Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine

Thomas M.F. Gerry is an English professor at Laurentian University.

McCaffery’s introduction to this collection of reports points out that
the Toronto Research Group—namely Nichol and McCaffery—had read by
1974 the works of Jabиs, Derrida, Barthes, and Lacan. He makes this
point to indicate both this book’s poststructuralist footing, and,
more importantly, its prophetic character as a nonacademic,
noninstitutionalized cultural study. Some of the items were first
published in the journal Open Letter; many are published here for the
first time. It might be going too far to advocate that all prospective
doctoral thesis writers first read this book, but the collaborative,
risk-taking approach to scholarship and creativity demonstrated by
McCaffery and Nichol, “kids of the book-machine,” offers much by way
of method and results that would significantly invigorate learned
discourse.

Rational geomancy is the authors’ term for “the acceptance of a
multiplicity of means and ways to reorganize those energy patterns we
perceive in literature.” As such, rational geomancy is clearly related
to McCaffery’s and Nichol’s poetry performance group, The Four
Horsemen (with Paul Dutton and Rafael Barreto-Rivera). Rational geomancy
also leads to the idea that reading and writing are not such radically
distinct operations as traditionally has been assumed, in that they are
both “activities of foregrounding from a ground of potentiality.”

The book’s three reports concern translation, narrative, and the
language of performance language. The Toronto Research Group’s
manifesto is also printed, as are some “conc(de)lusions,” other
writings, an appendix, and a fascinating bibliography. The presentation
of Rational Geomancy involves prose, poetry, drawings, photographs,
comics, charts, maps, parallel text, and so forth. In many other ways,
too, the book is multidisciplinary and encyclopedic. While, according to
McCaffery, the authors followed Gertrude Stein’s credo for the
artist—“be contemporary”—Nichol and McCaffery drafted the
1973–1982 reports on a typewriter. Their insistence on doing so is one
indication of the museum-like quality Rational Geomancy exudes. The
authors succeed in communicating (prophetically) a contemporary
perspective on what may be a phenomenon of the past: the book.