Not only because we had a snow-day cancellation, but also because I feel like I need at least to gesture, even this early in the course, at some kind of contingent, temporarily or partially unifying trajectory for our shared work and for the material you’ll read, I want to keep up, as best I can, a kind of lecturer’s blog where I can flesh out some of the key critical and interpretative points, the talking points, around our weekly texts. Please—students in English 200, at whom these posts are aimed—remember that these are blog entries, and, while they enact some of the critical practices we want to encourage you to take up for yourself, they are not intended as model essays, neither polished or finished.

We began on Wednesday, January 8, with a formal land acknowledgement, and I suggested that one important way to start to think about why this acknowledge might be more than thematically connected to the books and text’s we’re studying—it’s about a relationship to place, for example, as many of the works we’ll be reading, especially works that engage with versions of indigeneity, are—but that it’s also structurally and performatively implicated in our thinking. I referred to the work of the English philosopher of language J. L. Austin, and his lectures on what was to become Speech Act theory, How to Do Things With Words (1955). We didn’t go too far thinking about the complex questions of the cultural politics of land and treaties, but I gestured at a possible basic framework for our course, one that might emerge from considering what Austin called a performative utterance, that is, an aspect of language that involves not so much what it says as how it does things. There are two sense of the concept of the performative here, and they’re often confused, so it’s important to be a bit careful about this. Performance refers to action or enactment (both as kinesiology and as theatre); performativity—a term people often abuse—refers to the capacity of language to act within its own (often porous) bounds, and often enables a kind of reflexivity in language, what the critic J. Hillis Miller would have called “linguistic moments.” Austin called these moments illocutions, “pure” speech acts. The famous example is the marriage vow: saying “I do” occurs only as an utterance, but it enacts a promise and a contract—also types of speech acts—that alters our understanding of people’s identities, obligations, social relationships. Better examples of illocutions might be something like saying “thank you” or “you’re welcome,” which enact almost exactly and only what they say. Someone in the class asked a question about the wedding vow, if it was indeed a “pure” speech act, because it also appears, as a promise, to have ethical and legal implications outside of what appears to be the domain of language as such. It’s arguably a version fo what Austin might call a perlocution, a speaking that calls forth action in or from its worldly context—fair enough, good question. I’m not aiming to take this fairly particular reference to a fairly particular—though critically impactful—philosopher much further, but what I want to notice is that I’m opening up a key tension in all of our thinking around questions of engagement and impact, which are largely pedagogical or learning questions. Our title for the course is “Literary Worlds,” and we want to open up these questions by offering you ways to consider formal and aesthetic aspects of the works we’re reading—what makes them “literary,” for example, works of cultural import—and to think, too, about what Edward Said referred to as the worldliness of such works, how those works move through and beyond the representational or the textual to engage materially and experientially with how we live.

Kathleen Jamie’s “Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead,” a poem composed a little over twenty-five years ago, takes up this question of the worldliness of language—and of the literary and the cultural—in a couple of compelling ways. I’m just going to gesture at some significant elements in the poem, and invite you to consider them further—this might even be a way into your short assignment that’s due Monday night, the critical response. “Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead,” as what Jamie calls a “state-of-the-nation poem,” is a work of salvage and recuperation. It’s posthumous, as the title indicates, and suggests—because of the fortuitous surname of the couple whose household detritus the poet discovers by chance tossed away in a local dump—that the nation (what Benedict Anderson calls the “imagined community”), the place, to which these folks belonged is dead, or at least broken, constituted by garbage. Notice how the poem begins by specifying the location of the dump as geographically posthumous (etymologically, after burial in soil), “beyond the cemetery,” literally a zone beyond life, after death. Cultural memory now consists in a jumble or assemblage of artifacts, things like outdated postcards that Mrs Scotland had saved, many of them detailing special events in Scots culture. Most of these artifacts are language-objects, a book (Dictionary for Mothers), or Mr Scotland’s “joiners” tools with his surname embossed on the handle, to mark ownership, property, durability. All of these words appear to matter to the deceased, to speak to who and what they valued, to who and what they are, or were. But they don’t seem to matter much to the rest of us—their legacy, what endures beyond the limits of the personal, what they leave behind, is also swept away and bulldozed into the soil. There is a kind of ecology here that focuses in on mutability and entropy. “Do we save . . .” these objects, these words, and, by implication the spectres of Mr and Mrs Scotland? Notice the ambiguity of the pronoun here: Jamie doesn’t say I, but we. As readers of this poem we’re engaged in this same practical and existential self-questioning. Is it our task, as fellow travellers with the writer, to salvage meaning from her own repurposing and reiteration of the language-objects she both saves and copies out in her lines? Notice how the formal elements of the poem—the shapes of the stanzas, the variable, often fractured rhythms of the lines that gesture intermittently at both iambic pentameter accentual-syllabic metre and Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse—counterpoint a drive toward order with a continual dismantling and undoing of fixed structure, a coming apart as they’re put together, which the poem itself describes as a “sweeping up” and “turning out.” As a work of literary archeology, digging through national-cultural garbage, “Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead” enacts a poetic relationship to its world that speaks to the purpose of reading and of analysis, at least analysis as a search for contingently durable meaning.

I only have a few points to make at the moment about Jamie’s 2012 lyric essay, “Magpie Moth.” As with the earlier poem, there is a liminal ecology being framed in the text, framed around what we might call her interest in epistemic boundaries, the shorelines of human knowing. The essay maps a human encounter with the non-human, and investigates the limits of our instrumental reason and of (mutual) understanding. “But what do we know?” she asks herself, and us (in what might be a rhetorical or an actual question), near the essay’s unsettling close. As with the poem, her texts interrogate our capacity to comprehend, but offer little of the comprehensive, preferring to remain clear-eyed and unflinchingly baffled. What we come to see, as we try to use our own pens to wrench our clumsy feet from our eyes (and mouths), are the blurry, inapprehensible and absolute edges of our field of vision, of what can ever be seen. Something I didn’t talk about in either the lecture or the subsequent class is an anthropological pattern that appears to inform much literary writing that, like these two texts, is based on journeys into an unknown and unknowable space. I have to say I don’t accept what comes increasingly to me to feel like the deceptive symmetry inherent in this kind of reading, but I want to offer it to you as a base-line against which to think carefully about these texts, along with the Anglo-Saxon poems and Red. That pattern is the quest-romance, or hero’s journey, and it’s a narrative structure and even a modality of language that has pervaded what’s come to be known as Western culture. (Among the may sources for this archetypal patterning, I’d suggest having a look at Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism or at Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough—a late Victorian text in comparative anthropology and mythology—or comparing T. S. Eliot’s imploded epic The Waste Land, which in some ways prefigures—as a kind of monument to a decrepit European patriarchy, Jamie’s nascent eco-feminist writing.) One of the elements of the pattern involves what’s called a katabatic journey, a descent into a waste land or into a perilous underworld—a land of death—where a questing hero is tested, to emerged renewed and enlightened once they have, for instance, slain a dragon or a monster, or somehow purified a space. The journey, while horrifying, is (if successfully negotiated) often tied to healing or to cultural salvage: compare the garbage dump of Jamie’s poem, which constitutes such a waste land, or the misperceived “blank pool” on the moor that appears devoid of recognizable, healthy life, or to be inhabited by fish who aim to kill and consume the hapless moth; Jamie, by the end of the essay, has re-thought her false claim to god-like dominion, as the savior of a moth, and comes to understand herself as one creature among millions—a epistemic shift of scale—that constitute a living hyper-object, an ecology beyond any one creature’s control, each implicated in the many lives going on around them. The apparently deathly waste-land was not, in fact, in need of saving, of remediation, at all.