Ordinary
Eternal Machinery, Jeremy Luke Hill
845
Press Chapbooks, 2021
In
1966, Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers was a scandalous flop. Critics
found it confusing and sexually excessive. Robert Fulford called it “the most
revolting book ever written in Canada.” Ultimately, it was the big, wooden
horse of Cohen’s music career that smuggled the novel onto Canadian bookshelves
and eventually, into the comfortable respectability of the Canadian canon. The
fact that the novel succeeded in spite of snobby critics gave it a kind of
street cred you just can’t buy.
Reading the novel for the first time in
2021, I was expecting a genre-thrashing work of counter-culture. Certainly,
Cohen doesn’t disappoint. His prose is endlessly inventive, and his story is
playful and provocative. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but find myself
siding—occasionally—with the snobs. At times, the novel’s postmodern chicanery
seems to be (in the immortal words of Moe Szyslak) “weird for the sake of
weird.” What’s more, while Cohen’s use of bisexual protagonists might centre
marginalized people, his portrayal of Indigenous characters is troubling. And even
though Cohen’s libertine excesses may have anticipated the Summer of Love, the
novel’s sexualization of minors is decidedly ungroovy.
So what do we do with a novel like this?
Do we—to use the latest Orwellian parlance —deselect it? Do we drop it
into the Aegean Sea? Or, do we engage with it, talk about it, and risk becoming
complicit ourselves?
In Ordinary Eternal Machinery,
Jeremy Luke Hill revisits Cohen’s novel to address these difficult questions.
Hill’s chapbook is an unusual discourse: a collection of found poems culled
from the pages of Cohen’s novel, and paired with essays which incorporate
additional analysis by Hill’s “friend, poet, and early reader” John Nyman.
At first, the idea of pulling poetry out
of Cohen’s already lyrical prose seems a bit like making ice cream out of ice
cream cake (Cohen himself cannibalizes an image or two of his own poetry in the
novel). But Ordinary Eternal Machinery is more than just a dance floor
remix. In the essay “Play Therapy,” Hill posits that his found poetry is a
means of processing language that both
impresses and distresses him. He starts “playing with it, copying out passages”
as a kind of physical therapy, a working out of what’s not working for him.
Hill’s essays provide further commentary
on this process. In “Distance and Complicity,” he explores the critical
distance between the novel’s narrative voice and what he calls Cohen’s “most
distressing subjects—incest, child abuse, Indigenous genocide, female
circumcision.” Hill admits, “I distrust this distance. Even as I’m drawn to the
stylistic virtuosity that helps create it.”
John Nyman suggests that Hill’s
fascination with the novel is rooted in “a tradition of privilege: that instead
of being triggering, these problematic things evoke almost the opposite
response.” Nyman keeps Hill honest
throughout the chapbook, and—perhaps most interestingly—allows Hill to reassess
his project within the parameters of the project itself. “How do I understand
the luxury of artistic and critical distance,” Hill asks, “that accrues to me
because of my privileged social location?”
You can’t help but admire Hill’s sincerity
throughout Ordinary Eternal Machinery. The poet exposes his conflicted
love of Cohen’s novel, and allows Nyman to poke at its underbelly. What’s
missing from this exchange, though, are the marginalized voices Cohen co-opts:
the survivors of personal and historical horrors. As it is, this chapbook
represents one kind of privilege interrogating another. Some external oversight
would be welcome.
So, does Hill answer the difficult
questions he poses? Is Beautiful Losers still worthy of its place on
Canadian bookshelves? In a way, Hill, Nyman, and Cohen mirror the novel’s own
love triangle between the narrator, the character ‘F’, and the narrator’s wife,
Edith. One trio is fascinated with a body, the other, a body of work. In the
end, they all allow themselves to believe in a flawed, impossible tale
which—above all else—reveals their stalwart faith in its teller.
Greg Rhyno’s
first novel To Me You Seem Giant was nominated for a ReLit Award and an
Alberta Book Publishing Award. His writing has appeared in a number of journals
including Hobart, Riddle Fence, and Prism International.
He completed an MFA at University of Guelph and lives with his family in
Guelph, Ontario.
