Stan Dragland
The Difficult
In an essay about poetry from Phil Hall (“Red Skeleton”), Dragland promises (p. 72) to eventually explain an allusion:
How balance outright enmity with good-natured association, smart with dumb, the amassees and the masses (allusion to be glossed below), and so on and on?
On the way to that gloss, the reader comes across a note in the essay devoted to Gail Scott’s The Obituary [p. 84 reference to note 224 found on pages 215-16]. The note references Gloria Anzaldúa, “La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness”. In part, the note quotes “Soy un amasamiento, I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings.” I glimpsed here a promise fulfilled by assimilating the Spanish amasamiento with the English neologism amasses.
Ah, but the explanation found in reading the annotating unconscious is supplemented later (p. 96) in the same essay on Gail Scott’s novel where Dragland traces an expression employed by the character Rosine to its intertextual roots in English Canadian literature.
According to Rosine, “history has two classes: the amassees + the masses.” This looks odd, though a little thought will produce those who amass wealth at the expense of the masses, but it’s later glossed as landlords + tenants. And there’s an allusion behind it. The source is a poem by B.K. Sandwell about the patrician Canadian Massey family […]
Toronto has no social classes
Only the Masseys and the masses.
Addressee + Addresser
Haunted – Haunter
[I inscribe these pairs here because at one point Dragland invokes Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.]
And so for day 3027
26.03.2015