Glenn Gould (13 page)

At this point, the interviewing Gould suggested that the real imprisonment—and hence the real hoped-for canonization—could only be enacted by a return to Salzburg Festspielhaus, where the tracheitis was first traumatically contracted. “There could be no more meaningful manner in which to scourge the flesh, in which to proclaim the ascendance of the spirit, and certainly no more meaningful metaphoric
mise en scène
against which to offset your own hermetic life-style, than to define your quest for martyrdom autobiographically, as I'm sure you will try to do, eventually.” The interviewed Gould hotly denied he had any such desire, dodged the suggestion of a return to Salzburg, and brought the interview to a close with a reference to the signature line of Billy Pilgrim, from Kurt Vonnegut's
Slaughterhouse
Five
—Gould had recently done the score for George Roy Hill's 1972 film version, which he deplored for its “pessimism, combined with a hedonistic cop-out”—by saying, “I'm not ready yet.”
⁷⁹

What are we to make of all this? The self-interview form destabilized the ideas even as they were delivered, and the conflicts contained in the notion of a last puritan—a difficult, perhaps tragic, mixture of self-congratulation and self-disapproval—were quartered, or splintered, by the forced interplay of the two voices. Gould accused himself of a desire for immortality even as he allowed himself free rein in articulating an anti-individualist philosophy at odds with his own aggressive choices. His desires were not at all straightforward, in other words, and not in any simple fashion such as experiencing a mere inner conflict about returning to the stage.

The almost hysterical glee with which the interviewing Gould offered this suggestion—the prison sentence guaranteed to achieve martyrdom—made this amply clear. The various dodges and feints of self-justification that Gould had tried at other recorded points, taking on the criticisms made against him—of narcissism, of aggrandizement—were now turned into Möbius strips of ironic dialogue, by turns accusing and justifying, serious and mocking. There was psychic conflict on display here, to be sure, but it was labyrinthine and, to
use one of Gould's own favourite words, aleatory: it was a series of performative gambles, implicating the reader or listener in the presumed game. That is why the one thing we can confidently conclude from this curious document is that, in the mind of Glenn Gould, this is indeed a kind of intellectual fugue.

In the psychological lexicon, a fugue state is characterized by selective amnesia, loss of stability in personal identity, and the formation of new identity. Unexpected travel or wandering is typical—sudden disappearance. Gould never suffered amnesia, but his fugue-like intellectual wanderings were themselves evidence of a condition. If he was the last puritan, it was less because of any special disapproval of this or that feature of the modern world and more an unwillingness to take up one of the usual stable positions within that world. A fugue player is not in a fugue state, of course, but Glenn Gould was certainly forever disappearing.

In 1967 Gould broadcast on CBC Radio, as part of Canada's Centennial celebrations, a groundbreaking voice-based documentary called “The Idea of North.” It was to become his most famous composition.

The idea behind “The Idea of North” was a mixture of form and content, also of dialogue and mood (much of the dialogue is inaudible because of deliberate cross-mixing). In form, this was the first example of Gould's contrapuntal radio. The voices of the documentary would not be arranged in the usual linear way, one following the other, intermixing to create an overall narrative or logical whole. Instead, they would rise and fall over each, creating layered effects where a given voice might not be distinguishable. Gould described the desired effect as something similar to the experience of sitting on a subway car or in a crowded diner, hearing snatches of conversation, creating a whole not from a logical plan but from the intervention of listening as a creative act, as a sort of retrieval.

In these terms, “The Idea of North” is at best a partial success, since the listener feels controlled and frustrated at the same time. There is no real chance of intervening as a listener, except in the sense of straining after a falling voice, losing its sense whether you like it or not. Nevertheless, the program is a remarkable piece of radio, brave for its time— complaints about its inaudibility, entered by casual listeners, indicate this much—and partly cogent in its background ideas. That is, it is always interesting, if not enlivening or enlightening, to test the bounds of linear construction.

Inversions of linear expectation are arguably more illuminating in visual media, however, where we have a chance to arrange and rearrange the parts as we go forward in the temporality of the experience. The screen defines the edges of what is presented, even if the presentation is in montage or split screen. Radio, like music itself, is a medium of more sustained and rigid involvement on the part of the audience: it is a fundamentally intimate medium, an interior experience. (McLuhan was correct about this difference between visual and aural media, even if his language of “cool” and “hot” is misleading and imprecise.) In the face of Gould's production some listeners are likely to feel helpless, if not vexed, by the constant rearrangement and fluctuating voice levels, even if they appreciate its roots in modernist experimentation.
Contrapuntal
is not quite the right word, either; despite Gould's claims that the piece was constructed on the model of a fugue, it does not in fact offer the satisfaction of resolution to a tonic (whatever that would be in these terms) or even the meta-satisfaction of deliberately dashing the expectation of resolution to the tonic, as in Goldberg Variation 15, with its three prolonged rising right-hand notes . . .

In content, matters are more compelling. In a later recorded piece, a somewhat strained fantasy of Gould confronting his critics, one of Gould's own personae, Professor Karlheinz Klopweisser, would suggest that the real counterpoint is ideological, between the exercise of individual freedom and the “tremendously tyrannical force” of the
Zeitgeist
. In freely seeking isolation, choosing to be “in the world but not of the world,” the various figures in Gould's documentaries enact a “double counterpoint resolved at the octave.”
⁸⁰
We can think of this, naturally, in terms of Gould's own withdrawal from the world even as he remained fully engaged with it via sound recording and the telephone, those emblematic media of communication in McLuhan's age of acoustic space.

We could also think of it, more generally, as an example of what the critic Edward Said labels “contrapuntal consciousness.” This is the experience of anyone who
dissents from a dominant world view, sometimes as a function of visible difference crossed with ideology (for example, skin colour interpreted as “race”). In both cases, however, it is not always easy to discern a resolution of the kind offered by clear contrapuntal musical structure; rather, we glimpse something that such structure, in music, only hints at, namely that the real lesson of all counterpoint is not that it resolves but that it only appears to—that the play of layered and contrasting voices must begin again, ever again, always renewed.

“The Idea of North” was the first of three pieces in Gould's
Solitude Trilogy,
a suite of heavily edited radio works that also includes “The Latecomers” and “The Quiet in the Land,” about the inhabitants of a Newfoundland fishing village and a prairie Mennonite community, respectively. All three are documentary in a minimal fashion only. Gould was cheerful in his admission not only of elaborate editing but also of some manipulation in content, suggesting for example that the fourteen characters presented in “The Latecomers” were all related. The voices are, in fact, less real people than ideas or sentiments, aspects of thought— personae. They have been shaped, if not distorted, by the aims of the overall work, just as Gould the recording artist would treat the elements of a musical composition.

And so Professor Klopweisser's suggestion that Gould leaves the characters behind: “you create a dialectic in which their polarities are united,” he tells Gould in the later radio piece; “you create a collective recognition of the argument that binds them together.” This is placed in direct rejection of what another persona, Sir Nigel Twitt-Thornwaite, calls “integrity of the unique and unrepeatable moment captured forever” and which Gould mocks as, instead, “the embalmed concert moment” and “the permawaxed recording moment.”
⁸¹
As so often, the work is not, or not only, about what it is about. “The Idea of North,” indeed the whole trilogy, stands as another in a long series of Gould manifestos about the value of sustained artificiality over (alleged) captured authenticity. That this argument is delivered with Gould himself using at least three, and sometimes five, different voices is precisely the kind of irony he found excessively amusing.

The voices that animate the first work are people who live in and know Canada's vast northern territory. They speak of their experiences with humour, political sharpness, and sometimes weary familiarity about how the rest of the country ignores or neglects their home. One of them mocks the idea of “northmanship,” whereby a given person tries to outdo another with feats of isolation or deprivation: if you have gone
on a twenty-two-day sled-dog journey, I have completed one of thirty days, a game with no theoretical limit. And yet, as he noted, “It's not like there's some special virtue or merit that comes from being in the north.”
⁸²
Another plays with the idea of natural beauty, remarking how often and how inevitably it is filtered through prior perception of reproduced images. All of them, speaking on radio, are aware of the structural irony that isolation at once removes them from the overwhelming volume of mass media and makes them available and connected to it.

More than four decades later, not much has changed. Indeed, if anything, Canadians are more indifferent than ever to the realities of life in the largest area of the country. Global climate change and fossil fuel depletion have made the region more significant than ever, with shipping and resource opportunities that are not being ignored at all by other sovereign powers, especially the United States, whose purchase of Alaska may be about to pay off once more with a viable Northwest Passage. Meanwhile, the great majority of Canadians have not visited the region and don't intend to, huddling instead in the string of medium to large conurbations scattered across the country's southernmost edge. It cannot be any surprise that policy with respect to the north is a mixture of embarrassing misunderstanding and
condescension. This simply mirrors the attitude of most Canadians, which, when it even rises above indifference, tends to see only an abstraction wrapped in clichés tucked into a boring enigma.
⁸³

These matters were not really Gould's concern, of course, especially the policy issues—he held no brief for Aboriginal land claims, environmental protection, or sovereignty. To that extent, he fell into the same romanticizing trap that afflicts many artists who try to speak for a region or people but instead end up creating an exotic image that cannot help but be partial or even demeaning. Gould was mostly fetched by the idea of north as a category of thought, a philosophical idea. The real north was not the subject of his thinking, even if the subjects of the documentary hail from there; the subject was, instead, the metaphorical north. The title, indeed, tells us as much.

And it turns out that north is, more or less, a synonym for solitude: consciousness is here a function of latitude. North was not for Gould, as it is for some of us, a negative frontier, a pushing-down of hostile weight, the large uncharted fact of human-killing cold that defeated Hudson and Frobisher and the rest and, along the way, negatively defined Canada as a nation. In this common view, our cities are fragile bulwarks against the weather, contingent timeouts
from the constant effort of the climate to obliterate us. Instead, what exercised Gould's imagination, and ours as we try to follow the weave of voices in the documentary, is what it feels like to be isolated and often alone: to have no company other than your own thoughts. It is not a reference Gould would likely have known, I suppose, but here he echoed the adolescent dream of Superman's Arctic headquarters, the Fortress of Solitude, paradigmatic secret clubhouse for one, complete with library, laboratory, chess-playing robot, and exercise equipment. (The last, at least, not on Glenn Gould's wish list.)

The theme of solitude would continue with the second and third entries in the emergent trilogy. In a country as large as Canada, with so small a population, solitude, not company, would seem to be the natural condition. And yet, the vast bulk of the population not only does not live this way, it never even considers the places where people do. Thus the real subject of contrapuntal radio, a form that demonstrates incomplete or illusory dialectic resolution in ideas, is Canada itself. The country is unpacked by the documentary and revealed as a postmodern nation of widespread contrapuntal consciousness—postmodern because here there is no dominant
Zeitgeist
to escape, no hegemonic culture, only the proliferation and expansion of consciousness itself. This view
of Canada, not unique to Gould, would remain influential during the last decades of the twentieth century and it is still a central piece in the never-ending puzzle called Canadian identity.

Is the preoccupation with isolation a psychic projection of Gould's own desire to elude the company of others, the flesh-pressing presence of people's bodies, their breath and heat crowding in upon him? Is it an excavation of a larger psychic cavern, the national unconscious, which keeps its own deep fear of loneliness at bay by constructing not just cities but the logic of survival that supports the frontier conception of the north? Is it, more existentially, a reminder of the essential solitude of every person, who must die alone because my death is something only I can enact—others can watch but no other can do it for me? Is it all of these, wrapped in contrapuntal layers not of voice and sound but of thought and its absence, the silences of solitude and of the final fact, the end of the piece, death? Yes.