Title: "Hazardous Connections": bpNichol's Poetics of Chain

By: Geoffrey Hlibchuk

“Book V was structured on the idea of the chain—chain of thot, chain of images, chain of events—so that in writing when a branching of thot occurred i would try to follow all the chains that opened up” (Martyrology 5, n.p.). So writes bp Nichol in reference to Book 5 of The Martyrology, a book which eschews linearity and instead allows for a multiplicity of different reading paths. Numerical superscripts within the text allow the reader to jump forward or backward to other specified parts of the book. The effect is such that the reader can read along one path of the book and then, according to Nichol’s afterword, “choose, at different points, to diverge & follow the chain of ideas the various numbered options represent (the numbers corresponding to the twelve different chains in the text)” (Martyrology, 5). A reader may choose to follow a chain to a different section of the book, or can ignore it and finish the chain which he or she is reading (or even ignore every “footnote” in the book and read traditionally from cover to cover). As a consequence, “no two readers will necessarily have the same experience of Book V” (Martyrology, 5). Instead of a sequential unfolding of pages, these chains link up to other parts of the book and give the reader hypertextual options that multiply the ways in which it can be read. And though the book only contains seventeen occurrences of these chains, these are still enough to exponentially inflate the total number of reading paths into the thousands. Within this tactic—the catalyzing of vast multiplicities from basic singularities—lies Nichol’s interest in chains, an interest that allows pluralities to be gleaned from the basic linearity of language and reading. Download the pdf below to read the entire article.

A shorter version of this essay appeared in the Spring 2008 special issue of Open Letter: bpNichol + 20.

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