of sensory shift, even of synesthesia, when one mode of sensory apprehension overlays or replaces another, abound. Some crucial moments occur in the Church when the candles, on various visits, confront Hugh-Andrew-Scott with their roaring. At one point this extends to a total vision: “The sight of their sound was heaven” (246). This is an impossible representation, yet one that Symons will repeatedly endeavour to have his readers experience, sublime failure after sublime failure.
When Symons refers to himself as a “Canadian de langue française” (96), he not only establishes a relation to French Canada that is non-appropriative, respectful of its difference, and respectful of the ground of its attainments, but he cunningly-punningly situates his artistic project at the intersection of two languages and indirectly asserts a cultural entitlement to that Other. In particular Symons will push the boundaries of English to capture the lived consequences, the pull, the feel of quintessentially French structures, particularly reflexive verbs, creating not-quite-correct pronominal structures like “I seat me” or “I write me” or “It sufficed him” (394). The relation between self and world is thereby underlined, rendered slightly strange, heightened or exacerbated; it is part of the opening that Place d’Armes enacts: “I am living me in French, being lived in French,” he exclaims revealingly at one point, yet he is “writing me in English” (285). Much of the singular force of the language in this work derives from this simultaneous existential translation.
Communion
I would say that anyone who sat down with my three books could have no doubts at the end of the three as to what it was I was going through. Anybody could see that I was negotiating my way through a series of secular experiences — of blatantly secular experiences — and trying, through them, to find the spiritual. I was trying to find sacramental reality. And my effort — again this is where I’m not a writer — my effort is not to explain these experiences to the reader, but rather to put the reader through them.13
Symons, through the adventure and the proof of his text, aspires to a quasi-sacramental yet heterodox incarnacy, the Real Presence of Catholic theology passed through very radical modern freedom. He seeks to make revelation of profanation after having made profanation of revelation, in a useful turn of phrase belonging to French poet Michel Deguy.14 “He thought again of the Communion. That was the verity … of Body and Blood. It was inevitable if not yet completely achieved.” (385)
Communion takes many forms in the work, and the economy of ingestion, swallowing, digestion, assimilation, and transformation is operative in everything from lunch dates to fellatio to the close observation of furniture and buildings. “You eat the site till it is inside you, then you are inside it, and your relationship is no longer one of juxtaposition ... but an unending series of internalities. It’s like looking at mirrors in mirrors ... or rather crystal balls in crystal balls. That’s my job now ... to reinsite the world I’ve nearly lost.” (126) The swallower swallowed would not be a bad subtitle for the work as a whole. “Eschew the historic plaques. Eat the building.” (140) In the ecstatic yet dominated orchestration of conclusion, Holy Impasse has become procreative impasse, a substantial transformation, the breakthrough to “4-D,” a swallowing that is a swallowing up, total communion. The swirling, poetic evocations of Day Twenty-Two have been read in strikingly divergent ways by critics, but whatever the dominant images might be, the logics of porosity, vulnerability, penetrability, ingestion, and violability are operating at full capacity by this point:
no longer was there any question of details, of itemization ... all that had gone now ... he was confounded, in utter conjugation with the body of the Church — it was militant in him. He turned — and staggered out ... the Place d’Armes was outrageously alive in him ... (395–96)
Conclusion: “You Hate Them Almost as Much as You Love Them”
There are scenes of Place d’Armes where “the monster from Toronto” — as Robert Fulford called Hugh Anderson (and by extension Scott Symons) in an infamous and damaging review — comes to the surface, notably in the interactions with Rick Appleton, who functions as a scapegoat for sellout, almost an evil twin, the enemy or at least a frère ennemi. One cannot deny or downplay the anger and the spleen in the Anderson-Harrison-Symons complex. But the deep meaning of Place d’Armes is a hating through to love, another reinvention of impasse: “art is love — even an art of hate is love — the optimum of despair — creating despair in hope of hope” (361).
“‘You hate them almost as much as you love them ...’” remarks a perceptive antiques dealer as she observes Hugh Anderson devouring and demolishing the English-Canadian customers passing through her store (116). What terrifies and enrages Anderson is a deadening of sensibility, an increasingly abstract, technified relation to life, a growing corporatization of society, a diminishment of honour in relation to career, increasing greed, creeping amnesia, reduction of potency, smothering of spirituality. Yet Symons the culture critic is always secondary to Symons the joyful participant in life. The efforts of the Combat Journal pay off, in the end. They allow for the transcendence that joy affords and a true sighting of the richness of the fabric of what is given in the literal and allegorical City:
I realize that what has been restored to me these past days is my self-respect. I have gone through Hell for Heaven’s sake ... and found my human dignity. Bless Meighen’s eyes, bless the chalice, bless the Mother Bank and the Great White Elephant and the Flesh Market and the Sphinxes Large and Lesser and the Wedding Cake and the Greyway and the Front and Holyrood. (368–69)
Symons’s text is finally just that, a restoration: last words and blessing for his cherished, unknown readers, a figural return to an inner place that can never be fully grasped but which is always real, immanent in all of life’s moments.The final image of the text, an outstretched finger bursting with life and blood points there.
Place d’Armes is an act and a gift of love. It is a masterpiece in contemporary composer Pierre Boulez’s terms, “something unexpected which has become a necessity.” One that new readers will gratefully receive in this timely new edition.
Selected Biographical Sources
Gibson, Graeme. Eleven Canadian Novelists. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1973.
The Idler. Interviews with editors.“The Decade of the Last Chance,” No. 23, May/June 1989. “Deliquescence in Canada,” No. 36, July/August 1992.
Symons, Scott. “The Long Walk” in Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons. Toronto: Gutter Press, 1998.
____. “Notes Toward a CV by Scott Symons” in Dear Reader:Selected Scott Symons.
____. “Rosedale Ain’t What It Used to Be.” Toronto Life, October 1972.
____. “The Seventh Journey (A Last Letter to Charles Taylor).” Toronto Life, September 1997.
Taylor, Charles. Six Journeys: A Canadian Pattern (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1977).
Selected Critical Sources
Briggs, Peter.“Insite: Place d’Armes.” Canadian Literature, Summer 1977.
Buitenhuis, Peter. Introduction. Place d’Armes (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart paperback edition, 1977).
____. “Scott Symons and the Strange Case of Helmet of Flesh” in The West Coast Review, Vol. 21, No. 4, Spring 1987.
____. “Scott Symons” entry in The
