Novel: A Novel of Absence

Famous and celebrated since the 1960s for pushing the boundaries of language and representation in the creation of image as a site of both content and context, the world’s leading sound, visual, concrete and performance poet, bill bissett, describes this book as “a novel with connekting pomes n essays.”

Having already extended the boundaries of orthography, syntax, grammar, punctuation, and diction to free the linguistic creation of meaning from the conventions of the spoken and the written word—often with arresting and astonishing results—bissett sets out in his newest work to free and rehabilitate genre from its traditional role of limiting the possibilities of meaning in language, to greatly expanding them. He accomplishes this without a deconstructive erasure of, but with an apposition of genres that expands even further the possibilities of creating meaning through composition.

As such, bissett’s novel is in effect a response, by demonstrative example, to Jacques Derrida’s famous argument in Of Grammatology: that any investigation of meaning cannot escape the opposition or dialectic of speech and language central to the Western philosophical tradition. Against this tradition, bissett posits Gertrude Stein’s modernist observation that: “Everything is the same except composition …”

None of which is to say that bill bissett’s novel is a five-finger exercise in the realm of pure theory. Quite on the contrary, his interweaving of fact and fiction—what is considered the conventionally real with the imagined—has created a narrative for the reader that is redolent with surprise and discovery. The counterpoint of the “fictional” story of jimmee’s search for his lost love mark, to the lives of the “real” characters of the “pomes n essays” with which it interacts, takes readers of this novel to entirely new and engaging understandings of that part of the human condition that is delightfully accessible through language.