Technologies/Installations

Laurence Steven is Chairman of the English Department at Laurentian
University and author of Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s
Fiction.

I think Maltman’s decision to name each of the pieces in this volume
either the “Technology of [Something]” or “Installation #
[Something]” was a mistake. By the time I had read 54 poems, all
having a variant of one of these titles, I was definitely sensing the
author’s “point” hanging ominously around me like ozone in the air
after a lightning storm. I say sensing, for I can’t honestly say I
“got” the point. I knew I was being directed to regard the subjects
of these free-verse and prose poems in a particular light; they were not
presented to me at face value, but were refracted through Maltman’s
repeated insistence on technologies and installations. So I tried to
read them as technologies, and as installations, but for the life of me
I couldn’t see any difference between the two. I even tried
substituting the word “nature” for “technology,” an approach
that seemed to get me about as far—“The Technology of Alchemy”
becoming “The Nature of Alchemy,” for example. Yet perhaps the
difference between nature and technology is the point. In one prose
poem, Maltman says: “Were it not for the intricately balanced
biochemistry of carbon . . . not the tiniest smidgen, not the least,
minutest, vanishingest iota of these notions, truth, or beauty, any of
it, would exist. . . . Things are simply as they are—they come into
being without yearning. Only then does yearning begin to attach itself
to them, like barnacles to the bottom of a ship.” So given that
metaphysical foundationalism is defunct, the human world built by our
yearnings is reduced to a matter of technique, techne, technology.
Maltman has good company on this ground; but where George Grant, for
example, sees this transformation as decidedly something to lament,
Maltman seems unsure of his footing. The cover blurb claims that his is
a compassionate vision; the speaker in “The Technology of Romance,”
watching six women on the subway reading Harlequins, says he is
“engrossed, but at the same time removed, a little sad”; a word that
comes to my mind is impudent. The “remove,” the distance, the
knowingness that allows him to “imagine the exotic, passionate beings
they longed to be, or imagined they longed to, so far from their true
natures and experience” prompts me to ask how he knows what their true
natures are, from such a distance. More words come to mind:
condescension, snobbery.

The tendency this “remove” provokes—embodied in the labelling of
all subjects as technologies or installations—is unfortunate, because
Maltman is often a thoughtful writer and his subjects deserve more
attention from the reader than a reductive attempt to fit them into a
dimly perceived authorial scheme (or technology?). In “The Technology
of Sheep,” for example, the reader who resists the steering of the
title will find a delicate, intriguing prose poem with the power of
compelling fiction. The piece is essentially a short short story about
the power of history in England and the lack of it in North America.
George Grant would have been interested. Although elsewhere Maltman’s
view of history can appear one-dimensional, it is good to know that his
subjects can still entangle him into transcending his categories.