To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
share an attitude toward logos, what is said,
that stands them in opposition to deconstructive
modes of thought and analysis
(although I would suspect that a closer
reading of Derrida on Heidegger might
cause her to differentiate his work more
carefully from that of his followers; nonetheless,
she does argue forcefully that her two
thinkers are defiantly unnihilistic in their
approach to the potentials of human language).
As these quick glances at her argument
suggest, Halden-Sullivan's The Topology
of Being crams a lot into its 150 or so pages.
What she does, in both her use of Heidegger's
thought and her critiques of the limitations
of some of Olson's interpreters, is provide a
thoughtful background to a renewed reading
of Olson's many writings. Demonstrating
that they 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
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