dear helen…
apparently there was something growing below that dubious foliage … mighty spuds revealed themselves.
Thanks for the digging.
Thanks for novels.
D.M. Fraser Ignorant Armies: a consideration
Here, I offer, my consideration of D.M. Fraser’s Ignorant Armies (out of print alas, but Pulp Press originally). It was suggested the piece needs to be more friendly to readers, therefore if you are confused you can ask questions in the comments section. (since the piece has yet to be published in print, link/attribute pls). And a nod to Helen Potrebenko, Brian Kaufman, Jeff Derksen, Michael Turner for reading/comments/discussion.
Buried Treasures: Ignorant Armies. D.M. Fraser
D.M. Fraser is a footnote in Vancouver literature where he should be the headliner. Attracted by the title of his first collection — Class Warfare — I discovered his work last year, but it was his posthumously published book Ignorant Armies that spared my sanity during the recent 5 ring bling, all out flattening invasion of our city.
Ignorant Armies, published in 1990, by Pulp Press (out of print) emerged as a stand alone volume, during the attempt to create two complete collections of Fraser’s work. Fraser began work on the novel in 1978 and was still working on it when he died suddenly in 1985. The book was put together over three years, with input from close colleagues. In a note entitled You aren’t supposed to be reading this, Ignorant Armies editor Bryan Carson reflects on Fraser’s interminable, perfectionist approach: “He couldn’t tolerate a mistake on a page, would tear one out for nothing more serious than a typo and start the page over…”
This very process and happenstance of how the book formed itself, both by it’s author’s generation and subsequent external collation provides us with a lively reading experience, which we can wonder about, delight in each paragraph and choose how and where to darn them together overall. Knowing as we do that whatever Fraser intended finally for his book remains to be seen. While he left “structured units”, he did not indicate a conclusive map according to which they might sit.
The despot thruline of narrative is bid adieu in Ignorant Armies and instead we revel in a fragmented repository of chunking. Fraser’s sentences are long, lifting, yet single word succinct. His resplendent prose owes something to music: looping phrases that riff and repeat (Johnny Girardi came into town singing), phrases also delineate new events (May all our sins be forgiven). A lead in and a lead out and always in his sentences, an elevation. Therefore, identical to a piece of music the reader could chose, non-fatally, (any) where to join this prose.
The overall shape of the text reflects what’s happening in it. A Venn diagram of loops within loops that perhaps reflect the tad loopy nature of his characters. Characters, sufficient in number to form a small circle, thus rotate the tale, weave their lives, intricately around each other and bounce off each other like a game of rounders: They recall, rotate, remember and recoil. Gus Asher, (who is the main man) “if he recalls Johnny it’s to recall that was the winter Joan went crazy, and I too perhaps…”
While Johnny Girardi concludes on Asher: “A tour of his personal history yields little insight: it is an official visit to an exploded coal-mine or any industrial disaster, where the object of the ceremony is not to see what is there, but to be recorded as having been seen seeing it and weeping.”
Cut to Asher on Joan: “Asher broaching the notion with what he hoped was the suitable level of candor, I’m gonna fuck off out of this stinking house, felt a messianic exaltation that so amply irrigated his arid spirit that he began to weep almost immediately, loudly, thereby missing Joan’s murmured answer, Why don’t you do that very thing, tonight for example?”
Asher has handed the reins to Johnny Girardi to complete his tale. Johnny Girardi (sometimes Giraardi) plows through the book swinging his arm, like a marching band, as he bears agreed witness to Asher’s life. As noted in the text “The story is over by now and this is the epilogue”
Even Fraser’s point of view resembles the gliss of string instruments. It merges, and dissolves in the same paragraph to the extent I reached the last sentence of the book startled to discover Johnny Girardi had been talking to me, where I assumed Asher was. With not a bother on me, I read the book again.
Essentially the tale, if we must entertain such a bland notion, is a man sorting events (“an accounting”) in his life and allowing external points of view to consider the same situations. Some of the most poignant reflecting is Asher on his lust and love of manipulative Devon (who has murdered or knifed someone I think), his accounting affords an honest representation of the fluid nature of sexuality. This, while, still married to Joan from whom he is certainly, latterly in the book, separating. Devon concurrently has stolen Asher’s writing to create the “most notoriously unperformable opera in the world”.
As Devon is literally running circles around him, within his stagnant marriage lies Asher’s tranquillity and while he’s consuming both, it is at the stake of his wife’s sanity. Joan quietly commits suicide.
Gus Asher may be a self-centred, panicking, drunk, yet his rigorous honesty and pondering offer us the contradictory nature of human behaviour. Much seems to pain Asher, yet he adheres to his honest appraising. When Devon seeks to comfort him after Joan’s death he’s having none of it.
“I let him (Devon) hold me and pat me like a wounded puppy, saying obviously unbelievable things like It’s not your fault, she didn’t know what she was doing, but it was I who hadn’t known, hadn’t seen, love was a lie, as it may indeed be, and I summoned from impoverished memory everything mean and gross and ungiving in all of us, I charged all of us with every crime I could name (and god knows the list was long enough to occupy a night) I beseeched Devon to beat me until I bled from nose and mouth, to fuck me in the ass because I’d always hated that and feared him in his moods to do it…”
Separation or unfolding is a constant mode in this text. Even as readers we are embroiled: what is Asher’s actual truth? Is Johnny Girardi reliable? Blimey who on earth is Eli? Petrov would you stop being a pain in the hole.
It’s rare as a reader to bounce up a set of stairs with material that could be construed as likely to bring one down. Get blasted on Fraser’s pneumatic prose. He transforms the most vicious of maladies.
En route to my gymnastics training last night I was listening I subsequently learnt to Arlo Guthrie on the radio. I did not know Arlo Guthrie, but he was singing a song about a train in New Orleans. I do know of his dad (I subsequently learnt). So how come I don’t know his son. I suppose it’s reasonable not to know of him.
Anyway there he was singing fresh as a daisy bout a train. At the training session, I was working with a new coach on what they call “drills” trying to link two moves into a tumble, having worked the two moves separately. The coach, a very patient young fella, wanted me to do these various drills before hooking the engine to the carriage. But these drills felt so odd, hurling myself backwards into a pit and having to land one move before the pit started and being at the age of reluctance, this old Missy was having none of it.
We discussed it. I said you know psychologically these drills aren’t doing it for me. He said maybe I thought the drills were boring. I said I didn’t think I could find them boring since I was basically so resistant I couldn’t even attempt them. We debated a bit more. I said I have a funny brain. I like to run before I can walk even if I land in a heap. He explained the drills were to remove the psychological fear that’s inherent in linking two moves. I said hmm. He said he’d look at my first move and based on whether or not it was iffy, he’d decide if he was willing to spot the second move. I showed him the round off, he said it was good. We set up sting mats on tumble run thing, we set the first move up, then I was to throw the two moves with him offering a spot for the second.
I was standing on the tumble run. He looked uncertain and mumbled uncertainty. I suddenly felt a holy terror about what I had just set up as needing to be done, was now actually going to have to be done and neither of the two of us were certain what was going to result. Then I remembered some of my fury this week and said fuck it, and launched into the damn thing, which was as it turns out damn fine! He kept his head without getting clacked, and I couldn’t believe I had landed on my feet.
He said something like ok there we’ve thrown it as in we know you can throw it. I thanked him. We moved into refining it. I was grateful to him for facilitating my arse about face approach. It was a great moment. The link had been tentatively made and will not be unmade only improved one hopes. Then we had a long philosophical discussion about absolutely nothing to do with gymnastics.
Every aspect of that sport reminds me of novel writing. Except the progress is indisputable.
hover II
… what happened was the very opposite of what I’d intended. The text delivered itself sans any breath whatsoever. No need to breathe was a health theme for me on that day as my lung lining was inexplicably inflamed and breathing in caused bad chest pain and I was existing on a great deal less oxygen and a fun fair ride constant hangover. So it was delightful to find no need to breathe whatsoever in the reading…!
I love how you can approach a book through the left door and it will boot you out the right door. Return to it via the boot and find yourself riding on the bonnet.
hover I
We are at the age where chunks of rock songs get repeatedly sung 54 times a day. It’s a wonderful age. The content, in a new context, is v fun. When my child was small he enjoyed the Steve Miller Band (paternal influence) and it was rather curious to see a 4 year old singing about the trouble he was having finding a job or working real hard the whole day through and struggling to manage his temperamental women and so on.
Now, however, we’re in the stalled what I call hover land. (not to be confused with hovercraft, which would actually move someplace). The mind catches certain chunks of songs by it seems only ONE band and they exude out of his pores day and night.
I get to concentrate on the words in those 2 or 3 sentences. In public they are accompanied by a charming left handed air guitar. Our living space can’t accommodate too much air guitar or you’ll end up with a fractured wrist. So in public the words become even more vivid!
Unconnected p’haps but I am back thinking about single line reading of texts. A kind of fixated reading of the single lines, that would be slow and careful and you can feel each word digest through the six stomachs. It struck me reading Beckett’s How it is last month. Then a gap. A Sunday reread with even more determination and I shall have to tell you what happened. First though, a phone call, it is my ma’s birthday!
H-a-p-p-y B-i-r-t-h-d-a-y H-a-n-n-a-h (delores, cecelia etc)
I woke up this morning (and it was a night on fever duty) with the reminder that there is no country in the world likely where its citizens feel entirely chuffed with the state of critical culture. If you think it’s shite, basically you’ve one option and that is to contribute to it. And if it’s still shite contribute more to it. Despair. Contribute. Despair. Contribute. Repeat.
On critical males bellyaching
What is not improving by the hour is the piffle flying from the literary male who really must once and for all get over himself. God is this ever a week of bellyaching from them? We began at station creepo. It’s hardly Tuesday and I am stiffened with fury that these males, who cannot get beyond the gurgle of each other, continue to insist that there are no women in the world writing literary criticism, let alone Canada.
No one would deny the critical culture in this country could raise the blinds further up the window and allow for the circulation of oxygen, but Andre Alexis recent Walrus piece, that seemed to derail itself as it went along, insists that the critic and criticism begins and ends at the squabbling male, in the much reduced blast of newspaper that no longer even pretends to be interested in literature.
All the examples of possible critics to be heralded or dismissed are men, the same old names because we no longer read for what’s there, we read for those we understand to matter. It is the criticism and thinking of many women writers on literature that inspired me to take up my pen, that have rattled my brain. My critical reading does not begin and end at James Wood and John Metcalf.
Personally I put considerable thought and mad amounts of hours into every review I wrote for The Globe. Any review I wrote I hoped readers and writers would further the ideas or questions raised. The particular geography of books I wrote about should not have any bearing on the questions and considerations raised, since they’re relevant to any locale. I wrote my contributions towards a literary criticism in Canada, their phrasing reflects that, they may not be tattooed in the flag, but that should not dismiss them.
I spent 3 months writing a piece on DM Fraser’s Ignorant Armies to, as yet, no publishing avail.
I actively contributed (and the rates paid are beyond the beyond poor) to the local newspaper because the quality of it frustrated me and I’d rather contribute than sit around sniffing and dismissing in coffee shops while clutching the New York Times. This is my point, to completely dismiss nearly all contributions is disingenuous to that effort. That act of attempting to put something into the bowl whether it floats or sinks.
I’m not interested in being deemed a good critic, a poor critic or a middling one. I am concerned about being a thinking individual and I happen to think it’s vital that writers, working writers, think and write about literature. That very ambition is becoming increasingly impossible. Efforts are continually thwarted. And it seems irregardless women remain bloody invisible.
And for the record one of the best reviews I’ve read in Canada was actually published in The Vancouver Sun written by Annabel Lyon. For years I read The London Review of Books solely for the work of writers such as Jenny Diski. Plus some of the more interesting blogs about Canadian literature are actually written by women poets. And does critical culture begin and end at the newspaper section and the published word? What of the gatherings and talks all over the place (some drive me up the wall, but it is rather energizing to go up) organized by KSW etc, what of the volunteer labour that goes into creating these spaces for people to gather? Again: invisible. Destination: disregarded.
What is not improving by the hour is the piffle flying from the literary male who really must once and for all get over himself. God is this ever a week of bellyaching from them? We began at station creepo. It’s hardly Tuesday and I am stiffened with fury that these males, who cannot get beyond the gurgle of each other, continue to insist that there are no women in the world writing literary criticism, let alone Canada.
No one would deny the critical culture in this country could raise the blinds further up the window and allow for the circulation of oxygen, but Andre Alexis recent Walrus piece, that seemed to derail itself as it went along, insists that the critic is, and criticism begins and ends at the squabbling male, in the much reduced blast of newspaper that no longer even pretends to be interested in literature.
All the examples of possible critics to be heralded or dismissed are men, the same old names because we no longer read for what’s there, we read for those we understand to matter. It is the criticism and thinking of many women writers on literature that inspired me to take up my pen, that have rattled my brain. My critical reading does not begin and end at James Wood and John Metcalf.
Personally I put considerable thought and mad amounts of hours into every review I wrote for The Globe. Any review I wrote I hoped readers and writers would further the ideas or questions raised. The particular geography of books I wrote about should not have any bearing on the questions and considerations raised since they’re relevant to any locale. I wrote my contributions towards a literary criticism in Canada, their phrasing reflects that, they may not be tattooed in the flag, but that should not dismiss them.
I spent 3 months writing a piece on DM Fraser’s Ignorant Armies to, as yet, no publishing avail.
I actively contributed (and the rates paid are beyond the beyond poor) to the local newspaper because the quality of it frustrated me and I’d rather contribute than sit around sniffing and dismissing in coffee shops while clutching the New York Times. This is my point, to completely dismiss nearly all contributions is disingenuous to that effort. That act of attempting to put something into the bowl whether it floats or sinks.
I’m not interested in being deemed a good critic, a poor critic or a middling one. I am concerned about being a thinking individual and I happen to think it’s vital that writers, working writers, think and write about literature. That very ambition is becoming increasingly impossible. Efforts are continually thwarted. And it seems irregardless women remain bloody invisible.
And for the record one of the best reviews I’ve read in Canada was actually published in The Vancouver Sun written by Annabel Lyon. For years I read The London Review of Books solely for the work of writers such as Jenny Diski. Plus some of the more interesting blogs about Canadian literature are actually written by women poets. And does critical culture begin and end at the newspaper section and the published word, what of the gatherings and talks all over the place (some drive me up the wall, but it is rather energizing to go up) organized by KSW etc, what of the volunteer labour that goes into creating these spaces for people to gather? Again: invisible. Destination: disregarded.