The Double Ego: From Dark Till Dawn

Neil Querengesser taught in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Alberta.

These two surrealistic pieces, not easily classified, demand much attention and energy from the reader, rewarding his efforts according to his own tastes in genres. The first piece, “The Double Ego,” is subtitled “an autocollage” and is the schizophrenic account in prose of a poet’s mind turned inside out as he deliberately sets his alter ego in motion, following his random progress through a maze of personal and archetypal images that include an elephant’s tusk, “Yggdrasil, the world tree,” and the Whore of Babylon. “The Double Ego” is a highly imaginative work sustained by the intense ego of the poet as he describes his alter ego’s and his own journeys through the landscape of the subconscious. Symbolic image is piled upon symbolic image, and metamorphosis follows metamorphosis until the work threatens to defy intellectual apprehension while it nevertheless exerts a powerful emotional influence upon the reader. Similar effects are created by the second piece, “From Dusk Till Dawn,” which lacks even the dubious comfort of an ego as narrator. And adding further to the unsettling effects of both pieces is the venereal and scatological suggestiveness of Bullock’s own Daliesque sketches interspersed throughout the text.

These are two pieces which should make several re-readings worthwhile.