. I believe that Caveat Lector in her book about Canadian postmodernity is actually more or less the same essay.

- Btw, that was the exact essay I wanted you to find and to photocopy in library, Linda. Cohendrix, you haveit? Can you make copy or scan?

Cohendrix, speaking about criticism you'd prefer: I tend more to newer approaches. Did you read Michael Ondaatje's 1970' Leonard Cohen. I bought it recently & don't like it. The book was writen before structuralism and poststructuralism came in, and it's done in old-fashioned way of poetry criticism. He keeps saying "Cohen this, Cohen that", "this line is good", "that less-successfull poem" - I mean, there's no such things anymore! Who can say "this writing is good, this is bad". Where come the legitimation for such evaluation from. It was usual in academia until 20 years ago, but now, it's dead approach. There's the prominent question of cannon. There is postmodernism, postfeminism, postcolonialism and queer aproach. There's post-everything. There's no common ground anymore. We today write about women authors and when someone says "How her work can be equally worth as Faulkner's", we say it is worth because it is about women's liberation.
That returns me to contemporary criticism which is mostly completely lost communication with the actuality of the given text (I'd like to stay connected to text, not author), with what I completely agree, and which uses text only as excuse for their own (theoretical or ideological) concerns.
Namely, every of those theories, or theroetical critical approaches, starts from one point, one focus. Women for postfeminism, race for postcolonialism, text for structuralism, poular culture for cultural approaches... The texts previously considered as unworthy, are now worth - even becoming part of the cannon, as novel Wide Sargasso Sea - because we find something interesting in it. Something what tells something about us or our world. So, there's no more pure deduction and induction - because how can you deduce something from text if it doesn't tell you something about you/us - and maybe this is just current state of literary theory (which in any case ceased to exist and grew into the cultural theory at large), but I think the days of impressionistic essayistic writing with reliance in Author, which Ondaatje shows in major way - will never come back.

[tomsakic]

Hutcheon's approach to postmodernism has been criticised along with Scobie's in this excellent text from 1993 Cohen Conference: http://www.canadianpoetry.ca/cpjrn/vol33/burnham.htm.

There are some good points, namely, in theories of postmodernism, the critics like Hutcheon and David Lodge are usually involved in. Lodge, as example, enlisted all textual cathegories by which you can kow that some text is postmodern (repeating, contradiction, permutation, etc), and Hutcheon's work is also relying on style. - But I'd agree that isn't correct; namely - as Lodge was criticised - absolutely each of his cathegoris is present in texts of high modernism; for instance, you can't divide Thomas Pynchon's postmodern novel from Joyce's modern Ullysses because Ullysses has everyone of "postmodern" cathegories, even more than many others postmodern novels.

That was the point for many to argue that there's no any Postmodernism at all; I wouldn't agree. I think the postmodern context is different by modern by the fact that texts/artistic artefacts exist in the culture as popular artefacts, products, on market - as Burnham also argues, using Fredric Jameson's theories. As Walter Benjamin wrote, "The work of art in the age of its mechanical reproduction".

[linda_lakeside]

I'm sorry I never was able to copy that for you, Tom. The book is in Vancouver - and it's well, a book. If you recall, I offered...

Linda.

PS: I disagree with the statement that BL will be the only Canadian book people will 'bother with' in 100 years. It's a safe bet, we won't be able to prove one another right or wrong.

[Cohendrix]

"That returns me to contemporary criticism which is mostly completely lost communication with the actuality of the given text (I'd like to stay connected to text, not author), with what I completely agree, and which uses text only as excuse for their own (theoretical or ideological) concerns."

I think you're right that contemporary criticism has lost communication with the "actuality" of the given text, but I don't think that writers like Hutcheon are any less impressionistic than old-style evaluative critics. Hutcheon is herself a snobbish evaluator. In her short bio of Cohen's work she wrote (not in "Caveat Lector"), she wrote (I'm paraphrasing), "Pop culture is very shallow BUT it is all that we have today," and this was part of her "analysis" of Cohen's integration of high/low cultural elements. In addition to being very prone toward this type of classist nonsense, she is someone who chokes her minimal insights with a maximum of jargon.

I think your notion of being disconnected from "author" is entirely untenable and an indicator of everything that is wrong with literary studies in our day. That kind of crap belongs in the heyday of the New Criticism. The second world war is over--even Derrida seemed to notice that fact after Paul de Man bit the cookie.

I have no problem talking about "authors" and what "authors" believe or consistently do/don't do. I do this without any naivete that I'm becoming closer to the "author" as a person, but I do think it is possible to get closer to an "author" as a PERFORMANCE, and to support such readings ACCURATELY with comprehensive reading of said "author's" work. Is this impressionistic? Indeed, it is--but so are Hutcheon's careerist noodlings. Lame discussions about connections to "text" are a dead end--especially with Cohen, who is so concerned with the body throughout his work. Cohen is a performer. If one reads his work, one can get a feel for the rhythms, motifs and cadences of his performances. If I didn't care that a person had written this stuff--if it were only ink on paper, then I'd just wipe my ass with it.

[ForYourSmile]

Though a Beautiful Loser (F.) was a terrorist leader and other one was dragged by the (sexual) fervor of an independence desmostration, in my opinion, Beautiful Losers does not treat the topic of Quebec. Only it is the stage. The lack of ideology of the characters, the isolation of the triangle (or quadrilateral) in spite of the whole surround world reinforces the claustrophobic and dramatic environment of the novel.

We cannot know LC's opinion reading Beautiful Losers, neither listening Un Canadien Errant. We know the environment that he lived in his youth in Montreal and that describes us in My Favorite Game. We know to that saga and cultural environment belongs.

I remember the poem Villanelle for Our Time of Frank Scott (music of LC, Dear Heather). http://www2.marianopolis.edu/quebechist ... kscott.htm

The Beautiful Losers of the novel are very different of the Beautiful Losers of our gallery.

[Tchocolatl]

FYS, believe me, there is a lot of metaphors in this book. The atmosphere was a social claustrophobic atmosphere, with the reality of the two solitudes, (the "indians"? who? not even taken into about) better talk about parrallel worlds politically speaking. It was an English colony and you know how it is with colonialism : I don't think that it is a particular problem with the British, 'cause you Spanish, and Portugese and French and so on, as colonialists had the same colonialist attitudes with the people who lost the colonial wars. For example, when they were speaking French, the French Canadians were ordered to "speak white" by the English Canadians. Even if they speak white, and no matter how skilled they were, no FC could be something else than, so to speak, a slave, under this colonialist government. It gives you an idea of how suffocating the atmosphere could have been. Now, I don't fall into the trap of the "poor" guys are the good guys and the "masters" the bad ones. Too simple and false also, this way of regarding History.

The rape of Edith (I take this example among many others 'cause we previously wrote about it in another thread) is an image which describes what happened to the First Nations by Europeans during the colonization. Rough times, those times. If you go one day to Château Ramzay museum you'll see few interesting artefacts, paintings by a Sioux Chief. He was well aware that soon his traditonal ways of living will disapear and he was painting as much as he can about Sioux's ordinary ways of life to let the world know who they were.

But I agree with you, nothing can be read between the lines in this novel and in The Favourite Games about his opinion on the question.

However, I don't think that it matters, what he thinks about it, 'cause it is up to people who are living in Québec to decide if they want to be independent or not.

If they have to ask permission to Mr. Cohen or anybody else, this is even not a Quiet Revolution, it is a "may I can exist, please" revolution. Let say it plain : a joke.

Québec is a rich territory in term of natural resources and could do it without problem in regard of economy.

Right now, on the Island of Montréal, the social portrait is the following : 2/3 of families are speaking English and French (both official languages) and a third language (their native tong) at home. 75% of the immigrants are adopting the French way of life. Montréal is the biggest French city in North America.

If this reality does not please everybody, blame the reality

This said, the other reality is that right now, English is the international language in this Tower of Babel or if you prefer, on Earth, so I don't see why, in Québec, independent or not, people would stop to use the English/Intenational language in some way or in other. It is impossible.

[ForYourSmile]

Gentle Tchocolati , I have read carefully your interesting post, I do not want to be wrong in the interpretation, especially with you.

Absolutely in agreement, nobody can forget nowadays the English language. (Look at me, the efforts that I have to do for LC in this poor English). At the same time, it is not a waste of time hold the own culture. We are citizens of the world that we have an origin.

Quebec could have decided on his destiny, not all the peoples that feel uncomfortable under a hegemonic nationalism could have done it.

Mr. Cohen is very correct, but, certainly he has his ideas and, in my opinion, he is passionate by them: "I smile when I’m angry. I cheat and I lie. I do what I have to do To get by. But I know what is wrong. And I know what is right. And I’d die for the truth In My Secret Life" He has his opinion about the topic of Quebec, and I have some suspicion of which it is. Anyway, I do not have an explicit declaration about it.

I do not see that Beautiful Losers speaks about the British colonialism, either on the colonialism of the Jesuits on the Mohawks. Catherine Tekakwitha is a virgin, a martyr who dies in a mystical torment, a pure, unattainable being, as Joan of Arch. In the novel there is no critique on the responsibility of the Society of Jesus. Neither it explains why a member of the parliament places bombs. This is not the matter. Beautiful Losers speaks about passions without limit, also that of Catherine, and about beings destined to the self-destruction.

It's a magnificent novel. Of this I am certain, not even its own author will be able to make me doubt it ever. I cannot agree with this Cohen's odd apology, for a preface, to a dear Chinese reader:

"This is a difficult book, even in English, if it is taken too seriously. May I suggest that you skip over the parts you don't like? Dip into it here and there. Perhaps there will be a passage, or even a page, that resonates with your curiosity. After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover. In any case, I thank you for your interest in this odd collection of jazz riffs, pop-art jokes, religious kitsch and muffled prayer æ an interest which indicates, to my thinking, a rather reckless, though very touching, generosity on your part.
Beautiful Losers was written outside, on a table set among the rocks, weeds and daisies, behind my house on Hydra, an island in the Aegean Sea. I lived there many years ago. It was a blazing hot summer. I never covered my head. What you have in your hands is more of a sunstroke than a book.
Dear Reader, please forgive me if I have wasted your time."
http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/lcbook5.html

Really funny. You have not wasted my time.

Sunstroke , he forgets of the great quantity of amphetamines that he took in Hydra and, as he says, the ten years that he need to overcome it. (I am grateful for Xema and Antonio, who read this site though they do not write, the photocopies of the long and wonderful interview of Cristobal Fuegoreal.)

Speaking about Hydra, I have followed this fantastic trip. I had wanted to be there. This is a place to pilgrimage, some day...