Combat Journal for Place d'Armes. Scott Symons
McClelland & Stewart paperback, that Place d’Armes is a supreme statement of the Canadian imagination of the 1960s. It certainly ranks alongside such other canonical English-Canadian texts as Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Graeme Gibson’s Five Legs, or a little later, Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business. And it must also be situated in relation to the most significant works of the period in French Canada, with which Symons was deeply familiar, notably Prochain Episode by Hubert Aquin (Robert K. Martin goes so far as to call it “almost a translation” of Aquin’s book).
In its unleashed psychic and libidinal energies, its avant-gardist formal logics and hugely ambitious syncretic/synthetic aspirations, Symons’s book is certainly representative of some of the decade’s wider and wilder possibilities. But Place d’Armes is also idiosyncratic, anachronistic, sometimes reactionary, even as it participates enthusiastically in headlong literary (post)modernity. Symons’s first novel and his subsequent works find their own way in a negotiation with millennial cultures and the acceleration and transitional qualities of the contemporary. In the early 1970s he remarked that “Today is very exciting, but I don’t want to live in it” and asserted that “we’re living between two minds today.”8 The moment to which Symons’s work belongs is not narrowly contemporary.
(Parenthetically, it is interesting to note how Place d’Armes situates itself so explicitly in relation to other works of the 1960s highlighted in the 2005 Literary Review of Canada’s list of the one hundred most significant books in Canadian history.9 “I cry too little for the sensibility” when all our intellectuals moan “too little for their minds” [55] evokes Hilda Neatby’s So Little for the Mind. The text engages the thought of Marshall McLuhan intermittently, already taking that proper name as synonymous with reading media. Place d’Armes also takes note of the recent Lament for a Nation by George Grant [though, remarkably, the polymorphous/polyvocal narrator notes that he has not read it and does not need to]. The novel that Hugh Anderson is sketching out in the Combat Journal is referred to by one witty friend as a “minority report to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism.” Mocking but informed reference is made to Stephen Vizinczey’s In Praise of Older Women. And Hubert Aquin and Prochain Episode are vitally present in the text through the figure of Pierre Godin, with Anderson reading his novel, La Foire aux Puces, and noting Godin/Aquin’s suicide obsession, the liberating power of an “assurance-vie” consisting of a bottle of cyanide. It is fascinating to ask oneself if, in the current flowering and multiplication of Canadian writing, there might be such a strong sense of historical moment, of culture and commonly recognized stakes, if one were to examine key works of the first decade of the twenty-first century forty years hence ...)
Academic criticism of the novel (or anti-novel) has come in two waves, so to speak, with some crucial early articles focusing on questions of genre, narration, identity, and religion and a second constellation of concentrated critical interest associated with postmodern critical stances deriving insights into the text from gender and queer studies and postcolonial literary theory.10
Two statements will serve to condense the general tone of these interpretative moments:
These sophisticated journals remind us, as does so much recent Canadian literature, that evolution is preferred to Revolution, that what is great in the past can be adapted to give strength to the present. (Elspeth Cameron, 1977)
We would not want to lose a text as rich, as outrageous, as powerfully evocative of its time as Place d’Armes, but it is necessary to read it defensively, ready to take up the combat that Symons wants. Its limitations speak eloquently to the problem of writing the other, of speaking from a position of privilege while seeking to efface it, and of the ways in which a jouissance that seeks to undo the (cultural) text may end up simply rewriting it. (Robert K. Martin, 1994)
Each generation of critics, while arguing for strengths and weaknesses of the book, seeks to recuperate the difficult-to-contain text and maintain it in a positive relation to essential and diverse contemporary critical or ethico-critical perspectives. For Cameron it is the secret continuities between the contemporary manipulation of the diary, the production of a radical Combat Journal, and the many earlier historical manifestations of journals in Canadian culture. For Martin it is the desire to maintain a powerful text of transgression, resistance, and pleasure in spite of certain of its apparently politically distasteful aspects.
While each of these clusters of articles provides rich insight into the textuality, genericity, ideological underpinnings, cultural meanings, and consequences of the text, sometimes the singularity of the text eludes the interpretative models imposed upon it. To wit:
Terry Goldie: “Place d’Armes only reacclaims the misogyny of Tory heterosexism in a Tory homosexualism.”
Robert K. Martin: “One problem with Symons’s project is that it amounts to a kind of literary blackface, the performance of sexual or racial identity.”
Such statements seem to this reader demonstrably false, over-determined by their theoretical starting points, and necessarily reductive of texts that are infinitely more subtle and idiosyncratic than these reductions allow. But this is not the place to make an extensive demonstration or counter-argument.
By way of further introduction, let us consider just a few ways into Place d’Armes, a few avenues traced by Symons into the allegorical Place. The way is fraught with obstacles, but the obstacles also provide the way forward. With Hugh Anderson in the Rapido train, on the Day Before One, we are held trembling at a threshold: “unwilling to resolve the contradictions already becoming apparent” (45).
Passionate Impasse
Impasse. The word and the phenomenon haunt the quest of Symons-Anderson-Harrison. He is constantly faced with and sometimes briefly tempted by the “instant security of stalemate ... the security of impasse” (235–36). In the early going, when Hugh is on the Rapido train en route from Toronto to Montreal, his first unsatisfying encounters with his fellow citizens leave him with the feeling that all that can be attained in his urgent but as yet undefined “sensibility probe” is a kind of “improved impasse” (60), with Canadian decorum serving as an obstruction to feeling, an excuse for the avoidance of life. (Hence also the provocative opening disclaimer, “any resemblance to people dead or really alive is pure coincidence”). But Symons’s whole work rebels against the risk of “consecrated impasse” (174).
By the end of the exhaustive and exhausting writing out of the adventure, such impasse has metamorphosed, multiplied, opened up, become “Holy Impasse” (384) and at the precise moment where failure seems most likely, a successful breakthrough into realms of enhanced consciousness occurs. This is a paradoxical exit with no exit. An empassioning aporia, to speak like the Jacques Derrida of Demeure, where he analyzes the paradoxical death/non-death by firing squad of Maurice Blanchot in the latter’s At the Instant of My Death.11
Importantly, Symons himself is fascinated by the need for such enhanced passion and by the limited resources of the English language to convey it. In an act of translation that is cultural and spiritual more than it is narrowly linguistic, he considers the French passionnant: “there is no expression in English like c’est passionnant — literally it is empassioning” (282).
The work of Scott Symons is empassioned and empassioning or it is nothing. And it derives its passion from the experience and transformation of impasse.
A Text of Resistance
Place d’Armes must be read and experienced as a text of resistance: the book ferociously resists all forms of reductive, identitary thinking. It seeks to preserve sentience, lucidity, the articulation of education and sensibility as against the homogenizing tendencies of our time. It attacks official culture in its various guises, and in particular the obsession with the Canadian identity and its careerist “mechanisms.” The intersecting discourses of media/advertising/tourism/business are called into question from the opening pages of the book in a Radical Tory critique of the incipient formations of what we might call today late or