Re:, re-, re

Recombinant Theory 
by Joel Katelnikoff

Calgary: U Calgary Press, 2024
$26.99 / 9781773855790

Reviewed by Peter Babiak

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Reading this book reminded me of a habit I developed in grad school the year I was studying for my comprehensive exams. I summarized the key points in all the books I had to read by writing out the core sentences on index cards and then taping each card to the hallway wall of my apartment. There were a few hundred of them, forming an eccentric collage that probably looked symptomatic of a hypergraphic disorder. I’m not entirely sure it helped, but at the time I thought the best way to understand the texts was to surround myself with the most important sentences, live with them, look at and read them, over and over.

Joel Katelnikoff, the “author” of Recombinant Theory, has done something similar.  Apart from the “Acknowledgements” page and bibliographic list of “Texts Recombined,” he didn’t actually write much of it, at least not in the usual sense of that verb. He’s taken snippets of prose from ten “contemporary poet-theorists”—avant-garde writers associated with experimental verse or language poetry—and then, following the pastiche style popularized by postmodernism and perhaps the found-art techniques students experiment with in art classes, recombined them into new works. The resulting ten “essays,” each an homage to writers as diverse as Steve McCaffery and Erín Moure, are at once baffling, as good art often can be, and intellectually vigorous, as all theorizing about language always is.

Here are the opening sentences from the first four paragraphs of Katelnikoff’s piece that recombines the work of Lisa Robertson, famed member of Kootenay School of Writing:

This is a completely original treatise, yet it is autonomous only in its recombinant function. … In any case we were radically inseparable from the context we disturbed. … How will I recognize disorder? … We are furnished by our manners and habits.

It’s disorienting to read, yes, and would be so even if the ellipses were replaced by the omitted sentences. But there’s nonetheless something stubbornly intriguing about Katelnikoff’s scattershot of Robertson’s sentences. 

The back cover claims this technique of writing by sentence recombination of others challenges “how readers interact with and perceive text, context, and critical writing,” but this sounds academic enough to dissuade people who aren’t poets or English graduate students from giving this book a whirl. It’s best to think of Katelnikoff’s book as a performative work that, straddling the genre of poetic-prose and post-structuralist theories of language, advocates a more or less hyper-consciousness of language as the sublime tool that scaffolds the expanse of human thinking. 

Robertson’s sentences—even when recombined—are poetic because they’re arrangements of words and organizations of clauses we probably haven’t encountered before, or just very cool to read. Katelnikoff’s recombinations of her adventurous syntax direct this consciousness into what the linguist Charles Hockett calls the reflexive “design feature” of language: the fact that we use words not just to communicate but to say things about language and to think through language. 

Many sentences from Robertson’s poetic-prose gyrate around precisely this theme of linguistic reflexivity: “We dawdled morosely in the vigour of our own language”; “I feel love mixed with an excess of signification”; “The margins of reading can’t be controlled.” The unease you might experience reading these lines, especially when they’re taken out of their original contexts and recombined in a textual smorgasbord might never fully recede, but then this is to be expected in any vigorous reading that pushes thinking past our ordinary understanding of language as a communicative tool that we don’t need to think about.

It might help to refer here to another one of Katelnikoff’s work which appeared in an obscure Paris literary magazine about a decade ago. In “A Recombinant Theory Manifesto” he spells out a step-by-step explanation of this experimental technique and offers a summary of the end point it aims to produce: “critic becomes poet, reading becomes and artistic performance, and writing may never be furnished with a final signified, but only subjected to an explosion of signification.” A reader unfamiliar with what was happening in literary theory graduate seminars in the 1980s and 1990s can be forgiven if they feel confused, as if the writer has digested too many of postmodernism’s characteristically radical-sounding aphorisms, like this one: “a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning.” This is what literary theorist Roland Barthes wrote it in his famous 1967 essay “The Death of the Author.” A text, he went on to say, is “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” 

It’s not surprising that for his debut volume Williams Lake resident Katelnikoff selected Barthes’ melon-scratcher of a sentence as the epigraph. One idea lurking in it is that, when it comes language, there’s no such thing as originality, there’s only repetition. That’s the overall takeaway in Katelnikoff’s book. In a way, what he calls “recombinant theory” is a practical iteration of what the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss called “bricolage,” which is the name he gave to the characteristic technique of mythical or primitive thinking. 

The bricoleur, the influential anthropologist said, doesn’t originate anything new but uses whatever is available and recombines it to make new things. We could say the same principle is at work in sampling in electronic music, the hodgepodge aesthetic of steam punk, and most reiterations of superhero films. Commenting on the prominence of pastiche in the age of postmodern capitalism, Fredric Jameson once declared that “artists of the present day will no longer be able to invent new styles and worlds—they’ve already been invented; only a limited number of combinations are possible; the unique ones have been thought of already.”

Here is another example from an “essay” where Katelnikoff recombines sentence of the prolific BC writer and teacher, Fred Wah—

Rocks tell a story I haven’t heard before, like a root is moving through the darkness of the soil…. Trees keep being pictures of themselves: writing is sometimes remembering this image, and sometimes it has to make it up. … This action is not so much fraudulent as generative.

Why select these sentences from the corpus of Wah’s work and recombine them in this way? Apart from simple creativity, the answer might have something to do with the earthy metaphors, which aren’t only important because they’re earthy but because they’re metaphors. And metaphor, far from being a fancy use of words, is another way of saying language because all words, as thinkers as diverse as Nietzsche and McLuhan have reminded us, is metaphorical. Reality, or whatever it is we like to think is signified when we read is less about what’s out there—in Wah’s rocks, soil, trees—and more about the spellbinding architecture of words and sentences themselves, as well as the thoroughly mysterious manner our linguistics architecture infuses our worlds with meaning and, more importantly, meaningfulness.

Much of what the ten poet-theorists write in their original works is about language, specifically its capacity to be “generative.” That’s another thematic thread that runs through all Katelnikoff’s repurposing of other peoples’ sentences into new forms. Sentences from the eight writers I haven’t touched on here illustrate this same propensity for language’s reflexive feature: “Language is nothing but meanings, and meaning are nothing but the flow of contexts”; “What is important to grasp here is the human pulse in language”; “There is a promiscuity in the actual words on the page”; “Signifier and signified dreamed their dreams in an alien world”; “The limits of language seem incomprehensible because we are”; “We are all language, the grey light from which we scarcely rise”; “Life is a text that displays the potential of a constraint.” 

It’s probably fair to say we don’t “read” sentences like this, packed as they are with novel metaphors, illogical associations, and outright weird claims. We experience them like we might experience a Wallace Stevens poem or Chagall painting. That, I think, is the recurring message in this book. 

We might explain it further by saying along with Noam Chomsky that language is a rule–bound system which “makes infinite use of finite means,” but that insight doesn’t really clarify what an “experience” with language or art actually is. Katelnikoff’s recombinations left me with a lingering feeling of working the sentences out, the paragraphs, too, even while the sentences he recombines into paragraphs seem to be in a state of still working themselves out. They left me inquisitive, sometimes to the point of being bewildered, but this bewilderment is a good thing. It provides us with existential insights that, for one thing, are a counter-language to the blithe and frenetic thoughtlessness of our own profoundly unpoetic administered world. 

As Heidegger often said, poetry is vital because it discloses being to us—“The poet is the grounder of being”—which is why poets, perhaps also poetic-minded theorists of language like Katelnikoff and all artists, are best suited to understanding it.

Born and raised in the GTA, Peter Babiak now lives and writes in East Vancouver. He teaches linguistics, composition, and English Lit at Langara College, and writes for subTerrain magazine. His commentary and creative nonfiction has been nominated for both BC and national magazine awards; his collection of essays—Garage Criticism: Cultural Missives in an Age of Distraction, published by Anvil Press in 2016—was a Montaigne Medal finalist and an Honourable Mention in the Culture Category of the Eric Hoffer Awards. His essays were selected for The Best Canadian Essays in 2017 and 2018. He has a dog, a cat, a garden, and an alluring garage. [Editor’s note: Peter Babiak has reviewed books by Trevor Newland, Brian Dedora, Stephen Bett, Claire Wilkshire, Heather Haley, Trevor Newland, Douglas Coupland, Clint Burnham, Stan Rogal, and Jamie Lamb; his book Garage Criticism was reviewed by Ginny Ratsoy for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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