The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

deserve such attention is one of the major
achievements of her study.
A Sourcery for Books 1 and 2 ofbpNichol's
The Martyrology is not simply an Annotated
Index or a Guide, if only because Niechoda
needs to provide a more complete critical
introduction to Nichol's massive "life-long
poem" than the authors of the works on the
Cantos or The Maximus Poems did. Her
introductory essay does a fine job of gathering
a great deal of necessary material in a
small space; it is critically useful without
being too rarefied in its critique.
Pointing to the "polyphonic or communal
nature" of Nichol's varied inherited and
discovered forms, Irene Niechoda points to
how "[h]is interest in pre-print or nonprint
societies stems from their fundamental
integration of language, voice, and the
cosmos, of the poet and society. As The
Martyrology accumulates, its many voices
interplay with each other more complexly,
and its layering of cultural history becomes
denser. It is an amazing collection of dispersals".
Following these comments,
Niechoda turns to Olson and his sense of
"'istorin, of finding out for one's self" as a
clue to what drove Nichol in his search for
valid mythologies and pasts: "The
Martyrology records the process of Nichol's
confronting the responsibility that faces
anyone living on this continent and willing
to acknowledge the fact: that is, composing
one's own tradition".
Niechoda had the distinct advantage of
being able to consult with Nichol during
the writing of the Sourcery, and clearly he
was a willing participant in her labours; she
also had access to all the Nichol papers in
Simon Fraser University's Special
Collections (although it seems clear to me
that she must continue this work with the
later books of The Martyrology, it only further
underlines the loss his death brought
to us to know that she will have to do so
without his generous help). One of the first
ways in which he was able to help her was
in elucidating his extraordinary debt as a
writer and a mythologist to comic strips
and comic books. As Stephen Scobie long
ago pointed out in his discussion of The
Martyrology in What History Teaches, by
the mid-point of the 20th century, a writer
pretty well had to create a mythology rather
than simply writing out of some given one.
As he has pointed out, and as Niechoda
further argues, Nichol absented his long
poem from the obvious mythological base
of Greek mythology, choosing instead "to
investigate non-Mediterranean mythologies,
in an attempt to discover any that
might be more relevant to himself and,
most importantly, would spur him to create
his own". Niechoda's comments on Nichol's
responses to Dick Tracy and the Marvel
comics superheros of the 60s reveal one of
the ways he went about this particular
mythography.
Perhaps even more useful is her archaeological
digging in Nichol's various unpublished
works, especially "The Plunkett
Papers," in which much of the original
mythology of "Cloud-town" as well as the
discovered history of his own family
appears, only to be alluded to in The
Martyrology. Later, in the actual annotations,
she makes stellar use of earlier drafts
of the work to provide helpful background
material on many of its most opaque lines,
always reminding us that to a degree that
opaqueness is what counts, as a sign of how
the poem occurred, how much it signs the
process of its own writing as it creates a
possible narrative about various figures,
sometimes called saints, sometimes parts of
an autobiographical context. I think she
manages to strike the right balance most of
the time, giving us the personal, literary,
mythological backgrounds to specific
aspects of the first two books yet demonstrating,
again partly from NichoPs own
comments, how these are meant to remain
part of the rushing surface of a writing/
written stream. Nevertheless, her explana-