The Poetry Project

On The Vanishing Signs by Cam Scott

Greg Nissan

A Lustful Supplement To Someone Else’s Scripture

Doubled characters, mirrored forms, and incommensurate pairs proliferate in Cam Scott’s wide-ranging The Vanishing Signs, a book of essays on experimental writing emerging in the crises of neoliberalism, surveying a wide array of works from the late 1970s to the present. But doubles are never static twins. They inaugurate dialectical transformations, illuminating what’s discontinuous in aesthetic representations of subjectivity under capitalist social relations. A brief but incomplete index of Scott’s subjects: Robert Glück’s mirrored self in the 15th century religious pilgrim Margery Kempe, whose non-relation to her lover (Jesus Christ) initiates desire; Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk, in which a clerk presides over the poet’s left-hand pages, “where the verso is historical and the poem occasional,” reintroducing experience into the terrain of logistics; Kevin Killian’s celebrity obsessions and pop cultural avatars, which initiate a “literature from below” by tracing the gap between stars and fans; medieval plague and the AIDS crisis, whose homologies reveal not a simple continuity of corporeal ravages, but changing social relations, where HIV outbreaks can be read as “an index of proletarianization”; or the bad double of Canada’s racial imaginary in assigning hybrid identity to Métis people, where “mixing is predicated on the notion of purity” rather than its dissolution, as read through Gail Scott’s The Obituary.

These motifs draw our attention to mediations of subjectivity, using formal or narrative means to elongate perception and de-automize cognition. This phrase comes from the Russian critic Viktor Shklovksy’s Theory of Prose, which Scott invokes in his essays. In sonically buoyant and semantically precise prose, these essays explore how subjectivity factors into a Marxist account of the social totality. What can the “I” in poetry, lonely as a cloud, tell us about the rest of the weather? And how does a novel of bodily passions hold forth on a world beyond the senses?

The Vanishing Signs is itself such a disjunctive whole, culled from discrete works of occasional writing such as book reviews and talks. It walks and wanders, social as a cloud among others. In this sense it is “less architectural than urbanistic” (to nab a phrase from Scott’s essay on Lyn Hejinian), with no blueprints of sedimented literary movements, although readers will find recurring characters and motifs. Among them, an attention to formal experiments in queer literature which extend New Narrative’s focus on “sexuality as textuality”; the theoretical investments of Language poetry, also emerging in the late 1970s; and a host of innovative 21st century works from John Keene and Renee Gladman to Ted Rees and the Worker Writers School.

What binds these essays on literature, visual art, even television and asemic writing? Scott’s critical wit is that he links his particular readings of disparate works to their common backdrop in the crises of neoliberalism. He shapes popular narratives of subjectivity by showing where the body can enter and where it is blocked: from contesting the continuity of an inert queer community throughout history—biologisms like “born this way”—to refuting the homosexual as a paragon of individual freedom in a liberal society, offering “the homosexual as a measure of public space” instead.

In addition to Shklovsky, Scott invokes theories of the novel in the debate between György Lukács and Ernst Bloch. Lukács inveighs against avant-garde literature in favor of a realism that could depict the totality of social relations, like the bourgeois novel. The fragmentary renderings of interior perspective that typify avant-gardes like Surrealism only signal a retreat from reality. Bloch’s rejoinder, in Scott’s precise summary, is that “private consciousness is itself a social map.” These questions of phenomenology and totality loom large in Scott’s essays, reading for the historical contours of subjective experience.

Consider Scott’s reading of Glück’s seminal novel Margery Kempe. Glück animates Margery’s life, and her sexual visitations with Christ, as a mirror to his own torrid love affair. Scott foregrounds some of Glück’s most supple and spilling prose. Glück writes:

I want to be a woman and a man penetrating him, his inner walls rolling around me like satin drenched in hot oil, and I want to be the woman and man he continually fucks. I want to be where total freedom is.

Later Glück connects this doubling to C. Allan Gilbert’s painting All is Vanity:

Getting fucked and masturbated produces an orgasm that can be read two ways, like the painting of a Victorian woman with her sensual hair piled up who gazes into the mirror of her vanity table. Then the same lights and darks reveal a different set of contours: her head becomes one eye, the reflection of her face another eye and her mirror becomes the dome of a grinning skull/woman/skull/woman/skull—I wanted my orgasm to fall between those images. That’s not really a place.

This non-place is sensual but not immediate. Scott doubles the double, placing Glück’s flickering in conversation with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s rabbit-duck illusion, with which Wittgenstein distinguishes “seeing” from “seeing-as.” The latter is a reinterpretation and not a phenomenological absolute—“one simply sees a rabbit,” Scott remarks. He goes on to note that “the grammatical doubling that occurs in cases of ambiguous or multiple interpretations occasions creativity.” Since “seeing-as” is not part of perception, it makes the “world flare selectively.” New Narrative’s signature formal feature is a doubling that Glück names “text-metatext,” presenting a steamy narrative and offering the author’s own critical reflection on it, like handing the reader a sauna towel. If what’s bracketed conditions perception, framing the phenomenological scene without entering into it, text-metatext seems to make this flickering apparent by reinserting the flickering as doubles and mirrors. These stand-ins emphasize mediations of identity, even when you might want to abjure the historical, close your eyes, and bite the pillow hard.

Later, Scott coins his own flickering image in response to Glück: “getting fucked” and “getting fucked-as.” This gesture shows Scott to be a deftly assonant reader, gently mirroring the text at hand, if in a different register. His own description of the novel applies as much to his own work as to a lot of New Narrative writing: “a lustful supplement to someone’s else’s scripture.”

But Scott also knows when to read against the grain of the whole, to find the fracture where a glimpse of totality rushes in. In “Supply Chain Tanka,” an essay on Harryette Mullen, Scott insists that Mullen’s book-length poem, written in the Japanese verse form tanka, resists the accusations of apoliticism leveled at poetry, but “without making a slogan of perception.” Urban Tumbleweed is a peripatetic sequence which reveals the “produce aisle as a kind of garden.” Mullen’s tanka takes the natural (read: historical) world as object in a landscape rife with privatization and racial animus, where freedom of movement applies more to produce than people. Scott detects more reversals and mirrors: “worker bees are ‘technological’ while a helicopter circling overhead is a ‘curious dragonfly.’” A worm in a salad bowl transmits the hidden labor in the leafy greens, the farm as site of production come to spoil the table.

Mullen writes with language that appears in common usage, a familiar tongue which is the product of daily life and its repeated exposures, where language appears as second nature. (We might follow Scott and clarify its seemingly natural appearance with the terms “speaking” and “speaking-as”). So how does the work thematize this toggling, troubling the wandering I’s voice with a map of its modulations? Scott reads for a key a change, attending to a stanza in atypically elevated diction, whose tone approaches Romantic poetry and seems to align with a popular idea of poetic language. Mullen describes the fires of California as a “Blast of hellish breath, infernal scourge.” Scott follows:

The plain speech that typifies Mullen’s tanka is momentarily augmented by conventionally elevated means, as the lines assume an alliterative bounce, while internal rhyme (scourge, scorch) bind the stanza. This sonic abstraction contradicts the purposes of description, at the same time as it mimetically enacts an elemental intensification with the poem’s own language. As powerfully, the next poem proceeds factually, describing the victims of the forest fire with taxonomical specificity.

Scott reads deep into the sonic feedback in Mullen’s stanza, while positioning this lone tanka as both conventional to a Romantic tradition and against the common usage of Mullen’s diction. Despite the stanza’s “conventionally elevated” tone, Scott treats it not as exemplar for the poetic, but as rift in light of the whole. Through this collection Scott prods for prosodic conjunctures, contradictions that reveal the fault lines of the work. A field of perception comes into focus through a shift (here to the Poetic), which coordinates horizons of meaning as a process rather than an epiphanic moment, gathering both plain speech and hot language in the uneven development of Los Angeles. Reading with and against the grain all at once, Scott washes the lettuce of poetic diction without eclipsing its daily muck.

Throughout this collection, Scott’s poetic prose and his delectation of sexual publics are surely anything but an ascetic retreat from the senses. Rather, he frames the selective flares of perception in order to better locate the plane of experience. Since revelation (or revolution) of the world cannot happen all at once, as an image, but in time, as a process, Scott’s essays teach us to read the for the phenomenological fragmentations which are the mark of the social whole. If “nature is a romantic synonym...of totality,” then The Vanishing Signs is an indispensable thesaurus.

#270 – Fall 2022

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