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 information age–capitalism. Symons has an undoubted, instinctive respect for institutions but abhors what large corporate structures, be they private, like the “Mommy Bank,” or public, like the federal civil service, can do to a person’s openness to life. As he puts it in his brief biography at the end of the volume: “Status: A Para-Canadian, released from any allegiance to the Canadian State but obsessively devoted to the Canadian nation.” He is concerned with the “man,” the human being and the human consequences of accepting such restrictive modes of consciousness and expression, the effects of surrender to the “world of memo” and “mere competence.”
It is surely no accident that the “novel” begins with a flat imitation of a tourist blurb about historic Place d’Armes. Symons’s initial narrator, Hugh Anderson, is appalled at the ease with which he is able to produce this competent but empty approach to La Place. The false distance that it implies is precisely that reduction of the human to an alienated consumer, of a culture to its merely cultural effects, a reduction that Symons will combat in this book and in all of his published and unpublished work. He knows that the risk of failure is high, as is that of ridicule, but he must try.
“Que veux-tu? It’s my last chance ... my own people have put our cultures into national committee. They have deliberately killed any danger of a positive personal response.” (100)
The resistance of the “demissionary” is precisely the existential affirmation of a positive personal response.
Twenty-five years after the resignation from Toronto respectability, the démission that became a life mission, Symons recalled the choice in these terms:
The choice risked my life because it risked my sanity. I knew that this was where one had to move, to open the doors to male sentience. T.S. Eliot said that if he hadn’t pursued the path he did — a very dry life — he would have gone in the direction of Durrell’s Black Book. I’d read that before I jumped. At the same time, women’s lib was just beginning to explode. I couldn’t go to another woman because I already had the woman of my choice. I have always found it odd that I am considered the black wolf of CanLit. I’m a very conservative guy who went to Easter Mass at Saint Thomas’s. I’m a quiet person and in many ways timid. I was brought up with a deep sense of civic participation and commitment.12
Defence and Illustration
Place d’Armes and all of Symons’s published work seeks a language adequate to the kind of heightened experience upon which he gambles all. Symons’s language is enlivening, empassioning, neologizing, inventive, sensitive to the evolution of English, forward-looking in its assumed heritage of the freedom of the modern avant-gardes, but rooted in place and in history, and, of supreme importance, in a constant rapport of translation with its nearest other, French.
Some of the strategies utilized by Symons include alliterative punning (e.g., “the Nicean niceties”); discombobulating prefixes (e.g., impatriate for expatriate); transforming proper names into verbs (e.g., he Michelangeled me); the development of new compound nouns frequently to describe the kind of radical sensorial/emotive/conceptual shifts he intuits (e.g., umbilink, cocktit, assoul, manscape); the development of signifying and significant identity abbreviations that can be reused in the novel (e.g., ECM, Emancipated Canadian Methodist).
Aural punning on homonyms is also a favourite tactic of Scott Symons who frequently underlines the difference (or differance) of writing and orality. Phallacy is one particularly nice find, pointing as it does to a critique of phallocentrism in a writer sometimes accused of “hypervirility” or even “misogyny.” For Symons the male sexual organ is at the centre of the “perceptor set” joining self and world, but it is always, like so much else in this work, set off, relativized, in relation to inner, spiritual connections. And to the truths of language speaking itself. Phallacy argues gently against the risks of the narrowly phallic, the too-literally male, the vainly cock-focused.
Carnal joy, joy incarnate, then isn’t joy made by carnal manipulation, by mere phallacy ... it is a rejoicing at the world I already know ... it is quite simply the perception of that world, at any moment, eternally. Eternity intersects time at the moment, that ...; the moment that you see — really see. And makejoy is killjoy. Phallicity is fallen ... (267)
At times such punning, neologizing play might seem emptily clever, willfully mechanical or forced, but as Elspeth Cameron has pointed out, “The word play in Place d’Armes … is not mere sophistry. As in Joyce, it is part of the breakdown of fixed forms which recreates the cosmic flux of experience.” The moments of maximal linguistic extension and uninhibited inventivity occur at points when the Communion vision, the slipping into 4-D, seems to be at hand (though we must note that the final experience of the work is that of ellipsis, the spent and holy silence of the blank page).
