To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
will, from the "true path"). But slight as it
is, it remains a complex, divided, and disturbing
text.
Nichol's Preface and Libretto take up the
first 50 pages of the book; the remaining
250 are devoted to Howard Gerhard's score.
I do not have the musical competence to
pass judgment on it as music, though I long
to hear it; but I think that Nichol himself
would have been amused by the dilemma
of non-musically-literate "readers" faced by
this massive piece of visual semiotics.
Perhaps one could regard it as an extended
concrete poem: an example of graphic
notation which is both beautiful and mute;
the voice in the silence of the page, singing.
Or else the score is a "Probable System,"
of the kind included, among many other
exploratory pieces, in Truth: a book of fictions.
The "Probable Systems" are farfetched
ideas (a re-written alphabet; a
reading of the letters which maps show
appearing on the surface of Manitoba),
expounded and developed with a fanatical
thoroughness which turns them into parodies
of academic discourse, often as
"unreadable" as a 250-page musical score.
One delights in their ingenuity, and in the
insane persistence with which Nichol works
out every extension and permutation.
These pieces are in some sense "conceptual,"
yet the delicious point of the jokes
lies in the literalness with which they are
worked out on the page.
Truth: a book of fictions is another product
of the inspired and devoted editing of
Irene Niechoda, whose work on the great
mass of Nichol's posthumous manuscripts
has already proved of incalculable value to
students and lovers of his work. In assembling
this volume from Nichol's incomplete
notes and folders, Niechoda has been
guided by the ideas of "pataphysics which
Nichol and Steve McCaffery developed, as a
probable system, out of Alfred Jarry; she
also takes as the "prime concerns" of the
collection "the iconicity of the page, the
mechanics of the book, and the fictions of
writing & reading."
Again, the point of the wit lies in its literal
realisation, as when a section called
"Unsigned" actually consists of six blank
(but numbered) pages. I am reminded of
Erik Satie's piano piece "Vexations," which
he declared ought to be played 840 times in
succession. When John Cage actually did
this (in 1963), some critics claimed that
such a literal realisation of the instruction
was a naive and clumsy trampling of Satie's
delicate, whimsical, and purely conceptual
wit. I disagree: I think that Cage's performance
is much funnier than Satie's concept;
and it is the same humour that I find
in many of Nichol's pieces gathered here.
As always, they are a delight: explorations
at the edge of writing, at the limits of language—in
that area of border-blur where
Nichol found, not one true path, but many.
Studies of the Majors
Judith Halden-Sullivan
The Topology of Being: The Poetics of Charles
Olson. Peter Lang n.p.
Irene Niechoda
A Sourccry for Books I and 2 ofbpNichol'sThe
Martyrology. ECW Press $25.00
Reviewed by Douglas Barbour
Among the many things these two books
do, they demonstrate how far along Olson
studies have moved in the past couple of
decades and how far Nichol studies have to
go; but each, in its own way, testifies to the
importance of the 'marginal' writer whose
work it explores. Although he is still not
really accepted among the Ivy League critics
like Helen Vendler (which only goes to show
how out of touch with modern American
poetic experimentation such critics are),
Charles Olson is well recognized as the
major innovator he was by many of the most
interesting poets and critics writing today,
as a glimpse at the Bibliography of Judith
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