The Man with Flowers through His Hands: Fables

Ronald Conrad is a professor of English at Ryerson University in
Toronto.

This little book of prose-poems is much in the style of Michael Bullock’s 1975 book Randolph Cranstone and the Pursuing River It is made of fragments, of surreal images crowded one upon the other, often gross or beautiful, always extravagant, provocative, or even shocking in themselves — but lacking in sustained effect. A man is impaled on a church spire; a woman keeps her husband’s head in a bowl on the coffee table; a couple, in their lilac nest, are swept away on the river of the woman’s hair; a man throws words at the sun; another enters a clearing to find a sideboard stuffed with artichokes.

Some images are allegorical, like the one of two men at a table, each with a knife, so fully on guard against each other that they ignore their food and die of starvation. Others are Oriental: a lotus, a sari, a phoenix, willow, teahouse banners, a stone popping out of a character’s mouth — like the stone of Pao Yu in The Dream of the Red Chamber

Even more pervasive are the relentless Freudian images. There are projections of all kinds: worms, snakes, rods, wands, loaves of French bread, trees, totem poles, spires, masts, and towers — and their opposites the vases, bowls, ponds, lakes, doorways, passageways, tunnels, and caverns.

What is it all for? What is the effect, the purpose, the goal? Do not ask. Whether these are records of the author’s dreams, or exercises in the automatist manner of writing which he pursued in England as early as 1938 (Transmutations, a book of poems under the pseudonym of Michael Hale), or whether they are consciously designed surrealism, theme is no overall point. These pleasant nightmares remain parts, and the whole is less than their sum.

Worse, Bullock’s imagery comes to us through prose innocent of style. Its mechanical rhythms, a machine-gun clatter of consonants, suggest a first draft rather than a fifth or tenth (is this automatism in too pure a form?). Bullock’s style seems to deny his past as an artisan of language, translator of over 150 novels and plays. Several of his own works have been translated into to other languages; perhaps this one will be too. It would sound just fine in Chinese.