only happen after the recognition of this unity and it brings all of those presences together. We might even say that it is precisely that multiplicity, that “host” that is held together, allegorically elevated and held up in monstrance at the centre of La Place in the closing orchestrations of the novel.
Two other points concerning the originality of the book are worth mentioning for readers just discovering Symons. First, Place d’Armes is part of a three-book sequence, a trilogy. In Place d’Armes, Hugh Anderson remarks upon the necessity of a diptych, a Tale of Two Cities. Civic Square, the Toronto novel, the book-in-a-box, hundreds of unbound pages in a mock-Birks gift box, was to follow in 1969. But the diptych, too, required fleshing out, more Body and Blood, another spatio-temporal or conceptual dimension in Symons’s constant quest for enriched dimensionality, an enhanced spaciosity that the language and atmosphere of the mid-1960s allowed him to call “4-D.” Heritage:A Romantic Look at Canadian Furniture (1970), the third installment in the trilogy, seems like a coffee table book, a connoisseur’s treatise, un beau livre. But it, too, practises genre-bending. Symons does not so much describe the works of early Canadian furniture-makers as intersect lovingly with their histories, their lives, their characters. It is really a furniture novel, as Irving Layton is reported to have remarked.
The status of the three books themselves as objects has also been much discussed by observers and admirers. Place d’Armes was published in hardback in a format that reflected the nineteenth-century journal used by Anderson in the story, including jacket pockets containing marked-up maps, postcards, et cetera. There is a page at the end that is simply the reproduction of a notebook page with phone numbers, appointments, notes, and lists. Stan Bevington of Coach House Press designed the book and contributed immensely to its originality. In Nik Sheehan’s film, God’s Fool, Bevington reminisces about reading Symons’s manuscript (delivered by his wife) and making a trip to Montreal to reconnoitre the routes of the narrator. “When I came back it was really clear that we had to put in objects, that we had to make the book an object, as discussed in the story. We had to make an object that was hard, not floppy. Through discussions with the production people at M&S there kept being obstacles so I said, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’” And do it he did, earning a later compliment from the ultra-demanding Symons: “Stan still thinks at fingertips.” All of this contributes to blurring the distinction between the finished volume and the process and the means of its writing and its material form. For Symons it cannot be a matter of polished, achieved, closed fiction, something has really happened to someone and something should happen to the reader. Equally, something has come into the world in that exercise of creativity and life affirmation.And that thing is no dead, remote object, but something to be touched, to be held.
It is difficult to disagree with Peter Buitenhuis’s assessment in his introduction to the 1978 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
