“The Past is Perfect”: Leonard Cohen’s Philosophy of Time

417 Pages·2014·1.718 MB·English

by  Natalia Vesselova

“The Past is Perfect”: Leonard Cohen’s Philosophy of Time

Natalia Vesselova

Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the Doctorate in Philosophy degree in English

Department of English
Faculty of Arts
University of Ottawa.

© Natalia Vesselova, Ottawa, Canada, 2014.
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CONTENTS
Abstract iii
Acknowledgments iv
Introduction 1
Chapter One: The Glorious Beginning: Poetry 1956-1968
1. Let Us Compare Mythologies 21
2. The Spice-Box of Earth 61
3. Flowers for Hitler 105
4. Parasites of Heaven 148
5. Selected Poems 1956-1968 174
Chapter Two: Prose Left in the Past: Unpublished Works 1952-1960 192
Chapter Three: The Man and Time: Novels of the 1960s
1. The Favourite Game 250
2. Beautiful Losers 261
Chapter Four: Crises and Hopes: Poetry of the 1970s
1. The Energy of Slaves 279
2. Death of a Lady’s Man 311
Chapter Five: On the Road to Finding Peace: Poetry 1984-2006
1. Book of Mercy 331
2. Stranger Music 346
3. Book of Longing 363
Conclusion 385
Works Cited and Consulted 390
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ABSTRACT

This dissertation, “The Past is Perfect”: Leonard Cohen’s Philosophy of Time,
analyzes the concept of time and aspects of temporality in Leonard Cohen’s poetry and
prose, both published and unpublished. Through imagination and memory, Cohen
continuously explores his past as a man, a member of a family, and a representative of a
culture. The complex interconnection of individual and collective pasts constitutes the
core of Cohen’s philosophy informed by his Jewish heritage, while its artistic expression
is indebted to the literary past. The poet/novelist/songwriter was famously designated as
“the father of melancholy”; it is his focus on the past that makes his works appear
pessimistic. Cohen pays less attention to the other two temporal aspects, present and
future, which are seen in a generally negative light until his most recent publication.
The study suggests that although Cohen’s attitude to the past has not changed
radically from Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956) to Book of Longing (2006), his views
have changed from bitterness prompted by time’s destructive force to acceptance of its
work and the assertion of the power of poetry/art to withstand it; there is neither
discontent with the present nor prediction of a catastrophic future. Time remains a
metaphysical category and subject to mythologizing, temporal linearity often being
disregarded. Although Cohen’s spiritual search has extended throughout his life, his
essential outlook on time and the past is already expressed in the early books; his latest
publications combine new pieces and selections from previous books of poetry and prose
works, confirming the continuity of ideas and general consistency of his vision.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation would have never been written without the invaluable
contribution of my teachers, colleagues, and friends to my academic formation. As an
undergraduate student in Russia, at Tver State University, I was fortunate to study under
Georgy Bogin; he introduced me to phenomenology and the techniques of textual
interpretation; it was he who encouraged me to make my first conference presentation
and publish my first article. For a range of aspects of my education and professional
career in Russia I am obliged to the key person in my life, Igor V. Fomenko, the
supervisor of my Russian postgraduate studies, leader, and friend.
When I moved to Canada, it was my privilege to become a student at the
Department of English at the University of Ottawa. I wish to express my gratitude to the
University of Ottawa, to the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program, and to the SSHRC
for the financial support, which enabled me to undertake my studies and research. I am
deeply thankful to all the professors whose graduate seminars I attended; they supplied
me with the knowledge and skills I needed to reinvent myself as a scholar in a new
country, in a second language. Those members of the Department who were not my
teachers formally still helped me with their informal counsel and collegial attitude. It is
due to them that now I feel integrated into the Canadian academic community. I am
particularly grateful to Seymour Mayne for the long conversations about poetry we have
had since my first visit to Ottawa over a decade ago; I benefited from his memoirs, jokes,
and insider information about Montreal poets, including Leonard Cohen.
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I owe an infinite debt of gratitude to my patient and wise thesis supervisor, David
Staines, whose expertise and unlimited support guided me from beginning to end of my
graduate studies at the University of Ottawa. The most priceless endorsement I have
received is from my husband Douglas Clayton, whose continuous help, expert advice,
and unconditional love made the completion of my dissertation possible.
I am indebted to the employees of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the
University of Toronto, especially to Albert Masters and Jennifer Toews; they facilitated
my research and made the archival part of my work a happy and unforgettable
experience. It would be unfair to forgo expressing my thanks to the owners and staff of
Café Artissimo on George Street and Bluebird Coffee on Dalhousie Street in Ottawa for
the warm, friendly atmosphere and the incessant stream of caffeine which took me
through the long hours I spent there writing my thesis.
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INTRODUCTION

The phrase “Leonard Cohen’s philosophy of time” rightfully begs the question of
whether he has one. All his roles considered (poet, novelist, singer, songwriter, and
more), a professional philosopher he is not. He certainly does not systematically address
fundamental aspects of being in scholarly tracts designed to reveal his rationally
constructed opinions. Nevertheless, every person has an array of views on essential
problems concerning his or her understanding of the world at large and of particular
topics, such as faith, language, existence, ethics, mind, and time. Unlike other people,
writers are privileged to have the ability of expressing these views on paper, in the form
of fiction, drama or poetry, and occasionally to get credited for sustainable vision. Some
authors give their philosophical standpoints a conscious expression and devote their
works to a meticulous revelation of their perspectives; others disperse elements of their
fundamental views and attitudes throughout their entire body of work.
Even if a writer provides no rationalized theory concerning a philosophical
problem, the essential outlook, or philosophy in a broad sense of the word, can be
reconstructed on the basis of the totality of his or her written texts which enhance and
complement each other. While in his key works, the poetic manifestoes, a poet
consciously reveals his views, in minor poems he does so less deliberately; since lyric
poetry by definition expresses momentary emotions, a wide range of works provides the
evidence for a more detailed, complex, and accurate picture, uncovering various shades
of attitude. The same method allows one to trace the continuity and the dynamics of the
author’s system of views. In other words, larger numbers of works which have no quality
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of a manifesto add up to exposing emotions and views the poet did not intentionally
formulate for the readers but experienced and recorded in passing. Casting a broad net
therefore supplies more facts on Cohen’s attitude to time than an analysis of a handful of
his touchstone poems would do.
Time is a universal category of being; it has been intriguing thinkers and writers
for centuries, from Heraclites, Aristotle, and Saint Augustine to Marcel Proust, Henri
Bergson, and Martin Heidegger. Every artist with a penchant for self-reflectiveness has a
personal idea of time, and Cohen is no exception. A reader of his poetry and prose
receives the impression that time for him is a potent force, determining human actions
and affections. Ira Nadel quotes the poet’s essayistic rumination: “I have never loved a
woman for herself alone, but because I was caught up in time with her, between train
arrivals and train departures and other commitments” (Various Positions 28). In his
works, Cohen touches upon all three aspects of time, the past, the present, and the future;
the most attention, however, is given to the past. The author’s poetry and prose are past-
oriented; he focuses on coming to terms with himself and the outside world in the
contexts provided by the past. Cohen’s artistic output is known to be melancholic, despite
his subtle humour and ubiquitous irony. Among the factors creating this impression of
pensive sadness is his fascination with the past, which prompted the title of a recent book
about him: Yesterday’s Tomorrow – Leonard Cohen by Marc Hendrickx. One can claim
that it is this detachment from the “here and now” and an intense gaze trained on the past
that earned Cohen his famous designation as “the father of melancholy.”
It is important to note that “past” does not equal “history.” There are a number of
reasons for drawing a line between the two notions: history gives shape to the past
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through narrativization; it deals (at least, is supposed to deal) with facts. The past is a
more general notion and involves personal perspectives. There is a further discrepancy
between history and the past in literature; as formulated by Aristotle, it is the following:
the function of the poet is not to say what has happened, but to
say the kind of thing that would happen, i.e., what is possible in
accordance with probability or necessity. The historian and the
poet are not distinguished by their use of verse or prose; it would
be possible to turn the works of Herodotus into verse, and it
would be a history in verse just as much as in prose. The
distinction is this: the one says what has happened, the other the
kind of thing that would happen. For this reason poetry is more
philosophical and more serious than history. (16)
Cohen conceptualizes the past and transforms it into literature.
History imposes a structure on facts in the form of chronology, while Cohen in his
works, especially in Beautiful Losers, carefully orchestrates a seeming disorder, disjoints
and compromises chronology, replacing it with a-chronological non-discrete mythic time,
in accordance with his 1956 pronouncement: “I want to put mythic time into my poems,
so they can be identified with every true fable ever sung, and still be concerned with our
own time, and the poems hanging in our own skies” (qtd. in Nadel Various Positions 46).
The cultural inheritance of Jewish mysticism reveals itself in Cohen’s metaphysical
predisposition, his prophetic stance, and his a-historical, mythic vision of time with the
idea of the earth as “a province of Eternity” (Beautiful Losers 105). Whatever Cohen
writes, regardless of the genre, his mythological thinking relies on material which is
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“anecdotal, testimonial, and ritual,” non-chronological and a-historical by definition; he
stays “outside the boundaries of history” (Adria 125) and their inexorable limitations.
Finally, history is always written from a given ideological position, something
that Cohen tries to avoid in his works, attempting to adopt multiple points of view. This
quality may place his novels into the category of historiographic metafiction, a type of
self-referential literature that involves the reader in the process of looking for elusive
(and illusive) “truth” through offering either a dubiously reliable narrator or “various and
fragmentary points of view” (Hutcheon The Canadian Postmodern 65). Despite the
“historiographic” part of the term, the author is more concerned with the emotional
authenticity of reaction to the past than with pushing an ideological agenda. Hutcheon
states: “Historiographic metafiction … is ideological fiction … To write either history or
historical fiction is equally to raise the question of power and control; it is the story of the
victors that usually gets told” (The Canadian Postmodern 72). By contrast, as if to
challenge this assertion, Cohen’s most “historiographic” work is called Beautiful Losers
and depicts the failure of various ideologies. In the poems, Cohen’s vision of events and
personas is more subjective, protean, often ironic, and at times enigmatic. Unlike history,
the past is declaratively subjective, individualistic, fragmented, composed of unstructured
recollections and visions; it belongs to the mythically rather than chronologically
arranged temporality, and is presented in the form of artistic images.
In the poem “Streetcars,” Cohen proclaims, “I carry a banner: / The Past Is
Perfect.” The word “perfect” in this line is not a synonym for faultless and ideal. The past
is “perfect” because it has happened and consequently has become complete, not subject
to change. The poet’s play on words involves the grammatical term Past Perfect, the tense
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indicating that an action happened before another action or prior to a specific date in the
past. Grammatical Past Perfect, when used in a conditional clause, points to irreversible
circumstances which affected a later event or a decision: if something had happened, the
outcome would have been totally different, but in the present time nothing can be done
about that. The word “perfect” has no qualitative connotation here. The irrevocable
“perfect” past, being complete and finished, may provide a closure; more importantly, it
becomes an object for continuous exploration; it can be appropriated, mythologized,
interpreted, but not changed. The past is also “perfect” since certain things, such as a
human body, are fragile in the face of time, and they remain beautiful only in the past, the
memory and poetry preserving them.
For Cohen time is, most commonly, the passing time. During the 2009 concert
tour, he amiably told the public that he had a piece of advice for them: no one over the
age of fifteen should ever look at a magnifying mirror of the type usually found in hotel
bathrooms. The joke, though met by the audience with hearty laughter, reveals a serious
and important aspect of Cohen’s outlook: time does its ruinous work, and no human
being will be spared. It is not by chance that his latest published work, Book of Longing
(2006), contains numerous self-portraits, sketchy drawings documenting the work of time
on his aging face; they are grotesque evidences, sparing no wrinkles, thinning hair, and
sagging features. Cohen emphasizes that in one’s past everyone was a better version of
the self, at least, physically. The idea is not new or exclusive. In Alexander Pushkin’s
classical verse novel Eugene Onegin, the female protagonist Tatiana Larina says, meeting
her first and only love after several years spent apart, “Onegin, at that time I was younger
and, it seems, [a] better [person]” (my prose translation – NV); a present-day bawdy joke