Archaic Torso of Gumby
Geoffrey Morrison & Matthew Tomkinson
Gordon Hill Press, 2020
Review by Max Karpinski
Geoffrey Morrison and Matthew Tomkinson’s Archaic Torso of Gumby resists the traditional moves available to a reviewer. There is no reducing this strange and inscrutable text to an exemplary passage or two; although, momentarily, I will attempt to draw some tenuous connections, there is nothing like Gumby that I’ve read recently. But while Gumby doesn’t slot easily into the predetermined niches of contemporary literature—part memoir, short fiction, experimental prose, contemporary comic almanac (1)—I’ve come away from my reading of the text with a renewed sense of the possibilities for literature. I don’t mean this purely in the formal sense, as in the possibilities of an endlessly refractive and recombinatory prose form. I mean that—in my reading at least—Gumby is very much about what literature can do—and how literature can be—in the world.
Gumby takes the form of a series of loosely related prose vignettes. Seemingly, Morrison and Tomkinson trade off, taking turns riffing on ideas, concepts, turns of phrase, and even words. Their stories run the gamut from absurd to something approaching literary criticism; a game of “Getting to Philosophy,” in which the user tries to navigate Wikipedia via hyperlinks to find the shortest route to the page for Philosophy, leads to the discovery of a Google Books scanning error and a comparative analysis of Robert Louis Stephenson’s David Balfour alongside a biography of Paul Bowles; a surprisingly moving story details a fishmonger and his customer’s clandestine relationship, facilitated in part by a retractable crab fork; a young quick-change magician’s performance turns apocalyptic, in the double sense of “unveiling” and the collapse of reality. These short stories are heavily intertextual (an exhaustive catalogue of obscure references follows the text), but also intratextual. Phrases recirculate in a way that suggests, to me at least, a kind of utopian sense of the infinite affordances of the literary. A sentence—“I hoard outcomes”—applies to hypochondriacs and perfectionists alike; stories refract; things become multiple. This is a kind of textual approximation of Gumby himself, or more generally, the form of claymation to which Gumby belongs, an endlessly iterative and malleable mode in which everything can become anything (and vice versa) through a series of slight tweaks and applied pressures.
As far as textual interlocutors or influences, Gumby’s kaleidoscopic zoom through esoteric knowledge and topics, its non-sequitur set pieces, and the biographical echoes between the authors and the text’s multiple narrators, calls to mind the work of W.G. Sebald. Indeed, Sebald is named as a direct inspiration for one particular short story, “Loplop, The Swallow, Passes By,” which also draws from Max Ernst’s 1929 drawing, “Loplop, l’hirondelle, passe.” Closer to home—that is, British Columbia—Morrison and Tomkinson’s Gumby reminds me of Lisa Robertson’s prose essays. Morrison, Tomkinson, and Robertson share an archivist’s attention to detail and historical minutiae, a delight in the turning of a surprising sentence, and an irreverent humour that cuts across the grain of complex prose.
That irreverence is immediately available in Morrison and Tomkinson’s title: Archaic Torso of Gumby. It’s a winking reference to Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” which, in translation by Stephen Mitchell, opens with a stunning and hilarious line: “We cannot know his legendary head.” “Apollo” also closes with what Mark Doty calls “the sharpest last minute turn in sonnet history.” The speaker of Rilke’s poem describes being arrested by a headless statue of Apollo in the Louvre; it is an almost religious experience, of feeling as though one is recognized by the work of art (“for here there is no place / that does not see you”). And then the poem closes on a five-word sentence—the culmination of a transformative experience in front of the art object: “You must change your life.”
What does it mean to substitute Gumby for Apollo here, in a poem that describes a deeply personal epiphany before the artwork? In my reading, Morrison and Tomkinson skirt the line between an ironic send-up of the self-seriousness of Literature, and a sincere critical engagement with the literary and its transformative potentials. It’s tongue-in-cheek, but also earnest. I’ve suggested above the ways that Gumby’s very form—or, more accurately, its myriad forms, its stylistic excesses—might be related self-referentially to the claymation that houses Gumby himself. In other words, the authors take Gumby seriously. “The Cephalophores,” an early story in the collection that describes a party for headless saints, is interrupted after three pages of dancing and revelry by the appearance of Gumby and his horse, Pokey. The two implore Ginés de la Jara to come with them and to “soar out of this book.” When Saint Ginés refuses, the pair simply walk off the page, “exit[ing] through the cave wall.” When he butts into the self-contained worlds of these varied vignettes, it is possible to read Gumby as a kind of impish interventionist technique, a figure capable of moving fugitively through the text—infiltrating, transforming, and detourning the space he occupies.
It’s here that my reading of Gumby becomes informed by my relationship to one of the two authors. Geoffrey Morrison and I were in the English PhD program at the University of Toronto together, from 2014 through 2015. One story in Gumby, “Sheet Dance: Piers,” describes a similar epiphanic moment to that which Rilke’s poem articulates. In this story, Morrison narrates a friend’s dance show and concert that we both attended in the summer of 2015. As the band plays to close the evening, a “scholar” in the audience covers himself with an abandoned sheet from the dance show prior. He performs a series of improvisational rhythmic movements, with and against the band’s discordant droning: “When he finally emerges, he will no longer be a scholar; he will recall the feeling as a kind of ‘cleansing’.” The second half of “Sheet Dance: Piers” is about piers, that is, the structures themselves. They are a “foiled telos” and “a gesture of extravagance.” They are also sites of “yearning” that “sustain other bodies,” teeming with life. The story closes on “the profound sense of culmination,” to echo Doty’s description of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” The final sentence, floating alone in a paragraph after a page break, reads: “If you want to be seen as someone who peers into the depths, you may only ever see a reflection of yourself, peering.”
Set against that mode of scholarship that—speaking from personal experience—can sometimes feel profoundly lonely, Archaic Torso of Gumby offers a deep and critical engagement with literary history, experimental art, and pop culture that is grounded in the collaborative ethos that shapes the book itself, and that is always reaching outward—implicating other texts, writers, readers, bodies. While I noted the exhaustive catalogue of obscure references at the outset of this review, it feels important that Morrison and Tomkinson have decided to include those references in the first place; they want us to follow them, to take up those loose threads where vignettes veer off abruptly. If I were to venture a single-word summary of Gumby, I might, in the end, land on joyful. There is a palpable glee about the vagaries of literature, the strange collisions and echoes that spring up everywhere, seeming coincidences of phrase or thought (2). It feels to me as though this is the real “cleansing” which the dancing “scholar” experiences: the realization that there is a way of thinking critically and engaging deeply with text and art that doesn’t also demand a solitude or solipsism—that doesn’t have to turn inwards, but that operates through pleasure and joy by offering these surprising and delightful kernels of thought to friends, collaborators, conspirators.
(1) As Morrison and Tomkinson explain, comic almanacs were common, tongue-in-cheek responses to the sixteenth and early-seventeenth century almanac. They describe the traditional almanac as “a directory of needful facts and calculations” that provided helpful information such as “the best times to plant, the ins and outs of the tides, the movements of the stars.” Set against the dissemination of generally useful information, comic almanacs offered “tautological definitions, unhelpful instructions, and impossible cosmologies.” This description resonates self-reflexively; Gumby is shot through with moments like this, where the text offers us a road map to reading itself.
(2) The epigraphs to Archaic Torso of Gumby riff on that last line of Rilke’s poem. The first, from Susan Sontag’s diary, reads “I must change my life. But how can I change my life when I have a broken back?”; the second, from William James, in a letter to Henry James: “The condition of your back is totally incomprehensible to me.”
Max Karpinski holds a PhD from the University of Toronto’s English Department. In January 2020, he joined the University of Alberta’s English and Film Studies Department as a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow. His critical work has appeared or is forthcoming in Canadian Literature as well as an edited collection of essays published by Guernica Editions.