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Antigonish Review
# 128
| Richard
Cumyn |
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Memory's Mine, Memory's Trap
A Far Time by J.A. Wainwright (Mosaic Press, 2001; softcover, 198 pages; $20.00)
Baroque-a-nova by Kevin Chong (Penguin Books, 2001; softcover, 232 pages; $24.00)
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Will the 1960s ever go away? Not if people like Denny Doherty, Danny Finkleman or the producers of Austin Powers have anything to say about it. The better question could be, Do we want the Sixties to go away? Do we want that loosely-defined period that began with Sgt Pepper and the Monterey Pop Festival and ended with Saturday Night Fever and Dan Hill to sit quietly on the archival shelf of the 20th Century beside the Wright Brothers, Jazz, the Dust Bowl, Hiroshima and the Reagan-Thatcher years? If the "cover" phenomenon in music and fashion is any indication, with former protest songs being adopted by advertisers and the word "retro" sashaying down the runway dressed as a verb, the rich creative vein of Sixties counterculture expression is far from being depleted. Ian and Sylvia and Bob and Joan and Joni (and their agents) must smile every time some kid with a tongue-stud and a pacifier remixes one of their oldies to a driving techno beat. What this says about our ability and desire to look elsewhere for the new-new thing is pretty obvious. Still, given that we can't seem to stop staring at, dreaming about, mythologizing and mining that tumultuous time, can we take what is trapped there in the amber of our collective memory and release the once-living thing? Can it be transformed into art?
Kevin Chong and J.A. Wainwright have harvested the Sixties as raw material for their novels, but with contrasting methods and effects. Chong, born after the period in question, enjoys (and successfully employs) the glorious freedom afforded someone not handcuffed to memory. Thus from the mixed clay of the likes of Buffy Saint Marie and Margaret Trudeau Kemper can he sculpt such a fascinating and enigmatic fictional character as the Canadian folk-singer Helena St. Pierre, who even in death holds the emotional centre of Baroque-a-nova. And by making Helena's son Saul the story's narrator, a brooding high-school senior trying to make sense of her suicide and the times that defined her, Chong grounds his story in the present. The result is a relevant and wickedly sharp satire, a welcome antidote to the overdose of rosy retrospective served up by Those Who Were There.
When a Marxist hip-hop band, Urethra Franklin, records a hit cover of one of his parents' decades-old songs, a voracious media comes barging into Saul's world of soulless suburban sprawl and late-Nineties cultural blending. Given momentary custody of a TV camera during a promotional appearance by the band in a music store, he turns it on Marina, a young woman living with his father. Marina's parody of Much Music VJ babble says as much about our fuzzy sense of Canadian identity as it does about the state of music reportage.
The band we're talking to today goes by the handle 'U' Franklin. U standing for a part of the body that's, you know, down there. Franklin, as in one of our founding fathers. They're responsible for a rilly sweet-assed song called 'Bushmills Threnody.' I don't want to ruin anything for you, but it's, like, total fuck-me music. They didn't write it, or even sing it. These, like, Canadians wrote it and sang it, but 'U' Franklin have made it better, because they put drum machines to it and they rap over it. Anyway, I wouldn't recommend listening to music made before 1996-a lot of it was recorded by people who have now passed away.
Jake, the Canadian protagonist of A Far Time, would probably smile wryly at Marina's satirical riff. We can imagine him shaking his head and saying kindly, "Yes, but you had to be there to rilly appreciate the scene, man." As a young buck just out of school in 1967 he is present at "the old rodeo arena in Monterey" where music history is made. Seeing and hearing Hendrix, The Mamas and the Papas, and Janis Joplin on that stage, he is profoundly changed. His being there and being in love for the first time, we are supposed to believe, are the twin jolts that compel him to write poetry. It's difficult to be convinced of the transforming power of the experience, however, when the description of the concert reads like something gleaned from an album cover or the pages of a fanzine.
She came on with Big Brother and the Holding Company on Saturday afternoon, when half the crowd was sleeping off the night before, and launched into Ball and Chain. Everybody ducked. Mama Cass stared up at Janis Joplin from the front row, her eyes popping with wonder, her mouth breathing life into the stone-dead hippie term, "Wow!" He and Karen were farther back, but knew what they were seeing and hearing was original. There were no words that could say it any better than Cass's lone monosyllable of praise.
Well, in fact there are better words, sustained descriptions that might have taken us into the pump and grit of that remarkable performance. At least, you might argue, it establishes the "scene," even if it states the obvious. If there are minor annoyances in this novel, they are these cursory references to popular culture. The effect is like glimpsing a flash of the cover of Life before being hustled to the next destination. In an easy, journalistic way the story flows from London, England, where Jake falls in love with Karen, to California, her home state, to Toronto, where he begins graduate work, and to the Spanish island of Ibiza, where he settles in to begin the hard work of writing poetry. Only Karen's letters, describing her life, travel and involvement in political causes, come close to capturing the excitement of the times, and these are too few. After an anti-war protest on the steps of the Pentagon she writes:
We left about 1.00 a.m. when the cops started arresting our section piecemeal. If they had rushed or gassed us, we'd have stayed, but it seemed the point had been made, and all that was happening were more arrests and unnecessary violence at the front line. I'm supposed to write an article about it, but don't know if I can.
When Jake gets to Ibiza, the narrative shifts to a fuller, funnier, more
mature perspective. With solitude, purpose and time to reflect, he begins
to see his love for Karen for what it is: the idealist's ache, the perfect
kiss, fleeting, frozen in time and continually relived in the memory of
an impetuous leap they took together off a towering rock at Cape Mendocino.
In contrast, surrounding him on the Balearic island are richly comic characters:
Russell, a Blackfoot Indian painter; Richard Penumbra, a conceited producer
of spaghetti westerns; and Elly, Jake's ex-pat American landlord who looks
and acts like "a conquistadore descendant repossessing her homeland."
Only after he has had a spill or two, physical and emotional, in this rarefied
community, is he ready for the next stage in his life, an adult relationship
with Sarah, someone he had once adored from a distance in high school.
If the growth of the artist in A Far Time
is the classic Bildungsroman movement from youthful sensation and
sentimentality in all its forms of excess to the more realistic acceptance
of life's limits and contradictions, the same is true in Baroque-a-nova.
As Saul learns about his mother and about the pressures that made her
flee her marriage, the music business and the continent, he becomes less
flippant, more accepting of the people in his life. He looks at himself
with a more harshly critical eye. He admits to himself that he had only
pretended to love his girlfriend, Rose, in order to sleep with her, and
when he suspects that she has had an abortion, the cold fact of his cruelty
is a sobering agent. He sees he has been a jaded, irresponsible outsider,
moving between his stepmother's house and his father's like a casual guest.
After Helena's funeral, Saul takes the North American equivalent
of the Aborigines' walkabout, a solo drive around the continent, and for
the first time in his life longs for home. In the end he is capable of
deep feeling; we don't have to worry about him anymore.
Meanwhile Jake's attempt to capture Karen, his Beatrice, in fiction is stillborn:
Suddenly his novel seemed a potential grave for memory, a crypt for everything that had brought him here, winding his way from Big Sur to Montreal to Ibiza and Lesbos and back to Montreal and California again. Karen had been a crucial part of that journey…. Was he burying her in fiction…?
This passage, too conspicuously self-conscious to ignore, made me wonder whether Wainwright is warning other novelists against the potential trap posed by memory or confessing to the same impediment to creativity that plagued his hero.
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