ABC of Reading TRG by Peter Jaeger

ESC 28, 2002 passionate and eloquent writers. One stylistic earmark I noted as I proceeded through the text was Knutson’s preference for the term “rapport” over more intuitive and mundane terms like “relationship” and “connection.” It is a lovely choice, as it func­ tions in both of the languages under discussion, signifies some­ thing more indissoluble than a “relationship” between terms, and, thus, performs rhetorically the kind of challenge to binary schemata at work in her narratological analysis. In the end I am left with a sense of keen rapport among Knutson, Marlatt, and Brossard. W O R K S C IT E D B u tle r, Judith . B od ies That M a tter. N ew Y ork : R ou tled ge, 1 993. K n u tso n , S usan. “R ead in g N icole B rossard .” ellipse 53 (1 9 9 5 ): 9 -2 1 . S U S A N L. H O L B R O O K / U n iversity o f W in d sor Peter Jaeger. A B C of Reading TRG. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1999. 137. $19.95 paper. The experimental essays and prose works of the Toronto Re­ search Group (TRG), as poets Steve McCaffery and bpNichol once called themselves, cover a nine-year period of collabora­ tive reading and writing and were originally published serially in Open Letter. Introducing Rational Geomancy: The Collected Research Reports of the Toronto Research Group 1973-1982 (1992), McCaffery explains that he and Nichol met in 1969 and “both realized that we had been starved for critical response and discussion of poetics, theories and forms” (9). The result was a sustained investigation of the reader-writer relationship, the poetics of translation, and the non-narrative possibilities of prose writing percolated through readings in the early 1970s that included Edmund Jabes, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan. Another aim of the TRG experiments was to “stretch the formal parameters of the expository essay,” Mc­ Caffery says (Rational 10), and this is a project that Peter Jaeger shares in his A B C of Reading TRG. Although Nichol and McCaffery have both received critical attention individu­ ally, Jaeger’s A B C is the first book-length study to focus on 322 REVIEWS the collaborative projects of these poets, and it is at once an exegesis, a critique, and a poetic performance. The A B C of Jaeger’s title refers to Nichol’s penchant for language play at the level of the letter, and to McCaffery’s interest in the materiality of the signifier, but it also liter­ ally names the organization of the book. Jaeger does not at­ tempt to sustain a thesis or even a consistent thematic line of inquiry; rather, he juxtaposes, in alphabetical order, twentysix brief sections of three to eight pages on a variety of topor. the first is titled “Alphabet,” the second “Book-Machine,” the third “Canadada Concrete,” the fourth “Derrida,” and so on through to “Zarathrustran ’Pataphysics.” This alphabetical for­ mat encourages discontinuous reading, and, in fact, Jaeger in­ vites readers to skip around at will or to follow various topics through with the help of superscripted letters. In “Canadada Concrete,” for instance, the letters “EE” in the phrase “McCaf­ fery’s projectEE” refer the reader to the section titled “Excess Expenditure” and a Kristevan discussion of McCaffery’s “un­ ruly libidinal economy” (A B C 38). Jaeger’s method suggests that he shares with the TRG a “lasting belief in the provisionality of thoughts” (Rational 13), and while this postmodern stance shows in the non-sequential structure of A B C , it most tellingly informs Jaeger’s use of in­ compatible theoretical frames. In an introductory section called “Operating Instructions” — a reference to the TRG’s insistence that the book be understood as a “machine,” or distinctive form of technology, rather than a transparent medium— Jaeger writes that he wants to read the TRG reports “ ‘against the grain’ ” in order to “uncover the unconscious links among re­ pressed affective and political elements that circulate through­ out their writing” (7). For this component of his discussion, Jaeger calls on Jacques Lacan, Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Zizek...

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