In my second year as an undergraduate student at Carleton University in Ottawa, as an elective I picked the big quasi-obligatory Canadian literature English class with dispassion and a certain amount of indifference. Great gifts arrive best that way. I’d already been surprised by how much I liked Hugh MacLennan’s dusty and handwringing Two Solitudes when they had us read it back in high school, but this course very quickly became a delight I looked forward to weekly and three of the books on that syllabus are never far from my mind to this present day: Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush (hot off the presses in 1852); Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (1952); and, from Alberta my home and broken hand, Robert Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man (1969). At the behest of an editor, when immigrating to Upper Canada near modern-day Peterborough, Ontario during the 1830s, Susanna Moodie wrote a "guide" to settler life for British subjects considering coming to Canada, such that not only did she have to suffer setbacks, hardships, weather, and topography, she also had to get it all down and hand in her copy on time. What is toughest about this brazen and formidable woman is her composure. From right here on the Canadian prairie, Robert Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man is more than any other novel I know like the penis of a horse. You heard me. When I read it back in ’98-’99, I remember how much it reminded me at some points of Thomas Pynchon and at others of Rudy Wurlitzer, both American writers of the burnout counterculture who I fussed over back then...in my ringlets. Hazard Lepage, the self-proclaimed last of the studhorse men, attempts to preserve the bloodline of his rare blue stallion, Poseidon, against the backdrop of Alberta in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Poseidon is ultimately conscripted into nonstop impregnation for the industrial production of estrogen for birth control pills. I think it’s meant to parallel the atrocities of Nazi Germany. One passage involves seventeen different slang terms for the male sex organ. A sex act may or may not bring one character back from the dead. A prairie home companion for all. It’s the book in the middle of the CanLit three, however—Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley—that was most relatable to me, touched me the most deeply, and even left me in a bit of a cold sweat a couple nights…almost as though it were destiny talking. Definitely inspired by Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and for certain written pretty tipsy, The Mountain and the Valley is an autobiographical Bildungsroman set in Nova Scotia’s beautiful and lonely Annapolis Valley. Growing up in the direction of his author, dissipation and ruin in the fallout of molten creativity and haywire yearning, from the epilogue on we know that protagonist David Canaan, his name practically a set of spiritual chains around his ankles, will die on the summit of the South Mountain at the age of thirty. The thing that touched me the most back in ’98-’99 was the way in which creativity is demonstrated to bloom. Young David cannot go serve in the Second World War, so he starts to write fictional stories about himself serving over in the theatre of operations on the Europe continent…and then naturally realizes that you can really travel all kinds of places using this simple and affordable technique. Our professor told us that he and some other devout supplicants at the teat of letters once went on a modest pilgrimage to see Ernest Buckler at his farm in Nova Scotia and that though the great man opened the door to them agreeably enough, he was so insensibly drunk that they did not ultimately stay long.
Gilbert Sorrentino
Budd Lake, New Jersey
It is never going to be easy to discuss no-bullshit Brooklynite Gilbert Sorrentino’s wonderful 1980 novel Aberration of Starlight without dutifully invoking Rashomon, both the 1950 Akira Kurosawa film and the 1922 Ryūnosuke Akutagawa short story upon which it is based, perhaps the most famous parallax narrative of them all. Folks probably have some cursory knowledge of Rashomon and its basic engineering at the very least. The story focuses on a single event, backing up multiple times to come at it from the disparate vantages of the various tangentially-connected characters who participate in it from the standpoints of their own individual position within its schematics, informed as these are by contrasting conditions and outlooks. The word “parallax” refers to differences in how an object will be perceived conditional to the location of the observer. In the Sorrentino the event around which all pivots involves an act of violence between adults that is witnessed by a boy. This concern with variations in perception and another additional concern with the fundamentally illusory character of things as they are perceived, is already foregrounded in the title Aberration of Starlight and the epigraph at the beginning of the novel explaining it: light traveling from a star appears to be “traveling along a path at an angle to the true direction of the star” because of “the component of the observer’s velocity in a direction perpendicular to the direction of the star.” Sorrentino is less concerned with perceptions and misperceptions of the central event as event, and more with how the event registers in each of the four central characters’ narrative construction of his or her own self-modifying on-the-ground reality. Aberration, like much of Sorrentino’s early work, expresses a distinct and potent species of soul-sickness. This is a novel that becomes increasingly grim. There is a spreading sense of psychospritual desolation and devouring moral rot. It is telling that its mounting nastiness coincides with the two final sections focusing on the inner lives of its two adult males, two spectacularly malign individuals, first Tom Thebus, a recently divorced womanizer, and second John McGrath, father of Marie, also recently separated from her spouse—a man targeted with a great many epithets reserved for those of Italian heritage—and the woman Tom is cravenly pursuing. If Marie and her ten-year-old son seem sad and brittle with nothing good coming their way, in Tom and Mr. McGrath the sadness mutates into two modes of pathetic, callow monstrosity, a woundedness that wounds back with malice, the tongue forked. Tom is heedless libido, a born user and despoiler. McGrath is another case altogether. He’s not a predator nor much of a lech, at least not at the level of his actions and observable behaviours, but he represents reactivity and ressentiment, those eminently unattractive characteristics Nietzsche saw rise in the shadow of classical Jewish theosophistry and the Church of Blame, and which Sorrentino regularly bestows unflatteringly and as a central defect on men in his darker, more brooding fictions. His emotionally brutal and a-challenge-to-take autobiographical 1966 debut The Sky Changes might well remain the foremost exemplar here, actually. McGrath’s ressentiment is in large part born of emasculation; an emasculation exacerbated by decades of marriage to his domineering and spiteful wife Bridget, who has recently died. John is one of many characters in the novel who spouts racist vitriol or generalized disdain for those of different ethnicity/race, a behaviour the novel routinely ties to impotence and self-hatred. McGrath is enamoured of a recently widowed German woman at the boardinghouse who herself expresses sympathy for Hitler, and we cannot help remain mindful of the fact that the Second World War lies on the immediate horizon in terms of the novel’s historical timeline. As to the “one outstanding flaw in the otherwise carefully composed whole” respective of Tom Thebus in his cocksman’s pomp and poncy protocols: the fact that the man’s “trousers hung from his waist to his thighs with no readily distinguishable evidence that he possessed buttocks.” What? Didn’t nobody tell you a man need a ass to push with, boy?
Ferat Vampire (Juraj Herz, 1982)
Diverting things a little, perhaps, with respect to threepenny standards and procedures, I thought I might extemporize on two car accidents from my past…and I’ve had a few of ‘em. In a way, one of my major achievements as a teenager was rolling my puke green Volvo GT into a farmer’s field without writing the car off. Truly. We continued to drive that redoubtable Swedish cocksucker. I lived in the country and my school was in the country, such that much of my commute in the last year-and-a-half of high school was along gravel roads. I had my sister with me and we were going down the fairly steep hill on one of said gravel roads when I got a puncture in one of the back tires. As soon as I hit the brake the car started to fishtail and swerve. I went off the road at the bottom of the hill, took out a stretch of fence, and rolled the Volvo once. We got out and stood well back until somebody came. We were both back at school in a few hours, good and shook but damn well gonna barge our way through the rest of the bullshit day. A friend who liked the Pynchon novel upon which it was based told me he got in a fender bender right outside the theatre after seeing Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice because the movie, which he basically liked, left him dazzled and thrown. Something similar happened to me in my final year of undergraduate studies. I had spent the afternoon at the townhouse in Kanata I was sharing with two other guys reading Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy for Bela Egyed’s Deleuze seminar course, which was really lighting up my nervous system like a pachinko parlour. Active and reactive forces; the eternal return of the same [under the sun of difference]; affirmation. I got in the car to go to Deleuze class and, heading from Kanata to Ottawa proper, hit the back-end of a series of small pileups on the 417. I know that my judgement was unnaturally impaired by Nietzsche and Philosophy because I saw what was happening in enough time to avoid hitting the car in front of me, but just couldn’t make it happen, the deer caught in its own headlights. However, the upshot is that I was the first car in that particular pileup not to get hit from behind. Somebody let me use a phone, and I called Egyed at Carleton and told him I’d probably miss the seminar on account of a pretty weird car accident I’d just been in. He said: Oh, my God, of course, I hope you are okay, be well and take care of yourself, how awful. Anyway, about twenty-five minutes later I walked into the class…
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