Anxiety and the Influence of Urbanity the possibilities presented through the marriage of sight and language A course analysis by Andrew R. Mott
Abstract: The following paper is to be considered a survey of English 315 with Dr. Link, Topic in Canadian Literature: Word + Image. It focuses on drawing out the undercurrent of the course and exposing it as an overarching theme in the works that comprise the course始s canon. Through the analysis of the structure of the course, with a focus on key moments in its progression, the reader will come to an understanding of the main course objective. The paper takes special considerations for those that participated in the class, yet will still provide an illumination for those that hold an outside perspective. Dr. Link始s guided exploration of a Canadian canon of contemporary literature focuses on on how word and image can be combined in both abstract and conventional fashions to create an understanding of a global history of literature and philosophy that forms a foundation for current Canadian expression.
Anxiety and the Influence of Urbanity Beyond the reading is the deconstruction and there within lies the ability to find that difference and similarity are one and the same. While there are many undercurrents of the readings that comprise the English 315 canon, the one that is found to be of most importance to the learning outcome of the course is only truly engaged through group exploration and analysis. What exactly is this nuance of Canadian literature? It is the individual reflections of those discussing the texts that combine to create a similarity of difference and the inverse¹. While each author/artistʻs tone and style differ, they all explore an individual perspective that pertains to the understanding of life by the whole, particularly the understanding and experience of anxiety and urbanityʼs influence upon it. The concept of individual placement within the life of a Canadian national identity is something thatʼs explored through inference rather than direct explication, and results in a subconscious focus on pertinent issues of existence. The consideration of sophisticated combination of text and image runs a gamut of techniques and even goes as far as involving the visceral imagery that results from sound poetry, a method of linguistic exploration that questions the basis of communication. Through the deconstruction of the canon by the group, it coalesces into a mass of unease that is truly urbane and opens up a greater understanding of Canadian literature globally; for it is through the acceptance that Canadian literature is just a subset of a larger western dialogue, that it gains strength in its perspective as something that is different². Dr. Linkʼs approach to the course provides a clear path to creating a dialogue of group deconstruction for the construction of individual understanding. The first piece explored in the courseʼs canon sets the tone for what will follow and plays an important role in establishing a context for the content of the study. It is most interesting to note that Frank OʼHaraʼs “Why I Am Not a Painter” opens up the discussion of the class with the possibility that Canadian literature isnʼt actually best addressed with a foundation of readings from Canada. OʼHaraʼs poem explores the concept of replacement and negation, a thought that parallels with the poemʼs placement in the course, and while not overtly presented to the class in this context, this clandestine presentation of an American writer addressing both text and image speaks the unsaid. This thought is echoed through the publishing of Eliotʼs “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as the first piece in the courseʼs reprotext³; a supplementary reading that connects the student to a larger discourse. “Why I Am Not a Painter” breaks the ice of the marriage of text and image, but without actually joining the two together. This initial presentation of the combination of text and image, without any material imagery, pushes the student to grapple a new understanding of the possibilities of combinations of word and image and serves as an effective technique for starting a course that contains no pre-reading. There are numerous works in the canon that Link deconstructs that allude to text and image but avoid any actually material examples of a text and image combination.
As a preparation for the readings and work of the course, Link takes the time to lay a foundation for the discussions that are to ensue. Characters and characteristics are explored as a means to understand the elements of both words and imagery and lead to the concept of see, think, and find what it does and what it means. The contemporary is explained as a setting for the course and is placed within the framework of postmodernity and postmodernism, defined as the cultural period that chooses what illusions to treat as if they were real. A few metanarratives are briefly considered within this cultural perspective as a means to move forward with the content of the course, which formally⁴ begins with Schoemperlenʼs Forms of Devotion explored for its connotations as an object within the aforementioned cultural context. With a group that has yet to read anything, Link makes a wise choice in pointing out the consideration that the book is a modern form of a devotional, and gets a discussion going in searching for other thoughts that stem from the title. This process prepares the class to consider, in reading the book, both the maintenance and purification of faith as well as the question of where romance and religion intersect and diverge. Of course the devotional is a cultural icon of literature that precedes Canadian culture and reinforces the underlying notion that the canon of Canadiana needs to be considered from a global historical perspective. The detailed exploration of the short stories that comprise Forms of Devotion takes place as a guided dialogue that is free to go where ever the class takes it. Any and all ideas that are shared are considered and discussed as a group, and receive an intellectual depth of cultural networking and explication from Link. While the class may be steered to consider certain elements of the reading, it is through the individual representations of these elements forming a group representation that meaning is found. This guided forum of individual idea sharing for group consideration is the structure that the course will take for all of its classes and provides a framework to better prepare the student for the further readings of the course. The ideas that are shared become recurrent from text to text as the details of the stories change but connections to themes and metanarratives are found. Standard contrasts and comparisons are struck within a text and then later between authors, and while this standard exercise of literary analysis of texts in relation to one another helps to illustrate underlying themes, it is only when the discussion jumps to personal philosophies and a larger context that pertinent discoveries are found. Personal practice, experience and readings beyond the canon bring in needed external forces to discover that the themes of the canon extend into the larger community of life experience and back again. Without these asides and the allowance to find comparisons and contrasts from other sources, the class would fail to fully realize the greater importance of literature⁵. Nicholʼs sound poetry is one example of where the boundaries are pushed beyond the class and global philosophies are explored and then related to personal feelings of validity and frustration. While many readings in the canon donʼt stray very far from convention, it is BP Nicholʼs sound poetry that acts as the fool on the edge of the compound⁶, bringing those of reason to understand the unreasonable within their rules. Drawing from three
international philosophersʼ frameworks for understanding, Link leads the class into a discussion that reframes an understanding of communication and proposes the question, what happens when historical cultural perspectives are erased? The class wrestles with the trappings of history and the desire to be free from it, only to find that it is inescapable and must be addressed to understand both place and significance in a society or culture. While Nicholʼs visual works brought forth equally tough questions of societyʼs interactions with itself, it is the sound poetry that captures the essence of the course with its ability to create anxiety with such ease, and its undeniable link to the influence of urbanity. The centre piece of the course, which actually precedes Nicholʼs work, is Sethʼs Itʼs a Good Life, If you Donʼt Weaken, a novella that can be considered a textbook example of how anxiety results from the influence of urbanity. Focusing on this condition in the form of a quest for an understanding of success through an historical reflection of self⁷, Sethʼs book is the most conventional contemporary combination of text and image in the course. The idea of framing and weight of importance are easily related through Sethʼs work, and allow for the class to focus on building the skills needed to assess the subtleties that convention possesses. Sethʼs story is one that solidifies the questioning of success and places a great weight upon the influence of international communities, as the main character becomes obsessed with understanding the life of his favourite inspiration and why he faded into obscurity. Link fosters an understanding of existentialism through the work of Schulzʼs peanuts, an American comic strip that Seth references as a foundational influence, to connect the class to the philosophical explanation of Sethʼs condition. New York is represented as Sethʼs icon for the climax of success, while small town Canada serves as his understanding of the obscure land where failure goes to die; Sethʼs caught between the two and lost to know his place. While the storyʼs ending leaves open the interpretation of overcoming anxiety, whether it happens or not, it misleads its readers with the assertion that the book is a tale of truth. Extra-textuality is a key in fully exploring Sethʼs work and yet the fact that the story is actually fictional is left out of the discussion by Link, a decision that prevents the exploration of fallacious narrative and lends weight to the false as truth⁸. Beyond the extra-textual is the experiential, and thus plays are considered as a combination of sight and language. While the idea of a play as a method of combining word with image is abstract in a traditional literary sense, it becomes an obvious mixture once expectation is shifted past two dimensional representations, something that the introduction of Nicholʼs work helped to achieve. As a contemporary investigation, the play becomes an opportunity to consider the experience of the author, director, performer, and audience from the perspective of the script alone⁹. There are two plays contained in the canon, one of which is rooted in a fragmented understanding of the truth of lifeʼs dramatic experiences and another that threads together multiple stories of monument from varying perspectives. This is For You, Anna: A Spectacle of Revenge, is an abstract exploration of the true story of Marianne Bachmeierʼs vigilanteism, and Beuys Bouys Boys is a play that Link likens to a religious experience through its format of a single man constructing a monument while directly addressing the audience, the act itself becoming a
monument as described in the play⁰. The former play functions as a bridge to explore the medium, while the latter takes the shape of an anchor in the course¹¹. This is For You, Anna broaches deep human emotions through contemporary and historical representations of parables, pulling the truth of Bachmeierʼs story into the realm of cliché myth and exposing the underbelly of sexual relations and inequality. The overt theme of the play is one of revenge and social consequences, while the undercurrent is that of urban anxiety and its power of influence. It is an international story that functions as a Canadian feminist perspective of inquiry into the human experience of law, order, and repercussions¹². The finish with Beuys Buoys Boys leaves the class with an echo of the role of the play itself, with Link as Garnhum and the content as the monument¹³. The class can relate itself to the audience, with the play unable to exist without its participation. Isolation being represented by the artist, the marker, and the homosexual, all of which thread together to create a patchwork understanding of something much larger than the self, but that can only be understood through the singular perspective. The scale of the relationships of content within the play reach beyond the script and into the course structure itself, creating the understanding of dependancyʼs connection to independence and its cycle through and back from isolation. While never discussed in the framework of group experience in the class setting, the play can be extracted and laid a top the course to find echoing similarities as well as a map to cycle through the canon and back again. And of course, contained within the play are two major references to international culture that this piece of Canadiana wouldnʼt exist without, Beuys and Beckett, which bring full circle the subconscious discourse of the course. Anxiety and the influence of urbanity as explored through a canon of Canadian contemporary literature is found as a recurring and inescapable condition of human existence. Addressed through inventive combinations of sight and language, this undercurrent of English 315 is found in the work of every single author/artist the course addresses. Link is successful in illuminating a deeper understanding of Canadian literary and philosophical perspectives through the context of global literary and philosophical coalescence. By looking from the individual in the class scale to the nation on the global scale and connecting it to the concept of singular perspectives joining to create a group perspective that reinforces the value of the singular experience, one can access the most important learning outcome of English 315, an understanding of anxiety and the influence of urbanity *.
*
While there are elements of the class that have been omitted from this survey, the overarching theme is not lost without them and would only be better reinforced with their inclusion. As the class itself was denied time for full exploration of planned resources to reinforce a central idea, On the Essence of Laughter being an example, so too is this paper, A Penny Dreadful being an example.
¹ The course being situated in a Canadian college has a direct impact on the individual reflections of the material. Given the course were situated in an American college, then a different set of reflections would present themselves, but would still combine to create the same overarching understanding. ² The filters of national cultures present literary works that can address global issues through the local scale, but need to have a consideration of history of influence within the nation. Social, political, and economic influences of a nation will have an impact on the telling of a narrative. Within Canada there is a diversity in the understanding of content from coast to coast to coast, yet with an exploration of historical foundations the perspective of anxiety in urbanity is always capable of being found; this holds true on a global scale and illustrates the strength of the theme of the human condition to rise above a national narrative. ³ Primary placement serves as a support of importance and relevance to the course, as the poem is needed early in the course to have reference of understanding for Five Small Rooms in Forms of Devotion. Forms of Devotionʼs placement as the first assigned text of exploration in the class contributes to the notion that within its stories are valuable ideas that will echo throughout the rest of the course. ⁴ Formally pertaining to that which is overt in its presentation in the course, rather than the informal that acts as a supporting structure of understanding; “Why I Am Not a Painter” being an example. ⁵ The need for variety of experience is essential to healthy participation in the class. While there are many students who are enrolled that remain silent throughout the course, they rely upon a wealth of experience to understand the discussions of those that are willing to speak and be considered for debate or agreement. ⁶ Venturi as the fool who helps to usher in postmodernism to the modernist camps of architecture. A concept of shocking one into explorations of the rules that help to dissolve the idea of the rules: see Tom Wolfeʼs From Bauhaus to Our House. ⁷ Kalo as Sethʼs historical reflection of self. ⁸ By abstaining from discussing the truth of the story, Link leaves the most important element of extratextuality up to the discovery of the student. A decision that may deny one of the most pivotal discussions of the role of narrative in society. In essence, Link has echoed the behaviour of the author and allowed an important truth to remain guised as fiction. ⁹ While never directly addressing the fact that scripts are texts that create a physical manifestation of image, as well as a mental one, Link focuses on the details of the considerations of putting on a play and all the elements involved in its existence, as a matter of fact and of worthwhile consideration when analyzing the medium. ⁰ The audience partaking in a gathering that pays homage to the memory. Memory as both the single experience of the performance and all the experience that shaped it, as well as the memories that affect the perspective of the audience members. ¹¹ Giving shape and orientation to an environment, the buoy functions as an anchor, placeholder, and monument establishing context and stability. ¹² Repercussions represented through the physical actions of the actors, as well as a return to the beginning at the close of the story. ¹³ On multiple scales, Link becomes to the class as Beuys is to Garnhum, as buoys are to sailors, and as boys are to boys; a shaman, an anchor, and a reflection upon the self.