EXISTENTIAL TEXTUALITY: ENGAGEMENT IN THE FORM OF A LETTERPRESS BOOK JOHN CROMBIE'S SO

Visible Language, 2005 by McVarish, Emily

Abstract

"Existential Textuality: Engagement in the Form of a Letterpress Book" examines the work of English writer and book artist, John Crombie. In So, his combinatory narrative of cyclical romance, Crombie integrates typographical and literary composition, physical and narrative structure, letterpress and linguistic materiality to address the fundamental givens of existence: mortality and consciousness, freedom and contingency, subjectivity and temporality. The 'book' as both a finite and an interactive format gives rise, in the typographic schema of So, to a view of language, stories and life itself as sets of possibilities and events, the significance of which derives from choice and sequence. The implicated reader of So's multilinear tale may flirt with notions of authorship, yet in her hands, the codex enacts, typography writes and design tells, as every movement and surface of Crombie's work becomes reflective of the meanings that inhere in the very form of a printed book.

From children's puzzle-stories to fragments of Samuel Beckett _1, the handmade books of Kickshaws press share their imprint's two-faced presentation: "I'm something/I'm nothing." The word "kickshaws," a corruption of the French quelque chose, owes its existence to use by the English to describe French culinary frivolities of the seventeenth century, as in, "a 'something' French, not one of the known 'substantial English' dishes." From this first use, the Oxford English Dictionary traces the sense in which we take it here: "Something dainty or elegant, but unsubstantial or comparatively valueless; a toy, a trifle..." A denial of substance, despite elaborate appearances, unites the two meanings. Yet the very choice of a word that originates in the untranslatability of another should give us pause. For is not the trace of quelque chose-kék(é) chose-that lingers in "kickshaws" itself a sort of substance? And are not the matters to which an insistence on this trace leads us-the role of linguistic materiality in the production of meaning, for example-quite substantial, indeed?

One might even draw an analogy between the French emphasis on a dish's outward elaboration-mistrusted and dismissed as inconsequential, or worse, by the English-and the English attachment to the eloquence of a word's form. In this case, the form is phonetic: quelque chose preserves its foreign tone and airy elegance in becoming " kickshaws" rather than "something." And its retention involves us with the shape and shaping of language rather than with its "content:" the ideally disembodied meaning which it is any inscription's traditional duty to deliver. As in the original ambivalence of the English attitude that produced it, within the word "kickshaws" itself, and surely in its selection to identify the productions of John Crombie and Sheila Bourne, an intriguing contradiction exists, a demonstration of substance and complexity in the guise of self-dismissal. Thus, it is with care that we approach Kickshaws books, each one trying to pass itself off as a trifle while at the same time displaying at its surface the elements of a clever construction. If this display might be explained as an attempt to amuse, its diversions cannot prevent a quite opposite effect, which is to call our attention to the inner workings of books, of tales, and of language itself. In fact, the self-consciousness of Kickshaws books leads straight to the structures that make them-and any other book, any other narrative, any other meaning-possible. We should not be surprised, then, to find our suspicions of the seriousness_2 of the Kickshaws enterprise confirmed by John Crombie's evident formal and conceptual ambition. The design and production of his books embrace the question of the Book and the nature of textuality. His visually and verbally explicit schémas reveal the very mechanisms of writing. As for his stories, more often than not, they plot the bounds and pull of existence itself. Indeed, this theme enjoys such frequency in Crombie's work that to ignore its role would be to miss a central point.

Untitled Life

In Curtains,_3 a text describing the fall of night gradually loses its contrast to a dark background and disappears. In Overcoated,_4 the silhouette of a coat works its way up from the bottom of the page to obliterate more and more of the text body. These and many other stark sequences trace an allegorical progression toward death in Crombie and Bourne's books. And while theirs remain symbolic passages, the number of Kickshaws works that quite literally, if elementally, tell a life story is no less considerable._5 Often, the draw toward an end is set in motion by the repetitive and progressive action of these books; whether by accumulation or elimination, the entirety of a life's list-of women loved, books read, milestones reached-is exhausted, complete or contained in the sum of their pages. Many titles establish the scope of their subjects immediately: The Loves of My Life, Biobibliographie, Womb to Tomb, Such Is Life.... In others, a sense of range gains the reader as she realizes that a story begun with some rendition of a birth (a photo of a newborn described, for example) is moving at a narrative pace and on a typo-evolutionary scale that will surely lead to a death before the book is done. Or rather, exactly when the book is done. For what quickly becomes clear to the reader of these stories is the extent to which an analogy has been pushed: between a book (the Book) and an individual existence (Existence).