Popular Narratives

Roger Nash is Academic Vice-President of Athabasca University and author
of Night Flying.

Davey’s collection is divided into seven sequences of prose poems.
These pursue such different matters as adolescent love; impressions of
India filtered through concerns of a participant in a literary
conference there; the role of postcards in encoding our sense of self,
landscape, and culture; and what sense we may re-create today of the
twelfth-century love of Héloise and Abélard.

Like McLuhan and Barthes, Davey is exercised by the semiology of daily
life. His prose poems explore, self-reflectively, how they make sense as
texts, as much as what sense they can make on their respective themes.
There are probing reflections here on the significance of horseback
statues, war memorials, Tiger tank trophies, and the Arc de Triomphe.

However, Davey’s double concern with how and what he says creates
cross-genre writing in which semiotic reflection and poetic prose often
work against each other. Then the result is neither reflectively sharp
nor imaginatively vital. A sense of the love of Héloise and Abélard
deadens in the creaky jargon of “semiotics” and “intertextual
references.”

Héloise’s anguished beliefs and feelings are reduced to a
“text,” as is her life, which becomes a “text life.” Though this
is in accord with certain trends in semiology, it also shows the
limitations of those trends. Davey may wish to avoid forcing the reader
to identify with the affliction of Héloise and Abélard in the
sentimentality of bourgeois literature that is unreflective about its
own construction. But he avoids it in his semiotic talk only by going to
the other extreme, virtually reducing affliction to talk about it in a
text. But Héloise once lived joyfully and in anguish. She is not a
character in a fiction, as is Madame Bovary. That lives, like texts, may
have or lack sense, does not make similarity into an identity. There is
a parallel danger in semiology when signs, signals, gestures, and
messages are made ubiquitous. If every object is a message, then
“message” loses its meaning.