— Used Toys —

The Reader’s Encounter with Postmodernism, in Phyllis Webb’s

“Breaking”

By Patrick McEvoy-Halston
August 2002

When Phyllis Webb writes in “Breaking” “what are we whole or beautiful

or good for but to be absolutely broken,” for some this thought might seem a
highly paradoxical but revelatory definition of the purpose of life. A continual
process of breaking down inherited forms, inherited habits of reading and
writing, and of experiencing life so that one is always aware that no way of
thinking or seeing or living is either “right” or stable, is what postmodernism is
all about, so no surprise, really, that in our age Webb’s thought may be one of
the few articulated that beckons forth more prophets than skeptics. But though
most postmodern writers characterize their writing as if breaking expectations
helps release the imprisoned reader from her chains, some of them understand
that edged tools are a torturer’s instruments, as well as a liberator’s. As we
explore the poetry of several Canadian poets we will anticipate the effects of
attempts to dislocate and disorient the reader as I think Webb would have us,
that is, without an easy assumption that readers need to be rattled in order to
made self-aware. Without care, without an enlarged concern for people that
breeds close attendance to all possible repercussions of dramatic challenges to
readers—who may already be well aware of what disruptions can make of life—
the real toy-box of innovation and opportunities opened up, in potentia, by
postmodern techniques, may be received by an audience that has become, or
already was, too dispirited, too wary, too broken to feel much like playing with
their new toys.
Postmodernism, as it is by Stan Fogel in his review of Linda Hutcheon’s
The Canadian Postmodern, can be defined as the “shocking disruption by
messy things.” All postmodernists intend to disturb conventions, but some
seem more concerned than others regarding whether their paradoxical medicine
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—which hurts in order to heal—works, that is, whether it leaves the patient
reader better off. Phyllis Webb, for example, appears to have a different
understanding of how most of us experience our lives, as well as a greater
respect for our current palliative remedies, than does Erin Mouré. In “Prison
Report,” Webb writes that “tenderness is also / a light and a shock.”
Considering how often she explores suffering, a gesture of tenderness may be a
shock in this poem, as in life, owing to its rarity. In “Love Story” she writes of
an ape that died “‘of shock’.” In “Eschatology of Spring” she speaks of an
“abrupt birth.” She believes that for so many of us, conception to death affords
shock after shock after shock. To Webb (and other Canadian postmodern poets
such as Michael Ondaatje, Jan Zwicky, and Anne Carson) our need for
“mending” (141) is as powerfully felt as is her desire to disturb us. Though she
intends to challenge many conventional ways of representing language, we can
imagine her respecting our desire to cling to old ways, our fear of what will
happen to us should we let go. In contrast, though Mouré believes us in need of
healing, she conceives of our routines as the suffocation of potential (Geddes
492-94)—as all constraint.
Mouré, with her fixed conception of conventions as obstacles, is perhaps
a better representative of a postmodern thinker (or of what a postmodern
thinker is supposed to be like) than Webb is. By choosing to imagine our
familiar routines, our familiar world-view as forced upon us, many
postmodernists attempt to make life uncomfortable for the reader. By
continually frustrating the reader’s attempts to find meaning, by acquainting
the reader with a feeling—true discomfort, frustration—that had been largely
banished from her life, the hope is that the reader may conceive of her previous
ways of apprehending the world as optional, the first step to finding them
wrong-headed, as well.
It is probably misleading to characterize the experience of reading Mouré
as frustrating, though. Frustration is certainly the experience that arises from
reading poetry in which one repeatedly tries to find logical connections where
none exist. And in many of Mouré’s poems (as with “Postmodern Literature,”
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for example), owing to our difficulty and to Mouré’s obvious facility in

discarding all need for thoughts between two periods to have much to do with
one another, reading her poems can indeed be frustrating. However, though
she speaks of wanting to create “momentary slippages” (qtd. in Geddes 493) in
language, and of “unbalancing” our normal expectations “a bit” (494), and
though she thinks that, in sum, an accumulation of these slippages can create a
“[breakage of] usual reading habits” (494) that “opens” us to new ways of seeing
and to being healed, the experience of reading her work may not be that of
encountering moderated, manageable disturbances which eventually
accumulate to effect a dramatic change in the reader. Rather, her poems hit
hard immediately, and lastingly.
Reading “Toxicity,” for example, whatever the “slippages” from
conventions she creates (and there are many) is not so much to experience
frustration as to undergo torture. Line breaks and sentence fragments are well-
named to facilitate our articulation of are experiences with them. But if Mouré
used language that was different from the sort she normally uses, perhaps we
would learn that the impact of her work owes less than we might think to their
structural “play.” The images she evokes, even before they are broken up, are so
often horrifying to encounter. I am thinking of obvious examples such as the
image of the little girl who “pushes a thin / knife” (499) into a horse, or of “the
gun-shot wounds [. . . ] opening” (496), but also of the many times she refers to
countries such Guatemala in “Postmodern Literature,” or Argentina in
“Divergences,” or Nicaragua in “Toxicity,” that so resonate of political violence
and injustice they do not need to be elaborated upon for us to understand: She
may be attempting to thwart our attempts to find meaning in her poems, but we
intuit an overall sense she thinks violence everywhere, and that, with her
critique in her poetry of Chatelaine—a fashion magazine many women still read
— and apparently of hockey—a sport so many of us watch and play—we are
implicated, guilty.
We may respond by becoming like the many patients of psychotherapy
who, despite their resistance, and despite the pain that comes from discarding
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old habits, gradually do become more aware how these same habits closed down
their lives. Or perhaps as the sort of ordinary people who get their news filtered
and packaged by the six-o’clock news, we are already as much aware of how, as
Webb puts it, “death grows and grows in Chile and / Chad” (145) as we are of
pain found closer to home—in us—that our attention begins to turn to and on
the ongoing “bloody / judgement[s]” (145) of poets and other educators who
find little to like in the way we live our lives. As one person who wrote a letter to
the editor of the Globe and Mail (August 24, 1998) suggests, in the end, after
reading and re-reading Mouré’s poetry, rather than experiencing an intellectual
uplift, we may be left feeling as if we have been beaten down by a “serious stick”
—and by someone too self-righteous to be easily imagined as doing it for our
own good.
This letter-writer definitely left reading Mouré wanting more to fight
than to play. But another response to postmodern work that leaves us feeling
disoriented, or, rather, “used,” may be more common. Mouré’s “Grief” includes
something we normally do not encounter in poetry—a notation—but at the end
of the piece, which seems the natural spot to insert it. This example of
modifying convention indeed feels more like a soft slippage than a dramatic
break. But, again, it is important to attend to Mouré’s language. The last words,
“or maybe not,” clearly cast doubt on whatever they are intended to refer to. As
the asterisk they follow is found nowhere else, we intuit that everything in the
poem is being called into question, including the title. A poem titled “Grief,”
then, may not be about grief at all. So paradoxical, so uncertain, so postmodern
—yes. But also so potentially disastrous for poets who want their readers to
approach their poems without their guard up.
If a reader has encountered too many poets akin to Mouré, Michael
Ondaatje might be disappointed with how she reads his “Elizabeth.” All she
would need is the first description of a child at play to know “something bad is
going to happen,” and would be preparing herself as she reads for the something
bad sure to follow. However, if a reader allowed herself to re-create the feelings
and emotions she imagines Elizabeth is experiencing, when she encounters the
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deadly, “When they axed his shoulders and neck,” it is possible she might finish
reading the poem still open to “being broken” by postmodern poetry. Why?
Because we sense with Gary Geddes that Ondaatje, unlike Mouré, “does not
revel in the depiction of violence” (334). Though we may sense an apocalyptic
tone in some of his writing, in “Elizabeth,” by leaving us with Elizabeth as she
has come to prefer “cool [intellectual] entertainments,” we sense we have been
in the company of a writer who not only understands how debilitating pain can
be to our eagerness and willingness to playfully explore our world, but who very,
very much would prefer that all of us had been spared the pain in the first place.
Ondaatje’s work may be understood as both modern and postmodern.
The words of his poems are allowed to create the poem’s form, so he is
postmodern in his respect for, and his valuing of, process. But if evoking the
reader’s emotions rather than involving her intellect is a modernist dictum, then
he is, perhaps, in some ways, “old guard.” Considering my profoundly non-
postmodern suspicion that it is possible to feel whole, that is, integrated and
happy, but that so many of us need help to become this way, my hope is that as
his work soothes as much as shocks, mends as much it messes, he is actually
advance guard of whatever the next literary movement will come to be called.
Many postmodernists would probably think they have failed if people
became “acculturated” to their work. To them, life is “composed” of fragments
that never settle into pattern. We are either made aware, or we will be prey to
greater frustrations than postmodernists would now inflict upon us. So some
poets, including Jan Zwicky and Anne Carson—whose manipulations of
language and expectations often cease to disturb once we are accustomed to the
postmodern sensibility—may be conceived as either weak-blooded
postmoderns, or, as I would prefer to imagine them, as postmodernism’s
spiritual successors.
Zwicky shows that sentences freed “from the tyranny of the left-hand
margin”1 are not only emancipated, but helps give an organic form to poetry.
For example, in “Your Body,” a line begins directly under the last word in the
previous line that began with the same letter (“o”). Makes sense, actually; feels
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both natural and soothing; and therefore questionably a postmodern maneuver.

In “The Glass Essay,” Carson fills her work with sentence fragments, but in a
poem about a deeply traumatized woman. As we intuit that as she gradually
stitches herself together the language she uses will also come across as more
smoothly structured, the apparent equation of fragmentation with trauma might
also upset, or at least trouble some postmodernists.
Then again, Robert Kroetsch, a prominent critic who identifies himself
self-consciously as postmodern, who “hate[s] the word organic” (13) and who
insists “upon discontinuity” (25), also “thinks that to go into pure chaos is to
vanish” (25). Kroetsch resists using the word “organic” because it smacks of
integration, mergers, of “closure,” yet this word comes to mind in the process of
describing what he hopes to help create. To Kroetsch, as with all
postmodernists, the “self is a fragment” (7); but as with many postmodernists
(as with Zwicky and Carson) he also shows a desire, perhaps a longing, for
integration. Perhaps, then, one of the reasons Webb’s “what are we whole . . .
for but to be broken” catches our attention is not because we want to revel in its
paradoxical truth, but because we wonder what it might be like to feel whole. If
true, postmodernists may need to warm up to us before we will open ourselves
up to their strange new kind of entertainments.

Works Cited
Carson, Anne. “The Glass Essay.” 15 Canadian Poets X3. Ed. Gary Geddes.
Toronto: Oxford UP, 2001. 336-37. Print.
Fogel, Stan. “The Shocking Disruption By Messy Things.” Handout. English
453/Q01. Doug Beardsley. Victoria. University of Victoria. 2002. Print.
Geddes, Gary. 15 Canadian Poets X3.
Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary
English–Canadian Fiction. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988. Print.
Kroetsch, Robert. Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch.
Eds. Shirley Neuman and Robert Wilson. Edmonton: NeWest, 1982.
Print.
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McGrenere, Tim. Letter. Globe and Mail [Toronto] 24 August. 1988. Print.
Mouré, Erin. “Divergences.” 15 Canadian Poets X3. 495-96.
- - - . “Miss Chatelaine.” 499.
- - - . “Post-Modern Literature.” 494-95.
- - - . “Toxicity.” 498-99.
Ondaatje, Michael. “Elizabeth.” 15 Canadian Poets X3. 336-37.
Webb, Phyllis. “Eschatology of Spring.” 15 Canadian Poets X3. 144-45.
- - - . “Love Story.” 140-41.
- - - . “Prison Report.” 145-46.
- - - . “Sitting.” 141.
Zwicky, Jan. “Your Body.” 15 Canadian Poets X3. 554-55.
1
I believe I am quoting Robert Kroetsch here (source unknown).