Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (23 page)

A Political Reading

So if the Psychological Reading is too private and personal, and leaves out significant aspects of the novel, what do I think are the important ingredients in my Political Reading? In 1962 Canada had a national election. The governing Conservative party under John Diefenbaker had quickly become unpopular. The newly-elected John F. Kennedy in the USA was getting all the trendy headlines. Kennedy sent campaign help to the opposition Liberal party, led by Lester Pearson. The Liberals, whose policies were friendlier to the Americans, won the election. George Grant responded in 1965 with a book,
Lament for a Nation
, that turned the country on its head. He argued that John Diefenbaker was the last of the nationalist Canadian leaders, and that the recent election marked the end of an independent Canada. The Liberals had accepted what he called the continental model of development. In future, Canada would not build its own railway line from East to West, and strive to control its own economy. It would seek deeper and deeper integration with the American economy. The Canadian project of building a separate nation on the northern half of the continent was finished. Grant wrote about what Canadians were losing. I think that Canadians are also Cohen’s losers.

My reading of
Beautiful Losers
must now be becoming clearer. It is not a portrayal of Cohen’s psychology as much as it is a portrayal of his city and his country. That is why Catherine’s conversion by French Jesuits is so important, that is why F. is French. Let me say more about each of the main losers, and how they represent aspects of Canada in the 1960s.

The nation of Canada begins, of course, with its original inhabitants, and with their confrontation with Europeans. The first major confrontation was between the French and the Indians (as they were called by Europeans who thought that in sailing west they were on their way to India). Catherine Tekakwitha was a girl of the Mohawk First Nation. When she was four, she and her whole village contracted the European
scourge, smallpox. Catherine’s body was weakened by the illness, she was partially blinded and her face was disfigured. She was also orphaned when the rest of her family all died of the disease.

A Jesuit missionary, Père de Lamberville, came to her tribe when she was eighteen, and impressed her with the stories about both Jesus’s love and his suffering. She began to try to suffer as he had, and undertook acts of great self-denial, self-punishment, and self-mutilation. The missionaries warned her that she was taking these signs of penance too far, but she persisted. She vowed to remain a virgin forever. She prayed for hours in freezing temperatures. She whipped herself. She lay on a bed of thorns. She refused most food. So she died, weakened by her religious practices, at the age of twenty-four (in 1680). But she had had visions. She had wandered the forests placing small wooden crosses as reminders of prayer and penance. Others had visitations from her after her death. Miracles were performed in her name. The Roman Catholic Church had declared her venerable in 1943, but she was not made an official Saint until 2012, long after Cohen’s novel demanded her “official beatification” (p. 242).

We see here the story of a Native North American child whose life was devastated first by the disease and then by the religion of the invading Europeans. Much of the novel’s obscenity, the blood and pain, the flesh and sex, begins in Cohen’s honesty about Catherine’s life. “I have come to rescue you from the Jesuits,” his Historian announces. But the novel ends with her still in their hands. Catherine represents Canada’s Aboriginal people, who were losers in their confrontation with European invaders.

The Historian confesses already on the second page that he suffers from constipation. It helps to think of his constipation as his essence. He is cramped, inhibited, full of anguish and regret. I think he typifies English Canadians, inhibited by rules for being good, and rules for being rational. F. is indeed his opposite, and Catherine’s opposite, too. He is sensuous, lively, witty, and elegant. He is also successful as a businessman; at one point he pays a million dollars for a
factory. Later he becomes a Member of the national Parliament in Ottawa. Some readers thought at the time that F. was modeled on Pierre Trudeau (who became a Member of Parliament in 1965, and became Prime Minister in 1968). He even drove a Mercedes convertible like Trudeau, and like Trudeau he brought glamour and passion to the project of dragging English Canada into a new era. But the comparison fades away; F. fails in his mission, and he dies in an asylum, apparently of a sexually-transmitted disease.

The fourth main loser is Edith, a reincarnation of Catherine. She had a hard childhood, and was raped at thirteen. We learn that life with her husband, the Historian, gets less and less interesting for her. She and F. conspire to save the Historian from himself. But if she represents contemporary Aboriginals, she too fails to save English Canada from its dismal fate. Notice too that Mary Voolnd, who becomes important as F.’s nurse in his final days, is from Nova Scotia (p. 150). I see no reason for this detail except that it helps to establish that the book is about the whole country.

These episodes underline the central metaphor: Canadians are constipated and have trouble reaching orgasm. The Quiet Revolution Francophones have tried to show them a better way. But despite F.’s example and tireless efforts, Edith and the Historian continue to be mired in frustration. We have a standoff. None of them succeeds. All are losers.

My point is twofold. First, the four Beautiful Losers are not just aspects of the author’s consciousness. Second, one of its obvious aspects is that the four characters include a representative of the situation when the Europeans arrived, and three contemporaries who represent the three founding peoples of the nation of Canada: Aboriginals, French, and English.
Beautiful Losers
is all about Canada on the eve of the 1967 centennial of its founding.

At this point, you may be feeling the need for a more sophisticated argument concerning the idea that there is one interpretation of a novel that can be defended as the best one. One argument that still holds its own was given in 1968 by Anthony Savile to the distinguished Aristotelian Society
in London, England. Savile presents in that paper an account of best explanation in aesthetics. The search for the best interpretation is another way to describe my project. T.S. Eliot called it “the common pursuit of true judgement.” Savile argues that the correct reading of a work of art is the one that accounts for the greatest number of relevant features of the work, while being as simple and unitary and appropriate as any competing readings. This is what my reading of
Beautiful Losers
aspires to do.

A Sexual Reading

My Political Reading is not the only one left standing. There are other contenders to deal with. Since sex and religion go so closely together, let me introduce a sexual reading by offering a religious reading. You can see a resurrection story in
Beautiful Losers
. All the main characters die in Books One and Two. In Book Three those losers all reappear, transformed. Cohen himself called the book “a liturgy . . . a great mad confessional prayer” (as quoted by Ondaatje in
Leonard Cohen
, p. 44). Douglas Barbour outlines this reading in his penetrating essay, “Down with History.” He discusses the metaphysics of time, showing the contrast between the Historian’s sense of time and F.’s—who defies the limits imposed by history by trying to live wholly in the present. And he finds deliberate confusion in the chronology of the novel which reflects this religious dimension.

Another aspect of this reading is the way systematic thinking is attacked. The Historian is trying desperately to be rational. F., in contrast, tries to teach him to “connect nothing” (p. 16). Religions often insist that direct experience and faith are to be preferred over reason. In a telling symbol, the System Theatre is a movie theatre in Montréal where several scenes take place. But the “Sy” letters are broken, so that the neon sign says “stem Theatre” (p. 221). Stephen Scobie makes insightful remarks about this rejection of rigid, systematic thinking in favor of the organic pattern of a stem. And F. proclaims in his letter: “God is alive. Magic is afoot” (p. 157). But let me move on to sex.

William Blake suggests the following connection between religion and sexuality: “Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds / And binding with briars my joys and desires” (“The Garden of Love”). This is what happens to Catherine Tekakwitha when she meets the Jesuits. I see the sexual metaphor that dominates the novel this way. European colonizers convince Catherine to embrace the briars, and she chooses virginity and self-flagellation. The Historian also has trouble having sex with his wife, Edith. He is usually too preoccupied with his research to respond to her love. And in a wonderful scene at a Separatist political rally, he is excited by a woman who presses into him in the crowd, but is distraught in the end: “I didn’t come. I failed again” (p. 123). And Edith, in turn, is deeply frustrated.

Their friend F. tries to help them. He has sex with both Edith and the Historian, and with almost everything else that moves. He embodies liberation from the hang-ups of his friends, and, in contrast to Catherine, seeks sainthood through self-indulgence rather than self-denial. The climax of this story, if you will pardon the word, is a great orgy scene in which F. introduces a tireless Danish Vibrator in his attempt to bring Edith to orgasm (pp. 164–83). But he, too, ultimately fails. Edith commits suicide in order to teach her husband that the living are more important than the dead. Yet her husband remains a constipated and dirty-minded old man. The unexpected liberation comes at last in Book Three, to which I shall return.

The Religious Reading and Sexual Reading of the novel are mostly symbolic. It is not a pornographic novel; the point of all the sex is to serve as a metaphor for a more general liberation or salvation. So we must ask the question, who are the people to be liberated? And this brings me back to my Political Reading—for the four main characters represent Canada.

When I try to remember what I loved about this novel when I first read it, I realize that I thought of it as a kind of
Lament for a Nation
. The Canada that I had grown up in, that had been the territory of my political imagination, was
being deconstructed. However, while Grant was lamenting the loss of something he treasured, Cohen is dreaming of a radical transformation of the country.

There are commentators who vigorously disagree with my reading. Scobie is one example:

It is certainly possible to read the whole of
Beautiful Losers
as a political work, and to argue that the personal victimization of the central characters can be read as an allegory of Canadian society. But I am not sure that the tone of the book allows this interpretation to be primary; the tone is obsessively personal, and politics are absorbed into private vision. (
Leonard Cohen,
p. 113)

To this I reply: however private the vision, it is still Cohen’s vision of Canadian society, its main founding peoples, its persistent character, its problems, and their potential resolution. These are the subject matter around which the nightmares of self-destruction and the pornographic allegory of desperately striving for orgasm are woven. So I maintain that this interpretation, although it may not be the first one you’d think of, is a fundamental one. It is the necessary framework for a “best reading” of the book.

The Future of Canada

The novel ends with a short third section. This is a test case for my account. What sense can we make of Book Three, a short epilogue written in the third person? The constipated and filthy Anglophone Historian from Book One has been living in a tree hut through the winter. The other founding people are dead, and there is not much left of him. Then “Spring comes from the West.” He stands by a road, trying to hitch a ride into Montréal. In what seems to me a key image, a blonde young woman in an Oldsmobile stops to pick him up (p. 234). Remember, he was trying to save Catherine Tekakwitha from the Jesuits. He wanted to make her not just a dead virgin saint, but a living object of passion. Well, it seems to me that the blonde may be Catherine updated,
or Catherine’s successor. She is wearing moccasins. And the old Historian can see how far up they are laced. She drops him off at the System Theatre (p. 235), where he blinks in time with the frames of the film, so that both the film and he become invisible.

I read the beautiful, uninhibited, sexually demanding woman in the Oldsmobile as Joni Mitchell, but that’s my fantasy. Spring, new life, has arrived. She says “ισισ εγω,” which means “I am Isis.” Isis is an Ancient Egyptian goddess of fertility. Isis has a great many other attributes, as well, but virginity and self-punishment are not among them. She is Catherine transformed, she is the spring, she is the future. She is not self-denying, not virginal, not “hung-up.” She eagerly demands an orgasm from her passenger. Canada after Expo 67 will be a different place. Montréal will be a different city. And those who live on will be very different people. They will not be candidates for martyrdom or sainthood. They will not be trapped by their own history and their inhibitions. Catherine will be completely transformed. Perhaps that will be the final miracle, her sainthood achieved.

The old man now goes into The Main Shooting and Game Alley (the bottom of Montréal’s desire apparatus, as Cohen puts it). A mob forms to attack the old man. And what does he do? First he turns into a combination of F. (“the Terrorist Leader that escaped tonight”) and the Historian (“the pervert they showed on TV they’re combing the country for”) (p. 239). And then
he dematerializes
. For the first time in his life he relaxes totally. And he simply disappears. Mobs of ordinary Montréalers assemble. They are seeking a revolution, a second chance, a new future. Cohen does not tell us what will happen next. Perhaps the old man rematerializes as the lens of a movie projector and shows a vision of what may come. But we know that the old Canada is past. The future will be for people who are not inhibited by History, whose bodies are not tortured but liberated, and whose minds are not bound by the mythologies of the past.