What happens when there are (as there frequently are, and as the etymology of “amanuensis” suggests) inequities in the relationship? Foucault notes that all relationships are on some level agonistic – there are always imbalances of power, and there are always struggles, even between the best of friends.
In the descriptions of the Toronto Research Group’s composition process, for example, Nichol and McCaffery always use “enunciator” instead of “dictator,” as if to cosmeticize the inevitability of the power relations that course through their texts. Further, both are straight white men of the same income bracket; gender, class and race, major factors in the description of power relations in the scene of dictation, are not issues here. Nevertheless, at least one of their own texts, the fumetto (photo-comic) “Nary-A-Tiff,” in Rational Geomancy, which deals explicitly with questions of voice and influence, dramatizing the high stakes that accompany the question of who speaks, even under idealized circumstances, and, despite the claims of Rational Geomancy’s “Introduction.”
In the comic, which opens with both poets digging through the library “[i]n the palatial offices of The Toronto Research Group,” [All text in the comic is in capitals] McCaffery quotes a text to Nichol, whose author (Beaumont and Fletcher – a dual author-function, like the TRG itself) “anticipate De Sade.” Nichol initially accuses McCaffery of “justifying moral weakness as ‘excess,’” but after physically attacking McCaffery, he delivers his ultimate accusation: “All you do is plagiarize the French anyway!!” Though Nichol does not articulate a preferential influence of his own, Peter Jaeger writes in his discussion of “Nary-A-Tiff” in The ABC of Reading TRG, his study on the TRG, that “Nichol desires a transcendental figure (the ‘father’ and ‘Lord’ of The Martyrology) who negotiates with but ultimately upholds the inverse of McCaffery’s critique of conventional morality.” McCaffery proceeds to stab Nichol in the heart with a letter opener, disposes of the body and returns to his research … but the comic concludes with a shot of a ghostly Nichol staring in the window, presumably contemplating revenge on the blissfully unaware McCaffery.
Thematically, the text’s concern is with questions of literary influence: not only their moral and philosophical validity, but also the correct manner to incorporate those influences in one’s own writing. From the perspective of the Nichol of “Nary-A-Tiff,” McCaffery, under the metaphorical lash of Fletcher, Beaumont and De Sade, exhibits too much fidelity to his personal dictatorial voices, and slides over the blurry line that divides precise citation from plagiarism.
On the meta-narrative level, “Nary-A-Tiff” is a sophisticated dramatiza-tion of the complexities of dictation. When Nichol, who is, after all, at least sometimes another of McCaffery’s dictating voices, articulates a differing philosophical viewpoint from McCaffery’s continental dictators, “Narry-A-Tiff” paradoxically reifies the influence of McCaffery’s dictators by staging a violent narrative pantomime à la Sade. But even though the Nichol character is murdered, the text still cannot be rid of his influence, which asserts its vengeful presence in the very last pane of the cartoon, staring in through another (window)pane in a manner that evokes one of Nichol’s own comic strips, full of Byzantine arrays of nested frames. [bpNichol Comics] And outside of the work, at the scene of production, the two men are busy literally putting words in each others’ mouths as they paste word balloons down onto the photographs. Outside of such fleeting moments of elementary school-style craft production, though, typewritten dictation is rarely simple, and it is never innocent.
Darren Wershler-Henry / Technologies of Dictation: Typewriting and the Toronto Research Group
other islands in this text-fed stream
